The Great Patriotic War

At the crack of dawn on Sunday, June 22, 1941, Hitler unleashed 3,600,000 men and 3,682 tanks supported by 2,000 aircraft in the greatest land campaign in history -- the invasion of the Soviet Union, code-named Operation Barbarossa. That designation, with its connotations of medieval cruelty, signaled Hitler's commitment to a war of unparalleled ferocity made all the more devastating when combined with Nazi racist ideology which demanded nothing less than the extermination or the enslavement of the Slav Untermensch.


In this nightmarish scenario, a war of annihilation, Vernichtungs-kampf, was coupled with that of racial extermination, Rassenkampf, directed against the "Jew-Bolshevik enemy" in particular and the Slav subhuman in general. The accepted rules of warfare were abandoned and the murder squads were let loose on Jews, Bolsheviks, prisoners, partisans and hostages. The Nazis' relentless portrayal of the enemy's inhumanity generated a barbarous response, drenching the war in the east in atrocities.


Even now, over half a century later, this is a war which is little understood. During the Cold War, historical analysis was transformed into an ideological struggle, triggering a sustained Soviet campaign against Western falsifikatsiya, while Western historians dismissed some research as Soviet propaganda. The selfless, sacrificial, almost unparalleled heroism of the people of the Soviet Union was obscured by the generation of official, stylized, stereotyped "heroic myths." The human cost was disgracefully concealed or politically manipulated, all to hide unpreparedness, incompetence and uncaring profligacy with human life on the battlefront.


Behind the Soviet front, a draconian regime either callously abandoned the populace, subjected it to inhuman coercion or demanded inordinate sacrifice, whether on the land, in the factories, or in the terrible siege conditions of Leningrad. It was not, as persistent propaganda proclaimed, that the institutions of the regime planned, managed and assured survival. Ironically, it was those ill-conceived practices and arbitrary methods of Stalin's rule which so frequently prejudiced survival and safety. What counted in the final analysis was the popular exercise of self-discipline, devotion to duty, responsiveness to leaders' demands and a deep attachment to true patriotism, a proper accounting of which has yet to be made for posterity.


The magnitude and intensity of this gigantic military encounter produced numbers and statistics so astronomical as to engender disbelief or, at best, skepticism. At the cost of 8,668,400 dead and 22,326,905 wounded, the Red Army destroyed or disabled 607 German and Axis divisions. The Red Army was operationally committed for 88 percent of the 1,418 days of warfare, engaging an enemy which never committed less than approximately 70 percent of the Wehrmacht's entire field strength in the east. The Soviet military effort embraced nine campaigns, seven substantial defensive operations and 160 offensive operations.


But the battlefields alone do not describe the dimensions of this war. Stalin waged war not only on Nazi Germany but, where maintaining the strength of his own power demanded, on his own people as well. Prisoners at the front were exiled even if their capture had been the result of incompetent command. Stalin illegally "militarized" sections of labor, deported suspect nationalities and subverted the minimum legality of government, while pursuing a secret war for control of resistance movements and countenancing the tragedies and treacheries of partisan warfare. The cult of the war, the "Great Patriotic War," played a substantial role in reinforcing the legitimacy of the Soviet state but it could not entirely conceal the calamities inherent in Stalin's strategy.


Many aspects of Stalin as a war leader remain enigmatic, particularly the significance of his leadership. His obduracy toward his allies is much quoted, but then his allies took much time before realizing "the enormous and absolutely vital importance" of the Russian front. Hurriedly improvised diplomatic bridges were built after June 1941 but proved to be durable enough, ultimately, to bear the full weight of the "Grand Alliance." If the relationship included cooperation on a grand scale, it was also forced to accommodate mutual suspicion and barely concealed animosities. But inescapably, as the protracted duel between Stalin and Winston Churchill developed, intense exchanges erupted over territorial questions, supplies and the failure to deliver the "second front." Moscow could only reluctantly concede, and finally conclude, that the brunt of the fighting would fall on the Red Army.


The bitterness created by delays in launching the second front carried over into peacetime. It left a residue of resentment which only slowly dissipated and has not entirely vanished. The argument that it was only the spectacular successes of the Red Army in 1944 and the prospect of further Soviet advances into Central Europe which "speeded up" a second front still enjoys some popularity.


With the opening of the Soviet archives, it is likely that a more comprehensive picture of the politics and personalities of the Grand Alliance will emerge, but its ineradicable achievement, against many odds, was the climactic junction of Allied troops on the Elbe at Torgau in 1945, which split Nazi Germany in half.


This was -- party propaganda and the political subservience of historians notwithstanding -- a people's war combining tragedy and triumph on an epic scale. In the totality of the tragedy there were, and still are, costs for the survivors, for whom the mourning must long linger. In the measure of the triumph, bought with so much blood and treasure, there stands the historical achievement, from which none can detract, of first deflecting and ultimately defeating the tide of degenerate fascism which nearly engulfed us all.





John Erickson is a professor of history at the University of Edinburgh's Center for Defense Studies. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.