Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  What rôle, if any, would now be played by the Free German Committee? "It's no longer of any consequence," Zhukov said, and smiled, thus pretty well confirming that it had never been more than a propaganda device. "And the so-called German anti-Fascists?"

  "Why 'so-called'?" Zhukov said. "There are some genuine ones, though not perhaps very many yet. For twelve years they've had Hitler propaganda pumped into them... "

  "And what happened to Hitler?"

  Zhukov suddenly became very cautious (quite unlike Sokolovsky when he had talked to

  me only a few days before). For one thing, he had Vyshinsky sitting by his side. "A mysterious business," he said, and then told for the first time the story that was going to be flashed all round the world:

  A few days before the fall of Berlin he married Eva Braun. We know this from the

  diary of one of his A.D.C.'s. But we have not discovered any corpse that could be identified as Hitler's. He may have escaped in a plane at the last moment.

  "Wouldn't you say, Marshal, that that was most unlikely?" I asked.

  Zhukov ignored the question, and went on:

  "Martin Bormann who was in Berlin almost till the very end, appears to have escaped."

  "And who was Eva Braun? " somebody asked.

  Vyshinsky grinned and chipped in: "Maybe a girl, maybe a boy."

  Zhukov (laughing): "Somebody said she was a cinema actress, but I don't know."

  Vyshinsky: "Maybe a Jewess—". (Laughter.)

  After saying that Goebbels and his whole family had been found dead, Zhukov then

  turned to other things. Now that the war in Europe (he stressed in Europe) was at an end, a large part of the Red Army would be demobilised.

  Then he talked informally about himself, recalled that he had been born in a village near Moscow in 1896, that, from the age of eleven, he had worked in a fur shop, that, in World War I he had fought first as a private, then as an N.C.O. in the Novgorod Dragoons, and had been awarded two St George's crosses and two St George's medals.

  "For personal bravery," Vyshinsky commented.

  "For capturing German officers during night reconnaissance," Zhukov explained.

  "He was good at night operations even then," Vyshinsky grinned.

  Zhukov recalled that he had been a Party member since 1919, and then talked of his

  experiences in the Far East where he routed the Japanese in the battle of Halkin Gol in 1939.

  "The Germans," he said, "are technically better-equipped than the Japanese, and they are very good soldiers—no use denying it— but, taken as a whole, the German army lacks

  the Japs' real fanaticism."

  Then Zhukov spoke of what he called his "principal activities" during the war that had just ended:

  From the very beginning of the war I was engaged on preparing the defence of

  Moscow. For a time, before the Battle of Moscow, there was also Leningrad to take care of, and then there was the Battle of Moscow itself. After that I had to organise the defence of Stalingrad and then the Stalingrad offensive. I was Deputy

  Commissar of Defence under Comrade Stalin. Then there was the Ukraine, and

  Warsaw— and you know the rest.

  "And Kursk, and Belorussia?" somebody asked.

  "Yes, I had something to do with those too," Zhukov smiled.

  Vyshinsky beamed almost obsequiously: "Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kursk,

  Warsaw, and so on, right on to Berlin—pretty wonderful!" he said.

  Zhukov added a tribute to Comrade Stalin "and his great understanding of military affairs"—but this came almost as an afterthought. There were rivalries amongst the Soviet marshals—none of whom, except himself, he had even mentioned at this press

  conference—and, moreover, the Party (and Stalin) were conscious of Zhukov's immense

  popularity in the army and in the country. Very understandably, Zhukov had a very high opinion of himself and, with a curious mixture of modesty and almost boyish boastfulness, he tended to take credit for practically all the decisive victories the Red Army had won. Stalin did not like it at all.

  That day at Wendenschloss Vyshinsky, while keeping an eye on him, treated him

  outwardly with the greatest obsequiousness and admiration; but one could vaguely feel that Zhukov did not like Vyshinsky (how could he?) and resented his supervision.

  [When Harry Hopkins saw Zhukov about the same time, he was also unable to talk to

  him without Vyshinsky always being there, and suggesting to him how to answer

  questions. (Sherwood, op. cit., p. 904).]

  When, some months later, Marshal Zhukov was recalled from Germany and appointed to

  the relatively obscure post of Commander of the Odessa Military District, all kinds of explanations were offered for his semi-disgrace. One was that he had proved himself

  much too independent of the Soviet Party bosses; another, that he had objected to the excessive dismantling of factories in the Soviet Zone, and that he also treated various Party and Trade Union delegations who had come to Berlin with great casualness,

  sometimes even refusing to see them; it was also said that he had let his troops run wild in Germany, and finally, that he was much too friendly and soft in his relations with the Western Allies, particularly with Eisenhower. In reality, there seems little doubt that Zhukov's eclipse was the most striking manifestation of all of Stalin's and the Party's determination to put the Red Army in its place. Zhukov was too popular in the country.

  After Stalin's death, Zhukov made a spectacular come-back; and although he saved

  Khrushchev in 1957 from what later came to be known as the "anti-Party Group", Khrushchev also decided, before long, that Zhukov was too strong a personality for his taste. The Marshal was accused of looking upon the Army as a distinct political force; he was also accused of immodesty and self-glorification at the expense of the other Russian generals, and of having encouraged in the Army his own "personality cult". He was pensioned off at the end of 1957; his great rival, Marshal Konev wrote a disobliging article on him in Pravda, and the immense rôle he had played in saving Leningrad and Moscow and in winning so many other victories was deliberately played down in all

  subsequent accounts of the war published in Russia.

  Chapter IV THE THREE MONTHS' PEACE

  The Mood after VE-Day

  Although it was generally known that a large number of soldiers were being moved to the Far East during those summer months, very little thought was given to Japan by the

  Russian people generally. As far as they were concerned, the war—the real war— was over with the collapse of Hitler's Germany. The thought that there might yet be another war to fight against Japan was hateful to most; Russia had lost quite enough men as it was.

  It is not easy to describe the general mood in the country during that summer of 1945. It was composed of many different things. First of all, perhaps, a feeling of overwhelming relief that the war was over; but this went together with a feeling of immense national pride and a sense of enormous achievement—and every soldier, and nearly every civilian, too, felt that he had done his bit. This feeling of spontaneous joy, pride and relief found perhaps its fullest expression on that unforgettable VE-Day of May 9 in Moscow.

  The Army was enormously popular—too popular, indeed, for Stalin's and the Party's

  taste, though, for a short time after VE-Day, Stalin was determined to cash in on the Army's popularity and, in June, went so far as to assume the title of Generalissimo.

  Shortly before, on May 24, he held a great reception at the Kremlin in honour of

  numerous Soviet marshals, generals and other high-ranking officers, and it was then that he made that strange speech in which he singled out for special praise the Russian people,

  "the most remarkable of all the nations of the Soviet Union"—"the leading nation, remarkable for its clear mind, its patience and its firm character." The Soviet Government, he said, had made many mist
akes, but even in the desperate moments of

  1941-2, the Russian people had not told its government to go, had not thought of making peace with Germany, had shown confidence in the Soviet Government and had decided

  to fight on till final victory, whatever the cost.

  A great deal could be read into that speech: a belated mea culpa for many things that had happened before the war and during the early days of the war; a tribute to the Russians for having fought on when the Ukraine and so many other parts of the country had been overrun by the Germans; all sorts of mental reservations not only about the "disloyal"

  nationalities like the Crimean Tartars, the Caucasian mountaineers and probably also the Balts (who were being punished in varying degrees), but even about the Ukrainians

  whose record, in Stalin's suspicious eyes, had been uneven. The Red Army was rich in Ukrainian generals and Ukrainian Heroes of the Soviet Union, and yet there were other Ukrainians whose loyalty to Moscow and the Soviet system had been questionable. In the Western Ukraine, at that time, Ukrainian nationalists were still conducting a guerrilla war against the Russians, and this was going to continue till 1947. Were the Russians, "the leading nation", to be the Number One citizens in the Soviet Union henceforth? There were some uneasy reactions in Moscow to this exaltation of Great-Russian nationalism, especially coming, as it did, from a Georgian who spoke Russian with a broad Caucasian accent. What strange mental kink was behind it?

  Then, on June 24, came the great apotheosis of the Red Army, with "Generalissimo"

  Stalin at its head—the famous Victory Parade in the Red Square. Marshal Zhukov, by

  common consent the greatest of Russia's soldiers, reviewed the troops, and Marshal

  Rokossovsky commanded the Parade, in the course of which hundreds of German

  banners were flung down, in a torrential rainfall, on the steps of the Lenin Mausoleum, and at the feet of Victorious Stalin. Owing to the downpour—some old women in

  Moscow saw in this an evil omen—the civilian parade that was to follow the military

  parade was called off; but that night Stalin entertained 2,500 generals, officers and soldiers at the Kremlin. Here he made another strange speech, in which he paid tribute to the "small people", to "the little screws and bolts" of the gigantic machine without which the machine, with all its marshals and generals and industrial chiefs could not have worked. This speech also gave rise to some uneasy speculation: was there not here, apart from an extreme anti-egalitarian motif, a warning to the "military caste" that had emerged from the war? During the months that followed Moscow began to buzz with "anecdotes"

  about marshals' and generals' wives, with their nouveau-riche ways and their endless malapropisms.

  [For example, there was the general's wife who kept on talking at the Opera while the overture was being played: "Sh-sh, overture!" her neighbour said. " Overture yourself,"

  she snapped back, thinking ouvertura to be some unfamiliar term of abuse. Or else there was the story of the Marshal's wife who had so many silver foxes that she decided to wear only one, but to pin to her chest the tails of the remaining nine, to show that she had ten altogether.]

  There is good reason to suppose that this verbal propaganda, a fairly familiar device in Russia, had been put about on instructions from the Party hierarchy.

  Nor was it very long before the official propaganda began to discourage boastfulness on the part of officers and soldiers; the war was declared to be a thing of the past, and the soldiers could not be allowed to rest on their laurels. Very soon after the end of the Japanese war there appeared a poem by one Nedogonov, called The Flag over the Village Soviet which was given wide publicity: Its main theme was summed up in the Unes:

  "And if you won't work hard on the kolkhoz, we shall spit on all your medals and decorations."

  This systematic debunking of the war hero came later, but the first signs of it could already be detected only a couple of months after the victory over Germany.

  Economic Hardships Continue

  All this was, in a way, ungracious and hurtful; and yet it was understandable. In 1945

  Russia was in a serious economic situation; it was essential to demobilise as much of the Red Army as possible, and to get down to the hard realities of peace-time reconstruction.

  Hundreds of towns, tens of thousands of villages had been partly or completely destroyed by the Germans; the industrial areas of Kharkov, Kiev, Stalingrad, Odessa, Rostov, the Donbas, Zaporozhie and Krivoi Rog, besides many others, had been laid waste; millions of Russians and Ukrainians had been deported to Germany and most of them had

  returned in bad or indifferent health; altogether (though this figure was not to be

  mentioned until much later) twenty million people had lost their lives—or one-tenth of the entire population, an appalling proportion equalled only by Poland and Yugoslavia.

  There were also millions of war invalids.

  The civilian population of the Soviet Union had not only been underfed, but also grossly overworked during the war years, and many had died under the strain. The whole of the country's agriculture had been run almost entirely by women, and it was the women too who had kept the country's industries going in wartime. In 1945, fifty-one percent of all industrial workers in the Soviet Union were women. Many of the other workers were adolescents.

  Despite this intensive effort on the part of the Soviet people to keep the war-time

  industries going—and without this mass-effort Russia could never have won the war—

  the whole industrial situation was little short of disastrous by the end of the war. With the recovery of some of the industrial areas in 1943-4 and the intensification of production in the east and in central Russia, the production figures for the first half of 1945 showed a slight improvement, compared with the first half of 1944. But this was very little,

  compared with the not overwhelmingly good pre-war figures:

  During the first half of 1945, the Soviet Union produced only 77% of the coal

  produced in the first half of 1941; 54% of the oil; 77% of the electric power; 46% of the pig-iron; 52% of the steel; 54% of the coke; 65% of the machine-tools.. .

  [ IVOVSS, vol. V, pp. 376-84.]

  Almost everything had had to go into the war industries which in the first half of 1945, had produced nearly 21,000 aircraft, 29,000 aircraft engines, over 9,000 tanks, over 6,000

  mobile guns, 62,000 guns, 873,000 rifles and machine-guns, 82m. shells, bombs and

  mines, over 3 billion cartridges, etc. The industrial might of the Soviet Union had been practically cut in half since 1941. In 1945 she was producing only one-eighth as much steel as the USA. She was faced with the gigantic problem of reconstruction,

  reconversion and development. Agriculture had to be re-equipped with machinery almost from scratch, and supplied with chemical fertilisers. The production of agricultural machinery and of fertilisers was one of the first things to be stepped up immediately the war in Europe was over.

  The number of livestock, very far from enormous in 1940 (when the after-effects of

  collectivisation were still keenly felt), was much lower still in 1945. In 1945, there were only 47.4 m. head of cattle (which was 3.2 m. more than in 1944). By the end of 1945 the total number of cattle was only 87% of the 1940 figure; cows, 82%; sheep and goats,

  70%; pigs, 38%; horses, 51%. In the liberated areas the percentages were lower still (cows, 76%; pigs, 34%; horses, 44%).

  [IVOVSS, vol. V, p. 392. Some of the new cattle had been brought from Germany.]

  There was also, in 1945, a shortage of high-quality forage; as a result of this and other factors, the state purchases of meat were 61.8 percent of what they had been in 1940, and those of dairy produce, 45 percent. Which, obviously, meant that the civilian population, particularly in the cities, had to continue on short rations— especially those holding clerical-workers', dependents' and children's ration cards. Diplomats and other privileged foreigne
rs in Moscow at that time, who enjoyed higher rations and often attended

  sumptuous official Soviet receptions, were scarcely aware of the miserable standard of living that continued among "ordinary" Russians. Special efforts were made to give reasonably ample food to industrial workers, and to provide extra meals of sorts for schoolchildren; but most Russians still lived very poorly, their diet consisting almost entirely of bread, potatoes and vegetables, with very little sugar, fats, meat or fish. In 1945, I knew many families with clerical workers' ration-cards who, without actually starving, were having a worse than thin time, and to whom a whole lump of sugar in their tea was almost a luxury. The stopping of Lend-Lease, which had supplied a substantial amount of food to the Army— i.e. to about ten million people—caused an appreciable

  drop in the total amount of food consumed in Russia.

  [A small proportion of Lend-Lease food also went to the civilian population.]

  UNRRA was of some help in Belorussia and the Ukraine, though it could not be said to be over-generous; and there was no UNRRA relief at all in the rest of the Soviet Union.

  [There might have been UNRRA help in the western parts of Russia proper, but,

  apparently as a matter of prestige, the Soviet Government declined it.]

  For a time, the great drought of 1946 was to make food conditions in very large parts of the Soviet Union even more difficult.

  These hardships at the end of the war, which were, after all, only a continuation of the war-time hardships, cannot, however, be said to have undermined Russian morale as a

  whole, except that a certain relaxation in war-time discipline was to be reflected, before long, in intensified black-market activities and in a considerable increase in crime—a familiar post-war phenomenon in most countries.

  But in the summer of 1945 the feeling of elation continued, with the homecoming of

  millions of soldiers. In many places, life was already beginning to rise from the ruins; the Donbas mines were being rapidly put back into operation; the Kharkov Tractor Plant was beginning to turn out tractors again; villages in western Russia and in Belorussia were being rapidly rebuilt—though usually by only the most rudimentary methods; hundreds