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By Root 1635 0

entitled Bezymyanny (Nameless) was built outside Kuybyshev, 500 miles east of Moscow. To shift a large part of Russia’s industrial base, along with food, tools, equipment and prisoners, as well as twenty-five million Russians, so far eastwards, and then impose an eighteen-hour working day with one day’s rest per month, probably required completely totalitarian power. Factory production began behind the Urals even before builders had constructed the roofs and walls of the factories. Managers were given targets, and were made to appreciate that meeting them was a life-and-death matter, for them personally as much as for the nation. Of course conditions were often unspeakable; at one factory 8,000 female workers lived in holes bored into the ground. Every industrial concern that could be turned over to war production was turned over. A factory producing champagne bottles, for example, was appropriately enough reassigned to the production of Molotov cocktails.120 (There were two basic types of Molotov cocktail: the K-I that had a fuse and the K-S whose chemicals exploded on impact. Both could produce flames of 1,500 Celsius.)

At the heart of the Second World War lies a giant and abiding paradox: although the western war was fought in defence of civilization and democracy, and although it needed to be fought and had to be won, the chief victor was a dictator who was as psychologically warped and capable of evil as Adolf Hitler himself. Nor did the Red Terror end with the German invasion. Between June and October 1941, the NKVD arrested 26,000 people, of whom 10,000 were shot.121 There were four million prisoners languishing in the Gulag, even in the year 1942. No fewer than 135,000 Red Army soldiers – the equivalent of twelve divisions – were shot by their own side during the war, including many who had surrendered to the Germans and been recaptured. The death penalty was imposed for panic-mongering, falling asleep on duty, cowardice, drunkenness, desertion, loss of equipment, refusing to charge through a minefield, destroying a Party membership card on capture (even though carrying one meant a death sentence from the Germans), striking an officer, ‘anti-Soviet agitation’, and so on and so on.

Under Stalin’s ‘Not One Step Back’ order several generals were sentenced to death in absentia, and on one occasion the sentence was not carried out until 1950, when the soldier in question, General Pavel Ponedelin, foolhardily reminded Stalin of his existence by writing to him to protest his innocence. Marshal Zhukov ordered retreating Soviet troops to be machine-gunned, and even wanted to shoot the families of those who surrendered, but that was one act of brutality too far, even for the Stavka. Some 400,000 Russians served in the various punishment battalions that were set up to impose absolute obedience on the Red Army. Yet had the slightest backsliding been permitted, the Soviets could never have persuaded rational human beings to undergo the hell of the Great Patriotic War, especially for a regime that was widely (if necessarily privately) detested. ‘Probably only a dictatorship as savage as Stalin’s, and a people as inured to barbarism as the Russians, could have broken Hitler’s power,’ is Max Hastings’ verdict. ‘The story of how they did so has never been one for weak stomachs.’ At one point in 1941 Stalin ordained that the entire ethnic German populations of the Volga, Rostov and Moscow regions of Russia, numbering over half a million people, simply be relocated to collective farms far to the east – Kazakhstan and beyond – in order to prevent them from welcoming their distant cousins to Russia. At the very same period in Britain, there were strikes over pay and conditions even in the aircraft-production factories, something that in Russia would have been inconceivable (although instantly resolvable).122

Although Britain could hardly have ‘broken Hitler’s power’ on her own, if the Germans had been able to invade Britain or the United States, there is every indication that the inhabitants would have defended themselves just as