The point of departure for the integration of the Communist Party and its adjunct Komsomol network into psychological warfare activities in the German-occupied areas of the USSR was the great role played by the Party organs in peacetime "agitation and propaganda." In the initial stages of the war the Party had sought to leave behind an underground apparatus in each city, rayon, and oblast of the occupied areas. [See Chaps. II and III.] Among other things, the underground Party was to be responsible for the creation and control of the partisan movement on a territorial basis. Some measures for the movement's propaganda work were adopted even before the German arrival. An order of the Party's Central Committee of 18 July 1941, for instance, provided for the direction of partisan groups by small underground Party units, specifying that arrangements were to be made to send leaflets and posters to the partisans or to prepare for printing such materials on the spot. In Chernigov Oblast, the underground Party committee, which also constituted the original staff of the partisan movement, institutionalized propaganda activities as early as the end of July 1941, when a Secretary for Agitation and Propaganda was appointed and charged with "selecting literature, setting up a print shop, collecting and packing newsprint." Similar preparations were made in the Crimea, Krasnodar, and Stalingrad regions. In the last two areas the Party secretaries of the rayon and city
committees were made responsible for the preparation of propaganda work.
Where bands actually engaged in propaganda activities, the interrelationship of Party and partisan work was so close that any distinction between them would not correspond to the realities of the situation. One German intelligence report, discussing underground Party-directed propaganda in the summer of 1943, found that "systematic construction of an illegal network of Party and partisan propaganda" was taking place "throughout the entire Eastern occupied territories under central direction from Moscow." The outstanding feature was "the close coordination of partisan propaganda with Party propaganda"—a conclusion fully borne out by other available data. Another report stated that special propaganda groups set up by partisan brigades were administered jointly by the partisan staffs and the underground Party committees.
In some instances the underground Party committees were actually set up by partisans; in others the Party committee was physically attached to or even identical with the staff of a large
stationary brigade. Party secretaries, especially at the rayon level, often were partisan officers at the same time.
The difficulties in distinguishing between Party and partisan-sponsored propaganda activities are compounded by the frequency with which German reports fail to distinguish between Party organizers and partisan groups; they often assumed that the entire partisan movement was under direct, or even exclusive, Party control, and Soviet postwar accounts generally tend to exaggerate the role played by the Party as the "organizer of victory," either by conveniently ignoring the unpopular activities of the NKVD apparatus, or by seeking to inflate the part played by
Communist organs, compared with the politically more neutral and less articulate Army. It must be concluded that the role played by Party and Komsomol in partisan psychological warfare was greater than that of any other institution, especially since the work of the Red Army in this field was handled through the Main Political Administration, which at the same time was the Military Section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR.
a. Party Control over Partisan Propaganda
Partly because of the chaotic retreat and general disorganization, partly because of the unfavorable conditions in which the small staffs were compelled to operate during the initial stage of the occupation, in many rayons the Party nuclei left behind in effect dissolved and disappeared. The scattered evidence suggests that, during the first phase of the partisan
movement, the revival of the Party organization above the local level was crucially handicapped by the same factors that rendered difficult the survival and extension of the partisan movement itself.
In line with general endeavors to intensify anti-German activities and organization behind the lines, the Communist Party in the unoccupied areas began dispatching its representatives back to German-held soil in order to reorganize Party and partisan units and spread propaganda among the population. Such a development took place, for instance, in Leningrad Oblast when the Oblast Committee sent underground Party groups to German-held territory to engage in Party-political work.
[P. Sheverdalkin, ed., Listovki partizanskoi voiny v leningradskoi oblasti 1941-44 (Leningrad:
Leningradskoye Gazetno-Zhurnalnoye i Knizhnoye Izdatelstvo, 1945), p.7.]
There is every indication that a similar process took place in other oblasts.
The Party Oblast Committees, for the most part located on the Soviet side of the front, supplied the underground press with the necessary materials, printing equipment and paper, and
supervised the publication and distribution of propaganda materials.
[L. Tsanava, V senarodnaya partizanskaya voina v Belorussii protiv fashistskikh zakhvatchikov (Minsk: Gosudarstvennoye Izdatelstvo BSSR, Vol. I, 1949; Vol. II, 1951X11, 930.]
The Central Committees of the Belorussian and Ukrainian Communist Parties (located on the Soviet side) published their own materials and provided the partisans and the civilian population with copies of their papers, mostly by air.
[A Soviet postwar source credits the Central Committee of the Belorussian Communist Party and the Belorussian Staff of the Partisan Movement with instituting a regular newspaper supply service. This source alleges that, on the average, the rather impressive number of 350,000 papers was sent in daily, in addition to 30,000 copies of Sovetskaya Belarus, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Belorussian CP. Other newspapers included issues of Pravda, Izvestiya, Komsomohkaya Pravda, and Krasnoye Znamya. Despite the seemingly exaggerated
number, the source admits that material sent in from the Soviet side proved to be insufficient and needed to be supplemented by material printed in the German-held areas (Tsanava, II, 68).]
The Leningrad Oblast Committee played a somewhat unusual role in the partisan control structure, since the obkom secretary, Nikitin, also commanded the partisan staffs attached to the Northwest and Volkhov Fronts. When supplies were shipped to the partisans, the propaganda sections of the partisan staffs at the Volkhov and Northwest Fronts sent along considerable quantities of leaflets.
[Sheverdalkin, p. 7. These Party-operated sections should not be confused with the Political Administrations of each Front, which also sent psychological-warfare supplies to the partisans.
In some areas inter-rayon committees were established, covering several or parts of several rayons. These Party committees, generally created where it was not feasible to set up rayon committees, are credited by a Soviet source with having played "a tremendous role in the development of the partisan press" in Leningrad Oblast.]
The material at hand permits few generalizations about the changes in Party direction of partisan propaganda. Only in the spring of 1943 did the Germans find a set of directives ostensibly issued by the Central Committee of the VKP(b) with a "Work Plan" for Party organs behind the
German lines. The excerpts given in the available document fail to indicate that the plan was aimed specifically at the partisans, though in all probability it was. Among the various points, the directives stressed: "The Party member is obliged... to explain the war situation on the anti-Fascist fronts of the war to the non-Party masses and to restore and strengthen among them the belief in the final victory of Soviet power over fascism." The extensive point-by-point program attached to them included drafting civilians for work with the underground, increasing
inducements to collaborators to desert, infiltrating German and indigenous collaborator agencies, and preventing German requisitions and recruitment of forced labor.
Certainly the obkomy remained the key bodies in the formulation and transmission of propaganda policies to the partisan units, subject to broader directives at a higher level. The rayon committees of the Party were at first constrained to operate independently and without extensive underground means; more often than not, the German occupation had deprived them of cadres, means of supply, and for some time of liaison with higher echelons. As the Party
committees were revived on a territorial basis behind the German lines, each obkom and raikom was instructed to publish its own newspaper and leaflets. While the themes employed show enough general similarities to suggest rather specific directives from above, often rayon workers had to fend for themselves both in amassing technical equipment and in drafting specific appeals adapted to local conditions. By 1944, in most areas behind the German lines, each raikom was publishing newspapers and leaflets, though many of these were technically inferior, small in circulation, and irregular in appearance and distribution. [See also below, subsection B, 2.]
While many such Party committees were, in operation, at least formally separate from partisan groups, a corresponding Party network permeated the partisan structure itself. [For further details, see Chap. II, Sect. III, H, 3.] As the partisan movement grew and its institutional
framework expanded, so did the Party organizations and the Propaganda and Agitation Sections within them. While the major task of such sections was customarily indoctrination within the unit, at least in some instances the Party cell also functioned as a nucleus for the reinstallation of the Party apparatus among the civilian population as well. In some cases, the Party units within the partisan bands were closely tied in with the territorial Party organizations for the area in which they operated [This was particularly true in instances where the underground Party was also the organizer of the partisans and where Party secretaries were simultaneously partisan
officers. In Kalinin Oblast, 48 raikom secretaries; in Smolensk Oblast, 85 raikom secretaries worked as organizers of partisans units. In Belorussia [at the peak] 9 obkomy, 174 gorkomy [city committees] and raikomy were operating under the Germans. (Golikov, p. 100.)]; in others, they were directly responsible to higher Party echelons on the Soviet side of the front.
[This procedure paralleled the Red Army policy of keeping the Party and Komsomol organs within the military establishment exempt from the territorial network of the Party and making them directly responsible to the Central Committee of the VKP(b) through the Main Political Administration of The Red Army. See Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Party Control in the Soviet Army,"
Journal of Politics (Gainesville, Florida), November 1952.]
In addition to conducting political propaganda among the population, they were responsible for the collection of political intelligence.
As the partisan movement expanded, there was a growing tendency to transfer partisans who were Party members from combat and administrative duties to political and propaganda work, either within the Party cell or at the propaganda section of the partisan unit. In one way or another, the Party continued to play a decisive role in the psychological warfare work of the detachments. It provided special propaganda troops and individual lecturers and agitators, who were filtered through the lines or flown into the occupied areas, and who occasionally brought propaganda directives and printed material with them for distribution behind the German lines.
In other cases, high-ranking officers were temporarily sent in by the Party to give advice to partisan units and at the same time to deliver lectures and reports to partisans and neighboring civilians.
b. The Underground Komosomol in Psychological Warfare
As an adjunct of the Party, the Komsomol possessed an equally extensive network throughout the Soviet Union. With the advent of the German occupation, its apparatus on occupied soil also disintegrated, although its membership did not fully disperse. Though gravely weakened by mobilizations and evacuations, a probably larger percentage of Komsomol cadres than of their Party counterparts remained on occupied soil. It is likely that defeatism was less widespread among the Soviet-trained younger men and women than among skeptical older persons aware of alternatives to the Soviet regime and hardened by a generation of life in the USSR. It was thus an obvious measure for the Soviet regime to attempt a revival of the Komsomol apparatus, which was particularly well suited for employment in psychological warfare: Komsomol members were likely to be more literate, physically more hard and resilient, and at the same time more reliable from the Soviet point of view.
The revival of a Komsomol organization is described in various Soviet memoirs and postwar belles-lettres. The Chernigov and Krasnodar "Young Guards" are of particular interest since they operated in conjunction with partisan units.
[See also the Stalin Prize-winning novel by Konstantin Fadeyev, Molodaya Gvardiya [Young Guard].]
Led by a "political education inspector," the Kholmy Young Guard gradually became a substantial center of propaganda work. According to a Soviet account, "they printed leaflets containing the Soviet Information Bureau bulletins [a general practice of virtually all propaganda units] and news of district life with the regularity of a newspaper and faithfully delivered them to specific addresses. There, more copies were made by hand and passed on. In the course of [a few months] they had printed and distributed thousands of such leaflets."
[A. Fyodorov, Podpolnyi obkom deistvuyet (Moscow: Voennoye Izdatelstvo Mini-sterstva Vooruzhennykh Sil Soyuza SSR, 1947), pp. 373-74]
Other Komsomol groups engaged in propaganda activities in Minsk and Baranoviche Ob-lasts;
they published their own newspapers and leaflets. Komsomol members also formed the nucleus of an agitkollektiv, whose main work consisted in the distribution of printed material under Party supervision.
[See also Tsanava I, 217-18; II, 912, 921.]
In general, as a Soviet pamphlet stated frankly early in the war, the Komsomol was enrolled to win over the fence-sitters, especially the youth, in occupied territory. It was felt that such people frequently "needed merely a push, and it was this push that the Komsomol partisans were to provide."
[N. Mikhailov, Komsomoltsy v tylu u vraga (Moscow, 1942).]
Though the degree to which Komsomol units were revitalized varied greatly (in rural areas, generally in direct proportion to the prevalence of partisans), the oblast and rayon Komosomol committees were restored to a considerable extent and played a notable role in the field of propaganda.
[Tsanava (II, 64 ff.) claims that over 2,500 Komsomol agitators operated in Minsk Oblast in 1943. Regular meetings of underground Komsomol agitators allegedly were held in Minsk in October 1942 and February 1943.]
c. Propaganda Organization within the Partisan Movement.
During the early stage of the partisan movement, the propaganda apparatus was both primitive and haphazard. In some units which had no facilities to print propaganda material—and in 1941 this included most of the bands—the commissar would dictate prepared texts of leaflets to a few partisans who would copy them; in smaller units the politruk assumed responsibility for drafting leaflets, and the commissar remained in over-all charge of political affairs.
In 1942-43, in accordance with orders from higher headquarters referred to above, separate Propaganda and Agitation Sections were established in operative groups, brigades, and independent otryads on the German side of the front. The institutionalization of psychological warfare efforts reflected the increased strength of the units, more time, and additional technical equipment and personnel for propaganda work.
[Fyodorov, a leading partisan commander, claims that the size of partisan units was determined in part so as to enable them to engage in propaganda and political activities (Fyodorov, p. 355).]
Separate Propaganda and Agitation Sections were reported in operative centers in Belorussia, in Mogilev and Bryansk Oblasts. One Belorussian operative center apparently had such a section as early as May 1942; it was allegedly headed by a former political commissar of the Red Army with an assimilated rank of major general.
Such sections were also formed on the operative group and brigade level from the spring of 1942 on.
[According to a German intelligence summary, the standard table of organization for a brigade included a political and propaganda section, consisting of a commissar and thirty-five to seventy men (Nachrichten, Nr. 1, 3 May 1943, p. 8).]
Though this effort clearly accorded with the general streamlining of the partisan structure, some brigades established them much later; or they never had such sections. The Grishin Regiment, one of a handful of important "roving bands," created a section for propaganda and agitation in July 1943. The order setting up this section sheds some light on the tasks which it was expected to perform:
A Section for Agitation and Propaganda is to be created in order to increase agitation and propaganda activities in the regiment and among the civilian population. A section chief, two instructors, and an editor for the newspaper will be appointed. The assignments of the section for August are the following: