The Secret War by Max Hastings

Author:Max Hastings [Hastings, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-07-23T04:00:00+00:00

12

Russia’s Partisans: Terrorising Both Sides

On 3 July 1941, Stalin’s first broadcast appeal to the Soviet peoples echoed Churchill’s earlier clarion calls to the occupied nations of Europe: ‘Conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy and his collaborators; they must be pursued and annihilated wherever they are.’ What followed across vast tracts of the Soviet empire in the next three years became part of the heroic legend of Russia’s war, a tale of its peoples united in resisting the barbarous invader. Contemporary evidence now available, however, tells a more complicated story. From 1943 onwards, guerrilla operations influenced the struggle on the Eastern Front more significantly than any other theatre of war. Partisans could operate more readily in Russia’s forests, mountains and such wildernesses as the Pripyat marshes, than across most of Western Europe. Stalin suffered no bourgeois squeamishness about casualties, nor about collateral damage to civilians. The testimony of many wartime partisans shows that they conducted dual campaigns of terror: against the Axis, and also against millions of their own people who felt neither loyalty to Stalin’s polity, nor willingness to risk all to restore it. In this, as in so much else, the struggle in the East attained an extraordinary ferocity, and the participants suffered experiences far bloodier than those of Western Europe.

In the early war years, Stalin’s partisans faced the same difficulties as their counterparts elsewhere: they lacked organisation, arms, supply aircraft and wirelesses. Pavel Sudoplatov claimed in his memoirs that the NKVD had made elaborate preparations for stay-behind operations in the wake of German advances. This is false. In the 1930s, Stalin had dismantled the entire existing network of partisan bases and cadres across the country, as a threat to his own authority. Many veteran guerrilla leaders of the civil war were shot in the Purges. Throughout the later months of 1941 Sudoplatov and his comrades were obliged to strive and scrabble to improvise intelligence-gathering and partisan groups. Their early operations were shambolic, costly, futile. Almost all the men conscripted were untrained, and many were also unwilling. They were often deployed in regions – notably Ukraine – whose inhabitants had celebrated liberation by the Germans from Stalin’s hated tyranny. Partisans were regarded by local people as Moscow’s creatures rather than as patriots, as threats to their homes and competitors for desperately scarce food. Moreover, until Stalingrad the Germans were seen as winners, the Soviets as losers. In the Baltic states, during the months before ‘Barbarossa’ Beria had conducted purges in which tens of thousands of people were executed or shipped to the gulag, which explains why so many Lithuanians, Estonians and Letts garlanded the men of the Wehrmacht. While Britain’s SOE made no attempt to stimulate full-scale revolt in occupied Europe between 1940 and 1944, in the desperate circumstances of embattled Russia thousands of men were thrust into operations in the immediate wake of ‘Barbarossa’. Russia was paying so dreadful a forfeit that the partisans’ murderous losses vanished unnoticed into the great cauldron of blood set bubbling by Hitler and Stalin.

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