Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  know that a fearfully hard winter is ahead of them...

  Beaverbrook has been very much in the centre of things, and has pretty well

  eclipsed everybody, including Harriman ... and Gripps. This may be unfair, for

  Cripps and the Military Mission certainly did a lot to prepare the Conference...

  Even so, Beaverbrook's dynamics have unquestionably contributed to the success of the Conference; and his nightly talks with Stalin seem to have been decisive in

  smoothing away the rough edges... Beaverbrook has fully realised that the Russians are the only people in the world today who are seriously weakening Germany, and

  that it is in Britain's interest to do without certain things and to give them to Russia... He and Eden are said to be the most whole-hearted pro-Russians in the

  Cabinet now. At the little press conference yesterday he was bursting with

  exuberance. Slapping his knees he was saying that the Russians were pleased with

  Beaverbrook, and the Americans were pleased with Beaverbrook— "Now, aren't

  they, Averell?" to which Harriman replied: "Sure, you bet." ... Beaverbrook is praising Stalin up to the skies... I imagine he has been genuinely impressed by

  Stalin's practical mind, his organising ability, and his qualities as a national leader...

  At the Kremlin banquet last night, cold and sceptical Molotov made an unusually

  warm speech.. .

  [Alexander Werth, Moscow "41 (London, 1942), pp. 226-7. Beaverbrook's attitude to Russia had manifested itself much earlier as is borne out by the Harry Hopkins Papers on Churchill's famous "pro-Russian" broadcast of June 22: "He conferred that day principally with Beaverbrook and Sir Stafford Cripps... Although one would hardly have expected it of him, Beaverbrook was a vehement supporter of immoderate and unstinted aid to the Soviet Union and was subsequently an ardent, persistent and sometimes (to Churchill) embarrassing proponent of the Second Front. At the urging of these two men, as well as his own inclination, Churchill went on the air that Sunday with one of his most powerful speeches." (Sherwood, op. cit., p. 305.)]

  The impression Beaverbrook gave of the Moscow visit not only to the correspondents on the spot, but also to Churchill in his dispatch of October 4—"the effect of this agreement has been an immense strengthening of the morale of Moscow"—and the comments made by the Russians seem wholly at variance with the account given after the war by

  Churchill:

  Their reception was bleak and discussions not at all friendly. It might almost have been thought that the plight in which the Soviets now found themselves was our fault. (They) gave no information of any kind. They did not even inform them of the basis on which Russian needs of our precious war materials had been estimated. The Mission was given no formal entertainment until almost the last night... It might almost have been that it was we who had come to ask favours.

  [Churchill, op. cit., p. 416.]

  There is no doubt that at the time the Russians were extremely pleased with the political significance of the conference and the propaganda capital they could make of it and that they were anxiously looking forward to the long term prospect of American help on a

  large scale. On the other hand the British deliveries that were immediately available were, of course, a mere drop in the bucket.

  [Churchill's message to Stalin of October 6, promised that the convoy, due to arrive at Archangel on October 12, would carry twenty heavy tanks and 193 fighter planes, the

  convoy due on October 29 140 heavy tanks, 100 fighter planes (Hurricanes), 200 Bren

  carriers, 200 anti-tank rifles and 50 two-pounder guns]

  Even if "the reception was bleak"—although Beaverbrook then gave the very opposite impression—it is more than probable that the news from the front had something to do with it. While Beaverbrook and Harriman were still in Moscow, the great German

  offensive against Moscow had started, first in the Briansk and three days later in the Viazma sector. Whatever the future value of the Economic Conference was to be, the

  Battle of Moscow had to be won by the Russians alone with what was left of their

  operational equipment.

  While Soviet diplomatic activity was chiefly concerned with the establishment of closer relations with Britain and the USA, the German invasion had created a number of

  additional diplomatic problems. Finland, Hungary, Rumania and Italy were now in a state of war with the Soviet Union, and Churchill was reluctant to declare war on Hungary, Rumania and especially on Finland; indeed, the problem of Finland was to lead to some considerable Anglo-Soviet friction.

  Soviet relations with Vichy France were broken off, and, barely a week after the German invasion, Pétain authorised the formation of a French Anti-Bolshevik Legion; a number of Swedish volunteers also joined the Finnish Army, while a Blue Brigade was formed in Spain for operations in Russia, particularly at Leningrad. Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan hastened to assure Russia of their neutrality, though in the case of Iran these assurances were not accepted. Later in the year the Soviet Government demanded that Afghanistan expel numerous Axis agents from its territory—a demand with which the Afghan

  Government nominally complied, except that Signor Pietro Quaroni, the Italian

  Ambassador at Kabul, continued to remain at the centre of Axis activity in Afghanistan—

  until in 1943, after the fall of Mussolini, he was appointed Italian Minister to Moscow!

  Much was made in Moscow of the German war on "Slavdom"; on August 10 and 11 the first All-Slav meeting was held. It called on all the Slav peoples to wage a holy war against Germany, and the appeal was signed by "representatives of the peoples of Russia, Belorussia, the Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria".

  Already on July 18 a mutual-aid agreement had been signed in London between Maisky,

  representing the USSR and Jan Masaryk, representing the Czechoslovak Government in

  exile. The agreement provided for an exchange of ministers and the formation of

  Czechoslovak military units under the command of a Czechoslovak officer approved by

  the Russians; these units would be under the supreme command of the USSR.

  Dorothy Thompson relates that the only person in London she met in July 1941 who

  believed the Russians would not be crushed by the Germans was President Benes.

  [Sherwood, op. cit., p. 320.]

  Russia's diplomatic relations with "independent" Slovakia had, of course, automatically lapsed, and were not mentioned.

  The question of whether and on what terms diplomatic relations with Poland were to be restored presented a much trickier problem.

  On the face of it, the Maisky-Sikorski agreement of July 30, 1941 was little different from the Soviet-Czechoslovak agreement twelve days before; in reality it touched on

  some extremely awkward matters.

  It must have been a little embarrassing for the Russians to agree to the first paragraph declaring all Soviet-German territorial agreements made in 1939 to be null and void; there was also the problem of Polish citizens in the Soviet Union, which had to be faced somehow. In order to resolve this awkward question a protocol was attached to the main agreement in which the Soviet Government granted an amnesty to "all Polish citizens now imprisoned in the Soviet Union, either as prisoners-of-war or for any other valid reasons".

  Apart from that—as in the case of the Soviet-Czechoslovak Agreement—it provided for

  an exchange of Ambassadors and for mutual aid in the common war against Nazi

  Germany.

  This agreement, which had been preceded by some acrimonious discussions on the future borders of Poland, was, in the event, to mark the beginning of another most unhappy

  phase in Polish-Russian relations. On the surface and for the moment, however, Soviet-Polish co-operation was developing normally and on August 14 a military agreement was signed in Moscow between the Soviet Supreme Command, represented
by General

  Vassilevsky and by the Polish Supreme Command, represented by General Bogusz-

  Szyszko; within its terms General Sikorski appointed General Anders Commander-in-

  Chief of the Polish armed forces on Soviet territory, and it was announced that he "has begun to form the Polish Army". General Anders had been only just released from a Soviet jail.

  On September 4, Mr Kot arrived in Moscow as the first Polish Ambassador, and in

  December General Sikorski came to Russia, and had some long—and highly awkward—

  conversations with Stalin. But this will be dealt with later.

  Apart from Poland and Czechoslovakia, relations were also restored during the first

  months of the war with Yugoslavia, Norway, Belgium and Greece. There was also an

  important exchange of notes between Maisky and de Gaulle on September 27, 1941. The

  Soviet Government recognised de Gaulle as the leader of the Free French, proposed to de Gaulle all possible aid in his struggle against Germany, and expressed its determination to fight for the "complete restoration of the independence and greatness of France". De Gaulle replied in the same vein.

  It is hardly surprising that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour should have come as a great relief to the Russians at a time when the Red Army had just launched their

  December counter-offensive on the Moscow sector of the front. It was, of course,

  possible that the flow of supplies from Britain and the United States would slow down as a result; but this consideration was outweighed by the immense fact that the USA had now entered the war and that the drive of the Japanese armed forces to the west and south had, at least for the time being, removed the threat of a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union.

  On December 16 Roosevelt wired to Stalin proposing that the Russians take part in a

  conference at Chungking, along with Chinese, British, Dutch and US representatives.

  Stalin, in his reply, dodged the issue, though he added: "I wish you success in the struggle against the aggression in the Pacific."

  [Stalin-Roosevelt Correspondence, p. 18.]

  PART THREE The Leningrad Story

  Chapter I THE DEAD OF LENINGRAD

  There were many mass tragedies in the Second World War. There was Hiroshima, where

  200,000 people were killed in a few seconds, and many thousands of others were maimed and crippled for life; there was Nagasaki, on which the second atom bomb was dropped.

  In Dresden 135,000 men, women and children were killed in two nights in February

  1945. At Stalingrad on August 23, 1942, 40,000 people were killed. Earlier in the war, there had been the London Blitz and "small stuff" like Coventry, where some 700 people were killed in one night. There were the massacres in hundreds of "Partisan" villages in Belorussia; and there were the Nazi extermination camps where millions perished in gas chambers and in other horrible ways. The list is almost endless.

  The tragedy of Leningrad, in which nearly a million people died, was, however, unlike any of the others. Here, in September 1941, nearly three million people were trapped by the Germans and condemned to starvation. And nearly one-third of them died—but not as German captives.

  [In the words of Harrison Salisbury, one of the best foreign observers of the Russian wartime scene: "This was the greatest and longest siege ever endured by a modern city, a time of trial, suffering and heroism that reached peaks of tragedy and bravery almost beyond our power to comprehend... Even in the Soviet Union the epic of Leningrad has received only modest attention, compared with that devoted to Stalingrad and the Battle of Moscow. And in the west not one person in fifty who thrilled to the courage of the Londoners in the Battle of Britain is cognisant of that of the Leningraders." (New York Times Book Review, May 10, 1962.)]

  Leningrad—the old St Petersburg—had been the capital of the Russian Empire for over

  two centuries. With its Neva embankments, its bridges, its Winter Palace and Hermitage and dozens of other palaces, with its Admiralty and St Isaac's Cathedral, and its Bronze Horseman (the famous statue of Peter the Great), its Nevsky Prospect, its Summer

  Garden and its canals, with their hump-backed granite bridges, it was—and is—one of

  the most beautiful cities in the world.

  For two centuries it had been not only Russia's capital, but its greatest cultural centre. No Russian city had so many literary associations as St Petersburg. Pushkin, Gogol,

  Dostoevsky, Innokenti Annensky, Blok and Anna Akhmatova, to mention only a few,

  would never have been what they were but for that haunting city— so dazzling in its

  grandeur, grace and harmony to Pushkin; so mysterious, so sinister, so surrealist, if one may say so, to Gogol and Dostoevsky; the Gogol of The Nose; the Dostoevsky of The Idiot and Crime and Punishment.

  St Petersburg—Petrograd at the time—was also where the two Revolutions of 1917 had

  begun. In 1918, the Soviet Government moved Russia's capital to Moscow, and for three or four years afterwards, Petrograd was almost a dying city, hungrier than most. From 1919 to 1921 more than half its population had fled, and of those who had stayed behind, many thousands died of hunger. So hunger was not new to Leningrad. However, by 1924, its revival—above all, its industrial revival—began, and, by 1941, it was a flourishing industrial and cultural centre again and the greatest educational centre in the Soviet Union, with, proportionately, a larger student population than any other city.

  Though no longer the capital of Russia, it had its own, slightly snobbish local patriotism, and tended to look down on Moscow as an upstart. It had, too, had its bad spells under the Soviet régime. Kirov had been assassinated here in December 1934, and that had

  started the Great Purges of the late thirties. Leningrad had had its share, perhaps more than its share, of the Stalin-Yezhov Purges. Characteristically, a gifted writer and poet like Olga Bergholz, who was to play so important a part as one of the principal

  "Leningrad-can-take-it" speakers on the Leningrad radio during the famine winter of 1941-2, had spent several months in prison in 1937 on some fantastic trumped-up charge.

  Other members of her family had also suffered in the Purges. And yet, Olga Bergholz's book of reminiscences, The Daytime Stars, is one of the most moving books on the fearful days of the Blockade. There is, for instance, an unforgettable description of how, faint with hunger and with only a crust of bread and one cigarette to last her a day—the other cigarette she kept for her father—she wandered for ten miles through the snowdrifts and across the ice of the Neva, almost stumbling over dead bodies, to see her father, an elderly doctor, himself nearly dead of hunger, and with patients around him dying. She is a typical Leningrad phenomenon—a woman who was ready to die for Leningrad, but

  who, at heart, hated Stalin.

  And so, in September 1941, three million people were trapped by the Germans; never had a city of that size endured what Leningrad was to endure during the winter of 1941-2.

  Chapter II THE ENEMY ADVANCES

  In Leningrad the news on June 22, 1941 of the German invasion produced a wave of

  mass meetings, and in the next two weeks an immense number of Leningraders

  volunteered for the opolcheniye formations. At the great Kirov Works alone, 15,000 men and women applied for immediate military service. Not all these applications could be accepted, since it was essential that the Kirov Works should go on producing armaments.

  The original plan, therefore, to form fifteen workers' divisions had to be abandoned, and, on July 4, it was decided to limit the opolcheniye divisions to three, until further notice.

  By July 10, the first opolcheniye division was sent to the front, followed a few days later by the second and third. They had only a few days' training, which had taken place in the main squares of Leningrad. These three opolcheniye divisions were rushed to the so-called Luga defence line, which was 175 miles long and was only sparsely defended by three
rifle divisions and the pupils of two military schools, who had also been rushed there from Leningrad. By July 14, the Germans had already succeeded in establishing a large bridgehead north of Luga, on the right bank of the Luga river; it was from there that they were to develop their subsequent offensive against Leningrad.

  The situation was extremely grim, and it seems that Voroshilov, the C. in C. of the

  Northern Armies, and Zhdanov, head of the Leningrad Party organisation, were in a truly desperate state of mind, as one may judge from the order read out to all the Red Army units of the "North-West Direction" on July 14:

  Comrades Red-Army men, officers and political workers! A direct threat of an

  enemy invasion is now suspended over Leningrad, the cradle of the Proletarian

  Revolution. While the troops of the Northern Front are bravely fighting the Nazi

  and Finnish Schützcorps hordes all the way from the Barents Sea to Tallinn and Hangö, and are defending every inch of our beloved Soviet land, the troops of the North-Western Front, often failing to repel enemy attacks, and abandoning their

  positions without even entering into combat with the enemy, are only encouraging

  by their behaviour the increasingly arrogant Germans. Certain cowards and panic-

  stricken individuals not only abandon the Front without orders, but sow panic

  among the good and brave soldiers. In some cases both officers and political

  workers not only do nothing to stop the panic, and fail to organise their units for

  combat, but increase even more, by their shameful behaviour, the panic and

  disorganisation at the Front.

  The order went on to say that anyone abandoning the Front without orders would be tried by a field tribunal which could order them to be shot, "regardless of rank and previous achievements".

  [A. V. Karasev Leningradtsy v gody blokady (The Leningraders in the Years of the Blockade) (Moscow, 1960), p. 65.]

  In the middle of July the Leningrad Party organisation decided to mobilise hundreds of thousands of men and women to build fortifications; the work was supervised by