“To execute this order - means to defend our lands, to save the Motherland, to exterminate and to conquer the hated enemy… I think it is necessary.”
—People's Commissar for Defense of the USSR: Joseph Stalin. July 28, 1942.
Red Army soldiers advancing at Stalingrad, 1942.
In the history of military orders, Order 227 stands as one of the most extreme and brutal orders ever given; not one step back! Such draconian orders of course, that outlaw cowardice and retreat in the face of a determined enemy, harken back to the Spartans at Thermopylae. But was Order 227 really necessary? And did such extreme and punitive orders make any sense at all?
On the face of it, Order 227, issued by the Stavka on July 28, 1942, set about to accomplish three things:
1) Unconditionally eliminate moods of retreat in the troops, and counter act any propaganda that the Soviet Union can and should retreat further east. [1]
2) Unconditionally remove and/or court martial any corps or army commanders who accepted troop withdrawals without an order from army headquarters. [1]
3) Unconditionally remove and/or court martial commanders and commissars of regiments and battalions who accepted unwarranted retreat of their troops without an authorized order from the corps or division commander. [1]
In order to outlaw retreat however, and enforce army discipline, it was deemed necessary to give the NKVD and Soviet secret police extraordinary powers, including the ability to arrest, capture, or shoot any fleeing or panicking troops. Any Soviet officer who disobeyed Order 227, by ordering an unauthorized retreat, could be executed on the spot. No court martial was necessary. NKVD penal battalions and blocking detachments were mandated along each Soviet front and were infamously featured at the Battle of Stalingrad. In that battle alone, some 13,500 Red Army soldiers may have been subject to executions (Overy & Beevor), through many Russian historians, and plenty of Western historians, not unjustifiably, have disputed this claim based on exaggerated accounts of Soviet brutality and their own review of Russian archives.
Ignoring however the unconfirmed death tolls and thousands of Soviet soldiers who were in fact forced into penal units, was police enforcement of Red Army units really necessary? And did a no retreat order, so widespread and harsh in its possible punishment, especially to Soviet officers, make any sense at all?
The date of Order 227 of course is extremely important if arguing from a point of military necessity. By July 1942, Case Blue was in full swing, and the main objective of the Wehrmacht (and Army Group South) at this point was to capture the Baku oil fields. The loss of Baku would mean the loss of 80% of the Soviet Union’s oil and fuel production. In the previous year alone, the USSR had lost hundreds of miles of land -containing some 40% of its population- as well as much of its agricultural base, coal, iron, and aluminum stores located in the Ukraine and elsewhere. As a result of the German invasion, some 1500 large factories were relocated to Central Asia, along with some 16 million people. To stop the Nazi advance, the Red Army had even resorted, in some areas, to scorch earth tactics. And through it was completely necessary to trade space for time, and even practical to do so, what Order 227 thus sought to achieve, according to proponents, was to connect commanders on the ground with the domestic situation occurring in the back. If the Soviet Union’s oil production was to be protected, along with several other key economic sectors, like the Persian corridor, there could be no more retreat. To reverse course, and widen the narrow visions and strategies of his army commanders, Stalin thus took it upon himself to order a harsh order of no retreat.
It should be noted however, that Order 227 did not come without obvious risk. The Kiev encirclement had in fact come about partially because of Stavka’s refusal to abandon Kiev and what remained of the Stalin line. In addition, Order 227 was also a possible propaganda victory for German propagandists intent on painting a hopeless situation for the occupied territories and a communist system on the verge of collapse. As a result of this last concern, Order 227 would be read to Red Army units, it would not be published in Soviet newspapers or broadcast from Soviet radio stations. Finally, as some historians correctly note, perhaps the most damaging charge of all, was that Order 227 had the potential to lead to another reckless purge of Soviet manpower and high-ranking officers. Such a purge, were it to happen again, at a time when the German army was still deep within Soviet territory, and within striking distance of the Baku oil fields, would be both reckless and potentially disastrous. And though Russian historians and military writers are quick to point out that no solid Soviet front had yet been established to stop Army Group South, and wouldn’t be until Stalingrad, the huge disparity of available resources, manpower, and production in 1942, between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, meant that no retreat orders were again reckless and probably unnecessary. And though perhaps unfair, and inappropriate as some counter arguments go, history does show that by July 1942 Hitler had already forfeited any realistic means to defeat the Soviet Union by declaring war on the United States.
Oddly enough however, even with the entry of the United States and the beginning of Lend-Lease, perhaps the best arguments for Order 227 come from hindsight itself. While close to half a million soldiers did serve in penal battalions, NKVD and inhouse blocking detachments never had the capacity or the resources to threaten a serious purge of Soviet soldiers or Red Army officers. It was however, smart and militarily correct to turn Stalingrad and the whole southern front in the Soviet Union into a Nazi-Soviet bloodbath and an ideological campaign of military attrition. Would Pavlov's house, Rattenkreig, and the encirclement of Paulus’s Sixth Army have been possible had the Soviet 62nd Army not have been motivated to fight to the last man? And though history is full of respite examples of no retreat orders going badly wrong, such as at Kiev and Hitler’s own insistence on defending Stalingrad, the decision to hold a bridgehead across the Volga, and commit to drawn out urban combat, gave Zhukov and the Red Army the time and space it needed to assemble an overwhelming reserve force that would crush the flanks of Army Group B. In fact, the street by street, room by room, house by house fighting at Stalingrad lasted longer than the entire French campaign. History arguably knows of no greater example of stubborn resistance, courage, and downright determination against a determined adversary than the average Soviet soldier’s performance at Stalingrad.
If the Battle of Stalingrad was in fact the turning point of World War II, and if one needs to make the case that Hitler had badly underestimated the Soviet Union, then Order 227 by itself could be seen as justified. As historians who favor the order are quick to note, “it was an extraordinary order, brought about by totally unique circumstances, for a totally unique system and government.” In this sense then, Order 227, and its infamous slogan of “not a step back,” was just another patriotic extension of the Great Patriotic War, an order that if perhaps militarily senseless and barbaric, would reaffirm to the Red Army and the average soldier that the war was not at all lost, and that Stalin and the Soviet Union were invincible. Only the greatest soldiers in history have the capacity to the fight to the last man, and this expectation, to stand and fight, should not be lost on the Red Army or its generals. As Order 227 correctly notes, the German army was waging a deliberate campaign of extermination, using similarly cruel tactics against the Soviet people, and now, now was the time to put a stop to it. However, what the German soldier lacked, according to Stalin, was a “higher purpose.” To defend the Motherland, and renew faith and discipline in the Red Army, one only needed to make the message loud and clear. There would be no more retreat and no more cowards. To surrender more ground would be an illegal betrayal of the Soviet Union. As the author of Order 227 correctly predicted; all Soviet soldiers would fight to their death or die where they stood.
[1] Author’s summary of Order No. 227. Full Text: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Trans...ce_of_the_USSR