Fighting on all Fronts, page 25
2 Medinskii, 2012, p39.
3 Vladimir Lenin, Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, Report on Peace, October 26 (November 8) 1917, at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/25-26/26b.htm.
4 Quoted in D Hallas, The Comintern (Bookmarks, London, 1985), p123.
5 M Beloff, The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia 1929-1941, vol 2 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1949), p20.
6 Quoted in A Applebaum, Gulag: A History (Penguin, London, 2004), pp68-69.
7 Details from T Cliff, Trotsky: The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars, vol 4, ch 2, at www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1993/trotsky4/02-industrial.html.
8 Cliff, Trotsky, vol 4, ch 1, at marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1993/trotsky4/01-collect.html.
9 Cliff, Trotsky, ch 2, at marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1993/trotsky4/02-industrial.html.
10 D Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization (Pluto Press, London, 1986), p135.
11 Filtzer, 1986, p138.
12 Filtzer, 1986, p150.
13 N Khrushchev, The Secret Speech (Spokesman Books, Nottingham, 1976), p33.
14 M Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1987), p49.
15 D M Glantz and J House, When Titans Clashed (Birlinn, Kansas, 2000), pp9-10.
16 A Burovskii, Velikaia Grazhdanskaia Voina (Iauza Eksmo, Moscow, 2011), p211.
17 D Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1991), pp368-369.
18 Glantz, 2000, p33.
19 Glantz, 2000, p44. This judgement is confirmed by Stepan Mikoyan in E Joli, Pobeda liuboi tsenoi (Iausa:Eksmo, Moscow, 2010), p116.
20 Elena Rzhevskaia, in E Joli, 2010, p215.
21 Medinskii, 2012, p54.
22 Volkogonov, 1991, p395.
23 Danilov in V Suvorov and M Solonin (eds), Pro… li Voinu! Kak Stalin Ugrobil Krasnuiu Armiu i Pogubil SSSR (Iauza-Press, Moscow, 2012), p193.
24 Quoted in A Werth, Russia at War (Dutton & Co, New York, 1964), p71.
25 Quoted in Werth, 1964, p111.
26 Werth, 1964, p111.
27 Quoted in Werth, 1964, p96; Pronin in Suvorov, 2012, p191.
28 Aleksandr Pronin, “Sovetsko-Pol’skie Sobytia 1939 g”, in Suvorov, 2012, p104.
29 Quoted in Werth, 1964, p62.
30 Pravda, 16 May 1940, quoted in Werth, 1964, p86.
31 Danilov in Suvorov, 2012, p221.
32 V Suvorov, “Vdrug oni Voz’mut i Pomiriatsia”, in Suvorov, 2012, p17.
33 Danilov, 89 and Kirill Aleksandrov, “Planirovalsia Udar po Rumynii v napravlenii neftianykh mestorozhenii”, pp219-233, in Suvorov, 2012. Also Georgii Kumanev 238, why did we lose at first? Stalin was convinced Hitler would not fight on two fronts and so would have to defeat the UK first. 393 A month before the G attack, S, speaking to a close circle, said: “The conflict is inevitable, perhaps in May next year.” By the early summer of 1941, acknowledging the explosiveness of the situation, he approved the premature release of military cadets, and young officers and political workers were posted, mostly without leave, straight to units which were below full strength. On 19 June begin camouflaging aerodromes, transport depots, bases and fuel dumps, dispersing aircraft. The order came hopelessly late, and even then Stalin was reluctant in case “all these measure provoke the German forces.”
34 Vasily Grossman (author), A Beevor and L Vinogradova (translators), A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945 (Pimlico, London, 2006), p3.
35 Glantz, 2000, p41.
36 Volkogonov, 1991, p400.
37 Volkogonov, 1991, p401.
38 Stepan Mikoyan, in Joli, 2010, p117.
39 Oleg Ozerov, in Joli, 2010, p87. Confirmed by another veteran—30 we didn’t think there would be fighting in Russia but in Germany; Dannil Granin in Joli, 2010.
40 Glantz, 2000, p49.
41 Volkogonov, 1991, p406.
42 Glantz, 2000, p51.
43 Joli, 2010, p23.
44 Grossman p48.
45 Burovskii, 2011, p234.
46 Burovskii, 2011, p236.
47 Aleksandr Kuz’minykh, “Navernoe, budet voina…” in Suvorov, 2012, p278.
48 Aleksandr Kuz’minykh, “Navernoe, budet voina…” in Suvorov, 2012, pp273-275.
49 Aleksandr Kuz’minykh, “Navernoe, budet voina…” in Suvorov, 2012, p280.
50 Quoted in Mediniskii, 2012, pp127-128.
51 Quoted in G Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries (Verso, London, 2006), p171.
52 Grossman, p222.
53 Grossman, p249.
54 Werth, 1964, p271.
55 Aleksandr Kuz’minykh, “Navernoe, budet voina…” in Suvorov, 2012, p286.
56 Aleksandr Kuz’minykh, “Navernoe, budet voina…” in Suvorov, 2012, p288.
57 Volkogonov, 1991, p434.
58 Y Grigorian in Joli, 2010, p313.
59 S Mikoyan in Joli, 2010, p262.
60 Werth, 1964, p249.
61 Volkogonov, 1991, p486.
62 I C B Dear and M R D Foot, The Oxford Companion to the Second World War (OUP, Oxford, 1995), p290.
63 Volkogonov, 1991, p505.
64 Medinskii, 2012, pp394-395.
65 Quoted in Volkogonov, 1991, p427.
66 G Ter-Gazariants in Joli, 2010, p129.
67 Grossman, p155.
68 Quoted in D Loza, Fighting for the Soviet Motherland (Nebraska Press, Nebraska, 1998), pp129-130.
69 Alexander Revich in Joli, 2010, p167.
70 Oleg Ozerov in Joli, 2010, pp87-88.
71 Ozerov in Joli, 2010, p96.
72 Volkogonov, 1991, p445.
73 B V Sokolov, Okkupatsiia, Pravda i Mify, 2002 in militera.lib.ru/research/sokolov3/index.html.
74 Sokolov, 2002.
75 Sokolov, 2002.
76 Sokolov, 2002.
77 A S Sawin et al (eds), Der zweite Weltkrieg (Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1988), p366.
78 Sokolov, 2002.
79 I Ermolov, Russkoe Gosudarstvo v Nemetskom Tylu. Istoria Lokotskogo Samoupravleniia, militera.lib.ru/research/ermolov_ig02/index.html.
80 Sawin et al, 1988, pp366-367.
81 Sokolov, 2002.
82 Sokolov, 2002.
83 Sokolov, 2002.
84 Sokolov, 2002.
85 Sokolov, 2002.
86 D Granin in Joli, 2010, p30.
87 E Rzhevskaia in Joli, 2010, p218.
88 Glantz, 2000, p72.
89 Werth, 1964, p215.
90 J Scott, Behind the Urals (Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1942), p263.
91 D A Zhukov, I I Kovtin. RNNA. Vrag v Sovetskoi Forme (Veche, Moscow, 2012), p18.
92 Zhukov, 2012, p27.
93 Medinskii, 2012, p302.
94 Burovskii, 2011, p343.
95 Burovskii, 2011, p344.
96 Medinskii, 2012, p391.
97 Burovskii, 2011, p353.
98 T Selesnev, quoted in Sokolov, 2002.
99 Medinskii, 2012, p265.
100 Burovskii, 2011, pp359-361.
101 This latter figure is for both Chechens and Ingushes—Volkogonov, 1991, p444.
102 Burovskii, 2011, p363.
103 As Burovskii puts it, Burovskii, 2011, p363.
104 GKO decree no. 5859. www.memorial.krsk.ru/DOKUMENT/USSR/440511.htm.
105 Burovskii, 2011, p363.
106 Volkogonov, 1991, p444.
107 See Medinskii’s critique, 2012, p331. Ermolov writes, for example: “An important role was played by individuals who against the background of the collapse of soviet power in the remaining Red Army regions attempted to create a political movement, which, in its conceptions, could in future develop beyond the limits of the Lokot district and achieve an all-Russian dimension.”(I, Ermolov, Russkoe Gosudarstvo v Nemetskom Tylu. Istoria Lokotskogo Samoupravleniia, p32.)
108 D I Cherniakov, Lokotskaia gazeta, ‘Golos naroda’, na sluzhbe u Natsistkoi propagandy, www.august-1914.ru/occupation2.pdf, p68.
109 Quoted in Cherniakov, p69.
110 Quoted in I Ermolov, p31.
111 Ermolov, p21.
112 Ermolov, pp16-17.
113 Medinskii, 2012, p332.
114 Zhukov, 2012, p67.
115 Oleg Smyslov, Predateli i Padachi (Veche, Moscow, 2013), pp76-77.
116 Goering, quoted in Smyslov, 2013, p95.
117 Quoted in Smylsov, 2013, pp94-95.
118 Smyslov, 2013, p147.
119 Volkogonov, 1991, p456.
120 Volkogonov, 1991, p456.
121 Volkogonov, 1991, p491.
122 Volkogonov, 1991, p505.
123 L Rabichev in Joli, 2010, p202.
124 S Mikoyan in Joli, 2010, pp121-122.
125 Ozerov in Joli, 2010, p97.
126 S Mikoyan in Joli, 2010, p262.
127 V Etoosh in Joli, 2010, p150.
128 www.marxists.org/archive/petrovic/1965/reification.htm.
129 W Reich, Listen, Little Man! (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1974), p7 at www.wilhelmreichtrust.org/listen_little_man.pdf
6
The Slovak National Uprising of 1944
Tomáš Tengely-Evans
Introduction
The Slovak National Uprising of 1944 was one of the largest—and shortest—instances of armed insurrection against Nazi occupation during World War Two. It didn’t just involve the Slovak partisans, underground guerrilla fighters, but also international volunteers and regular troops. During the height of the Slovak National Uprising (henceforth referred to as the “SNP”) 18,000 partisans fought alongside 60,000 standing and reservist troops from the Slovak army, who had answered the call by rebel commanders to fight against father Jozef Tiso’s fascist puppet regime, the “Slovak State”. This insurgent force was pitted against military units and paramilitary forces loyal to the Tiso regime and 48,000 Waffen SS and Wehrmacht troops who had just occupied the territory on 28 August 1944.
Within two weeks of the start of the SNP on 29 August the insurgent army was in control of central and parts of eastern Slovakia. But this wasn’t a purely military operation. The insurgent command directed a basic war economy from its capital in Banska Bystrica in central Slovakia; and small attempts at building a “civil society” were also made, such as a free press and radio station and moves towards reforming public education. However, by the end of October 1944 Nazi forces had successfully recaptured the liberated territory in bitter fighting that saw 10,000 resistance fighters killed and a further 5,000 suffer capture and execution. While a small partisan force continued to fight the Nazi occupation, Slovakia would be liberated not by the partisans but by Marshal Ivan Konev’s Russian tank columns.
The insurgent army faced a difficult situation, but the uprising and the way it went down to defeat were both shaped by its own leadership, the broader inter-imperialist rivalry and the relationship between the two. It’s not a mere detail that Konev’s tanks began rolling through the Dukla Pass into eastern Slovakia just as the Nazis were recapturing Banska Bystrica—and less than a month after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising.
Yet very little is written about the SNP in English or Slovak histories of the Second World War, and Slovak historiography is mired in a right wing revisionist debate. When the Communist Party ruled Czechoslovakia, the SNP was a cornerstone of its propaganda and portrayed as an example of heroic communist resistance to fascism with the party playing the leading role. Now, unsurprisingly, this interpretation is unfashionable, but it has been replaced by a dangerous revisionist trend that paints the SNP as a “Bolshevik putsch” and the fascist “Slovak State” as a progressive, albeit flawed, episode in history (and this is something that reaches far beyond fascist pseudo historians, who can easily be disregarded). Meanwhile, trying to straddle somewhere in the middle is today’s official history of a “democratic coalition” against German occupation with the emphasis on social “history from below”—on “what did I do”—without the broader political picture. Neither grasps the reality and full complexity of the SNP, which can only be understood by using our analysis of an imperialist war from above and a people’s war from below.
The “Munich Betrayal” and Czechoslovakia’s old ruling class
The SNP was directly triggered by the Nazi occupation of the “Slovak State” on 28 August 1944, but it had been in the making for the previous five years since the British and French governments struck a deal with Hitler that dismembered the Czechoslovak state in 1938. The “Munich Betrayal” illustrates that the Second World War was not a war of the “democratic powers” against fascism; but it was also important in shaping how the uprising played out in a number of ways from both above and below. While the SNP weakened the old ruling class and opened up the possibility for fightback against the Nazis from below, it left the old rulers strong enough to make the running for leadership of any resistance movement.
The representatives of the dominant wing of Western Europe’s ruling classes—that favoured “appeasement”—made clear the position of imperialist powers throughout the 1930s. Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, had said in 1936 that: “Nations cannot be expected to incur automatic obligations save for areas where their vital interests are concerned”.1 The strategic interests of British imperialism did not extend into Eastern Europe, and certainly didn’t include safeguarding “plucky little” Czechoslovakia’s independence.
France had signed a treaty in 1925 that guaranteed Czechoslovakia’s borders and there had been a long-standing relationship between both ruling classes. During the First World War a group of middle class nationalists set up the Czechoslovak National Council with the aim of gaining independence from the Hapsburg Empire. This group represented an aspirant Czechoslovak ruling class, and it would indeed become the ruling class that tried to cling onto power right up until the Communist Party took control in 1948. It included the likes of Edvard Benes who was the president in the run up to the Munich Betrayal and led the “Czechoslovak government-in-exile” during the war. Its strategy was to win the ruling classes of Europe to supporting Czechoslovak independence through fighting alongside the Entente. The council organised Czechoslovak Legions in France and Italy, and the infamous one that fought against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War.
However, it wasn’t in France’s imperialist interests to face an all-out confrontation with Nazi imperialism in 1938 either; its government privately hoped that Britain would itself “suggest that pressure should be put on Prague…to acquiesce without seeming to have taken the initiative in the matter”.2 Trotsky aptly summed up the situation at the time: “England and France threw Czechoslovakia into Hitler’s maw to give him something to digest for a time and thus postpone the question of the colonies”.3 4 Russia also signed a similar treaty in 1935; however, it could afford to posture much more than the West European powers as it was only obliged to act alongside France and did not actually share a common border with Czechoslovakia.
When the Czechoslovak ruling class had resigned itself to the Munich agreement, President Benes protested that: “We have been disgracefully betrayed” and the new prime minister General Jan Syrovy tried to explain that: “We had no other choice because we had been left alone”.5 But Syrovy had previously promised, “I guarantee that the army stands and will stand on our frontiers to defend our liberty to the last”.6 The dismemberment and subsequent occupation of the inter-war Czechoslovak republic discredited the bourgeois politicians who been hung out to dry by the same West European powers that they had looked to (in particular for Czechoslovakia’s rulers, the French state). “I think that the bourgeoisie was discredited…first of all by the defeat of the First Republic in 1938 and secondly by collaboration of part of it with the German”, rightly summed up by Jiri Pelikan, a Communist Party member who participated in the resistance in Moravia but fled after the Russian invasion in 1968.7
This discrediting meant that the Communist Party in both the Czech and Slovak lands was able to play an important part in the underground resistance, which helped it to attain its relatively strong political position following the war’s end in May 1945.8 But while the party’s members on the ground were important resistance fighters, its own leadership sitting in Moscow was under the direction of Russian foreign policy. In the first phase of the occupation the Comintern argued that the main enemy was the Czechoslovak bourgeoisie headed by Benes and backed by the US and British imperialists. While working with the old ruling class would have been wrong and would weaken the resistance movement, the Communist Party wasn’t fighting for a revolutionary alternative but was following the sharp changes in Russian foreign policy. The Comintern’s line included: “Even messages signed by [the party leader] Gottwald himself stated that the German soldiers who had invaded Czechoslovakia were, in fact, proletarians in soldiers’ uniforms and therefore in no way class enemies”.9
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that made an alliance between Russia and Nazi Germany further disorientated Communist Party members.10 This was similar to the experience of other Communist Parties in France, Italy and Greece, which also played an important role in resistance movements. Pelikan argues that: “In fact, the party throughout the country modified these instructions, saying firstly that the comrades in Moscow were not well informed about the situation and secondly that the instructions were completely out of touch with reality”.11 Nonetheless, the party’s positions did severely compromise working class resistance to fascism and damaged resistance during the SNP itself.
While the old ruling class’s alliance with the West European imperialist powers had discredited them, the Munich Betrayal also meant that a number of them around the old president Edvard Benes could form a “government in exile” that was able to present itself as leading resistance to Nazi occupation. When the Czechoslovak government admitted capitulation on 21 September 1938, there was a public backlash where many of the contradictions in the future resistance first came out. In the capital, Prague, there was a general strike, and then an estimated 100,000 people gathered in Wenceslas Square. The dissident Czechoslovak communist Joseph Guttman wrote:
On the following day there was a spontaneous outburst of popular wrath. Without any call, without any leadership the workers, in spite of martial law and the prohibition of meetings, went on a complete general strike and marched in tremendous masses into the heart of Prague. The police disappeared, the soldiers were kept in their barracks to prevent their fraternising with the demonstrators.12 13
