Europe: A History (208 page)
Further south, in Greece, the Germans carried all before them. Athens was occupied; a British force which had tried to hold Crete was overwhelmed by the end of May.
Stalin’s reaction to the Balkan crisis showed no signs of solidarity with Hitler. One day before the German attack, on 5 April, he had signed a treaty of friendship with Yugoslavia. On 13 April he signed a vital neutrality pact with Japan. The
USSR was clearing the decks for major action in Europe. On 15 May, Zhukov is known to have suggested that the Red Army forestall the Wehrmacht by attacking first and disrupting German preparations..
MOLDOVA
F
IVE
young harvesters are sitting on a rug, eating their lunch on a rise amidst the golden cornfields. A girl in a bright red headscarf has spread out the newspaper on her knees, and is reading to her smiling companions. They are sharing a flagon of wine or water, a bowl of bread or rice, and a huge red water-melon. Acres of standing wheat and sheaves roll down to the green valley and to the wooded hills beyond. In the foreground a gleaming green motorcycle is parked; in the distance a combine is reaping. The location, as indicated by the pattern of the rug, is Moldavia (now Moldova). The date could be any time after 1940, when Moldavia was annexed to the USSR. The painting, by Alexei Vasilev, is called They are talking about us in
Pravda’
.
1
(See Plate 70.)
This is hardly great art. But the technique is competent; and the effect is pleasant to the eye. Without indulging any crude political gesture, Vasilev has succeeded in mobilizing all the main elements of Socialist Realism—or ‘revolutionary romanticism’ as Zhdanov called it—as decreed by the Party authorities in 1934. He produces a picture which, to quote Stalin’s phrase, is ‘national in form, and socialist in content’. The
narod-nost’
or national spirit of the work is implicit in the link between these Moldavian peasants and their admirers in Moscow. Its
partiinost’
or ‘devotion to the party’ is explicit in their delight at the mention of their work in the Party paper. Its
klassovost’
or ‘class-consciousness’ is underlined by their peasant clothes and physical labour. Its
ideinost’
or ‘ideological character’ is manifest in their optimistic and politically correct attitudes. Its
tipichnost’
or ‘representative message’ comes over loud and clear: happy workers plus modern machinery make for high productivity and the welfare of the masses. It is overtly socialist, and it looks quite realistic.
The fact is, all the most important realities of life in the Soviet Union have been systematically falsified. In reality, the Moldavian peasantry had recently been robbed both of its land and its culture. They were forced to live and work in collectives, whose surplus was taken away by the Soviet state. Thousands upon thousands had been driven to their death in the Gulag, or shot as so-called saboteurs. Their language had been arbitrarily transferred to the Cyrillic alphabet, so that Soviet-educated children could no longer read pre-war Romanian or Moldavian literature. They were denied all contact with the western half of their province in Romania, which they were told was a foreign country. They were beaten, beggared, and bullied. And the world was told they were stunningly content.
For the impartial viewer, the question posed is this: how much aesthetic value can art retain when, in human and moral terms, its principal purpose is fraudulent?
TSCHERNOWITZ
T
HE
Soviet army’s entry into northern Bukovina in June 1940 was the first step in the destruction of a civilization. Conquered by Austria from the Ottomans in 1775, this corner of old Moldavia had passed a century and a half as the furthest outpost of the Habsburg realms. It was then taken over for twenty years by Romania. Its capital city, Tschernowitz/Cernati. on the Prut, was the centre of a polyglot, multi-denominational, hierarchical society where the imperial German culture of
Mitteleuropa
had lain like a transparent sheet over the rich layers of local Jewish, Romanian, Polish, and Ruthenian life. After fifty years of Soviet levelling it has been left, as Chernovtsy, a drab provincial backwater of Ukraine.
Old Bukovina has vanished. But it can still be glimpsed through the nostalgia of an exile who returned in the last months of Soviet rule, having been raised in the 1920s amidst ‘futile attempts to maintain the dignity of a German ruling class in the border marches of a defunct empire’:
The old houses are still painted in an Austrian egg-yolk yellow, alternated with an imperial Russian pea green. But the Bukovinian melting-pot has gone … all have been killed or repatriated, and their places taken by stolid, cabbage-eating Ukrainians. The wild, colorful, murderous variegation … has been replaced by the sub-Stalinist uniformity of Chernovtsy. The market in the city square, where ‘under a fragrant cloud of garlic’ Jews, Armenians, Lipovanians, and Germans haggled for sheepskins, sharp cheese, rotgut, and tobacco, cooking oil and cowdung, is now a concrete-covered parade ground, hung with a gigantic billboard of Lenin. The cosmopolitan border world of Austria-Hungary and tsarist Russia has been transformed into ‘an immense
From Yugoslavia, the German battle divisions were transported to the Reich’s eastern borders. In early June 1941, the backwoods and byways from East Prussia to Romania were filled with the bustle of German bivouacs and the revving of tank engines. Every Polish peasant, and most of the world’s intelligence services, knew that Hitler was preparing to attack the Soviet Union. The only person who didn’t appear to know was Stalin, who ordered that border provocations should be avoided at all costs.
In the absence of the necessary documentation, the circumstances have never been clarified. Conventional wisdom has usually held either that Stalin could not comprehend the depths of Hitler’s treachery or that he was playing for time to complete his defences. Neither seems likely. One did not have to be an expert to realize that the German war machine had nowhere to go but eastwards. Hitler’s earlier thinking had foreseen all-out war in 1942 or 1943; but he had now to decide
either to follow the momentum of success or to call a halt and risk losing the initiative. For the ex-corporal and his gang of adventurers there was hardly a moment’s hesitation; their urge was to ride on to glory or to
Götterdämmerung
.
As for Stalin, the master of secrecy, one can only speculate. However, as the Germans would soon discover, the Soviets had not been idle. Huge military concentrations had been repositioned in vulnerable forward areas; the warplanes of the Soviet air force stood exposed on forward airfields; frontier cordons had been withdrawn; roads and bridges had been repaired to facilitate the movement of heavy traffic. The Red Army’s stance was one of imminent attack. Everything points to the probability that Stalin had been acting dumb in order to conceal his preparations for a surprise offensive against the Reich.
76
If so, he was beaten to the draw. The Wehrmacht struck at dawn on 22 June.
The Nazi Supremacy in Europe (June 1941-July 1943)
. Operation Barbarossa, which took the German army deep into the Soviet Union, launched the central military and political play of the Second World War in Europe. It opened up the front which was to account for 75 per cent of German war casualties, and which must be judged the main scene of Hitler’s ultimate defeat. It came astonishingly close to total success, and for two or three years vastly extended the territory of the Nazis’ New Order. The offensive of 1941 carried the Wehrmacht to the gates of Moscow; the offensive of 1942 led them to the Volga and the Caucasus (see Map 26).
The initial attack of June 1941 had spectacular results. One hundred and fifty-six divisions, consisting of over 3 million men, crossed the Ribbentrop-Molotov line and caught the Red Army entirely out of position. The Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground in a couple of days. Whole Soviet armies were surrounded, and vast numbers of prisoners taken. Panzer columns raced forward at unprecedented speed. In the Baltic States, in Byelorussia, and Ukraine they were cheered as liberators. German soldiers were greeted by local peasants offering the traditional welcome of bread and salt. In Lwów, where the retreating NKVD had massacred many thousands of its political prisoners, a public demonstration openly declared for Ukrainian independence. By December, despite the lack of winter equipment, forward German units had entered Russia and laid siege to Leningrad. They caught the Moscow Kremlin in their binoculars, before (on the same day as Pearl Harbor) Stalin’s secret reserve of fresh Siberian divisions arrived to drive them back. [
SMOLENSK
]
In 1942 the German Command chose to direct its advance along the southern steppes. Their priority was to seize the good black earth of Ukraine, and the distant oil of Baku. Yet they were meeting ever more effective resistance; and the retreating Soviets had stripped the land bare. The industrial areas were empty; the factories had been dismantled and removed to points east, and the working population evacuated; the great dam of Dniepropetrovsk, pride of the Five-Year Plans, had been dynamited. German soldiers scaled Mount Elbruz. When the second winter set in, they were approaching the Volga at Stalingrad.
SMOLENSK
I
N
July 1941 the Wehrmacht captured Smolensk with such speed that the I local Communist Party house and all its contents fell into German hands. The Smolensk archives contained detailed files on all aspects of communist activity since the Revolution, including Stalin’s purges and the Great Terror. Carried off to Germany, they were duly captured for a second time in 1945 by the American army, and taken to the USA. They were far smaller than the vast collections of Nazi documents which fell into American hands and which would form the core of the American-run Document Centre in Berlin. But the Soviet authorities had never granted free access to their state archives, let alone to secret Party records. So the windfall from Smolensk had inestimable value. Historical studies based on its files penetrated the fog of Soviet propaganda and Western theorizing, and provided one of the first authentic glimpses into the true nature of communist rule.
1
Many Sovietologists and Soviet apologists, however, were not happy. Having framed their fantasies in the knowledge that little or no primary evidence was available, they had no wish to confront hard facts. Hence, when the scholar who first analysed the Smolensk archives concluded that Stalin had perpetrated ‘an almost continuous purge’ in the 1930s, he was promptly denounced. ‘This view’, the arch-apologist could glibly declare, ‘is weakly supported by the available primary evidence.’
2
Such sophistry often passed for science until the fall of the Soviet Union.
Archives have always attracted those who wish to manipulate the writing of history. In 1992 the Russian authorities revealed the existence of the so-called
Osobii Arkhif
or ‘Special Archive’, which the Soviet regime had kept separate from all other records. Its full contents were still to be determined; but in addition to the Goebbels diaries, they certainly included such items as the records from France’s Sûreté Nationale and from Poland’s pre-war
Dwójka
or ‘Military intelligence’, even the papers of the British Expeditionary Force (1940) and of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. It was said to contain all the missing collections of the Nazis’ RSHA (Reich Security Main Office). Apparently, Nazi archive-hunters had put their swag from all over Europe into various castles and cellars in Poland and eastern Germany, only to see it looted in turn by the Red Army. The Soviets repaid the loss of the Smolensk archive many times over. [
METRYKA
]
Still more intriguing is the possibility that parts of the captured Nazi archives were falsified after they fell into communist hands. In Warsaw, for example, the post-war communist Security Office (UB) inherited the contents of the city’s former Gestapo secretariat. Armed with the appropriate registers, codes, stationery, blank report forms, and official seals, it
was a simple matter to amend the records. The UB had little difficulty providing documents to show that Poland’s resistance movement, the Home Army, had been run by Nazi collaborators.
3
For fifty years, therefore, historians’ views of the mid-twentieth century have been given a one-sided slant by the one-sided nature of the documentation.
4
But in the 1990s the hidden treasures of the ex-communist world were starting to restore the balance. In Germany, as the files of the East German Stasi were yielding their secrets, the Nazi files of the Berlin Document Centre were being prepared for transfer to the Federal Government. In Washington, congressional hearings were held to challenge the move.
5
For, as the victors of the Second World War were only too well aware, ‘Power brings knowledge, and knowledge power’.
The German advance to the Volga extended the territory under Hitler’s control by an area equal to all the Nazi conquests in Western Europe. It gave him the
Lebensraum
of which he had dreamed. The lawless zone beyond the Reich now stretched out for more than 1,ooo miles. The Nazis, it transpired, had no intention of consulting the wishes of the inhabitants. There were to be no independent republics—only military government in the front-line regions, and Reichs-kommissariats run by the SS in the ‘Ostland’ and Ukraine. The national movement in Ukraine, which in 1917–18 had been given full German support, was to be crushed. Through wilful stupidity, the Nazis spurned all the chances to win the population to their side. Through sheer arrogance, they turned their largest asset into an unbearable burden. Their savagery knew no bounds. They gave their new subjects no option but to resist. One hundred peasants were to be executed for every German soldier killed by ‘bandits’. Villages were routinely razed, and their inhabitants murdered. Nazi officials felt free to massacre people at will. As in Poland, the population was screened, assigned to racial categories, and issued with ration cards and work permits according to their classification. Where Jews were not killed outright, they were cast into ghettoes. The Slavonic nations, whose élites were slated for annihilation, were regarded as fit only for a pool of uneducated slave workers. Several million men and women were sent to the Reich for forced labour. With the growth of all categories of ‘undesirables’, the Nazi network of prisoner-of-war and concentration camps was greatly expanded. Since Soviet prisoners of war were granted no rights, some 3–4 million men were allowed to perish in open enclosures. The East was treated as a fund for unlimited human and material exploitation. In three years, the population of Ukraine dropped by 9 million.
