BUILT IN FIFTH COLUMN:

Counting Stalin's victims 50 years on: March 5 2003 marked the 50th anniversary of the death of one of the greatest mass-murderers of all time - the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. (John Ballantyne, 6/28/03, News Weekly)

Terrible though the sufferings of the 1930s were, they have tended to be eclipsed in popular perception by the ordeal the Soviet Union suffered after the German invasion in 1941. As the Western democracies owed their very survival to the enormous sacrifices sustained by the Soviet population in resisting the German onslaught, any criticism of Stalin since the war has tended to be muted.

But if the Soviet people eventually defeated Hitler, it was small thanks to Stalin who failed to prepare his country's defences adequately. During 1939-41, of course, Stalin was Hitler's ally and helped sustain the Nazi war machine by shipping vast quantities of Soviet grain, oil and other strategic materials to the Third Reich.

In addition, Stalin encouraged the Communist parties in the West to sabotage the Allied war effort. In the East, Stalin collaborated with Hitler in dismembering Poland, then invaded the Baltic States and attacked Finland.

When Hitler turned on his erstwhile Soviet ally, launching Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, the USSR was woefully unprepared. The Soviet military leadership had been severely incapacitated by the Purges. In 1937, Stalin had sentenced to death thousands of experienced military officers, including the Supreme Commander of the Red Army, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky.

During its life and death struggle with Hitlerism, the Soviet Union might have benefited from the help of the Polish army, but during the spring of 1940 Stalin had treacherously ordered the murder of 15,000 Polish army officers at Katyn Forest near Smolensk and other killing sites (a crime which he later blamed on the Germans).

As for Soviet civilians, Stalin's rural terror of the 1930s had sown the seeds of fierce hatred among Soviet peasants towards Communist rule. When the Germans invaded, many peasants prematurely hailed them as liberators, thus leading to a rapid collapse of Soviet resistance.

Hitler, of course, had no intention of winning the hearts and minds of eastern Slavs. Nazi racial doctrine held them to be untermensch (subhuman). The Nazis treated their despised subject populations as fit only for enslavement or extermination. The Soviet people, whatever their misgivings about their own country's régime, turned against their new oppressors and began waging partisan warfare.

Stalin's secret war

Estimates of Soviet casualties during the so-called Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 have varied according to political fashion. In 1947, the Soviets liked to boast that their victory had been won with "the least possible losses", and usually gave a figure of only seven million war dead. But, during the late 1950s, the Soviet leadership saw that a higher figure might be advantageous for propaganda purposes. The now familiar figure of "20 million Russian war dead" did not actually emerge until the 1960s, during Khrushchev's time.

In fact, the true number of Soviet people killed during the war years may well have been in excess of 20 million, but they were certainly not all Russian, and not all were killed as a result of the Nazi invasion.

Throughout the war the terrible death toll among the Gulag slave labour camp population continued unabated. Roy Medvedev, a famous independent Russian historian and Marxist-Leninist, has compared Gulag inmate numbers and deaths with actual troop casualties during the first phase of the war:

"The average number of prisoners in the Soviet Union in 1941-1942 was approximately equal to the number of soldiers on active duty in the army. At that time the loss of people [in labour camps and at the front] was also approximately equal."

Nick Eberstadt of the Harvard Centre for Population Studies has observed: "The USSR fought a two-front campaign in World War II. The first was against the invaders; the second was against its own citizenry."

Stalin waged this second war because he feared the animosity of his own people - so much so, in fact, that he was prepared to divert desperately-needed troops from the war front to deal with suspected enemies on the home front.

Stalin was particularly apprehensive that many non-Russian nationalities of the USSR might harbour pro-German sympathies, so he interrupted his war effort to unleash a campaign of ethnic cleansing against suspected populations.

Between 1941 and 1944, while Hitler was busy transporting Jews to the death-camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, Stalin uprooted 1,600,000 people from among the Crimean Tartars, Volga Germans and several Caucasian republics, including Chechnya.

He deported in cattle-trucks the entire populations of these small nations to eastern Siberia and the Sino-Soviet frontier. During the first 18 months, approximately one-third of them perished.

Other citizens who received no mercy were Soviet prisoners who survived internment by the Germans. During the war the Wehrmacht had captured about five million Soviet prisoners, of whom about 80 per cent died in captivity. The million or so survivors subsequently repatriated to the USSR, instead of being welcomed back at the war's end, were declared traitors to the socialist motherland.

On arrival, thousands were shot outright, whilst practically all the remainder were banished to slave labour camps where many more perished. As Professor Norman Davies has said: "It is a nice question whether these men, who had defied Hitler only to be killed by their own side, can properly be counted among the victims of the struggle against Fascism."

For many people in the former USSR, war did not end in 1945. Partisan warfare continued for some years after the war as people of Ukraine and the Baltic States resisted attempts by the Soviet Red Army and secret police to re-impose Communist tyranny on their nations.

Had we come as liberators we'd hav e had plenty of help.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 21, 2005 7:53 PM