Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 4, 1994 TAG: 9409070023
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BERNARD D. KAPLAN HEARST NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: PARIS LENGTH: Medium
The theory of a paranoid and desperate Stalin trying to hide the Soviet Union's weakness has emerged following a leading Western military historian's discovery that Moscow suffered more than twice as many dead in World War II as was previously thought.
John Erickson, a British specialist on the Soviet armed forces, has estimated that Soviet military and civilian losses in the 1941-45 conflict totaled 49 million - not 20 million, the figure given by Soviet officials in the past and generally accepted in the West.
The Edinburgh University scholar published his evaluation last month after a yearlong examination of Russian records that were classified as secret during the Soviet era.
Some analysts here say that Erickson's findings may be a significant pointer to the origins of the Cold War.
``The Soviet Union's war-time losses were already known to be far worse than any other nation's,'' explained Georges Minc, a Soviet expert at the French National Research Council, a Paris think tank.
``But the new figures are staggering. They suggest that the Soviets suffered a population loss roughly equivalent to the present-day population of France or Britain.'' The Soviet Union's population in 1940 was 164 million; so Erickson's estimate means it lost nearly 30 percent of its people.
Stalin's decision to raise the so-called iron curtain to isolate communist-held Eastern Europe from the West, as well as his curt refusal of America's help in the economic reconstruction of his devastated country and his exacerbation of East-West tensions can be explained partly by a degree of Soviet weakness that was unsuspected by the United States and its allies, Minc claimed.
``Stalin seems to have been convinced that a relentless display of defiance and hostility was the best method of disguising the truth from the West,'' he said, adding that the deception worked.
``American and other Western officials during the early postwar years simply would not believe a regime as bellicose as the Soviet Union could have any doubts about its own strength,'' the French analyst said. ``The West was hoodwinked.''
Pierre Hassner of Paris's Political Science Foundation and an authority on postwar Soviet diplomacy said Stalin was certain the West would launch a war to destroy his regime or, at the very least, to liberate Eastern Europe if the Soviet Union's vulnerability was revealed.
``Stalin, being the man he was, naturally assumed that Western leaders would act as he would have done if their positions had been reversed,'' Hassner said.
British military historian Roger Norton-Ames cited another reason for Stalin's covering up the truth about the Soviets' wartime losses.
He noted that some of the heaviest casualties, military and civilian, occurred in the first weeks of the German invasion in the summer of 1941. They resulted from unpreparedness caused by the prewar purges of the late 1930s that had wiped out an estimated 40 percent of the Soviet officer corps including many senior commanders.
``Stalin ordered the purges,'' Norton-Ames observed. ``It was therefore in his interest to hide what they had cost in terms of lives and destruction once the war started.''
Soviet military tactics also led to unnecessarily high battlefield casualties, he said.
``The enormous loss of life stemmed partially from the high command's attitude that ordinary soldiers were mere cannon fodder,'' he explained.
``When minefields had to be cleared quickly, whole battalions of troops were ordered to walk through them with the results that one can imagine. Units suspected of cowardice were shot en masse. Unlike in Western armies, minimizing casualties was a secondary consideration, when it was a consideration at all.''
Even after Stalin's death in 1953, Soviet officials took care to hide these brutal facts from their own people, Norton-Ames added.
by CNB