USSR Archives - Page 3 of 3

Cold War Smoke: Cigarettes Across Borders

In 1998, as the a result of a court case waged by a number of US states, cities, and counties, the tobacco industry paid 42 billion dollars in damages, had to cease most forms of advertising, and had to release some 36 million pages of documents. The excerpt of a document presented here is one of those millions of private tobacco industry documents, now available online. This document comes from a case concerning cigarette advertising. In 1986 Frank Resnik, the President and CEO of Phillip Morris, testified before a US House of Representative subcommittee on “Health and Environment,” where he constructed a case for the continued “right” to advertise tobacco products. His argument was based on a rationale that called upon the still ubiquitous logic of the Cold War.

Resnik’s central argument was simply and clearly that advertising does not increase the total number of smokers in any given society; that advertising influenced smokers’ choice in terms of brand and variety, but did not increase the number of smokers overall. His primary evidence for such an argument was that behind the Iron Curtain, where there was no cigarette advertising whatsoever, cigarette consumption had increased by 30% between 1970-1984. With Cold Warriors in his audience in mind, Reznik characterizes the lack of cigarette ads in the Bloc as symptomatic of an “endemic repression of the very freedoms which we Americans cherish.”

Collinsville, Illinois (photo by Lyle Kruger)

Such apparent distaste for the communist enemy, however, did not preclude American tobacco companies from engaging in lively trade in tobacco and tobacco technologies with the Eastern Bloc beginning slowly in the early 1960s with an East-West détente. By the 1970s company documents reveal an intensified interest in penetrating Bloc markets in a period when smoking rates in the United States were -2%, and communist Europe had some of the highest rates of increase, along with the “developing world.” While Russia was by far the biggest market in the Bloc, little peripheral and Soviet-loyal Bulgaria was by far the biggest producer of tobacco and cigarettes. In fact, between1966 and 1989, Bulgaria was either the largest exporter of cigarettes in the world, or second only to the US.

Cigarette Factory Workers, Pleven, Bulgaria (photo by www.lostbulgaria.com)

Bulgaria became one of the most important points of entry for Phillip Morris, RJ Reynolds, and other US tobacco companies to penetrate the Iron Curtain into a growing and untapped market. While the direct imports of cigarettes into the Bloc remained limited, Bloc states signed licensing agreements with US companies in the mid-1970s that resulted in the production of Marlboro (Phillip Morris) and Winston (RJ Reynolds) in local factories. These “American cigarettes” were highly seductive to local consumers, as other Western products that were largely available in hard currency stores or carried across the border in suitcases by the lucky few who could travel to the West. If Bulgarians and other Bloc citizens could not go to America, they could at least hold its glossy packaging in their hands, and inhale its particular blend of taste and nicotine that was quite distinct from the Bulgarian “Oriental” variety. In the late communist period, American cigarette brands perforated the Iron Curtain in a sustained and successful way, paving the way for a post-communist flooding of local markets.

But Resnik, of course did not mention such facts at the 1986 session of the House Health and Environment committee. He did not mention that with the leveling off of US markets the communist world had become an explicit target of tobacco trade and that the industry had been among the first to push US entry into these markets. Instead he called upon the House committee members as freedom-loving Americans to reject all legislative proposals to ban or restrict tobacco advertising. By 1986, however, the industry was rapidly losing ground to an organized and effective grass-roots anti-smoking movement. As of August 1986, tobacco ads were no longer allowed to appear on TV. Yet in the Eastern Bloc, where ads had never been on TV, smoking rates continued to rise among men, women, and youth. Perhaps Reznik was right in saying that advertising had no role in increased smoking rates, rather smoking was a by-product of communist modernization projects, with their accompanying new modes of leisure and consumption.

The rapid rise in smoking in the Bloc eventually raised concerns about tobacco and health, and Bloc states have waged fairly serious anti-smoking campaigns since the 1970s. Such campaigns, however, were largely ignored by local populations. Anti-smoking came from the wrong messenger, and what little “freedoms” people had – like an afternoon smoke break—were held onto tightly. Hence unlike the United States, communist citizens were largely resistant to the anti-smoking campaigns that stopped smoking as a mass consumer phenomenon in the West in its tracks. To this day, the former communist states (and still-communist China) have among the highest smoking rates in the world. While the Western cigarette easily seduced (and still seduces) these populations, the Western propensity to kick the habit is more contested. As Frank Reznik might have once interpreted it, the “right” to smoke is still valued by people from large swaths of the globe, particularly the lands once (or still) ruled by communists.

Watch for our November feature on Mary Neuburger’s new book, Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria

Debating Bolshevism

by Andrew Straw

Communism acquired many different faces during the twentieth century. In the Soviet Union, it became known as Bolshevism. Named after the political party, led by Vladimir I. Lenin, that defeated the rival Menshevik Party in the October Revolution in 1917, Bolshevism would become the official political dogma of the Soviet Union for decades to come. The domestic response to Lenin’s revolutionary doctrine has inspired nearly a century’s worth of historical literature. Yet one question remains: how did other countries worldwide understand and react to what seemed like a particularly Soviet brand of communism?

Poster shows a Bolshevik leaning on a map of Europe and setting fire to Bavaria. The text below says: “The Bolshevik is coming! Throw him out on Election Day! Bavarian People’s Party.” (Courtesy of The Library of Congress)

Andrew Straw, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, created “Debating Bolshevism” to answer this very question. While even Stalin questioned the relevance of the term in as late as 1952, one glance at primary and secondary literature from across the globe during the twentieth century demonstrate that while the term may seem obsolete now, understanding what Bolshevism meant, how it was used, and why people had such strong reactions to it is crucial to understanding twentieth century history. The fact that the Soviet Union was the only official Bolshevik state in no way confined the idea of Bolshevism to the USSR. After all, Bolshevism’s own origins came from a transnational dissident group in European exile, one in which Lenin himself claimed membership. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Bolshevism entered into an ideological debate taking place on a world stage. Supporters presented it as an alternative to Western goals and principles of the West. Debating Bolshevism demonstrates that the international community from all points of the political spectrum took it seriously: its detractors maligned its violent excesses, and its supporters exalted its unhinging of imperial powers and rapid change.

Lenin leads the October Revolution wearing a proletarian workers’ cap on the front page of a 22 January 2009 issue of Pravda. The front-page article is etitled “On the Crisis,” referring to the recent spread of “Occupy Wall Street” protests in cities around the world. The accompanying text states that unemployed workers in Putin’s Russian (unemployment had reach nearly 20% in some areas) are ripe for communist revolution and calls on all concerned to attend a communist rally that was held on January 31 in Moscow.

Further down the page, a picture of pre-revolutionary Russian workers stands side by side with an image of currently unemployed Muscovites to underline the point. In addition, the newspaper includes a flyer for the demonstration that prominently displays the clenched fists of workers.

Mao Zedong was one of the prominent leaders of the 20^thcentury, and the road leading to his successful consolidation of power in the People’s Republic of China was heavily informed by the Bolshevik idea of a radically revolutionary break and guerilla warfare tactics. Mao was a firm believer that a potential revolutionary situation exists in any country where the government consistently fails in its obligation to ensure at least a minimally decent standard of living. While guerilla warfare certainly existed before Bolshevism, Mao was inspired by Bolshevik anti-imperialism, revolutionary self-determination of colonized populations, and civilian participation. Mao’s literature on military strategy drew heavily from Lenin’s On Guerilla Warfare, citing both Lenin’s political ideas and military tactics and sharing the belief that a “people’s” revolution was inevitable. Furthermore, even Western military men viewed Lenin as key to the Marxist revolutionary trends because they thought, “only when Lenin came on the scene did guerilla warfare receive the potent political injection that was to alter its character radically.

But despite the influence, Mao did not adhere to Moscow demands calling for a proletarian revolution, but instead he believed China’s revolutionary potential was housed entirely in the peasantry. Mao “knew and trusted the peasants, and had correctly gauged their revolutionary potential.” At least at this seemed to by the case to Samuel B. Griffith wrote the 1961 introduction to his translation of Mao’s on Guerilla warfare. While Mao’s Cultural Revolution and collectivization would later bring cause take a huge toll on the countryside, his initial use of peasants contrasted with the distrust and disdain Lenin and especially Stalin had for the Russian peasantry. Mao’s view was a such source of dissension between him and the Kremlin that Moscow even sanctioned the attempt by Zhou Enlai and a group known as the “28 Bolsheviks” who tried to replace Mao in 1934. These tensions would remain and only grow into the Sino-Soviet split during the Cold War.

Visit Andrew Straw’s graduate student homepage.

University of Texas at Austin – History Department

(Professor: Jeremi Suri)

Photo credits:

Zhou Zhenbiao, “Marx’s – The Glory of Mao’s Ideologies Brightens Up the New China,” Peking, 1952

People Fine Arts via The Library of Congress

Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum (2004)

by Yana Skorobogatov

“Through Labor – Freedom!” read a sign above the entrance to Solovetsky, just one of the 476 camps that comprised the Soviet gulag system. This prison network – what Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously termed “the gulag archipelago” – is the subject of Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum’s excellent Pulitzer Prize winning book. It is an impressive compendium of firsthand accounts taken from countless memoirs, archives, and oral histories conducted by both Applebaum and the organization Memorial, which was founded in 1987 to preserve the memory of those who died in the gulag. Written in a journalist’s engaging style with a historian’s attention to detail, Gulag offers readers unprecedented access to the inner workings of the Soviet prison labor camp system and the lives of the people who survived it.

Applebaum is wise to structure her book thematically in order to maximize her reader’s immersion into each facet of gulag life. Chapters devoted to the individual characters one would encounter in a gulag camp – corrupt guards, tattoo artists, women and children – animate otherwise gruesome descriptions of the processes – arrest, transport, labor, and punishment – that gulag inhabitants were forced to undergo. Several nuanced discussions of the complex power structures formed inside the gulag zona will surprise even those readers familiar with Stalinist terror. For example, a camp boss’ order that identifies the prison brigadier as “the most significant person on the construction site,” shows how the system’s industrial imperatives presented average prisoners with opportunities for upward mobility. Other details, like one man’s account of his terminally ill wife being pushed to the floor by a prison guard, underscore the brutality upon which the gulag regime was founded.

The author supplements her detailed narrative with refreshing insight on the origins of Stalinist terror, a topic that has inspired heavy debate among Soviet historians. She joins the likes of J. Arch Getty, James Harris, and Michael Jakobson to argue that the gulags were a product of on the spot improvisation rather than a premeditated master plan. In the early 1930s, the Soviet leadership in general, and Stalin in particular, constantly changed course. Neither the OGPU nor the secret police made clear their ultimate goals about the future of the gulag system. It became common, for example, for the OGPU to labor over the issue of overcrowding in prison camps and declare amnesties for prisoners as a solution, only to issue another wave of repression and new plans for camp construction shortly thereafter. Cycles like these indicate that despite Stalin’s political, economic, and even personal investment in the gulag system, its origins were haphazard and the policies that shaped it inconsistent.

Readers will notice Applebaum’s penchant for infusing her own moral insight into her narrative, a tactic that will appeal to her non-academic audience but may disquiet a few historians. She portrays the novelist Maxim Gorky as morally corrupt and opportunistic, someone who made a career out of serving the Soviet regime by praising gulag prisons (“it is excellent,” he wrote of the Solovetsky camp) and convict labor projects like the White Sea Canal. Jean-Paul Sartre is criticized for supporting Stalinism throughout the postwar years, while Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill are condemned for smiling in photographs taken with Stalin during the Yalta Conference. Applebaum expresses disdain for most leftist intellectuals and politicians who excuse Stalin’s crimes and denounce Hitler’s in a single breath. The issue of unintended consequences makes it difficult to identify and condemn immorality in retrospect, which is why most academic historians tend to keep their moral judgments at bay when writing histories of even the most reprehensible of regimes. That Applebaum – a journalist by profession – chose to stray from the facts in her introduction and closing chapters betrays an otherwise impeccable book, whose subject – the history and legacy of Stalinist injustice – is capable of commanding a reader’s moral compass all on its own.

The Strangest Dream – Reykjavik 1986

by Jonathan Hunt

College freshmen have no personal knowledge of the Cold War. Born after the Berlin Wall’s fall and the Soviet Union’s collapse, the threat of nuclear Armageddon seems far removed from their experiences, a relic of a bygone age. Yet, today, more countries than ever hold weapons whose scale of destruction can dwarf that of every bomb used in World War II. As the Cold War nuclear arms race recedes from collective memory, it is important to remember why the world remains beneath the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

This October 11th and 12th, the world observed the 25th anniversary of the summit between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986, where the leaders of the world’s superpowers contemplated the abolition of nuclear weapons. The talks remain the closest humanity has come to stopping the accumulation and proliferation of nuclear arms. Twenty-five years later, historians still debate the summit’s legacy. Even if the nuclear colossi had adopted Gorbachev’s plan to disarm in three stages by 2000, only their fine example would have persuaded Great Britain, France, China, India, and Israel to join them. Reading the minutes of the four meetings at Reykjavik, it is also unclear if gravity bombs like the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been eliminated. Nevertheless, during those two autumn days, Reagan and Gorbachev neared the brink of a nuclear-free world, only to turn back in defeat.

It seems, ironically, that Reagan’s abhorrence of nuclear weapons scuttled the talks. As president, Reagan made research and development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an anti-missile shield derisively known as “Star Wars,” a centerpiece of his strategic policy. Nuclear abolitionists condemned the project as a multi-billion dollar boondoggle and a slippery slope toward normalizing the military use of nuclear weapons. Strategists weaned on the Cold War doctrine of mutual assured destruction warned that its construction could prompt the Soviet Union to launch a preemptive first strike. For Reagan, SDI represented a means by which to make nuclear weapons obsolete and an insurance policy if a “madman” ever got his hands on them. Gorbachev disagreed, and saw limits on SDI as indispensible if the USSR was to trust its rival to disarm.

At Reykjavik, Soviet and American negotiators smoothed over rough spot after rough spot, agreeing to limits and sub-limits on an array of nuclear delivery systems—bombs, cruise missiles, sub-launched, medium-range, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. More progress was made in 36 hours than the previous 15 years combined. Paul Nitze, the president’s special adviser on arms control and a fixture in U.S. foreign policymaking throughout the Cold War, remarked Soviet concessions were “the best we have received in 25 years.” When Reagan and Gorbachev began their fourth and final meeting, they knew the stakes: an historic agreement for deep arms cuts and eventual disarmament. They also knew the final and toughest challenge; how to finesse Reagan’s steely support for SDI and Gorbachev’s stand that the U.S. confine R&D to the labs.

Initial expectations for Reykjavik had been modest. Recurrent crises had beset U.S.-Soviet relations since Reagan took office. The White House’s more confrontational tone, the shooting down of a wayward Korean airliner over Soviet territory, the deployment of quick-strike missiles in Europe, and an alarming NATO nuclear exercise codenamed Able Archer, compounded an already fraught relationship. However, conditions eventually improved. Reagan assumed a more conciliatory line so as to facilitate arms control initiatives and lessen the chances of an accidental nuclear exchange. It was Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985, however, that transformed the tenor of the Cold War by infusing new life into a listless Soviet system. Following a series of three elderly statesmen whose best days were behind them, he was confronted by an economic system with chronic shortages and, in April 1986, a catastrophic meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Gorbachev insisted that “new thinking” be applied to the USSR’s manifold problems, and espoused the policies of perestroika, restructuring the Soviet economy, and glasnost, making the government more open and responsive. A major element of perestroika was redirecting the river of resources flowing into the state’s military-industrial complex, especially the secret agencies managing the USSR’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, to more productive ends. Unable and unwilling to keep pace with U.S. military spending, Gorbachev instead offered a three-step plan to liquidate the superpowers’ nuclear weapons.

It was a bold initiative, but Gorbachev’s labors were close to bearing fruit when he and Reagan sat down for their last tête-à-tête. Reagan promised to share advances in missile defense with the Soviets. Gorbachev fired back that the U.S. had thus far been unwilling to share even industrial and agricultural technology with his country. Just when the statesmen seemed to have exhausted their cases, Gorbachev’s foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, urged them to cross the finish line, declaring they had “come very close to accomplishing this historic task … [a]nd when future generations read the record … they will not forgive us if we let this opportunity slip by.” Despite Shevardnadze’s appeal, however, Reagan and Gorbachev failed to agree on the wording of the final text. The two negotiating parties left Reykjavik without an agreement.

Sadly, subsequent generations have more often forgotten than condemned the talks. The calamity of climate change is more familiar to our undergraduates than the firestorm of nuclear war and the long night of the ensuing nuclear winter. In the 1980s, scientists theorized that only 200 thermonuclear explosions would kick up a planetary shroud of radioactive dust, lowering temperatures enough to recreate the climactic conditions in which the dinosaurs died off. Five countries—the U.S., Russia, Great Britain, France, and China—have more than 200 warheads. The U.S. and Russia are currently reducing their arsenals to 1,550 deliverable warheads. A conflict between India and Pakistan, who fought four wars since 1947, where nuclear weapons were used would jeopardize the continuation of life, as we know it.

Current global affairs hardly resemble the global situation in 1986 when two nuclear-armed superpowers testily eyed one another. Yet some themes have reoccurred. Just as the Soviet Union fiscal emergency forced Gorbachev to offer a plan to nuclear disarmament, today’s financial crisis could pave the way for deep multilateral arms cuts. The nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan augurs lessons similar to those of Chernobyl regarding the uncontrollable nature of nuclear power. It remains for the leaders of today to take advantage of their window of opportunity.

For two days on a remote archipelago in the North Atlantic, Reagan and Gorbachev discussed the entwined destinies of the Cold War and nuclear arms. As educators, we must remind our students of such moments, when history conspires to grant individuals the occasion to re-route its course. Reykjavik’s great tragedy is not its failure; after all, the negotiations paved the way for two momentous treaties—the 1987 Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile Treaty and the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Its tragedy resides in its potential disappearance from our collective memory. For our students’ generation will have to address this dangerous legacy of the Cold War—even if they don’t remember it.

You may also like:

Reuters, Mikhail Gorbachev, “A Farewell to Nuclear Arms,” October 11, 2011

“The Reykjavik File: Previously Secret Documents from U.S. and Soviet Archives on the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev Summit, from the collections of The National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington DC.

Jonathan Hunt and Paul Walker, “The Legacy of Reykjavik and the Future of Nuclear Disarmament,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Nov/Dec 2011.

Photo Credits:
Federal Government via Wikimedia Commons

Lend-Lease Live: The Video

To accompany Charters Wynn’s story about US aid to the USSR during World War II, we offer this video of Lend-Lease in action.The narration is translated below.

“On the evening of June 24, 1941, Prime Minister of Great Britain Winston Churchill came on the radio. He declared: “Any person belonging to a country fighting against fascism will receive British aid.” He went on to say that he will give Russia and its people all the help that the British government can offer. On October 2, 1941, the agreement was signed. Under the terms of the agreement, Great Britain and the United States pledged to dispense aid to the Soviet Union beginning on October 1, 1941 until the end of June 1942 by providing approximately 400 airplanes, 500 tanks, rockets, tin, aluminum, lead, and other wartime materials. It was declared that Great Britain and the United States will help mobilize and deliver these materials to the Soviet Union.

Hitler spared Murmansk. He expected to capture it quickly in order to use it for its port system, repair and maintenance factories, and docks. Murmansk was the only port in Northern Russia that did not freeze in the winter. Its direct access to Moscow by rail lent it even more geostrategic value. However, Hitler’s army hit an impasse approximately 80 kilometers from Murmansk. Successful naval operations implemented by the Russian military further ruined the Fuhrer’s plans to capture the city by land, leading him to issue an order to destroy the city from above. Consequently, Murmansk endured the longest bombing campaign in the history of the Second World War.”

Lend-Lease

by Charters Wynn

During World War II the United States shipped an enormous amount of aid to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease program. The significance of this aid to the Soviet war effort has long been debated. During the Cold War, the Russians minimized its impact and the West exaggerated it. While it is obviously impossible to know what would have happened without the aid, it is clear that Lend-Lease came too late to be the decisive factor in the Soviet victory. But it is equally clear that when aid began to arrive on a massive scale, it significantly increased the speed with which the German Army was pushed out of the Soviet Union. Without Lend-Lease, the Soviet people would have had to make even greater sacrifices and would have suffered even more deaths.

The American Lend-Lease aid program was passed by the United States Congress in March of 1941 originally to support the war effort in Great Britain. American public and congressional opinion at first resisted the idea of extending the aid to the Soviet Union. Many Americans shared the views of Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, who argued, “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia. If Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany.” But aid was offered to the Soviet Union in October 1941 and when Hitler incautiously declared war on the United States four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the de facto American-Soviet alliance became a reality.

Most of the early aid arrived on the dangerous “Murmansk run.” In raging seas and Arctic temperatures, convoys carrying American war materials and basic goods ran a gauntlet of German air and U-boat attacks, from Great Britain to the Soviet Arctic ports of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. One convoy lost 70 out of 80 ships. Later in the war, the Pacific route, a short voyage across the Bering Straits from Alaska to the Siberian port of Vladivostok, made up nearly half the shipments, and one-third came over the mountains into Soviet Central Asia via the Persian Gulf.

The main American motive was self-interest, not generosity. While remaining suspicious of Stalin and the Soviet leadership, President Roosevelt believed the United States could lose only if Germany emerged victorious on the Eastern Front. With Germany controlling the continent of Europe from the English Channel to Central Russia, it was in the western Allies’ interests to help the Red Army fight the German forces.

Nor did the Russians see Lend-Lease as charity. They saw themselves as carrying the war on their shoulders in its most critical phase. As late as the end of 1942, the Red Army faced 193 German divisions, while Anglo-American forces in Africa faced only four. To Stalin and people in the Soviet Union, the western Allies’ failure to open a second front in Europe until June 6, 1944 was deliberately intended to let the Soviet Union bear the brunt of the fighting and casualties.

Lend-Lease aid was slow to arrive. During the most crucial period of the war on the Eastern Front it remained little more than a trickle. Only following the Battle of Stalingrad (August 19, 1942-February 2, 1943), when the Soviet Union’s eventual victory seemed assured, did American aid began to arrive on a significant scale – 85% of the supplies arrived after the beginning of 1943. Although the vast majority of the Red Army’s best aircraft, tanks, guns and ammunition continued to be manufactured in the Soviet Union, its mobility and communications, in particular, came to rely on Lend-Lease.

The Soviet ability to mount massive and overwhelmingly successful offensives against the still formidable German forces depended on the more than 360,000 trucks, 43,000 jeeps, 32,000 motorcycles, 380,000 field telephones, 2.5 million belts and 14 million boots produced in the United States, as well as large amounts of other equipment. Soldiers also depended on American food supplies, including hundreds of thousands of tons of Spam and other canned meat. Red Army troops advanced into Berlin driving American trucks and wearing American boots. As Stalin told Roosevelt, without Lend-Lease “victory would have been delayed.”

Ironically, although the Soviet Union would have won the war on the Eastern Front without Lend-Lease, American aid facilitated the Red Army’s arrival in Eastern Europe before Anglo-American forces, which set the stage for the beginning of the Cold War.

You may also like:

Russian newsreel video about Lend-Lease on our blog

Transcript of the Lend-Lease Act (1941)

“One for All, All for One: The Story of Lend-Lease,” (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943)

To read more about the war on the Eastern Front:

Richard Overy, Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet War Effort, 1941-1945 (1997)
Roger Munting, “Lend-Lease and the Soviet War Effort,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 19 (1984), 495-510
Albert L. Weeks, Russia’s Life Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. (2004)

Photo Credits:
American Douglas A-20 bomber, provided through Lend-Lease, is loaded on to a ship bound for Allied ports, ca. 1943. Photo by Gruber for U.S. Office of War Information, via Wikimedia commons
Graphs from “One for All, All for One: The Story of Lend-Lease”

Order No. 227: Stalinist Methods and Victory on the Eastern Front

by Charters Wynn

Each nation understandably views World War II through the prism of its own experience. Americans widely believe it was the Western allies who won the war in Europe. But it was on the Eastern Front that Germany lost World War II. “It was,” in the words of Winston Churchill, “the Russians who tore the guts out of the German army.” But the Red Army was able to emerge victorious despite suffering truly catastrophic defeats at the beginning of the war. Within six months after Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Hitler’s forces had destroyed virtually the entire pre-war Red Army. For every German who was killed in 1941, 20 Soviet soldiers died. In 1942 things got still worse. By mid-September the Nazis occupied most of the European portion of the Soviet Union and the Wehrmacht entered Stalingrad, about 1000 miles inside the country from the western border.

One reason for the unexpected and decisive Soviet victory in the epic Battle of Stalingrad was the notorious Order No. 227, known as “Not One Step Backwards!” Officers who permitted their men to retreat without explicit orders were to be arrested and “treated as traitors,” while rank-and-file “panickers and cowards” were to be shot on the spot or forced to serve in penal battalions. On July 28, 1942, Stalin had concluded that the severest measures were needed to restore discipline and punish those who might flinch in the line of duty. Any further retreat would not be tolerated: “It is necessary to defend to the last drop of blood every position, every meter of Soviet territory, to cling to every shred of Soviet earth and defend it to the end.”

Order 227 called for dramatically expanding the number of penal battalions. Penal battalions were sent to the most dangerous sections of the front to perform semi-suicidal missions such as frontal assaults on the enemy or walking across minefields. If soldiers escaped injury they would remain in the penal battalions until they “atoned for their crimes against the motherland with their own blood.” Some 430,000 men served in these punishment units and about half of them were killed or fatally wounded. Order 227 also increased by nearly two hundred the number of blocking detachments. These units, which were up to two hundred men strong, were set up behind front-line troops and ordered to shoot anyone who lagged behind or attempted to desert. How many Soviet soldiers were killed by other Soviet soldiers in these blocking detachments remains unclear. The latest Russian estimates put the number at 158,000 men, including as many as 15,000 shot over a couple weeks in Stalingrad.

The main purpose of “Not a Step Backwards!” was not to punish offenders but to deter waverers and to reassure those who were determined to stand and fight that any of their fellow soldiers who broke discipline would be caught and dealt with harshly. Accounts of the effect of Order 227 on the Soviet armed forces are mixed, but the balance of the reports suggest that it was generally supported by those serving in the front lines, helping to boost morale at a critical moment in the war. One soldier later recalled his reaction, “Not the letter, but the spirit and content of the order made possible the moral, psychological and spiritual breakthrough in the hearts and minds of those to whom it was read.”

Unlike other orders, Order 227 was not published in the newspapers but instead was read out loud to every man and woman in the Soviet armed forces. The savage conditions prevailing inside the Red Army were successfully concealed for decades because they did not fit with the post-war master narrative of unquestionable Soviet heroism and self-sacrifice. Other factors contributed to the Soviet victory, but the draconian Order 227 played a key role in turning the tide on the Eastern Front, nearly one and a half years before the June 6, 1944 landing of the Western allies on the beaches of Normandy.

Order No. 227 translated into English

The Unknown War: WWII and the Epic Battles of the Eastern Front (20 episode TV series, 1978)

Photo Credits
Georgy Zelma, Preparing to throw a grenade, Stalingrad
Georgy Zelma, Center of Stalingrad after liberation, 1943
Anatoly Garanin, Recruits leaving for the front, Moscow (the sign reads: Our Cause is Just. The Enemy will be Defeated. Victory Will be Ours)
All RIA Novosti Archive via Wikimedia Commons

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