Order No. 227

Background

Order No. 227 was issued in the summer of 1942, when the strategic situation had sharply worsened. After the defeat in the Kharkov operation of 1942 and unsuccessful fighting near Voronezh, on the Don and in the Donbas, Red Army troops retreated with heavy losses as far as the Volga and the Northern Caucasus. The Germans seized densely populated and industrially and agriculturally most developed regions of the USSR. The order itself recorded that 70 million Soviet citizens and vast strategic resources had been left in occupied territory, that the USSR had lost its superiority over Nazi Germany in manpower reserves and grain stocks, and that further retreat threatened the state with destruction. An earlier document with a comparable purpose was Order No. 270 of 16 August 1941.[P6][P3][P2]

Drafting

The draft text was prepared by Chief of the General Staff Aleksandr Vasilevsky, but by his own account almost nothing of the original wording survived: Stalin took the draft and rewrote it fundamentally, and the passage saying that the population "curses" the Red Army for retreating was his own contribution.[P7][P19]

Content

The order forbade the withdrawal of troops without an order and required each front to form one to three separate penal battalions and each army five to ten separate penal companies. Penal battalions were to number 800 men each and penal companies 150 to 200 men each; commanders, political commissars and soldiers guilty of a breach of discipline through cowardice or instability were to be placed in the most difficult sectors "to redeem with blood their crimes against the Motherland". Each army was also to form three to five blocking detachments (up to 200 men each) placed directly behind unstable divisions, tasked with shooting in place panic-mongers and cowards in the event of panic and disorganised withdrawal. Commanders of any rank who permitted unauthorised retreat were to be removed from their posts and court-martialled, and the order was to be read in all companies, cavalry squadrons, batteries, units and headquarters.[P4][P11][P52][P55][P56][P60]

The common belief that Order No. 227 created the blocking detachments is incorrect. Army-level blocking detachments already existed from September 1941, and NKVD detachments from the start of the war; the order increased their number and regulated their size, and by establishing detachments subordinate to the armies themselves it allowed army commands to deploy their own without having to appeal to the NKVD each time.[P4][P8]

Its mode of transmission was also distinctive. At Stalin's insistence the order was never printed for general distribution; its contents were conveyed by word of mouth to every man and woman in the army, and political officers were instructed that "there must not be a single person in the armed forces who is not familiar with Comrade Stalin's order".[P2][P85]

Reception and implementation

Reactions to the order were polarised even in Stalin's time. A report by the Special Departments of the NKVD on personnel responses to Order No. 227 records a series of negative and pessimistic remarks. In conversation, Third Rank military doctor Olshanetsky called the order the last cry of despair, when the Red Army was no longer able to hold out against the Germans, adding: "Nothing will come of this measure anyway." After the order was announced, medical instructor Demchenko said: "All this will not help. Either our own will kill everyone, or everyone will surrender as prisoners, but ours will not win." Army General Sergei Shtemenko, by contrast, judged that the order had an extremely beneficial effect on the fighting capacity of the troops.[P18]

Implementation was uneven. Commanders were reluctant to release troops for blocking detachments, viewing it as a waste of manpower, and the new units were filled with individuals who could not fight, whose duties came to include chores as well as guard work. In October 1942, the idea of regular blocking detachments at the front, as distinct from the autonomous NKVD forces, was quietly dropped.[P13][P37][P66][P97]

Consequences and disbandment

Subsequent events showed that the measures carried out under the order could not fully stop the retreat of Soviet troops, but did overcome the panicky character of the withdrawals. Intended to raise the morale of a demoralised Red Army, the order also had a largely harmful influence in many respects, and its implementation was in places evaded by commanders; fearing reprisals, commanders at all levels sometimes delayed withdrawal, which only led to additional losses.[P13][P23]

The total number of Red Army personnel sentenced by courts-martial during the war was 994,300; 436,600 were sent to places of confinement after sentencing, and 427,910 passed through penal units (companies and battalions) between September 1942 and May 1945. Not included in the statistics are 212,400 deserters who fled their positions and were not found or were sent by blocking detachments straight back to their units. On another count, 422,700 Red Army personnel were sentenced to penal battalions from 1942 to 1945, and in the first three months blocking detachments shot 1,000 penal troops and sent 24,000 to penal battalions. Merridale estimates that about 158,000 men were formally sentenced to be executed during the war, noting that the figure does not include the thousands shot at the roadside without a tribunal, nor the as many as 13,500 thought to have been shot at Stalingrad in the space of a few weeks.[P14][P37][P65][P93]

On 29 October 1944, citing the changed situation at the front, Stalin's order No. 349 disbanded the blocking detachments, and their personnel were absorbed into rifle units.[P15][P38][P34]

Publication

The full text was not published until 1988, more than forty years after the war; before that it appeared only in censored form, the first such publication being in 1958. The complete text appeared in issue 8 of the Military-Historical Journal in August 1988.[P2][P17]