The Soviet experience of the Second World War is, by aggregate casualties and territorial scale, the largest single episode of any country's twentieth century. Approximately twenty-seven million Soviet citizens died — about fourteen percent of the 1940 population, and a number greater than the total dead of all other belligerents combined except China. The war was fought, in Soviet memory, as a defensive struggle for national survival against a German invasion intended (and conducted) as a war of racial annihilation. The Russian-language name for the war — the Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna, the Great Patriotic War — dates the conflict from the 22nd of June 1941 (the German invasion) to the 9th of May 1945 (Germany's surrender to Soviet forces in Berlin). The earlier Soviet involvement in the European war — the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the joint Soviet-German invasion of Poland in 1939, the war with Finland, and the occupations of the Baltic states — is treated by Soviet and Russian historiography as a separate matter.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
On the 23rd of August 1939, the Soviet foreign commissar Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop signed in Moscow a treaty of non-aggression between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The published text was a standard non-aggression agreement. The unpublished secret protocol divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence: Germany would take western Poland and Lithuania; the Soviet Union would take eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and the Romanian province of Bessarabia. The pact was the immediate diplomatic prerequisite for the German invasion of Poland on the 1st of September 1939, which began the Second World War in Europe; the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland followed on the 17th of September. Poland was partitioned between the two powers by a follow-on treaty of the 28th of September. The Soviet portion of Poland was incorporated into the Ukrainian and Belarusian SSRs.
The Soviet Union spent the next twenty-one months pursuing the implementation of its sphere-of-influence rights. The Baltic states were occupied and annexed in summer 1940. Bessarabia was annexed from Romania in June 1940. Finland refused Soviet territorial demands in the autumn of 1939 and was invaded on the 30th of November; the Winter War of 1939–1940 ended in March 1940 with Finland ceding about ten percent of its territory but retaining its independence. The Soviet military performance in the Winter War was poor — the consequence of the recent military purge — and is widely held to have encouraged Hitler's confidence that an invasion of the Soviet Union would succeed.
Operation Barbarossa
Germany invaded the Soviet Union at 3:15 a.m. on the 22nd of June 1941 — a Sunday — along a front of two thousand kilometres from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The German operation, codenamed Barbarossa, deployed about 3.8 million Axis troops (including German, Romanian, Finnish, Hungarian, Slovak, and Italian forces), 600,000 motor vehicles, 750,000 horses, and 3,350 tanks. It was, by aggregate numbers, the largest military operation in human history. Hitler's stated strategic intention was the destruction of the Soviet state, the extermination of its political and ethnic leadership, the deportation or starvation of approximately thirty million people in the western Soviet provinces to free Lebensraum for German colonisation, and the reduction of the surviving Slavic population to a helot labour force. The operation was, in its political character, a war of racial annihilation; the so-called Commissar Order of June 1941 required German troops to execute captured Soviet political officers on the spot, and the parallel Hunger Plan of 1941 contemplated the deliberate starvation of about thirty million Soviet civilians to feed the German army.
The first six months were a catastrophe for the Soviet armed forces. The German advance covered about a thousand kilometres in five weeks. The Soviet western military districts lost about two-thirds of their tanks and most of their air force in the first weeks of the war. Five Soviet armies were destroyed at the battle of Bialystok-Minsk in late June; about 290,000 Soviet troops captured. Two further armies were destroyed at Smolensk in July-August (300,000 captured). The largest single encirclement in military history occurred at Kiev in September 1941: four Soviet armies, about 600,000 troops, were taken prisoner. The German army was within forty kilometres of Moscow by early December. The Soviet government had been evacuated to Kuybyshev (modern Samara) on the Volga in October; Stalin himself remained in Moscow.
The first counteroffensive
The German advance stalled in front of Moscow in late November-early December 1941 in conditions of extreme winter weather (-30°C and worse), supply exhaustion, and increasingly stiff Soviet resistance. The Soviet counterattack of the 5th of December 1941 — conducted by fresh Siberian divisions newly arrived on the western front, made possible by Soviet intelligence's (correct) assessment that Japan would not attack the Soviet Far East in 1941 — pushed the German army back from Moscow by about 100–200 kilometres over the next two months. The German strategic ambition of finishing the war in 1941 was now impossible.
The decisive year of the war was 1942. The German army's renewed offensive in the south — codenamed Fall Blau, beginning in June 1942 — aimed at the Caucasus oil fields and the Volga. It reached Stalingrad in late August. The battle of Stalingrad (August 1942 – February 1943) became the largest urban battle in history; the German Sixth Army of about 300,000 men was encircled by a Soviet counterattack in November 1942 and surrendered on the 2nd of February 1943, with about 91,000 prisoners taken (of whom only about 6,000 survived to be repatriated after the war). The defeat at Stalingrad is the conventional turning point of the eastern front, although the Soviet recovery had been visibly under way since Moscow.
The recovery
The Soviet military, industrial, and social mobilisation of 1942–1944 was the largest sustained national effort of the twentieth century. Industrial plant from the western provinces had been evacuated, between July and December 1941, to new sites in the Urals, western Siberia, and Kazakhstan — about 1,500 large factories and ten million people moved east in six months, an operation without parallel in any other country's wartime experience. The relocated factories began producing within months. By 1943, Soviet annual production of tanks, aircraft, and artillery exceeded German production despite the German army's continued occupation of Soviet industrial regions. American Lend-Lease deliveries — about 18 billion dollars in 1942 dollars of equipment over the war, including trucks, telephone cable, locomotives, food, and aircraft — supplemented but did not replace Soviet domestic production.
The 1943 battle of Kursk (5 July – 23 August 1943) was the largest tank battle in history and the last major German offensive on the eastern front; it ended in a decisive Soviet victory and the loss of German strategic initiative. The Red Army advanced steadily west through 1944 (Operation Bagration in summer 1944 destroyed the German Army Group Centre and recovered most of Belarus), entered eastern Europe in late 1944 (Romania and Bulgaria changed sides; the Warsaw Uprising of August-October 1944 was suppressed by the Germans while the Soviet army held its positions on the east bank of the Vistula, a decision still bitterly debated), and reached Berlin in April 1945. The Battle of Berlin (16 April – 2 May 1945) was the final major engagement of the European war; Hitler committed suicide in the Reich Chancellery bunker on the 30th of April; the German surrender was signed on the 7th of May at Reims and confirmed in Berlin on the 8th-9th (Soviet time). The Soviet victory in the European war was officially celebrated on the 9th of May.
The cost
The Soviet civilian death toll of the war was approximately eighteen million people (figure substantially revised upward in post-Soviet research, particularly by Boris Sokolov; the standard contemporary Soviet figure of seven million was politically constrained and significantly under-counted). The military death toll was approximately nine million, with about three million additional military prisoners who died in German captivity. The destruction of physical infrastructure was on an equivalent scale: 1,710 cities and towns substantially destroyed, 70,000 villages destroyed, 31,850 industrial enterprises destroyed, 65,000 kilometres of railway track destroyed. The Soviet population in 1945 was about twenty million below its 1940 level. It would not return to its 1940 size until the late 1950s.
The political consequence of the victory was the Soviet Union's emergence as one of the two superpowers of the post-1945 world, with control over a substantial Eastern European empire that the Red Army had taken from the Germans. The next chapter follows the country into that role.
End of Chapter V