v1.2.0 / chapter 17 of 17 / 01 feb 10 / greg goebel / public domain
* Hitler had foreseen correctly that the Soviets and the Western allies would have a falling-out and become enemies, but it happened much too late to do him any good. As the hot war against the Nazis faded away, the cold war between East and West began to take root. In the meantime Stalin, the distraction of crushing Hitler having ended, turned his attention back to the interrupted war against his own people.
* All Soviet citizens celebrated the new peace, even those in the Gulag, though the celebrations there were more mandatory than spontaneous. However, in Stalin's USSR, "peace" was a strictly relative term. Stalin had been forced to relax his grip to deal with Hitler. Now that Hitler was history, Stalin could tighten it again.
There was, for example, the troublesome matter of the overly popular and independent Zhukov. In his press conference with international reporters after the fall of Berlin, Zhukov made no mention of Stalin until queried by reporters. It is unlikely that this was the straw that broke Stalin's back, but it could not have made Stalin feel any better about Zhukov. Koba could also not have been happy with the admiration that Zhukov was being given in the British and American press. Stalin might call Zhukov his Suvorov, but listening to others do it was irritating.
Beria sent his lieutenant Viktor Abakumov, head of SMERSH, to Germany to arrest anyone who might be able to discredit Zhukov. Zhukov unsurprisingly found out and bluntly gave Abakumov the choice of immediately going back home under his own power or being escorted there by Zhukov's soldiers. Beria, infuriated, then moved to more direct action, having some of Zhukov's aides arrested and tortured to give false testimony against their commander. They testified in fine Stalinist tradition that Zhukov was plotting against the Great Leader, and that Zhukov had established secret contacts with American General Eisenhower.
Zhukov's friendly relationship with the folksy and amiable Eisenhower was in fact obvious. Eisenhower visited Moscow in August 1945, with Zhukov acting as his escort, with the two generals greeted by roaring applause wherever they went. Eisenhower even put his arm around Zhukov's shoulder. To Stalin's mind, this was all more or less treason in itself, though Koba himself was agreeable to Eisenhower, apologizing to the visitor for the "last minute change in plans" when the Red Army moved on Berlin instead of Central Europe.
Imprisoning or executing Zhukov was not prudent; after all, he was one of the heroes of the day. Zhukov was granted the honor of leading a victory parade in Moscow on 24 June 1945, romantically galloping in front of the troops on a gray charger, though the celebration was dampened by downpours of rain. Stalin's son Vasily told Zhukov that Stalin had wanted to perform the ride himself, but the horse had thrown him when he tried to get the hang of riding it, and so Koba decided to let Zhukov ride instead.
Zhukov could be put out of the way in a subtler fashion. At the end of 1945, he was denounced, demoted, and assigned to military bureaucratic oblivion, given meaningless posts in Odessa and the Urals. He would not be rehabilitated until after Stalin's death. Less prominent generals got worse treatment, with dozens arrested. Air Marshal Novikov was broken in rank, stripped of his decorations, and sent to prison. General Telyagin, Zhukov's executor in the conquest of Berlin, complained about looting by NKVD formations, and so Beria saw to it that Telyagin was sent to prison for 25 years. These men, too, would have to wait for Stalin's death to end their punishments.
* Germany was divided into separate zones of control, each administered by one of the victorious nations, and Berlin, deep in the Soviet zone of control, was split up similarly. Berliners were starving. Soviet citizens were going hungry at the time as well, but Stalin understood the need to maintain his image of benevolence, and priority was given to sending subsistence rations to Berlin. Special newsreels were put together displaying young children who had been separated from their parents, and shown to German citizens in hopes of reuniting families.
Those children from the East who had been taken away by the Germans were returned home, though in many cases there was little but ruins waiting for them. They carried with them identification numbers tattooed upon them by the Germans, and also the stigma of having been, however involuntarily and innocently, exposed to foreign infection. In Stalin's Soviet Union, that was crime enough.
Red Army prisoners of the Germans, and the Soviet citizens who had been carted off for Nazi slave labor, were also objects of suspicion. Even those prisoners who had been given weapons and thrown back into the fight against the Germans immediately after being freed from camps got little credit for it. The prisoners and slave laborers had looked forward to liberation, only to find themselves regarded with contempt by Red Army troops, who abused them, robbed them, and even raped the women, calling them "whores of the Germans".
That was almost the least of their worries. The NKVD set up a hundred holding camps where returnees could be held and interrogated. If the interrogators didn't like the answers they got -- and they were inclined to not like them no matter what they were -- the victim was going to suffer. Stalin invoked his agreements with the Western Allies to ensure that Soviet citizens and prisoners who had fallen into their hands were returned to the security of their own homeland.
The Allies returned the Hiwis, Soviet subjects who had fought against Stalin. General Krasnoff, Ottoman of the Don Cossacks, had fought against Bolshevism since 1918, and during the war led an army of 70,000 Cossacks to fight alongside Hitler's forces. At the end of the war, Krasnoff and his surviving Cossacks surrendered to the British. The British promised not to turn them over to Stalin, but Stalin insisted. The British packed up the Cossacks, who in some cases were accompanied by their families, and took them to a bridge.
The NKVD was waiting for them on the other side. The prisoners were ordered to walk across the bridge. The officers were shot immediately by the NKVD in full view of the British. Some of the Cossacks threw themselves off the bridge, which was about a hundred meters above the river. Those who had not been shot or committed suicide were packed into a train and hauled away. Most were not executed, but they would have a very hard time of it in the Gulag.
* While the trains took traitors, both suspected and real, eastward into the far-flung network of the prison camps, a train took Stalin west to meet with the other Allied leaders at Potsdam. Beria was entrusted to ensure Stalin's safety and paved the way with a massive security operation, with 17,000 troops guarding the rail route. Stalin did not believe in taking unnecessary chances.
At Potsdam, he was at the peak of his powers, meeting with the new Western leaders, US President Harry Truman and British Prime Minster Clement Atlee, who replaced Churchill even as the conference was in progress. The demilitarized status of Germany was clarified, as were the different occupation zones of the victorious Allies. The matter of resettling six million ethnic Germans who had been evicted from Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, in general in an abrupt and harsh manner, was addressed. Hitler had made a great deal of noise about the status of German-speaking minorities in Eastern Europe, and now the problem was being solved in a way he had not quite anticipated. The Allies handed Stalin a plum by recognizing the Communist Lublin government as the legitimate government of Poland. Soviet control over the rest of Eastern Europe was not challenged.
Truman pressed Stalin to help deal with the Japanese, and he was agreeable, saying planning was already in motion. The Soviet Union would move against Japan in mid-August. That was satisfying to Truman, but he was puzzled when he dropped hints to Stalin that the US had developed a powerful new weapon -- the first atomic bomb had just been tested -- and Stalin seemed completely disinterested. Actually, the development organization had been thoroughly infiltrated by Red spies; Truman hadn't been briefed on the program until after Roosevelt's death, while Stalin had known about the Bomb in detail long before Truman even knew it existed.
Stalin left Potsdam with considerable cause for satisfaction, though neither Truman nor Atlee seemed anywhere near as agreeable with Stalin as their predecessors had been. It was all but the last act between the two sides where they resembled allies. With Hitler dead and the borders with the West clarified, Stalin was once more the master of his own realm. His power was greater than that of the Tsars. He was, whatever his title, truly the greatest Tsar that Russia ever knew.
* The Japanese had been very careful not to provoke Stalin while he fought Hitler, but with Hitler taken care of, Stalin could send the mighty Red Army east to the Manchurian border to take advantage of the weakness of the Japanese, who were clinging on desperately under terrible blows from the Americans. Stalin had planned to move in mid-August, but on 8 August 1945 the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Fearing that the war against Japan would be over before the USSR could claim spoils in the Far East, Stalin ordered the offensive to jump off that same day.
The Soviet juggernaut rolled over the poorly equipped and supplied Japanese forces in front of them. Stalin hoped to make great gains and planned to invade the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. The Americans dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki a few days later. The war was soon over, and Stalin's invasion of the Japanese home islands became another incident in a history that never happened. He did make sure he collected on the deal he had made, acquiring South Sakhalin, the Kuriles, Port Arthur, and Dairen for the Soviet Union. These had been Tsarist possessions, lost in the Russo-Japanese war forty years earlier. The new Communist Tsar wanted them back.
The American use of the Bomb impressed on Stalin that the weapon had lived up to its fearsome potential. Stalin could no longer threaten the West with brute force, since the West could defeat him at that game. He turned his attention to the reconstruction of his country, as well as imposing his ideas of order on the population.
* Stalin's satisfaction with the results of the war was limited by the fact that it had left much of his kingdom in ruins. Over 2,000 towns in the Ukraine and western Russia had been damaged or all but demolished, and countless villages had been burned to the ground. Over 25 million Soviet subjects were homeless. People threw together hovels, dugouts, and shanties to provide shelter while they picked over the ruins to see what could be salvaged. Plows were drawn by women and old men.
Despite the destruction, there was some spirit of optimism among the tough Soviet people. They had survived the worst that the Fascists could throw at them. They would work and rebuild, believing that the better and freer society that Communism had been promising them for a generation was at hand. They were mistaken. State propaganda had been encouraging such delusions, but Stalin was merely waving a carrot he had no intention of actually handing over. Stalin never considered whether the people deserved to be rewarded for their sacrifices. He was only concerned that the people remained under his control, and remained free of contamination by foreign influences. The people's welfare and prosperity were secondary considerations at best.
The story of the million-plus German prisoners in Soviet custody gives a strange flavor of Stalin's thinking. The Germans were kept in their own system of camps, isolated from the Gulag that reduced millions of Soviet citizens to lives of misery. Soviet prisoners would not be exposed to foreign ideas, particularly those of a hated enemy. Ironically, the Germans received somewhat better treatment than Soviet prisoners, though that was a very low standard of comparison. The Germans were allowed to wear their own uniforms, to write letters home, and were even bossed by their own NCOs and officers. To be sure, this last measure was also a concession to efficiency, since the German Army organization retained a formidable capability to get things done even when it was on a chain, as the Americans had found out in their own prisoner of war camps. However, there was also something of a propaganda or persuasive agenda. German officers and men went through Marxist indoctrination and those that seemed embittered in their own cause or otherwise susceptible to the Communist message were cultivated. Once sent back home, they might be valuable resources for the USSR. Those Germans who were convicted of war crimes were publicly hanged. Those that survived were finally sent home beginning in 1949, though full repatriation took five years.
Soviet citizens who had been exposed to outside influences were "quarantined". A young Soviet woman named Olga Simonova had made the mistake of falling in love with a French captain, a pilot in the famed Normandie-Niemen air regiment. The Normandie-Niemen fought in the ranks of the Red Air Force, in Soviet Yak fighters, and their pilots received Soviet decorations such as Hero of the Soviet Union. All that didn't matter: they were still foreigners and suspect, as was anyone who had any close contact with them.
Olga Simonova was dragged out of her bed by an NKVD major and a plainclothesman and sent off to prison, She and the other women incarcerated with her were all processed by men who treated them like so many cattle to degrade them and break their spirit. She objected and raised a fuss, accidentally bruising a guard, who knocked her down and kicked her to a pulp. The doctor who tended her told her to tell no one about it if she wished to remain safe. She spent almost ten years in the Gulag, shifted from camp to camp. Some camps were better than others, but conditions in all were appalling. The guards did what they liked with the women. Many of the prisoners died.
There were lunacies within the lunacies. Even in Stalin's USSR, there were still some faint glimmerings of judicial process, and the NKVD received complaints from the judges about the flimsiness of charges against Soviet citizens. The NKVD was perfectly capable of fabricating much better cases and did so. According to some Russian historians, they established fake Soviet and fake Manchurian border camps, with NKVD prisoners of Chinese origin pretending to be the staff of the fake Manchurian border camp. The NKVD's clueless victims would be taken to the fake Soviet border camp and there told they were to go into "Manchuria" and spy for the USSR. Of course, once sent out, they were immediately captured by the "Manchurians", forced to agree to work for the Nationalist Chinese, and sent back, where they were once again captured and charged with treason. Most were shot.
* Not everyone submitted to resurgent Soviet power without a struggle. The Baltic states had now changed hands again, and Stalin renewed his efforts to erase their national identities. Many of the citizens there, and in other regions where the fighting had been intense and loyalty to Stalin doubtful in the first place, had fought as partisans against one side or both sides, and were still willing to keep up the fight.
The Baltic states did not have the rugged terrain that would permit a small guerrilla force to resist a large army. NKVD troops quickly crushed resistance, hunting down guerrilla bands and throwing anyone suspected of guerrilla sympathies into the Gulag. In the western Ukraine, Bandera's nationalist forces were able to fight from forest strongholds for a number of years before they were finally suppressed.
The misery was compounded when the summer of 1946 brought drought and crop failure to the Ukraine and southern Russia. The Soviet Union, a world power, could not feed its people.
The peasantry worked the land and were effectively even chained to the land by internal passports, but no longer owned the land. Indeed, even casually plucking an ear of grain and eating its kernels could get them a sentence to the labor camps. Their lives were controlled by Stalin and the local bosses, the mini-Stalins, who gave them orders and dealt out punishments. The local bosses were responsible for living up to the quotas established in the current Party plans, and if they did not meet them, they stood a good chance of being severely punished themselves.
Through all this suffering, Stalin kept the propaganda machine running in high gear. Films praised life under the new order, and public spectacles glorified Stalin and Soviet society in his image. Voting campaigns were scrupulously carried out, even though they provided no real choices to the voters. Newreels showed Stalin casting his vote like any good Soviet citizen, with Stalin joking a little with the cameraman. Other high Soviet officials like Molotov cast their votes in front of the cameraman, too, but few really believed it was an act of free expression. Molotov's own wife Polina was in the Gulag, having been arrested in 1948.
* In a speech on 5 March 1946 at Fulton University in Missouri, USA, Winston Churchill summed up the new reality between the Soviet Union and the West in another one of his memorable phrases: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the face of Europe." The Cold War had now been formally declared.
In early 1948 Communists took over the government in Czechoslovakia, and then in June 1948 Stalin cut off access to Berlin. The Americans and their allies responded with a magnificently organized airlift to keep the city supplied, presenting Stalin with the choice of either escalating the confrontation by shooting down the aircraft, or backing down. In May 1949, he decided to back down. The West had demonstrated more spine than he expected, and the airlift was a demonstration of material strength that the USSR couldn't match.
The main effect of these provocations was to reinforce American commitment to Europe, leading to the formation of NATO in 1949. The Americans had expected that peace would allow them to return home, disarm, and tend to their own business, as they had after World War I, but Stalin ensured that the long custom of American isolationism was a thing of the past. The US Marshall Plan, introduced in 1947, was helping stabilize the states of Western Europe in the face of the Soviet threat.
In 1949, a civil war in Greece finally ended, with Soviet-backed Communists decisively defeated. Yugoslavia, though a Communist state under Josip Broz Tito, demonstrated an assertive independence of Moscow that infuriated Stalin. Koba hated Tito as much as he had hated Trotsky and tried to have him assassinated, but the clumsy attempts failed and only reinforced Yugoslav independence. The Iron Curtain had reached the limits of its extent in Europe.
* Stalin was still working hard to meet challenges from the West. On 25 September 1949 the USSR exploded their first atomic bomb, which was a straight copy of the American "Fat Man" device that had smashed Nagasaki. It had been built as a top-priority project by a massive and secret project -- Operation ENORMOZ -- under the control of Beria. The USSR, lacking a good long-range bomber to deliver the bomb, had also obtained three Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers, which had been damaged in raids over Japan, with the American crews seeking refuge in Siberia. To their surprise, the crews were interned, and the aircraft were spirited off to be exactingly disassembled, reverse-engineered, and then manufactured as the Tupolev Tu-4.
The Soviets tried to keep the nuclear test a secret, but the Americans had just begun flying Superfortresses with atmospheric sampling gear to detect the radioactive traces of such explosions. The Americans were shocked since they had not believed the backwards Soviets were capable of such a feat. Stalin was shocked that he had been found out so fast.
The Soviet Bomb was Joseph Stalin's 70th birthday gift. His birthday was celebrated across the land, with the usual adoring speeches and the applause of audiences who clapped almost indefinitely, none wishing to be the first to stop. At the celebrations, a visitor from China, Mao Tse-Tung, sat at Stalin's side. Two months earlier, Mao had finally evicted Nationalist Chinese forces from the mainland, and China had become a Communist state, providing a nearly simultaneous second blow to the confidence of the West. This was a great victory for Stalin -- though the Red revolution in China would prove less of a benefit to the Soviet state than most in East or West assumed.
At the celebrations, Mao and Kim Il Sung of North Korea pressed Stalin for his approval for an attack on South Korea. With opportunities for Communist expansion elsewhere blocked, Stalin cautiously agreed. Soviet pilots were covertly sent to fly MiG-15 jet fighters against American aircraft. The Communists got the worst of it in the air, and the Americans reacted with surprising strength and determination on the ground after initial bungling. Still, the Americans were bogged down by the fighting, and Stalin wanted to protract the struggle indefinitely in hopes of wearing the Americans down.
However, Stalin was careful to keep the fighting limited. The Soviet Union did not have the atomic capability to match the Americans at that time. Instead, Stalin challenged the West with his rhetoric, charging them with tyranny and claiming that the Soviet Union carried the banner of democratic freedoms. With his other face, he lashed out at Voroshilov, Molotov, and Mikoyan at a dinner, calling them British spies. A hush fell across the room.
Kruschev claimed in his memoirs that late in the war, Stalin had started to become "not quite right in the head." Since Stalin clearly had never been quite right in the head by any civilized standard, the implication that he had become worse was terrifying. The overwhelming pressures of war had forced reality on Stalin for a time, but when Soviet victory became certain, he began to slip back into his brutal delusions at an accelerating pace. He was getting old and was not healthy-looking, and his mindset became increasingly suspicious and arbitrary. In 1951, he mentioned, idly as if nobody in particular was around: "I'm finished, I trust no one, not even myself."
The scientists and artists went through the motions of praise for the Great Leader, but that did not save them from denunciation. Beria and Zdahnov began the witch hunt against the intelligentsia, locking up famous poets, singers, and movie stars. Another witch hunt was begun against the medical profession, particularly against the Jewish doctors who served the Kremlin. The eminent specialist Vinogradof and others were arrested, and forced to sign phony confessions that they had plotted to poison members of the government.
Even in a land where people's concepts of truth had been so totally corrupted, nobody believed it. What they believed, with plenty of justification, that a new wave of major purges was brewing that might exceed the brutality and madness of those of the 1930s. The Jews were apparently being lined up as the primary victims, Stalin apparently having found Hitler's attempt at a "final solution" of the "Jewish problem" appealing. Of course, the purge wouldn't stop at Jews. Everyone, no matter what their rank or ethnic background, was terrified.
* On 1 March 1953, Stalin failed to emerge from his apartment, and that evening the guards finally built up the courage to break in. They found him lying on a sofa, conscious but unable to speak. He appeared to have suffered a stroke. Beria and other officials arrived on 2 March, with Beria making dire threats against the doctors who were trying to tend to the fallen Stalin, but there was nothing the doctors could do. In fact, it is strongly suspected that Beria delayed obtaining care for as long as possible, though no doubt the threat to the doctors was still perfectly sincere.
Stalin's son Vasily and daughter Svetlana also came on 2 March. They had not been close to their father for some time. Both had unsettled personal lives, jumping from one broken relationship to the next. Vasily was nothing like his half-brother Yakov; Vasily was an alcoholic who had been promoted to major general of the Red Air Force by officers who feared annoying Stalin, though there was no evidence Stalin paid much attention to Vasily one way or another. Svetlana had hardly seen her father since 1943, when one of her lovers, who had the bad luck to be Jewish and so a target of suspicion by the antisemitic Stalin, had been arrested and thrown into the Gulag. She had protested to her father, who flew into a rage and slapped her twice. When she did see Stalin after that, she was a wreck for days afterward.
Vasily was characteristically drunk when he came to visit his stricken parent, raising a fuss and accusing the doctors of trying to kill his father, and was finally told to leave. Vasily would soon find himself dismissed from his high position, struggling along as a nonperson under a new name until he died in 1962 at age 41.
Svetlana stayed with her father. Stalin lingered for three more days, finally dying on 5 March 1953. Towards the end, his breathing became more labored and increasingly difficult and he turned blue as he slowly choked to death. Svetlana recorded his last acts, saying "he opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry, and full of fear of death."
Then "he suddenly lifted up his left hand as though he were pointing to something up above and bringing down a curse on all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace." He stilled and in time stopped breathing. Beria would succeed him for a short time, only to be arrested and shot. He had terrorized too many people and made too many enemies. The generals had a score to settle with him, and not only did Zhukov lead the party that arrested Beria after luring him out from under his security umbrella, but a Soviet general pulled the trigger that ended his sordid career.
Kruschev took Beria's place and would begin denunciations of Stalin, trying to reform the clumsy and ugly structure Stalin had created, if with very mixed results. Kruschev could never decide if he was coming or going, having been a party to the terror in Stalin's time and then repudiating it after Stalin was gone; condemning Stalin's ways while still remaining in awe of him; trying to liberalize and then reflexively cracking down when things threatened to go out of control.
That was later. Hearing of Stalin's death, many citizens wept. Of all the monstrosities of Stalin's life, the most appalling was that state propaganda had convinced the people who he had misled, in every sense of the word, sadistically terrorized, tortured, and murdered, to love him. One Soviet citizen later said that when Stalin talked on the radio, it was "like listening to the voice of God." A woman recounted how after hearing the news of Stalin's death, she asked her fiance: "How are we going to live? It's impossible without him!"
Not everybody had been taken in. He fiance replied: "Peacefully." She commented later: "He was smarter than I was." Even in death, Stalin proved malevolent, with the crowds lining the streets of Moscow for his funeral becoming so packed that about a hundred people died in the crush. He would cast a long shadow after that. The days of lunatic mass terror quickly ended, but the state would remain authoritarian, xenophobic, fossilized, and inefficient, gradually running out of steam until it finally ground to a halt and fell apart into a rusty heap of scrap almost forty years later.
* This document began as a set of notes taken from a historical documentary series named RUSSIA'S WAR: BLOOD UPON THE SNOW, shown on the US PBS television broadcasting network in the late 1990s. The series was directed by Viktor Lisakovitch, and detailed the reign of Joseph Stalin and in particular his war with Hitler.
This series was very good, but really just provided a basic skeleton to be filled out from print sources. The second pass on the document was based on readings from the relevant volumes of the extensive TIME-LIFE series on World War II. The following sources contributed to the final pass:
* Revision history:
v1.0.0 / 01 apr 06 / gvg
v1.0.1 / 01 mar 08 / Minor cosmetic update.
v1.2.0 / 01 feb 10 / Added more on Allied coalition politics.
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