Russia at war 1941-1945

telegraph wires; for setting fire to forests, enemy stores and road convoys. In the occupied areas intolerable conditions must be created for the enemy and his

accomplices, who must be persecuted and destroyed at every step...

This war, Stalin continued, was not an ordinary war between two armies; it was a war of the entire Soviet people against the German-Fascist troops. The purpose of this all-people war was not only to destroy the threat hanging over the Soviet Union, but also to help all the nations of Europe groaning under the German yoke. In this war the Soviet people

would have faithful allies in the peoples of Europe and America, including the German people enslaved by their ringleaders ... the Soviet people's struggle for the freedom of their country would be merged with the struggle of the peoples of Europe and America for their independence and their democratic freedoms:

In this connection the historic statement of Mr Churchill on Britain's help to the Soviet Union and the statement by the United States Government on its willingness to help our country can only meet with a feeling of gratitude in the hearts of our people, and are highly indicative.

And then came the conclusion:

Comrades, our forces are immeasurably large. The insolent enemy must soon

become aware of this. Together with the Red Army, many thousands of workers,

kolkhozniki and intellectuals are going to the war. Millions more will rise. The workers of Moscow and Leningrad have already begun to form an opolcheniye

(home guard) of many thousands in support of the Red Army. Such opolcheniye

forces must be constituted in every town threatened with invasion...

A State Defence Committee has been formed to deal with the rapid mobilisation of

all the country's resources; all the power and authority of the State are vested in it.

[The members of this Committee, presided over by Stalin, were Molotov (Deputy

Chairman), Voroshilov, Malenkov and Beria, a fact not mentioned in the 1961 History, which merely states that Stalin was Chairman.]

This State Defence Committee has embarked upon its work, and it calls upon the

whole people to rally round the Party of Lenin and Stalin, and round the Soviet

Government for the selfless support of the Red Army and Navy, for the routing of

the enemy, for our victory...

All the strength of the people must be used to smash the enemy. Onward, to victory!

The effect of this speech, addressed to a nervous, and often frightened and bewildered people, was very important. Until then there had been something artificial in the

adulation of Stalin; his name was associated not only with the stupendous effort of the Five-Year Plans, but also with the ruthless methods employed in the collectivisation campaign and, worse still, with the terror of the Purges.

The Soviet people now felt that they had a leader to look to. In his relatively short broadcast Stalin not only created the hope, if not yet the certainty, of victory, but he laid down, in short significant sentences, the whole programme of wartime conduct for a

whole nation. He also appealed to the national pride, to the patriotic instincts of the Russian people. It was a great pull-yourselves-together speech, a blood-sweat-and-tears speech, with Churchill's post-Dunkirk speech as its only parallel.

An admirable description of the effect of Stalin's speech is to be found in Konstantin Simonov's famous novel, The Living and the Dead; here the speech was listened to in a field hospital:

Stalin spoke in a toneless, slow voice, with a strong Georgian accent. Once or twice, during his speech, you could hear a glass click as he drank water. His voice was low and soft, and might have seemed perfectly calm, but for his heavy, tired breathing, and that water he kept drinking during the speech...

There was a discrepancy between that even voice and the tragic situation of which he spoke; and in this discrepancy there was strength. People were not surprised. It was what they were expecting from Stalin.

They loved him in different ways, wholeheartedly, or with reservations; admiring

him and yet fearing him; and some did not like him at all. But nobody doubted his courage and his iron will. And now was a time when these two qualities were needed more than anything else in the man who stood at the head of a country at war.

Stalin did not describe the situation as tragic; such a word would have been hard to imagine as coming from him; but the things of which he spoke— opolcheniye,

partisans, occupied territories, meant the end of illusions... The truth he told was a bitter truth, but at last it was uttered, and people felt that they stood more firmly on the ground...

And the very fact that Stalin should have talked about the unhappy beginning of a vast and terrible war without changing his vocabulary, and that he should have

spoken in his almost usual way about the great but not insuperable difficulties that would have to be overcome— this, too, suggested not weakness, but great strength.

"My friends", Sintsov repeated over and over again. And suddenly he realised that in all the great and even gigantic work that Stalin had been doing, there had been a lack of just these words: "Brothers and sisters! My friends!"—and, even more so, the feelings that stood behind these words. Was it only a tragedy like the war that could give birth to these words and these feelings? ... Above all, what was left in his heart after Stalin's speech was a tense expectation of a change for the better.

This passage is all the more remarkable as it was written in 1958, when the general

attitude to Stalin had already become extremely critical; but Simonov was clearly

unwilling to distort history on this cardinal point. Other works written in the late 1950's, without exception, admit the extreme importance of Stalin's broadcast of July 3—even though some do not even mention his name, but merely speak of a "government

communication".

Chapter IV SMOLENSK: THE FIRST CHECK TO THE

BLITZKRIEG

The State Defence Committee, the formation of which Stalin had announced in his July 3

speech, was charged not only with the military conduct of the war but also with "the rapid mobilisation of all the country's resources". Among the decisions it made in these crucial days were many of far-reaching importance. They concerned the whole field of economic wartime organisation, including industrial mobilisation and the evacuation of whole

industries to the east as well as reorganisation within the armed forces.

Militarily, the State Defence Committee decided to decentralise the command system to some extent by dividing the enormous front into three main sectors, each with a

Command of its own. Voroshilov was appointed to command the "North-Western

Direction", including the Baltic and Northern Fleets; Timoshenko was appointed to the

"Western Direction", and Budienny to the "South-Western Direction", including the Black Sea Fleet. As principal members of their War Councils (i.e. the senior Party leaders for the areas concerned) they were given Zhdanov, Bulganin and Khrushchev

respectively.

On July 16 the military commissars were re-introduced. L. Z. Mekhlis, head of the

Political Propaganda of the Red Army, had fanatically supported this measure.

[ Mekhlis had been notorious in the past as one of the "purgers" of the Army, and was held directly responsible for the liquidation of Blucher. He was something of a

"politisation" fanatic, and had been on particularly bad terms with Timoshenko. A protégé of Voroshilov, he was unpopular with the "younger" generals, and finally, in 1942, after the disastrous Kerch operation in the Crimea, he was demoted. He was

sharply disliked not only by men like Zhukov and Rokossovsky, who did not favour the re-introduction of the officer-and-commissar dual command in the Army in 1941, but

also, on more personal grounds, by some top-ranking members of the Politburo, such as Shcherbakov. The eventual abolition of dual command should not be confused with the

Political Departments in the Army, which continued as before. On Mekhlis, see John

Erickson, The Soviet High Command, London, 1962.]

One cannot help suspecting that the re-introduction of commissars was something of a panic measure due to the fear of a latent, if not open, conflict between the Army and the Party, and the doubt whether some of the officers (many of whom had highly unpleasant memories of the purges) would prove reliable. It is difficult to be sure how much hostility to the Party there was among the officers. In the higher ranks, many veterans of the Revolution such as Budienny and Voroshilov were probably more "Party" than "Army", and others, like Konev, were half-and-half. But several of the brilliant younger generals, such as Zhukov, Tolbukhin, Rokossovsky and Govorov, were probably more "Army"

than "Party". The last two, for instance, had themselves been purged in 1937 and, though now fully rehabilitated, must still have had a good many reservations about the Party, however strong their patriotism.

In fact the military commissars were to prove a cause of friction and were to be abolished again in the autumn of 1942.

Similarly, it was decided at the end of June to mobilise members of the Party and

Komsomol as "politboitsy", i.e. "political soldiers" to be incorporated in the Army. Each obkom or kraikom (i.e. provincial party committee) was to mobilise within three days between 500 and 5,000 Communists, and place them at the disposal of the Commissariat of Defence. In this way 95,000 politboitsy were mobilised, and of these 58,000 were sent into the Army in the field within the first three months of the war.

Another measure was the approval of the constitution of the opolcheniye, i.e. mainly workers' battalions, in cities like Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa, Makeyevka,

Gorlovka and other industrial centres. These "home guard" units were to be used extensively— and often very wastefully—to fill in gaps at the front, notably in the

defence of Moscow, Leningrad and Odessa. The story of these poorly-trained and poorly-armed units is one of the most tragic in the whole war. Judging from the available figures, the eagerness to join the opolcheniye varied from place to place. It was highest in Leningrad, rather lower in Moscow, and much lower in Kiev.

Apart from the opolcheniye, a variety of other emergency formations were constituted in both towns and villages, such as anti-paratroop units, and orders were given for air-raid precautions:

All Soviet citizens between the ages of 16 and 60 (men) and 18 and 50 (women) must

compulsorily take part in civil-defence groups to be constituted by enterprises, offices and house committees. The training in anti-aircraft and anti-gas defence is to be carried out by the Osoaviakhim.

[The Osoaviakhim was the "Society for aiding defence and the aircraft and chemical industries"; it was a "voluntary society", set up long before the war, for giving some military experience to the population. Later, during the war, it was renamed DOSAAF

(Voluntary society for aiding the army, air force and navy).]

Another important set of instructions issued at the end of June concerned the organisation of partisan warfare in the enemy rear; but while the principle of the thing was important, large-scale partisan war behind the German lines did not develop until considerably later.

While the State Defence Committee were making these plans and also laying the

foundations for a thorough economic reorganisation of the country, the military situation continued to be disastrous. At the beginning of July there were large gaps in the front.

The "first echelon" of the Red Army had suffered such appalling losses in the first weeks of the invasion that it scarcely still counted as an effective force. The hopes of holding a new defence line (referred to by the Western press as the "Stalin Line") running from Narva on the Gulf of Finland, through Pskov, Polotsk, and then along the Dnieper to

Kherson on the Black Sea, had been smashed. And though there were still reserves of

men, the Red Army was suffering severe shortages of weapons of all kinds.

In these circumstances the Soviet command had to decide on priorities, and it decided that the first priority was to make every effort to hold up the enemy in the "Smolensk-Moscow direction".

Seen in perspective, the battle of Smolensk was to mark the beginning of a new phase in the campaign and, indeed, to introduce a decidedly different pattern into the struggle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In the Smolensk area, for the first time, Soviet resistance succeeded in bringing the German blitzkrieg advance to a halt, if only for a couple of months. Thus, at the very centre of gravity of the invaders' attack, on the direct road to Moscow, the freedom of manoeuvre of the German High Command was seriously

restricted and its all-important time schedule upset.

It was on July 16 that von Bock's advance guards reached the outskirts of Smolensk—and ran into resistance such as they had not met before. Hitherto they had encountered only limited nests of resistance and relatively small units making heroic and suicidal last-ditch stands. This time they were met with firm resistance on a coherent and relatively wide front.

The Russians were determined not to allow the enemy to advance much further. They

threw in reserves along a wide front from Velikie Luki to Mozyr, and their counter-

attacks were successful in checking the German advance. Though Smolensk itself fell, heavy fighting continued in the area, and for the rest of July and August the Germans failed to break through the Russian line, firmly stabilised about twenty to twenty-five miles east of Smolensk—the Yartsevo-Yelnya-Desna Line.

As usual, German and Russian histories disagree about which side had the numerical

advantage in men and material in the Smolensk battle. General Guderian, for example, has referred to "the Russians' great numerical superiority in tanks". In view of the heavy Russian losses earlier, this is extremely improbable, though it must be remembered that, after such a deep and rapid advance into enemy territory, many of the German tanks may not have been operational any more. Wear and tear would have taken their toll, and the supply lines were by now so extended (in a country with inadequate roads) that spares and fuel may well not have been arriving at the front quickly enough, or in the quantities needed.

Such numerical comparisons are, in any case, often misleading— whether in the heat of the battle, or after the event—and it would be fruitless to discuss the rival claims in detail here. There were, however, three factors which favoured the Russians in the battle around Smolensk: Firstly, the morale of the Russian troops was now much higher than it had

been; the thought that they were not fighting in distant Belorussia, but literally on the road to Moscow had an important psychological effect. Secondly, Soviet artillery, which was almost the only weapon the Red Army had with which to fight both tanks and

aircraft, was considerably better than the German. Thirdly, very important militarily and even more so psychologically, there was the first appearance of the devastating katyusha mortars. As Marshal Yeremenko later wrote:

We first tried out this superb weapon at Rudnya, north-west of Smolensk. In the

afternoon of July 15, the earth shook with the unusual explosion of jet mines. Like red-tailed comets, the mines were hurled into the air. The frequent and dazzling

explosions, the like of which had never been seen, struck the imagination. The effect of the simultaneous explosion of dozens of these mines was terrific. The Germans

fled in panic, and even our own troops near the points of the explosions, who for reasons of secrecy had not been warned that this new weapon would be used, rushed back from the front line.

[ Voyenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 1959, No. 1, p. 51 (Historico-military Journal), quoted by IVOSS.]

The Russians had also thrown in a few modern planes, so that German air supremacy was no longer quite as complete as it had been during the first three weeks of the war.

But whatever the numerical superiority of either side, the essential fact remains that the Russians succeeded in slowing down, and then halting, the German blitzkrieg just east of Smolensk—and that this had several important consequences.

From the Russian point of view it was a desperate rearguard action—but one on a large enough scale, and long enough sustained, to give the Russian High Command a

breathing-space. The "Smolensk Line" was the shield behind which the Soviet armies were able to regroup, and bring up reserves, for the defence of Moscow. But for this, Moscow might well have fallen, as Hitler had originally planned, before the winter set in.

From the German point of view the Russian stand in the Smolensk area was the first

check to their plans, and the resulting delay faced them with a major strategic problem.

On August 4, when the heavy fighting around Smolensk had already gone on for about

three weeks, Hitler held a conference at Novy Borissov, at the headquarters of Army

Group Centre. According to Guderian, who attended it, Hitler designated the industrial area of Leningrad as his primary objective. He had not yet decided whether Moscow or the Ukraine would come next, but seemed to incline towards the latter target... He hoped to be in possession of Moscow and Kharkov by the time winter began. But no decisions were reached on this day.

[Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader (London, 1952), pp. 189-90.]

For the next twenty days heavy, but still inconclusive fighting continued in the Smolensk area, and when Hitler held another conference on August 23, Guderian's pleading in

favour of a concentrated drive on Moscow was turned down. Hitler had finally made up his mind to attack the Ukraine and the Crimea, saying that the raw materials and the agriculture of the Ukraine were vitally important to the prosecution of the war. As for the Crimea, it was "a Soviet aircraft carrier for attacking the Rumanian oilfields", and must therefore be eliminated. "My generals," he said, "know nothing about the economic aspects of war." Whether or not Hitler still thought that, under this new plan, Moscow could fall before the winter, it was clear to Guderian that this was now most unlikely, and he took Hitler's decision very badly—or at least so he said after the war. He was later to refer to Hitler's decision to move two armies and one tank group to the south, instead of concentrating the attack on Moscow, as a "fatal error".

*

Though the Russians dismiss as fantastic the German claim to have captured 348,000

prisoners, over 3,000 tanks and over 3,000 guns in the Smolensk fighting, Russian losses were undoubtedly heavy. They themselves admit the loss of 32,000 men "missing", 685

tanks and 1,176 guns.

[IVOVSS, vol. 2, p. 77.]

Nevertheless the Smolensk battle was one of the turning points of the war. The Russians had halted the German blitzkrieg, and had forced Hitler to change his plans. Furthermore, it had an important effect on morale within the Red Army. Whereas, initially, many

Russian soldiers had been, as it were, psychologically overwhelmed by the power of the German army, and particularly by the number of their tanks, by the end of July more and more Russian soldiers had learnt to use weapons such as grenades and "Molotov

cocktails" against tanks, and (perhaps because of pep-talks by the Army's propaganda services) a healthy hatred of the Germans more and more took the place of sheer fear. An important aid to morale was a lavish distribution of medals and decorations, though not as lavish as it became later. About a thousand decorations were awarded after Smolensk and seven men were given the title "Hero of the Soviet Union".

Chapter V CLOSE-UP ONE: MOSCOW AT THE BEGINNING

OF THE WAR

I arrived in Russia on July 3, 1941, that is, twelve days after the beginning of the German invasion. Geographically, the journey from London to Moscow was of a kind that was

only conceivable in wartime: travelling with the second batch of the British Military Mission, I was flown to Inverness, then to the Shetlands, and from there, by Catalina flying boat—all in one sixteen-hour hop—to Archangel. The last few hours we flew over the vast uninhabited tundra country of the Kola Peninsula. Then, after flying over the White Sea and Archangel harbour, we came down on the waters of the Dvina river, some miles south of Archangel. Here, on board a sort of large house-boat, a sumptuous supper had been laid on by the local military authorities, and this supper continued, right through the "white" night till two or three in the morning. Among the members of this second batch of the Military Mission—the first batch, with General Mason MacFarlane at its

head, had flown to Moscow a few days before—were two Home Office officials in

colonel's uniform, one a fire-fighting expert, who was taking a stirrup pump to Moscow, and the other a shelter expert.

Our hosts were a colonel and two majors, both extremely amiable, and, as the evening progressed, other officers joined the party. Several referred to Stalin's broadcast that day, and thought it would be a very long and hard war, but that Russia would win it in the end.

One of the majors assured me that Moscow's air defences wese such that it would

probably never be bombed, and that the same was true of Leningrad.

All of them were eagerly interested in Britain with which Russia had, obviously, had very little contact for a long time. The curious thing was that both the colonel and the two majors showed a very special interest in Rudolf Hess and seemed, in fact, rather worried about him. They had read Churchill's speech and said that the Russian people had been very gratified by it, though they knew that Churchill had been one of the chief

"interventionists" in the Civil War; even so, one of them asked, was I really absolutely sure that Hess's proposals had been turned down? They were, obviously, not quite sure yet of either Britain's or America's disposition.

Outside, it had been a "white" night throughout. The fir trees on the steep sandy banks of the river were silhouetted against the brief twilight. There were lots of mosquitoes about.

After a couple of hours' sleep we were taken in motor-boats some distance up the river and then by car to an airfield. At 6 a.m. the sun was already high in the sky. Blades of grass and wild flowers were swept by the wind as we walked to the plane. It was a

luxurious giant Douglas, and for three or four hours we flew over what looked like one vast interminable forest. Then, at Rybinsk, we crossed the Volga and, after flying over some more thickly populated country, we reached the outskirts of Moscow.

On the face of it, Moscow looked perfectly normal. The streets were crowded and the

shops were still full of goods. There seemed no food shortage of any kind; in Maroseika Street, I walked that first day into a big food shop and was surprised by the enormous display of sweets and pastila and marmelad; people were still buying food freely, without any coupons. In their summer clothes the young people of Moscow looked anything but

shabby. Most of the girls wore white blouses, and the men white, yellow or blue sports shirts, or buttoned-up shirts with embroidered collars. Posters on the walls were being eagerly read, and there were certainly plenty of posters: a Russian tank crushing a giant crab with a Hitler moustache, a Red soldier ramming his bayonet down the throat of a giant Hitler-faced rat— Razdavit' fascistskuyu gadinu, it said: crush the Fascist vermin; appeals to women—"Women, go and work on the collective farms, replace the men now in the Army! " On numerous houses the front pages of that morning's Pravda or Izvestia with the full text of Stalin's speech were stuck up, and everywhere crowds of people were re-reading it.

All sorts of peculiar things were happening: I saw the last issue of Bezbozhnik, the

"godless" paper; it was entirely devoted to indignant denunciations of the Nazi persecutions of the Protestant and Catholic Churches in Germany! Clearly, Stalin was working for the greatest unity among the Russian people, and anti-religious propaganda had completely vanished since the war had begun. However, the Bezbozhnik's volte-face was a bit blatant, and, in fact, this was to be its last issue. It was closed down "owing to paper shortage". Instead, Emelian Yaroslavsky, the "anti-God" leader, was publishing pamphlets like The Great Patriotic War, in the best nationalist tradition, which they were now selling on bookstalls.

Partly perhaps as a result of Stalin's warning against spies and "diversionists" there was a real spy mania in Moscow. People seemed to see spies and paratroopers everywhere. The British army N.C.O.s who had travelled with me from Archangel had a most unpleasant

experience on that very first day. From the airfield, they had gone to Moscow in a lorry, together with the Mission's luggage. At a street corner they had been stopped by the militia; puzzled by the unfamiliar British uniforms, a crowd had gathered round them and somebody had said "parachutists", whereupon the crowd had grown angry and

vociferous. So the N.C.O.s had to be taken off to a police station, where they were finally rescued by an Embassy official.

Everyone was being asked for papers on all kinds of occasions, and it was absolutely essential to have these in order, especially after the midnight curfew, when a special pass was required. Speaking anything but Russian aroused immediate suspicion.

Auxiliary militia-women were particularly keen. I remember walking with Jean

Champenois [The Agence Havas correspondent in Moscow who joined the Free French

in 1941.] along Gorki Street at sunset, when suddenly a militia-woman pounced on him shouting: "Why are you smoking?" and ordered him to put out his cigarette at once; she thought he might be signalling to German aircraft!

All day long, soldiers were marching along the streets, usually singing. The opolcheniye movement was in full swing; during those first days of July tens of thousands of men, many of them elderly, volunteered, appearing at assembly points—such as the one

opposite the house I lived in, in Khokhlovsky Lane—by the hundred, all carrying small bundles or suitcases. After being sorted out—and partly rejected—they were sent to

training camps.

Apart from that, the mood in Moscow still seemed reasonably calm. People could still be seen laughing and joking in the streets though, significantly, very few talked openly about the war.

I found the Lenin Mausoleum closed, and was waved away, but without any explanation, by two bayoneted guards. On the surface, life seemed, in many ways, to go on as before.

Fourteen theatres were open and invariably crowded, and restaurants and hotels

continued to be packed.

For all that, Moscow was preparing for air raids. Already on July 9, special trucks began to run along the tram-lines, distributing heaps of sand. That week I wrote an article on the London blitz and on British air raid precautions, and this was promptly published in Izvestia, was much talked about, and even produced some polemics on the pros and cons of pouring buckets of water over incendiaries, which I had declared to be wrong. My

story of the London blitz was widely discussed, all the more so as during the Soviet-German Pact the Russian press had not dwelt very much on Britain's experiences of

bombing.

The prospect of German air raids led, by the second week of July, to a large-scale

evacuation of children from Moscow. Many women were also urged to leave and to work

on kolkhozes. Railway stations were crowded with people who had permits to leave Moscow. Many of the women I saw at the Kursk Station on the night of July 11, on their way to Gorki, were weeping; many thought they would not get back to Moscow for a

long time, and perhaps, for all they knew, the Germans would come.

*

Anglo-Russian relations were rapidly improving. Sir Stafford Cripps, who had been cold-shouldered by the Russians right up to the beginning of the Nazi invasion, had two

meetings with Stalin in the second week of July, and on July 12 the Anglo-Soviet

Agreement was solemnly signed by Molotov and Cripps in Molotov's office at the

Kremlin, in the presence of Stalin, Admiral Kuznetsov, General Shaposhnikov, General Mason MacFarlane, and Laurence Cadbury, head of the British Trade Mission. Stalin,

through an interpreter, talked at some length to Mason MacFarlane, and chocolates and Soviet champagne were served.

At Lozovsky's [ A Deputy Foreign Commissar and the Deputy-Chief of Sovinform-

bureau. His chief in the latter organisation was that extremely hard "Stalinist" party boss, member of the Politburo, A. S. Shcherbakov] press conference on the following

afternoon, the Russians were still showing surprise at the signing of the agreement

providing for mutual aid and promising not to make a separate peace with Germany.

Lozovsky himself seemed pleasantly surprised, and said it was the biggest blow for

Hitler, since it smashed his plan for fighting East and West separately. Asked whether the USA could be considered a silent partner to this agreement, he said gallantly: "The USA is too great a country to be silent."

The press set-up in Moscow during those first weeks of the war was a very strange one.

The only official sources of information were the Soviet press with their war

communiqués and their war reportages, and these press conferences held three times a week by Lozovsky.

The reportages in the press dealt chiefly with isolated cases of Russian bravery and heroism, though, occasionally, especially in the army paper, Red Star, there were some useful analytical articles. The communiqués tended to be cagey and often gave only the vaguest indications of where the fighting was actually taking place, but people soon learned to read between the lines. Fighting in "the Minsk direction" or "the Smolensk direction" usually meant that these cities had already been lost, and a study of the communiqué vocabulary taught one to understand the degree of the Russian setbacks;

thus "heavy defensive battles against superior enemy forces" meant that the Russians were in full and disorderly retreat; this was the worst of all the communiqué phrases.

The general tendency of Lozovsky's press conferences was to suggest that all the Russian setbacks were temporary; that, whatever the loss of territory, the Germans were not going to win; that Moscow and Leningrad, in any case, would not be lost; that Russian losses were admittedly high, but that German losses were higher still —the most questionable of his arguments; that relations between Germany and her satellites were highly strained, also a questionable proposition in the summer and autumn of 1941. Occasionally he

revealed important facts—such as the destruction by the Russians of the Dnieper Dam or the deportation to the east of the entire population of the Volga-German Autonomous

Soviet Republic—a matter of about half-a-million people. Major disasters, such as the capture by the Germans of many hundreds of thousands of prisoners, and the stupendous losses in aircraft, were not mentioned at all. On the other hand, he tended, if anything, to exaggerate the number of German tanks and aircraft engaged on the Russian Front; thus, he spoke of 10,000 German tanks taking part in the fighting.

Lozovsky was an Old Bolshevik, with a smooth, cosmopolitan veneer, a first-vintage

émigré, who had spent many years in Geneva and Paris, had known Lenin, spoke good

French, and, with his barbiche and carefully cut clothes, looked rather like an old boulevardier, whom one could well imagine on the terrace of the Napolitain during la belle époque. After the Revolution, he had been active on the Profintern, the Red Trade Union International, a body of small consequence, and later became a member of the Foreign Affairs Commissariat. With his Old Bolshevik background, he must have had some

anxious moments during the Purges; nor can he have been happy during the Soviet-

German Pact. However, Lozovsky was a good survivor though, personally, he did not fit very well into the Stalin-Molotov milieu. In 1943 he became a leading member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and this led, in the end, to his downfall; in 1949, along with other prominent members of this Committee, that perfectly harmless old man was

shot.

In 1941 he was considered—wrongly perhaps—as one of the Foreign Commissariat's

survivors of the Litvinov era, more sympathetic to the West than Molotov, though, on one notable occasion, he very clearly dissociated himself from Litvinov. It was a curious incident: just a couple of days before the signing of the Cripps-Molotov agreement,

Litvinov—who had been under a cloud since May 1939—was to speak on Moscow radio;

but when it came to the point, he spoke only on the foreign wave-lengths, and in English.

On the following morning, the Soviet press gave a few scraps of his broadcast; leaving out his "Let bygones be bygones" and "we have all made mistakes", it concentrated, instead, on the passage in which he asserted that the Germans were the common enemy

and that "there must be no de facto armistice in the West". When Lozovsky was asked what role Litvinov was going to play in future, he replied, very reluctantly, that "Mr Litvinov would presumably broadcast again."

The sources of information available to the Russian public were pretty watertight. At the very beginning of the war all private wireless sets had to be handed in to the militia; only foreign diplomats, journalists and certain Russian officials were allowed to keep theirs: everyone else had only loudspeakers giving the Moscow programme. It certainly would

have been unfortunate if some of the German propaganda stories had got round,

especially from those rusty old White-Russian colonels with their alcoholic voices—

that's at least how they sounded—who bellowed about "Stalin and his zhidy (yids)"

preparing to flee the country, about their "fat bank balances at Buenos Aires", about the

"millions of prisoners" taken by the Germans, the "desperate plight of the Red Army",

"the imminence of the fall of Moscow and Leningrad", about the Germans bringing "real socialism to Russia", and the like.

Not that the news was by any means good—even without these German commentaries.

Already, by July 11, it was known that the Germans were getting near Smolensk, and that most of the Baltic republics had been overrun; by the 14th, it was announced that fighting was taking place "in the direction of Ostrov"—which suggested a rapid German advance towards Leningrad from the south; by the 22nd, it was learned that the Finns were

fighting "in the direction of Petrozavodsk"; by July 28, that the Germans were advancing on Kiev. But the fact that, by the middle of July, the Germans seemed to have got stuck at Smolensk created in Moscow a curious state of euphoria, a feeling that perhaps the worst was over—even though the news from both the Leningrad Front and the Ukraine

continued to be distressingly bad.

The first air raid on Moscow took place on the night of July 21; what was most

impressive was the tremendous anti-aircraft barrage, with shrapnel from the anti-aircraft shells clattering down on to the streets like a hailstorm; and dozens of searchlights lighting the sky; I had never seen or heard anything like it in London. Fire-watching was organised on a vast scale. Later I heard that many of the fire-watchers had been badly injured by incendiary bombs, sometimes through inexperience but usually through sheer Russian foolhardi-ness. Youngsters would at first just pick up the bombs with their bare hands!

It was soon learned that there were three circles of anti-aircraft defences round Moscow, and that, during the first raid, barely ten or fifteen German planes (out of 200) had broken through. Some high explosive bombs and some incendiaries could be heard dropping, but only very few. There were quite a number of broken windows the next morning, a few

bomb-craters, including one in Red Square, a few fires, which were rapidly put out, but nothing very serious. On the night of July 22, there was a second blitz, which also caused only limited damage, except that over a hundred people were killed when one big shelter off Arbat Square received a direct hit. But, as on the first night, only a very small number of planes got through.

The air raids continued, off and on, through the last days of July and most of August. In the instructions issued at the end of July it was now said that sand must be used against incendiaries, rather than water—though, in reality, water continued to be used as well.

No shirking was allowed in fire-fighting. Three fellows guilty of neglect, and so held responsible for the destruction by fire of a large warehouse worth three million roubles, were shot.

[A. Werth, Moscow '41 (London, 1942), p. 100.]

I wrote at the time:

I wonder if Moscow is taking the blitz as well as London? People look grim; and

there are mighty few bomb jokes. Perhaps people here feel individually more helpless than they do in London. Ambulances are comparatively scarce, and

perhaps too precious to risk in a big blitz, and they therefore do not collect the wounded during a raid, but only after the all-clear has gone. Until then the wounded have only the local first-aid to rely upon. The fire-watching rules are very drastic, and a dangerous amount of sleep is lost... nor are most of the shelters adapted yet for sleeping.

[Ibid., p. 111.]

But, on the whole, Moscow, during those two first months of the war, presented a rather paradoxical sight. Official optimism was being, more or less, kept up by the Press. The halting of the Germans at Smolensk was made out to be of the utmost importance, even though the news from other sectors of the front was still looking highly ominous. But at least the German advance was not what it had been during the desperate first fortnight.

Conditions in Moscow were becoming more difficult. If, at the beginning of July, there was no real shortage of anything—food and cigarettes in particular were plentiful, and so were even nice-looking boxes of chocolates "made in Riga, Latvian SSR", now already in German hands—some hoarding went on in a smallish way all the time, and, by July 15,

the food shortage became very noticeable, and the mountains of cigarette packets

displayed at almost every street corner rapidly disappeared. On July 18 drastic food rationing was introduced, and the population split up into favoured, semi-favoured and unfavoured categories, the rations of the latter being already extremely meagre. True, the kolkhoz markets continued to function, but prices were rising rapidly. There were still some consumer goods in the shops, and at the end of August I even managed to buy a fur coat of sorts—made of white Siberian dogskin—in a shop in Stoleshnikov Lane, where

there was still a fairly good assortment of reindeer polushubki (fur jackets) and the like. I paid 335 roubles (about £7) for my "dog-coat"—which was cheap. But other shops, I found, were already quickly running out of shoes, galoshes and valenki (felt boots).

Restaurants were, however, continuing as before, and good meals were still served in the big hotels—the Metropole, Moskva, or in restaurants like the famous Aragvi in Gorki

Street. The Cocktail Hall in Gorki Street was also crowded; the theatres—fourteen of them—and the cinemas were working normally and many of them were competing in

producing topical and patriotic shows. The Bolshoi Theatre was closed, but its filiale in Pushkin Street was working, and there were the usual crowds of young people

clamouring outside for spare tickets, in case anybody had one, and, inside the theatre, giving frantic ovations whenever the famous tenors Lemeshev or Kozlovsky sang. At the Malyi Theatre they were playing Korneichuk's In the Ukrainian Steppes; when one of the characters said:

There is nothing more maddening than when you're interrupted just as you are

completing the roof of your cottage. If only we have five more years! But if war

comes, then we shall fight with a fierceness and anger the like of which the world has never seen!

It brought the house down.

Whenever in cinemas Stalin appeared on newsreels, there was frantic cheering—which,

in the dark, people presumably wouldn't do unless they felt like it. There could be no doubt about Stalin's authority, especially since that July 3 broadcast. He was the khoziain, the boss, who it was hoped knew what he was doing. Even so, people felt that things had gone badly wrong, and many were greatly surprised that Russia should have been

invaded at all.

Patriotic plays were being concocted, such as The Confrontation in Tairov's Kamerny Theatre, in which a German agent finally gives up in despair, finding all the Russian people completely united; or plays about Suvorov or Kutuzov, those victorious "Russian ancestors". The Ermitage Garden continued to be crowded on Sundays by a half-civilian, half-military public; here, in a crowded hall, Busia Goldstein played Tchaikovsky's

Violin Concerto, while in one of the theatres they were playing "satirical sketches"

ridiculing Hitler and Goebbels, and German soldiers and German generals and German

paratroopers, who were always outwitted by the patriotic Russian villagers. None of it, perhaps, terribly convincing in the circumstances. Nevertheless, people enjoyed it, and laughed.

Poets and composers were busy writing patriotic poems or patriotic war songs, and

soldiers would be seen marching down the streets singing the pre-war Little Blue Scarf, or Katyusha or V boi za rodinu, v boi za Stalina (Into battle for the country, into battle for Stalin), or Alexandrov's brand-new and solemn Sacred War, which was to remain a kind of semi-official anthem throughout the war years:

But alongside all this, many theatres continued as before—the Moscow Art Theatre going on with The Three Sisters, and Anna Karenina, and The School for Scandal, and the usual Bolshoi Ballet season opening at the end of September with Swan Lake, with

Lepeshinskaya dancing... This only a few days before the Germans' "final" offensive began...

The British and American Embassies were very active during those days. Cripps and

Steinhardt had become familiar Moscow figures, and could often be seen on newsreels.

At the end of July diplomatic relations were restored with the Polish Government in

London, though this was soon to lead to the first complications. When, a day or two after the Maisky-Sikorski Agreement of July 30, I asked Lozovsky whether the release of

Polish war prisoners had begun and whether steps had been taken to form a Polish Army in Russia, he became extremely cagey, saying that such steps were being taken, but with the Poles "scattered all over the Soviet Union", there were a lot of practical problems still to be settled; nor could he state how many Polish prisoners there were, since this would give away vital secrets to the enemy.

Soon after that Sikorski referred in a broadcast to the destruction of Poland by Germany and Russia in 1939, and demanded that Poland be restored within her 1939 frontiers.

Izvestia immediately protested:

Sorry, but frontiers are not immutable, and the British Government realises this, and has not guaranteed any East-European frontiers. Mr Eden said so the other

day. But with goodwill on both sides, Poland and the Soviet Union will settle this question, as they settled so many other questions. Moreover, Russia did not want to

"destroy" Poland, but merely wanted to prevent the Germans from getting too near Minsk and Kiev.

Diplomatic relations were also resumed with the exiled governments of Yugoslavia,

Belgium and Norway. An important Anglo-Soviet decision was to occupy Iran; a

decision which was to produce some unintentionally amusing stories in Pravda, whose correspondent, describing the enthusiasm with which the Soviet troops were welcomed

by the Persian population, quoted one old man as saying: "I welcome you in the name of Article 6 of the Treaty of 1921." This also gave rise to some bitter jokes like this one:

"Thank God we've occupied Persia; when the Germans have occupied the whole of

Russia, we'll have somewhere to run away to."

The highlight of diplomatic activity during that grim summer was Harry Hopkins's visit to be followed later by the Beaverbrook visit. All this, especially the Hopkins visit, had a cheering effect on the Russians. The exact purpose of the Hopkins visit was, of course, not disclosed at the time, except that it was assumed that the Americans were going to

"help". Needless to say, among ordinary Russians there was already much talk about the necessity of a Second Front; why couldn't the British land in France? Very little was, as yet, said about this officially, but Party propaganda had, clearly, spread the word that this was very important, if not absolutely decisive. A good deal was made, as a sop to Russian morale, of British air raids on Germany, though everybody seemed to feel that that wasn't enough... But of the active and, at times, cantankerous correspondence that was already going on between Churchill and Stalin, nothing was yet known to the Russian public.

Both Sir Stafford Cripps and General Mason MacFarlane, the head of the British Military Mission, were well-disposed to the Russians, even though MacFarlane occasionally

spoke of "this blood-stained régime" and Cripps had had to suffer a good many humiliations at the time of the Soviet-German Pact. I used to see a great deal of both of them during that summer and early autumn. Both considered the situation at the Russian front serious, but never hopeless, and were, clearly, convinced that the Russians would not be crushed, even though there were times when things looked pretty desperate—at the very beginning, and then after the Germans had captured Kiev and forced the Dnieper, and then again when they closed in on Leningrad, and started their "final" offensive against Moscow. But throughout, both considered Russia as a lasting and decisive factor in the struggle against Nazi Germany. Both were greatly impressed by Stalin, by his

knowledge of details, though Cripps told me, about the middle of August, that, at least on one occasion, he had found Stalin "badly rattled", adding, however, that he may have been play-acting, and simply trying to get Britain and America to do more than they were doing. Cripps was, above all, impressed by the fact that, with possibly one exception, Stalin in his negotiations with the British and the Americans always expressed himself in terms of a long war, his request for aluminium, in particular, was taken by Cripps as an indication of Stalin's thinking a long way ahead.

Some of the younger British and American diplomats and journalists, however, tended to think that the Russians were heading for catastrophe. One American woman-journalist

thought she would, "as a nootral", stay on to see from her Hotel National window the Germans march through Red Square. Some even gloated over the enthusiasm with which

the Latvians and Estonians were said to be welcoming the Germans. But, in the main,

there was among the journalists a feeling of goodwill and admiration for the Russians.

Apart from the "bourgeois" journalists—who were very few at the beginning of the war, but who received reinforcements as time went on—there were the so-called "Comintern"

journalists—correspondents of communist papers. They had had a difficult time during the Soviet-German Pact, and now kept rather aloof. Nor were the communist leaders

from foreign countries—Pieck, Thorez, Ulbricht, Gottwald, Anna Pauker, Dimitrov—to

be seen at all in 1941. It was scarcely known even whether they were still in Moscow.

Apart from the very small number of official communist correspondents—at least three of these were Americans and two were Spaniards—there were some other people vaguely

connected with the Comintern, with the foreign services of Moscow radio, or with

Moscow News, among them the once-famous Borodin, who had been Soviet Russia's foremost emissary in China; many of these were survivors of all kinds of purges, and some had been only recently allowed to return from exile; they were, as it were, the flotsam and jetsam of a now bygone era. The Russians did not encourage them to mix

with "respectable" allied, though bourgeois, correspondents. One of the best of these seemingly lost souls was John Gibbons, a convinced Glasgow communist, who had

fought the Black-and-Tans in his early youth and had, since the closing down of the

Daily Worker in 1939, been working on Moscow Radio. He was one of the few people I knew who lived in the famous Comintern hotel, the Lux, in Gorki Street. His wife, a cosy sentimental fat woman, continued to pine for her native Southampton. But John Gibbons, though he had lived through many sombre crises since 1936, remained a strangely happy and balanced man. True, during the next grim winter of 1941-2, he was to suffer deeply from having tea without sugar and only a piece of dry bread, while his boss on Moscow Radio, with a higher-category ration card, was in the same office eating ham and eggs.

"It's part of the system," he would say, "and no doubt they are right, but it was bloody unpleasant to smell the ham and eggs. All the more so as the boss thought it was quite normal, and never offered me even a scrap of the ham."

Chapter VI CLOSE-UP TWO: AUTUMN JOURNEY TO THE

SMOLENSK FRONT

The Battle of Yelnya, south-east of Smolensk, which went on throughout the whole of

August, was not a major battle of the Soviet-German war, and yet one has to live back into the fearful summer of 1941 to realise how vital it was for Russian morale.

Throughout August and part of September it was built up by the Russian press and by

Russian propaganda out of all proportion to its real or ultimate importance, and yet here was not only, as it were, the first victory of the Red Army over the Germans; here was also the first piece of territory—perhaps only 100 or 150 square miles—in the whole of Europe reconquered from Hitler's Wehrmacht. It is strange to think that in 1941 even that was considered a vast achievement.

After the capture of Smolensk, the Germans were held up along most of the Central

Front; but they had managed to drive a wedge south-east of Smolensk, capturing the town of Yelnya and a number of villages.

According to Guderian, there was some dispute among the German generals whether to

defend the Yelnya salient, or to evacuate it; in the end it was decided to evacuate it, though at heavy loss of life—which clearly suggests that the Russians actually drove the Germans out, after weeks of heavy fighting. The price paid in human lives by the

Russians for this "prestige victory" had been very high, and when, later in October, the big German offensive had started against Moscow, the Russians in what had been the

Yelnya salient were doomed to encirclement.

Although, until then, foreign correspondents had not been allowed at the Front, the

Yelnya victory was something that called for worldwide publicity, and seven or eight were taken in cars on a week's trip, beginning on September 15. What, in retrospect, was so striking about it was a certain tragic pathos of the whole scene. Tragic was the town of Viazma, exposed to constant air attack from near-by German airfields; more tragic still were the young airmen at the small fighter airfield near Viazma—who, with their seven or eight sorties a day over the German lines, were on a constant near-suicide job; tragic, too, was the completely devastated countryside of the "Yelnya salient", where every village and every town had been destroyed, and the few surviving civilians were now

living in cellars or dugouts.

Viazma, where we arrived in the late afternoon, looked almost normal, in spite of a large number of soldiers and bombed houses. It was a harmless little town, with its few

government buildings in the central square, and a few derelict churches, and a statue of Lenin, and the rest of the town a mass of quiet provincial streets, with wooden houses and little gardens in front of them, and rows of rough wooden fences. In the gardens grew large sunflowers and dahlias; and old women, with scarves round their heads, chatted in front of the garden gates. The place could not have changed much since the days of

Gogol.

The interview we had on that first night at Viazma with General Sokolovsky, at that time General Konev's Chief of Staff, was in the circumstances reassuring. He spoke in a quiet, even voice, describing what the Russian army had done on this Central Sector during the past few weeks. He attached the greatest importance to the fact that the Russians had stopped the German advance beyond Smolensk; claimed that "several German armies"

had been smashed up in the last month, and that, in the first days of September alone, they had suffered 20,000 casualties; several hundred German planes had been shot down in this sector over a number of weeks. The blitzkrieg as such, he said, was over, and the process of "grinding down" the German war machine had now started in real earnest, and the Russians had even succeeded in recapturing a considerable slice of territory in this sector. To check the Russian counter-offensive, the Germans had had to bring up

reinforcements in the last few days.

He thought German communications were being seriously interfered with by the

partisans in the enemy rear. He also thought that Russian artillery was greatly superior to German artillery, though he admitted that the Germans still had great air and tank

superiority. Another important point he made was that the Russian troops all had

polushubki (sheepskin jackets) and other adequate winter clothes and they could stand even fifty degrees of frost; the Germans could not stand up to it. It was significant that he should, already then, have attached the greatest importance to the part winter was soon going to play. As an afterthought he said that he could only speak of the Central Front, and could not speak with first-hand knowledge of Voroshilov in the north and Budienny in the south, where, indeed, the situation was then extremely serious.

Asked whether, in view of what he had said, a new German offensive against Moscow

was now impossible, he said: "Of course not. They may always try a last desperate gamble, or even a few 'last desperate' gambles. But I don't think," he added firmly, "that they will get to Moscow."

At sunset we drove to a small fighter base outside Viazma. Here were the "Stalin Hawks"—the Stalinskie sokoly—in their own surroundings. The moment we arrived, we heard the drone of engines and, despite the growing darkness, a Russian fighter swooped down and landed gracefully on the airfield.

A crowd of airmen on the ground ran up to the new arrival. The newly-landed plane was a fighter, but had been fitted with a bomb bay... The young pilot was, by now, busily examining one of the wooden wings which had been pierced by an anti-aircraft shell. He had dropped his bombs on a German airfield near Smolensk, and there had been some

heavy anti-aircraft fire. He had set fire to a hangar, and seemed very pleased with the result. He was about twenty, but had done a good deal of flying. When asked how much flying a day he did, he said: "From here to the German lines—oh, five, six, seven raids a day; only takes about an hour or so, there and back." There was another young, fair-haired airman whom I asked how he liked the dangerous life; "I love it. It may be dangerous, but every moment of it is exciting. It's the best life there is. It's well worth it."

(Did he really mean it? I wondered.)

Later we were shown a rocket that was used by these planes against tanks. Even so, there was something pathetic about these slow obsolete planes being used as supposed fighter-bombers—with probably very little effect, but at a terribly high cost in Russian lives.

That week spent in the Smolensk country—the Smolenshchina— was, in a sense, a

heartening but also a highly tragic experience. This was, historically, one of the oldest of Russian lands, not Estonian, Latvian or even Belorussian or Ukrainian; this was very nearly the heart of old Muscovy. The ancient city of Smolensk was already in German

hands, and the front was running some twenty or twenty-five miles east of it. There were villages through which we travelled where the Germans had not yet been. There were

hardly any young men left in these villages; only women and children and a few very old men, and many of the women were anxious and full of foreboding. Many of these

villages in the frontal zone had been bombed and machine-gunned. Some villages and

small towns, like Dukhovshchina, had been completely wiped out by German bombing,

and the fields of rye and flax around them had remained unharvested.

And then there were the soldiers. We visited many regimental headquarters, some of

them only a mile or two from the front line, and with shells frequently falling around. For the last month these men had been advancing, though at heavy cost. Many of the officers, like Colonel Kirilov, who received us on a wooded hill overlooking the German lines on the other side of a narrow plain, were like something out of Tolstoy—brave, a little gruff, taking war in their stride; some of these men had retreated hundreds of miles, but now they were happy to have stopped and even driven back the Germans. Kirilov had adopted as a "son of the regiment" a pathetic little fourteen-year-old boy, whose father and mother had both been killed in the bombing of a near-by village.

One night we stayed at a field hospital consisting of several large dugouts; two of them were still crowded with men who had been too severely wounded to be transported—men

who had lost both their eyes, or both legs; only a week before, there had been hundreds of wounded in these dugouts. All the nurses were pupils of the Tomsk medical school, all young and extraordinarily pretty, as Siberian women usually are. There was a staff of seven surgeons, six doctors and these forty-eight nurses, and, only a week before, they had had to handle as many as 300 wounded a day. The operating dugout was well-equipped, and there were X-ray and blood-transfusion outfits. As yet, the chief surgeon, a Moscow man, said, they had not been short of any medical supplies.

But perhaps the optimism among the soldiers was more on the surface. I had a talk one day with a captain, whose home town was Kharkov, and who had studied history and

economics at Kharkov University. He had been engaged in some heavy fighting round

Kiev during the previous month, until his regiment had been moved to this Smolensk

sector. He was in a gloomy mood. "It's no use pretending that all is well," he said: "The flag-waving, the hurrah-patriotism of our press are all very well for propaganda purposes to keep up morale; but it can be overdone—as it sometimes is. We shall need a lot of help from abroad. I know the Ukraine; I know how immensely important it is for our whole

national economy. Now we have lost Krivoi Rog and Dnepropetrovsk, and without the

Krivoi Rog iron ore, Kharkov and Stalino, if we don't lose them too, will find it hard to work at anything like full capacity. Leningrad, with its skilled labour, is also more or less isolated. And we just don't know how much further the Germans are going to push—with their troops already at Poltava, we may well lose Kharkov. We've been hearing for weeks about the Economic Conference that's to meet in Moscow; they say Lord Beaverbrook is on his way; I wonder what good it'll do..."

He went on: "This is a very grim war. And you cannot imagine the hatred the Germans have stirred up among our people. We are easy-going, good-natured people, you know;

but I assure you, they have turned our people into spiteful mujiks. Zlyie mujiki—that's what we've got in the Red Army now, men thirsting for revenge. We officers sometimes have a job in keeping our soldiers from killing German prisoners; I know they want to do it, especially when they see some of these arrogant, fanatical Nazi swine. I have never known such hatred before. And there's good reason for it. Think of those towns and

villages over there," he said, pointing at the red sunset over Smolensk; "think of all the torture and degradation these people are made to suffer." There was a flicker of mad hatred in his eyes. "And I cannot help thinking of my wife and my own ten-year-old daughter in Kharkov." He was silent for a time, controlling himself, and hammering one knee with his fingers. "Of course," he said at last, "there are the partisans; they are at least a personal solution to thousands of people over there. There comes a moment when people can't bear it any longer. They go off into the woods, in the hope that they may murder a German some time. Often it's like suicide; often they know that, sooner or later, they are almost sure to be caught, and to be put through all the beastliness the Germans are capable of..."

He then talked about the partisans generally, thought they were important, though not as important as they might be. And sooner or later, if the Russians went on retreating, the partisans would lose touch with their sources of supply, and would soon be short of arms.

"No doubt they can continue to carry on sabotage in a small way, and various forms of passive resistance, but they may no longer constitute a serious armed force. If only we had fully prepared the partisan movement, if only we had piled up thousands of arms

dumps throughout Western Russia. Something was done, but not nearly enough; and in

the south there are, unfortunately, no woods... "

It was during this visit to the Front that I first met Alexei Surkov, the Russian poet., who was there as a war correspondent. Later during the war we recalled those days. "Those were fearful days," he said. "Do you know that we wanted to show you people some of our tanks—well, I can now tell you, we didn't have a damned thing! "

The town of Dorogobuzh—famous before the war for its cheeses— on the banks of the

Upper Dnieper, which we reached one night, after travelling for hours along terribly muddy, bumpy roads, had been bombed by the Germans, and now nothing was left of it

but the shells of the stone and brick buildings and the chimney stacks of the wooden houses; of its 10,000 inhabitants, only about 100 people were still there. In July, in broad daylight, waves of German planes had dropped high explosives and incendiary bombs

over the town for a whole hour. There were no troops there at the time; men, women,

children had been killed—nobody knew how many.

After spending the night in an army tent outside the town—we saw the next morning

some fifty people, mostly women and some pale-looking children, lining up for food

outside an army canteen in one of the few only half-destroyed buildings of the town—we drove to Yelnya through what was now "reconquered territory". There had been heavy fighting there. The woods were shattered by shellfire; there were, here and there, large mass-graves, with crudely-painted wooden obelisks on top of them, in which hundreds of Russian soldiers had been buried. The village of Ushakovo, where some of the heaviest fighting had taken place for over a month, had been razed to the ground; and only from the bare patches along the road could one roughly imagine where the houses had stood. In Ustinovka, another village some distance away, most of the thatched roofs had been torn away by bomb blast; the people in the village had fled before the Germans came; but now there were faint signs of life again. An old peasant and two little boys had returned since the Russians had recaptured the village, and were working in the deserted fields, digging up potatoes—potatoes that had been sown long before the Germans had come. And there

was nobody else in the village, except an old woman, a blind old woman who had gone

insane. She was there when the village was shelled, and had gone mad. I saw her

wandering barefooted about the village, carrying a few dirty rags, a rusty pail and a tattered sheepskin. One of the boys said that she slept in her shattered hut, and they gave her potatoes, and sometimes soldiers passing through the village would give her

something, though she never asked for anything. She just stared with her blind white eyes and never uttered any articulate words, except the word "Cherti" —the devils.

We drove on to Yelnya, through more miles of uncut fields. Once we drove off the road into a wood, because there were three or four German planes overhead. In the wood there were Russian batteries and other signs of military activity. Yelnya had been wholly

destroyed. On both sides of the road leading to the centre of the town, all the houses—

mostly wooden houses—had been burned, and all that was left was piles of ashes and

chimney-stacks, with fireplaces some way down. It had been a town of about 15,000

inhabitants. The only building still intact was a large stone church. Most of the civilians who had been here during the German occupation had now gone. The town had been

captured by the Germans almost by surprise, and very few civilians had had time to

escape. Nearly all the able-bodied men and women had been formed into forced-labour

battalions, and driven into the German rear. A few hundred elderly people and children had been allowed to stay on in the town. The night the Germans decided to pull out of Yelnya— for the Russians were closing in, threatening to encircle the town— the

remaining people of Yelnya were ordered to assemble inside the church. They spent a

night of terror. Through the high windows of the church black smoke was pouring in, and they could see the flames. For the Germans were now going round the houses, picking up what few valuables they could find, and then systematically setting fire to every house in the town. The Russians drove into the town through the burning wreckage, and were able to release the now homeless prisoners.

In the course of this one and only visit to the Front we had talked to three German

airmen, the crew of a German bomber that had been shot down almost immediately after their raid on Viazma.

[They had just missed the house where we were staying, but had killed several people in the house across the street. The episode is described in Moscow '41.]

All three were arrogant, boasted of having bombed London, and were quite sure that

Moscow would fall before the winter.

They argued that the war against Russia had been rendered inevitable by the war against; England; it was part of the same war; and once Russia had been knocked out, England

would be brought to her knees. "And what about America?" somebody asked. "America, that's a long way away: Amerika, das ist sehr weit." They also said that it had taken five Russian fighters to bring down their Heinkel...

Chapter VII ADVANCE ON LENINGRAD

While the Red Army succeeded in stabilising the Front east of Smolensk, events in the north and, before long, in the south, took a turn for the worse. The unequalled tragedy of Leningrad will be related in some detail later in this book, and the German advance on Leningrad need be mentioned only briefly here. The German plan was to make one rapid thrust through Pskov, Luga and Gatchina to Leningrad, and to capture the city, while the Finns were expected to strike from the north. A second enveloping movement was to be carried out round Lake Ilmen, and then on to Petrozavodsk, east of Lake Ladoga, where the German troops were to join with the Finns. The Russian troops of the "North-West Direction", under Voro-shilov, had been routed in the Baltic Republics, and the Wehrmacht crashed through to Ostrov and the ancient Russian city of Pskov on their way to Leningrad, some 200 miles to the north. They had captured Ostrov on July 10 and

Pskov two days later. Another German force, after capturing Riga and occupying the

whole of Latvia, was rapidly advancing into Estonia, with the Russians retreating in disorder to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia and one of the most important Soviet naval bases on the Baltic. Of the original thirty divisions of the North-Western Front only five were now fully manned and fully armed, the rest were left with a ten to thirty per cent complement of either men or equipment.

[ IVOVSS, vol. II, pp. 78-79.]

By July 10, the position was as disastrous as during the worst stages of the Russian retreat through Belorussia. The Germans had a 24 to one superiority in men, four to one in guns and nearly six to one in mortars, not to speak about tanks and aircraft.

[In this, as in most other cases, there is a discrepancy between the Russian and the German estimates of the German forces involved. According to Telpukhovsky, op. cit., the Germans had assembled for their thrust against Leningrad 700,000 men, 1,500 tanks and 1,200 planes. The Germans, without giving any figure for the number of men in

Heeresgruppe Nord, claim that it had only 900 tanks and 350 planes in its drive on Leningrad. (See footnote by its German editors, A. Hillgruber and J. A. Jacobson on p. 56

of the German translation of Telpukhovsky's book, Die Sowjetische Geschichte des Grossen Vaterländischen Krieges, 1941-5 (The Soviet History of the Great Patriotic War 1941-5), (Frankfurt, 1961).]

To slow down the German advance on Leningrad, not only were some regular reserve

troops thrown in, especially along the River Luga, but also freshly improvised

opolcheniye units, consisting of workers' battalions, student and even schoolboy battalions, so characteristic of that levée en masse spirit which was to prove stronger in Leningrad than in almost any other Soviet city. Moreover, several hundred thousand

civilians had been mobilised, early in July, to dig three lines of trenches, anti-tank ditches, and other, admittedly rudimentary, defences on the approaches to Leningrad. The

"outer" line of defence was along the River Luga.

As it is now openly admitted, no fortifications of any kind existed in that part of Russia; for even though the Soviet Government had been extremely concerned about the security of Leningrad, and had even embarked on its Winter War of 1939-40 to push the Finnish frontier back, "it had never even occurred to anybody before the war that Leningrad might be threatened from the south or southwest".

[IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 210.]

The Germans pushed on relentlessly, and reached the Luga river long before the Russian defences were complete. Nevertheless, by July 10, a long stretch of the Luga Line had been manned by the so-called Luga operational group, consisting of four regular infantry divisions and three divisions of Leningrad opolcheniye. The German advance was, indeed, slowed down, but the Germans succeeded in establishing a number of

bridgeheads on the north side of the Luga.

Meanwhile, other German forces were overrunning Estonia on the west side of Lake

Peipus. Breaking through to Kunda on the Gulf of Finland east of Tallinn on August 7, the Germans cut off the Russian forces who had retreated to the Estonian capital. Even before that, other German forces had pushed north to Kingisepp along the east bank of Lake Peipus, and the threat to Leningrad had grown immensely. The Germans had forced the Narva river and were not only advancing on the former Russian capital from the

Narva-Kingisepp area, where the Russians had already suffered terrible losses in heavy fighting, and from the Luga area, but were also advancing to the east of Leningrad, both north and south of Lake Ilmen, with the obvious purpose of isolating Leningrad from the east and joining with the Finns on the east side of Lake Ladoga.

In July, the Finns had already struck out in two directions— across the Karelian Isthmus up to the frontier, and to the east of Lake Ladoga, towards Petrozavodsk, on the banks of Lake Onega.

A particularly harrowing episode was the attempt of the Soviet troops marooned at

Tallinn to escape by sea. For over a month they had tried to stop the Germans capturing Tallinn from the south. A large part of the Soviet Baltic Navy was still at Tallinn, and the greatest possible number of troops were to be evacuated by sea. It was a kind of Dunkirk, but without air cover, all available Russian aircraft being concentrated in and around Leningrad, where the situation was already highly critical, as the Germans had by this time practically cut off Leningrad from the east.

At Tallinn there were 20,000 Russian troops, and these, together with the Baltic Navy, had tied up substantial German forces within a radius of ten to twenty miles for over a month. 25,000 civilians were mobilised to strengthen the defences to the south of the city, though how enthusiastic these Estonians were may be questioned.

The Germans started their all-out attack on Tallinn on August 19, but the Russians,

supported by the guns of the coastal defences and warships, were able to hold their

ground for nearly a week. On August 26, however, the Germans broke into the city, and the Russian Supreme Command ordered the evacuation of Tallinn, all the more so as

Leningrad badly needed what troops and ships could still be rescued. After two more

days of intensive street fighting, the convoy of troop transports and warships sailed from Tallinn harbour. The Germans claimed that "not a single ship" would be able to leave Tallinn; but, according to the Russians, "most" of the ships, including the flag-ship Minsk, got through, despite constant attacks from German aircraft and torpedo boats, and floating mines which the Germans had scattered throughout the Gulf of Finland. The

biggest losses were suffered by the trawlers and destroyers trying to take the convoy through the German minefields. In the end, the "greater part" of the ships, carrying several thousand soldiers, landed in Kronstadt or Leningrad.

The Russian naval garrisons of Dago and other islands off the Estonian coast, held out till the middle of October, when the 500 survivors of the defence of Dago succeeded in

sailing under cover of night to Hangö, the Russian naval base in Finland, which was then still in Russian hands.

It was, in fact, not until the Russian armies had retreated—or fled might be the right word

—to the immediate vicinity of Leningrad after the collapse of the "Luga Line", that they began to contain the Germans with any success. Voroshilov had lost his head completely, and it was not until General Zhukov was rushed to Leningrad at the beginning of

September and reorganised the troops on the spot that the defence of Leningrad began in real earnest... It was to become the greatest of all the great Russian stories of human endurance. Never yet had a city of the size of Leningrad been besieged for nearly two-and-a-half years.

Chapter VIII ROUT IN THE UKRAINE "Khrushchev versus

Stalin"

Meantime, as we have seen, Hitler had decided to strike his main blow, not at Moscow, but at the Ukraine. Abandoning, for the time being, the drive on Moscow, he had

transferred some troops to the north to speed up the capture of Leningrad, and even larger reinforcements were sent to the Ukraine, which, together with the Crimea, he planned to overrun within a few weeks.

Early in July, the Russians had had a few local successes in the Ukraine; thus they had checked a German breakthrough to Kiev some ten or twelve miles outside the city. But at the end of July and the beginning of August, the blitzkrieg had been resumed. On August 17 the Germans occupied Dniepropetrovsk, at the far end of the Dnieper bend, and forced the Dnieper, despite the Soviet Supreme Command's order to hold the Dnieper Line at all costs. Kherson, Nikolayev and the iron-ore centre of Krivoi Rog were captured.

In the south-west Odessa was cut off by the Rumanians from the Soviet "mainland".

Meanwhile, north of Kiev, the Germans had started another offensive in the general

direction of Konotop, Poltava and, ultimately, Kharkov. Thus, by the beginning of

September, Kiev formed, in fact, the tip of a long and constantly narrowing salient, the Germans having advanced far to the east both north and south of the Ukrainian capital.

It is here that we come to one of the major controversies of the war—a controversy

involving not only Hitler and his generals, but also Stalin and Khrushchev. Khrushchev was a Member of the War Council attached to the staff of Marshal Budienny, the C.-in-C.

of the "South-Western Direction".

[ It should be explained, to avoid confusion, that the " South-Western Direction" was one of the three "Directions" into which the whole Front had been split in July. Several

"Fronts" (i.e. Army Groups) came under the authority of each "Direction". One of the

"Fronts" that came under the authority of the "South-West Direction" was the "SouthWest Front", the principal victim of the Kiev encirclement. By October 1941, the Front was no longer divided into "Directions", but only into "Fronts" (i.e. Army Groups). In September the commander of the "Direction" was Budienny, the commander of the

"Front" was Kirponos.]

Present-day histories are untiring in their praise of Khrushchev who, as a member of the Politburo and as Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, aroused everywhere, they say, the patriotic fervour of the people of the Ukraine, and of Kiev in particular—even though, lacking the great proletarian and revolutionary

traditions of Moscow and Leningrad, the levée en masse seems to have been considerably less spectacular there than in the other two cities. Moreover, Kiev had a peculiar

mentality. Only some twenty years before it had been occupied in quick succession by the German and Austrian armies, who had put up a puppet ruler, Hetman Skoro-padsky,

at the head of the Ukrainian "state", by Ukrainian nationalists under Petlura, by Reds, Whites and Reds again and, for a short time, in 1920, even by Pilsudski's Poles. Older people may have remembered that the German-Austrian occupation of 1918 had not been

as terrible as all that.

As by September 9, the Germans were advancing on Nezhin [ Seventy miles ENE of

Kiev.] from the north, and other German armies had penetrated far into the Dnieper bend in the south, and as no Russian reserves were available to check these two German

advances, Budienny and Khrushchev decided to pull out of the Kiev salient.

On September 11, they informed Stalin that his previous instructions to despatch two infantry divisions from Kiev to stop the German advance in the north could not be carried out; that the Soviet armies in the Ukraine had been badly weakened by weeks of heavy fighting, and that, despite the Supreme Command's opinion to the contrary, they

considered the time ripe for withdrawing to a new Une in the east.

On that same day, in speaking to General Kirponos, commander of the South-Western

Front, Stalin "emphatically rejected the proposal to abandon Kiev and to withdraw the troops from the Kiev salient to the River Psyol [in the Kursk-Poltava area]. He insisted that troops be taken from other sectors of the Front and thrown against the Germans

advancing on Konotop [east of Nezhin]..." He also relieved Budienny of his command and replaced him by Timo-shenko, who arrived in Kiev on September 13 to take up his

new duties.

On that day, the bottleneck from which the four armies of the South-Western Front could have pulled out was only twenty miles wide—between Lokhvitsa and Lubny... Two days

later, German tank formations closed this bottleneck.

Here we come to the climax of the Stalin-Khrushchev controversy, of which so much is made in the present-day History:

On September 14 Major-General Tupilov, Chief of Staff of the South-West Front,

considered it his duty to inform General Shaposhni-kov, the Chief of Staff in

Moscow, of the catastrophic situation... There were, he concluded, only a couple of days left. General Shaposhnikov called this report "panicky", asked the commanders of the South-West Front not to lose their heads and to carry out

Comrade Stalin's orders of September 11.

[IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 108.]

But on September 16, the Germans closed the bottleneck, and the four Soviet armies were surrounded... One of them, the 37th, was still holding the Kiev bridgehead on the west bank of the Dnieper. All these troops, says the History, had already suffered very heavy losses, "were disorganised and had lost most of their fighting capacity. All this could have been avoided if Budienny's and Khrushchev's advice had been followed in time."

[Ibid., p. 108.]

After pointing out that the Supreme Command had a very erroneous idea of the whole

situation, the History goes on:

Since the Supreme Command still would not order a general retreat, the War

Council of the South-Western Direction accepted N. S. Khrushchev's proposal to

abandon Kiev and to lead the troops of the South-West Front out of the

encirclement. Since the enemy had not yet consolidated his front along the Psyol, this seemed the only reasonable solution. On Budienny's and Khrushchev's behalf,

this decision was transmitted verbally by General Bagramian to General Kirponos,

who was then at Priluki, the headquarters of the South-West Front... Instead of

immediately carrying out this order, Kirponos finally asked Moscow whether or not to carry out the instructions of the War Council of the South-Western Direction.

[IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 109.]

It was not till 11.40 p.m. on September 17 that Shaposhnikov replied that the Supreme Command had authorised the abandonment of Kiev, but still said nothing about breaking across the river Psyol. Thus, two days were wasted in which substantial Russian forces could have broken out, but did not. What followed was an incoherent attempt to break out of the encirclement; it was all the more incoherent since communications between the various army headquarters were non-existent. Thus, separated from the other armies, the 37th Army continued its hopeless fight for Kiev during the next few days, and only then began—without any hope of success—to fight its way out.

Only some units succeeded in breaking out—for example one of 2,000 men with General

Bagramian at their head. The General Staff of the South-West Front and members of its War Council, having been unable to find a single plane, followed Bagramian with 800

men, but were cut off by German tanks. Near Lokhvitsa, a battle raged for two days in the course of which General Kirponos was mortally wounded and M. A. Burmistrenko, a

member of the War Council and Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian

Communist Party, as well as the Chief of Staff of the Army Group, General Tupikov,

were killed. Only very few members of the General Staff escaped. Tens of thousands of soldiers, officers and political personnel died in the unequal struggle, or were taken prisoner, many of them wounded.

[Ibid., p. 110, It is understood that Budienny, Timoshenko and Khrushchev escaped by air from Kiev.]

The Germans claim that the Wehrmacht captured no fewer than 665,000 prisoners in the Kiev encirclement. According to the History there were 677,085 men on the South-Western Front at the beginning of the Kiev operation. But of these a total of 150,541 men had escaped encirclement. The troops that were encircled fought on through the greater part of September and suffered very heavy losses, while others succeeded in breaking out. Not more than one-third of the number of troops who had been originally surrounded were taken prisoner.* These Russian statistics would reduce the number of prisoners

taken to about 175,000. One cannot help suspecting that the truth must lie somewhere half-way between the Russian and the German figures.

The question remains whether Stalin was not perhaps right, after all, to have clung to the Kiev salient for as long as he did. Paradoxically, the History suggests that this German victory in the Ukraine hopelessly upset Hitler's time-table.

[IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 111.]

This, indeed, coincides with the prevalent German view. In the opinion of some of the leading German generals, the time wasted on the Kiev operation very largely upset the plans of the German High Command to reach Moscow before the winter had set in. Thus

Haider considered that the Battle of Kiev was the greatest strategic mistake in the Eastern campaign, an opinion shared by Guderian, who spoke of the Battle of Kiev as a great

tactical victory, but doubted that great strategic advantages were to be derived from it.

[Guderian, op. cit., pp. 225-6.]

Guderian found some comfort, though not very much, in the thought that although "the planned assault on Leningrad had to be abandoned in favour of a tight investment" the prospects for occupying the Donets Basin and reaching the Don were now good. It is not quite clear, though, whether, at the time, he entirely agreed with the OKH's belief "that the enemy was no longer capable of creating a firm defensive front or offering serious resistance in the area of Army Group South".

In any case, however, the Germans had torn a 200-mile gap in the Russian front in the Ukraine, and, in the next two months, they occupied the whole Eastern Ukraine and

nearly the whole Crimea, and were not thrown some distance back until after they had captured Rostov.

Although Odessa was to rank officially among the four "hero cities" (the others being Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad), its defence against one German and eighteen

Rumanian divisions between August 5 and October 16 by the Special Maritime Army

under General Petrov was in reality something of a side-show in the general pattern of the war in 1941.

[ It was long after the war that, on Khrushchev's initiative, Kiev was added to the "hero cities". In military quarters this decision was sharply criticised, one colonel, who had gone right through the whole war, telling me: "Hero city, my foot! It was one of our worst skedaddles."]

Reaching the Black Sea coast at the beginning of August, the enemy had cut off Odessa from the Russian "mainland", but this main Russian naval base in the western part of the Black Sea was able to maintain communications by sea with both the Crimea and the

Caucasus. The Black Sea Navy and Marines played an important part in the defence of

Odessa where extremely heavy fighting was raging at the end of August and losses in

effectives reached as much as forty per cent overall, and in the case of the marines, as much as seventy to eighty per cent. In order to hold Odessa as long as possible, for this tied up considerable enemy forces, reinforcements were sent by sea, including a number of those invaluable katyusha mortars, whose mass production had only just begun.

It is remarkable, in view of the German air superiority, that the Russians should have been able to maintain, as they claim, regular sea communications from Odessa

throughout the siege of the city. They even claim that they managed to evacuate by sea to the Caucasus 350,000 civilians, that is about half of the population, and some 200,000

tons of industrial equipment.

When practically the whole of the Crimea, with the exception of Sebastopol, had been overrun by the Germans, 80,000 soldiers and a considerable amount of military

equipment were successfully transported by sea from Odessa to Sebastopol and the

Caucasus—and this despite a large-scale attempt at sabotage by enemy agents who, at the height of the evacuation, set fire to numerous port installations.

[ IVOVSS, vol. n, p. 118.]

Odessa fell after two and a half months of extremely fierce fighting, and losses were heavy on both sides. The Russians were very surprised by the toughness of the Rumanian troops, since Rumania's military record, particularly in World War I, had not been exactly glorious. According to the Russians—always prone to exaggerate enemy losses—the

Rumanians had lost 110,000 men at Odessa; but this is by no means a fantastic figure, since, according to the Rumanians, their army lost, between the outbreak of the war and October 10, 1941, as many as 70,000 dead and 100,000 wounded.

[Telpukhovsky, op. cit., German edition, p. 58.]

Odessa and all the country between the Dniester and the Western Bug, were to be

incorporated in Rumania under the name of Transniestria. There was, as we shall see, going to be a marked difference between the Rumanian and the German occupation

régime.

Whether 175,000 prisoners were taken east of Kiev, or 400,000 or 600,000—all this

Russian and German quibbling over figures is one thing; another is what all this

represented in human terms.

A heavy silence hung over the whole question all through the war and, indeed, for many years after. Certainly, Molotov issued, from time to time, long Notes on the ill-treatment of Russian war-prisoners, or on atrocities committed by the Germans in the occupied

areas of the Soviet Union. But these were clumsy documents, in which horrors were piled upon horrors to such an extent that those who read them, not only in the West, but even in Russia in 1941-3, only half-believed them—if that. Except for some atrocities the

Germans had committed in the relatively small areas around Moscow that were liberated by the Russians in the winter of 1941-2, there was still very little first-hand information on the German occupation, or even on the German treatment of war-prisoners. Only after Stalingrad, when the Russians began to liberate enormous areas, did the truth begin to emerge. And even then, not the whole truth. The full enormity of it did not begin to be measured until the liberation of Poland with its super-death-camps and the occupation of Germany when stock could at last be taken of what had happened to the Russians

deported to Germany as slave labour, or captured as war prisoners, particularly in 1941-2.

For long after the war, very little was said about those who were taken prisoner in those early war days; a stigma was still attached to those unfortunate people.

The human tragedy of the Russian prisoners was not to be openly discussed in Russia

until long after the war. By far the most graphic account of what it was like to have been trapped in the Kiev Encirclement was not to be written until twenty years after, and published in the form of a short story in Novyi Mir of January 1963. But though presented as fiction, it is the tale of one of its survivors, and has the ring of absolute authenticity.

In the thirty pages of Through the Night, Leonid Volynsky succeeds in telling the story of German captivity with the same concentrated intensity that Solzhenitsyn had given to his account of the Stalin labour camps.

The story begins on September 17, 1941 in a Ukrainian village, just as the German ring is about to close round the Russians.

Many years afterwards, I read a book by von Tippelskirch, a German general, who

wrote that the encirclement of our troops east of Kiev had tied down large German forces, and so ruined Hitler's game, since it delayed his offensive against Moscow.

No doubt that's just how things happened... But we knew nothing about that. To

hundreds of thousands of men trying during those nights to break out of the

German ring... groping their way through forests and marshes, and under a

hailstorm of German bombs and shells ... all this was nothing but a vast and

inexplicable tragedy.

On that night of the 17th, the narrator was wandering along a road; two or three thousand motor vehicles were burning; it was important not to let the Germans have them. That night, too, he saw a group of ten senior officers also walking towards Lokhvitsa (where there was believed to be a gap in the ring)—he recognised among them the Commander

of the Front, General Kirponos.

Not until several years later did I learn that he shot himself that night—or it may have been the following night, having refused to fly off in a plane that had been sent for him with great difficulty... His remains have since been reburied in Kiev. With him also died a member of his war council, Burmistrenko, who had been the Second

Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian CP before the war.

[It is curious to note that, according to the official History Kirponos was "killed"; there is no mention of his suicide.]

On the following morning, the narrator and three other soldiers, seeing German tanks approaching, hid in an overgrown ravine. But the Germans noticed them, and proceeded to machine-gun the bottom of the ravine. One man was killed, but the three others

surrendered. (The thought of suicide crossed the narrator's mind, but no more.) A German soldier, a decent and pleasant fellow at first sight, slapped their faces, and ordered them to empty their pockets. Closely followed by a tank, they had to run to a village called Kovali. By the end of the day, 10,000 prisoners were assembled there.

On the following morning, the "Commissars, Communists and Jews" were summoned to come forward, after the arrival of some fifteen SS-men in black uniforms and with skulls on their caps. Some three hundred came forward, were stripped to the waist and lined up in the yard. Then the interpreter, a young man, speaking with a strong Galician accent, shouted that some must still be hiding; and anyone who denounced a Communist,

Commissar or Jew could take his clothes and other belongings. "And, among ten

thousand men, you will always find a dozen or two such people; it may not be a high

percentage, but there it is. Such people do exist, and always will." So, in the end, four hundred were shot, being taken away ten at a time, and ordered to dig their graves.

They all died silently, except one, who uttered heart-rending screams, as he crawled at the SS-men's feet: "Don't kill me! My mother is a Ukrainian." One of the SS-men kicked him in the face, and knocked his teeth out, and he was hauled off to the

execution ground, his bare feet dragging through the dust.

The surviving war prisoners were marched first to one camp, and then to another, and the soldiers—"decent-looking, ordinary chaps, perhaps German working-men"—

automatically shot any stragglers, or anyone falling down by the road-side. The rest of the story is one of such constant starvation, cold and humiliation that the prisoners rapidly lost all human semblance and human dignity. The narrator and two other men succeeded in escaping—but they were the lucky exceptions.

Chapter IX THE EVACUATION OF INDUSTRY

The evacuation of industry threatened by the German invasion had been one of the Soviet Government's major concerns almost since the moment the war had begun. During the

very first days of the war two important industrial centres were lost: Riga and Minsk; but there was nothing of outstanding industrial importance in Lithuania, the rest of Latvia, Belorussia, or the Western Ukraine. The great industrial areas of the European part of the Soviet Union threatened by the invasion, or, at any rate, by destruction from the air, were the whole of Central and Eastern Ukraine—including the Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk,

Krivoi Rog, Mariupol and Nikopol areas, and the Donbas—and secondly, the industrial

areas of Moscow and Leningrad.

Whether or not the Soviet Government believed, in the early weeks of the war, that the Germans would reach Leningrad, Moscow, Kharkov, or the Donbas, it very rightly

decided, there and then, to take no chances, and laid down as a firm principle the

evacuation of all essential industries, and particularly the war industries, to the east. It knew from the start that this was a matter of life and death if the Germans were going to overrun large areas of European Russia.

This transplantation of industry in the second half of 1941 and the beginning of 1942 and its "rehousing" in the east, must rank among the most stupendous organisational and human achievements of the Soviet Union during the war.

A steep increase in war production and the reorganisation of the entire war industry on a new basis depended on the rapid transfer of heavy industry from the western and central areas of European Russia and the Ukraine to the distant rear, where it would not only be out of the German army's reach, but would also be beyond the range of German aircraft.

As early as July 4, the State Defence Committee ordered the Chairman of the Gosplan, Voznesensky, to draw up a detailed plan for setting up in the east what was, in effect, "a second line of industrial defence". The aim was to organise a "coherent productive combination between the industries already existing in the east and those to be

transplanted there".

The evacuation of industry to the Urals, the Volga country, Western Siberia and Central Asia, started at a very early stage of the war, not only from industrial centres immediately threatened by the Germans, but from other centres as well. Thus, as early as July 2, it was decided to move the armoured-plate mill from Mariupol in the Southern Ukraine, to

Magnitogorsk, though Mariupol was still hundreds of miles away from the front. On the following day, the State Defence Committee, after approving the plans for the output of guns and small arms during the next few months, decided to transfer to the east twenty-six armament plants from Leningrad, Moscow and Tula. During the same week it was

decided to send east part of the equipment, workers and technical staff from the diesel department of the Kirov Plant in Leningrad and the Tractor Plant in Kharkov. Another large plant for manufacturing tank engines was to be transferred from Kharkov to

Cheliabinsk in the Urals.

At the same time, the conversion of certain industries was decided upon: thus, the Gorki automobile plant was to concentrate on the output of tank engines. These two decisions laid the foundations for a vast Volga-Urals combine for the mass-production of tanks.

Similar steps were taken in respect of the aircraft industry.

With the German threat to the Eastern Ukraine growing, it was decided to evacuate

without delay such vast enterprises as the Zaporozhie steel mills (Zaporozhstal). On August 7 orders were given to evacuate the enormous tube-rolling mill at

Dniepropetrovsk. The first trains evacuating this plant left on August 9, and the ninth group of trains loaded with the plant's equipment, arrived at Pervouralsk in the Urals on September 6. By December 24 it was in production again.

Many other large plants were also evacuated during August. The dismantling and loading of the equipment went on non-stop for twenty-four hours a day, often under enemy

bombing. The size of the operation may be judged from the fact that in the case of

Zaporozhstal alone, it required 8,000 railway trucks to evacuate the entire plant and its stocks. Most of the equipment, weighing some 50,000 tons, was put to work in the

Magnitogorsk engineering combine.

On September 21, L. P. Korniets, of the Ukrainian Government, who supervised the

evacuation, was able to report to the Government that "At Zaporozhie all plants have been evacuated. The evacuation took place in an organised manner, and with proper

camouflage." He added that the raw materials were now being evacuated. In addition to the local workers, many hundreds of miners had been brought to Zaporozhie to help with the dismantling of the steel-mill equipment.

Rather less successful was the evacuation of some of the plants of the Donbas, which was overrun by the Germans more quickly than had been expected, and here the scorched-earth policy was extensively applied. Similarly, the Dnieper Dam was at least partly demolished by the retreating Russians. All the same, it had been possible to rescue a great deal: altogether, 283 major industrial enterprises had been evacuated from the Ukraine between June and October, besides 136 smaller factories.

More difficult, in the chaotic conditions of the first weeks of the invasion, had been the evacuation of the industrial plants of Belo-russia, all the more so as the railways were under constant air bombardment; even so, some 100 enterprises (though not comparable in importance to those of the Ukraine) were evacuated, chiefly from the eastern parts of Beloirussia (Gomel and Vitebsk).

The evacuation of Leningrad plants, and their workers, began in July after the Germans had reached the Luga river; but only ninety-two enterprises specialising in war

production, and some workshops of the Kirov and Izhora plants were evacuated in time; the rest were trapped in Leningrad after the Germans had cut all the railway lines.

The large-scale industrial evacuation of Moscow was not started until October 10, with the Germans only a few miles away. But by the end of November 498 enterprises had

been moved to the east, together with about 210,000 workers. No fewer than 71,000

railway wagons were required for this evacuation. During those grim winter months

measures were also taken to evacuate from "threatened areas" like Kursk, Voronezh and the North-Caucasian provinces, as much as possible of the available food reserves, as well as the equipment of many light-industry factories.

This fantastic migration of industries and men to the east was not completed without considerable difficulties: there were gigantic bottlenecks at certain major railway

junctions such as Cheliabinsk, and the evacuees suffered some terrible hardships on the way to the Urals, Siberia and Kazakhstan in the late autumn and at the height of winter.

Altogether, between July and November 1941 no fewer than 1,523 industrial enterprises, including 1,360 large war plants had been moved to the east—226 to the Volga area, 667

to the Urals, 244 to Western Siberia, 78 to Eastern Siberia, 308 to Kazakhstan and

Central Asia. The "evacuation cargoes" amounted to a total of one and a half million railway wagon-loads.

This transplantation of industry to the east at the height of the German invasion in 1941

is, of course, an altogether unique achievement. But it would, at the same time be naive to assume that everything of any industrial importance was either evacuated in time, or destroyed on the strength of Stalin's "scorched-earth" instructions of July 3.

After the war, the Soviet Government officially claimed that, apart from destroying six million houses, leaving twenty-five million people homeless, slaughtering or carrying off seven million horses, seventeen million head of cattle, twenty million pigs, etc., the Germans and their allies had also "destroyed 31,850 industrial enterprises, employing some four million persons before the war, and had destroyed or carried away 239,000

electro-motors and 175,000 machine-tools".

[Molotov's speech on Reparations on August 26, 1946, at the Paris Peace Conference for the Satellite countries, quoted in Vneshnyaya Politika Sovietskogo Soyuza, 1946 (Soviet Foreign Policy 1946) (Moscow, 1947), pp. 296-7.]

Even allowing for the fact that, with an eye on reparations Molotov quoted some greatly inflated figures for the industrial equipment destroyed or looted by the Germans and their allies, his statement is, in fact, still an admission that a very important quantity of such equipment was left behind.

Everything tends to show that a very important part in this evacuation of industry and its

"resettlement" in the east was played by Molotov, Beria, Malenkov and Kaganovich, but one would look in vain for any of these names in present-day accounts of this gigantic achievement which was ultimately to enable Russia to carry on the war. Instead, the

names that are now given pride of place are Mikoyan and Kosygin, who remain among

Mr Khrushchev's closest associates, and Voznesensky, who was shot, apparently in the course of the lurid "Leningrad Affair" in 1949.

Especially when the Battle of Moscow was at its height, and after the Russian counter-offensive had begun, the Russian working-class worked with redoubled energy in

resettling the evacuated war plants. Here was the combination of a great feat of

organisation with an almost unparallelled example of mass devotion, for the men and

women engaged in re-starting the evacuated armaments industry had to work at the

height of winter, with worse than inadequate food and housing.

In October, many government departments, such as the People's Commissariats of

Aircraft Production, Tank Production, Armaments, Iron and Steel, and Munitions were

evacuated from Moscow to Kuibyshev. Voznesensky, the head of Gosplan, was

instructed to send a weekly report to Moscow on the progress of the armaments

industries. Similarly, a part of the apparat of the Central Committee of the CPSU had been evacuated to Kuibyshev and "was authorised to send recommendations and

instructions to the regional party committees of the Volga, Urals, Siberian and Central-Asian provinces concerning the organisation of industries evacuated to these areas, and also concerning agricultural State purchases". Special "evacuation bases" were established in industrial centres such as Gorki, Kuibyshev, Cheliabinsk, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Magnitogorsk, Tashkent, etc.

Many evacuated factories were merged with local enterprises; thus, a large tank plant from the Ukraine was integrated with a number of local plants, to form a large combine which came to be known as the "Stalin Urals Tank Works", while the Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant, having merged with the evacuated Kharkov Diesel Works and parts of the Leningrad Kirov Plant came to be popularly known as "Tankograd".

Some of the "industrial giants" could not be transplanted as single units, and had to be decentralised: thus part of the Moscow Bali-Bearing Plant being re-settled in Saratov, another in Kuibyshev, and still another in Tomsk. All this created a variety of new

organisational problems.

During the war, I had the opportunity of talking to many workers, both men and women, who had been evacuated to the Urals or Siberia during the grim autumn or early winter months of 1941. The story of how whole industries and millions of people had been

moved to the east, of how industries were set up in a minimum of time, in appallingly difficult conditions, and of how these industries managed to increase production to an enormous extent during 1942, was, above all, a story of incredible human endurance. In most places, living conditions were fearful, in many places food was very short, too.

People worked because they knew that it was absolutely necessary—they worked twelve, thirteen, sometimes fourteen or fifteen hours a day; they "lived on their nerves"; they knew that never was their work more urgently needed than now. Many died in the

process. All these people knew what losses were being suffered by the soldiers, and they

—in the "distant rear"—did not grumble much; while the soldiers were suffering and risking so much, it was not for the civilians to shirk even the most crippling, most heartbreaking work. At the height of the Siberian winter, some people had to walk to work—sometimes three, four, six miles; and then work for twelve hours or more, and

then walk back again, day after day, month after month.

There was little or no exaggeration in the stories published in the press—for instance the story of how, on an empty space outside Sverdlovsk, two enormous buildings were

erected in a fortnight for a factory being brought from the Ukraine.

Among the mountains and the pine forests there is spread out the beautiful capital of the Urals, Sverdlovsk. It has many fine buildings, but I want to tell you of the two most remarkable buildings in the area. Winter had already come when Sverdlovsk

received Comrade Stalin's order to erect two buildings for the plant evacuated from the south. The trains packed with machinery and people were on the way. The war

factory had to start production in its new home—and it had to do so in not more

than a fortnight. Fourteen days, and not an hour more! It was then that the people of the Urals came to this spot with shovels, bars and pickaxes: students, typists, accountants, shop assistants, housewives, artists, teachers. The earth was like stone, frozen hard by our fierce Siberian frost. Axes and pickaxes could not break the

stony soil. In the light of arc-lamps people hacked at the earth all night. They blew up the stones and the frozen earth, and they laid the foundations... Their feet and hands were swollen with frostbite, but they did not leave work. Over the charts and blueprints, laid out on packing cases, the blizzard was raging. Hundreds of trucks kept rolling up with building materials... On the twelfth day, into the new buildings with their glass roofs, the machinery, covered with hoar-frost, began to arrive.

Braziers were kept alight to unfreeze the machines... And two days later, the war factory began production.

[ Pravda, September 18, 1942.]

At the time, however, the press scarcely ever referred to the special difficulties arising from war-time shortages. For example, a Government Instruction of September 11, 1941, laid down that steel and reinforced concrete were to be used very sparingly, "and only in cases when the use of other local materials, such as timber, was technically wholly out of the question". So, especially in 1941, many of the factory buildings were made of wood: These buildings were architecturally displeasing, and often altogether puny to look at; but... usually even large factory buildings were erected in a matter of fifteen to twenty days... People worked day and night—the scene of their work being lit by arc lamps or by electric bulbs suspended on trees... In one of the Volga cities the new buildings of the largest aircraft factory in the country were being built in this way...

Even before the roof had been completed, the machine-tools were already

functioning. Even when the thermometer went down to forty degrees below, people

continued to work. On December 10, fourteen days after the arrival of the last trainloads of equipment, the first Mig fighter-plane was produced. By the end of the

month, thirty Mig planes were turned out... Similarly, the last lot of workers of the Kharkov Tank Works left Kharkov on October 19; but already on December 8, in

their new Urals surroundings, they were able to assemble their first twenty-five T-34 tanks, which were promptly sent to the front.

[IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 151.]

Though a very high proportion of Soviet heavy industry, and especially war industry, was successfully moved to the east within four or five months, there was an inevitable drop in production in the meantime. There was, in fact, a gap of nearly a year—roughly from

August 1941 to August 1942 when the Red Army was extremely short of equipment, and

this shortage was very nearly disastrous between October 1941 and the following spring.

It was, as we shall see, one of the principal reasons why the Battle of Moscow was only a partial, and not a complete victory. It also largely accounts for the Russians' grievous reverses of the following summer.

Even so, the increase in armament production immediately after the invasion was very considerable. In the whole of 1941 the aircraft industry produced a total of nearly 16,000

planes of all types, of which more than 10,000 were produced after the invasion, but mostly between July and October. The figures for the production of tanks and other

weapons were equally striking, and the production of munitions of all kinds in the second half of 1941 was almost three times what it had been in the first. The tragedy of it was that, by October, all this progress came virtually to a standstill.

The difficulties facing the Soviet armaments industry in the east were enormous. Not all the workers of the evacuated plants could be transferred at the same time as the

machinery; in many cases, for a variety of reasons, only forty or fifty per cent of the workers followed. There was also at first a very serious shortage of certain raw materials.

High-grade steels for armour-plating, had, in the main, been produced in the Eastern Ukraine; this meant a fundamental reconversion of the various production processes in the east. This reconversion resulted in a temporary lowering of the output of the blast and open-hearth furnaces. There was an extreme shortage of molybdenum and manganese. A

high proportion of the manganese had been produced in the Nikopol area, which was now under German occupation. New manganese mining areas had to be opened up in the

Urals and Kazakhstan, where conditions of terrain and climate presented incredible

difficulties. The Nikopol miners, who had brought to the east their mining equipment, started producing manganese ore, with the help of locally conscripted labour, in a remote part of Sverdlovsk province, where manganese mining had been only tentatively begun

shortly before the war. The gradual organisation of the large-scale smelting of

ferromanganese at the Kushvisk plant, in the Kuzbas and at Magnitogorsk was later

described as "a stupendous industrial victory equal in importance to a major military victory". No more remarkable as a fact of human endurance was the development of molybdenum mines in the waterless steppe near Lake Balkhash in Central Asia.

When the Germans had overrun the Donbas, the Soviet Union lost over sixty per cent of her coal output, and the production of coal had to be stepped up in the Urals, the Kuzbas and Karaganda areas; in December 1941 it was decided to sink forty-four new mines

within the next three months. Desperate efforts were also made to increase the output of aluminium, nickel, cobalt, zinc, oil, chemicals, etc., in the east.

The critical situation is best summarised in the second volume of the official History: In the late autumn of 1941 our country lived through its most difficult days, both militarily and economically. The front required more and more armaments and

munitions, but owing to the evacuation of so many plants, the number of factories producing war equipment had sharply fallen... By the end of October, not a single plant in the south was working. Of the blast furnaces in operation on June 1, only thirty-eight per cent were now working; of the open-hearth furnaces, only fifty-two per cent; of the electric-steel-smelting furnaces, thirty-eight per cent, of the rolling-mills, fifty-two per cent. Compared with June 1941, we were producing by the end

of October 1941, thirty-three per cent of pig-iron, forty-two per cent of steel, forty-two per cent of rolled-iron. By December, the output of steel had dropped by two-

thirds. We had lost all the coal mines of the Donbas and of the Moscow Basin; rolled non-ferrous metals were down to practically nothing, and the total industrial output had dropped since June by over fifty per cent.

It was the lowest point reached throughout the war.

The migration of the aircraft industry had a disastrous effect on the output of

planes. This dropped in November to about thirty per cent of its September output; there was no means of replacing the heavy losses suffered by our air force in the battles of Moscow, Leningrad, etc. Only by concentrating all aircraft reserves on the most decisive sectors of the front could the Soviet air force carry on at all in the winter fighting of 1941-2.

Owing to evacuation, there was also a heavy drop in the output of tanks during the late autumn and winter months, and the same applied to the production of guns and munitions.

Nor was the conversion of peace production to war production easy: out of the

thirty agricultural machinery plants earmarked for such conversion, only nine had the necessary equipment for doing so.

In the munitions industry there was a serious shortage of ferroalloys, nickel, and non-ferrous metals. There were also desperate shortages of aluminium, copper and

tin. The loss of the Donbas with its highly-developed chemical industries, and the evacuation of the chemical industries of Moscow and Leningrad, resulted in a sharp drop in the output of explosives. Out of the twenty-six chemical plants evacuated to the east only eight had reached their destination by the beginning of December, and only four of these had started production.

Between August and November 1941, 303 munitions plants were out of action; these

used to produce every month many millions of shells, air bombs, shell-cases,

detonating fuses, hand-grenades and some 25,000 tons of explosives.

There was a growing disproportion between the number of guns produced and the

amount of ammunition available for each gun. In the second half of 1941 the front was chiefly using the ammunition reserves accumulated in peace-time. But after six months, these reserves were practically down to zero, while current production was fulfilling the army's needs only up to fifty or sixty per cent...

Apart from these heavy losses, Soviet industry also suffered from a serious shortage of manpower. The annual average of workers and employees in the national economy had

dropped from 31.2 million in 1940 to 27.3 million in 1941; in November this figure had dropped to 19.8 million. Some had been left behind in the occupied areas; others were still on their way to the east. But on November 9, while the Germans were still

prophesying the imminent fall of Moscow, the State Defence Committee laid down

precise plans for the speeding up of production in the east, and, in particular, it stipulated that, in 1942, 22,000 planes and 22,000 to 25,000 heavy and medium tanks be produced.

Just as Russia was becoming industrially more and more dependent on the east, by the end of 1941 she had become almost equally dependent on the east for food.

The war had seriously lowered the efficiency of agriculture. Most of the men in the

villages had been called up, including the tractor drivers who had been called up to drive tanks. Many of the horses, automobiles and tractors had been requisitioned for the Army.

Practically all the agricultural work in Russia during the war was done by women and adolescents. In many kolkhozes the ploughing was reduced to the most elementary forms, while at harvest-time the population of the whole neighbourhood, including town-dwellers, was mobilised to help. Horses were used when they were still available, and when there were still tractors, they were usually fitted with gas generators, because of the oil shortage.

The territorial losses suffered in 1941 had an almost catastrophic effect on Russian food supplies. Before the war, the territory overrun by the Germans by November 1941 had

produced thirty-eight per cent of the cereals, eighty-four per cent of the sugar, and contained thirty-eight per cent of the cattle and sixty per cent of the pigs. By January 1, 1942, the number of cows in the Soviet Union (not counting those in the occupied areas) had dropped from 27.8 million to 15 million and the number of pigs had dropped by over sixty per cent.

The Volga country, the Urals, Western Siberia and Kazakhstan were to become the

Soviet Union's "food base" for the greater part of the war. The areas under cultivation were greatly extended, and crops which had not been grown in these parts before, like sugar-beet and sunflower, were introduced. With the loss of the Don and Kuban country in the summer of 1942, the dependence on the "eastern food base" was to become even greater.

Chapter X BATTLE OF MOSCOW BEGINS— THE OCTOBER

16 PANIC

In his statement to us at Viazma in the middle of September, General Sokolovsky had

made three important points: first, that despite terrible setbacks the Red Army was

gradually "grinding down" the Wehrmacht; secondly that it was very likely that the Germans would make one last desperate attempt, or even "several last desperate

attempts" to capture Moscow, but they would fail in this; and, thirdly, that the Red Army was well-clothed for a winter campaign.

The impression that the Russians were rapidly learning all kinds of lessons, were

dismissing as useless some of the pre-war theories, which were wholly inapplicable to prevailing conditions, and that professional soldiers of the highest order were taking over the command from the Army "politicians" and the "civil war legends" like Budienny and Voroshilov was to be confirmed in the next few weeks. Some brilliant soldiers had

survived the Army Purges of 1937-8, notably Zhukov and Shaposhnikov, and had

continued at their posts during the worst time of the German invasion; Zhukov had

literally saved Leningrad in the nick of time by taking over from Voroshilov when all seemed lost. Apart from him and Shaposhnikov, Timo-shenko—a first-class staff officer who had started his career in the Tsar's army—was almost the only one of the pre-war top brass to prove a man of ability and imagination.

The first months of the war had been a school of the greatest value to the officers of the Red Army, and it was above all those who had distinguished themselves in the operations of June to October 1941 who were to form that brilliant pléiade of generals and marshals the like of whom had not been seen since Napoleon's Grande Armée. In the course of the summer and autumn important changes had been made in the organisation of the air force by General Novikov, and in the use of artillery by General Voronov; both Zhukov and

Konev had played a leading role in holding up the Germans at Smolensk; Rokossovsky,

Vatutin, Cherniakhovsky, Rotmistrov, Boldin, Malinovsky, Fedyuninsky, Govorov,

Meretskov, Yeremenko, Belov, Lelushenko, Bagramian and numerous other men, who

were to become famous during the Battle of Moscow or in other important battles in

1941, were men who had, as it were, won their spurs in the heavy fighting during the first months of the war. Distinction in the field now became Stalin's criterion in making top army appointments. It is, indeed, perfectly true that "the summer and autumn battles had brought on a military purge, as opposed to a political purge of the military. There was a growing restlessness with the incompetent and the inept. The great and signal strength of the Soviet High Command was that it was able to produce that minimum of high calibre commanders capable of steering the Red Army out of total disaster".

[Erickson, op. cit., p. 624.]

Undoubtedly some of the commanders had only a purely nominal Party affiliation, and

some of the new men, such as Rokossovsky, had actually been victims of the Army

Purges of 1937-8, and so could not have had any tender feelings for Stalin.

The Stavka, the General Headquarters of the Soviet High Command was set up on June 23, and a few days later the State Defence Committee (GKO), consisting of Stalin,

Molotov, Voro-shilov, Malenkov and Beria; on July 10 the "Stavka of the High Command" became the "Stavka of the Supreme Command", with Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Budienny, Shaposhnikov and General Zhukov, the Chief of Staff, as

members. On July 19 Stalin became Defence Commissar and on August 7 Commander-

in-Chief.

The Commissar system was greatly reinforced; the commissars, as "representatives of the Party and the government in the Red Army" were to watch over the officers' and soldiers'

morale, and share with the commander full responsibility for the unit's conduct in battle.

They were also to report to the Supreme Command any cases of "unworthiness" amongst either officers or political personnel. This was a hangover from the civil war, and, indeed, from the much more recent period when the officer corps was suspected of unreliability.

In practice, in 1941, the commissars proved, in the great majority of cases, to be either men who almost fully supported the officers, or were, at most, a minor technical

nuisance; but inspired by the same lutte à outrance spirit, and, faced daily by pressing military tasks, the old political and personal differences between officer and commissar were now usually less harsh than in the past. Even so, the dual command had its

drawbacks, and, at the time of Stalingrad, the commissars' role was to be drastically modified.

Whether or not there was any serious need for giving the officer a "Party whip", there was certainly even less need for the NKVD's "rear security units" to check panic through the use of machine-gunners ready to keep the Red Army from any unauthorised

withdrawals. "What initial fears there might have been that the troops would not fight were soon dispelled by the stubborn and bitter defence which the Red Army put up

against the Germans, fighting, as Haider observed, 'to the last man', and employing

'treacherous methods' in which the Russian did not cease firing until he was dead".

[Erickson, op.-cit., p. 598.]

These "rear security units" were a revival of a practice inherited from the Civil War, and proved wholly unnecessary in 1941, the Army itself dealing rigorously with any cases of cowardice and panic.

The role of the NKVD in actual military operations remains rather obscure, though it is known that, apart from the Frontier Guards, who were under NKVD jurisdiction, and

who were the first to meet the German onslaught, there were to be some very important occasions in which NKVD troops fought as battle units—for example at Voronezh in

June-July 1942, where they helped to prevent a particularly dangerous German

breakthrough. But there was a much grimmer side to the NKVD's connection with the

Red Army; thus, not only Russian prisoners who had managed to escape from the

Germans, but even whole Army units who—as so often happened in 1941—had broken

out of German encirclement, were subjected as suspects to the most harsh and petty

interrogation by the O.O. (Osoby Otdel— Special Department) run by the NKVD. In Simonov's novel, The Living and the Dead, there is a particularly sickening episode based on actual fact, in which a large number of officers and soldiers break out of a German encirclement after many weeks' fighting. They are promptly disarmed by the NKVD; but it so happens that at that very moment the Germans have started their offensive against Moscow, and as the disarmed men are being taken to a NKVD sorting station, they are

trapped by the Germans, and simply massacred, unable to offer any resistance.

Apart from that, however, the NKVD interfered less than before with the Red Army [This is not to say that the Army was left strictly to itself. Officers were still subjected to NKVD surveillance.]; the border-line between the military and the "political" elements in the Army was vanishing, and Stalin himself presided over this development. Whatever he had done in the past to weaken the army by his purges and his constant political

interference, he had learned his lesson from the summer and autumn of 1941. Voroshilov and Budienny were pushed into the background and the role of the NKVD bosses greatly reduced. The patriotic, nationalist and "1812" line was wholeheartedly taken up by all ranks of the army. All the military talent—discovered and tested in the first battles of the war and, in some cases, before that in the Far East—was assembled, all available reserves were thrown into battle, including some crack divisions from Central Asia and the Far East, a measure made possible by the Non-Aggression Pact concluded with the Japanese in 1939.

Whatever bad memories and reservations the generals may have had, Stalin had become

the indispensable unifying factor in the patrie-en-danger atmosphere of October-November 1941. There was no alternative. The Germans were on the outskirts of

Leningrad, were pushing through the Donbas on their way to Rostov, and on September

30 the "final" offensive against Moscow had started.

The Battle of Moscow falls, broadly, into three phases: the first German offensive from September 30 to nearly the end of October; the second German offensive from November 17 right up to December 5; and the Russian counter-offensive of December 6, which

lasted till spring 1942.

On September 30 Guderian's panzer units on the southern flank of Heeresgruppe Mitte (Army Group Centre) thrust against Glukhov and Orel, which fell on October 2 [The

surprise was complete. The trams were still running at Orel when the German tanks broke in.], but were then held up by a tank group under Colonel Katyukov beyond Mtsensk, on the road to Tula. Other German forces launched full scale attacks from the south-west in the Bryansk area and from the west on the Smolensk-Moscow road. Large Soviet troop

concentrations were encircled south of Bryansk and in the Viazma area due west of

Moscow. The Germans had planned to contain Soviet troops surrounded in the Viazma

area mainly by infantry, thus freeing their panzer and motorised divisions for a lightning advance on Moscow. But for more than a week, fighting a circular battle of extreme

ferocity, the remnants of the 19th, 20th, 24th and 32nd Armies and the troops under

General Boldin tied up most of the German 4th Army and of the 4th Tank Corps. This

resistance enabled the Soviet Supreme Command to extricate and withdraw more of their front line troops from the encirclement to the Mozhaisk line and to bring up reserves from the rear.

[ IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 245. As usual in such matters, there are considerable discrepancies between German and Russian, and even between Russian accounts of the Viazma

encirclement. The German claim, repeated by Tippelskirch, that "the Russians lost in the Viazma area sixty-seven infantry, six cavalry and seven tank divisions, totalling 663,000

prisoners, as well as 1,242 tanks and 5,412 guns", is dismissed by some Russians as "a piece of German day-dreaming, or a deliberate deception calculated to extract decorations and promotions from the Führer. In reality ten Soviet divisions (eight infantry, one motorised and one cavalry) were fighting against thirty or thirty-two German divisions.

Moreover, these (encircled) Russian divisions, seriously weakened by earlier fighting, tied up thirty or thirty-two German divisions west of Viazma for a week (from October 6

to 13)." Narodnoye opolcheniye Moskvy (Moscow Home Guard), (Moscow, 1961), pp.

141-2.

The official History, while not accepting inflated German claims, suggests that a far greater number of troops were encircled at Viazma.

It is also certain from numerous Russian break-out accounts that the number of Russian dead must have been enormous (cf. Narodnoye opolcheniye Moskvy, I. V. Boldin, op.

cit., and others). It is perhaps significant that, while claiming 50,000 prisoners in the Briansk encirclement in October 1941, Guderian should, when referring to the Viazma

encirclement, mention no figure at all for prisoners taken there. Maybe his figures

disagreed with the official ones.]

By October 6 German tank units had broken through the Rzhev-Viazma defence line and

were advancing towards the Mozhaisk line of fortified positions some fifty miles west of Moscow, which had been improvised and prepared during the summer of 1941, and ran

from Kalinin (north-west of Moscow on the Moscow-Leningrad Railway line), to Kaluga

(south-west of Moscow and half-way between Tula and Viazma), Maloyaroslavets and

Tula. The few troops manning these defences could halt the advance units of the

Heeresgruppe Mitte, but not the bulk of the German forces.

While reinforcements from the Far East and Central Asia were on their way to the

Moscow Front, the GKO Headquarters threw in what reserves they could muster. The

infantry of Generals Artemiev and Lelushenko and the tanks of General Kurkin which

fought here were, by October 9, placed under the direct orders of the Soviet Supreme Command. On the following day Zhukov was appointed C. in C. of the whole front.

But the Germans bypassed the Mozhaisk line from the south and captured Kaluga on

October 12. Two days later, outflanking the Mozhaisk line in the north, they broke into Kalinin. After heavy fighting Mozhaisk itself was abandoned on October 18. Already on the 14th fierce battles were raging in the Volokolamsk sector, midway between Mozhaisk and Kalinin, some fifty miles north-west of Moscow.

The situation was extremely serious. There was no continuous front any more. The

German air force was master of the sky. German tank units, penetrating deep into the rear, were forcing the Red Army units to retreat to new positions to avoid encirclement.

Together with the army, thousands of Soviet civilians were moving east. People on foot, or in horse carts, cattle, cars, were moving east in a continuous stream along all the roads, making troop movements even more difficult.

[ IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 244.]

Despite stiff resistance everywhere, the Germans were closing in on Moscow from all

directions. It was two days after the fall of Kalinin, and when the threat of a breakthrough from Volokolamsk to Istra and Moscow looked a near-certainty, that the "Moscow panic"

reached its height. This was on October 16. To this day the story is current that, on that morning, two German tanks broke into Khimki, a northern suburb of Moscow, where

they were promptly destroyed; that two such tanks ever existed, except in some

frightened Muscovite's imagination, is not confirmed by any serious source.

What happened in Moscow on October 16? Many have spoken of the big skedaddle

(bolshoi drap) that took place that day. Although, as we shall see, this is an over-generalisation, October 16 in Moscow was certainly not a tale of the "unanimous heroism of the people of Moscow" as recorded in the official History.

It took the Moscow population several days to realise how serious the new German

offensive was. During the last days of September and, indeed, for the first few days of October, all attention was centred on the big German offensive in the Ukraine, the news of the breakthrough into the Crimea, and the Beaverbrook visit, which had begun on

September 29. At his press conference on September 28 Lozovsky had tried to sound

very reassuring, saying that the Germans were losing "many tens of thousands dead"

outside Leningrad, but that no matter how many more they lost, they still wouldn't get into Leningrad; he also said that "communications continued to be maintained", and that, although there was rationing in the city, there was no food shortage. He also said that there was heavy fighting "for the Crimea", but denied that the Germans had as yet crossed the Perekop Isthmus. As for the German claim of having captured 500,000 or

600,000 prisoners in the Ukraine, after the loss of Kiev, he was much more cagey, saying that the battle was continuing, and that it was not in the Russian's interest to give out information prematurely. However, he added the somewhat sinister phrase: "The farther east the Germans push, the nearer will they get to the grave of Nazi Germany." He seemed to be prepared for the loss of Kharkov and the Donbas, though he did not say so.

It did not become clear until October 4 or 5 that an offensive against Moscow had started, and, even so, it was not clear how big it was. There was, needless to say, nothing in the Russian papers about Hitler's speech of October 2 announcing his "final" drive against Moscow.

However, Lozovsky referred to it in his press conference of October 7. He looked slightly flustered, but said that Hitler's speech only showed that the fellow was getting desperate.

"He knows he isn't going to win the war, but he has to keep the Germans more or less contented during the winter, and he must therefore achieve some major success, which would suggest that a certain stage of the war has closed. The second reason why it is essential for Hitler to do something big is the Anglo-American-Soviet agreement, which has caused a feeling of despondency in Germany. The Germans could, at a pinch,

swallow a 'Bolshevik' agreement with Britain, but a 'Bolshevik' agreement with America was more than the Germans had ever expected." Lozovsky added that, anyway, the

capture of this or that city would not affect the final outcome of the war. It was as if he was already preparing the press for the possible loss of Moscow. Yet he managed to end on a note of bravado: "If the Germans want to see a few hundred thousand more of their people killed, they'll succeed in that—if in nothing else."

The news on the night of the 7th was even worse, with the first official reference to

"heavy fighting in the direction of Viazma".

On the 8th, while Pravda and Izvestia were careful not to sound too alarmed (Pravda actually started with a routine article on "The Work of Women in War-Time"), the army paper, Red Star, looked extremely disquieting. It said that "the very existence of the Soviet State was in danger", and that every man of the Red Army "must stand firm and fight to the last drop of blood". It described the new German offensive as a last desperate fling:

Hitler has thrown into it everything he has got—even every old and obsolete tank, every midget tank the Germans have collected in Holland, France or Belgium has

been thrown into this battle... The Soviet soldiers must at any price destroy these tanks, old and new, large or small. All the riff-raff armour of ruined Europe is being thrown against the Soviet Union.

Pravda sounded the alarm on the 9th, warning the people of Moscow against "careless complacency" and calling on them to "mobilise all their forces to repel the enemy's offensive". On the following day it called for "vigilance" saying that, in addition to advancing on Moscow, "the enemy is also trying, through the wide network of its agents, spies and agents-provocateurs, to disorganise the rear and to create panic". On October 12, Pravda spoke of the "terrible danger" threatening the country.

Even without the help of enemy agents, there was enough in Pravda to spread the greatest alarm among the population of Moscow. Talk of evacuation had begun on the

8th, and foreign embassies as well as numerous Russian government offices and

institutions were told to expect a decision on it very shortly. The atmosphere was

becoming extremely tense. There was talk of Moscow as a "super-Madrid" among the braver, and feverish attempts to get away among the less brave.

By October 13, the situation in Moscow had become highly critical. Numerous German

troops which had, for over a week, been held up by the "Viazma encirclement", had become available for the final attack on Moscow. The "Western" Front, under the general command of General Zhukov, assisted by General Konev, and with General Sokolovsky

as Chief of Staff, consisted of four sectors: Volokolamsk under Rokossovsky; Mozhaisk under Govorov, Maloyaroslavets under Golubev and Kaluga under Zakharkin. There was

absolutely no certainty that a German breakthrough could be prevented, and on October 12, the State Defence Committee had decided to call upon the people of Moscow to build a defence line some distance outside Moscow, another one right along the city border, and two supplementary city lines along the outer and inner rings of boulevards within Moscow itself.

On the morning of October 13, Shcherbakov, Secretary of the Central Committee and of the Moscow Party Committee of the Communist Party, spoke at a meeting called by the

Moscow Party Organisation: "Let us not shut our eyes. Moscow is in danger." He appealed to the workers of the city to send all possible reserves to the front and to the defence lines both inside and outside the city; and to increase greatly the output of arms and munitions.

The resolution passed by the Moscow Organisation called for "iron discipline, a merciless struggle against even the slightest manifestations of panic, against cowards, deserters and rumour-mongers". The resolution further decided that, within two or three days, each Moscow district should assemble a battalion of volunteers; these came to be known as Moscow's "Communist Battalions" and were, like some of the opolcheniye regiments, to play an important role in the defence of Moscow by filling in "gaps"—at a very heavy cost in lives. Within three days, 12,000 such volunteers were formed into platoons and battalions, most of them with little military training and no fighting experience.

It was on October 12 and 13 that it was decided to evacuate immediately to Kuibyshev and other cities in the east a large number of government offices, including many

People's Commissariats, part of the Party organisations, and the entire diplomatic corps of Moscow. Moscow's most important armaments works were to be evacuated as well.

Practically all "scientific and cultural institutions" such as the Academy of Sciences, the University and the theatres were to be moved.

But the State Defence Committee, the Stavka of the Supreme Command, and a skeleton administration were to stay on in Moscow until further notice. The principal newspapers such as Pravda, Red Star, Izvestia, Komsomolskaya Pravda, and Trud, continued to be published in the capital.

The news of these evacuations was followed by the official communiqué published on

the morning of October 16. It said: "During the night of October 14-15 the position on the Western Front became worse. The German-Fascist troops hurled against our troops large quantities of tanks and motorised infantry, and in one sector broke through our defences."

*

In describing the great October crisis in Moscow it is important to distinguish between three factors. First, the Army, which fought on desperately against superior enemy forces, and yielded ground only very slowly, although owing to relatively poor manoeuvrability, it was unable to prevent some spectacular German local successes, such as the capture of Kaluga in the south on the 12th, of Kalinin in the north on the 14th, or that breakthrough in what was rather vaguely described as "the Volokolamsk sector" to which the "panic communiqué", published on October 16, referred. Even long afterwards it was believed in Moscow that on the 15th the Germans had crashed through much further towards

Moscow than is apparent today from any published record of the fighting. Only then, it was said, did Rokossovsky stop the rot by throwing in the last reserves, including

scarcely-trained opolchentsy, and troops from Siberia as soon as they disembarked from the trains. There are countless stories of regular soldiers and even opolchentsy attacking German tanks with hand grenades and with "petrol bottles", and of other "last ditch"

exploits. The morale of the fighting forces certainly did not crack. The fact that fresh troops from the Far East and Central Asia were being thrown in all the time, though only in limited numbers, had a salutary effect in keeping up the spirit of the troops who had already fought without respite for over a fortnight.

Secondly, there was the Moscow working-class; most of them were ready to put in long hours of overtime in factories producing armaments and ammunition; to build defences; to fight the Germans inside Moscow should they break through, or, if all failed, to

"follow the Red Army to the east". However, there were different shades in the determination of the workers to "defend Moscow" at all costs. The very fact that not more than 12,000 should have volunteered for the "Communist brigades" at the height of the near-panic of October 13-16 seems indicative; was it because, to many, these improvised battalions seemed futile in this kind of war, or was it because, at the back of many workers' minds, there was the idea that Russia was still vast, and that it might be more advantageous to fight the decisive battle somewhere east.

Thirdly, there was a large mass of Muscovites, difficult to classify, who were more

responsible than the others for "the great skedaddle" of October 16. These included anybody from plain obyvateli, ready to run away from danger, to small, medium and even high Party or non-Party officials who felt that Moscow had become a job for the Army, and that there was not much that civilians could do. Among these people there was a

genuine fear of finding themselves under German occupation, and, with regular passes, or with passes of sorts they had somehow wangled—or sometimes with no passes at all—

people fled to the east, just as in Paris people had fled to the south in 1940 as the Germans approached the capital.

Later, many of these people were to be bitterly ashamed of having fled, of having

overrated the might of the Germans, of having not had enough confidence in the Red

Army. And yet, had not the Government shown the way, as it were, by frantically

speeding up on all those evacuations from the 10th of October onwards?

Especially in 1942 the "big skedaddle" of October 16 continued to be a nasty memory with many. There were some grim jokes on the subject—especially in connection with

the medal "For the Defence of Moscow" that had been distributed lavishly among the soldiers and civilians; there was the joke about the two kinds of ribbons—some Moscow medals should be suspended on the regular moiré ribbon, others on a drap ribbon— drap meaning both a thick kind of cloth and skedaddle. There was also the joke of a famous and very plump and well-equipped actress who had received a Moscow Medal "for

defending Moscow from Kuibyshev with her breast".

I remember Surkov telling me that when he arrived in Moscow from the front on the

16th, he phoned some fifteen or twenty of his friends, and all had vanished.

In "fiction", more than in formal history, there are some valuable descriptions of Moscow at the height of the crisis—for instance in Simonov's The Living and the Dead already quoted. Here is a picture of Moscow during that grim 16th of October and the following days —with the railway station stampedes; with officials fleeing in their cars without a permit; the opolchentsy and Communist battalion men sullenly walking, rather than marching, down the streets, dressed in a motley collection of clothes, smoking, but not singing; with the "Hammer and Sickle" factory working day and night turning out thousands of anti-tank hedge-hogs, which are then driven to the outer ring of boulevards; with its smell of burning papers; with the rapid succession of air-raids and air-battles over Moscow, in which Russian airmen often suicidally ram enemy planes; with the

demoralisation of the majority and the grim determination among the minority to hang on to Moscow, and to fight, if necessary, inside the city.

By the 16th, many factories had already been evacuated.

All the same, below all the froth of panic and despair there was "another Moscow": Later, when all this belonged to the past, and somebody recalled that 16th of

October with sorrow or bitterness, he [Simonov's hero] would say nothing. The

memory of Moscow that day was unbearable to him—like the face of a person you

love distorted by fear. And yet, not only outside Moscow, where the troops were

fighting and dying that day, but inside Moscow itself, there were enough people who were doing all within their power not to surrender it. And that was why Moscow

was not lost. And yet, at the Front that day the war seemed to have taken a fatal turn, and there were people in Moscow that same day who, in their despair, were

ready to believe that the Germans would enter Moscow tomorrow. As always

happens in tragic moments, the deep faith and inconspicuous work of those who

carried on, was not yet known to all, and had not yet come to bear fruit, while the bewilderment, terror and despair of the others hit you between the eyes. This was inevitable. That day tens of thousands, getting away from the Germans, rolled like avalanches towards the railway stations and towards the eastern exits of Moscow;

and yet, out of these tens of thousands, there were perhaps only a few thousand

whom history could rightly condemn.

[Simonov, op. cit., p. 288.]

Simonov wrote this account of Moscow on October 16,1941 after a lapse of nearly

twenty years; but his story—which could not have been published in Stalin's day—rings true in the light of what I had heard of those grim days only a few months later, in 1942.

I also remember a very different kind of story—a story told me by a leading woman-

member of the Komsomol at the famous Trekhgorka Cotton Mill—a remarkable girl of

about twenty-five, called Olga Sapozhnikova, who belonged to a long dynasty of

Moscow cotton weavers. All her three brothers had been called up, and one was wounded and another "missing". She was a little plump and heavy, and had rough proletarian hands, with closely-clipped fingernails. And yet she had poise and character, and there was a solid kind of Russian beauty in that pale face, in her large, quiet grey eyes, firm jaw, finely shaped full mouth, and her white teeth showing when she smiled. Not a single nondescript feature about her; she belonged, even physically, to the proletarian

aristocracy; her character, like her body, shaped by good tradition.

[ The Year of Stalingrad, pp. 252-4.]

The story she told me, on September 19, 1942, differed in one respect from present-day stories; she told me how even the bravest and most determined people in Moscow had

felt uncertain of whether Moscow could be saved—or could be effectively defended had the Germans fought their way into the city.

"Those were dreadful days. It started about the 12th. I was ordered, like most of the girls at the factory, to join the Labour Front. We were taken some kilometres out of Moscow.

There was a large crowd of us, and we were told to dig trenches. We were all very calm, but dazed, and couldn't take it in. On the very first day we were machine-gunned by a Fritz who swooped right down. Eleven of the girls were killed and four wounded." She said it very calmly, without affectation.

"We went on working all day and the next day; fortunately, no more Fritzes came. But I was very worried about father and mother [both of them old Trekhgorka textile workers], with nobody to look after them.

"I explained this to our commissar, and he let me go back to Moscow. They were strange, those nights in Moscow; you heard the guns firing so clearly. On the 16th, when the

Germans had broken through, I went to the factory. My heart went cold when I saw that the factory had closed down. A lot of the directors had fled; but Dundukov was in charge; a very good man, who never lost his head. He handed out large quantities of food to us: I was given 125 pounds of flour, and seventeen pounds of butter and a lot of sugar, so that it should not fall into German hands. For me as a Komsomol—and a well-known

Komsomol at that—it was not much use staying on in Moscow. The factory people

suggested that I could evacuate father and mother to Cheliabinsk. But whatever was done about the old people, there was only one thing I could do, and that was to follow the Red Army. A lot of people had already left Moscow.

"I went and talked to mother. She wouldn't hear of Cheliabinsk. 'No,' she said, 'God will protect us here, and Moscow will not fall.' That night I went down to the cellar with mother; we took down a small kerosene lamp and buried all the sugar and flour and also father's Party card. We thought we'd live in the cellar if the Germans came; for we knew that they couldn't stay in Moscow for long. Perhaps I would have left with the Red Army, but it was hard to leave mother and father alone. That night mother cried, and said: 'The whole family has scattered; and are you going to leave me, too?' There was a feeling that night that the Germans might appear in the street at any moment; yes, it was possible, and Krasnaya Presnya was the part through which they would have come into Moscow. There

were no trains any more by which we could leave, and what was father to do? He might have walked two or three kilometres, but no more...

"But they did not come that night. At the factory the next morning everything was mined; it was only a case of pressing a button, and the whole factory would have gone up in the air. And then came a phone message from Pronin, the Chairman of the Moscow Soviet,

saying 'Absolutely nothing must be blown up.'

"And it was also on that day that the announcement was made that Stalin was in Moscow, and this made an enormous difference to morale; it now seemed certain that Moscow

would not be lost. Even so, from the northern outskirts, people were being evacuated to the centre. There were continuous air-raid warnings and bombs fell. But on the 20th the factory was opened again; we all felt so much better and were quite cheerful again after that..."

It was, indeed, on October 17 that Shcherbakov announced on the radio that Stalin was in Moscow. At the same time he explained to the people of Moscow the "complexity" of the situation (in official Russian war-time terminology "complexity" always meant "gravity") as a result of the German offensive against the capital; he also explained why it had been necessary to take those numerous evacuation measures. He firmly denied the rumours

about the imminent surrender of the city, rumours, he said, which had been spread by enemy agents. Moscow, he said, would be defended stubbornly, to the last drop of blood.

"Every one of us, no matter what his work or his position, shall act like a soldier defending Moscow against the Fascist invaders."

Two days later, a state of siege was proclaimed in Moscow. This had partly been caused by the looting that had gone on, here and there, at the height of the panic; now all

"breaches of law and order" were to be dealt with by emergency tribunals, and all spies, diversionists and agents provocateurs were to be shot on the spot. The maintenance of order inside Moscow was entrusted to the Commandant of the city and his NKVD troops.

These, together with regular army units and newty-formed "Communist battalions" were to man the gorodskiye rubezhy, the defence lines just outside and inside Moscow. The state of siege had, by all accounts I was to hear later, a salutary, and, indeed, stimulating effect on morale.

By the end of October over two million people had been officially evacuated from

Moscow; in addition, there were many others who had fled unofficially; many stories

were current later, for instance about a very important person on Moscow Radio, who

disappeared on October 16, and did not turn up again until three weeks later. Disciplinary action was taken in some cases against such "deserters", but there is no official record of the extent of these reprisals; it seems, however, that allowances were made for the

general state of chaos in Moscow that day, and for the fact that people were genuinely frightened of falling under German occupation.

Many of those who had stayed on in Moscow later took some pride in not having lost

their heads—or their faith in Moscow being saved [Those who had fled retorted in some cases: "You didn't mind being occupied by the Germans—I did."], and liked to recall the

"heroic atmosphere" of half-empty Moscow in the second half of October and in November, with the battle still raging not far away and, indeed, coming nearer and nearer in the second half of November. But it was now felt that the situation was well in hand and that a sudden German incursion into Moscow—which seemed so likely on that 16th

of October—had become impossible.

Chapter XI BATTLE OF MOSCOW II STALIN'S HOLY

RUSSIA SPEECH

In the first nineteen days of their offensive the Germans had advanced to less than fifty miles from Moscow at Noro-Fominsk and were even nearer the capital in the

Volokolamsk area. But all the time the Russian resistance was stiffening and by October 18 counterattacks slowed down the German advance. Losses were extremely heavy on

both sides, there were signs of growing fatigue among the Germans, and between

October 18 and the beginning of November they made very little progress.

German war memoirs stress the Wehrmacht's supply difficulties; but it is quite clear that the famous "Russian winter" was in no way decisive either in October or at the beginning of November. On the contrary, some of the Germans' difficulties arose from the fact that the roads had not yet frozen. To quote Guderian:

On October 29 our leading tanks reached a point some two miles from Tula. An

attempt to capture the city by a coup de main failed owing to the enemy's strong anti-tank and anti-aircraft defences; we lost many tanks and officers... The

condition of the Orel-Tula road had meantime grown so bad that arrangements had

to be made for the 3rd Panzer Division ... to be supplied by air... In view of the impossibility of launching a frontal attack on Tula, General Freiherr von Geyr

suggested that in order to continue our advance we by-pass the town to the east...

(He) was also of the opinion that there was no possibility of using motorised troops

until the frost set in.

[Guderian, op. cit., p. 152. (Emphasis added.)]

Guderian's argument that rain and mud interfered with the success of the first German offensive against Moscow seems futile, since it affected the Russians as much as the Germans; besides, Guderian himself admits that it was the defence put up by the

Russians, and not the mud that stopped him from capturing Tula, this key position on the way to Moscow. Moreover, the Russians also sprang on him the unpleasant surprise of

throwing in some of their T-34 tanks under Katyukov much to Guderian's disgust.

[ Guderian, op. cit., p. 248.]

On the night of November 6—that is, a week after the first German offensive against

Moscow had virtually petered out, and ten days before the second offensive began—

Moscow celebrated the 24th Anniversary of the Revolution. The Germans were still some forty miles from Moscow—in some places even nearer; and although the atmosphere in

Moscow was that of a besieged city, with tens of thousands of wounded crowding the

hospitals, and many thousands more arriving every day—the conviction that Moscow

would not be lost had steadily grown in the past fortnight.

The usual Eve-of-Revolution Day meeting was held on that night of November 6 in the

large ornate hall of the Mayakovsky tube station. The hall was crowded with hundreds of delegates of the Moscow City Soviet, and various Party and trade union organisations, and representatives of the Armed Forces. As many who attended that meeting later told me, the underground setting of the meeting was uncanny, depressing and humiliating.

Stalin's speech at the meeting was a strange mixture of black gloom and complete self-confidence. After recalling that the war had greatly curtailed, and in many cases wholly stopped, the peaceful building of socialism that had gone on for so many years, Stalin said:

In four months of war, we have had 350,000 killed, 378,000 missing and 1,020,000

wounded. During the same period the enemy had lost over four and a half million in dead, wounded and prisoners. There can be no doubt that Germany, whose human

reserves are running out, has been weakened much more than the Soviet Union,

whose reserves are only now being fully deployed.

Battle of Moscow II—Stalin's Holy Russia Speech 245

It is extremely doubtful that anybody in Russia could have believed these figures; but it was perhaps essential to overstate the German losses in order to bring home his

contention that the blitzkrieg had already failed. It had failed, Stalin said, for three reasons: the Germans, as could be seen from Hess's mission to England, had hoped that Britain and America would join them in their war against Russia or, at any rate, give Germany a free hand in the East; this had not come off: Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union were in the same camp. Secondly, the Germans had hoped that the Soviet régime

would collapse and the USSR fall to pieces.

Instead, the Soviet rear is today more solid than ever. It is probable that any other country, having lost as much territory as we have, would have collapsed.

Finally, the Germans had expected the Soviet armed forces to break down; after which they would, without further hindrance, push right on to the Urals. True, the German army was a more experienced army than the Soviet Army, but the Russians had the moral

advantage of fighting a just war; moreover, the Germans were now fighting in enemy

territory, far from their supply bases and with communications constantly threatened by the Partisans.

[This also was said more for effect. In 1941 partisan activity was still very weak and unorganised.]

Our army, as against this, is fighting in its own surroundings, constantly supported by its rear, and supplied with manpower, ammunitions and food... The defence of

Moscow and Leningrad show... that in the fire of the Great Patriotic War new

soldiers, officers, airmen, gunners, tank-crews, infantry men, sailors, are being forged—men who will tomorrow become the terror of the German army. {Stormy

applause.)

For all that, said Stalin, there were also unfavourable factors, which could not be denied.

One was the absence of a Second Front in Europe; whereas the Germans were fighting

the Red Army with the help of numerous allies—Finns, Rumanians, Italians, Hungarians

—there were no British or American armies on the European mainland to help Russia.

But there can be no doubt that the formation of a Second Front on the European mainland

—and it unquestionably must come within a very short time {stormy applause}— will greatly facilitate the position of our army, and make things more difficult for the

Germans.

The other unfavourable factor was the German superiority in tanks and aircraft. The Red Army had only a fraction of the tanks that the Germans had, even though the new

Russian tanks were superior to those of the Germans. It was essential not only to produce far more tanks, but also far more anti-tank planes, guns, rifles, mortars and grenades, and to devise and make every kind of antitank obstacle.

After demonstrating that, far from being either "nationalists" or "socialists", the Nazis were imperialists of the worst kind, determined, in the first place to annihilate or enslave the Slav peoples, and after quoting some particularly revealing German "Untermensch"

utterances, Stalin made his supremely significant appeal to the Russians' national pride—

And it is these people without honour or conscience, these people with the morality of animals, who have the effrontery to call for the extermination of the great

Russian nation—the nation of Plekhanov and Lenin, of Belinsky and

Chernyshevsky, of Pushkin and Tolstoy, of Gorki and Chekhov, of Glinka and

Tchaikovsky, of Sechenov and Pavlov, of Suvorov and Kutuzov! The German

invaders want a war of extermination against the peoples of the Soviet Union. Very well then! If they want a war of extermination they shall have it! {Prolonged, stormy

applause.) Our task now... will be to destroy every German, to the very last man, who had come to occupy our country. No mercy for the German invaders! Death to

the German invaders!" {Stormy applause.)

There were not only moral reasons why these wild beasts would perish, Stalin went on.

The "New Order" in Europe was not something that the Germans could rely on. Secondly

—and here was still a faint echo of Stalin's previous distinction between the "Nazi clique"

and the "German people"—the German rear itself was unreliable. The German people were tired of the war of conquest, which had brought them millions of casualties, hunger, impoverishment and epidemics.

Only the Hitlerite halfwits have failed to understand that not only the European

rear, but the German rear is a volcano ready to blow up, and to bury the Hitlerite adventurers.

And thirdly, there was the coalition of the Big Three against the German-Fascist

imperialists. This was a war of engines, and Britain, the USA and the USSR could

produce three times as many engines as Germany.

He then referred to the recent Moscow Conference attended by Beaverbrook and

Harriman, to the decision to supply the USSR systematically with planes and tanks, to the earlier British decision to supply raw materials to Russia such as aluminium, tin, lead, nickel and rubber, and the latest American decision to grant the Soviet Union a one

billion-dollar loan.

All this shows that the coalition between the three countries is a very real thing

{stormy applause) which will go on growing in the common cause of liberation.

In concluding, Stalin said that the Soviet Union was waging a war of liberation, and that she had no territorial ambitions anywhere, in either Europe or Asia, including Iran. Nor did the Soviet Union intend to impose her will or her régime on the Slav or any other peoples waiting to be liberated from the Nazi yoke. There would be no Soviet

interference in the internal affairs of these peoples. But to achieve this, the peoples of the Soviet Union must do their utmost to help the Red Army with armaments, munitions and food. And he ended on the usual note:

Long live our Red Army and our Red Navy!

Long live our glorious country!

Our cause is just. Victory will be ours!

Much more dramatic and inspiring was the setting in which Stalin delivered his speech to the troops on the following morning. In the distance Russian and German guns were

booming, and Russian fighter planes were patrolling Moscow. And here, in the Red

Square, on that cold grey November morning, Stalin was addressing troops, many of

whom had come from the Front, or were on the way to the Front.

Comrades! We are celebrating the 24th Anniversary of the October Revolution in

very hard conditions... The enemy is at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad... Yet, despite temporary failures, our army and navy are heroically repelling the enemy

attacks along the whole front.

Russia, Stalin went on, had survived worse ordeals than this; he recalled 1918, the first anniversary of the Revolution and, stretching some historical points, he said:

Three-quarters of our country was then in the hands of foreign interventionists. ..

We had no allies, we had no Red Army—we were only beginning to create it—we

had no food, no armaments, no equipment. Fourteen states were attacking our

country then... And yet we organised the Red Army, and turned our country into a

military camp. Lenin's great spirit inspired us in our struggle against the

interventionists. .. Our position is far better than it was twenty-three years ago. We are richer in industry, food and raw materials than we were then. We now have

allies, and the support of all the occupied nations of Europe. We have a wonderful army and a wonderful navy... We have no serious shortage of food, armaments or

equipment... Lenin's spirit is inspiring us in our struggle as it did twenty-three years ago.

Can anyone doubt that we can and must defeat the German invaders? The enemy is

not as strong as some frightened little intellectuals imagine...

[In his memoirs, Ehrenburg, while welcoming the speech as a whole, described this phrase as particularly offensive and un-called for; in 1941 the intellectuals were no more, and no less worried than the rest of the Russian people. {Novyi Mir, January, 1963.)]

Germany is, in reality, facing a catastrophe.

After reiterating that Germany had lost four and a half million men in the last four months, he went on:

There is no doubt that Germany cannot stand this strain much longer. In a few

months, perhaps in half a year, maybe a year, Hitlerite Germany must burst under

the weight of her own crimes.

Comrades, Red Army and Red Navy men, officers and political workers, men and

women partisans! The whole world is looking upon you as the power capable of

destroying the German robber hordes! The enslaved peoples of Europe are looking

upon you as their liberators... Be worthy of this great mission! The war you are

waging is a war of liberation, a just war. May you be inspired in this war by the heroic figures of our great ancestors, Alexander Nevsky, Dimitri Donskoi, Minin

and Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov, Michael Kutuzov! May you be blest by great

Lenin's victorious banner! Death to the German invaders! Long live our glorious

country, its freedom and independence! Under the banner of Lenin—onward to

victory!

This invocation of the Great Ancestors—the great men of Russian civilisation—Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, the great scientists and thinkers, and the great national heroes—

Alexander Nevsky who routed the Teutonic Knights in 1242, Dimitri Donskoi who

routed the Tartars in 1380 and Minin and Pozharsky who fought the Polish invaders in the seventeenth century, Suvorov and Kutuzov, who fought Napoleon—all this was

meant to appeal to the people's specifically Russian national pride. With the Baltic States gone, with the Ukraine gone, it was in old Russia, one might almost say in old Muscovy, that the remaining power of resistance against the Germans was chiefly concentrated.

In wartime Russia, where every official utterance, and especially any word from Stalin was awaited with a desperate kind of hope, these two speeches, especially the one

delivered in the dramatic setting of the Red Square, with the Germans still only a short distance outside Moscow, made a very deep impression on both the Army and the

workers. The glorification of Russia—and not only Lenin's Russia— had a tremendous

effect on the people in general, even though it made perhaps a few Marxist-Leninist

purists squirm on the quiet. However, even these realised that it was this patriotic, nationalist propaganda which identified the Soviet Régime and Stalin with Russia, Holy Russia, that was the most likely to create the right kind of uplift.

In any case, it was not something entirely new. It was Stalin's nationalism which had, for years now, triumphed over Trotsky's internationalism; for years Stalin had already been built up in popular imagination as a state builder in the lineage of Alexander Nevsky (e.g.

in the Eisenstein-Prokofiev film), of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great (e.g. in Alexei Tolstoy's novel).

Thus, in November 1941, all these reminders of the Tartar Invasion, of the Troubled

Times, with their Polish invasion, and of 1812 did not fall on deaf ears. The Russian people felt the deep insult of the German invasion—it was something more deeply insulting than anything they had known before. In his 6th of November speech Stalin had not missed the chance of pointing out the difference between Napoleon and Hitler;

Napoleon had come to a sorry end, but at least he had not brought to the invaded

countries any Untermensch philosophy.

We shall deal more fully in a later chapter with the mood in Russia in 1941-2; here it is enough to say that in his two November speeches, Stalin had not only cleverly adapted himself to this mood, but he did everything to strengthen and encourage it.

It was, indeed, appropriate that such a mood should be encouraged, with the ancient

Russian cities of Pskov, Novgorod and Tver (Kalinin) occupied by the Germans, with

Leningrad virtually surrounded, and the Germans still battering against hastily

improvised new Russian lines thirty or forty miles outside Moscow...

As a very orthodox Communist jokingly remarked to me some months later: "At that time it was absolutely essential to proclaim a 'nationalist NEP'."

[The New Economic Policy (NEP) introduced in 1921 had temporarily allowed some

capitalist trading.]

The importance of the two Stalin speeches is not underrated even in the "Khrushchevite"

History:

Stalin's two speeches had an enormous effect on the population in the occupied

areas... Soviet airmen dropped behind the enemy lines newspapers with accounts of the November 6 meeting and of the Red Square Parade. These papers passed from

hand to hand and were then kept as treasures. With tears of joy people learned that the Nazi stories about the fall of Moscow were nothing but stupid lies, and that

Moscow was standing firmly like a rock. In hearing the voice of their beloved Party

[euphemism for Stalin] they believed more firmly than ever in the might of the

Soviet State, in the invincible will of the Soviet people to win, in the inevitable doom of the Nazi invaders...

October and November 1941 were the grimmest months in the whole of the Soviet-

German war, only to be equalled by October 1942, when the fate of Stalingrad hung in the balance.

By the end of September 1941, the greater part of the Ukraine had been lost, and the Germans were crashing ahead towards Kharkov, the Donbas and the Crimea. After the

débâcle in the Battle of Kiev, in which the Russians—even according to their own admission— had lost in prisoners alone something in the neighbourhood of 175,000 men, the Germans, in the south, had a great superiority not only in men but in planes, tanks and guns.

[ Men, two to one; guns, three to one; planes, two to one. (IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 218.)]

Neither the Stavka's order to organise a "stubborn defence" on the Perekop Isthmus in the Crimea, nor its order to build solid defences west of Kharkov or the Donbas could be carried out in time. The mobilization of many thousands of Donbas miners into the local opolcheniye and the efforts made by 150,000 miners to build new defence lines were of no avail. By September 29, the Germans broke into the Donbas which was then

producing sixty per cent of the Soviet Union's coal, seventy-five per cent of its coking coal, thirty per cent of its pig-iron and twenty per cent of its steel. By October 17, Rundstedt's armies had overran the whole Donbas and, after forcing the Mius river,

entered Taganrog on the Sea of Azov; meantime, further north, Paulus's 6th Army was

advancing on Kharkov, which was captured on October 24; the Russians had, during the previous days, been evacuating what industrial equipment they could. It was also then, with the Germans already at Taganrog, that Rostselmash, the vast agricultural-machinery plant at Rostov began to be evacuated to the east; this work continued almost till the last minute, often under German bombing.

On November 19, the Germans captured Rostov, after two days' bitter street fighting. But the High Command considered Rostov so important that even at the height of the Battle of Moscow, Timo-shenko was given some reinforcements and ten days later, Rostov—

"the gate to the Caucasus"—was recaptured by the Russians. It was the first major Russian victory, though the Germans were pushed only some thirty to forty miles to the west, where they entrenched themselves along the Mius river. This victory was,

according to the Russians (with some confirmation from the Germans) not only militarily but also politically important as it affected Turkey's policy towards Russia.

[The Russian attacks on Rostov in the south and Tikhvin in the north also helped to

reduce the pressure on Moscow. Rostov was abandoned without Hitler's orders: hence the temporary disgrace of Rundstedt.]

In the meantime Manstein's 11th Army, supported by a Rumanian Army Corps, had

broken into the Crimea, where the Russian forces retreated in disorder to Sebastopol. By mid-November the whole of the Crimea was in German (or Rumanian) hands, with the

exception of Sebastopol, where three solid defence lines, ten miles in depth, had been organised. All enemy attempts to storm the naval base failed and under the command of Vice-Admiral Oktiabrsky and General Petrov the beleaguered fortress held out until July 1942. In underground workshops, more or less immune to the continuous bombing and

shelling, Sebastopol made many of its own arms and ammunition. In November and

December alone, it made 400 minethrowers, 20,000 hand-grenades, and 32,000 anti-

personnel mines, repaired numerous guns, machine-guns, and even tanks. At that time

52,000 men were defending Sebastopol, and for eight months they succeeded in tying up large German and Rumanian forces which, in the Russian view, would otherwise have

been used to invade the Caucasus across the Kerch Straits.

Though thrown back from Rostov and held at Sebastopol, the Germans could still claim to have caused not only grievous military, but also immense economic damage to the

Russians in the south.

The Russians' plight in the north was even more tragic. Except for a slender life-line across Lake Ladoga, the blockade of Leningrad had been complete by September 8, with the German capture of Schlüsselburg; on November 9, even the Ladoga gap was made

almost unusable after the Germans had captured Tikhvin on the main railway line to the south-east of the lake. Leningrad seemed finally condemned to starvation, and it was not till December 9 that Tikhvin was recaptured, and the future began to look a little less desperate. It is rather remarkable that, at the very height of the Battle of Moscow, the High Command should have been able to spare enough troops to recapture both Rostov

and Tikhvin—even though these had obviously been looked upon as merely minimal

objectives, which could not be followed up by either a recapture of the Donbas, or a major breach in the Leningrad blockade. For, at the time, Russia was not only short of trained soldiers, but also desperately short of arms. And, above all, it was clear that the Germans' Number-One target was still the capture of Moscow, despite the failure of their all-out October offensive.

Everything, by the beginning of November, tended to show that the Germans were

preparing for another all-out attack, and were concentrating heavy forces not only west, but also north-west and south-west of Moscow. The failure of the first offensive had given the Soviet High Command just enough time to assemble large strategic reserves

behind Moscow, and to strengthen their front line in all sectors.

The fact that Moscow was not captured in October had had an enormously salutary effect on the soldiers' morale. Some significance is today attached to the eagerness with which soldiers and officers were joining the Party and the Komsomol; within a month (October to November) the number of Party members in the three army groups outside Moscow

rose from 33,000 to 51,000, and of Komsomol members from 59,000 to 78,000; it was at this stage in particular that the policy was adopted of admitting to the Party, with the minimum of formalities, almost any soldier who had distinguished himself in battle; the identification of Party and Country was at its height. Or rather, the Party adapted itself, as best it could, to the nationalist spirit of resistance.

After the failure of the first German onslaught on Moscow civilian morale improved also.

The evacuation of Moscow had continued right through October and the first half of

November; about half the population had gone, as well as a large part of the industry: thus, out of 75,000 metal-cutting lathes, only 21,000 remained in Moscow, whose

industries were now concentrating chiefly on the manufacture of small arms,

ammunition, and the repair of tanks and motor vehicles. The Moscow sky was dotted

with barrage balloons, and there were anti-tank obstacles in most of the main streets, and a great many anti-aircraft batteries. These were far more numerous than before, and

firewatching rules had become even stricter; thousands of Muscovites were engaged in fire-watching. The atmosphere was austere, military and heroic—very different from

what it had been at the time of the panic exodus.

Although there was the general conviction that Moscow would not now be lost, the

seriousness of the coming second offensive was not underrated. As was to be expected the Germans achieved considerable superiority in a number of places. Their first big blows fell on November 16 in the Kalinin-Volokolamsk sector of the front where they

had three times more tanks and twice as many guns as the Russians. By November 22

they had broken into Klin north of Moscow and in the west to Istra, the point nearest to Moscow they were ever to reach in force. It was no doubt from Istra that German

generals later remembered that they "could look at Moscow through a pair of good field-glasses". Istra is some fifteen miles west of Moscow.

There were many acts of heroism by Russian soldiers in the embittered fighting north of Volokolamsk, such as the many— if atrociously costly—feats by General Dovator's

cossack cavalry (Dovator himself was to be killed during the Russian counter-offensive on December 19), or the suicidal resistance of Panfilov's anti-tank unit who were

guarding the Volokolamsk highway at the Dubosekovo crossroads:

On that day the Germans had hoped to break through to the Volokolamsk highway,

and to advance on Moscow. After a massive air attack, German tommy-gunners

tried to break into the Russian trenches, but were driven back by rifle and machine-gun fire. Then a second attack was launched by a fresh unit supported by twenty

tanks... Using anti-tank rifles, hand-grenades, and petrol bottles the Panfilov men crippled fourteen of the tanks and the other six were driven back. Shortly

afterwards the wounded survivors were again attacked by thirty more tanks. It was then that politruk (political instructor) Klochkov turned to the soldiers, saying

"Russia is big, but there is nowhere to retreat, because Moscow is behind us"... One by one the Soviet soldiers were being wounded and killed in a merciless fight which lasted four hours. The severely wounded politruk threw himself under an enemy tank with a bunch of hand-grenades and blew it up. The Germans, having lost

eighteen tanks and dozens of men, failed to break through...

[ IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 261.]

There are various versions of the famous story of the "Twenty-eight Panfilov men"; what is curious about such stories of suicidal Russian resistance is that they are a little like a lottery or a lucky dip; numerous equally valiant deeds passed, if not unnoticed, at least unrecorded for posterity. But there were a few sample heroes, so to speak, who were to be built up in the popular imagination. The air force had its national hero in the famous Captain Gastello who, in the first week of the war, had crashed his burning plane into a column of German tanks; the infantry—its twenty-eight Panfilov men; the Partisans—

and, by implication also the Komsomol and the Soviet people generally—were to have as their national heroine Zoya Kosmodemianskaya, the eighteen-year-old Moscow

Komsomol girl, who had set fire to a German stable and was tortured and hanged by the Germans in the village of Petrishchevo near Moscow during the grim days of November

1941.

[Later in the war there was a similar "canonisation" of the "Young Guard" resistance group in the mining town of Krasnodon in the Donbas. A. Fadeyev later wrote a famous novel on them.]

It so happened that the story of Zoya was discovered, together with her tortured and frozen body, with a rope round her neck, by Lidin, a Pravda reporter at the time of the Russian counter-offensive two weeks later... In reality, neither Gastello, nor the twenty-eight Panfilov men, nor Zoya were isolated cases of Russian bravery and self-sacrifice; there were very many others in the levée en masse atmosphere of November-December 1941.

On the southern flank of the Moscow front, the industrial city of Tula, joined to the capital by a narrow bottleneck, was in constant danger of being encircled. There was a particularly strong Party organisation in that old Russian centre of arms manufacture, and the workers' battalions took a very active part in the defence of their city, which was living in a sort of "1919" atmosphere, dramatically described by General Boldin, who was placed in charge of the defence of Tula on November 22. Guderian had failed

already once to reach Tula, but had not abandoned his attempts to outflank and isolate it.

On December 3 Tula was encircled, the Germans having cut both the railway and the

highroad to Moscow. As Boldin tells the story:

On December 3, sixteen enemy tanks, together with motorised infantry crossed the

Tula-Moscow railway at Revyakino and occupied three villages... I was also told

that, later in the day, the Hitlerites had cut in several places the Tula-Moscow

highway, some ten miles north of Tula. "What shall we do now?" said Zhavoronkov (the local Party chief). "A strange question," I said, trying to sound cheerful. "We'll just go on defending Tula as before, and go on killing Fascists."

Not for a moment did the roar of guns stop in and around Tula. I called up the

command post of the 258th rifle division in the village of Popovkino, and asked for its commander, Colonel Siyazov. "Mikhail Alexandrovich," I had to bellow into the field telephone, "take immediate steps to clear the Germans off the Moscow

highway!" Siyazov could hardly hear me. I had to spell out every word. Then I could faintly hear him say: "Comrade General, your order will be carried out. I am ordering the 999th regiment to attack."

I asked Siyazov to inform me hourly. Not for a moment did I doubt that they would succeed. Then the phone rang from H.Q., and General Zhukov asked for me. I felt it would be an unpleasant conversation. And so it was. "Well, Comrade Boldin,"

Zhukov said, "this is the third time you've managed to get yourself encircled. Isn't it rather too much? I already told you to move your army headquarters and command

post to Laptevo. But you were pig-headed, wouldn't carry out my order..."

"Comrade Commander," I said, "if I and my army staff had left, Guderian would already be here. The position would be much worse than it is now."

For a couple of minutes there was a loud crackle in the receiver, and finally I could hear Zhukov again. "What steps are you taking?" he said. I reported that the 999th rifle regiment of the 258th division had gone into action to clear the Moscow

highway and that, moreover, an attack was being mounted against the Germans at

Kashira. "What help do you need?" said Zhukov. "May I ask you to move the tanks of Getman's division southwards along the Moscow highway to meet the 999th