Kenneth Slepyan: People's Avengers or Enemies of the People? (Zeitgeschichte. Heft 2/1998)

Kenneth Slepyan

People's Avengers or Enemies of the People?

Identity Politics and the Soviet Partisan Movement

From the first days of the war, Soviet partisan identity was contested by the state and the partisans, and among the partisans themselves. The political ramifications stemming from this conflict makes the study of identities central to the history of the partisan movement. Identities act as prisms through which actors interpret the world and choose their own set of priorities and responses. A study of identities reveals the way power is exercised by states, social groups, and individuals. In the case of the Stalinist Soviet Union, the state customarily monopolized the privilege of creating group identities and then designating individuals and groups to these roles. As recent works on the history of the Soviet working class in the 1930s indicate, the existence of an official working class category did not mean that individuals in this class identified themselves as members of a united class, nor did this class take on the tendencies associated with a Marxist class model. On the contrary, the state made every effort to undermine the ability of workers and other groups to use these designated categories as a means for constructing a class identity in opposition to that of the state. Workers perceived their interests far more narrowly than those of class, defining themselves more by factors such as age, region, skill, occupation, and even the factory in which they worked. In order to maintain, or achieve privileged positions vis-à-vis the state (which had the sole power to give away social and material benefits), workers often competed against and sought to undercut fellow workers by depicting themselves as the true proletarians, a pro-cess which the state facilitated. Stalin also played off "white collar" professionals by promoting institutional competition, thus fostering divisive corporate identities. This "divide and rule" identity politics was an essential part of Stalinist social control, inhibiting the coalescing of identities independent of those prescribed by the state.[1]

In contrast to the oppression of the 1930s, and the subsequent post-war period, historians have customarily depicted the war years, particularly the first two years of the war as a time of relative ideological, social and cultural relaxation as the party-state concerned itself with production and mobilization.[2] Now people could live honestly and sincerely. Would this relaxation enable social groups to form, or begin to form identities indepen- dent of the state?

Among loyal Soviet citizens, perhaps the best place to seek an indepen-dent wartime social identity is the partisan movement. Heirs to a tradition of independence and autonomy from the imperial and early Soviet period, armed and operating outside the reach of the state's most overt means of control, the partisans were in a unique position to develop independent identities. However, despite the relative freedom provided by the war, and the partisans' own sense of physical and psychological separation from Soviet authorities, a unified, cohesive Soviet partisan identity independent from the state never developed. I will argue that this did not take place because of the continuation of identity politics into the wartime period. The power and importance of identity politics indicates that we should reconsider the notion that the war represented a break between the 1930s and the post-war years of high Stalinism.

To understand the role of identity politics in the partisan movement, we need first to examine the regime's views towards partisans and partisan warfare. Publicly, the state contributed to a popular romanticized view of the partisans, encouraging the public's fascination with Cossack epics and tales of bandits.[3] Films like the 1934 blockbuster "Chapaev" portrayed the Civil War partisans as dashing and heroic, like the Cossacks of yore, but now tempered with ideological consciousness. From the first months of the war, state propagandists turned the partisans into symbols of the Soviet Union's "national war" (vsenarodnaia voina) against the hated invaders, as all members of Soviet society, regardless of nationality, class, and gender, united to defend the rodina. All citizens who could were to join the partisan bands.[4] Propaganda and symbolism notwithstanding, in practice most Soviet officials, including Stalin, distrusted partisans and partisan warfare. They saw the Civil War partisans as disobedient, spontaneous and even treacherous, a pattern of behaviours known collectively and perjoratively as partizanshchina. Suspicions ran so deep that during the Ezhovshchina, the Red Army's extensive partisan training program was dismantled, its bases destroyed, and personnel executed. To Stalin and Voroshilov, preparation for partisan war indicated defeatism at best and planning for a possible uprising against the Soviet state at worst.[5]

The German invasion forced the Soviet leadership to change its position, if not its sentiments, towards partisan warfare. Regional and local Party officials were ordered to organize partisan detachments consisting of party cadres and Soviet aktivy.[6] Moscow did not consider the politically unaffiliated population staunch or trustworthy enough to be suitable partisan material, despite the centre's incessant public calls for ordinary citizens to take up arms against the invaders.

These first "party" partisans were joined in 1942 by tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers left behind enemy lines by the great encirclement battles of 1941. Party members and Red Army soldiers comprised the dominant groups in the movement until 1943 when increasing numbers of peasants also enlisted in the detachments. Other groups, which we shall focus on later, including women, non-Slavic nationalities, and former collaborators also tried to join the movement. Their participation broadened the movement, and in fact, gave credence to the leadership's claims that the movement was truly "national".

By the beginning of 1943, Soviet leaders had come to believe that the existence of a broad-based partisan movement legitimated the regime and its system by "proving" that it had widespread popular support. This political function soon became as important as the movement's military mission.[7]

However, the leadership continued to view the partisans suspiciously. Living behind enemy lines, the partisans faced daily exposure to ideologies and sources of information that could not be controlled by Moscow. Moreover, the partisans were engaged in subversion, conspiracy, and sabotage. Many partisans, in fact, took pride in their abilities as saboteurs, one commander even going so far as to compare the saboteur to that most laudable of Soviet types, the skilled heavy industrial worker.[8] To be a partisan, in the centre's eyes, was to occupy a gray area between potential traitor and loyal citizen. In the Stalinist black-and-white worldview, those people shaded in gray were automatically suspect.

Accordingly, Moscow implemented measures designed to keep the partisans under its control. In May 1942, a vast partisan administration under the leadership of Belorussian First Secretary P. K. Ponomarenko was established to direct partisan operations. Behind enemy lines, each partisan unit had a political commissar who was supposed to ensure the detachment's (and its commander's) political reliability. Commissars were maintained even after the post was abolished in the Red Army in October 1942. Also attached to each unit was a "special section" (osobyi otdel) of the NKVD to oversee internal security. While commissars and the special sections were intended to maintain central control over the partisans, in reality partisans often manipulated them to serve their own needs. Regardless of their actual utility, their mere existence indicates the suspicions with which state authorities viewed the partisan units.

Other policies also reflected this lack of faith. Unlike the much more relaxed standards enjoyed by Red Army soldiers, partisans who wanted to join the Party had to meet the rigorous peacetime admissions procedures in order to prevent, as one senior Party official termed it, the entrance into the Party of "rogues and provocateurs."[9] Upon liberation, partisans underwent a filtration process run by the NKVD to uncover any hostile elements that might have infiltrated the units.[10] Party leaders believed that even loyal partisans must have been tainted by their experience behind enemy lines. Officials in Minsk ordered in August 1944, after that region's liberation, that former partisan agitators could conduct political work only after they had been "re-trained."[11] Another party official, M. I. Nikitin, the head of the Leningrad Partisan Staff, observed in April 1944 that underground party workers required an extensive political education to raise their "ideological-political and theoretical level".[12]

The state's definition of the partisan was thus ambiguous. As symbols of the national war, the partisans were proclaimed as the "people's avengers", who legitimated the state's claim of enthusiastic popular support. However, the very nature of partisan warfare with its emphasis on conspiracy, subversion, and sabotage only increased to the leadership's pre-existing distrust and tendency to regard the partisans as potential, if not actual, enemies of the people.

In their own definitions of what it meant to be a partisan, partisans seemed to be well aware of the duality extant in the authorities construction of partisan identity. Partisans always defined themselves, in their reports to the centre, as loyal, dedicated citizens to the Soviet cause, faithfully adhering to the Party's line, and fulfilling their duty to the rodina. They also, however, played to the centre's distrust by portraying other partisans as subscribing to the partizanshchina behaviours of the Civil War.

The competitive existence of life behind the front reinforced behaviours learned in the political and social environments of the 1930s and by Moscow's divide and rule policies. Just as various groups of Soviet workers tried to define themselves as the true proletarians in order to win recognition and material rewards from the Soviet state, so too did partisans attempt to define themselves as real "Soviet" partisans to gain scarce and needed supplies like radios, explosives, and automatic weapons. Partisan groups recognized by state authorities as active, aggressive and loyal units would often be given jurisdictions over other units in the area.[13] By having Moscow legitimate them, partisans hoped to gain approval for their actions, and avoid the possibility that they might be accused of anti-Soviet activity. Hence partisans constructed identities in terms of what they did and what they claimed they did not do.

The partisans' first efforts to formulate a self-identity came from the two main groups comprising the partisan movement in 1941-1942: civilian male party members and Red Army soldiers caught behind enemy lines. Both groups based their identities on the supposed corporate attributes of their institutions. Together they created an institutionally-based, Slavic, male partisan identity. At the same time, they established sub-identities that defined themselves against the supposed negative attributes of the other.

The civilian/Party identity emerged from the original partisans of 1941. They believed themselves to be the true partisans since they were civilians, volunteers, and ideologically committed. Often, these partisans regarded the Red Army stragglers and ex-POWs with disdain, and sometimes refused to let them join their detachments or give them supplies, since they believed it was the defeatism of the Red Army soldiers which was responsible for the disasters of 1941.[14] Some partisans believed that the only reason Red Army stragglers became partisans was to expiate their sins before the Motherland.[15] As one Party partisan stated:

"What's a guy who came out of encirclement anyway? That means he didn't die in battle. Take him into the partisans in the forest and he won't want to die here either, he'll begin hiding behind somebody else's back. And that goes double for a prisoner of war. Once he was a prisoner, it means he surrendered. No, we don't need that kind. The Party picked and confirmed us."[16]

Thus in party-partisan eyes, the Red Army partisans were cowards at best and traitors at worst, while they were the true Soviet patriots.

These partisans, however, were also alienated from their Party comrades who had evacuated - or had fled - to Soviet territory.[17] The experience of surviving in a hostile environment, reinforced by the Party's own propaganda depicting the partisans as the personification of the popular struggle against the Germans contributed to a striking physical and emotional separation between party officials in the Soviet rear, who, in the words of one party member, "sold [their] people down the river,"[18] and those who stayed behind as partisans. The peacetime corporate identities of many Communists competed with a growing sense of themselves as partisans, with interests and experiences separate from those of the Party.

Red Army partisans prided themselves on their military discipline and professionalism, which they contrasted with what they believed to be the rank amateurism and indiscipline of the civilian groups.[19] One soldier turned partisan referred to a supposedly incompetent neighbouring civilian unit, the "Death to the German Occupiers" Partisan Detachment ("Smert nemetskim okkupantam") as the "condemned ones" (smertniki), a play on the unit´s name. He continued "We always accomplished our tasks, and they did not. We simply pitied them."[20] Red Army partisans in fact sometimes refused to allow civilians to join their units because they had no military training.[21]

However, the Red Army partisans also developed an identity distinct from regular army units. Red Army partisans often complained when regular officers, ignorant of partisan tactics, were sent to command them, and were even more resentful when these officers tried to turn the partisan formations into standard military units.[22] And, while rank retained some importance in the Red Army partisan detachments, those ordinary partisans who showed sufficient initiative and bravery often rose to command positions over high-ranking officers, a source of tension in many units.[23] It was also understood, that even with their military-like discipline, Red Army partisans had a greater sense of "rights" and "privileges" than their brethren in the regular army formations, and were prone to mutiny if the grievance was strong enough.[24]

These competing identities reflected not only differences among the partisans, but also a continuation of the 1930s struggle between the party and the military. These differences were also a manifestation of another tension endemic in the Soviet Union as it industrialized: the conflict between ideological commitment (the party) versus technical expertise and professionalism (the Red Army).

Partisans also employed loaded political language to denounce competing groups. Hence in their reports to Moscow, commanders and commissars referred to other partisans and partisan groups as being infected with "partizanshchina", conducting themselves "democratically" (electing officers), like "Greens" (organizing units solely for local self-defence purposes), behaving in an "anti-Soviet" manner (disobeying instructions, avoiding combat, living the good life etc.).[25] Of course, it is not always certain that the accused partisans actually engaged in these practices (they themselves certainly would not admit so to Moscow!), but it is clear that the accusing partisans used these terms to define others as false partisans, thus calling down the wrath of state authorities who were on the look-out for precisely these behaviours.

Competition over resources and credibility combined to undermine the partisans' sense of their unity and commonalty with other partisans. Instead of defining themselves solely on their own merits, Moscow's approval was needed to validate their existence. As in the 1930s, Moscow, and not the partisans - or workers - determined the nature of their relationship. Partisans that constructed an identity independent of the centre risked being labeled anti-Soviet, with all the consequences that label brought.[26]

There were, however, some facets of a partisan identity that both Party and Red Army partisans could agree on: partisans, even those loyal to the Soviet state, should be autonomous from the centre (even as they received state support), they should be male, they should be Slavic, and they should be affiliated with a Soviet institution. This identity, not coincidentally, comprised the primary elements of the dominant groups in the pre-war Soviet Union. Those who did not fit this description were either prevented from joining the movement, or were marginalized within it. Women, for example, were generally regarded by their male counterparts as being unqualified to fight. When allowed to join a detachment, they usually were relegated to support roles, or even treated solely as sexual objects. Non-Slavic national minorities, such as Jews and the Crimean Tatars were seen as aliens, as cowards and weaklings, and as actual or potential traitors. When Jews and Tatars did participate in the movement, it was because they were already part of an institution (either the party, Red Army or NKVD), or because they possessed a special skill needed by the detachment.[27] By marginalizing these groups, the "veteran partisans" sought to exclude them from making the claim that they were real partisans also.

Moreover, the "veteran partisan" identity undermined the state's description of the partisan war as "national"- a formulation as we have seen that became increasingly important as the war went on. If the movement was to fulfill its political role then all Soviet citizens had to be included in its ranks. Thus, the First Secretary of the Komsomol, N. A. Mikhailov, wrote in a memo to Ponomarenko in June 1943, "without the mass inclusion of women into the partisan detachments, it is impossible to broaden greatly the partisan movement, it is impossible to make it genuinely national."[28] Ponomarenko agreed with these sentiments and ordered commanders to accept all who wanted to join the partisans. Efforts were also made to include national minorities, and to encourage Nazi collaborators to re-defect and enlist in the detachments, since their presence would indicate the Nazis' loss of support and the moral and physical superiority of the Soviet system.[29] Veteran partisans grudgingly accepted these new recruits, although they remained marginalized in the movement. Former collaborators posed a particular problem as partisans of all stripes found it difficult to trust people who, until recently, had been shooting at them.[30] What's more, the inclusion of real traitors in their ranks gave credence to official fears that the movement was filled with "suspicious people", thus potentially making the other partisans guilty by association.[31] The inclusion of these groups lessened the validity of the veteran partisan identity, further undermining what little cohesion existed in the movement.

While the regime was motivated by overt political objectives to broaden the movement, other underlying reasons seem also to have been at work. By enabling marginalized elements to join the movement, the veteran partisan identity based on autonomy would be weakened as more citizens beholdened to the state entered the partisan ranks. Bolsheviks traditionally employed the rhetoric of the social and economic equality of women and national minorities as a way of demonstrating that they were in the process of creating a just and equal society.[32] The support of these groups in the partisan movement can be seen as a continuation of this policy. It also enabled state agencies to impose an identity on the movement that allowed all Soviet citizens, regardless of gender and ethnicity to participate. Officials and marginalized citizens became allies: these groups wanted to become full members of the partisan community, and the state wanted to incorporate them into the movement in order to gain more control over it by subverting its autonomist tendencies.

The partisan movement was thus subjected to the same "divide and rule" identity politics of the 1930s. Sensing the state's suspicions, the first partisans struggled to obtain legitimacy from Soviet authorities, and to be accepted as the real partisans, while defaming others. Yet they were also able to establish common traits that might have eventually served as the basis for an independent partisan identity, one based partly on autonomy from state control. But this identity excluded those who did not fit the model. The inclusion of these outsiders further fragmented the already divided partisan identity. It also lent credence to the regime's suspicion that the partisans were not reliable due to the expanded presence of the re-defectors.

Identity politics thus formed a central means of state control over the partisans. This is not to minimize the instruments of coercion and repression the state had at its disposal. "Divide and rule" identity politics complemented these tools and facilitated the regime's ability to exert its authority over the partisans.

If the wartime identity politics in the partisan movement was really an extension of identity politics from the 1930s, then our sense of the war as a time of potential freedom should be reconsidered. What happened to the partisans may have been an isolated instance, particularly since the partisans represented such a potential threat to state. Then again, it is more likely that while on the surface Soviet politics may have seemed more relaxed, preoccupied as the country was with winning the war, below the surface Stalinist politics continued to function. Since state officials continued to determine social identities, their meanings, and their relation to the state, and because partisans derived the legitimacy of their own identities from the state, the dynamics of Stalinist identity politics had changed little. Given this context, the re-imposition of the more oppressive aspects of Stalinism in the post-war period was not difficult. Rather than being a temporary break between the 1930s and late Stalinism, the war helped to solidify and legitimate the ways and means of Stalinist politics.

[1] For extensive discussions on the relationship of the Soviet state and Soviet workers see, Hoffman, David: Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941. Ithaca 1994; Kuromiya, Hiroaki: Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932. New York 1988; Filzer, Donald: Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928-1941. London 1986; Siegelbaum, Lewis and Suny, Ronald, eds.: Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity. Ithaca 1994. For discussions of the meaning of class see Siegelbaum's introduction to Making Workers Soviet, and Fitzpatrick, Sheila: "Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia", in: Journal of Modern History 65 (December 1993), pp. 745-770.

[2] See for example, Werth, Alexander: Russia at War, 1941-1945. New York 1964; Grossman, Vasily: Life and Fate. New York 1985; Tumarkin, Nina: The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. New York 1994, pp. 64-66; Stites, Richard, ed.: Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia. Bloomington 1995.

[3] For a discussion of the popularity of Cossacks and bandits in tsarist mass culture see Brooks, Jeffrey: When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917. Princeton 1985, pp. 166-213.

[4] For a more detailed discussion, see my dissertation 'The People's Avengers': Soviet Partisans, Stalinist Society and the Politics of Resistance, 1941-1945 (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan 1994), especially chapter one.

[5] Erickson, John: The Road to Stalingrad. New York: Harper & Row 1975, pp. 27-28, 240; Starinov, Colonel I.G.: Over the Abyss: My Life in Soviet Special Operations, translated by Robert Suggs. New York 1995, pp. 34-65, 143-161; Maslov, A.A.: "Concerning the Role of Partisan Warfare in Soviet Military Doctrine of the 1920s and 1930s", in: Journal of Slavic Military History 9 (1996), pp. 891-892.

[6] See Sovnarkom's resolution of 29 June 1941, reproduced in full in Izvestiia TsK KPSS, #6, 1991, pp. 218-220; and the more detailed instructions of 18 July 1941, reproduced in full in Izvestiia TsK RPSS, #6, 1991, pp. 218-220.

[7] For a more extended discussion see Slepyan: ´The People's Avengers', especially chapter two.

[8] Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii (hereafter cited as RTsKhIDNI)" f. 69, op. 1, d. 159, l. 58.

[9] RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 1093, l. 4.

[10] For a series of official instructions issued in the fall 1943 to filter out suspicious elements see RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 10, ll. 95-97, 127-128, 136-139.

[11] RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 88, d. 272, l. 15.

[12] V tylu vraga: Bor'ba partizan i podpol'shchikov na okkupirovannoi territorii Leningradskoi oblasti 1944 g.: Sbornik dokumentov. Leningrad, Lenizdat 1985, 303.

[13] See for example, the struggle between Dymnikov, a raikom secretary, and Orlov, a Red Army partisan for control of Diat'kovo raion, Orel oblast; RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 4, ll. 107-108, d. 28, d. 94, 1. 300; d. 215, ll. 10-13, 14-15; ll. 52-53; d. 300, l. 52.

[14] RTSKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 1094, ll. 1-6; d. 215, l. 11; Nauchnyi arkhiv Instituta istorii Rossii, Otdel rukopisnykh fondov (hereafter cited as NA IIR ORF) f. 2, raz. 2, op.6.

[15] NA IIR ORF, f. 2, raz. 2, op. 4, d. 125, l. 6.

[16] Cited in. Fedorov, A.F.: Podpol'nyi obkom deistvuet. Kiev 1986, p. 217.

[17] This is evident in the diaries of party members, and even in the tone of their reports to Moscow; RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1. d. 164,1.157; d. 1067, ll. 55-56.

[18] RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 1067, l. 234.

[19] One such partisan boasted that when his detachment moved through a village, the inhabitants believed that an actual Red Army unit had liberated them. NA IIR ORF, f. 2, raz. 2, op. 4, d. 47, l. 11; op. 6, d. 12, l. 10.

[20] NA IIR ORF, f. 2, raz. 2, op. 6, d. 15, ll. 6,10,18. Other partisan officials asserted that in fact the "Death to the German Occupiers" was a very good "civilian" detachment, yet it is clear in the minds of these officials that a hierarchy of partisan military effectiveness existed, in which the civilian detachments came out second-best; RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op.1, d. 28, l. 72.

[21] RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 1067, l. 171.

[22] RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 283, l. 6.

[23] NA IIR ORF, f. 2, raz. 2, op. 4, d.125, ll. 2-3; op. 6, d. 12, l. 11; RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op.1, d. 25, ll. 82-84.

[24] NA IIR ORF, f. 2, raz. 2, op. 6, d. 12, l. 17.

[25] RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 142, l. 47, d. 1080, l. 17, l. 39, f. 625, op. 1, d. 61, l. 91.

[26] The fate of the "Starik" Partisan Brigade, - and most notably its commander, V. S. Pyzhakov - which Soviet officials initially considered to be an exemplary unit, but who later came to see the unit as a bunch of marauders, and thus disbanded the unit, is one case in point; See the correspondence and unit reports concerning the "Starik Affair" in RTsKhIDNI, f. 625, op. 1, d. 61,ll. 32-218. Those partisan units that did not adequately acknowledge the supremacy of Soviet power were usually destroyed when they encountered advanced units of the Red Army. See D. Karov (Kandirov), "Antisovetskie i antinemetskie partizany," unpublished manuscript, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Dallin Collection, p. 5.

[27] For an extended discussion of these groups see Slepyan, "'Ihe People's Avengers" esp. Ch. 4.

[28] RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 1060, l. 18.

[29] RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 14, l. 41; d. 15, ll. 5-6; d. 1062, ll. 18, 50-52; Nechama, Tec: Defiance: The Bielski Partisans. Oxford 1993, pp. 108-109, Vakar, Nicholas P.: Belorussia: The Making of a Nation: A Case Study. Cambridge MA, 1956, pp. 193-194.

[30] NA IIR ORF, f 2, raz. 2, op. 4, d. 23, l. 18; d. 75,1. 4; op. 3, d. 15, l. 18; Tsentrl'nyi muzei vooruzhennykh sil SSSR, f. 4/69036; RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 159, l. 59.

[31] Briukhanov, A.I.: V shtabe partizanskogo dvizheniia. Minsk 1980, p. 155; RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 474, l. 19.

[32] See for example, the discussion of this phenomenon in Stites, Richard: The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism, 1860-1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978, pp. 317-345 and in Massell, Gregory: The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919-1929. Princeton 1974.