Dates of events might be considered objective facts, open to
neither debate nor contestation.
Yet periodisation – that is, setting the start and
end dates of a particular time period in history – is very much a matter of
interpretation. Indeed, where the historian (or history teacher) chooses to
begin or end a historical period can determine not just the length of the period
in question, but also its meaning and significance.
This is made clear in the case of the Soviet Union’s Second World War by Mark Edele’s excellent 2021 overview, Stalinism at War.
Edele makes the case from the outset for decentring the
Soviet experience of the war from Europe, deliberately starting his study in
Asia, where conflict began several years before Operation Barbarossa and
the Nazi invasion of June 1941. He also continues his study until well after
the typically accepted end date of 1945, drawing in post-war conflict into the
wider story of the Soviet war experience.
Even if we choose to continue dating the start of the Soviet
war to 1941 and its end to 1945, knowing why those dates are problematic can
help us, and our students, better grasp the dynamics of World War Two in Soviet
history. If we allow ourselves the opportunity, deliberately problematising the
periodisation of war may also enable us to introduce new interpretations of the
Soviet Second World War, providing new meaning to the conflict from a Soviet
perspective.
1941-45: A
Victim Of and Victor Against Nazi Aggression
In the most commonly told story, the Soviet war really began
with Nazi invasion during Operation Barbarossa in 1941 and ended in 1945, when
Soviet troops reached and occupied Berlin.
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German units advance through the USSR, 1941. Credit: Большая онлайн-библиотека e-Reading, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. |
This story, encapsulated by the enduring Russian name the
Great Patriotic (or Fatherland) War, presents the USSR first as a victim
of Nazi aggression and then as a heroic victor, overcoming the odds at
monumental human and material cost to defeat Hitler’s armies.
There is much to be said for this. At the outset of war, the
Soviet Union appeared grossly unprepared for conflict. Military spending had
rocketed – in 1930, defence production accounted for 2.6% of all Soviet industry;
by 1941, it had soared to 22.5%. Yet the purging of the Soviet military
leadership in the late-1930s and Stalin’s own paranoia and mistrust, which led
to chaos in the first hours and days of the invasion, allowed Nazi German forces
to advance to the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad by the end of 1941.
The astonishing turnaround in fortunes by 1945 was aided to
some extent by international support but was ultimately achieved at
unparalleled cost to the Soviet Union. Soviet military losses over the
preceding four years had been staggering. In 1941, ten Soviet soldiers were killed
or went missing for each German soldier killed. (This figure dropped in 1942 to
a ratio of six to one, then in 1943 to three to one, before equalising in the
final stages of war.)
The civilian impact was, if anything, even more terrible, and
included the mass murder of over half of the Soviet Jewish population during
the Holocaust.
By the end of the fighting, the USSR had suffered 27 million
war-related deaths, amounting to some 12% of the pre-war population.
1939: The
USSR as Aggressor
Starting in 1941, however, risks painting an unduly positive picture of Soviet involvement in World War Two.
The start of war across Europe, in September 1939, is
remembered in Britain resulting from Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. Yet
while Germany invaded half of Poland from the west on 1 September 1939, the
Soviet Union – who had recently signed a non-aggression treaty with Hitler –
the USSR then invaded from the east on 17 September.
This joint partition of Poland was, in fact, enabled by a provision
in the Nazi-Soviet (Molotov-Ribbentrop) Pact of August 1939, which
divided eastern Europe into “spheres of influence” under German and Soviet
control. In the following months, Soviet forces marched on into the Baltic states
– independent since the end of the First World War – to make good this vision.
 |
Soviet and Nazi foreign ministers, Molotov (left) and
Ribbentrop (right) at the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939. Credit: Public
domain, via Wikimedia Commons. |
Starting the Soviet war in 1939 therefore portrays the USSR as
a military aggressor in the east (even if we accept that it signed the Nazi-Soviet
Pact in order to forestall direct war with Nazi Germany).
1937-39: The
USSR as a Vulnerable (and Paranoid) Power in the East
Mark Edele, however, pointedly begins his account of war not
in 1941 or 1939, but in 1937, when conflict erupted in China between Soviet and
Japanese forces.
By this time, Japan had already been establishing itself
militarily for several years in Manchuria. Japanese expansion in this northern
region of China, which bordered the USSR, brought it face to face with the
Soviets. Following months of preliminary skirmishes, open war along the
Soviet-Manchurian border broke out in 1937 and culminated in 1939, with the battle
of Khalkhin Gol.
The battle raged from May to September, involving 100,000
men and 1,000 combat vehicles through several engagements and ultimately
costing both the USSR and Japan 30,000-50,000 dead and wounded each.
 |
Japanese troops advance on Soviet positions during the battle
of Khalkhin Gol, 1939. Credit Dōmei Tsushin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
This was not simply a side-show to the real war in the west
which would follow. It was a formative event which shaped the future years of
war. “Soviet victory…”, writes Edele, “had immense consequences for the further
unfolding of the Second World War.” Soviet forces were during the battle were led
by the young Georgy Zhukov, who had escaped the military purges and would go
on to become the most celebrated Soviet commander in the war against Nazi
Germany from 1941. It also gave the USSR a taste of mechanised mass warfare,
forcing it to adapt strategies and tactics in ways which would impact how it
approached war in the west.
War in the east also reveals something else about the Soviet
experience of war more generally. It reveals the experience of a country with
troubled borders over which it fretted and struggled to control in the
late-1930s. The perceived threat of invasion from the east was not new. In the
run-up to war with Japan, long-standing fears prompted the Soviet regime to
turn its paranoid attention to Koreans living on Soviet soil, who had been
suspected since the 1920s of potential disloyalty and espionage for Japan. In
1937, mass deporations were conducted against Koreans from the border region
with Manchuria. 171,781 Koreans had been transported in brutal conditions by 29
October 1937 in a policy of massive ethnic cleansing.
Beyond
1945: “The War After the War”
If the start of the Soviet Union’s Second World War is
complex and contested, so too is its end.
In the formerly independent Baltic states, armed resistance
against the (re-)imposition of Soviet rule continued after 1945. This resistance,
conducted by disparate and desperate bands, stood no chance of defeating Soviet
occupation, taking the character of vengeful reprisals by increasingly bitter
anti-Communists (and often open antisemites).
Nevertheless, it was not until 1949, when the Soviet regime
began mass deportations from the former Baltic states, that the insurgency was finally
uprooted. By the end of that year, armed bands had been finally crushed by Soviet
forces.
Over the period 1945-46, the USSR also witnessed a major
violent crime wave. The causes of this were, themselves, complex. In the case
of thefts, which soared in the immediate post-war years, Edele writes that “the
most general underlying cause was the utter poverty and despair of most Soviet
citizens after victory.” A more general “culture of violence” resulted from the
war amongst Soviet soldiers and former soldiers, leading to ugly brutality
perpetrated often by what Edele describes as small “violent collectives” of typically
“around seven men”. Through the actions of these (male) criminal bands, “Aggression,
sexual urges, alcohol and the satisfaction of material needs all congealed in
violent rituals of male bonding in small groups.”
This story of the Soviet Second World War is, if anything,
even less well known than that of war in the east. But again, it reveals
something fundamental and surprising about the Soviet war. Far from immediately
re-establishing totalitarian control over its entire (expanded) populations and
landmass, the USSR emerged from war internally divided and facing significant
challenges to its own domestic order. War – or at least a kind of low-level internal
warfare – therefore continued well after the formal cessation of hostilities on
the main fronts.
Further Reading
Mark Edele, Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II, Bloomsbury Academic (2021)
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