The Soviet Period Military Experience.

As in peacetime, the army at war resorted to creative, non-traditional methods to fill leadership gaps with trained, semi-trained, and untrained personnel. To fill generals’ positions, the army resorted to rapid promotion and appointment of non-military personnel, particularly in the rear services, and occasionally for opolchenie units. By and large the generals responded to the challenge of modern war particularly at the higher levels where they were not likely to become casualties. Many who survived the painful lessons of 1941 and 1942 went on to redeem themselves in 1943 and after.

Stalin’s high expectations of his generals and marshals transcended friendship during this critical time. After giving his longtime friends Marshal Voroshilov and Marshal Kulik several important military commands which they botched he had them both transferred in disgrace to administrative duties. After the war he had Kulik executed. After directing several notorious and costly tactical failures, Stalin named Marshal Georgi Zhukov Deputy Supreme Commander and maintained for himself the active role of strategic oversight which he played with an iron fist, yet by and large he left the generals with the responsibility and initiative for tactical operations though he remained the final arbiter of all major operational decisions.

At the end of 1940, the Red Army had 407 generals; it began the war six months later with 994 generals and ended with 2,952, but as is so often the case in human affairs, as quantity increased, quality decreased. Of the 2,956 generals serving in mid-1944, only eighty had graduated from the Higher Military Academy, seventy-four from the Higher Military Academy short course, 768 from various other military academies, 318 from military academy short courses, 999 from special advanced courses, 494 from military schools but without advanced training, and 223 from various short courses of less intensity than military school. Generals of the rear services, political administration, and juridical service had no military education per se. In Stalin’s opinion over half of the generals had not been properly prepared through the military education system. He claimed personal knowledge of 142 who did not have any military education whatsoever and added that the first thing to be done was to pull them out of their duties and give them appropriate military education.

Similarly, Marshal Zhukov was not impressed at all by the majority of generals. In August 1944 he complained to the cadre section of the Commissariat of Defense that many commanders of armies, fronts, corps, and divisions were not at all well trained. He blamed it on the prewar years when the NKO did not prepare candidates for their higher positions, which also happened during the war. He did not mentioned his culpability as prewar Chief of the General Staff. Zhukov reported that many officers had been called from the reserves to command regiments or battalions who had never had command experience. They learned about war at the front at the price of much blood. He lamented that the reserve system did not actively train officers and keep their skills up or improve them in peacetime. He further decried the lack of culture and sophistication of the majority of high ranking officers. The officer corps was not up to the requirements of modern war, which, according to Zhukov, was eight-tenths technical. He thought the army needed officers who understood their own and the enemy’s technical capacity, in particular artillery, tanks, and aviation – the crux of modern warfare. The Red Army suffered significant material and human losses because many officers were, in Zhukov’s words, “technologically illiterate.” Furthermore, although many generals had passed through the military education system, Zhukov felt that the system, particularly the academies, did not prepare the officer corps to command in wartime. Finally, he saw a big problem with commanders not using their initiative, especially in the first part of the war. This having potential political ramifications, Zhukov put forth no suggestions on how to deal with it. There may be some hypocrisy in Zhukov’s assessment, for as of yet no evidence has surfaced that Zhukov went out of his way to train his subordinate generals during the war.

The experience of war for officers below the rank of general was exceptionally difficult. In the initial period of the war casualties were so high and turnover so rapid, that when coupled with the continuing creation of new units, training was always abbreviated, which then perpetuated the high casualty rate, thus necessitating quick replacement which created a vicious cycle of inadequate training of replacement officers and high casualties for the duration of the war. The result was that a minority of officers in regiments had the chance to assimilate the lessons of war. Add into this equation rapid promotion of inadequately trained junior officers to battalion, regimental and brigade commands and casualties all around stayed high and mastery of the lessons of war remained low.

Russian historian B. V. Sokolov, gives unverified figures of losses of officers in all the armed forces due to death and capture in combat in 1941–45 as 1,023,093 men and women. Another 5,026 died from illness and other reasons, and 20,071 officers were sentenced to demotion by tribunals. The RKKA discharged 1,030,721 because of wounds. He maintains the ground forces alone lost 937,000 officers killed or captured.

The rapid turnover of officers quickly led to a decrease in the ages of new officers. Before the beginning of the great expansion of the army in 1936–37 officers normally began military school at age eighteen and graduated at age twenty or twenty-one. During the war, training prior to commissioning usually lasted only two months and most new mladshie leitenanty took command of their platoons at age eighteen, and were often younger than many of their soldiers. So many young officers flooded the army that men like eighteen year-old Lieutenant Oleg Rakhmanin and his fellow artillery school graduates, who reported for their first duty to participate in the Kursk–Orel offensive in July 1943, jokingly referred to men in the ages of twenty-five to thirty as “Elders” and “Fathers.”

From the beginning to end of the war an overwhelming number of units were commanded by officers of lower rank than the position called for. Dire straits found mladshie leitenanty commanding battalions in the defense of Moscow in 1941. It was normal even in 1945 to find companies commanded by lieutenants rather than captains, battalions commanded by captains rather than majors, and brigades and regiments led by majors rather than lieutenant colonels or colonels. In those cases when a division or corps commander and his staff had mastered the techniques of modern warfare, the lack of expertise in their subordinate regiments continued to keep combat losses excessive.

T-80UD tanks in the Red Square during the 1991 coup d'etat attempt

The centrifugal forces unleashed by glasnost and perestroika were unmistakably tearing apart the fabric of the Soviet Union, causing economic and social turmoil, and destroying the place of the army in politics and society. In response to Gorbachev’s sometimes unwillingness and other times inability to stop the disintegration a cabal of ultraconservatives plotted to overthrow him for the purpose of restoring the power of the party, the army, and the Russian nationality over the rest of the Union.

The Soviet Army’s involvement in the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev can be traced to Minister of Defense Iazov. The head of the conspiracy to create the State Committee for State Security, KGB chief Kriuchkov, knew that without the army the revolt had no chance and therefore enlisted the reluctant participation of Iazov whose main thought was to preserve the disintegrating Soviet empire. Only through his influence were other important generals such as commander of army ground forces General Varennikov, Deputy Defense Minister Achalov, commander of the Airborne forces General Grachev, and commander of the Air Force General Shaposhnikov brought into the scheme. Most of these men had serious doubts about the coup and for a time acted only out of a sense of loyalty to their immediate superior – Iazov. Acting under the orders of Varennikov and Grachev, elements of two army tank divisions and some airborne units dutifully rolled into Moscow on 19–20 August with quite vague instructions and no clear mission.

Iazov was caught off guard, because the people of Moscow, like the peoples of the Caucasus, did not back down from confrontation with the army. Instead, it was the soldiers who proved irresolute; and like in Novocherkassk in 1962, the generals were unwilling to order shooting. Because the people of Moscow were unintimidated, Iazov, fearing to create a civil war, and on the advice of his generals, decided on 21 August to withdraw the troops from Moscow, whereupon the coup collapsed.

Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, personal military advisor to Gorbachev, and Chief of the General Staff until 1988, committed suicide by hanging himself in his Kremlin office shortly after the failed coup attempt. His suicide note included the following sentiment shared by many top-ranking officers, “everything I have devoted my whole life to building is collapsing.” Subsequently Gorbachev named Marshal of Aviation E. I. Shaposhnikov the new Minister of Defense. He promptly resigned from the Communist Party, dismissed General Moiseev, the Chief of Staff of the Army, for “compromising” himself during the coup, and purged the Ministry of Defense of the majority of its deputy ministers and heads of departments and administrations.

The failure of the coup resulted in the virtual death of the Communist Party in the USSR and the abolition of GlavPUR in the army. Three days after the coup Gorbachev, in a Presidential decree, announced the termination of the activity of political parties and political movements in the armed forces. Military personnel could participate in political parties and movements on their own time. A week later the Ministry of Defense officially abolished GlavPUR. Political personnel who wanted to stay in the armed forces could petition to be transferred to military-educational duties. Overall, though, many were discharged, especially those of higher rank. The army ordered all former GlavPUR personnel who had twenty-five or more years of service discharged by 1 December 1991. That amounted to more than 3,000 political workers. Shaposhnikov promised that only five or six of GlavPUR’s thirty-two generals would remain in service.

Boris Yeltsin’s ascendancy to the leadership of a new Russia and the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 saw to the final demise of the Soviet Army and its immediate resurrection as a restructured Russian Army built on the shaky foundations of its predecessor.

In the center of Stalingrad the fighting went on day after day. Since September 14 about fifty Russians had been holding the big grain elevator, south of the Tsaritsa Gorge. On the night of September 17 they were reinforced by a platoon of marines. The fighting was merciless. The Germans came up in a tank with a white flag and called on the Russians to surrender. The Russians refused, and told the Germans to leave their tank where it was. When the Germans tried to jump into the tank, the Russians blew it up. On September 18 the swarm of Luftwaffe planes that was forever above Stalingrad suddenly disappeared. They had been drawn off to German forces fighting against an attack mounted by Zhukov to the northwest to relieve the pressure on Stalingrad. The 1st Guards Army launched this attack at 5:30 on the morning of September 18 after a preliminary artillery bombardment.

The Russians gained three thousand yards, but were then stopped by a German infantry counterattack. That day Marshal Zhukov ordered General Chuikov to launch a counterattack in northern Stalingrad to clear the enemy away and link up with the northwest armies. But by afternoon, Chuikov knew that the Russian attack in the north had failed. He did not need messages. The Luftwaffe planes suddenly reappeared over Stalingrad, as suddenly as they had left.

On September 19 Chuikov staged an attack northward as ordered, to join another attack by the forces in the northwest. Chuikov's troops made some progress, but the northwest attack failed again. On September 20 the Luftwaffe set about one task: to blow the main railroad station to pieces.

"After the bombing-and an artillery bombardment-the station buildings were on fire. The walls burst apart, the iron buckled, but the men went on fighting." A major strongpoint on the northern edge of the city was the big grain elevator. For three days the Germans had pounded the elevator with artillery, setting the grain on fire. Here is a Russian account of the fighting: In the elevator the grain was burning. The water in the machine guns evaporated, the wounded were thirsty but there was no water near.

This was how we defended ourselves twenty-four hours a day for three days. Heat, smoke, thirst, our lips were cracked. During the day many of us climbed up to the highest points in the elevator and from there fired on the Germans. At night we came down and formed a defensive ring around the building. Our radio equipment had been knocked out the first day and we had no contact with our units.

The German infantry broke through and started up the stairs of the elevator. The Russians drove them back in hand-to-hand fighting. But on the night of September 20 the Germans captured the elevator and put out the fires in the grain.

On September 21 the fighting moved to Red Square, to a nail factory and the Univermag department store, which was the headquarters of one of the Guards 42nd Regiment's 1st Battalion. The German artillery concentrated on the department store. German infantry invaded the store, and in hand-to-hand fighting every officer in the battalion command post was killed. The rest of the battalion pulled back, yard by yard to the Volga. Its last position was a three-story building on the corner of Krasnopiterskaya and Komsomolskaya streets, which forty men defended for five nights.

Here from a Russian account is how the fighting went:

"At a narrow window in the semi-basement we set up the heavy machine gun, with our emergency supply of ammunition-the last belt of cartridges I had decided to use at the most critical moment. Two groups, six in each, went up to the third floor and the attic. Their job was to break down walls and to prepare lumps of stone and beams to throw at the Germans. A place for the seriously wounded was set aside in the basement...." After five days the basement held twenty-eight seriously wounded men. Only twelve men were still able to fight. The only food was a few pounds of scorched grain. There was no water.

The German attacks stopped, but they kept up the fire from their heavy-caliber machine guns.

"The Germans attacked again. I ran upstairs with my men and could see their thin, blackened and strained faces, the bandages on their hands."

The nurse with the battalion, Lyuba Nestertenko, was dying with blood flowing from a wound in the chest. She tried to help bind up a man's wound, but she failed.

The German attack was beaten off. In the silence that gathered they could hear the fighting on Mamayev Hill and in the factory area.

"How could we help the men defending the city?" the commander of the battalion asked himself. "How could we divert from over there even a part of the enemy forces, which had stopped attacking our building?" They decided to infuriate the Germans by raising a red flag over the building in defiance. But they had no red material. One soldier who was severely wounded took off his bloody undershirt, wiped his wound with it to get more blood, and handed it to the officer.

The Germans shouted through a megaphone: "Russians, surrender. You'll die just the same."

The red flag went up over the building.

"Bark, you dogs. We've still got a long time to live," shouted a Russian soldier.

They beat off the next attack with stones, firing occasionally and using up the last of their grenades. Suddenly from behind a wall appeared a tank. They had no antitank gun and only one antitank rifle with three rounds. The officer handed the rifle to an antitank man and sent him out through the back to fire at the tank point-blank, but before he could get into position he was captured by German tommy gunners. What the antitank man told the Germans nobody knew, but an hour later they began to attack again precisely at the point where the heavy machine gun was located.

The Germans believed the Russians were out of ammunition and they came bravely forth, standing up and shouting and marching down in a column. The column came up to attack, advancing along the line of fire of the heavy machine gun:

"I put the last belt in the heavy machine gun at the semibasement window and sent the whole of the 250 bullets into the yelling, dirty gray, Nazi mob. I was wounded in the hand but did not let go of the machine gun. Heaps of bodies littered the ground. The Germans still alive ran for cover in panic. An hour later they led our antitank soldier onto a heap of ruins and shot him in front of our eyes, for having shown them the way to my machine gun."

There were no further attacks, but the Germans turned the artillery on the building and a torrent of shells fell on it.

"Again we heard the ominous sound of tanks. From behind a neighboring block stocky German tanks began to crawl out. This clearly was the end. The Guardsmen said goodbye to one another. With a dagger my orderly scratched on a brick wall: 'Rodimtsev's guardsmen fought and died for their country here.'"

The tanks pushed the walls of the building down. That night six Guardsmen, all wounded, got out of the building. They staggered toward the Volga. They ran into a patrol and were lighted by German flares and discovered. But the silent knifing of a German guard got them away unmolested. They encountered another patrol, and another German was knifed silently. They crossed the railroad line, went through a minefield, and reached the Volga, where they built a raft of pieces of wood from the wreckage of a building. They went into the Volga, where they drifted for several days until they were rescued-six men of a battalion.

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In the center of the city every one of these September days was a day of death.

The Russians had great difficulty in reinforcing the city center.

As one Russian put it:

There were times when these reinforcements were really pathetic. They'd bring across the river—with great difficulty—say twenty new soldiers, either old chaps of fifty or fifty-five or youngsters of eighteen or nineteen. They would stand there on the shore, shivering with cold and fear. They'd be given warm clothing and then taken to the front line. By the time these newcomers reached this line, five or ten out of twenty had already been killed by German shells, for with those German flares over the Volga and our front lines, there was never complete darkness. But the peculiar thing about these chaps was that those among them who reached the front line very quickly became wonderfully hardened soldiers. Real frontoviks.

By September 21 the Germans had cleared the bed of the Tsaritsa River, which split Stalingrad, and spread out over the center of the city. The lie of the streets, running east-west, favored the German attack from the west to the east aiming at the Volga. German guns could pour fire down the streets from one end to the other. German troops set up fire points and roadblocks at the western end and then fought their way to the other end. The tanks moved up, the Russians let them come, and then the infantry moved and the Russians began to fire. The tanks used their heavy guns to destroy whole buildings from close range. The job of German tank crews was very difficult. Russians with grenades and antitank rifles could cripple the tanks in the narrow streets by getting a hit in the engine grille or the thin armor of the rear deck.

Stalingrad now had the appearance of a great pile of wreckage, huge mounds of rubble in the city blocks, with single walls half-shattered, with doors hanging askew, sometimes parts of flooring still attached, the doors blowing in the wind, opening and closing for ghosts, surrounded by heaps of bodies and parts of bodies. The city center had begun to stink: the hot wind picked up the smell of the decaying corpses and thrust it into every cranny.

The Russians had changed their military tactics here, using small, heavily armed storm groups to carry out lightning attacks on buildings and strongpoints. General Chuikov said:

City fighting is a special kind of fighting. The buildings in a city act like breakwaters. They broke up the advancing enemy formations and made their forces go along the streets. The troops defending the city learned to allow German tanks to come right on top of them—under the guns of the antitank artillery and antitank riflemen; in this way they invariably cut off the infantry from the tanks and destroyed the enemy's organized battle formation.