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The Myth of the Patriotic War and the Resistance in the Gulags

The Resistance against the Nazi occupation in Russia did not differ at all from the nationalist pattern that characterised all occupied countries. In Stalinist propaganda, Nazism was a product of the entire history of the German people, a people to be destroyed in the name of Holy Mother Russia. The illusions of revolutionary fraternisation with the uniformed German proletarians sent to fight, which still lingered in the memories and expectations of some Russian officers and soldiers, were considered a betrayal punishable by death.

The Orthodox Holy Synod resumed its functions, and there was constant reference made to the great generals of the tsarist past, as well as the reintroduction of epaulettes and ranks into the army, which the Bolsheviks had abolished. The singing of the Internationale was replaced by a patriotic anthem.

Patriotic war and defeatism

On the other hand, the Nazi objective was not so much the heralded crusade against the Judeo-Bolshevik power, despite the fanaticism it had aroused among fascists, the bourgeoisie, and priests throughout Europe, but rather the control of Russia's raw materials and agricultural resources, as well as the elimination of a possible ally on the continent for the Anglo-Americans. The ruthless control entrusted to Himmler’s SS — marked by requisitions, the closure of all schools, forced labour, and mass shootings carried out by the infamous special units, the Einsatzgruppen — was directed primarily at hunting down the Jewish population.

Defeatism — understood as a spontaneous reaction to the war even against one’s own government — reached massive proportions, although political awareness of this had by then been silenced in the secrecy of Stalin’s concentration camps. Stalin’s Order No. 227, issued on July 28th, 1942, mandated executing soldiers if they retreated. Equally severe measures, such as deportation, were envisaged for the home front, aimed at workers who tried to evade round-ups sending them to work in inhospitable areas, as well as those who were absent from work, or who did not perform their tasks with the utmost diligence and commitment [Rebecca Manley, Économie de guerre et encadrement de la société en URSS, in Alya Aglan and Robert Frank, 1937-1947: La guerre-monde, vol. 2, Gallimard, 2015].

Executions at the front

Masha Cerovic of the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) documents the existence of penal military units, composed of rebellious soldiers and former deportees sent to the slaughter, police who shot soldiers from behind in case of retreat, and the criminal liability extended to the soldiers’ family members who remained at home. Yet, despite these measures — Cerovic insists — the defeatist phenomenon was massive, to the point that in 1941 the Red Army risked disintegrating like the Tsarist Army in 1917; it was contained, but it persisted until the end of the war [Masha Cerovic, Le front germano-soviétique (1941-1945): Une apocalypse européenne, in Aglan and Frank, op. cit.].

In the tragic tally of soldiers executed on both sides, Cerovic calculates that at least 20,000 German soldiers were sentenced to death, not counting those executed without trial or who died in concentration camps, where part of the 1.3 million men sentenced to prison terms [by the German command] ended up. There are no comparable Russian statistics, but the figures would probably be much higher. Max Hastings ventures the figure of 300,000 Russian soldiers killed by their commanders [All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945, HarperCollins UK, 2011].

It must be said that, from our standpoint, the iron logic of war inevitably includes executions at the front; Trotsky did this during the civil war, executing military and political officials who had failed in their duties and put their soldiers’ lives at risk, with Lenin’s approval.

Stalin, by contrast, used such executions for counter-revolutionary purposes, to defend the continuity of power, by then embodied by the system of State capitalism engaged in the imperialist war. Throughout the conflict he continued the practice of mass purges that had annihilated the Bolshevik party, destroyed the army’s cadres, and decimated the ranks of the working class.

Stalin’s camps during the war

Drawing on research in Russian archives, Marta Craveri published Resistenza nel Gulag — Un capitolo inedito della destalinizzazione in Unione Sovietica (Resistance in the Gulag — An unpublished chapter of de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union) [Rubbettino, 2003]. Her political approach is hostile to communism, not only to Stalinism, yet she confirms the facts long denounced by communist opponents of the Russian regime.

The author follows a chronology of the camps: 1929 represents a key date, because that year the government decided to use prisoners to colonise peripheral regions of the North and extract the natural resources concentrated in those areas through the exploitation of forced labour.

Meanwhile, deportations were becoming massive, with millions of workers convicted just for leaving their workplace illegally or for absenteeism and tardiness. The total number of people who passed through the Gulags is estimated at eighteen million. By then, the logic of State capitalism had taken over.

Here too, a clarification is needed. The use of prisons, of course, always comes with its tragedies and miseries, but the repression carried out by the Bolsheviks in power in 1917 was essential to neutralise counter-revolutionaries operating during a civil war that stretched across the country, with the violence it entailed from both sides.

This was not, therefore, the same concentration camp system as in the subsequent Stalinist period, not only because its size had multiplied a hundredfold, but also because the Stalinist deportation project now served entirely different ends, that is, the radical dismantling of the social and political bases of the October Revolution through the elimination of all Bolsheviks, and the terroristic subjugation of the proletariat to an intense capitalist development. Two different social bases, two opposing class orientations: this is a historical fact.

Starting in 1937, the economic potential of forced labour began to be taken into consideration for the implementation of increasingly demanding projects and tasks: construction of roads and railway networks, exploitation of coal mines and other minerals, oil wells, industrial complexes, and deforestation for timber. From 1933 to 1937, the productive potential of the NKVD [the police who managed the camps] gained an increasingly important place in the country’s economic planning.

In Komi, a region of coal mines and oil wells, there were 54,792 prisoners at work in 1938, and on the railway between Lake Baikal and the Amur River, their number reached 200,000. At Karlag, with industries related to agriculture and livestock, there were 60,000 prisoners at work, while the White Sea-Baltic Canal employed 150,000 prisoners. In the gold mines of Kolyma, which became one of the most important industrial basins, there were 190,309 prisoners in 1940.

The class struggle in the camps

With these data points and others, Craveri documents a well-known but little-considered aspect — the significant and growing weight in the Russian economy of the exploitation of labour in the Gulags. We are accustomed to images of deportees smashing stones almost only as a form of humiliation, without any real economic benefit, but this was not the case at all. Forced labour was used to build cities, bridges, dams, and mines, employing peasants and workers, even skilled ones, who were often imprisoned solely for this purpose, as well as technicians and engineers who planned and supervised the work, although they too were prisoners.

Gulag work accounted for up to 15% of military supplies during the conflict, and any blockade of the Vorkuta coal mines completely halted production in the Leningrad area. This helps us better understand the real impact of prisoners' strikes, which were countered with ruthless repression, but also with the hasty arrival of government officials to begin negotiations with the prisoners’ strike committees.

This led to constant disputes between the officials who directed the work and those who managed the camps, accused of failing to adequately feed and care for the prisoners, reducing their productivity at work: a conflict between executioners of the same kind, of course, which also manifested itself among the Nazis in their concentration camps. These conflicts almost always ended with the shooting of both parties, following the unpredictable turns of Stalin’s Terror.

One of Craveri's observations brings us back to the central thread of our enquiry: the Resistance as the development of a course of class struggle. In the USSR, according to the laws then in force, the difference between free labour and forced labour [was] increasingly small. There was a continual succession of central directives to better feed and care for the prisoners, so as not to waste precious labour, but the conditions in the camps were disastrous, with the prisoners forced to work to the end of their strength and left to die of starvation.

At the same time, repressive measures against all those who disrupted production were intensified and the death penalty was applied more frequently. In conclusion, Craveri notes that between 1941 and 1944, in the Stalinist Gulags, 603 insurrectionary organisations and groups were liquidated, of which 4,640 prisoners were members.

Lotta Comunista, September 2025

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