The code name for the attack was Operation Barbarossa. It commenced on Sunday morning, June 22, 1941, along a front that reached from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. For some three years German troops fought in the Soviet Union. It was an immensely costly campaign. Notable among its horrors was the systematic mass extermination of innocent Jews by Ein-satzgruppen, special Nazi mobile killing units, which followed in the wake of advancing Axis forces.
Each side committed momentous blunders. Despite clear evidence of German preparations, Stalin refused to ready his military for the attack. Hitler's forces swept forward practically unhindered, destroying ground and air defenses, driving before them a multitude of civilians and soldiers, killing, wounding, and capturing millions. Stalin was petrified. Hours passed before Soviet troops were ordered to fight back. As for the Germans, delay of the invasion, originally set to begin in mid-May, holdups of the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) at Kiev and Smolensk, and the onset of an early Russian winter meant that German soldiers had to contend with extreme cold weather. Exalted by the early successes of his armies and unprepared for stiff resistance from the Red Army, Hitler spread his forces, driving them toward Leningrad and Moscow, and across the mineral - and grain-rich south. The campaigns failed. Besieged Leningraders held out, starving and freezing, for two and a half years. The advance on Moscow cost the Red Army dearly, and in mid-November the city itself came under atfack, but tenacious defense, heavy German losses, freezing temperatures, and lack of reserves stopped the attackers. In early December Soviet troops began a counteroffensive.
Most successful was the German drive across Ukraine and south Russia. However, at Stalingrad, during the winter of 1942-1943, Soviet soldiers encircled General von Paulus's Sixth Army of some 100,000 soldiers
Parents find the body of their murdered son in Kerch, Eastern Crimea. This photo was probably taken in 1942, after the Germans captured the city. Reproduced by permission of British Information Services and from the Collections of the Library of Congress, Lot 11640-B.
And forced it to surrender. It was a turning point in the war. The Wehr-macht did launch one more major offensive in the USSR, in midsummer 1943, but it was countered by seasoned Soviet troops, superior in number and arms. Especially in the south (Ukraine, Crimea, lower Volga, northern Caucasus) Germans might have taken advantage of anti-Soviet or antiRussian feelings. Instead they were contemptuous of, and brutal toward, the conquered peoples. Of the more than three million Soviet POWs captured early in the war, some, at least (perhaps many), were willing to fight with Germany against the Stalin regime. Rather than cultivate and show some regard for these feelings, the Germans treated their captives with
Soviet residents watching German war prisoners being escorted though a village, past homes they had burned, around 1942-1943. Reproduced by permission of British Information Services and from the Collections of the Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-72772.
Extreme cruelty. Several hundred were deliberately murdered in the first test on humans of the poison gas hydrogen cyanide (Zyklon-B), used to exterminate Jews at Auschwitz.
Soviet war losses were immense, far greater even than Germany's. More than 20 million soldiers and civilians were killed. Jews in particular had been systematically hunted down and murdered. Two of the greatest single massacres of the Holocaust were carried out in September and October 1941 in or near the cities of Kiev and Odessa by Germans and Romanians. The Soviet government itself targeted certain ethnic groups for murder or deportation. Most of the many thousands of Poles rounded up during the Soviet occupation of Poland in 1939 were sent to Central Asia or Siberia, but several thousand Polish military officers were executed by security police, probably in 1940. Four thousand, four hundred and forty-three of these victims were unearthed near Smolensk in a place called Katyn Forest. Late in 1944 Polish fighters in Warsaw rose up against German occupiers, expecting support from the approaching Red Army. The Soviet units held up, however, waiting nearby for weeks while the uprising was crushed. In these ways Stalin eliminated potential opponents to his plans to Sovietize Poland. Some ethnic groups were accused of collaboration with the enemy and deported. Volga Germans at the beginning of the war and others later (Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Ingush, Karachay, Chechens, Balkars) were violently uprooted from their homelands and those who survived planted in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, or Siberia.
After the war's end Stalin told the victorious and hopeful Soviet people that they must bend to the hard tasks of reconstruction. A new five-year plan (1946-1950) with a 1930s emphasis on heavy industry called for Herculean efforts and sacrifices. These burdens were not lightened by financial help from outside. United States Lend-Lease ended, Stalin turned down Marshall Plan aid, and the possibility of foreign loans diminished as the cold war grew. The screws of repression, eased during the war, were again tightened. Returning POWs and other repatriates were regarded as spies—some were shot, others sent to the gulag. The value of rubles saved during the war by industrious peasants, working their private plots, was practically wiped out by a currency devaluation. Rural life continued to be hard and often dreary. Private plots were made smaller, earnings remained meager, and collectives merged into bigger collectives. Young men went to the cities if they could, leaving farms largely populated by the elderly, children, and women. Crowded cities grew more crowded. Food, housing, and every other necessity were in short supply. Residents were constantly on the lookout and foraging for any useful thing.
In contrast to the Soviet people, bent down by deprivation and heavy work, the Soviet state emerged from the war stronger than any other European country and one of the two great world powers. Except for Finland, Imperial Russia was nearly reassembled, the restored parts incorporated into the USSR or, in the case of Poland, overrun by Soviet military forces.
In fact, the Red Army overran all the countries of central Europe and by the end of the 1940s had turned them (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and eastern Germany) into satellite states, ruled by communist governments under Moscow's supervision. Communist parties independent of Moscow took over Yugoslavia and Albania. The most notable among postwar communist victories occurred in China, where Mao Tse-tung's forces overthrew the Kuomintang government of Chiang Kai-shek. Thus, all within a decade, the two great powers of the Eurasian continent, Japan and Germany, were crushed, and on their wreckage arose two new communist leviathans, every bit as hostile to Western liberal traditions as the fascist states had been.
As the USSR pressed its advantages and consolidated its hold over Eastern Europe, the West, especially the United States, began to take measures to prevent further expansion. President Truman announced in 1947 his government's willingness to assist countries trying to preserve their independence. Aid that year to Greece and Turkey may have prevented communist takeovers there. The Truman Doctrine and then the containment theory came to identify Western responses to Soviet expansionist moves, and the cold war to describe the general conflict. Moscow and Washington, D. C., did not directly shoot at each other but were drawn onto opposite sides of a number of threatening or deadly confrontations. Tens of thousands of U. S. soldiers died fighting Soviet-supported Koreans and Vietnamese, who died by the hundreds of thousands. Nuclear weapons added to these conflicts an ever-present threat of world annihilation. The USSR first tested an atomic bomb in 1949 and a hydrogen bomb in 1953.
The cold war had a powerful and negative effect on the lives of Soviet citizens. It was used to justify or explain nearly every hardship: the underfunding of agriculture and consumer goods in favor of heavy industry and military spending, constant police surveillance and disregard for justice, the vast prison labor system, wholesale spoliation of the environment, and so on.
The 19th Party Congress was held in October 1952. It approved the new five-year plan (1951-1955), which, like the others, emphasized heavy industry. During the congress Stalin increased membership in the top executive branches of the Party: the Presidium (Politburo merged with the Orgburo), the Secretariat, and the Central Committee—enough additional members to replace all the established (since the late 1930s) officers. The great leader, it seems, was preparing another purge. In satellite countries Party leaders were already being arrested and tried for being more or less disloyal, for advancing the interests, for example, of Zionists, Titoists, and imperialists. This time, however, besides Party officials, Stalin had Jews in his sights.
An anti-Jewish campaign promised to have wide popular support. One of the things that the revolutions of 1917 had not interrupted was the strong current of anti-Semitism. Even destruction of some two million Soviet Jews during the war had not erased the hatreds. One of the worst among a number of Stalin's anti-Jewish actions was the execution in 1952 of members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, a wartime organization of prominent Soviet citizens who had appealed successfully to American Jews for their financial support of the Soviet war effort. In January 1953 nine prominent doctors, most of them Jews, were arrested. They were charged with murdering high Party officials and forced by torture to confess their guilt. Widely publicized, the "doctors' plot" set in motion waves of accusations against Jews, doctors in particular.
World History
