Russia at war 1941-1945

[In his memoirs, Ehrenburg, while welcoming the speech as a whole, described this phrase as particularly offensive and un-called for; in 1941 the intellectuals were no more, and no less worried than the rest of the Russian people. {Novyi Mir, January, 1963.)]

Germany is, in reality, facing a catastrophe.

After reiterating that Germany had lost four and a half million men in the last four months, he went on:

There is no doubt that Germany cannot stand this strain much longer. In a few

months, perhaps in half a year, maybe a year, Hitlerite Germany must burst under

the weight of her own crimes.

Comrades, Red Army and Red Navy men, officers and political workers, men and

women partisans! The whole world is looking upon you as the power capable of

destroying the German robber hordes! The enslaved peoples of Europe are looking

upon you as their liberators... Be worthy of this great mission! The war you are

waging is a war of liberation, a just war. May you be inspired in this war by the heroic figures of our great ancestors, Alexander Nevsky, Dimitri Donskoi, Minin

and Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov, Michael Kutuzov! May you be blest by great

Lenin's victorious banner! Death to the German invaders! Long live our glorious

country, its freedom and independence! Under the banner of Lenin—onward to

victory!

This invocation of the Great Ancestors—the great men of Russian civilisation—Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, the great scientists and thinkers, and the great national heroes—

Alexander Nevsky who routed the Teutonic Knights in 1242, Dimitri Donskoi who

routed the Tartars in 1380 and Minin and Pozharsky who fought the Polish invaders in the seventeenth century, Suvorov and Kutuzov, who fought Napoleon—all this was

meant to appeal to the people's specifically Russian national pride. With the Baltic States gone, with the Ukraine gone, it was in old Russia, one might almost say in old Muscovy, that the remaining power of resistance against the Germans was chiefly concentrated.

In wartime Russia, where every official utterance, and especially any word from Stalin was awaited with a desperate kind of hope, these two speeches, especially the one

delivered in the dramatic setting of the Red Square, with the Germans still only a short distance outside Moscow, made a very deep impression on both the Army and the

workers. The glorification of Russia—and not only Lenin's Russia— had a tremendous

effect on the people in general, even though it made perhaps a few Marxist-Leninist

purists squirm on the quiet. However, even these realised that it was this patriotic, nationalist propaganda which identified the Soviet Régime and Stalin with Russia, Holy Russia, that was the most likely to create the right kind of uplift.

In any case, it was not something entirely new. It was Stalin's nationalism which had, for years now, triumphed over Trotsky's internationalism; for years Stalin had already been built up in popular imagination as a state builder in the lineage of Alexander Nevsky (e.g.

in the Eisenstein-Prokofiev film), of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great (e.g. in Alexei Tolstoy's novel).

Thus, in November 1941, all these reminders of the Tartar Invasion, of the Troubled

Times, with their Polish invasion, and of 1812 did not fall on deaf ears. The Russian people felt the deep insult of the German invasion—it was something more deeply insulting than anything they had known before. In his 6th of November speech Stalin had not missed the chance of pointing out the difference between Napoleon and Hitler;

Napoleon had come to a sorry end, but at least he had not brought to the invaded

countries any Untermensch philosophy.

We shall deal more fully in a later chapter with the mood in Russia in 1941-2; here it is enough to say that in his two November speeches, Stalin had not only cleverly adapted himself to this mood, but he did everything to strengthen and encourage it.

It was, indeed, appropriate that such a mood should be encouraged, with the ancient