Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was a young partisan captured by the Germans in the battle for Moscow. When the Russians counter-attacked they found her body on a village gibbet. In January 1942 her story was told in Pravda. There followed a poem, a play, and a cult. In the play Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya sees Stalin in a vision just before her death, and he solaces her with the information that Moscow has been saved (neglecting, inter alia, to explain why her father and grandfather were both shot in the Terror). In any event, one glance at the corpse of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and you would understand the nature of the enemy you faced. The Nazi policy of what might be called innovatory barbarism earned them the furious enmity of a wavering population which, even as things stood, produced nearly a million turncoats. Stalin knew that the Russian people wouldn’t fight for him. But they would fight for Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. She would make them ‘bellow like bulls when they attack’.
There are two photographs of this young woman in The Russian Century. One shows her being marched off to captivity with a placard round her neck, no doubt disclosing her crime (arson); it is an exceptionally beautiful face, both dark and pale, and of softly Jewish cast. The faces of her captors are businesslike, matter-of-fact, even quietly regretful … In the second photograph she wears the noose of a taut rope, though the body has been cut down. Her black hair is fanned out on the snow. Her ‘perfect’ right breast is visible – but you can’t quite say that, because a breast owes part of its perfection to the other breast, and the other breast has here been hacked off. Her head is bent at an impossible angle. And her face is unforgettably that of a martyr. The eyes are closed, the mouth is full but tightly clenched. Her face expresses preternatural self-sufficiency, and an entirely effortless superiority to her murderers and mutilators. It is the face of another world, another cosmos. She was eighteen.
As the Russians retreated in the first few weeks of the war they left behind them, in Poland, the Baltic states, and the Ukraine, Cheka-manned prisons full of the ‘usual suspicious elements’ – meaning, very broadly, anyone with an education. The prisoners were almost invariably killed, even the ordinary criminals and those merely awaiting trial. One can see the logic of dynamiting a cellful of suspects (women suspects: this happened in the Ukraine). But the more typical preference was to administer a slow death. There are many accounts of prison floors strewn with genitals, breasts, tongues, eyes and ears. Arma virumque cano, and Hitler-Stalin tells us this, among other things: given total power over another, the human being will find that his thoughts turn to torture.
Accounting, as a Catholic, for his belief in evil as a living force, the novelist Anthony Burgess once said, ‘There is no A. J. P. Taylor-ish explanation for what happened in Eastern Europe during the war.’ Nor is there. Of the many characteristics shared by the two ideologies, however, one in particular proved wholly corrosive: the notion that mercilessness is a virtue. In the millenarian confrontation of the antichrists, the twin sons of perdition, cruelty became competitive, both between and within the opposed forces. Hereabouts a line is crossed, and one thinks of the fuddled brute in the court report who has stabbed his victim ninety-three times (or some such outlandish figure). The first thrust will be justified by the one that comes after. Every further thrust will be justified by the one that came before.
Hitler spelled it out. In March 1941, nearly three months before the campaign began, he told his senior officers that the war against Russia would be different from the war against France. The war against Russia would be one of annihilation: Vernichtungskrieg. And under the cover of that, under its fog and night, its foul breath, would come the Vernichtungslagers, the to-nothing camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Maidanek, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor.
35 This is more than a picture book. Brian Moynahan’s text is a fresh and vigorous distillation.
The Taste Inside Stalin’s Mouth
On the day that Barbarossa broke, Stalin was so uncertain of his stomach that only a single glass of tea passed his lips. That glass of tea did not wash away the ‘taste of wormwood’ which (as he told his secretary, Poskrebyshev) had lodged itself in his mouth on 22 June 1941. When he questioned his great war-winning general, Zhukov, about the chances of holding Moscow, Stalin said, ‘I ask you this with pain in my heart …’ A pain in the heart, a flutter in the gut, and a new taste in the mouth. Wormwood: a sour perennial herb of the genus Artemisia. Wormwood: bitterness or grief, or a cause of these.
When his generals told him the truth about the western front, Stalin collapsed as a regnant presence. Some accounts have him holed up for a week or more at Kuntsevo in a state of semi-hibernation. In Volkogonov’s version we are offered an abruptly reclusive figure who would, nonetheless, occasionally lurch into the Defence Council with a volley of obscene abuse and then lurch out again. On 1 July a delegation arrived at the dacha. ‘Why have you come?’ asked Stalin with the ‘strangest’ look on his face. He clearly expected dethronement or arrest; and he would have gone quietly. To his obvious surprise, Molotov and Kaganovich and the rest of them patiently suggested that the country should resist the Germans and that Stalin should lead this effort. His reply is usually given as ‘Fine’ – though Conquest’s ‘All right’ sounds more appropriately robotic (it consorts with the taste of wormwood in his mouth). The battle for Moscow hadn’t begun. The battle with reality would last until Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–43.
At first he tried to prosecute the war through terror: the familiar psycho-chaos of fear and fantasy. He used the methods, and the personnel, of the Civil War.36 Trotsky’s innovation, the ‘blocking unit’ (which ensured certain death with shame to those evading possible death with honour), was widely revived. Captured officers would be aware that their families now faced arrest.37 Stalin kept ordering his blinded, shattered, trapped or fleeing forces to undertake obliterating counterattacks; failure invited summary trial and execution. At a time when the camps were being combed for competent military men, Stalin took the trouble to shoot 300 officers who were already in prison. As Kiev was falling he disdained all counsel and refused on principle to let the army retreat: 650,000 soldiers were taken prisoner, therefore becoming, by Order 270 (August 1941), ‘traitors to the motherland’. In other countries returning POWs were greeted by brass bands and bunting; in the USSR, soldiers who had fought their way out of encirclement were greeted with the super or the gulag. In 1941 and 1942 ‘no fewer than 157,593 men – a full sixteen divisions’ (Volkogonov) were executed for cowardice.
All his life Stalin was a consistently terrible little man. He never had anything resembling a finest hour – but the battle for Moscow shows him at his meagre apogee. In a crisis so severe that the government apparatus was being carted off to the Urals (the ‘Highway of Enthusiasts’, which led eastward, was thick with fleeing bureaucrats watched by jeering crowds) and there were plans to mine every significant piece of real estate in the capital (including the Metro), Stalin chose not to retreat. His train was waiting, but he stayed. In addition he astonished the Politburo with the proposal that the October Parade should take place as usual, which it did, in a snowstorm; the Germans were kilometres from the suburbs; and stretchers were ready to remove the dead and injured from Red Square if the Luftwaffe attacked. Stalin stood, as they say. He knew about failure; the author of Collectivization certainly knew something about failure. But this? All historians regard Stalin’s failure of 1941 as perhaps the most abject in world history. But he stood, he stood there, and he took it, like the sleet in his face.
36 Old comrades from the days of Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad; later still, Volgograd): the feral factotum Mekhlis, the ex-tailor Shchadenko, the Quasimodolike Kulik, and the tirelessly incompetent Voroshilov. In Teheran in 1943, when Churchill, in an atmosphere of historic emotion, presented Stalin (‘by order of the King’) with the Sword of Stalingrad, Voroshilov succeeded in dropping it as he solemnly bore it from the room.
37 Men of other ranks would be aware that their families would be ‘denied state assistanc
e’: i.e., ration cards, medical treatment, and the right to vote (this last a ‘platonic’ deprivation, according to Moshe Lewin).
Bolshevik Bravery
It is suggestive that Stalin, adding to his copious demerits, should question the courage of the Russian soldier, who would soon be astonishing the world with his (and her) heroic madness. Perhaps we should take a look at the physical bravery of the main politicals.
Trotsky was brave, but I have never read anyone who claimed that Lenin, when danger neared, was other than a double-quick decamper (and Zinoviev was known as ‘panic personified’). Trotsky was physically brave. A sense of invulnerability was an ingredient of his charisma. It was still with him on 20 August 1940, in Mexico. When the assassin Ramón Mercader drove the icepick into Trotsky’s head there came a cry – a cry that is variously described but seemed to convey outrage, infinite and incredulous outrage. And Trotsky resisted, and fought with his assailant.38 When Mercader struck, Trotsky had been at his desk, working on a biography of the man who had him murdered.
Stalin. In a playful demonstration of strength Tukhachevsky once swept him off his little feet and held him head-high; Stalin’s face, it is said, was a picture of rage and terror. It was terror only during the flight to Teheran in 1943. When the plane bobbed through the air pockets, Stalin’s knuckles whitened on the armrests as he grimaced with undisguisable fear. The plane had an escort of twenty-seven fighters. Stalin had never flown before. And he never flew again.
For the third and final Big Three summit, in 1945, Stalin travelled to Potsdam, by rail, under the protection of fifteen hundred regular soldiers and 17,000 Cheka troops. The nightly removal to Kuntsevo was always a major military operation. If Stalin took his daughter for a stroll in the grounds of the Kremlin, there would be a tank looking over his shoulder or idling just ahead.
In Teheran, Churchill toasted him as ‘Stalin the Mighty’. And that was the trouble. As a fighting man, or as a political bully of fighting men, in the Civil War, Stalin showed plenty of ‘contempt for life’, without perhaps ever attaining the truly radical refinement of that ethos: contempt for death. His performance was strikingly mercurial; but I have never seen any suggestion that he was shy of danger.
The trouble was power, and the inflationary effects of power. That was the trouble on the plane to Teheran: all this weight, all this value, all this me, subject to the uncontrollable physics of weather and aviation.
Retributively, fear of death became his internal great terror. When Lenin died the embalmers of his corpse were nominated as the Immortalization Commission. Stalin wanted immortalization while he was still alive, and one of his later ‘interventions’ took the form of an increasingly lively interest in gerontology; like Mao, he exhausted various quackeries with the usual results.39
Hatred of death, in Stalin’s case, duly arrived at its negative apotheosis. Towards the end he started killing doctors.
38 Trotsky hung on until the following day. As he lay dying in the hospital he had a strange visitor: the twenty-five-year-old Saul Bellow (who remembers the stain of blood and iodine on Trotsky’s short grey beard). The living Trotsky is evoked in Bellow’s novel The Adventures of Augie March (1953); in a book full of extraordinary passages, this is a superextraordinary passage, and powerfully romantic, embodying all the intensity of hope that our artists and thinkers directed towards 1917 … When Ramón Mercader was released from prison and journeyed to Moscow in the 1960s, he formally inherited the award that had been been granted (by Stalin) to his mother. It was, of all things, the Order of Lenin.
39 For a time Stalin’s chief longevity coach was Dr Alexander Bogomolets, who claimed that he (Stalin) might live to be 150 (he would now be 122). Dr Bogomolets died of natural causes at the age of sixty-five.
It loves blood / The Russian earth
So wrote Anna Akhmatova, who, after the war, would be earning her living by cleaning floors. And it did love blood, the Russian earth.
The battle for Moscow was Germany’s first defeat in the Second World War; it roughly coincided with Pearl Harbor (7 December) and with Hitler’s declaration of war against the USA (11 December) – surely, for Hitler, the moment of irreversible hubris. These events produced an enormous and complementary expansion in the psyche of his adversary: 1942 saw a series of superambitious disasters for the Red Army. Dmitri Volkogonov describes Stalin’s military thinking as ‘primitive’ (or indifferent to losses); he learned ‘by blood-spattered trial and error’ – but he did learn. He desisted, on the whole, from killing his generals, and started attending to them; Zhukov would soon be talking to Stalin ‘brusquely’, as if to an inferior. In October 1942 Stalin recalled the political commissars (Volkogonov’s ‘military illiterates’) from their ‘dual commands’ at the front. He created new decorations and restored Tsarist ranking systems; the shoulder-boards which in the Civil War had been nailed into the bare flesh of White officers now appeared on the uniforms of the Reds.
Stalin’s mental journey, by 1943, proceeded in the opposite direction to that of Hitler. One moved towards reality; the other moved away from it. They crossed paths at Stalingrad. And as the war turned on the hinge of that battle (and on the new psychological opposition), Stalin might have concerned himself with a ‘counterfactual’: if, instead of decapitating his army, he had intelligently prepared it for war, Russia might have defeated Germany in a matter of weeks. Such a course of action, while no doubt entailing grave consequences of its own, would have saved about 40 million lives, including the vast majority of the victims of the Holocaust.
I have been saying that the invasion pressed Stalin into a semblance of mental health. Certainly, in August 1945, remission ended, and the patient’s sanity once again fell apart. And even during the war he found time for a domestic atrocity that typically (i.e., insanely) combined the gratuitous and the literalistic. As early as the summer of 1941, Stalin evicted the Volga Germans from the lands they had occupied for two centuries and deported them to Central Asia and Siberia. In 1943–44 other minor nationalities followed: the Kalmyks, the Chechens, the Ingushi, the Karachai, the Balkars, and the Crimean Tartars; then the Crimea and the Caucasus were partly cleansed of Greeks, Bulgars, Armenians, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Khemshins. In Stalin’s view these were all suspect populations likely to turn to the Nazis; he told Khrushchev that he wanted to do the same to the Ukrainians but – despite his efforts in the 1930s – there were still too many of them (c. 40 million).40 The achieved deportations involved about 1.2 million people, most of them women, children and the elderly; the men were all in the army (where the Chechens and the Ingushi alone produced thirty-six Heroes of the Soviet Union). In its reports on these operations the Cheka keeps praising its own ‘efficiency’; and the deportations were not conducted with quite the raucous brutality of Dekulakization. All the families were dispossessed (Solzhenitsyn says that they were usually given an hour to pack); they were dispatched by rail, river and road;41 their fatality rate, over the next three or four years, was about 20–25 per cent. For the deportees now joined the kulaks in that enormous category, the ‘specially displaced’: they were internal refugees, itinerant slave labour, asked to adapt to new lands, new languages, new climates …
These actions naturally constituted a significant military deficit for the USSR. The extraordinarily thorough and labour-intensive excision of the Volga Germans came at a time when the western front had disintegrated: Beria’s initial circular went out on the day that the Germans reached the Neva (and the siege of Leningrad began to solidify). True, Stalin was still in the process of reining himself in; yet in 1943–44 – the golden age of his mental equilibrium – he still felt the need for the broadest possible canvas of power and pain. Traitor nations, traitor ethnicities: such suspicions would resurface after the war, forming the greatest and blackest irony of the entire period.
Meanwhile, across the border, Hitler’s psychological trouble was revealing itself as clinical – as organic. In early 1941 he was already suff
iciently ‘confident’ to undertake the invasion of Russia a) without a war economy, and b) without antifreeze. That is to say, he gambled on victory in a single campaign: a physical impossibility. We have seen how Chancellory-watchers all over the world were deceived by Hitler’s spell of success; he himself would have been the more deceived, to put it mildly. Recent work by Ian Kershaw and others has suggested that the ‘authoritarian chaos’ of Hitler’s polity was fundamentally irrational and self-destructive, and his plans for the east delusional.42 After Stalingrad, in any event, Hitler would scream at the bringers of bad news with foam visible in the corners of his mouth. ‘If ever a building can be considered the symbol of a situation,’ wrote Albert Speer, ‘this was it’: the walls of his bunker in East Prussia were sixteen feet thick; they ‘locked him up inside his delusions’. After the briefcase-bomb attempt on his life (July 1944), Hitler came to believe that Stalin’s purge of the Red Army had been an act of Benthamite justice and precision. He started doing what Stalin had stopped doing: he reimposed Party discipline, installing political officers at all military HQs. Having earlier lost his voice, Hitler, after the bomb attack, lost his hearing. His isolation was complete.
It loves blood, the Russian earth. The great battles represented inconceivable concentrations of hatred. Stalingrad, where the front was reduced to a street, a house, a room, a ceiling, a wall, a window; where swarms of rats ‘flowed like a warm river over the living and the dead’; where, indeed, the Germans were confronted by Rattenwaffe, ratwar,43 in which the Slavic under-men (Hitler’s ‘swamp animals’) took the fight to them in the runnels and the sewers (‘deep war’, in Ilya Ehrenburg’s phrase), and prevailed. Or the meshuggah megabattle of Kursk (July 1943), where, during a violent thunderstorm, fascism and Communism clashed with ‘indescribable fury and horror’, as Alan Bullock writes: huge densities of ‘armour crashed into each other to form a roaring, whirling tangle of over a thousand tanks locked together in combat for over eighteen hours’ – in an area of barely three square miles. Or the Siege of Leningrad, begun during the battle for Moscow and not lifted for 900 days, with a million dying in the first winter, the ‘road of life’ over frozen Lake Ladoga (the first trucks disappeared under the ice; many horses died en route and were delivered as meat), the relief vehicles making the return journey with refugees, the director of the Hermitage weeping on the railway platform as the first treasures rolled east, and Shostakovich, to the sound of guns, writing the symphony that expressed the murderous violence pressing in on the beleaguered city …