By now most readers of this blog will be aware that there are missing
explanations and the occasional slip in the English language version of
Averbakh's memoirs. The slips are not present in the Russian. It need
hardly be said that Averbakh did not provide the English language
translation! I should add, too, that one should not judge the translator or
the publisher harshly, both time and money were limited. The result is
that it is difficult to cover everything; for instance, I was puzzled by
the following, it's on page 16:
A proclamation was issued (known as the Voroshilov Order,
after the then head of the armed forces), which required all those aged
18 to join up with the army.
It wasn't the name I expected, the
1939 Law of Universal Conscription or a similar formulation. It turns out that Kliment Voroshilov gave a bombastic speech to the Supreme Soviet on 31st August 1939. It can be viewed
here.
The actual law was passed on 1st September 1939, it can be found
here.
Note that that was signed by M.I. Kalinin and A. Gorkin on behalf of the
Supreme Soviet. It goes without saying that not every eighteen year old
would necessarily have gone into the army. This proclamation was to do
with the building up of a reserve.
The key point was that conscription was lowered to eighteen years,
having, apparently only recently been reduced from twenty-one to
nineteen (Lieutenant-Colonel Albert Seaton,
ex-US military retired, in note 36 on page 18 of his book
The Russo-German War,
ISBN 0-89141-392-8, talks of this reduction to nineteen from twenty-one
in September 1939,
that is the same date. I'm not sure how to reconcile this. The whole
subject is confusing and perhaps best left to specialists. I'm not
convinced I understand it). There is another law discussed by David M.
Glantz,
also a retired
US Army lieutenant-colonel, who is considered by many to be the West's premier authority on the war on the
Ostfront. He has this to say on page 61 of
Operation Barbarossa (ISBN 978 - 0 - 7524 - 6070 - 3):
… Pre-war Soviet theory estimated that the army would have to
be completely replaced every four to six months during heavy combat. To
satisfy this need, the 1938 Universal Military Service Law extended the
reserve service obligation to age 50 …
Note the assumption of an absolutely horrifying rate of
loss. The obligation to join the military was also included in article
132 of the Soviet constitution of 1936 (the Stalin Constitution).
On the same page Glantz adds:
By the time of the German invasion, the Soviet Union had a
pool of at least 14 million men with at least basic military training.
On 22
nd June 1941, the day on which the Nazis
attacked, there were roughly five million men in the Red Army (The late
Professor John Erickson in
The Road to Stalingrad, ISBN 0 297 76877 8, page 225, gave a figure of 4.7 millions).
It is likely that many in Averbakh's circle, as well as others, referred to the 1939 law as the
Voroshilov Order.
It's not a name, as a Westerner, that I'm used to. However, Voroshilov
was promoted as a great military hero, so listeners to his speech would
automatically associate him with the order. In the English version, a
note explaining this would have been useful
, although I can't blame a translator of chess books for not doing so: one can't know everything.
Kliment Voroshilov is someone I can expatiate on with confidence.
Doubts about his competence go all the way back to the Russian Civil
War.
Born in the Ukraine in 1881, the son of a railway worker, Kliment
Yefremovich Voroshilov joined the Bolshevik faction after the 1903
split in the Russian Social Democratic Party. A participant in both the
1905 and 1917 revolutions, he was one of the first recruits to the
Cheka, which was established by Feliks Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926) during
the Russian Civil War. In 1918 he was chosen by Stalin as the military
specialist commander of the Tsaritsyn (modern day Volgagrad, but better
known as Stalingrad) front even though he had no experience or knowledge
of military affairs: it was the making of his career. Upon arrival, he
had many dedicated military professionals arrested or sent back to
Moscow on the charge that they were counterrevolutionaries.
His arrival did nothing for military efficiency. In Trotsky's
opinion large numbers of troops were needlessly tied up at Tsaritsyn,
thereby enabling Stalin to invent the myth of a heroic defence. Stalin
went on to clash with Trotsky and Tukhachevsky (1893-1937) over the
conduct of the war with Poland that broke out in 1920, Voroshilov was in
Stalin's camp. As a loyal supporter of the future dictator, Voroshilov
was promoted repeatedly and lauded as a military genius. In late 1925 he
replaced
Mikhail Frunze
as People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs, a marker as to who
was the most powerful man in the Soviet Union. Voroshilov held this
position (the title later changed to Commissar of Defence) until 1940.
He was notorious amongst those who knew him for having no head for
detail. Despite being blamed by many for the Soviet debacles in the
Winter War with Finland (1939-1940), Voroshilov was not purged, merely
sidelined. No longer Commissar of Defence, he was appointed the deputy
chairman of the Defence Committee. Following the disasters on the
frontiers after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on 22
nd June 1941, Voroshilov, to the great cost of many, was appointed
glavkom (commander-in-chief) of the fronts to the north-west (10
th
July 1941). Out of his depth, Leningrad was cut-off, save for a route
over Lake Ladoga, and appeared on the verge of falling. Fortunately for
the defenders, he was superseded, although he continued to hold senior
positions throughout the war.
Early in the 1950s, the paranoid Stalin began to entertain doubts
as to Voroshilov's loyalty, the dictator wondered whether his underling
was an English spy. Happily for Voroshilov, Stalin died in 1953.
Voroshilov was appointed Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet
(1953-1960). A long time member of the Politburo, he was denounced by
Khrushchev in 1961 and stripped of his posts. He died in 1969.
For most of the Stalin period Voroshilov was promoted as a great military leader, towns were named after him and the heavy
KV
tanks (not as famous as the T34 medium tanks, but also an unpleasant
shock to the invading Nazis) also bore his name. An irony is that
Voroshilov was opposed to the expansion of the armoured forces (see
Erickson op. cit., page 32). Not hated in the manner that
Mekhlis
was, many Red Army officers nonetheless held a low opinion of
Voroshilov personally, they felt he could have done more to protect the
officer corps before it was shattered (tens of thousands were shot or
sentenced to the Gulag) by the dictator.
On page 43, Averbakh recalls that he was sent to Naro-Fominsk, where he spent twelve hours a day building
BT tanks (almost certainly
BT-7s,
the BTs performed well in the 1939 battle of Khalkhin Gol, which put a
halt to Japanese ambitions at the expense of the Soviets; but, as
Averbakh relates, were of little use when fighting the Nazis). The town
is about forty miles south-west of the centre of Moscow (it's more or
less on a straight line drawn from Moscow to Kaluga, where Averbakh was
born). Averbakh relates that he was sent back to Moscow in September
1941 when the Nazis advanced closer to Moscow. Bock, the commander of
the Nazi Army Group Centre, issued the directive for Operation Typhoon,
which was supposed to result in the capture of Moscow, on 16
th
September. Thus Averbakh probably returned in the latter half of that
month. It is probably worth noting that Naro-Fominsk was the site of one
of the first morale boosting Soviet successes against the Nazis (along
with Tikhvin, which helped save Leningrad). Glantz (op. cit.) on page
168 gives:
… the XX Army Corps' 258th
and 292nd Infantry and 3rd Motorised divisions north of Naro-Fominsk,
and the 183rd Infantry and 20th Panzer divisions and one regiment of the
15th Infantry south of Naro-Fominsk. All three attacked … on 1st
December, but the attack had only limited armoured support and ran
directly into a carefully prepared Soviet anti-tank region … To the
south, the systematic defence by Colonel V.I. Polosukhin'
s 1st Guards Motorised Rifle division at Naro-Fominsk became a legend of tenacity.
Also on page 43, the words:
Once the bombing started and
More than once, I … put the out the fires started by the incendiary bombs … appear to have been misunderstood by some readers. The pro-Nazi Paul Carell (aka Paul Karl Schmidt, he was an
SS obersturmbannführer responsible for propaganda during the war) in his book
Hitler's War on Russia (published by Harrap and Son in 1964) has this to say on page 193:
Anyone remembering the wartime enemy raids on German towns
will ask: What about the Luftwaffe? He will note with surprise that the
German Luftwaffe did not succeed in interfering with the passage of
Soviet troops to the front through the Moscow transport network, nor in
preventing the arrival of Siberian divisions, nor generally in
paralysing Moscow itself as an area immediately behind the lines.
Nothing of that kind happened. The last German air raid on Moscow was
made during the night of 24th/25th October with eight machines. After that, only nuisance raids were made in December… Why?
Every German airman who was at Moscow knows the answer. The
Russians had established tremendously strong anti-aircraft defences
around the city. The forests were thick with AA
batteries. Moreover, the German Luftwaffe in the east had been
decimated in ceaseless operations, just as much as the armed forces, and
had to yield the air to the Soviet Air Force, which, before Moscow, was
numerically twice as strong. Besides, the Soviet Air Force had numerous
well-equipped airfields near the front, with heated hangars, enabling
any unit to take off swiftly and repeatedly, regardless of the weather.
The Germans machines, by way of contrast, were based on primitive
airstrips, a long way behind the fighting line, which permitted
operations only in favourable weather. Moscow was virtually spared from
the air.
I am sure that grandmaster Yuri Lvovich Averbakh, unlike
his detractors, is well aware of this. It is not all that difficult to
imagine that living in cramped conditions in an attic, and getting
bombed to an accompaniment of tremendously strong anti-aircraft fire
(Soviet anti-aircraft equipment was very good) was a vivid experience.
There is no need to read more into it than the facts warrant.
Note, too, that Moscow was never under siege, although the Nazis got very close. The scholar David Stahel, in his book
Kiev 1941 (ISBN 978-1-107-01459-6),
has
this to say on page 386 about the sieges and near sieges in the opening
months of Barbarossa (note that not all of these were cities):
The Soviet naval base of Hanko on the southern coast of
Finland was blockaded by mines and defended by almost 20,000 Soviet
troops along the narrow peninsular linking it to the mainland. It was
only evacuated early in December 1941. Across the Gulf of Finland the
siege of Tallin lasted from mid-July until 28 August and ended with the
capture of 20,000 Soviet POWs. The monumental siege of Leningrad was
only getting underway in early September. Further south the siege of the
Soviet fortress of Brest lasted from the first day of the war until the
last few defenders were killed in late July.
Mogilev on the Dnepr was the site of another desperate siege in July,… Kiev was also under siege from the second week of July …
It's true, though, that David Glantz (op. cit., page 148) wrote:
In essence, Moscow was under a state of siege.
He was describing the rushed construction of additional defences in
October on the immediate approaches to Moscow and in the city itself.
Six thousand
NKVD (i.e. Chekist) troops,
supplemented by militia units, blocker detachments and so forth were
responsible for security and the construction of defences. Four hundred
thousand inhabitants of Moscow and its oblast (province) were pressed
into service to construct these defences. They did so over twenty days. There was
real panic in Moscow, as discussed by Averbakh on page 44. Nonetheless,
this was not a siege as commonly understood.