Commander, Colonel Svoboda. On December 18 Stalin had a meeting with Benes, in the
presence of Molotov and Fierlinger, and some surprise was caused by the absence of any phrase like "cordial atmosphere" in the official statement that such a meeting had taken place. It was known that, with Stalin's blessing, the Czech Communists had been
accusing Benes for some time of not encouraging a more active Resistance movement in Czechoslovakia; I gathered from Benes—whom I saw a few days later—that Stalin had
raised this question, too. Unlike the Poles, the Czechs in London were a "good" London Government, but they were a London Government for all that; and Stalin's tentative suggestion that they move to Moscow met with no response from Benes.
Nevertheless, Benes's farewell speech on December 23 was marked by extreme
cordiality, except that the Russians were not perhaps altogether pleased with his reference to the new Soviet-Czechoslovak Pact as one of the most important pillars on which the future policy of Czechoslovakia would be built.
Looking back on 1943, Russia had every reason to be in an optimistic mood, though, to individual Russians, the war, with its fearful casualties, continued to be a very grim reality. More and more young men were being drafted daily into the Red Army, and it
was only too common to meet elderly men and women who had already lost several or all of their sons in the war. According to official figures published after the war, there were about seven million men in the Army at the beginning of 1944, and since at least five million men had, by then, been lost in two-and-a-half years' fighting, (not to mention the wounded), it is easy to imagine how deeply the war had affected practically every family in the country.
[The exact number of troops in the Red Army, Navy and Air Force are not easy to
ascertain; General Deane, head of the US military mission in Moscow since 1943 thought there were "on the average" twelve million men, but these, of course, also included non-combat troops.]
Work in the war industries, largely run by women, adolescents and elderly men, was
desperately hard, with overtime, compulsory subscriptions to State loans, various
"competitions", practically no holidays and often very little food. Eighty to ninety percent of the mostly meagre rations were handed over to the factory canteens. The podsobnyie khoziaistva (auxiliary farms), usually no more than vegetable plots, attached to each factory, produced some extra vegetables, but food supplies were still far from good. To the ordinary worker, the kolkhoz markets were of little help because of the still exorbitant prices.
Doctors, surgeons and teachers were all hideously overworked. There were not nearly
enough surgeons to deal adequately with all the wounded during major military
operations, and many lives were lost as a result.
The conditions in some—though not all—of the secondary schools of Moscow in 1944
may be illustrated by the comments made to me by an eleven-year-old boy about that
time. There were thirty-five pupils in his form, and one fearfully overworked woman-
teacher for all subjects: history, geography, arithmetic, natural science and Russian. All the food the children got at school was a slice of bread with some "nasty bitter jam—
American stuff made of oranges"; some of the kids threw this drisnya (diarrhoea) out of the window. Among the boys, this youngster told me, there was a good deal of
lawlessness, "hooliganism" and thieving; in a short time three penholders, a cap and a pair of gloves had been stolen from him. Most of their fathers were in the Army (or
dead), and most of their mothers were working endlessly long hours in a factory. Among these youngsters there were clear signs of escapism: they no longer sang the usual
patriotic songs, but an "escapist" song from a recent film about Kostya, a swaggering beau in the docks of Odessa, or, worse still, a "hooligan" (i.e. obscene) version of the same song. The war was, clearly having a bad effect on secondary education, and may
well account for the extensive wave of juvenile crime that was to mark the immediate post-war years in Russia.
There was a serious shortage of teaching staff in 1944, and both the elementary and
secondary schools suffered most from it. Also, in Moscow—now deep in the rear—the
very young were less conscious of the immediate war tension as life was returning to
"normal", except for the shortage of everything. On the other hand, vocational and trade schools, whose purpose was to create large industrial labour reserves, were given priority; similarly, top priority was given to the training of more and more new soldiers.
*
The spirit of the Russian working class was still good, despite unquestionable signs of physical fatigue. It was better still in the Army. Not only was there a feeling of great elation among the soldiers, as every day brought new victories, but there was a great national pride, a sense of achievement, and a well-cultivated desire for more and more distinctions, medals and decorations. These medals and decorations ran into many
millions, and acted as a great incentive to every soldier. There were already "Stalingrad medals" and "Leningrad medals" and "Sebastopol medals" and "Moscow medals" and the end of the war was to see new medals "for the capture of Bucharest", "for the liberation of Warsaw"—as well as Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna, Prague and Berlin medals, besides a whole range of new decorations.
In the Army both Stalin and the generals were popular. I remember the tragic, but typical case of a nineteen-year-old boy I knew, Mitya Khludov. He belonged to a well-known
Moscow merchant family, whose survivors had inevitably had a difficult time during the early years of the Revolution. He was in an artillery unit during the Battle of Belorussia in the summer of 1944. He wrote me a letter, in which he said: "I am proud to tell you that my battery has done wonders in knocking the hell out of the Fritzes. Also, for our last engagement, I have been proposed for the Patriotic War Order, and, better still, I have been accepted into the Party. Yes, I know, my father and my mother were burzhuis, but what the hell! I am a Russian, a hundred percent Russian, and I am proud of it, and our people have made this victory possible, after all the terror and humiliation of 1941; and I am ready to give my life for my country and for Stalin; I am proud to be in the Party, to be one of Stalin's victorious soldiers. If I'm lucky enough I'll be in Berlin yet.
We'll get there—and we deserve to get there—before our Western Allies do. If you see Ehrenburg, give him my regards. Tell him we all have been reading his stuff... Tell him we really hate the Germans after seeing so many horrors they have committed here in
Belorussia. Not to mention all the destruction they've caused. They've pretty well turned this country into a desert."
Ten days later Mitya's sister had another letter from him, this time from a hospital. He had been wounded, but said he was feeling better and would soon be back with his
battery. He gave no details of his injury. But a few days later he died. We learned later that he had died in one of those terribly overcrowded field hospitals in which it was physically impossible to give the wounded all the individual attention and care that they needed.
Mitya's enthusiastic feeling of being "one of Stalin's soldiers" was not the only reaction.
But this nationalist mood with its eagerness for medals and distinctions, and its hatred of the Nazis who had "humiliated" Russia, was probably the most widespread of all, and was shared by most of the peasant lads in the Army. Such moods were, of course,
encouraged by the politotdels, the Army's propaganda services. Others were conscious of belonging to a lost and condemned generation which was destined to be sacrificed—a
mood reflected in that pathetic little literary masterpiece by Emmanuel Kazakevich, The Star, the story of a reconnaissance raid, written towards the end of the war. The consciousness of living close to death runs through most of the Soviet writing during the war— whether in Surkov's po
etry, or Siminov's poetry and plays, or Grossman's and
Kazakevich's stories and novels. In the poems of Simeon Gudzenko, a remarkable poet
(discovered during the war by Ehren-burg) there was a slightly different frontovik mentality; war to such men is a desperate, but still fearfully exciting gamble, and, after the war, such men felt a nostalgia for it. He, like so many others, also hoped it would be a better and freer Russia after the war.
1944 was to be known as the year of the Ten Victories.
1. In January the Leningrad Blockade was finally broken. After a tremendous artillery barrage from the Oranienbaum Bridgehead, the Russians broke through the powerful
German ring of concrete and armoured pillboxes and minefields and joined with other
Russian forces striking from the east; losses were very heavy on both sides, but within a week the Germans were on the run, and did not stop until they reached Pskov and the
borders of Estonia. There was immense rejoicing among the 600,000 people who were
still living in Leningrad after the fearful thirty-months' siege. In retreating, the Germans had destroyed many historic buildings, among them the palaces of Pushkin (Tsarskoie
Selo) and Pavlovsk, south of Leningrad.
2. In February and March the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front under Konev (assisted by those of the 1st Ukrainian Front under Vatutin) first encircled several German
divisions in the Korsun Salient on the Dnieper, and then, in their famous "Mud
Offensive", crashed right through into Rumania, after forcing the Bug, the Dniester and the Pruth. They were then held up for a few months outside Jassy in Northern Rumania.
3. In April Odessa was liberated, and in May the Crimea was completely cleared.
4. In June Finland was knocked out by the Russian breakthrough to Viborg (Viipuri)
across the Karelian Isthmus. Then, having reached the 1940 Finnish border, the Red
Army stopped of its own accord, without pursuing its advance on Helsinki.
5. No less spectacular than Konev's offensive across the Ukraine into Rumania in March was the liberation of Belorussia, after the Russians had broken through the powerful German Bobruisk-Mogilev-Vitebsk fine. Nearly thirty German divisions were trapped,
chiefly around Minsk, and the Russians advanced almost as far as Warsaw, where the
Armija Krajowa insurrection had by then begun.
[ The Armija Krajowa (or A.K.) was the Polish underground resistance movement
directed from London.]
In the course of this offensive the Red Army liberated a large part of Eastern Poland (including the new provisional capital of Lublin), nearly the whole of Lithuania, and, after forcing the Niémen, reached the frontiers of East Prussia.
6. In July, in a parallel offensive, the Red Army liberated the Western Ukraine, including Lwow, forced the Vistula and, after an abortive attempt to break through to Cracow,
established the important bridgehead of Sandomierz on the west bank of the Vistula,
south of Warsaw. But after its failure to take Warsaw, the Red Army did not pursue its task of breaking through to Germany at any price. Here, in Poland, the concentration of German forces was, indeed, heavier than anywhere else.
7. Instead, in August, the Red Army struck out in the south—in Moldavia and Rumania
—and, after trapping fifteen or sixteen German divisions as well as several Rumanian divisions in the Jassy-Kishenev "pockets", swept into Rumania, precipitated Rumania's surrender, overran Bulgaria, reached the borders of Hungary, and established contact with the Yugoslavs.
8. In September Estonia and most of Latvia were freed of the Germans. Thirty German divisions remained, however, in Kurland peninsula, and remained there, as a "nuisance"
force, till the capitulation of Germany in May 1945.
9. In October, the Red Army broke into Hungary and Eastern Czechoslovakia, joined up with the Yugoslavs and took part in the liberation of Belgrade. In Hungary the fighting was exceptionally fierce, and the fight for Budapest at the end of the year lasted several months. The city was not captured until the following February.
10. In October also, the Red Army attacked in the extreme north, threw the Germans out of Petsamo, in the Finnish salient running to the Arctic, and broke into Northern Norway.
The victories of 1944 were spectacular, but very few of them were easy victories. The Germans fought with extreme stubbornness in Poland (especially in August, when the
Russians were stopped outside Warsaw), at Ternopol in the Western Ukraine (which,
with its three weeks' intensive street fighting, was reminiscent of Stalingrad); and, later, in Hungary and Slovakia. German resistance was also particularly fierce in all areas on the direct road to Germany, notably in the areas adjoining East Prussia and, later, in East Prussia itself.
The Germans were, at last, obviously outnumbered. The Allies had been advancing in the west since June, and by September Germany had lost all her allies, except for a few
Hungarian divisions.
Yet the German tendency to resist the Russians at any price, and to resist the Western Allies less strongly, became more and more pronounced as the war was moving to its
close. The Vistula line opposite Warsaw; Budapest; East Prussia; and, later, the Oder Line, were defended more desperately by the Germans than any line or position in the west. Apart from the sweep across the southern Ukraine in March, and the sweep across Rumania in August (both following an encirclement of large German forces), and the
minor operation in northern Norway, none of the Russian offensives in 1944 were in the nature of a walkover, and the nearer the Russians got to Germany, the more desperate became German resistance.
If, in 1941 and even in 1942, the German soldier seemed to so many Russians a soulless, but formidably efficient robot, the Russian attitude to the Germans changed very
perceptibly during 1943 and 1944—but in two different directions. There were still some formidable German soldiers, particularly the Waffen-SS, ready to fight to the last round, and even known to commit suicide rather than surrender. But the ordinary German war
prisoner was no longer the arrogant individual he used to be in 1941 and 1942. Now more and more German prisoners tended to whine, and tried to look pathetic, and spoke of
"Hitler kaputt"; the 1941 and 1942 desire to beat up and even kill German prisoners had now largely disappeared; after a short time the Russian soldiers' anger cooled down, and they would even give newly-captured Germans food, saying: "go on, stuff yourselves, you bastards."
But there was another side to the "German problem". Nearly every liberated town and village in Russia, Belorussia or in the Ukraine had something terrible to tell.
In Belorussia, hundreds of villages in alleged "Partisan country" had been burned down, and their inhabitants either murdered or deported. Everywhere large cities had been
systematically destroyed; in the Ukraine, where there was relatively little scope for partisan warfare, the Germans had deported a very high proportion of the young people; everywhere, in the towns, the Gestapo had been active, and people had been shot or
hanged. The Einsatzkommandos and other troops had been busy exterminating partisans or alleged "accomplices" of partisans—often whole villages, including women and children. In hundreds of towns there had been the systematic massacre of Jews. In Kiev, for example, tens of thousands of Jews had been exterminated in a gully outside the city called Babyi Yar. Every Ukrainian and Belorussian city had its own horror story. As the Red Army advanced to the west, it heard these daily stories of terror, and humiliations and deportation; it saw the destroyed cities; it saw the mass-graves of Russian war
prisoners, murdered or starved to death; it saw Babyi Yar with its countless corpses, among them the corpses of small children; and, in the Russian soldiers' mind, the real truth on Nazi Germany, with its Hitler and Himmler and its Untermensch philosophy and its unspeakable sadism became hideously ta
ngible. All that Alexei Tolstoy and
Sholokhov and Ehrenburg had written about the Germans was mild compared with what
the Russian soldier was to hear with his own ears and see with his own eyes and smell with his own nose. For wherever the Germans had passed, there was a stench of decaying corpses. But Babyi Yar was small amateur stuff compared with Majdanek, the
extermination camp near Lublin where one and a half million people had been put to
death in a couple of years, and which the Russians captured almost intact in August 1944.
[See pp. 889 ff]
It was with the whiff of Majdanek in their nostrils that thousands of Russian soldiers were to fight their way into East Prussia... There was the "ordinary Fritz" of 1944, and there were the thousands of Himmler's professional murderers; but was there a clear
dividing line between the two? For had not "ordinary Fritzes", too, taken part in the extermination of "partisan villages"? And did not the "ordinary Fritz", in any case, approve of what his SS and Gestapo colleagues were doing? Or didn't he approve? Here was both a psychological and political problem which was to give the Soviet government and the Red Army command a good deal of trouble, especially in 1944 and 1945.
The Teheran communiqué had created in Russia a feeling of euphoria: but for a number of reasons this did not entirely suit Stalin and the Party. Stalin had apparently been irritated by Churchill's half-hearted attitude to "Overlord", and also by his repeated grumbling about "the Polish Problem", on which Stalin held strong views. So in January 1944 Pravda launched, as already said, its "Cairo Rumour" about separate peace talks
"between two leading British personalities and Ribbentrop in a coastal town of the Iberian Peninsula"—a story which was later implicitly repudiated by Stalin himself in the Red Army Order of February 23. This story was followed by a particularly savage attack by Zaslavsky in Pravda on Wendell Willkie (of all people) who had raised some questions—in a very mild form—about what the Russians were going to do about Poland, the Baltic States, the Balkans and Finland.
Russia at war Page 86