Part II

ARDUOUS TIMES

Chapter Three. BLITZKRIEG PLAN FRUSTRATED
Chapter Four. THE SOVIET UNION BECOMES A UNITED MILITARY CAMP
Chapter Five. THE BATTLE OF MOSCOW
Chapter Six. BATTLES IN THE SUMMER AND AUTUMN OF 1942
Chapter Seven. MOBILISATION OF THE REAR IN 1942

THE OTHER WAR THEATRES

THE FIRST PERIOD OF WAR. A BRIEF SUMMARY

Chapter Four

THE SOVIET UNION BECOMES A UNITED MILITARY CAMP

1. ARMED FORCES GROW STRONGER

In the autumn of 1941 the enemy was at the walls of besieged Leningrad and threatened Moscow. In the south he was pushing towards Kharkov, the Donets Basin and Sevastopol. In his hands were key economic regions, millions of Soviet people and considerable material wealth. Towards the close of the year not a single of the south’s iron-and-steel plants and converters could be used. Only 38.4 per cent of the country’s pre-war blast-furnaces and 52.2 per cent of its rolling mills were in operation. In December 1941, as compared with June, pig iron output diminished 75 per cent. Of the factories producing munitions, 303 were put out of commission in the period from August to November.

Yet the nazis had to be stopped. The country had to mobilise its moral and material resources. The might of the Soviet state had to be concentrated on crushing the enemy. This meant a titanic effort for the entire nation. During the Civil War Lenin said: “All honest workers and _ peasants, all Soviet officials must pull themselves together like soldiers and concentrate to the maximum their work, their efforts and their concern directly on the tasks of the war.” He said the Soviet Republic “must become a single military camp, not in word but in deed”. This was doubly valid in 1941.

Stabilising the military situation and reinforcing the Soviet Armed Forces held top priority. In the heavy defensive fighting of the summer of 1941 the Armed Forces had suffered losses in men and in field and anti-tank guns, tanks and aircraft. Huge stores of fuel, ammunition and weapons were either captured by the enemy or destroyed by retreating Soviet troops. The shortage in tanks, guns and aircraft was acute. Even rifles and cartridges were in short supply. The losses had tilted the scales sharply in the enemy’s favour.

The unintermittent-battles and the withdrawal farther into the country had an adverse effect on Army morale. Although, by and large, men and officers fought tenaciously, signs of a tank- and plane-phobia bordering on panic appeared here and there. There were cases of cowardice and indiscipline. Troop units abandoned positions without orders for withdrawal, and officers lost their heads when in difficulty, issuing contradictory orders instead of keeping firm and skilful control.

The Party Central Committee and the State Defence Committee took steps to tighten discipline and improve organisation. While commending the heroism and courage of the Army and Navy as a whole, and noting their high morale and loyalty, GHQ condemned cowardice, panic and loose discipline. Commanders and political instructors were to maintain order and punish men who broke their Army oath or were unsteady in battle. True, errors of judgement were committed in carrying out this instruction. Many officers resorted to compulsion, while neglecting educational work. On October 4, 1941, the People’s Commissariat for Defence condemned distortions in disciplinary practices and required better educational work with the ranks. The men had to be told that if the powerful and brutal enemy was to be defeated, they had to display supreme self-sacrifice, show contempt of death and be merciless to traitors, cowards and deserters.

To enhance Party influence among the troops, the Central Committee of the Party passed decisions on June 27 and 29, 1941, to send Communists and Komsomol members to the front as political instructors. More than 95,000 of the best-trained were despatched for active service by regional and territorial Party committees in the first three months of the war.

On July 16, 1941, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a decree reorganising political propaganda and introducing military commissars in the Red Army. A few days later the decree was extended to include the Navy. The boards and departments for political propaganda were converted into political boards and departments. The rank of military commissar was instituted in the regiments, divisions, corps, headquarters, military schools and other Army institutions, and the post of political instructor was instituted in the companies, squadrons and batteries. The Party and the Government called on the commissars, political bodies and Party organisations to conduct their work in a new way and intensify mass political agitation and propaganda in the Army and Navy in order to achieve an effective enhancement of the troops’ combat capability in the shortest possible time.

Commanders, political officers and the Party organisations explained to Army and Navy personnel the home and foreign policy of the Party and Government, the just nature of the Great Patriotic War, kindling their patriotism and making them confident of final victory. Emphasis was placed on eliminating fear of tanks and aircraft. Skill in fighting enemy tanks and planes improved visibly.

Party and Komsomol organisations gave invaluable help to commanders in raising the combat ability of the troops. Communists and Komsomol members helped to weld the personnel into close-knit units, setting examples of bravery. Their conduct in battle was an inspiration for other men. But the number of Communists dwindled after every action. Often, Party organisations in companies and batteries became non-existent due to the heavy casualties. Urgent measures were needed. Hundreds of thousands of officers and men accepted as an honour the call to join the Leninist Party. According to the Party Rules they needed character recommendations by three Communists having a three-year Party record and acquainted with the applicant through joint work for at least a year. In war-time this, naturally, hindered the growth of Army Party organisations. The Central Committee of the CPSU(B) modified this rule on August 19, 1941: men in active service with a good battle record were admitted on the recommendation of three Party members with a oneyear Party record who knew the applicant for even less than a year. While 27,068 armymen were admitted to the Party as candidates between January 1 and June 30, 1941, as many as 126,625 joined the Party in the next six months.

The term at officer training schools and military academies was shortened and the number of trainees increased. New schools were opened, and advanced training courses, notably two- and three-month courses for junior lieutenants, were instituted. By the end of the first six months of the war more than 192,000 officers had been freshly trained.

To build up a large Army, GHQ and the General Staff centralised the training of reserve troops. This was put into the hands of a special group responsible to the Defence Commissariat, later reorganised into the Central Administration for Army Activation and Equipment.

To meet combat losses and increase the fighting force, reinforcements streamed in from the rear. As many as 291 divisions and 94 brigades were sent to the front between June 22 and December 1, 1941, in addition to troops in western border areas at the beginning of the war. In the meantime, new divisions were formed in the far rear. Men of alli nationalities, from all the Soviet Republics, were called up. Azerbaijanians, Kazakhs, Kirghizes, Turkmenians and many of the other formerly oppressed peoples, never called up in tsarist Russia because they were not trusted with weapons, went to defend their country, which had been liberated by the Revolution. National divisions were formed of men from the Caucasian republics, Central Asia and the Baltic area.

Fundamental changes were introduced into the Armed Forces. A reorganisation was carried out in July and August. Due to the shortage of command personnel the control administrations of most of the infantry corps were dissolved. The number of divisions in an army was reduced to five or six. Motorised divisions were converted into ordinary infantry divisions. Tank and air corps were disbanded, chiefly due to the shortage of vehicles and aircraft. The number of regiments in an air division was reduced from three to two and the number of aircraft in a regiment was also reduced.

The new infantry divisidns differed from the pre-war, their numerical strength being reduced. In July-September 1941 GHQ formed 48 cavalry divisions, expecting to make the ground forces more manoeuvrable and mobile. Yet they did not compensate for the shortage of armour and motorised troops. The formation of tank brigades and battalions to support infantry was begun in August and proved to be successful. Artillery, too, was reorganised, enabling GHQ to manoeuvre better with the available strength.

Seeing that the fighting had assumed immense proportions and operational troop guidance had become more complicated (while top-level commanders lacked experience), the fronts were reduced in size. The five fronts formed at the beginning of the war were broken down into eight by the end of the summer campaign, with four separate armies operating independently. The General Staff, which throughout the war was the working organ of GHQ and was subordinated to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, was reorganised to improve the leadership of the Armed Forces..

It was soon clear that the Army’s logistics had to be reorganised. Supply was centralised, and General A. V. Khrulev was appointed to the post of Chief of Logistics. Similar posts were also instituted in fronts and armies. One of the members of the respective military councils was made responsible- for logistics. Soon, the Party Central Committee established political departments handling supplies in fronts and armies, and a centralised committee to care for wounded and sick servicemen was formed in October 1941, with A. A. Andreyev, a Secretary of the Party Central Committee, at its head.

A civil guard of many thousands was formed under Party guidance. This patriotic movement initiated by the citizens of Moscow and Leningrad played an active part in defending the capital, Leningrad, Smolensk, Kiev, Makeyevka, Gorlovka, Sevastopol, Odessa, Tula and many other cities.

Anti-paratroop detachments and battalions were formed by local Party, government and other public organisations to combat saboteurs, spies and enemy paratroops, and to patrol military objectives close to the battlelines.

Much was done to stiffen the anti-aircraft defences in cities and to protect the population from possible gas attacks. Local anti-aircraft defence bodies were organised, and on July 2 a Government decision made antiaircraft training obligatory for all citizens. Men of 16 to 60 and women of 18 to 50 were formed into self-defence squads at factories, offices and on the residential principle. The squads trained after working hours.

All these measures dating from the summer of 1941 improved the combat capacity of the Soviet Armed Forces and strengthened the defence of towns, villages and military objectives behind the firing lines.

2. ECONOMIC REORGANIZATION

The Soviet economy had to go on a war-time footing in the shortest possible time. On June 30 the Central Committee of the CPSU(B) and the Council of People’s Commissars issued an economic mobilisation plan for the third quarter of 1941. It was focussed entirely on meeting the war needs. But events developed so swiftly and unfavourably for the Red Army that the plan became impracticable before it was put into practice. To meet the emergency, on July 4 the State Defence Committee delegated N. A. Voznesensky, Chairman of the State Planning Board, to head a commission assigned “to work out a war-economy plan ensuring the country’s defence and utilising the resources and production facilities of, or evacuated to, the Volga area, Western Siberia and the Urals’, thus turning these regions into the main arsenal of the Red Army.

The war-economy plan for the last three months of 1941 and for 1942 (for the Volga area, the Urals, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia), endorsed by the Party and Government on August 16, envisaged a rise in the output of heavy industry, of arms, ammunition and other materiel in order to tip the scales and give the Soviet Union a technical advantage over the invader.

War costs were huge. The state budget needed a drastic revision. Allocations for war requirements were increased, while those for civilian industries and social and cultural requirements were cut.

The industry of the Ukraine, Byelorussia and the western part of the Russian Federation had to be removed at top speed to the country’s east. Shifting heavy industry proved difficult; it meant evacuating large factories, such as Zaporozhstal, Dneprospetsstal, the Kirov Plant of Leningrad, the Izhory, Novokramatorsk and Mariupol iron-and-steel giants and the Zuyev and Shterovka power plants. Factories had to be dismantled, equipment loaded on railway cars, often under enemy bombing, transported, and then reassembled without delay at new, safer sites.

Nothing like this had ever been undertaken before. But the evacuation passed without a hitch, again demonstrating the immense advantages of the socialist system of economy. Between July and November 1941 as many as 1,523 factories, including 1,360 large, chiefly war-industrial plants, were shifted to and restarted in the Urals, Siberia, the Volga area and Kazakhstan. In a little over five months nearly 1,500,000 carloads of freight was transported by rail.

Overall guidance of the evacuation was assigned to a Council for Evacuation set up by decision of the Party Central Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars and headed by N. M. Shvernik, with A. N. Kosygin and M. G. Pervukhin as his deputies. Evacuation bureaus and committees were formed at commissariats and administrations. At new sites guidance was provided by local Party and government bodies.

The evacuation of industry was a glorious chapter in the history of the Soviet working class and the annals of the war. Factories operated at their original sites until the last minute. Dismantling did not begin until orders were given by the authorised representative of the State Defence Committee and the People’s Commissariat. The valuable equipment of Zaporozhstal, for example, was loaded on railway cars when the western bank of the Dnieper was already in German hands. The factory personnel helped by the local coal-miners loaded 8,000 carloads of iron and steel, and the entire plant, under the very nose of the enemy. The main plant was reinstalled at the Magnitogorsk iron-and-steel complex and gave excellent service.

The personnel of power stations in war-affected areas displayed true civic courage. Plant was removed in virtually the last minute. The dismantling of the Zuyev Power Station, for example, proceeded when the enemy was at the door. It seemed that the nazis would capture the station, and to prevent this, explosives were placed under the plant as it was being dismantled. Work continued in mined premises.

The evacuation of 109 big factories from Byelorussia took place after many districts there had already fallen into nazi hands, and in Moscow and Moscow Region 498 factories were evacuated before the end of November.

To remove industry from west to east and deny the enemy the use of the Soviet economic potential was of paramount importance. But it was no less important to reassemble and restart the evacuated plant at new sites. The Soviet people coped with the task splendidly. That the distribution and reactivation of evacuated factories were, on the whole, efficient is a credit to the thoroughly planned, far-sighted policy of the Communist Party. Long before the war it foresaw the need for stand-in engineering, oil-refining and chemical plants in the Urals, Western Siberia and the Volga area. These “understudies” were natural sites for the evacuated factories.

Non-productive premises and buildings still in the construction stage were also used to house evacuated enterprises. In some cases, however, newly arrived factories began operating literally from scratch, in the taiga, near a remote railway station. Yet erection of new buildings, assembly of plant and the start-up of production were almost simultaneous. The country’s biggest aircraft works produced its first fighter plane in the Volga area 14 days after the arrival of the last carload of evacuated plant. The workshops were still unroofed when the machinery was started.

The changed conditions entailed a reorganisation of management. N. A. Voznesensky, Deputy Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, was appointed “to represent in the city of Kuibyshev the Council of People’s Commissars, to head the work of the Commissariats evacuated to the east, notably Aviaprom, Tankoprom, Armaments, Ferrous Metallurgy and Ordnance, and to put into operation plants evacuated to the Volga area, the Urals and Siberia in the shortest possible time”. A. A. Andreyev, who was also stationed in Kuibyshev with part of the Central Committee staff, supervised the regional Party committees in the Volga area, the Urals, Siberia and Central Asia “in matters concerning the organisation of industry evacuated to these regions, and in matters concerning the procurement of farm products”.

A Government decision of July 1, 1941, gave the People’s Commissars added powers. The same applied somewhat later to the People’s Commissars of the Union republics. New Commissariats of the mortar and tank industries were formed to improve guidance of the war industry, and many regional, city and district Party committees set up special departments to supervise defence production. The Central Committee sent authorised organisers to the bigger factories, building projects and transport enterprises to help local Party bodies organise production and promote the socialist emulation movement. All these measures put economic management on a war-time footing.

Naturally, difficulties occurred. The railways were overstrained. Often freight arrived late; cars with parts of large machines arrived at long intervals, delaying assembly; the shortage of metals, ferro-concrete and building materials for new industries and the evacuated factories was acute.

A modern factory is a highly complex body, tied in with dozens, sometimes hundreds of ancillary enterprises. It could not function normally without them. The war wrought havoc with well-established contacts; cooperation in new locations was hard to resume. The only solution was to use local resources, organising production of necessary materials on site to avoid long-distance transportation and to relieve the railways.

Another formidable problem was manpower. Many workers had enlisted in the services. No more than 30 to 40 per cent were evacuated with the enterprises. The shortage of specialists and assemblymen was near disastrous. On the instructions of the Party Central Committee, local authorities campaigned for new workers trained under crash programmes. The working day was extended for the duration of the war by a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of June 26, 1941, and annual leaves were replaced by money compensation credited to the workers at savings banks. A special committee was set up to distribute manpower. All people employed at war-important factories and ancillary enterprises were declared mobilised and attached to their places of employment.

The task was to increase output. This applied to all factories, those relocated in the east as well. But there was another no less important problem: that of producing aircraft, tanks, anti-tank guns and mortars of a quality superior to the enemy’s.

A number of engineering and machine-tool enterprises, as well as electrical engineering plants, were turned over to the aircraft industry. New aircraft plants were built. In the last six months of 1941 the average monthly output of Il-2 attack planes, Pe-2 dive-bombers and Yak-1, Mig-3 and LaGG-3 fighters was doubled, while the general output also grew, amounting to 8,000 planes against the 3,950 planes in the first half of the year.

The tank plants, too, increased serial production of armour superior to any other of its kind: the heavy KV tanks, the medium T-34 and the light T-60 and T-50. In the latter half of 1941 the output of tanks showed a more than 2.5-fold increase and amounted to 4,740 tanks. Nazi General Gunther Blumentritt, Chief of Staff of the 4th Army, which advanced on Moscow, admitted that the T-34 tanks “were the most powerful in existence” in 1941. He amplified: “Our 37- and 50-mm anti-tank guns were impotent against the T-34…. When the Russians got this new tank, the infantry was made completely defenceless.”

The search for better armour and ways of speeding production went on at all tank works. It was the tank industry that first employed Academician Y. O. Paton’s automatic welding method, which increased productivity fivefold. Gear-cutters of V. M. Tsaplinsky’s team began operating 37 machine-tools instead of 19; various innovations raised the team’s productivity fivefold.

Everybody concerned, whether worker or superintendent, looked for ways of increasing the output of arms and ammunition. The stream of submachine-guns, machine-guns, shells and cartridges coming off the production lines swelled steadily.

Towards the close of 1941 the war industry was still unable to satisfy the Red Army’s growing demand for weapons and other war supplies. The supplies received from the Allies fell far short of the commitments they had undertaken at the Moscow Conference in September 1941. Of the 800 aircraft and 1,000 tanks which Britain had promised to deliver in October-December 1941, the Soviet Union received 669 aircraft and 487 tanks. In the period from October 1941 to July 1942 the USA sent the Soviet Union 545 aircraft and 783 tanks or less than one-third of the promised number, and 16,502 lorries or less than one-fifth of the number it had pledged to supply. The Soviet Union had to put a further strain on its own resources.

Large quantities of high-grade steel were needed for the production of aircraft, tanks and other war machines. Before the war high-grade steel was smelted at plants in the southern and central districts. To meet the new steel demand plants in the Urals and Western Siberia had to change their techniques and the production flow.

Gifted Soviet engineers, mechanics and steelworkers found rapid solutions for the most puzzling technical problems. G. I. Nosov, director of the Magnitogorsk Complex, engineer V. A. Smirnov, foreman M. M. Khilko and furnaceman D. N. Zhukov devised a way of smelting armour steel in big open-hearth furnaces. The Kuznetsk Plant also worked out new methods for making armour and rolling grade steels. The Zlatoust Steel Mill learned to make 78 new grades of steel in the first six months of the war. Output of high-grade rolled stock went up steeply, though in the more than 200 years since the founding of the plant it had never produced more than ten different grades of steel.

To make grade steel, the industry needed ferro-alloys. The Nikopol mines, which had provided most of the manganese before the war, had been captured by the Germans, and new sources had to be found urgently. At the end of 1941 the steel mills began receiving manganese from the Urals, and in 1942 also from Kazakhstan. The non-ferrous industry expanded. So did the chemical industry. In the last three months of 1941 the Urals provided 62 per cent of the country’s pig iron, nearly 50 per cent of the steel, and all the aluminium, magnesium, nickel and cobalt.

Steelworkers in the Urals, Siberia and Kazakhstan knew that the metal they made was armour for the tanks, and parts for aircraft, shells, arms and ammunition to defeat the enemy.

All industries were in the toils of radical change, of technical progress.

An acute shortage of coal resulted from the loss of the Donets Basin and the coal deposits in Rostov Region. The situation deteriorated still more in the autumn of 1941, when the coal basin near Moscow also fell into enemy hands. Before the war, the above-mentioned areas accounted for 63 per cent of the country’s coal. In the circumstances, coal extraction in the eastern areas had to be increased without delay. A Government decision of December 8 envisaged higher output by the operating mines, and set strictly specified dates for starting up new mines. A plan for capital mine-sinking was finalised on December 25. Forty-four mines with a total annual yield of 5,120,000 tons were to go into operation in the Urals, the Kuznetsk Basin and Karaganda in the first three months of 1942. This plan was fulfilled. The socialist emulation movement helped boost labour efficiency and achieve Party and Government targets. The call, ‘Don’t go home until you’ve finished your assignment”, first issued by aviation workers, quickly found millions of followers in other industries. “In the heat of an open-hearth furnace one feels like a fighter at the battle-lines,’ wrote A. Y. Sorokovoi, steelworker of the Kushva Mill, in a letter to his Urals colleagues. “I shall use all my experience and knowledge to reduce smelting time without lowering quality On the contrary, I shall try to improve it.” The crew of the open-hearth mill at the Third Magnitogorsk Complex pledged to cut production time. Soon, Magnitogorsk steelworkers P. A. Savelyev and A. L. Shalaginov, M. V. Burkatsky and I. T. Popov, both of Kuznetsk, D. D. Sidorovsky of the Urals Engineering Works and I. A. Biserov of Zlatoust won recognition throughout the country for their performances. Collective farmers and the personnel of state farms matched the workers in devotion. They coped with the immensely important job of providing the Army and population with food, and industry with raw materials. Agriculture was badly damaged in the beginning of the war. Technical facilities and supplies had dwindled instantly. Lorries, powerful tractors and horses were requisitioned for Army use in large numbers. Repair workshops, too, were switched to war orders. The shortage of fuel and spare parts for machinery was acute.

Workers at the Serp i Molot Factory Pledge to help defeat the enemy, Moscow June 1941

Arms distributed to Moscow’s Civil Guard, July 1941

An army unit’s Party branch meets to admit new members, Western Front, August 1941

Western Front Military Council (left to right): Front Commander General of the Army G. K. Zhukov, Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General V. D. Sokolovsky and member of the Military Council I. S. Khokhlov, winter 1941-42

Fortifications on Moscow outskirts, November 1941

The traditional Red Square military parade took place on November 7, 1941, despite closeness of advancing nazi troops

Meeting after liberation of Volokolamsk in commemoration of partisans executed by nazis, December 20, 1941

“Invincible” Nazi Army in Head-long flight, December 1941

IL-2 Planes in Production, 1942

Assembly of KV tanks at the Kirov Plant, Chelyabinsk, 1942

Assembly of mortars at a Siberian factory, June 1942

Moscow Region collective farmers’ delegation presents unit with tank column built on personal savings, 1942

Young Pioneers of Ashkhabad School No. 19 visit wounded in hospital, 1942

General meeting of Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Sverdlovsk, May 1942

Soviet flag raised over battle-scarred Stalingrad, February 1943

Nazi men and officers taken prisoner in the city, February 1943

Rocket launchers begin the counter-offensive at Stalingrad

Men of the 62nd Army firing from the semi-demolished Krasny Oktyabr Plant, November 1942

A considerable part of the rural population was drafted into the Army or employed at factories, mines and timber camps or building fortifications. Yet the harvest had to be brought home at all costs. Soviet farmers showed what people can do if their honour, freedom and independence are at stake. Wives and sisters took the place of their husbands and brothers, operating combines and tractors. Millions of women worked in the sweat of their brow in the fields and on livestock farms.

The shortage of manpower and farm implements could delay harvesting, which meant a loss of grain, potatoes, cotton and sugar-beet. To avert this, all able-bodied rural inhabitants and part of the urban population were called out. Outdated machines, horse-drawn threshers, sickles and scythes were put to use.

Despite this heroic effort, procurement of grain and other products fell sharply in 1941, chiefly because vast tracts of land, yielding 38 per cent of the country’s pre-war grain and 84 per cent of the sugar-beet, were occupied by the enemy. The lost areas had also accounted for 38 per cent of the cattle and 60 per cent of the swine herd.

The eastern and southeastern regions, i.e., the Volga area, Siberia, the Urals, Kazakhstan and Central Asia became the main source of food products and raw materials as well. Despite the difficulties, winter crops there were extended by 2,000,000 hectares as compared with 1940. This was the first major result of the reorganisation. Production of fodder was increased: much more hay and silage were procured in the rear areas than throughout the country in 1940.

The first months of the war provided striking evidence of the advantages of the socialist system of collective farming.

Soviet transport faced a crucial test. The enemy did all he could to bring the railways to a standstill. By December 1941 he had made 5,939 air-raids on railway lines running near the front—the Byelorussian, Kirov, Oktyabrskaya, Moscow-Kiev and others. This created bottlenecks and interrupted traffic. Closer to the front, trains often travelled at a distance of only a few hundred metres from each other. It was not easy in the circumstances to ensure scheduled traffic. But transport workers did their job, taking trains to and from the front. To speed traffic, they devised rapid coupling methods, adding extra carriages and running on the minimum of fuel and water. In the first 40 days of the war nearly 2,500,000 men were rail-borne to the battle-lines. ‘In one week in June 1941,” wrote I. V. Kovalev, People’s Commissar for Railways, “military entrainment and transport surpassed by more than 50 per cent the entrainment of armed forces in tsarist Russia in 1914 during the period of deployment, which had lasted nearly two months.” Extraordinary dedication was needed to cope with the difficulties in the early months of the war. The railwaymen had such dedication in full measure. Distinguished services were rendered during the defence of Kiev by V. I. Kazansky, engine-driver on the Southwestern Railway. Wounded in both legs when an enemy aircraft strafed his train, he nonetheless drove the train to its destination. M. I. Kushner, engine-driver of the Ostashkov depot, Kalinin Railway, had come through many German air attacks unscathed, but when his train was carrying wounded troops German aircraft damaged his engine, wounding him in the leg and his assistant Y. I. Tyulkov in the head. But the crew stuck to their post and brought the train safely to the station.

Merchant seamen and river crews, too, acquitted themselves splendidly, especially in the Dnieper-Dvina, Northwestern and Volga basins. The Lake Ladoga shippers delivered freights to beleaguered Leningrad and brought out evacuees, in all weather, under enemy fire.

All modes of communication—the telephone, telegraph, mail and radio—were at the complete disposal of the Armed Forces. On July 23, I. T. Peresypkin, People’s Commissar for Communications, was appointed simultaneously Chief of Red Army Communications, securing better use of all signals at front and rear.

The first few weeks of the war saw industry and agriculture, transport and communications converted to war-time conditions, providing for the war needs and adding to the war potential of the Soviet Union.

Soviet scientists and researchers had their hands full. The quality of German arms, and those of her allies, had to be surpassed in the shortest possible time; the Soviet soldier needed more powerful up-to-date arms than those of the enemy.

The job was tackled in extremely difficult conditions. Research institutes and laboratories had for the most part been evacuated from Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, and the other big cities. Local Party organisations undertook to co-ordinate research. In Tomsk, for example, the City Party Committee set up a science council which supervised the work of some 300 scientists, affording indispensable help to factories, transport, agriculture and, directly, to the Red Army. The Commission for Mobilising the Resources of the Urals, headed by Academician V. L. Komarov, President of the Academy of Sciences, made an invaluable contribution.

Geologists had a big assignment: to find new deposits for industries as quickly as possible. Large deposits of iron ore were discovered in the Kuznetsk Basin, oilfields in Bashkiria and bauxites in the Urals, all this in the early months of the war.

Scientists and engineers worked hand-in-hand at Magnitogorsk, Sverdlovsk and Kuznetsk to devise advanced methods of metal smelting. The succeeded in reducing the time of open-hearth smelts, making complex rolled stock for tanks and producing tubes for mortars.

Physicists, chemists and designers joined in the war effort. They found ways of replacing critical materials, yielding a saving in expensive strategic metals: nickel and molybdenum. In Moscow and Lipetsk researchers produced a substitute for coke, badly needed in the foundries of engineering plants; no longer did coke have to be shipped in from afar, relieving thousands of railway cars.

Despite the difficult war-time conditions, the Government did not neglect personnel training at universities and research institutes.

The war created immense problems for the educational system. Many school buildings were converted into hospitals and other war-time institutions. The shortage in trained teachers was acute. Yet children continued to go to school. Thousands of teen-agers finishing occupational, vocational and railway schools took the place of their elders at the work-benches.

Political education among the population was of the utmost importance curing the economic conversion to war-time. The Party explained Lenin’s proposition on the need to defend the socialist motherland and rally the nation to the struggle against the enemy, making every citizen deeply conscious of his personal responsibility for the nation’s future.

Newspapers, avidly read, explained the Party’s war-time policy and reported the situation at the front and rear. Pravda, organ of the Party Central Committee, exposed the man-hating ideology of fascism and summoned the people to battle and to feats of labour.

Literature and art helped the war effort. Many writers and poets went to the battle-lines as war correspondents. The far from complete list includes M. P. Bazhan, P. U. Brovka, V. V. Vishnevsky, A. P. Gaidar, Mussah Jalil, A. Y. Korneichuk, Y. S. Krymov, K. M. Simonov, A. A. Surkov, V. P. Stavsky, A. T. Tvardovsky, M. A. Sholokhov and I. G. Ehrenburg. Novels, short stories and poems were eagerly read. Many appeared in central, regional and Army newspapers, and as brochures and booklets. The composers, too, contributed: their songs inspired faith in victory and raised morale. More than 100 songs were written in Moscow in the first four days of the war. A. V. Alexandrov’s “Holy War” (lyrics by V. I. Lebedev-Kumach) was first published on June 24, winning country-wide popularity overnight. Also popular were M. I. Blanter’s (lyrics by M. V. Isakovsky) “Good-bye, Towns and Villages”, A. I. Khachaturyan’s (lyrics by A. Lugin) “Captain Gastello” and M. G. Fradkin’s (lyrics by Y. A. Dolmatovsky) “Song of the Dnieper’. Soviet artists attacked the enemy in cartoons and posters. People crowded round TASS street displays of posters by the Kukryniksi team (M. V. Kupriyanoy, P. N. Krylov and N. A. Sokolov) “Crush and Destroy the Enemy!”, A. A. Kokorekin’s “Death to the nazi scum!”, D. S. Moor’s “What Have You Done for the Front?’, I. M. Toidze’s “The Motherland Calls!”, and so on. Theatrical companies performed at hospitals and for the troops in the trenches, often under enemy shelling.

The Soviet intelligentsia closed its ranks, standing shoulder to shoulder with the nation to repulse the enemy.

3. THE FIGHT BEHIND ENEMY LINES

The Party and Government did their utmost to organise the fight behind the enemy lines. It began on the first day of the war. Under Party guidance, underground organisations, partisan groups and sabotage crews were formed of workers, farmers, intellectuals, Communists, Komsomol members, non-Party people, men and women of all nationalities and age groups. Their ranks were swelled by soldiers, commanders and political officers breaking out of enemy pockets or escaping from POW camps. Trained in the art of war, they injected discipline and organisation into the partisan units, helped the partisans to acquire war skills, and were often chosen to head partisan formations.

Millions of Soviet citizens responded zealously to the Party Central Committee’s call for vigorous resistance behind the enemy lines; they were recruited in occupied territory and on the Soviet side of the front. Letters pleading for assignments behind the enemy lines streamed in from all over the country. “Our country is engulfed in flame,” wrote engineer K. S. Zaslonov, who was not a member of the Party, “and it is up to every patriotic citizen, breathing the healthy Soviet air, to defend his land.” At his request, Zaslonov was authorised to form a partisan detachment.

By the end of 1941, a few months after the war had broken out, nearly 3,500 partisan groups were active in the enemy’s rear. However, mistakes were made at the initial stage of the partisan movement. The detachments and wrecking groups were modelled on military units and formations despite the fact that this did not fit in with the specifics of the struggle. The forms and methods used by the partisans were sometimes incorrect. Steps to remove these shortcomings were taken in the course of the war.

The directive of June 29 was followed up by a Central Committee decision of July 18 stating the tasks of Party bodies in specific terms. The job of organising resistance behind the enemy lines was assigned to republican, territorial, regional and district Party organisations. In 1941 more than 800 city and district committees and district Party centres, and nearly 300 city and district Komsomol committees, were formed clandestinely in the occupied territory of Leningrad, Kalinin, Smolensk, Orel, and Kursk regions, and in the Karelo-Finnish, Byelorussian, Moldavian and Ukrainian republics, assuming leadership of the people’s fight behind the enemy lines.

The firmest, most tempered and tested Communists, Komsomol members and other citizens were selected for underground bodies, partisan units and sabotage crews. The Ukrainian Party organisation alone assigned 26,536 Communists to underground missions.

Many secretaries of regional, city and district Party committees, chairmen of executive committees, secretaries of regional and district Komsomol committees and other Party, Komsomol and Government officials were left behind to work in the enemy’s rear. Braving danger day and night, these devoted men turned the underground Party and Komsomol organisations into highly efficient units, the real headquarters of the embattled nation behind the enemy lines.

The elusive underground made life unbearable for the invaders. They struck in nazi-occupied towns and villages, on railways, roads, in the forests and in the steppe. They blew up bridges, destroyed roads, cut communication lines and derailed trains, attacked rear headquarters and garrisons, and frustrated regulations issued by the occupation authorities.

Underground anti-fascist organisations with many non-Party people in their ranks alongside Communists and Komsomol members devised numerous ways of harassing the enemy. Their acts of sabotage were highly effective. But that was not all. Under Party guidance the underground conducted political education among the population, publishing leaflets and newspapers, reporting the latest war news and calling on the people to sabotage the measures of the occupation authorities and join the partisans. They gathered information on troop movements and helped supply partisans with arms and food.

What were the mainsprings of the nation-wide struggle against the invaders? Some bourgeois, particularly West German, historians maintain that had the occupation authorities not been so brutal towards the population there would have been no popular movement. This is contrary to the facts. Of course, the occupation was the basic source giving rise to the patriotic struggle of the population for liberation. The “new order” established by the invaders was a regime of terror and violence. The nazis destroyed everything that the people had gained in the years of Soviet power. They wiped out the Soviets of Working People’s Deputies, all public organisations, and common public ownership of land and factories. They denied the people personal as well as political freedom. The workers were subjected to inhuman exploitation. Food, fodder and livestock were requisitioned from the peasants. The best land was given to German colonists, nazi officials and traitors. The nazis set about destroying the culture of the Soviet peoples methodically. Never before had people experienced such oppression. The “ideas” expressed in the man-hating East Plan and similar nazi documents, drawn up beforehand, were translated into practice in the occupied territory. The invaders decimated the Soviet population behind the lines; many were flung into concentration camps or shipped to Germany for forced labour. The assault was primarily on Communists, Komsomol members, activists and those who were so much as suspected of sympathising with the partisans.

The Soviet people could not suffer this ‘new order’. Nothing on earth would make them accept the reactionary system. Soviet power was their own power. That is the basic reason for the large-scale partisan and anti-fascist movement, and the underground. It was love of country, the determination to safeguard its freedom and independence, and loyalty to socialist ideas, that prompted the population to resist. The brutality of the occupation regime, rooted in the very nature of fascism, only doubled their hatred of the invaders and steeled them for an irreconcilably bitter struggle.

Thousands of Soviet patriots laid down their lives fighting the enemy in the early months of the war, but new men came to take their place.

Partisans and underground resistance fighters T. P. Bumazhkov, M. A. Guryanov, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, I. N. Kuzin, F. I. Pavlovsky, A. V. Petrova, S. I. Solntsev and Liza Chaikina were created Heroes of the Soviet Union for the courage displayed by them in 1941.

All Soviet people rose as one to stamp out the danger of nazi enslavement. At the front and in the rear, and in nazi-occupied areas, they did not spare themselves in fighting for the honour, freedom and independence of their socialist country. All the resources of the Soviet state, all its material and spiritual powers, were marshalled to safeguard the great gains of the October Revolution. Government, Party and mass organisations devoted themselves totally to the war effort. The country became a united military camp. It was guided by the Communist Party, whose inspiring and leading role was of decisive importance in mobilizing the entire nation for the defeat of the enemy.

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J.V. Stalin, People’s Commissar of Defence and Supreme Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces of the USSR	Marshal of the Soviet Union K. Y. Voroshilov, Commander-In-Chief, Northwestern Sector

Marshal of the Soviet Union S. K. Timoshenko, Commander-in-Chief, Western Sector	Marshal of the Soviet Union S. M. Budyonny, Commander-in-Chief, Southwestern Sector