Russia at war 1941-1945

Krivoi Rog iron ore, Kharkov and Stalino, if we don't lose them too, will find it hard to work at anything like full capacity. Leningrad, with its skilled labour, is also more or less isolated. And we just don't know how much further the Germans are going to push—with their troops already at Poltava, we may well lose Kharkov. We've been hearing for weeks about the Economic Conference that's to meet in Moscow; they say Lord Beaverbrook is on his way; I wonder what good it'll do..."

He went on: "This is a very grim war. And you cannot imagine the hatred the Germans have stirred up among our people. We are easy-going, good-natured people, you know;

but I assure you, they have turned our people into spiteful mujiks. Zlyie mujiki—that's what we've got in the Red Army now, men thirsting for revenge. We officers sometimes have a job in keeping our soldiers from killing German prisoners; I know they want to do it, especially when they see some of these arrogant, fanatical Nazi swine. I have never known such hatred before. And there's good reason for it. Think of those towns and

villages over there," he said, pointing at the red sunset over Smolensk; "think of all the torture and degradation these people are made to suffer." There was a flicker of mad hatred in his eyes. "And I cannot help thinking of my wife and my own ten-year-old daughter in Kharkov." He was silent for a time, controlling himself, and hammering one knee with his fingers. "Of course," he said at last, "there are the partisans; they are at least a personal solution to thousands of people over there. There comes a moment when people can't bear it any longer. They go off into the woods, in the hope that they may murder a German some time. Often it's like suicide; often they know that, sooner or later, they are almost sure to be caught, and to be put through all the beastliness the Germans are capable of..."

He then talked about the partisans generally, thought they were important, though not as important as they might be. And sooner or later, if the Russians went on retreating, the partisans would lose touch with their sources of supply, and would soon be short of arms.

"No doubt they can continue to carry on sabotage in a small way, and various forms of passive resistance, but they may no longer constitute a serious armed force. If only we had fully prepared the partisan movement, if only we had piled up thousands of arms

dumps throughout Western Russia. Something was done, but not nearly enough; and in

the south there are, unfortunately, no woods... "

It was during this visit to the Front that I first met Alexei Surkov, the Russian poet., who was there as a war correspondent. Later during the war we recalled those days. "Those were fearful days," he said. "Do you know that we wanted to show you people some of our tanks—well, I can now tell you, we didn't have a damned thing! "

The town of Dorogobuzh—famous before the war for its cheeses— on the banks of the

Upper Dnieper, which we reached one night, after travelling for hours along terribly muddy, bumpy roads, had been bombed by the Germans, and now nothing was left of it

but the shells of the stone and brick buildings and the chimney stacks of the wooden houses; of its 10,000 inhabitants, only about 100 people were still there. In July, in broad daylight, waves of German planes had dropped high explosives and incendiary bombs

over the town for a whole hour. There were no troops there at the time; men, women,

children had been killed—nobody knew how many.

After spending the night in an army tent outside the town—we saw the next morning

some fifty people, mostly women and some pale-looking children, lining up for food

outside an army canteen in one of the few only half-destroyed buildings of the town—we drove to Yelnya through what was now "reconquered territory". There had been heavy fighting there. The woods were shattered by shellfire; there were, here and there, large mass-graves, with crudely-painted wooden obelisks on top of them, in which hundreds of Russian soldiers had been buried. The village of Ushakovo, where some of the heaviest fighting had taken place for over a month, had been razed to the ground; and only from the bare patches along the road could one roughly imagine where the houses had stood. In Ustinovka, another village some distance away, most of the thatched roofs had been torn away by bomb blast; the people in the village had fled before the Germans came; but now there were faint signs of life again. An old peasant and two little boys had returned since the Russians had recaptured the village, and were working in the deserted fields, digging up potatoes—potatoes that had been sown long before the Germans had come. And there

was nobody else in the village, except an old woman, a blind old woman who had gone

insane. She was there when the village was shelled, and had gone mad. I saw her