Soviet partisans

• 1. Introduction

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  Soviet partisans fought one of the largest guerrilla wars in recorded history, operating across the occupied Soviet Union, interwar Poland, and eastern Finland during World War II. By the end of 1941, more than 90,000 men and women had joined partisan detachments. By 1943, that number had swelled to over 550,000. Who were these fighters, how did a dispersed resistance become a strategic force, and what darker chapters complicate the story of their legacy? Those are the questions worth sitting with as we trace the Soviet partisan movement from its chaotic beginnings to its final operations alongside the Red Army.

• 2. The First Detachments

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  On the 23rd of June 1941, just one day after Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, Major Dorodnykh formed the Starasyel'ski detachment in the Zhabinka district. Three days later, Vasily Korzh organized the Pinsk detachment. These were not planned resistance cells. They were improvised units, built from the wreckage of Red Army formations overrun in the first catastrophic weeks of the German invasion.

  Joseph Stalin spoke by radio on the 3rd of July 1941, issuing a call to armed resistance, and on the 20th of July he appointed himself Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army. Directives from the Soviet People's Commissaries Council and the Communist Party had already been issued on July 29, ordering the formation of partisan detachments and diversionist groups throughout German-occupied territory. The program was defined in Moscow; the implementation fell to whoever had survived on the ground.

  The core of the early partisan movement came from three groups: Red Army soldiers cut off behind the front, members of destruction battalions, and Communist Party and Komsomol activists who chose to stay in Soviet-occupied prewar Poland. The first Hero of the Soviet Union awards for partisan action came on the 6th of August 1941, going to detachment commanders Pavlovskiy and Bumazhkov. Some detachments were parachuted directly into occupied territory that same summer. By December 1941, roughly 2,000 detachments with more than 90,000 personnel were in operation, yet no central coordination linked them.

• 3. Command and Coordination

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  The Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement was organized on the 30th of May 1942, placed under Stavka and headed by Panteleimon Ponomarenko as Chief of Staff. The initial command sat with top Politburo member Kliment Voroshilov. Before that spring, partisan units across Belarus had been virtually left to their own devices through the brutal winter of 1941-42, suffering severe shortages of ammunition, medicine and supplies, with radio communication absent until April 1942.

  The turning point in Belarus came in February 1942 with the opening of the Vitsyebsk gate, a corridor connecting Soviet-controlled and German-occupied territory. Weapons flowed through. Smaller units began consolidating into brigades. Rail sabotage intensified, with hundreds of engines and thousands of cars destroyed by the end of 1942. By November 1942, Soviet partisan strength in Belarus had reached roughly 47,000 persons.

  In 1944 the scope extended even beyond Soviet borders. Seven united formations and 26 larger detachments operated in Poland. Twenty united formations and detachments operated in Czechoslovakia. The Rodina formation, organized by former Soviet citizens who had escaped Nazi camps, operated in France. More than 40,000 Soviet citizens joined partisan formations across multiple countries, and some, including M. Huseynzade in Yugoslavia, F. Poletaev in Italy, and V. Porik in France, became national heroes in the countries where they fought.

• 4. Operations on the Rails

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  Operation Rails War ran from the 3rd of August to the 15th of September 1943. More than 100,000 partisan fighters from Belarus, the Leningrad Oblast, the Kalinin Oblast, the Smolensk Oblast, the Oryol Oblast, and Ukraine participated across an area roughly 1,000 kilometers along the front and 750 kilometers wide. The reported total: more than 230,000 rails destroyed, along with bridges, trains, and other rail infrastructure. The operation was intended to disrupt German reinforcements and supplies for the Battle of Kursk.

  Operation Concert followed almost immediately, running from the 19th of September to the 1st of November 1943. Its goal was to cut German rail capacity ahead of the Battle of the Dnieper. Despite poor weather that limited airlifts to less than half the planned supplies, the operation produced a 35-40 percent decrease in rail capacity across the area of operations. In Belarus alone, partisans claimed the destruction of more than 90,000 rails, 1,061 trains, 72 railroad bridges, and 58 Axis garrisons.

  German occupation leader Ziemke described the effect in northwestern Russia directly: partisans had so thoroughly disrupted the railroads that reserve divisions had to be rerouted to Pskov, 130 miles north of Nevel, and loaded into trucks, with not enough vehicles available. German Army Group North was forced to rely on truck transport for reinforcements during critical combat. According to German estimates, by October 1942 Soviet partisans were present in 75 percent of the Nazi rear area in Russia, up from 10 percent in August 1941. By the autumn of 1942, fully 10 percent of all German field divisions in Russia were engaged in fighting partisans.

• 5. Sydir Kovpak and the Long Raids

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  Sydir Kovpak's Putivl partisan detachment conducted one of the most remarkable extended operations of the entire partisan war. Beginning in 1942-43, Kovpak led his unit from the Briansk forests through eastern Ukraine, passing through Pinsk, Volyn, Rovno, Zhitomir, and Kiev oblasts. By 1943 they had reached the Carpathians.

  Kovpak's Sumy partisan unit covered more than 10,000 kilometers in fighting behind German lines and destroyed garrisons in 39 populated areas. The scale of these operations drew direct attention at the highest level of German command. Members of the German General Staff suggested to Hitler that he consider using poison gas as a remedy against the growing partisan menace.

  In Ukraine more broadly, however, the first year had been devastating. Between August 1941 and early March 1942, some 30,000 partisans had been organized into more than 1,800 detachments. By early May 1942, just 37 detachments consisting of 1,918 individuals remained operational and in communication with the Soviet Union. The rest had been destroyed, dispersed, or lost contact entirely. The Odessa underground proved more durable. Soviet forces withdrawing from the city in autumn 1941 built a partisan core in the catacombs beneath the city, a network estimated at 100 kilometers that contained staffs, shelters, logistics facilities, a bakery, and a printing house where leaflets were produced.

• 6. Complicated Loyalties

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  At the heart of the Soviet partisan story is a tension that Soviet historiography largely suppressed: the movement was not universally welcomed. In territories that had been part of the Soviet Union before the war, civilians often cooperated willingly, providing food, weapons collected from battlefields, and intelligence. Residents of the Ushachsky district in Vitebsk region handed over 260 tons of bread to partisans in 1942 and the first half of 1943. Belarusian partisans rescued 15,000 Soviet citizens from German hands and moved another 80,000 inhabitants from German-occupied territory to the Soviet rear.

  In territories annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939-1940, the picture was different. Local populations had reason to resent both occupiers. Soviet partisans requisitioned food, livestock and clothing, and when peasants refused, often took them by force. As one captured Soviet commander acknowledged, "Most partisan units feed, clothe, and arm themselves at the expense of the local population and not by capturing booty in the struggle against fascism. That arouses in the people a feeling of hostility."

  The internal records were more explicit. Partisan diaries described units ransacking entire villages. One inspector of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party reported that partisans from Alexander Saburov's formation "resemble bandits. People flee from his unit to the forests as they flee from the Germans. Plunder is unlimited." According to the memoirs of Dmitrii Medvedev, Saburov's partisans had become so accustomed to plunder that commanders could not restrain them. In Crimea, violent confiscation of food in Tatar villages led to armed conflict and the near-total collapse of the partisan resistance there by the summer of 1942. According to historian Christian Gerlach, German anti-partisan actions in Belarus alone killed an estimated 345,000 people, mostly civilians.

• 7. Against Polish and Ukrainian Forces

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  Soviet partisans operated in a landscape of overlapping resistance movements, and those relationships turned violent. For a period in 1941-42, some military cooperation existed between Soviet partisans and the Polish Home Army, the Armia Krajowa. Soviet authorities deliberately restrained partisan pressure in western Belarus during this period to support Moscow's diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile under Wladyslaw Sikorski.

  The Katyn massacre changed everything. After the discovery of the massacre and the breakdown of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the Polish exile government in April 1943, Moscow treated the AK as a hostile force. On the 23rd of June 1943, Soviet leaders ordered their partisans to denounce Polish partisans to the Nazis. Soviet units were authorized to shoot the leaders of Polish partisan groups, and to discredit, disarm, and dissolve their units. Soviet partisans were also instructed to feed the German forces information on Polish non-communist resistance. Massacres of Polish civilians followed, including at Naliboki on the 8th of May 1943, and at Koniuchy on the 29th of January 1944.

  The situation with Ukrainian nationalists was equally fraught. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA, formed in 1942 as a military arm of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. It fought both the Nazi occupiers and Soviet forces simultaneously. UPA leaders and Soviet partisan commanders attempted at points to negotiate a temporary alliance, but Moscow's NKVD headquarters suppressed any such moves by local commanders. In Latvia, former Soviet partisan Vasiliy Kononov was later prosecuted and convicted for war crimes against locals, a conviction upheld by the European Court of Human Rights.

• 8. Legacy and Commemoration

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  Historians assessing the Soviet partisan movement have reached sharply divergent conclusions. Historian Leonid Grenkevich called it a genuine people's war, unprecedented in Russian history on such a scale. Geoffrey Hosking wrote that the Soviet peoples displayed endurance, resourcefulness, and determination between 1941 and 1945 that may lie beyond the capacities of economically more advanced nations. Matthew Cooper framed the partisans as political beings struggling for a powerful ideological cause, representatives of the Soviet regime proving that neither it nor its ideology had been defeated.

  US Air Force historians Parrish, Atkinson, and Simpson identified the movement's other function: the Moscow-controlled partisan network was the sole effective means by which the Soviet government could maintain control over and extract loyalty from Soviet populations behind German lines. Polish historian Marek Jan Chodakiewicz argued that Soviet-aligned guerrillas routinely plundered peasants and lacked popular support, and that such conduct was eliminated from the standard Soviet narrative. Historian Alexander Gogun concluded that in 1941-42 the primary partisan targets were not German invaders but local police and civilian collaborators, and that inflated effectiveness reports traveled all the way up the chain of command to Stalin before entering Soviet history books.

  Russia observes Partisans and Underground Fighters Day on June 29 every year, a holiday established by the State Duma in March 2009 at the initiative of the Bryansk Regional Duma, signed into law by President Dmitry Medvedev on the 11th of April 2009. Ukraine marks the Day of Partisan Glory on September 22, first appearing on the Ukrainian calendar in October 2001 following an order from President Leonid Kuchma. In 2020, at the Moscow Victory Day Parade, the banners of the Zheleznyak Partisan Detachment were carried by personnel of the Honor Guard Company of the Armed Forces of Belarus on Red Square.