Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (30 page)

The Soviet Army of Stalinist times was probably the most elaborately shackled force in history, for it possessed no means of independent action.
What a paradox! The fearsome war machine, which was grinding the Wehrmacht to pieces, was so organized internally that its commanders could not take the slightest step on their own initiative. Marshal Rokossovsky, who held both the highest military rank and the top command in the most important of Fronts, could not take the most trivial decisions without first obtaining the written permission of the political officers who swarmed above, alongside, and behind him. He, like all Soviet soldiers, held a subordinate position within the organization of which he was the nominal head.

Three key mechanisms must be taken into account. The first revolved round Stalin’s personal dictatorship; the second concerned the Communist Party’s Chief Military-Political Department, or ‘Glav-Pol’; the third turned on the special status of the National Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). Not only was every single Soviet institution guarded by watchdog bodies, but every watchdog was watched by other, superior, watchdogs specifically appointed to monitor their activities.

By the mid-1940s, Stalin’s personal authority was virtually total. Over the previous twenty years, he had transformed the collective party dictatorship of the Bolsheviks into a still more extreme form of totalitarianism in which the will of the Leader and the will of his party were indistinguishable. Later commentators talk politely of the ‘Personality Cult’: in practice it was every bit as vicious and mystical as the Nazis’
Führerprinzip.
Stalin could do no wrong. He held all the levers of power. In addition to the key post of General Secretary of the Communist Party, he was also Prime Minister and Commanderin-Chief. There were no longer any party factions. There was no ‘Right Opposition’ or ‘Left Opposition’ as had once existed in the 1920s. All there was, was one person who held the lives and deaths of 200 million at his bidding. The Soviet Army existed to execute his commands; those who failed to execute them were themselves executed. Those, like Rokossovsky or Zhukov, who carried them out with efficiency and panache risked his displeasure for being too successful.

Ever since Lenin’s days, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had worked on the principle that it had an absolute right to guide and direct all the activities of all state institutions (known in the jargon as ‘the party’s leading role’). Embodied in the constitution, it ensured that any act not authorized by the party was illegal. In practice, it worked through a complicated ‘dual system’ of Government in which particular party organs were designated to supervise the work of particular state
bodies. Hence, the party’s Politburo gave (unpublished) orders to the Council of Ministers: the International Department of the Party Secretariat controlled every aspect of Soviet foreign policy including the work of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and of foreign Communist parties abroad; and the party’s Military-Political Department controlled the armed forces. Most Western commentators came to realize that the party’s General Secretary was the top executive who completely outranked the Soviet State President, but many of them never managed to notice that Soviet embassies were not necessarily run by ambassadors, that Soviet ministries were not always run by ministers: and that the Soviet Army was not really run by the marshals.

In the 1940s, Glav-Pol and the NKVD maintained a stranglehold on every aspect of the army’s life. Through the NKVD chief, Lavrenti Beria, they were entirely at Stalin’s disposal. They exercised their hold through indoctrination, through the dual system of military commands, and through the activities of ‘special forces’.

Political indoctrination received a higher priority than military training: all Soviet soldiers were thoroughly indoctrinated, but only the elite troops were thoroughly trained. The politicos ran all the military academies, induction centres, and training camps, and were apt to hold frontline propaganda seminars on the eve of battle. They were taught to inculcate the infallibility of Marxism-Leninism, the invincibility of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Russia, and the unparalleled genius of Joseph Stalin.

On the First Byelorussian Front, however, difficulties arose. In 1944–45, a new draft of non-Russian conscripts arrived. It consisted largely of local men who had been schooled before the war outside the USSR, principally in Poland and Romania, and who were not disposed to accept the official line. ‘They regarded it quite sceptically,’ one political department reported with alarm. ‘After the conversation on the feat of a Hero of the Soviet Union, Sgt. Varlamov, who blocked the embrasure of an enemy firepoint with his body, there were comments that this cannot be possible.’
¹⁹
At the same time, another NKVD report talked of unacceptable non-operational losses ‘due to the ignorance of the officers and the bad training of soldiers.’ In one division alone twenty-three troopers were killed and sixty-seven wounded in a single month through the mishandling of sub-machine guns.
²⁰

The tentacles of the Military-Political Department were spread through every level of the armed forces. Its agents, generally known to
the outside world as ‘commissars’ but officially designated as
politruks
, or ‘political leaders’, usually held two posts. One post, that was not publicized, lay within the department’s own hierarchy. The other lay with the professional hierarchy of the armed forces. In this way, it was entirely possible for a person of high military rank to be relatively low in the pecking order of power, and equally for figures of apparently mediocre military status to wield power and influence far above their formal status. At the lowest level, every Soviet company or battalion possessed both a military commander and a political officer, whose job was to report to his party superiors and thereby to keep the commander in line. At the highest level, every Soviet marshal or general was shadowed by a political officer of similar nominal rank but of superior political stature.

Marshal Rokossovsky’s frontline command bunker, for example, would have been laid out to a standard pattern. It was extremely austere. The essential furniture consisted of a double bunk bed, and a table with two chairs. The Marshal would occupy the top bunk. He would be constantly watched night and day from the lower bunk by his political officer, Gen. Nikolai Bulganin, an ex-Chekist. When orders were ready for despatch, the men would sit at the same table. And both would sign – Rokossovsky first, and Bulganin second. From this set-up, it is not difficult to deduce who the real commander of the First Byelorussian Front was. And the conversation can hardly have been jocular. For Bulganin was a senior member of the service which only six or seven years earlier had put Rokossovsky on trial, shot the majority of his peers, and sent him to the Gulag. Bulganin still had a brilliant career before him. Once the war was over, it was no accident that he would rise to the very top of the system whilst Rokossovsky did not.

The All-Union NKVD – successor to the Cheka and the OGPU, and predecessor of the KGB – was an umbrella organization which controlled all branches of the Soviet security services. It was far more comprehensive than anything that existed elsewhere. Its numerous directorates controlled all manner of operations from espionage and counter-espionage to the civil police, the frontier and coast guards, the fire brigades, the prisons, the Gulag, the Ministry of the Interior, criminal investigations and prosecutions, and various corps of internal security troops. In comparison to the German model, it was like the SS, the
Waffen-SS
, the
Sicherheitsdienst
, the
Abwehr
, the
Kripo
, the Gestapo, and many other services, all rolled into one. Its three Chief Directors, G. G. Yagoda, N. I. Yezhov, and Lavrentii
Beria, were all mass-murderers on the grand scale. Each was himself murdered.

The
Smyersh
organization, whose name derived from an acronym of
smyert’ shpionam
(‘death to the spies’), was the ultimate wartime watchdog of the watchdogs, and the embodiment of Stalinist paranoia. Formally created in 1943 as a department of the Soviet General Staff, it was separate from both the Red Army and the NKVD, even though all its operatives were drawn from the NKVD’s 3rd Directorate of Military CounterIntelligence. Its commander was Beria’s deputy. Its special duties were to root out all spies, saboteurs, subversives, and suspicious persons from the military and from the rear areas under military occupation. There were
Smyersh
units in the HQ of every front, every army, every corps, and every division.

On the First Byelorussian Front, the chief representative of
Smyersh
had several discrete units under his immediate command and could call on extra ‘special forces’ as needs arose. Though a mere lieutenant general, he could have obtained the authority to arrest Marshal Rokossovsky at any time. Rokossovsky could never have ordered the arrest of a senior political officer.

The NKVD’s Chief Directorate of Internal Troops (GUPVO) was itself divided into six directorates, controlling the Frontier Corps, the Convoy Troops, the Industrial and State Guards, the Railway Guards, and the Intendant’s Service. From 1941, a large number of NKVD rifle regiments, totalling some 100,000 men, were raised and trained for combat. They were formed into independent NKVD line divisions complete with their own armour and artillery. From these were drawn the fearsome destroyer battalions, whose task was to hunt down enemies in the rear areas, and the notorious blocking detachments, whose function was to man the cordons behind the Red Army’s lines and to drive the troops into battle. Every Red Army soldier knew that if he failed to face up to enemy bullets in front of him he would be killed by an NKVD bullet in the back.

The implications of these interlocking organizations for any outsider caught up in the Soviet advance were extremely serious. The frontline soldiers, whom the outsiders were likely to meet first, were usually friendly enough. But the second line was inveterately hostile. The NKVD would routinely arrest all and sundry and would ask questions later. Since they habitually killed their own people with impunity, they thought nothing of killing foreigners. Theirs was a closed world with which it was extremely difficult to interact.

The political controls under which the Red Army laboured could be clearly seen in action by anyone who watched it on the march. As reported by eyewitnesses, it passed through each locality in three distinct waves. The frontline troops, who went first, were well clothed, well shod, well armed, and supported by huge streams of tanks, self-propelled guns, motorized AA batteries, and rocket launchers. Next came a vast horde of second-line soldiery and camp followers. These were often dressed in rags or scraps of uniform and were bootless. Scurrying to and fro like ants, or riding mangy ponies, or dragging themselves along in a tangled mass of wagons and captured farm animals, they carried their rifles on a string and their sacks of loot slung over their shoulders. At the rear, the NKVD’s private security army stood attentively in their shining American jeeps as they edged forward. Dressed in smart grey uniforms with bright blue epaulettes, they toted sub-machine guns at the ready. Their task was to shoot down anyone in front who failed to keep moving.

Politics equally underlay the calculated brutality of the Soviet soldiery towards civilians. The conquered peoples were deliberately chastised with the rough edge of Soviet might. What is more, on higher orders deriving from the earlier part of the war, all Soviet people who had lived under German occupation but had not been killed resisting, were to be treated as potential traitors. Plunder was standard. Assault and battery was normal. Murder was common. Rape was ubiquitous. And the NKVD, who would pounce on the least hint of political dissent, did not think to intervene in such trivialities. A famous Russian writer, who served as an artillery officer under Rokossovsky, described the scene:

The conquerors of Europe swarm,
Russians scurrying everywhere.
Vacuum cleaners, wine, and candles,
Skirts and picture frames, and pipes
Brooches and medallions, blouses, buckles
Typewriters (not of a Russian type)
Rings of sausages and cheeses . . .
A moment later the cry of a girl,
Somewhere from behind a wall,
‘I’m not a German. I’m not a German.
No! I’m – Polish. I’m a Pole.’
Grabbing what comes handy, those
Like-minded lads get in and start –
And lo, what heart
Could well oppose?
²¹

Politics, above all, determined the extreme rigour directed against all non-Soviet resistance fighters. On 14 July 1944, in the week that Rokossovsky crossed the Bug, Stalin and his Chief of the General Staff, Gen. Antonov, sent a special order to all commanders on the various western fronts:

From Moscow’s point of view, foreign Communist parties existed to bolster Moscow’s influence abroad. To these ends, every European country was blessed, or saddled, with its resident CP. Until 1943, the worldwide network of CPs was maintained and guided by the Moscow-based Comintern organization.

Several fundamental questions are raised, therefore, by Comintern’s extraordinary decision in 1938 not merely to disband the Polish Communist Party (KPP) and to kill its leaders, but also to ‘suspend’ it in a manner that made no provision for a replacement. Clearly, this was something more than a mere purge. Stalin had killed off the Bolshevik leadership of his own party, and in wave after wave of terror purges had created an organization that was new in almost every respect. But he never attempted to abolish the party itself, because the party held the keys to the governance of the USSR. One can only conclude that his motives for attacking the Polish Communists in such an extreme way were not confined to rooting out infiltrators or suppressing ideological dissent. Since no steps were taken to create a new body in place of the KPP, one has to suspect that Stalin had already foreseen the possibility of destroying Poland itself. For the sequence of events was remarkable. Less than a year after Comintern had declared that the KPP had been ‘temporarily abolished’, Molotov was declaring that Poland, too, had ‘ceased to exist’.