The book opens with a soldier. "Almost sixty years ago a new type of soldier appeared on the historical scene. He had the same old grey greatcoat but there was a big red star on his cap. He was a Soviet soldier who not only did not threaten the toiling masses, but, on the contrary, was prepared to endure the greatest privations and give his life for their interests." The lines are Marshal Andrei Grechko's, and they set the terms of everything that follows. This is not a military history in the ordinary sense. It is a 156,000-word argument that the Soviet soldier who marched into Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1944 and 1945 came only to liberate, never to occupy — and that the regimes he left behind him rose from the will of the peoples he had freed, not from the weight of his boot.
The claim is made by a man in a position to know the difference. The preface is signed "A. A. Grechko, Marshal of the Soviet Union." Andrei Antonovich Grechko was, when the book appeared, Minister of Defence of the USSR — he held the post from 1967 until his death in April 1976 — and from 1973 a full member of the Politburo. He was, in other words, the serving head of the armed forces whose conduct the book narrates and defends, writing at the very apex of the Brezhnev-era military-party state. The Liberation Mission of the Soviet Armed Forces in the Second World War carries a Progress Publishers copyright of 1975. Nothing in it argues from a date later than 1975; it quotes Brezhnev's détente speeches of 1973 as the latest political horizon, and it was plainly written for the thirtieth anniversary of the victory in 1945. This is a commissioned anniversary book, the official war memorial of the Soviet high command, produced for export in the language of international circulation. Its date is its date.
Two things must be said before anything else, and the second does not cancel the first.
The Soviet war against Nazi Germany was the decisive military fact of the twentieth century, and no honest reader can leave this book without feeling the weight of it. Grechko is not exaggerating when he writes that "the main battles of the Second World War were fought on the Soviet-German front where 607 enemy divisions were destroyed, routed or taken prisoner — almost three and a half times as many as on all the other fronts taken together," that "the Anglo-US troops in Africa and Western Europe smashed or took prisoner 176 enemy divisions," and that "the Wehrmacht sustained 80 per cent of its casualties on the Soviet-German front." These proportions are broadly what the historiography records. The Eastern Front was where the German army was broken. It was Soviet soldiers who reached the death camps first — the book names Oświęcim (Auschwitz) and Majdanek among the "giant" extermination camps the invaders built on Polish soil — and it was the Red Army's advance that ended the most systematically murderous regime in human history.
The book gives the Soviet death toll as "twenty million Soviet people, or 40 per cent of the total human casualties in the Second World War." That was the official figure of 1975; the toll has since been reckoned upward, and the number generally cited today is around 27 million. Either way it is a wound without parallel in modern history, and it is the ground of everything the book asks its reader to feel. No country paid what the Soviet Union paid, and the men in the grey greatcoats who paid it were, overwhelmingly, workers and peasants who believed they were fighting fascism. All of that is real, and it must be credited without stint and without the reflex, common in Western Cold War writing, of setting Stalin's crimes beside Hitler's as though the two states had been the same thing. They were not the same thing, and the tradition from which this introduction is written never said they were. The point of the critique that follows is not that the liberation was a fraud. It is that the word "liberation" was made to carry more than it can hold.
The organising word of the book is liberation, and its unspoken twin is occupation. Watch which advance gets which word. The Nazis occupy; the Anglo-Americans, in the book's telling, half-occupy; but the Soviet Army, wherever it goes and whatever it does after it arrives, only ever liberates. The regimes it installs are never imposed. Grechko states the thesis flatly in his opening pages: "The new social system in these countries was not established under pressure from the Soviet Army, as bourgeois falsifiers of history are now asserting, but as a result of the conditions that had matured in the liberated countries for moving towards new social relations, in keeping with the will and desire of their peoples."
This is the sentence the whole book exists to defend, and it is the sentence that will not survive contact with the book's own narrative. For the same volume that denies any "pressure from the Soviet Army" also records, with no apparent sense of contradiction, the machinery of that pressure. When the Red Army entered Poland in the summer of 1944, Soviet GHQ issued an order — reproduced approvingly here — that "any mobilisation arrangements carried out on Polish territory by Polish organisations not connected with the PCNL" (the Soviet-sponsored Polish Committee of National Liberation) "were illegal," and that "persons engaging in such activity were to be immediately arrested as German agents sowing discord among the Polish population." The Polish Home Army — the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe, which had fought the Germans for five years — was to be, in the same order, "disarmed." To recruit soldiers for a Poland other than the one Moscow was building was, by decree, to be a "German agent." A book that prints this and then insists the new order owed nothing to Soviet pressure is refuting itself on facing pages.
Nowhere does the machinery grind more visibly than in the chapter Grechko titles, without irony, "The Tragedy of Warsaw." The facts, stripped of the book's framing, are among the most terrible of the war. On 1 August 1944 the Polish Home Army rose against the German occupier in Warsaw, expecting the Red Army — which had reached the Vistula on the city's eastern edge — to come to its aid. For sixty-three days the insurgents fought the Wehrmacht almost alone. The Red Army stood on the far bank and did not come. Stalin refused, for weeks, to let British and American aircraft use Soviet airfields to drop supplies. When the fighting ended on 2 October the Home Army had been annihilated; on Hitler's order the Germans then deported the surviving population and levelled the city block by block. Something between 150,000 and 200,000 civilians died. The book's own figures — "the insurgents' losses totalled 22,000 ... losses among civilian population of the capital amounted to 180,000. On Hitler's orders the Polish capital was levelled with the ground" — are not far from the historians'.
What the book does with those facts is the finding. In Grechko's account the catastrophe is the fault of its victims. "Acting on orders from the emigre government," he writes, "Armia Krajowa on August 1, 1944 provoked an uprising in Warsaw paying no heed to the situation at the front and without informing the Soviet Command, thus dooming it to failure." The uprising, "as regards the plans of its organisers and its political substance ... was anti-Soviet in character and designed to prevent the victory of people's rule in Poland." The Soviet government "declared that the Warsaw action was a reckless and fearful gamble," and the Soviet command "had to dissociate itself from the Warsaw adventure." When Polish troops under Soviet command did finally attempt a crossing in mid-September, it was, Grechko says, the insurgents who betrayed them: "the Polish troops encountered outright treachery." The whole disaster is summed up in a single sentence: "The Polish people paid a heavy price for the adventurism of the Polish reactionaries." The insurgents, "blinded by class hatred," had summoned "the almost unarmed people to fight against German panzer divisions."
Read that back. Fifty thousand Poles die fighting the SS in the streets of their own capital, the city is razed, and the lesson the Soviet Minister of Defence draws is that the dead were reckless adventurers blinded by class hatred. The military-necessity defence — that the Red Army was simply exhausted, its supply lines 500 kilometres behind — the book makes at length, and it is not baseless; the front had genuinely outrun its logistics. But it cannot explain the five months the Red Army then sat on the Vistula before resuming its advance in January 1945, and it cannot explain the airfields. What the framing does explain is why an uprising against the Germans could be filed under "anti-Soviet": because its organisers wanted a Poland that Moscow did not control. That, and not military logistics, is why the Home Army had to be a gang of reactionaries and its rising an "adventure."
The Fourth International's own tradition read Warsaw differently at the time, and its reading has worn better. Ernest Mandel, in The Meaning of the Second World War (Verso, 1986), corrects the class libel first: the Home Army was "dominated by the social-democratic PPS rather than by bourgeois reactionaries," and it rose "anxious to obtain the maximum amount of weapons for self-defence against ongoing repression by the NKVD." As for the Red Army's inaction, Mandel is blunt: "Stalin blocked all help to Warsaw, letting the Germans do the dirty work of liquidating the Armija Krajowa he would otherwise have had to do himself" (ch. 15, "The Final Onslaught"). Whether or not one accepts Mandel's imputation of motive in full, the underlying sequence — a national resistance movement destroyed within earshot of an army that could have helped and did not — is exactly the sequence Grechko's chapter is built to make unspeakable.
If the Warsaw chapter is an inversion, the book's treatment of the Soviet-Polish rupture is a silence, and it is a revealing one. Grechko records that when the Red Army reached the Polish border, diplomatic relations with the Polish government in London had broken down, and he assigns the blame: "it was the Polish reactionary circles which were responsible for the fact that the relations between the two countries were still not re-established." He does not say what broke them. The relations broke in April 1943, when the London Poles asked the International Red Cross to investigate the mass graves the Germans had just uncovered in the Katyn forest — the bodies of some 22,000 Polish officers, policemen and members of the intelligentsia. They had been shot in the spring of 1940 by the NKVD, on the direct authorisation of the Soviet Politburo. In 1975 the official Soviet position was still that the Germans had done it; the truth was not admitted by a Soviet government until 1990.
The word Katyn does not appear anywhere in this book. Neither does NKVD. Neither does the word deportation, in a volume much occupied with what happened to Poles. The book discusses at length the army of General Anders — the Polish force raised on Soviet soil in 1941–42 and then, in Grechko's telling, treacherously "evacuated to Iran" by an émigré government that "let down the interests of the Polish people." It does not mention that Anders's soldiers were men released from Soviet prisons and labour camps, nor that the officers who should have led them were the men already lying in the pits at Katyn. A war memorial is entitled to its dead; it is not entitled to bury other people's. The silence on Katyn is not an oversight in a book of this scale and this authorship. It is the load-bearing omission on which the Polish chapters stand.
Behind the particular cases lies the general claim, and it is here that the book must be met on its own ground rather than the imperialist one. Grechko's thesis is that the "people's democracies" of Eastern Europe were the free choice of their peoples. The anti-Stalinist left answered this argument as the events were happening, and its answer was neither that the transformation was a good thing imposed by liberators nor that it was simply Soviet imperialism of the ordinary kind. It was that the Soviet bureaucracy first suppressed the independent revolutionary movements the war had thrown up, and then, when the Cold War forced its hand, carried through the social transformation from above, by military and police power, precisely so that it should not be carried through from below.
The evidence for the first half was already in print in October 1944, while Warsaw still smouldered. The editors of Fourth International wrote that month — in "The Kremlin's Counter-Revolutionary Role in Eastern Europe" (vol. V, no. 10, whole no. 47, October 1944) — that the Soviet Union had "emerged as a first class military power" and that "the economy nationalized by the October revolution proved its superiority in action"; the Soviet masses had "performed miracles in beating back the German imperialist assault." That is the credit given honestly, by the book's sharpest critics, in the moment. But the same editorial went on: "Stalin employs the Red Army to uphold the capitalist status quo, to bolster reactionary dictatorial regimes, to crush all attempts of the masses to take their fate into their own hands, to oppose every effort towards Sovietization." Two years later, reviewing the whole arc, E. R. Frank (Bert Cochran) put it in one line: "the Red Army entered Eastern Europe as an executor of the counter-revolutionary politics of the Kremlin. It did not support the uprisings of the masses; it suppressed them" ("The Kremlin in Eastern Europe," Fourth International, vol. VII, no. 11, whole no. 72, November 1946). Frank's article records what Grechko's cannot: that in Bulgaria, in Poland, in Yugoslavia, the arrival of the Red Army first touched off mass seizures of factories and land, and that the Kremlin's first task was to disarm the militias and prop the old apparatus back up.
The second half — the eventual, deliberate assimilation of the buffer states — is Mandel's subject in his closing chapters. The Soviet bureaucracy, he argues, opted only around 1947–48 for "creating a glacis of client states at its Western borders structurally assimilated to the Soviet Union — i.e. characterised by the overthrow of capitalist state power and property relations through military-bureaucratic compulsion ('revolution from above')" (ch. 17, "The Aftermath"). This is the analysis of the deformed workers' state, and it is worth stating plainly because it is what separates the socialist critique of this book from the reactionary one. Capitalism was indeed abolished in Eastern Europe; landlords and industrialists did lose their property. But it was done from above, by an occupying army and a political police, over the independent organisations of the working class rather than through them — the opposite of the self-emancipation Grechko claims. The standing measure of this argument remains Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936), with its portrait of the Soviet bureaucracy as a privileged, nationally minded caste whose foreign policy was governed not by the world revolution but by the defence of its own position and the status quo that secured it. Grechko's "will and desire of their peoples" is the formula that caste used to describe the results of its own bayonets.
There is one more reason this 1975 book is not merely a historical curiosity, and the book supplies it itself. The doctrine of the "liberation mission" — the Soviet army as the selfless internationalist servant of other peoples, entitled to enter their territory to protect them from "counter-revolution" — did not stay in 1945. Grechko carries it forward across thirty years and applies it, in so many words, to the event that had most recently tested it. Writing of the Warsaw Treaty's solidarity, he records without a flicker that "in fulfilment of their internationalist duty the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic and Poland, in August 1968 agreed to move their troops into Czechoslovakia in order to help the Czechoslovak people, to protect them against the threat of counter-revolution and the intrigues of reaction and imperialism."
That sentence is the hinge of the whole book. The invasion that crushed the Prague Spring is described in the identical vocabulary as the march of 1944–45: "internationalist duty," "help," protection against "counter-revolution" and "imperialism." The reader is meant to hear no difference between liberating Auschwitz and occupying Prague, because in the book's grammar the Soviet army cannot occupy — it can only assist. This is the same phrase, "fraternal assistance," that the book uses for the rebuilding of Warsaw and the arming of Polish divisions; here it is doing the work of legitimising tanks in Wenceslas Square. The 1968 intervention was the living demonstration of what the "liberation mission" meant once it hardened into what the West would call the Brezhnev Doctrine — the claimed right of the Soviet bloc to reverse, by force, any move by a member state out of its orbit. That Grechko, the Minister of Defence who commanded the armies that carried it out, should reach back into a book about 1945 to bless 1968 is not incidental. It is the point. The category that cannot be turned on its own author — the army that liberates and never occupies, even as it occupies — is the category doing all the work.
None of this means the book has no value. Its operational military history is detailed and, on the movement of fronts, divisions and matériel, largely reliable; the Vistula–Oder operation, the Balkan campaigns, the raising of the Polish, Czechoslovak, Romanian, Bulgarian and Yugoslav formations on Soviet soil are set out with a specificity that the Western literature often lacks, and a reader who wants to know how the Red Army actually fought its way across Eastern Europe will learn a great deal here. The scale of the Soviet sacrifice, and the reality of the Soviet contribution to the defeat of fascism, are not in question and should not be minimised in reaction against the book's politics. That is exactly the trap the book is built to spring: to make anyone who questions the word "liberation" sound as though they are denying the victory.
They are not. The victory was real and it was decisive. What the reader must hold separate is the fighting from the framing — the soldier in the grey greatcoat from the doctrine written over his grave thirty years later by the man who then sent his sons into Prague. Grechko wanted those two things to be one thing, indivisible, so that to doubt the second was to insult the first. The whole discipline of reading this book is to keep them apart: to honour the twenty-seven million, and to refuse the sentence that turns the Home Army into German agents and the tanks of 1968 into fraternal aid. The Red Army did liberate Europe from the Nazis. It also, in the same months, disarmed the Polish resistance, sat out the destruction of Warsaw, buried the truth of Katyn, and installed by force the regimes that this book insists arose from the free will of their peoples. Both are true. Only one of them is in this book.