Partisan warfare occupied a fairly prominent place in several areas of Soviet thought during the interwar period. Military textbooks and courses in Red Army academies analyzed partisan operations of the Civil War period and occasionally referred to partisan activity in other periods or countries, such as the guerrilla war conducted against Napoleon in both Russia and Spain.
Historical and political journals, especially those concerned with the history of the Communist Party, printed lengthy articles on the Red partisans of the Civil War. These articles analyzed the social and political background of the Civil War partisans and stressed political as well as military aspects of the movement.
[See Raymond L. Garthoff, Soviet Military Doctrine (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953). pp. 391-94.]
Partisan leaders were extolled as models of "militancy" and devotion to communism. While many of the Civil War partisan leaders sank into obscurity soon after the Soviet regime was firmly established or were purged during Stalin's efforts to consolidate his dictatorship, several prominent Soviet leaders, such as Marshal Klimentii Voroshilov, continued to be acclaimed as heroes of the partisan movement.
Partisan warfare therefore was not an entirely new concept for the generation of Soviet citizens, or at least the Communist Party members among them, which experienced the German invasion of 1941. Nevertheless this generation was not psychologically prepared to carry on underground resistance against an occupying power. As the first secretary of the disadvantages. Although a guerrilla group can recover quickly from physical dispersion by the enemy, it may disintegrate if certain key leaders are eliminated, because, unlike a regular military force, it frequently has no alternative organization to which the survivors are bound to attach themselves. Since even the unimpaired guerrilla band is not a part of a permanent institutionalized body, serious problems of morale and discipline may arise. [See Chap. III.] Although these problems are outside the
purview of this study, the role of the guerrilla unit within the general strategy of war is of real pertinence. Guerrilla operations against the enemy are of comparatively little value to the over-all war effort unless they can be coordinated from the center and directed against important objectives. This is especially true because guerrilla units, particularly when they operate near the homes of their members, tend to shun activity which would result in strong enemy reprisals. As a rule, actions which the enemy counters energetically are, of course, precisely those which would be of most value to the over-all war effort of the country to which the guerrillas belong. For the Soviet regime the importance of controls was even greater, since, unlike countries where the guerrillas have arisen in a spontaneous reaction to foreign invasion, the occupied Soviet zone tended at first to accept the German occupation passively.
Aside from the military value, however, an important advantage of centralized direction lies in the political field. In a guerrilla movement where centralized control is not effective, individual commanders tend to become a law unto themselves. At first the leader of a band passively evades the control exerted by the central authorities, then openly sets up an opposition center.
Experiences of this sort were frequent in civil wars in countries like Mexico and China in the second and third decades of this century and during the civil war in Russia and the Ukraine. The Soviet rulers vividly remembered their experiences with guerrilla leaders like Nestor Makhno in the Ukraine, who declared their allegiance to the Soviet regime when it seemed expedient to do so, but eventually had to be forcibly suppressed when they refused to conform to Soviet decrees.
They were determined to prevent the reappearance of such centrifugal tendencies in the event of another protracted war in the Soviet Union. The emergence of independent leaders from among its own citizens is to a totalitarian regime almost as distasteful as the complete control of these citizens by a foreign invader.
In order to preserve the advantages of guerrilla activities and, at the same time to avoid their traditional pitfalls, the Soviet leadership during the Second World War employed two types of control which had been little used in earlier guerrilla warfare. Because it was the Soviet Union, a major industrial power, which was supporting the bands, modern technical devices like the airplane and the radio were available. Of equal or greater importance where the techniques of political and social control peculiar to the regime. The central subject of this chapter is the manner in which the organizational and control structure of the Soviet partisan movement evolved. One aspect concerns the application of established Soviet methods of control to the partisan movement; another is the manner in which the special circumstances of partisan warfare resulted in improvising new methods, or in modifying established ones. Taken in this way, the study of partisan warfare provides important insight into the functioning of the Soviet system under conditions of stress.
§II. The First Efforts of Partisan Organization
A. THE PREWAR SOVIET CONCEPT OF PARTISAN WARFARE
Partisan warfare occupied a fairly prominent place in several areas of Soviet thought during the interwar period. Military textbooks and courses in Red Army academies analyzed partisan operations of the Civil War period and occasionally referred to partisan activity in other periods or countries, such as the guerrilla war conducted against Napoleon in both Russia and Spain.
Historical and political journals, especially those concerned with the history of the Communist Party, printed lengthy articles on the Red partisans of the Civil War. These articles analyzed the social and political background of the Civil War partisans and stressed political as well as military aspects of the movement.
[See Raymond L. Garthoff, Soviet Military Doctrine (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953), pp. 391-94.]
Partisan leaders were extolled as models of "militancy" and devotion to communism. While many of the Civil War partisan leaders sank into obscurity soon after the Soviet regime was firmly established or were purged during Stalin's efforts to consolidate his dictatorship, several prominent Soviet leaders, such as Marshal Kli-mentii Voroshilov, continued to be acclaimed as heroes of the partisan movement.
Partisan warfare therefore was not an entirely new concept for the generation of Soviet citizens, or at least the Communist Party members among them, which experienced the German invasion of 1941. Nevertheless, this generation was not psychologically prepared to carry on underground resistance against an occupying power. As the first secretary of the Chernigov Oblast Committee of the Communist Party, Aleksei Fyodorov, puts it in his memoirs, the very term "underground"
seemed archaic and "bookish" to Party members who had lost all feeling for conspiratorial work during their twenty years of undisputed power.
[Aleksei Fyodorov, Podpolnyi obkom deistvuyet (Moscow: Voennoye Izdatelstvo Ministerstva Vooruzhyonnykh Sil Soyuza SSR, 1947), I, 15; see also Ivan Kozlov, V krymskom podpolye:
vospominaniya (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel, 1947, pp. 10, 17-18.]
In part this may be explained by the fact that the regional Party officials apparently were unaware that higher Party authorities had drawn up plans for a clandestine organization to take over in the event of enemy occupation. When Fyodorov went to Kiev shortly after the outbreak of war to consult with Nikita Khrushchev, then first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party,
he was amazed to learn that such plans had indeed been made very much earlier at the all-union and union republic level of the Party.
[Ibid., pp. 12-13. Some German reports refer to extensive Soviet prewar planning for partisan activity. However, these reports are either couched in vague terms, without specific evidence to support them, or are based on interrogations of low-ranking and obviously poorly informed members of partisan bands.]
Evidently, prewar planning was confined to generalized schemes worked out by the central Party authorities. The lack of detailed preparation at the regional and local level may seem to indicate an incredible lack of foresight, but it more probably was an inevitable corollary of the prevailing Soviet doctrine which envisaged a future war as an offensive campaign.
The overt signal for partisan organization was given in Stalin's radio speech of 3 July 1941. This lengthy address, dealing with many aspects of the war, contained one paragraph on partisan warfare:
In areas occupied by the enemy, guerrilla units, mounted and on foot, must be formed;
diversionist groups must be organized to combat the enemy troops, to foment guerrilla warfare everywhere, to blow up bridges and roads, damage telephone and telegraph lines, set fire to forests, stores, transports. In the occupied regions conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy and all his accomplices. They must be hounded and annihilated at every step and all their measures frustrated.
[J. V. Stalin, The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union (New York: International Publishers, 1945), p. 15]
At about the same time, several agencies of the Soviet Government began feverish preparation for partisan activity. In all probability there was no formal coordinating body, although it is likely that the principal Party, Red Army, and NKVD officials concerned conferred from time to time on the roles that their respective departments should play. Such coordination is suggested by the fact that, in spite of certain ambiguities, the basic orders issued for the formation of the partisan movement indicate some general delineation of areas of responsibility.
B. THE TERRITORIAL ORGANIZATION