Russia at war 1941-1945

One cannot help suspecting that the re-introduction of commissars was something of a panic measure due to the fear of a latent, if not open, conflict between the Army and the Party, and the doubt whether some of the officers (many of whom had highly unpleasant memories of the purges) would prove reliable. It is difficult to be sure how much hostility to the Party there was among the officers. In the higher ranks, many veterans of the Revolution such as Budienny and Voroshilov were probably more "Party" than "Army", and others, like Konev, were half-and-half. But several of the brilliant younger generals, such as Zhukov, Tolbukhin, Rokossovsky and Govorov, were probably more "Army"

than "Party". The last two, for instance, had themselves been purged in 1937 and, though now fully rehabilitated, must still have had a good many reservations about the Party, however strong their patriotism.

In fact the military commissars were to prove a cause of friction and were to be abolished again in the autumn of 1942.

Similarly, it was decided at the end of June to mobilise members of the Party and

Komsomol as "politboitsy", i.e. "political soldiers" to be incorporated in the Army. Each obkom or kraikom (i.e. provincial party committee) was to mobilise within three days between 500 and 5,000 Communists, and place them at the disposal of the Commissariat of Defence. In this way 95,000 politboitsy were mobilised, and of these 58,000 were sent into the Army in the field within the first three months of the war.

Another measure was the approval of the constitution of the opolcheniye, i.e. mainly workers' battalions, in cities like Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa, Makeyevka,

Gorlovka and other industrial centres. These "home guard" units were to be used extensively— and often very wastefully—to fill in gaps at the front, notably in the

defence of Moscow, Leningrad and Odessa. The story of these poorly-trained and poorly-armed units is one of the most tragic in the whole war. Judging from the available figures, the eagerness to join the opolcheniye varied from place to place. It was highest in Leningrad, rather lower in Moscow, and much lower in Kiev.

Apart from the opolcheniye, a variety of other emergency formations were constituted in both towns and villages, such as anti-paratroop units, and orders were given for air-raid precautions:

All Soviet citizens between the ages of 16 and 60 (men) and 18 and 50 (women) must

compulsorily take part in civil-defence groups to be constituted by enterprises, offices and house committees. The training in anti-aircraft and anti-gas defence is to be carried out by the Osoaviakhim.

[The Osoaviakhim was the "Society for aiding defence and the aircraft and chemical industries"; it was a "voluntary society", set up long before the war, for giving some military experience to the population. Later, during the war, it was renamed DOSAAF

(Voluntary society for aiding the army, air force and navy).]

Another important set of instructions issued at the end of June concerned the organisation of partisan warfare in the enemy rear; but while the principle of the thing was important, large-scale partisan war behind the German lines did not develop until considerably later.

While the State Defence Committee were making these plans and also laying the

foundations for a thorough economic reorganisation of the country, the military situation continued to be disastrous. At the beginning of July there were large gaps in the front.

The "first echelon" of the Red Army had suffered such appalling losses in the first weeks of the invasion that it scarcely still counted as an effective force. The hopes of holding a new defence line (referred to by the Western press as the "Stalin Line") running from Narva on the Gulf of Finland, through Pskov, Polotsk, and then along the Dnieper to

Kherson on the Black Sea, had been smashed. And though there were still reserves of

men, the Red Army was suffering severe shortages of weapons of all kinds.

In these circumstances the Soviet command had to decide on priorities, and it decided that the first priority was to make every effort to hold up the enemy in the "Smolensk-Moscow direction".

Seen in perspective, the battle of Smolensk was to mark the beginning of a new phase in the campaign and, indeed, to introduce a decidedly different pattern into the struggle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In the Smolensk area, for the first time, Soviet resistance succeeded in bringing the German blitzkrieg advance to a halt, if only for a couple of months. Thus, at the very centre of gravity of the invaders' attack, on the direct road to Moscow, the freedom of manoeuvre of the German High Command was seriously

restricted and its all-important time schedule upset.