truly fearful during some periods—people went on working as they had never worked
before, sometimes to the point of collapse and death. No doubt there were moments of panic and demoralisation both in the Army and among civilians—and I deal with these, too, in the course of my narrative: nevertheless, the spirit of genuine patriotic devotion and self-sacrifice shown by the Russian people during those four years has few parallels in human history, and the story of the siege of Leningrad is altogether unique.
It may seem strange today to think that this immense People's War was successfully
fought under the barbarous Stalin régime. But the people fought, and fought, above all, for "themselves", that is, for Russia; and Stalin had the good sense to realise this almost at once. In the dark days of 1941 he not only explicitly proclaimed that the people were fighting this war for Russia and for "the Russian heritage", thus stimulating Russian national pride, and the national sense of injury to the utmost, but he succeeded in getting himself almost universally accepted as Russia's national leader. Even the Church was roped in. Later, he even deliberately singled out the Russians for special praise, rather at the expense of the other nationalities of the Soviet Union, for having shown the greatest power of endurance, and the greatest patience and for never having lost faith in the Soviet regime—arid, by implication, in Stalin himself. This was one way of saying that, in
fighting for Russia, the Russian people also fought for the Soviet system, which is at least partly true, especially if one considers that, practically throughout the war, the two became extraordinarily closely identified, not only in propaganda, but also in people's minds. Similarly, the Party did everything to identify itself with the Army—except on one occasion, in 1942, when an attempt was made to blame the insufficiently equipped Army for some grave military reverses.
This is not to say that the régime had no major share in the credit for Russia's ultimate victory: but for the vast industrialisation effort that had gone on since 1928, and the tremendous organisational feat of evacuating a large part of industry to the east at the height of the German invasion, Russia would have been destroyed. All the same, many
fearful mistakes had been made, both before the war and at the beginning of the war; and even Stalin admitted it.
In this book, I trace the varying attitudes of the Russian people to Russia, to the régime, and to Stalin himself. Marshal Zhukov, who did not like Stalin, nevertheless paid him this tribute: "You can say what you like, but that man has got nerves of iron." Among the rank-and-file Russian soldiers, Stalin was popular: as Ehrenburg recently put it, "they had absolute, confidence in him." A father-figure or, shall we say, a Churchill-figure was badly needed in wartime and, in spite of everything, Stalin provided it remarkably
successfully. All the same, as will be seen, his standing during the war had a great many ups and downs.
The popular reactions to the régime and to Stalin during the war are, of course, only one of the many aspects of Russian wartime mentality with which I deal in this book. I was also careful to watch people's reactions to the Germans and to the Western Allies. The attitude to the Germans was determined partly by direct experience, and partly by
propaganda lines—often seemingly contradictory lines—adopted by the Party and the
government at different stages of the war. In the course of my story I report on the mounting Russian anger against the Nazis, the near-racialist anti-German propaganda of Ehrenburg and others (a propaganda which was suddenly stopped in April 1945, with the Russians well inside Germany), and the effect of the German occupation on both the
local inhabitants and, later, the victorious Red Army. It is scarcely surprising that many of the Russian soldiers ran wild in Germany after all that the Germans had done in the Soviet Union. And yet the Russians' attitude to individual Germans at various stages of the war was often very far from following the "Ehrenburg" pattern.
Feelings about the Western Allies also varied considerably. The distrust of the West had been so great that the Russians heaved a real sigh of relief in 1941 when they found that Britain had not ganged up with Hitler. But, with things going from bad to worse on the Russian front, the clamour for the Second Front soon started— a clamour which became strident and abusive in the summer and autumn of 1942. Much of this anger was worked up by the Soviet press; but it would have been there, anyway; the Russians were suffering fearful reverses and the Allies "were doing nothing." By the middle of 1943, especially with considerable quantities of Lend-Lease deliveries arriving at the Russian Front, the attitude perceptibly changed, and in the Soviet air force in particular, the Western allies were distinctly popular. Russian airmen were, for instance, greatly impressed by the Anglo-American bombings of Germany. All the same, the "unequal sacrifices" were something of which the Russians were acutely conscious even at the best of times..
Close on twenty years have passed since the end of the war in Russia, and I am perhaps the only surviving Westerner to have lived in Russia right through the war years and to have kept an almost day-to-day record of everything I saw and heard there.
Paradoxically, as far as foreigners were concerned, the war years were by far the most
"liberal" of all the Stalin era. We ranked as Allies, and were treated accordingly—on the whole, very well. In the circumstances, and especially as I speak Russian as a native (I was born in old St Petersburg), I was able to speak freely and informally to thousands of soldiers and civilians. Moreover, as the correspondent of the Sunday Times and the writer of the "Russian Commentaries" for the BBC, read by Joseph McLeod, I was given some exceptional opportunities for travelling about the country and visiting the Front. Some of these trips were made by small groups of about five or six correspondents, but I also often went on solo trips; among the most memorable of these were my stay in blockaded Leningrad, and the ten days spent in the Ukraine at the height of the Konev offensive in March 1944 which swept the Red Army right into Rumania. On all these trips I took
every opportunity of talking to all and sundry; and Russian soldiers and officers, I soon found, were among the most candid and uninhibited talkers in the world. They were
human beings, each with marked individual traits of his own, and were quite unlike the uniform heroic robots that they are often made to look in some of the more official Soviet books on the war. During those trips I also had the opportunity of meeting many famous generals—among them General Sokolovsky at Viazma in the tragic autumn of 1941;
Chuikov and Malinovsky in the Stalingrad area; Rokossovsky in Poland; and, finally,
Marshal Zhukov in Berlin.
In Moscow I got to know personally some of the top Soviet political leaders, particularly Molotov, Vyshinsky and Shcherbakov, but I cannot say that I attempted any serious
Kremlinological studies during the war. At the time all seemed to be going reasonably smoothly inside the Kremlin, especially after Stalin had given the necessary weight and authority to the "new" generals in the autumn of 1941. What we know about Stalin and his immediate entourage during the war comes chiefly from what a few Russians, such as Marshal Yeremenko, and some distinguished foreign visitors, such as Churchill, Hopkins, Deane and Stettinius, have published since the war. There are also the entertaining
Russian minutes of the Stalin-de Gaulle and Bidault-Molotov talks in December 1944. A more sordid picture is provided by some (inevitably hostile) Poles like Anders and
Mikolajczyk. Though this evidence gives us a general idea of how the Russian leadership worked, a detailed account of the inner workings of the Kremlin during the war will not be possible until all the documents and records become available —if they ever do.
[The goings on among the Nazi hierarchy have become public property only because
Germany was defeated and countless documents were captured. This has had, I feel, one bad effect on books on Germany during the war: they have concentrated on the actions of the Nazi thugs, and have told us too litt
le about the reactions of the German people.]
It is most unlikely that they will, because they would show how great was the part played by people whose names are now taboo. But while we do not usually know exactly how
certain far-reaching decisions were taken by the Kremlin, we do know what their effects were.
While I made no attempt to spy on high government spheres, I was, on the other hand, able to observe, day after day, everyday life among Russian workers and other civilians, and the changes of mood among them from the consternation of 1941-2 to the optimism
and elation of 1943 onward—despite countless personal losses and the great hardships that most, though not all, continued to suffer. (The inequality, especially in food
rationing, was one of the most unpleasant aspects of ordinary life in Russia during the war—and, indeed, long after.) I also saw a great deal of writers, artists and other
intellectuals—Pasternak, Prokofiev and Eisenstein among them—and also some very
queer political animals, such as the members of the "Union of Polish Patriots", that foetus which soon emerged from the womb of Mother Russia as the Lublin Committee.
All these contacts with both "important" and "unimportant" people gave me a good cross-section of Russian opinion, with its many nuances, during the various stages of the war—
whether in Moscow, or at the Front, or in the newly-liberated areas—and I do not think it necessary to apologise for having devoted a substantial part of this book to personal observations of the life and moods in the Soviet Union during the war years.
[In the earlier part of this book I have used some of the descriptive material from my earlier books on Russia, particularly The Year of Stalingrad, which are now out of print.]
I even venture to think that they will fill a substantial gap in so much of the more-or-less official Soviet writing on the war.
It would, however, have been quite insufficient to rely entirely on my own observations, however numerous, and on contemporary press accounts, in writing this account of the war years in Russia. During the first few months of the Invasion it was possible to guess a great many things, but it was virtually impossible to explain with any accuracy just why, within two months, the Germans reached the outskirts of Leningrad and, within three-and-a-half months, the outskirts of Moscow. During those months when, in Pasternak's phrase, autumn was advancing in steps of calamity, I shared the general bewilderment and consternation of the Russian people. Much else remained obscure during the war.
Many such obscure points have been clarified by the enormous amount of literature
published in Russia in recent years—since the XXth Congress of 1956 and, more
particularly, since 1959-60 of which I have made a careful study, and which has helped me greatly. Thus, the first volume of the official History of the War, already mentioned, contains, for all its shortcomings, some amazing facts to explain the many military, economic, political and psychological reasons for the unprepared-ness of the Red Army to meet the German onslaught. I have also drawn on some remarkable personal
reminiscences by Russian soldiers, such as Generals Boldin and Fedyuninsky, describing the first days of the war in the Invasion areas. The silence and discretion with which all this was treated in the Stalin days is now at an end. Whether in war histories, memoirs, novels, or even poetry, more perhaps has been written in recent years about those fearful first months of the war than about any other. A novel like Konstantin Simonov's The Living and the Dead [ Published in the United Slates by Doubleday in 1962.] is, in fact, the best, though belated, piece of reporting there is on these months between the Invasion and the Battle of Moscow. Recent Russian books, included in the bibliography at the end of this volume, throw light on many other 1941 disasters, such as the Kiev encirclement, in which the Germans claimed 660,000 prisoners, or the early stages of the Battle of Moscow, including the equally disastrous Viazma encirclement.
Or take Leningrad, that unique story of a city of three million people, of whom nearly one-third died of hunger, but would not surrender. In Leningrad, a book I published in 1944, I gave, in human terms, a full and accurate account of what had happened there during the famine. But I obviously could not, at the time, obtain statistical data, for instance, on the exact amount of food available in the city when the German ring closed round it, or on the exact quantities delivered at various periods across the ice of Lake Ladoga. Today the precise facts are to be found in such invaluable recent books as D. V.
Pavlov's and A. V. Karasev's on the Leningrad Blockade. These are first-class historical documents by any standard.
I have also used dozens of other books recently published on other important episodes of the war—the grim summer of 1942, the tragedy of Sebastopol, the Stalingrad story,
Partisan warfare during the different stages of the war, and so on.
I have also dealt in some detail with the diplomatic story of the war, some of the episodes on which I was able to observe closely. My many talks with Sir Stafford Cripps in 1941, and with Sir Archibald Clark Kerr later in the war, were of great value in throwing light on Anglo-Soviet relations. I also kept in close touch with the U.S. Embassy, and one of my most valuable contacts was the very shrewd M. Roger Garreau, General de Gaulle's
representative in Moscow.
Politically, one of the main strands in this book is the story of Soviet-Polish relations, which were in the very centre of Stalin's preoccupations, and which had important effects on his relations with his allies: first, the crisis culminating in the breach of diplomatic relations with the Polish Government in London in April 1943; then the formation of a Polish Army on Russian soil; the whole lurid Katyn business, then the setting up of the Lublin Committee and the tragedy of Warsaw in the autumn of 1944. It will be seen that, with a few important reservations, and after careful reflection, I tend to agree with the Russian version of Warsaw, but not at all with the Russian version of Katyn—at least pending further information, which is remarkably slow in appearing. Mr Khrushchev has done nothing to clear that matter up.
In short, I have made extensive use of recent Russian books on the war—most of which might be classified as "Khrushchevite", and ipso facto anti-Stalinite. There is, however, a danger in taking all these as gospel truth merely because they are anti-Stalinite. Stalinite history was notorious for its lack of "objectivity", and for its shameless suppression and distortion of historical facts. But the same, to a lesser extent, is often also true of Khrushchevite history. To give a small example. When I saw General Chuikov at
Stalingrad in February 1943, he declared that two members of the hierarchy had been on the Stalingrad Front almost all through the battle—Khrushchev and Malenkov. One
would look in vain in any recent book, even in Chuikov's own extremely candid story, for any mention of Malenkov. Khrushchev's role is greatly magnified in recent histories of the war and much is made of two particular instances (Kiev in 1941 and Kharkov in
1942) when disaster could, allegedly, have been averted if only Stalin had followed
Khrushchev's advice.
Khrushchevite history, like Stalinite history in the past, suffers from sins of omission. As Molotov, Malenkov and Beria were Stalin's closest associates on the State Defence
Committee (i.e. the War Cabinet, as it were), one would correctly assume that they
played a role of the utmost importance in the conduct of the war and the organisation of the war economy; but, except for a few rare references to Molotov as Foreign Commissar and to Beria's "treasonable activities", these names are not mentioned in recent accounts of the war. Similarly, the role of some generals, now in high favour, is magnified, and that of others, notably Zhukov, greatly minimised. In the official History, the fact that Zhukov had anything to do with the defence of Leningrad (which in reality he saved) is merely mentioned in a perfunctory one-line footnote. There are some other flaws in
Khrushchevite history: some crucial landmarks—such a
s the far-reaching reforms in the Red Army in the summer and autumn of 1942 after the fall of Rostov—are glossed over
completely, though General Malinovsky, whom I saw soon afterwards, attached the
greatest importance to them.
The various changes in the propaganda line, the attitude of the people to Stalin and the Party and the relations between the Party and the Red Army are other topics which
(perhaps not surprisingly) are rarely touched upon in Soviet writings on the war.
Much of the more or less official "Khrushchevite" writing also fails to render the real atmosphere of the war years. Thus, I find that not only my personal notes but also the Soviet press of the Black Summer of 1942, when the Germans were crashing ahead
towards Stalingrad and into the Caucasus, render much more accurately than any official history written today the intense anxiety and exasperation that swept the country. There were days when the tone of the press was frantic and almost hysterical with patrie-en-danger propaganda and, a little later, in its outcry against cowardice, disobedience and incompetence in the Army. (This, as we shall see, was at least partly designed to divert the dismay in the country from Stalin and the government to the Army.)
Despite these shortcomings, recent Soviet books on the war still contain an enormous amount of valuable factual material. I have used this extensively, but not uncritically, and not without a great deal of laborious cross-checking. In many cases I have had to
compare Russian statements and figures with their German counterparts.
Though my story is chiefly concerned with the war years in the Soviet Union, I thought it necessary to deal briefly, in an introductory part, with the 1939-41 period in Russia. After going through the Soviet press of the time and questioning scores of Russians on that period, I have tried to show in these chapters how the post-Munich developments—the
Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations in the spring and summer of 1939, the Soviet-German Pact, the partition of Poland, the war with Finland, the fall of France, the Battle of Britain and the rapid deterioration of Soviet-Nazi relations after Molotov's Berlin visit at the end of 1940 were presented to the Soviet people in their press, and also what a very large number of Soviet people privately felt about it all. I think readers will find some
Russia at war Page 2
