Russia at war 1941-1945

repatriation to Finland of some 400,000 people who did not want to stay under Soviet rale and the loss of substantial timber and hydroelectric resources. The agreement not to occupy Finland with Russian troops was a gesture of goodwill to the Finns themselves and a gesture of reassurance to the Scandinavian countries generally.

When Zhdanov, who had stood at the head of the defence of Leningrad, went to Helsinki, he conferred politely for two hours with "fascist Beast" Mannerheim, the object of so many vicious Russian cartoons; and in October Stalin sent a friendly message to the

Finnish-Soviet Friendship Society in Helsinki, whose president was none other than that conservative but ultra-realist new Premier, Paasikivi himself.

In the end, the Finns did not do much to "disarm" the Germans, and there does not appear to have been any actual fighting between Finns and Germans. What in fact happened was that the Germans withdrew from most of northern Finland of their own free will, after burning down all the towns and villages (to be later rebuilt with UNRRA help). What

fighting there was was done by Russian troops under Marshal Meretskov who broke

through the strong German lines west of Murmansk, and then captured Petsamo and

Kirkenes [The German air base whose main purpose had been to smash the

convoys from England to Murmansk and Archangel], the latter inside Norway.

Everything in northern Norway was burned down by the Germans who then withdrew by

sea. The rest of Norway remained under their occupation till May 1945. But the fact that even a small part of Norway was liberated by the Red Army continued to be of some

sentimental value in Soviet-Norwegian relations for some years after the war.

The story of Bulgaria can be told very briefly. Although Britain and the United States were at war with Bulgaria, the Soviet Union was not, and there was a Bulgarian Minister in Moscow (or Kuibyshev) throughout the war. The Germans had used Bulgaria as a

source of raw materials and as a military and naval base, but the Russians, making

allowances for the widespread pro-Russian sentiment in Bulgaria and the weakness of its government, had shown considerable tolerance to that country for a long time, even

despite serious provocations—for instance when the Germans freely used Bulgarian ports during their evacuation of the Crimea. But by August 1944, the situation had changed.

When the Red Army overran Rumania, several armed German ships escaped from there

to Bulgarian ports, and were not interned. These ports were also alleged to harbour

German submarines.

On August 26, Draganov, the Bulgarian Foreign Minister, made a "neutrality" declaration and promised that any German soldiers in Bulgaria would be disarmed if they refused to withdraw from the country.

The Russians did not think this good enough and declared war on Bulgaria on September 5. Three days later Tolbukhin's troops invaded Bulgaria. They met with no resistance, and were received with enthusiasm. On the following day as a result of an anti-German insurrection in Sofia, Kimon Georgiev's "Fatherland Front" Government was formed and declared war on Germany. The bloodless Two Days' War was over. Messages of

brotherly affection were sent by the Bulgarian Government to Tito, and a Bulgarian

Army was getting ready to fight the Germans. The "revolutionary enthusiasm" in Bulgaria was much deeper and more general than in Rumania.

Before many weeks had passed, the Russian press noted with satisfaction that all over Bulgaria People's Courts had been set up to try war criminals, and that the Bulgarian Army was being purged of all its "Fascist elements".

The Armistice between the Allies and Bulgaria was signed in Moscow on October 28.

[One of the Bulgarian signatories was N. Petkov, the Agrarian leader, who was to be tried and shot soon after the war as a Western "agent".]

Bulgaria, like Rumania, had entered the Soviet "sphere of influence".

The link-up between the Red Army and Tito's Yugoslavs took place at the end of

September. On the 29th a TASS communiqué announced that, in order to be able to

attack the Germans and Hungarians in Hungary from the south, the Russians had asked

permission from the Yugoslav Committee of National Liberation to enter Yugoslav

territory. On October 4 it was announced that the Russian and Yugoslav armies had

joined forces in an unspecified town in the Danube valley.

On October 20, Tolbukhin's troops and Tito's Yugoslavs entered Belgrade together

amidst great popular rejoicing.

On the same day Malinovsky's troops took Debrecen in eastern Hungary, but the Russian advance in Hungary, though rapid at first, was then slowed down by veiry stiff German and Hungarian resistance, especially as the Russians approached Budapest in November.

The Germans had, by then, foiled Horthy's attempt to "do a King Michael on them", and Hitler and Salasi, the Hungarian Fascist leader, decided at their meeting early in

December, to hold Budapest "at any price". Although, officially, the Germans expressed their confidence in being able to hold Budapest, it was known that many of its industries were now being evacuated to Austria.

It took some time to set up at least the nucleus of a "democratic régime" in Russian-occupied Hungary. It was not till December 20 that it was announced that a Hungarian Provisional National Assembly had been formed at Debrecen, "the citadel of Hungarian Freedom—that Debrecen where Kossuth raised the flag of independence in 1849".

On the following day the Soviet press announced:

At the beginning of December, under the chairmanship of Dr Vasary, the mayor of

Debrecen, a group was formed of representatives of the different Hungarian parties.

In the liberated territory the election of delegates to the Provisional National

Assembly took place between December 13 and 20. 230 delegates were elected,

representing the democratic parties, the town and village councils and the trade and peasant unions... The Assembly opened with the playing of the Hungarian National

Anthem. The meeting was held in the Reformation College where, in 1849, Kossuth

proclaimed the independence of Hungary...

An Address to the Hungarian People was adopted which said:

It is time to make peace. Salasi is an usurper... We call upon the Hungarian people to rally to the banners of Kossuth and Rakoszi and to follow in the footsteps of the Honweds [volunteer militia] of 1848. We want a democratic Hungary. We guarantee

the inviolability of private property as the basis of our social and economic order.

We want Land Reform... Turn your arms against the German oppressors and help

the Red Army... for the good of a Free and Democratic Hungary!

Two days later a Provisional Hungarian Government was formed; no Communist leaders

were included in it—it would have been premature when a large part of Hungary,

including Budapest, was still in German hands. The premier was General Miklos; the

other ministers included a peasant leader, Ferenc Erdei, Janos Göngös, Count Gesa

Teleki, and General Janos Veres, the Minister of Defence, a Horthy man, who had been Hungarian chief of staff since April 1944, was then arrested by the Germans, but

managed to escape.

This assortment of back-the-winner Hungarian gentlemen were not to stay long at the

head of affairs. "Kossuth" was a convenient symbol, but did not mean much. Nor did Rakoszy. It was the other Rakosi who was waiting for the signal to enter the stage.

It was also in the eventful autumn of 1944 that in "independent" Slovakia a great rising took place against the Germans by Slovak partisans, supported by Red Army units and by part of the Slovak Army. In the end, the rising was crushed by strong German forces that were rushed to Slovakia, though some partisans escaped to the mountains. Although, at the time, there was a virtual news blackout about the whole tragic business, there was later to be much recrimination, on the part of the Russians, both against the "dubious"

and "half-hearted" rôle played in the rising by the Slovak Army and by the Czechoslovak Government in London which had not given the insurrection sufficient encouragement.

[ The Slovak Communist Party, allegedly riddled with "bourgeois nationalists", was also to be blamed for its half-heartedness and for its failure to carry out the instructions of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak C.P. (IVOVSS, vol. IV, p. 318).]

Both the Slovak Insurgents and the Soviet troops, fighting in incredibly difficult

conditions in the Carpathians, suffered very heavy casualties.

Significantly (and the London Government was largely to be blamed for this) only about a thousand men from Bohemia and Moravia came to join in the Slovak rising, the average unromantic Czechs preferring not to stick their necks out.

The facts available on the Slovak rising are numerous, but highly confusing, and the Russian presentation of the rôle played by the non-communist elements in Slovakia has been far from generous.

There was also much recrimination in the opposite direction, and in Slovakia, to this day, there continues to be some ill-feeling against the Red Army amongst many non-communists, whose stories about having been "let down" are not unlike those still current amongst pro-Western elements in Poland.

Chapter XI CHURCHILL'S SECOND MOSCOW VISIT

In October 1944 the Red Army was overrunning Estonia and Latvia in the north; farther south, General Cherniakhovsky's troops first set foot on German soil at the eastern tip of East Prussia; but what interested—and worried—Churchill above all were first, the Polish Problem and second, the Russian penetration of the Balkans and Central Europe—by

which he meant, in the first place, Hungary.

He was ready to write off Rumania and Bulgaria as part of the Russian sphere, but was not prepared to do so in the case of Yugoslavia, Hungary and, above all, Greece. The Kings of Greece and Yugoslavia were looking to Britain for protection against

communism and although the Russians were losing thousands of men every day in the

heavy fighting in Hungary, he felt that Hungary, like Yugoslavia, should at least be the object of an East-West compromise.

As we know from Churchill's own account the whole question of the Balkans, including Hungary, was "settled" in a few minutes between him and Stalin.

[Churchill, op. cit., vol. VI, p. 198.]

During their very first meeting on October 9, he scribbled on a half-sheet of paper his proposal for Russian or British "predominance"—Rumania: Russia 90%, the others, 10%; Greece: Britain (in accord with USA) 90%, Russia, 10%; Bulgaria: Russia, 75%, the

others, 25%; Yugoslavia and Hungary: 50-50%.

I pushed this across to Stalin... Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us... At length I said:

"Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues ... in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper." "No, you keep it,"

said Stalin.

As Churchill himself says, even in retrospect, relations between him and Stalin were never better than they were during that October visit to Moscow. Shortly before that, he had gone out of his way to flatter the Russians by saying that they had "torn the guts" out of Hitler's war machine. The British Ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr was eager to make the Churchill-Eden visit to Moscow an overwhelming success and something of a

personal triumph for himself.

[He was very conscious of his historic rôle as wartime Ambassador to Russia. Asked,

before leaving Moscow for Washington in 1945, what had impressed him most in Russia, he said unhesitatingly, " Stalin." Stalin had gone out of his way to be pleasant to him.]

Since the British statesmen were the guests of the Soviet Government, Clark-Kerr (at Churchill's suggestion, it is true) organised a banquet and, for the first time in his life, Stalin dined at the British Embassy. The Ambassador also exercised all his diplomatic skill and charm on the two sets of Poles. He tried to be particularly nice to Bierut and Osöbka-Morawski who had been offended by the treatment given them by Churchill and

Eden, who looked upon them as a pair of Russian "quislings" who had gone so far as to declare that the "Polish people" did not want Lwow. Clark-Kerr also hoped that he had persuaded Mikolajczyk during this Churchill-Eden visit to return to Moscow after a

flying visit to London, and to go to Poland immediately to form the new government

there. When Mikolajczyk failed to return, Clark-Kerr felt he had been badly let down.

Outwardly, an unprecedented atmosphere of cordiality surrounded the Anglo-Soviet

talks; for several minutes a thunderous ovation at the Bolshoi Theatre greeted Churchill and Stalin as they both appeared in the State Box.

On October 18, at the end of his Moscow visit, Churchill received the press in the large Ambassador's study; outside the large windows were the bare trees and an autumn

twilight, and in the study hung the large oil paintings of Queen Victoria, King Edward VII in his regalia, Queen Alexandra, King George V and Queen Mary. Wearing a lounge

suit with a blue bow tie, Churchill looked in good form. He began by jokingly referring to his days as a war correspondent in South Africa and to "the bitter irritation of having my dispatches censored: and I sympathise when a good story is spoilt by the blue pencil—or it may be the red pencil here."

When I last came to Moscow (he said), Stalingrad was still under siege, and the

enemy was sixty or seventy miles from this city, and he was even nearer Cairo. That was in August 1942... Since then the tide has turned, and we have had victories and wonderful advances over vast expanses... Coming back here, I find a great sense of hope and confidence that the end of the trials will be reached... Some very hard

fighting will yet have to be done. The enemy is resisting with discipline and

desperation, and it is best to take a sober view of the speed with which the

conclusion will be reached on the Western Front. But there is good news everyday, and it is difficult not to be over-sanguine.

After referring to the "circle of fire and steel" closing in on Germany and the hunger, cold and shortages with which Germany was now faced, Churchill said:

It is a great change from the days when England and her Empire were left alone to face the mighty power of Germany... As for our work here, I shall only say this:

after Quebec and the long discussions I had with my great friend President

Roosevelt, I thought it right to see my other friend—as I think I may truly call him

—Marshal Stalin.

The smooth working of interallied relations, he said, was greatly assisted by these

conferences. In the course of these Moscow talks, "we were most deeply involved in the anxious questions concerning Poland, and I am quite sure I am entitled to say that very definite results have been gained and differences have been sensibly narrowed. The

Polish question stands in a better position than it did and I have good hope we shall reach full agreement eventually among all the parties concerned. Undoubtedly, we must not

allow Poland to become a sore place in our affairs. We British went to war for Poland, and our sympathy for Poland is great, and Britain has a special interest in her fortunes, now that Poland is about to be liberated by the great manly efforts of our Allies." He made no reference whatsoever to the Warsaw tragedy which had come to its gruesome

end only a fortnight before.

Churchill then referred to the "surprising events" that had been occurring in the Balkans, and said that each of the Balkan problems was difficult to handle by correspondence, which was another good reason for coming to Moscow. Eden here had had "a hard time".

But very sensible results had been achieved in co-ordinating the policies of the two governments in these regions. Then he spoke of the atmosphere of "friendship and comradeship" that had marked these Moscow talks:

We both have our armies in the field and I am glad the Russians no longer have the heavy feeling that they bear the whole brunt... Unity is essential if peace is to be secure. Let us cast our eyes forward beyond the battle-line to the day when

Germany has surrendered unconditionally, beaten to the ground, and awaiting the

decisions of the outraged nations who saved themselves from the pit of destruction that Hitler had digged for them.

He ended with a Churchillian tirade on Anglo-Russian-American friendship:

This friendship, in war as in peace, can save the world, and perhaps it is the only thing that can save the peace for our children and grandchildren. In my opinion, it is a goal easily attainable. Very good, very good are the results in the field, very good the work behind the lines, and hopes are high for the permanent results of

victory.

He also referred to "the great regard, and respect, and great confidence" he felt for "the great chief of the Russian State".

The Russians present at the conference were very pleased with the statement; they saw in Churchill a strong supporter of a Big-Three policy.

No doubt there were difficulties—no real progress was made during the long talks with Mikolajczyk, Romer and Grabski on the one hand, and the Lublin Poles on the other; nor did the agreement on the Balkans amount to very much, except that the Russians seemed ready to abandon Greece—but some useful talks had taken place on the possible partition of Germany, and, above all, Churchill had secured some fairly precise assurances from Stalin about the Russians joining in the war against Japan within three months after the defeat of Germany. At Roosevelt's request the discussion of the disagreements that had arisen at Dumbarton Oaks over UNO was postponed till the next Big-Three meeting.

So the results of the Moscow talks were rather a mixed bag. Nevertheless, there was a general impression that Churchill and Stalin were now on excellent terms, and that

Churchill was now genuinely starry-eyed about "the great chief of the Russian State", partly perhaps under the influence of Clark-Kerr.

The extreme cordiality in the Churchill-Stalin relations is reflected in the correspondence they exchanged during and just after the Moscow visit. These letters are reproduced in the volume published in Moscow in 1957, though they are not quoted by Churchill

himself.

Thus, his letter of October 17, in which he asked Stalin to see Mikolajczyk—"in whose desire to reach an understanding with you and with the National Committee I am more

than ever convinced" —concludes with the words:

My daughter Sarah will be delighted with the charming token from Miss Stalin and

will guard it among her most valued possessions. I remain, with sincere respect and goodwill,

Your friend and war comrade,

Winston S. Churchill.

On October 19, Stalin wrote:

Dear Mr Churchill,

On the occasion of your departure from Moscow please accept from me two modest

gifts as souvenirs. The vase, "Man in a Boat" is for Mrs Churchill and the vase

"With Bow against Bear" for yourself. Once again I wish you good health and good cheer.

J. Stalin.

In reply Churchill wrote:

My dear Marshal Stalin,

I have just received the two beautiful vases... We shall treasure them amongst our most cherished possessions... The visit has been from beginning to end a real

pleasure to me... most particularly because of our very pleasant talks together. My hopes for the future alliance of our peoples never stood so high. I hope you may long be spared to repair the ravages of war and lead All The Russias out of the years of storm into glorious sunshine.

Your friend and war-time comrade,

Winston S. Churchill.

After a further message of overwhelming cordiality sent during his and Eden's return journey, Churchill sent Stalin from London an almost gushing message of thanks for the

"Russian products" (obviously caviare) that had been added to the English party's luggage:

It is only since my arrival in London that I have realised the great generosity of your gifts of Russian products for myself and members of my mission. Please accept the warmest thanks of all who have been the grateful recipients of this new example of Russian hospitality.

[ Stalin-Churchill correspondence, pp. 263-6.]

At all the Moscow parties, Churchill had, indeed, shown a gargantuan liking for caviare.

Throughout the visit, Stalin had gone out of his way to show Churchill and Eden the

greatest friendliness; he had even gone to see them off to the airfield. There had been nothing like it since the Matsuoka visit in 1941. The communiqué recorded "considerable progress" in the talks on Poland, "greatly reduced differences" and "dispelled misunderstandings"; agreement on Bulgaria, and agreement on a joint policy on

Yugoslavia—the Yugoslavs would, of course, be "free to choose their own system", but meantime there would be a fusion of the National Liberation Committee and the Royal

Yugoslav Government.

Chapter XII STALIN'S HORSE-TRADING WITH DE GAULLE

There is a long story behind de Gaulle's visit to Moscow in December 1944. During the Soviet-German Pact the Soviet Union had established diplomatic relations with the Vichy Government, though the Vichy Ambassador, M. Gaston Bergery and his American wife,

Bettina, the ex-Schiaparelli mannequin, did not arrive in Moscow until April 25, 1941, i.e. after the German invasion of Yugoslavia. When he presented his credentials to

Kalinin in the presence of Molotov, and urged Russia to "take part in the organisation of the New Order in Europe", his speech was met with stony silence from the Russians. On the following day, Mr Bogomolov, the Soviet Ambassador to Vichy France, who

happened to be in Moscow at the time, called on Bergery and explained to him, in

"ideological terms", why the Soviet Union did not think it possible to accept Germany's hegemony in Europe.

[G. Gafencu. Préliminaires de la guerre à F Est. (Paris, 1944), pp. 234-5. Bogomolov was to become Ambassador to the various "allied" (i.e. exiled) governments in London.]

Diplomatic relations with Vichy were, of course, broken off the moment the Germans

invaded the Soviet Union. The first direct contacts between the Free French and the

Russians were made as early as the beginning of August 1941 on de Gaulle's initiative when M. Jouve, de Gaulle's unofficial representative in Turkey, called on Mr S.

Vinogradov, the Soviet Ambassador there and informed him that de Gaulle, whom he had just seen at Beirut, would like to send two or three Free French representatives to

Moscow. Without insisting on recognition—official or unofficial—of the Free French by the Soviet Government, de Gaulle was anxious to establish direct relations with the

Russians, instead of dealing with them, as hitherto, through the British. According to the Soviet account of the meeting, Jouve pointed out that, in General de Gaulle's view, the Soviet Union and France were both continental Powers which had problems and aims

different from those of the Anglo-Saxon states. And Jouve added:

General de Gaulle talked a lot about the Soviet Union. Her entry into the war, he said, represented for us a great chance on which we had not counted before. He also said that while it was impossible to say when exactly victory would be won, he was absolutely certain that, in the end, the Germans would be smashed.

[ Sovietsko-Frantsuzskie otnosheniya.., 1941-1945. (Moscow 1959), pp. 43-44.]

During the same week MM. Cassin and Dejean called on Mr Maisky, the Soviet

Ambassador in London proposing to him the establishment of "some kind of official relations" between the Soviet Union and the Free French. They suggested that these relations be modelled on those existing between the Free French and the British

Government. On September 26, 1941, Maisky informed de Gaulle that the Soviet Union

recognised him as the leader of all the Free French who had rallied to him, "regardless of where they were". It also promised the Free French all possible aid in the common struggle against Germany and her allies.

[Ibid., p. 47.]

De Gaulle was anxious, almost from the outset, to give tangible form to the military cooperation between the Free French and the Soviet Union, and wanted to send to Russia a French division then stationed in Syria. But this apparently met with opposition from the British and, in April 1942, Dejean proposed that the French send to Russia thirty airmen instead, and thirty ground staff—to begin with.

Thus the foundations were laid for that French Normandie Squadron which arrived in

Russia later in the year. No doubt they were little more than a token force, but they represented an important political factor and a symbolic link between Russia and the French Resistance. The French airmen fought gallantly on the Russian Front, suffered very heavy casualties, and Russian military decorations were lavishly conferred on them.

Great publicity was given to this French unit.

In March 1942 a small diplomatic mission, headed by M. Roger Garreau, and with

General E. Petit as the Military Attaché, arrived in Moscow. Garreau was (at least at that stage) a strong supporter of de Gaulle and, in his conversations with the Russians, never made any secret of the disagreements between de Gaulle on the one hand and the British and Americans on the other.

[In this he was closely following de Gaulle's example in London. In talking to Soviet diplomats the General frequently complained about the British Government: thus, on

November 26, 1941, in reply to Ambassador Bogomolov's remark that he regularly read

his (de Gaulle's) paper, France, de Gaulle angrily snapped back: "That isn't my paper, that's the paper of the British Ministry of Information." On another occasion, on September 26, 1942, he told Bogomolov that the British were trying to build up Herriot as his rival, adding "with great irritation" that the British were trying all the time to overthrow him by making use of all sorts of other people. (Ibid., pp. 50 and 96).]

Garreau (like de Gaulle) attached the greatest importance to the support given by Russia to the Free French, and on March 23,1943, went so far as to tell Molotov that "but for the Soviet Government's support, Fighting France would not have survived the great

November (1942) crisis when various attempts were made in North Africa to set up quite a different government."

[Ibid., p. 118. ]

In June 1943 the question arose of recognising the French Committee of National

Liberation in Algiers, and on the 23rd, the British Ambassador, in a letter to Stalin, said that he had learned "with alarm" of the Soviet intention of recognising this Committee.

[ Ibid., p. 167.]

Under British and American pressure, this recognition was delayed, but when it was

finally granted in August 1943, the Soviet "formula" of recognition was much shorter and more straightforward than that of the British and American Governments, with its

numerous conditions and reservations. When, finally, in August 1944, the de Gaulle

Government established itself in Paris, the Russians pressed Britain and the United States for an early recognition as the French Provisional Government. So, on the whole, de

Gaulle had every reason to be satisfied with the backing the Soviet Government had

given him ever since 1941.

His decision to go to Moscow to see Stalin at the end of 1944 had been largely

determined by a good deal of irritation and annoyance caused him by the British and

Americans, by their "domineering" position in France, and by his desire to show that he had an independent policy and was nobody's satellite. The Russians, for their part, were interested in France in so far as this was a country in which the communists had played a leading part in the Resistance and were making their influence felt inside the French Government.

And yet, in the conditions prevailing at the end of 1944, the most important question for the Russians was to finish the war against Germany as quickly as possible, and Stalin expected the French communists to subordinate their own political interests to this end—

as we know, for instance, from the instructions Stalin obviously gave Maurice Thorez soon afterwards to approve the dissolution of the Patriotic Militias (the para-military communist organisations of the Resistance), and to co-operate with de Gaulle.

[See the author's France 1940-1955 (London, 1956), pp. 244-5.]

During de Gaulle's visit to Moscow Stalin made a point of urging the General half-

jokingly "not to shoot Thorez—at least not for the present"—since the communist leader was going to behave as a good patriotic Frenchman. Thorez, who had been in Moscow

throughout the war, had returned to France in November 1944—where he had just been

amnestied for his "desertion" from the French Army in 1939, and was later (in 1945) also going to be appointed one of the Ministers of State in de Gaulle's government.

De Gaulle's visit to Moscow was, above all, a move to break away from an excessive

dependence on Britain and the USA. In those pre-atomic days de Gaulle continued to

think of France and Russia— as he had already done in 1941—as the two great future

military Powers on the Continent of Europe which could keep Germany down, and whose

points of view and interests were different from those of the "Anglo-Saxons". It was precisely on this point that, in 1944, Stalin was unable to see eye-to-eye with de Gaulle—

for the simple reason that, in purely military and economic terms, France was totally insignificant compared with Britain and America. So, much to de Gaulle's

disappointment, Stalin refused to take France seriously at that stage as a military ally.

Instead, Stalin tried to use de Gaulle as a means of breaking Western unity over the Polish question. De Gaulle, for his part, tried to force the hands of Britain and America by getting Stalin to accept the annexation of the Rhine-land by France. In the end, de Gaulle refused to recognise the Lublin Committee, and Stalin refused to recognise the Rhine frontier, and de Gaulle finally "triumphed" by taking back to Paris a Franco-Soviet Treaty of Alliance, on the lines of the Anglo-Soviet Pact of 1942. But this was by no means everything that either de Gaulle or Stalin had originally hoped to achieve.

There was something slightly comic about the whole de Gaulle-Bidault visit that

December. The Russians treated the French with a good deal of condescension, and the French, at the time, felt this very keenly, though there is not the slightest suggestion of that in de Gaulle's Memoirs.

Travelling via Baku and Stalingrad, de Gaulle, Bidault, General Juin and a handful of diplomats arrived in Moscow on December 2. First de Gaulle dropped a brick at

Stalingrad where there was a reception in his honour at which he presented the city with a memorial tablet from the people of France. In his speech he referred to Stalingrad as "a symbol of our common victories over the enemy", a description of the defence of Stalingrad which the Russians did not much relish, especially coming from a Frenchman.

At the Kursk Station in Moscow two days later, the French party were met by Molotov

and a guard of honour. The Diplomatic Corps were also there in force, and a large crowd had gathered outside the station, attracted by the numerous official cars. Emerging from the station, de Gaulle looked at this big crowd in the square: and the crowd looked back, not quite sure who he was, and nobody even murmured "Vive de Gaulle!" or anything.

So he drove off, wondering what a queer country this was.

[In his Memoirs, de Gaulle writes: "A considerable crowd had gathered, from which rose a hum of sympathetic voices." Op. cit., p. 68; I was there, and was totally unaware of any kind of "hum".]

In 1944, de Gaulle was a very great man in France, and it shocked him not to be treated as such anywhere else.

The minutes of the three Stalin-de Gaulle meetings on December 2, 6 and 8, as published by the Soviet Foreign Ministry in 1959, as well as the minutes of the Molotov-Bidault talks are of the greatest interest, since in substance and especially in their overtones they differ considerably from de Gaulle's rather glib account of what happened.

[ Sovietsko-Frantsuzskie otnosheniya, 1941-45. (Moscow, 1959).]

The minutes are also one of the few first-hand accounts we have of how Stalin conducted negotiations during the war.

During de Gaulle's first meeting with Stalin the General started by saying that the real trouble with France was that she did not have any alliance with Russia, and, also, that her eastern frontier was very vulnerable.

Yes, said Stalin, the fact that Russia and France were not together had been a great misfortune for Russia, too. He then asked de Gaulle whether French industry was being restored.

De Gaulle: Yes, but very, very slowly. There are terrible transport difficulties and a coal shortage. In order to equip her army, France has to appeal for arms from the Americans and, for the present these won't give her any. It will take France two years to restore her industry.

Stalin expressed some surprise at this, and said that Russia was not finding the restoration of industry such an insuperable problem. The south of France had been liberated without difficulty, and there had not been much fighting in Paris, so what was the trouble?

De Gaulle said that most of the French rolling stock had been destroyed and that much of what was left was being used by the British and Americans.

Rather with the suggestion that it was these who were doing most of the fighting in

France, Stalin then asked how France stood for officer cadres.

De Gaulle replied that in 1940 the Germans had captured nearly the whole French Army and most of the officers. Only a small number were left in North Africa, and these were now fighting in France. Some had betrayed their country by collaborating with Vichy. So a lot of new officers now had to be trained.

Stalin: The reason why I asked about this is that everywhere—whether in Poland, Hungary, Rumania or Yugoslavia—the Germans always try to round up officers

and pack them off to Germany. But how do you stand for airmen?

De Gaulle: We have very few airmen, and even those we have need complete re-training, as they are unfamiliar with modern planes.

Stalin: Now the French airmen of the Normandie Squadron are doing very well on the Russian Front; so if you are so hard up for airmen, we could perhaps send them back to France?

De Gaulle: No, no, this is quite unnecessary. They are contributing nobly to the common cause while in Russia.

Stalin: I suppose you have very few training schools for airmen?

De Gaulle: Yes, very few, and very few planes.

Having got over this phase of the talk, in which he had to act the poor relation (there is no mention of these remarks in his Memoirs), de Gaulle tried to get down to more serious business. It would be a good thing for both France and Russia, he said, if the Rhineland could be joined to France. Maybe the Ruhr would have to be given an international

régime, but not the Rhineland proper.

Stalin asked how Britain and America looked upon this, to which de Gaulle replied that these had already let France down in 1918 by insisting on a temporary arrangement,

which just didn't work. As a result, France was again invaded. Perhaps Britain and

America had learned their lesson, but he couldn't be sure.

Stalin: As far as I know, the British are considering a different solution: an international control of Rhineland-Westphalia. What you are proposing is

something quite different. We must find out what Britain and America think about

it.

De Gaulle: I hope the matter may be examined by the European Advisory Commission.

Stalin: Yes.

De Gaulle then went on with his sharp criticism of Britain and America. They were

neither geographically nor historically on the Rhine, and the French and Russians had had to pay a heavy price for this. Even though they were fighting there now, they would not be on the Rhine forever, while France and Russia would always remain where they were.

The full-scale intervention of Britain and America always took place in peculiar

conditions—much too late; as a result, France was nearly destroyed in 1940.

Stalin was not convinced. The strength of Russia and France alone were insufficient to keep Germany in order. The experience of the two world wars had demonstrated this.

Frontiers in themselves were not of decisive importance; what mattered was a good and well-commanded army. It was no use relying on the Maginot Line, or Hitler's Ostwall.

And when de Gaulle still persisted, Stalin said:

Please understand me. We simply cannot settle this question of France's eastern

frontier without having talked about it to the British and the Americans. This and many other problems must be decided jointly.

Obviously not at all satisfied with this, de Gaulle tried to approach the question from a different angle by bringing up Germany's eastern frontier.

De Gaulle: If I understand the question correctly, the German frontier should run along the Oder and then along the Neisse, that is, west of the Oder.

Stalin: Yes, I think the old Polish territories-—Silesia, East Prussia, Pomerania—

should be returned to Poland, while the Sudeten country should be given back to

Czechoslovakia.

But he did not rise to the bait.

Throughout the de Gaulle-Bidault visit, Stalin was, significantly, in regular

communication with Churchill. The day after his first meeting with de Gaulle he cabled to Churchill saying that he had informed de Gaulle that the question of Germany's

western frontier could not be settled independently of Britain and the United States. As regards the Franco-Soviet Pact, he had told de Gaulle that the matter would require a many-sided examination. Churchill, in reply, indicated his preference for a Tripartite Pact.

It was during the Molotov-Bidault meeting of December 5 that the Russians bluntly

raised the question of the recognition of the Lublin Committee by France.

Molotov: Why shouldn't France and the Polish Committee exchange official representatives? After all, both Britain and the USSR entertain relations with both the Yugoslav Liberation Committee and the Royal Yugoslav Government. By

establishing official relations with Lublin, France would not need to break with the Polish émigré government.

Molotov then said that he liked the French draft of the Soviet-French Pact, but the Soviet Government considered that the signing of this Pact should go together with the

establishment of official French relations with the Lublin Committee.

Bidault, obviously taken aback, said he was surprised that the Franco-Soviet Pact should have this condition préalable attached to it; for their own part, the French also had some questions they would like urgently settled: for instance, that of the Rhine frontier.

Molotov dodged the issue, without telling Bidault that Stalin had already cabled to

Churchill about it. Instead, he stressed that the Soviet Union was still bearing the brunt of the war and that, in signing a Pact with France, she would like a definite decision to be taken about Poland; this would be of the greatest importance to the implementation of the Pact.

During the second Stalin-de Gaulle meeting on December 6, Poland was the main topic.

De Gaulle referred to the old cultural and religious bonds uniting France and Poland, and (without mentioning the anti-Soviet cordon sanitaire) said that France had tried, in 1918, to turn Poland into a great anti-German force. Unfortunately, men like Beck had tried to make an agreement with Germany, and were both anti-Russian and anti-Czech. He [de

Gaulle] was all in favour of both the Curzon Line and the Oder-Neisse Line.

He had no objection to an Anglo-Franco-Soviet bloc; but he would like a straight Franco-Soviet Pact to begin with.

Stalin (still busy consulting Churchill) said he thought the matter could be settled in the next few days. He would like, instead, to return to the question of Poland. He hoped France would adopt, vis à vis Poland, a more realistic attitude than that shown by Britain and the United States. The British Government had, unfortunately, got itself tied into knots with both the Polish Government in London and Mihailovic, who was now "hiding somewhere in Cairo". The London Poles were playing at musical chairs, while the Lublin Poles were carrying out a land reform, similar to what France had done in the 18th

century. He went on to demonstrate that the London Government were becoming more

and more discredited in Poland and talked at some length of the "folly" of the Warsaw rising, saying that the Red Army could not have taken Warsaw in time, with its guns and shells lagging 200 miles behind.

De Gaulle was not convinced about the London Government being "discredited" in Poland, and said it would become more apparent what the Polish people really felt once the whole country had been liberated.

On December 7, Stalin cabled Churchill saying that he and his colleagues had approved Churchill's idea of a Tripartite Anglo-Franco-Soviet Pact, and had submitted it to the French, but had not yet received a reply.

That same day Bidault told Molotov that it was not satisfactory for France to simply

"join" in the old Anglo-Soviet Pact; it might give rise to the idea that France figured in such a Pact as a kind of junior partner. Molotov brushed this argument aside, and

returned to the question of French recognition of the Lublin Poles. This was an aspect of the Franco-Russian talks on which Stalin was not keeping Churchill informed—though the British Embassy in Moscow knew, of course, more or less what was going on.

During his third meeting with Stalin on December 8 de Gaulle again announced that

Germany was France's Number One Problem and that "so long as the German people

existed, there would always be a menace." And again he started on the Rhine frontier. It was essential for France and Russia to join forces. Britain, which was "always late", could rank only as a "second-stage" ally, and the United States as a "third-stage" ally.

Neither could be depended upon in the great moment of danger, and under a Tripartite Pact all immediate action would inevitably be slowed down by the British.

Stalin agreed that a straight Franco-Soviet Pact would make France more independent in relation to "other countries", but since it would be difficult for Russia and France alone to win the war, he still preferred a Tripartite Pact.

De Gaulle then said that the Tripartite Pact was "un-French"; it would, in present circumstances, stress France's inferiority vis-à-vis England; it would be easier for France to deal direct with Russia; France was uncertain about Britain's future attitude to

Germany, and, moreover, she was expecting all kinds of difficulties with the British both in the Middle East and the Far East.

Stalin remarked that the Tripartite Pact was Churchill's idea, and that he [Stalin] and his colleagues had agreed to the British proposal. True, Churchill had not vetoed the Franco-Soviet Pact, but, all the same, he preferred the Tripartite Pact.

If we shelve this (Stalin continued), Churchill will be offended. However, since the French are so anxious to have a straight Franco-Soviet Pact, let me suggest this: if the French want us to render them a service, then let them render us one. Poland is an element in our security. Let the French accept in Paris a representative of the Polish Committee of National Liberation, and we shall sign the Franco-Soviet Pact.

Churchill will be offended, but it can't be helped.

"You have probably offended Churchill before," de Gaulle said.

"I have sometimes offended Churchill," Stalin replied, "and Churchill has sometimes offended me. Some day our correspondence will be published, and you will see what kind of messages we have sometimes exchanged."

There seems, at this point, to have been an embarrassed silence and then Stalin suddenly asked de Gaulle when he intended to return to France. De Gaulle said he was hoping to leave in two days.

After a somewhat irrelevant digression on the aircraft factory the French guests had visited, de Gaulle remarked that he much regretted that there could be no Franco-Soviet Pact, and it would now be necessary to start discussing a Tripartite Pact. He appreciated Stalin's policy on Poland, but it was not at all clear what the Lublin Committee

represented.

The meeting broke up in a chilly atmosphere.

Later that day Bidault called on Molotov and said there had perhaps been some

"misunderstanding" about the Lublin Committee. Anyway, de Gaulle intended to see the member of this Committee on the following day. Molotov said he hoped this meeting

would make a great difference, and meantime he and Bidault could work on the draft of the Franco-Soviet Pact.

De Gaulle was no more impressed by Bierut, Osöbka-Morawski and Rola-Zymierski than

Eden and Churchill had been, and agreed, in the end, before leaving Moscow, to no more than sending an "unofficial" French representative to Lublin, and "quite independently"

of the Franco-Soviet Pact.

Such was the horse-trading that went on for over a week between Stalin and de Gaulle—

each, in his own way, trying to pull a fast one on Britain and the United States.

The atmosphere surrounding this French visit to Moscow was not devoid of comedy. One day, de Gaulle and Bidault were taken for a ride on the Metro, where nobody took any notice of them and where they were pushed about and had their feet trodden on

mercilessly. Bidault seemed particularly outraged when he told me about it. In their negotiations, he said, the Russians were pretty rough: "Ça manque d'élégance, ça manque de courtoisie. C'est un régime brutal, inhumain". As for the people in the Metro:

"Ces gens sont muets. Ont-ils des sentiments?"

["There's a lack of graciousness, a lack of courtesy. A brutal, inhuman régime... " "Are these people mute? Have they any feelings at all?"]

One assured him that they had, though not necessarily for official French visitors, of whom they knew little or nothing. And the people on top, Bidault fumed, were mean and accrocheurs. [ Sticky.]

He twisted his wrist about in the air. He also thought their whole ideology completely cockeyed—an incredible medley of Hegel, Marx and Stalin—what kind of political

philosophy was that? He thought that in a completely ruined Europe, there would be a wave of something more extreme than communism, as understood here; and "they must be terrified of Trotskyism! "

Something wasn't quite clicking. As a Russian colonel whom I met at the great reception given at the French Embassy said: "You know, we can't really take the French terribly seriously. Toulon and Kronstadt and l'alliance Franco-Russe with Marseillaise and God Save the Tsar don't mean a damned thing to the present generation of Russians!"

All the same, that Embassy reception was really something. There was an enormous

tricolour flag outside, floodlit in the blizzard, and the Embassy teemed with dozens of celebrities—Ulanova and Lepeshinskaya and Ehrenburg and Prokofiev amongst them.

The gallant French airmen of the Normandie Squadron, who had been decorated by de

Gaulle that morning, were also there. With surprising graciousness, de Gaulle was doing the round of the guests. When he came to me I mentioned his visit to Stalingrad. "Ah, Stalingrad!" he said, "c'est tout de même un peuple formidable, un très grand peuple."

"Ah, oui, les Russes. .." "Mais non," said de Gaulle with a touch of impatience. "Je ne parle pas des Russes, je parle des Allemands. Tout de même, avoir poussé jusque là!"

["Ah, Stalingrad! All the same, they are a pretty tremendous people, a very great people."

"Ah yes, the Russians... " " No, I'm not talking about the Russians; I mean the Germans.

Fancy having pushed all that far!"]

In later years, when de Gaulle started on his "Paris-Bonn Axis" and publicly embraced Adenauer, I often remembered that remark. Was he, in 1944, still full of professional admiration for an Army that had smashed the French Army in five weeks? Or was this

astonishing remark a reaction to the condescension with which Stalin had spoken to him, only a few days before, of the French Army, most of which had been taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940? Or did de Gaulle perhaps want to remind the Russians that they, too, had been on the run, and that thanks to their geography, they had been able to run much farther even than the French had run in 1940?

At the Kremlin banquet on the last night Stalin behaved with a mixture of truculence, bonhomie and buffoonery ("il avait l'air de se foutre un peu de nous," one of the French guests later remarked), and it was not till after de Gaulle had made an angry and

spectacular exit that the Russians finally decided to sign the Franco-Soviet Pact without the Polish "counterpart", except for a very minor face-saver. The Russians only signed the Pact in these conditions because they thought it might still come in useful at some later date, and would also help the French Communists. But, throughout the de Gaulle visit, they made no secret of their low opinion of France's contribution to the allied war effort, and the idea of basing the future security of Europe and of the Soviet Union in the first place on a Franco-Russian alliance struck them as unrealistic.

Stalin did not raise a finger to get de Gaulle invited to Yalta two months later. In December 1944 what mattered to Stalin were Britain and the USA, with their armies and air forces and economic resources.

It is more than improbable that Stalin would have agreed to the Rhine frontier

independently of them even if de Gtaulle had agreed to recognise the Lublin Committee.

The only deal that Stalin had proposed was the signing of the Franco-Soviet Pact (even at the risk of annoying Churchill) in exchange for a French recognition of Lublin.

But to de Gaulle this Pact was still important as part of that "independent" French policy

—the "Between-East-and-West" policy —that he and Bidault tried (unsuccessfully) to pursue for two years after the war.

Chapter XIII ALTERNATIVE POLICIES AND IDEOLOGIES

TOWARDS THE END OF THE WAR

The last three months of 1944 were marked by a variety of Russian military campaigns in preparation for the final onslaught on Nazi Germany between January and May 1945. In the north the Red Army overran the Baltic Republics, where they met with a somewhat

mixed reception from the population. There were Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian

formations in the Red Army, and much was also made in the Soviet press of a

Communist-inspired partisan movement in both Latvia and Lithuania; but while, in the larger cities like Tallinn and Riga, the working-class welcomed the Red Army with

apparent enthusiasm, the peasantry were lukewarm. The middle-class, and the many

government officials who had more or less collaborated with the Germans, had either

followed them in their retreat, or were now lying low. All three countries had their own Nazis and their own Gestapo men. When I went to Tallinn in October 1944, I saw furtive and anxious looks on a good many faces, especially among the better-dressed people. The NKVD were becoming very active, and thousands of Balts were to be deported in the

next few years.

[ In Solzhenitsyn's famous One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, several seemingly quite harmless Balts figure among the convicts.]

By the end of October all the three Republics were liberated, with the exception of the Courland peninsula (where thirty German divisions were to remain trapped till the end of the war). By that time over 300 square miles of German territory in East Prussia had also been conquered by the Russians. The great exodus of the German population from East

Prussia had begun, many fleeing to Königsberg, others further west.

The fighting for these small areas of German territory had been extremely heavy. The Russians were also meeting with very strong German resistance in Slovakia and

Hungary, where the Red Army's progress was very much slower than it had been in

Rumania. Budapest was not to fall till February 13, 1945.

In Poland the front had become more or less stabilised in September, but it was generally expected that the final blow at Nazi Germany would be struck from here.

Fighting, however, continued on the Sandomierz bridgehead, south of Warsaw which the Germans were attacking with great determination. Among the Red Army soldiers there

was now a feeling of impatience—and distrust. In November 1944 I was shown a letter

from a soldier who was fighting "somewhere in Poland"— apparently at Sandomierz: As before, I am on my way to Berlin. True, we may not get there in time, but Berlin is precisely the place that we must reach. We have suffered enough, and we deserve the right to enter Berlin. Our "military rank" entitles us to it, while the Allies are not entitled to it. They probably wouldn't understand, but Fritz understands it only too well. Hence the frantic resistance with which we are meeting. They keep shelling us morning, noon and night, and must have brought pretty well everything they had in the west. They obviously prefer to be licked by the Allies, and not by us. If that happened, it would really hurt us. I trust, however, you will soon hear some good news from us. Our fellows' fury and thirst for revenge after all we have seen are more intense than ever. Even in the days of our retreat it was nothing like it...

But the question of who would reach Berlin first—and this had already become a real

obsession with many Russian soldiers—was now thought to be no longer a military, but a diplomatic question, which would have to be settled in the Russians' favour.

[At any rate, all Russians were convinced that there was such a diplomatic agreement, and the soldiers had no doubt whatsoever that the Allies could have taken Berlin had they wanted to, but that the Allied governments decided against it for political reasons—

namely, so as not to antagonise the Russians unduly. As we know, Eisenhower, fearing that German resistance might continue for a very long time in the mountainous "Southern Redoubt", gave priority over Berlin to the occupation of southern Germany and western Austria, despite angry protests from Churchill who thought it politically of the utmost importance for the Western Powers to occupy Berlin before the Russians got there. It has, nevertheless, been suggested that there was a Stalin-Roosevelt agreement behind

Eisenhower's choice. But, as Stettinius says: "I know of no evidence to support the charge that President Roosevelt agreed at Yalta that American troops should not capture Berlin ahead of the Red Army." (Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference, London 1950, p. 264). The fact remains that had the Western Powers occupied Berlin before the Russians, it would have created violent anti-American feeling in Russia, especially in the Army. Roosevelt was no doubt aware of it. By the time Truman took over, the final

Russian offensive against Berlin was on the point of starting.]

It is probably true to say that the Red Army as a whole was prepared to lose many

thousands of men in the Battle of Berlin, rather than see the British and Americans get there first with a minimum loss of life. It was, obviously, also politically important, from the Russian standpoint, to record in every German mind the fact that Berlin had not been voluntarily surrendered to the Western Allies, but had been conquered by the Russians in bloody battle.

A very large number of new questions arose during the latter half of 1944, now that the war was moving to its close—questions concerning foreign policy, internal policy, as well as a variety of cultural and ideological problems. A paradoxical aspect of Russia at that time was that the gigantic human losses it had suffered and the immense devastation wrought by the retreating German armies, as well as great hardships and shortages in both town and country, were combined with a nation-wide feeling of pride and an

immense sense of achievement.

The Soviet Union was faced with the vast problem of economic reconstruction and the at least equally serious population problem. Today it is estimated that, by the end of the war, the Soviet Union had lost, in one way or another, about twenty million people,

among them at least seven million soldiers. Although no exact figures are available, it would seem that these seven million include some three million soldiers who died in

German captivity. Further, several million civilians died under the German occupation, including about two million Jews who were massacred, besides the victims of the

German anti-partisan punitive expeditions; about a million people died in Leningrad

alone, while the sharp lowering of living and food conditions throughout Russia, the shortage of medical supplies, etc., must account for a few million more deaths. Several hundred thousand also died in the various evacuations in 1941 and 1942, in the strafing of refugees and the bombings of cities. Thus in Stalingrad alone some 60,000 civilians were killed.

One of the characteristic developments of 1944 was the new Family Code embodied in

the Supreme Soviet Decree of July 8, 1944. The two main purposes of the reform were to discourage "loose living" after the war, and to increase the birth-rate. The decree established the Order of "Mother-Heroine" for mothers of ten or more live children, the Order (three classes) of "Motherly Glory" for mothers of nine, eight or seven live children, and the "Motherhood Medal" (two classes) for mothers of six or five live children. A progressive scale of monetary grants was laid down. Thus, at the birth of a third child the mother received 400 roubles, at the birth of the fourth, 1,300 roubles, and so on, till 5,000 roubles for the tenth, eleventh, etc., child. Especially after the monetary reform of 1947 it became positively good business to produce children ad infinitum. The system was, in substance, not unlike the French allocations familiales established after the Liberation.

The same decree made divorce very much more difficult, troublesome, and costly than it had been. The most controversial part of the decree concerned "lone" (i.e. unmarried) mothers. Alimony was abolished, though not retroactively. Monetary grants were allowed to unmarried mothers, and they could also, if they wished, hand their child, or children, over to a. State institution, with the option of claiming them back at any time. This measure was dictated partly by wartime conditions which, especially in the war zones and the newly-liberated areas, made it both difficult and embarrassing to enquire too closely into a child's parentage. Secondly, in view of the larger number of women than men in Russia towards the end of the war, this decree was, in fact, intended to encourage the production of "illegitimate" children by relieving unmarried mothers of all, or most of the financial responsibility for them. The rather crude demographic principle underlying it was "illegitimate children, rather than none at all". In later years, this part of the 1944

decree was to be severely criticised, since, with the encouragement it gave the

professional seducer, it went counter to the "cult of the family" and that high standard of morals the rest of the decree was striving to bring about, notably by making the

registration of marriage compulsory before the father could incur any legal and financial responsibilities for the children. De facto marriages, without registration, were no longer legally valid, and the children remained officially "fatherless", even if the father was a model family man. The decree of August 8, 1944, besides providing various financial

benefits relating to pregnancy and confinement, also imposed a heavy tax on bachelors over twenty-five and a smaller tax on couples with fewer than three children. The law of 1936 prohibiting abortion remained in force, and was not to be changed until many years after the war.

As important as the population problem after the war was that of the economic restoration of the country. Hundreds of cities and towns and thousands of villages had been wholly or partially destroyed by the Germans, much livestock and agricultural machinery had been taken, and the great question that began to be discussed at top level as early as 1943

was how this economic restoration was to be financed. There were, in principle, three possible sources: the Soviet Union's own admittedly depleted resources; a large foreign loan—inevitably from the United States; and, finally, substantial German reparations in kind, and similar reparations, on a smaller scale, from Germany's allies. (The ideal would have been a combination of all three). The armistice terms accepted by Finland and

Rumania in 1944 were the first examples of such limited reparations agreements. Finland, for example, agreed to pay 300 million dollars over a period of six years, later extended to eight years. At Yalta, Stalin was to propose that Germany pay Russia ten billion

dollars in kind, a figure to which Churchill, in particular, strongly objected.

A further source of "reconstruction expenses", as the post-war years were to show, were the various trade agreements and other financial arrangements made between Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe.

[The Yugoslavs were the first to rebel against such agreements which were highly

advantageous to Russia, but unfavourable to them.]

But this was still in the future, and the problem that preoccupied Stalin and the other Russian leaders, from 1943 on, was an American loan of seven billion dollars or more.

American visitors to Russia, representing important business interests, such as Donald M.

Nelson and Eric Johnston, favourable to a programme of large-scale American exports to Russia after the war, and seeing this as a precaution against a possible post-war slump in the USA, were taken very seriously by the Russians, especially at the height of the Big-Three harmony, roughly between the middle of 1943 and the Yalta Conference in

February 1945. At the same time, the Russians felt certain ideological and political inhibitions about such a loan, since they feared that excessive financial dependence on the United States might well go counter to their own security considerations. Put perhaps a little crudely, there was a conflict between reconstruction and security. Speedy and relatively easy reconstruction meant a certain dependence on the United States, but it also inevitably meant a greatly-reduced degree of Soviet control over eastern Europe and parts of central Europe, which represented, in the Russian military conception of 1944-5, an indispensable security precaution against a new German aggression or against any kind of aggression from the West. Loose talk in the United States about a "war with Russia in fifteen years' time" had already begun in 1944, and was to become more and more widespread once the first American atom bomb had been dropped.

In the end, the American loan of seven billion dollars came to nothing. But it seems certain that the Russian leadership was to some extent divided on the question and that, inside the Party itself, there were roughly three tendencies, often in conflict inside the minds of the same people. There were, to quote William Appleman Williams's definition, the "softies", the "conservatives" and the "doctrinaire revolutionaries".

[ The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York, 1962), pp. 222-3.]

Since many Soviet leaders combined all three tendencies in varying degrees, it is

impossible to say how large each "school of thought" was. The pattern also varied greatly from year to year. There were certainly far more "softies" in 1944 than there were to be in 1947 or 1948.

Perhaps the most diehard "softy" was Litvinov, who remained one even as late as 1947. I had a conversation with him at the reception given by Molotov on Red-Army Day in

February 1947 which threw some light on what had happened. Taking me aside, he

suddenly started pouring his heart out. He said he was extremely unhappy about the way the Cold War was getting worse and worse every day. By the end of the war, he said,

Russia had had the choice of two policies: one was to "cash in on the goodwill she had accumulated during the war in Britain and the United States." But they (meaning Stalin and Molotov) had, unfortunately, chosen the other policy. Not believing that "goodwill"

could constitute the lasting basis for any kind of policy, they had decided that "security"

was what mattered most of all, and they had therefore grabbed all they could while the going was good—meaning the whole of eastern Europe and parts of central Europe. At

this point, Vyshinsky walked past, and gave us both an exceedingly dirty look. Litvinov was never to appear at any public reception again. Ivy Litvinov's reckless indiscretions at the same party—remarks made for anybody to hear —added to Molotov's great

displeasure.

In the end, for a variety of reasons, it was the "conservative" policy that prevailed, i.e. the policy lying half-way between the "softy" policy and the "world revolution" policy. The

"conservative" policy finally adopted by Stalin was a rejection of the "world revolution"

idea, at least in any foreseeable future (his advice that the Communist "patriotic militia"

be disbanded in France after the liberation is a case in point); at the same time, the security of the Soviet Union, as he saw it, required a strict Russian control of eastern Europe, a control that became increasingly strict as the cold war developed. The most important landmark in this process was the "stalinisation" of Czechoslovakia in February 1948.

The "softy" attitude was not perhaps widespread among the Party hierarchy in 1943-4, but it certainly was among the general public, and most of all, perhaps, among the

Russian intellectuals. Their great belief was that, after the war., Russia would be able to

"relax".

In Moscow, in particular, there were some extraordinary signs of relaxation by the middle of 1944, with a kind of foretaste of easier living conditions, of post-war prosperity and of a growing frivolity in public taste.

Although the "commercial restaurants" and "commercial shops" which opened in April 1944 had nothing to do with that ideological "softness" against which the Party journals were to protest before long, they undoubtedly contributed to the easy-going mood among the more privileged sections of the Moscow population, and even among wider sections.

Foreigners in Moscow, and especially the English, with their ideas on war-time austerity, were scandalised by anything so "undemocratic" as these shops and restaurants where people with a lot of money could buy any luxuries they liked. In such restaurants, a good meal, including drinks, cost about 300 roubles or, at the "diplomatic" rate, about £6 per head. These shops and restaurants represented a sort of legal black market.

After a ruinous party for four at the Moskva Restaurant on May-Day, 1944 (there was a jazz band playing, and the meal, with two bottles of wine, cost nearly £30) I asked Boris Voitekhov, the writer, a diehard party-man, about the "party line" on these commercial restaurants.

"This country," he said, "is in a tragic plight after three years of war. Look at our women, for instance. When I see how they work— how they run our agriculture, and look after their children, though tired and dirty and hungry, how they drive steamships and fly aeroplanes—it brings a lump to my throat. It affects me more even than the Red Army, with its fearful casualties. There are people in our country who are literally dying of hunger. At first sight, the commercial restaurants are a scandal. But they are not. And I'll tell you why. It is sentimental democracy to say you mustn't allow an officer on leave to have a night out at the Moskva. What he eats and drinks is a drop in the ocean and won't help the poor and the starving. It is also a good thing when a factory director from the provinces, who has been reporting on his work to the Kremlin, can go somewhere for a decent meal. It keeps him in good humour, makes him think kindly of Moscow, and has a good effect on his work. And even if there are twenty or thirty crooks and racketeers out of every hundred people in the restaurant, it doesn't matter. Crooks don't last long in our country."

People were, in fact, glad to have commercial restaurants and commercial shops to go to.

Especially the shops. These gave even the poorly-paid a chance to have an occasional treat, such as buying some chocolates or cream cakes, even at an absurd price, and so, for once, getting something different from the same dreary old rations. The restaurants were mostly frequented by highly-paid industrial executives, writers, artists and scientists and, above all, by officers on leave who were only too glad to "blow" a whole month's unspent salary on a night out.

These commercial shops and restaurants were also part of a long-term policy for

regulating prices in the kolkhoz markets, and their introduction was, in fact, to be a first step towards the abolition of rationing two years after the war, after a further series of price adjustments and the monetary reform.

But whether commercial restaurants and shops were an economically sound proposition

or not in the long run, by the middle of 1944 they certainly created a somewhat frivolous illusion of "back to normal" and post-war prosperity. And that at a time when a very, very hard war was still being fought.

There were other signs of frivolity and escapism. The famous chansonnier and diseur Alexander Vertinsky, after spending more than twenty years as an idol of the Russian émigrés in Paris, New York and, finally, Shanghai, turned up in Moscow. His recitals of

"decadent" songs drew immense crowds, including hundreds of soldiers and officers.

Although he was never reviewed or advertised in the press, posters announcing Vertinsky recitals were stuck up all over Moscow, and the story went that he was the protégé of high-up NKVD officials who loved him after years of confiscating thousands of his

gramophone records which travellers had tried to smuggle into Russia! Another theory was that he had been a Soviet spy while posing as an émigré. The fact remains that his songs, with their quaint exoticism, were thoroughly escapist and wildly popular in the Moscow of 1944.

Both songs and films were tending to become escapist. The most popular song hits in

1944 were two songs by Nikita Boguslavsky from a film called The Two Pals— The Dark Night and Kostya, the Odessa Mariner already referred to; both were later to be denounced as examples either of escapism, or of "tavern melancholy"— kabatskaya melankholiya.

The Russian people in 1944 liked to think that life would soon be easier, and that Russia could "relax" after the war. The "lasting alliance" with Britain and the USA had much to do with it. In the middle of 1944 Konstantin Simonov, with his genius for scenting the mood in the country, produced a play called So It Will Be, in which officers home on leave were seen preparing to settle down to a pleasant, easy life in a nice Moscow flat, where even that proverbial bully, the upravdom, the manager of the block of flats, was a personification of kindness and efficiency. "The wounds of war, however deep, will soon heal," one of the officers said. And another, after something of a crise de conscience, decided that his wife and child, who had been missing for years in German-occupied

territory, must be considered as finally lost, and that he might as well start life again with a professor's sweet young daughter. It was the very antithesis of the Wait for Me mood of Simonov's 1941-2 poetry. In 1944 the cinemas were showing American films, among

them a particularly inane Deanna Durbin film, for which thousands queued for hours.

Some Party members were full of easygoing ideas. One very tough Party member

remarked to me in 1944: "We also have our softies in the Party—people who think of the future of Anglo-Soviet and American-Soviet relations in terms of the Britansky Soyuznik

[ The British Ministry of Information weekly which sold about 50,000 copies in those days.] with its sickly rubbish about '400 Years of Anglo-Russian Friendship'. It is high time they read some Lenin."

Even some notoriously tough party members were not quite immune against this relaxed atmosphere. Thus, in the summer of 1944, with the Second Front in full swing, the writer Vsevolod Vyshnevsky remarked at a VOKS [ Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.] party (maybe he would not have made the same remarks anywhere else):

When the war is over, life in Russia will become very pleasant. A great literature will be produced as a result of our war experiences. There will be much coming and going, with a lot of contacts with the West. Everybody will be allowed to read

anything he likes. There will be exchanges of students, and foreign travel will be made easy.

It was even widely suggested that light reading would be encouraged. Thus, there was a scheme for starting a library of thrillers and detective stories in Russian—mostly

translated from English— under the general editorship of Sergei Eisenstein, that great lover of Western thrillers.

The first serious warning against these "Western" and "bourgeois" tendencies came from a certain Solodovnikov, writing in the official Party magazine Bolshevik, in October 1944:

Recently views have been expressed in various quarters to the effect that, after the war, art and literature will follow the "easy road", and will, in the first place, be calculated to entertain. The supporters of this view talk of the development of light comedy and other thoughtless forms of entertainment, and object to big and serious subjects being included in art and literature. Such views receive support from part of our audiences. Such tendencies must be fought. They are reactionary, and in flat contradiction with the Lenin-Stalin view that art is a powerful weapon of agitation and education among the masses.

He not only fumed against "frivolous" art, but also against "refined" art which was calculated only for "the bloated upper ten thousand".

On the whole, however, he spoke highly of Soviet literary and artistic production during the war—and was particularly enthusiastic about the music produced by Shostakovich,

Prokofiev, Miaskovsky, Khachaturian and Shebalin.

[All these were to be fiercely denounced as "formalists" in 1948.

(see the author's Musical Uproar in Moscow, London, 1949).]

He also warned Russian artists against aping "Western, especially German"[This was a polite way of avoiding any mention of Britain and the

USA.] models and deplored the wartime tendency to wax enthusiastic over ikons and

religious music, merely on the ground that they formed part of the Russian "national heritage", a marked departure from the 1941-2 line.

The rapid succession of events in 1944 raised a number of other new problems in the eyes of the Party. Deep below the surface, there was a fundamental rivalry between the Party and the Army. During the first three years of the war, the Party was usually only too glad to identify itself with the Army. But with the end of the war in sight, it decided that it was time to regain something of its former identity. During the first two years of the war, the emphasis in nearly all official propaganda had been on "Holy Russia", and it now seemed important to revive a greater Soviet-consciousness. The Party also had to take account of the fact that many people in the occupied areas had been demoralised by Nazi

propaganda and by the re-introduction of private enterprise (only small-scale, but still private enterprise), that the Red Army was now fighting in "bourgeois" countries, which created a number of new psychological problems.

For the first two or three years of the war (whatever was said later to the contrary) there had been a tendency for the Party to get lost in the crowd. Especially in the Army, the Party had become diluted by the easy admission of new members, whose numbers had

grown between 1941 and 1944 from about two to six million.

In 1944 there came a change. Pravda of June 24, 1944 still placed the Communist's practical wartime value above all other qualities.

Personal qualities are, at the present time, tested, above all, by the party candidate's contribution to the struggle with the enemy. Every candidate or member of the

Party must be in the front rank of those carrying out the required military,

economic or political tasks. The Communist at the front must be brave and

spontaneously willing to do the most dangerous jobs. That is why the Communist's

authority is so high in the Red Army, and why hundreds of thousands of soldiers,

before going into battle, now apply for membership.

But, by September 1944, bravery was no longer enough. As Red Star wrote on September 27:

The ideological training of members is now more necessary than ever. The Party

organisations in the Army have done much in this respect—but not enough. The

Army's Party Organisations largely consist of young party members and are being

replenished by more young men who have been tested as brave soldiers but who,

politically, are insufficiently experienced. More attention must be given to the ideological upbringing of candidates and members.

Secondly... the front now runs through territory outside our borders. To find his way

about in these new conditions, a Communist needs a sound ideological equipment

more than ever (emphasis added).

As the war was moving to its close the admission of new Party members was tightened

up. "What we need now is not quantity but quality," Red Star wrote on November 1, thus completely abandoning its earlier position. It now recalled that the rules of admission to the Party had been relaxed early in the war, and now argued that far too many people, including soldiers who had never been in any battle at all, had been admitted to the Party.

[ It recalled the two decrees of August and December 1941, the latter issued at the height of the Battle of Moscow. Under this any officer or soldier "who has distinguished himself in battle" could be admitted to the Party after a three months' candidate stage.]

The Party's representatives within the Army had often "misused the authority given them"

and had admitted far too many people into the Party. Now, "the chief object of the Army's party organisations must be the ideological-political education of communists and their absorption into Party work." The same line was taken by Bolshevik in October 1944

which declared: "In the complex international situation facing the Soviet Union, the Party member needs a compass, and there is no better one than Marxist-Leninism." It

recommended the intensive study of the Stalinist Short History of the Communist Party.

The same Bolshevik article then referred to two recent Central Committee decrees which concerned newly liberated areas. It was remarkably outspoken in commenting on the

Central Committee's Decree on Belorussia:

Ideological and political education is of exceptional importance in the newly-

liberated areas... The enemy has spread the poison of racialist theories in these areas, inciting Ukrainians against Russians, Belorussians against Lithuanians,

Estonians against Russians, etc... The Nazi invaders have also inflamed private-

property instincts among these peoples. They liquidated the kolkhozes, distributed the land among German colonists, destroyed the intelligentsia, encouraged trading and profiteering, and played off workers and peasants against each other...

In short, political education in these newly-liberated areas must be intensified. And Bolshevik also emphasised a number of awkward facts seldom, if ever, mentioned in the daily press at the time:

White emigrants, Ukrainian nationalists, Bandera, Bulba and Melni-kov bands are

being extensively used by the Germans in the Ukraine... These contemptible

flunkeys of Hitler placed their nationalist slogans at the service of German

imperialism, and also actively participated in the massacres organised by the

Germans.

[The massacres obviously refer to the massacres of Jews, though these are, as usual, not specifically mentioned.]

The Party organisations must intensify their work, especially in the rural areas of the Ukraine. They must remember that until this German-Ukrainian nationalism is

completely weeded out, the restoration of the Ukrainian economy and national

culture is impossible.

But what worried the Party above all, perhaps, was the widespread hope, both in the

liberated territories, and inside the Army, with its millions of peasant conscripts, that the kolkhoz system would be "changed".

*

If the Germans, despite the general beastliness of their occupation régime, had succeeded, on the Russians' own admission, in creating anti-Soviet moods in both Belorussia and the Ukraine, particularly among private-enterprise enthusiasts, there was, obviously, also a parallel danger of Russian soldiers becoming infected by their contact with the bourgeois way of life in countries like Rumania, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

The problem was not, of course, entirely new. In 1939 the Red Army had occupied

eastern Poland and, in 1940, the Baltic States. There had then been a rush by Soviet citizens, on one pretext or another, to Lwow and Tallinn and Riga to buy up trunkfuls of clothes, and shoes and handbags while stocks lasted. But that had been relatively small stuff. Now hundreds of thousands, or millions of Russian soldiers were seeing countries where housing conditions were often better than in Russia, where farms were more

prosperous-looking, and where there was still something to be bought in the shops.

Rumania in 1944 was not overflowing with consumer goods, but there was much more to

be found in the Bucharest department stores than in the completely bare shops in the Soviet Union. About that time I remember Konstantin Simonov wearing in Moscow a

wonderfully loud tweed suit acquired in Bucharest. And, until further notice, Rumania was going to remain a "bourgeois country"; Moscow had assured the Western allies that no changes in Rumania's "social structure" were contemplated. There was all the more reason to debunk the Western way of life, as seen in Rumania, and to warn Russians

against being taken in by the "tinsel" of Bucharest.

Typical of this campaign was a series of articles by Leonid Sobolev in Pravda in September 1944:

Fantastic Transniestria has again become the Soviet province of Odessa. The

unfortunate Rumanian people have had to pay millions (sic) of lives for that spectacle... Our Soviet people were united, and that is why we have won. Here in

Rumania it is different: on the one hand there are the Rumanian people, on the

other, the political adventurers... What patriots there were in Rumania were lost in a bewildered, befuddled crowd... Rumanian intellectuals tell me that in 1939 all

resistance to Hitler would have been useless... One would think that one man's

resistance to one tank would also be useless— yet such things happened at

Sebastopol.

After a satirical and contemptuous description of Bucharest, with "its tinsel, vulgarity and commercialism", its "sickening cringing to the Red Army", and its "well-dressed people sitting at café tables", and "traders and speculators, sitting on the high seats of horse-carriages, and looking like old posters of burzhuis", Sobolev then said that "this tinsel of Bucharest" was not typical of Rumania. At Constanza there were 80,000 people, but not a single theatre, no concert hall, no local newspaper and only two secondary and two

elementary schools.

"We shall pass through many foreign countries yet. Soldiers! your eyes will often be dazzled; but do not be deceived by these outward signs of their so-called civilisation!

Remember, real culture is that which you carry with you... When the war is over,

foreign nations will resume their own lives, but there will always remain in their hearts the memory of your great human culture, of the soul of the Soviet people—of that people who shed their blood so that millions might be free and happy."

He then went on to say that the Rumanian countryside was poor, and that all the loot went to Bucharest:

Quietly, with an ironical smile, our soldiers march along these sumptuous streets...

The Rumanians had expected "Russian beasts" to enter the city. They were expecting murder and robbery and rape. Nothing like that happened... A few

bandits in Russian uniform who were caught turned out to be Rumanian deserters...

Soviet comments on the Slav countries—Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia—were

somewhat different, even though these, too, had their "well-dressed people sitting at café tables"—especially Czechoslovakia. For one thing, there was more good feeling for the Russians there than there was in Rumania, let alone Hungary.

Also, whatever official writers said, the Russian soldiers were far from always being gallant knights in shining armour. If, in the southern and central-European Slav countries, their conduct was reasonably good (though far from perfect—the Yugoslavs had a great deal to say later on that score), it was worse in Rumania and worse still in Hungary and Austria. Nor was it by any means exemplary in Poland. Sometimes this conduct varied

from army to army. Malinovsky's troops had a worse reputation than others, and the

Kazakhs and other Asiatics sometimes emulated their forebears, the warriors of Genghis Khan, especially in Germany, where anything from wrist-watches to young boys attracted their covetous attention.

It is not denied by the Russians themselves that some Russian troops ran wild, especially in Germany; but here there were, of course, some weighty extenuating circumstances.

PART EIGHT Victory—And the Seeds of the

Cold War

Chapter I INTO GERMANY

The final Russian offensive against Germany, which was not to stop until her capitulation nearly four months later, began on January 12. On the following day the Russians

published this communiqué:

The troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front under Marshal Konev (Chief of Staff,

General Sokolovsky) took the offensive, on January 12 in the area west of

Sandomierz and, despite bad weather, which made air support impossible, broke

through the enemy's strong defences along a twenty-five mile front. Our artillery barrage was decisive. In two days the troops advanced twenty-five miles and the

width of the breakthrough is now forty miles. 350 localities have been occupied.

The statement that the Russian offensive was started "without air support" had a diplomatic story behind it.

In 1948 the Russian Foreign Ministry published the letters exchanged between Churchill and Stalin before and during this January offensive.

After the Germans had launched their Ardennes Offensive, which had placed the Anglo-

American troops in a "difficult position" (the Russian publication said), and Britain was threatened with "a second Dunkirk", Churchill sent the following message to Stalin on January 6, 1945:

The battle in the west is very heavy and, at any time, large decisions may be called for from the Supreme Command. You know yourself... how very anxious the

position is when a very broad front has to be defended after temporary loss of the initiative. It is General Eisenhower's great desire and need to know in outline what you plan to do... [Can we] count on a major Russian offensive on the Vistula front, or elsewhere, during January?... I regard the matter as urgent

On the next day Stalin replied that it was "very important to make use of our superiority in artillery and aircraft", for which clear weather was essential—and the weather prospects were bad—but "in view of the position of our allies on the Western Front, Headquarters of the [Soviet] Supreme Command has decided to complete the

preparations at a forced pace and, disregarding the weather, to launch wide-scale

offensive operations against the Germans all along the Central Front not later than the second half of January."

On January 9, Churchill replied with overwhelming gratitude:

"I am most grateful to you for your thrilling message. I have sent it over to General Eisenhower for his eyes only. May all good fortune rest upon your noble venture.

The news you give me will be a great encouragement to General Eisenhower

because... German reinforcements will have to be split."

The Russian offensive was duly launched on the 12th—even earlier than Stalin had

promised: five days later, Churchill cabled to Stalin thanking him "from the bottom of his heart" and congratulating him on "the immense assault you have launched upon the Eastern Front."

Later, in February, in an Order of the Day, Stalin claimed that the Russian offensive had undoubtedly saved the situation in the West: "The first consequence of our winter offensive was to thwart the German winter offensive in the West, which aimed at the

seizure of Belgium and Alsace, and enable the armies of our allies, in their turn, to launch an offensive against the Germans."

Churchill, while quoting some of this correspondence, gives it rather less dramatic

significance. He describes it, nevertheless, as "a good example of the speed at which business could be done at the summit of the alliance." Also, "it was a fine deed of the Russians and their chief to hasten this vast offensive, no doubt at heavy cost in life.

Eisenhower was very pleased indeed."

[Churchill, op. cit., vol. VI, p. 244. On the other hand, Chester Wilmot, in describing the military events in the West in December 1944-January 1945 in The Struggle for Europe greatly minimises the effect of the Russian offensive on the situation on the Western Front.]

On January 14, two days after Konev's thrust from the Sandomierz bridgehead, the 1st Belorussian Front under Marshal Zhukov (Chief of Staff, General Malinin) struck out

from their two bridgeheads south of Warsaw, and from another one to the north. After surrounding Warsaw, the two groups entered the Polish capital (or rather, its ruins) on the 17th. Units of the Polish Army took part in this operation.

The timing of the Russian offensive on the middle Vistula appears to have come as a

surprise to the German High Command. True, an eventual Russian thrust in the "Warsaw-Berlin direction" was to be expected, and the Germans had built seven defence lines between the Vistula and the Oder. But in January they expected that, before attacking here, the Russians would try to destroy the thirty German divisions trapped in Courland and also strike their heaviest blow in Hungary. The concentration of German forces along the middle Vistula was therefore not as great as it might have been. The enormous

superiority the Russians achieved in this "sector of the main blow" may be gauged from the following figures quoted by the Soviet History.

The 1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts had 163 divisions, 32,143 guns and

mortars, 6,460 tanks and mobile guns and 4,772 aircraft. The total effectives were 2,200,000 men. Thus we had in the Warsaw-Berlin direction [at the beginning of the offensive] 5.5 times more men than the enemy, 7.8 times more guns, 5.7 times more tanks, and 17.6 times more planes.

[IVOVSS, vol. V, p. 57. This great superiority was, of course, far from being maintained throughout the subsequent fighting; with the Germans throwing in reserves, there was to be some extremely bitter fighting in many areas for the next four months, e.g. on the Oder, at Königsberg, etc.]

Further north, the troops of Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front also struck out.

By the 18th the whole picture was clear: Konev was overrunning southern Poland on his way to Silesia; Zhukov, central Poland towards the heart of Germany; Rokossovsky,

northern Poland on the way to Danzig. Meantime in the south, General Petrov (4th

Ukrainian Front) was advancing in the Carpathians and, in the north, Cherniakhovsky

(3rd Belorussian Front) was breaking deep into East Prussia.

A few dates and place names should suffice to illustrate the success of this offensive: January 18 Rokossovsky captured the fortress of Modlin. Konev captured Piotrkow.

January 19 Konev captured Cracow, almost intact.

January 20 Cherniakhovsky captured Tilsitt in East Prussia.

January 21 Cherniakhovsky captured Gumbinnen, and Rokossovsky Tannenberg, also in

East Prussia.

January 23 Zhukov captured Bygdoszcz (Bromberg) and Konev broke into Silesia and

reached the Oder along a forty-mile front.

January 24-26 Zhukov captured Kalisz, "on the way to Breslau". Rokossovsky broke through to the Bay of Danzig, thus almost isolating the German forces in East Prussia; Konev broke into the Polish Dombrowski coal basin.

January 29 Zhukov crossed the 1938 frontier into Germany, south-west of Poznan.

Poznan, and its large German garrison, was encircled and, two days later, Zhukov

penetrated into the province of Brandenburg, on his way to Frankfurt-on-the-Oder.

That was the setting in which Hitler was "celebrating" the 12th anniversary of his accession to power—with the Russians inside the province of Brandenburg! One last

obstacle, the Oder, and then— finis.

There was panic in Berlin. Hundreds of thousands of refugees were fleeing along all

roads to Berlin and beyond, in twenty-five or thirty degrees of frost. Many died by the roadside, and thousands were suffering from frostbite when they reached Berlin. If they were not, as a rule, strafed from the air, it was because among this torrent of refugees, with their lorries, horse-carts, hand-carts, babies and animals, there were also many non-Germans—war prisoners and slaves of all nationalities, who were being forcibly

evacuated—away from the front, away from the Russians. Hospitals in Berlin were

packed, the military barracks were almost empty, and the life of the capital was made an endless misery by massive air-raids from the West, the most devastating of which

precisely coincided with this influx of refugees from the East. The most fearful were the thousand-bomber night raids at the beginning of February, which set miles and miles of the city ablaze.

Before abandoning Tannenberg, the Germans blew up the immense Tannenberg war

memorial and took to Berlin the remains of Hindenburg and his wife. "We shall put it up again when East Prussia is liberated", the radio announcer said dismally. But Ditt-mar, the "radio general", was saying: "The position on the Eastern Front is incredibly grave", and they were interrupting the programmes with announcements of Terrorbomber, here, there and everywhere.

On January 30 Hitler himself spoke, lugubriously, like a voice from the grave. It was the last time his people were going to hear him speak. "By sparing my life on July 20, the Almighty has shown that He wishes me to continue as your Führer." No word of comfort, still less of apology came from him. Only: "German workers, work! German soldiers, fight! German women, be as fanatical as ever! No nation can do more." He then started prophesying how Europe, with Germany as her spearhead {an der Spitze), would yet defeat the hordes that England had called up from the steppes of central Asia.

Meanwhile, thousands of refugees were chasing along the Autobahnen and other roads to Berlin, where nobody wanted them. Berliners, aided by the police and the SS, were

driving them farther away—where to? 150,000 of those who had not fled to Berlin, fled to "impregnable" Königsberg, only to be trapped there, until the German garrison hacked a path through the Russian lines and they could flee to Danzig along the icy wastes of the lagoon and the strip of snow-covered dunes. But, before very long, Danzig itself was going to be cut off by the Russians.

The Russian offensive across Poland and deep into Germany was spectacular. The

Germans retreated to the Oder, but leaving behind various garrisons for delaying actions.

The largest delaying force was that progressively isolated in an ever-shrinking area of East Prussia; but there were also garrisons at Poznan, Torun and, later, at Schneidemühl and Breslau. A handful were still resisting desperately in the castle of the Teutonic Knights at Marienburg. In their retreat through Poland the Germans destroyed what they could— railway bridges above all—but they had no time to destroy Lodz or Cracow, or

the great sources of wealth that Silesia represented to the new Polish State.

In many of the conquered towns of Germany there was a babel of tongues—French war-

prisoners who had worked on the land ("It was we Frenchmen who ran the agriculture of East Prussia in the last two years," some of them later claimed); British prisoners, many of them survivors of Dunkirk and almost old residents; American newcomers—G.I.'s

captured at Bastognes a few weeks before, who had gone into Germany from one end,

and were now coming out at the other; Dutch workers, Belgian workers, French workers, Polish slaves, Russian slaves, Italians—not much better than slaves either —it was rather crazy, jolly and chaotic.

Later, in March, I was to see many British, American, French and other ex-war prisoners who were being sent home by sea via Odessa. The first days of their liberation had been pretty rough-and-tumble, and each had some tragic, or comic, story to tell. A kind of real international solidarity had developed among them, and if things sometimes went wrong, as they were bound to do, it couldn't be helped. The Russian armies had plenty of other things to worry about but, by and large, the repatriation through Odessa was done as well as could be expected in exceptionally difficult circumstances.

[Some had even arrived in Odessa with their "wives", mostly Ukrainian girls who had been deported to Germany. I saw six English lads with Ukrainian "wives"—they all claimed to have gone through some sort of religious marriage ceremony in Germany—

and all six couples lived happily together in Odessa in a schoolroom. There was a seventh couple—a London lad with a German girl from East Prussia, a plucky young thing who,

he claimed, had saved both his life and that of a Russian officer, who had thereupon given them his blessing. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian girls—rather raw village specimens they were—were not allowed to go to England with their Tommy husbands, and the poor

plucky German girl was informed by the British repatriation authorities that her

"husband" already had a wife in London.]

*

Despite the spectacular Russian advance through January and February, and great

superiority in both men and every kind of equipment, the Germans were not cracking up yet. Ehrenburg's daily outbursts of gloating, mostly on the subject of "see-how-they-run", did not strictly correspond to the facts. I remember a Russian major saying to me: "In some places their resistance reminds me of Sebastopol; those German soldiers can be

quite heroic at times." And a professional soldier wrote in Red Star in February: How fierce the battles are in the Poznan area may be judged from this episode: in one of the suburbs of Poznan some five hundred German soldiers and officers were

cut off from the rest. Having entrenched themselves in a number of stone buildings, they continued to resist our advancing troops till they were nearly all destroyed.

Only the last fifty Germans, who realised the uselessness of further resistance,

surrendered.

The Germans were certainly not easily surrendering to the Russians; their chief hope, except when trapped or left behind for delaying actions, was to get beyond the Oder. By the end of January the German losses since the beginning of the offensive were put by the Russians at 552 planes, 2,995 tanks, 15,000 guns and mortars, 26,000 machine guns,

34,000 motor vehicles, 295,000 dead—but only 86,000 prisoners; and even this figure

may have been an exaggeration. Throughout February, the Russian advance went on

relentlessly. Every night the German radio played light music— what else were they to do? And then a male voice would say dismally that here was the report from the Fiihrer's headquarters: "After heroic resistance, Elbing has fallen... The enemy has broken into Posen and Schneidemühl... The Bolsheviks are suffering enormous losses. They lost

7,500 tanks in the last month. But the V-bombing of London continues... " Then there would be atrocity stories about such-and-such little girls and somebody's 87-year-old grandmother having been raped. Next, another military march and again: Terror-bomber, Terrorbomber over such-and-such cities. Finally the same old baritone would then sing his little song: "Geht zu Bett und geht zu Ruh, geht dem neuen Morgen zu", ["Go to bed and go to sleep, until the morning comes".] or the Fräulein would wind up reassuringly, and yet rather conscious, one felt, of the silliness of the remark: "Good night, and sleep really well."

The Russian press published many lurid accounts of Berlin, especially after the immense fire raid of February 4. But so far the big land offensive in the West had not yet started, and the Russians tried to push on as fast as they could.

On February 1 Rokossovsky took Torun by storm, after a six-days' siege.

On February 6, Konev forced the Oder along a wide front in Silesia and isolated Breslau.

By February 9, Königsberg was almost entirely encircled, and a German prisoner was

reported as saying:

There is not much enthusiasm amongst the troops who have been ordered to defend

Königsberg to the last. All are tired, and the soldiers are silently watching the panic among the civilians; it has a depressing effect on soldiers and officers alike. The city is full of gloomy rumours. All the schools, theatres and railway stations are packed with wounded. The civilians have been told that they must get out of Königsberg as best they can.

On February 10 Rokossovsky took Elbing, and on the 14th Zhukov took Schneidemiihl,

after several days' street-fighting. On February 23, after a month's siege, Zhukov took Poznan and its citadel, the last German stronghold there. General Chuikov, of Stalingrad fame, and a specialist in street-fighting took a leading part in the fighting there. 23,000

prisoners were taken. That was the day on which the Allies launched their offensive in the west.

A few days before, one of Russia's most brilliant young soldiers, General

Cherniakhovsky was fatally wounded outside Königsberg. Marshal Vassilevsky took

over the command of the 3rd Belorussian Front.

During March, the war in the East became somewhat less spectacular than in January and February. Everywhere the Germans were resisting fiercely. Vassilevsky was battering at Königsberg which, reduced to a heap of rubble, was not going to fall until April 9.

Zhukov's and Rokossovsky's troops were closing in on Danzig from different directions.

By the middle of March Danzig was completely isolated, except by sea; on March 28

Gdynia was taken, with its harbour wrecked, but its modern Polish-built town—called

"Gothenhafen" during the German rule—more or less intact. Not so Danzig, which fell on March 30, after several days' fierce street-fighting. The beautiful medieval city had been reduced by then to a smoking ruin, but the Polish flag was solemnly hoisted on what was henceforth to be known as Gdansk. Ten thousand German prisoners were taken, but

many more than that were dead. Many civilians in and around Danzig committed suicide, so great was the fear of falling into Russian hands. I was later to see a German Army leaflet printed during the last days of the defence of Danzig; it was full of last-ditch resistance slogans and stories of Russian atrocities, and it promised a mighty German counter-offensive. Significantly, there was no mention of Hitler in it.

It was, more or less, the same at Königsberg. When it fell, 84,000 prisoners were claimed there, and 42,000 German dead, though the Russians also had lost many thousands of

men. A few thousand half-demented civilians were still living among the ruins, among them many Russian war prisoners and deportees. Except for some minor mopping-up

operations still to be done, East Prussia had vanished from the map by the middle of April. The country was to become partly Russian, partly Polish. Most of the Russian

troops in East Prussia could now be moved to the Oder where, with the bridgeheads the Russians already held on its west bank, the stage was now set for the final onslaught on Berlin. Meanwhile, after the fall of Danzig, Rokossovsky was pushing along the Baltic towards Stettin.

For a time, during that first half of April, attention shifted to the south. Even before the fall of Budapest in February, the "Democratic Government" of Hungary at Debrecen asked for an Armistice, and this was signed in Moscow on January 20 by Göngös, Weres and Balogh on behalf of Hungary and by Voroshilov on behalf of the three Allied

Powers. As Red Star wrote on the following day:

Hungary was Hitler's last satellite in Europe, and the most stubborn of all. Not until the Red Army had occupied a large part of Hungary did the Horthy Government

feel obliged to break with Germany... But the Germans organised a coup d'état in Budapest and Salasi, a ruffian with a criminal past, and head of the Crossed Arrows

[A Hungarian Nazi organisation.] , became head of the new puppet government... His aim was simply to defend Austria's frontiers with the help of Hungarian

"volunteers". But even Hitler, in his New Year message, had to admit that the partnership was coming to an end.

The Hungarian Democratic Government at Debrecen decided then to declare war

on Germany and sued for an Armistice... The terms are generous, especially when

one considers that Hungary was Hitler's first and last satellite, and that the

Hungarian troops behaved abominably at Voronezh, on the Don, at Orel, Chernigov

and Kiev... The 300 million dollars' reparations (200 to the Soviet Union, 100 to Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) spread over six years, are generous... Territorially, Hungary returns to her 1937 frontiers, and Hitler's Vienna Award of 1940 is thus

cancelled... Hungary must now take part in the war against Germany... Meantime,

the Soviet troops are completing the liberation of Budapest.

Budapest fell at last on February 13. 110,000 prisoners were taken, among them Col.-

Gen. Pfeffer-Wildenbruch. Eleven panzer divisions—which might have served a better

purpose elsewhere— were now thrown into Hungary, since Hitler was eager to save

Vienna at any price. After the fall of Budapest the Germans launched a strong counter-offensive and the Russians even lost some ground. It was not till the end of March that both Tolbukhin and Malinovsky could say that the German counter-offensive had spent

itself. On March 29 the Russians crossed into Austria; on April 4, Malinovsky captured Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia and, on the 13th, after a week's heavy fighting inside the city, Malinovsky and Tolbukhin occupied Vienna.

A novel feature of the Vienna fighting was the announcement by Tolbukhin that rank-

and-file Nazis had nothing to fear. All kinds of other surprising phrases began to appear in the Soviet press at the time: "The Viennese are helping the Red Army, and they fully understand that the Soviet Union is not fighting against Austrians."

"The Austrians' hatred for Prussianised Germany has deep historic roots..." And, after the fall—or "liberation" as it was called—of Vienna, the Soviet press was full of pleasant little stories of how the Russian soldiers went on pilgrimages to the grave of their favourite composer, Johann Strauss "who had written the music for the film The Great Waltz". Wreaths were also laid on the grave of Beethoven.

Meantime Yeremenko had taken the place of Petrov as commander of the 4th Ukrainian

Front, and the sweep through Czechoslovakia also gained in momentum. On April 26,

Malinovsky entered Brno, the capital of Moravia. However, in the end, neither he nor Yeremenko was destined to liberate Prague. On the very last day of the war, it was

Konev's tanks which made a spectacular breakthrough to the city from Saxony in the

north, just as street fighting in Prague was becoming serious and the danger of the city's destruction was growing from hour to hour. The part played in the Prague fighting by the Vlasov troops, who deserted their German masters and went over to the Czech Resistance movement makes one of the strangest stories of this phase of the war; but, for a long time, neither the Russians nor the Czechs liked it mentioned.

By the middle of April, with the Russians deep inside Austria and Czechoslovakia and the Western Allies sweeping across Western and Southern Germany, and Zhukov, Konev

and Rokossovsky holding the Oder Line, the time was ripe for the final attack on Berlin.

A short digression is called for, however, on the tricky subject of Russian policy towards Germany when the Red Army began to occupy German territory. After all that the

Germans had done— and horrors like the destruction of Warsaw and the extermination

camps at Maidanek and Auschwitz were still fresh in every soldier's memory—there was no sympathy at all for the German people. No doubt, there was much respect for the

German soldier, but that was different. Having fought the Germans for nearly four years on Russian soil, and having seen thousands of Russian towns and villages in ruins, the Russian troops could not resist their thirst for revenge when they finally broke into Germany.

Ever since Russian troops had been on German soil, some rough things had been going

on. In the first flush of the invasion of Germany, Russian soldiers burned down numerous houses, and sometimes whole towns—merely because they were German! (I was to see

this later, for instance in a large East Prussian town like Allenstein. The Poles who had taken over the city—now re-christened Olsztyn—were furious at all the repairing and

rebuilding they had to do in a town which had originally fallen almost intact into Russian hands). There was also a great deal of looting, robbery and rape. The rape no doubt

included many genuine atrocities; but as a Russian major later told me, many German

women somehow assumed that "it was now the Russians' turn", and that it was no good resisting. "The approach," he said, "was usually very simple. Any of our chaps simply had to say: 'Frau, komm,' and she knew what was expected of her... Let's face it. For nearly four years, the Red Army had been sex-starved. It was all right for officers, especially staff officers, so many of whom had a 'field-wife' handy—a secretary, or

typist, or a nurse, or a canteen waitress; but the ordinary Vanka had very few

opportunities in that line. In our own liberated towns, some of our fellows were lucky, but most of them weren't. The question of more-or-less 'raping' any Russian woman just

didn't arise. In Poland a few regrettable things happened from time to time, but, on the whole, a fairly strict discipline was maintained as regards 'rape'. The most common

offence in Poland was 'dai chasy' —'give me your wrist-watch.' There was an awful lot of petty thieving and robbery. Our fellows were just crazy about wrist-watches—there's no getting away from it. But the looting and raping in a big way did not start until our soldiers got to Germany. Our fellows were so sex-starved that they often raped old

women of sixty, or seventy or even eighty—much to these grandmothers' surprise, if not downright delight. But I admit it was a nasty business, and the record of the Kazakhs and other Asiatic troops was particularly bad."

The posters put up in Germany, during the first weeks of the invasion, such as: "Red Army Soldier: You are now on German soil; the hour of revenge has struck! " did not make things any easier. Moreover, the press propaganda of Ehrenburg and others

continued to be very ferocious indeed.

Here are some samples from Ehrenburg's articles during the invasion of Germany:

Germany is a witch... We are in Germany. German towns are burning, I am

happy...

The Germans have no souls... An English statesman said that the Germans were our

brethren. No! it is blasphemy to include the child-murderers among the family of

nations...

Not only divisions and armies are advancing on Berlin. All the trenches, graves and ravines rilled with the corpses of the innocents are advancing on Berlin, all the cabbages of Maidanek and all the trees of Vitebsk on which the Germans hanged so

many unhappy people. The boots and shoes and the babies' slippers of those

murdered and gassed at Maidanek are marching on Berlin. The dead are knocking

on the doors of the Joachimsthaler Strasse, of the Kaiserallee, of Unter den Linden and all the other cursed streets of that cursed city...

We shall put up gallows in Berlin... An icy wind is sweeping along the streets of Berlin. But it is not the icy wind, it is terror that is driving the Germans and their females to the west... 800 years ago the Poles and Lithuanians used to say: "We shall torment them in heaven as they tormented us on earth"... Now our patrols stand outside the castles of the Teutonic Knights at Alienstein, Osterode, Marienburg...

We shall forget nothing. As we advance through Pomerania, we have before our

eyes the devastated, blood-drenched countryside of Belorussia...

Some say the Germans from the Rhine are different from the Germans on the Oder.

I don't know that we should worry about such fine points. A German is a German

everywhere. The Germans have been punished, but not enough. They are still in

Berlin. The Führer is still standing, and not hanging. The Fritzes are still running, but not lying dead. Who can stop us now? General Model? The Oder? The Volks-sturm? No, it's too late. Germany, you can now whirl round in circles, and burn,

and howl in your deathly agony; the hour of revenge has struck!...

And, after visiting East Prussia, Ehrenburg wrote: "The Niezschean supermen are whining. They are a cross between a jackal and a sheep. They have no dignity... A

Scottish army chaplain, a liberated prisoner-of-war, said to me: 'I know how the Germans treated their Russian prisoners in 1941 and 1942. I can only bow to your generosity

now.'"

It did not take very long for both the Party and the Command of the Red Army to realise that all this was going too far. The troops were getting out of hand, and, moreover, it was clear that, before long, the Russians would be faced with a variety of political and administrative problems in Germany which could simply not to be handled on the "anti-Marxist" basis that "all Germans are evil." The alarm, not so much over "atrocities" as over the totally unnecessary destruction caused by the Red Army in the occupied parts of Germany, was first reflected in the Red Star editorial of February 9, 1945:

"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is an old saying. But it must not be taken literally. If the Germans marauded, and publicly raped our women, it does not

mean that we must do the same. This has never been and never shall be. Our

soldiers will not allow anything like that to happen—not because of pity for the

enemy, but out of a sense of their own personal dignity... They understand that

every breach of military discipline only weakens the victorious Red Army... Our

revenge is not blind. Our anger is not irrational. In an access of blind rage one is apt to destroy a factory in conquered enemy territory —a factory that would be of value to us. Such an attitude can only play into the enemy's hands.

Here was a clear admission that factories—and much else—were being burned down by

Russian troops—simply because they were "German property".

On April 14, Ehrenburg's hate propaganda was stopped by a strong attack on him in

Pravda by G. F. Alexandrov, the principal ideologist of the Central Committee.

According to Ehrenburg's post-war Memoirs this attack was launched on direct instructions from Stalin. Alexandrov's article, "Comrade Ehrenburg is Oversimplifying"

took him up on two points: first of all, it was both un-Marxist and inexpedient to treat all Germans as sub-human;

"Hitlers come and go, but the German people go on forever", Stalin himself had said in a recent speech; and Russia would have to live with the German people. To suggest that every German democrat or Communist was necessarily a Nazi in disguise was absolutely wrong. The article clearly suggested that there were now certain Germans with whom it would be necessary for the Russian authorities to co-operate. Secondly, Alexandrov

objected to Ehrenburg's Red Star article two days before, called "That's Enough! " in which he had raged against the ease with which the Allies were advancing in the west and the desperate resistance the Germans were continuing to offer the Russians in the east.

Ehrenburg had said that this was so because, having murdered millions of civilians, in the east, the Germans were therefore scared of the Russians, but not of the Western Allies, who were being deplorably "soft". They had, he claimed, even ordered Russian and Ukrainian slaves to go on working on German estates during the spring sowing.

While agreeing with some of this, Alexandrov still said that Ehrenburg was

"oversimplifying" the issue:

At the present stage the Nazis are following their old mischievous policy of sowing distrust among the Allies... They are trying, by means of this political military trick, to achieve what they could not achieve by purely military means. If the Germans, as Ehrenburg says, were only scared of the Russians, they would not, to this day, go on sinking Allied ships, murdering British prisoners, or sending flying bombs over

London. "We did not capture Königsberg by telephone," Ehrenburg said. That is quite true; but the explanation he offers for the simple way in which the Allies

occupy towns in Western Germany is not the correct one.

This sop to the Allies was no doubt still intended to be in the good Yalta tradition, but it was perhaps not meant to be overwhelmingly convincing. For, although there was to be genuine rejoicing, especially among soldiers and officers on both sides, when, on April 27, the Russian and American forces met at Torgau on the Elbe, and cut the German

forces in two, and although there were friendly demonstrations outside the American

Embassy on VE-Day in Moscow on May 9, there continued to be considerable distrust of the Western Allies. True, the Allies did not fall for Himmler's (or any other) "separate peace" offer, but no sooner had the Germans capitulated than the Russian press was already full of angry screams about "Churchill's Flensburg Government"—a government which, they later asserted, was not liquidated until the Russians themselves had taken a very strong line about this "outrageous business."

[The "Government" under Admiral Doenitz—Hitler's "heir"— which continued to function at Flensburg, near the Danish border, as an "administrative organ" for some days after the capitulation. The encouragement allegedly given to it by the British was

attributed by the Russians to the most sinister motives on Churchill's part.]

But that is a different story. The most significant part of Alexan-drov's attack on

Ehrenburg concerned the new official line on "the German people". Very suddenly the hate propaganda against "the Germans " was stopped. Ehrenburg was no longer allowed to write— at least not on Germany. His hate propaganda had served its purpose in the past, but now it had become inexpedient.

The "no-more-Ehrenburg" blow fell two days before the final Russian offensive against Berlin, which started on April 16, from the bridgeheads on the Oder. A week later, a special communiqué stated:

The troops of the 1st Belorussian Front under Marshal Zhukov launched their

offensive from the bridgeheads on the Oder with the support of artillery and

aircraft, and broke through the defences of Berlin. They took Frankfurt-on-the-

Oder, Wannlitz, Oranienburg, Birkenwerder, Henningsdorff, Pankow, Köpenick

and Karlshorst, and broke into the capital of Germany, Berlin.

At the same time, Konev's troops broke into Berlin from the south, after taking first Cottbus, and then Marienfelde, Teltow and other Berlin suburbs.

On the 25th it was announced that Zhukov and Konev had made their junction north-west of Potsdam, thus completely encircling Berlin. On the same day, Pillau, the last German stronghold in East Prussia was taken.

On May 2, after a week of the most dramatic battles—a week in the course of which

Hitler and Goebbels killed themselves in Berlin —the city surrendered.

Then, on the 7th, the whole German Army capitulated. Jodl signed the capitulation at Reims, and Keitel, the next day, in Berlin. Here the Russian signatory was Marshal

Zhukov. To the Russians, the Reims capitulation had been a "preliminary" formality; only a relatively junior Russian officer was present. While Churchill was broadcasting the end of the war on May 8 at 4 p.m., the Russian radio was broadcasting its "Children's Hour"—a pleasant little story about two rabbits and a bird. In Russia, the end of the war was not announced until the early hours of May 9. In Russia VE-Day was a day later than in the West. For one thing, Prague had not yet been liberated. The Western Allies thought this a detail; the Russians did not.

May 9 was an unforgettable day in Moscow. The spontaneous joy of the two or three

million people who thronged the Red Square that evening—and the Moscow River

embankments, and Gorki Street, all the way up to the Belorussian Station—was of a

quality and a depth I had never yet seen in Moscow before. They danced and sang in the streets; every soldier and officer was hugged and kissed; outside the US Embassy the crowds shouted "Hurray for Roosevelt!" (even though he had died a month before); they were so happy they did not even have to get drunk, and under the tolerant gaze of the militia, young men even urinated against the walls of the Moskva Hotel, flooding the wide pavement.

[The British Embassy, being on the other side of the Moskva river, some distance from the main scene of mass rejoicing, was given only a few minor friendly demonstrations.]

Nothing like this had ever happened in Moscow before. For once, Moscow had thrown all reserve and restraint to the winds. The fireworks display that evening was the most

spectacular I have ever seen.

Yet the one-day difference between VE-Day in the West and VE-Day in the East made

an unpleasant impression; and at first minor, and then more serious squabbles began

between the Allies almost before the ink of Keitel's signature had dried.

There was the row over the "Flensburg Government"; there were rows over the repatriation of Soviet prisoners and other Soviet citizens, whose return was being

delayed. An angry statement on the alleged breaches of the Yalta repatriation agreement was published by General Golikov, head of the Repatriation Commission. Above all,

there was more trouble about Poland. Many seeds of unpleasantness were beginning to

sprout...

Chapter II YALTA AND AFTER

The Yalta Conference of the Big Three, which was held three months before the collapse of Germany, has been described so often —notably by some of its participants, such as Mr Churchill, Mr James F. Byrnes and Mr Edward Stettinius—that no detailed account of that historic meeting is required here.

[The conference took place between February 4 and 11. The delegations were lodged in three of the palaces outside Yalta—the Tsar's palace of Livadia, the Vorontsov Palace and Koreis—which had more or less survived the German occupation. They had to be

fitted with new plumbing, and furniture had to be brought from Moscow.]

Yalta has been described as the "high tide of Big-Three unity" and, at the time, its results were hailed with great praise in most of the American press. It was not until later, when the Cold War was in full swing, that Yalta was described as a "Munich" at which Britain and the United States had "surrendered to Stalin", largely, it was said, because, at the time of Yalta, Roosevelt was a "weary and sick man", who had allowed himself to be bamboozled and outwitted by the wily Russian dictator.

Roosevelt was certainly a sick man. I still remember those truly pathetic newsreels of Yalta showing a terribly emaciated Roosevelt in his wheel-chair. I also remember Fenya, the kindly elderly Russian maid at the Metropole Hotel in Moscow, who was appointed

to Yalta as Roosevelt's personal chambermaid and who commented on her return, almost with tears in her eyes: "Such a sweet and kind man, but so terribly, terribly ill." When Roosevelt suddenly died soon afterwards, not only Fenya, but thousands of other Russian women wept.

On the other hand, Stettinius has argued in his book that the Russians made more

concessions at Yalta than they obtained from the Western Allies.

[ Roosevelt and The Russians (London, 1950).]

His list of "Soviet concessions" includes the following:

The Soviet Union accepted the US formula for voting on the Security Council, thus

putting an end to the Dumbarton Oaks impasse.

The Soviet Union abandoned her request for all the sixteen Soviet Republics being

represented at the UN Assembly, and contented herself with votes for the USSR, the

Ukraine and Belorussia only.

The Soviet Union agreed to the Associated Nations, who declared war on Germany by

March 1, participating at San Francisco as original members.

The Soviet Union agreed to closer military co-ordination.

She agreed, despite earlier objections, to the French not only having an occupation zone in Germany, but also to their being represented on the Control Commission.

She accepted that the western border of Poland be left for the Peace Conference to settle.

She agreed to a compromise formula on the constitution of the future Polish Government and to "free elections" in Poland.

She bowed to the US view that the figure of twenty billion dollars should be treated by the Reparations Commission in its initial studies merely as a basis of discussion.

In the case of the Declaration on Liberated Europe the Russians withdrew their two

amendments, including that giving a special status to people who had "actively opposed the Nazis".

On the other hand, while appealing to Stalin's "generosity" to Poland, the Western Powers had not felt able to insist on Lwow and the oil areas of Galicia being given to Poland. They had also given way on one or two questions concerning the strict allied supervision of the Polish election but, as Stettinius said in an italicised passage: As a result of the military situation [in February 1945] it was not a question of what Great Britain and the United States would permit Russia to do in Poland, but what the two countries could persuade the Soviet Union to accept...

[Our troops] had just recovered ground lost by the Battle of the Bulge and had not yet bridged the Rhine. In Italy our advance was bogged down in the Appennines.

The Soviet troops, on the other hand, had swept through almost all Poland and East Prussia and had reached at some points the river Oder... Poland and most of eastern Europe, except for most of Czechoslovakia, was in the hands of the Red Army.

[Stettinius, op. cit., p. 266. ]

For all that, Stettinius claims that "the Yalta Agreements were, on the whole, a diplomatic triumph for the United States and Great Britain. The real difficulties with the Soviet Union came after Yalta when the agreements were not respected."

[Ibid., p. 261.]

It is clear that Britain and the United States were not negotiating with the Soviet Union from "positions of strength". No doubt both Roosevelt and, especially, Churchill felt very strongly about a number of questions; in the first place Poland. "Poland," Churchill said,

"is the most important question before the Conference, and I don't want to leave without its being settled." Eden argued that "the presence of Mikolajczyk in the Polish Government would do more than anything else to add to its authority and convince the British people of its representative nature". Churchill declared himself horrified by the reports that "the Lublin Government had announced its intention of trying members of the Home Army and underground forces as traitors";

[This is precisely what the Soviet authorities were going to do only a few months later.]

he also argued against "stuffing the Polish goose so full of German food that it would get indigestion", and particularly against the Western (and not the Eastern) Neisse being taken as part of the western frontier of Poland. Against this, Molotov argued in favour of giving Poland back her ancient frontiers in East Prussia and on the Oder. "How long ago were these lands Polish?" Roosevelt asked. "Very long ago," said Molotov. Roosevelt merely made a wisecrack in reply: "This might lead the British to ask for a return of the United States to Great Britain."

But the Russians felt, in their own way, even more strongly about Poland than Churchill did. In reply to one of Churchill's harangues about Poland having to remain "captain of her soul", Stalin remarked: "To Britain, Poland is a question of honour; to the Soviet Union it is a question of both honour and security," and, time and again, he returned to the question of the Armija Krajowa constituting a threat to the Red Army in Poland.

The record of Yalta shows that, while agreeing to give the Western Allies something of a face-saver in the shape of the Harriman-Molotov-Clark Kerr committee, which would

help to "reorganise" the Polish Government, and thus "prepare" a free Polish election, Stalin made no secret whatsoever of what he considered to be Russia's fundamental

interests in Poland. A "free and unfettered" Polish election—even though he reluctantly subscribed to it—was not one of them.

The same, broadly speaking, applied to other countries in eastern Europe, notably

Rumania and Bulgaria. It is perhaps significant that, according to Stettinius, Stalin should have remarked several times at Yalta that he did not give a hang about Greece, and had every confidence in British policy there. This meant that there was, in fact, a tacit agreement about "spheres of influence", roughly on the lines of those already agreed upon in Moscow in October 1944,

[See pp. 912-3. This is hotly denied in the post-war Soviet History, which says, in particular, that Churchill's story about the "50-50" agreement on Yugoslavia is "pure fiction". (IVOVSS, V. p. 134.)]

except that, in the case of Poland, Churchill (and, to a lesser extent, Roosevelt) continued to have serious qualms. But neither could overlook the fact that Poland was in the rear of the Red Army. It is significant that when, soon after Yalta, the Russians ordered King Michael of Rumania to dismiss General Radescu and replace him by the pro-Soviet Petru Groza, Roosevelt thought it inappropriate to protest because the Red Army's

communication and supply lines ran through Rumania. The same, in a sense, was also

true of Poland.

[Some ten days after Yalta, at the Red Army Day reception that Molotov gave in Moscow on February 23, Vyshinsky, trying to sound rather drunk (which he wasn't) proposed a toast to some of the big shots of the Soviet armaments industries present: " I drink to you," he said, "who are the best and most indispensable auxiliaries of us diplomats.

Without you, we should be completely helpless." And he then announced that he was going to leave for Bucharest the next morning, "just to show them where they got off." It was not quite clear who "they" were, but it was soon learned that he had had a "very serious" talk with King Michael; that he had banged the royal desk with his fist and that, as a result, the pro-Western General Radescu had been replaced at the head of the

Rumanian Government by Mr Peter Groza. Radescu took refuge in the British Legation.]

The Yalta Conference devoted less time than one might have expected to the problem of Germany. "Closer co-ordination of the three Allies than ever before" was decided upon.

The published Report on the Conference said that Nazi Germany was doomed, and that

the German people "will only make the cost of their defeat heavier to themselves by attempting to continue a hopeless resistance." The terms of the unconditional surrender were not published:

These terms will not be made known until the final defeat of Germany... The forces of the Three Powers will each occupy a separate zone of Germany... [There will be]

a central Control Commission consisting of the Supreme Commanders of the Three

Powers with headquarters in Berlin.

[Berlin, not part of the Soviet zone, was to be a distinct zone divided in four.]

France, the Report continued, would be invited to take over a zone of occupation and to participate as a fourth member of the Control Commission, if she so desired.

Then followed a passage on the Allies' "inflexible purpose to destroy German militarism and Nazism... to disarm and disband all German armed forces, to break up for all time the German General Staff... to remove or destroy all German military equipment ... to bring all war criminals to just and swift punishment and exact reparation in kind... wipe out the Nazi Party, Nazi laws, organisations and institutions, remove all Nazi and militarist influence from public offices and from the cultural and economic life of the German

people... It is not our purpose to destroy the people of Germany, but only when Nazism and militarism have been extirpated will there be hope for a decent life for Germans, and a place for them in the comity of nations."

In the Protocol of the Yalta Conference (not published at the time) the Surrender Terms for Germany included a provision under which the Big Three would take "any such steps as they deem requisite for future peace and security, including the complete disarmament, demilitarisation and the dismemberment of Germany." The study for the procedure of dismemberment was referred to a committee consisting of Mr Eden, Mr Winant and Mr

Gusev (the Foreign Secretary and the US and Soviet Ambassadors in London).

[The post-war History claims that at Yalta, the Russians were against dismemberment and looked with suspicion at any Western dismemberment plans. (IVOVSS, V, pp. 130-5). If at Teheran Stalin still favoured the dismemberment of Germany, he appears to have changed his mind by the time the Yalta Conference met. The "dismemberment" question was discussed at a number of meetings, particularly between the November 1944 meeting of the European Advisory Commission and Potsdam in July 1945. At the EAC meeting in

March 1945 the Russians had clearly changed their minds about the desirability of

"dismemberment". In claiming that they had already changed their minds at Yalta, i.e. a month before, the Russians are now stretching a point only slightly.]

A Reparations Committee was set up in Moscow under the chairmanship of Mr Maisky

which would take "in its initial studies as a basis of discussion " the twenty billion dollars (half of it for the Soviet Union) proposed by the Russians.

The Russians were not particularly pleased with this deliberately non-committal protocol of Reparations, and were later to claim that Roosevelt had agreed to their getting ten billion dollars (from equipment, current production and labour), despite very strong opposition from Churchill, who had kept recalling the fearful reparations muddle after World War I. But there is little doubt that, apart from this Reparations question, the Russians were well satisfied with the Protocol on the de-nazification and the

demilitarisation of Germany. It is also certain that Stalin took the World Organisation, based on the unity of the Big Three, very seriously—though not quite seriously enough to run any grave risks with Poland, Rumania and the rest of his east-European sphere of influence.

The atom bomb had not yet been exploded, and American military men feared that,

unless Russia joined in, the war against Japan might well last till 1947, and cost the United States at least another million casualties. Britain and the USA were therefore anxious, at the time of Yalta, to get Russia to join in the Japanese war. After all the loss of life in the war against Germany, the Russians were not at all keen on another war, and Stalin argued that he would "have to show something for it" before they would readily accept war against Japan. He therefore demanded first, the maintenance of the status quo in outer Mongolia; second, the restoration of Russia's former rights violated by Japan in 1904—the return of southern Sakhalin; the restoration (subject to an early agreement with Chiang Kai-shek) of Russian interests in respect of Dairen, Port Arthur and the Chinese Eastern and South-Manchurian railways, to be operated jointly by a Soviet-Chinese

Company, with China retaining full sovereignty in Manchuria; and third, the handing

over of the Kurile Islands to the Soviet Union (even though these had in effect belonged to Japan for a long time). This was a satisfactory pourboire for Russia to receive in the Far East. Stettinius quoted a significant remark of Molotov's, which suggests that the Russians were perfectly content to pursue a Big-Three policy even in China, i.e. to coexist peacefully with Chiang Kai-shek:

Molotov told General Patrick Hurley that the Soviet Union was not interested in the Chinese Communists; these weren't really Communists anyway.

[ Stettinius, op. cit., p. 28. One can only wonder whether today Khrushchev agrees with his old friend Molotov! See also p. 1030 for Stalin's remarks on the Chinese Communists to Hopkins in May 1945.]

On the whole, Stalin left the British and, even more so, the Americans at Yalta with a rather favourable impression. Byrnes thought him "a very likeable person"; Churchill thought he had "greatly mellowed since the hard days of the war"; while he struck Stettinius as a man "with a fine sense of humour"—

At the same time one received an impression of power and ruthless-ness along with his humour... The other members of the Soviet delegation would change their minds perfectly unashamedly whenever Marshal Stalin changed his.

[Ibid., p. 107. This remark is all the more curious in the light of both Stettinius's and Harriman's "theory" that if Stalin "went back on the Yalta decisions" soon afterwards, it was under the pressure of the other members of the Politburo, who were supposed to have criticised him for having been too soft in his dealings with Churchill and Roosevelt.]

He appeared as a calm and skilful negotiator, who only showed any strong emotion when he spoke of German reparations and of the fearful devastation caused by the Germans in Russia. On the whole, he was reasonably accommodating, and did not press on his

partners demands they thought wholly unreasonable—such as the one that all the sixteen Soviet Republics be represented at UN.

[Stalin and Molotov started this gambit by explaining that, in 1944, the Soviet

Constitution had been amended so as to give all the sixteen Soviet republics the right to conduct their own foreign relations. This was an obvious device to get extra seats at UN.

I remember visiting the improvised "Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Georgian SSR" at Tbilisi in 1946. None of its officials took it in the least seriously. It consisted of only three or four rooms.]

Western observers were impressed by the fact that, throughout the Yalta Conference,

Stalin remained in the closest touch with the conduct of the war and did his work as Commander-in-Chief between midnight and 5 a.m.

As one looks closely at the Yalta records, several points stand out clearly. Stalin was all in favour of a United Nations, based on the unity of the Big Three. He was very reluctant to admit France to Germany as a fourth partner, but gave way at Churchill's insistence.

He made no secret of his contempt for France's military record or of his personal dislike of de Gaulle, whom, according to Harriman, he described as "an awkward and stubborn man." Kindness, he argued, was the only possible reason for giving France a zone in Germany. According to Stettinius, Stalin called de Gaulle "not a complicated man".

Nor did Stalin make any secret of his mental reservations about Poland. He kept on

talking about "agents of the London Government shooting Russian soldiers," and no doubt felt that, so long as Russia was needed as an Ally against Japan, he had little to fear from any Anglo-American protests about Russian policy in either Poland or the Balkans.

In the Balkans, moreover, there was a tacit understanding about splitting them into

"spheres of influence": just as Stalin "didn't give a hang about Greece", so Churchill had told King Peter of Yugoslavia that he wouldn't sacrifice a single man or a single penny to put any king back on his throne.

The protocol on Germany, and its demilitarisation and denazification, satisfied Stalin, though he thought the agreement on reparations was much too vague. Maisky had spoken of the "astronomical figures" of the damage caused by the Germans to the Soviet Union, and there was one extremely important—and closely-related —point which was raised at Yalta, but apparently dropped almost immediately: the question of a big American

reconstruction loan to the Soviet Union.

According to Stettinius's record, this question came up only incidentally when Molotov said to him that Russia expected to receive reparations in kind from Germany, and "also expressed the hope that the Soviet Union would receive long-term credits from the

United States."

[ Op. cit., p. 115.]

Stettinius recalls that Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau had sent a letter to the President shortly before Yalta advocating "a concrete plan to aid the Russians in the reconstruction period", and suggesting that "this would iron out many of the difficulties we have been having with respect to their problems and policies." But, as Stettinius says:

"The Soviet Union did not receive a loan at the close of the war. Whether such a loan would have made her a more reasonable and co-operative nation will be one of the great

'if questions of history."

There is every reason to believe that, at Yalta, Stalin was still hoping that such a loan might materiaUse; it would have meant the relatively "easy" way of reconstruction for the Russian people, instead of the "hard" way that Stalin had to choose for them despite certain "ideological" objections to the former solution.

It may be possible to read a hint at such a loan into Stalin's toast to Roosevelt at one of the Yalta banquets when he said that the President had been "the chief forger of the instruments which had led to the mobilisation of the world against Hitler." Lend-lease, he said, was "one of the President's most remarkable and vital achievements" which pointed to an exceptionally broad conception of America's national interests.

Although he also paid some glowing compliments to Churchill at the same banquet—"the bravest governmental figure in the world" —all observers are agreed that he was much more anxious to be friendly to Roosevelt than to Churchill. Even so, he said he was sure that Churchill would continue to be at the head of the British Government, and that there would be no Labour victory in the next election. And he seemed to prefer it that way.

This, he suggested, was all the more desirable because—

The difficult task will come after the war, when diverse interests will tend to divide the Allies. I am confident, however, that the present alliance will meet that test and that the peace-time relations of the three Great Powers will be as strong as they were in war-time.

[ Stettinius, op. cit., p. 198.]

American writers have made much of Stalin's "betrayal" of Yalta so soon after the conference. Some have attributed it—not at all plausibly—to the criticisms and

opposition with which Stalin met from the "revolutionary doctrinaires" in the Politburo.

Much more credible are some of the other explanations offered for the "change" in Soviet policy after Yalta. It is probable that Stalin took note of Roosevelt's remark that the United States were unlikely to keep any troops in Europe for more than two years.

Secondly, he seems to have been impressed, soon after Yalta, by the great hostility that the Russians met in Poland, which led to his determination not to take any serious

chances, either there or in any of the other east-European countries.

The growing American opposition in March and April, to the idea of a big post-war loan to Russia was also of some importance, in increasing East-West tension. Roosevelt's

death caused genuine alarm in Russia—

[It made a very deep impression. All Soviet papers appeared with wide black borders on their front pages, and, by a curious instinct, people felt that this was a major tragedy for Russia which had lost "a real friend".]

—an alarm which soon proved justified, especially when President Truman made his

début in his Russian policy by stopping Lend-Lease for Russia immediately after VE-Day

—while Russia was still committed to entering the war against Japan, on America's side.

As we know from Harry Hopkin's account of his visit to Moscow soon afterwards, Stalin was deeply annoyed and offended by what Stettinius called this "untimely and incredible"

step.

Indeed, Yalta, this great manifestation of three-power unity of purpose with victory over Nazi Germany in sight, proved, perhaps inevitably, a watershed in inter-allied relations.

Conflicting interests and contrasting ideas that in normal circumstances would have been almost incompatible, had been shelved, while the gigantic struggle was in progress. But now when it came to preparing for peace the working compromises that had been reached proved only too fragile. As we have seen, it was difficult enough to reach these

compromises; now they were to be put to the test of being applied in practice and

interpreted in detail. Thus it became increasingly difficult to conceal those vital

differences of self-interest and outlook between the wartime coalition partners.

Another psychological factor contributed to the tension between Soviet Russia and the Allies towards the very end of the war in Europe. The approach of victory produced in Russia not only waves of relief, hope and indeed, elation, but even extraordinary

outbursts of national pride almost bordering on arrogance. There was, not least in the Red Army, a tendency to resent the presence of the Western Allies in Germany and especially in Berlin—in the capture of which so many thousands of Russians were to die in the last days of the war.

On the one hand, Russia was a devastatedx, almost a ruined, country, with a formidable task of economic reconstruction ahead of her. But on the other hand, she was sitting on top of the world, having won the greatest war in her history. The future seemed bright as never before. Some soldiers were openly saying: "But for Britain and America, the whole of Europe would be ours." This "revolutionary romanticism" was not widespread, still less officially approved, but it had a tiny little corner in many people's hearts. The future seemed pregnant with all kinds of exciting possibilities. A revolutionary Europe to a few

—a happy, prosperous Russia to most. Among many of those who now dreamed of such

a happy Russia there also existed the idea that the survival of the Big-Three alliance after the war would, somehow, tend to liberalise the Soviet régime (as, in some respects, it had already done during the war). Many illusions (in either direction) were to be destroyed only a few months later, with the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima...

Chapter III - JUNE, 1945: BERLIN UNDER THE RUSSIANS

ONLY

This was very unlike Berlin. There were jasmin bushes round the villa, the garden was full of strong sweet scents, birds were twittering in the trees, and, at the end of the green, sunny alley, the water of the Wannsee was bright blue. "They lived well, the parasites,"

said the Russian lad, a sentry outside the villa. He was nineteen or twenty, with a little down on his chin, rosy cheeks and laughing blue eyes. On his khaki shirt he wore the Stalingrad Medal and the Bravery Medal. "They lived well, the parasites," he repeated.

"Great big farms in East Prussia, and pretty posh houses in the towns that hadn't been burned out or bombed to hell. And look at these datchas here! Why did these people who were living so well have to invade us?"

This was one of the most common thoughts of Red Army soldiers during that first

summer in Germany. They were not impressed by the vestiges of "Western" prosperity, but simply angered at the thought that these "rich" Germans should have wanted to conquer Russia.

"And to think of all our fellows they killed," he went on. "It was tough just outside Berlin. Some of the German youngsters were quite crazy—attacked our tanks with their faustpatronen; knocked out quite a few that way. Some of the German girls threw hand grenades out of windows. However, they are all very meek and quiet now. Some of the

Germans are really not too bad. They're scared, of course; that's why they are so polite.

But I lost a lot of comrades on the way here, and one could never be sure that one would get to Berlin alive. But now I am having a good time. Four of us have a motor-boat and we go out on it at night on the lake. There are a lot of lakes here, all strung together—one can go in the boat for miles. Pretty country round here, don't you think? Now the

Germans aren't allowed to come to this place. Wendenschloss it's called."

The "parasite" to whom the villa belonged must have been quite a big local shot in the Nazi Party. In my bedroom there were still some German books—mostly Party literature

— Mein Kampf, and a volume of Goering speeches, and a biography of Goering, full of idyllic pictures of the brute. Each volume was a presentation copy from the local Party committee.

Wendenschloss was, indeed, roped off from the rest of Berlin. Marshal Zhukov was

living in a large villa beside the lake; and in the Yacht Club a "great inter-Allied ceremony" (as the newspapers called it) took place on June 5. Zhukov, Eisenhower, Montgomery and Delattre de Tassigny, sat round a large green table and signed the Four-Power Declaration on the defeat of Germany, the assumption by the Four Powers of the supreme rule over Germany and the establishment of a Control Council.

It was a somewhat disorderly affair. Montgomery arrived at the airport three hours later than the Russians had expected him. There was much unpleasant whispering and hissing:

"The Russians want to grab as much as they can."

[The Western Allies were not at all pleased to have to evacuate very shortly a large territory, including Leipzig, and to hand it to the Russians in accordance with the zonal boundaries previously agreed to. Churchill was much opposed to this evacuation without getting anything in return. He was very angry about the fait accompli of the Oder-Neisse Line.]

Although Zhukov was expecting all the signatories to stay for his elaborately-prepared dinner, both Eisenhower and Montgomery excused themselves, and only the French

stayed on—the British and Americans leaving almost immediately after the signing

ceremony. Why Montgomery had brought ninety-seven people with him nobody could

make out. " Il y a un froid très net," the French at Wendenschloss remarked. Anyway, the French stayed on for the banquet, and Vyshinsky, Zhukov's political adviser, made a

speech in which (choosing to forget all that Stalin had said about the French at Yalta) he referred to them as "our real friends," and General Delattre de Tassigny—who was then in the midst of his flirtation with the French Communists—declared that he wished

France to be "a true democratic people's republic"— whatever that meant. Anyway, the Russians were very pleased with the French General, and a few among them perhaps

began to think vaguely of Europe in terms of some old-time revolutionary romanticism...

For all that, everything was calculated to show the Germans that the four Allies were monolithically united and that they would continue to be so once Berlin—now under sole Russian occupation— was split into four zones, in terms of the new arrangements made.

All the streets of Berlin—even the most devastated ones—were decorated that day with flags of all the four Allies...

At the Wendenschloss ceremony I had a talk with Marshal Soko-lovsky, whom I had not

seen since the grim days of 1941.1 reminded him of how, a fortnight before the all-out German offensive against Moscow, he had explained that the Red Army would gradually

grind down the might of the German Army. He gave a happy smile, and said he remembered that meeting with the press at Viazma. He told me that he was "quite satisfied" that Hitler was dead, although his remains had not been definitely identified.

"But there seems no doubt that he is dead all right," he said. So, he added, was Goebbels, together with his whole family—but that was more common knowledge. Sokolovsky's

statement was all the more interesting as the official Russian line at that time—and for a long time afterwards— was that Hitler might have escaped. Sokolovsky's "off-the-record"— or should one say "off-his-guard"?—remark was unique in its own way.

Zhukov's statement on the same subject a few days later was "on the record"—and much more cautious.

[There was a strong suspicion among Western diplomats that there was a shabby political purpose in the innuendo that Hitler had escaped to Spain or South America with certain Western complicities. Stalin persisted in telling Hopkins, about the same time, that Hitler was not dead.]

When I mentioned the talk about Russian troops having run wild in Germany,

Sokolovsky shrugged his shoulders. "Of course," he said, "a lot of nasty things happened.

But what do you expect? You know what the Germans did to their Russian war prisoners, how they devastated our country, how they murdered and raped and looted. Have you

seen Maidanek or Auschwitz? Every one of our soldiers lost dozens of his comrades.

Every one of them had some personal scores to settle with the Germans, and in the first flush of victory our fellows no doubt derived a certain satisfaction from making it hot for those Herrenvolk women. However, that stage is over. We have now pretty well clamped down on that sort of thing— not that most German women are vestal virgins. Our main

worry," he grinned, "is the awful spread of the clap among our troops."

No one who had known Nazi Germany, and had lived through the war—in France in

1940, in Britain during the Battle of Britain and the London blitz, and the rest of it in Russia—could avoid feeling a pang of Schadenfreude at the sight of Berlin. The capital of Hitler's 1,000-year Reich had been turned into a hundred square miles of mostly ruin and rubble. All down the endless Frankfurter Allee not a house—except one, where the commandant of Berlin now had his headquarters—had escaped destruction;

Alexanderplatz, Unter den Linden, Friedrichstrasse, Wilhelmstrasse, and then the

Potsdamerplatz, and the Kleiststrasse and Tauentzienstrasse and, beyond them, the

Kurfürstendamm (here alone a few houses had escaped)—all the old familiar places had been smashed. In the wastes of the Wilhelmstrasse, with Hitler's now shattered

Chancellery, there were only ghosts—ghosts of the million people who had bellowed

Heil Hitler on the day Hitler became Chancellor, ghosts of the S.A. marching, marching, marching past their Führer in their interminable raucous torchlight procession.

For once, Germany was no longer marching; she had come to the end of the road.

Between the ruins, the Wilhelmstrasse was silent now, without a living soul anywhere, and with only a stink of corpses rising from the ruins. The Tägliche Rundschau,

published under Russian auspices, was printing photographs of Berlin's ruins, and

recalling what Hitler had said in 1935: "In ten years' time Berlin will be unrecognisable."

This was Russian Berlin. The Russians were still in sole command. A month had passed since the German capitulation. Early in May Berlin was in a state of complete chaos, with millions milling round the ruins, not knowing what to do, and where to go, or where to find even a scrap of food. On May 4, two days after the capitulation of Berlin, the

Russian commandant, General Berzarin, issued his first Order:

1) The Nazi Party and all its organisations are dissolved.

2) Within forty-eight hours all members of the Nazi Party, the Gestapo, the police and members of the public services must register. Within three days, all members of the Wehrmacht and the SS must register, too.

3) All public services in Berlin must be resumed immediately, and food shops and bakeries must open.

4) Within twenty-four hours all food reserves exceeding five days' consumption

must be declared.

5) Banks must be closed and all accounts frozen.

6) All arms, ammunition, wireless sets, cameras, cars and petrol must be handed

over to the Russian authorities.

7) All printing machinery and typewriters must be registered.

8) No one must leave their dwellings between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. But theatres,

cinemas, restaurants and churches may remain open till 9 p.m.

The entire population, except old people and women with small children was mobilised for work. Men had to return to their regular jobs, or do "heavy work" like repairing bridges and dismantling factories; women had to clear away the rubble, pile up billions of bricks, and bury the thousands of corpses rotting among the ruins. Only those registering for work (apart from the above exceptions) were entitled to a ration card. The distribution of ration cards began on May 8, but the lower-category ration cards were less than

adequate. The black market began to flourish right away, and many Russian soldiers

swapped food for all kinds of more or less valuable objects. There was real famine among those who had nothing to exchange for food. This was particularly true of Berlin and Dresden.

The dismantling of factories— Trophäenaktion ("Operation Booty")—began at once. The Siemens plant near Berlin was completely emptied of machinery during the very first

days of the Russian occupation, and the same happened to many other places. It was done under the direction of engineers who had come from Russia, and the military authorities were not too pleased about it.

Within a month of the German capitulation of Berlin, some kind of order had been

introduced into the complete chaos. On June 5 the Allied Control Council was formed, and, on June 9 Marshal Zhukov announced the setting up, under his authority, of the

SMA, the Soviet Military Administration for Eastern Germany. Even before that, General Berzarin, the commandant of Berlin had set up an administration of sorts in the capital.

This was followed, on June 10, by Marshal Zhukov's Order No. 2 permitting the creation of "democratic and anti-Fascist parties" acting, of course, under Russian control. On the very following day the German Communist Party, headed by Pieck and Ulbricht,

declared itself in favour of the Sonderweg—a "particular German way": We believe that it would be wrong to impose the Soviet system on Germany, since

this would not correspond to the present development of the country... Instead, we are in favour of a democratic anti-Fascist régime and a parliamentary republic

guaranteeing the people democratic rights and freedoms.

A similar line was taken by the SPD, the Socialists, several of whose leaders—notably Fechner, Grotewohl and Gniffke—were shortly to declare themselves in favour of a

united Socialist-Communist Party, which, within a year, was to become the SED

{Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands). The SMA also permitted the constitution of bourgeois parties—the Catholic CDU and the liberal LDP—provided these entered a

united anti-Fascist Front. This anti-Fascist bloc was to be formed on July 14, 1945.

In 1945, not only the bourgeois parties and the Socialists, but also the German

Communists were still openly against the Ostgrenze, the Oder-Neisse Frontier, and hoped that the Russians would "reconsider" it. It was not till 1948 that the German Communists recognised it as "the Frontier of Peace and Friendship." Nor was it till 1948 that, under the impact of the Stalin-Tito quarrels, the German Communists openly abandoned their Sonderweg positions and decided to model their régime, in the main, on the Soviet Union.

There were thousands of Russian soldiers in Berlin during those days. On the ruins of the Reichstag, where deadly lighting had gone on for days, on the pillars of the shattered, battered Brandenburger Tor, on the pedestals of the Siegessäule (Victory Column), of the Bismarck monument, of the smashed equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I, thousands of Russian names had been scratched, or written or painted: "Sidorov from Tambov", or

"Ivanov, all the way from Stalingrad", or "Mikhailov who fought the Fritzes in the Battle of Kursk", or "Petrov, Leningrad to Berlin", and so on. There were Russian soldiers'

graves in the Tiergarten, around the Reichstag; and along the main streets, especially in the busier and less devastated streets of East Berlin, notices had been put up everywhere:

"HITLERS COME AND GO, BUT THE GERMAN PEOPLE AND THE GERMAN

STATE GO ON.—STALIN." The reference to the "German State" made many Germans believe that there would soon be a central German government. There were German

policemen with white brassards at street corners, and a few tramcars and a couple of underground lines were running. Water was being pumped out of other underground lines which had been flooded on Hitler's orders and in which a large number of people had

been drowned as a result.

There was much army traffic in the main streets and there were also the wheelbarrows—

hundreds of them—of Germans moving their belongings from one place to another.

There were also lorries packed with D.P.'s. The Germans looked subdued; only once in a while one caught the glimpse of a dirty look. Most of them were busy: they were clearing away rubble and mending pavements.

There was more mateyness between the Russians and the Germans than one would have

expected. At street corners soldiers were seen chatting with German men and girls; they were not supposed to sleep with German girls, though they could at their own risk and peril—and they did. Small German boys and elderly women were the most boisterous of

all. The boys would scrounge food and cigarettes off the Russians, and the elderly women displayed a sort of motherly familiarity. They waved at Russian lorries for lifts, and the lorries would often stop.

Colonel-General Berzarin, the commandant of Berlin, was a fine specimen of a Soviet

general.

[He was to be killed in a car smash only a week later; that, at any rate, was the official version. Many Russians in Berlin suspected that he had, in reality, been assassinated by Nazi terrorists.]

He was, quite obviously, not at all pleased at the prospect that Berlin would soon have to be shared with the British, Americans and French. He felt that as the Russians had lost thousands in the fierce final battle of the war they deserved Berlin all to themselves. He also felt that he had made as good a job as possible of Berlin in the incredible

circumstances of May 1945, and that things were beginning to take shape. The arrival of the others would only cause a lot of rivalry and friction, and undermine the Russians'

authority with the Germans...

Anyway, Berzarin was not the kind of man who had much use for the Allies, least of all the British. The son of a Leningrad steel worker, and a Party member of long standing, he had joined the Red Army in 1918 at the age of 14, and, in 1919, he had fought the British at Archangel. "Yes," he said, "I had to fight there against our present allies. At first we got it in the neck from them, but later I realised what good athletes they were—they could certainly run!" In 1939 he had fought at Halkin Gol; in 1941, he commanded a Russian army at Riga, "and there I got my first knock from the Germans, and it was a pretty hard knock, I can tell you." Then he fought on various other fronts—and, finally,

"our army was the first to reach the Oder, and it was we to whom the Germans in Berlin finally capitulated last month."

"But it was heavy going," he went on. "Our artillery and infantry won this battle. The allied bombing caused great damage here, but it was of no direct military value. The allied dropped 65,000 tons of bombs on Berlin, but it was we who, in a fortnight, fired 40,000 tons of shells at it. With tanks and guns we had to smash up whole houses. The Germans were fanatical. Young boys and girls threw hand-grenades at us and attacked

our tanks with their infernal near-suicidal jaustpatronen. There were a lot of barricades all over Berlin. Finally, they capitulated on May 2. A large part of the population and thousands of soldiers were hiding in cellars and shelters. But even after the capitulation some SS-men and Hitler youths continued to fire at us from the ruins. This went on for a few days. Since then, there are still occasionally assassinations of Russian soldiers and especially officers; but, on the whole, everything is quiet... "

He admitted that, to put an end to these assassinations, the Russians had had to take hostages from amongst the numerous Nazis.

Berzarin claimed that in May 1945 the Russians had saved Berlin from starvation. He

gave figures for the gradual restoration of the underground-railway, tramlines,

telephones, gas supply, etc.—and then spoke of the rations. Every person received 0.75

lb. of potatoes a day, but the other rations among the five categories varied greatly: bread from 20 oz. to 10 oz., meat from 3 oz. to 0.66 oz., sugar from 1 oz. to 0.5 oz. Some food even had to be brought from Russia.

"But before long," Berzarin said, "the Red Army, now largely depending on its own supplies, will have to be fed by the Germans, and we are making the peasants grow as much as possible." He was planning to allow a "free market" in Berlin, which would encourage the peasants to bring their produce to the city.

The population of Berlin was already nearly three millions, and more people were

coming in all the time. The health services were a major problem: all doctors had been mobilised, and there were 40,000 wounded Germans in Berlin in special hospitals.

Housing was, of course, the worst problem of all: forty-five percent of Berlin's houses had been totally destroyed, thirty-five percent partly destroyed, and only some fifteen or twenty percent, mostly in the suburbs, were more or less intact. There was no work for most of the population, who were being used for clearing away rubble.

He also made it clear that it was "well worthwhile" under the Russians to be emphatically anti-Nazi, and all bona fide anti-Nazis were being highly favoured.

Anti-Nazis are being used by us for checking all appointments, particularly to the police force. The policemen are carefully chosen; even so, they are allowed to carry only truncheons, not firearms. In smaller jobs we allow nominal, non-active Nazis to remain. All ex-Nazis must report for work.

The cultural side is being developed; there are 200 cinemas in Berlin, and we show them Russian films, such as Ivan the Terrible. The centre of musical activity is the Radio Centre; here the German opera orchestra has been reconstituted under the

conductor Ludwig. Schools will be restored as soon as possible; but all the Nazi

school-books will have to be replaced. The problem of finding enough anti-Nazi

teachers will not be easy.

We have organised the municipality, complete with an Oberbürgermeister, a Dr Werner and, under him, sixteen departments—food, health, industry, trade,

administration, education, etc.

There was both comedy and pathos about the Town Hall of Berlin, in a former Insurance building, which had somehow escaped destruction, somewhere off the Alexanderplatz.

The Oberbürgermeister, Herr Werner, was a gaunt handsome old man of sixty-eight, wearing a long black frock coat, a stiff butterfly collar and black tie. He was a wealthy rentier with a villa at Lichterfelde, and the Russians got hold of him several days before entering Berlin proper, and had appointed him Oberbürgermeister.

[The Berlin City Government was composed of seven bourgeois, six Communist Party officials, two Social-Democrats and two nonparty members. Two were German

communists who had spent years in a Nazi concentration camp, but most of the other

communists were "Moscow" Germans. According to Wolfgang Leonhard, at that time a close associate of Ulbricht's, it was the "Ulbricht Group", working in close co-operation with the Russians, who were chiefly responsible for the appointments. It was also

Ulbricht who insisted, in June 1945, on the dissolution of the "anti-fascist committees"

who had constituted themselves in Berlin spontaneously and "from below", and on their virtual replacement by the political parties, as authorised by Zhukov. It was these parties, especially the Communist Party, which were to provide administrative cadres for the

Soviet Zone. (Wolfgang Leonhard, op. cit., pp. 323-35).]

He said he had lived well till 1942, and had had a large income, but then hard times came, and he had lost 60 lbs. in weight. The constant bombings of Berlin had got him down. Now he was saying all the right things. General Berzarin had "done him the great honour" of appointing him Oberbürgermeister of Berlin. The feeding of Berlin was a terrible problem, since the Nazis had destroyed all the food-stores, saying: "While we are here you'll have food, but when the Bolsheviks take over, you'll starve". But things were not nearly as bad as the Germans—very frightened at first—had expected. The Red Army had presented Berlin with a thousand lorries for clearing the rubble and doing some

reconstruction, and they had placed a car at his (Werner's) disposal, since he lived ten miles from his office and also a bodyguard of six soldiers. He also said: "Marshal Stalin gave us twenty-five million marks, and the Marshal's magnanimous gesture has been

deeply appreciated by all Berliners." By the end of the summer, schools would be opened, "and when I raised the question of religious tuition with General Berzarin, he said, 'You can educate them in a religious spirit for all I care'. I rejoiced at these words, for I and my family are very devout Lutherans."

There was, he said, even a religious department at the Berlin Town Hall, headed by a Catholic priest, Father Buchholz, who had been locked up in a concentration camp after July 20. At Lichterfelde, Werner said, he had a garden, and some lovely rose-bushes, and he hoped he could soon retire; but now he felt it his duty to do whatever he could to rehabilitate the German people in the eyes of the world. They had fallen so fearfully low.

There was something pathetic about this old-time conservative German. Pathetic in a

different way was Herr Geschke, a seedy little man with bloodshot eyes, who seemed in miserable health and almost half-demented. This former German communist deputy had

been in a concentration camp for twelve years. He was now head of the Welfare

Department at the Berlin Town Hall and, as he told his story of torture and gas-chambers, he suddenly broke down and wept.

Germans released from concentration camps—even broken reeds like Geschke—played

an importent part during those early weeks in Berlin in selecting personnel for the

Russian-sponsored administration, and in doing "democratic" propaganda and denazification work. Before the constitution of the four parties authorised by the Russian authorities, an organisation called ANTIFA was active in purging the administration and in running the "cultural life" of Berlin—and particularly the Berlin radio.

In a sense, the Russians were building on sand; for soon the greater part of Berlin was going to be taken over by "the others". The Russians were invariably bitter about it, claimed that they were building up a coherent anti-Nazi Germany, but that, in Berlin, at any rate, "all this good work would go to pot". I was to remember some of these arguments when, three years later, they attempted their abortive Berlin Blockade.

This was a different Berlin from what it had been. Subdued, frightened, grateful for small mercies, grateful even for a revival of some of the old Berlin frivolity. In one of the surviving buildings of the Kurfürstendamm there was a cabaret attended by well-dressed Germans with furtive looks, by tarts and Russian officers. The whole show was

unspeakably vulgar. Some dirty little song about sonny asking Grandpa whether he and Grandma had really made love in their time and granddad replying: "Olala", or some such muck. Then a tall boy with a guitar boomed Russian folksongs in broken Russian

and a "Song of Transylvania" with the refrain: "Deine Augen brennen heisser als Paprika" ("Your eyes burn hotter than paprika"), then there was a tap-dancer, a xylophone player, and a Polish or Jewish female who howled Parlez-moi d'amour. There were no anti-Nazi cracks, but the theme-song was a boost for local Berlin patriotism. It was called Berlin kommt wieder, and the slimy audience kept joining in with great gusto.

At the stall they sold copies of this song, and at the buffet some foul ersatz orangeade.

The managers of the cabaret cringed and bowed deeply to the Russian officers.

This was a bit of West Berlin—under the Russians. It almost had a whiff of Isherwood!

*

A few days later, Marshal Zhukov gave his famous press conference on the verandah of his villa overlooking the Wannsee. Vyshinsky was also there. With Zhukov, one felt in the presence of a very great man. Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, and now the offensive which had started on the Vistula on January 12, and had ended here, in Berlin—Zhukov's name was inseparable from them all. But his manner was simple, and full of bonhomie.

He spoke of the Battle of Berlin:

This was not like Moscow or Leningrad, or even Stalingrad... During the first years of the war, we often had to fight against fearful odds; nor did our officers and

soldiers have as much experience as they have now. In this Battle of Germany we

had great superiority in men, tanks, aircraft, guns and everything. Three-to-one, sometimes even five-to-one. But the important thing was not to take Berlin— that

was a foregone conclusion—but to take it in the shortest possible time. The

Germans were expecting our blow and we had to think out how to introduce the

important element of surprise.

I attacked along the whole front, and at night. As prisoners later told us, the great artillery barrage at night was what they had least expected. They had expected night attacks, but not a general attack at night. After the artillery barrage, our tanks went into action. We had used 22,000 guns and mortars along the Oder, and 4,000 tanks

were now thrown in. We also used 4,000 to 5,000 planes. During the first day alone there were 15,000 sorties.

The great offensive was launched at 4 a.m. on April 16, and we devised some novel features: to help the tanks to find their way, we used searchlights, 200 of them.

These powerful searchlights not only helped the tanks, but also blinded the enemy, who could not aim properly at our tanks.

Very soon we broke through the German defences on the Oder along a wide front.

Realising this, the German high command threw what reserves it had outside Berlin into the fray, and even some reserves from inside Berlin. But it was no good. These reserves were smashed from the air or by our tanks, and when our troops broke into Berlin, the city was largely denuded of troops. Most of Berlin's antiaircraft guns had been thrown into the Oder Battle, and the city was defenceless against air attack.

More than half-a-million German soldiers took part in the Berlin operation. 300,000

were taken prisoner even before the capitulation, 150,000 were killed; the rest fled.

And he concluded this brief story in characteristically professional fashion:

It was an interesting and instructive battle, especially as regards tempos and the technique of night-fighting on such a scale.

[He said he had had to stay awake for six nights running. He and his officers had only been able to do this by sipping cognac. Vodka, though a good stimulant for the troops, was no good for generals as after a time it had a soporific effect.]

The main point is that the Germans were smashed on the Oder, and in Berlin itself it was, in fact, just one immense mopping-up operation. It was very, very different from the Battle of Moscow.

[More recent Soviet accounts of the Berlin Operation, notably in vol. V of the official Soviet history of the war (IVOVSS, V, pp. 288-90) published in 1963 show that it was a much more complex affair than Zhukov suggested. In this battle three-and-a-half million people were involved on the two sides, 50,000 guns and mortars, 8,000 tanks and mobile guns, and over 9,000 planes. In this Berlin operation, the Russians smashed seventy

German infantry divisions, twelve armoured and eleven motorised divisions. Before the actual capitulation of the Germans on May 8, the Russians captured 480,000 prisoners, besides 1,500 tanks, over 4,000 planes and 10,000 guns. The History stresses that the Berlin Operation was carried out not only by the 1st Belorussian Front under Zhukov, but also by two other Fronts, the 1st Ukrainian and the 2nd Belorussian. The Red Army,

according to the History, had "crushing superiority" in this operation. It also says that the German soldiers and officers, blinded by Nazi propaganda, went on fighting fanatically till the very end and that, between April 16 and May 8, they inflicted very serious losses on the Russians. The three fronts directly concerned with the Berlin operation lost

305,000 men in dead, wounded and missing— chiefly during the breakthrough on the

Oder and Neisse and during the fighting inside Berlin. They lost over 2,000 tanks and mobile guns, 1,200 guns, 527 planes. "The Anglo-American casualties during the whole of 1945 were 260,000 men." Several hundred, if not thousand, Russians were killed in the storming of the Reichstag alone. So the fighting inside Berlin was much more serious than merely "a vast mopping-up operation", as Zhukov called it. It seems apparent from the discrepancies between some of the above figures and those quoted by Zhukov that he spoke chiefly of his 1st Belorussian Front, rather than of the more "general" Berlin operation. The rivalry between him and other top generals may have had something to do with it.]

Somebody asked what the Russians' relations with the Germans would be. That, he said, depended on how the Germans behaved; the sooner they drew the necessary conclusions

from what had happened, the better. He (Zhukov) was certainly in favour of a quick trial of the German war criminals. He thought there was agreement on that point among all the Allies. "And on other points?" somebody asked. "On other points," he said, "there's also got to be agreement if we don't want to play into the hands of the Germans."

What rôle, if any, would now be played by the Free German Committee? "It's no longer of any consequence," Zhukov said, and smiled, thus pretty well confirming that it had never been more than a propaganda device. "And the so-called German anti-Fascists?"

"Why 'so-called'?" Zhukov said. "There are some genuine ones, though not perhaps very many yet. For twelve years they've had Hitler propaganda pumped into them... "

"And what happened to Hitler?"

Zhukov suddenly became very cautious (quite unlike Sokolovsky when he had talked to

me only a few days before). For one thing, he had Vyshinsky sitting by his side. "A mysterious business," he said, and then told for the first time the story that was going to be flashed all round the world:

A few days before the fall of Berlin he married Eva Braun. We know this from the

diary of one of his A.D.C.'s. But we have not discovered any corpse that could be identified as Hitler's. He may have escaped in a plane at the last moment.

"Wouldn't you say, Marshal, that that was most unlikely?" I asked.

Zhukov ignored the question, and went on:

"Martin Bormann who was in Berlin almost till the very end, appears to have escaped."

"And who was Eva Braun? " somebody asked.

Vyshinsky grinned and chipped in: "Maybe a girl, maybe a boy."

Zhukov (laughing): "Somebody said she was a cinema actress, but I don't know."

Vyshinsky: "Maybe a Jewess—". (Laughter.)

After saying that Goebbels and his whole family had been found dead, Zhukov then

turned to other things. Now that the war in Europe (he stressed in Europe) was at an end, a large part of the Red Army would be demobilised.

Then he talked informally about himself, recalled that he had been born in a village near Moscow in 1896, that, from the age of eleven, he had worked in a fur shop, that, in World War I he had fought first as a private, then as an N.C.O. in the Novgorod Dragoons, and had been awarded two St George's crosses and two St George's medals.

"For personal bravery," Vyshinsky commented.

"For capturing German officers during night reconnaissance," Zhukov explained.

"He was good at night operations even then," Vyshinsky grinned.

Zhukov recalled that he had been a Party member since 1919, and then talked of his

experiences in the Far East where he routed the Japanese in the battle of Halkin Gol in 1939.

"The Germans," he said, "are technically better-equipped than the Japanese, and they are very good soldiers—no use denying it— but, taken as a whole, the German army lacks

the Japs' real fanaticism."

Then Zhukov spoke of what he called his "principal activities" during the war that had just ended:

From the very beginning of the war I was engaged on preparing the defence of

Moscow. For a time, before the Battle of Moscow, there was also Leningrad to take care of, and then there was the Battle of Moscow itself. After that I had to organise the defence of Stalingrad and then the Stalingrad offensive. I was Deputy

Commissar of Defence under Comrade Stalin. Then there was the Ukraine, and

Warsaw— and you know the rest.

"And Kursk, and Belorussia?" somebody asked.

"Yes, I had something to do with those too," Zhukov smiled.

Vyshinsky beamed almost obsequiously: "Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kursk,

Warsaw, and so on, right on to Berlin—pretty wonderful!" he said.

Zhukov added a tribute to Comrade Stalin "and his great understanding of military affairs"—but this came almost as an afterthought. There were rivalries amongst the Soviet marshals—none of whom, except himself, he had even mentioned at this press

conference—and, moreover, the Party (and Stalin) were conscious of Zhukov's immense

popularity in the army and in the country. Very understandably, Zhukov had a very high opinion of himself and, with a curious mixture of modesty and almost boyish boastfulness, he tended to take credit for practically all the decisive victories the Red Army had won. Stalin did not like it at all.

That day at Wendenschloss Vyshinsky, while keeping an eye on him, treated him

outwardly with the greatest obsequiousness and admiration; but one could vaguely feel that Zhukov did not like Vyshinsky (how could he?) and resented his supervision.

[When Harry Hopkins saw Zhukov about the same time, he was also unable to talk to

him without Vyshinsky always being there, and suggesting to him how to answer

questions. (Sherwood, op. cit., p. 904).]

When, some months later, Marshal Zhukov was recalled from Germany and appointed to

the relatively obscure post of Commander of the Odessa Military District, all kinds of explanations were offered for his semi-disgrace. One was that he had proved himself

much too independent of the Soviet Party bosses; another, that he had objected to the excessive dismantling of factories in the Soviet Zone, and that he also treated various Party and Trade Union delegations who had come to Berlin with great casualness,

sometimes even refusing to see them; it was also said that he had let his troops run wild in Germany, and finally, that he was much too friendly and soft in his relations with the Western Allies, particularly with Eisenhower. In reality, there seems little doubt that Zhukov's eclipse was the most striking manifestation of all of Stalin's and the Party's determination to put the Red Army in its place. Zhukov was too popular in the country.

After Stalin's death, Zhukov made a spectacular come-back; and although he saved

Khrushchev in 1957 from what later came to be known as the "anti-Party Group", Khrushchev also decided, before long, that Zhukov was too strong a personality for his taste. The Marshal was accused of looking upon the Army as a distinct political force; he was also accused of immodesty and self-glorification at the expense of the other Russian generals, and of having encouraged in the Army his own "personality cult". He was pensioned off at the end of 1957; his great rival, Marshal Konev wrote a disobliging article on him in Pravda, and the immense rôle he had played in saving Leningrad and Moscow and in winning so many other victories was deliberately played down in all