Armageddon - Max Hastings [91]
Within a matter of months, Stalin’s political hegemony had supplanted that of Hitler across vast tracts of territory. With great difficulty and in defiance of fierce American criticism, Churchill was able to save Greece from communist domination, chiefly because British forces were able to land there from the Mediterranean. Elsewhere in eastern Europe, however, a grim pattern was emerging. The Western allies, and above all the Americans, still perceived the war overwhelmingly as a military event. For Stalin, it was always a political one. The days were over when Moscow confined its ambitions to dominance of its own republics. Russia’s reward for victory was to be an empire of buffer-states, which would ensure that never again was the nation vulnerable to direct aggression. Stalin scarcely troubled to disguise from Russia’s allies his determination that political settlements determined by Soviet wishes would be imposed upon territories liberated by Soviet arms. He argued, not unreasonably by his own logic, that the Western allies likewise pleased themselves about the governance of every nation their own armies liberated. “This war is not as in the past,” Stalin told Milovan Djilas. “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”
As the Americans and British advanced across western Europe, although some disorder persisted behind their front, there was no armed resistance to their administration. They were presiding over a genuine process of liberation. Across millions of square miles of Soviet-occupied territory, however, desperate fighting persisted for months. Far behind the front, whole Soviet divisions were deployed to clear up the armed flotsam of many nations, men who knew that they possessed no hope of survival if they fell into Russian hands. In addition to German stragglers, there were Ukrainians and representatives of Soviet minorities of every hue who had been rash enough to throw in their lot with the Nazis. Forming bands sometimes hundreds strong, they sallied from their eyries in forests and mountains to attack Soviet supply dumps and villages, in search of food or vengeance. “For some reason,” Beria reported to Stalin on 25 November 1944, “there are a great many people who call themselves partisans, operating in groups of several hundreds, dressed in the ragged uniforms of several armies, or of Ukrainian police. They rob, rape women and shave their heads and otherwise provoke trouble in cunning ways. They make swift, sudden thrusts, using the forests for cover and infiltrating men into our positions to provoke unrest. They harry our forces, cut off units and establish road blocks. They know their areas very well.”
The Soviet archives are filled with NKVD reports of partisan activity, both real and fictional. It will never be possible to determine how many of those hunted down and killed were indeed traitors to the Soviet cause or mere hapless innocents. Beria, the NKVD’s overlord, was a killer at least as terrible as Himmler or Heydrich, and more effective than either. While generals measured their triumphs in the miles that their armies advanced, Beria reported his achievements to Stalin in a ghastly game bag of captured and slaughtered state enemies, submitted monthly to the Kremlin. On 31 December, he declared a total of 13,960 Ukrainians, 7,228 Belorussians, 9,688 Moldavians and 45,011 citizens of Leningrad returned to Russia from captured territories, along with similar flotsam from other minority groups. Of these, 38,428 had been sent to their homes; 5,827 conscripted