blood at an early age. At the end of his studies, the young Soviet officer must be a model of patriotism, culture, and a high standard of military knowledge... The
curriculum will be more extensive than in an ordinary secondary school. Already at eight he will start learning a foreign language. On many routine details we are
consulting old officers who received their education in the old Cadet schools... The boys will be chosen from among the sons of soldiers and partisans, and also from
among children whose parents were killed by the Germans... The uniforms are
modelled on Red Army uniforms, with epaulettes and other markings; so that from
childhood the boys should develop a feeling of love and respect for the uniform... We
have already received many applications, for an officer considers it an honour that his
son should carry on his military traditions. (Emphasis added.)
For some weeks afterwards the press, particularly the military press, went on publishing articles by old generals, notably by Lieut-Gen. Shilovsky, giving an attractive account of their days in the old Cadet School under the old régime.
A year later, when I visited the Suvorov School at Kalinin, I found that, among the
subjects the budding little officers were taught were English, fine manners and old-time ballroom dances (the waltz, the mazurka, the pas-de-quatre, etc.). On the walls, there were large pictures of Suvorov, but also equally large ones of Stalin and of numerous Red Army generals.
All this went together with the revival of the Church in Russia, already described.
September 1943 saw the crowning of the Patriarch of Moscow, and the visit of the
Archbishop of York.
No doubt all this was partly intended for foreign consumption; it was useful to put
Churchill and Roosevelt in a good mood, and to get the New York Times to talk about a
"return to Tsarism" and even perhaps to capitalism. But it was more than that: the dissolution of the Comintern, the establishment of the Suvorov Schools, General
Krivitzky's articles, in October 1943, on "the glorious traditions of General Brusilov"
[The most successful Russian general of World War I], the election of the Patriarch, and the orgy of gold braid and new uniforms—uniforms for diplomats, uniforms for
railwaymen ("and why not," Ehrenburg later said, "for poets, with one, two or three lyres on their epaulettes? ")—all this was strangely significant of the Stalinist Great-Russian ultra-nationalism of 1943— a year that contrasted so strikingly with the année terrible only two years before, or even with one year before.
*
Not that the "Socialist" side of things was being entirely neglected: alongside with the Suvorov Schools for a new officer caste a large network of Trade Schools for metal
workers and others was to be set up in nine of the liberated areas; and there was nothing
"Tsarist" about these; and, in 1944, as we shall see, there was a return, in some respects, to "Leninist Purity" and a drive for greater "Soviet-consciousness"; but this was, somehow, less striking than the manifestations of Great-Russian ultra-nationalism of 1943.
It all had a certain bearing on Stalin's relations with Britain and America. It seems significant, for instance, that in the November 7, 1943, slogans the very mention of capitalism should have been avoided.
The first of the slogans said: "Hail the 26th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution which overthrew the power of the Imperialists in our country, and proclaimed peace among all the nations of the world!"
And the other slogans were "Long live the victory of the Anglo-Soviet-American
Coalition! " "Long live the valiant Anglo-American troops in Italy!" "Greetings to the valiant British and American airmen striking at the vital centres of Germany! ", etc., etc.; and this was when the British Ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, told me that Stalin had assured him that "in a way, he, too, believed in God."
How deep this regard for the Allies was in Party and Komsomol circles may, however, be questioned. On October 27, at a meeting celebrating the 25th anniversary of the
Komsomol—that was the time of the Foreign Ministers' Conference in Moscow, and the
"November slogans" had already been published—N. A. Mikhailov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, paid tributes to Lenin, Stalin, the Army, and the Party, but did not mention the Allies at all.
There was below the surface something of a conflict at that time between "Holy Russia"
and the "Soviet Union". Sometimes compromises were reached between the two. Thus, on the question of the new State Anthem a curious compromise was reached at the end of 1943. No new Anthem by Shostakovich or Prokofiev was approved; but the new
nationalist and Stalinist words were pinned to the old Party anthem, which became the State Anthem of the Soviet Union, while the Internationale became officially the anthem of the Party! There had been tremendous competition in the writing of the new anthem, and on January 5, 1944, it was announced that over 200 also-rans—172 poets and
seventy-six composers—had been paid "consolation prizes" of between 4,000 and 8,000
roubles each!
Meantime—i.e. between July and November 1943—the Red Army was making a
spectacular advance in the Ukraine and elsewhere.
Kharkov was captured by General Konev (Steppe Front), with the aid of General Vatutin (Voronezh Front) and General Malinovsky (South-West Front) on August 23.
The next great victory was General Tolbukhin's in the far south when, after breaking through from the Voroshilovgrad area to the Sea of Azov, his troops captured Taganrog, which the Germans had held ever since the autumn of 1941. 5,000 German prisoners
were taken.
On August 31, Rokossovsky (Central Front) captured Glukhov and penetrated deep into
the northern Ukraine.
Farther south, the Donbas was being rapidly overrun, the Germans fearing encirclement and pulling out, after wrecking factories and coalmines.
On September 8, a Stalin Order covering the whole front page of every newspaper, and addressed to Tolbukhin and Malinovsky, declared that in six days' skilful and rapid
operations, the whole of the Donbas had now been liberated.
On September 10, with the aid of a naval landing west of the city, Tolbukhin and
Malinovsky captured Mariupol on the Sea of Azov.
In the far south the last two German strongholds in the Caucasus were being mopped up.
After five days' heavy fighting the troops of General Petrov and the naval units under Vice-Admiral Vladimirsky captured Novorossisk on September 16—or rather the ruins of that important naval base. The Taman peninsula was cleared by October 7, most of the Germans escaping to the Crimea across the straits of Kerch.
On the 21st, Rokossovsky took the ancient city of Chernigov, already reduced to ruins by German mass bombings in the summer of '41; and, on the 23rd, Konev took Poltava (also almost completely destroyed by the retreating Germans); on the 29th, breaking through to the Dnieper, Konev took Kremenchug.
On the 25th, Sokolovsky (Western Front) took Smolensk.
By the end of the month, as was officially stated, the Red Army was advancing on Kiev, in the Ukraine, and on Vitebsk, Gomel and Mogilev in Belorussia.
If September was marked by a spectacular amount of territory liberated, October was
marked by something even more important— the forcing of the Dnieper. The German
hope of "holding the Dnieper line" was smashed.
The great optimism after the forcing of the Dnieper may be gauged from a poem by
Surkov printed on October 8:
... Avenging Russia is advancing;
Ukraine and Belorussia, wait and hope;
The Germans have not long left to torment you,
The evil days of your bondage are numbered,
From the high banks of the Dnieper
We see the waters of the Pruth and the Niémen.
Russo-Ukrainian Unity was the subject of many articles, and was symbolised in the
establishment of a new high decoration, the Order of Bogdan Khmelnitsky.
[ For some reason, the Khmelnitsky order was not widely awarded, and never became
popular in the army; it seemed an unnecessary rival to the Suvorov, Kutuzov and Nevsky orders which had the prestige of Stalingrad attached to them. Moreover, it caused some embarrassment when a number of Russian officers of Jewish race refused the
Khmelnitsky order on the ground that the glorious Hetman had been guilty of a
considerable number of pogroms. (Similarly several Poles refused the Suvorov Order,
Suvorov having been one of the worst oppressors of the Polish people.)]
No doubt, in earlier Soviet interpretations, the celebrated 17th century Hetman was not quite as great a man as he was now made out to be; in fact, he was described in the 1931
edition of the Soviet Encyclopaedia as a double-crosser of the worst sort, and indeed something of an agent of the Polish szlachta; but now a different view was taken: A Knight of the Order of Bogdan Khmelnitsky—that is a proud title, (wrote Red
Star). The life of Bogdan Khmelnitsky is an example of the decisive struggle for the brotherly union of the Ukrainian people and its elder brother, the Russian people.
Khmelnitsky clearly realised that the free and prosperous development of the
Ukraine was possible only in the closest union with Russia. The Soviet people who finally completed the union of all Ukrainian lands into one mighty state [Meaning the incorporation of parts of the Western Ukraine formerly ruled by Austria-Hungary and, after World War I, by Poland, Rumania and Czechoslovakia.],under the Red Banner of the Soviets, particularly value Bogdan Khmelnitsky's immortal deed.
On October 14, Malinovsky captured Zaporozhie, and, on the 23rd, Tolbukhin captured
Melitopol. The Crimea was now about to be cut off from the mainland. The actual
penetration of the Russians into the Crimea did not, however, succeed, and had to be postponed till the spring of '44. A particularly brilliant stroke was Malinovsky's surprise attack on Dniepropetrovsk, on the lower Dnieper, which was captured on October 25.
The German "Dnieper Line" was cracking from top to bottom.
Chapter XIV THE SPIRIT OF TEHERAN
It is unnecessary to go once again over the ground of the Foreign Ministers' Conference in Moscow in October 1943, or of the Teheran Conference a month later, both of which have been described in some detail by Churchill, in the Hopkins Papers, in General John Deane's Strange Alliance, and elsewhere. What we are chiefly concerned with here are the Soviet reactions to these two momentous events, which are, of course, major
landmarks in Soviet-Western relations during the war.
It may seem surprising that the war in Russia had gone on for over two years, and that it was not till the end of 1943 that these first two full-dress meetings among the Big Three leaders should have taken place. In 1941, it is true, Hopkins, Beaverbrook, Harri-man and Eden had all visited Moscow; in May 1942 Molotov had travelled to Washington and
London, and Churchill had come to Moscow on his dismal visit in August 1942, in the
course of which he had not found Stalin or the other Soviet leaders in a particularly happy or receptive mood. Stalingrad was, just then, on the eve of its grimmest ordeal, and the Germans were well inside the Caucasus.
In October 1943, the Russians were winning one victory after another, day after day. If, before Kursk—which in July 1943 had started an uninterrupted succession of Russian
victories—the Russians were worried and on edge, and were clamouring for vigorous
action in the west, which would draw some forty or fifty German divisions from the
Soviet Front—in October 1943, the Soviet Government, and indeed Soviet opinion, were taking things much more calmly. The Russians were losing thousands of men every day, but the Second Front was no longer, to them, a matter of life or death. It now began to be taken for granted that the war would be won anyway—and that the Western Allies were
quite prepared to fight the war to a victorious finish, but with a maximum loss of life to the Russians, and a minimum loss of life to themselves. This was now accepted with a kind of bitter resignation.
Even so, the Allies had their uses; they were supplying substantial quantities of lend-lease equipment to Russia; and, as Stalin said to Eden in October 1943, he did not ignore the fact that the threat of a Second Front in Northern France had, in the summer of 1943, pinned down some twenty-five German divisions in the west, beside the ten or twelve
German divisions that were tied up in Italy. For the time being Stalin was reasonably satisfied; though he had not stopped worrying about "Overlord"—the cross-Channel landing in Northern France—again perhaps being unduly delayed. It was the common
belief in Moscow (a belief fed by American indiscretions) that Churchill was still anxious to extend operations in the Mediterranean, but was continuing to surround "Overlord"
with all kinds of conditions and reservations.
This was the Number One question which, in the Russian view, needed clearing up at the Foreign Ministers' Conference that met in Moscow on October 19, 1943.
There had, as already said, been very few top-level Government contacts between the
Russians and the Anglo-Americans, and the Moscow Conference was the first Big-Three
meeting of its kind. It came at a good moment, after three months of uninterrupted
Russian victories.
That this Conference took place in Moscow, and not elsewhere, was because Stalin, too busy with his own war, would not go abroad, and would not even let Molotov go—for
instance, to Casablanca. It was not merely a technical matter; Stalin's line was that the Soviet Union was bearing the brunt of this war, and that it was for the "others" to travel to Moscow. Even if Cordell Hull was an old man and a sick man, it couldn't be helped.
For the Summit Meeting with Roosevelt and Churchill, Stalin was willing to stretch a point and go to Teheran, close to the Soviet border, but he would not go to Habanniya or Basra, let alone Cairo. It was not only that Stalin as Commander-in-Chief could not
absent himself for more than a few days; nor was it primarily a question of security; it was above all, a question of prestige: "We aren't going hat-in-hand to the West; let the West come to us." It made in the Soviet Union just the kind of impression Stalin meant it to make.
As long as the Western Allies were not doing any very serious fighting anyway, and had made it amply clear that no "real" Second Front was to be expected in the near future, and since the Red Army still seemed to have a very long way ahead of it, there was, to the Russians, no urgent need for a Big-Three Conference.
But by October 1943 the situation had changed. There was room for joint military
planning; within a few months, the Red Army might well be across the Soviet borders, and the defeat of Germany was becoming, more and moire, a tangible reality. The big
question now was how long the war was to last. Since the month before Kursk, when the Russians officially stated that the Soviet Union could not win the war single-handed, there had been a certain departure from this position.
The statement was still true, but no longer in such absolute terms.
Paradoxically, one opinion expressed to me in a moment of indiscretion at the time of the Moscow Conference by Alexander Korneichuk, who was then one of the Foreign Vice-Commissars, was: "Things are going so well on our front that it might even be better not to have the Second Front till next spring. If there were a Second Front right now, the Germans might allow Germany to be occupied by the Anglo-Americans. It would make
us look pretty silly. Better to go on bombing them for another winter; and also let their army freeze another winter in Russia; then get the Red Army right up to Germany, and then start the Second Front."
Quite obviously a man like Korneichuk was anxious that the Russians should occupy Poland before the collapse of Germany or a de facto surrender to the West.
The Moscow Conference went on for no less than twelve days, and was marked by an
extraordinary round of sumptuous lunches, ballet shows, embassy receptions and a super-banquet at the Kremlin described in lurid detail by General Deane, the head of the newly-appointed US Military Mission to the Soviet Union. There had never been anything like it in wartime Moscow, now deep in the Russian rear.
Eden had several meetings with Stalin and found him, on the whole, in good humour,
though still ironical about the Western war effort—apart from the bombing of Germany, which pleased him greatly. "Hit the svolochi hard, the harder the better!" he said, thumping the table with his fist. His chief concern was the date of "Overlord"—and in this he was glad to receive full support from the Americans. The Americans, for their part, were anxious to obtain a promise of Russian participation in the war against Japan.
Both questions were discussed at the Moscow Conference, though no clear decisions
were to be taken until Teheran.
Stalin, for his part, was satisfied with the Americans' support of "Overlord". As General Deane wrote a little later, at the time of Teheran: "[Most of] the Americans at the Conference met Stalin for the first time. They were all considerably and favourably
impressed by him, perhaps because he advocated the American point of view in our
difference with the British. Regardless of this, one could not help but recognise qualities of greatness in the man... " To which, on a technical plane, he added:
Stalin is a master of detail... and has an amazing knowledge of such matters as
characteristics of weapons, the structural features of aircraft, and Soviet methods in even minor tactics.
[ John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance (London, 1947), pp. 47 and 152.]
In a sense, the Moscow Conference was a rehearsal for Teheran; but it also achieved
some "positive" results of its own—the setting up of a European Advisory Commission, a Commission for Italy (which would include British, American, French, Greek and
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