Impact of War
Cards (29)
- •Lyudmila Pavlichenko came from the Ukraine and grew up as a tomboy who liked to compete and prove she was better than the boys. •Whilst living in Kiev as a teenager, she earned her Voroshilov Sharpshooter Badge, a civilian marksman certificate. •When Barbarossa happened she tried to sign up as a sniper but they were pushing her to be a nurse instead. •She insisted and proved her skills by shooting 2 Romanian collaborators from a hill. She was then enlisted in the Red Army’s 25th Rifle Division. •She fought in numerous battles and had a massive confirmed kill count of 309!
- •As she became more famous, she was sent on more dangerous missions, including duels with enemy snipers. She won every duel she fought, including one that lasted for 3 days!•The German army would broadcast threats to her from loudspeakers: “Pavlichenko, if we catch you, we will tear you into 309 pieces and scatter them to the winds!” When she heard this, she said she was happy they knew her record.•She was injured by a mortar in 1942 and was then used for propaganda and she even became the first Soviet citizen to be welcomed into the White House in Washington DC.
- Little to no attention was given to the emotional and psychological damage of the war. When people returned home from the horrors of war there was a rise in alcoholism, adultery and domestic abuse.
- Stalin saw the multinational nature of the Empire as a potential threat to state security and took brutal action to prevent political disintegration. As early as August 1941, he dissolved the Volga German autonomous republic and sent its peoples (even Communist Party members) to the East.
- In Poland, after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, in April 1940 more than 20,000 officers, polices and members of the Polish elite were shot and buried in mass pits in Katyn and elsewhere.
- Around 3 million men and women were sentenced to terms in the camps when they got back and only 1/5 were allowed to return home and they were mainly old men, women and children. All those released had the words “socially dangerous” on their records.
- Stalin had addressed the grievances of his army officers in order to win the war. He downgraded the role of the political commissars attached to army units and brought back special badges of rank. He also emphasised the political education of troops. This meant increasing numbers of the military chose to join the Communist Party.
- During the way, over 5 million candidate members and 3.6 million new members joined the Party. Of these, 3.9 million candidates and 2.5 million members were in the army or navy. By 1945, ¼ of armed foces personnel were Communists and 20% were in Komsomol. Whereas in June 1941, only 15% of the military had been in the Party, it was about half of Party membership by 1945.
- The war helped to strengthen belief in the communist system. Although nationalism had been emphasised over the Marxist struggle, by May 1945, Stalin could declare that the war had shown the superiority and resilience of the socialist system. “It was a victory for communism over fascism and was thus hailed as a vindication of both Stalin and the Stalinist system.”
- Hitler had planned to seize Russian farmland and industry during the invasion. By the end of 1941, the German-occupied territory contained 63% of the country’s coal, 68% of its iron, 58% of its steel, 45% of its railways and 41% of its arable land.
- Stalin introduced a “scorched earth” policy to make the farmland useless. He also took 1523 Soviet factories, along with workers, and moved them from western Russia and the Ukraine to areas in the East (the Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia) between July and November 1941. New railways were built or extended to connext the industrial bases with the front line.
- New furnaces were built at Magnitogorsk in just 8 months and at Chusivaya in 7 months. The Engels plant in Zaporozhye started production 20 days after it was transplanted.
- Food problems were harder to solve, particularly because the poor harvest in 1942 was only 1/3 that of 1940. Survival was ensured by strict rationing and demanding quotas on the collective farms, but to maintain morale and incentive, peasants could keep private plots and sell their produce.
- Under the Lend-Lease scheme of 1941, 11 billion dollars of aid was provided by the USA.
- The USA supplied the USSR with 6,430 planes, 3,734 tanks, 104 ships, 210,000 vehicles plus essential raw materials and 5 million tonnes of food. By the end of the war, 427,000 of 665,000 vehicles in the USSR came from overseas.
- When the announcement of the invasion was made, thousands flooded to volunteer at the recruiting stations. “The panic induced by the German attack helped to reunite Russian society and provide the cohesion that had been threatened in the 1930s.”
- December 1941, a new law came to mobilise all undrafted workers for war work. All men aged 16 to 55 years and women aged 16 to 45 years had to work for the war. White-collar workers were sent to munitions factories; pensioners were encouraged to return to work; and students were asked to undertake part-time work.
- Factories came under martial law; strict punishments for negligence, lateness or absenteeism and unauthorised absence was classed as desertion, punishable by death. “Clearly, the harsh conditions suffered in the 1930s helped in the acceptance of such measures and probably helped to provide some of the resilience displayed in the war years.”
- Army discipline was tightened. It was an offence to be taken captive and while a soldier was in captivity, his family’s military ration cards were confiscated. Stalin saw soldiers’ lives as expendable to the “greater good” and 8.6 million soldiers were killed between 1941 and 1945, an average daily rate that was double that of the allies.
- There were also acute housing and fuel shortages so health problems escalated. Some became refugees, some had to fight for the survival of their city and some had to leave in huts near their newly relocated factory.
- Gulag labour was used to maintain supplies. They built airports, landing strips and roads in the most inhospitable conditions. The death rate in the gulags in 1942 was at 25%. Gulag labour produced around 15% of all Societ ammunition, lots of uniforms and extarcted coal, oil, precious metals and raw materials, mostly from the Arctic regions.
- Propaganda focussed on the “Great Patriotic War” concept and devoting themselves to “Mother Russia” against the “godless invaders” and “child killers”. A letter in Pravda said they must not say “Good Mornign” or “Good Night”, they should only say “Kill the Germans”. In 1943, the Internationale (socialist anthem) was replaced by a new nationalistic song of the Motherland.
- Artists were allowed freedom to create, to build an atmosphere of national reconciliation. Anna Akhmatova, a poet, broadcast patriotic verses on the radio. Maria Yudina ( a pianist) was flown into Leningrad during the siege to perform. Shostakovich was forgiven and composes his Symphony No.7 “Leningrad”, performed at the height of the siege on 9th August 1942. The brass players had to be given extra rations so that they could perform!
- Orthodox Church which to an extent, turned religion into an arm of the government.
- This contradicted previous communist attitudes and female communist organisations were allowed to collapse because they didn’t help the war effort.
- The “night witche” were female bomber plane pilots who flew 23,672 sorties and 23 received the Hero of the Soviet Union award.
- Women were expected to be essential members of the workforce while also raising large families, so their burden increased. By 1945, over ½ of all Soviet workers and more than 4/5 of land workers were female. Over half a million women fought in the armed forces as pilots, snipers and tank commanders. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was recorded as killing 309 Germans before her own death in June 1942.
- Some Soviet citizens and Red Army soldiers ended up behind enemy lines in the rapid advance of 1941 and had to live in occupied territory. Some formed partisan groups to use guerilla tactics. By 1943, there were an estimated 300,000 such partisans and probably a million more by 1945. Many were women
- . Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was made a “Hero of the Soviet Union” – she refused to betray her comrades when she was caught cutting telephone cables. She was tortured, executed and dumped in the snow and pictures of her body became powerful propaganda.