Russia at war 1941-1945

During the Finnish war Soviet relations with Germany continued— at least on the face of it—to be friendly, while the hostility to Britain and France became much more strident than before. True, there were, from time to time, some seemingly inexplicable deviations from this obvious line; thus, at the end of November, Pravda surprisingly reproduced an article from the Nineteenth Century (London) deeply sympathetic to Poland and describing the ruthless bombing by the Germans of trains crowded with refugees. It was like a confirmation of the numerous stories of German brutality in Poland which Russian soldiers had brought back from there, and which were widely current in Russia. Pravda's inconsistency is but one of the minor mysteries in that very strange period in Russian history. Yet, on the surface, Soviet-German relations could not be better.

As the Finnish war progressed, the official Russian attitude to Britain and France became more and more hostile. Typical was Pravda's New Year editorial on January 1, 1940:

"Our country is the land of the greatest historical optimism. On the other hand, the capitalist world, as it enters 1940, is torn by agonising contradictions. Covering up their imperialist aims with hypocritical slogans about their 'battle for democracy', the British and French financial oligarchies, helped on by their faithful flunkeys from the Second International—Blum, Jouhaux, Citrine and Bevin—are kindling the flames of the new

war."

The class war in Britain, France and the USA, said Pravda, was stronger than ever between the "overwhelming majority of the people" who did not want war, and a handful of capitalists who cared nothing for the people's blood and were only interested in their own profits: "All the honest sons and daughters of the British, French and American peoples have branded with contempt that gang—ranging from the Pope to the London

stockbrokers—who have started all this screaming and yelling over the noble help given by the Red Army to the Finnish people struggling against their oppressors."

A few days later there were angry articles on "the shameful comedy of the 'expulsion' of the Soviet Union" from the League of Nations—a comedy staged by Britain and France.

These were, moreover, now sending arms to Finland.

In themselves, the Anglo-French arms shipments to Finland did not matter very much;

but it is quite obvious that the indignation the Russian attack on Finland had caused in Britain, France, America and Scandinavia, gave the Russian leaders food for anxious

thought. They dreaded the possibility that Finland might become common ground for a

reconciliation between Germany and the Western Powers, a reconciliation from which

Russia would be made to suffer. This largely explains the eagerness with which they

hastened to wind up the Finnish war and to make peace with the "Mannerheim gang"

without waiting for the "Terijoki government" to make its triumphal entry into Helsinki.

The idea of turning a "hostile" Finland into a "friendly" Finland with the help of this absurd device had miscarried completely and had merely silenced those Finnish elements

—including men like Paasikivi—which had criticised their government for rejecting the original Russian proposals.

What then had been the progress of the actual military operations?

Neither at the time, nor later, did the Russians do much flag-waving over the Finnish war.

It is now openly admitted that the first month of the war was an almost undiluted disaster.

The most the Russians achieved in December was to advance, in the course of "very heavy fighting", between fifteen and forty miles; but, having reached the Mannerheim Line proper, with its network of powerful fortifications, they came to a halt. On the Karelian Isthmus, as well as in Central Finland, the Russians were handicapped by snow, in some places five or six feet deep. The few available roads were heavily defended by the Finns, and the Russians had practically no trained ski troops, in which the Finnish army abounded. To move heavy equipment on such terrain was as good as impossible.

The Finns were heavily armed with automatic rifles and tommyguns, while the Russians were not. Temperatures—around minus 30°C. —were abnormally low. A large

proportion of the Soviet troops "were simply unprepared for this kind of warfare; they had had no experience of moving on skis through lake and forest country, and had no

experience at all of breaking through permanent lines of fortifications, or of storming pillboxes and other reinforced concrete structures".

[IVOVSS, vol. I, p. 266.]

By the beginning of January, the offensive was stopped. Marshal Timoshenko was

appointed Commander-in-Chief, and, for a whole month, the Russians planned and

prepared for a break-through of the Mannerheim Line. Large reinforcements, especially of engineers, were to be mustered for the purpose. Massive support of tanks, planes and guns was provided for in an all-out offensive effort to overcome the Finnish

fortifications. Moreover, three infantry divisions, reinforced by cavalry and tanks, were assigned the task of out-flanking the Mannerheim Line in the Viborg area across the ice of the Gulf of Finland.

The storming of the Mannerheim Line, preceded by a tremendous artillery barrage "from thousands of guns", did not begin till February 11. But the advance was still slow; although the Russians destroyed and captured many of the pillboxes, the Finns in the surviving pillboxes continued their desperate resistance, and casualties were very high on both sides. The steel and concrete fortifications of the Mannerheim Line, many of them connected by underground passages, with reinforced concrete walls three feet thick, were, indeed, in many cases almost invulnerable even to the heaviest pounding. It took nearly a week after a breakthrough along an eight-mile front before the Russians began to make any decisive progress. By February 21 most of the western part of the Mannerheim Line had been overrun, but the Russian losses had been so heavy that their forces had to be regrouped and further heavy reinforcements had to be brought up before the offensive could be resumed, what remained of the Mannerheim Line conquered and Viborg

captured.

Full-scale operations were only re-started on February 28. As the Russians approached Viborg, they met with another major obstacle —the flooding of large areas by the Finns

—but they finally reached the Viborg-Helsinki highway. By now the resistance of the

Finnish Army had, in the main, been broken. On March 4, Mannerheim informed the

Finnish Government that the Army could no longer resist successfully. The Soviet-

Finnish Peace Treaty was signed in Moscow on March 12.

[After the Finnish attempts to obtain German or American mediation had failed, tentative negotiations were started in January in Stockholm between the well-known Finnish

playwright, Hella Wuolijoki—with Foreign Minister Tanner's consent—and Mme

Kollontai, the Soviet Ambassador. A variety of negotiations continued throughout

January and February, though the Finns still hoped to obtain substantial military aid—

including troops—from Sweden, and also hoped that the Swedes would allow French and

British troops to go to Finland via Sweden. On this point the Swedes, afraid of becoming involved in a major war, would not yield and, indeed, advised the Finns to make peace with the Russians on the best possible terms.]

Almost throughout the "Winter War" there had been something of a news blackout in Russia, even though people in Moscow, and especially Leningrad, had a fair idea of what was going on. But very little was said at first about the great offensive against the Mannerheim Line in February, and still less about the abortive advance into Central

Finland; and it was not till the first week of March, after three months of inconclusive and mostly frustrating news, that the Soviet press at last began to speak of "victories on the Mannerheim Line". And then, suddenly, on March 12, it was announced that the Peace Treaty between the USSR and Finland had been signed. The signing was done by

Molotov, Zhdanov and Vassilevsky on the Russian side, and Ryti, Paasikivi and General Waiden on the Finnish side. The terms were harder than those originally proposed by the Russians—let alone those originally "agreed to" by Kuusinen. Now the whole Karelian Isthmus, including Viborg and numerous islands, a part of Rybachi Peninsula on the

Arctic, west of Murmansk, and the country north of Lake Ladoga were annexed by the

Soviet Union; moreover, she received a thirty-year lease on Hangö for a naval base.

Nothing was said any more about the "Terijoki Government"; it might never have existed. All that it had achieved in effect was to unify the Finnish people (many of whom had thought the original Russian proposals quite reasonable), and to cause much

unnecessary resentment in Finland. Now this resentment was further increased by the loss of Viborg.

Since, by March 5, the Red Army could easily have occupied Helsinki and other parts of Finland, the Finns may be said to have been let off lightly; nevertheless, without the loss of Viborg, it is just conceivable that the Finns might have been less eager to attack the Soviet Union in 1941. In itself, Viborg was of very little strategic value, but its loss was keenly felt in Finland, where the many thousands of "Viborg refugees" added greatly to anti-Russian feeling. During the War, many Russians agreed (on the quiet) that the

annexation of Viborg had been a serious mistake.

As distinct from Britain and France, Germany had, in the official Russian view, remained commendably neutral during the Soviet-Finnish war. Even so, the thought must have

crossed the Russian leaders' minds that Germany might yet take advantage of Finnish

grievances and longing for revenge. On the face of it, it is true, the Russians had attained their objective, which was to render Leningrad "invulnerable". This, as it turned out, short-lived advantage was outweighed by the fact that the performance of the Red Army in the Finnish War was far from good. There was a danger that the Germans might draw certain conclusions from this.

That the Soviet General Staff was not satisfied with the Red Army's record in Finland may be seen from the far-reaching measures that began to be taken soon afterwards to reorganise the Army. 1940 was to become, in General Zhukov's words, the "year of the great transformation" in the Red Army.

For all that relations with Germany had remained highly satisfactory on the surface

throughout the duration of the Soviet-Finnish War. All the abuse in the Soviet press was reserved for the Western democracies which, it was now claimed, were more anxious

than ever to "generalise the war" and to drag the neutrals into it. As early as January 17, Pravda began to speak about Anglo-French designs on the neutrality of the Scandinavian countries. Hitler's speeches continued to be politely reported, notably the one on January 30 in which he said that, thanks to the Soviet-German Pact, Germany had a "free rear" in the East: the state which Britain had guaranteed had disappeared from the face of the earth in eighteen days. Pravda also duly reported his threats to England and his announcement that "Germany would be victorious".

On February 11, with the Soviet-Finnish war still in full swing, a new Soviet-German economic agreement was signed. This, said Pravda, was a very good thing: "Present-day Germany is a highly-developed industrial power requiring many raw materials; and these the Soviet Union can largely supply. We also are a great industrial power; nevertheless, we can do with certain forms of imported industrial equipment... Our trade with Britain and France has dwindled, and the increase in our trade with Germany is only to be

welcomed... The new economic agreement had been welcomed by the Völkischer

Beobachter and other German papers."

[ Pravda, February 17, 1940.]

The volume and exact nature of these exchanges was not stated. Three days later Pravda reported another Hitler speech again boasting of the quick victory over Poland and

announcing that there was "more to come". As Pravda put it: '"I am determined to pursue this battle to the finish,' Hitler said with particular vigour."

[ Pravda, February 18, 1940.]

There was a clear suggestion here that an attack in the West was now in the offing.

Molotov waited till the end of March before making a statement to the Supreme Soviet on the termination of the Finnish War and on the international situation generally. This speech was, at least outwardly, the most violently anti-British and anti-French ever made.

He was no longer regretting the breakdown in the Anglo-French-Soviet talks during the previous year; on the contrary, he now said that "the Soviet Union had been determined not to become a tool in the hands of the Anglo-French imperialists in their anti-German struggle for world hegemony".

"The Anglo-French imperialists," he said, "wanted to turn the war in Finland into a war against the Soviet Union. But they failed in this, and the Soviet Union's relations with Germany continue to be good." The Anglo-French hostility to the Soviet Union, he went on, had been most violent in connection with the Finnish question, and he then

indignantly spoke of the police raid on the Soviet trade delegation in Paris, and of the

"virtual expulsion" from France of the Soviet Ambassador, Jacob Suritz. The Soviet Government had had to recall him.

After referring to the satisfactory economic relations with Germany, Molotov then

complained of British and French interference with Soviet-German trade: "They seize our ships in the Far East, because they are alleged to 'help Germany'; yet Rumania sells half her oil to Germany, and Rumania remains unmolested." He then protested against the various "fabrications" concerning Russia's alleged designs on India and other parts of the British Empire. "Our policy is a policy of neutrality, and I know it isn't to the taste of the Anglo-French imperialists, who want to inflict on us a policy of hostility and war against Germany."

Pointedly he remarked that Chamberlain, who had hoped that the Finnish War would

develop into something different, was greatly distressed when he heard of the Finnish-Soviet peace settlement. He spoke of the 141 planes and the other equipment Britain had sent to Finland, and of the military help France and Sweden had given her.

He concluded somewhat morosely by saying that the war in Finland had cost the Soviet Union 48,745 dead and 158,000 wounded—for a small "frontier rectification".

[The Finns put the Russian losses much higher.]

Saying that the Finns were minimiising their losses, Molotov then "estimated" that they had lost 60,000 dead and 250,000 wounded. These figures gave the Russians but little grounds for boasting, nor were they likely to foster Finnish-Soviet relations. Significantly he was very sparing in his praise of the generals who had conducted the campaign.

Altogether, as I was later told by many Russians, Molotov's report on the Finnish War had left them with an unpleasant and frustrating feeling. The only two things that could be said in favour of the war were that it had achieved its immediate objective (but at a terrible price, and in very unfortunate conditions)—and that it was now over. Here and there, questions were also asked about the "Terijoki Government", but it was soon made clear to the bright young people who asked them that they had better shut up.

[Wolfgang Leonhard, op. cit., p. 86.]

Pravda briefly announced that, in view of the changed international situation, the Finnish

"People's Government" had been dissolved. This was the end of that absurd experiment.

At one time, while the war was still on, Pravda had published a long list—covering two whole pages of the paper—of the officers and soldiers decorated for bravery; but there was remarkably little flag-waving over the conclusion of the Finnish War—much less,

indeed than over the "victory" won in Eastern Poland. Here at least much could be made of the, more or less genuine, enthusiasm with which the Ukrainians and Belorussians

welcomed the Red Army; there was nothing like that in Karelia, where practically the entire population had been evacuated, or had fled, to Finland. Viborg, the only large city occupied by the Russians, had been abandoned by all its inhabitants. Above all there was the depressing effect of the heavy casualties suffered and of the suspicion that all was not perfect with the Red Army. Then, less than a month after the signing of the Soviet-Finnish Peace Treaty, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. This gave rise to more

anxiety.

During that short interval nothing of any consequence happened in Russia, with the

exception of the meeting of the Supreme Soviet at the beginning of April which approved the 1940 budget. Already the effects of the Finnish War could be felt here. As Pravda wrote in its editorial of April 5: "The Supreme Soviet has approved the budget of the USSR for 1940. With great enthusiasm it voted a large increase in our defence

expenditure. Our country must have an even more powerful Red Army and Navy if it is

to discourage the warmongers. The fifty-seven milliard roubles to be spent on

strengthening our defence will help the Red Army and Navy to solve any problems

connected with the security of our State."

The tone of this editorial was remarkably free of the usual bluster, and was perhaps intended to convey that the Red Army would, in the future, give a better account of itself than it had done in the Finnish War.

Before the actual German attack on Denmark and Norway, the Soviet press tended to

echo the German charges of "Anglo-French violations of Norwegian sovereignty". This was, indeed, the phrase used by Pravda on April 9. By the time the paper had been printed, the Germans were already busy occupying the two Scandinavian countries.

During the days that followed, the Russian press continued, on the face of it, to follow the German line. Thus, on April 10, together with the news that German troops had occupied both Copenhagen and Oslo, the Soviet papers published under a three-column heading

the "Memorandum of the German Government" which, they said, had been read over the radio by Goebbels. Two days later, TASS, in a message from Oslo, referred to Quisling as "the new head of the Norwegian Government". However, it did not deny the continued existence of the "other" Norwegian Government.

After that the German and British communiqués, as well as TASS reports from London

were published with a certain air of neutrality and impartiality. In a variety of ways the fact was emphasised that the Soviet Union kept strictly neutral in the Scandinavian war.

For example, on April 12, there was an angry official TASS denial of a New York Times story that most of the German troops that had occupied Narvik had travelled there by way of Leningrad and Murmansk.

Yet there seems little doubt that, in the eyes of the Soviet leaders, the war was spreading much too near home. Although at the time nothing was published about it in the Soviet press, much is made in the Soviet History of the War of the way in which direct Soviet diplomatic intervention saved Sweden from being occupied by the Germans: "After the Nazi invasion of Denmark and Norway, the Soviet Government informed Count

Schulenburg, the German Ambassador in Moscow, that it was definitely interested in the preservation of Swedish neutrality."

[ IVOVSS, vol. I. p. 395.]

According to Soviet diplomatic documents quoted by the History, "both the Swedish Premier and the Swedish Foreign Minister, in addressing (Mme) A. M. Kollontai, the

Soviet Ambassador, warmly thanked the Soviet Union for having restrained Germany

and for having saved Swedish neutrality".

Meanwhile, the Soviet press went on with its rather routine and seemingly "neutral"

coverage of the war in Norway, with occasional surveys stressing the general ineptitude of the Anglo-French operations. The last of these surveys appeared in Pravda on May 9, and concluded that the Germans had as good as won. On the following day the Germans

struck out in the west.

Inside Russia the most important developments during the Norwegian war concerned the reorganisation of the Red Army. On May 8, 1940 an ukase of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet announced the creation of new military titles—Major-General,

Lieutenant-General and Army General, in addition to the already existing title of Marshal of the Soviet Union.

[These replaced the clumsier and less "distinguished" titles, such as "Army Commander of the 1st Rank", the equivalent of "Army General".]

At that time four men held the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union: Voroshilov,

Timoshenko, Shaposhnikov and Kulik.

[Shaposhnikov, a highly professional soldier whom the Soviets had inherited from the Tsarist Army, was to be Chief-of-Staff during a large part of the 1941-5 war; he retired, in the end, owing to ill-health. Kulik, on the other hand, was a political upstart who was to fade out soon after the beginning of the war. He was to be blamed for much of the unpreparedness of the Red Army in 1941, and, in particular, for having failed to equip it with up-to-date machine-guns and other automatic weapons, which at first placed the

Russian infantryman at a terrible disadvantage against the German soldier.]

At the same time Voroshilov was appointed Deputy Premier and Chairman of the

Defence Committee of the USSR; his previous post of Commissar of Defence went to

Timoshenko. Corresponding titles were also created in the Soviet Navy. During the

months that followed, the press was filled with army nominations and promotions,

complete with pictures of all the new generals, which filled four pages of Pravda for days and days. Coinciding with the German invasion of France, this unprecedented publicity given to hundreds of Red Army generals was no doubt calculated to have a reassuring

effect on the public.

Chapter V RUSSIA AND THE FALL OF FRANCE-BALTIC

STATES AND BESSARABIA

During my war years in Russia I put these two questions to a great number of people:

"What did you feel about the Soviet-German Pact?" and "At what point, while the Pact was in force, did you begin to have serious doubts about it? "

The answer to the first question was, almost invariably, something like this: "Everybody thought it nasty and unpleasant to have to pretend to make friends with Hitler; but, as things were in 1939, we had to gain time at any price, and there was no choice. We did not think that Stalin himself particularly liked the idea, but we had tremendous faith in his judgment; if he decided on the non-aggression pact with Hitler, he must have thought that there was no other way." The answer to the second question was invariably along these lines: "We started getting really nervous when we saw that Hitler had managed to smash the French Army within a month, or less. We had had considerable confidence in the

French Army and had also heard a lot about the Maginot Line and—let's face it—we

thought the war in France would last a long time, and that the Germans would be greatly weakened as a result. Selfish?—well, yes, we were, but who isn't? That we were

frightened may be seen from the frantic haste with which, while the Germans were busy finishing off the French, we grabbed the Baltic States, Bessarabia and Northern

Bukovina. And then came those draconian labour laws, the reorganisation of the Red

Army, and all the rest of it. We never expected for a moment that the Germans would

attack and above all invade us the way they did, but we felt that we had to prepare for a very hard fight if Hitler were mad enough to turn our way."

And then there was a supplementary question which I liked to ask. It was this: "Between the fall of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union there was the war between

Germany and England— and what did you think of that?" Here the answers became

much more confused but, roughly, they boiled down to this: "We developed a sudden contempt—yes, contempt—for the French. On England our feelings were very divided.

We had been conditioned to be anti-British, what with Chamberlain, Finland and the rest.

But gradually, very gradually we began to admire the English—for standing up to Hitler.

There was a good deal in our papers about the bombing of London, Coventry, and so on.

We also began to feel sorry for the English people, and—began to feel that, sooner or later, we might have to face something similar. Our intellectuals felt particularly strongly about it. The idea of a 'just war', a 'people's war' began to cross some people's minds. But then, in May, there was Hess, and we got fearfully suspicious of the English again."

Ever since September 1939, the official Soviet line had been that the war between

Britain, France and Germany was an "imperialist" war; but, since the partition of Poland, the powers guilty of pursuing this "imperialist" war were Britain and France, but not Germany. They, and not Germany, were now the "aggressors". During the Finnish War, Germany had been "neutral", while Britain and France had demonstrated their deep hostility to the Soviet Union by helping Finland with arms and volunteers, and by

expelling Russia from the League of Nations. The German occupation of Denmark and

Norway was at first widely attributed in the Soviet press to Anglo-French "provocation", though soon afterwards the Russian pleading with Germany not to occupy Sweden

showed that they were anxious to limit the damage in Scandinavia.

Soviet relations with Britain and France remained badly strained, and the Soviet press angrily reported the persecution of the French Communists—whom Moscow itself had

put in a hopelessly awkward and difficult position with its "imperialist war" slogans. The French working-class—and the Communists in particular—who in any other

circumstances would have fought Nazi Germany wholeheartedly, were precisely the

people who were being told by the Russians—and, more particularly by Dimitrov and the Comintern— that the war against Nazi Germany was an "imperialist" war and so, in consequence, not a "just" war. A different morale of the French Communists might not have made any great difference at the time of the German break-through into France in May 1940, and the French Army would probably have capitulated in any case; but,

undoubtedly, Moscow helped in some degree to weaken French resistance, even though it was obviously in the Russians' interest to strengthen it and to keep Hitler pinned down in France as long as possible.

It was all very well for communist propaganda later to adopt the fashionable Ehrenburg line that France had been "betrayed" by her bourgeoisie, but the morale of the whole nation was low in May-June 1940, including that of the French working-class. The

Soviet-German Pact and the subsequent Russian and Comintern propaganda about the

"imperialist war" had placed the French Communists—whether leaders or rank-and-file

—in a truly tragic dilemma. Many of them strongly suspected that they—and France—

were being sacrificed by Moscow, to whom the survival of the Soviet Union, with the

help of the Soviet-German Pact, was the Number One priority.

[ This tragic dilemma among the French Communists in the face of the. Soviet-German

Pact and the German invasion of France is examined in detail in the author's France, 1940-1955 (London, 1956), pp. 179-202. This chapter was, significantly, omitted from the Russian translation published in Moscow in 1959.]

Whether or not, as is now claimed by communists, certain French Communist leaders

took a firm anti-German lutte à outrance line in the first week in June, the Soviet leaders were very careful at the time to avoid anything that might have caused Hitler the least offence. Nevertheless, there was a significant change in the tone of the Soviet press as the French tragedy developed. At first it was distinctly malevolent towards France and

Britain. Thus in summing up the results of the first five days of the military operations in the West, Pravda wrote in its editorial of May 16:

During these first five days, the German armies have achieved considerable successes.

They have occupied the greater part of Holland, including Rotterdam. The Netherlands Government has already run off (sbezhalo) to England. It had been a long-standing ambition of the Anglo-French bloc to drag Holland and Belgium into its war against

Germany... After the Germans had forestalled Britain and France in Scandinavia, these two countries moved heaven and earth to get Holland and Belgium into the war... So far, the Anglo-French bloc can boast of only one success: it has thrown two more small

countries into the imperialist war; two more nations have now been condemned to

suffering and hunger.

No one will be deceived by the Anglo-French lamentations over the violations of

international law. As soon as the war had spread to Norway, the British grabbed the

Faroe and Lofoten islands—heaven only knows in virtue of what international law. We

now see how great is the responsibility of the Anglo-French imperialists who, by

rejecting Germany's peace offers, set off the Second Imperialist War in Europe.

There was no mention of the ruthless bombing of Rotterdam, and, on the following day, in a review of the military situation describing German successes, there were again the same phrases about the Netherlands Government having "run off" to London, "leaving the army and the country to their fate". On the same day Pravda published a particularly nauseating anti-British article by David Zaslavsky.

But, during the following week, with the Germans crashing on towards Dunkirk, the tone suddenly changed. The reports became much more factual. Every important Churchill

speech was quoted at some length, as was also Reynaud's famous patrie en danger

speech to the Senate on May 21. Significantly, much space was given to the question of American help to Britain and France. On June 5, Churchill's post-Dunkirk speech—"we shall fight on the beaches ... we shall never surrender"—was published under a three-column heading in Pravda. On the same day the paper announced that Molotov had

"raised no objection" to the British Government's appointment of Sir Stafford Cripps as Ambassador to Moscow.

When the resistance of the French army finally collapsed by the middle of June, and

Pétain asked the Germans for an armistice, the Russians seemed suddenly to become

obsessed with one great fear: which was that Britain might make peace with Germany—

for what would happen then? Most significant in this respect was the military survey in Pravda of June 20 by Major-General P. A. Ivanov: "Not only has the French Army been smashed, but France has now lost all her vital industrial centres. This is France's

débâcle.. . Another of Britain's allies has been put out of action, and now Britain is left face to face with Germany and Italy. Yet both sides have mighty economic resources, and therefore they may continue the war for a very long time yet, and it is much too early to try to foretell the outcome of this war.

[ Emphasis added]

It is highly symptomatic that the activity of the British air-force should have been switched from the battle in France to the bombing of economic targets in Germany." And there followed long and detailed accounts of British air-raids on Germany.

[TASS, London, quoting Reuter.]

There was not the slightest suggestion any more that a peace settlement between

Germany and Britain would be a good thing!

Stupefied by Hitler's overwhelming victory over France, Russia now dropped all further pretence of respect for the sovereignty of the Baltic States. Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia were occupied, draconian new labour legislation imposed on Soviet industry, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina occupied—all this was being done within the last fortnight in

June. Already on June 17, Pravda reported that there was "great rejoicing at Kaunas", as the Red Army entered Lithuania, adding significantly that "its Fascist dictator, Smetona"

had "fled to Germany". During the following days, the Soviet press reported similar

"jubilant demonstrations" from Tallinn and Riga. The governments of the Baltic States were accused of plotting against the Soviet Union and Latvia and Estonia, in particular, of having "grossly violated their mutual assistance pacts with the Soviet Union". This now demanded that "they set up governments which would respect their treaties with the Soviet Union and that they give free access to their territory to Soviet troops, which would guarantee that these treaties would be respected ".

[ Pravda, June 17, 1940.]

It was quick work. On June 18 it was already announced that Mr Paletskis "who had been put in a concentration camp by the [pro-Nazi] Smetona gang in 1939", had become Lithuanian Premier. Similar miraculous changes were to take place in the next few days in Latvia and Estonia. On the very day Pravda published the DNB report from Berlin of

"Hitler's meeting with the French delegation in the Forest of Compiègne" it also described the "jubilant reception given to the Red Army by the Estonian people at Tallinn". Some time later Molotov was to explain the diplomatic background of the Russian invasion of the Baltic States as best he could; but every Russian clearly thought he understood why the Red Army had marched in—while Hitler wasn't looking.

The direct connection between the invasion of the Baltic States on the one hand, and the fall of France on the other, was so embarrassingly obvious that, on June 23, the Soviet Government found it necessary to publish this extraordinary statement—denying that it was "dissatisfied with the German successes in the West":

In connection with the entry of Soviet troops into the Baltic States there are

persistent rumours in the Western press about 100 or 150 Soviet divisions being

concentrated on the German frontier. This is supposed to arise from the

dissatisfaction felt in the Soviet Union over Germany's military successes in the West, and to point to a deterioration of Soviet-German relations.

TASS is authorised to state that this is totally untrue. There are only eighteen to twenty Soviet divisions in the Baltic countries, and they are not concentrated on the German border, but are scattered throughout the Baltic countries.

No "pressure" on Germany is intended and the military measures taken have only one aim: which is to safeguard the mutual aid between the Soviet Union and these countries.

As for Soviet-German relations, the TASS statement went out of its way to say that the occupation of the Baltic States—or Germany's victory in the West, for that matter—could not in any way affect them, though it was careful not to say whether, or not, the Baltic States had been occupied with German consent. "There is a deliberate attempt" (the TASS statement went on) "to cast a shadow on Soviet-German relations. In all this there is nothing but wishful thinking on the part of certain British, American, Swedish and Japanese gentlemen... They seem to be incapable of grasping the obvious fact that the good-neighbourly relations between the Soviet Union and Germany cannot be disturbed

by rumours and cheap propaganda, since these relations are based not on temporary

motives of an ad hoc {konyunkturnyi) character, but on the fundamental State interests of the USSR and Germany."

So far so good; but six days later it was announced that "the Soviet-Rumanian conflict over Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina" had been "satisfactorily settled". Whereupon the Soviet press proceeded to report the "jubilant" reception given by the population of these two areas to the Red Army.

[According to the Russian post-war History, the Russians had become increasingly worried, especially since May 1940, by Rumania's "growing subservience" to Germany; both Tatarescu and King Carol, who had, for a time, tried to sit on the fence, were now beginning to lean heavily over to the German side. It was on June 26 that the Soviet Government presented what was in effect an ultimatum to the Rumanian Government

demanding an "immediate solution" of the question concerning the return of Bessarabia to the Soviet Union. It also demanded the transfer to the Soviet Union of Northern

Bukovina which was ethnically Ukrainian. An additional argument concerning Northern

Bukovina was that "in November 1918 the People's Assembly (veche) of Bukovina had, reflecting the will of the people, decided in favour of joining Soviet Ukraine".

Davidescu, the Rumanian Ambassador in Moscow, declared, on the following day, his

government's "readiness" to enter into negotiations with the Soviet Government; but the latter demanded a "Clear and precise" answer. This came almost immediately, and on June 28 the Red Army began to move into the two areas.

On June 23 Germany had been informed of the Soviet demands on Rumania, "but had to declare that she was not interested in the question of Bessarabia". As the History says:

"While the Battle of France was going on, it was particularly undesirable for the Germans to complicate their relations with the Soviet Union. Moreover, the Germans feared that, in the event of a Soviet-Rumanian conflict, Rumania might lose her oilwells, while

Germany was extremely anxious that these should remain intact".

For hard-boiled "realism" the Russian conduct in this case was hard to beat. The History adds that, "with the best will in the world", Britain was unable at the time to "interfere in Soviet-Rumanian relations", since she was wholly tied up by the war in the West.

(IVOVSS, I, p. 281). Rumania joined the Axis in November 1940.]

*

During the few days separating the occupation of the Baltic States and of Bessarabia-Bukovina, a number of other significant things happened. On June 25 it was announced that diplomatic relations had been established between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

Milan Gabrilovic was appointed Ambassador to Moscow and V. A. Plotnikov

Ambassador to Belgrade.

But that was not all. On the following day came a real bombshell of another kind—the ukase of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet placing Soviet industry virtually on a war footing. The eight-hour working-day was now introduced, and the full six-day working-week; more important still, workers and employees were now tied to their particular

enterprise or office, and there could no longer be any migration of labour. The ukase also provided for the most rigid disciplinary measures against absenteeism and similar

offences.

Needless to say, countless "spontaneous" meetings of workers were reported from all over the country, all approving the ukase, the purpose of which, according to all the speakers at these meetings, was to increase the military might of the Soviet Union. The fall of France was having its immediate repercussions inside Russia.

Speaking at a plenary session of the Soviet Trade Union Federation on June 25, N. M.

Shveraik said: "We are living in a capitalist encirclement and the war is raging over great areas. It is our good fortune not to be in the war, but we must be prepared for all

emergencies. We must do all we can to be many times stronger than we are; we must in every way and at any moment be ready to face every possible ordeal."

After the fall of France, it was only too clear to everybody that there was only one country from which these "ordeals" could now come. It was certainly not England, and not even Japan. And Shvernik went on: "Comrades, as Comrade Stalin has taught us, the most dangerous thing in the world is to be caught unawares. To be caught unawares

means falling a victim to the unexpected. Today the international situation demands from us that we strengthen the defence of our country and the might of our armed forces day after day."

During that historic week, the coverage of events in the West showed a slight, if only very slight, pro-British bias. Churchill's speeches saying Britain would fight till final victory, were duly reported, and, as early as June 21, there was a first mention in the Russian press of de Gaulle and his refusal to surrender to the Germans. On the other hand, Pétain was reported as calling for the termination of the war between Germany and Britain; and the Soviet press also published the Franco-German armistice terms, and the report of the German High Command on the French campaign: 27,000 Germans killed,

18,000 missing, 111,000 wounded. Prisoners taken: 1,900,000, including five army

commanders.

The fact that German losses were only about half of what had been the Russian losses in the "little" Finnish War cannot have passed unobserved. The secret hope that Germany would have found herself greatly weakened by her war in the West had been dashed to

the ground. Now, for the first time, the Russians heard names bandied about which,

before long, were to acquire so ominous a ring: Rundstedt, Kleist, Guderian.

For all that, the pretence that relations with Germany were good had still to be kept up.

Alongside reports of the "election campaigns" in the Baltic States, the Soviet Press published extracts from a German White Paper disclosing "Anglo-French intrigues against the Soviet Union" at the time of the Finnish War, their plans to bomb Baku, and similar matters. And then came Molotov's Supreme Soviet speech of August 1, 1940 in

which he commented in his own peculiar way on all the spectacular and tragic events of the last few months. In a devious and subtly ambiguous manner he intimated that he was not displeased and perhaps relieved—as he most certainly was—that Britain had not

given up the struggle.

Germany has achieved a great success against the [Western] Allies. But she has not solved her fundamental problem, which is to stop the war on conditions desirable to her. On July 19 the Reichskanzler offered peace negotiations to Great Britain, but the British Government rejected his offer, interpreting it as a demand for

capitulation. It replied that it would go on till final victory. The British Government has even broken off diplomatic relations with France. All this means that Great

Britain does not wish to give up her colonies and wants to go on fighting for world domination, even though this will be much more difficult for her since the defeat of France and since Italy's entry into the war.

Having delivered this side-kick at "British imperialism", Molotov then proceeded: "The end of the war is not in sight. We are likely to be faced with a new stage of the war—a struggle between Germany and Italy, on the one hand, and Britain, supported by the United States, on the other." The reference to the United States was clearly intended to suggest that Germany's chances of winning the war were not necessarily good.

It is highly significant that even when things looked blackest for Britain, the Russians took a reasonably optimistic view of her chances; thus, the chief ideological journal of the Communist Party, Bolshevik of July 15, 1940 concluded its survey by saying that Britain was "far from finished", while a similar line had already been taken by the well-known economist, Prof. E. Varga in Mirovoye Khoziaistvo i Mirovaya Politika (World Economy and World Politics) early in June, when the collapse of France was already

imminent.

As for the future of Soviet-German relations, Molotov merely repeated, almost word for word, the TASS communiqué of June 23: "There has recently been in the British and pro-British press much speculation on the possibility of discord between the Soviet Union and Germany. Attempts have been made to frighten us with the growing might of

Germany. But our relations are not based on temporary ad hoc considerations, but on the fundamental state interests of the two countries."

What he said about Britain was at any rate distinctly less ill-tempered than anything said or published for a long time: "There have been no substantial changes in our relations with England. After all the hostile acts she has committed against us, it was hard to expect any favourable developments in Anglo-Soviet relations, even though the

appointment of Cripps as British Ambassador to Moscow may point to a desire on the part of Great Britain to improve her relations with the Soviet Union."

[ Emphasis added.]

The incorporation in the Soviet Union of the Baltic States, Bessarabia and North

Bukovina was presented by Molotov in a manner that was to be expected. It was, no

doubt, pleasing to see the Soviet Union recover some of the territories which had once belonged to the old Tsarist Empire, and even to annex an area— Northern Bukovina,

including the large city of Czernowitz—which had never been part of it. Northern

Bukovina, Molotov said, was chiefly inhabited by Ukrainians and Moldavians—and

these, as well as the inhabitants of Bessarabia, had now become Soviet citizens "with great joy". There was now every reason to believe that relations with Rumania would become normal again. As for the Baltic States, Molotov explained their incorporation in the Soviet Union in the following terms:

The mutual assistance pacts we had with Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia did not produce the desired results. The bourgeois cliques in these countries were hostile to the Soviet Union, and the anti-Soviet "Baltic Entente" between Latvia and Estonia was latterly extended to Lithuania.

Therefore, especially in view of the international situation, we demanded a change in the government personnel of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and the introduction into these countries of additional Red Army formations. In July free parliamentary elections took place in all three countries, and we can now note with satisfaction that the peoples of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in a friendly élan elected representatives who have since unanimously declared themselves in favour of the introduction of the Soviet system in all three countries, and for their incorporation in the USSR. Ninety-five per cent of all these people had previously formed part of the USSR (sic).

Molotov reckoned that, since September 1939, the population of the Soviet Union had

increased by about twenty-three million people, all of which meant "an important increase in our might and territory".

Relations with Turkey and Iran, he went on, were now "fairly normal", despite the revelations in the German White Paper on the sinister role the two countries had played in the Anglo-French plotting against the Soviet Union. Relations with Japan—since the licking she had received at Halkin Gol—were now also "fairly normal", and a Manchukuo-Mongolian commission would shortly deal with the frontier problem

between the two countries. And then: "I shall not dwell on our relations with the USA if only because there is nothing good to report. [Laughter.] We understand that some Americans don't like our successes in the Baltic countries." He also referred to the gold belonging to the Baltic States which the USA had "grabbed", even though the Soviet Union had bought this gold from them.

He ended with the suggestion that the war would continue for a long time; and that "the entire Soviet people" must remain in a state of "mobilised preparedness" in view of the danger of a military attack on them. "We must not be caught unawares by any 'accident'

or any of the tricks of our foreign enemies."

Paletskis, Kirchenstein and Lauristin respectively representing Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, spoke at this Supreme Soviet meeting, and on August 2 new laws were adopted on the "Formation of the Moldavian SSR", on the "Inclusion of Northern Bukovina and the Khotinsk, Akkerman and Ismail districts of Bessarabia in the Ukrainian SSR", and on the "Admission of the Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian SSR's into the USSR". These laws were passed at the request of the parliaments of the three countries, and in virtue of Arts. 34 and 35 of the Soviet Constitution. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was

instructed to fix the date for elections in the three countries. On August 10 Pravda published a "Poem on Stalin" by Salome Neris, a Lithuanian poetess.

Meantime, in the three Baltic States a purge was being carried out amongst "Fascist" and other unreliable elements, with Vyshinsky, Dekanozov and Zhdanov supervising these

operations; estimates vary as to the number of persons deported from the Baltic

Republics between July 1940 and the outbreak of the Soviet-German war, but it is not improbable that they ran into tens of thousands.

Although the Baltic States, like the rest of Europe, had been affected by the war in the West, consumer goods were still plentiful in cities like Tallinn and Riga, and even long afterwards, all the elaborate and ingenious pretexts Russians used to think up in 1940

forgoing on more or less official "missions" to these newly-recovered territories in order to replenish their wardrobes and buy other nice things continued to be a standing joke.

The elections in the three Baltic Soviet Republics followed the usual Soviet pattern, but Russians who visited these countries in the autumn of 1940 had no great illusions about their peoples' unanimous love for the Soviet Union. There were strong pro-Soviet

currents among the Latvian working class, but that was about all. When the Germans

overran the Baltic States in June-July 1941, they met with very little opposition from the population; certain elements continued to be violently anti-Soviet, as is admitted in much of the Russian post-war writing on that stage of the war. The Estonians, although most of them disliked the Germans, had strong affinities with Finland, and Finland was at war with Russia...

Chapter VI RUSSIA AND THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN: A

PSYCHOLOGICAL TURNING-POINT?

In post-war Soviet histories of the war, there is a marked tendency to minimise the

importance of Britain's resistance to Germany between the fall of France and the summer of 1941; one Soviet author went so far as to say that the Battle of Britain was something of a myth; there had really been no such thing. There had been important air battles over Britain, but it had never come to a real clash between the "bulk" of the German and British forces. One explanation currently offered in recent histories is that Hitler's fear of the Red Army stopped him from making an all-out attempt to invade England.

Although this assertion may have some substance, one might as well recall that, on

August 23, 1940, i.e. just as the Battle of Britain was about to start in real earnest, Pravda as good as egged Hitler on to attack England. In its editorial that day, celebrating the first anniversary of the Soviet-German Pact, it wrote:

The signing of the Pact put an end to the enmity between Germany and the USSR,

an enmity which had been artificially worked up by the warmongers... After the

disintegration of the Polish State, Germany proposed to Britain and France a

termination of the war— a proposal which was supported by the Soviet

Government. But they would not listen, and the war continued, bringing hardships

and sufferings to all the nations whom the organisers of the war had dragged into the bloodbath... We are neutral, and this Pact has made things easier for us; it has also been of great advantage to Germany, since she can be completely confident of

peace on her Eastern borders.

[Emphasis added.]

After referring to the Economic Agreement of February 11, 1940, the article concluded that Soviet-German relations had "honourably stood the test of time", which was all the more valuable with a great war raging elsewhere.

The most notable news items in the Soviet press during the last week of August and the beginning of September were a brief announcement on August 24 of Trotsky's death

[This read as follows: "London, August 22 (TASS). London radio reports that Trotsky has died in hospital in Mexico City of a fractured skull, the result of an attempt on his life by one of the persons in his immediate entourage."]; another Timoshenko speech on the reorganisation of the Red Army; a TASS denial of a Japanese report that Stalin had, at the end of August, discussed with Ambassador Schulenburg an agreement between the

USSR, Germany, Italy and Japan on the abolition of the Anti-Comintern Pact: "TASS is authorised to state that this is a pure invention. During the last six or seven months Comrade Stalin has had no meeting with Schulenburg." On September 5, there was a report on the destroyers that the United States had given to Britain. From September 9 on, following the first great German air-raid on London on the night of September 7, more and more space was devoted to the Battle of Britain—though it was never called that.

There was at first scarcely any first-hand reporting of news from "our own

correspondent", but the coverage, consisting chiefly of official German and British communiqués, extracts from DNB and Reuter reports, and quotations from the British

and American press, etc., ran into two or three columns every day, and was reasonably well-balanced. Thus, on September 16 TASS reported from London: "According to

Reuter, it was officially stated that the Germans lost today 185 planes, and the British 25." On October 1, there was a similar report from London saying that, during

September, the Germans had lost 1,102 planes and at least 2,755 airmen, against a loss of 319 British planes. "168 British airmen baled out over British territory."

Despite the dryness of this reporting, the news from England undoubtedly stirred the imagination of the Russian public. Several Russians later told me that the most common reaction at the time had been: "Well, at last these German bastards are getting it in the neck from somebody." There was something else that made an even greater

psychological impact. London was the first great city the bombing of which was being reported in the Soviet press in some detail. There had been practically nothing about the bombing of Polish cities, and the devastating German air-raid on Rotterdam had scarcely been mentioned at all. But now the papers were full of stories about "gigantic fires", casualties, evacuees, shelter difficulties, and the like, and the Russian reader began to see it all in terms of a human drama. Significantly, after reporting for several days that most of the German bombing was done in the East End, in the London docks, "in the poorer areas of the city", it was also reported some days later that "bombs had been dropped on Buckingham Palace".

And then about a month after the beginning of the bombing of London, there was the first major first-hand report in the Soviet press from the TASS correspondent in London. In Pravda on October 5, there appeared an account of "A Visit by the TASS Correspondent to one of the Field Batteries of Anti-Aircraft Guns in the London area". "The present system of anti-aircraft defences in England", it said, "is much more impressive than anything the Luftwaffe has yet encountered." After describing the battery's night operations, the TASS correspondent [The TASS correspondent was Andrew Rothstein.

Significant is not the fact that a British subject and a communist should have written so sympathetically of the British people, but that the Soviet press should have published every word of his story. Such things do not happen by accident in Russia.] went on:

In the morning I was able to get more closely acquainted with the twenty soldiers manning the battery. Mostly these were young workers of twenty-three or twenty-four—miners, transport workers, printers, mechanics, besides a smaller number of

employees and unskilled labourers. Nine of the soldiers were trade union members, among them two miners. The food rations they got were satisfactory. The battery

had been there only a few weeks. The cook (a corporal) who was a miner, coming

from the same village as Jack Horner, the communist chairman of the South Wales

miners' federation, showed me the menu. For breakfast they had tea, porridge,

bacon (or sausage) and egg; for lunch, meat and two vegetables, and a sweet; at 5

p.m. they had tea, bread and butter (or marge), jam and biscuits; at 7 p.m. supper including another meat course. They were getting 12 oz of bread a day, 12 oz of

meat, 0.5 lb of vegetables, 2 oz of fresh fruit, and a weekly ration of 3.5 oz of butter.

The TASS correspondent added that there were "dozens of such batteries" in the London area, and commented on the comradely atmosphere amongst all these men: "The

behaviour of the sergeants is entirely different from what it used to be during the 1914-18

war." This article caused a real stir in Russia. It was something quite new. There had never been any "human interest" stories in the Soviet press about the Germans and their

"menus", let alone about Frenchmen and Norwegians. There was also a clear suggestion that this was a "people's war" in which the "proletariat" were playing as active a part as any, including Jack Horner's fellow villagers who could reasonably be supposed to be communists.

For a time, at any rate, a subtle kind of fellow-feeling for the British people was thus created in Russia. The intellectuals felt it, of course, most acutely. Anna Akhmatova wrote a poem on the bombing of London, which was not, however, to be published until 1943:

Time, with its bony hand,

Is now writing Shakespeare's twenty-fourth drama.

No, let us sooner read Hamlet and Caesar and Lear

Above the leaden river.

No, let us rather accompany darling Juliet

With singing and torches to her grave.

No, let us sooner look into Macbeth's window,

And tremble, together with the hired murderers.

But not this, not this, not this.

This one we cannot bear to read.

[Anna Akhmatova, Izbrannoye (A Selection) (Tashkent, 1943), p. 12.]

And Nikolai Tikhonov, full of foreboding, wrote another poem which was finally

published in 1956:

Through the night, through sheets of rain, and the wind cutting his cheeks,

Learning his lesson as he goes along,

The man of London winds his way to the shelter,

Dragging his rug along the watery pavement.

There's the cold steel key in his pocket,

A key to rooms now turned to prickly rubble.

We still are learning lessons at our school desk,

But at night we dream of the coming exam.

[ Literaturnaya Moskva (Moscow, 1956), p. 499.]

Especially among the intellectuals, there had, all along, been a distaste for the Soviet-German Pact, and a growing feeling that what was now happening to England would,

sooner or later, happen to Russia too: "At night we dream of the coming exam"...

On October 25 Pravda contained three news items, each significant in its own way:

"Hitler meets Franco", which suggested that Russia was certainly in very strange company; "The Evacuation of Children from Berlin", which suggested that England was hitting back hard; and another TASS message from London saying that there had been

great improvements lately in the organisation of air-raid shelters. And, two days later:

"Roosevelt warns Pétain against collaboration with Germany and against declaring war on England." After that came the news of the Italian attack on Greece —suggesting that the war was now spreading to the Balkans, a point about which Russia had always been very sensitive.

[Another curious news item during that week was the arrival in Moscow of Matias

Rakosi, the Hungarian communist leader. It was stated that he had been in jail for fifteen years, and had now been released as a result of the recent Soviet-Hungarian negotiations.]

Chapter VII DISPLAY OF RUSSIAN MILITARY MIGHT—

MOLOTOV'S TRAGICOMIC VISIT TO BERLIN

And then came November 1940. The Soviet Government clearly felt that the people

needed reassuring. The November 7 celebrations of the 23rd anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution were marked by a spectacular display of the Soviet Union's military might; this was not only meant to restore the Soviet public's confidence, but also to impress Germany. At the Bolshoi Theatre, on the eve of Revolution Day, there was the usual

meeting at which Kalinin, the venerable President of the Soviet Union, spoke, saying that

"of all the large States, the USSR is, in fact, the only one not to be involved in war, and is scrupulously observing its neutrality". To this Pravda added: "What we see in the capitalist world is a process of savage destruction of what generations of human beings had created. People, cities, industries, culture are being ruthlessly destroyed."

[ Pravda, November 9, 1940.]

In his Order of the Day, on November 7, the Commissar of Defence, Marshal

Timoshenko declared: "The Red Army is prepared, at the first summons of the Party and the Government, to strike a crushing blow at anyone who may dare to violate the sacred frontiers of our socialist state."

As Pravda described it on November 9, the November 7 military display was a very big affair:

The military parade in the capital of our country was truly dazzling. Troops of

every kind demonstrated before Comrade Stalin and the leaders of the Party and

the Government their preparedness for the defence of the sacred frontiers of the

Soviet Union.

The parade demonstrated the real might of the Soviet Army. The squares of cities

shook with the thunder of mighty engines, and the rhythmic march of the battalions.

Our combat planes flew over our cities in impeccable formation. There were many

of them everywhere: in Moscow, Riga, Lwow, Orel, Tallinn, Czernowitz, Voronezh,

Kiev, Odessa, Archangel, Murmansk, Sebastopol, Tbilisi, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk,

Erevan, Viborg, Krasnoyarsk, Baku, Alma Ata, Vladivostok and other cities.

Altogether, over 5,000 combat planes of different types and classes took part in

these air parades and, but for the bad weather in some places, there would have

been 8,000. Our proud Stalin Hawks flew these remarkable planes, the work of our

glorious Soviet constructors.

[" Stalin Hawks" was the affectionate term for Soviet airmen.]

It then spoke lyrically of the "growing army of Stakhanovites" who had also taken part in the parade, and of the thousands of children—those "Soviet children who have a happy, cloudless today and a secure tomorrow".

There was, of course, no suggestion that a high proportion of the 5,000 planes that had taken part in these air parades near the German, Finnish and Japanese borders, and

elsewhere, were wholly obsolete. No doubt the general public knew no better, but the German military and air attachés at the Red Square parade may well have drawn more

professional conclusions.

In Leningrad, where there appears to have been no air display owing to bad weather, the parade was directed by the commander of the Leningrad Military District, Hero of the Soviet Union, Lt.-Gen. Kirponos, who was to come to a tragic end in the Kiev

encirclement, barely ten months later.

Looking back on this strange period, one has the curious feeling that, in his own way, Molotov was made to play in Russia the part of Laval; like Laval, he was le vidangeur, who had to do all the dirty work, while Pétain—and Stalin—tried to keep their hands

relatively clean, and refrained, as far as possible, from any direct dealings with the Germans. It was significant that, in the TASS denial published at the end of August, a point should have been made of the fact that Stalin had not seen the German Ambassador

"during the last six or seven months".

Molotov, on the other hand, was extremely busy and active. Although he did not go to Laval's extreme of saying "je souhaite la victoire allemande", it was his job to present to the Soviet people the Soviet-German Pact at all its stages in the most favourable light possible.

This does not mean that Molotov crawled and grovelled to the Germans; on the contrary, he had, throughout, been thoroughly hard-headed and businesslike in his dealings with them and was one of the few men not to appear impressed, still less overawed, by Hitler, when he at last met him face-to-face in Berlin on November 12, 1940.

This is borne out by the story of the events leading up to Molotov's visit to Berlin in November 1940 and his handling of the matter. In June, without asking the Germans'

permission, the Russians had occupied the Baltic States, Bessarabia and Northern

Bukovina. The Germans then became particularly alarmed by the Russians' proximity to the Rumanian oilfields, a source of oil supremely important to Germany. This started a process which, within a few months, was to end in the complete German subjugation of Rumania, and the virtual occupation of Bulgaria, to be followed by the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. The German penetration of Rumania had begun, in a more or

less camouflaged form, soon after the Russian occupation of two of Rumania's northern provinces and had coincided with Hitler's "Vienna Award", under which a large part of Transylvania had been handed over to Hungary. What was left of Rumania—now a plain

Fascist dictatorship under Antonescu—was "guaranteed" by Germany and Italy.

[King Carol abdicated and went to Switzerland with Madame Lüpescu, leaving the throne to his young son Michael.]

The Russians took the beginning of this German penetration of the Balkans very badly, and charged the German Government with violating Article III of the Soviet-German

Pact which called for consultation. The Germans retorted that they had not been

consulted about either the Baltic States or Bessarabia-Bukovina. A further complication arose from reports that German troops had been seen in Finland, ostensibly in transit to Northern Norway, and that Germany was selling large quantities of armaments to

Finland. Worse still, at the end of September the Germans informed Molotov that a

military alliance was about to be signed by Germany, Italy and Japan, an alliance which, the Germans claimed, was directed against the United States. Molotov reacted sharply to this piece of news, demanding full information on the treaty, and also pressed the

Germans for more details on their activities in Rumania and Finland. A few days later the Germans informed Molotov that they were sending a "military mission" to Rumania, which produced from him the rejoinder: "How many troops does that represent?"

Relations were becoming severely strained between Berlin and Moscow, and on October

13, Ribbentrop sent a long, wordy and perhaps deliberately vague letter to Stalin,

prophesying the early collapse of England and proposing that Molotov come to Berlin,

"where the Führer could explain personally his views regarding the future moulding of relations between our two countries". He significantly added in an underlined passage that "it appears to be the mission of the Four Powers (the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy and Japan) to adopt a long-range policy ... through the delimitation of their interests on a world scale".

It was obviously necessary for the Russians to try to find out what the Germans were up to next, and the invitation to Berlin was accepted. But there is nothing to show that they were genuinely interested in sharing the British lion's skin—anyway the lion was still alive—or in joining in any German-Italian-Japanese alliance against the United States.

What they were worried about, above all, were the Balkans and Finland.

As we know from the German documents published since the war, Ribbentrop, during his first Berlin meeting with Molotov, harped above all on the imminent collapse of the

British Empire, and suggested that, in the share-out of this Empire, the Russians might be interested in extending their "sphere of influence" to the south, particularly towards the Persian Gulf. Molotov was not impressed, any more than he was by Hitler's harangue, in the afternoon, about a "common drive towards an access to the ocean", implying that the Russians might perhaps be interested in India. Instead, Molotov fired question upon

question at Hitler. "No foreign visitor," Schmidt, Hitler's interpreter later recalled, "had ever spoken to him in this way in my presence." Molotov wanted precise answers to his questions about the New Order in Europe and Asia, and, above all, about German

machinations in Finland, Rumania, Bulgaria and Turkey—areas in which the Russians

were directly interested. On the pretext that there might soon be a British air-raid, Hitler, completely taken aback by Molotov's manner, broke off the discussion until the next day.

When they met again on the 13th, Molotov once more showed no interest in the share-out of the British Empire, but argued, instead, that the German-Italian guarantee to Rumania was directed against the Soviet Union, and, since the Germans were unwilling to

"revoke" it, Russia would be willing to give a similar guarantee to Bulgaria, a suggestion which Hitler took very badly. Bulgaria, the Führer said, had not asked for such a

guarantee and, in any case, he would have to consult Mussolini on the subject. Again, thoroughly displeased with his troublesome and impertinent visitor, Hitler broke off the talk on the same pretext as on the previous night. He did not attend the gala banquet Molotov gave that night at the Soviet Embassy. This banquet—at which "friendly" toasts were exchanged by Molotov and Ribbentrop—was interrupted by an air-raid warning,

soon to be followed by the drone of planes, and the guests scattered to shelters,

Ribbentrop rushing Molotov to the near-by shelter of the German Foreign Office. While they were there, Ribbentrop pulled out of his pocket the draft of an agreement which, in effect, transformed the Three-Power Pact into a Four-Power Pact; under this, Germany, Italy and Japan recognised the present frontiers of the Soviet Union; while, according to the secret protocols defining each country's "territorial aspirations", the Soviet Union was to expand "in the direction of the Indian Ocean".

Again, the infuriating Molotov was not interested; and kept on returning instead to

questions like Finland, Rumania and Hungary, and German plans for Bulgaria,

Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey; he also continued to insist on the preservation of

Swedish neutrality.

Ribbentrop, more and more exasperated, declared that Molotov had not answered the fundamental question; which was whether the Soviet Union would "co-operate in the great liquidation of the British Empire". Finally, Molotov could not resist it: "If you are so sure that Britain is finished, then why are we in this shelter? "

[ Stalin was to tell Churchill about this parting shot in August 1942. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. III, p. 586.]

The visit ended inconclusively, and a fortnight passed before Stalin himself took up the ball and unlike Molotov in Berlin showed some interest in joining the Three-Power Pact as a fourth member. He might well have thought that he could not obtain any satisfaction from Hitler by any other means.

His main proposals were that the Germans clear out of Finland; that Russia sign a mutual assistance pact with Bulgaria, that she establish a military and naval base within range of the Turkish straits; and that Iran be recognised as a Russian sphere of interest. Stalin must have known that there was but a small chance that Hitler would accept these demands.

Even at this late hour, Stalin still made it clear that he was not interested in India or any other part of the British Empire. His primary concern was that Hitler should leave the Balkans and Finland strictly alone. No reply to these proposals was ever received from Berlin.

How was the Molotov visit presented to the Soviet people? The Soviet press certainly made a brave effort to show its readers that the Soviet-German Pact was still a good thing, and that relations with the Germans were still correct, if not cordial. And yet, the Soviet newspaper reader, well-trained to read between the lines, must have guessed that things had not gone too well, as he read the following items:

COMRADE V. M. MOLOTOV'S VISIT TO BERLIN, Berlin, November 12

(TASS):

Comrade Molotov was given a festive (torzhestvennaya) reception in Berlin...

[The Russian adjective is somewhere half-way between "festive" and "solemn". It might be translated as " V.I.P..]

Long before the arrival of his train at the Anhalter Bahnhof, there had assembled on the station platform the representatives of various German government organs,

the representatives of the German High Command, the Diplomatic Corps of Berlin,

members of the Soviet Embassy and Trade Delegation and foreign and German

journalists.

The platform was decorated with flowers and evergreens, and the main entrance of

the station with the State flags of Germany and the USSR. All the adjoining streets were crowded with people long before the arrival of the train.

Comrade Molotov was met by Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop; Commander of the

OKW, General Field-Marshal Keitel; the head of the Labour Front, Dr Ley; the

head of the German Police, Herr Himmler; the head of the German Government

Press Office, Dr Dietrich, State Secretary Weizsäcker, Herr Steeg, the Burgomaster of Berlin, and many others.

Herr von Ribbentrop then accompanied Comrade Molotov to his Bellevue

residence. The German press unanimously considers the arrival of Comrade

Molotov as a fact of first-rate political importance.

[ Pravda, November 13, 1940.]

And then:

In the afternoon of November 12 a conversation took place in the new Chancellery

between the Reichskanzler of Germany, Herr Hitler and Comrade Molotov, in the

presence of Ribbentrop and the Deputy Foreign Commissar, V. G. Dekanozov. The

conversation lasted more than two hours.

[ Pravda, November 13, 1940.]

On the following day, according to Pravda, Molotov had further conversations in Berlin, and left in the morning of November 14. The following communiqué was published:

In the course of his visit to Berlin on November 12-13, Foreign Commissar V. M.

Molotov had a conversation with the Reichskanzler, Herr Adolf Hitler and Foreign

Minister Herr von Ribbentrop. The exchange of views took place in an atmosphere

of mutual trust and established mutual comprehension on all the important

questions concerning the USSR and Germany. V. M. Molotov also had a

conversation with Reichsmarschall Goering and another with Herr Hitler's deputy

at the head of the National-Socialist Party, Herr Rudolf Hess.

On November 13, V. M. Molotov had a final conversation with Herr von

Ribbentrop.

[ Pravda, November 15.]

Then there was another story on the "festive atmosphere" in which Molotov was seen off from the Anhalter Bahnhof. After 10 a.m. Ribbentrop had collected Molotov at the

Bellevue Palace to accompany him to the station. Again the station was decorated with flags, flowers and evergreens, and Molotov and Ribbentrop reviewed a guard of honour.

Apart from Ribbentrop, Molotov and his party were seen off by Reichsminister Dr

Lemmers, Himmler, Ley, Dietrich, Weizsäcker; Himmler's deputy, Daluege;

General Thomas representing Keitel [etc.]. Comrade Molotov was also seen off by

members of the Soviet Embassy and Trade Delegation in Berlin, to whom he

warmly said good-bye. Having thanked Herr von Ribbentrop for the reception he

had been given, Comrade Molotov then took leave of the representatives of the

German government who had come to see him off.

[ Pravda, November 15.]

Nothing was revealed at the time about the real nature of the Molotov-Hitler-Ribbentrop talks and although, in the final communiqué, there was that phrase about the "mutual trust", Russian readers had an uneasy feeling that something was not quite right. There was a little too much about the flowers and evergreens at the Anhalter Bahnhof, but no mention of any "friendly atmosphere" in the first report on the Hitler-Molotov meeting, even though it had lasted "more than two hours".

Could something be read into the fact that Keitel had merely sent his deputy to see

Molotov off? And into the fact that Molotov had said good-bye "warmly" to the members of the Russian Embassy, but not to the Germans?

[Perhaps the "warmth" was deliberately omitted in the account of Molotov's leave-taking, since the Germans present included such particularly unsavoury characters as Himmler and Daluege. Curious, too, was the omission of any mention of Molotov's second

meeting with Hitler.]

Needless to say, there was nothing in the Soviet papers about the British air-raid on Berlin, which had forced Ribbentrop and his guest into a shelter, where Molotov had

made one or two caustic remarks. But these were to be quoted in Moscow sub rosa

before long.

On November 18 the Soviet press printed photographs of Molotov and Hitler in the new Chancellery; Molotov had a completely noncommittal expression, and Hitler one of those strained and oily semi-smiles, into which anything could be read. Molotov looked much the same in the photograph with Ribbentrop; but the latter at least tried to look a little more cheerful. It was exactly a month after the publication of these photographs that Hitler finally decided on Plan Barbarossa, i.e. the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Molotov's most unusual manner of talking to Hitler had certainly something to do with it.

Although Hitler had considered an attack on Russia as early as the summer of 1940, his final decision was not taken until after his infuriating meetings with Molotov.

Chapter VIII "1941— IT WILL BE A HAPPY YEAR"

On the face of it, nothing seemed to have changed in Russia as a result of Molotov's November visit to Berlin. And yet, all kinds of strange news items began to appear in the press: for instance, a TASS denial, on November 16, of an American report that Japan had offered the Soviet Union the whole or part of India in exchange for Eastern Siberia—

a curious coincidence, to say the least, so soon after Hitler's mention of India to Molotov.

Then, for two days (November 16-17), Pravda ran, for no apparent reason, two whole pages by André Maurois on "Why France Lost the War", which for all their crypto-Vichyism, were scarcely pro-German. On the next day there was a story about 400,000

Frenchmen being thrown by the Germans out of Lorraine, and there were numerous

reports of "Famine in Paris". There were further suggestions of the Soviet Union not being really sympathetic to the Axis Powers; thus, on November 18, TASS denied a

German story that Hungary had joined the German-Italian-Japan axis "with the approval and encouragement of the Soviet Union". Then, as later, there were frequent accounts of German air-raids on England (Coventry, Manchester, etc.) and of the air blockade of

Britain, shipping losses, and so on.

One of the peculiarities of the Soviet-German Pact was that it provided for no "cultural"

contacts between the two countries, and one of the few manifestations of a heightened Russian interest in German Kultur was Eisenstein's production, on November 22, 1940, of the Walküre at the Bolshoi Theatre. A peculiarity of this Eisenstein production was his original and unconventional treatment of the Wagner opera—with pantomime effects

introduced, for instance, in Act I to illustrate Siegmund's narrative. Members of the German Embassy who attended the première referred to the "deliberate Jewish tricks"

with which Eisenstein had desecrated the Master's work. But, on the other hand,

Sieglinde was sung by Mme Spiller, who, according to Moscow gossip, was Molotov's

lady-friend —perhaps a subtle compliment to the Germans.

Nothing much happened in December. There were the usual celebrations of Constitution Day, and there were many self-congratulatory articles saying that, in 1938, the Soviet Union had a population of 170 million, in 1939 one of 183 million, and in 1940, one of 193 million, since the Baltic Republics had joined the USSR and Bessarabia and

Northern Bukovina had been freed from "the yoke of the Rumanian boyars".

The elections in the new Karelo-Finnish Republic, and in the Western Ukraine and

Belorussia later in December proved a "dazzling victory of the Stalin Bloc of Communist and Non-Party Candidates". The press also reported that at a Supreme Soviet election meeting at Czernowitz, the candidate, General G. K. Zhu-kov, Commander of the Special Kiev Military District, had declared to his voters: "Under the wise leadership of Comrade Stalin, our country has become the mightiest country in the world"—a statement

strangely contrasting with the much more cautious words General Zhukov was to use

only a few months later.

The press continued to deal in some detail with the situation in Britain, with Churchill's statement that the danger of an invasion was not over, with British victories in the Western Desert and with Italian defeats in Albania. There was also a report of some

particularly powerful new American bombers; altogether, much interest continued to be shown in American aid to Britain. Occasionally, there were also some more explicitly anti-Nazi items like this in Pravda of December 19: "Hungary: All Jews (except 3,500) Deprived of Voting Rights."

New Year 1941 was celebrated in Russia with the usual exuberance and in the customary holiday atmosphere, complete with the giant New Year parties for children, and

celebrations in millions of homes. The editorials in the press tried to sound highly reassuring. On December 31, 1940 Pravda wrote: "We can look back on 1940 with a feeling of deep satisfaction... As Comrade Kalinin said on November 6, our economic

progress resulted in an eleven per cent increase of production... Much was done in 1940

by the Party and the Government to increase the military might of the USSR and the

defensive strength and military preparedness of the people. There have been great

improvements in the training and education of the Army and Navy personnel, and

important work is being done in the military education of the civilian population, and of our young people in particular... In all fields our successes have been stupendous."

And after recalling once again the incorporation of new territories in the Soviet Union, the editorial concluded: " 1941 will be the fourth year of the third Stalinist Five-Year Plan. And as we enter 1941, which will be a year of an even more tremendous

development of our socialist economy, the Soviet people are looking into their future cheerfully and full of confidence."

Ironically, during the next few days, the Soviet press spoke more and more frequently of the possibility of a German invasion of England, largely on the strength of speculation in the British press. Was there here a touch of wishful thinking? Even in February and

March this motif was frequently to be found in the Russian papers.

Since the Molotov visit to Berlin and, even more so, since the middle of January, the Russians had, indeed, more and more cause for uneasiness, but they continued for as long as possible to hope that Germany was still not interested in the East. On January 7 a photograph—obviously old, and dating from September 1940—was published in Pravda showing a crowd of English children in a trench watching an Anglo-German dogfight in the sky. Would Hitler get bogged down in the West?

However, appearances had to be kept up. On January 11, Pravda announced "Another Victory of Soviet Foreign Policy": the signing of the Soviet-German Agreement on the State Frontier between the two countries, a frontier running from the Igorka river to the Baltic, mostly through "former Poland". There was a picture of Molotov and Schulenburg signing the agreement. The publication of the agreement was accompanied by a

communiqué on reciprocal property claims in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and on the repatriation of Germans from these countries; as well as on a new Mikoyan-Schnurre

economic agreement. All was well, Pravda suggested:

The present agreement, based on the Soviet-German agreement of February 11,

1940, covers the period from February 11, 1941 to August 1, 1942 and marks the

next stage in the economic programme approved by the Soviet and German

Governments. It provides for a much larger volume of trade than that provided for during the previous period. The USSR will send industrial raw materials, oil

products and foodstuffs, particularly grain... Germany will send us industrial

equipment. This new economic agreement of January 10, 1941 marks a great step

forward.

The exact volume and nature of this trade was kept dark at the time, and even today it remains one of the more obscure aspects of the last war. There are conflicting views as to the contribution these Russian supplies made to Germany's war economy. Certain

German studies have tended to exaggerate their importance, while the Russians have

tried, on the contrary, to minimise them. More recently Professor Friedensburg of the West German Deutsches Institut für Wirt Schaftsforschung published a detailed study on the subject. According to him, Germany received from the Soviet Union between January 1, 1940 and June 22, 1941 roughly the following deliveries: 1.5 million tons of grain, 100,000 tons of cotton, 2 million tons of petroleum products, 1.5 million tons of timber, 140,000 tons of manganese and 26,000 tons of chromium.

The last two items were of course of great importance to Germany's war industry at the time when the British blockade had deprived it of many of its customary sources of

supply. According to Friedensburg, Russia had not supplied them before the Soviet-

German Pact had come into force. He also claims that the Russians had resold to

Germany copper bought from the United States. On the other hand, the Russians seem to have received fairly little in return. According to the same author, German statistics for that period show a balance of 239 million Reichsmarks in the Russians' favour, while the Russian statistics for 1940 showed a balance of 380 million roubles also in their favour, a sum which the Hitler régime had never paid and which the author asserts the Russians themselves refrained from claiming after the war, suggesting that they found it more convenient to forget about it.

During May and June 1941 when Stalin dreaded more than ever a German attack,

important raw materials such as copper and rubber were being rushed to Germany by

express trains from the East and the Far East to keep Hitler happy in an effort of

"appeasement" that was as frantic as it was futile. A few weeks later this copper, after processing, was used to kill thousands of Russians.

So, on the surface, all seemed well on January 10 when the new economic agreement was signed with Germany—an agreement which covered the period up to August 1, 1942—

by which time the Germans were well on their way to Stalingrad and the Caucasus.

But only three days later a new kind of rot started. Pravda published the following ominous statement: "The foreign press has suggested that we had approved the entry of German troops into Bulgaria. If there are German troops in Bulgaria, they are there

without our consent. We were never consulted." It had now become clear that the Germans had taken no notice of Molotov's plea that the "Eastern Balkans" were a Soviet sphere of interest. Yet, if the Russians were annoyed they still showed it only by small petulant pinpricks. Thus, for no obvious immediate reason, they attacked Knut Hamsun, calling him a "rotting corpse" who did not share his fellow-Norwegians' hearty dislike for German rule. "And to think that this corpse—rotting alive—used to be a highly popular author in our country'"

[ Pravda. January 25, 1941.]

Hitler's speech of January 30 was duly reported. He said that the outcome of the war had already been settled in 1940; that an all-out U-boat war against England would start in the spring, and that the Americans were "wasting their time". But what struck the Russians most was that there was no mention of the Soviet Union. Moreover, there was that

ominous little phrase at the end: "I have calculated every conceivable possibility." Stalin knew that, by now, his December "proposals" had been ignored by Hitler.

Moscow's nervousness produced strange results. On January 30 there was an ukase of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet appointing Beria, head of the NKVD, "General

Commissar of State Security"; a few days later the People's Commissariat of the Interior (NKVD) was turned into two different commissariats—Interior (NKVD) under L. P.

Beria and Security (NKB) under V. N. Merku-lov.

The phrase "mobilisational preparedness" kept recurring over and over again in propaganda and the press; the ukase of the previous June on labour discipline was being more and more rigidly enforced, "slackers" and absentees in industry being subjected to ruthless punishment; great attention was being given to the training of young people for industry in a network of establishments like railway and FZO (factory) schools with their 600,000 pupils. These young people were intended to become an important labour

reserve in the great national emergency.

In the middle of February, at the 18th All-Union Conference of the Party, long, detailed and rather critical reports were produced by Malenkov on the "Successes and

Shortcomings of Industry and Railways", by N. Voznesensky on the "General Progress of the Economy of the USSR in 1941 ", and so on.

The usual glorification of the "invincible" Red Army, referred to as recently as December 1940 by Zhukov as "the mightiest army in the world", gave way to a more sober and critical assessment. On Red Army Day, February 23, 1941, the same General Zhukov

clearly suggested in an article in Pravda that the Army was undergoing a process of transformation, which had not yet been completed, and that things were still far from perfect. 1941, he wrote, would be the year of the "great change" (perelom) in the Red Army, the year of "the reconstruction of the whole system of the soldiers' training and education". He congratulated himself on the changes that had already been made since the Finnish War, and pointed out that in August 1940 the officer's "single command" had been restored, which meant that the officer was no longer under the thumb of the

commissar; as a result the status, responsibility and authority of the officers had been greatly increased. This, Zhukov emphasised, was the "essential foundation" on which the other reforms would be built.

He stressed the importance of military "professionalism" and attributed the spectacular defeat of the French Army in 1940 largely to the French soldiers' low standard of

training, and to their un-familiarity with modern weapons. In the Red Army such "sloppi-ness" would not be tolerated: "An imperialist war is raging round us. In the reconstruction of our system of military training we have achieved some unquestionable successes. The training is taking place in near-combat conditions, and we have improved the tactical skill of our troops; but it would be a grave error to be smug and complacent about it; much still remains to be done."

The whole article, without sounding alarmist, nevertheless betrayed a certain feeling of uneasiness, though it is impossible to say whether a man like Zhukov anticipated a

German invasion only four months later; the whole suggestion underlying his article was that the "great change" in the Red Army was a fairly long-term affair which was not likely to be completed until 1942.

In reality the international situation in February 1941 was already rapidly deteriorating from the Russian point of view. The big question was whether Hitler would move west or east.

On February 16, the Soviet press quoted The Times—with some relief, one may suspect

—on the continued danger of a German invasion of England; on February 25 it reported another Hitler speech promising more victories over the British, but again, as on January 30, there was no mention of the Soviet Union. And then the trouble in the Balkans started in real earnest. On March 3, Andrei Vyshinsky, Deputy Foreign Commissar, informed the Bulgarian Government that he "disagreed" with its decision to let German troops enter Bulgaria "to protect peace in the Balkans". "On the contrary," Vyshinsky said, "we consider that this measure will merely extend the area of conflict to the Balkans, and the Soviet Government cannot, therefore, support the Bulgarian Government's policy." This was blunt enough; it was, in fact, the first open and official clash between Soviet and German interests.

There were now German troops in Hungary, Bulgaria and Rumania. But on March 27

there was a popular uprising in Belgrade against Yugoslavia becoming a German satellite with the connivance of its rulers. A group of officers, with General Simovic at their head, had organised the coup, which took place two days after Premier Cvetkovic and his Foreign Minister, with Prince Paul's blessing, had signed in Vienna an agreement joining the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan. The Simovic revolt aroused great popular enthusiasm amongst the Serbs and incensed Hitler.

Thinking no doubt that the Germans would still "reckon" with the Soviet Union, and obviously unaware of Hitler's decision to invade Yugoslavia, the Soviet Government

hastened to conclude a Friendship and Non-Aggression Pact with the new Yugoslav

Government. Significantly, it did not dare propose to Yugoslavia a Mutual Assistance Pact which would have committed Russia to immediate military action, should Germany

attack. Stalin and Molotov were wrong if they thought that such qualified support would frighten off Hitler.

On April 5 the Friendship and Non-Aggression Pact was solemnly signed in Moscow in

the presence of Foreign Minister Simic, Ambassador Gabrilovic and two of his assistants on the Yugoslav side and Molotov, Stalin and Vyshinsky on the Russian side. Less than twenty-four hours later the Germans invaded Yugoslavia and the Luftwaffe dropped

thousands of bombs on defenceless Belgrade. On April 7, Pravda carried on its back page, and in unspectacular type, a TASS message from Berlin saying that Germany had

declared war on Yugoslavia and Greece and that the German Army had started military

operations against these two countries. The massive bombing of Belgrade—Hitler's

revenge for the "unheard-of" affront he had suffered—was played down—even though, as time was to show, Yugoslavia's gallant revolt and tragic resistance providentially delayed the invasion of Russia by a few weeks.

There was no official Russian reaction to the German invasion of Yugoslavia. All the Soviet Foreign Commissariat dared to do in the next few days was to instruct Vyshinsky to inform the Hungarian Ambassador that "the Soviet Union could not approve of

Hungary's attack on Yugoslavia".

On April 11 the Soviet press reported Churchill's speech saying that, for several months past, the Germans had concentrated large armoured and other forces in Bulgaria, Hungary and Rumania. But it refrained from any comment and, for the next few weeks, it reported in a routine and "objective" kind of way the Germans' progress in Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete. There were no lamentations over the tragic fate of the Yugoslavs with whom a Friendship Pact had so recently been signed. A showdown with Hitler seemed inevitable; Stalin's and Molotov's one aim now was to put off the evil hour—at any price.

Chapter IX THE LAST WEEKS OF PEACE

In Soviet novels and films produced both during and since the War, the news of the

Invasion of June 22, 1941 is often represented as a complete surprise. "Life was so peaceful and happy, and we were preparing to go on holiday when suddenly, on that

lovely Sunday..." Oddly enough, that is precisely what happened to a great many ordinary Soviet citizens, who had been conditioned for years into thinking that the Red Army was the finest army in the world, and that Etitler would never dare attack Russia. Others, more sophisticated, reacted the way the hero of Simonov's novel, The Living and the Dead did:

"It seemed that everybody had been expecting the war for a long time and yet, at the last moment, it came like a bolt from the blue; it was apparently impossible to prepare oneself in advance for such an enormous misfortune." But the politically minded people in Russia must have known for some time that the danger of war was immense, and there

can be no doubt that the invasion of Yugoslavia must have deeply shaken both Stalin and Molotov.

For some months past, the Kremlin had been receiving specific and grave warnings. As early as February, after his visit to Ankara, Sir Stafford Gripps had told the Soviet Foreign Commissariat that the Germans were preparing to invade the Balkans and that

they were also planning an attack on the Soviet Union "in the near future". About the same time, similar information had been given by Sumner Welles to Konstantin

Oumansky, the Soviet Ambassador in Washington. And then, in April, there was

Churchill's famous message to Stalin.

In the post-war History these warnings are treated somewhat ungraciously—they were

"not disinterested warnings", the suggestion being that the British and Americans were merely trying to drag the Russians into the war and turn them into "England's soldiers".

Instead, the History claims that Soviet Intelligence in Poland, Czechoslovakia and even Germany had kept the government fully informed on what was going on.

Be that as it may, it seems certain that Molotov and Stalin were both fully aware of the danger of a German attack but still hoped that they could put off the evil hour—at least till the autumn, when the Germans would not attack; and then by 1942, Russia would be better prepared for war.

Russia's Friendship Pact with Yugoslavia had not deterred Hitler; it had turned out a lamentable fiasco. True, there had been a number of subtle little "anti-German"

demonstrations before that—a few pinpricks in the press, as we have seen, and a few

other little demonstrations, such as the award of a Stalin Prize in March 1941 to

Eisenstein's ferociously anti-German film, Alexander Nevsky, as well as to some other strongly-nationalist and implicitly "anti-invader" works like Alexei Tolstoy's novel, Peter I, Shaporin's oratorio, The Field of Kulikovo, and Sergeiev-Tsensky's novel on the Siege of Sebastopol. Behind the scenes at the end of March, Manuilsky, Vice-President of the Comintern, had even declared that, in his opinion, "a war with Nazi Germany could now scarcely be avoided". The story got round Moscow. Better still, in March a number of Russian officers of Timoshenko's entourage had invited the British Military Attaché to a party. The conversation had been guarded and non-committal until the atmosphere had

warmed up— no doubt helped by the vodka—and, in the end, some of the officers went

so far as to drink to "the victory over our common enemy".

In the course of the evening they had made no secret of their deep concern about the general situation, especially in the Balkans.

[Having heard about this, I asked Cripps in Moscow in July 1941 whether it was true.

"Yes, that is, roughly, what happened. It was certainly something of a pointer. It was all the more significant since I, as Ambassador, continued to be as good as boycotted by both Stalin and Molotov." The story was also later confirmed to me by Colonel E. R.

Greer, the British Military Attaché, though he was uncertain about the exact date of the incident.]

Officially, no doubt, both Stalin and Molotov had to go on pretending that they were not frightened. After the signing of the Soviet-Yugoslav Pact Gabrilovic, Yugoslav

Ambassador in Moscow (as he later told me himself), asked Stalin: "What will happen if the Germans turn on you?" To which Stalin replied: "All right, let them come!"

On April 13—the day Belgrade fell—the Soviet-Japanese Non-Aggression Pact was

signed. It was a doubtful insurance, but still an insurance that the Russians took in view of the growing German menace. Everybody in Moscow was startled by Stalin's

extraordinary display of cordiality to Matsuoka, the Japanese Foreign Minister, who had come from Berlin to Moscow to sign the Pact. He took the unprecedented step of seeing Matsuoka off himself at the railway station. He embraced him and said: "We are Asiatics, too, and we've got to stick together! " To have secured Japanese neutrality in these conditions, and the promise by Japan not to attack Russia regardless of any commitments she had signed "with third parties" was, in Stalin's eyes, no mean achievement. As long as Japan stuck to her word, it meant the avoidance of a two-front war, if Germany attacked.

On that station platform Stalin was in an unusually exuberant mood, even shaking the hands of railwaymen and travellers as he walked down the platform arm-in-arm with

Matsuoka.

True, he also threw his arm round the neck of Colonel von Krebs, the German Military Attaché, who had also come to see Matsuoka off, saying "We are going to remain friends, won't we?" But what mattered most to Stalin that day was his pact with Japan. Stalin had no great illusions about the Germans. Significantly, at the end of April, he telephoned Ilya Ehrenburg saying that his anti-Nazi novel, The Fall of Paris, could now be published. (Ehrenburg concluded from this call that, in Stalin's view, war with Germany was now inevitable.)

On May Day, there was a particularly impressive military parade in Red Square,

complete with motorised units, many new KV and T-34 tanks, and hundreds of planes. It was rumoured in Moscow that all these troops were on their way to Minsk, Leningrad

and the Polish border. Ambassador Count Schulenburg noted on May 2 that the tension in Moscow was growing, and that the rumours of a Soviet-German war were becoming

increasingly persistent. On that day Hitler made his speech on the Balkan campaign; as in his two previous speeches, there was again no mention of the Soviet Union.

On May 5 a reception was given in the Kremlin to hundreds of young officers, new

graduates of the military academies. Stalin spoke at this meeting. Officially, nothing was disclosed beyond what Pravda was to write on the following day. The article was entitled: "We must be prepared to deal with any surprises." "In his speech, Comrade Stalin noted the profound changes that had taken place in the Red Army in the last few years, and emphasised that, on the strength of the experience of modern war, its

organisation had undergone important changes, and it had been substantially re-equipped.

Comrade Stalin welcomed the officers who had graduated from the military academies

and wished them all success in their work. He spoke for forty minutes and was listened to with exceptionally great attention."

Obviously he had said much more than that in forty minutes.

After the outbreak of the war, I was given a fairly detailed account of this meeting, to which great importance was attached in Moscow at the time. I gathered that the main

points that Stalin had then made were these:

1) The situation is extremely serious, and a German attack in the near future is not to be ruled out. Therefore, "be prepared to deal with any surprises".

2) The Red Army is not, however, sufficiently strong to smash the Germans easily; its equipment is still far from satisfactory; it is still suffering from a serious shortage of modern tanks, modern planes and much else. The training of large masses of

soldiers is still far from having been completed. The frontier defences in the new territories are far from good.

3) The Soviet Government will try, by all the diplomatic means at its disposal, to put off a German attack on the Soviet Union at least till the autumn, by which time it will be too late for the Germans to attack. It may, or may not, succeed.

4) If it succeeds, then, almost inevitably, the war with Nazi Germany will be fought in 1942—in much more favourable conditions, since the Red Army will have been

better trained, and will have far more up-to-date equipment. Depending on the

international situation, the Red Army will either wait for a German attack, or it may have to take the initiative, since the perpetuation of Nazi Germany as the

dominant power in Europe is "not normal".

5) England is not finished, and the weight of the American war potential is likely to count more and more. There is a very good chance that, after the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact with Japan, that country will stay quiet as far as the Soviet Union is concerned.

Stalin reiterated that the period "from now till August" was the most dangerous of all.

[I have compiled this from several Russian verbal sources; all of them agreed in the main, and particularly on one of the most important points: Stalin's conviction that the war would "almost inevitably" be fought in 1942, with the Russians possibly having to take the initiative.]

Immediately following this Stalin speech to the young officers, there was a succession of desperate Russian attempts to "appease" the Germans in order to at least postpone the invasion, if there was to be one. On May 6 an ukase of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet appointed Stalin, until then "only" Secretary-General of the Party, President of the Council of People's Commissars, i.e. head of the Soviet Government. Molotov became

Deputy-President, whilst remaining at the same time Foreign Commissar.

The general public, not unnaturally, saw a danger signal in this appointment of Stalin as head of the government; in more normal conditions this would not have happened. One

of the men most impressed by this government change was Count Schulenburg who, in a

series of dispatches to Berlin, argued that Stalin was the most determined opponent of any conflict with Germany. But his counsels of moderation fell on deaf ears in Berlin; Hitler had decided long ago to attack Russia, regardless of what Schulenburg, an

exponent of the traditional Bismarckian Ostpolitik, thought or advised.

The next few weeks were marked by a kind of cold-footed opportunism on Stalin's part; to impress Hitler with his "friendliness" and "solidarity" he took such incongruous and gratuitous steps as closing down the embassies and legations of countries now occupied by the Germans, such as Belgium, Greece and Yugoslavia, which implied a sort of de facto, if not de jure recognition of their conquest by Germany.

[ This measure was, of course, not extended to the French "Vichy" Embassy in Moscow which had existed since 1940. The Ambassador was the erstwhile left-wing politician

Gaston Bergery, whose American wife, a former Schiaparelli model, would tell Russians how nice Paris was under the German occupation: "Les Allemands sont tellement corrects."]

For good measure, the strictest instructions were reiterated to the military authorities in the frontier areas and elsewhere on no account to shoot down any of the numerous

German reconnaissance planes flying over Soviet territory. In May 1941, the Soviet

Government went so far as to give official recognition to the short-lived pro-German and anti-British government of Rashid Ali in Irak—a country with which the Soviet Union

had not had any diplomatic relations before.

Also in May, only a few days after Stalin had become head of the government, the

Russians were puzzled and alarmed by the startling news of Hess's arrival in Britain. The news was presented in a highly confusing manner. TASS reported from Berlin on May 12

that, according to the Germans, Hess had "gone insane"; but this was not borne out by TASS dispatches from London, and the suspicion immediately arose of an Anglo-German deal—needless to say, at Russia's expense.

However, the Soviet press said very little about Hess; he was an awkward subject at a time when top priority had to be given to the development of cordial relations with Nazi Germany. Everything was done to keep the Germans happy, and considerable quantities

of oil and other materials in short supply were rushed to Germany without pressing for the delivery of industrial equipment from Germany due to Russia under the Trade

Agreement.

Whereas Schulenburg remained amicable in his talks with Molotov, the German

Government's response to Stalin's friendly economic and diplomatic gestures was

precisely nil. It seems, therefore, that it was in sheer desperation that—exactly a week before the Invasion—Stalin decided to publish that famous TASS communiqué of June

14, a document which was to figure prominently in all Soviet histories of the war written under Khrushchev as the most damning piece of evidence of Stalin's wishful thinking, shortsightedness and total lack of understanding of what was going on in Germany even at that late hour. This is the text of the famous TASS communiqué:

Even before Cripps's arrival in London and especially after he had arrived there, there have been more and more rumours of an "early war" between the Soviet Union and Germany. It is also rumoured that Germany has presented both

territorial and economic claims to the Soviet Union... All this is nothing but clumsy propaganda by forces hostile to the USSR and Germany and interested in an

extension of the war.

TASS is authorised to state: 1) Germany has not made any claims on the USSR, and

is not offering it any new and closer understanding; there have been no such talks.

2) According to Soviet information, Germany is also unswervingly observing the

conditions of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, just as the USSR is doing.

Therefore, in the opinion of Soviet circles, the rumours of Germany's intention to tear up the Pact and to undertake an attack on the USSR are without any

foundation. As for the transfer to the northern and eastern areas of Germany of

troops during the past weeks, since the completion of their tasks in the Balkans, such troop movements are, one must suppose, prompted by motives which have no

bearing on Soviet-German relations.

3) As is clear from her whole peace policy, the USSR intends to observe the

conditions of the Soviet-German Pact, and any talk of the Soviet Union preparing

for war is manifestly absurd.

4) The summer rallies now taking place among Red Army reservists and the

coming manœuvres have no purpose other than the training of reservists and the

checking of railway communications. As everyone knows, such exercises take place

every year. To represent them as something hostile to Germany is absurd, to say the least.

[ In the recent History Stalin is taken severely to task for this TASS communiqué: "Up to the last moment I. V. Stalin tried to prevent a German attack and tried to influence the German Government. In order to test Germany's intentions and to influence her

government, Stalin caused TASS to publish this communiqué... It reflected Stalin's

incorrect assessment of the political and military atmosphere. Published at a time when war was already on our threshold, the TASS statement misguided Soviet public opinion and weakened the vigilance of the Soviet people and of the Soviet Armed Forces."

(IVOVSS, vol. I, p. 404.)]

The History is no doubt quite right in saying that it was much too late in the day to "test"

Germany's intentions; but, on the other hand it seems deliberately to exaggerate the TASS communique's soporific effect on the Soviet people.

The Russians were sufficiently used to reading between the lines of government

communications not to overlook the innuendo of the phrase: "These troop movements, one must suppose, are prompted by motives which have no bearing on Soviet-German relations." Far from being unduly reassured by this TASS communiqué, a very high proportion of the Russian people spent the next few days anxiously waiting for Berlin

"reactions" to it. According to Gafencu, the Rumanian Minister in Moscow, thousands of people were glued to their wireless sets listening to news from Berlin. But they listened in vain. The German Government did not respond in any way to the TASS statement, and

did not even publish it. When, on the night of June 21, Molotov asked Schulenburg to call on him, it was too late.

Schulenburg, apparently wholly uninformed of Hitler's plans, was unable to give any

answer to Molotov's anxious questions as to "the reasons for Germany's dissatisfaction"; and not until he returned to the Embassy did he receive Ribbentrop's instructions to go to see Molotov and, "without entering into any discussions with him" to read out to him a cabled document which, framed in Hitler's most vituperative manner, was in fact a

declaration of war.

[As Shirer says, "It was a familiar declaration, strewn with all the shopworn lies and fabrications at which Hitler and Ribbentrop had become so expert... Perhaps ... it

somehow topped all the previous ones for sheer effrontery and deceit" (op. cit., p. 847).]

Sick at heart, the Ambassador drove back to the Kremlin just as dawn was breaking, and read the document to Molotov. According to Schulenburg's account, the Foreign

Commissar listened in silence, and then said bitterly: "This is war. Do you believe that we deserved that?"

PART TWO

From the Invasion to the Battle of Moscow

Chapter I SOVIET UNPREPAREDNESS IN JUNE 1941

In the early morning hours of June 22, 1941, Plan Barbarossa—on which Hitler and his generals had worked for the last six months— came into action. And the Russians were not prepared for the onslaught.

The three-pronged German invasion, aiming at Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the

middle, and the Ukraine and the Caucasus in the south, with the ultimate object of

occupying within a short time practically the whole of European Russia up to a line

running from Archangel to Astrakhan, was to prove a failure. But the first weeks of the war and, indeed, the first three-and-a-half months were, to the Russians, an almost

unmitigated disaster. The greater part of the Russian air force was wiped out in the first few days; the Russians lost thousands of tanks; hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as a million Russian soldiers were taken prisoner in a series of spectacular encirclements during the first fortnight, and by the second week of July some German generals thought the war as good as won.

How was this possible? Stalin's interpretation of these initial disasters—which was to remain the official version for many years afterwards—was that the element of surprise had been overwhelmingly in the Germans' favour. No doubt, Stalin himself later admitted that "certain mistakes" had been made on the Russian side; but there was no mention of these "mistakes" at first, and the only explanation given in July was the "suddenness and perfidious-ness" of the German attack.

This explanation did not entirely satisfy the Russian people at the time; they had been told so much for years about the tremendous might of the Red Army that the non-stop

advance of the German steam-roller during the first three weeks of the war—to

Smolensk, to the outskirts of Kiev and to only a short distance from Leningrad —came as a terrible shock. There was much questioning and heart-searching as to what had gone wrong. But, in the face of the fearful threat of the destruction of Russia, and despite much sotto-voce grumbling, this was not a time for recrimination, and, whatever had gone wrong, and whatever the mistakes that had been made, the only thing to do was to fight the invaders. The mystique of a great national war, of a life-and-death struggle took deep root in the Russians' consciousness within a very short time; and the "national war"

motifs of Stalin's famous broadcast of July 3 made such a deep impression precisely

because they expressed the thoughts which, in the tragic circumstances of the time, the Russian people—consciously or unconsciously—wanted to hear clearly stated. Here at

last was a clear programme of action for a stunned and bewildered nation.

But the fact remains that at first Russia proved totally unprepared to meet the German onslaught, and that in October 1941 the Germans very nearly won the war.

While Stalin was alive, no serious attempt was made openly to analyse the numerous

long-term, as well as immediate causes of the military disasters of 1941; and it was not, in fact, till after the 20th Congress of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in 1956, and Khrushchev's sharp, and at times even exaggerated, criticisms of Stalin's

"military genius" that Soviet military historians got down to the job of explaining what really happened.

The explanations given for the disasters of 1941 are numerous and touch on a very wide range of subjects. Among the principal long-term causes some were historical (e.g. the 1937 purges in the Red Army); some were psychological (the constant propaganda about the invincibility of the Red Army); some were professional (lack of any proper

experience of war among the Red Army as compared with the Germans and, in many

cases, a low standard of training); some, finally, were economic (the failure of the Soviet war industries, despite the breathing-space provided by the Soviet-German Pact, to turn the Red Army into a well-equipped modern army).

Whether, as seems likely, the Red Army would have been perfectly fit to fight the

Germans in 1942, it was obviously not in a condition to do so in 1941.

One of the most important recent Russian publications, printed in 1960, is the first volume of the official History of the War. This explains with refreshing candour many of the things that went wrong in 1941. In particular, it deals in considerable detail with the bad psychological conditioning for the "next" war of both the Red Army and the Soviet people generally.

Thus, it draws particular attention to the wishful thinking pervading the famous Draft Field Regulations of 1939 which said:

Any enemy attack on the Soviet Union will be met by a smashing blow from its

armed forces;

If any enemy inflicts war upon us, our Red Army will be the most fiercely-attacking army the world has ever known;

We shall conduct the war offensively, and carry it into enemy territory;

The activity of the Red Army will aim at the complete destruction of the enemy and the achievement of a decisive victory at a small cost in blood.

The present-day History strongly criticises this document, as well as other pieces of military doctrine current in the Red Army before 1941.

Soviet strategic theory [it says] as propounded by the Draft Field Regulations of 1939 and other documents did not prove to be entirely realistic. For one thing, they denied the effectiveness of the blitzkrieg which tended to be dismissed as a lopsided bourgeois theory. Soviet military theory was largely based on the principle of ending any attack on the Soviet Union with the complete rout of the enemy on his own

territory.

Thus, the whole emphasis of Soviet military theory was on the offensive, and the failure of both Poland and France to break the German attack was, all too easily, attributed to a) the lack of organised resistance and b) the nefarious activities of "fifth columns" in the rear in the case of France, and to the lack of national homogeneity in the case of the Polish army.

Soviet strategy (says the History) considered defence as an essential part of war, but stressed its subsidiary role in relation to offensive operations. In principle, our strategy considered a forced retreat as a possibility, but only on a limited and isolated part of the front, and as a temporary measure, connected with preparations for the offensive. The question of large forces having to break out of a threatened

encirclement was never seriously examined at all... (Emphasis added.) This makes, indeed, ironical reading in the light of what happened in 1941. There is another important point the History makes— namely, the "deadening" effect on Soviet military thought of the Stalin "personality cult":

This "personality cult" led to dogmatism and scholasticism, which impaired the independent initiative of military research. It was necessary to wait for the

instructions by a single man, and to look for the confirmation of theoretical

propositions, not in life and practical experience, but in ready-made formulae and quotations... All this greatly reduced the scope of any free discussions of military theory.

[IVOVSS, vol. I, p. 439. ]

There were other shortcomings. The Red Army had had very little actual experience of war. Its only major experience dated back to the Civil War of 1918-20, and the conditions in which that war was fought had very little relevance to modern warfare. Experience was, indeed, soon to show that heroes of the Civil War like Budienny and Voroshilov

were completely out of their depth in the war conditions of 1941. True, there had, since then, been the war in Spain, in which the Russians had participated in a small way, but, as the History says,

The limited and peculiar nature of the war in Spain was wrongly interpreted. Thus, the conclusion was reached that the concept of large tank units—though we were

the first to have applied them in practice— was erroneous. As a result our

mechanised tank corps were dissolved, and did not begin to be reconstituted again until the very eve of the German invasion.

[Ibid.]

There had also been, in 1938-9, the successful battles against the Japanese at Lake

Hassan and Halkin Gol, but these again were different from the vast war of 1941. Certain bitter lessons, it is true, had been learned from the Winter War in Finland, but had not yet been sufficiently implemented. As for the German invasion of Poland and France, there was still an irresponsible tendency in the Red Army to imagine that "it couldn't happen here". At least not along a vast front.

This irresponsible optimism and wishful thinking were faithfully reflected in the

"political-educational" work done in the Red Army in 1940-1. The History now readily admits that some appalling mistakes were made in this education, especially in all

questions concerning Germany. Under the influence of the Soviet-Nazi Pact, anti-Nazi propaganda was toned down to an almost unbelievable extent. Nothing was done to

suggest that the Germans were Russia's most likely enemies in the next war. Instead, the Molotov line continued to be plugged that it was in the "state interests" of both countries not to attack one another. Much of the propaganda both in the army and among the Soviet people generally was, in 1940 and even in 1941, full of the most infantile wishful

thinking.

On the eve of the War (says the History) great harm was done by suggesting that any enemy attacking the Soviet Union would be easily defeated. There were popular films

such as If War Comes Tomorrow and the like which kept rubbing in the idea... Even some army papers followed a similar line. Many writers and propagandists put across the

pernicious idea that any fascist or imperialist state that attacked us would collapse at the very first shots, since the workers would rebel against their government. They wholly underrated the extent to which, in fascist countries, the masses had been doped, how terror had largely silenced the rebels, and how soldiers, officers and their families had all acquired a vested interest in military loot.

[IVOVSS, vol. I, pp. 434-5.]

Nevertheless, even after the war had started, Molotov and Stalin still continued to

distinguish between the "long-suffering" German people and the criminal Nazi clique!

Such, according to the History, were the main factors of the psychological

unpreparedness of the Soviet people and of the Red Army in 1941, on the eve of the

German invasion. The picture, it must be said, is slightly exaggerated because, as will have been seen from our story of the Soviet-German Pact period, there was

unquestionably in the country a growing uneasiness which, especially after the fall of Yugoslavia in April 1941, developed into real anxiety.

No less serious than this psychological unpreparedness for an all-out war against Nazi Germany was the military unpreparedness of the Red Army both as regards the actual

training of the men and the quantity and especially the quality of their equipment.

A major question that arises in this connection is whether the Soviet Government really made full use of the twenty-two months' respite given it by the Soviet-German Pact. The argument put forward by present-day Soviet historians is that the Soviet Union had a very sound economic and industrial base in 1940-1, that "the importance of the defence measures taken during these twenty-two months cannot be overrated", but that the net result of it all was not as good as might have been expected. On the one hand it is true, Soviet economy had a material and technical base which would permit it to embark

on the mass-production of all forms of modern armaments ... and meet the needs of both the Armed Forces and the population in case of war... The armaments

industry, based on a heavy industry, was able, before the war, to supply the Army with all the necessary equipment, to set aside reserves, and fully supply new

formations with equipment once the war had begun. With vast raw material

resources, the Soviet Union was economically prepared to repel a fascist aggression.

[IVOVSS, vol. I, p. 405.]

The Soviet Union had the largest engineering industry in Europe, and some 9,000 large new industrial enterprises had been set up under the three Five-Year Plans—1,500 under the first, 4,500 under the second, and 3,000 during the first three years of the third (that is, up to 1941). In 1940 she produced 18.3 million tons of steel, 31 million tons of oil and 166 million tons of coal—these production figures were, moreover, to be substantially increased in 1941. Military expenditure had represented only 12.7 per cent of the budget during the Second Five-Year Plan, but had, since the beginning of World War II, risen to 26.4 per cent, and, in 1941, "there was a further increase in connection with the technical re-equipment of the Army". Since September 1939, in particular, measures had been taken by the Party and the Government to increase in the next one-and-a-half to two years the productive capacity of certain armaments industries, and particularly of the aircraft industry, by at least 100 per cent.

But all this planning was one thing, and the actual results were quite another. These, as the History admits, were still extremely disappointing by the end of 1940; nor were they spectacular by any means by the middle of 1941, at the time of the German invasion.

The new Soviet models—the Yak-1 and Mig-3 fighters and the Pe-2 bombers—began to

be produced in 1940, but only in very small quantities. Thus only twenty Mig-3's, sixty-four Yak-l's and one or two Pe-2's were produced in 1940. The position improved

somewhat in the first half of 1941, when 1,946 of the new fighter planes—the Mig-3's, Lagg-3's and Yak-1's—were produced, as well as 458 Pe-2 bombers and 249 Il-2

stormoviks.

But these quantities were totally insufficient to increase substantially the proportion of modern planes in the army, and, by June 1941, the great majority of army planes

consisted of obsolete models.

[ IVOVSS. vol. I, p. 415.]

The performance of the tank industry was no better. In June 1941 the Red Army had a

very large number of tanks, but nearly all of these, too, were obsolete.

The new tanks, the KV and the T-34—which were later to prove more than a match for

the German tanks—were not yet in production in 1939; in 1940 only 243 KV tanks and

115 T-34 tanks were produced; not till the first half of 1941 was there an impressive increase; during that period 393 KV's and 1,110 T-34's came off the assembly line.

Similarly, the production of guns, mortars and automatic weapons proceeded at "an intolerably slow pace". For this the Deputy Commissars for Defence, G. I. Kulik, L. Z.

Mekhlis and A. E. Shchadenko are blamed; Kulik, in particular, is taken to task for

having neglected the production of automatic rifles, the value of which he persisted in denying, and the lack of which was to put the Russian infantryman at a great

disadvantage. The production of ammunition in 1941 was lagging behind even that of the guns. Although the first special anti-tank rifles were made in Russia in 1940-1, these had not yet been supplied to the Army by the beginning of the war.

[Ibid., p. 416.]

Another very serious weakness of the Red Army was the absence of a large-scale

automobile industry in the Soviet Union; in June 1941 the Soviet Union had a total of only 800,000 motor vehicles, and a large proportion of guns had to be drawn either by horses or by wholly inadequate farm tractors.

On the other hand Russian artillery is estimated by Russian experts to have been better than German artillery; jet rockets, first used in the Finnish War, began to be produced on a large scale in 1940-1, and Kostikov's famous katyusha mortars were extremely popular with the Red Army almost from the very beginning. They first came into action at

Smolensk about the middle of July.

Radar was still in its infancy in the Red Army, and even ordinary wireless

communications between army units were not the general rule. "Even the minimum

requirements were not fulfilled in this respect. As a result a lot of obsolete material was used. Many officers did not know how to handle wireless communications ... and

preferred the old-fashioned telephone."

[ Ibid., p. 455.]

In a highly mobile war this often proved quite useless.

This is just one example in many of the widespread professional inferiority of the Russian soldier and officer as compared with their German opposite numbers in 1941, and it was, in fact, not till 1943 that, in the estimation of the Russian military leaders themselves, the Russian soldier and officer became professionally as competent as the German, if not more so.

Very few officers or soldiers in 1941 had had any direct experience of war, and many of them were novices who had only lately been trained as "replacements" for the thousands of officers who had been purged back in 1937 and 1938. Although the officer's "single command" had been re-introduced in August 1940 through the eclipse of military

commissars, an uneasy relationship continued to exist between many officers and those Party and Komsomol cadres in the Army which were expected to go on "helping" the officers; and, in July, the fully-fledged military commissars were reintroduced again.

Although (in July 1940) fifty-four per cent of officers were Party members or Party

candidates and twenty-two per cent were Komsomols, there remained, among the

officers, a constant after-taste of the Tukhachevsky affair, and a feeling of strain between them and certain Party bosses in the army with their anti-officer complex. It was not till the autumn of 1942, as we shall see, that the officer fully came into his own rights.

The training of specialised troops—notably tank crews and airmen—had also been

seriously neglected. There are some quite astounding admissions on this score in the official History. Not only was there a shortage of modern tanks and planes in the frontier areas on the day the Germans struck, but there was also a serious shortage of properly trained airmen and tank crews:

The new tanks did not begin to arrive in the frontier zones until April-May 1941, and, on June 22, in all the five Military Districts, there were no more than 508 KV's and 967 T-34's in all. True, there were considerable numbers of old tanks (BT-5's, BT-7's, T-26's, etc.) but by June 15, only twenty-seven per cent were in working

order.

Worse still—

The training of specialists for the new tanks required a considerable time. Since there was a shortage of tank crews, it was necessary to transfer to the tank units officers, sergeants and soldiers from other army formations—from infantry and

cavalry units. But time was too short to let these learn their job properly. By the beginning of the war, many tank men had had only one-and-a-half to two hours'

experience in actual tank driving. Even many officers in tank units were not fully qualified to command them... Similarly, our airmen had not become properly

familiarised with the new planes.

[IVOVSS, vol. I, pp. 475-6.]

Thus, in the Baltic Military District those operating the new planes had had, by June 22, only fifteen hours' flying experience, and those in the Kiev Military District as little as four hours— extraordinary figures when one considers that in the US air force, for

instance, 150 hours' flying experience are required before combat.

Such were some of the extraordinary shortcomings in the Red Army on the day the

Germans attacked. There were many others, with which the History deals in some detail.

The frontier was an extremely long one—the Finnish frontier, between the Arctic and the Gulf of Finland about 750 miles long, and the "German" frontier, between a point just east of Memel on the Baltic and the mouth of the Danube in Rumania, over 1,250 miles long.

No doubt the Soviet Government took a few belated precautions in May 1941; but the

troops that were moved nearer the frontier "were neither fully mobilised nor at full strength, and they lacked the necessary transport. The railways worked according to a peacetime schedule, and the whole deployment of these troops was carried out very

slowly, since it was not thought that the war would start in the immediate future."

By June 22, most of the troops in the frontier areas were scattered over wide spaces.

In the Special Baltic Military District they were scattered over a depth of 190 miles from the frontier; in the Western District over a depth of 60 to 190 miles, in the Kiev District over a depth of between 250 and 380 miles.

The General Staff of the USSR assumed that these troops would be brought up to full

strength during several days that would elapse between mobilisation and the actual

beginning of military operations.

The whole defence of the State frontier was based on the assumption that a surprise attack by Germany was out of the question, and that a powerful German offensive

would be preceded by a declaration of war, or by small-scale military operations, after which the Soviet troops could take up their defensive positions... No

operational or tactical army groups had been formed to repel a surprise attack.

[IVOVSS, vol. I, p. 474.]

The History goes on to quote a table showing that in the main invasion areas the Germans had a clear four or five-to-one superiority over the Russians; but, in addition to this numerical superiority, they also enjoyed great qualitative superiority, many of the Soviet soldiers in the frontier areas being fresh conscripts—youngsters without any knowledge or experience.

There was also, as already mentioned, an appalling shortage of modern tanks on the

Russian side, and of properly trained tank crews. The equipment of the frontier troops, says the History, "was not to be completed until the end of 1941 or the beginning of 1942".

Even grimmer is the story of how the modern Russian planes in the western areas were destroyed, mostly on the very first day of the invasion.

The fast new planes required longer runways than had existed before; and it so happened that in the summer of 1941 a whole network of new airfields was being built in the

frontier zones. This building of new airfields and the reconstruction of the old ones was in the hands of the NKVD. And here comes, in the History, the suggestion of perhaps deliberate sabotage on the part of Beria's organisation. Taking no notice of the warnings from the military, Beria proceeded to build and rebuild a large number of airfields in the frontier areas simultaneously.

[In reality, there appears to be no "objective" proof that Beria was a traitor or a German agent, but he has always been available when in recent years awkward facts have had to be explained. This footnote should not suggest that the author has ever had any kindly feelings for Beria.]

As a result, our fighter aircraft were concentrated, on June 22, on a very limited number of airfields, which prevented their proper camouflage, manoeuvrability and dispersal. Also, some of the new airfields ... had been built much too close to the frontier, which made them specially vulnerable in the event of a surprise attack. The absence of a proper network of airfields on June 22 and the overcrowding of a small number of the older airfields—the location of which was perfectly well known to the enemy—account for the very grave losses our air force suffered during the very first days of the war.

[IVOVSS, vol. I, pp. 476-7.]

Everything else at the frontier went wrong on that 22nd of June. The carrying capacity of the railways in the frontier areas—all acquired since 1939—was three or four times lower on the Russian side than on the German side. Also, the building of fortifications along the

"new" borders was only at an initial stage in June 1941. A plan had been drawn up in the summer of 1940 for fortifying this border, but it was a plan stretching over several years.

The fortifications on the "old" (1938) border had been dismantled, and, on the "new"

frontier only a few hundred pillboxes and gun emplacements had been built by the time the war started. Anti-tank ditches and other anti-tank and anti-infantry obstacles had been built to the extent of less than twenty-five per cent of the plan. The Germans were, of course, very well informed about these fortifications, airfields, etc. The History mentions not only numerous German commando raids that had taken place since 1939, but also the more than 500 violations of Soviet airspace by the Luftwaffe, 152 of them since January 1941. To avoid any unpleasantness with Hitler, the frontier troops, according to the History, had been given strict orders not to shoot down any German reconnaissance planes over Soviet territory.

[ The History actually attributes this order not to Stalin or Molotov, but to "traitor Beria"

who had the frontier guards under his jurisdiction.]

A significant conclusion made by the History is that the Soviet General Staff had some perfectly sound plans for "making the frontier much less vulnerable by the end of 1941 or the beginning of 1942", but that, in view of the German menace in 1941, everything had been done "too slowly and too late". And there follows the assertion that neither the General Staff, nor the Commissariat of Defence would have shown such incompetence

"if there had not been those wholly unjustified repressions against the leading officers and political cadres of the Army in the 1937-8 Purge".

This reference to Tukhachevsky and the other victims of the Purge is, of course, a

monumental understatement when one considers that perhaps as many as 15,000 officers

—probably about ten or fifteen per cent of the total, but with a higher proportion of purgées in the higher ranks—were either temporarily, or finally eliminated. Among those temporarily eliminated were such distinguished soldiers as the future Marshals Govorov and Rokossovsky.

The mess and muddle on the Russian side of the frontier was, of course, in striking

contrast with what was going on on the German side. Here, since the middle of 1940, i.e.

even before Plan Barbarossa had been finally adopted on December 18, the Germans had been thoroughly preparing their ground for a possible attack on the Soviet Union. Roads, including autobahnen, railways and a large network of airfields had been built during the year preceding the invasion; during that period the Germans had built or modernised no fewer than 250 airfields and fifty landing strips in Poland for their deadly Heinkels, Dorniers and Messerschmitts.

In the words of a German chronicler, "millions of German soldiers broke into Russia in June 1941, without enthusiasm, but with a quiet confidence in victory".

[ Philippi and Heim, Der Feldzug gegen Sowjetrussland (The Campaign against Soviet Russia) (Stuttgart, 1962), p. 11.]

Chapter II THE INVASION

And now began for the Russian people Vannée terrible—the most terrible it had ever known. In a matter of a few days and weeks death and destruction swept over vast parts of the country. In the frontier zones, and, indeed, much further inland, the concentrated German onslaught smashed, captured or wholly disorganised the Red Army units facing

it; the Soviet air force was as good as wiped out in the western areas on the very first day of the German invasion; within five days the German forces had already captured Minsk, the capital of Belorussia, well within the Soviet Union's 1938 borders; nor did it take much longer for the German armies to occupy all the areas incorporated by the Soviet Union since 1939— Western Belorussia, the Western Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and

Estonia. In the north, the Finns smashed through to the old 1939 border just north-west of Leningrad. By July 8, the Germans were already crowing that the war in Russia was

"practically" won.

There is no doubt that Russia was dazed by these terrible initial reverses, and yet, almost from the first day, it was clear that it was a national war.

[This was something that was understood by the best foreign observers of Russia. Thus a few days before I left London for Russia on July 2, 1941, I had a long talk with the late Sir Bernard Pares who said: "I can already see it's going to be a tremendous national war, a bigger and better 1812." Similarly, at the end of June,

G. Bernard Shaw wrote in a letter to The Times that, with Stalin now on our side, we were sure to win the war. On the other hand, British military experts at War Office or Ministry of Information briefings very clearly suggested that they did not think the war in Russia would last more than a few weeks or, at most, months.]

A feeling of consternation swept the country, but it was combined with an under-current of national defiance and the apprehension that it would be a long, hard and desperate struggle.

Everybody realised that millions of lives would be lost, and yet only very few people seem to have visualised the possibility of utter military defeat and a total conquest of Russia by the Germans. In this respect the contrast with France during the German

invasion of 1940 is very striking.

This fundamental confidence was characteristic of the attitude of the Russian people and of the large majority of the Ukrainians and Belorussians; it did not exist in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, or in the Western Ukraine, where pro-Nazi and other anti-Soviet

influences were strong. In these areas the German invasion was either welcomed or

suffered with relative indifference.

[B. S. Telpukhovsky, Velikaya otechestsvennaya voina Sovietskogo Soyuza, 1941-5. (The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union). (Moscow, 1959), p. 39.]

The hostility with which the Russians were surrounded in parts of the Western Ukraine only recently incorporated in the Soviet Union, is well illustrated in the memoirs of General Fedyuninsky, who tells of how, in May 1941, his car broke down in a village

near Kovel:

There gathered around us a crowd of about twenty people. No one was saying

anything. Some, especially the better-dressed ones, smirked maliciously at us. No one offered to help. No doubt, there were among them some poor people, who

sympathised with us, who had received land from the Soviet authorities, and who

were later to fight bravely in the Red Army or in Partisan units. But now they were silent, frightened by rumours of an early arrival of the Nazis and by threats from the kulaks and the Bandera boys.

[General I. I. Fedyuninsky, Podnyatyie po trevoge (Raised by the Alarm). (Ministry of Defence Publishing House, Moscow, 1961). Bandera was a "Ukrainian Nationalist" who later openly collaborated with the Nazis.]

*

What were the first days of the war like in the frontier areas invaded by the Germans?

The memoirs of some of the Russian soldiers published in the last few years, especially those of General Fedyunin-sky and of General Boldin, give a striking picture of those events.

[General Fedyuninsky, op. cit., General I. V. Boldin, Stranitsy Zhizni (Pages from my Life). (Ministry of Defence Publishing House, Moscow, 1961).]

In April 1941 Fedyuninsky (who was later to play a distinguished role in the war—

especially in breaking the Leningrad blockade) was appointed commander of the 15th

Infantry Corps of the Special Kiev Military District, with his headquarters in the West-Ukrainian town of Kovel, some thirty miles east of the border between the Soviet Union and German-occupied Poland, and on the main line to Kiev.

At the time of my arrival in Kovel, the situation on our Western frontier was

becoming more and more tense. From a great variety of sources, and from our army

and frontier-guard reconnaissance, we knew that since February German troops

had begun to concentrate along our borders... Violations of our air-space had been on the increase in recent months... At that time we did not yet know that Stalin, disregarding the reports of our intelligence and of the commanders of our frontier districts, had badly misjudged the international situation and particularly the

timing of the Nazi aggression.

The general found that the troops in the frontier areas were still on a peace footing and that the reorganisation was proceeding very slowly. The new planes and tanks which

were to replace the obsolete models were arriving only at a very slow pace. The older officers, including some who had served in the Tsarist army, took a serious view of the coming war, but among the younger soldiers and officers, there was a good deal of

deplorable complacency.

Many of them thought that our Army could win an easy victory and that the

soldiers of any capitalist country, including Nazi Germany, would not fight actively against the Red Army. They also underrated the military experience and the

enormous technical equipment of the German Army. When the showdown came,

the might of the German Army came as a complete surprise to some of our officers.

Although the famous TASS communiqué of June 14 dismissed the rumours of Germany's

aggressive intentions as "completely groundless", Fedyuninsky reiterates that "it was completely contrary to what we were able to observe in the frontier areas", and he tells the story of how, on June 18, a German deserter came over to the Russians. While drunk, he had hit an officer, and was afraid of being court-martialled and shot; he also claimed that his father was a communist. This German soldier declared that the German Army

was going to invade Russia at 4 a.m. on June 22.

Fedyuninsky promptly 'phoned the local army commander, Tank General Potapov, but

was told that the whole thing must be "a provocation", and that "it was no use getting into a panic about such nonsense". Two days later Fedyuninsky was visited by General Rokossovsky, who did not share Potapov's complacency, and seemed extremely agitated.

In the early hours of June 22, Fedyuninsky was called over the telephone by Potapov, who ordered that the troops be ready for any emergency, but added that ammunition had not yet been distributed.

I had the impression that at Army Headquarters, they were still not quite sure that the Nazis had started a war.

The 15th Infantry Corps was expected to hold a line about sixty miles wide.

We had to deploy our forces and occupy our defensive positions under constant

shelling and air bombing. Communications were often broken and combat orders

often reached the units with great delay... Nevertheless, our officers did not lose control, and we reached the defensive positions where the frontier guards had

already, for several hours, been waging an unequal struggle. Even the wives of the frontier guards were in the firing line, carrying water and ammunition, and taking care of the wounded. Some of the women were firing at the advancing Nazis... But

the ranks of the frontier guards were melting away. Everywhere barracks and

houses, set on fire by enemy shells, were blazing. The frontier guards were fighting to the last man; they knew that, in that misty dawn of June 22, troops were speeding to their rescue.

Throughout that first day, Fedyuninsky's troops withstood the German onslaught, but the Germans threw in more and more new forces, and towards the evening, the Russians,

having suffered very heavy losses, began to withdraw. The situation was further

complicated by German paratroop landings in the Russian rear, as well as by numerous false reports of other paratroop landings spread by "enemy agents". In Kovel the Bandera gangs, acting as a German fifth column, were causing havoc—attacking Russian army

cars, blowing up bridges, and spreading these false reports. As large German armoured forces were approaching Kovel from the northwest, along the Brest-Kovel road, it was decided to evacuate Kovel. Parts of the 15th Infantry Corps continued to fight, while already encircled by the Germans. Even so, in three days' fighting, the main forces of the Corps had been pushed back only some twelve to twenty miles from the frontier.

Nevertheless, Kovel had to be abandoned, and new defensive positions to be taken up

further east. But before evacuating Kovel, the wounded and the families of army officers had to be evacuated.

Most officers' wives, used to frequent journeys, took only the bare essentials with them. But some lost their heads, and would take to the railway station things like prams, mirrors and even flower-pots... Those in charge of the evacuation had quite a job to bring these people to their senses...

The retreat was typical of so many similar retreats in June 1941. The Germans had

complete control of the air, and losses from strafing were heavy; moreover saboteurs did their best to harass the Russian retreat by blowing up bridges.

Railway junctions and Unes of communication were being destroyed by German

planes and diversionist groups. There was a shortage of wireless sets at army

headquarters, nor did many of us know how to use them... Orders and instructions

were slow in arriving, and sometimes did not arrive at all... The liaison with

neighbouring units was often completely absent, while nobody tried to establish it.

Taking advantage of this, the enemy would often penetrate into our rear, and attack the Soviet headquarters... Despite German air supremacy, our marching columns

did not use any proper camouflage. Sometimes on narrow roads, bottlenecks were

formed by troops, artillery, motor vehicles and field kitchens, and then the Nazi planes had the time of their life... Often our troops could not dig in, simply because they did not even have the simplest implements. Occasionally trenches had to be dug with helmets, since there were no spades...

Yet despite the terrible losses suffered by the Russians, morale remained reasonably high.

"It would, of course," says Fedyuninsky, "be wrong to deny that there were cases of

'nerves' or cowardice, but they were rather unusual, and rapidly overcome by the

steadfastness shown by the majority of the soldiers, whose morale was sustained by the Party."

How heavy the losses were could be judged from a regiment Fedyuninsky reviewed one

day: "It was now no larger than a peacetime infantry battalion."

It is curious how, after telling this desperate story of the 15th Infantry Corps retreat, and the story of the two regiments who broke out of a German encirclement after eight days'

heavy fighting, Fedyuninsky then dwells on the effect on the troops of Stalin's famous broadcast of July 3.

It is hard to describe the enormous enthusiasm and patriotic uplift with which this appeal was met. We suddenly seemed to feel much stronger. When circumstances

permitted, short meetings would be held by the army units. To platoons and

companies political instructors would explain the position at the Front, and tell them how, in response to the Party's appeal, the whole Soviet people were rising like one man to fight the holy Fatherland war. They stressed that the war would be very hard, and that many ordeals, privations and sacrifices were yet ahead, but that the Nazis would never defeat our powerful and hard-working people.

But the retreat continued, and by July 8 Fedyuninsky's troops had withdrawn to the

Korosten fortified line in the Ukraine, already well inside the "old" borders of the Soviet Union. On August 12, after a further retreat towards Kiev, Fedyuninsky was summoned

to Moscow, and ordered by General Vassilevsky to fly immediately to Leningrad, where the situation was becoming even more serious than in the south.

More dramatic and tragic still than Fedyuninsky's story of the first days of the war is that of General Boldin who, in the winter of 1941, was to become famous as the commander

responsible for the defence of Tula.

He heard of the imminence of a German invasion on the evening of June 21, while

attending, with other officers, the performance of a Korneichuk comedy at the Army

Officers' club at Minsk.

Suddenly Colonel Blokhin, head of the intelligence department of our special

Western Military District, appeared in our box and leaning over the shoulder of our commander, Army General Pavlov, whispered something in his ear. "It can't be true," Pavlov said...

Turning to me, he said: "Seems nonsense to me. Our reconnaissance reports that things are looking very alarming at the frontier. The German troops are supposed

to be ready for action—and even to have shelled some of our positions." Then he touched my hand, and pointed at the stage, suggesting we had better go on watching the play...

The play no longer meant anything to Boldin; he began to brood about the alarming news that had been coming in for the last few days—for instance, the news from Grodno on

June 20 that the Germans had taken down the barbed-wire entanglements barring the

Avgustov-Seini main road, that the rumbling of countless engines could be heard that day from across the border, and that several reconnaissance planes, some of them carrying bombs, had violated Russian air space.

On the 21st, there had been reports of heavy German troop concentrations at various

points, complete with heavy and medium tanks. He was puzzled by the Army

commander's "Olympian calm"...

This calm did not last long. In the early hours of the morning, Boldin received an agitated

'phone call from Pavlov, asking him to come to Headquarters immediately.

Ten minutes later he was there.

"What's happened?" I said.

"Can't quite make out," said Pavlov, "some kind of devilry going on. General Kuznetsov 'phoned from Grodno a few minutes ago. Said the Germans had crossed

the border along a wide front and were bombing Grodno, with its army

headquarters. Telephone communications have been smashed, the army units have

had to change over to radio. Two wireless stations are already out of action, must have been destroyed... There have also been calls from Golubev of the 10th Army and Colonel Sandalov of the 4th. Most unpleasant news. The Germans are bombing

everywhere."

Our conversation was interrupted by a call from Moscow: it was Marshal

Timoshenko, the Commissar of Defence, who wanted Pavlov to report on the

situation... Soon Kuznetsov 'phoned again to say that the Germans were continuing their air attacks. Along thirty miles all the telephone and telegraph lines were down.

Liaison between many units had been broken... During the next half-hour more and

more news came in. The bombing was growing in intensity. They were bombing

Belostok and Grodno, Lida, Brest, Volkovysk, Slonim and other Belorussian towns.

Here and there, there had been German paratroop landings. Many of our planes

had been destroyed on the ground, and the Luftwaffe were now strafing troops and

citizens. The Germans had already occupied dozens of localities, and were pushing inland...

Then came another 'phone call from Timoshenko, who said:

"Comrade Boldin, remember that no action is to be taken against the Germans

without our knowledge. Will you please tell Pavlov that Comrade Stalin has

forbidden to open artillery fire against the Germans."

"But how is that possible?" I yelled into the receiver. "Our troops are in full retreat.

Whole towns are in flames, people are being killed all over the place... "

"No," said Timoshenko, "there is to be no air reconnaissance more than thirty-five miles beyond the frontier."

I argued that since the Nazis had knocked out practically all our front-line air force, this was impossible anyway, and insisted that we throw in the full weight of our

infantry, artillery and armour, and especially our anti-aircraft guns. But

Timoshenko still said No;—only reconnaissance of not more than thirty-five miles

inside enemy territory. ..

It was not till some time later that Moscow ordered us to put into action the "Red Packet", i.e. the plan for covering the State frontier. But this order came too late...

The Germans had already engaged in full-scale military operations, and had, in

several places, penetrated deep into our territory.

A few hours later, with Timoshenko's permission, Boldin flew to Belostok. His plane was hit by twenty bullets from a Messerschmitt, but nevertheless managed to land on an

airfield twenty miles east of the city. A few minutes later nine German planes appeared over the airfield and dropped their bombs, without any interference; there were no antiaircraft guns on that airfield. Several cars and Boldin's plane were destroyed.

Every minute counted. We had to get to the 10th Army Headquarters. There were

no cars at the airfield, so I took a small truck, and together with some officers and a number of soldiers—twelve people in all—we got into it. I took the seat next to the driver, and told him to drive to Belostok.

"It's dangerous, Comrade General," he said, "twenty minutes before you landed, there was a German paratroop landing; so the commander of the airfield told me."

An unpleasant bit of news, but it couldn't be helped. It was incredibly hot, and the air smelt of burning...

At last we reached the Belostok main road. Through the windscreen I could see

fifteen German bombers approaching from the west. They were flying low, with

provocative insolence, as though our sky belonged to them. On their fuselages I

could clearly see the spiders of the Nazi swastika.

On the way, Boldin stopped a crowd of workers wandering in the opposite direction.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"To Volkovysk," they said.

"Who are you?"

"We had been working on fortifications. But the place where we worked is now like a sea of flames," said an elderly man with an exhausted look on his face.

These people seemed to have lost their heads, not knowing where they were going

and why.

Then we met a few cars, led by a Zis-101. The broad leaves of an aspidistra were

protruding from one of the windows. It was the car of some local top official. Inside were two women and two children.

"Surely," I said, "at a time like this you might have more important things to transport than your aspidistra. You might have taken some old people or children."

With their heads bent, the women were silent. The driver, too, turned away, feeling ashamed.

And then came the German strafing.

Three volleys of machine-gun fire hit our truck. The driver was killed. I managed to survive, as I jumped out just in time. But with the exception of my A.D.C. and a

dispatch rider, all were killed...

Nearby, I noticed the same old Zis-101. I went up to it. The women, the children, the driver were all killed... Only the evergreen leaves of the aspidistra were still sticking out of the window.

Horror piled upon horror that day. Belostok was in a complete state of chaos, at the railway station a train packed with women and children evacuees was bombed, and

hundreds were killed.

At last, towards evening, Boldin reached the Headquarters of the 10th Army which had moved out of Belostok to a little wood some distance outside the city. It consisted of two tents, with a table and a few chairs. General Golubev was there, with a number of staff officers. He had been unable to communicate with the Front (i.e. Army Group)

Headquarters as the telephone lines had been destroyed, and radio communications were being constantly jammed by the enemy. Golubev told Boldin:

"At daybreak three German army corps, supported by masses of tanks and

bombers, attacked my 5th infantry corps on my left flank. During the first hours, all divisions suffered very heavy losses... "

His face and voice showed that he was deeply shaken. Having asked my permission

to light a cigarette, he unfolded a map:

"To prevent our being outflanked in the south, I deployed the 13th mechanised corps along the river Kuretz, but as you know, Ivan Vasilievich, there are very few tanks in our divisions. And what can you expect from those old T26 tanks—only

good enough for firing at sparrows,.. "

From his further report it emerged that both the aircraft and the anti-aircraft guns of the army corps had been smashed, and that spies had apparently informed the Germans

where the army's fuel dumps were, for during the very first hours of the invasion, these had all been destroyed by bombing.

Then General Nikitin, commander of the 6th cavalry corps, arrived and reported how his men, after successfully repelling the first German attacks, had been almost wholly

exterminated by German aircraft. The remnants of the cavalry corps had been

concentrated in a wood north-east of Belostok.

Looking up from the map, General Golubev said:

"It's hard, very hard, Ivan Vasilievich. My men are fighting like heroes. But what can you do against a tank or a plane? Where there is any chance of clinging to

something we hold on; we fight back from any strong position, and the enemy

cannot dislodge us. But there are few such positions, and the Nazis drive their

wedges forward, they avoid frontal attacks, they get round us; they gain both time and space. The frontier guards, too, are fighting well, but few of them are left and we have no means of supporting them. And so the Nazis advance, insolently,

marching upright, behaving like conquerors. And that's on the very first day of the war! What'll happen after that?"

At that very moment communications with Minsk were reestablished, and General

Pavlov proceeded to give Boldin peremptory orders about the counter-offensive the 10th Army was to carry out that night. Boldin objected, pointing out that the 10th Army had been as good as wiped out. For a moment Pavlov seemed to hesitate, and then said:

"These are my orders. It's for you to carry them out."

What, Boldin reflected, was the meaning of these totally unrealistic orders? And he

related that, long after the war, he discovered that men like Pavlov used to issue such orders, "merely for the record, to show Moscow that something was being done to stop the Germans".

[Boldin does not mention the fact that Pavlov was, soon afterwards, to be shot for his incompetence—or as a scapegoat. Pavlov is also mentioned in Ehrenburg's memoirs as

one of the Russian generals he met in 1937 in Spain. He also refers to Pavlov's tragic end in 1941.]

The rest of this tragic chapter in Boldin's book deals with the attempts, during the 23rd, to mount a counter-offensive with the remnants of the 10th Army, some other units and the armoured corps under General Hatskilevich, which was still in comparatively good

shape. But all day long the troops and the army headquarters were being attacked by

enemy aircraft. One general was killed, and although Hatskilevich's tank crews fought bravely, they were beginning to run out of fuel. Boldin, unable to contact the Front headquarters, sent two planes to Minsk, begging for fuel to be flown to the headquarters of the 10th Army. But both planes were shot down.

It was in this desperate situation that Marshal Kulik suddenly arrived from Moscow.

[Kulik was a "Stalinist" upstart who had risen to the top of the Army hierarchy since the 1937 Purge. Little more was to be heard of him after the beginning of the war.]

He listened to my explanations, then made a vague gesture, and mumbled: "Yes, I see..." It was quite obvious that, when leaving Moscow, he had no idea that the situation was as serious as this. Soon afterwards, the Marshal left our command

post. When saying goodbye, he said he would see what he could do.

As I watched his car driving away, I wondered what he had come for... I had known him as a man of energy and will-power, but now his nerves seemed to have given

way. General Nikitin seemed to think so, too. When the car had disappeared in a

cloud of dust, he remarked: "A strange visit"...

A few minutes later Hatskilevich arrived. He was in a state of great agitation. "We are firing our last shells. Once we've done that, we shall have to destroy the tanks."

"Yes," I said, "I don't see what else we can do."

Within a few hours, General Hatskilevich died a hero's death on the field of battle.

Surrounded on all sides—like the other troops in the famous "Belostok Pocket"—without ammunition, the generals, officers and soldiers under Boldin split into small groups, and started moving east, hoping for the best... Boldin's small group of men, who picked up more and more soldiers in the woods in the course of their forty-five days' trek—in the end there were 2,000 of them—finally managed to cross the front near Smolensk and to join the main Russian forces.

There were countless other units who did not have Boldin's good luck, and who were

either wiped out by the Germans, or forced to surrender. Boldin admits that, during the first few days of the trek, the morale among some of his own soldiers was low, especially as a result of German leaflets saying: "Moscow has surrendered. Any further resistance is useless. Surrender to victorious Germany now." Yet most of them were not desperate, but angry.

*

The first-hand accounts of Generals Fedyuninsky and Boldin confirm that Stalin and the Army High Command still seemed, even at the twelfth hour, to have hoped to avoid the war. It was not until the night of the invasion that urgent directives were sent out to the army secretly to man the gun emplacements along the frontier; to disperse the aircraft concentrated on the frontier-zone airfields, and to get the troops and anti-aircraft defences into a state of military preparedness. No other measures were prescribed and even these orders came too late.

Thus General Purkayev recalls that when he started moving his troops to the frontier, the war had already begun several hours before. Another commander, Army-General Popov,

recalls that when the Germans started their air raids on Brest-Litovsk it all came as a complete surprise. A regiment which was rushed to the frontier from Riga was

intercepted by superior German forces advancing north and practically exterminated.

The official Soviet History admits that in many frontier areas the Germans broke all resistance within a short time. Many troops went into battle completely unprepared and the Germans had little difficulty in breaking through the frontier defences. The Soviet air force was almost wiped out over large areas. During the first days of the war German bombers raided sixty-six airfields, especially those where the most modern planes were concentrated. Before noon, on June 22, 1,200 planes were destroyed, 800 of them on the ground. The Central Sector suffered the heaviest casualties of all—528 planes were

destroyed on the ground and 210 in the air.

There were practically no reserves in the frontier areas; telephone and telegraph

communications were disrupted in the very first hours of the war; army units lost contact with each other; some front commanders lacked the necessary operational and strategic training, and the experience required for the command of large operational forces in war conditions. Throughout the day the Soviet General Staff was unable to gain a clear idea of what was happening.

[IVOVSS, vol. II, pp. 20 and 28-29.]

Issued at 7.15 a.m. on June 22, the first directive of the General Staff to the frontier troops reflects their ignorance of the true situation and, seen in retrospect, has the ring of bitter travesty:

1) Our troops are to attack enemy forces with all the strength and means at their disposal, and to annihilate them wherever they have violated the Soviet border.

2) Our reconnaissance and combat aircraft shall ascertain where enemy aircraft

and land-forces are concentrated. By striking mighty blows our aircraft are to

smash the main enemy troop concentrations and their aircraft on its airfields. These blows are to be struck anywhere within sixty to a hundred miles of German

territory. Memel and Königsberg are to be heavily bombed. Until further notice, no air attacks are to be made on Finnish or Rumanian territory.

This order, given after the Soviet air force had already been practically eliminated, could, naturally, not be carried out. By the end of June 22, the left flank of the German Army Group Centre had already advanced far beyond Kaunas, where it had routed the Russian 11th Army, now in disorderly retreat from Kaunas to Vilno.

No doubt, here and there, the Russians were able to hang on, as for instance the garrison of the Citadel at Brest-Litovsk, which, although surrounded on all sides and constantly bombed and shelled, held out for over a month, till July 24. When the Germans finally captured the Citadel, most of its defenders were dead or severely wounded. The main

German forces in the area, however, by-passed Brest-Litovsk and pushed thirty-five

miles east on the very first day of the war.

The first official communiqué, published at 10 p.m. on June 22, was probably intended to prevent panic or bewilderment among the Soviet population:

In the course of the day, regular German troops fought our frontier troops and

achieved minor successes in a number of sectors. In the afternoon, with advance

field forces of the Red Army arriving at the frontier, the attacks of the German

groups have been repelled along most of the frontier with heavy losses to the enemy.

That the General Staff itself had no very clear idea of what was happening on the first day of the war is confirmed by the second directive given to the troops in the frontier area. The South-Western Army Group was to start, on the very next day, a major

offensive, which would lead, by the end of June 24, to the capture of Lublin, some thirty miles beyond the Soviet border! The North-Western Army Group was at the same time to capture Suvalki, and all three Army Groups were, moreover, ordered to surround any

German forces that had penetrated into Soviet territory.

Absurd though the order was, a pathetic attempt was made to carry it out; in a number of places the Russians succeeded in concentrating what tanks they still had in the frontier areas; but, in the absence of air support they were wiped out by German bombers.

The German advance continued almost without a hitch. Large Russian forces were

trapped in the Belostok pocket and eleven divisions in the Minsk area. By June 28 the Germans had already reached the city of Minsk, were pushing deep into the Baltic

Republics and were approaching Pskov, on the straight line to Leningrad.

A few days later the remnants of sixteen Russian divisions were facing two powerful

German tank formations along the Berezina, and under these conditions it was

unthinkable to form a new 220 miles long defence line; some delaying actions were,

however, fought with great gallantry by the Russians, notably east of Minsk, at Borisov, where they threw in a large number of tanks, though most of them obsolete. These

delaying actions to some extent helped to gain time in which to bring up reserves and organise a defence in depth in what already came to be known as the "Smolensk-Moscow direction".

Some minor delaying actions were also fought, with suicidal bravery, against the German Army Group South. Held up in the Rovno area and unable to pursue their advance

towards Kiev, the Germans turned north and got bogged down for some time in what

were described as "battles of local importance". But by July 9, the Germans had broken through to Zhitomir, which was captured, and were threatening to break through to Kiev and to encircle the main Russian forces in the Northern Ukraine. But here again, at

Berdichev, the Russians threw in some armour and there was heavy fighting around

Berdichev for almost a week.

Chapter III MOLOTOV AND STALIN SPEAK

It was not until several hours after the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union that an official announcement was made over the radio by Foreign Commissar Molotov. "Men and women, citizens of the Soviet Union," he began in a faltering, slightly stuttery voice.

"The Soviet Government and its head, Comrade Stalin, have instructed me to make the following statement:

At four o'clock this morning, without declaration of war, and without any claims

being made on the Soviet Union, German troops attacked our country, attacked our

frontier in many places, and bombed from the air Zhitomir, Kiev, Sebastopol,

Kaunas and some other places. There are over 200 dead or wounded. Similar air

and artillery attacks have also been made from Rumanian and Finnish territory.

The next sentence betrayed Molotov's extraordinary dismay and suggested that, in its dealings with the Germans, the Soviet Government would have been willing to consider almost any concessions to put off the evil hour:

This unheard-of attack on our country is an unparalleled act of perfidy in the

history of civilised nations. This attack has been made despite the fact that there was a non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, a pact the terms of

which were scrupulously observed by the Soviet Union. We have been attacked even

though, throughout the period of the Pact, the German Government had been

unable to make the slightest complaint about the USSR not carrying out its

obligations. Therefore the whole responsibility for this act of robbery must fall on the Nazi rulers.

Molotov then spoke of the visit he had received at 5.30 in the morning from the German Ambassador, who had informed him that Germany had decided to attack the Soviet

Union because of Russian troop concentrations on the frontier.

He stated emphatically that no Soviet plane had ever been allowed to cross the border, and he branded as "lies and provocations" the announcement over the Rumanian radio that morning that the Russians had bombed Rumanian airfields, and Hitler's statement

"trying after the event to concoct stories about the non-observance of the Soviet-German Pact by the Soviet Union". But now that the Germans had attacked the Soviet Union, the Soviet Government had ordered its troops to repel the attack and to throw the Germans out of Soviet territory.

This war has not been inflicted upon us by the German people, or by the German

workers, peasants and intellectuals, of whose sufferings we are fully aware, but by Germany's bloodthirsty rulers, who have already enslaved the French, the Czechs,

the Poles, the Serbs, and the peoples of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium,

Greece and other countries.

Molotov did not doubt that the Soviet armed forces would do their duty and smash the aggressor. He recalled that Russia had been invaded before, that, in the great patriotic war of 1812, the whole Russian people had risen as one man to crush Napoleon. The same

would happen to "arrogant Hitler".

The Government of the Soviet Union is deeply convinced that the whole population

of our country will do their duty, and will work hard and conscientiously. Our

people must be more united than ever. The greatest discipline, organising ability and selflessness worthy of a Soviet patriot must be demanded of everybody to meet the needs of the Army, Navy and Air Force, and to secure victory.

The Government calls upon you, men and women citizens of the Soviet Union, to

rally even more closely round the glorious Bolshevik Party, around the Soviet

Government and our great leader, Comrade Stalin. Our cause is good. The enemy

will be smashed. Victory will be ours.

There were a few catch phrases that stuck—about this being another "patriotic war" after the model of 1812; as well as the last paragraph: "Our cause is good. The enemy will be smashed. Victory will be ours (pobeda budet za nami)." But the general tone of the broadcast, and especially the complaint that the Germans had

"made no demands" on Russia, left an uneasy, almost humiliating, feeling. It took twelve incredibly long and anxious days before Stalin himself broadcast to the

Russian people.

In the midst of the conflicting, reticent and, to all appearances, untrue military

communiqués, the Russian people derived what cheer they could from Churchill's

historic broadcast on the night of June 22, less than twenty-four hours after the German invasion.

These were the passages that made a particularly strong impression on the Russians. He admitted that: "No one has been a more consistent opponent of communism than I have in the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it." But then he went on, as only he could do:

I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land... I see them guarding their homes where their mothers and wives pray—ah, yes, for there are

times when all pray—for the safety of their loved ones... I see the ten thousand

villages of Russia where the means of existence is wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial joys, where maidens laugh and children play. I see advancing on all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine... I see the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of

crawling locusts. I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still smarting from many a British whipping, delighted to find what they believe is an easier and safer prey...

And then—the assurance that there would never be a deal with Hitler, and the promise that Britain would support Russia, and finally, the conviction that: "He [Hitler] wishes to destroy the Russian power because he hopes that if he succeeds in this, he will be able to bring back the main strength of his Army and Air Force from the East and hurl it upon this Island... "

The comments I heard from Russians were almost all along these lines: "We had heard about Hess; we suspected that there might well be a deal between Britain and Germany.

We remembered Munich and those Anglo-Franco-Soviet talks in the summer of 1939.

We had felt deeply about the bombing of London, but had, all along, been taught to

distrust England. One of our first thoughts, when Germany invaded us, was that it had perhaps been done by agreement with England. That England should be an Ally—yes, an

Ally—was more than we had ever hoped for..."

At last Stalin spoke. It was an extraordinary performance, and not the least impressive thing about it were these opening words: "Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, fighters of our Army and Navy! I am speaking to you, my friends!" This was something new. Stalin had never spoken like this before. But the words fitted perfectly into the atmosphere of those days.

Stalin began by saying that the Nazi invasion was continuing, despite the heroic defence of the Red Army, and although "the best German divisions and air force units had already been smashed and had found their grave on the field of battle". Understating the territorial losses already suffered, Stalin then said that the Nazi troops had succeeded in capturing Lithuania, a large part of Latvia, the western part of Belorussia and parts of the western Ukraine. German planes had bombed Murmansk, Orsha, Mogilev, Smolensk,

Kiev, Odessa and Sebastopol. "A serious threat hangs over our country."

Did this mean, Stalin asked, that the German-Fascist troops were invincible? Of course not! The armies of Napoleon and of William II also used to be considered invincible; yet they were smashed in the end. And the same would happen to Hitler's army. "Only on our territory has it, for the first time, met with serious resistance." That a "part of our territory" had, nevertheless, been occupied, was chiefly due to the fact that the war had begun in conditions favourable to the Germans and unfavourable to the Red Army:

At the time of the attack, the German troops, 170 divisions in all, had been fully mobilised and were in a state of military preparedness along the Soviet frontier, merely waiting for the signal to advance. The Soviet troops had not been fully

mobilised, and had not been moved to the frontier. Important, too, was the fact that Fascist Germany unexpectedly and perfidiously violated the 1939 Non-Aggression

Pact between herself and the USSR, wholly indifferent to the consideration that she would be branded as the aggressor by the whole world.

Stalin then proceeded to justify the Soviet-German Pact.

One might well ask: How was it possible for the Soviet Government to sign a non-

aggression pact with such inhuman scoundrels as Hitler and Ribbentrop? Had not a

serious mistake been made? Of course not! A non-aggression pact is a peace pact

between two states, and that was the pact that Germany proposed to us in 1939. No peace-loving state could have rejected such a pact with another country, even if

scoundrels like Hitler and Ribbentrop stood at its head. All the more so, as this Pact did not in any way violate the territorial integrity, independence or honour of our country."

Stalin went on to say that the Pact had given the Soviet Union time to prepare against a German attack should Nazi Germany decide to embark on one.

This war has been inflicted on us, and our country has entered into a life-and-death struggle against its most wicked and perfidious enemy, German Fascism. Our

troops are fighting heroically against heavy odds, against an enemy heavily armed with tanks and aircraft... The main forces of the Red Army, armed with thousands

of tanks and planes, are now entering the battle... Together with the Red Army, the whole of our people are rising to defend their country.

The enemy is cruel and merciless. He aims at grabbing our land, our wheat and oil.

He wants to restore the power of the landowners, reestablish Tsarism, and destroy the national culture of the peoples of the Soviet Union... and turn them into the slaves of German princes and barons.

There should be no room in our ranks for whimperers and cowards, for deserters

and panic-mongers. Our people should be fearless in their struggle and should

selflessly fight our patriotic war of liberation against the Fascist enslavers...

After a reference to Lenin, Stalin said:

We must immediately put our whole production on a war footing, and place

everything at the service of the Front and the organisation of the enemy's rout... The Red Army and Navy and the whole Soviet people must fight for every inch of Soviet soil, fight to the last drop of blood for our towns and villages... We must organise every kind of help for the Red Army, make sure that its ranks are constantly

renewed, and that it is supplied with everything it needs. We must organise the

rapid transport of troops and equipment, and help to the wounded.

... All enterprises must intensify their work and produce more and more military

equipment of every kind... A merciless struggle must be undertaken against all

deserters and panic-mongers... We must destroy spies, diversionists and enemy

paratroopers... Military tribunals should immediately try anyone who, through

panic or cowardice, is interfering with our defence, regardless of position or rank...

And then came the famous "scorched-earth" instructions:

Whenever units of the Red Army are forced to retreat, all railway rolling stock must be driven away. The enemy must not be left a single engine, or a single railway

truck, and not a pound of bread nor a pint of oil. The kolkhozniki must drive away all their livestock, hand their grain reserves to the State organs for evacuation to the rear... All valuable property, whether grain, fuel or non-ferrous metals, which

cannot be evacuated, must be destroyed.

Then followed the "partisan war" instructions:

In the occupied territories partisan units must be formed... There must be

diversionist groups for fighting enemy units, for spreading the partisan war

everywhere, for blowing up and destroying roads and bridges and telephone and