Russia at war 1941-1945

Now is not the time when a coward or traitor can rely on mercy. Every officer and political worker can, with the powers given him by the State, see to it that the very idea of retreating without orders becomes impossible... Not a step back: such is the country's order, the order of our leader and general, Comrade Stalin.

The "power" given to the officer and commissar mentioned here was nothing less than the right to shoot or to order the summary execution of traitors or cowards.

On August 1 Red Star added a macabre (and so far unpublicised) detail to the familiar story of the 28 Panfilov men who had died in the battle of Moscow, fighting against

German tanks to the last man:

They dealt with one contemptible coward. Without any preliminary discussion all

the Panfilov men fired at the traitor; that sacred volley symbolized their

determination not to retreat another step, and to fight to the bitter end.

It also recalled Shchors, the Civil War hero, one of whose rules was: "A soldier who has left the battlefield without officer's orders is shot like a traitor."

There is good reason to believe that, on the strength of these new "iron discipline" rules about "traitors" and "cowards", certain commissars in the Red Army went too far during the week that followed. Nothing else would explain the extraordinary editorial of Red Star on August 9, which said that one must, after all, discriminate between incorrigible cowards and men who had momentarily lost their nerve:

The War Commissar (says the Statute of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet) is the representative of the Party and the Government in the Red Army and, together with the officer, he bears full responsibility for the performance of military tasks and...

for the determination to fight to the last drop of blood... If you see that you have before you an obvious enemy or defeatist, a coward or panic-monger... then it is no use wasting any propaganda or persuasion on him. You must deal with a traitor

with an iron hand. But sometimes you come across people who need your temporary

support; after that they will firmly take themselves in hand...

This was, clearly, a warning to trigger-happy commissars ready to kill off all "cowards".

The second part of the same editorial already foreshadowed the coming abolition of the commissars in their present rôle:

It is a great mistake to imagine, as some comrades do, that in battle the political commissar must act in precisely the same way as the officer, on the ground that, in the midst of a battle, there is no time to argue; that the only thing to do is to give orders, and to punish if these orders are not obeyed. Naturally, every soldier bearsthe gravest responsibility for the non-fulfilment of his superior's orders on thebattlefield. But the commissar's task is, first and foremost, to eliminate the possibility

of such things happening. And his chief weapon is political agitation, the Bolshevik

persuasion of men. [Emphasis added.]

Thus this truly historical article in the Red Army's paper not only sounded the alarm over the excessively ruthless and perhaps irresponsible application of the new "iron discipline"