Political authority opposition and the state of Russia in wartime (AQA A-Level History): Revision Notes

Political authority opposition and the state of Russia in wartime

Stalin's Role and Actions	What Does This Suggest About His Influence?
The vast purge of high-ranking Red Army officers, beginning with Marshal Tukhachevsky in 1937, had a traumatic effect. Morale was shattered, and initiative and independence of action were stifled. Foreign governments assumed the Red Army was a broken shell, reinforced by its poor performance in the war against Finland in 1940.	Hindered the potential for success: Skilled military experts were replaced by unskilled deputies, weakening the army's effectiveness.
Determined not to alienate Hitler, Stalin met the requirements for deliveries of raw materials under the Nazi-Soviet Pact in full and ignored 80 warnings of German troop build-up. The country was unprepared for the German attack, leading to the loss of 6 million men. Stalin admitted to his closest associates that they had failed to protect Lenin's legacy.	Hindrance: Stalin's refusal to heed warnings and poor interpretation of the situation led to catastrophic losses. He put his country at risk for an empty promise.
Stalin's inflexible mentality in 1941-42 prevented tactical withdrawals, leading to catastrophic losses when Kiev was encircled. Over-ambitious counter-offensives in 1942 led to further losses of men and territory.	Hindrance: His decisions led to unnecessary losses, weakened the army, and damaged soldiers' morale, as they were sent into unwinnable battles.
Stalin issued ruthless orders, including Orders 270 and 227, which established detachments to shoot deserters, panickers, and unauthorised retreaters. At the Battle of Stalingrad, an estimated 13,500 Soviet troops were shot in this way.	Help + Hinder: While the orders increased discipline and persuaded soldiers to fight, they also instilled fear, potentially harming morale. The army became more effective through fear, but it also demonstrated Stalin's ruthlessness.
There is no evidence to suggest that Stalin suffered any remorse about sending millions to their deaths in battle.	Hindrance: Stalin's ruthlessness and lack of remorse meant he did what was needed without regard for human cost, which scared soldiers and potentially led to less tactical decision-making.
Stalin was a rallying force, showing leadership qualities during desperate times. He did not leave Moscow when government offices were evacuated in 1941 and inspired the Soviet people with speeches that rallied them to fight on.	Help: Stalin's leadership and speeches inspired high morale and loyalty among the armed forces and civilians, establishing him as a charismatic dictator during a critical period.

📌 What were the political impacts of the Great Patriotic War?

Stalin did not publicly address the outbreak of war until the 3rd of July, almost two months after it started He was very involved in organisation and war meetings.

GKO

• State Committee for Defence
• Oversaw all aspects of political, military, and economic life
• Could not control everything
• Delegated responsibilities to local gov offices and officials
• Due to strong voluntary commitment of Russian 50% of GDP was dedicated to the war versus 20% for other nations

Membership and responsibilities:

• Stalin: Chair
• Molotov: Deputy chair, tanks
• Malenkov: Aircraft
• Beria: Security Police Chief, Armaments and munitions
• Voroshilov: Armed forces representative
• Voznesensky: Head of the State Planning Apparatus
• Mikoyan: Food supplies
• Kaganovich: Food supplies Stavka

Military Supreme Command:

• land, sea and air operational responsibility
• Headed by Stalin from 10 July (Commander-in-chief)
• 8 August promoted himself to Chairman
• Separate from the GKO
• The only commonality was Stalin's role

Historian Graham Gill reflects:

• Neither organisation could impose any restraint on Stalin
• Much decision-making was done informally in his office
• The Politburo was still very active and led by his close ally Beria

The role of propaganda

• Three main aims of

Propaganda:

• Increase morale
• Build up willingness to fight
• Build up confidence in the defeat of the enemy
• Builds trust in gov and leadership of the country
• Stalin's cult of personality; seen as the all-powerful leader
• The parade in the Red Square was the triumph of Stalin's political career
• Source D: presenting Stalin as a saviour/father figure of the country
• 'Generalissimo'
• Source E: war of liberation, building morale of the soldiers, protection of Russian history

Repression

Treatment of Minorities

• Mass arrests, deportations and executions involved in Soviet takeovers of any territory

Territory as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact:

• 1.5 million people uprooted and deported to gulags and exile villages in Kazakhstan and Siberia
• Considered potentially hostile
• More than 20,000 officers, police and members of the Polish elite were shot and buried in mass pits at Katyn and elsewhere (April 1940)
• Stalin determined to hold on to the territory
• Eliminated any potential opposition in advance
• Volga Germans were deported in 1941
• No grounds for regarding them as Nazi spies
• 600,000 of them
• Included families of men serving in the Red Army
• Exaggerated reports that some members of the population had collaborated with the Germans infuriated Stalin as the Red Army pushed westwards in 1943 & 44
• Used as a pretext to punish entire nations
• Only the Chechen-Ligush began an anti-Soviet rebellion as the Germans approached
• 2 million members of ethnic minorities were deported to the Soviet interior (Crimean Tartars, Chechens, other Transcaucasion populations)

Ethnic cleansing

• Homelands wiped off the map
• Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania re-annexed in 1944
• Their elites were arrested and shot or sent to the camps
• A quarter of the deported nationalities died in transit or the first five years in special settlements

Role of the NKVD

• Increased in size during the war
• Counteracting panic and monitoring Party and Komsomol efforts to maintain morale
• A special department set up to lead the struggle against spies and traitors in the Red Army
• Had authority to execute deserters on the spot
• Orders 270 and 227 were distributed to all fighting units in the army

Highlighted the dilemma of the Red Army soldier:

• You were a deserter if he surrendered however traitor if you retreated
• Any officers caught infringing the order would be shot on the spot or sent to the punishment companies
• Soldiers guilty of cowardice or wavering faced the same fate
• Punishment companies overseen by the NKVD
• More than 430,000 men served in them
• Numbers swelled by gulag inmates and criminals
• Sent through minefields and other almost suicidal missions
• Blocking detachments were placed behind unsteady units 'to shoot the spot panic-mongers and cowards'
• Blocking detachments were abolished in October 1942
• The NKVD continued to carry out the same role

Return of the war-stranded

• Over 5 million Soviet citizens had been stranded in German-occupied Europe
• Some were prisoners of war
• Some had been taken to slave labour camps in Germany and Austria
• A few had collaborated with them
• Up to 150,000 Soviet soldiers had either fought or been forced to fight the Red Army
• Stalin believed in Order 210 which had declared prisoners of war as deserters
• Half were condemned to the gulag even though they had already suffered horribly in German concentration camps
• Wanted all Soviet citizens who had been 'contaminated' by contact with the outside world returned
• Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to do so at Yalta
• Some were returned from as far as the West Coast of America
• Some were forced onto trucks and returned to the USSR
• 32,000 Cossacks, men, women, children
• Some committed suicide rather than suffer deportation
• Around 3 million men and women were sentenced to terms in the camps
• Only one-fifth of those who came back were allowed to return home and they were mainly old men, women and children. Those released had the words 'socially dangerous' on their records and bore the stigma of collaboration or cowardice for years

Culture and Stalin's Death

WWII and the arts

• During WWII, artists and writers experienced less persecution and greater freedoms
• Shostakovich attacked prior to WWII, had his seventh symphony performed in the still besieged Leningrad on July 9th, 1942
• It was amplified around the city in the spirit of patriotism
• After WWII everything changed for these creatives

Tightening cultural grip

• Culture was a greater vehicle for politics in the eyes of Stalin
• Growing Cold War tensions following WWII led to Zhdanovschina
• Zhdanov was only Stalin's mouthpiece
• This was a drive for cultural and ideological purity
• State Museum of Modern Western Art closed down
• Leningrad was a point of contention for Stalin
• He aimed to ensure its continued subservience to Moscow in all aspects
• Theatres closed down for showing too many Western plays
• Playwrights and film directors were given directives from Stalin's gov
• Writers championed during WWI were persecuted once more
• E.g. Anna Akhmatova was referred to by Zhdanov as 'half-nun, half-whore'

Wider cultural life

Science

• Absurd claims made for achievements of Soviet science
• Ethnic Russians seemed to have invented almost everything
• Scientists had to adhere to State-set guidelines for survival
• Stalin worked closely with Lysenko in 1948
• This was to impose his views of genetics on the USSR
• Lysenko was a biologist and agronomist
• Claimed heritable changes in plants could be achieved by changes in the environment, rather than genetics alone
• Wheat subjected to refrigeration would produce seeds that could be sown in colder climates
• Renowned geneticists who did not agree with his theory were arrested
• Chemistry also suffered
• Einstein's theory of relativity was dismissed as it did not fit with Marxism-Leninism however it could not be ignored
• Quantum mechanics also couldn't be ignored if they wished to develop the atom bomb
• The leadership knew no science
• Working under the pressure of the Stalinist regime scientists developed the bomb in only a little more time than the American team
• Helped only slightly by espionage

Russian Nationalism

• Stalin mounted a drive to emphasise the superiority of ethnic Russians over other nationalities
• Despite the fact he was Georgian
• Been called a 'Great Russian chauvinist' by Lenin
• Was a genuine believer in Russian Nationalism
• Policy sat well with ethnic Russians
• Helped secure their support for the regime
• Was also an effective way of controlling other nationalities
• Top-paying jobs in non-Russian republics went to ethnic Russians
• Especially Party Secretaries and Police Chiefs
• Soviet Central planning, collective farms and other institutions and practices imposed on newly annexed countries
• In the Baltic states, there were deportations to Siberia and Kazakhstan
• 142,000 people from these new Soviet Republics were deported in 1945-49
• Notably, peasants resisting the imposition of collectivisation in 1948
• Russian migrants took over their homes
• Deportations took place in western Ukraine
• Tens of thousands of Russian migrants and migrants from Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine moved in
• Cultures of nationalities like Latvians and Lithuanians were denigrated
• Moldavian language had Russian words added
• Had to be written in Cyrillic letters
• Ukrainian decreasingly taught to Ukrainian-speaking children in the Russian Republic
• Stalin was as keen on Russification as the Tsars

Anti-Semitism

• Stalin reserved a particular venom for the Jews
• Initiated a vicious campaign of anti-Semitism
• 1948: Jewish anti-Fascist committee was closed down
• They had helped send thousands of Russian Jews to fight the Nazis
• Leaders were arrested
• Thirteen were executed
• Jewish Soviet politicians disappeared and others in important positions lost their jobs
• Jewish writers and artists were arrested
• Jewish schools and synagogues closed
• Textbooks did not refer to the fact that Karl Marx was a Jew
• Stalin talked about setting up a special area for Jews in the Soviet Union in eastern Siberia
• Series of trials in which Zionist conspiracies were exposed
• Culminated in the Doctor's Plot just before Stalin died
• The reason for campaign lay in Jewish connections to the West
• Many Jews had relatives in the USA, other Western Countries and the new state of Israel
• Heavily backed by the Americans
• Stalin called them 'rootless cosmopolitans' who owed more loyalty to Jewish internationalism and Israel than to the Soviet State
• Suspected of being agents for the West and particularly America – Stalin's main Cold War enemy

Stalin's death

• Suffered a stroke following a night of excessive drinking
• Politburo members were reluctant to act to save him
• His own doctor had been locked up in the doctor's plot
• Died four days later
• Mixture of relief and grief was felt and publicly there were huge outpourings of emotion
• Thousands visited his embalmed body
• Would be risky in such an uncertain climate to air negative views of Stalin

High Stalinism

• Historians call the period after WWII to Stalin's death 'High Stalinism'
• Contained all the features that define Stalinism:
• Personalised and centralised control
• Command economy focused on heavy industry
• Stifling bureaucracy
• Cult of personality
• Use of terror and an enhanced role for the secret police
• Effective propaganda and cultural uniformity

📌 What were the political impacts of the Great Patriotic War?

Stalin did not publicly address the outbreak of war until the 3rd of July, almost two months after it started. He was very involved in organisation and war meetings.

GKO

• State Committee for Defence
• Oversaw all aspects of political, military, and economic life
• Could not control everything
• Delegated responsibilities to local gov offices and officials
• Due to strong voluntary commitment of Russian 50% GDP was dedicated to the war versus 20% for other nations
• Membership and responsibilities:
• Stalin: Chair
• Molotov: Deputy chair, tanks
• Malenkov: Aircraft
• Beria: Security Police Chief, Armaments and munitions
• Voroshilov: Armed forces representative
• Voznesensky: Head of the State Planning Apparatus
• Mikoyan: Food supplies
• Kaganovich: Food supplies

Stavka

• Military Supreme Command: land, sea and air operational responsibility
• Headed by Stalin from 10th July (Commander-in-chief)
• 8th August promoted himself to Chairman
• Totally separate from the GKO
• Only commonality was Stalin's role
• Historian Graham Gill reflects:
• Neither organisation could impose any restraint on Stalin
• Much decision making was done informally in his office
• The Politburo was still very active and led by his close ally Beria

The role of propaganda

Three main aims of propaganda:

• Increase morale
• Build up willingness to fight
• Build up confidence in the defeat of the enemy
• Builds trust in gov and leadership of the country
• Stalin's cult of personality; seen as the all-powerful leader
• The parade in the Red Square was the triumph of Stalin's political career
• Source D: presenting Stalin as a saviour/father figure of the country
• 'Generalissimo'
• Source E: war of liberation, building morale of the soldiers, protection of Russian history

Repression

Treatment of Minorities

• Mass arrests, deportations and executions involved in Soviet takeovers of any territory
• Territory as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact:
• 1.5 million people uprooted and deported to gulags and exile villages in Kazakhstan and Siberia
• Considered potentially hostile
• More than 20,000 officers, police and members of the Polish elite were shot and buried in mass pits at Katyn and elsewhere (April 1940)
• Stalin determined to hold on to the territory
• Eliminated any potential opposition in advance
• Volga Germans deported in 1941
• No grounds for regarding them as Nazi spies
• 600,000 of them
• Included families of men serving in the Red Army
• Exaggerated reports that some members of the population had collaborated with the Germans infuriated Stalin as the Red Army pushed westwards in 1943 & 44
• Used as a pretext to punish entire nations
• Only the Chechen-Ligush began an anti-Soviet rebellion as the Germans approached
• 2 million members of ethnic minorities were deported to the Soviet interior (Crimean Tartars, Chechens, other Transcaucasion populations)
• Ethnic cleansing
• Homelands wiped off the map
• Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania re-annexed in 1944
• Their elites were arrested and shot or sent to the camps
• Quarter of the deported nationalities died in transit or the first five years in special settlements

Role of the NKVD

• Increased in size during the war
• Counteracting panic and monitoring Party and Komsomol efforts to maintain morale
• Special department set up to lead struggle against spies and traitors in the Red Army
• Had authority to execute deserters on the spot
• Orders 270 and 227 were distributed to all fighting units in the army

Highlighted the dilemma of the Red Army soldier:

Was a deserter if he surrendered

A traitor if he retreated

Any officers caught infringing the order would be shot on the spot or sent to the punishment companies

• Soldiers guilty of cowardice or wavering faced the same fate
• Punishment companies overseen by the NKVD
• More than 430,000 men served in them
• Numbers swollen by gulag inmates and criminals
• Sent through minefields and other almost suicidal missions
• Blocking detachments were placed behind unsteady units 'to shoot on the spot panic-mongers and cowards'
• Blocking detachments abolished in October 1942
• The NKVD continued to carry out the same role

Return of the war-stranded

• Over 5 million Soviet citizens had been stranded in German-occupied Europe
• Some were prisoners of war
• Some had been taken to slave labour camps in Germany and Austria
• A few had collaborated with them
• Up to 150,000 Soviet soldiers had either fought or been forced to fight the Red Army
• Stalin believed on Order 210 which had declared prisoners of war as deserters
• Half were condemned to the gulag even though they had already suffered horribly in German concentration camps
• Wanted all Soviet citizens who had been 'contaminated' by contact with the outside world returned
• Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to do so at Yalta
• Some were returned from as far as the west coast of America
• Some were forced onto trucks and returned to the USSR
• 32,000 Cossacks, men, women, children
• Some committed suicide rather than suffer deportation
• Around 3 million men and women were sentenced to terms in the camps
• Only one-fifth of those who came back were allowed to return home
• Were mainly old men, women and children
• Those released had the words 'socially dangerous' on their records
• Bore the stigma of collaboration or cowardice for years

📌 What were the social and economical impacts of the Great Patriotic War?

Stalin knew and believed in the idea that total mobilisation was needed in a war of annihilation, unlike Hitler. The emotional and psychological wellbeing of civilians was of secondary concern to Stalin and his government.

Mobilisation of Industry

• Within two days of the German attack, Russian machinery, manpower and other vitals for the war effort were moved further east
• 1.5 million rail waggon loads of machinery, resources and workers were transported east
• This was 8-10% of the economic capacity of the USSR
• 3,500 new soviet factories built to supply the war effort
• Streamlining of production: T34 tank production time halved
• Russian T34 and KV tanks outnumbered and outperformed the German Panzer by the end of the war
• Soviet products were known to be poor quality
• Aircraft had a reputation of being death traps
• Some men preferred the punishment of digging up German mines rather than Russian ones as they feared they would blow up

The People and agriculture – negative impacts

• Severely overworked and under-nourished
• Cold, poorly housed
• Living standards fell on average by two-fifths
• Some female workers lived in holes in the ground
• Countryside stripped of men, horses and machinery
• Four out of five collective farmers were women by the end of the war
• Carts and ploughs pulled by human beings
• State procurement of food from collective farms more ruthless than during the civil war
• Malnutrition due to intense rationing

Lend-Lease

• Predominantly from the USA
• To avoid economic collapse
• US shipped tins of Spam
• Imported trucks, jeeps and railway resources to give mobility to the Red Army
• 1943/44: made up 10% of the GDP of the USSR

Resilience of the Russian people

• Historian Edward Acton argues horrors of Nazi occupation provoked massive determination to resist
• The war brought the people and the regime together
• They "all felt closer to [our] government than at any other time"
• They felt they were all fighting the war together and were defending their country
• Propaganda aided their resilience

Women's contributions

• Made a huge contribution to the war effort
• Particularly good snipers
• Central Women's School for Sniper Training turned out 1,061 snipers and 407 instructors
• Graduates killed 12,000 German soldiers
• 'Night Witches' flew 23,672 sorties in flimsy biplanes
• 23 received the Hero of the Soviet Union award
• Women most valued by fellow male soldiers were the medics and signallers
• At the front 100% of the nurses and over 40% of doctors and field surgeons were women
• They and radio operators suffered heavy casualties
• The perseverance and determination of women in occupied zones and behind the front lines in factories and on farms also contributed
• Women made up 41% of the industry workforce before the war and around 53% during 1942-45
• 80-90% of the light industry workforce were women
• Even in heavy industry the proportions grew sharply
• Proportion of female labour employed in agriculture rose to over 80% by the end of the war
• All working predominantly by hand
• Urban sieges, rural deprivation, mass evacuation and mass deportation wreaked havoc with the well-being of millions of families
• Hit women very hard

Price of War

• 25 million left homeless
• 2 million recognised invalids
• 70,000 villages destroyed
• 27 million dead Overall did the Great Patriotic War strengthen or weaken Stalinism? JEON paragraph:

Overall the Great Patriotic War allowed Stalinism to strengthen, and Stalin's power was heightened. Propaganda meant indoctrination was rife and Stalin was hailed as a national hero, the saviour of Russia. He was in control of the GKO and the Stavka, and the majority of decisions were made in his office. No one could impose restraint upon Stalin. The resilience of the people was intense, and the contributions of women were nothing short of incredible – 100% of the nurses and over 40% of doctors and field surgeons on the front line were women. However, living conditions were still abysmal for many and hundreds of minorities were being deported and sent to gulags. The treatment of prisoners of war was not much better either. Despite this, the majority of Russian people still felt closer to their government than ever before, and collectively felt they were all fighting the war together, for the country and for the people.