In June 1941, Germany launched its attack on Russia, taking by surprise the army and the air force, much of which was destroyed on the ground, because Stalin had refused to believe the reports that Hitler intended to break the 1939 Pact. From that moment onwards, the war on the eastern front took on massive dimensions and was waged with unprecedented violence.
In her essay Le front Germano-Soviétique (1941-1945): Une apocalypse européenne [in A. Aglan and R. Frank, La Guerre-monde, 2015], Masha Cerovic writes that about fourteen million soldiers lost their lives
; more precisely, nine million Soviets, four million Germans, and almost one million among their allies
. It is calculated that the Russian population paid a price of over twenty million human lives, including the fallen and those who died of illness and starvation: hundreds of thousands of them were partisans, executed without pity. A huge sacrifice, which, however, in and of itself, does not mean that the Russia of the time was socialist
, given that the Stalinist counter-revolution was by then completed. On the contrary, the memory of this sacrifice was exploited by Russian State capitalism to mask its real social and political nature in the following decades.
Control of the Resistance and defence of power
The distinguishing feature of the Russian Resistance – writes István Deák in Europa a processo (Europe on trial
) [Il Mulino, 2019] – was the gradual, complex reorganisation by the central authority of the great mass of survivors and disbanded soldiers of its own defeated armies. In order to avoid surrendering and dying in German prison camps, or retreating with the risk of being shot for it by their own high command, millions of soldiers found refuge in the country’s endless forests
, becoming de facto partisans
who were joined by other young people. Thousands of them were subsequently killed by rival groups or enemy forces; others were massacred by the peasants whose meagre food supplies and few remaining livestock they had requisitioned
. Only with the progress of the war and the first victories of the Russian counterattack in 1943 – the German surrender in Stalingrad and the great tank battle of Kursk – did the Soviet government bring this mass phenomenon back under control.
The government’s disorientation and the workers’ Resistance
In his book Le Parti bolchévique. Histoire du PC de l’URSS (The Bolshevik Party. History of the Communist Party of the USSR
) [1963], Pierre Broué, one of the most renowned Trotskyist historians, recalls the situation in Stalinist Russia at the end of the 1930s: The young Russian working class – half of the twenty million workers in factories, transport, and the building industry, were less than 30 years old in this period – found themselves imprisoned in the most solid cage a capitalist State has ever been able to construct, a cage which closes on them from childhood and makes the continual threat of arrest and convictions weigh on each of them
.
Broué does not accept the Stalinist justification that the military collapse in the face of the German invasion was due to the Nazis’ unexpected about-face, but he also rejects the thesis of those who saw in the first disastrous Russian losses a manifestation of defeatism, as if the Russian soldiers and populations had initially welcomed the Germans as liberators
. According to Broué, this interpretation is not confirmed
, in contrast to other historical accounts. He asserts that only a limited number of such cases occurred in the incorporated nationalities (Ukraine, the Baltic States, and the Caucasus), but not among the Russian population.
The historian finds more credible the thesis that the initial inertia was the outcome of the masses’ dependence on the State apparatus
, which, at that moment, taken by surprise, was not issuing directives. However, according to Broué, the German invasion triggered a new situation, because the extreme danger weakened the bureaucratic grip
. We believe that this dynamic, imposed by the war, could also be found in other imperialist countries, from the United States to Germany itself, and namely meant a quicker and more unusual selection of cadres.
Broué interprets it instead as proof of the possible political revolution
– awaited by Trotskyists, albeit postponed to the postwar period – which was meant to eliminate bureaucratic encrustation and resume the march towards the workers’ State
. As early as 1941, the first spontaneous partisan groups were formed, starting from the workers who organised themselves, with their own armed detachments, to defend besieged factories and cities, in Moscow, Leningrad, and Rostov.
Workers’ defence and State control
Broué records that, when the government and the police evacuated the capital, the will to resist at all costs was born among a minority consisting mainly of young factory workers: a small, enthusiastic, working-class vanguard
. He adds that a similar development of events seems to have taken place in the regions occupied by German troops
, often under the leadership of non-party members
.
The Trotskyist historian derives from this that the real resistance does not depend on the party [...] In these first months, not only did the party not lead the resistance, but it tended to weaken in relation to it, and only in the following stage, in 1942 and 1943, [...] would it really control most of the partisan groups through the NKVD
.
We acknowledge that this is a valuable reconstruction, but it remains one shaped by a political interpretation that had by then been superseded by the complete reversal of power at the hands of State capitalism, politically represented by Stalinism. There is no doubt that an enemy attack on one’s own district or factory objectively arouses a reaction of defence and survival.
If this mobilisation in industrial suburbs consists mainly of young workers, then the movement will also have a subjective class characterisation, i.e., one that reflects the socialist expectations and ideals of its vanguards. However, we have seen the same processing happening in all other countries involved in the war – in strikes, in the defence of factories, in the flight from round-ups, in the armed struggle that ensued.
However, in every country the capitalist ruling class has politically directed and controlled that class revolt, repressing it when necessary. Interpreting it – as Broué does – as confirmation of the still socialist nature of the workers’ State
, defended by workers themselves, even though the party was in the hands of bureaucrats, may correspond to the will of many of the combatants, but it is insufficient at an analytical level.
In fact, this interpretation can even become misleading, not only because it puts forward the paralysing political objective of defending the USSR
, which consequently hindered partisan action in the face of Russia’s American and British allies, but also because Stalin’s counter-revolution was ultimately able to incorporate the spontaneous movement, mercilessly eliminating those who resisted.
Passing the baton between generations
The critical observations with which we have framed Broué’s text take nothing away from the fact that, in the terrible war that was underway, old surviving Bolsheviks and young combatants sought to link themselves back to the revolutionary traditions of October 1917, handing down to us the important proof of unbowed revolutionary spirit. After all, only one generation had gone by: people who were less than 50 years old were speaking to young twenty-year-olds who had grown up listening to propaganda which continually harked back to socialism, even though it did this with the aim of ideologically disguising an ongoing counter-revolution.
In Volume 26 of his Opere (Complete works
), Arrigo Cervetto deals with a review of this book by Broué, published in France in 1963, printed in the magazine Informations ouvrières of the Trotskyist group led by Pierre Lambert. Cervetto picks up from it the note that P. Broué’s Bolshevik Party is the real Bolshevik Party, without supermen or prophets
; the author has been able to convey the tragedy of the Bolshevik militants by integrating an analysis of the social forces, of which they were no longer in control of starting from 1922, with the element of personal drama
.
Summarising and commenting on the review, Cervetto places it within a concise but comprehensive evaluation which is useful to quote: The Bolshevik old guard reacted to Stalinism in a very limited way because the pressure of the social forces, of which Stalin was the embodiment, submitted those comrades to a cruel physical and moral torture, to such a point that they were no longer able to be aware of the slow development of the historical perspective. The old Bolsheviks often capitulated, but they were exterminated because they were the embodiment of revolutionary ideals. But even slandered and shot, the old Bolsheviks still take their rightful place into the historical perspective because they paved the way, with their sacrifice, for the ‘neo-Leninism’ or ‘neo-Bolshevism’ of the new generations of workers and students
.
Cervetto adds a methodological note, which can also be taken as support for our efforts in this research on internationalist minorities during the war. In fact, he concludes: the old Bolsheviks, exterminated by Stalin, became a link in the chain between the Leninist Party and the many attempts at revolutionary regroupment, whose existence this book documents extensively, even if, to those who are unable to see the whole historical perspective, it may seem that Broué attaches excessive importance to this documentation
.
Lotta Comunista, July-August 2025