Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  [It was later, but only later, when the danger was over, that Simonov was rather sharply criticised in retrospect for having made his characters look such "amateur partisans", guided no doubt by the finest patriotic motives, but still lacking all the organisational precision of the Communist Party. Their resistance was marked, as it were, by

  partisanshchina in the bad sense, i.e. a spontaneous act of self-sacrifice, without proper organisation behind it. This criticism was very similar to that which, in 1948, condemned Fadeyev's famous novel, The Young Guard, published two years before. Here also the young heroes of a Resistance group in the mining town of Krasnodon were charged, in

  retrospect, with partisanshchina. Worse still, Fadeyev, the official criticism said, had failed to point out that "in reality" all the Resistance Movement in the occupied territories had been directed by the Party, i.e. more or less directly from Moscow and by its

  representatives in German-occupied areas. Fadeyev was made to rewrite the novel.]

  Another writer of considerable importance as a morale-builder was Alexei Surkov, the

  "soldier's poet", as distinct from Simonov, more the "officer's poet", besides many others like Semyon Kirsanov, Dolmatovsky, etc. Surkov's poem I Hate was published in Red Star of August 12 and concluded with the Unes:

  My heart is as hard as stone,

  My grievances and memories are countless,

  With these hands of mine

  I have lifted the corpses of little children...

  I hate them deeply

  For those hours of sleepless gloom.

  I hate them because in one year

  My temples have grown white.

  My house has been defiled by the Prussians,

  Their drunken laughter dims my reason.

  And with these hands of mine

  I want to strangle every one of them.

  And here was Ehrenburg at the height of the Russian retreat in the Northern Caucasus, and with the Germans breaking through to Stalingrad:

  . . . . One can bear anything: the plague, and hunger and death. But one cannot bear the Germans. One cannot bear these fish-eyed oafs contemptuously snorting at

  everything Russian ... We cannot live as long as these grey-green slugs are alive.

  Today there are no books; today there are no stars in the sky; today there is only one thought: Kill the Germans. Kill them all and dig them into the earth. Then we can go to sleep. Then we can think again of life, and books, and girls, and happiness.

  ... Let us not rely on rivers and mountains. We can only rely on ourselves.

  Thermopylae did no stop them. Nor did the Sea of Crete. Men stopped them, not in

  the mountains, but in the suburban allotments of Moscow. We shall kill them all.

  But we must do it quickly; or they will desecrate the whole of Russia and torture to death millions more people.

  [ Red Star, August 13, 1942.]

  And on another day he wrote:

  We are remembering everything. Now we know. The Germans are not human. Now

  the word "German" has become the most terrible swear-word. Let us not speak. Let us not be indignant. Let us kill. If you do not kill the German, the German will kill you. He will carry away your family, and torture them in his damned Germany... If you have killed one German, kill another. There is nothing jollier than German

  corpses.

  These two propaganda themes were to continue, both before and after the fall of Rostov.

  But after its fall, a new note was also sounded—partly in support of the organisational changes being introduced into the Red Army. Self-pity and hatred of the Germans were no longer enough. Partly no doubt to explain to an acutely anxious country the disasters that had befallen the Red Army since May, the new line now taken was that the Army

  itself was largely to blame for what was happening—and not the Government—or Stalin.

  In retrospect the violent criticisms of the Red Army that were made at this time seem unfair. They ignored the fact that in the summer of 1942 the Russians were still seriously short of heavy equipment, and that along most of the front in the south the Germans had a great superiority in tanks and, especially, in aircraft.

  After the fall of Rostov there was a ruthless tightening up of discipline in the army—

  ruthless to the point of summary executions, all down the scale, for disobeying orders or displaying cowardice. Then too there was a propaganda drive in which the soldier's and the officer's personal honour and loyalty to his regiment were constantly invoked. One over-enthusiastic propagandist pointed out that even when a regiment received orders to retreat, it was still a blot on the regiment's reputation. More important still, it was impressed upon the soldiers that the country was disgruntled and disappointed in its own army. Political commissars were called upon to circulate among the troops plaintive and contemptuous letters received from soldiers' relatives.

  Finally the post-Rostov changes marked the beginning of a rise in the status of officers in the Red Army. There was for instance the creation of new military decorations for officers only: the Orders of Suvorov, Kutuzov and Alexander Nevsky—significantly named after the "Great Ancestors".

  [There had already been an Alexander Nevsky Order under Nicholas II who had

  conferred it in 1912 on Poincaré, then French Prime Minister. Suvorov was Catherine II's most famous general, and Kutuzov was the victor of Napoleon in 1812.]

  This was part of the drive, which was to take on spectacular proportions soon afterwards, to create something like a new officer caste which would be thoroughly competent and, at the same time, smart and decorative. The "old warhorse", slovenly in his attire and easygoing in his soldiering, was more and more discredited in the post-Rostov

  propaganda drive. Before long, the dual command of officer-and-commissar was to be

  scrapped once again in favour of the officer's "sole command".

  It was not until the height of the Stalingrad battle that epaulettes and a lot of gold braid were added to officers' uniforms—epaulettes like those which angry soldiers had torn off their officers' shoulders back in 1917. Out of the fire and smoke of Stalingrad the gold-braided officers emerged; in this gold braid the fires of Stalingrad were reflected, as it were. It was that which made those gold-braided epaulettes so popular and acceptable.

  [Much of this gold braid was imported from England, and the Russian request for vast quantities of it at first struck the British (as an Embassy official told me at the time) as

  "absurdly frivolous". They did not grasp the full significance of these exports until later.]

  Their introduction was like a collective reward to the whole officer class of the Soviet Union. The gold braid also emphasized the professionalism of the Red Army. It was no longer a revolutionary army of sans-culottes; the time was drawing close when the Red Army would have its word to say as the greatest national army in Europe; it was only right that its officers should be as smartly dressed as the British and American officers—

  not to mention the German officers. It was psychologically very sound that the gold braid should have made its appearance during Stalingrad, and not before; fine uniforms would have looked all wrong in retreat. Nevertheless, the process of smartening up the Soviet officer, both inwardly and outwardly, was begun in the "psychological operation" that followed the Rostov disaster.

  Since the Russian people had no sources of information except the Soviet radio and the press, the news and propaganda that these produced were, of course, of the utmost

  importance. Everybody, especially during those anxious days, waited frantically for the nightly communiqué, and most people had learned to read between the lines, and to

  decipher the adjectives. Propaganda articles were read with enormous interest by tens of millions of people. Ehrenburg, Sholo-khov and Alexei Tolstoy (probably in this order) were immensely popular, as we have seen. So were some of the war correspondents'

  articles which, without necessarily
telling all the truth, were known to tell at least some of the truth. Russia is probably also the only country where poetry is read by millions of people, and during the war, poets like Simonov and Surkov were read by everybody.

  It is therefore interesting to see how the press handled the grim situation both before and after Rostov.

  During the first week of July, the emphasis was on the heroic struggle of the men and women of Sebastopol which had just ended. Then, with the German offensive developing all over the south, the emphasis was, more and more, on "Holy Russia" and on hatred of the enemy. "Hatred of the Enemy" was the title of the Pravda editorial of July 11. The tone was still appealing, rather than threatening, as it was to become after Rostov: Our country is living through serious days. The Nazi dogs are frantically trying to break through to the vital centres of our country...The wide steppes of the Don are spreading before their greedy eyes. Dear comrades at the Front! Your country

  believes in you. It knows that the same blood flows in your veins as in those of the heroes of Sebastopol... May holy hatred become our chief, our only feeling. This

  hatred combines a burning love of your country, anxiety for your family and

  children, and an unshakable will for victory... We have every chance to win. The

  enemy is in a hurry; he wants to achieve results which would forestall the Second Front. But he will not escape this danger. The stubbornness of the Soviet people has destroyed more than one enemy plan before now...

  Here was a warning not to expect too much from the Allies, and to depend on Russia's own will to save herself. A higher pitch of emotional patriotism, combined with the

  hatred motif, was reached by Simonov's poem, "Kill Him!" published in Pravda the day Voroshilovgrad fell—

  If your home is dear to you where your Russian mother nursed you;

  If your mother is dear to you, and you cannot bear the thought of the German

  slapping her wrinkled face;

  If you do not want the German to tear down and trample on your father's picture,

  with the Crosses he earned in the last war;

  If you do not want your old teacher to be hanged outside the old school-house;

  If you do not want her, whom for so long you did not dare even kiss,

  to be stretched out naked on the floor, so that amid hatred, cries and tears, three German curs should take what belongs to your manly love;

  If you don't want to give away all that which you call your Country,

  Then kill a German, kill a German every time you see one...

  And so on, and so on.

  The young Communists' paper, Komsomolskay a Pravda tended rather more than Pravda to invoke the memory of Lenin, as well as memories of the Civil War. On the whole, it went in for "pep talks" rather than lamentations of the Ehrenburg variety. On July 24, foreshadowing, as it were, the more determined tone of the post-Rostov period, it recalled the heroic battles of the Civil War "under the banners of Stalin and Kirov, Voroshilov and Ordjonikidze"—

  Yes, we remember how Stalin saved the south in incomparably more difficult

  conditions than the present ones. "We had no line of retreat left," Voroshilov later related, "but comrade Stalin did not worry about that. His one thought was to smash the enemy, to win at any price..." So it was at Tsaritsyn in the autumn of 1918. So it will be again now. Our army is convinced of it. Our entire people are convinced of it... So let us close our ranks, young friends, more vigorously, and smash the hated invaders...

  [ It is curious that the paper should have then prophesied that the Germans would be stopped at Stalingrad (the former Tsaritsyn).]

  The first press reactions to the fall of Rostov were still fairly mild, and the Pravda editorial of July 28 tended to blame the absence of the Second Front for what had

  happened, enumerating the nine infantry and two armoured divisions that had arrived

  "from France and Holland " in the last few weeks. But something clearly happened on July 29 at the highest Government and Party level; for, on July 30, (the day of Stalin's

  "Not a step back" order) Pravda set a new tone altogether:

  Iron discipline and a steady nerve are the conditions of our victory. "Soviet soldiers!

  Not a step back!"—Such is the call of your country. .. Our Soviet country is large and rich, but there is nothing worse than to imagine that you can, without making a maximum effort, yield even an inch of ground, or abandon this or that town without fighting to the last drop of blood. The enemy is not as strong as some terrified panic-mongers imagine.

  What followed was even stronger meat:

  Every soldier must be ready to die the death of a hero rather than neglect his duty to his country.

  Four times in the editorial the phrase "iron discipline" was used.

  During the Civil War Lenin used to say: "He who does not help the Red Army

  wholeheartedly, and does not observe its order and iron discipline is a traitor"...

  And at the 8th Congress of the Party, Stalin said: "Either we shall have a strictly disciplined army, or we shall perish." Today the officer's order is an iron law.

  Red Star that day was even more explicit. It gave the same quotation from Lenin with this addition from the same speech: "He who does not observe order and discipline is a traitor, and must be mercilessly destroyed."

  Now is not the time when a coward or traitor can rely on mercy. Every officer and political worker can, with the powers given him by the State, see to it that the very idea of retreating without orders becomes impossible... Not a step back: such is the country's order, the order of our leader and general, Comrade Stalin.

  The "power" given to the officer and commissar mentioned here was nothing less than the right to shoot or to order the summary execution of traitors or cowards.

  On August 1 Red Star added a macabre (and so far unpublicised) detail to the familiar story of the 28 Panfilov men who had died in the battle of Moscow, fighting against

  German tanks to the last man:

  They dealt with one contemptible coward. Without any preliminary discussion all

  the Panfilov men fired at the traitor; that sacred volley symbolized their

  determination not to retreat another step, and to fight to the bitter end.

  It also recalled Shchors, the Civil War hero, one of whose rules was: "A soldier who has left the battlefield without officer's orders is shot like a traitor."

  There is good reason to believe that, on the strength of these new "iron discipline" rules about "traitors" and "cowards", certain commissars in the Red Army went too far during the week that followed. Nothing else would explain the extraordinary editorial of Red Star on August 9, which said that one must, after all, discriminate between incorrigible cowards and men who had momentarily lost their nerve:

  The War Commissar (says the Statute of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet) is the representative of the Party and the Government in the Red Army and, together with the officer, he bears full responsibility for the performance of military tasks and...

  for the determination to fight to the last drop of blood... If you see that you have before you an obvious enemy or defeatist, a coward or panic-monger... then it is no use wasting any propaganda or persuasion on him. You must deal with a traitor

  with an iron hand. But sometimes you come across people who need your temporary

  support; after that they will firmly take themselves in hand...

  This was, clearly, a warning to trigger-happy commissars ready to kill off all "cowards".

  The second part of the same editorial already foreshadowed the coming abolition of the commissars in their present rôle:

  It is a great mistake to imagine, as some comrades do, that in battle the political commissar must act in precisely the same way as the officer, on the ground that, in the midst of a battle, there is no time to argue; that the only thing to do is to give orders, and to punish if these orders are not obeyed. Naturally, every soldier bears th
e gravest responsibility for the non-fulfilment of his superior's orders on the battlefield. But the commissar's task is, first and foremost, to eliminate the possibility

  of such things happening. And his chief weapon is political agitation, the Bolshevik

  persuasion of men. [Emphasis added.]

  Thus this truly historical article in the Red Army's paper not only sounded the alarm over the excessively ruthless and perhaps irresponsible application of the new "iron discipline"

  rules, but also brought to the surface the chronic conflict that had been brewing for a long time between the officer and the commissar. In applying the new rules, the commissars (generally harder and more rigid people than the officers) had apparently gone to

  extremes which the officers in many cases resented. Red Star clearly suggested now that the meting out of punishment was not the commissar's primary job, and that in fact, it wasn't his job at all, but the officer's; the commissar's primary job was "agitation and Bolshevik persuasion". This was a very clear indication that the two functions would soon be sharply divided. After this Red Star protest against the indiscriminate shooting of

  "cowards" the ferocious articles in the press stopped almost completely.

  Another theme that kept on recurring in Soviet propaganda was "Don't ever surrender.

  Captivity in Germany is worse than death." Pravda of August 13, quoted with appropriate comments, numerous letters from Germany, including one from a German

  woman called Gertrude Renn, and dated February 2,1941:

  It is very cold, nearly as cold as in Russia. A lot of potatoes this winter got frozen.

  These are given to the Russians who devour them raw. At Fallingbostell 200 or 300

  Russians die every week, from hunger or cold. After all, they don't deserve anything else.

  Whether genuine or not, this letter certainly sounds perfectly plausible in the light of what one learned then or later about Russian war-prisoners in Germany. For all that, especially in 1942, a black mark was almost automatically placed against the name of any Russian soldier who had fallen into German hands, while Russians who escaped from