Stalin: A Biography

The Germans had failed to win the battle of Kursk. The Red Army had not won in a conventional sense because the Wehrmacht conducted a planned and orderly retreat. Thus there was no definitive end to the battle. But Hitler had sustained strategic defeat simply by not having been able to win. After Kursk the Wehrmacht was pushed steadily westwards. Red Army morale rose as German spirits dipped. The USSR conscripted its vast reservoir of peasant soldiers while the Germans and their allies were running out of fighting men. Soviet factories reached a peak of production and were accelerating at a faster rate than Germany’s industrial capacity. Stalin and his Stavka believed that the reverses suffered by German arms at Kursk signalled the beginning of the end for Hitler’s New Order in Europe.

Soviet commanders were right that Stalin had contributed less than themselves to the victory at Kursk. Yet they saw only the military side of his activity: they had little cognisance of his other interventions in the USSR’s war effort. Stavka had nothing to do with foreign policy, political organisation, cultural and social policy or economic mobilisation. Stalin interfered in all these sectors and his impact was deep. In 1941–2 this had already led to several adjustments which he thought necessary to the interests of the USSR. The massive territorial losses in the war’s early months precipitated a collapse in food supplies as Ukrainian wheat, potatoes and sugar beet fell into the hands of the Germans. Although no directive was issued, the authorities slackened off their efforts against the black market in agricultural produce. The exceptions were cities under siege such as Leningrad where the NKVD punished anyone caught trading on the street. But market economics more widely crept back into the Soviet order as party and municipal government accepted that peasants bringing sacks of vegetables for sale helped to alleviate urban malnutrition;⁸ and Stalin, who had fulminated against the flouting of trading laws in the 1930s, kept silent about this during the war.

He also understood the need to widen the limits of cultural expression. Many intellectuals who had been suspect to the authorities were told that the state welcomed their creative services. Notable among them were the poet Anna Akhmatova and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Akhmatova had been married to the poet Nikolai Gumilëv, who had been killed as an anti-Soviet militant in 1921; her son Lev still languished in prison and her writings had not been published for years. But well-read members of society remembered her with affection. It was in Stalin’s interest to allow her work to be read over the radio and at concerts. This permission was not indiscriminate. Preference was given to those of her poems which emphasised the achievements of the Russian people. Shostakovich had learned the lesson of his troubles before the war and given up accompanying his music with words. He wrote the score of his Seventh (Leningrad) Symphony while working as a night fire warden. The piece was recognised for its greatness by the first-night audience in 1942.

Cheap editions of the Russian classics were distributed at the front. Stalin as writer also belonged to the Soviet literary pantheon and the commissars gave his pamphlets to the troops; but he was not in fact a favourite author for men on active service. The regime recognised this and moderated its insistence on placing his oeuvre at the centre of its propaganda.

Stalin also dropped the Internationale as the USSR state hymn (or national anthem) and held a competition for a new one. The winner was Alexander Alexandrov with a melody which stirred the soul. Words were added by Sergei Mikhalkov and Garold El-Registan and they were among the most effective items in the armoury of official propaganda. The first verse went:⁹

The indestructible union of free republics
Was bound together by Great Rus.
Long live the united, the powerful Soviet Union
Created by the will of the people!

The second verse moored patriotism in allegiance to the October Revolution:

Through the storm the sun of freedom shone on us
And the great Lenin lit up the way for us:
Stalin brought us up — he inspired us towards loyalty to the people,
Towards labour and towards heroic feats!

The hymn had a genuine emotional resonance for the wartime generation; it was hardly a cultural ‘concession’ since it contained a paean to Stalin; but it indicated that the authorities understood that cosmopolitanism, as embodied in the Internationale, did little to make Russians fight for the Motherland.