Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  continued to be distressingly bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I wrote at the time:

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

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

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

  [Ibid., p. 111.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  It brought the house down.

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

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

  invaded at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Izvestia immediately protested:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter VI CLOSE-UP TWO: AUTUMN JOURNEY TO THE

  SMOLENSK FRONT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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