This is the official history of the greatest land war ever fought, written by the institution that had the most to gain from telling it a particular way. The title page names no single author. Above it stands the corporate one: "Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CC CPSU." Below it, an editorial commission of twenty-nine, chaired by the veteran Party ideologist P. N. Pospelov and studded with marshals of the Soviet Union — Bagramyan, Sokolovsky, Zakharov, and, among them, A. A. Grechko, the serving Minister of Defence whose own Liberation Mission of the Soviet Armed Forces is this book's companion volume in the present series. The working editor-in-chief of the text itself was M. M. Minasyan, and it is his name the catalogue records. But the book is not really Minasyan's. It is the Party's account of the Party's war, produced by the body whose job was to fix the canonical version of Soviet history and defend it against all comers. Nearly a quarter of a million words long, detailed to the level of individual divisions and river crossings, it is the single most authoritative one-volume statement of what the Soviet state wished the world to understand about 1941–1945.
Its date needs a word, because the spine misleads. The English edition carries a Progress Publishers copyright of 1974, but the title page states plainly that it is an "abridged translation from the 1970 Russian edition," prepared by the editorial board of the second Russian edition. The arguments in it are the arguments of 1970, not 1974 — and 1970 matters, because that was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the victory, the year the Brezhnev-era cult of the Great Patriotic War reached its full ceremonial height. By then the war had become the central legitimating myth of the Soviet state: not the Revolution of 1917, increasingly awkward to celebrate, but the victory of 1945, around which a whole civic religion of eternal flames, eternal-glory monuments and anniversary parades had been built. A small internal tell fixes the moment. Among the wartime "prominent political workers" the book lists by name is "L. I. Brezhnev" — the General Secretary, whose modest 1943 service on the "Little Land" beachhead was being elevated, exactly in these years, into an episode of the war's high drama. This is a book produced at the apex of that cult, by the men who administered it.
Two things have to be said about it, and the order matters, because the second must never be allowed to cancel the first.
The war this book describes was the decisive military event of the twentieth century, and no honest reader can finish it unmoved. The central claim the book makes for the Eastern Front is true. The Soviet-German front was, in the book's phrase, "the main and decisive front of the Second World War" — the theatre where the German army was actually broken. The figures it gives are of the right order: 181 divisions and eighteen brigades massed against the USSR in June 1941, some 77 per cent of the Wehrmacht's active strength thrown east. It was Soviet soldiers, not Western ones, who fought the bulk of the German army for four years and destroyed most of it. It was the Red Army that reached and opened the death factories: the book describes the liberation of the "notorious huge Oswiecim concentration camp" — Auschwitz — near Cracow, where, it records, the Germans "put to death more than four million people" (the figure standard in the Soviet bloc at the time, later revised down by historians, but the crime is not in doubt). And it was the Soviet people who paid the incomprehensible price. "The USSR lost 20,000,000 of its sons and daughters," the book states — the official toll of 1970; the figure now generally accepted is closer to 27 million. Either way it is a wound with no parallel in modern history. Sixteen hundred towns razed, seventy thousand villages burned, a third of the national wealth destroyed. The men in the grey greatcoats who died stopping this were, overwhelmingly, workers and peasants who understood themselves to be fighting fascism, and they were.
All of this must be credited without stint. And it must be credited precisely because the critique that follows is not the reactionary one. There is a long tradition in Western Cold War writing that sets Stalin's crimes beside Hitler's, calls the two states versions of one "totalitarianism," and quietly deflates the anti-fascist war into a squabble between equivalent tyrannies. That tradition is false, and the revolutionary socialist tradition from which this introduction is written has always rejected it. The Soviet Union was not Nazi Germany's moral twin; the war against it was not a war between two identical evils; and the Red Army's victory was a real deliverance for the peoples of Europe, this reader's own ancestors among the saved. Nothing in what follows should be read as chipping at that. Ernest Mandel, whose The Meaning of the Second World War (Verso, 1986) is the Fourth International's own full-length reckoning with the war and the counterweight to this volume, is emphatic that it was "the tremendous increase in its industrial potential and productive reserve created by the October Revolution and the planned economy" that enabled the USSR to survive and win (ch. 5). The victory was the achievement of a society the October Revolution had built. The quarrel is not with the victory. It is with what the victory was made to excuse.
The method of this book is subtler than simple denial, and it is worth naming precisely, because it is easy to mistake for candour. This is a post-1956 text: it operates under Khrushchev's partial admission of the "personality cult," and it does not pretend that Stalin was infallible. It says, in so many words, that he made mistakes. What it never does — not once in 250,000 words — is allow those mistakes to be crimes, or allow the regime's real crimes to be mentioned at all. Stalin may be wrong about a date, a diplomatic calculation, a military order. The Soviet state is never wrong about anything it chose to do to its own people or its neighbours. Error is admissible. The category of criminality, turned inward, is not. Hold that distinction in mind and the book's whole architecture becomes legible: the disasters that Stalinist historiography has always blamed on everyone but Stalin are here handled by three techniques — recategorised as triumphs, diffused into an agentless abstraction, or simply erased.
Take first the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, and what came after it. The book does not hide the pact; it defends it. Cornered by the Munich betrayal, the Anglo-French refusal to negotiate seriously, and the threat of a two-front war, "the Soviet Government had no choice," it argues; "that was why the USSR consented to a non-aggression pact offered by Germany and signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939." As a reading of Soviet motives this is not worthless — the Western powers had indeed spent 1938–39 trying to turn Hitler eastward, and the book documents it with real material, including the Hudson-Wohltat talks in London. A critical reader can grant that the pact bought Stalin time and was, in the narrowest raison-d'état sense, explicable.
What the book cannot admit is what the pact actually contained. Nowhere does it mention the Secret Additional Protocol signed on the night of 23 August 1939 — the document in which Berlin and Moscow drew a line across Eastern Europe and divided it: Poland partitioned, the Baltic states, Finland and Bessarabia assigned to the Soviet "sphere." That protocol is the hinge of everything that happens over the next two years, and it is invisible. The suppression is not for want of the concept. In a bravura passage earlier in the same book, the authors expose the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936–37 by pointing to "the secret protocol appended" to it. They know exactly how damning a hidden clause is, and deploy the knowledge — against the enemy. Their own secret protocol does not exist.
And so the events it authorised have to be renarrated as their opposite. The Red Army's entry into eastern Poland on 17 September 1939 — coordinated with the Wehrmacht, executing the protocol's partition line — becomes a rescue: after "the Polish Government fled the country," Soviet troops moved in to "place the lives and property of the people under its protection," whereupon "Western Ukrainians became part of the fraternal people of the Ukraine, while Western Byelorussians rejoined their brothers in Byelorussia," their "freely-elected people's assemblies" duly requesting reunification. The annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940 — carried out under ultimatum, with Soviet garrisons already in place and the elections rigged — becomes a revolution: "the bourgeois governments were overthrown and replaced by people's governments," whose parliaments then "requested the Supreme Soviet of the USSR to admit their countries to the Soviet Union." The seizure of Bessarabia is an end to "a historical injustice." The Winter War against Finland is forced on a reluctant USSR when "Soviet territory was shelled" — the Mainila provocation, presented without irony as fact.
The Fourth International answered this account before it was written, in the very weeks the events occurred, and the answer has worn well. Trotsky had predicted the pact itself. On 6 March 1939 — nearly six months before it was signed, when the world's diplomats still thought a Moscow-London alliance the likelier outcome — he wrote that "an agreement between Stalin and Hitler, if attained — and there is nothing impossible in that, could astonish only the most hopeless simpletons." When the partition came, he named it exactly. While the British and French missions had been discussing the defence of Poland with Voroshilov, he wrote in September 1939, "the same Voroshilov, together with the representatives of the German General Staff, was discussing the best manner in which to smash and divide Poland." (That is the same Voroshilov whose reassuring Pravda interview of 27 August this book quotes approvingly.) "The Stalinist invasion," Trotsky concluded, "is nothing but a symmetrical supplement of the Hitlerite operations." As for the "reunification" of the Ukrainians and Byelorussians, he refused the sentimental cover the book still uses thirty years later: "no honest person can approve the 'liberation' of 8 million Ukrainians and White Russians at the price of the national enslavement of 23 million Poles." Mandel, writing in retrospect, folds the whole sequence into one clause: Stalin's "reckless diplomatic game" had "delivered Poland and Europe to Hitler" (ch. 2). None of these writers was a friend of the Western empires; all of them saw what the Institute of Marxism-Leninism was still, in 1970, unable to print.
The second disaster is the one the book comes closest to admitting, and the manner of the near-admission is itself the finding. In its survey of Soviet strength on the eve of war, the book concedes that progress "might have been greater still but for the Stalin personality cult," which "in the Armed Forces… manifested itself chiefly in unfounded repressions on slanderous charges of a large number of experienced commanders and political workers." Then, in the same breath, it closes the wound: "more than one-fourth of the cadres dismissed from the Armed Forces were reinstated on the eve and during the first months of the war."
Read what that sentence does. The agent has vanished — it was "the cult," not Stalin, that repressed the commanders. The scale has been shrunk to a reassuring fraction — one-fourth reinstated, as though the story were one of recovery rather than slaughter. And the word for what happened to the other three-fourths is never supplied. The reality the sentence is built to muffle is that in 1937–38 Stalin's political police shot the high command of the Red Army: three of its five marshals, thirteen of its fifteen army commanders, the majority of its corps and divisional commanders — tens of thousands of officers, executed or imprisoned on fabricated charges of treason, in the years immediately before the largest invasion in history. The book cannot say this, and its inability shows most clearly in what it does with the victims' names. Elsewhere it lists, as pioneers of Soviet military science, "M. V. Frunze, M. N. Tukhachevsky, A. I. Yegorov, B. M. Shaposhnikov, I. E. Yakir, I. P. Uborevich, S. S. Kamenev and many other outstanding generals." Four of the men in that sentence — Tukhachevsky, Yegorov, Yakir, Uborevich — were shot in the purge it has just described in the abstract. It names them as builders of the army; it does not name them as the army's murdered. The two halves of the fact are kept on separate pages, never allowed to touch. This is the same operation the present series has traced through Soviet histories of the arts and the Party — the "unmarked grave," the named figure whose manner of death is the one thing that cannot be printed — here performed on the officer corps of the Red Army.
And the book will not even hold to its own small concession. In its concluding chapters, describing the Party's wartime unity, it reaches for a quite different vocabulary: "long before the war the Party had crushed the Trotskyites, Right opportunists and bourgeois nationalists… and freed itself from defeatists and sceptics." That is the purge again — but now it is not "unfounded repressions" at all; now it is a purification, a strengthening, the Party ridding itself of rot. The book holds both accounts at once and reconciles neither. The purge is a regrettable excess of the cult when the subject is the army's unpreparedness, and a triumph of Party hygiene when the subject is the Party's cohesion. It depends which page you are on.
The reply corpus had measured the cost while Tukhachevsky was still alive. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936) — the book against which every Soviet account of Soviet society in this series should be read — Trotsky described the Red Army as it was being remade into a bureaucratic instrument: an institution that "has given birth to a privileged officers' caste, crowned with marshals," while the people were "forbidden in the Soviet Union to carry even nonexplosive weapons." He discussed Tukhachevsky in that book as the living "actual head of the War Department." Within a year Stalin had him shot. Mandel drew the military consequence directly: the Red Army's "complete lack of readiness in 1941" and the terrible showing in the Finnish war had been "brought about largely by Stalin's criminal purge of the Red Army"; that purge, he wrote, "decapitated the Red Army, disorganised the defences of the country… and facilitated the Nazi attack on the USSR" (chs. 2, 5). The decapitation is precisely the thing this book, which admits "unfounded repressions" of "commanders," will not connect to the catastrophe that followed.
That catastrophe is the load-bearing test, and here the book is more revealing — and, in one respect, more candid — than either its treatment of the pact or its treatment of the purge. The disaster of June 1941 was total: hundreds of thousands taken prisoner in the first weeks, the air force destroyed on the ground, the western Soviet Union overrun in a summer. The question a critical reader brings is whether the book assigns responsibility for it or hides behind enemy "perfidy." The answer is: mostly the latter, with cracks.
The dominant explanation is objective and exculpatory. The Germans held the advantages of prior deployment and full mobilisation; the Soviet divisions "were not readied for combat and were thus caught unawares"; the rearmament of the air force was incomplete; the new frontier fortifications were unfinished. Above all there is "the element of surprise achieved by the nazis": "the attack was sudden both for the nation and the Soviet Armed Forces." The most incriminating single document in the whole story is printed — the fatal directive telegraphed at 23.45 on 21 June, four hours before the attack, which alerted the border districts but warned them "not to react to provocations 'liable to create serious complications.'" The book prints it and walks past it. It does not ask who insisted on that clause, or why an army expecting an attack "on June 22–23" was ordered not to respond to one.
Yet the book does not manage total silence, and the cracks are worth marking, because they show how far even an official history could go in 1970 and where the wall stood. It concedes, citing Zhukov's memoirs and the Party's own fiftieth-anniversary theses, that "there were miscalculations in determining the time of a possible nazi attack," and — remarkably — it names Stalin: "until the very last moment Stalin believed that he could delay the outbreak of war by political and diplomatic means." It even admits that the warnings existed and were ignored: "correct conclusions were not always made from the communications of intrepid Soviet intelligence men, Richard Sorge in particular, who reported that nazi Germany was preparing to attack the USSR." And later, over the encirclement at Kiev in September 1941 — one of the war's worst defeats, some six hundred thousand men lost — it lets Marshal Bagramyan's memoir do the work of saying that Stalin's refusal to authorise a withdrawal, his insistence that Kiev "be held at any price," sealed the trap.
This is real, and it should be granted: the book is not a pure whitewash of June 1941. But notice the shape of the candour. Stalin is permitted to have miscalculated — to have misjudged the timing, hoped too long, held Kiev too stubbornly. He is a commander who erred. What is never said is that the surprise was manufactured by his own conduct: that he had the warnings and disbelieved them as provocations, forbade the mobilisation that might have blunted the blow, and had shot the officers who might have argued him out of it. And the one place the book comes near to naming a culprit for the ignored intelligence, it aims low: the failure to draw "correct conclusions" from Sorge is laid to "some of the senior officers of the Soviet Armed Forces," not to the man at the top who actually held that intelligence and dismissed it. The responsibility is admitted in the abstract and then displaced downward, off the leader and onto the epaulettes of the anonymous. Mandel's verdict is the one the evidence supports: the Red Army was "totally surprised by Operation Barbarossa," and the surprise was "the direct result of Stalin's disastrous misunderstanding of the political situation." Mandel adds a point this book's whole framing needs: the later attempt "to present the Red Army's defeats of 1941–42 as the products of a strategy of calculated retreat" has "no substance whatsoever." The catastrophe was a catastrophe, not a stratagem.
Some things the book does not minimise or displace; it omits them entirely, and the omissions are exact. The word Katyn appears nowhere. Neither does NKVD. The massacre of some twenty-two thousand Polish officers, policemen and intellectuals in the spring of 1940 — shot by the Soviet security service on the direct authorisation of the Politburo, then blamed on the Germans, a lie the Soviet state maintained until 1990 — has been cut out cleanly from a book much concerned with the fate of Poland and full of pages on German atrocities against Poles. So has the deportation of whole nations. In 1943–44 Stalin deported the entire Chechen, Ingush, Balkar, Karachai, Kalmyk and Crimean Tatar peoples — men, women and children — to Central Asia and Siberia on collective charges of collaboration, dissolving their republics as he went. The book names several of these peoples' homelands as territory the Red Army fought over in 1942 — Checheno-Ingushetia, the Kalmyk Republic, Kabardino-Balkaria — and says not one word about what was done to their populations the following year. The silence even reaches the book's roll of honour: its proud list of the many Soviet nationalities decorated for valour runs to dozens of peoples, some of them very small, and passes over the Chechens, the Ingush, the Crimean Tatars and the Balkars — the deported nations — as though they had not been there. In a book whose central theme is the "friendship of the peoples of the USSR" forged in war, the peoples the regime was simultaneously destroying are the ones the friendship cannot see.
The Warsaw Rising of 1944 gets the same treatment here as in Grechko's companion volume, and a reader can consult that introduction for the full account. In brief: the book blames the catastrophe on its victims. The rising was "triggered" recklessly by a Home Army leadership pursuing "real political aims" its own rank and file did not share; "thousands upon thousands of Polish patriots paid with their lives for the criminal gamble of the reactionaries." And it pre-empts the obvious charge — that the Red Army stood on the Vistula and let the Germans destroy the insurgents — by naming it only to dismiss it: "enemies of Soviet-Polish friendship" resort to "the brazen fabrication that the Soviet Command had deliberately halted the Red Army at the walls of Warsaw in order to doom the rising." The facts of the sixty-three days, and Mandel's reading of them, are set out in the Grechko introduction; the point to carry here is that the same operation runs through both books because both are executing the same institutional line.
What, then, is this book good for? A great deal, if it is read for what it is. Its operational military history — the movement of fronts and armies, the great encirclements, the raising of the allied Polish, Czechoslovak, Romanian and Bulgarian formations, the logistics of a war economy shifted a thousand miles east — is detailed, internally serious, and often fuller than the Western literature on the same operations. A reader who wants to understand how the Red Army actually fought and won the largest campaigns in the history of warfare will learn from it. And its central historical claim is sound and important: that the Eastern Front was the decisive theatre, that the Soviet Union bore the overwhelming weight of the war against Nazism, and that it did so at a cost no other combatant approached. Against the persistent Western habit of remembering the Second World War as a Anglo-American story with a Russian sideshow, this book is a necessary corrective, and it should be used as one.
The discipline it demands is the discipline of separating two things the book was built to fuse: the fighting from the framing. The framing is a specific political operation with a specific purpose — to make the Soviet state the flawless hero of an anti-fascist epic, so that the officer corps it shot, the neighbours it carved up with Hitler, the officers it buried at Katyn and the nations it deported into the Kazakh steppe all disappear behind the grey greatcoat of the liberating soldier. The anti-Stalinist left never had to choose between honouring that soldier and telling the truth about the regime that spent him, because its analysis had room for both. In Trotsky's account, developed in The Revolution Betrayed and confirmed, terribly, by 1941, the USSR was a workers' state that a privileged, nationally-minded bureaucracy had usurped and deformed — a caste whose interest lay not in the world revolution but in its own security and status, and whose foreign policy was conducted in "the traditional mould of European power politics," to borrow Mandel's phrase, spheres of influence and all. That caste could and did defend the social conquests of October against Hitler, at colossal sacrifice; the workers and peasants of the Red Army did the defending, and they won. And that same caste had decapitated their own army, partitioned Poland with the enemy it would soon face, and would go on lying about Katyn for half a century. Both are true. Only one of them is in this book.
The critique is not that the war was a fraud, and it is emphatically not that the two sides were the same. It is that a real and decisive victory, paid for in twenty-seven million lives, was conscripted into the service of a regime that needed the victory to be spotless, and rewrote the record until it was. Read the marching for the truth it holds. Read the framing for the state that needed it. The book will do everything in its considerable power to prevent you keeping them apart. Keeping them apart is the whole of reading it well.