Russia at war 1941-1945

Russian cities of Pskov, Novgorod and Tver (Kalinin) occupied by the Germans, with

Leningrad virtually surrounded, and the Germans still battering against hastily

improvised new Russian lines thirty or forty miles outside Moscow...

As a very orthodox Communist jokingly remarked to me some months later: "At that time it was absolutely essential to proclaim a 'nationalist NEP'."

[The New Economic Policy (NEP) introduced in 1921 had temporarily allowed some

capitalist trading.]

The importance of the two Stalin speeches is not underrated even in the "Khrushchevite"

History:

Stalin's two speeches had an enormous effect on the population in the occupied

areas... Soviet airmen dropped behind the enemy lines newspapers with accounts of the November 6 meeting and of the Red Square Parade. These papers passed from

hand to hand and were then kept as treasures. With tears of joy people learned that the Nazi stories about the fall of Moscow were nothing but stupid lies, and that

Moscow was standing firmly like a rock. In hearing the voice of their beloved Party

[euphemism for Stalin] they believed more firmly than ever in the might of the

Soviet State, in the invincible will of the Soviet people to win, in the inevitable doom of the Nazi invaders...

October and November 1941 were the grimmest months in the whole of the Soviet-

German war, only to be equalled by October 1942, when the fate of Stalingrad hung in the balance.

By the end of September 1941, the greater part of the Ukraine had been lost, and the Germans were crashing ahead towards Kharkov, the Donbas and the Crimea. After the

débâcle in the Battle of Kiev, in which the Russians—even according to their own admission— had lost in prisoners alone something in the neighbourhood of 175,000 men, the Germans, in the south, had a great superiority not only in men but in planes, tanks and guns.

[ Men, two to one; guns, three to one; planes, two to one. (IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 218.)]

Neither the Stavka's order to organise a "stubborn defence" on the Perekop Isthmus in the Crimea, nor its order to build solid defences west of Kharkov or the Donbas could be carried out in time. The mobilization of many thousands of Donbas miners into the local opolcheniye and the efforts made by 150,000 miners to build new defence lines were of no avail. By September 29, the Germans broke into the Donbas which was then

producing sixty per cent of the Soviet Union's coal, seventy-five per cent of its coking coal, thirty per cent of its pig-iron and twenty per cent of its steel. By October 17, Rundstedt's armies had overran the whole Donbas and, after forcing the Mius river,

entered Taganrog on the Sea of Azov; meantime, further north, Paulus's 6th Army was

advancing on Kharkov, which was captured on October 24; the Russians had, during the previous days, been evacuating what industrial equipment they could. It was also then, with the Germans already at Taganrog, that Rostselmash, the vast agricultural-machinery plant at Rostov began to be evacuated to the east; this work continued almost till the last minute, often under German bombing.

On November 19, the Germans captured Rostov, after two days' bitter street fighting. But the High Command considered Rostov so important that even at the height of the Battle of Moscow, Timo-shenko was given some reinforcements and ten days later, Rostov—

"the gate to the Caucasus"—was recaptured by the Russians. It was the first major Russian victory, though the Germans were pushed only some thirty to forty miles to the west, where they entrenched themselves along the Mius river. This victory was,

according to the Russians (with some confirmation from the Germans) not only militarily but also politically important as it affected Turkey's policy towards Russia.

[The Russian attacks on Rostov in the south and Tikhvin in the north also helped to

reduce the pressure on Moscow. Rostov was abandoned without Hitler's orders: hence the temporary disgrace of Rundstedt.]

In the meantime Manstein's 11th Army, supported by a Rumanian Army Corps, had

broken into the Crimea, where the Russian forces retreated in disorder to Sebastopol. By mid-November the whole of the Crimea was in German (or Rumanian) hands, with the