DISCUSIÓN DE RESULTADOS

In subsection B above it was suggested that the Soviet regime probably regarded the

conspiratorial attitude and irregular habits fostered by partisan life as potentially disruptive in postwar Soviet society. As far as the rank-and-file partisans were concerned, the "treatment" of this problem was begun soon after the Red Army reoccuppied the areas of partisan activity.

Except for the large roving bands and other detachments which could profitably be dispatched for continued activity farther to the west, the partisan units in the reconquered areas were scheduled for rapid disbandment. Frequently the partisans were permitted a victory parade through the towns on whose outskirts they had skirmished. Sometimes they were then allowed a few days or weeks of leave. In the meantime, according to rumors which are hard to substantiate definitely, suspect or recalcitrant elements were screened out and sent to concentration camps.

Most of the rank-and-file partisans appear, however, to have been sent very quickly to the Red Army. One Soviet source indicates that of 3,149 partisans in the Vinnitsa area, 2,345 went to the army.

[Istoriya velikoi otechestvennoi voiny, IV, 472.]

There—if they survived the war —the partisans acquired a salutary dose of stringent discipline, while their particular partisan experience became submerged in the general experience of war-time military service common to Soviet men of their age group.

Treatment of the partisan leadership cadres was rather different. Undoubtedly there was some screening of unreliable elements in this group, too. Generally speaking, however, the screening of the officer corps had proceeded throughout the years of partisan activity. In one area, at least, the Red Army was forbidden to induct commanders and commissars of detachments or higher partisan echelons without approval of the Party obkom secretary.

[H.Gr. Mitte, Ic, 2 August 1944 (GMDS, 113/1175).]

One of the great, though unplanned, side benefits to the Soviet regime of the partisan episode was its value as a testing ground for new leadership personnel. If under the trying conditions of partisan activity an official displayed the positive qualities outlined in subsection C, while at least avoiding flagrant display of the negative qualities, he clearly was a valuable asset for the future. In particular, a man who displayed initiative while maintaining complete loyalty and self-discipline even when he could not be immediately checked by his superiors possessed a

combination of qualities which could be put to excellent use in the peacetime totalitarian system.

The regime appears to have recognized this potential during the war by taking special steps to evacuate partisan commanders like Kovpak when their units were in danger of annihilation.

Since the war, men with partisan leadership backgrounds have often had brilliant careers.

It would require a special monograph to trace the postwar careers of former partisan officers in detail. Some trends stand out, however. Former NKVD officers generally returned to police service, but at higher levels. Thus Naumov and Saburov, who had held minor police posts before the war, became heads of the police administrations in important frontier oblasts. S. S.

Belchenko, chief of staff of the partisan movement at the Kalinin Front, had risen by 1957 to the high post of Deputy Chairman of the Committee on State Security. Party officials tended to return to the Party apparatus in positions resembling those they had held in the partisans. Usually they also remained within the same Union Republics. V. N. Malin, the head of the political section of the Central Staff, was by 1958 a section chief in the Soviet Communist Party central Secretariat. Aleksei Bondarenko, a minor official in a rayon in the Bryansk area before the war, became first secretary of the Bryansk obkom after his brilliant partisan achievements. Moisei S.

Spivak, prewar secretary for cadres in the Ukraine, who played a major role in the initial organization of the partisan movement there and later was prominent in the Ukrainian Staff, enjoyed a few years of prominence after the war. After some published criticism, he disappeared shortly before Stalin died; possibly he was a victim of the secret purge of Jews. Other members of the central Ukrainian partisan apparatus who were prominent in the Ukrainian Staff, such as A. N. Zlenko, continued to hold important posts throughout the Stalin period and after. A very high proportion of the lower officials assigned as secretaries of the underground Party

committees were killed during the occupation. This was the fate of the obkom secretaries in Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Kirovograd, and Poltava, as well as many in lower posts. On the other hand, several (usually those sent in as replacements after the initial debacle) who survived were rewarded with high posts in the Ukrainian provinces after the war. S. A. Oleksenko, after his successful direction of the Kamenets-Podolsk underground, regained the status of regular obkom first secretary (in Drogobych) which he had apparently lost during the Great Purge. P. Kh.

Kumanok, who directed the Sumy underground, held secondary secretarial posts in obkoms after the war. The prewar Vinnitsa obkom secretary for cadres, D. T. Burchenko, was promoted after his direction of the Vinnitsa underground to head the state apparatus in that oblast. M. A. Rudich became secretary of a Party district committee in Lvov after heading the underground in Lvov oblast.

[For additional details on the postwar careers of underground and partisan leaders in the Ukraine, see Armstrong, The Soviet Bureaucratic Elite, pp. 131-132.]

Apart from its value as a testing ground for officials of the Soviet apparatus, the partisan movement had enormous potential for use by the regime as an inspirational legend. That the regime has recognized this potential is indicated by the enormous outpouring of books about the partisans. It is evident that the publication of documents, memoirs, and histories on partisan activity has been closely related to shifts in the "general line" of Communist propaganda and to power rivalries in the Soviet regime. A detailed investigation of these relationships would require close examination, employing the tools of content analysis, of the themes treated in books appearing at various times. Such an investigation would also include careful comparisons of the textual variations, small but often significant, in successive editions of the same book. In the absence of such a detailed investigation, the observations presented in the following

paragraphs are necessarily somewhat impressionistic; but they at least suggest the main lines of development in the partisan literature.

During the war and for a short time thereafter works on the partisans tended to picture the movement as a popular, patriotic uprising against the Germans. While the partisan movement was never described as spontaneous, the elements of Party and NKVD direction were played down. This treatment seems to have been in close accord with the general Soviet propaganda line, which stressed an all-embracing patriotism as long as it was necessary to use all means to rally the Soviet peoples against the Germans. By 1946 the regime apparently felt that the time had come to re-emphasize the pre-eminence of Party controls and ideology. During the following two years (in what has been known as the "Zhdanovshchina") several of the earlier works were criticized for not emphasizing the decisive role of the Party in organizing and guiding the

partisans. The emphasis on the close association between partisans and Party was closely related to the prestige of A. A. Zhdanov, whose Leningrad partisan operation had been especially successful. Toward the beginning of 1948, however, Zhdanov appeared to be losing his influence; in August he died. There are even some indications that Zhdanov's patronage of ex-partisans may have been involved in his decline.

[Armstrong, The Politics of Totalitarianism, p. 177.]

In the Soviet East European satellites a background of partisan activity tended, between 1948 and 1953, to make a Communist leader suspect of "bourgeois nationalism" and "Titoism." No doubt the primary reason for this suspicion was the strident Yugoslav emphasis on partisan warfare as the best way for Communist parties to come to power.

[See especially Eugenio Reale, Avec Jacques Duclos au Banc des Accusés à la Réunion

Constitutive du Cominform à Szklarska Poreba (22-27 Septembre 1947) (Paris: Librairie Phon, n. d.), especially pp. 110 ff., 134 ff.]

It is notable, however, that the Slovak ex-partisans, who had been entirely under Soviet rather than Yugoslav guidance during the war, were prominent among the purge victims of this period.

Within the Soviet Union, ex-partisans had to tread warily. The most striking instance of the danger inherent in glorifying partisan and underground exploits is, significantly, connected with D. M. Medvedev, whose partisan career had originally been a path to rehabilitation after his disputes with higher-echelon NKVD officers. In 1952 (in a Ukrainian magazine) Medvedev published an account of the Vinnitsa underground called "On the Banks of the Southern Bug."

The series of articles was sharply criticized in a Vinnitsa newspaper for glorifying men who were poseurs rather than real underground heroes. In February 1953, just before Stalin died, the

criticism was picked up by the influential central periodical Literaturnaya Gazeta.

[The article is translated in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, V, No. 7, pp. 38-39.]

After Stalin died Medvedev's account, apparently unchanged, was published in book form with a circulation of hundreds of thousands. An editorial note to one edition commented that the work had "required not only great labor, but also civil courage; when Medvedev went to work on the book, there was much which was unclear in the history of the Vinnitsa underground and several of its participants were subjected to unjustified accusations."

[Dmitrii N. Medvedev, Na beregakh yuzhnogo Buga (Kiev: Radyanskyi Pysmen-nyk, 1962), introductory note, p. 2.]

But Medvedev himself had died in 1954 at the age of fifty-six.

Immediately after Stalin died, some of the more prominent police officials who had participated in partisan direction became deeply involved in the conflict over Beria's position. Strokach played a key role in the events which ultimately led to Beria's downfall. One reason, probably, was that Strokach (if his wartime adjutant is to be believed) was bitterly anti-Semitic—he had once even accused Khrushchev of favoring Jews—while Beria was bringing back Jewish police officers whom Stalin had purged. Apparently the main reason, however, was Strokach's

unwillingness to join in Beria's scheme to discredit the Ukrainian Party apparatus. Very likely this reluctance was partly due to the close ties with the Party which Strokach (and some of his subordinates with frontier-guard backgrounds) had developed while directing the partisans.

[Armstrong, The Politics of Totalitarianism, pp. 242, 406n48.]

At any rate, while Strokach was retired as head of the Ukrainian ministry of the interior in 1956, accounts of the partisan movement have continued to acclaim his role. On the other hand some—

though by no means all—of the high police officials involved in central and Belorussian partisan direction were purged as followers of Beria. Sudoplatov and Eitingon, who had worked behind the scenes in the Fourth Administration of the NKVD, disappeared just as obscurely. L. F.

Tsanava, head of the Belorussian police apparatus and author of the most detailed history which has been published on any phase of the partisan movement, was purged in 1956— and his book disappeared with him.

For most of the former partisan leaders, however, Khrushchev's rise to supreme power must have been highly gratifying. He is said to have ordered the compilation of manuscripts of partisan accounts as early as 1944.

[Naumov, p. 402.]

In 1949, Khrushchev conspicuously praised the partisans in spite of Stalin's tendency to suspect them. After Khrushchev secured control of the Soviet Communist Party, Soviet works

emphasized the "fraternal aid" rendered to partisans in the East European Communist states, and a background of partisan activity again became a sign of distinction there. In the USSR the flood of partisan memoirs and documentary collections rose. For some unknown reason, however, Khrushchev has frowned upon systematic historical investigation of the partisan movement. In March 1962 he scornfully compared a dissertation on "Partisan Operations in the Belorussian Forests during the Patriotic War" to one on "The Ecology and Economic Importance of the European White Stork, the Black Stork and the Common Gray Heron in Belorussia." Both, he said, were "ludicrous" wastes of Soviet money. If there were to be treatments of the partisans and other phases of the war, let them be memoirs, articles, and literary works.

[Speech to Central Committee Plenum, March 9, 1962, as translated in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, XIV, No. 12, p. 11.]

In view of Khrushchev's frequent changes of course, it would be unwise to conclude that no detailed histories of partisan operations can be expected in the near future. There may be, however, a certain long-range significance in his remarks. As indicated above, the story of the partisan movement has provided the regime with a highly useful legend. The partisan legend forms part of the larger epic of "The Great Patriotic War," which is the heroic age of the generation now in power in the USSR. The partisan legend, however, has the advantage that it dramatizes the role of the Communist Party and its present leaders, while emphasis on regular military operations tends to enhance the prestige of the army. Several recent memoirs assert (with dubious historical validity) that service in the partisans was harder and more dangerous, and (by implication) more commendable than in the Red Army.

[Begma and Kyzya, p. 487; Makedonskii, p. 105]

In addition, the story of the partisans is particularly adaptable to indoctrination of youth. The theme of a daring band of dedicated young men living robustly in the open air, fighting against terrible odds, and wreaking vengeance on the blackest of villains has attracted young people from the days of Robin Hood to the Wild West. Add to this recipe the ingredients of a detective thriller, and an ideal vehicle for indoctrination is at hand. It is scarcely surprising that, even in the last years of Stalin's life, the output of partisan stories continued. The great majority of these are based on fact, but the literary editors (and occasional skilled writers from among the

partisans, like Pavlo P. Vershigora) have recast the recollections of real partisans in dramatic form. Though unsophisticated, these stories provide a welcome contrast to the drab, obviously didactic tone of most officially favored Soviet writing. At the same time, the "literary" reworking of the partisan memoirs provides ample opportunity for the skilled propagandist to stress the positive elements of the partisans' characters and to warn indirectly against those characteristics which the regime regards as negative. In this way the partisan genre of literature is made to play a significant and probably effective part in the machinery of Soviet indoctrination. Its role is unlikely to diminish for many years to come.