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By Root 911 0

beckoned in 1941, Stalin embraced a new prototype. “Our benefactor thinks that we have been too sentimental,” wrote Boris Pasternak bitterly. “Peter the Great is no longer an appropriate model. The new passion, openly confessed, is for Ivan the Terrible, the oprichnina [tsarist enforcers], and cruelty. This is the subject for new operas, plays and films.” Beyond hundreds of thousands of Russians and inhabitants of the republics whom he killed as state enemies, Stalin’s policies had driven millions more to starvation and even cannibalism. He had gone far towards stripping from the Russian people their heritage of impulsive passion and artistic genius, replacing it with an ice-age universe in which even absolute obedience offered no warranty of survival. Stalin had contrived the destruction of human trust in a society now ruled by terror, manic suspicion and arbitrary injustice. He himself liked to tell a story of Beria, most terrible of secret policemen. Stalin loses a favourite pipe. A few days later, Beria calls to inquire whether it has been recovered. “Yes,” replies Stalin, “I found it under the sofa.” “Impossible!” says Beria. “Three people have already confessed to this crime!”

The German invasion provoked the deportation of entire Soviet subject populations, such as the Chechens and Crimean Tartars, more than two million people whose loyalty to Moscow was deemed suspect. They died in the hundreds of thousands. Stalin’s conduct of his own dominions, in which he had already presided over at least ten million deaths, perhaps twenty million, commanded the respect, even envy, of Hitler. The Georgian shared his German counterpart’s appetite for self-pity in adversity. He was a much cleverer man, however, especially in one vital respect. War made Hitler a fantasist and Stalin a realist.

It is unlikely that any other Soviet leader could have wrung from his own people the sacrifices necessary to defeat the Nazis. “Who but us could have taken on the Germans?” mused a Soviet soldier, Konstantin Mamerdov. Who indeed? Victory demanded the commitment of a tyranny as ruthless as that of Germany, and ultimately more effective militarily and industrially. But for Stalin’s massive pre-war programme to industrialize the Soviet Union, heedless of the cost in millions of peasant lives, it is unlikely that his nation could have manufactured the weapons to resist Hitler in 1941. Once at war, Stalin “was oblivious of the fundamental principle of the military art, that the objective should be gained at minimal cost in human life,” observes one of his modern Russian biographers, General Dmitry Volkogonov. “He believed that both victories and defeats inevitably reaped a bitter harvest . . . It seemed to Stalin quite unnecessary to make the attainment of strategic objectives dependent on the scale of losses.”

The most important “if” of the Second World War is to consider the consequences had Germany not invaded the Soviet Union. The Battle of Britain notwithstanding, Churchill’s island could have been conquered had Hitler’s ambitions not been overwhelmingly fixed upon the creation of an eastern empire. The three years of attrition which followed, before the Western allies invaded France, demanded a price from the Russian people which the democracies were quite incapable of paying. It seems wrong to take for granted the Soviet Union’s passionate resistance to Hitler. It remains extraordinary that its people, who had suffered so terribly from Stalin’s rule, nonetheless rallied to the standard of Mother Russia under his leadership, in a fashion that determined the course of history.

To grasp the nature of the war against Germany, a crude rule of thumb is useful. Every mile of front on which the Americans and British fought, every German soldier deployed in the west, was multiplied three- or four-fold in the east. The disparity in casualties both suffered and inflicted during the last year of the war, when the Western allies were fighting in north-west Europe, was even greater. Eisenhower’s armies suffered some 700,000 casualties—killed, wounded