Some Thoughts on Operation Barbarossa

I wrote the following as a response to a question on how close Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, came to success. It seems appropriate to save it here now we are close to the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War.

How close did the German invasion of Russia come to success? Far, far closer than many people care to allow. The suggestion that the whole thing was a piece of political and strategic madness by Hitler, pushed most assiduously after the war by Franz Halder, the Wehrmacht Chief of Staff, among others, does not stand up to examination. His own wartime diaries reveal that he was as keen on the whole operation as anyone. As early as 3 July he wrote, "It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in a space of two weeks".

We now known, from documents released by the Russian archives since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that this was a view that even Stalin was close to accepting. At the end of that month one of the agents of Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, made attempts through the Bulgarian ambassador to discover if Hitler would accept large territorial concessions in return for peace. The Russian historian, Dimitri Volkogonov, has also uncovered evidence to suggest that the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, was actively preparing for a second Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which had ended Russian involvement in the First World War. The thinking seems to have been that of Lenin in 1918: trade territory for political survival.

The real crisis came in October after the great enveloping battle at Vyazma and Briansk, the opening move of the final advance on Moscow, where the Germans took 660,000 prisoners, leaving a mere 90,000 men to face the whole of Army Group Centre. It is even rumoured that some Moscovites put out welcome posters for the Germans. Zhukov later reported that Stalin was more desperate than ever for peace. He was also on the point of leaving Moscow. Document No. 34 of the State Defence Committee, dated 15 October 1941, and now in the public domain, shows just how serious Stalin believed matters had become. It is resolved, the document proceeds,

To evacuate the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and the top levels of Government...(Comrade Stalin will leave tomorrow or later, depending on the situation)...In the event of enemy forces arriving in Moscow, the NKVD are ordered to blow up business premises, warehouses and institutions which cannot be evacuated, and all underground railway electrical equipment.

The following night an armoured train made ready to carry Stalin east.

Nevertheles, it is by no means certain that the Soviet Union would have fallen even if Moscow had been taken; but it would have given the Germans crucial control over the whole Russian transport network. More than that, the collapse of Russia's ancient capital, and the flight of Stalin, is likely to have had the most devastating effect on both morale and fighting ability. If Stalin was a coward, it has rightly been written, then everyone could be a coward.

There are two things surely that saved Russia at this most crucial point in its history; the decision of Stalin, for reasons yet unkown, to remain in Moscow, and crucial intelligence forwarded from Tokyo by Richard Sorge, a Communist secret agent, that the Japanese were not going to attack Russia, not at least until after Moscow had fallen. In a huge gamble the guard on Manchuria, occupied by the powerful Kwantung Army, was dropped, and the Siberian divisions moved west. If Sorge had been wrong it is difficult to know how the Soviet Union could have survived. But he was not wrong. Zhukov deployed his fresh units to the north and south of Moscow. For once it really is appropriate to say that the rest is history

The Hippopotamus

If one wants to understand Tsar Alexander III, to understand the nature of the man, and the regime he created, I would suggest if in St. Petersburg one should visit the Marble Palace, where one will find a huge bronze equestrian statue. Grotesque in proportion and appearance, it was meant to create an impression of awesome autocratic power. But no sooner had it appeared than people started to call it 'The Hippopotamus', a name it has carried ever since. When the sculptor himself heard of the popular reaction to his work, after it rode into the world in 1909, he said "I don't get into politics. I just depicted one animal on another." :-))

You see, the Hippopotamus is a perfect symbol for the Russia of Alexander III, in all of its colossal immobility. In his determination to preserve the autocratic character of the state, Alexander moved firmly away from the path of reform, previously pursued by his own father. Although the Russian economy-and Russian capitalism-developed rapidly during the period of his rule, the state became ever more repressive and reactionary. Amongst other things the powers of the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, were considerably increased. The 1881 Statute of State Security, which Lenin later described as the 'real Russian Constitution', extended extraordinary authority to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, allowing it to prohibit gatherings of more than twelve people, close schools and universities, and prosecute any individual for perceived political crimes.

Besides reinforcing the apparatus of repression, Alexander also decided that the path to national salvation lay in further measures of Russification, carried on at the expense of the Poles and other minorities within the Empire. The Orthodox Church was promoted above all others, and Russia's large Jewish minority, confined within a designated Pale of Settlement, was subject to increasing levels of persecution and discrimination.

But it was in the countryside that Alexander's reactionary policy was at its most damaging for the long-term prospects of the Romanovs. Peasant self-government was undermined by giving increased powers to the zemstva, dominated by the nobles. Still worse, Alexander II's rural reforms were effectively rendered meaningless by the appointment of the so-called Land-Captains, officials answerable to the provincial Governor-Generals. These Land-Captains had the power to overrule peasant courts and remove peasant officials. They could also arrest any of the peasants under their authority, fine them or even subject them to corporal punishment. For the peasants the system was so oppressive that many were convinced that serfdom was being restored, especially after 1893, when they were banned from leaving their local mir, the communes within which they lived.

Alexander had the character, the stature and the will to force his model of autocracy on Russia. It was an example he bequeathed to his son, Nicholas, always in awe of his formidable father. He filled the mind of unimaginative Nicky with all sorts of outdated notions and values. The last of the Tsars was a man filled with good intentions; and with these he took the road to hell

The Greatest Failure since Lenin

It’s now twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wail, presaging collapse of Communism across Eastern Europe. I marked the occasion recently in a piece I called The Woes of Lemonade Joe, focusing specifically on the actions of Mikhail Gorbachev. I’m now beginning to find out even more about the man, about exactly what motivated him. And the thing that motivated him most was the writings of Lenin! I can’t quite believe that; he must have been the only man in the whole rotten system to pay anything bit lip service to that particular monster of Russian history. I’ll say more on this in a bit.

I’ve glanced over The Accidental Hero of 1989, a piece by Victor Sebestyen in the latest edition of Prospect. Some of the details are really quite amusing. The gradual sclerosis of the Soviet leadership in the days before Gorbachev became General Secretary was a source of much sardonic humour. How could it not when a living cadaver like Konstantin Chernenko was wheeled on to the stage? “Comrades,” one joke went, “we will start the congress in the traditional way-with the carrying in of the general secretary.”

Gorbachev, reaching the top of the barbed-wire pole in his fifties, came almost like a schoolboy compared with the gerontocracy that had ruled hitherto. Amazingly he was the first Soviet leader to have been born after the Revolution of 1917. His rise through the ranks of Party and government followed the usual pattern. “We all licked Brezhnev’s ass”, to use his own words. But Lemonade Joe was different: he was an idealist in a world of cynics and placemen-and that was the cause of his ruin and the ruin of the Evil Empire. It must be one of history’s acutest ironies: for what Lenin set up he also pulled down.

It was Gorbachev’s special mission, as he saw it, to return to the ‘pure’ path of Lenin away from the ‘perversions’ of Stalin. Leninist ideology was always there as a sort of background noise, some noticed but mostly tried to ignore, though not Gorby. His idealism is actually quite touching, naïve, yes, but touching. Unfortunately for him it most often ended in disaster. He somehow thought that by allowing the publication of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, by revealing the horrors of Soviet history, that people would somehow become better Communists! The reality, of course, is that they began to hate the foul doctrine even more.

It really is true: Gorbachev’s path to hell was paved with not just good intentions but with truly noble ones. Consider more closely the actions, worthy in every degree, which earned him the nickname of Lemonade Joe. In 1984 more than nine million drunks were picked off Soviet streets. The statistics for premature death, family violence and crime were truly shocking. In the Politburo when Gorbachev proposed a drastic increase in the price of vodka, Vladimir Dementsev, the finance minister, objected that it would have disastrous effect on state finances. “Do you propose to build communism on vodka?”, Gorbachev responded. He simply did not understand that the system had long since abandoned all attempts to ‘build communism.’

The price hike had just the effect Dementsev predicted. What was worse the growth in illegal distilleries and home brewing resulted often in a form of mass poisoning. The death rate shot up even further. Gorbachev took two steps forward and three steps back. And that is more or less how the Soviet Empire was governed in its final years.

He receives hardly any mention now in Russian school texts, which devote much space to the greatness of Stalin. That’s not fair. Gorbachev was by far the greatest Leninist since Lenin; and that is precisely why he was Communism’s greatest failure.

Remembering the White Guard

All this is simple, as blood and sweat are:
A Tsar for a people, a people for a Tsar.
All this is clear as two's secret, shared:
Two together--the Spirit's third.
The Tsar's raised from heaven upon his throne.
This is as pure as sleep and snow.
The Tsar will climb to his throne again,
yet--All this is holy, as blood and sweat.

From The Swan’s Encampment by Marina Tsvetaeva

Having written about the Grand Duchess Anastasia, and prior to that Lenin, I now intend to let my lush romanticism fly over another of my favourite topics-the Russian White Guard. The story of the men and women of the Volunteer Army deserves to be better remembered; their courage deserves to be remembered; their determination to save their country from the likes of Lenin and Trotsky deserves to be remembered; their tragedy deserves to be remembered.

Most people, I suppose, know little about the Russian Civil War, and what little they know tends to be inaccurate. What I should say, first off, is that Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 was not a revolution, as commonly described, but a military putsch by a gang of murderous desperados. The real Revolution, the democratic revolution, if you prefer, came in March of that same year. A Provisional Government was formed pending the election of a Constituent Assembly, the first fully democratic body in Russian history. But when it met it was immediately dismissed by the Communists, who had received half of the vote of their nearest rivals. A new dictatorship, based on force and terror, was then put in place.

The Volunteers, a tiny band of officers of the old army, based in the far south seemed from the start to be in a hopeless position. Lavar Kornilov managed to organise a core of resistance in the city of Rostov-on-Don; but, under attack by the Reds, he was forced to abandon his position, as the White Guard retreated into the Kuban in the deep of winter. This was the beginning of the Ice March, one of the true epics of Russian history. Anton Denikin, Kornilov’s second-in-command, said of this, “We went from the dark night of spiritual slavery to unknown wandering in search of the bluebird.” In Russian folklore the bluebird is the symbol of hope.

Kornilov was killed on the march but the White Guard survived under the command of Denikin. Thousands joined, including Sergei Yakovlevich Efron, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s husband. The tide washed almost to the walls of Moscow. Unfortunately for Russia, unfortunately for the people of Russia, the Reds had a commanding control of the centre of the country and the rail network. The Putschists survived; the bluebird died.

On that same visit to Moscow, when I went to gawp at Lenin, or what purports to be Lenin, I also visited the grave of Anton Denikin at the Donskoy Monastery, this time in a spirit of quiet reverence.