Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  interesting new facts in this story: the mixed feelings produced by the Soviet-German pact, the great anxiety caused in Russia by the rapid collapse of France, the sneaking sympathy and admiration for Britain (especially among Soviet intellectuals) during the blitz winter of 1940-1, and the great relief, reflected even in Pravda editorials and in Molotov's speeches, at the thought that, after the fall of France, Britain was, with American support, continuing the war and that a German victory was still very far from being a foregone conclusion! Regardless of all the official bluster about the invincibility of the Red Army, anxiety in the country grew very rapidly during the first half of 1941.

  Despite all Stalin's and Molotov's absurd attempts after the fall of Yugoslavia and Greece to put off the evil hour by at least a few months or even weeks, they both knew that a showdown with Germany was now inevitable, as seems apparent from Stalin's "secret"

  talk to the military academy graduates at the beginning of May 1941. His only hope now was to gain just a little more time. There also seems little doubt that some of the more clear-sighted Russian soldiers already had the possibility—and desirability—of an

  Anglo-Soviet alliance at the back of their minds.

  In conclusion I wish to express my deepest appreciation to the Louis M. Rabinowitz

  Foundation of New York for their generous grant which has helped to meet so many of

  the expenses connected with the writing of this book.

  My warmest thanks also go to my friend Bobby Ullstein for her frequent good advice and her untiring work on the proofs—which is far more than one normally expects from one's publisher's wife! I also thank my friend John G. Pattisson for his great help in seeing the book through the press.

  Finally, I wish to record my special gratitude to John Erickson of Manchester University, our leading authority on the Red Army and author of the admirable Soviet High

  Command, for reading the greater part of the manuscript and for making many valuable and helpful criticisms and observations.

  A.W.

  PART ONE Prelude to War

  Chapter I RUSSIA'S 1939 DILEMMA

  On May 4, 1939 there appeared in Pravda and in all other Soviet papers a small paragraph entitled:

  UKASE OF THE PRESIDIUM OF THE SUPREME SOVIET ON THE

  APPOINTMENT OF V. M. MOLOTOV AS PEOPLE'S COMMISSAR OF

  FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF THE USSR.

  It read:

  The Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR

  V. M. Molotov is appointed People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs. The two

  functions are to be exercised concurrently.

  Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR:

  M. Kalinin

  Secretary of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR:

  A. Gorkin

  There was no mention of Maxim Litvinov, who had resigned on the previous day "at his own request" and whom Molotov had so abruptly replaced at the head of Soviet

  diplomacy, or of any other post he had been given instead. The small news item caused a sensation throughout the world, where it was interpreted as the end of an epoch.

  Hitler himself, at the famous military conference of August 22, 1939—the day before the signing of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact and barely ten days before the

  invasion of Poland—declared to his generals: "Litvinov's dismissal was decisive. It came to me like a cannon shot, like a sign that the attitude of Moscow towards the Western Powers had changed."

  This, like countless other statements to the effect that the dismissal of Litvinov and his replacement by Molotov meant a "decisive" change in Soviet foreign policy, is much too simple. The most that can be said is that the ukase of the Supreme Soviet of May 3

  marked the official end of the "Litvinov epoch"; but this had, in fact, been petering out over a very long period, especially since Munich in September 1938, a settlement from which the Russians had been ostentatiously excluded.

  The gravest doubts about the success of Litvinov's collective security and League of Nations policy existed in Russia for a long time. In fact, it is wrong to describe this policy as "Litvinov's" policy. He was pursuing a policy laid down and approved by the Soviet Government and the Party, and the personal factor mattered only in so far as he pursued this policy with great conviction, enthusiasm and determination. But, all along, he had found the results deeply disappointing and frustrating. For only a short period in 1934 did the French think in terms of a Grand Alliance against Nazi Germany, comprising France's allies (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Yugoslavia), Britain and the Soviet Union.

  This was when Louis Barthou was Foreign Minister. Britain was, however, less than

  lukewarm towards the Barthou plan, and so was Poland.

  After Barthou's assassination in October 1934 he was replaced at the Quai d'Orsay by Pierre Laval, whose greatest ambition was an alliance with Mussolini's Italy and some kind of agreement with Nazi Germany. If, in 1935, he signed a mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union, it was chiefly for tactical and domestic reasons, and the practical value of this pact was not rated highly either in France or in Russia. For one thing the French were reluctant to follow up the pact with a military convention.

  In March 1936 came Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland; and France's failure to react clearly suggested to the Russians that France could scarcely be depended upon to abide by her alliances with Poland and the Little Entente countries. There was going to be a widening gulf between France's official foreign policy and her military possibilities once the Rhineland had been occupied and fortified by Hitler.

  And who, during those years, had been the men in charge of British policy? Ramsay

  MacDonald, Sir John Simon, who gave Mussolini a free hand in Abyssinia at the Stresa conference in 1935; then Baldwin and Simon who had discouraged any French action in

  response to the Rhineland coup; then Samuel Hoare of the Hoare-Laval Plan; then Chamberlain and Halifax. Appeasement had, in varying degrees, become the official

  policy of both Britain and France—appeasement over the Rhineland coup, appeasement over Spain, appeasement over Austria and Czechoslovakia. Munich had been the ultimate triumph of the appeasement policy. In Britain, the few sincere critics of this policy—

  notably Anthony Eden—had been swept aside, and Churchill was little more than a voice crying in the wilderness. In France things were no better. At the end of 1937, the well-meaning but wholly ineffectual Yvon Delbos, who had been Foreign Minister since the

  formation of Léon Blum's Popular Front Government in June 1936, went on a long tour

  through Eastern Europe—he visited Warsaw, Belgrade, Bucharest and Prague—but only

  to find that France's system of alliances had fallen to ruins since the Rhineland coup, with the Czechs alone still pathetically believing that France would come to their help if Germany attacked them. Significantly Delbos failed to include Moscow in his tour.

  Before long the arch-appeaser Georges Bonnet became the head of French diplomacy.

  When after Munich Bonnet welcomed Ribbentrop to Paris in December 1938, he did not

  officially (as has sometimes erroneously been suggested) give Germany "a free hand in the East". Nevertheless the half-heartedness with which France's "special relations with third powers" were referred to, the extremely ambiguous statements Bonnet made a week later before the Foreign Affairs committee of the Chamber about France's commitments vis-à-vis Poland, Rumania or the Soviet Union, and above all, the press campaign launched with official blessing, in influential papers like Le Matin and Le Temps, in favour of lunatic schemes such as the formation of a "Greater Ukraine" under the rule of German stooges like Biskupsky and Skoropadsky, left very little doubt about the

  overtones of the Bonnet-Ribbentrop "friendship talks".

  [See the author's France and Munich: Before and After the Surrender (London, 1939), pp. 384-91.]

  When, during the follow
ing summer, Bonnet proceeded to "warn" Germany, Ribbentrop did not fail to point out that in December 1938 Bonnet had shown no desire to interfere with either German designs on Danzig or with German interests in the East generally.

  The idea of a "Greater Ukraine" had certainly not been a brainwave of the French or British "appeasers". Hitler had been playing with this idea for some weeks after Munich; soon, however, he realised that if his plans for a "Greater Ukraine" were to be pursued further at this stage it might result in a rapprochement between Russia, Poland and Rumania.

  [Robert Coulondre, De Staline à Hitler (Paris, 1950), pp. 251-3.]

  In January 1939 he told Beck that he had lost interest in the Ukraine. But the very fact that such a scheme had been considered and applauded by influential sections of the

  French (and British) press, was, of course, not lost on Stalin, and his suspicions of some deal between London, Paris and Berlin inevitably grew during the winter of 1938-9.

  Even at this stage, however, Stalin continued to distinguish carefully between the

  "aggressive" powers (Germany, Italy, Japan) and the "non-aggressive" powers (France, Britain, USA), although he deplored the latters' weakness and gutlessness—as he was to make very clear in his Report to the 18th Congress of the Communist Party on March 10, that is, five days before the German march into Prague, which put an end to the

  precarious "peace in our time" after barely six months.

  That winter of 1938-9 was an uneasy winter in Russia. True, the Purges had been largely discontinued by the end of 1938, but thousands had been sent to exile or to labour camps; and many—no one could tell how many—had been shot. At the Lenin Commemorative

  Ceremony at the Bolshoi Theatre on January 21, 1939, Yezhov, Stalin's No. 1

  executioner, was still to be seen amongst the top Party and Army leaders—Stalin, Beria, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Shcherbakov, Andreyev, Kalinin, Shkiriatov, Malenkov,

  Molotov, Budienny, Mekhlis, Zhdanov, Voroshilov, and Badayev. It was to be Yezhov's

  last public appearance.

  Now, at the end of the Second Five-Year Plan, living—though not housing—conditions

  in Russia, and particularly in Moscow, had greatly improved. Stalin's zhit' stalo legche, zhit' stalo veselei—"life has become easier, life has become more cheerful"—had become the country's official slogan. Trivial musical comedies, operettas and comic films were in vogue. Popular song writers like Pokras, Blanter and Dunaevsky were at the height of their fame; Blanter had just composed his famous Katyusha (which was, alas, to become one of the favourite soldiers' marching songs in 1941) and Dunaevsky his Shiroka strana moya rodnaya (Vast is my Country) with the more than incongruous line "I know of no other country where man breathes so freely". (This at the height of the Purges!) Alongside popular slapstick comic films like Volga-Volga starring Lubov Orlova, a sort of Soviet Gracie Fields, and illustrating how cheerful life had become in the Soviet Union under the "Sun of the Stalin Constitution", there were the patriotic films, among them Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky—showing what would happen to the descendants of the villainous Teutonic Knights if they ever dared invade Holy Russia. Another famous film, Doctor Mamlock, denounced Hitler's persecution of the Jews.

  More or. less consciously everybody was aware of the Nazi danger. There was an uneasy feeling that everywhere in the world the "aggressors" were having it their own way—

  except where they dared touch the Soviet Union and her Mongolian ally, as Japan had

  done at Lake Hassan only a few months before. But Japan, Italy and Germany were

  becoming increasingly arrogant, and throughout that winter the news from Spain was

  more and more depressing despite the meaningless assurances in Pravda that "the Spanish people would not lay down their arms until final victory". At the beginning of January, Colonel Beck, Poland's strong man, was on his way to Berchtesgaden to see

  Hitler. Had Russia any friends, a few wondered on the quiet—except, of course, gallant little Mongolia?

  No wonder that in those days people looked to the Army for protection and that for

  example some women ace-fliers like Valentina Grizodubova, Polina Osipenko and

  Marina Raskova became popular idols. When in May 1939 one of them, Polina

  Osipenko, and the ace-flier Serov were killed in an air-crash, it was like a day of national mourning; they were given a public funeral in Red Square, and the pall-bearers included Stalin, Molotov, Beria and other leaders.

  Every opportunity was taken to glorify the Armed Forces of the Soviet homeland,

  though, as some observers later recalled, all this was a little like whistling in the dark; below all the bluster about the invincibility of the Red Army there was a good deal of anxiety. On January 1, 1939, in its New Year's Day editorial, Pravda recalled a recent warning by Stalin himself: "We must be ready at any moment to repel an armed attack on our country, and to smash and finish off the enemy on his own territory."

  Significantly, at the Lenin Commemorative Ceremony on January 21, 1939, a large part of the long address delivered by Shcherbakov was devoted to the Red Army:

  The Socialist Revolution has triumphed in one country. The Socialist State is

  encircled by the capitalist world, and this encirclement is only waiting for an

  opportunity to attack our state. In such conditions there can, of course, be no

  question of any withering-away of the State...In 1919 our Party programme

  provided for the transformation of the Red Army into a People's Militia. But

  conditions have changed, and we cannot build up a mighty army on a militia basis.

  In these conditions our Party and our Government have built up a mighty Red

  Army and Red Navy, and a mighty armaments industry, and have lined with steel

  and concrete the frontiers of this land of triumphant socialism. The Soviet Union, which was weak and unprepared for defence, is now ready for all emergencies; it is capable, as Comrade Stalin said, of producing modern weapons of defence on a

  mass scale, and of supplying our Army with them in the event of a foreign attack.

  The Party and the Government are maintaining our people in a state of military

  preparedness, and no enemy can catch us unawares.

  Shcherbakov recalled how, only a few months before, "the Japanese Samurai had felt on their own skin the might of Soviet arms; there, at Lake Hassan, where the Japanese

  militarists had tried to provoke us into war, our air force and artillery turned the Japanese guns into litter and their pillboxes into dust".

  This clash with the Japanese had, in fact, been the Red Army's only real experience of war for many years past, and it was, a little rashly, being held up as a stern warning to all other aggressors. At the same time, there still seemed to be a certain muddleheadedness about modern warfare—an attitude curiously reminiscent of certain French military

  theorists at the time, who pooh-poohed the concept of the blitzkrieg. Thus Pravda wrote on February 6, 1939, in connection with the twentieth birthday of the Frunze Military Academy:

  In the land of triumphant socialism, the working class, under the leadership of the Party of Lenin and Stalin, is building up new military concepts. Following the

  directives of the Party and Comrade Stalin, the Frunze Academy has discarded a

  good number of old fetishes, cast aside quite a few mouldy traditions, and liquidated the enemies of the people who had tried to interfere with the training of Bolshevik military cadres devoted to the Party.

  Was this intended as a nebulous reference to Tukhachevsky and the thousands of other purges of the Red Army? Anyway, Stalin and the present Red Army leadership knew

  best:

  Military thought in the capitalist world has got into a blind alley. The dashing

  "theories" about a lightning war ( blitzkrieg), or about small select armies of technicians, or about the air war which can replace all other military op
erations—

  all these theories arise from the bourgeoisie's deathly fear of the proletarian

  revolution. In its mechanical way, the imperialist bourgeoisie overrates equipment and underrates man.

  This debunking of the blitzkrieg and the primary reliance on "man" seems, looking back on it, about as incongruous as the alleged deadly fear of the "proletarian revolution" by which Hitler in particular was supposed to be obsessed.

  *

  It went on like this almost day after day during that winter of 1938-9. "The Red Army is Invincible," Pravda wrote on Red Army Day, February 23, 1939, and E. Shchadenko, Deputy Commissar for Defence, declared that, under the leadership of Comrade

  Voroshilov, the Red Army was ready to "answer any attack by the militarists with a smashing blow of treble force". N. S. Khrushchev also joined in this chorus exalting the invincibility of the Red Army. Below a large picture of Khrushchev, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Pravda of March 4, 1939

  published this message to Stalin from the Party Conference of the Kiev province:

  The Kiev Party Organisation has spared no effort to turn the province of Kiev into an impregnable advance post of Soviet Ukraine. We are living here in a frontier

  zone, on the border of two worlds... The Fascist warmongers have not ceased to

  think of attacking Soviet Ukraine. We swear to you, dear Comrade Stalin, that we

  shall always be in a state of military preparedness, and shall be fully capable, with all the strength of Soviet patriotism, of dealing with any enemies and of wiping them off the face of the earth... Under the guidance of your closest brother-in-arms, N. S.

  Khrushchev, the Bolsheviks of the Kiev Zone will carry out with honour the tasks

  with which they have been entrusted... Long live our wise leader and teacher, the genius of mankind, the best friend and father of the Soviet people, great Stalin!