Armageddon (26 page)
The Russians swiftly secured Bulgaria and began to move into Yugoslavia. Major Dmitry Kalafati, a thirty-year-old graduate student from the Ukraine who became a distinguished scientist after the war, was ordered to take four artillery regiments to provide support for infantry of the 6th People’s Proletarian Division of Tito’s army. He found this a disturbing experience, since the partisans were prone to decamp to local villages at night, leaving the Russian guns unprotected. Tito’s men were also studiedly vague about where they might encounter the Germans. By the autumn of 1944, Russian ground forces were receiving highly effective tactical air support, but in Yugoslavia Kalafati was constantly frustrated by the refusal of Sixteenth Aviation Army to respond to his coded requests for Stormoviks. In desperation he sent a plain-language signal, “Fuck you—where are the planes?,” which at last produced Soviet dive-bombers.
Just as the British failed to cut off the retreat of the German Fifteenth Army through Holland, so in the east the German Army Groups E and F retreated north and west from the Balkans, escaping entrapment by the Russians sweeping through Rumania. Once again, the Wehrmacht demonstrated its skill in postponing the inevitable. Although the Warsaw Rising is well known in the West, much less familiar is the Slovak revolt in the autumn of 1944. It began in eastern Slovakia in late August. Local partisans—who were, unlike those of Warsaw, overwhelmingly loyal to Moscow—perceived their Soviet liberators close at hand beyond the Carpathians. When the Slovaks rebelled against their German occupiers, the Russians marched to their aid. Soviet troops pushed west with the support of Moscow-trained Czech troops. But the Germans concentrated two SS and five Wehrmacht divisions to resist the Soviet advance, and they were successful. “Because of the mountainous terrain, we would not use tanks and cavalry effectively, so could not exploit our successes,” Konev wrote to Zhukov on 27 September. “Our infantry was also untrained in mountain warfare. We advanced so slowly that the enemy had time to move troops to threatened sectors.” Konev reported that most of his infantry divisions were reduced to barely 3,000 men apiece, and his tank corps to an average of sixty tanks, most of which suffered constant mechanical breakdown in the mountains. Shortages of ammunition and fuel made it impossible to use artillery effectively. Between 8 September and 28 October, Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front in the East Carpathians alone lost an average of 1,216 casualties a day, giving a total of 62,014. Then the Germans turned on the Slovaks. The notorious Dirlewanger and Kaminski Brigades, fresh from their triumphs in Warsaw, were deployed in eastern Slovakia. They wreaked a terrible vengeance upon all who failed to flee into the mountains. Although the Germans had suffered defeat, substantial forces were able to escape westwards from the battlefield.
Within a matter of months, Stalin’s political hegemony had supplanted that of Hitler across vast tracts of territory. With great difficulty and in defiance of fierce American criticism, Churchill was able to save Greece from communist domination, chiefly because British forces were able to land there from the Mediterranean. Elsewhere in eastern Europe, however, a grim pattern was emerging. The Western allies, and above all the Americans, still perceived the war overwhelmingly as a military event. For Stalin, it was always a political one. The days were over when Moscow confined its ambitions to dominance of its own republics. Russia’s reward for victory was to be an empire of buffer-states, which would ensure that never again was the nation vulnerable to direct aggression. Stalin scarcely troubled to disguise from Russia’s allies his determination that political settlements determined by Soviet wishes would be imposed upon territories liberated by Soviet arms. He argued, not unreasonably by his own logic, that the Western allies likewise pleased themselves about the governance of every nation their own armies liberated. “This war is not as in the past,” Stalin told Milovan Djilas. “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”
As the Americans and British advanced across western Europe, although some disorder persisted behind their front, there was no armed resistance to their administration. They were presiding over a genuine process of liberation. Across millions of square miles of Soviet-occupied territory, however, desperate fighting persisted for months. Far behind the front, whole Soviet divisions were deployed to clear up the armed flotsam of many nations, men who knew that they possessed no hope of survival if they fell into Russian hands. In addition to German stragglers, there were Ukrainians and representatives of Soviet minorities of every hue who had been rash enough to throw in their lot with the Nazis. Forming bands sometimes hundreds strong, they sallied from their eyries in forests and mountains to attack Soviet supply dumps and villages, in search of food or vengeance. “For some reason,” Beria reported to Stalin on 25 November 1944, “there are a great many people who call themselves partisans, operating in groups of several hundreds, dressed in the ragged uniforms of several armies, or of Ukrainian police. They rob, rape women and shave their heads and otherwise provoke trouble in cunning ways. They make swift, sudden thrusts, using the forests for cover and infiltrating men into our positions to provoke unrest. They harry our forces, cut off units and establish road blocks. They know their areas very well.”
The Soviet archives are filled with NKVD reports of partisan activity, both real and fictional. It will never be possible to determine how many of those hunted down and killed were indeed traitors to the Soviet cause or mere hapless innocents. Beria, the NKVD’s overlord, was a killer at least as terrible as Himmler or Heydrich, and more effective than either. While generals measured their triumphs in the miles that their armies advanced, Beria reported his achievements to Stalin in a ghastly game bag of captured and slaughtered state enemies, submitted monthly to the Kremlin. On 31 December, he declared a total of 13,960 Ukrainians, 7,228 Belorussians, 9,688 Moldavians and 45,011 citizens of Leningrad returned to Russia from captured territories, along with similar flotsam from other minority groups. Of these, 38,428 had been sent to their homes; 5,827 conscripted for the armed forces; and 43,693 sent to NKVD camps. Among them 153 “spies and traitors” had already been identified, said Beria.
Alexandr Klein, a Red Army officer captured by the Germans, escaped back to the Russian lines, where he faced an interrogation characteristic of Soviet paranoia:
Suddenly the Major raised himself sharply, and asked, “Can you prove that you are Jewish?”
I smiled, embarrassed, and said that I could—by taking off my trousers.
“And you are saying that the Germans didn’t know you were a Jew?”
“If they had known, believe me, I wouldn’t be standing here.”
“Ach, you
yid
mug!” exclaimed the dandy, and kicked me in the lower stomach so hard that I suddenly gasped for breath and fell.
“What are these lies? Tell us, you motherfucker, with what mission were you sent here? Who are you involved with? When did you sell yourself? For how much? How much did you give yourself for, you creature for sale? What is your code name?
Klein was sentenced to death, reprieved, and finally sent for twenty years to one of the worst camps in the Soviet Gulag. Alongside such people as his interrogators were the Western allies seeking to destroy Nazi tyranny.
Stalin issued an order giving high priority to mopping up rear areas behind the Red Army: “All agents, saboteurs and terrorists must be captured, [together with] all those who have served in German police units, as public prosecutors, leaders of local fascist organizations, editors of newspapers and magazines, members of the so-called ‘Russian Liberation Army’ as well as other suspicious elements.” Already 31,089 NKVD troops were operating behind the Soviet front. A further four divisions and four independent regiments—27,900 men plus 1,050 “experienced NKVD specialists”—were sent to reinforce them.
To the very end of the war, German military intelligence continued to dispatch agents behind the Soviet lines. The Germans used Soviet renegades with absolute ruthlessness, parachuting them into Russian-occupied territory in full awareness that their prospects of survival were negligible. Two Armenians in German pay were arrested in the Crimea in July 1944. They were ex-Komsomol members who had been trained by the Germans and dropped into the area with a transmitter. The NKVD used them to play a “radio game” with their German controllers. The prisoners sent some forty signals, announcing the creation of fictitious sabotage groups and demanding more agents and supplies. The Germans swallowed all this, and asked for daily local weather reports. On 23 December, they parachuted another agent into Soviet hands, carrying 427,000 roubles in cash and new radio batteries. Such wretched men, shuttlecocks between such adversaries, could expect mercy from neither.
I
N THE WINTER
of 1944, Churchill felt isolated in his struggle against Stalin’s ambitions in eastern Europe. After more than five years of strife in the name of freedom, tens of millions of people were merely to exchange one tyranny for another. Some historians highlight the notorious slip of paper which the prime minister handed to Stalin in Moscow in October, acknowledging Russia’s hegemony in large parts of its conquests. The Soviet dictator casually ticked the note. This exchange represented, say Churchill’s critics, an unworthy and indeed unprincipled acquiescence, which belies his claims as a crusader for east European freedom. Even those Americans who recognized the malevolence of Soviet intentions, such as Harriman, recoiled from Churchill’s apparent willingness to concede much of eastern Europe as a Soviet sphere of influence. The United States deplored the very concept of spheres of influence, whether Russian or British. Its government argued that it was committed to the rights of all peoples everywhere to self-determination.
Yet Churchill perceived himself reluctantly to be accepting some faits accomplis, in order to throw everything into the struggle to save Poland and Greece from Stalin’s maw. Several leading members of the U.S. administration were by now thoroughly alarmed by Soviet behaviour. Their views counted for little, however, while the ailing Roosevelt nursed his delusions that he could forge an equable relationship with Stalin. The minds of Allied generals, even including Churchill’s closest military partner, Sir Alan Brooke, were fixed solely upon the defeat of Germany and Japan. They were thinking little about the shape of post-war Europe, and, indeed, why should soldiers have been expected to do so? Britain’s prime minister, with such assistance as the Foreign Office could give, continued to strive vainly to thwart Stalin’s ambitions, while publicly asserting British support for the Soviet alliance. In particular, in the autumn of 1944 Churchill went further in risking Stalin’s wrath than at any period of the war, to fight for Poland.
After the defeat of their Rising, the plight of the Poles was dreadful indeed. Since Stalin had seized eastern Poland in 1939, his minions had laboured to eliminate potential resistance to communist domination. It is now known that the 4,000 Poles whose bodies were found by the Nazis at Katyn in 1943 represented only a sample of at least 26,000 Polish officers murdered by Beria’s NKVD. A single Soviet executioner achieved an unspeakable record, by killing 7,000 men personally, with a German Walther pistol. To this day, mass graves of Stalin’s victims continue to be uncovered in eastern Poland. As the Soviet armies advanced into the country in 1944, the NKVD followed in their wake, killing Polish resisters who had survived the struggle for Warsaw. Russia waged war upon the Army Krajowa long after the last German had been driven from Polish soil. Moscow’s policy was implacable. For all Churchill’s passionate pleadings for the nation for whose freedom Britain had gone to war, he received no glint of comfort from Moscow, its determination fortified by confidence in Washington’s acquiescence. Stalin liked Roosevelt personally, while disliking Churchill. The Soviet leader acknowledged after the war, however, that his attitudes were formed by the fact that the American president would humour his purposes, while the British prime minister would not. And nothing could alter the reality that Soviet troops stood upon Polish soil, while the American and British armies were immeasurably remote.
FEAR, LOVE AND THE PARTY
T
HEY WERE A
strange mixture, the soldiers of the Red Army, the largest fighting force the world had ever seen, deployed from the Baltic to the Balkans. There were great masses of illiterate peasants from the Soviet republics, who performed the worst of the Red Army’s brutalities, and from whom neither human thought processes nor tactical skills were demanded. In the better formations and technical arms, by contrast, many officers and some soldiers were educated, sensitive men and women, cultured within the limits permitted to Stalin’s Russia. It was a paradox, that while the Red Army was capable of terrible brutalities, many of its soldiers were deeply puritanical. Captain Vasily Krylov, twenty-two, had only once kissed a girl in his life before he went to the war, though he made up for lost time when he encountered Red Army nurses. Twenty-one-year-old Major Yury Ryakhovsky professed himself shocked to discover pornographic pictures in a German bunker. When he was wounded and in hospital, he formed a warm friendship with Klava, his nurse. They sometimes sang songs together, but never went to bed. “I was a very sensitive, innocent young man.” Like so many of his generation of educated Russians, Ryakhovsky read voraciously—never whodunits or romances, but Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin and endless poetry. Vasily Krylov carried a volume of Shakespeare in his pack beside his lucky teddy bear. Half the Red Army had read Anna Akhmatova’s patriotic poem “Courage,” published in 1942: