Fighting on all Fronts (34 page)
Read Fighting on all Fronts Online
Authors: Donny Gluckstein
57
Volkogonov, 1991, p434.
58
Y Grigorian in Joli, 2010, p313.
59
S Mikoyan in Joli, 2010, p262.
60
Werth, 1964, p249.
61
Volkogonov, 1991, p486.
62
I C B Dear and M R D Foot,
The Oxford Companion to the Second World War
(OUP, Oxford, 1995), p290.
63
Volkogonov, 1991, p505.
64
Medinskii, 2012, pp394-395.
65
Quoted in Volkogonov, 1991, p427.
66
G Ter-Gazariants in Joli, 2010, p129.
67
Grossman, p155.
68
Quoted in D Loza, F
ighting for the Soviet Motherland
(Nebraska Press, Nebraska, 1998), pp129-130.
69
Alexander Revich in Joli, 2010, p167.
70
Oleg Ozerov in Joli, 2010, pp87-88.
71
Ozerov in Joli, 2010, p96.
72
Volkogonov, 1991, p445.
73
B V Sokolov,
Okkupatsiia, Pravda i Mify
, 2002 in
militera.lib.ru/research/sokolov3/index.html
.
74
Sokolov, 2002.
75
Sokolov, 2002.
76
Sokolov, 2002.
77
A S Sawin et al (eds),
Der zweite Weltkrieg
(Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1988), p366.
78
Sokolov, 2002.
79
I Ermolov,
Russkoe Gosudarstvo v Nemetskom Tylu. Istoria Lokotskogo Samoupravleniia
,
militera.lib.ru/research/ermolov_ig02/index.html
.
80
Sawin et al, 1988, pp366-367.
81
Sokolov, 2002.
82
Sokolov, 2002.
83
Sokolov, 2002.
84
Sokolov, 2002.
85
Sokolov, 2002.
86
D Granin in Joli, 2010, p30.
87
E Rzhevskaia in Joli, 2010, p218.
88
Glantz, 2000, p72.
89
Werth, 1964, p215.
90
J Scott,
Behind the Urals
(Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1942), p263.
91
D A Zhukov, I I Kovtin.
RNNA. Vrag v Sovetskoi Forme
(Veche, Moscow, 2012), p18.
92
Zhukov, 2012, p27.
93
Medinskii, 2012, p302.
94
Burovskii, 2011, p343.
95
Burovskii, 2011, p344.
96
Medinskii, 2012, p391.
97
Burovskii, 2011, p353.
98
T Selesnev, quoted in Sokolov, 2002.
99
Medinskii, 2012, p265.
100
Burovskii, 2011, pp359-361.
101
This latter figure is for both Chechens and Ingushes—Volkogonov, 1991, p444.
102
Burovskii, 2011, p363.
103
As Burovskii puts it, Burovskii, 2011, p363.
104
GKO decree no. 5859.
www.memorial.krsk.ru/DOKUMENT/USSR/440511.htm
.
105
Burovskii, 2011, p363.
106
Volkogonov, 1991, p444.
107
See Medinskii’s critique, 2012, p331. Ermolov writes, for example: “An important role was played by individuals who against the background of the collapse of soviet power in the remaining Red Army regions attempted to create a political movement, which, in its conceptions, could in future develop beyond the limits of the Lokot district and achieve an all-Russian dimension.”(I, Ermolov,
Russkoe Gosudarstvo v Nemetskom Tylu. Istoria Lokotskogo Samoupravleniia
, p32.)
108
D I Cherniakov,
Lokotskaia gazeta, ‘Golos naroda’, na sluzhbe u Natsistkoi propagandy
,
www.august-1914.ru/occupation2.pdf
, p68.
109
Quoted in Cherniakov, p69.
110
Quoted in I Ermolov, p31.
111
Ermolov, p21.
112
Ermolov, pp16-17.
113
Medinskii, 2012, p332.
114
Zhukov, 2012, p67.
115
Oleg Smyslov,
Predateli i Padachi
(Veche, Moscow, 2013), pp76-77.
116
Goering, quoted in Smyslov, 2013, p95.
117
Quoted in Smylsov, 2013, pp94-95.
118
Smyslov, 2013, p147.
119
Volkogonov, 1991, p456.
120
Volkogonov, 1991, p456.
121
Volkogonov, 1991, p491.
122
Volkogonov, 1991, p505.
123
L Rabichev in Joli, 2010, p202.
124
S Mikoyan in Joli, 2010, pp121-122.
125
Ozerov in Joli, 2010, p97.
126
S Mikoyan in Joli, 2010, p262.
127
V Etoosh in Joli, 2010, p150.
128
www.marxists.org/archive/petrovic/1965/reification.htm
.
129
W Reich,
Listen, Little Man!
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1974), p7 at
www.wilhelmreichtrust.org/listen_little_man.pdf
The Slovak National Uprising of 1944
Tomáš Tengely-Evans
The Slovak National Uprising of 1944 was one of the largest—and shortest—instances of armed insurrection against Nazi occupation during World War Two. It didn’t just involve the Slovak partisans, underground guerrilla fighters, but also international volunteers and regular troops. During the height of the Slovak National Uprising (henceforth referred to as the “SNP”) 18,000 partisans fought alongside 60,000 standing and reservist troops from the Slovak army, who had answered the call by rebel commanders to fight against father Jozef Tiso’s fascist puppet regime, the “Slovak State”. This insurgent force was pitted against military units and paramilitary forces loyal to the Tiso regime and 48,000 Waffen SS and Wehrmacht troops who had just occupied the territory on 28 August 1944.
Within two weeks of the start of the SNP on 29 August the insurgent army was in control of central and parts of eastern Slovakia. But this wasn’t a purely military operation. The insurgent command directed a basic war economy from its capital in Banska Bystrica in central Slovakia; and small attempts at building a “civil society” were also made, such as a free press and radio station and moves towards reforming public education. However, by the end of October 1944 Nazi forces had successfully recaptured the liberated territory in bitter fighting that saw 10,000 resistance fighters killed and a further 5,000 suffer capture and execution. While a small partisan force continued to fight the Nazi occupation, Slovakia would be liberated not by the partisans but by Marshal Ivan Konev’s Russian tank columns.
The insurgent army faced a difficult situation, but the uprising and the way it went down to defeat were both shaped by its own leadership, the broader inter-imperialist rivalry and the relationship between the two. It’s not a mere detail that Konev’s tanks began rolling through the Dukla Pass into eastern Slovakia just as the Nazis were
recapturing Banska Bystrica—and less than a month after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising.
Yet very little is written about the SNP in English or Slovak histories of the Second World War, and Slovak historiography is mired in a right wing revisionist debate. When the Communist Party ruled Czechoslovakia, the SNP was a cornerstone of its propaganda and portrayed as an example of heroic communist resistance to fascism with the party playing the leading role. Now, unsurprisingly, this interpretation is unfashionable, but it has been replaced by a dangerous revisionist trend that paints the SNP as a “Bolshevik putsch” and the fascist “Slovak State” as a progressive, albeit flawed, episode in history (and this is something that reaches far beyond fascist pseudo historians, who can easily be disregarded). Meanwhile, trying to straddle somewhere in the middle is today’s official history of a “democratic coalition” against German occupation with the emphasis on social “history from below”—on “what did I do”—without the broader political picture. Neither grasps the reality and full complexity of the SNP, which can only be understood by using our analysis of an
imperialist war from above
and a
people’s war from below
.
The SNP was directly triggered by the Nazi occupation of the “Slovak State” on 28 August 1944, but it had been in the making for the previous five years since the British and French governments struck a deal with Hitler that dismembered the Czechoslovak state in 1938. The “Munich Betrayal” illustrates that the Second World War was not a war of the “democratic powers” against fascism; but it was also important in shaping how the uprising played out in a number of ways from both above and below. While the SNP weakened the old ruling class and opened up the possibility for fightback against the Nazis from below, it left the old rulers strong enough to make the running for leadership of any resistance movement.
The representatives of the dominant wing of Western Europe’s ruling classes—that favoured “appeasement”—made clear the position of imperialist powers throughout the 1930s. Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, had said in 1936 that: “Nations cannot be expected to incur automatic obligations
save for areas where their vital interests are concerned
”.
1
The strategic interests of British imperialism did not extend into Eastern Europe, and certainly didn’t include safeguarding “plucky little” Czechoslovakia’s independence.
France had signed a treaty in 1925 that guaranteed Czechoslovakia’s borders and there had been a long-standing relationship between both ruling classes. During the First World War a group of middle class nationalists set up the Czechoslovak National Council with the aim of gaining independence from the Hapsburg Empire. This group represented an aspirant Czechoslovak ruling class, and it would indeed become the ruling class that tried to cling onto power right up until the Communist Party took control in 1948. It included the likes of Edvard Benes who was the president in the run up to the Munich Betrayal and led the “Czechoslovak government-in-exile” during the war. Its strategy was to win the ruling classes of Europe to supporting Czechoslovak independence through fighting alongside the Entente. The council organised Czechoslovak Legions in France and Italy, and the infamous one that fought against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War.
However, it wasn’t in France’s imperialist interests to face an all-out confrontation with Nazi imperialism in 1938 either; its government privately hoped that Britain would itself “suggest that pressure should be put on Prague…to acquiesce without seeming to have taken the initiative in the matter”.
2
Trotsky aptly summed up the situation at the time: “England and France threw Czechoslovakia into Hitler’s maw to give him something to digest for a time and thus postpone the question of the colonies”.
3
4
Russia also signed a similar treaty in 1935; however, it could afford to posture much more than the West European powers as it was only obliged to act alongside France and did not actually share a common border with Czechoslovakia.
When the Czechoslovak ruling class had resigned itself to the Munich agreement, President Benes protested that: “We have been disgracefully betrayed” and the new prime minister General Jan Syrovy tried to explain that: “We had no other choice because we had been left alone”.
5
But Syrovy had previously promised, “I guarantee that the army stands and will stand on our frontiers to defend our liberty to the last”.
6
The dismemberment and subsequent occupation of the inter-war Czechoslovak republic discredited the bourgeois politicians who been hung out to dry by the same West European powers that they had looked to (in particular for Czechoslovakia’s rulers, the French state). “I think that the bourgeoisie was discredited…first of all by the defeat of the First Republic in 1938 and secondly by collaboration of part of it with the German”, rightly summed up by Jiri Pelikan, a Communist Party member who participated in the resistance in Moravia but fled after the Russian invasion in 1968.
7
This discrediting meant that the Communist Party in both the Czech and Slovak lands was able to play an important part in the underground resistance, which helped it to attain its relatively strong political position following the war’s end in May 1945.
8
But while the party’s members on the ground were important resistance fighters, its own leadership sitting in Moscow was under the direction of Russian foreign policy. In the first phase of the occupation the Comintern argued that the main enemy was the Czechoslovak bourgeoisie headed by Benes and backed by the US and British imperialists. While working with the old ruling class would have been wrong and would weaken the resistance movement, the Communist Party wasn’t fighting for a revolutionary alternative but was following the sharp changes in Russian foreign policy. The Comintern’s line included: “Even messages signed by [the party leader] Gottwald himself stated that the German soldiers who had invaded Czechoslovakia were, in fact, proletarians in soldiers’ uniforms and therefore in no way class enemies”.
9
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that made an alliance between Russia and Nazi Germany further disorientated Communist Party members.
10
This was similar to the experience of other Communist Parties in France, Italy and Greece, which also played an important role in resistance movements. Pelikan argues that: “In fact, the party throughout the country modified these instructions, saying firstly that the comrades in Moscow were not well informed about the situation and secondly that the instructions were completely out of touch with reality”.
11
Nonetheless, the party’s positions did severely compromise working class resistance to fascism and damaged resistance during the SNP itself.