Russia

Operations will be inestimably more intensive and severe than in the First World War. Then, frontier battles in France lasted for two or three days. Now, such an offensive operation can last for weeks. As for the Blitzkrieg which is so propagandized by the Germans, this is directed towards an enemy who doesn’t want… to fight it out. If the Germans meet an opponent who stands up and fights and takes the offensive himself… [the] struggle would be bitter and protracted … In the final resort it would depend on who had the greater moral fibre and who at the close of operations disposed of operational reserves in depth. ³⁹

Already Tukhachevskii’s prognostications were being borne out, and the outlook seemed increasingly bleak. Yet, despite the losses and the panic, there were some more hopeful indications of the moral fibre which Tukhachevskii had thought might be decisive. Some desperate counterattacks were somehow organized; some units had continued to fight doggedly on although surrounded; others operated as partisans in the invader’s rear. All this slowed the tempo of the invader’s progress. At the same time a vital operation finally got under way — to evacuate such war industry as had not already fallen into enemy hands out of the line of the enemy’s advance into the safety of Central Asia and Siberia. The scale of the effort is reflected in statistics:

In the first three months of the war … [the railways] moved two and a half million troops up to the front lines, and shifted 1,360 heavy plants … 455 to the Urals, 210 to Western Siberia, 200 to the Volga and more than 250 to Kazakhstan and central Asia … The evacuation had used 1,500,000 trucks, and by mid-November 914,380 waggons had shifted 38,514 loads for the aviation industry, 20,046 for ammunition plants, 18,823 for weapons factories, 27,426 for steel plants, 15,440 for the tank industry …

In Saratov, machinery began operating and the walls of a new factory went up around it; fourteen days after the last train-load of machines were unloaded, the first MiG fighter rolled out. On 8 December, the Kharkov Tank Works turned out its first twenty-five T-34 tanks, just short of ten weeks after the last engineers left Kharkov, trudging along the rail tracks. ⁴⁰

Over the winter of 1941—2 the industrial plants in the Urals were to produce about 4,500 tanks, 3,000 aircraft and 14,000 pieces of artillery. Supplies were also shipped from Britain and, under Lend-Lease arrangements, from the United States - especially lorries, jeeps, machinery, munitions and corned meat. But these had to take perilous routes to Murmansk or the Far East through seas infested with enemy submarines.

Once again a Russian migration was in progress. Troops and factories were not the only items on the move. The transportation of entire peoples was soon under way. Its Canadian and American allies may have interned citizens who were ethnic Japanese, the British detained German and Italian citizens, but the Soviet Union deported Chechens, Kalmyks, Balkars, Karachais, Crimean Tatars and even the Volga Germans, who had been domiciled there since the eighteenth century, to put them beyond reach of the invaders. These measures may have reflected Stalin’s suspicious nature or perhaps his caution, for there is little evidence that the regime was popular among these peoples.

Moscow’s defences held despite the battering, and a carefully timed counter-offensive was launched on 5 December. Within two weeks it succeeded in breaking the German front and relieving the pressure on the capital. Attention turned north to Leningrad, which, though surrounded and subjected to unremitting pounding, still held out. A fresh German offensive against it, launched in January, achieved only limited success and soon ran out of steam. Meanwhile, under cover of the dark days, something very like a revolution was taking place in the senior command. Generals like Pavlov, who had been found wanting, were replaced, Mekhlis was demoted, Voroshilov (who was said never to have opened a book on his trade) was sidelined. The new men — Vasilevskii, Sokolovskii, Vatutin, Malinovskii, Koniev, Rokossovskii, Chuikov — were more competent, and had proved themselves in the crucible of battle. Yet Stalin, like Hitler, still kept command in his own hands, and his most brilliant general, Zhukov, though involved in the high command, was still excluded from the top post that would have given him the direction of operations.

Meanwhile, in December 1941 the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war on the Allied side, and in February 1942 they had struck south against Singapore. This finally diminished fears of a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union, allowing more troops to be transferred from the Pacific to the European front. Even so it was to be a close call.