The Road to Berlin (86 page)

The danger now loomed that there might be not too few party members in the armed services but rather too many. The Central Committee tried to apply the brakes, yet the total party membership in the armed forces reached its highest wartime peak as 1944 drew to a close—3,030,775 members and candidate members. Almost 23 per cent of the Red Army were party members, and it was even higher in the Navy (31 per cent), with the fastest rate of growth in the specialist arms and services, though even in the infantry units (with their heavy rate of casualties) 10 per cent of all riflemen were party members. In particular formations, however, the percentage of party members among infantrymen was falling due to battle casualties, and new recruits to the Party were not restoring the figures. The flood of new party members inevitably meant an expansion of the organization to handle them, in particular the divisional party commission, comprising some nine to eleven senior and long-service party members; the basic unit of the party-political apparatus also came to rest in the battalion party organization.

With the Red Army now fighting well beyond the Soviet borders and open to the contagion of ‘bourgeois’ contacts, the work of ideological preparation and surveillance took on a new dimension. In addition, as the Red Army liberated Belorussia and the Ukraine, the male population of military age was conscripted into the field armies as they passed through the towns and countryside, a motley collection of former soldiers, ex-prisoners and semi-literate country boys, all of whom required both political and ordinary education. Baffled as much as ignorant, these new recruits asked political officers such questions as ‘Who are our allies?’ and ‘Who can become an officer in the Red Army?’ The Main Political Administration directive of 22 March 1944 stressed that the youth under German occupation had been exposed to ‘bourgeois-nationalist’ propaganda and other influences, demanding an intensive effort at re-education which must take ‘the highest priority’. At a meeting of the Military Propaganda Soviet in July, Shcherbakov (head of the Main Political Administration) emphasized that ‘other methods’ would have to be used in work dealing with conscripts unfamiliar with what ‘every Soviet man’ knows. The conscript from the newly-liberated western areas of the Soviet Union was to be taken in hand by the field commanders, political officers and propaganda staff well before he was sent to an operational unit; in the reserve regiments the new recruit relearned the business of being a Soviet citizen, and veteran soldiers did their best to impart some military skills to those without any previous military training. At the other end of this vast manpower spectrum, the political administration was facing the problems of increasing war-weariness and combat fatigue among front-line troops, the veterans in particular. Armies and divisions set up ‘leave houses’ for officers, sergeants and rank-and-file soldiers, trying at the same time to counter this lassitude by treating men with unbroken front-line service in a special manner.

The ‘tendency of the Party to get lost in the crowd’, as Alexander Werth put it, underwent a sharp and visible change. In the armed forces the
Orgburo
on 14 October put its weight behind the Political Administration directive on tightening up the ‘ideological–political education’ of prospective party members and their effective absorption into party work, while the democratization in recruitment for civilian party organizations was similarly slowed. Though still weakened and with a preponderance of young, wartime recruits (two-thirds of the total strength in 1944), the Party speedily showed its teeth. A stream of Central Committee decrees hammered in the need to improve ‘mass political and ideological work’ in many areas; the party
aktivy
received categorical instructions to take ‘concrete measures’ to improve instruction and indoctrination. To correct the drift from Marxism–Leninism, the party organs set about organizing a mass lecture programme; but the newly liberated areas presented special difficulties for not only were there ‘material’ deficiencies—the devastation left in the wake of the Germans—but also ‘moral–political consequences’ of occupation, a euphemism for the property owning instinct which flourished among the peasants who had seen the collective-farm system broken up. Soviet propagandists now took up
the fight against ‘individualism’ and the consequences of the ‘capitalist order’ introduced by the Germans.

The popular expectation that the whole
kolkhoz
(collective farm) system would somehow ‘emerge’ in a different form, a belief widely spread in the liberated areas and shared by the peasants now entering the army as conscripts, obviously gave the Party cause for great concern. During the ‘anti-Vlasov campaign’ in 1943 the rumours and whispers deliberately fed into the rural population spoke of the eventual abolition of the collectives; part of the general anticipation of post-war changes, the ‘relaxation’, included this crucial question of the transformation in the countryside. In Belorussia and the western Ukraine the party massed its propagandists and educators to persuade the peasants to return to the ‘sole correct road—to break with privately owned, small-scale farming’. A special effort was directed towards peasant women, whose heads had been filled with ‘lies’ about the
kolkhozy;
thousands of peasants were lectured about the evils of private property and the virtues of the collectives. At the same time the Party and the administration grappled with yet another infusion of problems, the forced labour and prisoners of war freed by the Soviet advance. Colonel-General F.I. Golikov assumed control of a special organization, established under the authority of
Sovnarkom
, to deal with repatriated Soviet civilians and soldiers. But Beria struck first. His
NKVD
troops and agents rounded up the repatriates for screening and interrogation, the preliminary in many thousands of cases to deportation to a Soviet forced labour camp, there to purge the monstrous crime of simply having fallen into German hands.

Free of any military threat, Stalin could now turn his morbid attention to settling the scores for all the rankling insubordination and indiscipline he had detected during the months of greatest danger. The non-Russian nationalities had already paid in horrible fashion for their own derelictions. The Chechens of the Chechen–Ingush Autonomous Republic in the North Caucasus had been brutally rounded up by the
NKVD
and the survivors transported from their homes; in 1944 Stalin completed this obliteration by abolishing the Republic and establishing the Groznyi
oblast
in the place of the burnt and blasted Chechen settlements. The same fate lay in store for the Crimean Tartars—deportation, punishment and finally obliteration. While they had never stopped, the wheels of the devious and cruel Stalinist system were already speeding up: the concentration of immense power in the hands of a relatively small group within the State Defence Committee, though essential for survival, scarcely conformed to Stalin’s liking, and he proceeded to break it up. The clash between Stalin, Beria and Malenkov was possibly (and reportedly) triggered off by the reaction of the latter to Stalin’s illness in the spring of 1944, when he was found unconscious at his desk. Old feuds flared anew when Zhdanov was recalled from Leningrad to resume his duties in Moscow; Leningrad’s ambitious plans to rebuild were abruptly shoved aside in favour of concentrating on restitution of its military–industrial capacities. This proved to be the lightest of the punishments subsequently inflicted on insubordinate Leningrad.

The Party had already begun to tighten up in the armed forces, reasserting its somewhat tarnished authority. Bravery no longer sufficed. The Communist in the forces needed more than his proficiency in combat (and there were complaints that soldiers were admitted to the Party who had never seen any action); the emphasis was passing to ideological fitness and political maturity, which meant both knowing and toeing the Party line. Stalin acquiesced readily enough in the diminution of the Party’s role in the army in order to promote military efficiency, but he was not prepared to countenance any erosion of his own authority. The cult of Stalin as an outstanding military leader was by now well under way, and the troops were fed a diet of Stalin’s ‘Orders of the Day’. The re-imposition of his absolute authority, however, required still more drastic measures, and this task fell to Bulganin, promoted in November 1944 to Stalin’s deputy for defence at the cost of displacing Voroshilov. It was Bulganin’s assignment to prepare for the ‘purge of the heroes’ designed to cut down to size the generals and other personalities connected with defence matters who trod too heavily on the Party’s prerogatives or on Stalin’s susceptibilities.

Yet throughout 1944 the country continued to mobilize. The labour force grew from 19,400,000 in 1943 to over 23,000,000 in 1944, of which almost ten million were employed in industry and on building work or construction. Women, girls and youths figured largely among these contingents set to work for the first time—women in 1944 formed over 50 per cent of the labour force in industry and 36 per cent of the labour in building and construction work. Not many months before, in 1941–2, the trains had sped east carrying factories out of the range of the German armies, a massive industrial migration that had torn whole regions out by the roots. Now in 1944 the ‘re-evacuation’ was in full swing, bringing machines back to the western industrial regions where brigades of young people were already working to rebuild the shattered factories and plants. ‘Re-evacuation’, reconstruction in the liberated areas and the need to maintain production in the eastern hinterland meant careful deployment of skilled labour, above all keeping a balance between the western and eastern regions, though high priority went to putting the Donbas and the metallurgical industries of the south into full production.

Coal, petroleum, ferrous metals, machine tools and cement were among the more critical shortages in a country stretched to the limit, with its underfed and drastically overworked population. Prices of foodstuffs continued to rise. Tens of thousands of villages, thousands of worker settlements and towns, several large cities and the railway system were for the most part hideously ruined. Factories, plants and urban installations had been blown up or destroyed in the fighting, mines flooded and railways wrecked. In April 1944 the State Defence Committee concentrated on key improvements to raise output in the rear areas and the newly liberated regions, giving priority to the supply of electric power and the mining of coal. New electric power stations were planned for the Kuzbas and the northern Urals, as well as for the central industrial region and the Ukraine. The mines of
the Donbas were already contributing coal to the Soviet war effort, where the production of weapons continued to climb—29,000 tanks and self-propelled guns (24,000 in 1943); 40,300 aircraft (34,900 in 1943); 122,500 guns of all types and calibres (a drop when compared with 130,300 in 1943, but the smaller output was due to the withdrawal of older models); 184,000,000 shells, mines and aerial bombs (compared with 175,000,000 in 1943); almost 7.5 milliard rounds of small-arms ammunition. The IS-2 heavy tank (the ‘Joseph Stalin’) with its 122mm gun was now in serial production and over two thousand were built in 1944 (only 102 in 1943); over 11,000 of the new modernized T-34s (the T-34/85 with an 85mm gun) were produced, together with the first 500 SU-100 self-propelled guns built on a T-34 tank chassis; and 2,510 of the new ISU-122 and ISU-152 (using the IS-2 tank chassis) compared with only 35 in 1943. Lend-lease delivery of weapons fell in comparison with 1943 (2,613 tanks in 1944 compared with 3,123 in 1943; 5,749 aircraft in place of 6,371 in 1943), though the shipment of raw materials played an important part in building up Soviet reserves: of the half million tons of steel, more than half consisted of rails, which, together with 129,000 lorries and over 1,000 locomotives, served to alleviate difficulties in restoring the transport system.

In October the Russians received another substantial bonus, less tangible than tanks or aircraft but no less significant as a psychological boost to their feelings of the surety of the ‘grand alliance’, which was yet one more harbinger of better post-war days to come based on ‘Big Three’ co-operation. Between 9 and 18 October the Prime Minister held a series of talks in Moscow with Stalin, conversations that surpassed any other in affability and mutual esteem—or so it appeared on the surface and to the world at large. Churchill, though worried about the prospect of Soviet control being fastened over the whole of south-eastern Europe, did not come to Moscow this time entirely devoid of bargaining power; the Allied armies in the west, for all the earlier Soviet mocking, pushed on with gathering speed and already on 11 September had crossed into German territory, giving them a head start in the race for Berlin. The suggestion for a meeting came from the Prime Minister on 27 September and for once Stalin made neither objection nor demur. As soon as Stalin indicated his willingness to meet, the Prime Minister was in Moscow within a week.

In Moscow Churchill found ‘an extraordinary atmosphere of goodwill …’ (such was his description of his reception to President Roosevelt) and at his first meeting with Stalin on 9 October he seized the opportunity to ‘settle our affairs in the Balkans’, outlining on a piece of paper a scheme of sharing out south-eastern Europe between the Soviet Union and Great Britain, or ‘the others’. In Rumania the Russians were to have ninety per cent of the predominance (ten per cent for ‘the others’); in Greece ‘Great Britain in accord with USA’ would in turn take ninety per cent predominance with Russia taking ten per cent; in Yugoslavia and Hungary honours were even at fifty per cent each; while in Bulgaria the Soviet Union would acquire seventy-five per cent. It was perhaps
something of an improvement upon the matchsticks of Teheran. Stalin returned the paper to Churchill with a large blue tick inscribed upon it. ‘It was all settled’, Churchill remarked, ‘in no more time than it takes to set down.’

It was not, however, ‘all settled’. Molotov and Eden haggled throughout 10 October over the precise meaning of these percentages, curious exchanges with these two pertinacious foreign ministers bargaining for what amounted to a ten per cent increase in Russian influence in Yugoslavia as against a larger British share in Bulgaria. This quasi-mathematical disputation was resumed in the afternoon, when Molotov suggested a figure of eighty per cent for Hungary and Bulgaria, fifty per cent for Yugoslavia, by which he meant that until the German surrender Bulgaria would come under Soviet control, but after the German surrender British and American participation would be allowed. This led, in turn, to a settlement over the terms of the Bulgarian armistice and to a balance sheet ‘flogged out’, in Churchill’s phrase, between the two foreign ministers. The Russians pressed for predominance in Bulgaria, took ‘great interest in Hungary’, claimed the ‘fullest responsibility’ in Rumania but were prepared ‘largely to disinterest themselves in Greece’. The explanatory letter the Prime Minister drafted for Stalin on British policy and the significance of the percentage sliding-scale was not sent, since Churchill thought it ‘wiser to let well alone’; to the War Cabinet he sent a message stressing that ‘the system of percentage’ did not mean specific numbers on particular commissions in the various Balkan countries but rather it expressed ‘the interest and sentiment with which the British and Soviet Governments approach the problems of these countries.…’ Nor did this agreement in principle commit the United States or represent in any way ‘a rigid system of spheres of influence’.