Did Soviet soldiers fight for socialism?

[OnFire]

One of the arguments I hear from conservatives regarding the Soviet military in World War II is that the average Soviet soldier did not fight for socialism or the Soviet state but only for their homeland as defined by traditional concepts of Russian nationhood. Additionally, these same people will say that if Hitler had not treated the people of the Soviet areas he conquered so badly, they would have gladly joined him in fighting Stalin. They claim the Nazis were welcomed as liberators when they first invaded the USSR.

Is there any truth to these arguments? While I have read that some men from ethnic minorities joined the fascists and formed special units within the German army, my understanding is that attempts to form major anti-Soviet units from among the Slavic people of the USSR were dismal failures.

I was hoping some of the comrades here could enlighten me on this issue, as I find myself hotly debating this matter with people I know. I have been having some trouble finding decent sources. You wouldn't believe how much pro-German propaganda there is on the Internet (a legacy of the Cold War I presume).

[G4b3n]

If you look at the official soviet documents of the era, the rhetoric is very chauvinistic. In fact, it was made absolutely clear by party line that this war was a national struggle and not a class struggle, in communications from Moscow to various workers' parties of occupied states such as France. But there was absolutely no dichotomy between the motherland and socialism, in fact they where almost one and the same. So within the view of the Stalinist paradigm, the red army soldiers where defending their motherland and ipso facto socialism.
To say that the Germans were, or ever could have been welcomed as liberators is completely false. Soviet propaganda was very thorough in depicting the German fascists as lackeys of world capital who wish to steal the peoples' workplaces away from them and give them to the bourgeoisie. Regardless of what you have to say about Stalinism, most Russians were actually very happy up to WWII, especially compared to the economically depressed bourgeois nations of the west, where the unemployed homeless flooded the streets.

[PhoenixAsh]

That said large swats of the country side were indeed very happy with the Germans untill the Germans started raping, brutalizing and killing them though.

Which is exactly why it was necessary to increase nationalism and introduce a form of national Bolshevism.

The analysis here could be that per definition the farmers were not ver happy under Bolshevism. This is perfectly good and historical and class based explanation for this dichotomy.

[Ocean Seal]

One of the arguments I hear from conservatives regarding the Soviet military in World War II is that the average Soviet soldier did not fight for socialism or the Soviet state but only for their homeland as defined by traditional concepts of Russian nationhood. Additionally, these same people will say that if Hitler had not treated the people of the Soviet areas he conquered so badly, they would have gladly joined him in fighting Stalin. They claim the Nazis were welcomed as liberators when they first invaded the USSR.

Is there any truth to these arguments? While I have read that some men from ethnic minorities joined the fascists and formed special units within the German army, my understanding is that attempts to form major anti-Soviet units from among the Slavic people of the USSR were dismal failures.

I was hoping some of the comrades here could enlighten me on this issue, as I find myself hotly debating this matter with people I know. I have been having some trouble finding decent sources. You wouldn't believe how much pro-German propaganda there is on the Internet (a legacy of the Cold War I presume).

If ifs were fifths we'd all be drunk

[tuwix]

One of the arguments I hear from conservatives regarding the Soviet military in World War II is that the average Soviet soldier did not fight for socialism or the Soviet state but only for their homeland as defined by traditional concepts of Russian nationhood. Additionally, these same people will say that if Hitler had not treated the people of the Soviet areas he conquered so badly, they would have gladly joined him in fighting Stalin. They claim the Nazis were welcomed as liberators when they first invaded the USSR.

Is there any truth to these arguments? While I have read that some men from ethnic minorities joined the fascists and formed special units within the German army, my understanding is that attempts to form major anti-Soviet units from among the Slavic people of the USSR were dismal failures.

I was hoping some of the comrades here could enlighten me on this issue, as I find myself hotly debating this matter with people I know. I have been having some trouble finding decent sources. You wouldn't believe how much pro-German propaganda there is on the Internet (a legacy of the Cold War I presume).

Predominant propaganda argument was that they fight of fatherland indeed. In Russia until today there is used term 'Великая Отечественная война' that is to be translated as 'Grand Patriotic War'. It was invented by Stalin's propaganda.

But even if some soldiers had thought that they are fighting for socialism, they did not. The Soviet Union was state capitalist country and with Stalin's rule they had even features of absolute monarchy.

[Patchd]

One of the arguments I hear from conservatives regarding the Soviet military in World War II is that the average Soviet soldier did not fight for socialism or the Soviet state but only for their homeland as defined by traditional concepts of Russian nationhood. Additionally, these same people will say that if Hitler had not treated the people of the Soviet areas he conquered so badly, they would have gladly joined him in fighting Stalin. They claim the Nazis were welcomed as liberators when they first invaded the USSR.

Is there any truth to these arguments? While I have read that some men from ethnic minorities joined the fascists and formed special units within the German army, my understanding is that attempts to form major anti-Soviet units from among the Slavic people of the USSR were dismal failures.

I was hoping some of the comrades here could enlighten me on this issue, as I find myself hotly debating this matter with people I know. I have been having some trouble finding decent sources. You wouldn't believe how much pro-German propaganda there is on the Internet (a legacy of the Cold War I presume).


Regardless, the war fought by the USSR as a political entity was not an "anti-fascist" war by virtue, but if it was by any stretch, then it was only by proxy. The war was a war fought between pro-capitalist states. There were probably pro-soviet fighters who fought for socialism, but as a generalised political force they were fighting for one side in a capitalist war. In a similar vein, there were probably those committed to advancing socialism within the social democratic parties, but doing so within these organisations were advancing only a pro-capitalist politic.

This is not to make a judgement about where those in the working class movement should have sided given the historical context, especially seeing as how the "international" working class movement in that context had already become co-opted into defending and advancing a political agenda of a faction of capital, and specifically, the interests of a capitalist state, namely the USSR.

[Flavius]

As others mentioned above, Soviet soldiers did not fight for socialism. Not just because state propaganda had more of a nationalist/patriotic tone, but also because the USSR itself was from what I would call socialist. But, as always, that's just my opinion.

[OGG]

Wasn't there a good number of soldiers conscripted from the prisons? I don't think they had socialism on their mind.

[Rafiq]

The notion that Soviet soldiers were somehow fighting IN SPITE of ruling ideology, i.e. fighting for "what little" they had left of their "Russian homeland" is a flat-out lie. There was no motherland that was conceived as separate from the Soviet Union, plain and simple - Soviet soldiers were fighting for "socialism", or, at least in their minds they were fighting for the gains they had achieved for the past few decades. "Motherland", all that rhetoric and so on was embedded with this. When Americans, Brits or the French go to war, when have they directly incorporated in their propaganda that they're fighting for capital? This is how ideology works. Homeland, family, all of this EXPLICITLY, and INARGUABLY referred to life that was unique to the Soviet Union. Russian patriotism, too was "socialist" in character - there was no patriotism that existed outside of Stalinist discourse that was not exceptional.

Of course, what this signifies is the lack of historical self-consciousness in the Soviet Union. That is to say, Soviet ideology was not socially-conscious, and was bourgeois in character. The second world war was traumatic and it arguably cemented, and solidified the changes that had occurred throughout the period after collectivization (it destroyed ALL the remnants of the universalism/internationalism of the October revolution, for one). Still though - the reason we Communists would have supported, UNCONDITIONALLY the Soviet Union in the war is mere evaluation of the German propaganda: The way the Soviets were depicted is absolutely constitutive of a real BOURGEOIS (and not simply aristocratic/reactionary) pathological fear of the inferno of revolution, the divine wrath of the proletariat. These "hard" Fascists who mercilessly used their "iron will", who captivate the fascination of philistine ideology to this day, soiled their pants like small children at the very thought of the Soviet project. They were pathologically obsessed by it (so much so that they mimicked its aesthetic to gain a semblance of its power) - like rabid dogs, they were hell bent on annihilating and destroying the Soviet Union, meeting its inhabitants with a level of savagery unseen before in the history of warfare, because despite EVERYTHING which happened, despite ALL of the events which transpired, the threat of a German revolution was still a very real one, and this fear struck to the very core of the Nazi ideologue (I.e. Commissars were first shot unconditionally, and even when they weren't, were disallowed from mixing with the general POW population for fear of another 1918).

German propagandists would depict "slavic/Mongolian hordes" as being frenzied up, transformed into fanatical beasts by their "Jewish commissars".

The phenomena is very interesting too, because EVEN the sons and daughters of Great Purge victims were enthusiastically fighting in the war effort on ideological lines. Why? Because for the Soviet population, despite the catastrophes and problems they experienced, those were their problems, ones that couldn't be solved without the general presupposition of the achievements that they did have - which they saw as under threat by the German invaders.

[erupt]

One of the arguments I hear from conservatives regarding the Soviet military in World War II is that the average Soviet soldier did not fight for socialism or the Soviet state but only for their homeland as defined by traditional concepts of Russian nationhood. Additionally, these same people will say that if Hitler had not treated the people of the Soviet areas he conquered so badly, they would have gladly joined him in fighting Stalin. They claim the Nazis were welcomed as liberators when they first invaded the USSR.

Is there any truth to these arguments? While I have read that some men from ethnic minorities joined the fascists and formed special units within the German army, my understanding is that attempts to form major anti-Soviet units from among the Slavic people of the USSR were dismal failures.

I was hoping some of the comrades here could enlighten me on this issue, as I find myself hotly debating this matter with people I know. I have been having some trouble finding decent sources. You wouldn't believe how much pro-German propaganda there is on the Internet (a legacy of the Cold War I presume).

The only truth I know about the Wehrmacht (Germany Army) being welcomed as "liberators" at all are in the Southern regions mostly, e.g. Stepan Bandera and his followers in the Soviet republic of Ukraine, and Russian fascists who were in the SS, e.g. the 29th Waffen SS Grenadier Division of the SS Rona (1st Russian); the division was also known as the Kaminski Brigade, and at one point it was 14,000-15,000 strong. I still think Bridgadeführer Kaminski and another Obersturmbannführer Shavykin were shot for ill discipline by the Waffen-SS. Also remember how many Romanians, Croats, Czechs, Slovaks (Free Slovak Movement), even Poles and Serbs fought alongside the Wehrmacht. I've even heard of a young man of Jewish origin joining the Waffen-SS.

Any defector, any person of any nationality of the Soviet Union being a fascist, that was all used as anti-Soviet propaganda; then, of course, they were used as canon fodder against the Soviet Red Army. Anytime the Nazi military needed high numbers and they knew casualties were coming, they liked to use non-Germanic soldiers of "Greater Germany" (e.g. Hungarians, Romanians, as many loyal Italian Fascists that remained with Hitler and the Italian Socal Republic, etc.)

[Hatshepsut]

Soldiers in battle fight for their friends beside them and try to stay alive if they can. There is very close bonding in military platoons, especially in a war. The worst thing you can do is let a buddy down by failure to perform duty no matter how scary it is. Political thought is more important before the training and subsequent combat begins, to motivate citizens who aren't yet soldiers to agree with joining armies even where conscription is used.

Some parts of Ukraine and the Baltic Republics where majorities didn't want to be part of a USSR dominated by Russia may have initially welcomed the arriving German troops. I imagine Hitler's policies soon convinced them to change their minds. While Bolsheviks could be extremely brutal, they never pursued the goal of exterminating the entire civilian population of a region in the way Nazism's Lebensraum ("living space") doctrine called for. The depopulated areas were of course to become home to Germans of correct racial makeup. Nazis held that Slavs (Untermenschen, "under-men") were fit only for slave labor and death, committing their SS troops to permanent killing projects. This differs from the Soviet officials' ordering massive but temporary homicides aimed at achieving specific political goals.

As such differences may not matter much to those who get killed, I consider myself lucky not to have lived through it. I think the Soviet side was guilty of horrific crimes, but I don't buy the theory that "they were just the same evil as the Nazis." Far from equivalent, Nazism is a death philosophy inimical to life itself. SS Totenkopf brigades wore skull ornaments on their uniforms. If Hitler had won the war, all non-Germanic peoples in eastern Europe would have perished to the last man, woman, and child. It was the distractions of having to fight a war that somewhat limited the scope of their cattle car and gas chamber industries.

[LeninistIthink]

Just to point to what we have said, we would add that Hitler actually distributed and redistributed Russian propaganda material to the German army, because it aided discipline in that it left no way out for the German soldiers except nazi discipline. Can anyone imagine the German High Command helping with the circulation of Bolshevik propaganda in the period 1917-18?!! That was the difference between Stalinist propaganda and Bolshevik propaganda.

Outside Moscow there were one million German soldiers, not clad for the winter, without sufficient food, or sometimes any at all - they died frozen in heaps. Not one international call, not one call to them as workers was made - not a single offer of a bowl of soup even. The bureaucracy could only offer anti-Boche, anti-Hun racialism and hate.

This is from Ted Grant's 'Reply to Comrade Clifford' on marxists.org can't post the link , there was not a source provided but if this was the case then it does show how the soviet soldiers were acting in national defence as opposed to class struggle and socialism. Perhaps not individually but from orders from above, I am sure there were a few who thought they were really struggling for 'socialism'.

[Hatshepsut]

It's at https://www.marxists.org/archive/grant/1966/clifford.htm

(I can't remember if you need 20 posts before the software lets you put a link; you can post the link address as text by "go advanced" & uncheck "automatically parse links" in the additional options, which takes out the [URL] codes)

What Grant says just amounts to the fact that you aren't going have comradely communistic appeals to enemy troops in the middle of a war where your own life and death are at stake should that enemy win. No one's ever claimed Stalin's USSR was true to Marxism or Leninism. Grant has a lot of B.S. however: He says the Soviets had more firepower and could have defeated the Germans in the first six months. But he neglects the fact that the Soviets didn't have enough trucks and railroad cars to move their supposed firepower around; the German army was mobile and partly mechanized while the Russians were on foot. The Russians had to prioritize dismantling their factories and moving them to points east of the Urals to ensure their long-haul ability to resist.

Grant's spiel on a Russian "Death to the German people" isn't sourced and exaggerates in the hope the reader won't check. He makes much of Soviet propaganda's failure make WWII a proletarian struggle. Of course it didn't. Grant finally delivers the standard line that capitalists held like laughing wallflowers to the sidelines while the Russians and Germans ate each other's lunch. A half-truth; at first the West indeed did so, before it realized how dangerous Hitler really was. After all, Molotov & Ribbentrop had recently agreed to carve up Poland—Not to mention Roosevelt also had to sell the idea of American boys dying in Europe at a time when people still believed the ocean a protective barrier. By 1942 the USA was fully committed in the Pacific; with virtually no standing army in 1941 it simply required those three years to train and build enough to support D-Day. Ted Grant wasn't a military logician and didn't know what he was talking about when he attempted to teach us how wars should be fought.

[L.A.P.]

Rafiq is completely wrong: consistent communist militants did not, and should not have, support the USSR in the Second Imperialist War. There may be some truth to what he is saying about the ideological discourse at play during the war, but that doesn't give any reason to support the material war effort itself. The USSR's role in WWII was a massive blow to an already defeated workers movement, and was resisted by the communist minority until the bitter end.

[Rafiq]

"Consistent communist militants" had no medium of existence, no expression of that existence - so to speak, that was outside unconditional support for the Soviet Union during the war. You already answer the basic question yourself: The worker's movement in Europe was inevitably tied to the existence of the Soviet Union, but even moreso, there would have been no way - absolutely no way whatsoever, given the political conditions in Europe, for a worker's movement to have been able to oppose both Fascism and the Soviet Union.

The logic is very simple: You evaluate why exactly the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, and this was owed - partially at the very least, to an emanating fear of their own working class. Fascism was unable to solve the social antagonism, and the pathological fear of Communism was still embedded in the very hearts and minds. Of course, what's the tragedy? The tragedy is that the Soviet Union did not, in reality, actually represent the crazy fear that was in the back of the minds of the Nazis. By the time they invaded the Soviet Union, degeneration into the logic of national conflict, social conservatism, and a religious revival were already underway and sponsored by the state - the Soviet Union was nowhere near the monster that the Nazis painted it, and this is a very tragic misfortune for us Communists. But still, elements of this monster persisted, from fanatical commissars to the last remnants of the revolution giving its last cry, much like Robespierre's already deformed body giving its last, most terrible screech before being beheaded. The tragedy is that following WWII, all remnants of the October revolution were decimated - THIS was the cutting point, because the Nazis smashed into the face of the state the everlasting conundrum of the international question, and even though they were defeated, the Soviet state had to absolve itself of this legacy of internationalism completely to defeat the Nazis - this is reflected, for example, in how the anthem was changed, how the Red Army was made officially the Soviet army, and so on.

One could then proceed to argue that the Soviet Union's victory over the Germans would have not in fact done anything. But again, Communists must beg to differ - because our support for the Soviet Union is allocated in the same manner that we perhaps would have supported Jacobin France - even as a bourgeois state, the Soviet Union was worth fighting for in the midst of Fascism. The second world war was NOT the first. Of course, unconditional support DOES NOT mean uncritical support, it simply means that when push comes to shove, which side are you on? Who can honestly say that they wouldn't have fought in the ranks of the Red Army if given the chance, in the midst of the rabid hellhounds of capital? Who can say they wouldn't have lusted for the blood of the German reactionaries?

Perhaps instead, towards the end of the war a concentrated effort to re-kindle the fires of the revolutionary spirit, to abdicate from the geopolitical games and to turn the world upside down would have been the correct path, to Stalin's basic geopolitical conservatism, i.e. speaking of "free peoples" and so on. Even then, this naively presupposes anyone was in a position to facilitate this - perhaps it would have been possible, but this has nothing to do with whether IN JUXTAPOSITION to the Germans, whether we should support the Soviet Union.

[L.A.P.]

You have no idea what you're talking about. The Italian Fraction Abroad were very active in Belgium, France, and Italy against all sides of the war, including the USSR and the anti-fascist resistance. You're talking about the impossibility of a mass workers movement capable of opposing both Stalinism and fascism, but the point is that the dichotomy itself rests upon the graves of the revolutionary workers as its foundation. The only meaningful a thing a communist militant could do is be part of a minority of the most radical tendency uncompromisingly struggling for the communist program; and that is exactly what the Italian Fraction Abroad did, which ended up making it a real threat to Mussolini's regime.

[Rafiq]

Of course it would succeed in making one feel good about fulfilling an alleged ethical duty. Beyond that, the practical implications are absolutely worthless. Of course I am very aware of the fact that there were these or that sects that opposed support for the Soviet Union. There were Trotskyist factions that did this, too.

If one whimsically had the power to practically subvert the whole war, then sure, you're right, any Communist would have opposed this. But wait a minute: The Soviet Union wanted nothing more than an end to the war, it did not want war at all in fact.

[Frid]

Sure, they were fighting for "socialism", with a huge dose of reactionary nationalism made up by uncle Joe. They also didn't mind fighting for other countries' "socialism". To the point of not freeing them after their rape parade over them. To the point of fortifying the border between East and West Germany to stop ppl fleeing to Capitalism. A crazy distortion and disgrace to Socialism.

If our idea of socialism is authoritarian third parties dealing with imperialists in the likes of Churchil and Roosevelt to divide europe according to "spheres of influence" (read: colonies of capitalist imperialist or social imperialist powers), then we are doomed and no amount of Stasi corrupt police states can save us.

[John Nada]

Sure, they were fighting for "socialism", with a huge dose of reactionary nationalism made up by uncle Joe. They also didn't mind fighting for other countries' "socialism". To the point of not freeing them after their rape parade over them. To the point of fortifying the border between East and West Germany to stop ppl fleeing to Capitalism. A crazy distortion and disgrace to Socialism.1.Not all the Red Army was of Russian or even of Slavic descent. Many were from Central Asia and the Caucasus Region(as was Stalin, a Georgian).
2.There were Communist partisans fighting for the cause of socialism in "their own" nations too. Some of which became popular due to their leading role in the anti-fascist resistance.
3.The Soviet Union offered to reunify Germany, but west Germany and the Western allies declined, suspicious of the offer.
If our idea of socialism is authoritarian third parties dealing with imperialists in the likes of Churchil and Roosevelt to divide europe according to "spheres of influence" (read: colonies of capitalist imperialist or social imperialist powers), then we are doomed and no amount of Stasi corrupt police states can save us.I don't think anyone wants to give in to US and UK imperialism or have harsh police states in the future(I hope). Nuclear blackmail on top of being nearly destroyed in a war kind of up the stakes at that time.

[Hatshepsut]

The Soviet Union offered to reunify Germany, but west Germany and the Western allies declined, suspicious of the offer.

Indeed. As a demilitarized, neutral state. The West preferred a wall of arms deployed as far forward as possible, Deutschland divided or no. Soviet intervention in Hungary was likewise brutal yet undertaken only reluctantly, after Hungarian cops were swinging by the neck from lampposts and efforts to compromise on leadership composition had failed. Khrushchev initially agreed to Imre Nagy as head.

[Gotya]

I once talked with this stranger who was in Korea. I asked him basically the same thing. Asked if he was fighting for his country. He said you're basically out there trying to save your own hide. That is pretty much what you have to expect from an 18 year old, or anybody really. War is full of lies.

[Invader Zim]

That said large swats of the country side were indeed very happy with the Germans untill the Germans started raping, brutalizing and killing them though.


Which was pretty much day one -- particularly Jews. Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppen reports from 1941 is the stuff of nightmares.

[Burzhuin]

Since I was born long after WWII was over I can only rely on my Father stories. My family belongs to so called ethnical minorities. It seems my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather has nothing to do with Russia and Stalin. But area they used to leave we occupied on fifth day of the War. But they were already in forest formed partisan unit. I can understand my grandfather, who was communist. But my father was 14 years old and was not even in Komsomol (Young Communist organization). When I asked him, his response was simple: he was fighting for better life. And for him, as I understand, it was fighting for socialism. I know every soldier Red Army fought for something personal. But it is for sure they all fought for socialism. As our American boys in uniform are fighting for capitalism. Even if they do not realize it.

[ACME_MAN]

I think the Nazis screwed up by their treatment of many conquered peoples. I suspect there were many patriotic Russians, but most probably a lot of scared Russians who knew that if they didn't fight, they would probably be shot.

[olahsenor]

Stalin's paranoiac false beliefs that there were 'spies' in the KGB did not deter his agents to go back to the country despite strong possibility that they will be liquidated for having 'fed lies to Stalin' just like Sorge whose intelligence reports were brushed aside by Stalin until they had been proven to be true. They're loyal to socialism. One even shot himself and swore allegiance to socialism after having had 'fallen out of grace' from Stalin. I would do it too. Motherland comes first before me, my family and friends. I hope this opinion of mine is not trolling.

[Emmett Till]

I think the Nazis screwed up by their treatment of many conquered peoples. I suspect there were many patriotic Russians, but most probably a lot of scared Russians who knew that if they didn't fight, they would probably be shot.

Patriotic? During WWII, "patriotism" all over Europe disappeared in the face of the Nazi Blitzkrieg, which originally was popular in bourgeois patriotic circles all over Europe, especially in France, where the basic attitude of the "patriots" was "better Hitler than Blum," the former social democratic PM.

Mass resistance movements only broke out *after* the Nazis demonstrated their brutality to all conquered peoples.

But it was a very different story in the USSR. And, despite all Stalin's patriotic propaganda about Russian war heroes, it was the Soviet working class and peasantry who defeated Hitler. Not because of Russian patriotism, but because they identified the Soviet motherland with socialism and the achievements of their revolution, which Stalin had only partially taken away from them.

Ukraine is actually the best proof of this. The Nazi collaborating UPA, which they are now building statues to in Ukraine, actually proclaimed themselves to be anti-Stalinist socialists! In between murdering every Jew, Pole or communist they could get their grubby hands on.

Even in Ukraine, despite the horrible famine and some genuine abuse of Ukrainian national rights, the population was so pro-socialist that even Nazi collaborators had to proclaim their socialist credentials to gain support.