The reforming tsar: 1698-1725
From the moment of his return from the Grand Embassy, in 1698, Peter makes it dramatically plain that he intends to westernize Russia's hide-bound oriental society and that he will be ruthless in achieving his purpose. He has had to hurry back from his European tour because the streltsy have again attempted an uprising against him.
The rebellion has been easily put down and the culprits are under arrest. Over the coming months Peter takes a personal interest in the interrogation, torture and brutal execution of some 800 rebels. This is his insurance policy against further threats to his rule. His programme of reform will take longer. But it too begins with a dramatic gesture.
The tsar celebrates his first evening back in Moscow with friends in the foreign settlement near Preobrazhenskoe, the village where he has grown up. He then spends the night in a favourite wooden hut from his childhood days, after ordering the leading boyars to attend him there in the morning.
They assemble in their long robes and beards, markedly different in appearance from Peter's own European clothes and shaven face. The beard in particular has been consciously preserved over the years as a symbol of the standards of old Russia. But on this morning the young tsar emerges from his hut with a pair of shears. He cuts a slice from the profuse whiskers of every boyar.
Peter accompanies this assault with a practical measure containing a touch of wit. Anyone who so wishes may remain unshaven. But there is to be a new tax - on beards.
This symbolic gesture is followed by an extensive programme of practical reform. Never, perhaps, has a ruler so rapidly transformed an antiquated society. Using the absolute power which he has established, Peter introduces new government structures at local and central levels. He replaces a chaotically unreliable army (a militia of noblemen and the professional streltsy) with a large standing force of peasants conscripted for life and properly trained. He creates a naval service and a fleet of warships.
The tsar launches industrial enterprises (as many as 200, for the most part using the labour of state-owned serfs) to develop mines and to build weapons and equipment for his army and navy. Encouragement is given to an entrepreneurial class to set up private commercial ventures.
Education is promoted. Secular schools are founded, for which western texts are translated into Russian. Russians needing specalist skills are sent abroad to learn them in foreign academies. At home professors of mathematics are employed to visit the houses of the gentry, whose sons are not allowed to marry until they attain a certain educational standard. The first Russian newspaper (Vedomosti, 'Records') is published from 1703.
Peter's measures touch all aspects of life. The currency is reformed, as is the Russian script (eight letters are lopped from an unwieldy Cyrillicalphabet). The Russian new year, previously September 1 (supposedly the date of the creation of the world) now becomes January 1. The Christian chronology of Anno Domini is adopted - though Peter's new calendar is less modern than it might be, for he chooses the Julian system rather than the Gregorianreform.
The problem of corruption is tackled by encouraging a pernicious system of informers. But nothing is too small for the tsar's attention. Building and fire regulations are introduced, and one ukase (imperial decree) even orders that crops are to be cut with scythes rather than sickles.
St Petersburg: 1703-1712
From 1703 Peter the Great has gratifying evidence of his achievements on behalf of Russia. A great project is taking shape at the mouth of the river Neva, on marshy wooded land which comes into Peter's possession in 1703. Within two weeks of gaining the area he starts to build the Peter and Paul fortress on the right bank of the river; the following year a royal shipyard is founded across the water. The first warship is launched from the yard in 1706.
A town grows rapidly on the site. In 1712 it becomes the capital, named St Petersburg after the tsar's patron saint. Its main street, the Nevsky Prospekt, is built by Swedish prisoners captured in the Northern War.
Peter the Great first intervenes in the Northern War early in 1700, seizing the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland. This territory has belonged since 1617 to Sweden, cutting Russia off from the Baltic. The campaign of 1700 ends ignominiously when the young Swedish king, Charles XII, defeats the Russians at Narva and regains the coastline. But Charles then turns south against other enemies. By 1703 Peter is able to recapture the mouth of the Neva from its Swedish garrison.
In 1707 the Swedish king prepares an invasion of Russia, now plainly emerging as his main rival in the Baltic. This time Peter the Great responds with the classic Russian tactic when Moscow itself is threatened.
Sweden and Russia: 1707-1711
In the autumn of 1707 Charles XII moves northeast from Saxony with an army of almost 40,000 men. His intention is to move towards Moscow during the summer of 1708, forcing Peter to withdraw from the Baltic to defend his capital. The plan is frustrated by Peter's strategy of avoiding a pitched battle while devastating the countryside between the advancing Swedish army and Moscow. By the autumn of 1708 Charles XII is forced to turn south into the Ukraine in search of food.
The winter of 1708-9 is unusually cold even for these inhospitable regions. It is a much reduced Swedish army, of some 18,000 men, which finally comes to grips with the Russians in July 1709 at Poltava.
The engagement is the first major disaster in Charles's brilliant military career. With almost the whole Swedish army either captured or killed, Charles himself escapes south into Turkish territory. He immediately enters negotiations with the Turks, who share his hostility to the Russians and are eager to recover Azov.
Charles summons a new army from Sweden, to provide his share of an anti-Russian alliance with Turkey. It never arrives, but the Turks on their own defeat Peter the Great in 1711 at the Prut river. In the ensuing negotiations Peter agrees to return Azov - and considers himself to have escaped lightly in giving no concessions at all to Sweden, as Turkey's supposed ally.
Emperor of all Russia: 1721
The eventual peace between Russia and Sweden, signed at Nystad in 1721, gives Peter everything he has hoped for from the twenty-one years of the Northern War. The coast of the eastern Baltic is now his. St Petersburg, which he has had the courage and effrontery to build on appropriated land, is internationally accepted as the capital of Russia.
The new city is perfectly placed to prosper at the junction of two great trade routes, just as Novgorodwas when founded in this region almost a millennium earlier. At this northern apex, the river routes from the Black Sea and the Caspian link with the sea route through the Baltic to western Europe.
A few weeks after the signing of the peace of Nystad a service of thanksgiving is held in St Petersburg's cathedral. After the ceremony Peter goes in procession to the senate, where he is acclaimed under a new title greater than that of tsar. He is now 'Father of the fatherland, Peter the Great, emperor of all Russia'.
This reign, so triumphant on the political scene, has been accompanied by a dismal record in the emperor's private life. Within his family he behaves with the tyranny and the cruelty revealed also at times in his public career.
The tsarevich Alexis: 1716-1718
Peter's most pathetic victim is his only surviving son, Alexis. Intellectual in his interests, conservative in his attitudes and inclined to a life of ease and pleasure, the young man could not be more different from the hyperactive, intensely physical, practical-minded reformer who is his father. The tension between them causes Alexis to flee from Russia in 1716, taking refuge with the Austrian emperor.
His father, viewing this as an act of treason, tricks the young man into returning to Russia on a promise of clemency. He then imprisons him, and tortures his friends and his mistress to discover evidence of a conspiracy.
Little emerges, other than reports of Alexis saying that when he is tsar he will return the capital to Moscow and reduce the size of the navy. Such intentions may be capital offences in his father's eyes, but they are not enough to justify the scandal resulting from a formal execution of the heir to the throne.
Instead the prince dies discreetly in the St Petersburg fortress, after twice being flogged within inches of his life (with the fearsome Russian whip known as the knout) during the enquiry into his supposed rebellion. He has made the tactical error of having a son, the future Peter II, just three years earlier. With two male descendants of Peter the Great in existence, one is perhaps expendable.
Peter and Catherine: 1701-1725
The only lasting affection shown by Peter proves him as independently minded in his emotional life as in politics. Early in 1703 he becomes the lover of a Lithuanian peasant, captured in the Northern War and now working as the domestic serf of a Russian prince. Later in the same year, when their first child is born, the mother is received into the Russian Orthodox church under a new name, Catherine. She becomes the tsar's inseparable companion, bearing him seven children of whom two daughters survive infancy. Divorced from his first wife, Peter marries Catherine formally in 1712 (they may have married secretly in 1707) and has her crowned empress in 1724.
Less than a year later she succeeds him on the throne, as the empress Catherine I.
Seventy years of empresses: 1725-1796
It is a remarkable fact that the Russian empire established by Peter the Great is ruled for the next seven decades by women.
The only male emperors in that span are a 12-year-old boy (Peter II, grandson of Peter the Great, enthroned in 1727 and dead three years later); a two-month-old infant (Ivan VI, emperor for a year and then hidden away in prison until his death); and a German prince of feeble mind and body (Peter III, ruling for six months in 1762 before being deposed and murdered).
The reigns of four women span these decades. Catherine I, illiterate but well endowed with commonsense and strength of character (necessary qualifications to survive as Peter the Great's intimate companion), has proved her sterling qualities before her reign. But she has only two years on the throne, dying in 1727.
Her successor Anna, a daughter of Peter the Great's half-brother Ivan V, is the only weak character among the four. Ruling from 1730 to 1740, her interest is mainly in the fashionable entertainments of the day. Sumptuous amusements are now provided in St Petersburg, but mainly by foreigners - provoking much local indignation.
Elizabeth, reigning from 1741 to 1762, brings back the vigorous mood of Peter the Great - appropriately, since she is a daughter of Peter and of Catherine I. Russian interests are now energetically pursued again, particularly in opposition to Prussia in the early stages of the Seven Years' War.
Elizabeth leaves her crown to Peter III, the German grandson of her elder sister. Inheriting early in 1762, he proves totally unsuited to the task. But his wife, a German princess, more than makes up for his inadequacies. Within six months she acquires her husband's throne and before the year is out he is murdered, almost certainly with her connivance. She will rule for thirty-four years, justifiably becoming known as Catherine the Great.
Catherine the Great: 1762-1796
Catherine is both brilliant and passionate. Her many lovers provide rich material for scandal and gossip in the courts of Europe, and several of her most talented advisers and generals feature in the list. But the programme which they put into effect is hers, as is the interest in political theory and in the advancement of Russia which shapes her policy.
Contemporary French ideas fascinate her most. Like Frederick the Great, she corresponds with Voltaire and the encyclopedistswhose ideas are fashioning the Enlightenment.
After seizing the throne in 1762, Catherine rapidly adopts the reforming role of an enlightened despot. In relatively simple areas such as education and culture she is successful. In 1764 she takes steps to provide education for Russian girls. In the same year she founds the Hermitage as a court museum attached to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg (the entire collection of Robert Walpole is one of her purchases).
In the difficult field of social reform, she attempts with less success to improve the lot of her people.
Before her accession Catherine has been in favour of emancipating Russia's serfs. In 1767 she writes an Instructionoutlining a programme of reform (so radical that its publication is banned in France), and she summons an elected assembly to consider it. It soon becomes evident that the nobles (whose wealth is commonly assessed by the number of serfs they own) will resist any change. Needing their support, Catherine abandons her plans.
Ironically the lot of the peasants deteriorates during her reign. When she dies, almost every peasant in Russia is a serf - as a result of her granting crown lands (where the peasants are free) to favourites and nobles who are allowed to impose the conditions of serfdom.
Frustrated in her efforts at internal reform, Catherine turns with great success to foreign policy, eventually achieving major gains at the expense of both Turkey and Poland.
Catherine addes a new element to Russia's Turkish policy, previously concerned only with the strategic matter of access to the Black Sea. Building upon the ancient theme of Moscow as the Third Rome, she now presents Russia as the natural political patron of all Orthodox Christians within the territory of the old Byzantine empire. She even dreams of one of her grandsons ruling in Constantinople, and in pious hope has the boy named Constantine. But first there is the practical matter of war against the Turks.
Russo-Turkish wars: 1768-1792
Russia's interest in reaching the Black Sea, attempted but not lastingly achieved by Peter the Great, is furthered in two wars at the end of the 18th century. A conflict of 1768-74 brings Russian successes in several battles and leads to important concessions. Russia gains fortresses to west and east of the Crimean peninsula, together with the right to maintain a fleet in the Black Sea.
Moreover the Turks grant Russia the right of protection over all Christians within the European parts of the Ottoman empire. The meaning of this is rather vaguely specified, but it will give the Russians a useful pretext for future intervention in the Balkans.
The Tatar khan ruling the Crimea is declared in the same treaty of 1774 (that of Kuchuk Kainarji) to be independent of Turkey. Catherine the Great takes this as a pretext for annexing his valuable Crimean peninsula in 1783, a period when Russia is at peace with Turkey.
War breaks out again in 1787. Again Russia prevails. A treaty signed in January 1792 at Jassy leaves the northern coast of the Black Sea in Russian hands from the Dniester river to the Kerch Strait. Having won a role in the Baltic in the early part of the century, Russia now also has access to the Mediterranean through the Black Sea. Meanwhile valuable new acquisitions have again been made in the Baltic region, at the expense of Poland.
Three partitions of Poland: 1772-1796
Over a period of a quarter of a century Poland is dismembered and consumed by her neighbours. The process begins during the confusion of a war between Russia and Turkey. In 1769 Austria takes the opportunity of occupying part of Poland, to the south of Cracow.
Frederick the Great follows suit in 1770, sending troops to seal off the coastal region between the two main parts of his realm (Brandenburg and the kingdom of Prussia). This valuable area, known as Polish royal Prussia, has long been part of the Polish kingdom. Frederick claims that he is acting only in precaution against an outbreak of cattle plague. But acquiring royal Prussia would neatly unify his territory.
The first official annexation of Polish land is cynically agreed in 1772 between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Russia, at war with Turkey, has an interest in keeping Prussia and Austria in benign mood. She accepts the proposal that each of them should annexe part of Poland. Russia's influence in the kingdom means that she can force acceptance of the arrangement on the Poles.
By the treaties of 1772 Austria acquires the region round Lvov. Frederick secures royal Prussia (with the exception at this stage of the port of Gdansk). And Russia takes a slice of northeast Poland.
The next two partitions occur when Russia finds new excuses to intervene in Poland's internal affairs. Russian armies enter the kingdom during a disturbance in 1792, and are on hand again to tackle a national insurrection in 1794.
On both occasions Polish armies offer strong resistance to superior Russian forces. But force prevails. After a two-month siege, and a massacre of Poles in the suburbs, Warsaw falls in September 1794 to a combined Russian and Prussian army.
The second partition, agreed in 1793, benefits only Prussia and Russia. Prussia now receives Gdanskand a swathe of land stretching south almost to Cracow. Russia takes a vast slice of eastern Poland, amounting to some 97,000 square miles.
This is greater than the territory which Poland now retains, in a strip from the Baltic coast down to Cracow and Brody. A few years later, in treaties of 1795 and 1796, this final Polish remnant is divided between the three predators. Prussia is extended east to include Warsaw. The Austrian frontier moves north to the same area. Once again the lion's share, in the east, goes.
Civil War
Lenin's seizure of power leaves his government with a multiplicity of enemies. They include supporters of the old regime, who now become known as White Russians (by contrast with the red of the Bolsheviks); the socialist majority in the disbanded Constituent Assembly, together with all their numerous supporters; nationalists in many of the regions of the Russian empire, for whom the developing chaos seems to offer a chance of independence; and even Russia's former allies, who have an interest in helping any Russians still opposed to Germany.
In March 1918, when Lenin signs the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the most active opposition is a small White army which has been fighting throughout the winter in the south, around the city of Rostov.
This force is led by Kornilov, the commander-in-chief dismissed in the previous September by Kerensky. Driven from Rostov by a Red army in February 1918, he leads his 4000 soldiers and a large contingent of the bourgeoisie of the city in a straggling procession southwards across the frozen steppe.
Their progress is accompanied by extreme brutality as they torture and kill the peasants whose scarce supplies of food they need (there is also a frenzied element of vengeance in Russia's bitter class war). But their survival, in what becomes known as the Ice March, provides heroic inspiration for the White cause - until now on the verge of dwindling to nothing.
The White cause is helped at the same time by the even greater brutalities being perpetrated by the Bolsheviks. Because of the desperate need to secure sufficient grain for the cities, it becomes official policy to terrorize peasants into handing over even their seed corn.
All the peasants suffer from the armed men now sent against them, though the 'battle for grain' masquerades as an attack only on the richer peasants, the so-called kulaks. In the summer of 1918 Lenin announces the new policy in a hysterical speech, denouncing these peasants as bloodsuckers and leeches and declaring 'ruthless war on the kulaks, death to all of them'. This is to be a civil war in which White Terror is more than matched by Red Terror.
The effect of the Bolshevik treatment of the peasants is an increase in support for the Whites. The Cossacks, in the region of Rostov and the Don, are the first to swell the White numbers appreciably.
By 1919 the Whites also have help in the form of large consignments of munitions and some 30,000 troops from the victorious Allied nations (their purpose now being to suppress Communism rather than damage Germany). The result of this increase in strength is three massive thrusts against the heartland of Russia during 1919. The first is from White armies pressing west from Siberia towards the Volga. The second is from the Crimea up towards Moscow. The third is in the northwest towards Petrograd.
All three ultimately fail for the same reason (their lines of advance are over-extended) but their approach confronts the Bolsheviks with a serious crisis. In October 1919 a White army is only 250 miles from Moscow. Lenin, in the Kremlin, hastily assembles every available Red army unit and orders the conscription of 120,000 workers and peasants to dig trenches across the approach roads to the city.
A week later another White army captures hills overlooking the suburbs of Petrograd. Trotsky catches the train north from Moscow and organizes a brilliant last-minute defence, rapidly raising morale with his gift for oratory. In fierce fighting his men push the Whites south from their hills. Meanwhile, after intense battles, the advance on Moscow is also halted and reversed.
These events are the turning point in the civil war. Western support drains away from what is now evidently a lost cause. By November 1920 there is only one White army on Russian soil, in the Crimea. As the regiments prepare to escape to safety from Sebastopol, the war ends with one final piece of Bolshevik brutality.
Alexei Brusilov, a hero of the war against Germany and now a supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, is persuaded to sponsor an offer of amnesty to the departing officers. Leaflets to this effect are dropped from aeroplanes. Brusilov is told that there was no response. In fact, he discovers later, several hundred officers, seeing his name on the document, decide to stay in Russia. They surrender, as instructed, to the Red army. They are all shot.
Securing power
Lenin is swift in the steps taken to establish the Bolshevik party as the unmistakable (and soon to be unremovable) government of Russia.
In a definitive break with the recent past he moves the seat of government, on 10 March 1918, from Petrograd to Moscow. The centre of power is now back in the historic heart of the country, once again associated with the forbidding walls of the Kremlin. In the same month the Bolsheviks adopt a more national profile, changing their name to the Russian Communist Party. And as a gesture of modernity these days and months are now the same as those used by the rest of the world. From midnight on 31 January 1918 Lenin converts Russia to the Gregorian calendar. The next day is declared to be February 14.
These are symbolic changes. The practical imposition of Communist power throughout Russia is a harder task, but Lenin seems to relish the prospect of using the techniques of a police state to impose control through terror. He believes passionately in the need for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat(albeit only as a stage in the progress towards a Communist utopia in which there is no need for government), and he is in no way averse to all the techniques of repression and cruelty invariably associated with dictatorship.
One might expect the imposition of the Communist dictatorship to be delayed or modified by the urgent need to fight a civil war. But if anything the war helps Lenin's cause
Trotsky, a man with a genius for organization, is put in charge of building up the Red Army. He does this with great efficiency. The more intelligent peasants, conscripted from the villages, become a valuable source of political activists. Educated by the army, they find in party membership their escape from the bleak life of rural poverty.
Meanwhile the demands of the civil war give the party an excuse to impose centralized control in what becomes known as War Communism. Food is forcibly collected for government distribution in the battle for grain waged against reluctant peasants by thuggish Food Brigades. Market trading of any kind is suppressed. And the management of factories is placed under Communist control.
This campaign, the world's first imposition of the managed economy which subsequently characterizes all Communist states, provokes profound opposition among peasants and workers alike. From the summer of 1918 there is increasing unrest, both in farms and factories. But it is not until after 1920, when the Whites have been defeated in the civil war, that the full extent of popular unrest is evident. There is widespread demand for the revival of the local soviets, the form of grassroots democracy which was the common cause of the majority in 1917.
The spring of 1921 confronts Lenin with his gravest crisis, as furious peasants and workers resort to violence.
All over the country Communist officials and soldiers are attacked in rural areas, often with incredible savagery, as peasant armies carry out ruthless guerrilla warfare (reprisals are no less brutal). A rash of strikes sweeps through the cities, beginning in Moscow in February 1921. At the end of the same month there is a mutiny by the sailors in the Kronstadt naval base near Petrograd. Their demands include free elections.
With every likelihood of the mutiny spreading to other garrisons, Lenin takes decisive action. On March 16 a massive attack is launched on the naval base, with artillery fire, aerial bombing and an assault across the ice by 50,000 Red Army troops. By the following day 10,000 Red Army troops are dead, but the mutiny is over (some 2500 rebels are subsequently shot without trial).
At this defining moment of Communist ruthlessness, the Tenth Party Congress is taking place in Moscow. Lenin uses the crisis of the mutiny to press home his advantage.
A pressure group within the party, calling itself the Workers' Opposition, is arguing for trades union rights. Lenin moves a motion condemning them and receives a massive majority. He then goes further. He succeeds in passing a resolution which bans the formation of factions within the party. Henceforth decisions of the Central Committee may be criticized, but only by individuals. So, from March 1921, the control of the Central Committee over the Communist party is as secure as the control of the Communist party over the nation.
New Economic Policy
Though inflexible on any topic affecting the power of the Communist party, Lenin is prepared to yield on other issues. Acknowledging that the attempt to requisition the peasants' entire harvest has been a disaster (corn is successfully hidden, fewer fields are planted, resentment is extreme), he persuades the Tenth Party Congress to vote for a U-turn. In what becomes known as the New Economic Policy (NEP), peasants are to be allowed to keep the surplus of their product after a tax in kind has been paid to the state. At the same time the ban on markets is lifted.
A vigorous rural trade revives at astonishing speed (though it also brings with it a rash of profiteers, much resented as Nepmen - from the initials of the New Economic Policy).
While this measure goes a long way towards appeasing the rural districts, those peasants actively involved in revolts are suppressed without mercy by the Red Army during the summer of 1921. Artillery, armoured cars, bombers and even poison gas are used in the campaign. Many of the captured are shot. Others (about 50,000) are herded into the first specially constructed concentration camps of the Soviet Union.
Lenin takes this opportunity to remove any further threat from the rival socialist parties, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, many of whom have supported the peasants. Some 500 Mensheviks are arrested during 1921. In show trials in the following year all members of the SR party are branded 'enemies of the people'.
Union of republics
Immediately after the October revolution the heart of the Russian empire (from Petrograd and Moscow through Siberia to the Pacific coast) is given a new name - the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. The hint of federalism is a way of accomodating the nationalist aspirations of the many minorities in this vast swathe of land. It does not imply any intention of relaxing control from the centre, which by 1921 is absolute.
During the course of the civil war various regions outside this central bloc (Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan) fall under the control of Communist governments, secured by the local power of the Red Army.
It is a natural next step to bring these regions into a closer relationship with Moscow. Early in 1922 Joseph Stalin, the general secretary of the Communist party, is given the task of drawing up a plan of federation. He brings together the first Congress of Soviets in Moscow in December of the same year. On December 30 the soviet republics of Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine and the Transcaucasian Federation agree to form a closer union. The following summer a constitution is established for a new state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The USSR officially comes into being on 6 July 1923.
The constitution gives each republic the right to secede, but this is somewhat notional since each is governed by the same Communist party with its headquarters in Moscow. The political monolith which remains intact for nearly seventy years is now in place.
But at the same time the new state, born of violent revolution, begins to achieve international acceptance. A turning point is a Russian famine in the summer of 1921, the result of crop failure aggravated by Communist policies. Some 20 million people are threatened with starvation, prompting a massive international aid effort spearheaded by the USA.
With this first international contact, a pariah state starts to edge back into the fold. There are the beginnings of foreign trade. In 1922 Germany re-establishes full diplomatic relations and by the end of 1924 most other European countries have recognized the USSR. But by this time the Russian leadership has had to cope with a new crisis.
Rise of Stalin
Since the October revolution in 1917 the leadership of the Communist party, and thus of the nation, has been unmistakably in the hands of one man. While Trotsky has been an extremely able assistant, the ruthless securing of the revolution has been Lenin's achievement. But the unremitting work load takes its toll. In May 1922 he has a stroke. Not till October does he get back into his office. Just two months later a second stroke paralyzes his right side. He survives, an incapacitated invalid, for another year, dying in January 1924.
Trotsky has long been his obvious successor. But in April 1922, just a month before his first stroke, Lenin introduces a dark horse to the race.
Joseph Stalin, a committed Bolshevik from his early twenties and a passionate supporter of Lenin, has been in the inner circle of the party since the revolution. But the real growth of his power begins in April 1922 when Lenin creates a new post for him - General Secretary of the Communist Party.
In this position Stalin has direct control over party appointments. It gives him the perfect chance to prepare for the coming struggle after Lenin falls ill in May. During the remainder of 1922 Stalin appoints some 10,000 of his own supporters as provincial officials. When Lenin gets back to work in September, he finds that Russia is effectively ruled by a triumvirate of Stalin, Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev.
The three are united in their hatred of Trotsky, widely seen as a detached and arrogant intellectual. Both Kamenev and Zinoviev, considering themselves candidates to succeed Lenin, believe that they are using Stalin as a pawn in their personal strategy. But the reverse proves to be the case, as Stalin steadily strengthens his own faction.
Lenin, taking up the reins again, becomes for the first time aware of Stalin's character and ambition. As a result he is busy trying to reinforce Trotsky's position, as a counterweight to Stalin, when he has his second stroke, in December 1922. Stalin moves quickly. He takes charge of Lenin's doctors and persuades the central committee that the leader should be kept, for his own sake, in isolation. Lenin becomes, in effect, Stalin's prisoner.
In secret Lenin dictates a series of brief notes, intended for a forthcoming Party Congress, in which he condemns Stalin's behaviour and recommends his removal from the post of party secretary. He orders these notes (subsequently known as Lenin's Testament) to be sealed and kept for the moment in strict secrecy.
They are destined to remain secret for many years (until 1956), because in March 1923 Lenin suffers a third devasting stroke which robs him of the power of communication. He can only watch helplessly from the sidelines as Stalin continues to strengthen his position. In October Trotsky is censured for factionalism by a massive majority at a plenary session of the Politburo, the Communist executive committee. He narrowly escapes being expelled from the party.
Stalin, instinctively cautious, argues against Trotsky's expulsion. And he moves only slowly against Kamenev and Zinoviev, his partners in the triumvirate. But by 1926, with these two and Trotsky now allied in opposition to him, Stalin is strong enough to remove them from the Politburo. He expels them from the party in the following year and forces Trotsky out of the country in 1928.
Kamenev and Zinoviev are shot in 1936, after being vilified in the show trialsthrough which Stalin finally secures his personal reign of terror. Trotsky dies in a suburb of Mexico City in 1940, victim of an assassin sent to his home by his old adversary. Meanwhile Stalin, using methods as ruthless as his treatment of political rivals, has totally transformed the world's first Communist nation.
Industrialization, collectivization
There is much debate among the leadership of the Soviet Union during the 1920s as to whether the NEP, enabling the economy at least to tick over in a traditional way, should be replaced by a strong centralized drive to improve Russia's industrial and agricultural output. While he is unsure of his own power, Stalin trims on the issue - supporting the views of those who are most useful to him. But by 1929 he feels strong enough to force through a drastic plan of reform.
The first Five Year Plan, adopted by the party in 1929, predicts an increase during the period of 200% in industrial output and of 50% in agricultural produce. Such ambitions depend inevitably on harsh coercion of the work force.
The Five Year Plan is in a sense a return to the War Communism of the civil war years, and once again the supposedly rich peasants, the kulaks, bear the brunt of the policy. Not only is their land seized by the state to form collective farms, but they and their families are transported to Siberia and put to work in agricultural labour camps.
It is calculated that one in five of them, mainly the women and children, die on the journey - in the cattle trucks or on forced marches. When they arrive and are put to work, the barbarous conditions soon account for more. Six million of these uprooted peasants are believed to have died, in a tragedy barely perceived outside Russia until years later.
By 1935, two years after the end of the first Five Year Plan, more than 90% of Russia's agricultural land is farmed collectively. But the result is a massive drop in production rather than the predicted increase. When forced to merge their own smallholdings in a collective farm, the peasants tend to slaughter their animals thus reducing the common stock. And no amount of coercion is sufficient to make them plough and sow for the future with anything like their previous commitment.
During the early 1930s there are renewed famines and millions of deaths. But this time, unlike in 1921, there is no foreign aid to lessen the suffering - largely because Stalin does his best to suppress news of the disaster.
While collectivization is a failure, it turns out to be more feasible to impose industrialization. Determined to give Russia her own heavy industry, Stalin diverts production away from consumer goods - a change requiring the public to accept unprecedented scarcities.
He secures efficiency in his new factories by incentive schemes for managers and skilled workers (conveniently disregarding Communist notions of equality), while using what is in effect slave labour to keep down the state's bill for wages. Some 25 million peasants are moved from the land to the factories, where they are forced to work at subsistence levels under harsh industrial discipline. But the policy succeeds. By the end of the second Five Year Plan, in 1937, rural Russia has become a major industrial nation.
Both the method and the cost of these achievements can be seen in a prestige project dear to Stalin's heart - the construction of a canal to link the Baltic and the White Sea. The fulfilment of this difficult task, in the near-Arctic north, is entrusted to the political police (at this stage the OGPU, later to be known as the KGB). They are to provide the workers from the prisons and camps under their control. Of the 300,000 transported north to dig and labour, 200,000 die before the canal opens in 1933.
The human cost of industrialization and the evident failures of collectivization provoke pockets of dissent even within the tightly controlled Communist party. But by the mid-1930s Stalin feels strong enough to settle once and for all his political scores.
Purge and Terror
The period subsequently known as the Great Terror lasts in Russia from 1936 to 1938, but there is a turning point in this direction in 1934. Stalin has not until now used assassination of his comrades as a political weapon. But there is evidence (admittedly inconclusive) to suggest that his hand is behind the death in this year of his one-time protégé, Sergei Kirov.
In 1926 Stalin appointed Kirov, in place of Zinoviev, as head of the party in Leningrad (the new name given to Petrograd after Lenin's death in 1924). But now, in the early 1930s, Kirov is showing marked signs of independence, even perhaps to the point of seeming a potential rival to Stalin. In 1934 Kirov is assassinated in his office by a young party member.
Stalin acts swiftly, ordering the immediate death of the assassin and thirteen supposed accomplices. He follows this with the execution of hundreds of Leningrad comrades and the deportation of thousands of others for supposed involvement in the plot.
This is the first of Stalin's major purges, which become known to the world primarily through three great show trials held in Moscow in successive years from 1936. The first relates again to the Leningrad assassination. Stalin's one-time close colleagues and subsequent opponents, Zinoviev and Kamenev, are now charged with conspiring to kill not only Kirov but the entire Communist leadership.
They and their co-defendants are described by the prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, as 'Mad Fascist police dogs! Despicable rotten dregs of humanity! Scum of the underworld!'. They confess to the trumped up charges and are shot.
The next show trial, in 1937, charges the accused more specifically with being terrorists in league with Trotsky (now living in exile and doing his best to publicize the truth about Stalin). Again all are convicted and nearly all are shot. The third, in 1938, brings together a more motley selection of victims - including some notable opponents of Stalin from the right-wing of the party and even the police chief who had prepared one of the earlier trials.
These high-level victims are what the world sees of Stalin's purges, but they are the tip of an iceberg. During the same period the party hierarchy is purged of almost everyone who had a part in achieving the revolution. The non-Russian Soviet republics suffer particularly severely. In some regions almost no-one above the age of 35 remains in place in the civil service, army or police. Trotskyite sympathies and bourgeois nationalism are the main charges against these 'enemies of the people'.
The figures are unknown, but it is probable that millions of officials and their families are variously executed, imprisoned or exiled. This scale of terror makes Hitler's slightly earlier Night of the Long Knivesseem almost a parochial event.
In the years before World War I Mussolini is an active revolutionary socialist, becoming in 1912 the editor of Avanti, the official publication of the Italian Socialist party. But in October 1914 he is expelled from the party when he abandons the policy of neutrality and advocates joining the war on the side of France and Britain.
Within weeks he is publishing a new belligerent paper, Il Popolo d'Italia, around which he attempts to gather the few socialist members of the people of Italy who share his views. Six months later the Italian government adopts his policy, declaring war on Austria-Hungaryin May 1915. Mussolini is called up and serves as a private in the infantry until he is wounded in 1917.
Foreign policy
With Hitler in power in Berlin, from 1933, it is evident that Russian foreign policy needs to take account of the likely emergence of an agressive and expansionist Germany. Stalin's first reaction is to enter more fully into the diplomatic networks of the international community. The USSR joins the League of Nations in 1934.
In 1935 the Communist International or Comintern, controlled by Stalin, softens its rhetoric against the bourgeois democracies and declares that its most urgent task is the defeat of Fascism. In the same year Russia makes defensive military alliances with France and Czechoslovakia.
The appeasement of Hitler by France and Britain at Munich, in 1938, casts doubt upon this conventional strategy for the protection of Russia. The worst possible scenario from Moscow's point of view is for Hitler to be safe from retaliation in western Europe, leaving him free to concentrate all his energies on Germany's eastern front - where he has always stated that he intends to find the Lebensraumrequired for the German people.
In these circumstances an agreement of some kind with Hitler may be preferable, in spite of the supposed implacable hostility between Communism and Fascism. At a party congress in March 1939 Stalin hints that he might consider some such arrangement. Meanwhile the western nations are mainly concerned now with Hitler's demands upon Poland.
Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact: 1939
In August 1939 a Franco-British military mission is in Moscow trying to persuade Stalin to commit to a treaty for the defence of Poland. Little progress is made, ostensibly because the Poles are refusing to allow Soviet troops to cross their territory to attack Germany. But there is another hidden reason which soon becomes apparent.
The Soviet Union and Communism have always been twin forces of demonic evil in Hitler's oratory, but he now proves himself happy to sup with the devil for a very real strategic advantage. It is important to his plans that he shall not be distracted by a major war on his eastern front. In August he opens negotiations with Stalin. Poland is his bait.
Stalin, invited by the western powers to join an alliance which will almost certainly involve him in a costly war against Germany for no very evident benefit, now finds himself offered a more attractive option - inactivity and a sizable increase in his territory.
It takes the Russian dictator little time to choose. The world is astonished on August 21 by the announcement from Berlin that Ribbentrop is flying to Moscow to sign a nonaggression pact with his opposite number, the Russian foreign minister Molotov. This sudden friendship of two implacable enemies would seem less inexplicable if people knew of the secret protocol which accompanies the pact.
The protocol agrees a new set of international boundaries. As modified slightly in a second visit by Ribbentrop to Moscow, in September, it acknowledges Germany's approval of the Russian annexation of the independent nations Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (should any such opportunity occur). And it establishes an agreed division of Poland between Germany and Russia.
With this much achieved, Hitler is ready to take his next step - launched, for propaganda purposes, with a grisly little charade.
A breathing space
Stalin's pact with Hitler affords him a breathing space of slightly less than two years after Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939. The outbreak of war, with Russia safely on the sideline, provides Stalin with the immediate benefits which he has been promised: a slice of Poland, the military annexation of Lithuania, Latviaand Estonia, and the opportunity for an undisturbed attack upon Finland.
The Finns, however, resist strongly - involving Russia in a costly Winter War. The Russians eventually prevail (by March 1940) but not before they have revealed to the world, and in particular to Hitler, how ill-prepared the Soviet army is (many of the more experienced generals have been victims of a purge in 1937).
During the second half of the 1930s Russia's production of military equipment has been drastically increased, and Stalin now uses his breathing space to accelerate this programme. But he still believes that Russia's best chance of remaining outside the main conflict lies in alliances with neighbours (such as a neutrality pact signed with Japan in April 1941) and appeasement of Hitler (to whom large shipments of Soviet material continue to be sent).
But Stalin's optimism flies in the face of mounting evidence of Hitler's intentions. During this same period, April 1941, German troops are beginning to mass on the Soviet border.
From the moment of his return from the Grand Embassy, in 1698, Peter makes it dramatically plain that he intends to westernize Russia's hide-bound oriental society and that he will be ruthless in achieving his purpose. He has had to hurry back from his European tour because the streltsy have again attempted an uprising against him.
The rebellion has been easily put down and the culprits are under arrest. Over the coming months Peter takes a personal interest in the interrogation, torture and brutal execution of some 800 rebels. This is his insurance policy against further threats to his rule. His programme of reform will take longer. But it too begins with a dramatic gesture.
The tsar celebrates his first evening back in Moscow with friends in the foreign settlement near Preobrazhenskoe, the village where he has grown up. He then spends the night in a favourite wooden hut from his childhood days, after ordering the leading boyars to attend him there in the morning.
They assemble in their long robes and beards, markedly different in appearance from Peter's own European clothes and shaven face. The beard in particular has been consciously preserved over the years as a symbol of the standards of old Russia. But on this morning the young tsar emerges from his hut with a pair of shears. He cuts a slice from the profuse whiskers of every boyar.
Peter accompanies this assault with a practical measure containing a touch of wit. Anyone who so wishes may remain unshaven. But there is to be a new tax - on beards.
This symbolic gesture is followed by an extensive programme of practical reform. Never, perhaps, has a ruler so rapidly transformed an antiquated society. Using the absolute power which he has established, Peter introduces new government structures at local and central levels. He replaces a chaotically unreliable army (a militia of noblemen and the professional streltsy) with a large standing force of peasants conscripted for life and properly trained. He creates a naval service and a fleet of warships.
The tsar launches industrial enterprises (as many as 200, for the most part using the labour of state-owned serfs) to develop mines and to build weapons and equipment for his army and navy. Encouragement is given to an entrepreneurial class to set up private commercial ventures.
Education is promoted. Secular schools are founded, for which western texts are translated into Russian. Russians needing specalist skills are sent abroad to learn them in foreign academies. At home professors of mathematics are employed to visit the houses of the gentry, whose sons are not allowed to marry until they attain a certain educational standard. The first Russian newspaper (Vedomosti, 'Records') is published from 1703.
Peter's measures touch all aspects of life. The currency is reformed, as is the Russian script (eight letters are lopped from an unwieldy Cyrillicalphabet). The Russian new year, previously September 1 (supposedly the date of the creation of the world) now becomes January 1. The Christian chronology of Anno Domini is adopted - though Peter's new calendar is less modern than it might be, for he chooses the Julian system rather than the Gregorianreform.
The problem of corruption is tackled by encouraging a pernicious system of informers. But nothing is too small for the tsar's attention. Building and fire regulations are introduced, and one ukase (imperial decree) even orders that crops are to be cut with scythes rather than sickles.
St Petersburg: 1703-1712
From 1703 Peter the Great has gratifying evidence of his achievements on behalf of Russia. A great project is taking shape at the mouth of the river Neva, on marshy wooded land which comes into Peter's possession in 1703. Within two weeks of gaining the area he starts to build the Peter and Paul fortress on the right bank of the river; the following year a royal shipyard is founded across the water. The first warship is launched from the yard in 1706.
A town grows rapidly on the site. In 1712 it becomes the capital, named St Petersburg after the tsar's patron saint. Its main street, the Nevsky Prospekt, is built by Swedish prisoners captured in the Northern War.
Peter the Great first intervenes in the Northern War early in 1700, seizing the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland. This territory has belonged since 1617 to Sweden, cutting Russia off from the Baltic. The campaign of 1700 ends ignominiously when the young Swedish king, Charles XII, defeats the Russians at Narva and regains the coastline. But Charles then turns south against other enemies. By 1703 Peter is able to recapture the mouth of the Neva from its Swedish garrison.
In 1707 the Swedish king prepares an invasion of Russia, now plainly emerging as his main rival in the Baltic. This time Peter the Great responds with the classic Russian tactic when Moscow itself is threatened.
Sweden and Russia: 1707-1711
In the autumn of 1707 Charles XII moves northeast from Saxony with an army of almost 40,000 men. His intention is to move towards Moscow during the summer of 1708, forcing Peter to withdraw from the Baltic to defend his capital. The plan is frustrated by Peter's strategy of avoiding a pitched battle while devastating the countryside between the advancing Swedish army and Moscow. By the autumn of 1708 Charles XII is forced to turn south into the Ukraine in search of food.
The winter of 1708-9 is unusually cold even for these inhospitable regions. It is a much reduced Swedish army, of some 18,000 men, which finally comes to grips with the Russians in July 1709 at Poltava.
The engagement is the first major disaster in Charles's brilliant military career. With almost the whole Swedish army either captured or killed, Charles himself escapes south into Turkish territory. He immediately enters negotiations with the Turks, who share his hostility to the Russians and are eager to recover Azov.
Charles summons a new army from Sweden, to provide his share of an anti-Russian alliance with Turkey. It never arrives, but the Turks on their own defeat Peter the Great in 1711 at the Prut river. In the ensuing negotiations Peter agrees to return Azov - and considers himself to have escaped lightly in giving no concessions at all to Sweden, as Turkey's supposed ally.
Emperor of all Russia: 1721
The eventual peace between Russia and Sweden, signed at Nystad in 1721, gives Peter everything he has hoped for from the twenty-one years of the Northern War. The coast of the eastern Baltic is now his. St Petersburg, which he has had the courage and effrontery to build on appropriated land, is internationally accepted as the capital of Russia.
The new city is perfectly placed to prosper at the junction of two great trade routes, just as Novgorodwas when founded in this region almost a millennium earlier. At this northern apex, the river routes from the Black Sea and the Caspian link with the sea route through the Baltic to western Europe.
A few weeks after the signing of the peace of Nystad a service of thanksgiving is held in St Petersburg's cathedral. After the ceremony Peter goes in procession to the senate, where he is acclaimed under a new title greater than that of tsar. He is now 'Father of the fatherland, Peter the Great, emperor of all Russia'.
This reign, so triumphant on the political scene, has been accompanied by a dismal record in the emperor's private life. Within his family he behaves with the tyranny and the cruelty revealed also at times in his public career.
The tsarevich Alexis: 1716-1718
Peter's most pathetic victim is his only surviving son, Alexis. Intellectual in his interests, conservative in his attitudes and inclined to a life of ease and pleasure, the young man could not be more different from the hyperactive, intensely physical, practical-minded reformer who is his father. The tension between them causes Alexis to flee from Russia in 1716, taking refuge with the Austrian emperor.
His father, viewing this as an act of treason, tricks the young man into returning to Russia on a promise of clemency. He then imprisons him, and tortures his friends and his mistress to discover evidence of a conspiracy.
Little emerges, other than reports of Alexis saying that when he is tsar he will return the capital to Moscow and reduce the size of the navy. Such intentions may be capital offences in his father's eyes, but they are not enough to justify the scandal resulting from a formal execution of the heir to the throne.
Instead the prince dies discreetly in the St Petersburg fortress, after twice being flogged within inches of his life (with the fearsome Russian whip known as the knout) during the enquiry into his supposed rebellion. He has made the tactical error of having a son, the future Peter II, just three years earlier. With two male descendants of Peter the Great in existence, one is perhaps expendable.
Peter and Catherine: 1701-1725
The only lasting affection shown by Peter proves him as independently minded in his emotional life as in politics. Early in 1703 he becomes the lover of a Lithuanian peasant, captured in the Northern War and now working as the domestic serf of a Russian prince. Later in the same year, when their first child is born, the mother is received into the Russian Orthodox church under a new name, Catherine. She becomes the tsar's inseparable companion, bearing him seven children of whom two daughters survive infancy. Divorced from his first wife, Peter marries Catherine formally in 1712 (they may have married secretly in 1707) and has her crowned empress in 1724.
Less than a year later she succeeds him on the throne, as the empress Catherine I.
Seventy years of empresses: 1725-1796
It is a remarkable fact that the Russian empire established by Peter the Great is ruled for the next seven decades by women.
The only male emperors in that span are a 12-year-old boy (Peter II, grandson of Peter the Great, enthroned in 1727 and dead three years later); a two-month-old infant (Ivan VI, emperor for a year and then hidden away in prison until his death); and a German prince of feeble mind and body (Peter III, ruling for six months in 1762 before being deposed and murdered).
The reigns of four women span these decades. Catherine I, illiterate but well endowed with commonsense and strength of character (necessary qualifications to survive as Peter the Great's intimate companion), has proved her sterling qualities before her reign. But she has only two years on the throne, dying in 1727.
Her successor Anna, a daughter of Peter the Great's half-brother Ivan V, is the only weak character among the four. Ruling from 1730 to 1740, her interest is mainly in the fashionable entertainments of the day. Sumptuous amusements are now provided in St Petersburg, but mainly by foreigners - provoking much local indignation.
Elizabeth, reigning from 1741 to 1762, brings back the vigorous mood of Peter the Great - appropriately, since she is a daughter of Peter and of Catherine I. Russian interests are now energetically pursued again, particularly in opposition to Prussia in the early stages of the Seven Years' War.
Elizabeth leaves her crown to Peter III, the German grandson of her elder sister. Inheriting early in 1762, he proves totally unsuited to the task. But his wife, a German princess, more than makes up for his inadequacies. Within six months she acquires her husband's throne and before the year is out he is murdered, almost certainly with her connivance. She will rule for thirty-four years, justifiably becoming known as Catherine the Great.
Catherine the Great: 1762-1796
Catherine is both brilliant and passionate. Her many lovers provide rich material for scandal and gossip in the courts of Europe, and several of her most talented advisers and generals feature in the list. But the programme which they put into effect is hers, as is the interest in political theory and in the advancement of Russia which shapes her policy.
Contemporary French ideas fascinate her most. Like Frederick the Great, she corresponds with Voltaire and the encyclopedistswhose ideas are fashioning the Enlightenment.
After seizing the throne in 1762, Catherine rapidly adopts the reforming role of an enlightened despot. In relatively simple areas such as education and culture she is successful. In 1764 she takes steps to provide education for Russian girls. In the same year she founds the Hermitage as a court museum attached to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg (the entire collection of Robert Walpole is one of her purchases).
In the difficult field of social reform, she attempts with less success to improve the lot of her people.
Before her accession Catherine has been in favour of emancipating Russia's serfs. In 1767 she writes an Instructionoutlining a programme of reform (so radical that its publication is banned in France), and she summons an elected assembly to consider it. It soon becomes evident that the nobles (whose wealth is commonly assessed by the number of serfs they own) will resist any change. Needing their support, Catherine abandons her plans.
Ironically the lot of the peasants deteriorates during her reign. When she dies, almost every peasant in Russia is a serf - as a result of her granting crown lands (where the peasants are free) to favourites and nobles who are allowed to impose the conditions of serfdom.
Frustrated in her efforts at internal reform, Catherine turns with great success to foreign policy, eventually achieving major gains at the expense of both Turkey and Poland.
Catherine addes a new element to Russia's Turkish policy, previously concerned only with the strategic matter of access to the Black Sea. Building upon the ancient theme of Moscow as the Third Rome, she now presents Russia as the natural political patron of all Orthodox Christians within the territory of the old Byzantine empire. She even dreams of one of her grandsons ruling in Constantinople, and in pious hope has the boy named Constantine. But first there is the practical matter of war against the Turks.
Russo-Turkish wars: 1768-1792
Russia's interest in reaching the Black Sea, attempted but not lastingly achieved by Peter the Great, is furthered in two wars at the end of the 18th century. A conflict of 1768-74 brings Russian successes in several battles and leads to important concessions. Russia gains fortresses to west and east of the Crimean peninsula, together with the right to maintain a fleet in the Black Sea.
Moreover the Turks grant Russia the right of protection over all Christians within the European parts of the Ottoman empire. The meaning of this is rather vaguely specified, but it will give the Russians a useful pretext for future intervention in the Balkans.
The Tatar khan ruling the Crimea is declared in the same treaty of 1774 (that of Kuchuk Kainarji) to be independent of Turkey. Catherine the Great takes this as a pretext for annexing his valuable Crimean peninsula in 1783, a period when Russia is at peace with Turkey.
War breaks out again in 1787. Again Russia prevails. A treaty signed in January 1792 at Jassy leaves the northern coast of the Black Sea in Russian hands from the Dniester river to the Kerch Strait. Having won a role in the Baltic in the early part of the century, Russia now also has access to the Mediterranean through the Black Sea. Meanwhile valuable new acquisitions have again been made in the Baltic region, at the expense of Poland.
Three partitions of Poland: 1772-1796
Over a period of a quarter of a century Poland is dismembered and consumed by her neighbours. The process begins during the confusion of a war between Russia and Turkey. In 1769 Austria takes the opportunity of occupying part of Poland, to the south of Cracow.
Frederick the Great follows suit in 1770, sending troops to seal off the coastal region between the two main parts of his realm (Brandenburg and the kingdom of Prussia). This valuable area, known as Polish royal Prussia, has long been part of the Polish kingdom. Frederick claims that he is acting only in precaution against an outbreak of cattle plague. But acquiring royal Prussia would neatly unify his territory.
The first official annexation of Polish land is cynically agreed in 1772 between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Russia, at war with Turkey, has an interest in keeping Prussia and Austria in benign mood. She accepts the proposal that each of them should annexe part of Poland. Russia's influence in the kingdom means that she can force acceptance of the arrangement on the Poles.
By the treaties of 1772 Austria acquires the region round Lvov. Frederick secures royal Prussia (with the exception at this stage of the port of Gdansk). And Russia takes a slice of northeast Poland.
The next two partitions occur when Russia finds new excuses to intervene in Poland's internal affairs. Russian armies enter the kingdom during a disturbance in 1792, and are on hand again to tackle a national insurrection in 1794.
On both occasions Polish armies offer strong resistance to superior Russian forces. But force prevails. After a two-month siege, and a massacre of Poles in the suburbs, Warsaw falls in September 1794 to a combined Russian and Prussian army.
The second partition, agreed in 1793, benefits only Prussia and Russia. Prussia now receives Gdanskand a swathe of land stretching south almost to Cracow. Russia takes a vast slice of eastern Poland, amounting to some 97,000 square miles.
This is greater than the territory which Poland now retains, in a strip from the Baltic coast down to Cracow and Brody. A few years later, in treaties of 1795 and 1796, this final Polish remnant is divided between the three predators. Prussia is extended east to include Warsaw. The Austrian frontier moves north to the same area. Once again the lion's share, in the east, goes.
Civil War
Lenin's seizure of power leaves his government with a multiplicity of enemies. They include supporters of the old regime, who now become known as White Russians (by contrast with the red of the Bolsheviks); the socialist majority in the disbanded Constituent Assembly, together with all their numerous supporters; nationalists in many of the regions of the Russian empire, for whom the developing chaos seems to offer a chance of independence; and even Russia's former allies, who have an interest in helping any Russians still opposed to Germany.
In March 1918, when Lenin signs the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the most active opposition is a small White army which has been fighting throughout the winter in the south, around the city of Rostov.
This force is led by Kornilov, the commander-in-chief dismissed in the previous September by Kerensky. Driven from Rostov by a Red army in February 1918, he leads his 4000 soldiers and a large contingent of the bourgeoisie of the city in a straggling procession southwards across the frozen steppe.
Their progress is accompanied by extreme brutality as they torture and kill the peasants whose scarce supplies of food they need (there is also a frenzied element of vengeance in Russia's bitter class war). But their survival, in what becomes known as the Ice March, provides heroic inspiration for the White cause - until now on the verge of dwindling to nothing.
The White cause is helped at the same time by the even greater brutalities being perpetrated by the Bolsheviks. Because of the desperate need to secure sufficient grain for the cities, it becomes official policy to terrorize peasants into handing over even their seed corn.
All the peasants suffer from the armed men now sent against them, though the 'battle for grain' masquerades as an attack only on the richer peasants, the so-called kulaks. In the summer of 1918 Lenin announces the new policy in a hysterical speech, denouncing these peasants as bloodsuckers and leeches and declaring 'ruthless war on the kulaks, death to all of them'. This is to be a civil war in which White Terror is more than matched by Red Terror.
The effect of the Bolshevik treatment of the peasants is an increase in support for the Whites. The Cossacks, in the region of Rostov and the Don, are the first to swell the White numbers appreciably.
By 1919 the Whites also have help in the form of large consignments of munitions and some 30,000 troops from the victorious Allied nations (their purpose now being to suppress Communism rather than damage Germany). The result of this increase in strength is three massive thrusts against the heartland of Russia during 1919. The first is from White armies pressing west from Siberia towards the Volga. The second is from the Crimea up towards Moscow. The third is in the northwest towards Petrograd.
All three ultimately fail for the same reason (their lines of advance are over-extended) but their approach confronts the Bolsheviks with a serious crisis. In October 1919 a White army is only 250 miles from Moscow. Lenin, in the Kremlin, hastily assembles every available Red army unit and orders the conscription of 120,000 workers and peasants to dig trenches across the approach roads to the city.
A week later another White army captures hills overlooking the suburbs of Petrograd. Trotsky catches the train north from Moscow and organizes a brilliant last-minute defence, rapidly raising morale with his gift for oratory. In fierce fighting his men push the Whites south from their hills. Meanwhile, after intense battles, the advance on Moscow is also halted and reversed.
These events are the turning point in the civil war. Western support drains away from what is now evidently a lost cause. By November 1920 there is only one White army on Russian soil, in the Crimea. As the regiments prepare to escape to safety from Sebastopol, the war ends with one final piece of Bolshevik brutality.
Alexei Brusilov, a hero of the war against Germany and now a supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, is persuaded to sponsor an offer of amnesty to the departing officers. Leaflets to this effect are dropped from aeroplanes. Brusilov is told that there was no response. In fact, he discovers later, several hundred officers, seeing his name on the document, decide to stay in Russia. They surrender, as instructed, to the Red army. They are all shot.
Securing power
Lenin is swift in the steps taken to establish the Bolshevik party as the unmistakable (and soon to be unremovable) government of Russia.
In a definitive break with the recent past he moves the seat of government, on 10 March 1918, from Petrograd to Moscow. The centre of power is now back in the historic heart of the country, once again associated with the forbidding walls of the Kremlin. In the same month the Bolsheviks adopt a more national profile, changing their name to the Russian Communist Party. And as a gesture of modernity these days and months are now the same as those used by the rest of the world. From midnight on 31 January 1918 Lenin converts Russia to the Gregorian calendar. The next day is declared to be February 14.
These are symbolic changes. The practical imposition of Communist power throughout Russia is a harder task, but Lenin seems to relish the prospect of using the techniques of a police state to impose control through terror. He believes passionately in the need for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat(albeit only as a stage in the progress towards a Communist utopia in which there is no need for government), and he is in no way averse to all the techniques of repression and cruelty invariably associated with dictatorship.
One might expect the imposition of the Communist dictatorship to be delayed or modified by the urgent need to fight a civil war. But if anything the war helps Lenin's cause
Trotsky, a man with a genius for organization, is put in charge of building up the Red Army. He does this with great efficiency. The more intelligent peasants, conscripted from the villages, become a valuable source of political activists. Educated by the army, they find in party membership their escape from the bleak life of rural poverty.
Meanwhile the demands of the civil war give the party an excuse to impose centralized control in what becomes known as War Communism. Food is forcibly collected for government distribution in the battle for grain waged against reluctant peasants by thuggish Food Brigades. Market trading of any kind is suppressed. And the management of factories is placed under Communist control.
This campaign, the world's first imposition of the managed economy which subsequently characterizes all Communist states, provokes profound opposition among peasants and workers alike. From the summer of 1918 there is increasing unrest, both in farms and factories. But it is not until after 1920, when the Whites have been defeated in the civil war, that the full extent of popular unrest is evident. There is widespread demand for the revival of the local soviets, the form of grassroots democracy which was the common cause of the majority in 1917.
The spring of 1921 confronts Lenin with his gravest crisis, as furious peasants and workers resort to violence.
All over the country Communist officials and soldiers are attacked in rural areas, often with incredible savagery, as peasant armies carry out ruthless guerrilla warfare (reprisals are no less brutal). A rash of strikes sweeps through the cities, beginning in Moscow in February 1921. At the end of the same month there is a mutiny by the sailors in the Kronstadt naval base near Petrograd. Their demands include free elections.
With every likelihood of the mutiny spreading to other garrisons, Lenin takes decisive action. On March 16 a massive attack is launched on the naval base, with artillery fire, aerial bombing and an assault across the ice by 50,000 Red Army troops. By the following day 10,000 Red Army troops are dead, but the mutiny is over (some 2500 rebels are subsequently shot without trial).
At this defining moment of Communist ruthlessness, the Tenth Party Congress is taking place in Moscow. Lenin uses the crisis of the mutiny to press home his advantage.
A pressure group within the party, calling itself the Workers' Opposition, is arguing for trades union rights. Lenin moves a motion condemning them and receives a massive majority. He then goes further. He succeeds in passing a resolution which bans the formation of factions within the party. Henceforth decisions of the Central Committee may be criticized, but only by individuals. So, from March 1921, the control of the Central Committee over the Communist party is as secure as the control of the Communist party over the nation.
New Economic Policy
Though inflexible on any topic affecting the power of the Communist party, Lenin is prepared to yield on other issues. Acknowledging that the attempt to requisition the peasants' entire harvest has been a disaster (corn is successfully hidden, fewer fields are planted, resentment is extreme), he persuades the Tenth Party Congress to vote for a U-turn. In what becomes known as the New Economic Policy (NEP), peasants are to be allowed to keep the surplus of their product after a tax in kind has been paid to the state. At the same time the ban on markets is lifted.
A vigorous rural trade revives at astonishing speed (though it also brings with it a rash of profiteers, much resented as Nepmen - from the initials of the New Economic Policy).
While this measure goes a long way towards appeasing the rural districts, those peasants actively involved in revolts are suppressed without mercy by the Red Army during the summer of 1921. Artillery, armoured cars, bombers and even poison gas are used in the campaign. Many of the captured are shot. Others (about 50,000) are herded into the first specially constructed concentration camps of the Soviet Union.
Lenin takes this opportunity to remove any further threat from the rival socialist parties, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, many of whom have supported the peasants. Some 500 Mensheviks are arrested during 1921. In show trials in the following year all members of the SR party are branded 'enemies of the people'.
Union of republics
Immediately after the October revolution the heart of the Russian empire (from Petrograd and Moscow through Siberia to the Pacific coast) is given a new name - the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. The hint of federalism is a way of accomodating the nationalist aspirations of the many minorities in this vast swathe of land. It does not imply any intention of relaxing control from the centre, which by 1921 is absolute.
During the course of the civil war various regions outside this central bloc (Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan) fall under the control of Communist governments, secured by the local power of the Red Army.
It is a natural next step to bring these regions into a closer relationship with Moscow. Early in 1922 Joseph Stalin, the general secretary of the Communist party, is given the task of drawing up a plan of federation. He brings together the first Congress of Soviets in Moscow in December of the same year. On December 30 the soviet republics of Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine and the Transcaucasian Federation agree to form a closer union. The following summer a constitution is established for a new state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The USSR officially comes into being on 6 July 1923.
The constitution gives each republic the right to secede, but this is somewhat notional since each is governed by the same Communist party with its headquarters in Moscow. The political monolith which remains intact for nearly seventy years is now in place.
But at the same time the new state, born of violent revolution, begins to achieve international acceptance. A turning point is a Russian famine in the summer of 1921, the result of crop failure aggravated by Communist policies. Some 20 million people are threatened with starvation, prompting a massive international aid effort spearheaded by the USA.
With this first international contact, a pariah state starts to edge back into the fold. There are the beginnings of foreign trade. In 1922 Germany re-establishes full diplomatic relations and by the end of 1924 most other European countries have recognized the USSR. But by this time the Russian leadership has had to cope with a new crisis.
Rise of Stalin
Since the October revolution in 1917 the leadership of the Communist party, and thus of the nation, has been unmistakably in the hands of one man. While Trotsky has been an extremely able assistant, the ruthless securing of the revolution has been Lenin's achievement. But the unremitting work load takes its toll. In May 1922 he has a stroke. Not till October does he get back into his office. Just two months later a second stroke paralyzes his right side. He survives, an incapacitated invalid, for another year, dying in January 1924.
Trotsky has long been his obvious successor. But in April 1922, just a month before his first stroke, Lenin introduces a dark horse to the race.
Joseph Stalin, a committed Bolshevik from his early twenties and a passionate supporter of Lenin, has been in the inner circle of the party since the revolution. But the real growth of his power begins in April 1922 when Lenin creates a new post for him - General Secretary of the Communist Party.
In this position Stalin has direct control over party appointments. It gives him the perfect chance to prepare for the coming struggle after Lenin falls ill in May. During the remainder of 1922 Stalin appoints some 10,000 of his own supporters as provincial officials. When Lenin gets back to work in September, he finds that Russia is effectively ruled by a triumvirate of Stalin, Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev.
The three are united in their hatred of Trotsky, widely seen as a detached and arrogant intellectual. Both Kamenev and Zinoviev, considering themselves candidates to succeed Lenin, believe that they are using Stalin as a pawn in their personal strategy. But the reverse proves to be the case, as Stalin steadily strengthens his own faction.
Lenin, taking up the reins again, becomes for the first time aware of Stalin's character and ambition. As a result he is busy trying to reinforce Trotsky's position, as a counterweight to Stalin, when he has his second stroke, in December 1922. Stalin moves quickly. He takes charge of Lenin's doctors and persuades the central committee that the leader should be kept, for his own sake, in isolation. Lenin becomes, in effect, Stalin's prisoner.
In secret Lenin dictates a series of brief notes, intended for a forthcoming Party Congress, in which he condemns Stalin's behaviour and recommends his removal from the post of party secretary. He orders these notes (subsequently known as Lenin's Testament) to be sealed and kept for the moment in strict secrecy.
They are destined to remain secret for many years (until 1956), because in March 1923 Lenin suffers a third devasting stroke which robs him of the power of communication. He can only watch helplessly from the sidelines as Stalin continues to strengthen his position. In October Trotsky is censured for factionalism by a massive majority at a plenary session of the Politburo, the Communist executive committee. He narrowly escapes being expelled from the party.
Stalin, instinctively cautious, argues against Trotsky's expulsion. And he moves only slowly against Kamenev and Zinoviev, his partners in the triumvirate. But by 1926, with these two and Trotsky now allied in opposition to him, Stalin is strong enough to remove them from the Politburo. He expels them from the party in the following year and forces Trotsky out of the country in 1928.
Kamenev and Zinoviev are shot in 1936, after being vilified in the show trialsthrough which Stalin finally secures his personal reign of terror. Trotsky dies in a suburb of Mexico City in 1940, victim of an assassin sent to his home by his old adversary. Meanwhile Stalin, using methods as ruthless as his treatment of political rivals, has totally transformed the world's first Communist nation.
Industrialization, collectivization
There is much debate among the leadership of the Soviet Union during the 1920s as to whether the NEP, enabling the economy at least to tick over in a traditional way, should be replaced by a strong centralized drive to improve Russia's industrial and agricultural output. While he is unsure of his own power, Stalin trims on the issue - supporting the views of those who are most useful to him. But by 1929 he feels strong enough to force through a drastic plan of reform.
The first Five Year Plan, adopted by the party in 1929, predicts an increase during the period of 200% in industrial output and of 50% in agricultural produce. Such ambitions depend inevitably on harsh coercion of the work force.
The Five Year Plan is in a sense a return to the War Communism of the civil war years, and once again the supposedly rich peasants, the kulaks, bear the brunt of the policy. Not only is their land seized by the state to form collective farms, but they and their families are transported to Siberia and put to work in agricultural labour camps.
It is calculated that one in five of them, mainly the women and children, die on the journey - in the cattle trucks or on forced marches. When they arrive and are put to work, the barbarous conditions soon account for more. Six million of these uprooted peasants are believed to have died, in a tragedy barely perceived outside Russia until years later.
By 1935, two years after the end of the first Five Year Plan, more than 90% of Russia's agricultural land is farmed collectively. But the result is a massive drop in production rather than the predicted increase. When forced to merge their own smallholdings in a collective farm, the peasants tend to slaughter their animals thus reducing the common stock. And no amount of coercion is sufficient to make them plough and sow for the future with anything like their previous commitment.
During the early 1930s there are renewed famines and millions of deaths. But this time, unlike in 1921, there is no foreign aid to lessen the suffering - largely because Stalin does his best to suppress news of the disaster.
While collectivization is a failure, it turns out to be more feasible to impose industrialization. Determined to give Russia her own heavy industry, Stalin diverts production away from consumer goods - a change requiring the public to accept unprecedented scarcities.
He secures efficiency in his new factories by incentive schemes for managers and skilled workers (conveniently disregarding Communist notions of equality), while using what is in effect slave labour to keep down the state's bill for wages. Some 25 million peasants are moved from the land to the factories, where they are forced to work at subsistence levels under harsh industrial discipline. But the policy succeeds. By the end of the second Five Year Plan, in 1937, rural Russia has become a major industrial nation.
Both the method and the cost of these achievements can be seen in a prestige project dear to Stalin's heart - the construction of a canal to link the Baltic and the White Sea. The fulfilment of this difficult task, in the near-Arctic north, is entrusted to the political police (at this stage the OGPU, later to be known as the KGB). They are to provide the workers from the prisons and camps under their control. Of the 300,000 transported north to dig and labour, 200,000 die before the canal opens in 1933.
The human cost of industrialization and the evident failures of collectivization provoke pockets of dissent even within the tightly controlled Communist party. But by the mid-1930s Stalin feels strong enough to settle once and for all his political scores.
Purge and Terror
The period subsequently known as the Great Terror lasts in Russia from 1936 to 1938, but there is a turning point in this direction in 1934. Stalin has not until now used assassination of his comrades as a political weapon. But there is evidence (admittedly inconclusive) to suggest that his hand is behind the death in this year of his one-time protégé, Sergei Kirov.
In 1926 Stalin appointed Kirov, in place of Zinoviev, as head of the party in Leningrad (the new name given to Petrograd after Lenin's death in 1924). But now, in the early 1930s, Kirov is showing marked signs of independence, even perhaps to the point of seeming a potential rival to Stalin. In 1934 Kirov is assassinated in his office by a young party member.
Stalin acts swiftly, ordering the immediate death of the assassin and thirteen supposed accomplices. He follows this with the execution of hundreds of Leningrad comrades and the deportation of thousands of others for supposed involvement in the plot.
This is the first of Stalin's major purges, which become known to the world primarily through three great show trials held in Moscow in successive years from 1936. The first relates again to the Leningrad assassination. Stalin's one-time close colleagues and subsequent opponents, Zinoviev and Kamenev, are now charged with conspiring to kill not only Kirov but the entire Communist leadership.
They and their co-defendants are described by the prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, as 'Mad Fascist police dogs! Despicable rotten dregs of humanity! Scum of the underworld!'. They confess to the trumped up charges and are shot.
The next show trial, in 1937, charges the accused more specifically with being terrorists in league with Trotsky (now living in exile and doing his best to publicize the truth about Stalin). Again all are convicted and nearly all are shot. The third, in 1938, brings together a more motley selection of victims - including some notable opponents of Stalin from the right-wing of the party and even the police chief who had prepared one of the earlier trials.
These high-level victims are what the world sees of Stalin's purges, but they are the tip of an iceberg. During the same period the party hierarchy is purged of almost everyone who had a part in achieving the revolution. The non-Russian Soviet republics suffer particularly severely. In some regions almost no-one above the age of 35 remains in place in the civil service, army or police. Trotskyite sympathies and bourgeois nationalism are the main charges against these 'enemies of the people'.
The figures are unknown, but it is probable that millions of officials and their families are variously executed, imprisoned or exiled. This scale of terror makes Hitler's slightly earlier Night of the Long Knivesseem almost a parochial event.
In the years before World War I Mussolini is an active revolutionary socialist, becoming in 1912 the editor of Avanti, the official publication of the Italian Socialist party. But in October 1914 he is expelled from the party when he abandons the policy of neutrality and advocates joining the war on the side of France and Britain.
Within weeks he is publishing a new belligerent paper, Il Popolo d'Italia, around which he attempts to gather the few socialist members of the people of Italy who share his views. Six months later the Italian government adopts his policy, declaring war on Austria-Hungaryin May 1915. Mussolini is called up and serves as a private in the infantry until he is wounded in 1917.
Foreign policy
With Hitler in power in Berlin, from 1933, it is evident that Russian foreign policy needs to take account of the likely emergence of an agressive and expansionist Germany. Stalin's first reaction is to enter more fully into the diplomatic networks of the international community. The USSR joins the League of Nations in 1934.
In 1935 the Communist International or Comintern, controlled by Stalin, softens its rhetoric against the bourgeois democracies and declares that its most urgent task is the defeat of Fascism. In the same year Russia makes defensive military alliances with France and Czechoslovakia.
The appeasement of Hitler by France and Britain at Munich, in 1938, casts doubt upon this conventional strategy for the protection of Russia. The worst possible scenario from Moscow's point of view is for Hitler to be safe from retaliation in western Europe, leaving him free to concentrate all his energies on Germany's eastern front - where he has always stated that he intends to find the Lebensraumrequired for the German people.
In these circumstances an agreement of some kind with Hitler may be preferable, in spite of the supposed implacable hostility between Communism and Fascism. At a party congress in March 1939 Stalin hints that he might consider some such arrangement. Meanwhile the western nations are mainly concerned now with Hitler's demands upon Poland.
Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact: 1939
In August 1939 a Franco-British military mission is in Moscow trying to persuade Stalin to commit to a treaty for the defence of Poland. Little progress is made, ostensibly because the Poles are refusing to allow Soviet troops to cross their territory to attack Germany. But there is another hidden reason which soon becomes apparent.
The Soviet Union and Communism have always been twin forces of demonic evil in Hitler's oratory, but he now proves himself happy to sup with the devil for a very real strategic advantage. It is important to his plans that he shall not be distracted by a major war on his eastern front. In August he opens negotiations with Stalin. Poland is his bait.
Stalin, invited by the western powers to join an alliance which will almost certainly involve him in a costly war against Germany for no very evident benefit, now finds himself offered a more attractive option - inactivity and a sizable increase in his territory.
It takes the Russian dictator little time to choose. The world is astonished on August 21 by the announcement from Berlin that Ribbentrop is flying to Moscow to sign a nonaggression pact with his opposite number, the Russian foreign minister Molotov. This sudden friendship of two implacable enemies would seem less inexplicable if people knew of the secret protocol which accompanies the pact.
The protocol agrees a new set of international boundaries. As modified slightly in a second visit by Ribbentrop to Moscow, in September, it acknowledges Germany's approval of the Russian annexation of the independent nations Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (should any such opportunity occur). And it establishes an agreed division of Poland between Germany and Russia.
With this much achieved, Hitler is ready to take his next step - launched, for propaganda purposes, with a grisly little charade.
A breathing space
Stalin's pact with Hitler affords him a breathing space of slightly less than two years after Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939. The outbreak of war, with Russia safely on the sideline, provides Stalin with the immediate benefits which he has been promised: a slice of Poland, the military annexation of Lithuania, Latviaand Estonia, and the opportunity for an undisturbed attack upon Finland.
The Finns, however, resist strongly - involving Russia in a costly Winter War. The Russians eventually prevail (by March 1940) but not before they have revealed to the world, and in particular to Hitler, how ill-prepared the Soviet army is (many of the more experienced generals have been victims of a purge in 1937).
During the second half of the 1930s Russia's production of military equipment has been drastically increased, and Stalin now uses his breathing space to accelerate this programme. But he still believes that Russia's best chance of remaining outside the main conflict lies in alliances with neighbours (such as a neutrality pact signed with Japan in April 1941) and appeasement of Hitler (to whom large shipments of Soviet material continue to be sent).
But Stalin's optimism flies in the face of mounting evidence of Hitler's intentions. During this same period, April 1941, German troops are beginning to mass on the Soviet border.
| The Russian campaign: 1941-1942 | ||
| As early as the autumn of 1940, when the Battle of Britaincasts doubt on his invasion plans across the Channel, Hitler's thoughts turn to an attack on his eastern ally, Stalin. He orders plans to be prepared under the codename Barbarossa. In a directive dated 18 December 1940 he states: 'The German armed forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign before the end of the war against England.' Hitler's intention is that his quick campaign should begin early in May 1941, but precious weeks are lost and it is not until June 22 that three army groups cross the Russian border on a broad front from southern Poland to the Baltic coast. | ||
| In charge of this campaign are the army commanders who together carried out such a brilliant blitzkrieg to the west a year earlier. The first signs are that they will repeat their triumph. Guderian's armoured corps advances 50 miles in the first day. Four days later, on June 27, he reaches Minsk, 200 miles inside Russia. 300,000 Russians, encircled by the German thrust, are taken prisoner. Guderian crosses the obstacle of the Dnieper river on July 10 and reaches Smolensk on July 16. The route he is taking leads directly to Moscow. Less than four weeks have passed, and 400 miles have been travelled. The Russian capital is now only 200 miles away. There is surely time. | ||
| Guderian and other commanders urge the strategy of pushing straight on towards Moscow, but Hitler makes a priority of disabling as much as possible of the Russian army. Guderian is ordered to swing south towards Kiev, where a pincer movement succeeds in capturing another 500,000 men (bringing the total number of prisoners in the campaign so far to about a million). The move towards Moscow is resumed in early October. At the end of the month a victory at Vyazma brings another 600,000 Russian prisoners. But Moscow is still 125 miles ahead. The weather is deteriorating. The roads are deep in mud, soon to freeze. A few advance detachments struggle to the suburbs of the capital, in early December. But now the Russian winter has started in earnest. | ||
| Further to the north another German army, pushing along the Baltic coast, has made similarly spectacular progress in the early weeks of the campaign. Russia's second city, Leningrad, is reached in August. But the Germans prove unable to capture it. They begin a siege, which they hope will be over before the winter. It turns out to last for 900 days, until January 1944. The Germans, confident in their technique of blitzkrieg, have come unprepared for winter conditions. They now receive orders from Hitler that no one is to turn back on any front. Remembering what happened to Napoleon's army on the march to Moscow, the shivering commanders and their men know all too well the hidden strengths brought out in the Russians by depths of winter and extremes of danger. | ||
| In December the Russians begin their counteroffensive, using divisions brought from Siberia. They make progress, rolling the Germans back on some fronts as much as 150 miles. But in an astonishing feat of endurance, in appalling conditions, the German resolve holds firm. It is fifteen months before the Russians dislodge the enemy from Vyazma, just 125 miles from the capital. So when summer returns, in 1942, the Germans are in place for a renewed offensive. This time it is directed to the south. Hitler has his eye on the oil fields of the Caucasus. Once again, even though the German divisions are much weakened by their deprivations, the assault is carried out with extraordinary verve. | ||
| The strategy is to capture three salient points which protect the Caucasus, the valuable region between the Black Sea and the Caspian. They are Sebastopol on the Black Sea coast, Rostov at the mouth of the Don and Stalingrad on the Volga. The campaign is launched in early June. A month later the Crimea and Sebastopol are in German hands. Rostov falls on July 25, enabling a German army to press on towards the oil fields. But the third target, Stalingrad, proves elusive. With extreme tenacity, fighting from house to house, the Russians defend this city which protects routes from the north and east. So the Germans begin a second winter on Russian soil, in the blitzkrieg that went wrong. | ||
| Stalingrad: 1942-1943 | ||
| The battle for the city of Stalingrad, bitterly fought from building to building, lasts from August to November 1942. Neither side is able to gain absolute control of the city and evict the other, even though Germany's entire Sixth Army is involved. But the Germans, even if they achieve possession, are in the graver danger. They are fighting far from their sources of supply. And the city they are struggling so hard to occupy may prove a trap, as the Russians are even now planning. A Russian pincer campaign is launched on November 19. It has a simple aim, to encircle the Germans. Just four days later the noose is complete, though not yet tight. It surrounds a large area between the Volga and the Don. Inside it are more than 200,000 of the enemy. | ||
| The commander of the Sixth Army, General Friedrich Paulus, is well aware that this is the last possible chance to extricate his men. He sends a request to Hitler to begin a withdrawal. The answer comes back: No. Meanwhile German and Italian efforts to break the noose from outside are repulsed with heavy losses. Attempts to break out, and the freezing winter conditions, cause massive losses in the Sixth Army. Eventually, in mid-January 1943, Paulus protests to Hitler that it is beyond human strength to continue fighting in these circumstances. Hitler's reply, as to the commanders near Moscow a year earlier, is that not an inch of ground is to be given up; 'the Sixth Army will do its historic duty at Stalingrad to the last man'. | ||
| At the same time Hitler promotes von Paulus to the rank of field marshal. No German field marshal, the Führer remarks at the time, has ever been taken prisoner. But at the end of the month (on 31 January 1943) von Paulus, with just 91,000 survivors, surrenders to the Russians. Hitler is apoplectic, declaring himself personally betrayed. He protests that the new field marshal should have taken his own life, like an ancient Roman, rather than face captivity. Hitler's personal obstinacy succeeds in maintaining a German front in Russia for another year and more. But the more significant fact is that his obsessive refusal to yield has now lost him an entire German army - and will soon lose him another, in north Africa. | ||
| The Great Patriotic War | ||
| The indomitable spirit shown by the Russians at Stalingrad is also true of the wider war effort. Accustomed to absolute control, Stalin proves an admirable leader in a national crisis. Communist slogans are put aside as the nation's war replaces the class struggle. A new national anthem is provided instead of the Internationale. The religious hierarchy of the Orthodox church, accustomed to years of persecution, is now treated as an important ally in enlisting the fervour of the mass of the Russian people. The war itself is referred to as the Great Patriotic War. Practical achievements match the propaganda. In a supreme effort, heavy industries are relocated during 1942 from the threatened west to the remote regions of eastern Russia. | ||
| The result is that the nation, with vast swathes of its richest territory in German hands early in 1943, is nevertheless able to achieve an increase in the production of armaments. During this year some 20,000 tanks and 35,000 planes roll out from the factories. Meanwhile supplies are also arriving in convoys from the west, along the dangerous Arctic route north of Scandinavia and down to Archangel. The tide turns at last in the summer of 1943. A Russian offensive makes lasting gains, securing a great bulge southwest from Moscow with the capture of Smolensk, Kiev and Kharkov. By the end of the year two thirds of the land taken by the Germans is back in Russian hands. | ||
| Military successes continue apace during 1944, which becomes known to Russians as the Year of the Ten Blows. The first of these thrusts, in January, is of huge psychological importance; at last, after 900 days, Leningrad is liberated from a German stranglehold. In March Russian armies reach the borders of Poland and Romania. By the end of May the Crimea is back in Russian hands. In July thirty German divisions are captured, clearing the route to Warsaw. In August Romania surrenders, to be followed soon by the arrival of the Red Army in Yugoslavia and Hungary. By the start of 1945 Soviet forces are poised to move into the linked territories at the very heart of Hitler's Reich, Germany and Austria. | ||
| On April 6 a Soviet army enters Vienna, and before the end of the month Soviet forces encircle the German capital. On April 30 Russian soldiers are in the streets of Berlin at the moment when, below them in his bunker, Hitler commits suicide. Just five days earlier, on April 25, American and Soviet troops have made contact seventy miles south of Berlin, at Torgau on the Elbe. Stalin has been demanding since 1942 a second front in the west to relieve the German pressure on Russia. The Allies have not been in a position to provide it until D-Day, in June 1944. This delay has a major effect on the postwar world. Soviet armies are already deployed throughout eastern Europe when Germany surrenders in May 1945. | ||
| Such an outcome is already predictable when Stalin plays host to Roosevelt and Churchill in the conference at Yalta in February 1945. When the issue is raised, he makes the improbable promise that he will ensure free elections in eastern Europe after the war. He also agrees (in return for the bait of the Kuril Islands) to break his neutrality treaty with Japan and enter the war in the east. Russia's success in World War II lays the seeds for the Cold War of the following decades. But nothing should detract from the heroism with which that success has been achieved. Of all the combatant nations Russia suffers by far the greatest losses. The estimate of Russian soldiers and civilians killed is 17.5 million. The equivalent for Britain and the Commonwealth is less than 400,000. | ||
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