Russia at war 1941-1945

died, often together with the rest of the family... "

Tikhomirov then showed me an extraordinary document, which he called "our Famine Scrapbook", containing copies of many children's essays written during the famine, and much other material. It was bound in purple velvet, and the margins composed of rather conventional children's watercolours depicting soldiers, tanks, planes and the like; these surrounded little typewritten sheets—copies of typical essays written during the famine.

One young girl wrote:

Until June 22 everybody had work and a good life assured to him. That day we went on an excursion to the Kirov Islands. A fresh wind was blowing from the Gulf,

bringing with it bits of the song some kids were singing not far away, "Great and glorious is my native land". And then the enemy began to come nearer and nearer our city. We went out to dig big trenches. It was difficult, because a lot of the kids were not used to such hard physical labour. The German General von Leeb was

already licking his chops at the thought of the gala dinner he was going to get at the Astoria. Now we are sitting in the shelter round improvised stoves, with our coats and fur caps and gloves on. We have been knitting warm things for our soldiers, and have been taking round their letters to friends and relatives. We have also been

collecting non-ferrous metal for salvage...

Valentina Solovyova, an older girl of sixteen, wrote:

June 22! How much that date means to us now! But then it just seemed an ordinary

summer day... Before long, the House Committee was swarming with women, girls

and children, who had come to join the civil defence teams, the anti-fire and anti-gas squads... By September the city was encircled. Food supplies from outside had

stopped. The last evacuee trains had departed. The people of Leningrad tightened

their belts. The streets began to bristle with barricades and anti-tank hedgehogs.

Dugouts and firing points—a whole network of them—were springing up around

the city.

As in 1919, so now, the great question arose: "Shall Leningrad remain a Soviet city or not? " Leningrad was in danger. But its workers had risen like one man for its defence. Tanks were thundering down the streets. Everywhere men of the civil

guard were joining up... A cold and terrible winter was approaching. Together with their bombs, enemy planes were dropping leaflets. They said they would raze

Leningrad to the ground. They said we would all die of hunger. They thought they

would frighten us, but they filled us with renewed strength... Leningrad did not let the enemy through its gates! The city was starving, but it lived and worked, and

kept on sending to the front more of its sons and daughters. Though knocking at the knees with hunger, our workers went to work in their factories, with the air-raid sirens filling the air with their screams...

This from another essay on how the school-children dug trenches while the Germans

were approaching Leningrad:

In August we worked for twenty-five days digging trenches. We were machine-

gunned and some of us were killed, but we carried on, though we weren't used to

this work. And the Germans were stopped by the trenches we had dug...

Another girl of sixteen, Luba Tereshchenkova, described how work continued at the

school even during the worst time of the blockade:

In January and February terrible frost also joined in the blockade and lent Hitler a hand. It was never less than thirty degrees of frost! Our classes continued on the

"Round the Stove" principle. But there were no reserved seats, and if you wanted a seat near the stove or under the stove pipe, you had to come early. The place facing the stove door was reserved for the teacher. You sat down and were suddenly seized by a wonderful feeling of well-being: the warmth penetrated through your skin,

right into your bones; it made you all weak and languid; you just wanted to think of nothing, only to slumber and drink in the warmth. It was agony to stand up and go to the blackboard... At the blackboard it was so cold and dark, and your hand,

imprisoned in its heavy glove, went all numb and rigid and refused to obey. The

chalk kept falling out of your hand, and the lines were all crooked... By the time we reached the third lesson there was no more fuel left. The stove went cold and a

horrid icy draught started blowing down the pipe. It became terribly cold. It was then that Vasya Pugin, with a puckish look on his face, could be seen slinking out and bringing in a few logs from Anna Ivanovna's emergency reserve; and a few

minutes later, we could again hear the magic crackling of wood inside the stove...

During the break nobody would jump up because nobody had any desire to go into

the icy corridors.

And this from another essay:

The winter came, fierce and merciless. The water pipes froze, and there was no

electric light, and the tram-cars stopped running. To get to school in time, I had to get up very early every morning, for I live out in the suburbs. It was particularly difficult to get to school after a blizzard, when all roads and paths are covered with snowdrifts. But I firmly decided to complete my school year... One day, after

standing in a bread queue for six hours (I had to miss school that day, for I had received no bread for two days) I caught a cold and fell ill. Never had I felt so miserable as during those days. Not for physical reasons, but because I needed the moral support of my school-mates, their encouraging jokes.. .

[Curious that in all these ultra-patriotic essays there was not a single mention of Stalin.]

None of the children who continued to go to school died, but several of the teachers did.

The last section of the Famine Scrapbook, introduced by a title page with a decorative funeral urn painted in purple watercolour, was written by Tikhomirov, the headmaster. It was a series of obituary notes of the teachers who were either killed in the war or had died of hunger. The assistant headmaster was "killed in action". Another was "killed at Kingisepp", in that terrible battle of Kingisepp where the Germans broke through towards Leningrad from Estonia. The maths teacher "died of hunger"; so did the teacher of geography. Comrade Nemirov, the teacher of literature, "was among the victims of the blockade", and Akimov, the history teacher, died of malnutrition and exhaustion despite a long rest in a sanatorium to which he was taken in January. Of another teacher

Tikhomirov wrote: "He worked conscientiously until he realised he could no longer walk.

He asked me for a few days' leave in the hope that his strength would return to him. He stayed at home, preparing his lessons for the second term. He went on reading books. So he spent the day of January 8. On January 9 he quietly passed away." What a human story was behind these simple words!

I have described conditions in Leningrad as I found them in September 1943, when the city was still under frequent and often intense shell-fire. This shelling continued for the rest of the year, and it was not till January 1944 that the ordeal of Leningrad finally ended. During the previous weeks a large Russian armed force was transferred under

cover of night to the "Oranienbaum bridgehead" on the south bank of the Gulf of Finland; and this force, under the command of General Fedyuninsky, struck out towards Ropsha, where it was to meet the troops of the Leningrad Front striking towards the south-west.

During that first day of the Russian breakthrough no fewer than 500,000 shells were used to smash the German fortifications. About the same time, the Volkhov army group also came into motion, and, within a few days, the Germans were on the run, all the way to Pskov and Estonia. On January 27, 1944 the blockade officially ended.

All the famous historical palaces around Leningrad—Pavlovsk, Tsarskoie-Selo, Peterhof

—were in ruins.

Chapter VIII WHY LENINGRAD "TOOK IT"

Why did Leningrad "take it"? A glib, easy and, on the face of it, quite justified argument is that, with all road and rail communications cut, the people of Leningrad had no

alternative to sticking it out, and had to be "heroic", whether they wanted to or not. Had they had time to get out, it is also argued, they would have been on the run, just as the people of Moscow were on the run on October 16, 1941. But that is not really the point.

What is remarkable, once the city was surrounded, was not the fact that the people "took it", but the way they took it.

In his interesting study, The Siege of Leningrad, Mr Leon Goure suggests that a number of people in the city were in favour of surrendering it to the Germans and that, though not a majority, "the number of disaffected persons... appears to have been far from negligible".

[Leon Goure, The Siege of Leningrad (Stanford, 1962), p. 304.]

When I was in Leningrad I heard quite a few references to a German "fifth column"

inside the city, and this is also mentioned in recent Soviet studies. But the evidence that more than a tiny minority wanted to surrender is very slender.

Mr Goure himself recognises that "patriotism, local pride, growing resentment of the Germans and reluctance to betray the soldiers" had much to do with the "maintaining of discipline". At the same time he places, in my view, undue emphasis on "an ingrained habit of obedience to the authorities", "no prior experience of political freedom", the

"Stalinist terror", and so on, and relies too much on the evidence of certain post-war refugees.

[Ibid., pp. 304-6. Mr Harrison Salisbury, in The New York Times of May 10, 1962, takes the book to task on that score, recalling Hitler's directives to "erase St Petersburg from the face of the earth", adding that "we are not interested in preserving even a part of the population of this large city"—directives on the substance of which nobody in Leningrad could have had any serious doubts.]

There is much stronger evidence to show that the "Leningrad can take it" spirit was there from the very start. There was no one, except a few anti-communists, who even

considered surrender to the Germans. At the height of the famine, a few people—who

were not necessarily collaborators or enemy agents (as Soviet accounts assert), but

merely people driven half-insane with hunger—did write to the authorities asking that Leningrad be declared an "open city"; but no-one in his right mind could have done so.

During the German advance on the city, people soon learned what the enemy were like; how many young people had died through enemy bombing and machine-gunning while

digging those trenches? And once the blockade was complete the air-raids began,

together with the sadistic leaflets like that dropped on Leningrad on November 6, to

"celebrate" Revolution Day: "Today we shall do the bombing, tomorrow you shall do the burying".

The question of declaring Leningrad an open city could never arise, as it did, for

example, in Paris in 1940; this was a war of extermination, and the Germans never made a secret of it. Secondly, the local pride of Leningrad had a quality of its own—it was composed of a great love of the city itself, of its historical past, its extraordinary literary associations (this was particularly true of the intelligentsia) and also of a great proletarian and revolutionary tradition amongst its working-class; nothing could have so blended these two great loves for Leningrad into one thing as the threat of the annihilation of the city. Perhaps even quite consciously, there was also the old competition with Moscow: if Moscow were to fall in October 1941, Leningrad at least would hold out longer, come

what may; and, once Moscow had been saved, it was a point of honour for Leningrad to do as well, and even better. Some of the most bitter anti-Stalinists like Olga Bergholz, were also the most fanatical Leningrad patriots. But sentiment, however praiseworthy, was not enough. No doubt, the army's record, right up to the moment when it retreated to the outskirts of Leningrad, had been disappointing; and the Leningrad authorities had, obviously, done a great deal of bungling too during those first two and a half months of the German invasion. The whole problem of evacuation, especially of children, had been grossly mishandled, and little or nothing had been done to lay in food reserves. But once the Germans had been stopped outside Leningrad, and once the decision had been taken to fight for every house and every street, the faults of the army and the civilian authorities were readily forgotten; for now it was a case of defending Leningrad at any price. It was only natural that very rigid discipline and organisation were necessary inside the besieged city; but this had little to do with "an ingrained habit of obedience to the authorities", or, still less, with "the Stalinist terror". Obviously, food had to be severely rationed; but to say that people in Leningrad worked and did not "rebel" (for what purpose?) in order to have a ration card—which, to many, did not even mean "the difference between life and death"—is to misunderstand the spirit of Leningrad completely. And there is little doubt that the Party organisation, after many initial blunders, played a very important role in keeping Leningrad going: first, by making rationing as fair as was humanly possible in incredibly difficult conditions; second, in organising civil defence inside the city on a vast scale; third, in mobilising people for cutting timber, peat, etc.; fourth, by organising the various "roads of life". And there is also no doubt that, in the midst of the most appalling hardships of the winter of 1941-2, organisations like the Komsomol showed the greatest self-sacrifice and endurance in helping people.

There can really be no comparison with London; the blitz was terrible enough, though it was not comparable to what German cities got a few years later. The bombing of London was really worse than the bombing or shelling of Leningrad, at least in terms of

casualties. But only if one imagined that everybody in London was starving during the blitz winter, and ten or twenty thousand people were dying of hunger in London every day, would it be possible to put an equation mark between the two. In Leningrad the

choice lay between dishonourably dying in German captivity or honourably dying (or,

with luck, surviving) in one's own unconquered city. Any attempt to differentiate

between Russian patriotism, or revolutionary ardour, or Soviet organisation, or to ask which of the three was the more important in saving Leningrad is also singularly futile: all three were blended in an extraordinarily "Leningrad" way.

Local "Leningrad" patriotism gave a special flavour to all three. In Leningrad in 1943 I could observe this on every occasion; to the people of Leningrad, their city, with all that it had done and endured, was something unique. They spoke with some contempt of the

"Moscow skedaddle" of 1941 and many, among them that very remarkable man, P. S.

Popkov, head of the Leningrad Soviet, felt that, after what it had done, Leningrad

deserved some special distinction. One idea, very current at the time, was that Leningrad should become the capital of the RSFSR, i.e. of Russia proper, whereas Moscow would

remain the capital of the USSR.

This Leningrad particularism was not at all to Stalin's liking. He must have known that there were much fewer pictures of him there than in any other city in the Soviet Union, and that Leningrad tended to look upon itself as being something rather distinct, both militarily and politically, from the "mainland". It was suspected in Moscow that Zhdanov (who had been a great chief in the days of the siege—quite regardless of all his previous

"purge" activities and his subsequent vandalism in the cultural field) had become something of a Leningrad particularist himself, though he was not born there. There is little doubt that, especially after Zhdanov's death in 1948, Stalin decided to stamp out Leningrad's particularism. A remarkable museum, called The Defence of Leningrad, had been organised during and after the siege; this was a striking collection of documents and exhibits of every kind, illustrating the gigantic "mass effort" made by the Leningrad people, and their civilian and military leaders. This museum was closed in 1949. As

Pavlov wrote in 1961:

This was totally unjustified, and most regrettable. Immensely valuable data were

concentrated in this museum reflecting the heroic struggle of the besieged, the

conditions in which Leningraders lived during the fearful time of the Blockade; the defence measures taken against the air-raids and artillery bombardments; the

exhibits demonstrated the high degree of organisation in producing armaments and

in building defences, in dealing with delayed-action bombs, and so on. The museum was a remarkable tribute to the inventiveness, stubbornness and courage of

ordinary people. But this museum was organised in the days of the "personality cult" when the heroic deeds of so many Lenin-graders tended to be attributed to single personalities.

In 1957 (Pavlov goes on to say) a museum of the History of Leningrad was opened; but this, he says, "contains only a few rooms of exhibits relating to the war period; this

'museum', quite different from that assembled during the war, is utterly inadequate."

Not only was the museum of the Defence of Leningrad destroyed in 1949, but there was also the—still somewhat mysterious— "Leningrad Affair", in which Kuznetsov, Popkov and many other leaders of the defence of Leningrad lost their lives. Was the Leningrad Party organisation too "particularist", not sufficiently Stalinist? There have been no more than some vague references to it in Mr Khrushchev's speeches, with the suggestion that Malenkov played a particularly sinister role in this purge. It has also been suggested that both Stalin and Malenkov (who was an enemy of Zhdanov's) waited till Zhdanov was

dead until they settled their scores with the Leningrad organisation, which had never been particularly loud in its praise of Stalin, least of all during the War and the Blockade.

Chapter IX A NOTE ON FINLAND

One thing was very striking during the Leningrad Blockade; the enemy was Germany, and Finland was scarcely even mentioned. Yet the Finns were also at war with the Soviet Union, were taking part in the blockade of Leningrad, and their troops were within some twenty miles north and north-west of the city. Further east, they had penetrated deep into Soviet territory, and were holding a line along the Svir river, between Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega. The large Soviet city of Petrozavodsk, capital of the Karelo-Finnish SSR, was under Finnish occupation.

The position of the Finns in their war against the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944

was, however, very unusual. They had many bonds with the Germans, but their war

against Russia was still a "separate" war, and they were certainly less subservient to the Germans than were, for instance, the Hungarians and Rumanians. After the war they were to claim that they had not allowed German troops to operate against Leningrad from

Finnish soil and that they had not taken part in the bombing or shelling of Leningrad.

There had, of course, been negotiations between Germany and Finland long before June 22, 1941 on joint operations against Russia. There is also no doubt that the Finns did, at one moment, push beyond the old frontier, since they captured the Russian frontier town of Beloostrov only twenty miles north-west of Leningrad; here, however, the Russians counter-attacked, and the Finns were thrown out on the very next day, after which this part of the front was stabilised.

The Germans were not satisfied with this, and on September 4, Jodl came specially to see Mannerheim and urged him to continue the Finnish offensive beyond the old border—i.e.

against Leningrad. Mannerheim appears to have refused. At the trial of the pro-German Ryti after the war, the former head of the Finnish Government even argued that the Finns had really "saved" Leningrad:

On August 24, 1941, I visited Marshal Mannerheim's headquarters. The Germans

had been pressing us to advance on Leningrad, after crossing the old frontier. I said that the conquest of Leningrad was not our object, and that we should not take part in it. Mannerheim and War Minister Waiden agreed with me, and rejected the

German proposal. As a result, there arose the paradoxical situation in which the

Germans were unable to advance on Leningrad from the north; in this way, the

Finns defended Leningrad from the north.

[See C. Leonard Lundin, Finland in the Second World War (New York, 1957).]

For all that, the Finns did take part in the encirclement of Leningrad; also, according to the German historian Walter Görlitz, the Finns would have attacked Leningrad had there been a final German onslaught on the city from the south; but this never took place.

[Walter Görlitz, Paulus and Stalingrad (London, 1963), p. 128.]

They occupied considerable stretches of Soviet territory which had never belonged to them, notably east of Lake Ladoga. But although, as is evident from the Soviet armistice conditions presented to the Finns in 1944, there were some German troops stationed in Finland, there appears to be no evidence that they were ever used against Leningrad from Finnish territory. Whether Leningrad was ever shelled or bombed from Finnish territory is perhaps more doubtful; in 1943 I was shown one or two shell-holes on the north side of buildings in Leningrad, which suggested that some shells had been fired from Finnish territory. But even if these one or two shell-holes were genuine, there was certainly no regular shelling of Leningrad from the north. Notices in the streets of Leningrad declaring the southern "sheltered" side of the streets much safer than the north side, clearly implied that the shelling was all assumed to come from the south, i.e. from the Germans.

It is certain that any major offensive from the Finnish side during the most critical months of the Leningrad blockade, and heavy shelling from the north would have greatly added to Leningrad's troubles. That the Finns did not attack at that critical time was due to a number of factors: a certain distaste of many Finns at being allied to Hitler, who had ruthlessly invaded Denmark and Norway; the fact that Britain and, later, the United

States, were allied with the Soviet Union; and a perhaps genuine reluctance on

Mannerheim's part to take part in the conquest and destruction of Leningrad.

This does not mean that the Finnish bourgeoisie was not violently anti-Russian, as it had been ever since 1918, and even more since the Winter War of 1939-40. But grandiose

ideas of a "Great Finland" stretching, according to some of the more absurd blueprints, as far as Moscow ("an old Finnish city, as its very name indicates") seem to have been limited to the lunatic fringe. Nevertheless, there were at least a small number of select Finnish troops which took part in the German operations against Russia proper, and,

according to numerous testimonies I heard both during and after the war, particularly in the Smolensk and Tula areas, many of these Finnish soldiers behaved particularly

brutally to the Russian civilian population—especially to girls and women—"worse even than the Germans".

As far as the military and political leadership of Leningrad were concerned, there seems, however, little doubt that they were conscious of a certain negative value of the role played by the Finns in the tragedy of Leningrad. When, after the Soviet-Finnish

armistice, Zhdanov travelled to Helsinki, he had long and pointedly courteous

conversations with Mannerheim and, as we know, the armistice terms finally agreed to, leaving nearly the whole of Finland unoccupied by Soviet troops, were much milder than might have been expected. With an eye on future relations with the Scandinavian

countries, and no doubt remembering the fiasco of Kuusinen's "Terijoki Government" of 1939-40, the Russians made no attempt, either then or later, to turn Finland into a

People's Democracy.

PART FOUR The Black Summer of 1942

Chapter I CLOSE-UP: MOSCOW IN JUNE 1942

I returned to England in November 1941, and did not go back to Russia again until May 1942—this time for the duration—sailing for twenty-eight days from Middlesbrough to

Murmansk on the Liberty ship, the Empire Baffin, which formed part of the famous PQ-16 convoy. Soon after leaving Iceland, the convoy was subjected to six days' dive-

bombing by the Germans, from their bases in Northern Norway. As we know from

Churchill's letters to Stalin, the Admiralty expected half this convoy to be wiped out; but owing, apparently, to some faulty organisation on the Germans' part, only eight ships were sunk, out of a total of thirty-five. The Germans were to make up for it a month later with the next convoy, the PQ-17, threequarters of whose ships were destroyed.

In The Year of Stalingrad I described this extraordinary voyage of the PQ-16, the marvellous spirit shown by both the British and the Russian seamen who took part in it; the miserably poor protection given it by a couple of submarines and a few destroyers and corvettes—the two escorting cruisers having left it after the first German air-raid.

About 160 men lost their lives in that convoy, and many others were wounded, and were, in the end, taken to the terribly crowded and under-equipped hospital at Murmansk.

At the end of May 1942 there were about 3,000 British "survivors" at Murmansk—many of them from the cruiser Edinburgh, which had been sunk shortly before. Despite frequent German airraids, especially when a convoy landed there from the west,

Murmansk was still more or less intact at the time; and it was not until a month later that most of it was destroyed in a great fire-blitz.

In the same book I described not only Murmansk in May 1942, but also my remarkable

six-days' journey in a "hard"—i.e. third-class—carriage from Murmansk to Moscow during the first week of June. With the sun shining for nearly twenty-four hours in that part of Russia far beyond the Arctic Circle, summer had come in a rush within a few

days, and the far north, with its millions of flowers, was extraordinarily beautiful. Of wonderful beauty too, in the midnight twilight, were Lake Imandra, in the mountainous country of Soviet Lapland through which we travelled a day after leaving Murmansk, and then the immense forests south of the White Sea and all along the Archangel-Vologda

railway line, which we reached on the third day. Often the train would stop, and people would jump out to pick flowers and cranberries—which had been preserved by the snow

through the winter.

The carriage was crowded with soldiers and civilians, and they presented a remarkable cross-section of Russian humanity. In The Year of Stalingrad I recorded dozens of conversations with soldiers, officers, railwaymen and all kinds of civilians, among them an eleven-year-old girl called Tamara, an evacuee from Leningrad, who had spent the

winter in a small town on the White Sea and was now being taken by her mother to a

kolkhoz, where her grandmother lived, in the more clement province of Riazan, south-east of Moscow.

All these people had something significant to say. Tamara had gone to school during her winter on the White Sea; she had with her several school books with pictures of Stalin and Voroshilov, as well as a game of snakes-and-ladders. She said she had had enough to eat at the school canteen, thought that "Hitler would have to be killed before things got better", but kept the carriage amused, all the same, by often singing in a shrill voice an optimistic ditty she had learned at school:

Hitler sam sebé ne rad,

Vziát' ne mózhet Leningrád,

Vídit Névsky i sadý,

I ni tudý i ni sudy

Na Moskvú pustílsya vor,

Dáli tam yemú otpór,

Propádayut vse trudý,

I ni tudý, i ni sudý

(Hitler is cursing his luck, he can't take Leningrad; he can see the Nevsky and the

gardens, but he's got stuck. Then the thief tried Moscow, but here, too, he got thrown back; all his efforts are in vain; he's stuck, he is stuck again).

Although enormous areas of Russia were still under German occupation, the fact that

neither Moscow nor Leningrad had been lost gave people a certain amount of self-

confidence; nevertheless, morale among them varied a great deal—partly depending on

the amount of food they had had to eat. Civilians were badly underfed, and many suffered from scurvy; old women especially were tearful and pessimistic, and thought the

Germans were terribly strong, and God only knew what might yet be in store for Russia during the coming summer. Railwaymen, though much better fed than most other

civilians, were in a grim mood—all the more so as they had had an extremely hard winter on this Murmansk railway which had been continuously bombed by the Germans.

Practically all the railway stations had been destroyed by bombing, and, off the line, there was also much wreckage of carriages and engines.

Morale among soldiers and officers was rather better: some of them spoke highly of the British Hurricanes that were operating at Murmansk; others talked about the

"tremendous" casualties they had inflicted on the Germans and Finns on the Murmansk Front with their "miraculous" katyusha mortars. Many of the officers came from the Caucasus and the Ukraine; all spoke nostalgically of their homes and families there, but opinion seemed to be sharply divided between the optimists and pessimists: some thought the Germans might well overrun the rest of the Ukraine and the Caucasus, others that they hadn't a chance. All the same, they were far from under-rating the power of the Germans, and in their game of dominoes, they called the double-six "Hitler"—"because it's the most frightening of them all". The double-five was called "Goebbels".

In that part of Russia, Leningrad was an obsession with many of the people; they had seen thousands of Leningrad evacuees, many of them half-dead, and had heard the real and unvarnished truth about the dreadful famine winter there; many had friends and

relatives in Leningrad, among them my friend Tamara, whose step-father was a

Leningrad railwayman.

Civilians were extremely short of food, though the soldiers were well-supplied, and at railway stations it was only the soldiers who did a lot of trading with the peasants, bartering a small piece of soap or an ounce of tobacco for a dozen eggs or even half a chicken. The civilians had nothing to trade, and money was as good as useless; the

peasants weren't interested. The civilians spoke with some bitterness of the "shameless profiteering" of which both the peasants and the soldiers were guilty.

The attitude to the Allies was extremely mixed. Many of these people had been travelling all the way from Murmansk, where they had seen ships bringing tanks and munitions and sacks of Canadian flour, but, on the whole, they tended to think that all this was small stuff. An old elementary school-teacher, suffering from scurvy, and now on his way to join his family in a fishing-village on the White Sea where he hoped to get more

"wholesome food", talked to me a lot about England, saying that Churchill was, of course, an old enemy of the Soviet Union, and the Russians should, therefore be grateful that he at least wasn't on the side of the Germans; but he doubted whether there would be a Second Front for a very long time, at least so long as Churchill was in charge.

There was a moment of real excitement in the carriage when somebody brought in the

news of a British 1,000-bomber raid on Cologne; suddenly England seemed to have

become wonderfully popular. But the next day the mood was much less cheerful; it had been learned from somewhere that the Russians had just lost 5,000 men in the Battle of Kharkov, and that "70,000 were missing". This struck everybody as extremely disturbing and ominous, and the soldiers from the Ukraine and the Caucasus seemed particularly

alarmed.

At last, on the fifth day, the train reached the great railway junction of Vologda. There were hundreds of evacuees at the station —mostly women and children—who had waited

literally for days for their train, sleeping on railway platforms or in waiting-rooms, and with very little to eat, beyond the daily half-pound of bread which was distributed

regularly—even though little else was.

Here I also saw several trains with hundreds of emaciated evacuees from Leningrad, and also a number of hospital trains, with hundreds of wounded from the Leningrad and

Volkhov Fronts where there was heavy fighting again.

Having missed our connection at Vologda, we were stuck there for a whole day, and it was not till nearly a week after leaving Murmansk that I finally reached Moscow. During the last lap of the journey, the carriage was even more crowded than before; many

soldiers had squeezed in at Vologda. I particularly remember one giant of a soldier, looking like Chaliapin in his youth, who devoured a pound of bread and six hard-boiled eggs all at one go. "You've got a pretty good appetite," I remarked. "I should say so," he replied. "I've got to make up for all last winter. You'd stuff yourself if you'd been there."

He turned out to be one of the soldiers who had fought at Leningrad right through the winter.

One thing struck me at the time as very curious: throughout that week in the train from Murmansk to Moscow, nobody had mentioned the name of Stalin. Was his leadership

being taken for granted, or were there some silent doubts about the great quality of his leadership? Was it not because the people of the north were more closely concerned with the Leningrad tragedy than with Moscow, and that it was in Moscow, which had been

saved in the previous autumn "under Stalin's leadership", that his prestige was highest of all? Stalin was in Moscow. He belonged to Moscow, as it were, and had come to symbolise in popular imagination the capital's spirit of resistance.

In June 1942 Moscow was still very near the front line. The Germans were firmly

entrenched at Rzhev, Viazma and Gzhatsk, rather less than eighty miles away. Nobody

could be quite sure that the Germans would not attempt another all-out attack on the city.

The last bombs had been dropped on Moscow in March, and although the anti-aircraft

defences were said to be much better than in the summer of 1941, there was no certainty that air-raids would not begin again.

Moscow had a lean and hungry look. It had lived through a hard and, to many people,

terrible winter. It was nothing compared with what Leningrad had suffered, but many

individual stories were grim—stories of under-nourishment, of unheated houses, with

temperatures just above or even below freezing point, with water-pipes burst, and

lavatories out of action; and in these houses one slept smothered—if one had them—

under two overcoats and three or more blankets. In June bread still sold in the open market at 150 roubles a kilo (thirty shillings a pound). There was almost no cabbage or other vegetables, and although the bread ration varied from 28 oz. to 14 oz. a day, the rations of other foodstuffs were often honoured in a most irregular way, or not at all.

[In the case of "heavy" workers (railwaymen, for instance) the rations were as follows: Bread 1.5 lb. daily

Cereals 4 oz. daily

Meat 3.5 oz. daily

Fats 0.75 oz. daily

Sugar 0.75 oz. daily

Tobacco 0.5 oz. daily

Tea 1 oz. a month

Fish 2.5 oz. daily

Vegetables (cabbage or potatoes) 0.5 lb. to 1 lb. daily.

In most cases these rations were not fully honoured; in factories most of the food was handed over to the canteen. Rations for the three other categories were, of course, much lower.]

What reserves of potatoes and vegetables there had been in the Moscow province naa

either been looted by the Germans or taken over by the Army. Sugar, fats, milk and

tobacco were all very scarce. There was a peculiar form of profiteering which had

developed in Moscow during the spring, when the owner of a cigarette would charge any willing passers-by two roubles for a puff—and there were plenty of buyers.

[Nominally about a shilling.]

People in the Moscow streets looked haggard and pale, and scurvy was fairly common.

Consumer goods were almost unobtainable, except at fantastic prices, or for coupons, if and when these were honoured. In the big Mostorg department store strange odds and

ends were being sold, such as barometers and curling-tongs, but nothing useful. In the shopping streets like the Kuznetsky Most, or Gorki Street, the shop windows were mostly sand-bagged and where they were not, they often displayed cruel cardboard hams,

cheeses and sausages, all covered with dust.

There were other deplorable shortages. In dental clinics—with the exception of a few privileged ones—teeth were pulled without an anaesthetic. The chemists' shops were

about as empty as the rest.

A large part of the Moscow province had been devastated; many villages had been

burned down, and in towns like Kalinin, Klin or Volokolamsk life was slowly rising from the wreckage and rubble.

Moscow itself was very empty, with nearly half its population still away. Only half a dozen theatres were open in June, among them the Filiale of the Bolshoi, and tickets were easy to obtain. In the buffet, all they sold, for a few coppers, was—glasses of plain water. The Bolshoi itself had been hit by a ton bomb, and was out of action. There was a good deal of other bomb damage here and there, and the sky was dotted with barrage

balloons.

The panic exodus of October 16 had remained a grim and, to many, a shameful memory.

Hundreds of thousands who had left then had not yet returned. Many government offices were still in the east—at Kazan, Ulianovsk, Saratov, Kuibyshev and other places; the University and the Academy of Sciences had been moved east; many factories had also

evacuated much of their equipment and many of their workers, and were working on

skeleton staffs, if at all. On the other hand, those who had stayed on in Moscow during the two "danger months"—from October to December—now recalled with some pride of how they had stuck it through. Those had been heroic weeks, and there had been

something great and inspiring in the very air of Moscow during that time, with barricades and antitank obstacles in the main streets, especially on the outskirts; the timid had gone, but the Kremlin had not budged. Stalin had remained in Moscow and, with him, the

generals, and most of the Politburo. The Commissariat of Defence had not budged, nor had the Moscow Town Council, with Pronin at its head. Sure enough, there had been that panic on October 16, but the announcement on the following day that Stalin was in

Moscow had had a great moral effect on both the population, and on the soldiers fighting their deadly battle on the outskirts of the capital.

But by February it was clear that the German rout had not been complete. The Germans were still holding a mighty springboard at Gzhatsk, Viazma and Rzhev, and this required a large concentration of Russian troops to protect Moscow. Smolensk, which the

Russians had hoped to recapture, still remained far in the enemy rear. There was a note of disappointment in Stalin's Red Army Day Order of February 23.

And, in June 1942, there were many persistent rumours that something had already

seriously gone wrong at Kharkov, and that the Germans were preparing for an all-out

offensive in the south.

I had many opportunities, during the early summer months of 1942, of seeing something of the devastation the Germans had caused around Moscow. On the road to Klin, for

instance, there was a great deal of destruction, barely fifteen or twenty miles north-west of the capital—bombed, burned and shelled houses, and a church with half its dome

blown away by a shell. This church was at Loshki, twenty-eight miles from Moscow, and the town had been occupied by the Germans in November 1941. At Istra, three houses

had survived out of 1,000, and, instead of 16,000 people there were now only 300, most of them living in dugouts. At Klin over 1,000 houses had been destroyed out of 12,000; this, according to later German standards of destruction, could be called almost generous.

It was only because they had had to pull out in a hurry. Under their three weeks'

occupation, only 1,500 people had remained in the town, out of 30,000; now 15,000 were back. Even if most of the town was standing, the Germans had still done an enormous

amount of looting; and the kolkhozes in the neighbourhood had suffered great losses.

Before the Germans came, 3,000 cows belonging to the kolkhozes had been evacuated; but of the 4,500 cows belonging to the peasants themselves, 3,000 had been driven away by the Germans. All this had seriously affected Moscow's food supplies. Soviet

propaganda at the time made much of the "destruction" and "desecration" of Tchaikovsky's house at Klin, and of Tolstoy's house at Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, but the houses themselves were still standing, though much had been stolen from them or

damaged. The Germans had, moreover, buried a lot of their dead right round Tolstoy's solitary grave in the park, and this, no doubt, was a form of "desecration". The Russians, after recapturing Yasnaya Polyana, threw all the German bodies out.

The large Tolstoy Centenary School, built near Yasnaya Polyana in 1928, had been

burned down by the Germans, and here, as in so many other places they had committed

various atrocities. I shall mention here just a couple of examples of what I saw and heard during those months.

Near the Tolstoy School, I went into one of the cottages of the village. Here I saw a young woman with a sad face. Her husband had been hanged right here, in the village.

The Germans had suspected him of having punctured one of their tyres. They had hanged him along with another man, whom nobody in the village knew. On a bed, in the dark

corner of the room, a child was sleeping. The woman told how she had gone away to

another village to see her sister a few days before. And she then told the wild tormented story of her home-coming that day, when she had heard the news. Twice the Germans

had stopped her on the way and had ordered her to peel potatoes. As she spoke, the child woke up, and as we sat there in the dark hut, her story was interrupted by the small girl's pranks and laughter.

Then the hanged man's mother arrived. She was a stronger character than the wife; she had seen it all happen, and she told her story firmly and coherently. She told how the Russian troops retreated, and then how the German tanks came into the village. And,

soon after, there was a knock on the door of the hut, and a German with a torch said: "Six men will live here."

"They came and lived here," she said. "They were rough and coarse, but the Finns—for two of them were Finns and four were Germans—were even worse. The moment they

took him away, one of the Finns, with a leer, told me they were going to hang him. I pushed him aside, trying to run after my son, but he knocked me down and pushed me

into that small store-room and locked the door. Later a German came, and unlocked the door and said: 'Your Kolya's kaputt.' He and the other man remained hanging there for three days, and I could not go near them, but I could see them from this window swaying in the wind. Only three days later did the Commandant allow the bodies to be taken

down. They were brought into this room, and laid down, right here. I untied their stiff creaking arms, and, as they began to thaw, I wiped the sweat and dirt off their poor faces.

And so we buried them."

Sitting there in the dark hut, with only a small oil lamp burning under the ikon (with Stalin's picture torn out of some magazine beside it), the old woman now wept softly. She said she had four other sons, all at the front, and said that one of them "wasn't writing any more". And in the dark corner of the hut the younger woman wept, and kissed and slapped, and then again kissed the hanged man's unruly laughing child.

I remember another journey later in the summer—this time to the Rzhev sector of the

front, where there had been some very heavy fighting for weeks. Again we passed

through Istra with its forest of chimney-stacks (that was all that was left of the town) and the ruins of the New Jerusalem monastery which the Germans had blown up; then we

drove through Volokolamsk, where there was much less destruction, but where the

Germans had hanged numerous "partisans". And then we stopped at Lotoshino. A number of people came up to our cars. There was a little man there, wearing a tattered cap and jacket, and with a bunch of spring onions under his arm. He had been here right through the German occupation. The first day the Germans came, he said, they hanged

eight people in the main street, among them a hospital nurse and a teacher. The teacher's body was left hanging there for eight days. They had called for the people to attend the execution, but few went. The teacher was a Party member. The Germans had stayed in

the town for three months, till January 2; a fortnight before, they had begun to burn down the town. The last houses weren't burned down till the eve of their departure. They

appointed starostas (village mayors) from among the local inhabitants; later, when the Russians caught these starostas, they shot them.

As we stood there talking, a crowd of village kids gathered. They were mostly a bunch of ragamuffins in tattered clothes, and though many of them looked underfed, they were full of fun as they talked about the Germans. One or two even saw a humorous side to the

teacher being strung up...

One boy, with a jolly laugh, told how he once set fire to a German store. "Then I ran away and hid on top of the stove, and was very scared; but one of the Germans came

along and dragged me down, and kicked me in the arse, but nothing more happened. I

suppose they forgave me. 'Kleiner Partisan'' they would call me, and give me another kick in the arse, and when winter came, they kept on screaming for fires and saying,

'Kalt, kalt, kalt!' Or they'd keep on shouting 'Scheisse' which means... I said I knew.

"Actually," said the boy, "what saved us was the distillery. It kept them in good humour.

They'd fill themselves up with vodka from the distillery storehouse, and then they'd sing German songs—don't know what the hell they sang; it sounded kind of mournful on

winter nights— like dogs howling... And, of course, they fed their faces; they devoured everything—chicken and geese and pigs and ducks. They would chase the ducks and

geese and beat them to death with sticks. And then they burned down the town. I avoided them the last days; they were in such a foul temper. And now," he went on, "people live here in dugouts (for all the houses have been burned down), or on the kolkhoz not far away. Tomorrow—on September 1—the school will open, but it's not our school, but

another one, five kilometres away; our old school (he pointed at a patched-up building) was burned down, but has now been patched up as a hospital."

Three points emerge very clearly and indisputably from these (and many similar)

accounts: firstly, that the public executions of communists and other "suspects"—usually branded "partisans"— were a common practice in towns and villages occupied by the Germans. Since these executions frequently took place "on the first day" of the occupation, they were apparently the work not of any special detachments under

Himmler, but of members of the Army itself. It seems also true that the "communists"

must have been picked as a result of denunciations either by willing collaborators, or by people frightened into doing so.

[That executions were carried out by the Army is persistently denied by German generals, but, according to the Russian eyewitnesses I saw in 1942, it was "ordinary soldiers" who did the hanging. However, this is a much argued point, and it seems that the practice varied from place to place.]

Secondly, that, already in 1941, the Germans were practising a scorched-earth policy, with incendiary teams burning down whole towns and villages before retreating—if they had the time to do so. Thirdly, that the Germans appointed Russian burgomasters in the towns and starostas in the villages—people picked from what they considered "reliable"

elements, ex-bourgeois, or ex-kulaks. How many of these were willing collaborators, and how many had simply been bullied into accepting such jobs, and whether they deserved to be shot once the Russians returned (or even whether they actually were always shot) are questions on which very little light is thrown by either Russian or German authors. It is certain however, that many such Russian "collaborators" were playing a double game, and that some Soviet "underground" members were actually encouraged to join the German-appointed local-government agencies. As in all other Resistance movements, so in Russia, the Resistance had its "own" men and women "colonising" such German-appointed bodies, picking up information, and maintaining contact with partisans or other pro-Soviet elements.

Chapter II THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

The background to the Anglo-Soviet Alliance of May 1942 is too well known to need

detailed discussion here. In December 1941 Mr Eden had gone to Moscow, and Stalin

and Molotov had asked for a recognition of the Soviet frontiers as they stood at the time of the German invasion. This meant a recognition of the new frontiers with Finland and Rumania and the incorporation of the Baltic States in the Soviet Union, as well as that of the territory which Churchill still persisted in calling "Eastern Poland". But while Churchill was prepared to give way on these questions, including that of the Baltic States, he met with opposition from Washington, where such an incorporation was regarded as

being contrary to the principles of the Atlantic Charter. The Soviet Government, no doubt with some mental reservations, had subscribed to "the general principles and aims" of the Atlantic Charter. Privately, the Russians often said that if they had some "mental reservations", Churchill had many more still. Ultimately, on May 23, during Molotov's visit to London, Eden proposed to substitute for a territorial agreement a general and public Treaty of Alliance for twenty years, omitting all references to frontiers, and a treaty on this basis was signed on May 26.

As for the question of the Second Front, this had first been raised by Stalin in a letter to Churchill in the summer of 1941 and the Russians had continued to press it on both the British and the Americans.

American proposals made in the spring of 1942, particularly General Marshall's proposal

"that we should attempt to seize Brest and Cherbourg ... during the early autumn of 1942"

were not to Churchill's liking at all, even though he "did not reject the idea from the outset."

[ Churchill, op. cit., vol. 4, pp. 288-9.]

Both in 1941 and during part of 1942 Churchill took the view that Russia was an

"expendable" ally, and was at times highly pessimistic about her chances of survival.

Thus, as we have seen, he took a much more dismal view of the Beaverbrook Mission to Moscow at the end of September 1941 than seemed warranted by Beaverbrook's own

attitude. To Beaverbrook the Soviet Union was an ally of immense value, and he was

anxious to back it at almost any price. Even after the Russians had repelled the first German onslaught on Moscow, Churchill thought that Russia's early defeat was not at all unlikely, and he felt with some bitterness—and perhaps a touch of malice—that they had

"brought it upon themselves". In a letter to Sir Stafford Cripps, now evacuated to Kuibyshev, of October 28, 1941, he wrote:

I fully sympathise with you in your difficult position, and also with Russia in her agony. They certainly have no right to reproach us. They brought their own fate

upon themselves when ... they let Hitler loose on Poland. They cut themselves off from an effective Second Front when they let the French Army be destroyed... If we had been invaded and destroyed in July or August 1940... they would have remained utterly indifferent.

[Churchill, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 420.]

For one thing, Churchill was keenly aware that, at that stage, Britain would have to bear the brunt of any Second Front operation. So he preferred other ideas—a landing in

French North Africa, or "Jupiter"—the liberation of Northern Norway, which would

"represent direct aid to Russia", and he regarded 1943 as the earliest date for landings in France.

In planning the gigantic enterprise of 1943 it was not possible for us to lay aside all other duties. Our first Imperial duty was to defend India... To allow the Germans and Japanese to join hands in India or the Middle East involved a measureless

disaster to the allied cause. It ranked in my mind almost as the equal of the

retirement of Soviet Russia behind the Urals, or even of their making a separate

peace with Germany. At this date [spring 1942] I did not deem either of these

contingencies likely, [but] our Indian Empire... might fall an easy prey... Hitler's subjugation of Soviet Russia would be a much longer and, to him, more costly task.

Before it was accomplished the Anglo-American command of the air would have

been established beyond challenge. Even if all else failed this would be finally

decisive...

[ Churchill, op. cit., vol. 4, p. 288.]

Roosevelt was extremely sceptical about "any junction between Japanese and Germans"

and was, like General Marshall, more favourable than Churchill to an attempt to open a Second Front in France in 1942.

That was certainly the impression that Molotov brought back from his visits to

Washington and London in May-June 1942, and the present-day Soviet History makes the most of the fact that Roosevelt twice assured Molotov that the Second Front would be opened in 1942, and that General Marshall told him that the USA had every possibility of opening such a front. According to Hopkins, however, what Roosevelt had twice told

Molotov was that he expected a Second Front to be opened in 1942. Hopkins also records that "Marshall felt that the sentence about the Second Front [which Molotov had drafted for the communiqué] was too strong, and urged that there be no reference to 1942", adding: "I called this particularly to the President's attention but he, nevertheless, wished to have it included".

The public statement issued on June 11 therefore included the sentence:

"In the course of the conversations full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent task of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942."

Now the fat was in the fire. Although Churchill discreetly omits to mention Roosevelt's responsibility for this statement, and felt forced to subscribe to it on Molotov's return from Washington to London, he insisted on handing to Molotov the now well-known

aide-memoire saying, inter alia:

It is impossible to say in advance whether the situation will be such as to make this operation feasible when the time comes. We can therefore give no promise in the

matter, but, provided that it appears sound and sensible, we shall not hesitate to put our plans into effect.

[Sherwood, op. cit., p. 582, and Churchill, op. cit., vol. 4, p. 305. Churchill underlines the words "We can therefore give no promise in the matter"]

The plan in question, as we know, concerned "a landing on the Continent in August or September 1942", and Molotov's great hope was that "at least forty German divisions"

would be drawn off from the Russian front.

At the ceremony in London on May 26 at which the Anglo-Soviet Treaty was signed very warm speeches were made by Molotov and Eden, both of whom stressed the great

importance of the alliance, not only during the war, but also after the war. For all that, Churchill's attitude continued to be somewhat reserved. According to both the Russians and Americans, relations between Molotov and Roosevelt were much more friendly than

between Molotov and Churchill.

[Many anecdotes were told both then and later about Molotov's week-end at Chequers.

One diplomat told me it had all been "rather like a Marx Brothers' film." Molotov's English was limited to three words: "Yes", "no", and "second front". At dinner one night, Molotov remarked on the extraordinary patriotic fervour of the Russian people as

displayed in this war—a fervour the depth of which had even surprised the government.

"The Old Adam coming out, what?" Churchill growled. Molotov took some trouble to explain that this was not only Russian patriotism, but also Soviet patriotism, not quite the same thing. There was also this record of Molotov's first impression of Churchill: "A very strong man—very strong." Then, as an afterthought: "Unfortunately, he'll never make a good communist." But the best stories about Molotov demanding his bedroom key, and the Russian search for bombs under his bed, the revolver on his bedside table, and the special way of making his bed, so that he could jump out in a hurry in case of anything, are told by Churchill himself. (Op. cit., vol. 4, p. 201.)]

As Hopkins wrote to Winant after Molotov's visit was over:

Molotov's visit went extremely well. He and the President got along famously and I am sure that we at least bridged one more gap between ourselves and Russia. There is still a long way to go, but it must be done if there is ever to be any real peace in the world. We simply cannot organise the world between the British and ourselves

without bringing in the Russians as equal partners. [As for the Second Front] I have a feeling that some of the British are holding back a bit, but all in all it is moving as well as could be expected.

[Sherwood, op. cit., pp. 582-3.]

It was largely as a result of the Molotov visit to Washington that a new Lend-Lease

agreement—or rather, a wider agreement on what was called the "principles of mutual aid against aggression"—was signed by Cordell Hull and Litvinov, the Soviet

Ambassador, on June 11.

In Moscow it was decided to make immense political capital out of Molotov's visits to London and Washington. A special meeting of the Supreme Soviet at the Kremlin was

called on June 18 to ratify the Anglo-Soviet Alliance. But for fully a week before that the Soviet press had built up the Molotov visits to the West as an event of the most far-reaching importance.

Molotov, flying in a fast British bomber high over Scandinavia, returned from London on June 13; but already on June 11 the Soviet press had published the full text of the Anglo-Soviet agreement, as well as the famous "Second Front" communiqué. On the 13th, it published the text of the Soviet-American agreement. The papers that day were, by

Russian standards, spectacular. Over the front page of Pravda was splashed a photograph showing Eden and Molotov signing the alliance, with a pussy-face Maisky on one side

and a cigar-chewing Churchill on the other. Here also were the text of the Soviet-

American agreement, the text of warm bread-and-butter letters from Molotov to

Churchill, Eden, Roosevelt and Cordell Hull; the text of Roosevelt's cable to Stalin thanking him for having sent Molotov to Washington on his "most satisfactory" visit, and Stalin's cable of thanks to Roosevelt, and so on. In his cables to both Churchill and Roosevelt, Molotov specifically referred to the "Second Front in 1942". Page two of Pravda prominently announced the decision of the Soviet Union and Canada to exchange diplomatic representatives. Such a display was enough to make any Soviet citizen

extremely ally-conscious. In its editorial Pravda wrote that day:

At countless meetings throughout the country the workers, kolkhoz-niki,

intellectuals, soldiers, officers and political workers of the Red Army are expressing the greatest conviction that the strengthening of these bonds [between the Big

Three] will hasten final victory... 1942 must become the year of the enemy's final rout. Our Soviet people have reacted with great satisfaction to the complete

understanding concerning the urgent tasks for the creation of a Second Front in

1942.

During the days that followed the press kept up this optimistic Second Front barrage.

The splendours of the Supreme Soviet meeting—the first since the beginning of the war

—contrasted strangely with Moscow's down-at-heel appearance. In the Kremlin,

diplomats (many of whom had specially come from Kuibyshev) and members of the

government were driving up in their limousines. Outside the main entrance of the palace I noticed a car flying a little Japanese flag. In the former Throne Room, completely rebuilt since the Revolution, Lenin stood in his floodlit niche above the rostrum. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet sat on the left, and the members of the government on the right.

On the platform behind the speaker sat members of the Politburo and other leading

deputies. On the floor of the hall there was room for some 1,200 deputies of the two Houses sitting jointly— the Chamber of the Union and the Chamber of Nationalities. A large number of these had been flown from distant parts of the country, and there were many colourful oriental costumes and dresses in the front half of the floor. Many of the women wore bright scarves and sari-like dresses, and many men wore embroidered

coloured caps, and many of the faces were Mongol, and others almost Indian-like.

Among the members of both Houses were many soldiers in uniform, some wearing war

decorations; but many seats were empty, partly owing to the difficulty of reaching

Moscow at short notice, but chiefly because many deputies were at the front, while others had already been killed.

Then suddenly the whole building shook with applause as the State Defence Council,

with Stalin inconspicuously among them, took their seats on the platform. For several minutes the deputies stood up and cheered, and shouted Stalin's name. Stalin and the others on the platform also rose, and Stalin himself clapped, in acknowledgment of the ovation he was receiving. Finally everybody sat down. Stalin was wearing a well-cut

pale-khaki summer tunic— plain, without any decorations. His hair was much greyer and his build much smaller than I had imagined it to be, I had never seen Stalin before. There was a pleasant casualness in his manner as, in the course of the meeting, he talked

informally to his neighbours, or as he turned round to exchange remarks with people

behind him, or as he stood up with the rest and clapped somewhat lazily when, time after time, his name was being acclaimed by the Assembly.

Molotov was the first to speak, and for a long time he spoke about the principal episodes in the process of the rapprochement between Britain and the Soviet Union—the Cripps-Molotov agreement of July 12, 1941, the Hopkins, Beaverbrook and Eden visits; then he outlined the main points of the agreement now signed in London: the first part was, in the main, a repetition of the July 1941 agreement, now embodied in a regular treaty; the second part, on post-war co-operation was "in agreement with the main theses of the Atlantic Charter to which the Soviet Union had already subscribed in the past". He then quoted Stalin in confirmation of his further remark that the Soviet Union had no

territorial ambitions anywhere, and said that, in terms of the Treaty, Britain and the Soviet Union would strive to "render impossible any future aggression by Germany, or any other State linked with her in her acts of aggression in Europe". (The Russians were at that time still very careful not to say anything that might conceivably offend Japan.) The Treaty, he said, was for twenty years, and subject to renewal, and he added:

I cannot but associate myself with the words of Mr Eden: "Never in the history of our two countries has our association been so close. Never have our obligations in respect of the future been more perfect." This is unquestionably a happy omen...

The Treaty has met with the most favourable response in both Britain and the

Soviet Union, while in the enemy camp it has caused confusion and angry hissing.

As the speech went on, one became aware of a feeling of impatience in the hall: What about the Second Front? At last Molotov came to that:

Naturally, serious attention was given to the problems of the Second Front, both in London and Washington. The results of these talks can be seen from the identical

Anglo-Soviet and American-Soviet communiqués. .. This is of great importance to

the peoples of the Soviet Union, because the establishment of a Second Front in

Europe would create insuperable difficulties for the Hitlerite armies at our front.

Let us hope that our common enemy will soon feel on his own back the results of the ever-growing military co-operation between the three Great Powers.

There was, according to next day's Pravda, "stormy, lengthy applause" at this point; in reality, I noticed that the applause might have been greater than it actually was: it seems obvious that the "let-us-hope" had had a somewhat damping effect—which was to be reflected in some of the later speeches.

Molotov then said that the results of his visit to Washington had been less definite than those of his visits to London, but he stressed that the Soviet-American agreement on present and future cooperation was only "preliminary", adding, however, that general problems of war and peace had been lengthily discussed by him and Mr Roosevelt, and

that both the President of the United States and Mr Churchill had been very kind.

In conclusion, Molotov said:

Our strength is growing, our certainty of victory is stronger than it has ever been.

Under the great banner of Lenin and Stalin we shall wage this struggle till complete victory, till the complete triumph of our cause and that of all freedom-loving

nations.

Apart from discussing the British alliance, many of the other speakers took the

opportunity to speak of their own constituencies. Shcherbakov, representing Moscow,

recalled the struggle for Moscow and said, amid a storm of truly emotional applause:

"And now, Comrades Deputies, you can see your Capital intact! "

There was also a touch of emotion in the applause that greeted L. R. Korniets, a

representative of the now almost completely occupied Ukraine. Korniets, with his heavy drooping "Ukrainian" moustache did not mince his words: "We hope," he said, "that from agreements and words, the great Western Powers will proceed to action."

Zhdanov, representing Leningrad, who received an ovation almost as great as that given to Stalin, said:

The value of the Treaty is unquestionably enhanced by the fact that complete

agreement was reached in London and Washington in respect of the urgent tasks

for the creation of a Second Front in Europe in 1942...

He quoted a worker of the Kirov Plant (right in the front line) as saying:

"It strengthens our conviction that Hitler and his bloody clique will be crushed in 1942. Let us work with double and treble energy in helping the Red Army to carry

out its heroic mission."

Y. L. Paletskis, the Lithuanian representative, said he was convinced that there would not be "the slightest delay" in preparing the Second Front in Europe in 1942, as this was also in Britain's and America's interests; and the Latvian, Estonian, Georgian, Uzbek and other representatives spoke more or less on the same lines.

After three and a half hours of speeches, the Treaty was unanimously ratified. In Pravda on the following day Ehrenburg wrote a heartfelt couple of columns on "The Heart of England", in which he grew lyrical about London, its old stones, its soot and its "pastel skies". The raids on Cologne and the Ruhr were "only a beginning".

Already the small children of France, looking across the misty sea, are whispering:

"There's a ship over there." And the name of the ship is the Second Front.

The meeting of the Supreme Soviet was followed by a brief, one might say very brief, Anglo-Russian honeymoon. A few weeks later the sharp bickering over the Second Front began. It should be noted that at no time was the British aide-memoire mentioned on the Soviet side, or even hinted at—except perhaps for that "let us hope" in Molotov's speech.

There continued much suspicion on both sides—right up to Stalin's speech on November 6, and the landing in North Africa a few days later. Much of the bad humour and, before long, anger on the Russian side was spontaneous, and largely caused by the pretty

desperate outlook at the front; though, for a few weeks before the North Africa landing, some of the angry comments in the press may have partly been calculated to deceive the Germans.

Chapter III THREE RUSSIAN DEFEATS: KERCH, KHARKOV

AND SEBASTOPOL

All the, admittedly superficial, rejoicing over the Anglo-Soviet Alliance in fact coincided with one of the hardest periods of the war in Russia; for in May the Russians had suffered disasters at Kerch and Kharkov, and it was also obvious that the days of Sebastopol's resistance were numbered.

After the Russians had been driven out of the Crimea in the autumn of 1941, with the exception of Sebastopol which continued to be held by a strong garrison, they undertook a combined operation from the Caucasus in an endeavour to recapture the Kerch

Peninsula, at the eastern extremity of the Crimea, and thus establish a strong bridgehead from which eventually the whole Crimea could be liberated and Sebastopol relieved. This was one of the largest combined land-and-sea operations undertaken by the Russians

during the war. In the last week of December 1941, despite highly unfavourable weather conditions and some heavy losses, they succeeded in landing some 40,000 troops,

occupying the whole Kerch peninsula, and also (for a few days) the important city of Feodosia on the Crimean "mainland".

It was at Kerch, incidentally, that the Russians received their first evidence of large-scale German atrocities: soon after the German occupation of Kerch in 1941, several thousand Jews had been exterminated by one of Himmler's Einsatzgruppen and buried in huge trenches outside the town. Needless to say, Field-Marshal von Manstein, who was in

command of the German 11th Army in the Crimea, later denied all knowledge of this.

The immediate result of the successful landing at Kerch was to reduce the German

pressure on Sebastopol, and Manstein was later to admit that the Russian landing had created an immense danger to the German forces in the Crimea.

[E. v. Manstein, Verlorene Siege (Lost Victories), Bonn, 1955, p. 246.]

But owing to shortage of trained men, or equipment, or both, or because of some very serious miscalculation on the part of the Russian High Command, the successful Kerch landing was not followed up except by a few abortive sorties, and on May 8 von

Manstein launched an all-out offensive against the Russian forces in the Eastern Crimea.

This opened with a concentrated air attack on the Russians, who suffered heavy casualties and were forced to retreat to a fortified line known as the Turkish Wall. But the German onslaught was much too strong:

Our forces proved themselves incapable of holding the Turkish Wall, and retreated to Kerch. The local command had shown itself incapable of using the air force effectively, and our troops retreated under constant German air attacks... By the 14th the Germans broke into the southern and western outskirts of Kerch, and between the 15th and 20th our rearguard units fought desperately to enable our main forces to cross the Kerch Straits to the Taman Peninsula [on the Caucasus side of the five-mile-wide straits]. Even so, it proved impossible to carry out the evacuation in an organised manner. The enemy

captured practically all our military equipment, which was then used against the

defenders of Sebastopol.

[IVOVSS, vol. 2, p. 405.]

It was in these laconic words that the recent Soviet History described the first of the great disasters suffered by the Russians in the Crimea.

This disaster is attributed by the History to a faulty organisation of defence, the "shallow operational disposition of the troops" and the lack of essential reserves. Other reasons were "the thoughtlessness of the army headquarters, the absence of camouflage at the command posts, which had failed, moreover, to move from place to place, with the result that in their very first raids, the Luftwaffe smashed up these command posts, thus

wrecking all communications. The different headquarters were, moreover, unaccustomed to the use of radio." Lt. Gen. Kozlov, the commander of the Kerch Army Group, and his top commissar, Mekhlis, as well as numerous other officers and commissars, were

demoted, and Mekhlis, who was at that time both Vice-Commissar of Defence and one of the heads of the Political Administration of the Red Army was reheved of both these

posts and demoted to the rank of corps commissar. Mekhlis and the officers of the Kerch group were accused of having "wasted hours arguing about the situation at fruitless sessions of the War Council", instead of acting. In particular, they had been too slow in withdrawing the troops to the Turkish Wall, and this had been fatal to the whole

defensive operation.

[Ibid., p. 406.]

Although some publicity was given at the time to the disgrace of Mekhlis, one of the villains of the Army Purge in 1937-8, little, if anything, was said about the holocaust among the other officers responsible for the Kerch disaster. It seems obvious that the demotion of Mekhlis was at least partly intended as a political operation (he was deeply detested by the "younger" generals); but how far he (and the other officers) were used as scapegoats for a perhaps inevitable failure (for German air superiority at Kerch was overwhelming) is anybody's guess. What is certain, however, is that the Kerch disaster paved the way for an even greater disaster: that of Sebastopol. After the liquidation of the

"Kerch front", von Manstein was free to concentrate all his forces in the Crimea against Sebastopol which had held out ever since October... Sebastopol was, however, a "noble", not a "shameful" disaster.

Like the Battle of Kiev in 1941, the so-called Battle of Kharkov in May 1942 was to

become the subject of some of Khrushchev's angry posthumous recriminations against

Stalin.

According to the present-day Soviet History, the Soviet Supreme Command had made numerous mistakes in its planning of the spring operations. First, because of the

concentration of enemy forces in that area, it had expected the main German blow to fall on Moscow:

Instead of concentrating large forces on the south-western and southern front, and creating an insuperable defence in depth in these areas, the Siavka continued to strengthen the Briansk front, whose main forces were protecting the Tula-Moscow

axis.

Secondly, the Soviet Supreme Command simply over-rated its own strength and under-

rated that of the Germans:

In planning large offensive operations in the summer of 1942 which would clear the invaders out of the Soviet Union, and so liberate millions of people from the German yoke, the Soviet Supreme Command over-rated the successes of our winter

offensive, and had not taken sufficient notice of the fact that, after the defeats it had suffered, the German army had restored its battle-worthiness, and was still full of offensive possibilities.

[ IVOVSS, vol. 2, p. 404.]

The Russian rout at Kharkov in May 1942 was more heavily concealed from the public

than almost any other Russian defeat; perhaps the great rapprochement then in progress with Britain and the United States had much to do with it, or perhaps also the fact that Stalin himself—at least according to present-day accounts— had played a leading role in conceiving and, worse still, in persisting in, this disastrous operation.

In March 1942 the Supreme Command had considered a plan for a large offensive in the Ukraine which would carry the Red Army all the way to a line running, north-to-south, from Gomel to Kiev, and then, roughly along the right bank of the Dnieper, through

Cherkassy, and on to Nikolaev on the Black Sea. Owing to shortage of reserves, this plan was abandoned in favour of a more modest offensive, the main object of which was the liberation of Kharkov. One Russian blow was to be struck from the north of Kharkov, the other from the south—from the so-called Barvenkovo salient which the Russians had

recaptured during the winter.

It so happened that the Germans were planning an offensive in the same area, but the Russians got in their blow first when they started their offensive towards Kharkov on May 12. The real trouble was that Russian superiority in the area was far from

overwhelming and, worse still (as events were soon to show) the Germans had powerful mobile reserves in the neighbourhood, and the Russians had not. The Soviet historian, Telpukhovsky sums up this battle as follows:

To smash our offensive, which had begun on May 12, a strong formation of German

troops, supported by large numbers of tanks and aircraft, struck a powerful blow at our 9th Army in the Slaviansk and Barvenkovo areas on May 17. Our troops had to

withdraw to the left bank of the Donets, thus exposing the flank of the Soviet shock troops advancing on Kharkov. By cutting the communications of our troops

advancing on Kharkov, the Germans placed these in an extremely difficult position, and they were forced, with very heavy fighting, to withdraw to the east, suffering serious casualties in the process.

[Telpukhovsky, op. cit., p. 119.]

The more recent History is much more explicit about this episode: it says that the advance on Kharkov was persisted in at the demand of Stalin, and despite the protests of Khrushchev, who saw that these troops were walking into a trap. Further, it tells how the Russian tank reserves were thrown in too late to save the situation. Finally, it admits that a large number of Russian troops were encircled, and that in the hard-fought attempts to break out "many brave men" died, including the deputy commander of the South-West Front, Lt. Gen. Kostenko, the commander of the 6th Army, Lt. Gen. Gorodnyansky, the

commander of the 57th Army, Lt. Gen. Podlas and many other high-ranking officers.

Although many of the troops broke out by escaping across the Donets, others continued to fight in the encirclement until May 30.

The offensive against Kharkov which had begun so successfully, thus ended in the

rout of three armies of the South-Western and Southern Front.

[ IVOVSS, vol. 2, p. 415.]

The History also mentions the fact that, as a member of the War Council of the South-Western Front, Khrushchev urged Stalin to stop the advance on Kharkov and to

concentrate the Russian forces on smashing the German counter-offensive. But Stalin

insisted on the Russians continuing their advance on Kharkov—"which," says the History, "complicated the situation still further."

[ IVOVSS, vol. 2, p. 414.]

Whether this is strictly true or not (and one must remember that the History was written after the XXth Congress, and goes out of its way to magnify Khrushchev's role in the war at Stalin's expense), it is interesting to note that this particular episode was dealt with at considerable length in Khrushchev's "Secret Report" at the XXth Congress in February 1956. The main points he made were these:

When an exceptionally serious situation developed in the Kharkov area, we

correctly decided to drop the operation whose objective was to encircle Kharkov...

We informed Stalin that the situation demanded changes in the operational plans...

Contrary to common sense, Stalin rejected our suggestion and ordered that the

Kharkov operation be continued, although by this time many of our army units

were themselves threatened with encirclement and extermination...

I telephoned Vassilevsky (the Chief of Staff) and begged him to explain the situation to Comrade Stalin. Vassilevsky replied, however, that Comrade Stalin did not wish to hear any more about this operation... I then telephoned Stalin at his villa.

Malenkov answered the phone. I said I wanted to speak to Stalin personally. Stalin informed me through Malenkov that I should speak with Malenkov... I asked again

to speak to Stalin himself. But Stalin still said no, though he was only a few steps from the telephone. After "listening" in this manner to our plea, Stalin said: "Let everything remain as it is."

And what was the result? The worst that could be expected. The Germans

surrounded our armies and we lost hundreds of thousands of our soldiers.

[ The Dethronement of Stalin: Full Text of the Khrushchev Speech {Manchester

Guardian reprint, 1956), p. 21. I have slightly abridged the text, and made a few corrections in the rather clumsy translation of this version of the "Secret Report".]

Whether in reality the Russians lost, as Khrushchev claimed, "hundreds of thousands of our soldiers", the Germans, at any rate, claimed 200,000 prisoners.

In any case, the facts about the "Battle of Kharkov" were kept extremely dark at the time, except for a strange communiqué at the end of May which put the Soviet losses at "5,000

killed and 70,000 missing", in its own way an admission that something had gone seriously wrong. It caused considerable consternation. There was even a clumsy attempt to represent the "Battle of Kharkov" as a Russian victory: early in June, the foreign press were specially taken to a German war prisoners' camp near Gorki; the 600 or 700

prisoners we were shown had, indeed, been captured during the first stage of the Kharkov Battle—i.e. during the Russian offensive of May 12-17. Most of them, while deploring their Pech, their "bad luck", were extremely cocky for all that; they claimed to be convinced that Germany would smash Russia in 1942, and they did not believe for a

moment in any Second Front materialising in time.

[A visit to this camp, a former monastery, in which the Germans were fairly comfortably housed and better fed than most Russian civilians, and many conversations with the

Germans there, are described in The Year of Stalingrad, pp. 87-89. Most striking was the Germans' Herrenvolk attitude to their Rumanian fellow-prisoners, of whom there were half a dozen in the camp.]

The third great defeat suffered by the Russians in the summer of 1942 was at Sebastopol; but, unlike Kerch and Kharkov, Sebastopol was one of the most glorious defeats of the Soviet-German war. In many ways, except for its tragic end, the nine-months' siege of Sebastopol had the same quality of human endurance and solidarity as the siege of

Leningrad. Local patriotism, based on the historic memories of the other siege of Sebastopol in 1853-4, complete with "great ancestors" like Admirals Nakhimov and Kornilov, besides the peculiar revolutionary and patriotic traditions of the Black Sea Navy, had a decisively important effect on the morale of both soldiers and civilians.

Important, too, were the very strong and efficient local party and Komsomol

organisations. Towards the end, the last-ditch resistance was also encouraged by the simple and tragic fact that, with the exception of a very, very few top-ranking personnel, who got away dangerously by submarine, there was no alternative to imprisonment by the Germans but a fight to the last round.

As we have seen, the Germans had overrun the whole of the Crimea in October 1941—

with the exception of Sebastopol. The siege of the great naval base began on October 30, and the first attempt by the German 11th Army under von Manstein to break through to Sebastopol, defended on land by a semi-circle of three more or less well-fortified fines, lasted from October 30 to November 21. A very important part in repelling this first great German onslaught was played by the guns of the Black Sea Navy, and by the naval

marines fighting on land; these, like the men of the Baltic Fleet at Leningrad, were among the toughest Russian troops. The most famous case of suicidal resistance by the Russians during that first German attack was that of the five Black Sea sailors, with politruk (political instructor) Filchenkov at their head who, having run out of ammunition, threw themselves with their last remaining hand-grenades under the

advancing German tanks, and so prevented a break-through to Sebastopol from the northeast. This heroic deed of the "five sailors of Sebastopol" was to become the subject of many songs and poems, among them a very beautiful song by Victor Belyi.

Although the Germans and Rumanians already had a great superiority in manpower, as

well as vast superiority in aircraft and tanks, Sebastopol was protected on land by good natural defences, and the navy, with its powerful guns, was of considerable help. In November 1941 the Russians had over 50,000 combat troops in Sebastopol, including

21,000 marines. The Germans and Rumanians, according to Russian sources, had at least twice as many.

The first German attack, which continued for three weeks, barely dented the first of the three defence lines here and there, the only important German gain being the capture of the Balaclava Hills, east of Balaclava—which itself remained in Russian hands. Rather more successful was the second German-Rumanian attack between December 17 and 31,

when the enemy pushed the Russians back to a line about five miles to the north of

Sebastopol, and also made minor advances due east of the city; but this also came to a halt on December 31, partly as a result of the successful Russian landing on the Kerch peninsula, which as we have seen diverted many German troops from Sebastopol. The

most famous Russian exploit during that second German offensive against Sebastopol

was that of a handful of Black Sea sailors who, for three days, defended Firing Point No.

11 in a village called Kamyshly till they were all dead or dying. When the firing point was recaptured by the Russians, they found a note written by one of the men:

Russia, my country, my native land! Dear Comrade Stalin! I, a Black Sea sailor, and a son of Lenin's Komsomol, fought as my heart told me to fight. I slew the beasts as long as my heart beat in my breast. Now I am dying, but I know we shall win.

Sailors of the Black Sea Navy! Fight harder still, kill the mad Fascist dogs! I have been faithful to my soldier's oath.—Kalyuzhnyi.

[In all post-Stalin books, including the official History, mentioning this episode, the words "dear Comrade Stalin" are replaced by dots, or omitted altogether.]

A remarkable story of how Sebastopol lived through the nine months of the siege was

told after the war by B. A. Borisov who was Secretary of the Sebastopol Party committee and Chairman of the city's Defence Committee for the whole period. He tells of the

Sebastopol airmen, such as Yakov Ivanov, who rammed enemy planes usually at the cost of their own lives; of the way in which practically the entire population of Sebastopol had to be moved into shelters, cellars and, especially, caves during the first two German offensives, so fierce and continuous was the bombing of the city; of the vast cave near the Northern Bay in which a giant workshop— ("Spetskombinat No. 1") was set up—where the people manufactured mortars, mines and hand-grenades, and another,

("Spetskombinat No. 2"), near Inkerman, where clothing and footwear were made on a large scale in underground cellars previously used for storing Crimean champagne. He tells of the underground schools that were organised for the children in Sebastopol itself, of the numerous reinforcements that came to Sebastopol by sea, first after the fall of Odessa, and later, from the Caucasus. Most pathetic of all perhaps was the extraordinary elation and optimism that swept Sebastopol in January and February, after the failure of the second German offensive against the city, and after the successful Russian landing at Kerch. It was then thought that if both Kerch and Sebastopol held, the whole Crimea

would soon be liberated. People moved out of their shelters and caves back into their battered houses, and the young people made a special effort to repair as many houses as possible. Even tram-cars began to run along the streets of Sebastopol, though the

Germans were only five miles to the north. On May Day, which was almost exactly six

months after the siege had begun, there were numerous meetings and celebrations,

despite several air-raids and German shelling.

But that day our troops were preparing to help our troops on the Kerch peninsula; for these were expected to start their offensive at any moment. Both at Sebastopol and at the front everybody was talking about the Crimea being liberated and the

siege of Sebastopol lifted. Everybody was in an exalted holiday mood.

[ B. Borisov. Sevastopoltsy ne sdayutsya (Men of Sebastopol Do Not Surrender).

(Simferopol, 1961), p. 130.]

Then came the tragic news of the loss of Kerch, and Sebastopol now had to prepare for the worst. A somewhat disorderly evacuation of children and old people was started. The sea communications with the mainland had already become highly precarious. Half the

Komsomols in Sebastopol (among them many girls) volunteered for the Army, and the

others remained in the city to work double shifts, in the Sebastopol armaments works.

Once more people had to be moved from their houses back to shelters and caves.

And now the last ordeal began. About May 20 it was learned from reconnaissance, and

from messages received from the partisans in the Crimean mountains, that vast numbers of German troops were converging on Sebastopol. On June 2 the Germans began to bomb

Sebastopol with hundreds of planes, and every day hundreds of heavy shells would

explode in the city. In six days the Germans dropped 50,000 high-explosive and

incendiary bombs on Sebastopol, besides thousands of shells; the destruction was terrible, and the casualties very high. The Germans were using a giant siege gun called Dora,

which had originally been built to smash the heaviest fortifications of the Maginot Line.

Then, on June 7, the final German-Rumanian offensive against Sebastopol was launched.

Because of great German air superiority, the Russian airfields around Sebastopol were now almost completely out of action, and sea communications between Sebastopol and

the Caucasus had virtually been cut by the Luftwaffe. Such small quantities of food, arms, raw materials and petrol as still reached Sebastopol from the mainland were now usually brought by submarines or small craft. Submarines were also used for evacuating the wounded. It is obvious that they could take very few and that most of the wounded remained in the blazing inferno of Sebastopol. The local "armaments industry" could no longer cope with the urgent needs of the troops, and the constant bombing and shelling made the distribution of food and water to the crowded caves and other shelters almost impossible.

After three weeks' very heavy fighting, which then continued for a couple of days in the streets of Sebastopol, the Germans occupied what was left of the city. In the July heat, the stench from the countless unburied bodies was such that the last defenders fought

wearing their gasmasks. Meantime, an evacuation of sorts was attempted from Cape

Chersonese, some eight miles west of Sebastopol. Here, at night, one plane was able to land, and take away a few of the wounded; also a submarine picked up Admiral

Oktiabrsky, General Petrov, General Krylov and other top-ranking Army and Party

personnel.

In the course of his narrative Borisov draws some remarkable portraits of the leading male and female members of the Sebastopol Komsomol—all of them young people of

infinite patriotism, endurance and devotion to duty—who were either killed in the

fighting round Sebastopol, or were killed or taken prisoner after the Germans had entered the city. He dwells, in particular, on the tragic fate of two leading Komsomol members, a man and a woman—Sasha Bagrii and Nadya Krayevaya. Like so many others, they had

waited in vain at Cape Chersonese for either a plane or a ship; one plane did land in the middle of the night, but could only take away a few wounded and a few "seniors". When dawn came, the shelling of the airfield was resumed, and no more planes could be

expected. Nor could any ships reach Chersonese. Noticing a large accumulation of

soldiers and civilians near Cape Chersonese, the Germans started shelling them.

Bagrii and Nadya then joined one of the rearguard units... Taking rifles and

cartridges from dead sailors, they tried with the others to break through to the

Crimean hills to join the partisans. But in the shelling half the brave people were killed... A second attempt to break through was no more successful, and as the

Germans started their final attack, the shots from the Russians became fewer and

fewer... Most of the survivors now counter-attacked with nothing but their bayonets.

Nadya was killed. The last that was heard of Sasha Bagrii was this: he was seen,

scarcely able to move, in a column of prisoners. Then he was seen, half-dead and

spitting blood first at Bakhchisarai and then at Simferopol. And here there were

traitors who denounced him to the Germans. And the Germans did not forgive all

that he had done for his country and for Sebastopol...

[ Borisov, op. cit., p. 176.]

I was to see Sebastopol in May 1944, after it had been recaptured by the Russians; I was then to hear many more harrowing stories of those last agonising days of Sebastopol in June and July 1942. All that was known in Moscow in July 1942 was that very few of the defenders of Sebastopol had got away. Twenty-six thousand Russian wounded were said

to have fallen into German hands, besides an unspecified number of other soldiers. The Germans claimed to have captured 90,000.

[This figure is not necessarily exaggerated. According to the postwar Soviet History, there were 106,000 Russian troops, including 82,000 combat troops, at Sevastopol, when the final German onslaught began, as against 203,000 German and Rumanian troops,

including 175,000 combat troops. The vast German-Rumanian superiority in equipment

was greater still, except in guns—

German-

Soviet

Rumanian

Guns of all

780

606

kinds

Tanks

450

38

Aircraft

600

109

]

In Moscow one thing had been clear: after the German victory at Kerch in May, the fate of Sebastopol was sealed; the only question was how long it would hold out. It held out longer than could reasonably have been expected, and this heroic defence was contrasted, not without some sarcasm, especially by Ehrenburg, with the "gutless" surrender of Tobruk only a week earlier.

The news of the imminent fall of Sebastopol had been broken as gently as possible to the Russian people; but the Russian reader had learned to read between the lines. Each

communiqué adjective was, as it were, a code word which meant something quite

definite. Thus, "fierce fighting" (ozhestochennyie boi), "stubborn fighting" (upornyie boi) and "heavy fighting" (tyazhelyie boi) meant three different things; "heavy fighting" meant that things were going very badly; this phrase was more and more frequently used in the communiqués on Sebastopol during the last fortnight the city held. On June 25

Sebastopol was "holding out against superior enemy forces"; on June 28, Pravda already spoke of the "immortal fame of Sebastopol"; on June 30, Ehrenburg wrote in Red Star—

The Germans boasted: "We shall drink champagne on June 15 on the Grafsky

Embankment"... Experts foretold: "It's a matter of three days, perhaps a week."

We knew how many planes they had, and they knew how hard it was to defend a

city with all its roads cut. But they forgot one thing: Sebastopol is not merely a city.

It is the glory of Russia, the pride of the Soviet Union. We have seen the capitulation of towns, of celebrated fortresses, of States. But Sebastopol is not surrendering. Our soldiers do not play at war. They fight a life-and-death struggle. They do not say "I surrender" when they see two or three more enemy men on the chessboard.

This was clearly a crack at Tobruk. However, the end of Sebastopol was now clearly in sight. On July 1 the communiqué said:

Hundreds of enemy planes are dropping bombs on our front lines and on the city.

They are making more than 1,000 sorties a day. Every defender of Sebastopol is

endeavouring to kill as many Germans as possible.

And, on July 3, the communiqué said that, after a siege of 250 days, the Soviet troops had abandoned Sebastopol on the order of the High Command.

Three days later Admiral Oktiabrsky who had escaped from Sebastopol by submarine

with other top military leaders, published in Pravda a detailed account of the battle of Sebastopol, turning a military defeat into a great moral victory. He gave some

unbelievably high figures of the German and Rumanian losses (300,000 killed and

wounded) during the 250 days' siege, but avoided all reference to the number of Russians left behind, including the 26,000 wounded left in the ruined town or on the beaches—

without a ship to take them away...

The men and women of Sebastopol had rendered a great service to the rest of the Russian forces by tying down von Manstein's 11th Army for so long and preventing it from

operating on the "main" front.

Chapter IV THE RENEWAL OF THE GERMAN ADVANCE

Though Sebastopol did not finally fall until the beginning of July, its fate was already sealed at the time of the meeting of the Supreme Soviet on June 18 to ratify the Anglo-Soviet Alliance. There had, too, been the disasters at Kerch and Kharkov in May. And yet on June 21 the Army paper Red Star wrote:

The German Army is still stubborn in defence. But it has been deprived of that

offensive drive it had before... But though the enemy is still strong, one thing is clear. There cannot be a German offensive like last summer's. The question facing Germany now is not to conquer the Soviet Union, but to hang on, to last out

somehow. Not that it will stick to defensive warfare throughout... But its offensive operations cannot go beyond the framework of limited objectives.

Equally surprising, in the light of the real situation, was the publication by

Sovinformbureau on June 22 of A Review of The First Year of the War giving the following figures for casualties in support of the statement that the Red Army had shaken the German war machine so badly that the ground had been prepared for the smashing of the German Army in 1942:

Germany

USSR

Killed, wounded and prisoners

10,000,000 4,500,000

about

Guns lost over

30,500

22,000

Tanks lost over

24,000

15,000

Planes lost over

20,000

9,000

These figures for German casualties were, to say the least, improbable and have not been reproduced in post-war Soviet histories. At the time even the most credulous readers took them with a large pinch of salt. Much more plausible are the figures given in General Haider's diary for German casualties (excluding the sick):

Up to 15.2.42— 946,000

Up to 10.5.42—1,183,000

Up to 20.5.42—1,215,000

Up to 10.6.42—1,268,000

Up to 30.6.42—1,332,000

Up to 10.7.42—1,362,000

Up to 20.7.42—1,391,000

Up to 31.7.42—1,428,000

Up to 10.8.42—1,472,000

Up to 20.8.42—1,528,000

Up to 31.8.42—1,589,000

Up to 10.9.42—1,637,000

This means that, by the end of the winter campaign, the Germans had suffered nearly a million casualties; then, after a relative lull, between February and May (which had, however, still cost them some 200,000 casualties), the Germans had half-a-million

casualties between the beginning of the May operations and the beginning of the Stalingrad Battle. So even the pre-Stalingrad phase of the 1942 campaign was very far from having been a walkover for the Germans.

The figure in the Russian Report of June 22 for Soviet casualties is less fantastic, and is if anything an under-estimate. And though the German losses in heavy equipment are

grossly exaggerated, the Russian losses, curiously enough, may also have been exaggerated, considering the great shortage of planes and tanks from which the Russian armies had suffered almost from the outset, and the very slow rate at which these were being produced, especially between October 1941 and March 1942.

The stupendous losses of equipment given in the table may have been calculated to

impress upon Soviet industry the gigantic size of reinforcements and replacements

required from it, and upon the Western Allies the wholly inadequate help they had been sending up till then.

Naturally [the Sovinformbureau statement went on] on a front as long as this the

German High Command can concentrate here and there a sufficient number of

forces... in order to achieve certain successes. That is what happened, on the Kerch peninsula... But such local successes cannot decide the outcome of the war. The

German Army of 1942 is not what it was a year ago. The picked German troops have,

in the main, been destroyed... The German army cannot carry out offensive operations

on a scale similar to last year's. [Emphasis added.]

But even if this optimistic propaganda was believed for a short while it was very soon to be disproved by events and as the German offensive progressed throughout the summer

of 1942, the feeling that Russia—Holy Russia—was again in mortal danger grew from

day to day. True, there was not the same feeling of bewilderment as in the early days of the invasion in 1941, and the German failure to seize either Moscow or Leningrad had created an undercurrent of hope—and perhaps even the conviction—that "something"

good would happen again. Even so, whereas the communiqués in May and the greater

part of June were vague but reasonably optimistic, those that followed were to spread almost undiluted gloom throughout the country.

Hitler's Directive No. 41, drawn up in the spring of 1942 outlined the main aims of the German summer campaign; but certain important changes were then made in the course

of the campaign itself. Briefly, Hitler's plan boiled down to this: first, liquidation of the Russians in the Crimea (Kerch and Sebastopol); second, the capture of Voronezh, which would present the double advantage of constituting a serious German threat both to

Central Russia south-east of Moscow (Tambov-Saratov area), as well as to Stalingrad; third, the encirclement and liquidation of the main Russian forces inside the Don bend, with one German pincer striking south-east from Voronezh, and the other north-east from Taganrog; fourth, after thus clearing the way to Stalingrad, either capture the city on the Volga, or at any rate destroy it completely by bombing, and then turn due south towards the Caucasus, and capture the oil areas of Maikop, Grozny and Baku, and finally reach the southern frontier of the Soviet Union, which would probably bring Turkey into the war on the side of the Axis Powers. The plan also provided, among other things, for

another attempt to capture Leningrad.

But once the campaign had started, a number of major and, as it proved, fatal, changes were made in this plan. First the Russians stopped the Germans at Voronezh and

secondly, they did not allow themselves to be trapped—at least not in large numbers—

inside the Don Bend. These, and a few other factors (such as the easy German capture of Rostov) made Hitler change his original plan. As Chuikov was to comment later:

This logical and coherent plan was abandoned; and so, instead of doing his utmost in using the bulk of his forces to capture Stalingrad during the third phase of the campaign, and then proceed to capture the oil areas in the Caucasus, Hitler decided to carry out two operations simultaneously: capture Stalingrad and invade the Caucasus.

[V. I. Chuikov, Nachalo puti (The Beginning of the Road). (Moscow, 1959), p. 18.]

The big German offensive which began over a wide front on June 28—i.e. a few days

before the fall of Sebastopol, which was by now a foregone conclusion—assumed at first all the old characteristics of the blitzkrieg. Telpukhovsky's semi-official history of the war, published in 1959 briefly sums up the situation in June-July as follows:

Our forced abandonment of the Crimea and our defeat at Kharkov substantially

changed the situation along the whole southern part of the front in the Germans'

favour. Once more the enemy was able to take the initiative... On June 10 the

Germans started offensive operations in the Kharkov sector, and on June 28 they

launched a major offensive in the Kursk-Voronezh sector... They broke through our defences south of Kursk and on July 8 came very close to Voronezh. However, the

stubborn resistance and the counter-attacks of the Soviet troops of the newly-

formed Voronezh Front stopped the German advance, and the Nazi high command

therefore turned part of these troops towards the south, along the right bank of the Don-on the way to Stalingrad.... The Soviet troops, retreating under the pressure of superior enemy forces, nevertheless resisted heroically, and thus gained valuable time, which was used for throwing in reserves and strengthening the defensive

capacity of Stalingrad... But with 1,200 planes in this area of the front, the enemy had great superiority in aircraft, as well as in guns and tanks.

[ Telpukhovsky, op. cit., pp. 119-20.]

Within a short time the parts of the Donbas still in Russian hands were overrun, the important industrial city of Voroshilovgrad (Lugansk) falling on July 19. More rapid still was the German advance further north into the Don country; and only at Voronezh,

further north still, were the Germans stopped. Here the Russians succeeded in averting the danger of a German breakthrough to the Tambov-Saratov area—which would have

meant that Moscow's main communications with the east would be cut before long. It is still not clear, despite much discussion by historians of both sides, whether such an advance on Tambov-Saratov ever entered the German plans; but the possibility was

clearly envisaged on the Russian side, and very strong Russian forces were concentrated for that reason in the Voronezh area.

Communications with the east and south-east had already become highly precarious; the Caspian-Volga waterway, with its ships and tanker-fleet was one of the principal Russian supply-lines, the equivalent of ten railways. Practically all the Caucasus oil came along the Volga route. After the ice had melted in the spring of 1942 enormous quantities of Caucasian oil had been shipped to Moscow and central Russia—the equivalent of about a year's reserve; but with the beginning of the summer campaign German bombing of the

Volga line made it more and more hazardous. Russia's alternative oil supplies from the east depended on the railways running through the Saratov-Tambov area, which was one reason for the Russian determination to stop the Germans at Voronezh at any price. The grave danger of a critical oil shortage was emphasised in Moscow in July 1942, when the most drastic cuts were made in petrol rations, even for some of the most privileged

categories of users.

Except for the very important German failure to break through at Voronezh, the general outlook was very serious indeed.

[In Moscow at the time some military observers, e.g. General Petit, the French military attaché, who had close contacts with Russian top brass, attached the utmost importance to this; had the Germans broken through at Voronezh, Moscow might have been encircled;

by spreading south, the Germans were much less dangerous, and were less likely to

achieve any quick and decisive results.]

The breakthrough into the wide open spaces of the Don country was bad enough; but the real shock to the Russian people came with the announcement on July 28 that

Novocherkassk and Rostov had been lost. This meant that the Germans were now going

to invade the Kuban and the Caucasus. At the same time, they were already far inside the Don country, and were busy forcing the Don on the southern side of the bend at

Tsymlianskaya, on the way to Stalingrad.

What happened at Rostov? Many dark hints were dropped at the time both in the press

and in private conversations. The gist of it all was that certain Red Army units had panicked and fled, and that officers and generals had lost their heads under the fierceness of the German onslaught. This time the Germans had attacked Rostov from the north and north-east, and not from the west, as in 1941; east and north-east Rostov had no defences to speak of. It was made clear in the press that no orders had been given to abandon the city, and that here was a clear case of disobedience. Many were shot and demoted:

generals, officers and ordinary soldiers. There is no doubt that a cry of "Pull yourselves together!" went through the country; and this cry was loudly echoed in the press. It talked more and more in the days that followed of the "iron discipline" that had been introduced, and the fall of Rostov was openly attributed to "cowards and panic-stricken creatures"

who had failed in their duty to defend the city. There are some rather puzzling aspects about the whole "Rostov affair". Militarily, it is extremely doubtful whether, in the circumstances of July 1942, it could have been held for any length of time, and it has even been suggested (perhaps with some hindsight) that any attempt to make of Rostov another "Sebastopol" could only have ended in encirclement which, in turn, would have entailed the useless loss of many thousands of valuable troops. It seems clear that, on the pretext that Rostov had been abandoned without orders, the government was going to use the tremendous shock caused in the country by the fall of the city for a vast

psychological, as well as organisational operation.

[See pp. 414 ff.]

Anyone who was in Russia at the time knows that the great anxiety that had been

mounting throughout July reached something very like panic the day the fall of Rostov was announced. Looking back on this period there is no doubt that the psychological

operation undertaken as a result of the fall of Rostov was highly salutary; throughout August, the mood in the country continued to be grim, but no longer panicky, and by

some curious instinct, people were expecting a change for the better as the Germans

approached Stalingrad.

It was after the fall of Rostov that the Russian command called a halt with Stalin's "not a step back" order, read to the troops on July 30, and although this was very far from being literally carried out—for the retreat continued rapidly in the Northern Caucasus and (more slowly) in the Don country, on the way to Stalingrad, something, as we shall see, had changed in comparison with the earlier part of the summer campaign.

More valuable contributions to our understanding of this period than the official histories are the reminiscences by a number of Russian generals who played an active part in the operations, such as Marshal Yeremenko's and Marshal Chuikov's. No doubt, like generals the world over, they have axes to grind about some of their colleagues; but what emerges most clearly from their reminiscences (and this was not altogether clear at the time) is not only that some Russians generals were good, and others quite useless, but that the morale and efficiency of some of the troops was high, while other Russian troops retreating to Stalingrad were almost completely demoralised.

An even more vivid picture of what was going on in the south is given in certain novels written after the war, such as Fadeyev's Young Guard, or in films like the much more recent Ballad of a Soldier—with all the roads teeming with refugees who were being attacked from the air; trains that were being wrecked by German bombers; troops in more or less disorderly retreat—scenes of horror reminiscent of the worst days of 1941 but with the difference that in 1942 there was practically nowhere further to retreat to. Or more precisely, the limits were Stalingrad and the Caucasus foothills. There was a frantic feeling in the country that if the Germans were not to be stopped there, then the war would be as good as lost.

The military situation at the end of July and the beginning of August was certainly

looking serious for the Russians. There was very heavy fighting inside the Don Bend, and the Germans had already crossed the river at Tsymlianskaya. They were clearly on their way to Stalingrad. Meanwhile, the Russians were in full retreat in the Kuban. By August 3 the Germans, advancing from their Tsymlianskaya bridgehead, had reached

Kotelnikovo, and they then continued their advance, more slowly, towards Stalingrad

until August 18. The only redeeming feature was the Russian success in firmly holding the country north of the Don Bend as well as a number of bridgeheads within the bend itself, notably at Kletskaya. They also later captured a bridgehead at Serafimovich, which, as we shall see, was to play an important part in the Russian counter-offensive at Stalingrad in November.

In the Caucasus the German advance was much more rapid. By August 11 the fighting

had spread in the west to the oil town of Maikop, and to Krasnodar and the Germans were penetrating the mountains on their way to the Black Sea coast. In their southern thrust, they had, by the 21st, occupied the famous watering places, Piatigorsk, Essentuki and Kislovodsk in the Caucasus foothills, and soon afterwards planted the Nazi flag on the top of Mount Elbrus. In their south-eastern drive they were crashing ahead towards the vital oil areas of Grozny and Baku.

Chapter V PATRIE-EN-DANGER AND THE POST-ROSTOV

REFORMS

It is often assumed that what was published in Russia during the war was "just

propaganda", as indeed it often was, and that the real truth is told in the present post-Stalin histories, which it often is not.

To anyone who, like myself, was in Russia at the time, present-day Soviet histories depict the whole period in over-simple terms.

I noted in my Moscow diary, which I quote in The Year of Stalingrad, the extraordinarily emotional atmosphere that summer, for instance even at any routine Tchaikovsky concert

—as though all Russian civilisation were now in deadly danger. I remember the countless tears produced on one of the worst days in July 1942 by the famous love theme in

Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture. Irrational no doubt, but true!

Significant of the sense of deadly danger was also the poem called Courage that Anna Akhmatova wrote during that summer (though it was not to be published until a year

later):

We know what today lies in the scales

And what is happening now.

The hour of courage has struck on the clock

And courage will not desert us.

It is not frightening to fall dead under enemy bullets

It is not bitter to remain homeless.

But we shall preserve you, our Russian speech,

Our great Russian word.

We shall carry you to the end, free and pure,

And give you to our grandchildren and save you from bondage,

For ever.

It was during that summer that Shostakovich's famous Leningrad Symphony was first performed in Moscow. The impact of the first movement depicting the German invasion

—which was now continuing—was truly overwhelming.

These emotional undertones, with the frantic patrie-en-danger mood, and in particular the psychological shock deliberately provoked after the fall of Rostov (and the changes it paved the way for) are scarcely mentioned at all in the Soviet histories. Curiously, a better picture of the mood of the people can be gained from the literature and indeed from the propaganda articles in the press at the time.

So far two feelings had characterised the literature and propaganda of that summer of 1942. One was the same love of Russia that had been so typical of all the writing at the height of the Battle of Moscow—only it was now a love that had even greater warmth

and greater tenderness. It was, too, specifically a love of Russia proper, to which—apart from the Caucasus—the German advances had by now reduced the European part of the

U.S.S.R. The other was hate— hate, no longer mingled with ridicule, or scarcely so

(except for the "Winter Fritz" who still loomed large at the Moscow Circus). It grew during those summer months till it reached a paroxysm of frenzy during the blackest days of August. "Kill the German" became like Russia's Ten Commandments all in one.

Sholokhov's The School of Hate, the story of a Russian prisoner who had suffered hell at the hands of humorously-sadistic Germans, published in several papers on June 23 had a profound effect. Poignant and convincing, it set the tone of much of the hate propaganda during the weeks that followed.

Ehrenburg, too, was a very important factor in the great battle for Russian morale in the summer of 1942; every soldier in the Army read Ehrenburg; and partisans in the enemy rear are known to have readily swopped any spare tommy gun for a bundle of Ehrenburg clippings. One may like or dislike Ehrenburg as a writer, but during those tragic weeks he certainly showed a genius for putting into biting, inspiring prose the burning hatred Russia felt for the Germans; this man, with his cosmopolitan background and his French culture, had grasped by intuition what the ordinary Russian really felt. Ideologically, it was unorthodox, but tactically, in the circumstances, it was thought right to give him a free hand. Read later in book form, his articles no longer make the same impression; but one must imagine oneself in the position of a Russian in the summer of 1942 who was

watching the map and seeing one town going after another, one province going after

another; one must put oneself in the position of a Russian soldier retreating to Stalingrad or Nalchik, saying to himself: How much farther are we going to retreat? How much

farther can we retreat? The Ehrenburg articles helped such a man to pull himelf together.

It wasn't Ehrenburg only; but Ehrenburg certainly holds a central place in the battle for Red Army morale. His articles were printed chiefly in Red Star, the army paper, and reprinted in hundreds of Front sheets. Some of the writings of Alexei Tolstoy, Simonov, Surkov and many others, also had an important effect on morale.

Simonov's play, The Russian People, printed in full in Pravda in July and performed in hundreds of theatres throughout the country, was typical of the "all Russians are united "

motif: here, in a seaside town, a sort of miniature Sebastopol, a handful of Russians, an old ex-Tsarist officer among them, fight the Germans till nearly all are killed; they are touchingly frail human creatures fighting against a terrible inhuman machine. The

emotional appeal of the play was overwhelming in the conditions of 1942; I remember

how, at the Filiale of the Moscow Art Theatre, there was complete silence for at least ten seconds after the curtain had fallen at the end of the third act; for the last words had been:

"See how Russian people are going to their death". Many women in the audience were weeping. Needless to say, there was a happy ending; in the last act the town was

recaptured by the Red Army. It could not have been otherwise in those days: for a

Journey's End driven to the very end, would have been too depressing. The feeling of hate for the Germans, already very strong in The Russian People (significant that it should have been called Russian, rather than "Soviet People") grew in intensity during the summer and culminated in Simonov's famous Kill Him! poem.

[It was later, but only later, when the danger was over, that Simonov was rather sharply criticised in retrospect for having made his characters look such "amateur partisans", guided no doubt by the finest patriotic motives, but still lacking all the organisational precision of the Communist Party. Their resistance was marked, as it were, by

partisanshchina in the bad sense, i.e. a spontaneous act of self-sacrifice, without proper organisation behind it. This criticism was very similar to that which, in 1948, condemned Fadeyev's famous novel, The Young Guard, published two years before. Here also the young heroes of a Resistance group in the mining town of Krasnodon were charged, in

retrospect, with partisanshchina. Worse still, Fadeyev, the official criticism said, had failed to point out that "in reality" all the Resistance Movement in the occupied territories had been directed by the Party, i.e. more or less directly from Moscow and by its

representatives in German-occupied areas. Fadeyev was made to rewrite the novel.]

Another writer of considerable importance as a morale-builder was Alexei Surkov, the

"soldier's poet", as distinct from Simonov, more the "officer's poet", besides many others like Semyon Kirsanov, Dolmatovsky, etc. Surkov's poem I Hate was published in Red Star of August 12 and concluded with the Unes:

My heart is as hard as stone,

My grievances and memories are countless,

With these hands of mine

I have lifted the corpses of little children...

I hate them deeply

For those hours of sleepless gloom.

I hate them because in one year

My temples have grown white.

My house has been defiled by the Prussians,

Their drunken laughter dims my reason.

And with these hands of mine

I want to strangle every one of them.

And here was Ehrenburg at the height of the Russian retreat in the Northern Caucasus, and with the Germans breaking through to Stalingrad:

. . . . One can bear anything: the plague, and hunger and death. But one cannot bear the Germans. One cannot bear these fish-eyed oafs contemptuously snorting at

everything Russian ... We cannot live as long as these grey-green slugs are alive.

Today there are no books; today there are no stars in the sky; today there is only one thought: Kill the Germans. Kill them all and dig them into the earth. Then we can go to sleep. Then we can think again of life, and books, and girls, and happiness.

... Let us not rely on rivers and mountains. We can only rely on ourselves.

Thermopylae did no stop them. Nor did the Sea of Crete. Men stopped them, not in

the mountains, but in the suburban allotments of Moscow. We shall kill them all.

But we must do it quickly; or they will desecrate the whole of Russia and torture to death millions more people.

[ Red Star, August 13, 1942.]

And on another day he wrote:

We are remembering everything. Now we know. The Germans are not human. Now

the word "German" has become the most terrible swear-word. Let us not speak. Let us not be indignant. Let us kill. If you do not kill the German, the German will kill you. He will carry away your family, and torture them in his damned Germany... If you have killed one German, kill another. There is nothing jollier than German

corpses.

These two propaganda themes were to continue, both before and after the fall of Rostov.

But after its fall, a new note was also sounded—partly in support of the organisational changes being introduced into the Red Army. Self-pity and hatred of the Germans were no longer enough. Partly no doubt to explain to an acutely anxious country the disasters that had befallen the Red Army since May, the new line now taken was that the Army

itself was largely to blame for what was happening—and not the Government—or Stalin.

In retrospect the violent criticisms of the Red Army that were made at this time seem unfair. They ignored the fact that in the summer of 1942 the Russians were still seriously short of heavy equipment, and that along most of the front in the south the Germans had a great superiority in tanks and, especially, in aircraft.

After the fall of Rostov there was a ruthless tightening up of discipline in the army—

ruthless to the point of summary executions, all down the scale, for disobeying orders or displaying cowardice. Then too there was a propaganda drive in which the soldier's and the officer's personal honour and loyalty to his regiment were constantly invoked. One over-enthusiastic propagandist pointed out that even when a regiment received orders to retreat, it was still a blot on the regiment's reputation. More important still, it was impressed upon the soldiers that the country was disgruntled and disappointed in its own army. Political commissars were called upon to circulate among the troops plaintive and contemptuous letters received from soldiers' relatives.

Finally the post-Rostov changes marked the beginning of a rise in the status of officers in the Red Army. There was for instance the creation of new military decorations for officers only: the Orders of Suvorov, Kutuzov and Alexander Nevsky—significantly named after the "Great Ancestors".

[There had already been an Alexander Nevsky Order under Nicholas II who had

conferred it in 1912 on Poincaré, then French Prime Minister. Suvorov was Catherine II's most famous general, and Kutuzov was the victor of Napoleon in 1812.]

This was part of the drive, which was to take on spectacular proportions soon afterwards, to create something like a new officer caste which would be thoroughly competent and, at the same time, smart and decorative. The "old warhorse", slovenly in his attire and easygoing in his soldiering, was more and more discredited in the post-Rostov

propaganda drive. Before long, the dual command of officer-and-commissar was to be

scrapped once again in favour of the officer's "sole command".

It was not until the height of the Stalingrad battle that epaulettes and a lot of gold braid were added to officers' uniforms—epaulettes like those which angry soldiers had torn off their officers' shoulders back in 1917. Out of the fire and smoke of Stalingrad the gold-braided officers emerged; in this gold braid the fires of Stalingrad were reflected, as it were. It was that which made those gold-braided epaulettes so popular and acceptable.

[Much of this gold braid was imported from England, and the Russian request for vast quantities of it at first struck the British (as an Embassy official told me at the time) as

"absurdly frivolous". They did not grasp the full significance of these exports until later.]

Their introduction was like a collective reward to the whole officer class of the Soviet Union. The gold braid also emphasized the professionalism of the Red Army. It was no longer a revolutionary army of sans-culottes; the time was drawing close when the Red Army would have its word to say as the greatest national army in Europe; it was only right that its officers should be as smartly dressed as the British and American officers—

not to mention the German officers. It was psychologically very sound that the gold braid should have made its appearance during Stalingrad, and not before; fine uniforms would have looked all wrong in retreat. Nevertheless, the process of smartening up the Soviet officer, both inwardly and outwardly, was begun in the "psychological operation" that followed the Rostov disaster.

Since the Russian people had no sources of information except the Soviet radio and the press, the news and propaganda that these produced were, of course, of the utmost

importance. Everybody, especially during those anxious days, waited frantically for the nightly communiqué, and most people had learned to read between the lines, and to

decipher the adjectives. Propaganda articles were read with enormous interest by tens of millions of people. Ehrenburg, Sholo-khov and Alexei Tolstoy (probably in this order) were immensely popular, as we have seen. So were some of the war correspondents'

articles which, without necessarily telling all the truth, were known to tell at least some of the truth. Russia is probably also the only country where poetry is read by millions of people, and during the war, poets like Simonov and Surkov were read by everybody.

It is therefore interesting to see how the press handled the grim situation both before and after Rostov.

During the first week of July, the emphasis was on the heroic struggle of the men and women of Sebastopol which had just ended. Then, with the German offensive developing all over the south, the emphasis was, more and more, on "Holy Russia" and on hatred of the enemy. "Hatred of the Enemy" was the title of the Pravda editorial of July 11. The tone was still appealing, rather than threatening, as it was to become after Rostov: Our country is living through serious days. The Nazi dogs are frantically trying to break through to the vital centres of our country...The wide steppes of the Don are spreading before their greedy eyes. Dear comrades at the Front! Your country

believes in you. It knows that the same blood flows in your veins as in those of the heroes of Sebastopol... May holy hatred become our chief, our only feeling. This

hatred combines a burning love of your country, anxiety for your family and

children, and an unshakable will for victory... We have every chance to win. The

enemy is in a hurry; he wants to achieve results which would forestall the Second Front. But he will not escape this danger. The stubbornness of the Soviet people has destroyed more than one enemy plan before now...

Here was a warning not to expect too much from the Allies, and to depend on Russia's own will to save herself. A higher pitch of emotional patriotism, combined with the

hatred motif, was reached by Simonov's poem, "Kill Him!" published in Pravda the day Voroshilovgrad fell—

If your home is dear to you where your Russian mother nursed you;

If your mother is dear to you, and you cannot bear the thought of the German

slapping her wrinkled face;

If you do not want the German to tear down and trample on your father's picture,

with the Crosses he earned in the last war;

If you do not want your old teacher to be hanged outside the old school-house;

If you do not want her, whom for so long you did not dare even kiss,

to be stretched out naked on the floor, so that amid hatred, cries and tears, three German curs should take what belongs to your manly love;

If you don't want to give away all that which you call your Country,

Then kill a German, kill a German every time you see one...

And so on, and so on.

The young Communists' paper, Komsomolskay a Pravda tended rather more than Pravda to invoke the memory of Lenin, as well as memories of the Civil War. On the whole, it went in for "pep talks" rather than lamentations of the Ehrenburg variety. On July 24, foreshadowing, as it were, the more determined tone of the post-Rostov period, it recalled the heroic battles of the Civil War "under the banners of Stalin and Kirov, Voroshilov and Ordjonikidze"—

Yes, we remember how Stalin saved the south in incomparably more difficult

conditions than the present ones. "We had no line of retreat left," Voroshilov later related, "but comrade Stalin did not worry about that. His one thought was to smash the enemy, to win at any price..." So it was at Tsaritsyn in the autumn of 1918. So it will be again now. Our army is convinced of it. Our entire people are convinced of it... So let us close our ranks, young friends, more vigorously, and smash the hated invaders...

[ It is curious that the paper should have then prophesied that the Germans would be stopped at Stalingrad (the former Tsaritsyn).]

The first press reactions to the fall of Rostov were still fairly mild, and the Pravda editorial of July 28 tended to blame the absence of the Second Front for what had

happened, enumerating the nine infantry and two armoured divisions that had arrived

"from France and Holland " in the last few weeks. But something clearly happened on July 29 at the highest Government and Party level; for, on July 30, (the day of Stalin's

"Not a step back" order) Pravda set a new tone altogether:

Iron discipline and a steady nerve are the conditions of our victory. "Soviet soldiers!

Not a step back!"—Such is the call of your country. .. Our Soviet country is large and rich, but there is nothing worse than to imagine that you can, without making a maximum effort, yield even an inch of ground, or abandon this or that town without fighting to the last drop of blood. The enemy is not as strong as some terrified panic-mongers imagine.

What followed was even stronger meat:

Every soldier must be ready to die the death of a hero rather than neglect his duty to his country.

Four times in the editorial the phrase "iron discipline" was used.

During the Civil War Lenin used to say: "He who does not help the Red Army

wholeheartedly, and does not observe its order and iron discipline is a traitor"...

And at the 8th Congress of the Party, Stalin said: "Either we shall have a strictly disciplined army, or we shall perish." Today the officer's order is an iron law.

Red Star that day was even more explicit. It gave the same quotation from Lenin with this addition from the same speech: "He who does not observe order and discipline is a traitor, and must be mercilessly destroyed."

Now is not the time when a coward or traitor can rely on mercy. Every officer and political worker can, with the powers given him by the State, see to it that the very idea of retreating without orders becomes impossible... Not a step back: such is the country's order, the order of our leader and general, Comrade Stalin.

The "power" given to the officer and commissar mentioned here was nothing less than the right to shoot or to order the summary execution of traitors or cowards.

On August 1 Red Star added a macabre (and so far unpublicised) detail to the familiar story of the 28 Panfilov men who had died in the battle of Moscow, fighting against

German tanks to the last man:

They dealt with one contemptible coward. Without any preliminary discussion all

the Panfilov men fired at the traitor; that sacred volley symbolized their

determination not to retreat another step, and to fight to the bitter end.

It also recalled Shchors, the Civil War hero, one of whose rules was: "A soldier who has left the battlefield without officer's orders is shot like a traitor."

There is good reason to believe that, on the strength of these new "iron discipline" rules about "traitors" and "cowards", certain commissars in the Red Army went too far during the week that followed. Nothing else would explain the extraordinary editorial of Red Star on August 9, which said that one must, after all, discriminate between incorrigible cowards and men who had momentarily lost their nerve:

The War Commissar (says the Statute of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet) is the representative of the Party and the Government in the Red Army and, together with the officer, he bears full responsibility for the performance of military tasks and...

for the determination to fight to the last drop of blood... If you see that you have before you an obvious enemy or defeatist, a coward or panic-monger... then it is no use wasting any propaganda or persuasion on him. You must deal with a traitor

with an iron hand. But sometimes you come across people who need your temporary

support; after that they will firmly take themselves in hand...

This was, clearly, a warning to trigger-happy commissars ready to kill off all "cowards".

The second part of the same editorial already foreshadowed the coming abolition of the commissars in their present rôle:

It is a great mistake to imagine, as some comrades do, that in battle the political commissar must act in precisely the same way as the officer, on the ground that, in the midst of a battle, there is no time to argue; that the only thing to do is to give orders, and to punish if these orders are not obeyed. Naturally, every soldier bears the gravest responsibility for the non-fulfilment of his superior's orders on the battlefield. But the commissar's task is, first and foremost, to eliminate the possibility

of such things happening. And his chief weapon is political agitation, the Bolshevik

persuasion of men. [Emphasis added.]

Thus this truly historical article in the Red Army's paper not only sounded the alarm over the excessively ruthless and perhaps irresponsible application of the new "iron discipline"

rules, but also brought to the surface the chronic conflict that had been brewing for a long time between the officer and the commissar. In applying the new rules, the commissars (generally harder and more rigid people than the officers) had apparently gone to

extremes which the officers in many cases resented. Red Star clearly suggested now that the meting out of punishment was not the commissar's primary job, and that in fact, it wasn't his job at all, but the officer's; the commissar's primary job was "agitation and Bolshevik persuasion". This was a very clear indication that the two functions would soon be sharply divided. After this Red Star protest against the indiscriminate shooting of

"cowards" the ferocious articles in the press stopped almost completely.

Another theme that kept on recurring in Soviet propaganda was "Don't ever surrender.

Captivity in Germany is worse than death." Pravda of August 13, quoted with appropriate comments, numerous letters from Germany, including one from a German

woman called Gertrude Renn, and dated February 2,1941:

It is very cold, nearly as cold as in Russia. A lot of potatoes this winter got frozen.

These are given to the Russians who devour them raw. At Fallingbostell 200 or 300

Russians die every week, from hunger or cold. After all, they don't deserve anything else.

Whether genuine or not, this letter certainly sounds perfectly plausible in the light of what one learned then or later about Russian war-prisoners in Germany. For all that, especially in 1942, a black mark was almost automatically placed against the name of any Russian soldier who had fallen into German hands, while Russians who escaped from

German captivity (or even broke out of a German encirclement) were, as a rule, treated as

"suspects". Some were cleared; others put in "punitive battalions", others still, as we know from certain recent publications, were sent to Russian "labour" camps.

I recall a grim conversation I had with a Russian colonel shortly before the fall of Sebastopol, where many thousands of Russians were to fall into German hands.

What was it, the Colonel said, that made Sebastopol so different from Tobruk or

Singapore? "Isn't it because of the Russian's more intense hatred of the enemy, and because of the British temptation to surrender when all hope of holding out is lost? Is not the good treatment of British war prisoners by the Germans part of a definite policy—

aiming at stopping the British from fighting to the last man?"

"Do you then suggest," I said, "that if the Germans treated Russian war prisoners better, Sebastopol would have fallen long ago?" "No," he said rather angrily, "because such calculations don't enter the head of a Russian soldier, still less a Soviet sailor. These people loathe the guts of every German. Besides, they know that by fighting this hopeless battle of Sebastopol till the very end, they are tying up very large German and Rumanian forces, and are so helping the rest of the Front. Here is heroism—but heroism plus

definite orders."

I then brought up the question of the International Red Cross, the Geneva Convention, and so on. Would it not be better if Russian war prisoners were given some International Red Cross protection, for instance, as Molotov had indeed suggested? The colonel said to this: "I am not so sure about that. The damned Germans are going to trick the

International Red Cross, anyway, at least as far as our prisoners are concerned. We treat the German war prisoners reasonably well [This was, of course, much too sweeping a

statement] because, in the long run, it's a policy that will pay—not that we like doing it.

These swine are better fed than millions of our civilians—and that's a galling thought.

But would a convention with the Germans on war prisoners be a good thing? Our troops have gone through hell, and will go through many more hells before we are finished with this war. And in such a hell—I am ready to admit it—the thought that a comfortable bed and breakfast—the kind of thing British prisoners get—may be secured by the simple

gesture of surrendering to the Germans might be bad for morale. Not every man in our army has the makings of a hero. So let him die, rather than surrender... Listen, this is a terrible war, more terrible than anything you've ever seen. It's an agonising thought that our prisoners are starved to death in German camps. But, politically, the Germans are making a colossal blunder. If the Germans treated our prisoners well, it would soon be known. It's a horrible thing to say; but by ill-treating and starving our prisoners to death, the Germans are helping us."

The interesting thing is that the Germans used very much the same kind of reasoning; German propaganda aimed at impressing upon every soldier that falling into Russian

hands was equal to suicide: either he would be immediately shot, or die a slow agonising death "in Siberia". This was, roughly, the story of every German prisoner whom I was to see later in the Don country, at Stalingrad and in numerous battles after Stalingrad, when the fear of encirclement became a kind of obsession with the German army, and even led to some unexpected withdrawals. Also, rather than surrender, many SS-men committed

suicide.

It will be convenient here to look a little beyond the pre-Stalingrad phase of the war, and deal with the next stages in the process which began immediately after the fall of Rostov.

These next steps may be said to fall under three headings: the "inner" smartening-up of the officer corps through the promotion of many young officers who had shown a high

degree of technical competence during the war, and the demotion or shelving of the "old war-horses", a process which had already had its precedent in 1941 with the removal from key positions in the Army of men like Voroshilov and Budienny. This shelving of the "old war horses" served to divert popular annoyance about the military defeats from the Party (including Stalin) to "certain" Army leaders. Secondly, there was the "outer"

smartening-up of the Soviet officer through the introduction of smarter uniforms,

complete with epaulettes and gold braid. Thirdly, the process begun soon after Rostov of drawing a clear line between the officer's and the commissar's respective roles (see the Red Star editorial of August 9 quoted above) was brought to its logical conclusion on October 9, when the officer's "sole command" was at last restored.

The contrast between the old and new types of officer was vividly brought out in

Korneichuk's play The Front which is worth examining, if only because of the enormous publicity given to it.

[Korneichuk told me soon afterwards that the "general idea" of the play had been given to him by Stalin himself.]

The main theme of the play was the conflict between Army-General Gorlov, Commander

of a Front (i.e. army group) and his subordinate, Major-General Ognev, in command of one of the armies. Gorlov is an amiable man, brave, with a fine Civil War record, but wholly unsuitable for modern warfare.

He pokes more or less good-natured fun at the "specialists", and proudly claims: "I have never gone through any of your academies or universities; I am not one of your theorist chaps. I'm an old war-horse." Personal bravery, to him, is the secret of military success.

"We'll smash any enemy," he says, "not with wireless operators, but with heroism and valour." He is surrounded by toadying nonentities who flatter him; they are men with none of Gorlov's fundamental honesty. Among them are his intelligence chief, the editor of the Front newspaper, a war correspondent, and his liaison officer. All of them are drawn in a highly satirical vein.

The central figure in the opposite camp is Ognev, a young general with a mastery of

modern warfare. He is supported by Gorlov's brother, director of a large aircraft factory, and worshipped by Gorlov's own son. The atmosphere in Gorlov's headquarters is

thoroughly easy-going, with frequent supper parties, toasts and smug speeches. Ognev is disgusted by all this, and Gorlov's brother, who has come on a tour of inspection from Moscow (where he had discussed aircraft production with Stalin himself) is taken aback by all this and then reports to Moscow on the very unsatisfactory job his brother is doing.

The central episode is one where the two schools of thought clash in a military operation which Gorlov completely bungles; then the situation is saved, at heavy cost, by Ognev's much clearer vision of the Germans' intentions and by his far better organisation.

In the very first scene the following typical conversation occurs:

General Gorlov (to Udivitelny, the Intelligence Chief): How many German tanks are there at Kolokol station?

Udivitelny: Fifty, comrade commander.

Gorlov: Not more?

Udivitelny: Maybe they've brought up a few more in the last five days, but I shouldn't think so.

Gorlov: But Ognev says they've got three hundred.

Udivitelny: But how's that possible, comrade commander? I don't imagine they've got more than five hundred along the whole Front.

Gorlov (to Ognev): There you are!

Ognev: Why then are they bringing up petrol at such a rate to Kolokol?

Udivitelny: I couldn't say. I suppose they are preparing for the next offensive.

They've got stores there, anyway.

Ognev: Who is in command of the Germans here?

Udivitelny: I really don't know. Before, they had that—what d'you call him; difficult sort of name; can't remember; Major-General von something-or-other. He was

replaced. Who the present Von is I couldn't say.

Ognev: What fire power have they got?

Udivitelny: Well, the usual four divisions—with a seventy per cent complement; couldn't tell you exactly.

Ognev: Have they got any ski regiments?

Udivitelny: I don't suppose so. Maybe a few small groups. Why, the Germans weren't preparing for winter.

Ognev (yelling): God damn you! What the hell do I care what you think? What I want to know is what the Germans have actually got. Answer me: do you know, or

don't you know?

Kolos (commander of the cavalry group): Volodya, please...

Gorlov: Why yell like this; this isn't a bazaar.

Ognev: You ask him why he is lying like a carpet-vendor at a bazaar. What the hell does he mean by "maybe" and "I suppose so", "That's possible", and "I don't imagine so". How can you issue orders if that's all your Intelligence produces? What data have you? With the snow-storm raging for five days, what kind of data could

you have got from your air reconnaissance? What else do you know? Nothing. And

in these five days the Germans might have done any damned thing.

Here was the official condemnation by the Party of Russia's peculiar brand of Blimps; these, in September 1942, were produced as an answer to the bewildered questions why the Germans were again, for the second year in succession, overrunning vast areas of Russian territory.

In the last act, after a hard victory has been won, and disaster averted by Ognev, despite Gorlov's original orders, Gorlov is dismissed from his post. He is bewildered, but begins to understand, and accepts his removal with good grace. In the course of the action, his son, one of Ognev's most devoted admirers, is killed. Gorlov is not treated viciously in the play, and whoever has seen The Front at the Moscow Art Theatre will remember the pathetic, almost Chekhovian figure Gorlov cuts in the last act when played by the great Moskvin.

But the play is intended to convey an optimistic message. In the end, not only Gorlov, but his whole entourage disappear; and they are replaced by other men like Ognev, who have been brought to the surface by the war itself, and who, in addition to their "academic"

training, have also learned a great deal from direct military experience. Ognev is very much the new type of the Soviet officer and, in a sense, the publication of the play in September 1942 constitutes an important link between the immediate "post-Rostov"

reforms and their logical sequel, the heightening of the officer's role in the Red Army, his

"glamourisation" through the introduction of new uniforms, and above all, the abolition of the commissars and the restoration of "sole command".

That many "Ognevs" had been exiled and even shot in the 1937-8 Purge is, needless to say, not even alluded to in Korneichuk's play. Rokossovsky, for one, was well aware of it; and that may be why he (and many other officers) did not care for the play. They felt, moreover, that it produced some awkward discussions among the troops themselves, and caused some disrespectful questions to be asked. Paradoxically, the play was, on the one hand, a Party-versus-Army demonstration, but, on the other, an exaltation of the

professional soldier at the expense of the old civil war hack with his more "revolutionary"

tradition.

The full restoration of the officer's "single command" was contained in the ukase of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of October 9, which abolished the Institute of the

Political Commissars in the Red Army. The ukase, alluding to the friction that often used to arise inside an army unit between the officer and the commissar, especially during the hard weeks of the retreat, explained that there was now no further need for political commissars in the old sense; they had originally been introduced during the Civil War to keep an eye on the officers, many of whom had belonged to the old Tsarist Army and

"who did not believe in the strength of the Soviet regime and were even alien to it."

Without as much as alluding to the reduced rôle of the commissars under Tukhachevsky, and the "politisation" of the Army after the purges, the abolition of "dual command" in 1940, at Timo-shenko's insistence, and its reintroduction once more at the beginning of the German invasion in 1941, the ukase merely said that, since the Civil War, a large number of officers had been trained under Soviet conditions, and that, during the present war, "an enormous number of new and experienced officers have emerged; they have acquired the greatest experience, have proved their devotion to their country, and have grown in stature both militarily and politically."

On the other hand the commissars and political workers have greatly increased

their military knowledge; some of them have already been given commanding

posts ... while others may be employed as officers right away, or after a certain period of military training... In the circumstances, there is no longer any reason for having political commissars in the Red Army. What is more, the perpetuation of the Institute of Political Commissars may act as an obstacle in achieving the best results in the command of the troops; this, in itself, would put the commissars in a false and awkward position. The time has therefore come for establishing complete Single

Command, and for placing upon the officer the sole responsibility for military

decisions..,

Thus dual control was abolished; the commissar was turned into the officer's "deputy in the political field"; he was also an officer, but usually of junior rank and was, above all, in charge of political education, propaganda, welfare, etc. The important thing was that he could no longer interfere with the officer's decisions, least of all with his operational decisions.

Another great practical advantage of this reform, after the terrible losses suffered since June 1941, was the great increase, within a short time, in officer cadres drawn from the ranks of ex-commissars, most of whom had had first-hand experience of the war.

The ukase replaced the "institute" of political commissars and political instructors (the opposite numbers of the n.c.o.'s) by an "institute" of "deputy-commanders in the political field in army units, staffs, sub-units, military schools, and in the central... offices of the People's Commissariat for Defence..."

The Red Star editorial of October 11 pointed out that numerous commissars had had a gallant war record; there had been many cases when an officer was killed or wounded, and the commissar took over his duties. Many such commissars had already been given

officers' posts. The article emphasised that the latest ukase was, in effect, the last phase of a process that had gone on for a long time. Distorting history pretty mercilessly by omitting all that had happened in the late 1930's and also since the war, it set out to show that the latest reform, was in effect, merely an application of the army reform Frunze had advocated back in the early 'twenties. Tukhachevsky, that opponent of "dual command"

was, of course, not mentioned.

Having extolled the merits of "single command", Red Star nevertheless went on to say that the new reform did not mean any lowering in the standard of political education and Bolshevik agitation in the army.

The officers' deputies in the political field must continue this propaganda ... They must go on forging men of iron, capable of the greatest fearlessness, of the greatest spirit of self-sacrifice in this battle against the hated Hitlerites.

In conclusion it said that the Red Army would very shortly be endowed with 200 new

regimental commanders and 600 new battalion commanders drawn from the ranks of the

ex-commissars.

All this was, in a sense, a clear victory of the "Army" over the "Party".

Together with this reform came the introduction of the new uniforms. A little later, in 1943, in addition to new uniforms, a whole code of manners was introduced for officers; above a certain rank, for instance, they could not travel by public transport, and were not allowed to "carry paper parcels". Altogether a number of points from the etiquette of the old Tsarist Army were revived.

Chapter VI STALIN ROPES IN THE CHURCH

The establishment of correct and even seemingly cordial relations between Church and State had been one of the imperatives of Soviet Government policy ever since the

beginning of the war. Even before the war, especially since the publication of the "Stalin"

Constitution of 1936 which guaranteed freedom of religious beliefs, the cruder forms of anti-religious propaganda had been largely abandoned. As we have seen, one of the most comic episodes in this process had been the decease, a fortnight after the German

invasion, of Emelian Yaroslavsky's famous "anti-God" weekly, Bezbozhnik.

The aim of the Soviet Government was to create absolute national unity; and, with a very high proportion of soldiers in the Army coming from peasant families, among whom

religious traditions were still strong, it was important to do nothing that would offend their religious "prejudices". With government propaganda becoming more and more patriotic and nationalist, complete with invocations of the great national heroes of the past, including a saint of the Orthodox Church—St. Alexander Nevsky—it was

impossible to treat the Church as a hostile element in what soon came to be known as

"the Great Patriotic War". It was, indeed, essential to secure the utmost co-operation from the Church, and to induce the clergy to do patriotic propaganda among the faithful, and support the Soviet regime, rather than look for salvation to the Germans who, despite all the monstrosities of their occupation policy, still gave some encouragement to the

Orthodox Church which they regarded (not unreasonably) as an element with serious

grievances against the Soviet system. To the Soviet Government the Church was, in

effect, a potential Fifth Column, which it was imperative to win over.

Some of the Orthodox clergy in the occupied areas certainly collaborated with the

Germans, or pretended to—particularly during the earlier stages of the war—while some members of the Ukrainian church hierarchy were wholly subservient to Berlin to the end.

In 1941 and 1942 there were many instances of the Germans posing as liberators of the Christian faith in the occupied areas. General Guderian mentions, for example, the town of Glukhov, near Briansk, where "the population asked our permission to use their church as a place of worship once again. We willingly handed it over to them."

[Guderian, op cit., p. 228.]

In their radio propaganda the Germans made much of this "revival" of religion in the areas they had occupied, and the fact that some priests were said to have joined the partisans was insufficient to cancel out these German claims entirely. Moscow was

particularly sensitive, in 1942, to hostile propaganda, especially in the United States, on the ground that there was no "freedom of religion" in Russia.

A curious landmark in the story of the Russian church during the war was the publication by the Moscow Patriarchate, in August 1942, of a sumptuously-bound and admirably

printed and illustrated volume called The Truth about Religion in Russia. Its flyleaf claimed that 50,000 copies had been printed. The Central Committee itself had not

produced such a typographical masterpiece for years; there was obviously a great deal behind this publication. It was certainly intended partly for foreign consumption.

Much of the book had been written (or purported to have been written) by Father Sergius, Metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomna, and locum tenens of the Patriarchal Throne since the death of the Patriarch Tikhon in 1925. Although Tikhon's anti-Soviet attitude was well known, Sergius nevertheless recalled that, according to Tikhon, the "Soviet order means the rule of the people... and is, therefore, firm and unshakable". Sergius further recalled (a rather piquant touch) that Tikhon had "explicitly condemned" the schism in the Orthodox Church, brought about by the Karlovite sect, who for years had waged war against the Metropolitan Evlogi of Paris, the head of the "true" Russian church in Western Europe.

[Named after Karlovac in Yugoslavia, a centre of violently anti-Moscow religious

activity among the White-Russian émigrés. See W. Kolarz, Religion in the Soviet Union, p. 41 (London 1961).]

The Karlovites were émigré extremists who later identified themselves with the teachings of Hitler. The Orthodox Church, as represented by Sergius, was the old Russian Church, but deprived of the financial and other earthly privileges it had enjoyed under the Tsars.

In the old days the Tsar himself had been head of the Church; but the separation of

Church and State was, in Sergius's opinion, all to the good.

This attack on the "Karlovites" was in fact a disguised attack on Father Vvedensky's

"Living Church" which had created a schism, not among the émigrés, but in Russia itself.

This Living Church had been encouraged by Lunacharsky and other members of the

Soviet government in the early years of the Revolution. This attack on "schisms" in 1942

clearly showed that the Soviet Government was willing to throw Vvedensky and his

"Living Church" overboard; it had, indeed, been a failure; people went to a Vvedensky church only when there was no "real" church in the neighbourhood. The "Living Church"

was, indeed, to be disbanded in 1943. It went, as it were, into voluntary liquidation, with Vvedensky recanting, and its priests and bishops submitting to the authority of Sergius, who was elected Patriarch in 1943.

The disappearance of the Vvedensky Church was in the logic of things: it was important to the Soviet Government that there should be only one Russian Church.

In The Truth about Religion in Russia Sergius wrote that the loss by the Church and the monasteries of land and other property did not denote persecution, but "a return to Apostolic times when priests pursued their profession... more in accordance with the teachings of Christ." The separation of Church and State had had a purifying effect on the Church; now only true believers went to church, and nominal Christians had dropped out.

No doubt he regretted that communists should "adhere to the anti-religious standpoint". It was certain, however, that anti-religious propaganda had been in decline for several years past, and had disappeared completely since the beginning of the war.

Since the beginning of the war, Sergius went on, the attitude of the Church had been clearer than ever. It rejected absolutely Hitler's "crusade" for its liberation. Although no priests were attached to the Red Army, the Church constantly prayed for this Army, and also said innumerable prayers for individual soldiers at their families' request. In their sermons Russian churchmen now constantly referred to the Nazis as the successors of

"the foul hounds"—the Teutonic Knights, whom St Alexander Nevsky, the patron saint of Leningrad, had routed in 1242 on the ice of Lake Peipus.

Sergius went on to say that he had recently addressed an Epistle to the Orthodox faithful in occupied territories, telling them that they must never forget that they were Russians and that they must do nothing, wittingly or unwittingly, while under the German yoke, which would be a betrayal of their homeland.

He also said that the Church had proved its patriotic fervour not only in words, but also in deeds; it was helping the Red Army not only with prayers, but also with gifts and

collections. Thus the Holy Trinity Church at Gorki had recently collected a million

roubles for the Defence Fund.

The book also devoted much space to the "chaos" in the Orthodox Church abroad. Those who saw eye to eye with the Russian Church, it said, were dismissed or persecuted by the Germans: this was true of Gabriel, Patriarch of Serbia, of Chrysanthos, Metropolitan of Athens, and Stefan, the Bulgarian Metropolitan, "who because of his great sympathy for the patriotism of the Russian Orthodox Church," had fallen into disfavour with the Germans and was "frequently attacked in the pro-Nazi press."

Great sympathy for the patriotism of the Russian Church has also been shown by

the Near-Eastern Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, as well as by

Benjamin Fedchikov, Metropolitan of the Aleutians and North America [who

represented the Moscow Patriarchate under that picturesque title in the United

States]. He has worked steadily in favour of American aid to Russia, despite the

Theophilites, an Orthodox sect, who have been engaged in anti-Soviet propaganda,

and have been urging President Roosevelt to send an ultimatum to the Soviet

Government demanding guarantees of "religious freedom" in Russia after the war.

The book further contained a sharp attack on certain "church quislings", notably in the Ukraine, who, after accepting the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate, were now

serving Hitler in fostering Ukrainian "nationalism". In an Epistle addressed to the Ukrainian faithful, Sergius stated that Bishop Sikorsky had presented himself to the German authorities as the "Archbishop of Luck and Kovel and Head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church." This imposter "had promised his faithful co-operation to the Germans, whom he had addressed as the liberators of the Ukrainian People' ".

The true Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, said Sergius, was the Church which was

"sharing all the hardships and sorrows of the Russian people."

The second part of the book told of the German destruction of numerous valuable

churches (notably the New Jerusalem Monastery at Istra and the Novgorod churches),

and of the fearful atrocities committed by the enemy in occupied areas. Conscious of the sufferings inflicted by the Germans on the Russian people, the book said, the priests had nearly everywhere [sic] refused to fraternise with the German "liberators".

For all that, in 1942, the Church was still very down-at-heel, and it was not till later that steps were taken to restore church buildings— buildings of "historic value"—and that the Patriarch and the newly formed Synod were given decent quarters in Moscow. These

measures, and others of a financial nature were taken after the establishment of a special Department for Church Affairs at the Council of People's Commissars, with a Mr Karpov at its head—a comrade who had been a police official in charge of church matters and who was now sometimes jokingly referred to in Moscow as "Narkombog" or

"Narkomop", i.e. People's Commissar for God, or People's Commissar for Opium (for the people).

But in the summer of 1942, churches in Moscow—and even "Moscow Cathedral", which had never been more than a very large and ugly and relatively modern suburban church—

were still a dismal and depressing sight. The cathedral remained one of the few Moscow centres of organized, professional and completely unashamed begging, even though the rouble notes and twenty-kopek pieces they were given can hardly have been of any value to the wretched tattered old women. The congregation consisted chiefly of elderly people, though there were also some young women—many of them with children. They kept

passing on to the altar slips of paper with the names of those they wished included in the prayers. Then there were collections "for the poor" and "for the restoration of the church"—which it certainly badly needed. Only very few soldiers could be seen among the congregation. The priests' robes were on the shabby side, though the robes and crown of the Metropolitan Nicholas looked impressive enough; but there seemed a shortage of both incense and candles, and the singing was poor and uninspired. The whole scene was drab and miserable.

By 1943 there was already a great improvement. The church attendance, especially on

Easter night, was extraordinarily high; whole streets adjoining the twenty-five or thirty churches in Moscow were crowded with people who could find no room inside. A Party

member told me: "The Party and the Komsomol have been much impressed by the

number of people who went to church this Easter— much more even than usual." One explanation was that people knew that the Church was no longer frowned upon by the

authorities. Significantly, there were many more soldiers in the churches in 1943 than there had been in previous years.

The establishment of more "correct" relations with the Church in 1942-3 was part of both a short-term and a long-term policy. It was certainly part of that drive for "complete national unity", which the grim situation of 1942 demanded. The Church derived

considerable benefits from it and, in return, became increasingly vocal in its loyalty to the regime, even to the point of saying special prayers for Stalin, and treating him as an

"anointed of the Lord", though no doubt in only a figurative way.

Internationally the "reconciliation" with the Church served a great variety of purposes: it made a good impression on the Allies, particularly the United States; it made the Moscow Patriarchate play the role of a sort of Greek-Orthodox Vatican, intolerant of any suspect

"sects". Leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church were also encouraged to fraternise for instance with leaders of the Anglican Church, and were prominent in such organisations as the All-Slav Committee, and were even used to add the weight of their authority to more dubious bodies such as the Committee of Inquiry into the Katyn Murders. After the war the Metropolitan Nicholas, in his golden robes also added lustre to international Peace Congresses where he spoke alongside other leading Soviet personalities like

Korneichuk and Ehrenburg.

Looking beyond 1942, we may briefly summarise the story of State-Church relations

during and just after the War. As Walter Kolarz was to write later in his excellent

Religion in the Soviet Union,

The ideological content of Soviet communism in 1941 or 1943 was infinitely more

patriotic than it was in the twenties or early thirties. All sorts of nationalist contraband had infiltrated into the official communist ideology ... The Church

found Stalin's revised communism attractive to its traditional way of thinking.

[Kolarz, op, cit., p. 49.]

Kolarz also recalls how in 1941-3 the church leaders assisted the war effort not only in words but also in deeds. When a tank column christened "Dimitri Donskoi" [The valiant Russian Prince who routed the Tartars on the Field of

Kulikovo in 1380. An oratorio in his honour by Yuri Shaporin had

been given a Stalin Prize in 1941 just before the war.] paid for out of funds collected by the Church was handed over to the Army, the Metropolitan Nicholas spoke of Russia's

"sacred hatred of the fascist robbers" and referred to Stalin as "our common Father, Joseph Vissarionovich".

In September 1943 a sort of "concordat" was concluded between the Church and the State, after Stalin had himself received all the three Metropolitans (Sergius, Alexis and Nicholas), at the Kremlin. As a result of this meeting the Church was allowed to elect its Patriarch and to re-establish a proper ecclesiastical government, the Holy Synod. The Russian Orthodox Church was allowed to resume publication of the Journal of the

Moscow Patriarchate which had been suspended in 1936, and to open a limited number of theological seminaries and academies. The Church was also recognised as a "juridical person" entitled to own property.

The official recognition of the Patriarchal Church as the sole legal representative of the Orthodox Christians became fully operative in October 1943 with the appointment of the

"Council for the affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church" under the above mentioned Karpov, which was to act as the go-between between the Patriarchate and the Soviet

Government. It issued licences for the opening and restoration of churches; and another of its duties was to look after the material interests and even personal comfort of the Patriarch and his closer collaborators.

The Patriarchate became, as it were, part of the Soviet Establishment. It not only made a great show of the Church's loyalty to the regime, and of a special devotion to Stalin personally, but it also became a political instrument of considerable international

importance.

Sergius, the first war-time Patriarch, died in May 1944, and was succeeded by Alexis, the Metropolitan of Leningrad and Novgorod. By the time Alexis was elected, the Russians had practically won the war; but this did not mean that the Church had outlived its

usefulness from Stalin's point of view.

Church support was still needed to enhance the respectability of the Soviet

Government... and was particularly essential in the fight against centrifugal forces in the borderlands___Outside the new Soviet borders there was even more for the

Church to do as an ally of the Soviet State. The Red Army was now operating in

countries with an Orthodox population—Rumania, Bulgaria and Serbia—and the

Russian Orthodox Church could assist in promoting... friendship among the

Orthodox peoples of the Balkans.

[ Kolarz, op. cit., p. 56.]

The unspectacular election of Sergius as Patriarch in 1943 by a handful of metropolitans and bishops contrasted strikingly with the sumptuous election of Alexis in February 1945

attended by 204 ecclesiastical dignitaries and laymen. Among the guests were the

Patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria and the representatives of other Balkan and Near-East Patriarchs. Metropolitan Benjamin of North America was also present, and alluded approvingly to the old messianic traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church by saying that Moscow might yet become "The Third Rome".

Stalin was all in favour of Moscow's becoming a sort of "Vatican" of the Orthodox Church, and Alexis was given every encouragement to extend his foreign contacts and to claim for himself and his Church a leading position in the religious world. On April 10, 1945 Stalin had another meeting with the Patriarch Alexis and the Metropolitan Nicholas, and gave the Patriarch every encouragement for his forthcoming journey to the Near and Middle East—a journey which lasted four weeks. A special plane, piloted by a Hero of the Soviet Union, was placed at the Patriarch's disposal. The political implications of all these contacts were obvious enough; and, as already said, the Church hierarchy, and in particular the Metropolitan Nicholas were to lend special respectability to a variety of committees of inquiry, as well as to the Peace Movement in its various international manifestations, such as the famous congress of the Partisans of Peace at the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1949.

There was much talk in Moscow, especially towards the end of the war, about Stalin, the ex-seminarist, having a soft spot for the Church, which was thought to be somehow

associated in his mind with the Muscovite State and with his "forerunners", the Moscow Tsars.

The international purpose served by the Church was also only too obvious. It did its best to establish a friendly contact with certain other Churches; a great fuss was made over the visit to Moscow of the Archbishop of York whose only complaint was that the bearded

old gentlemen would insist on kissing him on every possible occasion; he thought this

"constant diving into their whiskers" was being a bit overdone. Sir Archibald Clark Kerr (later Lord Inverchapel), the British Ambassador told me, at the end of 1944, about a meeting he had with Stalin, at which the Marshal assured him that "in his own way, he also believed in God." "I dare say," Clark Kerr commented, "he had his tongue in his cheek when he said so; but it is surely interesting that he should have thought it politic to make such a remark to me!"

The modus vivendi established between the Church and the State during the war was of considerable mutual benefit, though no doubt it made many diehard communists squirm

at times; it was all very "un-Leninist". Stalin's apparent wish that the Russian Orthodox Church should become a sort of "Vatican" for all Orthodox Christians throughout the world, met with a considerable measure of success, though not complete success. The

resistance to the whole concept developed after the war, together wth the intensification of cold-war currents.

It is true that, even at the height of the Stalin-Patriarch honeymoon, both the Party and the Komsomol continued to discourage religious practices among their members, and no

chaplains were ever attached to the Red Army. But active anti-religious propaganda in Russia was not to be resumed on a large scale until after Stalin's death.

The Russian Orthodox Church was traditionally anti-Catholic; nevertheless with the

establishment of a Polish Army in Russia in 1943 and the subsequent liberation of Poland by the Red Army, Stalin was very anxious, at one stage, to normalise relations with the Catholic Church as well. In this he was much less successful. And, on one famous

occasion, he even had a big practical joke played on him by an obscure American parish priest.

PART FIVE Stalingrad

Chapter 1 STALINGRAD: THE CHUIKOV STORY

Broadly speaking, the Battle of Stalingrad may be divided into the following stages: (1) July 17 to August 4, when the main fighting was still inside the Don Bend. Here the Russians attempted, on the strength of the "not-a-step-back" slogan at least to slow down the German advance. On the north side of the Bend, the Russians fought stubbornly in order to preserve at least a few bridgeheads. It was also hoped that, by slowing down the German advance, time would be gained for strengthening the "defences" of Stalingrad, which were being built by thousands of people in a feverish hurry but, as time was to show, without much effect.

[Yeremenko admits that only a quarter of these defences had been completed by August, and badly at that. (Yeremenko, op. cit., p. 76.) Moreover, these rudimentary defences were neither properly manned nor armed.]

Nevertheless, authorities such as General Yeremenko claim that the fighting outside the Don Bend was very valuable in slowing down the German advance, and in preventing

them from either trapping large numbers of Russian troops inside the bend, or capturing Stalingrad at one fell swoop.

(2) August 5 to August 18. Having previously forced the south side of the Don at

Tsymlianskaya, large portions of the German 6th Army, supported by General Hoth's

panzer army, were now trying to outflank the Russians by striking towards Stalingrad via Kotelnikovo, Abganerovo and Plodovitoye, south-east of the city. By August 14 nearly the whole of the country inside the Don Bend (except for a few Russian-held bridgeheads in the north) had been overrun by the Germans. Besides attacking Stalingrad from the south, the Germans were also advancing on the city from the west and the north-west.

(3) August 19 to September 3. The fighting in the country between Don and Volga now

reached its height. Although, south-east of the city, the enemy was held for some days along the Axai and then the Myshkova rivers, the Germans broke through to the Volga

north of Stalingrad, forming there a five-mile-wide salient. This happened on August 23, a day which was also marked by a 600-bomber raid on Stalingrad. Despite the seemingly chaotic conditions created in the city by this super-air-raid, in which 40,000 were killed, neither the military nor the civilian authorities quite lost their heads; to avoid

encirclement and also to stop the Germans from striking south from their Volga salient north of Stalingrad, the Russians hastened to retreat to the city. The German Rynok-Yerzovka salient north of Stalingrad was "stabilised".

(4) Between September 4 and 13 the fighting was concentrated on the "outskirts" of Stalingrad, but with the Germans breaking through to the Volga south of Stalingrad as well, the Russian 62nd Army found itself isolated from the rest of the Russian forces. On September 12 General Chuikov was appointed commander of the 62nd Army.

(5) The period from September 13 to November 18 was marked by the historic battle

inside Stalingrad. By the middle of October, the Russians were holding only three small bridgeheads; but still the Germans were unable to dislodge them, despite a "final"

offensive in the first half of November. The bulk of the Russian artillery was on the other side of the Volga and so relatively invulnerable, despite great German air superiority.

Then came the Russian counter-offensive:

(1) November 19 to December 11, during which period the Russians succeeded in finally encircling the Germans and Rumanians at Stalingrad.

(2) December 12 to January 1, which was chiefly marked by the Hoth-Manstein attempt

to break through to the encircled Stalingrad troops, by its failure, a further widening of the Russian ring round Stalingrad and the complete rout of the Italians on the Don.

(3) January 10 to February 2, 1943 marked by the final liquidation of the German and Rumanian forces inside the Stalingrad "cauldron".

In considering the defensive stage of the Stalingrad battle, the most important piece of evidence available, both on the military aspects and on Russian morale, is the remarkable book The Beginning of the Road by General (now Marshal) Chuikov, who was the Commander of the 62nd Army throughout the Stalingrad siege. Published in 1959, it is the best account of this complicated battle. It is also one of the most candid books published by any Russian General.

[ An English version of the expurgated 1961 edition was published in London in 1963.]

Chuikov, who until the beginning of 1942 had been Soviet Military Attaché at

Chungking, was sent to the Stalingrad front at the beginning of July, when the Germans were advancing across the Don country. In his account of the retreat to Stalingrad he gives a very frank picture of the uneven morale of both troops and officers, including senior officers.

Thus at the railway station of Frolovo [west of Stalingrad] I ran into the

headquarters of the 21st Army. The H.Q. was on wheels. Everything, including

Army Commander Gordov's sleeping outfit, was on the move—in cars and lorries. I

did not like such excessive mobility. One could feel a lack of stability, and a lack of determination. They looked as though they were trying to get away from their

pursuers—everybody, including the Army Commander.

A few days later, travelling west towards the Don, he also saw evidence of very low

morale:

I saw how these people were moving along the waterless Stalingrad steppe from

west to east, eating up their last reserves of food, and overcome by the stifling heat.

When I asked them: "Where are you going? Who are you looking for?" they gave senseless answers: they all seemed to be looking for somebody on the other side of the Volga, or in the Saratov region... In the steppe, I met the staffs of two divisions who claimed to be looking for the H.Q. of the 9th Army. These staffs consisted of a few officers sitting in three or fours cars, loaded to the brim with petrol tins. In reply to my questions: "Where are the Germans? Where are our units? Where are you going?" they didn't know what to say. It was, clearly, not going to be easy to restore the morale of these people and the fighting spirit of the troops in retreat...

Some of the generals were no better. General Gordov, who had been commander of the

21st Army, was appointed commander of the 64th Army, with Chuikov as his Deputy.

On the night of July 19 we met at the H.Q. of the 64th Army... I had never met him before. He was a general with greying hair and with tired grey eyes which seemed to see nothing, and whose cold expression seemed to say: "Don't tell me about the situation, I know all about it. There's nothing I can do about it, since such is my fate."

Being in a defeatist mood, Gordov ordered that only part of his Army should hold

positions inside the Don Bend, and that the reserves be left on the east side of the Don.

Chuikov was critical of this decision, but adds that "General Gordov was not a man who tolerated any contradiction from his inferiors."

Nevertheless, only a few days later, Gordov was summoned to Moscow and was

appointed to the even higher post of commander of the Stalingrad Front (i.e. Army

Group). Meantime, Chuikov was left as acting commander of the 64th Army. On July 25

the troops under his command made contact with the Germans at Nizhne-Chirskaya, in

the south-east corner of the Don Bend. After describing a ferocious two-day battle, in the course of which many German tanks were destroyed, and the Germans also suffered

heavy casualties from the Russian katyusha mortars, Chuikov then relates how the Germans nevertheless succeeded in breaking through the Russian lines inside the Don

Bend.

We had no tanks left, but I sent along several battalions of marines to fill in the gap... It seemed that we would manage, in the end, to close the breach. But here, unfortunately, a panic started. It did not start in the front line, but in the rear. It started among the medical personnel, in the artillery park and our transport units, all of them on the right bank of the river. They had heard from somewhere that the German tanks were within a couple of miles. In those days such a piece of news was sufficient to drive all these people in disorder to the river crossing. Through

channels unknown to me this panic spread to the front line troops.

To stop this mass of people and vehicles from rushing towards the Don, I sent

several members of my staff and my artillery chief, Major-General Brout, to the

crossing. It was all too late and in vain. Enemy aircraft spotted this large

concentration of people and cars at the river crossing, and proceeded to bomb it. In the course of this bombing General Brout... and several other officers of the Army H.Q. were killed.

By nightfall the Germans had destroyed the bridge, but one infantry division and some other small units were still inside the Don Bend. What happened next was only too

typical of the lack of coordination at the top on the Russian side. In Chuikov's absence, the Chief of Staff of the 64th Army gave orders to these troops to retire beyond the Don.

Arriving back at headquarters, Chuikov was appalled by this news, and promptly

countermanded the order which might have led to another stampede and panic,

particularly in the absence of any crossing in that area. The troops successfully dug in inside the Don Bend, and so filled the breach at the end of three days' heavy fighting.

Generals the world over have axes to grind, and Chuikov is no exception. Throughout

this narrative he contrasts good troops with bad troops, good leadership with bad

leadership. Thus, when he learned, at the height of the fighting inside the Don Bend, that General Kolpakchi had been relieved of his command of the 62nd Army, and had been