The USSR Home Front and World War II

Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer (eds.), Hunger and War. Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II, Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2015

 

Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer, Fortress Dark and Stern. The Soviet Home Front During World War II, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021

 

Reviewed by Michael Haynes

 

 

World War Two was the greatest war the world has ever seen. More countries were involved. It was fought on broader land fronts, more seas and in more airspace. A greater number of people were mobilised for the armed forces. It was more destructive of capital and destructive of labour than any previous war. Civilians died compared to the military at a rate of roughly 2:1. The war involved a greater degree of dehumanisation and abject terror. There were war crimes on all sides. Some participants practiced extermination policies. It changed capitalism and its geo-political forms. Yet we still do not know how to make sense of it as a whole nor of the role of the belligerents and not least that of the USSR.

Prior to the collapse of the USSR the question of the Soviet home front during the Second World War always took second place to that of the actual fighting. John Barber and Mark Harrison’s, The Soviet Home Front, 1941-1945: A Social and Economic History of World War II, London: Longman 1991 was a pioneering discussion and much of the statistical scaffolding (at least in the west) draws heavily on Mark Harrison’s many contributions. But, in the last three decades, many detailed books and papers have been published and not least in the successor states of the USSR. [1]

Now Wendy Goldman and Donald Filtzer’s history of the Soviet Home Front and their preceding edited collection which looked at different aspects of public health in these years, offers a new synthesis of real depth. A Fortress Dark and Stern is a large book in terms of its size but even more in terms of the research effort that has gone into it. Drawing on research in five major archives in Moscow, previously hidden contemporary accounts, and some oral history, it is simply the best account we have of the Soviet home front. It is difficult to do justice to its richness and the way it brings home the dire situation within the USSR in the war years and how this was overcome allowing most – but by no means all – to survive. Each chapter organises a framework for our understanding and throws an unforgettable light on things whose magnitude is hard for us to grasp. Consider the story of the obscure town of Kamensk-Ural’skii in 1941-1942. Its population doubled from 50,000 to 100,000 in a few weeks. It had no housing, a poor water supply and no sewage system. It lacked medical support, and the inhabitants were restricted to one visit to the bath house every 37 days. Or the story of the factory in Chapaevsk with 1,400 workers to feed which had only 40 spoons, 40 small plates, 40 bowls, 15 glasses and 60 metal mugs. There are intensely personal stories too, like that of the young worker in a cotton factory who, with the others who worked there, deliberately soaked her clothes in cotton oil so she could take it home to be sucked off by family members and especially her ‘little brother’.

But these books also pose, at least in this reviewer’s mind, some sharp questions to which the authors offer unsatisfactory or no answers. I say this with some regret because the scale of the authors’ achievements is enormous and the problems of understanding the issues posed by the war both at the level of theory and human survival are great.

The first part of this review article therefore offers a slightly wider framing of the war than the authors give in their account. It then reviews their arguments to show the strength of the research that Goldman and Filtzer have personally done. Finally, it looks at three areas where it seems to me that their arguments are contestable or missing: the nature of the war: the nature of the Soviet state; and their evaluation of the situation of the ‘working class’.

1. The USSR and the Second World War

 In 1941, the USSR was the biggest country in the world with a population of some 200 million – increased by the integration of some 0.5 million sq. km and some 22 million people because of the expansion that followed the Nazi-Soviet Pact.[2] But, compared to the Western European states, the USA and, of course, Nazi Germany it was still only semi-developed. Industrialisation, focused on the heavy-industry military sectors, had driven the economy forward, but the USSR was still only 33% urban. Agricultural workers made up 53% of the workforce compared to 20% in Germany, 17% in the USA and only 6% in the UK. Industrial productivity had improved but was still low. Agricultural productivity was still lower. In the best of circumstances, it would have been hard for the USSR to fight a powerful, more developed adversary. But the USSR did not fight in the best of circumstances. The numbers in the Red Army had been rapidly expanded from 940,000 in 1936 to some 5 million in 1941. These troops were ill equipped and trained. The military leadership was demoralised by the purges which had seen the imprisonment or execution of some 35,000 officers including many senior military leaders. Then, following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, while general militarisation continued, Stalin naïvely believed he had outwitted Hitler. He refused to heed warnings of the impending attack. When it began at 3 a.m. on 22 June 1941, it opened what would become a 2000 km front. The attack was directed to the north and Leningrad, to the centre and Moscow and to the south. Panic and retreat followed on across the whole front.

Historians in the USSR carefully tried to work out the territorial and population losses at different stages of the war. Their data is set out in table 1.

 

 

Table 1 The Scale of the Nazi Occupation of the USSR [3]

 

		% of territory*	Pop 1939 000	% Pop
	1941 borders	100.0	190,678	100.0
1	Occupied during war	8.7	84,852	+44.5
2	Occupied June 22- Dec 1941	7.0	74,531	39.1
	Liberated 7 Dec-Feb 1942	-0.6	-4,880	-2.6
3	In occupation March 1942	6.4	69,651	36.5
	Occupied July-Nov 1942	+1.7	+10,321	+5.4
4	Total occupied Nov 1942	8.1	79,972	41.9
	Liberated Nov 19 -March 1943	-2.2	-15,484	-8.1
5	In occupation March 1943	5.9	64,488	33.8
	Liberated July 12 -Oct 1943	-1.3	-18,785	-9.8
6	In occupation Oct 1943	4.6	45,703	24.0
	Liberated Oct 1 43-Jan 1 1944	-0.5	-6,774	-3.6
7	In occupation Jan 44	4.1	38,929	20.4
	Liberated Jan 1 -June 22 1944	-1.5	-18,950	-9.9
8	In occupation June 22 1944	2.6	19,979	10.5
	Liberated July 22 – Aug 2 1944	-1.6	-14,845	-7.8
9	In Occupation Aug 2 1944	1.0	5,134	2.7
	Liberated after Aug 2 1944	1.0	-5,134	-2.7

 

 

These historians have estimated that 8.7% of Soviet territory was lost at some stage containing 44.5% of its pre-war population. The initial Nazi advance was slowed by bitter fighting in the autumn of 1941. It ground to a halt in the winter with Leningrad under siege and Wehrmacht troops not far from Moscow. At this point, 7% of Soviet territory had been lost with 39% of its pre-war population. The table then shows the size of the territory regained in early 1942, before the Nazi armies advanced again towards the south. By November 1942, they now held 8.1% of Soviet territory which had contained 41.9% of its pre-war population. The winter of 1942-1943 were the lowest months in military terms. But the Nazis were held and defeated at Stalingrad in early 1943. Yet the Nazi armies were far from decisively beaten. They sought to regain the initiative in the summer of 1943. It was their defeat in the huge battle of Kursk in July-August that showed the tide had really turned. The table then shows how territory and peoples were liberated in 1943-1944. The process was grinding and bloody. It would continue to be so after the Red Army crossed the borders of the USSR first to the south and then from January 1945 in a huge offensive in Poland. The Red Army advanced west to Berlin where the Nazis finally surrendered on 8/9 May 1945. [4] It was a victory over Hitler disproportionately won by the Red Army and at huge cost. Historians have laboured to count the human losses for the USSR. Based on an excess deaths measure, they are routinely put at 26-27 million.

Table 2 shows the numbers called up to fight. Although more women could be found in the Soviet military, the vast majority of those who fought were men. As those at the front died, were wounded or were disabled by accident and disease they had to be continually replaced. The ‘manpower’ drain on the civilian economy was continual.

 

Table 2 Numbers Called up 22 June 1941 to 1 May 1945

(includes 2,237,000 called up twice) [5]

 

	Numbers
06/41-05/42	15,384,837
05/42-12/42	5,3828,392
1943	4,646,250
1944	4,646,250
1/1945 -05/ 1945	551,243
Total	31,812,158

 

The results for the home front labour force are outlined in table 3. This shows its contraction as a result of territorial losses and the shift to a total war economy with the rise in the numbers in the military and the sectoral redistribution of the rest of the workforce.

 

Table 3 The Soviet Working Population 1940-1945 in millions [6]

 

	1940	1941	1942	1943	1944	1945
Total	86.8	72.9	54.7	57.1	67.1	75.7
Armed forces	5.0	7.1	11.3	11.9	12.2	12.1
‘Home front’ workers	81.8	65.8	43.4	45.2	54.9	63.6
Of which industry	13.8	12.6	8.7	9.0	10.2	11.6
defence	1.8	1.9	2.7	2.9	2.9	2.1
civilian	12.0	10.7	5.9	6.1	7.3	9.5
Construction, trade, transport, services	18.8	16.3	10.4	10.7	13.5	16.0
Agriculture	49.3	36.9	24.3	25.5	31.3	36.1

 

The decline in the labour force in agriculture and civilian industry was around 50%. The numbers in direct defence production increased but were relatively small. But, to support them, the military at the front, and military logistics, most of the rest of the economy had to go short and, with it, the population at large. It came close to a home front defeat but, eventually, enough soldiers were provided with enough equipment of sufficient quality to allow the Nazis to be defeated. Let us follow Goldman and Filtzer in seeing how it was done.

Chapters 1 and 2 of Fortress Dark and Stern deal with the mass evacuations eastwards. These had to balance the need of the retreating Soviet forces to fight on and the need to deny the Nazis anything through a scorched earth policy. There were three main waves of evacuation of equipment, people and livestock all of which involved horrific journeys.[7] Some were on foot, others on trains lacking food and sanitation which travelled painfully slowly often with no idea of their destination. The first and most disorganised wave was in June to September 1941. A second wave occurred in late 1941 including the evacuation of a substantial part of Moscow. A third wave of evacuation then took place in 1942 as the Nazis began their spring advance to the south. Once equipment, buildings, animals and people had arrived at their destinations, the reconstruction effort had to be made. Factory walls were literally built around works and their equipment as they started to operate it. This took place on a far more concentrated scale than the first five-year plan, with many workers sleeping by the machines or in dug outs. Yet it worked, allowing for the massive production of military equipment albeit with the cannibalisation of much of the rest of the economy.

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on feeding the population. Territorial losses meant that the potential food supply was much smaller while the remaining population in the unoccupied lands was swollen by refugees. A complex rationing system had to be devised amidst chaos with at least some reference to need. This mainly fed the urban population.[8] Shortages were endemic. The main foods were bread and potatoes. Malnutrition and scurvy were commonplace far beyond the besieged city of Leningrad. By the end of 1945, however, some 80 million were being supplied with bread. Canteens in 1943 supplied some 16 billion meals. Artificial foods were part of this and so were vitamin supplement manufactured in any way possible which allowed canteens in 1944 to supply 4.3 billion doses.

Food was also supplied in other ways, some of which undermined the rationing system and some of which complemented it. One was what Goldman and Filtzer call ‘self-provisioning’. Different parts of the managerial structure from the factory upwards benefited from a semi-organised diversion of food to themselves both at in privileged canteens at work and in their homes. A second, more benign adjustment, which they call ‘levelling’ involved some managers diverting foods that should have gone elsewhere to their own starving workers or other vulnerable groups. A third redistribution mechanism was then endemic individual and small group theft. Some of this stolen food went into black markets. There were also extensive grey markets for food grown by the peasants and on allotments that the authorities had little choice but to largely ignore. Clearly those who gained least from these mechanisms were the poorest, those with least power, income, savings and goods to barter and sell.

 Chapters 5 to 7, the biggest part of the book, look at the labour system in the war years bridging the authors’ independent contributions to our understanding of labour in the 1930s and first postwar years.[9] Alongside the many millions mobilised into the army, the state mobilised some 15 million people on the home front. These included both urban and rural labour reserves – some redirected from industries that could no longer be supported but also new industrial workers – women, the very young, the old, the long-term sick, the disabled etc and prisoners in the Gulag. The authors describe the system as a labour service ‘analogous to the military draft’ and the state as ‘a perpetual mobilisation machine’. The ‘home front’ involved ‘vast mobilised contingents continually in motion’ (p. 229). Labour retention was a huge problem. Many of these poorly trained and badly housed and clothed people working in the harshest conditions tried to move back in huge numbers. Conditions were worse for those who remained in the Gulag because of the combination of low priority in feeding and their use for often physically demanding labour. The labour system reached a crisis point in 1942-3, when the war economy was at its weakest and the military threat the greatest. The mobilisation of labour was extended to Central Asia and the authorities again struggled to contain people fleeing. As the German army began to retreat, new labour resources became available from the formerly occupied population who were mobilised often to the East. Sometimes, the local authorities here also resisted the central mobilisation calls. At the individual level, many went temporarily missing or disappeared. The authors quote one estimate that, in 1943, the economy only got just over 50% of those mobilised and even the defence industries got 30% less than was allocated. (pp. 222-3). Only in 1944 did conditions begin to improve but they remained dire as they would in the immediate postwar years.

Chapter 8 looks at public health and rehearses some of the themes dealt with in the 2015 collection. Epidemics were largely contained, the increase in the child mortality miraculously limited (helped by the falling birth-rate). But civilian mortality did rise. This was a product of hunger, and the spread of diseases like TB as well as workplace issues like accidents, poisonings, industrial diseases. The collapse of public hygiene made things worse. So too did the lack of medical care (though, in any crisis, this is always a secondary factor). Resources were lacking, and it was a problem to replace the skilled medical personnel mobilised for the front. But, in all this, the workplace remained central because the availability of food was tied to it. Missing ‘norms’ could create a vicious circle of human decline as rations were cut. Chapter 9 looks at the role of propaganda and its relationship to the popular mood, its unifying themes and how it changed over time. The discussion centres on the role of class themes versus nationalism (and antisemitism), hate propaganda and the appeal for vengeance. Goldman and Filtzer argue that the authorities eventually called a halt to vengeance propaganda but sympathetically explore how such propaganda related to the very real horror of finding out what the Nazis had done.

Chapter 10 looks at the processes of reconstruction prior to ‘the end’ of the war. Goldman and Filtzer describe liberation as a ‘newsreel in reverse’ (p. 341). The Nazis used their own scorched earth policy to destroy what had been rebuilt or what had survived their advance in 1941-42. The Soviet state took over a land of people without food, buildings to work in, homes to sleep in and clothes to dress in. ‘Every activity had to be done on foot, the trams did not run, there were no motorized vehicles and the few horses that remained were needed for collective farms.’ To cope with the food problem, 12 million new bread ration cards were issued in 1943-44, but food was still short. The Red Army still had to be supported and labour in the once occupied areas now had to be mobilised for the war effort. Political order also had to be created with a handful of cadres who ran a filtration system that tried to distinguish active collaborators from those who had accommodated and those who had resisted. Resistance to the Nazis also spilled over for some to different types of resistance to the return of the pre 1941 order. Goldman and Filtzer close their book in May 1945. But they recognise that ‘recovery’ would be protracted. In 2020, in the Russian Federation, there were 8.8 million people who were over 75. Some were born as the war was ending, some still had childhood memories, some as young adults. How marked their lives were by the physical and mental struggles of 1941-45 is difficult to discern but it is certain that most, if not all, had scars that they carried and will carry until they die.

2. 

   The Nature of the War

 Goldman and Filtzer’s focus on the experience of the home front may be no bad thing, given the way that the modern ‘memory’ of the war is being distorted and diminished by time and new political tensions. But I find it strange that they do not confront in more detail the problems posed by the nature of the war. In the end, while noting how the modern Russian state manipulates the memory of the war too, the authors say

The victory of the Soviet people against fascism, however, also belongs to all the world’s people, part of an ongoing international struggle against virulent nationalism, race hatred, anti-Semitism and exploitation. It is an extraordinary historical legacy left to all who continue to fight for the anti-fascist ideals it represented. (p. 378)

 

But Goldman and Filtzer avoid all engagement with the question of imperialism in World War 2 and the question of whether the USSR itself was an imperialist power with wider aims or whether it was simply engaged in a defensive struggle. Yet, surely, the question of what the home front was for needs to be posed? It may have supported the fight against Nazi Germany, but it can also be argued to have supported the eventual annexation of a part of Finland, the Baltic states, a large bit of Poland, and Bessarabia.[10] It supported the liberation of ‘Eastern Europe’ from fascism but also supported the creation of vassal states there. The guns produced on the home front were certainly used to kill ‘fascists’, but they were also used to crush all other forms of opposition to Stalinist rule including from the left. Was there not a relationship too between the home front and the pressure to gain other territories from Turkey to China to Japan?[11] And, if the Allies began to differ more as 1944 progressed, was this because the leaders of the USA and the UK began to fear that Stalin had revolutionary intentions, or that he intended for the USSR to be a postwar great power contesting for global leadership?

These questions about the nature of the war affect how we conceptualise which fronts ‘the home front’ was supporting and when. It is common to ask students to consider when World War 2 began. Was it on 18 September 1931 when Japan invaded Manchuria, or as late as the end of 1941 with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 and the Nazi declaration of war on USA on 11 December 1941? Goldman and Filtzer take the view that what matters is the war with Nazi Germany that begins on 22 June 1941, and ends on 9 May 1945. Why?

The USSR had clashed with Japanese imperialism in various border incidents from 1932-1939.[12] These erupted into more intense fighting in the Battles of Khasan in July-August 1938 and Khalkhin Gol in July-August 1939. This fighting was still ongoing when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed with its secret agreement to divide Poland. If, the conventional European view, Nazi Germany started the Second World War by invading Poland from the west on 1 September 1939, did World War 2 for the Soviets start when the Red Army then invaded Poland from the East on 17 September 1939? Together, Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland virtually 50:50 (73,000: 77,000 square miles). Eventually, some 20% of the population of Poland would die, including almost all Poland’s Jews. Between 1939-1941, while the Nazis were responsible for 120,000 deaths, the Soviet side killed more than 150,000 including the 25-26,000 in the April-May 1940 massacres at Katyn.[13] Many were killed in the other states that were absorbed. Hundreds of thousands were deported eastwards. The Red Army then invaded Finland on 30 November 1939, with the intention of complete occupation. Although the Red Army did badly, the USSR still gained 10% of Finland’s territory in the peace agreement of 13 March 1940.

These events suggest that our sense of what is peace and what is war is political. A recognition of them begins to undermine any narrative that the USSR was simply engaged in an anti-fascist war. These events also undermine our sense of when and what ‘the home front’ is in a militarised society.

Even in the book’s narrower terms, the focus on the ‘Eastern front’ is a problem. After the clashes of 1938-1939, both Moscow and Tokyo moved towards a degree of mutual accommodation. This was consolidated in April 1941 by the signing of a non-aggression or neutrality pact with Tokyo. This committed the two countries not to go to war with one another for five years, either because of their own conflicts or at the behest of third parties. Stalin hoped that, as with the Nazi-Soviet Pact, this would free the USSR from war, but, if the agreement with Hitler broke down, it might help to avoid a war on two fronts. This was exactly what happened. But the USSR still maintained a very significant presence on its far-eastern front, albeit with troop rotation to the Europe front. The scale of the deployment which the Soviet home front had to supply is shown in table 4.

 

Table 4 The Deployment of Soviet Armed Forces on the Far-Eastern and

Southern Fronts 1941-1945 [14]

 

	Far-Eastern Front			Southern Front
	Personnel 000	Tanks etc	Planes	Personnel 000	Tanks	Planes
22/06/41	703.7	5,797	4,140	331,7	430	1,754
01/12/41	1,343.3	2,124	3,193	507.0	245	530
01/06/41	1,446.0	2,589	3,178	534.0	310	770
01/01/42	1,296.8	2,526	3,357	1,342.0	310	810
01/08/43	1,156.9	2,367	na	336.0	310	850
01/02/44	1,163.0	2,069	4,006	336.0	310	850
09/05/45	1,185.0	2,338	4,668	336.0	310	850

 

From 1943, Moscow’s policy began to look towards war with Japan to consolidate and project its interests in the Far East.[15] Stalin told the Allies at Tehran that he would enter the war against Japan, but he was in no rush to do so. Preparations developed during 1944. Then, at Yalta, Stalin obtained another secret agreement that Soviet claims ‘shall be unquestionably fulfilled after Japan had been defeated’.

When the war in Europe ended preparations for war in the Far East intensified even more – the scale of the movement of troops and equipment acting as a serious burden. By August 1945, some 1.5 million troops were amassed and then, at midnight, 9 August (Chita time – August 8 Moscow time) a Soviet Blitzkrieg was launched along a 4,000 km plus front. Some suggest that the offensive played a bigger role in Japan’s decision to surrender that the nuclear bombs. Either way, Stalin was determined to maximise Soviet gains and the war ended messily with Soviet actions continuing after Japan signed its surrender documents on 2 September. Some 12,000 Red Army troops were killed and 24,000 wounded. Some 600,000 prisoners of war were captured, of whom perhaps 60-70,000 died in captivity. But Stalin and the USSR now established their ‘influence’ in Manchuria itself, northern Korea, the Kurile Islands, and southern Sakhalin.

The Southern Front was also complex and contentious and not least in Iran. In late August 1941, it was occupied in a joint operation by British forces, from the south (later reinforced by US forces), and Soviet forces, from the north. The aim was to deny Iran to Nazi Germany, to use it as a base for operations in the wider region, as a transport corridor and to take its resources for the Allied war effort. Iran was a major route for lend-lease supplies and most notably food for both the Soviet home front and fighting forces. The USSR also settled perhaps 300,000 Polish refugees in its zone. Food was prioritised for the occupying troops. In 1942, a major famine broke out, especially in the south, which was soon accompanied by a typhus epidemic. The USSR delayed participating in a modest food redistribution to the starving areas, while also taking some grain for export to help feed its population. Bluntly, some Iranians died so that some Soviets might live. How many died is unclear. Some consider the figure likely to be larger. At the end of the war, with ‘Soviet oil’ coming largely from the Baku area, Stalin hoped for ‘joint ventures’ and to get major Iranian oil concessions. The USSR was then the last occupying power to leave Iran.[16]

In 1940, a Red Army soldier allegedly asked a political worker, ‘What kind of war is this we have now, the second [imperialist] or some other kind?’ The political worker is supposed to have said ‘There’s no point in counting imperialist wars … When the war’s over, a [party] congress will convene, and they’ll tell us what type of war it was’.[17] It is still a question worth posing and answering. What people thought they were fighting and dying for both at the front and in the rear may not have been what they were fighting and dying for. But Goldman and Filtzer’s readers will be none the wiser either.

 

3. The Nature of the State

 Goldman and Filtzer see the Soviet state and those who ran it as central to an analysis of the Home Front. Those who administered near the bottom had little or no power. But party and state officials and those in charge of the different enterprises and institutions did. During the war, the broad function of this controlling group remained the same, but Goldman and Filtzer show that much changed in how it worked. In the first days of the war, the military began to be organised through a new Stavka and the home front became subject to the GKO or State Defence Committee. The party structures became more marginal and the various commissariats (Goldman and Filtzer list some 50 of them) – especially those linked to the war effort – grew in authority. Additionally, a set of new powerful war time committees were created like those dealing with evacuation, the labour supply, transport etc.

There was personnel change as some were mobilised into the Red Army or its logistical support while others were transferred to run the parts of the home front system that were expanding. Younger people with administrative skills who could deliver rose very quickly to the higher and even highest levels. Tasks changed too, as did the manner of working. At one level, total war meant the militarisation of ‘officialdom’ and their investing with quasi-military powers. There were also many examples of severe punishment when they failed. But the system was also looser than it was in the 1930s. Such ‘planning’ as there had been became less important in the face of urgent need and the rapid development of problems whose scale was often barely perceived until they hit. The wartime system combined centralised control with the attempt to co-ordinate various campaigns to supply and support the war effort and cope with shortages of everything.

Goldman and Filtzer say that their aim is to bring ‘the state back in … not as a vague synonym for power, but as a group of concrete, functioning organisations’ (p. 6). Their focus is on the intermediate state bodies rather than the very highest. Stalin and the very top leadership get little look in, but the detail of the concrete functioning at their intermediate level is tremendous and a hugely welcome addition to our understanding of the mechanisms of the war economy and state. But they nowhere address the issue of the overall nature of this state or the nature of the bureaucracy running it.

Despite the centrality of the state to the modern world, our understanding of it, and the state bureaucracy, is still weak. There is a mass of discussion of bureaucratism as a way of administering and working (and its negative elements) but much less on the bureaucracy, and the state bureaucracy as a thing – its class nature, the extent to which it can ‘rise above society’, who gives orders, who takes them and so on. A state’s monopoly of the means of violence can be widely deployed externally and internally. But the state is much more than the means of violence. In normal times, states directly control an enormous amount of activity. In war, the need to defeat the enemy then forces states to act with even greater power. In the USSR, the way that the state rose above society took extreme forms and, in the war years, the Soviet state not only ‘assumed the heights its massive mobilising powers’ but (perhaps more controversially), say Goldman and Filtzer, ‘manifested a greater ability to command and mobilise its population than any other combatant nation’. (pp. 1, 372)

Yet, when it comes to its overall role, ‘the state’ in Goldman and Filtzer’s account does seem to function as ‘a vague synonym for power’. ‘The state’ ‘acts decisively’, ‘moves rapidly’, ‘decides’, ‘creates’, mobilises’. Crucially, ‘eight days after the invasion, the state created the Committee to Distribute the Labor Force… which would assume vast powers ….’. Then, at the end of the war, ‘the state eliminated the Komitet in May 1946, and the ration system in December 1947’. But, of course, the state did not do this. It was the government and those who held the levers of power who did it, perhaps concentrating more mobilising force in fewer hands. So ‘whose’ state was it and what was the nature of the social group that controlled it and what were their relations to the wider society?

The most developed analysis of the ‘Soviet bureaucracy’ before 1941 was that associated with Trotsky. Trotsky’s analysis began in the early 1920s with a sense that bureaucratism was a problem. This soon shifted to the bureaucracy as a corporate force. Trotsky was haunted by the fear that the bureaucracy was becoming a ruling class. But ,until his death at the hands of an assassin of this Soviet state, he refused to call those in command of it a new ruling class of whatever type. Instead, he treated the state and party bureaucracy as a parasitic force that had somehow risen above society, detaching itself from the workers, on the one hand, and but pulled to the right by ‘alien class pressures’ (largely imagined bourgeois and kulak forces), on the other. Trotsky’s bureaucracy functioned as ‘the sole and commanding stratum’ – but it was ‘not an independent class but an excrescence upon the proletariat’. It played no independent socio-economic role and, said Trotsky, would not survive the war.

Trotsky does not appear in Goldman and Filtzer’s account, but their discussion helps us to understand how and why the Soviet bureaucracy did not collapse as he predicted it likely would but strengthened its role. It did so because, contrary to Trotsky, it controlled both production and distribution and, above all, it commanded the deployment of labour-power. Those with the ability to command used this power to turn the economy even more towards military production. They steered it down in its most difficult moments in 1943-44 and guided it back up again. Despite huge mistakes, the emergence of unforeseen problems; despite the confusion and chaos; despite a degree of internal incoherence; and despite people refusing to do what they were supposed to do, this Soviet state and its bureaucratic rulers worked. The bureaucracy, too. did play a role in pushing forward technological advance. The data is murky, but the productivity increases were sufficient to help defeat a technologically more advanced power.

Indeed, despite their emphasis on the active apparatuses, Goldman and Filtzer do not even give us an idea of the numbers of people involved. Let us try to help. No society adequately maps and counts those who control it. To explore the dimensions of any ruling group, requires us to use murkier data. In the case of the USSR, its statisticians had a category for labour-force analysis called members of the ‘state and economic management apparatus and management bodies of co-operatives and public organisations’. This excluded some we would want to add in and probably included some we might want to exclude. But it probably captures within it the numbers of most of the ruling ‘bureaucracy’. Table 5 shows that in the statistics of the day this group numbered around 5-6% of the Soviet labour force.

 

Table 5 State and Economic Management apparatus in relation to the workforce as a whole in the USSR 1940-1945 in 000 [18]

 

	Total workers and employees	‘State apparatus and related bodies’	%
1940	31,192	1,825	5.85
1941	27,303	1,440	5.27
1942	18,372	924	5.03
1943	19,402	970	5.00
1944	23,623	1,301	5.51
1945	27,263	1,645	6.03

 

 

More detailed data might allow us to differentiate within this group, but we see here the decline in absolute numbers due to the wartime occupation – perhaps 34% of the 1940 figure according to the data. We also see some slight fall in numbers because of the redirection of members of this group to other things. But we also get a sense of the maintenance of the overall size of the group and its quick numerical recovery at the end of the war.

But what does this mean for our understanding of the nature of this ‘group’? Were those within the state who had effective control over it, the means of force, production and distribution, the allocation and reward of labour different from or similar to those at the centre of the war efforts in other countries? Were they simply Trotsky’s ‘parasitic oligarchy’; ‘a caste’? Were they an ‘elite’; ‘a new ruling class of ‘commissars’ – politicians, administrators and technicians’; ‘a state bourgeoisie’; perhaps a completely new class form? And how and to what extent were their interests different from and in conflict with the rest of society? Goldman and Filtzer leave this whole question open.

 

4. The Nature of the Working Class

 The third issue I want to raise relates to Goldman and Filtzer’s treatment of the working class. It should first be said that there were (loosely) two classes at the bottom of Soviet society – the working class and the peasantry. The focus of Goldman and Filtzer’s work is the working class and the urban/ industrial home front. Authors have a right to do what they wish, but it is a puzzle to me that they did not decide to treat the countryside and the peasantry more systematically. In 1940, the collective farm, state farm and independent farmers, with manual and white-collar support staff and administrators, made up 60% of the Soviet population. Overall, the USSR would not become 50% urban until 1961. They can, of course, reply that there are other accounts which complement their own and this is true. But the lack of a more detailed discussion of the countryside seems to me to unbalance their account.

During the war, the countryside was stripped of labour – partly to renew the Red Army (60% of its recruits were rural) and partly as part of the mobilisation of labour for industry – a process we have seen they powerfully analyse. The kolkhoz workforce (narrower than the whole agricultural workforce) fell from 47 million in 1941 to 22.8 million in 1943 – partly the result of the territorial losses and partly labour mobilisation – before rising again to 32.8 million in 1945. Able-bodied males fell, from 36% of this workforce to 13% in 1945. To replace these males, the share of able-bodied women in the kolkhoz workforce rose from 40% in 1941 to 53% in 1945.

The countryside was also stripped of horses. Tractor production collapsed. Fertiliser disappeared as the chemical industry was oriented towards military-industrial production. Sweat became more important in producing food and particularly the sweat of women. But it was also necessary to send labour back to the countryside at harvest time to help bring in grain. Not all peasants were able to sell on the kolkhoz markets and to accumulate cash reserves, but some were and most of their savings would later be taken away in the post-war currency reform.

 But the bigger issue is what does the experience of the war and the home front tell us about socio-economic relations looked at from the bottom up? It is likely true that most workers on the Soviet home front ‘supported’ the war effort. But it is important to confront the elephant in the room of discussion of the Soviet working class and the Second World War. The mass of workers in all countries supported the war efforts of their governments, whether they be classed as democracies or dictatorships, authoritarian, fascist or whatever designation you want to give to the Soviet government. In all of them, too, support rose and fell in part in relation to military fortunes, but, even in Nazi Germany, the regime retained a popular base until the end. In and of itself, therefore, popular support tells us nothing about the nature of a regime. But the way it was achieved – the nature, forms, and degree of the manipulation of passivity, consent, and coercion that a regime deployed may tell us a lot about the nature of the regime itself and the position of workers.

The oppressed and exploited position of Soviet workers by the end of the 1930s ought not to be in doubt. Trotsky called them semi-slaves – a term which, if nothing else, captures their lack of basic freedoms. Before, during, and after the war, there is no comparison between the situation of workers in the USSR and workers in the USA, the UK or even Italy and Japan. The only meaningful comparator is Nazi Germany and, if we consider the way the Nazi regime treated the workers it thought of as its ‘own’, compared to the way the Soviet regime treated ‘its’ workers, the comparison does not work to the advantage of the Soviet regime.[19]

Seeing ‘working-class’ ‘support’ in 1941-45 as in any sense an endorsement is even more of a problem. First, regard has to be had to how the working class that had been partially formed in the 1930s was now torn apart socially and barely reformed in the war years as a stable entity.[20] Then we need to think about the degree to which the war was an existential struggle for survival. Commending Goldman and Filtzer’s book, Mark Harrison says of people at that time that ‘many faced bad or impossible choices.’ This seems correct. People made largely these choices from a position of extreme social and political atomisation.[21] The regime itself, of course, tried to frame the struggle and the position of workers within an even more intensely nationalistic set of ideas. Natalya Sedova, Trotsky’s widow, watching from outside was shocked by their scale. ‘The last four years have shown us that the reactionary landslide has assumed monstrous proportions within the USSR’. She felt that ‘there is not the slightest echo of socialist ideology; dominant in it are petty bourgeois, middle class tendencies; the cult of the family and its welfare. The Red Army has become transformed into a nationalistic-patriotic organization defending the fatherland …’.[22]

Everywhere in World War II, the line between free and coerced labour became more blurred. In these years, Nazi Germany began to catch up with the USSR but judged on the record of how it treated ‘its’ workers (rather than those in the occupied territories) fascism still ran second behind Stalinism. But Goldman and Filtzer do not draw this connection. Instead, they write of ‘the failure of repression’ saying that ‘wartime labour legislation proved more repressive on paper than in practice’ (p. 262) It certainly failed to stop desperate people doing desperate things and not least peasants fleeing back to the countryside whenever they could. But talk of the ‘failure of repression’ seems a strange way to evaluate the coercive power deployed by the wartime Soviet state.

No other country deported its own citizens on the scale that the USSR did, starting with its ethnic German population. No other country kept as many of its own citizens imprisoned. The composition between the different elements of the Gulag system changed, but its overall size only diminished by around a quarter in the war years. The population of the different parts of the Gulag was continually churning too, as new people came in and old ones left because of mobilisation, release and more than 600,000 deaths. No other country had anything like the same draconian labour legislation for its own people, nor did they militarise the labour of their ‘own’ population to the same degree.[23] None created such a large ‘labour army’ (largely from the deported peoples and the peoples of Central Asia). Focusing more narrowly on the workplace, the statistics Goldman and Filtzer quote show that, in the years 1940-45 9.8 million workers were convicted of absenteeism and illegal quitting under the labour legislation of 1940-43. (And which, despite end of war amnesties, remained in force until 1948.) This was an astonishing one third of the urban labour force. Perhaps 3 million of these were convicted in 1940-June 1941 before the Nazi invasion, so the authorities had given workers a clear sense of their intensions. The penalties we essentially loss of pay for most of these convicted but around 4% of those convicted in the war years – 385,000 labour deserters – according to their estimate were sent to the Gulag. Was this really a small number? During the war years, too, discipline was reinforced by some 40,000 plus death penalties at the hands of the ‘courts’ of the secret police and a further large number of civilians subject to military discipline. (Nazi Germany came closer to the USSR, with 16,000 death sentences passed by its courts on its ‘own’ population, but that is still less relatively than the Soviet state imposed.)[24]

In their edited collection, but not in their book, Goldman and Filtzer quote Stalin’s notorious June 1945 victory toast:

I would like to drink to the health of those on the lower echelons whose conditions are little envied, to those who are considered as the “screws” of the immense machine of the government but without them, all of us marshals or commanding officers of the fronts or armies wouldn’t be worth, if I may so express it, a jot. Because it requires only for one screw to disappear and all is finished, I drink to the health of the simple folk, ordinary and modest, the “screws” which ensure the functioning of our enormous state machine in all its aspects: science, economy, war. They are numerous and their name is legion because they comprise dozens of millions.[25]

The toast was badly received because it seemed to make the mass of the population cogs in the machine but that is what they were. Taking all this together then attempts to tease out something positive or ‘socialist’ about the regime seems to us stranger and stranger. As one contemporary struggling to make sense of the USSR in the war put it in July 1943, it is possible that ‘the Stalinist army will win its battles; the proletariat will not’.[26]

***

The USSR played the key role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Goldman and Filtzer give us many reasons not to romanticise this. But their unwillingness to address big issues more openly seems part of a wider retreat in the analysis of the history of the USSR. We now know immensely more in empirical terms. Yet we have drifted away from making theoretical sense of what we think we know. It may be true that much of the past debate on the left about the USSR was marginal during the Cold War. The narrative then was dominated by binary simplicities. But, for all its faults, the left debate of earlier times was a rich one.[27] As a result of the work of Sean Matgamna, we now have easier access to the debate on the nature of the USSR and its actions that transfixed part of the tiny anti-Stalinist left outside of the USSR just before, during and after the war. Contemporaries struggled to make sense of the wartime actions of the Soviet state, as well as the experience of the Soviet people with a level of sophistication that the subsequently bowdlerised accounts of the different factions in the west hardly did justice to.[28]

The collapse of the Soviet bloc which had been formed in 1945-48 out of the defeat of Nazi Germany may seem to have made these debates obscure. But has it? The past, the present and the future are always linked. The ‘Russia Question’ has not gone away but changed its form. Three decades on, we can see that the collapse of the USSR changed the internal relations of that country and other successor states less than it was often imagined it would. We can see it has re-opened regional tensions. And we can see too, as in World War II, that these are being refracted, albeit with new additions to the pot, globally. Of course, our garbled image of World War II still lives on these conflicts. In trying to make sense of this, we need as many facts as possible, we need good facts, we need authoritative facts. But we also need structures or, as E.H. Carr once said, to make the facts stand up we need sacks to put them in.

References

 

Barber, John and Harrison, Mark 1991, The Soviet Home Front, 1941-1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II, London: Longman.

Goldman, Wendy 2002, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 Goldman, W. & Filtzer, Donald (eds.) 2015, Hunger and War. Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union During World War II, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.

Goldman Wendy & Filtzer, Donald 2021, Fortress Dark and Stern. The Soviet Home Front during World War II, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Evans, Richard 2007 ‘Coercion and consent in Nazi Germany’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 151: 53-81.

Filtzer, Donald 1986, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928-1941, London: Pluto Press.

Filtzer, Donald 1992, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization: The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953-1964, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Filtzer, Donald 1993, The Khrushchev Era: De-Stalinization and the Limits of Reform in the USSR, 1953-1964, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Filtzer, Donald 2002, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Filtzer, Donald 2010, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943-1953, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goskomstat 1990, Narodnoe khozyaistvo SSSR v velikoi otechestvennoi voine 1941-1945 gg, Moscow: Goskomstat.

Gutiontov, Pavel 2019, ‘Dozhit’ do passtrela’, Novaya gazeta, May 8.

Harrison, Mark,1996, Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940-1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi 2011, ‘Soviet Policy toward Japan during World War II’, Cahiers du monde russe, 52: 245-271.

Khlevniuk, Oleg V. 2022, ‘The Soviet Home Front during the Great Patriotic War: Modern Historiography about the Nature and Evolution of the Mobilization System’, Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 92. Supplement 8: S751-S759.

Lorimer, Frank 1946, The Population of the Soviet Union. History and Prospects, Geneva: League of Nations.

Manley, Rebecca, 2015 ‘Nutritional Dystrophy: The Science and Semantics of Starvation in World War II in 1942’, in Wendy Z. Goldman & Donald Filtzer (eds.), Hunger and War. Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II, Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 205-264.

Matgamna Sean (ed.) 1998, The Fate of the Russian Revolution. Lost Texts of Critical Marxism, London: Phoenix Press.

Matgamna Seam (ed) 2015, The Fate of the Russian Revolution, Volume 2. The Two Trotskyisms confront Stalinism, London: Phoenix Press.

Peri, Alexis 2015, ‘Queues, Canteens, and the Politics of Location in Diaries of the Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1942’, in Wendy Z. Goldman & Donald Filtzer (eds.), Hunger and War. Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II, Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 158-205.

Polian, Pavel 2003, Against Their Will. The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR, Budapest: Central European University Press.

Rosstat 2015, The Great Patriotic War, Anniversary Statistical Collection, Moscow: Rosstat.

Rosstat 2020, Velikaya otechestvennaya voina, 75 pobeda 1945-2020, Moscow: Rosstat.

Stammers, Neil 1983, Civil Liberties in Britain during the 2nd World War, London: Croom Helm.

Sul’kevich, Semyon, 1940, Territoriya i naselenie SSSR, Moscow.

Thomas, Martin 2018, ‘Four Missing Years. A Review of Trotsky and the Problem of the Soviet Bureaucracy’, Historical Materialism, 26 (4), 165-179. 

Thurston Robert W. and Bonwetsch, Bernd (eds.) 2000, The People’s War. Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Tkachenko, Sergei 2018, Kampanii i operatsii Vooruzhennuikh sil SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine 1941- 1945 gg., Feodosia: RIO NITS.

Von Hagen, Mark 2000, ‘Soviet Soldiers and Officers on the Eve of the German Invasion: Toward a Description of Social Psychology and Political Attitudes’, in R. Thurston & B.B onwetsch (eds.), The People’s War. Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union, Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press: 187-210.

Van der Linden, Marcel 2009, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates since 1917, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Vert, N. et al. 2004, Istoriya stalinskogo gulaga Konets 1920-kh-pervaya polovina 1950-kh godov. Tom 1 Massovyye repressii v SSSR, Moscow: ROSSPEN.

Voznesensky, N.A. 1949, Soviet Economy during the Second World War, New York: International Publishers.

Wachsmann, Nikolaus, 2004, Hitler’s Prisons. Legal Terror in Nazi Germany, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Wolff, David, 2011, ‘Stalin’s Post-War Border-Making Tactics’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, 52: 273-291.

[1] See Klevniuk 2022 for a survey of many of the materials in Russian. Thurston and Bonwetsch 2000 is an earlier collection in English.

[2] An internal archival population estimate was made of 198.7 million for 1 Jan 1941. ‘Spravka s chislennost’yo naseleniya SSSR na 1 yanvarya 1941’, 22 April 1941. This is available at https://istmat.org/node/50979 . See also Lorrimer 1946 pp. 183-187 and Sul’kevich 1940. A slightly later document suggests natural increase of just over a million in the first half of 1941. https://istmat.org/node/44093.

[3] Total territory includes Siberia. The occupied % of the USSR west of Urals would be much higher. Rosstat 2015: p. 31.

[4] The cease fire was due to start at 23.01 Central European time on 8 May but it was already 9 May to the East, hence the difference in whether VE day is May 8th or 9^th.

[5] Rosstat 2020, p. 247.

[6] Harrison 1996, tables 5.4 and 5.5.

[7] It is said that, in 1941-42, 25 million moved East, of which 17 million did so between July and December 1941. Polian 2003, pp. 47, 56. Goldman and Filtzer 2021, p. 59

[8] If we average the data on the urban food supply by calorific value for the years 1942-1944 then state organisations provided 78% of all food (centralised distribution 73.1%; subsidiary farms 4.0%; and decentralized procurement 0.8%). Individuals’ gardens and collective farm trade supplied 9.9 and 12.1% respectively. Bread was central to state supply. If we except bread and flour, then the % of other food (by calorific value) supplied in these years from individual gardens rose to 24% and collective farms to 22.3%. My calculations from Goldman and Filtzer 2015, p. 55.

[9] See Goldman 1992 ; Filtzer 1986, 1992, 1993, 2002, 2010.

[10] At the end of June 1940, Soviet forces occupied Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina which were then part of Romania. Von Hagen 2000, p.199 quotes a Soviet soldier at the time being arrested for anti-Soviet agitation for saying: ‘The policy of the Soviet state is peaceful only in words; in fact it is aggressive and annexationist. It forced war on Poland, Finland and now Romania,’ and adding of the ordinary soldiers ‘we are cannon fodder’.

[11] See Wolff 2011 on the revision of the USSR’s borders at the end of the war.

[12] For most of the 1930s, it looked as if Japan was a bigger threat to the USSR than Germany. Moscow wanted to defend the existing Soviet borders in the Far East; maintain its influence in Manchuria and China; regain territories lost including those for 1904-5 and project a new authority on its borderlands. This clashed with the vision of a more powerful Japan and the desire of its leaders to control China and Manchuria and to create a greater Japan. The battles in the Far East showed that the Red Army was stronger than some had thought. This chastened the Japanese leadership at the same time as the threat from Germany was rapidly growing.

[13] The figures on the Soviet side are uncertain and some say much higher. In addition to those directly killed, others died as a result of forced deportation.

[14] Tkachenko 2018, pp. 97-98

[15] Hasegawa 2011, pp. 245-271 is a valuable introduction to Soviet wartime policy with Japan and the road to war.

[16] For an introduction to Stalin’s policy in Iran in 1945-1946 see Wolff 2011. There is a growing literature on the role of the US and UK in Iran during the war but still a limited treatment of the role of the USSR.

[17] Von Hagen 2000, p. 199. When the war was over, the problem remained. In 1948, Voznesensky said that ‘the second world war between the bloc of bourgeois democratic states and the bloc of fascist states coincided historically with the Patriotic War of the Soviet Union against Hitler Germany (sic), which perfidiously attacked our country’ (my emphasis). Voznesensky, 1949, p. 8. These different forces came together temporarily in ‘one coalition, one camp’.

[18] Goskomstat 1990, p. 176, 179

[19] In the 1930s, the Nazi regime had yet to sink to its later depths. The figures are hazy but, between 1933 and 1939, less than a thousand were executed. In the USSR, the figure for judicial executions was some 45,000 for 1929-1939, excluding 1936/7 and some 730,000 if those two extraordinary years are added in. Prisons and camp conditions also killed, but the numbers of deaths again bear no comparison. In the USSR, in the 1930s, some 370,000 plus died in its prisons and camps. Put simply, Stalin’s Russia was then, by a huge distance, the most murderous regime in the world towards its own citizens, even when its large population is taken into account.

[20] This was as a result of the huge geographical mobility of the time; the loss of men to the Red army; their replacement with new groups (‘It is hardly an exaggeration to picture the actual Soviet workplace collective in wartime as schoolchildren, grandparents, mothers, aunts’ wrote Barber and Harrison in their earlier account. Barber and Harrison 1991, pp. 148-9); a degree of national recomposition, the mobilisation of new workers from central Asia and so on.

[21] Alexis Peri’s 2015 analysis of diaries from Leningrad during the blockade offers an illuminating exploration of an extreme case. She suggests that starvation focused attention more on ‘internal adversaries’. Whether in the street, in queues, at work or from their apartments people thought of themselves ‘deserving’ and looked with suspicion, envy, distaste, and hostility at ‘others’ – cynical but passive in the face of talk of proletarian values and ‘model party workers’ who talked of them to get more. There is much of interest too in Rebecca Manley’s companion chapter on ‘nutritional dystrophy’. Manley 2015

[22] See Matgamna (ed.) 2015 p. 79, 335.

[23] For an account of what happened to civil liberties in the UK during the war see Stammers,1983. It is difficult to imagine a serious book being written about civil liberties in Stalin’s Russia.

[24] The comparison can also be made with the military front save that in the USSR a significant part of the home front also became subject to military discipline. During the Second World War, soldiers were shot by their own side in two circumstances. One was at the front without any judicial proceedings. The other was via judicial proceedings. Obviously, only the second are more or less properly recorded. We know that the German army formally applied 7,810 death sentences to its own troops. On the allied side the number of soldiers to get formal death sentences after a judicial process was 146 in American Army, 102 in France army and 40 in UK. Now let us look at the Red Army. First the high command – more than 90 generals and admirals were arrested. 48 were shot and 6 died in prison. This is 12% of all Soviet generals and admirals lost in the war. Some 2.5 million members of the Soviet ‘military’ faced tribunals. This resulted in 284,344 death sentences of which 157,573 were carried out amongst rank-and-file soldiers, the lower officer corps and many ‘civilians’ subject to military discipline and tribunals. Others died in prison camps. Executions at the front for deserting or retreating ‘desertion’ began immediately in 1941. They continued throughout the war. On 28 July 1942, Stalin issued his infamous blocking order ‘Not one step back’ as a result of which anyone who retreated without an order would be shot by ‘blocking battalions’. Additionally, it was threatened that punishment battalions would be put in the most dangerous sections of the front. The numbers who died in these front executions are unknown but seem likely to run into tens of thousands. Thus, to save the USSR from the Nazis Stalin’s forces and military tribunals executed possibly in excess of 250,000 of own side. Informal executions by the German army of its own may have been 50,000. Gutionov 2019. See also Vert et al 2004, pp. 608-10.

[25] Goldman and Filtzer 2015, pp. 36-37.

[26] Max Shachtman in Matgamna (ed.) 1998, p. 327.

[27] Van der Linden 2009. My own view is that the USSR is best thought of in terms of a theory of state capitalism, but what is important here are the issues addressed in the left debate about the nature of the USSR.

[28] See Matgamna (ed.) 1998, 2015; Thomas, 2018.