THE RUSSIAN FRONT

I’ve been reading quite of bit of military theorist Alexander Svechin over the last couple of weeks, and came across a nice observation of his on the nature of future war. It fits well with a phenomenon I’ve always found fascinating, which is the disintegration of encircled Soviet forces in the fall of 1941. When Soviet troops were encircled en masse by the Germans, as at Vyazma, say, or Kiev, some managed to keep their cohesion and break out through the stretched-thin German encircling forces. Most, however, marched off meekly into German prisoner-of-war camps–some 600,000 at Kiev alone. It’s difficult to know for certain, but the experience that drove Andrei Vlasov into collaborating with the Nazis may well have been the disintegration of his 2nd Shock Army when it was trapped behind German lines outside Leningrad and eventually disintegrated.

The contrast is quite striking with the German experience at Moscow in the winter of 1941-1942, where cut-off German formations maintained their cohesion and held on until they broke out or were relieved. It’s also a contrast with the Soviet experience of spring and summer 1942, when the Germans were advancing as quickly through Ukraine and southern Russia as they had through Belorussia and western Russia in fall 1941, but not were getting nearly the same haul of prisoners. Soviet troops were much more likely to retreat in good order out of German encirclement.

The reasons for the difference don’t seem especially mysterious to me–the Red Army in fall 1941 was badly-commanded, inexperienced, and not particularly thrilled with Stalin. By spring-summer 1942, the Red Army’s high command was getting better and the genocidal nature of the German war effort was increasingly clear. Svechin’s observation is quite striking, and a damning indictment of what Stalin’s regime had done to the Red Army:

“The typical battle of the future is fighting in encirclement, when the enemy will be on all sides and above . . and any sort of precise information on the location of one’s own troops and the enemy will be lost. The greatest achievements of military technology have put the center of gravity back on the human material—on the soldier’s consciousness and dedication to the banner under which he fights.” from Front nauka i tekhniki # 7, 1934, republished in Postizhenie voennogo iskusstvo (Moscow, 1999), p. 423.

Courtesy of the Russian Ministry of Mass Communications, a major new site has just gone live in time for victory day. Entitled Chronicle of Victory, 1941-1945, it’s an historian’s dream come true.

The site is simply breathtaking in what it makes available. Aerial photographs, operational maps, complete runs for the war years of Vestnik frontovoi informatsii, Izvestiia, and Krasnaia zvezda (viewable on screen or downloadable as .pdfs) . . . it is truly spectacular.

Sure, I have some quibbles. The site requires a Microsoft silverlight plug-in, there’s no navigational aids in English, you can’t browse the newspaper holdings but instead have to search by date, and the offerings of archival documents are very slim. Plus, I could get the newsreel footage to work, but not the audio-only clips . . . but that shouldn’t detract from the ridiculous mass of material free for the asking.

According to the Telegraph, Polonsky has raised the possibility of legal action against Figes:

Dr Polonsky said she was intending to recover costs from Prof Figes. She said: “There have been some large legal costs built up in the last week which I hope to retrieve from the Figes family.” She added: “I understand that he is claiming that he has been traumatised by the research he did with victims of the Russian gulags which caused him to behave like this. I think it is horrific to use one of the greatest acts of criminality in history to excuse his bad behaviour. In any case he has been behaving like this for years beforehand.”

Meanwhile, Robert Service says the whole thing calls for reform of libel law in the UK:

The public interest in this squalid little story is that if someone is wealthy and malicious enough it is possible to tread on the throat of free and open discussion in this country almost with impunity. I was close to caving in at times simply because I lacked Figes’s financial resources. We have a set of libel laws seemingly designed to produce another Robert Maxwell. At the same time we have electronic media that enable the ink to flow from poison pens. In my case, these two features of our culture were wrapped around each other like a vicious weed. Legislative reform is urgently required.

Putin is not normally given credit for his sense of humor, but we must as always give credit where appropriate (via BBC Monitoring and Johnson’s Russia List). In a session of the Duma, Vladimir Zhirinovskii was lambasting Moscow mayor Yurii Luzhkov for allowing lucrative properties to fall into the hands of foreigners. Luzhkov is a easy target, given his bare-fisted style, his interest in economic development, and his wife’s lucrative career in construction. Specifically, Zhirinovskii complains, Ronald Lauder had been allowed to take a controlling interest in the real estate development on the site of the gone and unlamented Rossiia hotel. To make matters worse, Zhirinovskii says, the site is next door to the Kremlin and Lauder is head of the World Jewish Congress (an ironic accusation, of course, coming from Vladimir Vol’fovich).

Then Putin steps to the podium and says that the accusation is ludicrous, since he can’t imagine Luzhkov giving up Moscow property to anyone, let alone foreigners.

Now that’s a funny line. Politically, it’s even better. Putin scores a point for wit. Zhirinovskii, who’s seen by most observers as a thoroughly domesticated opposition figure who serves as a safety valve for the Kremlin, maintains his populist and nationalist credentials. And Luzhkov, whose power base in Moscow makes him politically formidable, gets taken down TWO pegs. Well-played, Mr. Putin.

In the summer of 2009, I noted a piece by Pat Buchanan on the origins of World War II which essentially took the same position as the Russian military: it’s the fault of the Poles for not accepting Hitler’s ostensibly reasonable demands for the cession of Danzig.

In the wake of the most recent Katyn tragedy, Buchanan has made the same point, though a bit more delicately, presumably to be cognizant of Polish feelings. He writes of the irony that Polish defiance in insisting on landing in fog at Smolensk led to tragedy, just as in 1939:

it was Polish defiance of Adolf Hitler’s demand to negotiate the return of Danzig, a German town put under Polish control after World War I, that gave birth to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which led to Katyn.

To repeat my point in the earlier post, Hitler had just jumped up and down on his own Munich agreement by absorbing what was left of Czechoslovakia and utterly destroying any hope that he might solely be interested in ethnically German territory. Why should the Poles trust Hitler after that?