Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  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 fai
rly 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 c
himney-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