Stalin and His Hangmen (67 page)

But how much blame must Stalin and his hangmen take? Did Stalin criminally shed the blood of his armies in futile attacks or last stands? Was the scorched earth policy a legitimate means of denying the enemy sustenance? Beria, Abakumov, Merkulov and Mekhlis shot and hanged soldiers, civilians and prisoners indiscriminately to a level far exceeding the official figure of 40,000 executions for the four years of war. The conditions in Soviet camps became atrocious, as bad as Dachau or Buchenwald. In 1942 alone, 352,560 prisoners, a quarter of the GULAG, died. Some 900,000 GULAG prisoners died of maltreatment during the
war, though their camps were thousands of miles from the front. Civilian mortality in both cities and countryside in the unoccupied part of the USSR soared. At the worst periods, the spring of 1942 and the winter of 1943, in some areas half the infants died before their first birthdays. During the blockade of Leningrad, 750,000 perished.
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The actual 37 million civilian deaths in the occupied and unoccupied areas of the USSR from 1941 to 1945 exceed by some 23 million the expected number, had mortality stayed at peacetime levels. The structure of the surviving population was distorted to the extent that in some country areas there were three women for every man left alive. Moreover, the draconian retribution exacted on the Soviet population in reconquered areas cannot be blamed on Hitler, while the deaths of half a million deportees and of one and a half million German POWs are entirely due to decisions made by Stalin and carried out by Beria and other commissars.

About half the Soviet prisoners in German hands and just over half the German prisoners in Russian hands survived. Both sides felt untrammelled by the Geneva convention. The atrocities committed by the German army from the very start of the war made the Russian military disinclined to take prisoners; particularly when retreating, they shot surrendered Germans. Red Army men knew the Germans shot all Soviet prisoners who were Jewish or who held party posts. Most Soviet prisoners were captured in the first years of the war and had to endure four years of starvation and abuse before liberation; the vast majority of German prisoners were captured only in the last eighteen months of the war. The annual mortality of German POWs in Soviet hands was twice as high as that of Soviet POWs in Germany.
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Until mid-1943, when the Soviets were sure of victory, their treatment of POWs was horrific. A typical document dated 4 May 1943 sent to Major General Ivan Petrov, who ran the NKVD’s Main Directorate for POWs and Internees (GUPVI) reads: ‘I inform you of the movement of POWs to Pokrovskoe camp 127. From 4 to 13 March 1943 we had three train-loads of POWs totalling 8,007. Of these by 1 May 1943 6,189 died, including 1,526 en route… Causes of death: dystrophy 4,326, typhus 54, frostbite 162, wounds 23, others 98…’ Of the 91,000 Germans who surrendered at Stalingrad, 27,000 died within weeks, although von Paulus’s army was starved and frostbitten when captured, and only 5 per cent, mainly officers, survived.
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In 1943, after Stalingrad, tens of thousands of Germans flowed into the GULAG, and the authorities began to see some point in keeping them alive. Soprunenko, who had managed what were in essence death camps, was replaced by Ivan Petrov, who had worked with Beria in the NKVD blocking forces in the Caucasian passes. Petrov picked out from the POWs those capable of useful work. German prisoners of late 1943 and 1944 were fresher, and as civilians had often been artisans; 80 per cent of them could be used. As the war progressed, Russian guards became more forgiving. German artisans had a work ethic, and in mines, forestry and construction outshone even free Soviet workers. In the camps German prisoners staged operas, carved ornaments and grew tomatoes: their 50 per cent survival rate over several years was higher than that of civilian prisoners thanks to their contributions to the GULAG economy and to the comforts of the camp commandants.

The work ethic of the German prisoners was also their undoing. When the war ended Stalin was reluctant to lose this workforce so 35,000 of the best POWs were charged with crimes – plotting to invade the USSR, aiding world bourgeoisie – and given twenty-five-year sentences. In the last months of the war, the number of prisoners virtually doubled and 1,500,000 foreign slave workers doubled the output of the GULAG, just as Hitler’s programme of
Ostarbeiter
slavery had boosted the German war effort. Most POWs in the USSR built roads and railways, many worked for the Ministry of Defence. In the post-war period, it is calculated that 8 per cent of Soviet GNP came from POW labour. By 1950 they had contributed a billion working days to the Soviet economy, and had rebuilt several main highways and a dozen ruined cities.

German war guilt was thus partially expiated, but Nazis who had committed atrocities were prosecuted haphazardly. Trials began with three SS officers and their Russian driver in Kharkov in December 1943; they were hanged for massacring hospital patients and wounded POWs. Some 37,600 Nazi POWs were sentenced for war crimes: of these only 400 were executed, the others receiving twenty-five-year sentences so that their knowledge or skills could be exploited. Many known perpetrators of atrocities were treated benignly. Those publicly hanged in Kiev and a dozen other cities were not necessarily the most guilty while the Germans hanged in Minsk could not have committed the Katyn atrocities for which they died.

Only after 1946 could POWs receive mail or Red Cross parcels, and the repatriation process dragged out until the end of 1955. By then, however, there was a new source for the camps, millions of former Soviet citizens and other east Europeans garnered by the Red Army, SMERSH and the NKVD.

Liberating Europe

In 1944–5, as the war ended, Beria’s NKVD met resistance even on Soviet territory. The Chechens and Crimean Tatars had submitted without a fight, but in the western Ukraine and the Baltic states, particularly Lithuania, there was desperate partisan resistance. It would take the NKVD nine years to liquidate the Ukrainian nationalists and the Lithuanian ‘green brotherhood’, who had been joined by deserters from the Red Army and were supported by men of the Polish Home Army (Armija Krajowa), whom the Soviets had first betrayed and then turned on. In six months’ mopping up after the German retreat, 40,000 Ukrainians were killed and nearly as many taken prisoner. Beria let Bogdan Kobulov and Lavrenti Tsanava, his commissar in Belorussia, run this anti-guerrilla war. Some 200,000 Ukrainians, Belorussians and Poles were killed in 1944–5; the NKVD lost fewer than 3,000 men.

In the recaptured Baltic states, Beria resumed the arrests and deportations interrupted in June 1941. About 100,000 kulaks were deported from the Baltic to Siberia. All ethnic groups other than Lithuanians and their Russian colonizers were deported from Lithuania. In Latvia 2,000 ‘forest cats’ and other guerrilla groups fought the NKVD. There were massive reprisals. Estonia offered less armed resistance, but still lost most of its remaining intellectuals and middle class to the Siberian camps.

In summer 1944, with the Red Army back in Poland and Stalin determined to consolidate his conquests of 1939–40, Beria was fully stretched. As the German troops retreated, followed by millions of civilians fleeing East Prussia, the Armija Krajowa, loyal to the Polish government in London, tried to take control. This partisan army, supplied with light weapons, radios and uniforms by British and American aeroplanes,
numbered over a quarter of a million. For them the Red Army were occupiers, not liberators, though the Poles recognized the Soviets’ right to pursue the Germans across Poland. The USSR had broken off relations with the London government and the Armija Krajowa in 1943, when the latter had accused the NKVD of the Katyn murders.

When the Red Army entered Vilnius, helped by two Polish partisan regiments, the eighty-year-old Polish bishop greeted them with a cross in his outstretched hands. He was arrested by the NKVD. The Poles were told that Vilnius was now the Lithuanian capital, even though the Lithuanians had collaborated with the Germans in exterminating the Jews and oppressing the Poles, who had together been the ethnic majorities in the city. The Red Army was accompanied by its own puppet Polish Ministry of Security and army under Zygmunt Berling.

There were so few communist Poles, particularly officers, that this army had been stiffened with Russian officers with Polish surnames. The intelligence service of the communist Polish army was entirely Russian. As the NKVD took over each city they disarmed, arrested and sometimes shot members of the Armija Krajowa. Ivan Serov, Beria’s deputy in Poland, branded the Armija Krajowa criminals and British agents. Serov could not cope with all Poland. In Lublin and Łódé, for example, Viktor Abakumov of SMERSH and Lavrenti Tsanava of the NKVD worked in parallel. Their main concern was ethnic homogenization: tens of thousands of Belorussians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians, as well as millions of Germans, were deported from Poland, while similar numbers of Poles were driven out of the Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania. This cleansing accorded with the Armija Krajowa’s nationalism, but did not reconcile them to communist rule.

In summer 1944 the Armija Krajowa led an uprising in Warsaw against the Germans, banking on help from the Red Army dug in on the opposite bank of the Vistula. However, the Soviets chose to watch idly as the Germans brought in heavy artillery and over two months destroyed Polish resistance and, block by block, Warsaw itself. After the surrender of General Bór-Komorowski, the new commander of the Armija Krajowa, General Leopold Okulicki, disbanded his men into autonomous partisan groups.

By the time the Soviets reached Berlin, Beria’s men had arrested 27,000 Poles, mostly resistance fighters against the Germans. The unreliability of
the puppet Lublin Polish forces, who deserted to their families or to the partisans at the first opportunity, forced Beria and Serov to use cunning. In March 1945 Beria had Serov invite General Okulicki and seven key figures in the Polish resistance to talks with the NKVD at which, guaranteed immunity from arrest, they would meet a General Ivanov and fly with him to London to reach a compromise between the London and Lublin governments with the terms agreed by Russian American and British representatives. On 28 March the eight Poles were taken to an airport. There was no General Ivanov; the plane flew them to Moscow, where they went straight to the Lubianka to be interrogated by Beria’s deputy, Vsevolod Merkulov. They were followed by 113 other Poles. Okulicki had been in the hands of the NKVD before, from 1939 to 1941 in Lwów. He confessed that he had been waiting for the war to end in order to join with the British in a battle against the USSR. On 18 June sixteen Poles were tried by Ulrikh, who was for this delicate occasion restrained, on Stalin’s orders, by Molotov, Beria and Vyshinsky. The Poles were allowed defence lawyers; the sentences were mild. Leopold Okulicki came off worst with ten years’ imprisonment. However, Okulicki and two others soon died in prison. Poland had had the first taste of the techniques Beria and Abakumov would use all over eastern Europe to secure Stalin’s control.

Bierut’s government was nervous about reaction to Okulicki’s fate and interceded for Armija Krajowa members and for judges, professors, schoolboys and others among the thousands arrested. Stalin granted most an amnesty. Bierut’s government included a number of Jews; endemic Polish anti-Semitism flared up. In Kraków Polish policemen joined in a pogrom. On 4 July 1946, in Kielce, a runaway Polish child, Henryk Blaszczyk, was induced by state security officers to say that he was fleeing from Jews who meant to eat him. A crowd of some 15,000, again led by policemen, slaughtered forty-two Jews. These pogroms, which in total killed perhaps 2,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, were led by Poles who saw Jews and communists as one and the same. A 1947 leaflet in Bydgoszcz declared, ‘a handful of degenerate Jews have taken over the state’. But the Soviet-backed Polish Ministry of Security joined the frenzy: one of its bulletins read, ‘Once again a nine-year-old girl has disappeared. It may be that Jews from Rzeszów have eaten her…’ Poles complained that Russian films had been dubbed into Polish by Jews so
the Soviet authorities employed Dzierżyński’s widow and son to check the dubbing actors for Jewish accents.

Other countries that the Red Army invaded caused the NKVD fewer headaches. In Bulgaria elections were rigged to give Dimitrov’s communists and their Soviet advisers control by the end of 1945. In Czechoslovakia, where even non-communists revered Stalin as the leader of the Slavs and the USSR as the sole country that had not betrayed them at Munich, the survivors of the pre-war communist party, strengthened by the Moscow nominees Gottwald and Clementis, needed less assistance than Polish communists and infiltrated Eduard Beneš’s social democrat government. The communists took over policing, public and secret, and banished or murdered politicians who stood in their way. The Red Army and the NKVD helped the Czechs in their most popular enterprise: to drive out three million Germans from the Sudetenland. The government handed over the land to Czech peasants and the factories to Red Army engineers for dismantling and removal to the USSR.

By the end of 1944, the Soviet authorities had installed in Romania their nominee Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. As in Czechoslovakia, they needed three years to disable other political parties. (One minister, Gheorghe Tatarescu, said, ‘We shall put some in prison, liquidate others and the rest we shall deport.’) Romania, unlike Poland or Czechoslovakia, was not to be ethnically homogenized: the Hungarian-speaking west of the country was kept intact, and many Romanian Jews had survived. Stalin insisted on Gheorghiu-Dej giving ministerial posts to a Jew, Ana Pauker, and an ethnic Hungarian, Vasile Luca – although both were soon purged.