The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (68 page)

He tells us to listen what he will read and he read[s] a mortal decree that in half an hour we must be ready to leave, wagon will come… I immediately went blind and I got to laugh terribly, NKVD man screams get dressed, I run around the room and laugh… children are crying and begging me to pack or there will be trouble, and I have lost my mind.

Once removed from their homes, the unfortunate captives were then marched or driven in carts to the nearest railway station and herded into cattle trucks, with sometimes as many as sixty or seventy people in each. In the sub-zero winter temperatures many babies and young children died before the trains had even departed. In four major operations, between February 1940 and June 1941, around half a million Polish civilians were rounded up in this fashion. Sometimes the militiamen lied about where the victims were being sent, claiming their destination was Germany or another part of Poland. In fact, most were deported to the camps and collective farms of Siberia and Kazakhstan, the most remote and least hospitable regions of the Soviet Union. It seemed like a journey through purgatory to hell. ‘We are being carried through this endless space,’ recalled Zofia Ptasnik, ‘such a flat and huge land with only a few scattered human settlements here and there. Invariably, we see squalid mud huts with thatched roofs and small windows, dirty and dilapidated, with no fences or trees.’ Many of the younger and older deportees did not survive to disembark at their destination. For those who did, there was seldom anything approaching adequate food or shelter. They died in their tens of
thousands of cold, hunger and disease. By 1942, according to some estimates, barely half the deportees were left alive.

Those who did not perish could only listen incredulously to the attempts by Soviet instructors to ‘re-educate’ them. Antoni Ekart recalled how one camp lecturer ‘address[ed] the prisoners on the nobility of putting all their effort into work. He would tell them that noble people are patriots, that all patriots love Soviet Russia, the best country in the world for the working man, that Soviet citizens are proud to belong to such a country, etc. etc. for two solid hours – all this to an audience whose very skins bore witness to the absurdity and the hypocrisy of such statements.’ Elsewhere the language was harsher. A villager in Pałusza, who had seen his own neighbours carted off eastwards, was told:

This is how we annihilate the enemies of Soviet power. We will use the sieve until we retrieve all bourgeois and kulaks… You will never see again those that we have taken from you. They will disappear over there, like a field-mouse.

Not everyone was worse off under Soviet rule. The Jews of Grodno were positively relieved by the arrival of Soviet forces, since they shut-down the pogrom that had broken out when the Polish army capitulated to the Germans. Elsewhere, Jews welcomed Soviet rule as an improvement on the increasingly bigoted Polish regime of the post-Piłsudski era. In the village of Brańsk, which initially had been occupied by the Germans, some Jews welcomed the Red Army with flowers and banners. Many who found themselves on the German side of the demarcation line hastened across to the Soviet side, little realizing that some of their co-religionists were fleeing in the opposite direction. Only a minority were as unlucky as Julius Margolin, a visitor from Palestine, who moved from western Poland to Pińsk, but was arrested by the Soviets for not possessing the correct papers and sentenced to five long years in the Gulag. To many Jews, who had endured mounting persecution during the 1930s, Soviet rule was an opportunity. Many willingly joined the new institutions established to administer the Soviet zone. There was remarkably little resistance to the aggressive policy of secularization adopted by the Soviet authorities, which aimed ‘to uproot religious beliefs and customs as well
as Jewish nationalism’. Particularly in the eyes of many younger Polish Jews, this seemed a tolerable price to pay for being treated on an equal footing with Gentiles. In some areas, former Polish officials claimed they were told by local Jews: ‘Your time has passed, a new epoch begins.’

The apparent affinity between the Soviets and the Jews would not be forgotten by Poles, who were quick to discern proof of the alleged affinity between Judaism and Bolshevism. ‘The relations between the Poles and Jews are at present markedly worse than before the war,’ noted one Polish observer in Stryj in June 1940. ‘The entire Polish population adopted a negative attitude towards the Jews because of their blatant cooperation with the Bolsheviks and their hostility against the non-Jews… The people simply hate the Jews.’ Memories of symbolic acts of betrayal lingered long after the war was over. One man remembered a Jewish boy whom he knew from school ‘reaching for our white and red national flag and… ripping it in half, tearing the white part off the red one’. The boy told him, ‘Your bloody Poland is finished.’ A woman from Wilno recalled ‘a Jew, with a red [arm]band, [taking] a sabre out of the sheath and read[ing] out “honour and fatherland”’. He laughed ‘like mad’, she recalled: ‘Ha! Ha! They stood up for their fatherland with honour.’ Such recollections were no doubt embellished with the passage of time. Nevertheless, they indicate the divisive effect of the Soviet rule on Poland’s already fractured society. In other parts of the country, the Soviets gave preferential treatment to Ukrainians and Byelorussians. They deliberately encouraged Ukrainian violence against Poles with slogans like
Poliakam, panam, sobakam – sobachaia smert’!
(‘To Poles, landowners and dogs– a dog’s death!’). Ethnic divisions widened in a similar way when the Red Army occupied Lithuania in June 1940. Whereas Jews had played a minimal role in the public life of the country during its independence, two members of the Soviet-installed People’s Government were Jews. When Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union, five members of the Supreme Soviet and two of the fifteen members of its Presidium were Jews, as were two members of the Council of Commissars and two of the nine Supreme Court justices.

Poland had been partitioned between German and Russian empires
before, but never like this. Both Hitler and Stalin subjected the population to a horrific reign of terror. Their shared aim was quite simply to obliterate the political and cultural life of the Polish people for ever, so that Poland would cease to exist not merely as a place, but also as an idea. It would become simply a frying pan and a fire. Looking in the mirror that was occupied Poland, Stalin had good reason to believe he had met his match – a match made in Hell, perhaps, but one that had every reason to endure.

Their maltreatment of the Poles was only one of many ways in which the Nazi and Soviet regimes had grown to resemble one another. Not only was German National Socialism looking more and more like Soviet ‘socialism in one country’. Hitler increasingly resembled a kind of apprentice Stalin, rather like some sort of junior devil.

When Iosif Dzhugashvili, the son of a Georgian shoemaker, looked at Adolf Schicklgruber, the son of an Austrian customs clerk, he seemed to see in the younger man a kindred spirit. As schoolboys, each had regarded the world with the same clenched-jawed defiance. Hitler was a failed artist, Stalin a dropout seminarian. Both men had been revolutionaries who had gone to jail under the regimes they had later overthrown. Both had come to power as members and then leaders of anti-capitalist workers’ parties. Both worked erratically, favouring late nights and summer retreats(Stalin’s equivalent of Ober-salzberg was his villa at Sochi on the Black Sea). Both had difficulties with women. Hitler’s niece Geli Raubal, on whom he had jealously doted, had shot herself in September 1931; Stalin’s wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva had done the same thing just fourteen months later, also driven to suicide by the attentions of an obsessive older man – twenty-two years older in each case. Both girls were replaced by more robust types: the wholesome receptionist Eva, the plump housekeeper Vatcheka. Moreover, although ten years his junior, Hitler seemed be learning fast from Stalin’s example just what it took to be a dictator. On the Night of the Long Knives he had shown that he too could purge his own party of potential rivals; Stalin was impressed. (‘Did you
hear what happened in Germany?’ he remarked to Anastas Mikoyan. ‘Some fellow that Hitler! Splendid! That’s a deed of some skill!’) In the SS and Gestapo Hitler had created a secret police system that looked and functioned a good deal like Stalin’s NKVD. He had openly modelled his Four-Year Plan for the German economy on Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, breaking with his Economics Minister Schacht to impose something more like a command system. Now, in Poland, Hitler was demonstrating a promising propensity for mass murder – though at this stage he still seemed unlikely to catch up with Stalin, who had already been responsible for at the very least six million deaths by the end of 1938.

The two regimes even looked the same. This had been obvious since the Paris World Exposition of 1937, when the Nazi and Soviet pavilions had confronted one another like totalitarian obelisks on the right bank of the River Seine. The German pavilion, designed by Hitler’s pet architect, Albert Speer, was a 500-foot tower crowned with a giant eagle and swastika, surrounded by nine pillars decorated with gold mosaics and more swastikas. At its foot stood the sculptor Josef Thorak’s
Comradeship
, two 22-foot-high nude supermen, hand in hand. The Soviet pavilion, by Boris Iofan, was an equally monolithic tower, supporting Vera Mukhina’s stainless steel statue
Worker and Collective Farm Girl
. To be sure, the pavilions were not identical. The Germans sneered at the ‘barbaric formalism’ of the Soviet pavilion, while the Russians decried the ‘sterile and false… fascist neoclassicism’ of the Nazi pavilion. Nevertheless, as the Italian artist Gino Severini noticed, the exhibits had much in common – particularly ‘their obvious intention of making size, making immense pompous size’. This was not accidental. According to Speer, while looking over the site before the Exposition he had ‘stumbled into a room containing the secret sketch of the Soviet pavilion’:

A sculpted pair of figures thirty-three feet tall, on a high platform, were striding towards the German pavilion. I therefore designed a cubic mass, also elevated on stout pillars, which seemed to be checking the onslaught, while from the cornice of my tower an eagle with a swastika in its claws looked down on the Russian sculptures.

The exhibits at the Exposition revealed to the world what had
already been underway for some time – the extraordinary convergence of Nazi and Soviet iconography. The huge domed hall that was to be built in Hitler’s transfigured capital, Germania, was in many ways a riposte to Iofan and Vladimir Shchuko’s winning design for a Palace of Soviets in Moscow, the style of which, as Anatoly Lunacharsky put it, ‘did not avoid classical motifs, but attempted to surpass classical architecture’. Both regimes erected shrines to their own pseudo-religions; both depicted their leaders as deities and national father-figures. In Soviet art, as in Nazi art, the same male archetypes were represented: the party martyr, the shock worker, the hero soldier. Franz Eichhorst’s
Streetfighting
was virtually a replica of Aleksandr Deineka’s earlier
Defence of Petrograd
(1927), just as Hermann Otto Hoyer’s
SA Man Rescuing Wounded Comrade
(1933) owed a debt to Cosima Petrov-Bodkin’s
Dying Commissar
(1928) and Arthur Kampf’s
In the Steelworks
(1939) was almost indistinguishable from Nikolai Dorimidontov’s
Steelworks
(1932). Equally common in both cultures was the figure of the peasant woman as fertility symbol, almost interchangeable in Leopold Schmutzler’s
Farm Girls Returning Home
and Yevgeny Katzman’s
Kaliazin Lacemakers
(1928). Even the ‘enemy images’ of Jews and ‘Nepmen’ (traders who were allowed to operate under the pre-Stalin New Economic Policy) had a suspiciously large amount in common, especially as the Stalinist regime moved in the direction of an official anti-Semitism in the 1940s. Both regimes offered boundless opportunities for a generation of conservatively inclined or merely opportunistic artists working in virtually all media to overthrow the modernists who had made so much of the running in the 1920s. To be sure, Hitler had railed against
Kunstbolschewismus
(‘Bolshevik art’) in
Mein Kampf
, asserting that ‘the morbid excrescences of insane and degenerate men… under the collective concepts of Cubism and Dadaism [were] the official and recognised arts of [Bolshevized] states’. Yet the state-sponsored backlash against modernism was even then beginning in the Soviet Union. As early as 1926 Robert Pelshe, the editor of
Sovetskoe iskusstvo
, had railed against ‘the mental disease of the “left” radicals… Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, Verism, Dadaism, Suprematism, against foolishness and laziness, against careless indifference and doubt’. The Soviet decree ‘On the Restructuring of Literary and Artistic Organizations’
was passed in 1932, before Hitler had come to power in Germany. Even the institutions developed by Goebbels to impose central control on every branch of German culture bore a striking resemblance to those that had already been established under Stalin. So similar was Nazi art to Soviet art by the late 1930s that Stalin could legitimately have accused Hitler of plagiarism.

Of course, there were differences between Nazism and Communism, just as there were between Hitler and Stalin. Hitler was a demagogue, a man who could electrify an audience with his messianic rants; Stalin a bureaucrat, obsessively micro-managing everything from screw production to mass executions. Hitler had come to power by more or less democratic means, Stalin by machinations within the Communist
apparat
. Hitler took over one of the world’s most advanced industrial societies; in 1938 the per capita GDP of the Soviet Union was less than half that of Germany. Hitler lacked Stalin’s murderous paranoia; it was far safer to be a functionary at the court of the former. The aesthetics of the two regimes also diverged in a number of intriguing ways. German representations of the countryside tended to be self-consciously pre-modern, whereas Soviet rural scenes generally involved at least one tractor. There were many more nude women in Nazi art, whereas Soviet female figures were demurely clad in boiler suits or picturesque national costumes. The debts owed by Nazi art were to neo-classicism and romanticism; by contrast, the origins of Socialist Realism have been traced back to the Peredvizhniki (the Wanderers), whose members had seceded from the academic establishment in the 1860s. Apart from an aversion to modernism in nearly all its forms, the two dictators themselves had distinctly different tastes. Hitler was a Wagnerian, Stalin more or less cloth-eared, though he did enjoy Gluck’s
Ivan Susanin
(especially the scene when the Poles are lured into a forest by a Russian and left there to freeze). Apart from Ziegler’s
Four Elements
and Breker’s bust of Wagner, Hitler’s private apartments were largely adorned with nineteenth-century works. Stalin, by contrast, had nothing more than a few dog-eared Peredvizhniki prints pinned to the bedroom walls of his dacha.