Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  criminal.]

  "Why was this not made clear in the Declaration of July 26? Had it been, would not

  [Truman's] 'purpose of God' have been more Christianly followed?" Fuller comments. He also says that the requests made to Russia as early as May to intercede as a mediator must have made it clear to the Western Powers that Japan's position was catastrophic, and that she was completely ripe for surrender. The only obstacle was the question of the

  Emperor.]

  Even assuming that the Japanese would have continued to resist and that the saving of American lives was all that was at stake, then the dropping of the bomb could still have been held up until September, just before the invasion of Kyushu—which would have cost a lot of American lives. If the bomb was dropped in a desperate hurry on August 6, it must have been because Truman was determined to drop it before the Russians had

  entered the war—which they were expected to do, in accordance with the Yalta

  Agreement, not much later than the 8th.

  [Asked in 1960 whether there was any urgency to end the war in the Pacific before the Russians became too deeply involved, Mr Byrnes replied: "There certainly was on my part. We wanted to get through with the Japanese phase of the war before the Russians came in." (U.S. News and World Report, August 15, 1960.)]

  But that was not all: the bomb, as is so clearly suggested by Truman, Byrnes, Stimson and others, was dropped very largely in order to impress Russia with America's great might. Ending the war in Japan was incidental (the end of this war was clearly in sight, anyway), but stopping the Russians in Asia and checking them in Eastern Europe was

  fundamental.

  Whether the Russians intended to stick closely to the Yalta Agreement and enter the war on August 8 is not altogether certain; but once the bomb had been dropped, the Russians could not afford to delay; for what if Japan capitulated as a result of the bomb before Russia entered the war? It was essential to enter the war before such a Japanese

  capitulation, if Russia was to receive her territorial "reward" and play any part in the occupation of Korea—and Japan.

  The real irony of it all is that Japan was ready to capitulate both without the atom bomb and without Russian intervention. But this suited neither the USA, nor the Soviet Union, both of which had to strike the "decisive" blow.

  It is interesting to note that the present-day History does not breathe a word about Stalin's

  "revenge for 1904", but attributes Russia's entry into the war to three high-minded motives: 1) security against future Japanese aggression; 2) Russia's sacred duty to her Western Allies; and, 3) her moral duty to help, China, Korea and other Asian peoples in their struggle against the Japanese imperialists.

  The "new look" of American policy after the dropping of the atom bomb soon became apparent. On August 16 Truman declared that, unlike Germany, Japan would not be

  divided into occupation zones. Truman firmly rejected the Russian proposal that the

  Japanese surrender to Russian troops in northern Hokkaido; nor were the Russians to take any part whatsoever in the occupation of Japan. Truman went even further: on August 18

  he asked that the Russians let the Americans use one of the Kurile Islands as an air base, a proposal that Stalin rejected with a great show of indignation.

  [ Correspondence between Stalin and the Presidents of the USA and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain.. . (Moscow 1957), vol. II, pp. 267-8.]

  The uneasiness and anxiety created in Russia by the atom bomb were such that, soon

  after the capitulation of Japan, Russian correspondents visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki and deliberately reported that the bombs had not been nearly as destructive as the

  Americans had made out; if there were very heavy casualties, it was because of the

  inflammable nature of Japanese houses, and any city with stone houses and adequate

  shelters would not have suffered nearly as much. The correspondents said they had

  interviewed several people who had escaped injury by simply lying down in an ordinary trench!

  These stories about the relative innocuousness of the atom bomb were not only intended to reassure the Russian public, but also to support the theory that it was not the atom bomb, but the destruction of the Kwantung Army by the Russians, that had brought Japan to her knees.

  They did not make much impression in Russia. Everybody there fully realised that the atom bomb had become an immense factor in the world's power politics, and believed

  that, although the two bombs had killed or maimed a few hundred thousand Japanese,

  their real purpose was, first and foremost, to intimidate Russia.

  After causing a spell of anxiety and bewilderment, all the bombs did, in effect, was to create on the Russian side a feeling of anger and acute distrust vis à vis the West. Far from becoming more amenable, the Soviet Government became more stubborn.

  [The only major exception was Iran, where Moscow yielded to American pressure by

  evacuating Iranian Azerbaijan.]

  Inside Russia, too, the régime became much harder after the war instead of becoming

  softer, as so many had hoped it would be.

  It was scarcely a coincidence that, ten days after Hiroshima, the Supreme Soviet should have instructed the Gosplan—the State Planning Commission—and the Council of

  People's Commissars to get busy on a new Five-Year Plan. No breathing-space was to be allowed to the Russian people; the great industrial and economic reconstruction of the country was to start immediately. And, together with it, the making of the Russian atom bomb.

  The end of the war was to be followed by years of disappointment and frustration for the Russian people. The wartime hopes of a Big Three Peace gave way to the reality of the Cold War and the "Iron Curtain". The happy illusions of 1944 that the Soviet régime would become more liberal, and life easier and freer after the war, soon went up in

  smoke. For one thing the Soviet economy was largely in ruins, and to rebuild it a gigantic programme of austerity and hard work was called for. The policy of restoring heavy

  industry as fast as possible meant that consumer goods remained scarce for a long time.

  Housing conditions were bad and food was short. The NKVD, which had shown a certain

  discretion during the war, came into its own again and a new terror developed which did not come to an end until 1953, after Stalin's death.

  Yet despite the disappointments that followed it, the grim but heroic national war of 1941-5 remains both the most fearful and the proudest memory of the Russian people—a war which, for all her losses, turned Russia into the greatest Power oil the Old World.

  Already it almost seems an historical epic of a bygone age—which can never be repeated.

  To the Russian people the thought of another war is doubly horrifying; for it would be a war without its Sebastopol, Leningrad or Stalingrad; a war in which—everywhere—there would be only victims and no heroes.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The most important single Soviet publication on the war years, not only in terms of sheer bulk, but also for the valuable information it contains is the monumental six-volume (five published to date) History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union (Istoriya Velikoi Otechestven-noi Voiny Sov.Soyuza), referred to as IVOVSS. In the Introduction I refer to some of its numerous weaknesses —its stodgy writing, its ever-repeated clichés, its suppression of many awkward facts (for instance the "Moscow panic" of October 16, 1941), the virtual deletion of names of people now out of favour, even though they

  played an important part during the war years; the magnification of Khruschev's role in the war; the tendentiousness in the treatment of some of the diplomatic episodes just before and during the war ; the pooh-poohing of Lend-Lease, and so on. This collective work by dozens of Soviet scholars and various kinds of experts, working under an

  editorial committee composed of professional historians, leading Party ideologists and
a number of generals, and the whole of it published by "The Department of History of the Great Patriotic

  War of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism attached to the Central Committee of the

  CPSU" is, of course, a book which has gone through the most careful process of "vetting"

  at the highest Party level. And yet, despite all this, IVOVSS still contains an immense amount of information most of which was not available in the Stalin days. It contains, for example, a very thorough and, on the whole, convincing explanation of the numerous

  reasons for the Red Army's disastrous reverses in 1941 ; it analyses very carefully the reasons, both military and economic, for the relative failure of the second phase of the Russian counter-offensive in the winter of 1941-2; it tells, with masses of new details, the story of the stupendous effort to keep the country's war economy going, with the main armaments production being concentrated in the East. The History is based almost entirely on archive material, and this includes such valuable sources as AVP SSR

  (Foreign Policy Archives), AMO SSSR (Archives of the Ministry of Defence), the war

  archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (IML); the Central Party Archives of the same Institute (TsPA IML), the Komsomol and Trade Union Archives, the State Archives of the October Revolution (TsGA-OR), the War History Archives of the Central

  Committees of the Communist Parties of the Ukrainian, Belo-russian and of other Federal Republics of the Soviet Union, and similar archives of the different ministries and of the various obkoms (regional party committees)—for instance, those of Smolensk, Briansk, etc. (chiefly on Partisan warfare) or of Sverdlovsk, Cheliabinsk, etc. (chiefly on the war industries). Although these quotations from the various archives are inevitably selective, they still contain much new information. On foreign policy too, the History also quotes some revealing documents, for instance some of the dispatches from Astakhov, the Soviet chargé d'affaires in Berlin, on his conversations with Weizsäcker and Ribbentrop during the summer of 1939— dispatches from which Stalin and Molotov could obviously draw

  certain conclusions.

  I have also, in writing this book, made use of not only a number of general Soviet

  histories of the war (none of them very satisfactory) but also of a wide range of

  monographs on various episodes of the war (some, particularly those on Leningrad, are excellent), and an even greater number of personal reminiscences by generals, partisan leaders, etc. Of these books, hundreds of which have appeared, especially since 1958. I give as detailed a list as possible. On the other hand, in listing Western books pertaining to the immediate pre-war period and the war years in Russia, I have confined myself to only some of the most important titles. The same applies to German books on the war in the Soviet Union.

  DIPLOMATIC AND OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS

  Correspondence between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR (Stalin) and the Presidents of the United States (Roosevelt and Truman) and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain (Churchill and Attlee) during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. 2

  vols. Moscow, 1957.

  Documents of British Foreign Policy 1919-39. London, 1947 and after.

  Documents of German Foreign Policy. Series D. 1937-45. 10 vols. Washington, 1957.

  Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSR, vols. 1-4. Moscow, 1957, publication continuing.

  Dokumenty i materialy kanuna vtoiroi mirovoi voiny. vol. II. Arkhiv Dircksena. Moscow, 1948.

  Foreign Relations of the United States. Diplomatic Papers. The Conference of Berlin.

  Washington, 1946.

  Le Livre Jaune Français. Documents diplomatiques. Paris, 1939.

  Nazi-Soviet Relations 1939-41. Washington, 1948.

  Sovetsko-Frantsuskie otnosheniya vo vremia Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny. Dokumenty i materialy. Moscow, 1959.

  Sovetsko-Chekhoslovatskie otnosheniya vo vremia Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny.

  Dokumenty i materialy. Moscow, 1960.

  Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy (1917-41), selected and edited by J. Degras. 3 vols.

  London, 1948-53.

  Vneshnyaya politika Sovetskogo Soyuza v period Otechestvennoi Voiny. 3 vols. Moscow, 1946-7.

  Vneshnyaya Politika Sovetskogo Soyuza, 1946 g. Moscow, 1947.

  The Trial of German Major War Criminals; Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal sitting at Nuremberg, Germany. 23 vols. (HMSO, London, 1946-51), referred to as TGMWC.

  STUDIES AND MEMOIRS CONCERNING DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS WITH

  THE SOVIET UNION

  [Including some general works partly dealing with these.]

  Beloff, M., The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1929-41. 2 vols. London, 1947.

  Bonnet, G., Fin d'une Europe. Geneva, 1946.

  Byrnes, J. F., Speaking Frankly. London, 1947.

  Byrnes, J. F., All in One Lifetime. New York, 1958.

  Carr, E. H., German-Soviet Relations between the Two Wars. Baltimore, 1951.

  Churchill, W. S., The Second World War. 6 vols. London, 1948-54.

  Ciano's Diaries. London, 1948.

  Coates, W. P. and Z., A History of Anglo-Soviet Relations. 2 vols. London, 1945 and 1958.

  Coulondre, R., De Staline à Hitler. Mémoires de deux ambassades. Paris, 1950.

  Dalton, H., The Fateful Years 1931-45. London, 1947.

  Davies, J., Mission to Moscow. London, 1942.

  Deane, J. F., The Strange Alliance. London, 1947.

  Eisenhower, D. D., Crusade in Europe. London, 1948.

  Feiling, K., The Life of Neville Chamberlain. London, 1946.

  Gafencu, G., The Last Days of Europe. London, 1946.

  Gafencu, G., Préliminaires de la guerre à l'Est. Paris, 1944.

  Gaulle, C. de, Mémoires. 3 vols. Paris, 1954-8.

  The Memoirs of Cordell Hull. London, 1948.

  Ickes, H. L., The Secret Diary. New York, 1954.

  Izraelyan, V. L., Diplomaticheskaya istoriya Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny 1941-45.

  Moscow, 1958.

  Kennan, G., Soviet Foreign Policy 1917-1941. New York, 1960.

  Kennan, G., Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin. New York, 1961.

  Leahy, W. D., I Was There. London, 1950.

  Maisky, I., Who Helped Hitler? London, 1964.

  Namier, L. B., Diplomatic Prelude, 1938-39. London, 1948.

  Noel, L., L'aggression allemande contre la Pologne. Paris, 1946.

  Potemkin, V. P. (ed.), Istoriya diplomatii, vol. III (1919-39). Moscow, 1945.

  Reynaud, P., Au coeur de la mêlée. Paris, 1951.

  Reynaud, P., La France a avésu l'Europe. 2 vols. 1947.

  Schuman, F. L., Russia since 1917. New York, 1957.

  Scherer, A., Le problème des "mains libres à l'Est" (Rev. d'Histoire de la 2e Guerre Mondiale, October 1958), Paris, 1958.

  Sherwood, R. E., The White House Papers of Harry L. Hopkins. 2 vols. London, 1949.

  Shirer, W. L., The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. London, 1960.

  Stettinius, E. R., Lend-Lease, Weapon of Victory. New York, 1944.

  Stettinius, E. R., Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference. London, 1950.

  Taylor, A. J. P., The Origins of the Second World War. London, 1961.

  Truman, H.S Memoirs of Harry Truman, vol. I. New York, 1955.

  Williams, W. A., The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York, 1962.

  SOVIET OFFICIAL SPEECHES, ETC.

  CPSU Congress reports: 18-yi, 19-yi, 20-yi, 21-yi, 22-oi s'yezd KPSS (Moscow, 1939,

  1952, 1956, 1959 and 1961 respectively).

  Kalinin, M. I., Vsyo dlya fronta, vsyo dlya pobedy. (Articles and speeches.) Moscow, 1942.

  Khrushchev, N. A., The Dethronement of Stalin. (Secret speech at 20th Congress.) Manchester Guardian reprint, Manchester, 1956.

  See also February 1946 election speeches by Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan,

  Andreyev, Zhdanov, Khrushchev, Kaganovich, Beria, Malenkov, Vosnesensky and

  other
s, all published in pamphlet form (Moscow, 1946).

  The Red Army To-day. (Speeches delivered at the 18th Congress of the CPS U(B).) (In English.) Moscow, 1939.

  Stalin, I. V., O Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voine Sovetskogo Soyuza. 5th ed. Moscow, 1945.

  Stalin, I.V., Voprosy Leninizma. 11th ed. Moscow, 1940 (contains text of March 10, 1939

  speech).

  See also Vneshnyaya politika Sovetskogo Soyuza v gody Otechestvennoi Voiny for several speeches and statements by V. M. Molotov and others. 3 vols. Moscow, 1946-7.

  Zasedaniye Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR, 1-aya sessiya. 12-19 marta 1946g.

  Stenograficheskyi otchet. 2 vols. Moscow, 1946 and subsequent Supreme

  Soviet sessions.

  GENERAL SOVIET HISTORIES OF THE WAR

  Istoriya Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny Sovetskogo Soyuza. 5 vols. Moscow, 1960-3. (See introduction to Bibliography.)

  Platonov, Lieut.-Gen. S. P. (and others), Vtoraya mirovaya voina, 1939-45. Moscow, 1958.

  Telpukhovsky, B. S., Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina Sovetskogo Soyuza, 1941-45.

  Moscow, 1959. See also German translation of same book with critical German

  introduction and footnotes :

  Telpuchowski, B. S., Die sowjetische Geschichte des Grossen Vaterländischen Krieges.

  Kritisch erläutert von Andreas Hillgruber und Hans-Adolf Jakobsen. Frankfurt a/M., 1961.

  Vorobyov F. D. i Rravtsov, V. M., Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina Sovetskogo Soyuza, 1941-45. Moscow, 1961.

  Vorobyov, V. F. (and others), Boyevoipuf sovetskikh vooruzhennykh Sil. Moscow, 1960.

  (This is a popular history of the Red Army since 1918.)

  SPECIAL STUDIES, REMINISCENCES AND DOCUMENTS ON THE WAR IN

  RUSSIA, INCLUDING SOME GENERAL WORKS PARTLY DEVOTED TO

  THE WAR YEARS

  Abbreviations:

  PR = Partisan and Resistance activity

  Mil. = Military

  Ec. = Economic and industrial

  (a) soviet union

  Ampilov, V. i Smirnov, V., Vmalen'kom gorode Lide. Moscow, 1962. (PR)