Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Time, with its bony hand,

  Is now writing Shakespeare's twenty-fourth drama.

  No, let us sooner read Hamlet and Caesar and Lear

  Above the leaden river.

  No, let us rather accompany darling Juliet

  With singing and torches to her grave.

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

  And tremble, together with the hired murderers.

  But not this, not this, not this.

  This one we cannot bear to read.

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

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

  published in 1956:

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

  Learning his lesson as he goes along,

  The man of London winds his way to the shelter,

  Dragging his rug along the watery pavement.

  There's the cold steel key in his pocket,

  A key to rooms now turned to prickly rubble.

  We still are learning lessons at our school desk,

  But at night we dream of the coming exam.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter VII DISPLAY OF RUSSIAN MILITARY MIGHT—

  MOLOTOV'S TRAGICOMIC VISIT TO BERLIN

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

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

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

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

  [ Pravda, November 9, 1940.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Soviet Union.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  glorious Soviet constructors.

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

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

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

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

  professional conclusions.

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

  encirclement, barely ten months later.

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

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

  "during the last six or seven months".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Swedish neutrality.

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

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

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

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