Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  or not in the long run, by the middle of 1944 they certainly created a somewhat frivolous illusion of "back to normal" and post-war prosperity. And that at a time when a very, very hard war was still being fought.

  There were other signs of frivolity and escapism. The famous chansonnier and diseur Alexander Vertinsky, after spending more than twenty years as an idol of the Russian émigrés in Paris, New York and, finally, Shanghai, turned up in Moscow. His recitals of

  "decadent" songs drew immense crowds, including hundreds of soldiers and officers.

  Although he was never reviewed or advertised in the press, posters announcing Vertinsky recitals were stuck up all over Moscow, and the story went that he was the protégé of high-up NKVD officials who loved him after years of confiscating thousands of his

  gramophone records which travellers had tried to smuggle into Russia! Another theory was that he had been a Soviet spy while posing as an émigré. The fact remains that his songs, with their quaint exoticism, were thoroughly escapist and wildly popular in the Moscow of 1944.

  Both songs and films were tending to become escapist. The most popular song hits in

  1944 were two songs by Nikita Boguslavsky from a film called The Two Pals— The Dark Night and Kostya, the Odessa Mariner already referred to; both were later to be denounced as examples either of escapism, or of "tavern melancholy"— kabatskaya melankholiya.

  The Russian people in 1944 liked to think that life would soon be easier, and that Russia could "relax" after the war. The "lasting alliance" with Britain and the USA had much to do with it. In the middle of 1944 Konstantin Simonov, with his genius for scenting the mood in the country, produced a play called So It Will Be, in which officers home on leave were seen preparing to settle down to a pleasant, easy life in a nice Moscow flat, where even that proverbial bully, the upravdom, the manager of the block of flats, was a personification of kindness and efficiency. "The wounds of war, however deep, will soon heal," one of the officers said. And another, after something of a crise de conscience, decided that his wife and child, who had been missing for years in German-occupied

  territory, must be considered as finally lost, and that he might as well start life again with a professor's sweet young daughter. It was the very antithesis of the Wait for Me mood of Simonov's 1941-2 poetry. In 1944 the cinemas were showing American films, among

  them a particularly inane Deanna Durbin film, for which thousands queued for hours.

  Some Party members were full of easygoing ideas. One very tough Party member

  remarked to me in 1944: "We also have our softies in the Party—people who think of the future of Anglo-Soviet and American-Soviet relations in terms of the Britansky Soyuznik

  [ The British Ministry of Information weekly which sold about 50,000 copies in those days.] with its sickly rubbish about '400 Years of Anglo-Russian Friendship'. It is high time they read some Lenin."

  Even some notoriously tough party members were not quite immune against this relaxed atmosphere. Thus, in the summer of 1944, with the Second Front in full swing, the writer Vsevolod Vyshnevsky remarked at a VOKS [ Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.] party (maybe he would not have made the same remarks anywhere else):

  When the war is over, life in Russia will become very pleasant. A great literature will be produced as a result of our war experiences. There will be much coming and going, with a lot of contacts with the West. Everybody will be allowed to read

  anything he likes. There will be exchanges of students, and foreign travel will be made easy.

  It was even widely suggested that light reading would be encouraged. Thus, there was a scheme for starting a library of thrillers and detective stories in Russian—mostly

  translated from English— under the general editorship of Sergei Eisenstein, that great lover of Western thrillers.

  The first serious warning against these "Western" and "bourgeois" tendencies came from a certain Solodovnikov, writing in the official Party magazine Bolshevik, in October 1944:

  Recently views have been expressed in various quarters to the effect that, after the war, art and literature will follow the "easy road", and will, in the first place, be calculated to entertain. The supporters of this view talk of the development of light comedy and other thoughtless forms of entertainment, and object to big and serious subjects being included in art and literature. Such views receive support from part of our audiences. Such tendencies must be fought. They are reactionary, and in flat contradiction with the Lenin-Stalin view that art is a powerful weapon of agitation and education among the masses.

  He not only fumed against "frivolous" art, but also against "refined" art which was calculated only for "the bloated upper ten thousand".

  On the whole, however, he spoke highly of Soviet literary and artistic production during the war—and was particularly enthusiastic about the music produced by Shostakovich,

  Prokofiev, Miaskovsky, Khachaturian and Shebalin.

  [All these were to be fiercely denounced as "formalists" in 1948.

  (see the author's Musical Uproar in Moscow, London, 1949).]

  He also warned Russian artists against aping "Western, especially German"[This was a polite way of avoiding any mention of Britain and the

  USA.] models and deplored the wartime tendency to wax enthusiastic over ikons and

  religious music, merely on the ground that they formed part of the Russian "national heritage", a marked departure from the 1941-2 line.

  The rapid succession of events in 1944 raised a number of other new problems in the eyes of the Party. Deep below the surface, there was a fundamental rivalry between the Party and the Army. During the first three years of the war, the Party was usually only too glad to identify itself with the Army. But with the end of the war in sight, it decided that it was time to regain something of its former identity. During the first two years of the war, the emphasis in nearly all official propaganda had been on "Holy Russia", and it now seemed important to revive a greater Soviet-consciousness. The Party also had to take account of the fact that many people in the occupied areas had been demoralised by Nazi

  propaganda and by the re-introduction of private enterprise (only small-scale, but still private enterprise), that the Red Army was now fighting in "bourgeois" countries, which created a number of new psychological problems.

  For the first two or three years of the war (whatever was said later to the contrary) there had been a tendency for the Party to get lost in the crowd. Especially in the Army, the Party had become diluted by the easy admission of new members, whose numbers had

  grown between 1941 and 1944 from about two to six million.

  In 1944 there came a change. Pravda of June 24, 1944 still placed the Communist's practical wartime value above all other qualities.

  Personal qualities are, at the present time, tested, above all, by the party candidate's contribution to the struggle with the enemy. Every candidate or member of the

  Party must be in the front rank of those carrying out the required military,

  economic or political tasks. The Communist at the front must be brave and

  spontaneously willing to do the most dangerous jobs. That is why the Communist's

  authority is so high in the Red Army, and why hundreds of thousands of soldiers,

  before going into battle, now apply for membership.

  But, by September 1944, bravery was no longer enough. As Red Star wrote on September 27:

  The ideological training of members is now more necessary than ever. The Party

  organisations in the Army have done much in this respect—but not enough. The

  Army's Party Organisations largely consist of young party members and are being

  replenished by more young men who have been tested as brave soldiers but who,

  politically, are insufficiently experienced. More attention must be given to the ideological upbringing of candidates and members.

  Secondly... the front
now runs through territory outside our borders. To find his way

  about in these new conditions, a Communist needs a sound ideological equipment

  more than ever (emphasis added).

  As the war was moving to its close the admission of new Party members was tightened

  up. "What we need now is not quantity but quality," Red Star wrote on November 1, thus completely abandoning its earlier position. It now recalled that the rules of admission to the Party had been relaxed early in the war, and now argued that far too many people, including soldiers who had never been in any battle at all, had been admitted to the Party.

  [ It recalled the two decrees of August and December 1941, the latter issued at the height of the Battle of Moscow. Under this any officer or soldier "who has distinguished himself in battle" could be admitted to the Party after a three months' candidate stage.]

  The Party's representatives within the Army had often "misused the authority given them"

  and had admitted far too many people into the Party. Now, "the chief object of the Army's party organisations must be the ideological-political education of communists and their absorption into Party work." The same line was taken by Bolshevik in October 1944

  which declared: "In the complex international situation facing the Soviet Union, the Party member needs a compass, and there is no better one than Marxist-Leninism." It

  recommended the intensive study of the Stalinist Short History of the Communist Party.

  The same Bolshevik article then referred to two recent Central Committee decrees which concerned newly liberated areas. It was remarkably outspoken in commenting on the

  Central Committee's Decree on Belorussia:

  Ideological and political education is of exceptional importance in the newly-

  liberated areas... The enemy has spread the poison of racialist theories in these areas, inciting Ukrainians against Russians, Belorussians against Lithuanians,

  Estonians against Russians, etc... The Nazi invaders have also inflamed private-

  property instincts among these peoples. They liquidated the kolkhozes, distributed the land among German colonists, destroyed the intelligentsia, encouraged trading and profiteering, and played off workers and peasants against each other...

  In short, political education in these newly-liberated areas must be intensified. And Bolshevik also emphasised a number of awkward facts seldom, if ever, mentioned in the daily press at the time:

  White emigrants, Ukrainian nationalists, Bandera, Bulba and Melni-kov bands are

  being extensively used by the Germans in the Ukraine... These contemptible

  flunkeys of Hitler placed their nationalist slogans at the service of German

  imperialism, and also actively participated in the massacres organised by the

  Germans.

  [The massacres obviously refer to the massacres of Jews, though these are, as usual, not specifically mentioned.]

  The Party organisations must intensify their work, especially in the rural areas of the Ukraine. They must remember that until this German-Ukrainian nationalism is

  completely weeded out, the restoration of the Ukrainian economy and national

  culture is impossible.

  But what worried the Party above all, perhaps, was the widespread hope, both in the

  liberated territories, and inside the Army, with its millions of peasant conscripts, that the kolkhoz system would be "changed".

  *

  If the Germans, despite the general beastliness of their occupation régime, had succeeded, on the Russians' own admission, in creating anti-Soviet moods in both Belorussia and the Ukraine, particularly among private-enterprise enthusiasts, there was, obviously, also a parallel danger of Russian soldiers becoming infected by their contact with the bourgeois way of life in countries like Rumania, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

  The problem was not, of course, entirely new. In 1939 the Red Army had occupied

  eastern Poland and, in 1940, the Baltic States. There had then been a rush by Soviet citizens, on one pretext or another, to Lwow and Tallinn and Riga to buy up trunkfuls of clothes, and shoes and handbags while stocks lasted. But that had been relatively small stuff. Now hundreds of thousands, or millions of Russian soldiers were seeing countries where housing conditions were often better than in Russia, where farms were more

  prosperous-looking, and where there was still something to be bought in the shops.

  Rumania in 1944 was not overflowing with consumer goods, but there was much more to

  be found in the Bucharest department stores than in the completely bare shops in the Soviet Union. About that time I remember Konstantin Simonov wearing in Moscow a

  wonderfully loud tweed suit acquired in Bucharest. And, until further notice, Rumania was going to remain a "bourgeois country"; Moscow had assured the Western allies that no changes in Rumania's "social structure" were contemplated. There was all the more reason to debunk the Western way of life, as seen in Rumania, and to warn Russians

  against being taken in by the "tinsel" of Bucharest.

  Typical of this campaign was a series of articles by Leonid Sobolev in Pravda in September 1944:

  Fantastic Transniestria has again become the Soviet province of Odessa. The

  unfortunate Rumanian people have had to pay millions (sic) of lives for that spectacle... Our Soviet people were united, and that is why we have won. Here in

  Rumania it is different: on the one hand there are the Rumanian people, on the

  other, the political adventurers... What patriots there were in Rumania were lost in a bewildered, befuddled crowd... Rumanian intellectuals tell me that in 1939 all

  resistance to Hitler would have been useless... One would think that one man's

  resistance to one tank would also be useless— yet such things happened at

  Sebastopol.

  After a satirical and contemptuous description of Bucharest, with "its tinsel, vulgarity and commercialism", its "sickening cringing to the Red Army", and its "well-dressed people sitting at café tables", and "traders and speculators, sitting on the high seats of horse-carriages, and looking like old posters of burzhuis", Sobolev then said that "this tinsel of Bucharest" was not typical of Rumania. At Constanza there were 80,000 people, but not a single theatre, no concert hall, no local newspaper and only two secondary and two

  elementary schools.

  "We shall pass through many foreign countries yet. Soldiers! your eyes will often be dazzled; but do not be deceived by these outward signs of their so-called civilisation!

  Remember, real culture is that which you carry with you... When the war is over,

  foreign nations will resume their own lives, but there will always remain in their hearts the memory of your great human culture, of the soul of the Soviet people—of that people who shed their blood so that millions might be free and happy."

  He then went on to say that the Rumanian countryside was poor, and that all the loot went to Bucharest:

  Quietly, with an ironical smile, our soldiers march along these sumptuous streets...

  The Rumanians had expected "Russian beasts" to enter the city. They were expecting murder and robbery and rape. Nothing like that happened... A few

  bandits in Russian uniform who were caught turned out to be Rumanian deserters...

  Soviet comments on the Slav countries—Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia—were

  somewhat different, even though these, too, had their "well-dressed people sitting at café tables"—especially Czechoslovakia. For one thing, there was more good feeling for the Russians there than there was in Rumania, let alone Hungary.

  Also, whatever official writers said, the Russian soldiers were far from always being gallant knights in shining armour. If, in the southern and central-European Slav countries, their conduct was reasonably good (though far from perfect—the Yugoslavs had a great deal to say later on that score), it was worse in Rumania and worse still in Hungary and Austr
ia. Nor was it by any means exemplary in Poland. Sometimes this conduct varied

  from army to army. Malinovsky's troops had a worse reputation than others, and the

  Kazakhs and other Asiatics sometimes emulated their forebears, the warriors of Genghis Khan, especially in Germany, where anything from wrist-watches to young boys attracted their covetous attention.

  It is not denied by the Russians themselves that some Russian troops ran wild, especially in Germany; but here there were, of course, some weighty extenuating circumstances.

  PART EIGHT Victory—And the Seeds of the

  Cold War

  Chapter I INTO GERMANY

  The final Russian offensive against Germany, which was not to stop until her capitulation nearly four months later, began on January 12. On the following day the Russians

  published this communiqué:

  The troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front under Marshal Konev (Chief of Staff,

  General Sokolovsky) took the offensive, on January 12 in the area west of

  Sandomierz and, despite bad weather, which made air support impossible, broke

  through the enemy's strong defences along a twenty-five mile front. Our artillery barrage was decisive. In two days the troops advanced twenty-five miles and the

  width of the breakthrough is now forty miles. 350 localities have been occupied.

  The statement that the Russian offensive was started "without air support" had a diplomatic story behind it.

  In 1948 the Russian Foreign Ministry published the letters exchanged between Churchill and Stalin before and during this January offensive.

  After the Germans had launched their Ardennes Offensive, which had placed the Anglo-

  American troops in a "difficult position" (the Russian publication said), and Britain was threatened with "a second Dunkirk", Churchill sent the following message to Stalin on January 6, 1945:

  The battle in the west is very heavy and, at any time, large decisions may be called for from the Supreme Command. You know yourself... how very anxious the

  position is when a very broad front has to be defended after temporary loss of the initiative. It is General Eisenhower's great desire and need to know in outline what you plan to do... [Can we] count on a major Russian offensive on the Vistula front, or elsewhere, during January?... I regard the matter as urgent