Russia at war 1941-1945

hand, and has sent me to fight against the black hordes of Hitler that have broken into my country. Stalin has told me that the battle will be hard and bloody, but that victory will be mine.

I heard Stalin, and know it will be so. I am the 193 million of free Soviet men, and to all of them Hitler's yoke is more bitter than death...

Mine eyes have beheld thousands of dead bodies of women and children, lying along the railways and the highways. They were killed by the German vultures... The tears of women and children are boiling in my heart. Hitler the murderer and his hordes shall pay for these tears with their wolfish blood; for the avenger's hatred knows nomercy...

Of the greatest importance, too, as morale-builders, were Ehren-burg's articles in Pravda and Red Star—brilliant and eloquent diatribes against the Germans, which were very popular in the Army. They were, occasionally, criticised on the ground that he tended to ridicule the Germans, forgetting what a powerful, deadly enemy they were. His

suggestion that all Germans were evil was, of course, at variance with the official ideological line (repeated once again in Stalin's order of the day of February 23), but

"Ehrenburgism" was fully approved in the circumstances as the most effective form of hate propaganda. Nor was he alone in taking this propaganda line: there were also

Sholokhov and Alexei Tolstoy, and many others. The "all Germans are evil" motif was to become even more outspoken in the fearful summer of 1942.

Chapter XIII THE DIPLOMATIC SCENE OF THE FIRST

MONTHS OF THE INVASION

Diplomatically, the Soviet Union was in a very strange position at the time of the German invasion. The only two embassies in Moscow that seemed to count in the eyes of the

Soviet authorities before that were the German and the Japanese Embassies, and, of all ambassadors, Count von der Schulenburg was the one the Russians cultivated most. The Japanese Ambassador was also being courted, especially since the Matsuoka visit a few months earlier. As a gesture of appeasement towards Hitler, diplomatic relations had been broken off in May 1941 with Norway, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Greece; but Vichy

France was represented by a full-fledged Ambassador, Gaston Bergery.

Apart from Sweden, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Finland, very few neutral countries were represented; and if, with the American Embassy, under Laurence A. Steinhardt,

relations were correct, but no more, the British Embassy, under Sir Stafford Cripps, was officially treated with deliberate coolness, almost bordering on rudeness. Cripps had the greatest difficulty in maintaining contact with the Soviet Foreign Commissariat, and, till the outbreak of the war in June 1941, he had not been privileged to meet Stalin, and had to content himself with occasionally seeing Vyshinsky, whose manner was far from

forthcoming.

There is in Churchill's Second World War [ Vol. 3, pp. 320-3.] a very curious passage concerning the one and only message he sent Stalin on April 3, asking Russia, in effect, to intervene in the Balkans.

PRIME MINISTER TO SIR STAFFORD CRIPPS

Following from me to M. Stalin, provided it can be personally delivered by you:

I have sure information from a trusted agent that when the Germans thought they

had got Yugoslavia in the net—i.e. after March 20—they began to move three out of the five Panzer divisions from Rumania to Southern Poland. The moment they

heard of the Serbian revolution this movement was countermanded. Your

Excellency will readily appreciate the significance of these facts.

Eden, in his dispatch to Cripps accompanying the Churchill message asked that Cripps should point out to Stalin (if he were to see him) that the Soviet Union now had an