On presenting their papers at the British Embassy, a junior secretary took them to an annexe, that had recently been acquired to house the additional staff necessitated by the new alliance. Here they were introduced to a number of people, given a bedroom between them and made members of the Press Section Mess.
During their journey they had held many discussions as to how they should set about their mission once they arrived in Russia. Kuporovitch had been pessimistic from the beginning, and had declared on half a dozen occasions that, while it was just possible that they might find means of getting reliable information as to Stalin’s health, any attempt to assess Russia’s resources would prove far beyond their scope, and that the chances of their finding out the final line upon which the Soviet armies must stand or surrender were positively nil.
The fact that Gregory had never lived in Russia, and knew nothing of the special difficulties which would confront them there, made him much more optimistic. He reasoned that as two unusually shrewd observers, both having considerable military knowledge, they ought, provided they were allowed reasonable freedom of movement, to be able to see enough and talk with enough people to form a pretty sound appreciation of the proportion of soldiers to men of military age who were still civilians, of the rapidity with which new classes were being called up, and of the length of time it took to convert the intakes into battle-worthy troops. To find out about Russia’s future strategy would obviously be a much more difficult matter. But here, he felt, that if only he could meet enough people, particularly Soviet officers, and discuss prospects with them, in time the pieces of the jigsaw would fall into place. Then, if he could get the impression he had formed himself tacitly confirmed in casual conversation by one or two talkative senior officers, he would at least have something well worth reporting to Sir Pellinore.
In pursuance of this policy of securing a sort of “Gallop Poll” by talking to anybody and everybody whose views might be worth hearing, at dinner that night they entered into conversation with every member of the Press Section Mess, and obtained quite a useful collection of miscellaneous information as a background for their further specific investigations.
The official rate of exchange made the rouble incredibly expensive to foreigners. It was easy to get a far higher rate “round the corner”, but even then there was little that one could purchase with one’s roubles when one got them. Such things as could be bought, including the personal services of the Muscovites, male and female, could however, be had for a song if the purchaser was in a position to pay for them with cigarettes, soap, perfume or lipstick.
At this point, Gregory and Stefan found it difficult not to smile, since the latter, knowing perfectly well what sort of conditions he was likely to find in his own country, had taken appropriate measures, and from Cairo onwards each of them had been lugging an additional suit-case crammed with just such priceless commodities.
Their new acquaintances went on to inform them that the Ballet was as superb as ever, the Opera excellent and the cinema shows, apart from the high quality of their technique, lousy, as they had practically no humour or story value and were, one and all, simply vehicles for Government propaganda. The public went regularly and made no complaints, because they were conditioned to this, and not one in ten thousand of them had ever seen anything different; but these endless documentaries and films with a moral were a poor form of entertainment.
Nevertheless the Bolsheviks’ long experience in the art of propaganda was now proving of enormous value, both in keying their own people up to make the maximum possible efforts for the war and as an insidious weapon against the enemy. They were absolute realists and, knowing that they were fighting a completely unscrupulous enemy, they arranged their broadcasts with no regard at all to the truth, but solely on their calculated effectiveness—a game at which they were daily making rings round Dr. Goebbels. Yet, wherever possible, they made the truth serve them too, and every programme included accounts of the spectacular heroism or high production feats of individual soldiers or war workers as well as of units, divisions and factories; a policy that filled the British pressmen, who, after two years of war, were still muzzled on such matters, with envy, and an added contempt for their own amateurishly-run Ministry of Information.
They all agreed that Russian morale was excellent and did not believe that this was due only to the skilful internal propaganda. Various factors were advanced to account for this. In the first place the Russians had certain qualities in common with the British. The two countries alone, of all those in Europe, had never been entirely overrun and subdued by an enemy in the whole of their history; therefore it was impossible for either people to envisage total defeat. Both peoples were also essentially home-dwellers, as opposed to the café-frequenting nations of the Continent; both were intensive cultivators of their own soil, the British in their millions of small gardens and the Russians on their farms; and this attachment to home and land gave them an additional incentive to fight desperately in their defence. Added to this it was clear that, whatever the shortcomings of the Soviet régime might be, it had at least caused the Russian masses to feel that they now were the real owners of their country, and that not only the land and the cities, but also the parks, palaces, theatres, stadiums, museums, and even the works of their artists, scientists and writers, were in fact the personal property of each and every one of them.
This high morale was, moreover, by no means attributable to the type of blind patriotic neurosis which had gripped and given a spurious self-confidence to many nations during the first stages of the 1914–1918 war. The Russians had now been waging a gigantic conflict on a thousand mile front for nearly three months, and if enemy claims were to be believed, their losses in dead and prisoners already ran into millions. Even on the most conservative estimate they had taken appalling punishment and, so far, with only brief local successes here and there, been thrown back on every sector.
When Gregory left London, at the end of July, they had already been driven out of the greater part of the protective belt of foreign territory that they had secured as a screen for their own frontiers during their Machiavellian alliance with Hitler. Russian Poland, Lithuania and Bessarabia had been overrun. The Germans were pouring north into Latvia and west into the Ukraine, and were only being held with difficulty at Smolensk.
Their initial defeats had compelled them to divide their long front into three commands, under Voroshilov in the north, Timoshenko in the centre and Budenny in the south; but this had not saved them from further disaster. During August, von Leeb had driven through Latvia to Esthonia, taken Novgorod, reached Lake Ilmen and forced Voroshilov back against the Valdi hills; while von Rundstedt had proved more than a match for Budenny, hurling him back through the southern Ukraine, encircling Odessa, capturing Nikolaieff and thrusting towards the Crimea; Timoshenko alone had managed temporarily to stem the German torrent in the centre, but von Bock had smashed his southern flank, taken Gomel and almost cut him off from Budenny.
Since leaving Baghdad, Gregory and Stefan had been able to follow the news only with difficulty, but now their new friends brought them up to date as far as they could do so as, apart from the fact that the Soviet communiqués were often intentionally misleading, it was doubtful if even the Kremlin had more than a rough idea of the general situation throughout the whole length of their vast front.
In the north von Leeb had driven a wedge between Voroshilov and Timoshenko, cut the Moscow-Leningrad railway, and now claimed to have reached the shores of Lake Ladoga, to the north-east of the latter city, while the Finns, supported by several German divisions, had resumed their war against the Russians, forcing them to withdraw from the thinly-held Karelian isthmus to the north-west, gained from the Finns by the armistice of March 1940; so the Russian Marshal and his northern army were now surrounded and besieged in Leningrad.
In the south Odessa was still holding out, but von Rundstedt had inflicted further defeats on Budenny, the most serious of which had been
the spectacular break-through of von Kleist’s armoured columns to the Dnieper. By it the Russians had been deprived of the huge hydro-electric plant, powered by the giant dam at Dnepropetrovsk, that supplied one of their greatest manufacturing areas, and the blow was a heavy one. The penetration towards the Crimea had deepened and Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, was now semi-encircled.
In the hope of relieving the pressure on his two colleagues, Timoshenko had launched a desperate counter-offensive in the centre. Under him General Koniev had defeated the German Panzer expert Guderian, and the whole of von Bock’s Army Group had been badly mauled in the neighbourhoods of Smolensk and Gomel; but with both his flanks now in the air, it was doubtful if Timoshenko would be able to hold the ground he had recaptured for long.
The only hopeful feature of the campaign appeared to be the Russians’ determination to stick at nothing that might eventually help to defeat their enemy. In all the previous German Blitzkriegs it had proved sufficient for them to send their armoured columns forging ahead to the limit of their endurance for all resistance to collapse behind them. But the Russians were made of sterner stuff than the other people that the Panzer armies had overrun. Army corps, divisions and even companies that found themselves cut off had no thought of surrender, but fought on to the last, knowing that by so doing they were giving invaluable help to their comrades further east, who were still opposing the enemy spearheads. Their stubbornness resulted in thousands of German troops designated for the front line having to be held back to deal with them; but even when their formations were cut up and they ran out of ammunition the survivors took to the woods, from which they issued as small, desperate bands at night to sabotage the enemy lines of communication.
Many thousands of women had joined those bands in the enemy rear and were fighting shoulder to shoulder with the men; and wherever the Germans appeared other women were deliberately setting fire to their own homes and crops in pursuance of Stalin’s “scorched earth” policy. It was this nation-wide determination not only to die if need be, but to beggar oneself and even see one’s children starve, rather than allow food or shelter to fall into the enemy’s hands which provided an offset of incalculable value against the actual territorial gains of the German armies.
In their room that night, Gregory and Kuporovitch talked the situation over. The Russian was as confident as ever that his country would emerge from the struggle victorious, but Gregory was not so sanguine. It was obvious that these “Maquis” operations, which were being carried out behind the German lines on a scale never before envisaged, must be creating a heavy drain on the enemy’s resources, but with so many Russian cities either captured or cut off the reduction of Russian resources must be even greater. If the Germans could maintain the momentum of their advance for another three months the whole of European Russia would be in their hands, and Gregory did not see how the Russians could possibly continue to keep their armies in the field if they had to rely entirely on their Asiatic territories for munitions and supplies.
Against this Kuporovitch argued that, even if it were early summer, no army could keep up the pace the Germans had set themselves for a further three months, and that now that winter was fast approaching offensive operations would be rendered doubly difficult. He forecast that the Germans would continue to have gradually lessening local successes for another month, that the heavy snows would then bring about conditions much more favourable to the Russians, and that during the long winter new armies would be built up which would roll the Germans back after the ground had dried in the late spring.
However, they at length agreed that they were both only theorising, and went to bed.
The following morning they went over to the Embassy and the Press Attaché presented them to the Ambassador. Sir Stafford Cripps had already been informed by a “Most Secret” cypher telegram from London that they were being sent to Russia for special duty. However, in accordance with the Protocol, no Ambassador is ever embarrassed by being made aware of activities which might mitigate against his own standing with the foreign Power to which he is accredited, so Sir Stafford neither knew nor enquired the real reason why they had been sent out to him. His instructions were simply that they should be given some employment in his Press Section which would leave them such freedom as they might desire yet at the same time qualify them to seek interviews and be granted travel facilities as members of the Embassy staff.
The Ambassador gave his Press Attaché suitable instructions and enjoined secrecy upon him regarding the dummy posts that were to be created for the two new arrivals, then he formally wished them luck in their undertaking, and they left him to his papers.
The Press Attaché proved both amiable and helpful. He was clearly intrigued by these two “cloak and dagger merchants” for whose arrangements he had been made responsible and, taking them to his own room, he enquired if they had any suggestions as to suitable cover for themselves. Gregory replied that their work could best be accomplished under some apparent activity which would necessitate their visiting a number of Russia’s principal cities and, if possible, making a few trips to various parts of the front as well.
“I’m afraid that is asking for the moon,” the Attaché smiled. “You can move about in Moscow quite freely and I can probably get you permits to visit some of the larger cities that are still a long way behind the battle zone, but visits to the front are absolutely out of the question. Our Allies are almost unbelievably cagey about everything to do with their military operations and even General Mason MacFarlane, the head of our Military Mission, has not been allowed to see anything of the fighting yet.”
“Visits to some of the big reinforcement depots, where the new intakes of recruits are being mustered and trained, would probably serve just as well,” Kuporovitch remarked.
“That could possibly be arranged, but what excuse could we put forward as your reason for wishing to visit such places?”
“Statistics,” said Gregory thoughtfully. “An enquiry into statistics would cover an interest in a multitude of subjects. We’d have to keep off figures which might be liable to reveal important military secrets, of course; but we could say that we represented certain important British scientific journals and were gathering data to write articles for them on the war potential of the Russians as a people. A lot of it would be semi-medical stuff. Average height, weight, age and general state of fitness of the recruits; prevalence of various hereditary diseases among them; their powers of resistance to cold and heat; typical diet upon which they have been brought up; percentages of pre-war types of employment; ratio of single against married men; average number of children; numbers in family, and so on. By and large, the Russians are an extraordinarily healthy looking lot, so their authorities should not object to that.”
The Attaché nodded. “No, that sounds a good idea. But of course, they’ll lie to you like blazes, and let you see only the crack troops that have been specially hand-picked to reinforce their Guard Divisions. It’s always like that here. They keep special hospitals, creches, factories, in apple-pie order solely to impress visiting foreigners, and over what happens elsewhere an impenetrable veil is drawn. It’s not done with any deliberate intention of misleading one, but just because they want everybody to think well of them, and they honestly believe that in showing the sample they are only anticipating a little the high standard they will have throughout the whole country one fine day.”
“I don’t mind how many lies they tell us,” Gregory grinned, “if only they’ll let us get around a bit under our own steam.”
So the matter was arranged, and Gregory and Kuporovitch were given a small office at the top of the building, with two tables, four chairs, pens, inks, pencils, stationery and a card on the door bearing their names, underneath which was written “Statistical Department (Press Section)”.
They had arrived in Moscow on a Friday and, having made their arrangements on Saturday morning, they spent the rest of the weekend wandering about the capital. Gregory
found that having Kuporovitch with him now proved an enormous advantage, as the Russian could drop into casual conversation with all sorts of people who, regarding him as one of themselves, talked perfectly freely, and were not put off by his own presence, since he had adopted the expedient of wearing a bandage, as though he had been wounded, over his mouth.
The Russians are a talkative lot and will argue with anyone about anything, until any hour in the morning, but despite the general garrulousness of the people with whom Kuporovitch scraped acquaintance they learned nothing that was of any value to them in connection with their mission. These personal contacts only confirmed what their Press colleagues had told them; the people were as uncompromisingly anti-Nazi as the British and just as confident in final victory. Uncle Joe Stalin, with his battle cry of “Death to the German Invaders”, was as popular as Winston Churchill was in Britain, and the masses were more solidly behind him than they had ever been before; but they knew nothing about his health and they had no idea of the size of their Army.
As Kuporovitch pointed out, rather glumly, this was not really surprising, as the Soviet Government issues no Army List and no details of the expenditure on the Fighting Services are ever published; but Gregory was not unduly disappointed, since he was more or less killing time until he could contact more promising sources, and mooching round like this both helped to fill in his background and gave him a good idea of the layout of the city.
The weather was becoming distinctly chilly and, it was reported, the first snow had fallen in Leningrad on the Friday; so on Monday morning they took some of their store of soap and went in search of furs, and the goloshes without which the Russians never move abroad in the winter. On their return with their purchases they found a message from their nominal master saying that he would like to see them, so they went along to his office.
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