Armageddon - Max Hastings [76]
Most Russian civilians spent the war years on the brink of starvation, working a sixty-six-hour week with one rest-day a month, receiving half the rations of Germans. Only vegetables grown in sixteen million urban gardens saved many people from death. In the course of the war, some 29.5 million Soviet citizens were drafted for service of one kind or another. By the autumn of 1944, more than 11.4 million men and women were serving in Stalin’s forces, 6.7 million of these with the active army. All statistics are unreliable, but the best available suggest that Soviet forces suffered total losses of 8.7 million killed, together with twenty-two million sick and wounded. These casualties were, of course, additional to at least eighteen million Soviet civilians who died.
It is important to qualify Soviet casualty figures. They fail to differentiate between those who were killed by the Nazis and those who died or were allowed to die at Moscow’s hands. Stalin’s agents continued killing and imprisoning “saboteurs” and “enemies of the state” in the hundreds of thousands. A quarter of all deportees in Siberian labour camps died of starvation in 1942—some 352,000 of them. Beria recorded the deaths of 114,481 in 1944, the year of victories. Around 157,000 men were shot for alleged desertion, cowardice or other military crimes in 1941–42 alone. Official Soviet rationing policy reflected indifference to the deaths from hunger of many weak and elderly people, since these were incapable of working or fighting. Throughout the territories now occupied by the Red Army the NKVD, Stalin’s all-powerful secret police and enforcing militia, was rounding up German civilians and PoWs in vast numbers, and dispatching them for labour service in the Soviet Union. Beria reported to Stalin in November 1944, for instance, that 97,484 German men between the ages of seventeen and forty-five and women between eighteen and thirty were being shipped to the Ukrainian mines from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Some of these could replace the German slaves who were dying in Soviet hands—6,017 during the first ten days of November alone, as Beria also recorded.
Stalin dominated Russia’s war more absolutely than Hitler controlled Germany’s. The Nazi empire was fatally weakened by the rivalry, self-indulgence, strategic folly and administrative incompetence of its leaders. In the Soviet Union, there was only one fount of power, from whom there was no escape or appeal. Ismay, Churchill’s personal Chief of Staff, recoiled from the cringing subservience of Russia’s generals when he first visited the Kremlin in 1941. “It was nauseating,” he wrote, “to see brave men reduced to such abject servility.” The Soviet Union’s defeats in 1941–42 were chiefly attributable to Stalin’s own blunders. In the years that followed, however, in striking contrast to Hitler, the master of Russia learned lessons. Without surrendering any fraction of his power over the state, he delegated the conduct of battles to able commanders, and reaped the rewards. He displayed an intellect and mastery of detail which impressed even foreign visitors who were repelled by his insane cruelty. He showed himself the most successful warlord of the Second World War, contriving means and pursuing ends with a single-mindedness unimaginable in the democracies. Terror was a more fundamental instrument of Russia’s war-making than of Germany’s. Even Stalin’s most celebrated marshals were never free from its spectre.
In the late summer of 1944, Soviet armies stood on the Vistula after accomplishing their most spectacular victories of the war. Yet, in the eyes of the West, admiration