Russia at war 1941-1945

Practically all the railway stations had been destroyed by bombing, and, off the line, there was also much wreckage of carriages and engines.

Morale among soldiers and officers was rather better: some of them spoke highly of the British Hurricanes that were operating at Murmansk; others talked about the

"tremendous" casualties they had inflicted on the Germans and Finns on the Murmansk Front with their "miraculous" katyusha mortars. Many of the officers came from the Caucasus and the Ukraine; all spoke nostalgically of their homes and families there, but opinion seemed to be sharply divided between the optimists and pessimists: some thought the Germans might well overrun the rest of the Ukraine and the Caucasus, others that they hadn't a chance. All the same, they were far from under-rating the power of the Germans, and in their game of dominoes, they called the double-six "Hitler"—"because it's the most frightening of them all". The double-five was called "Goebbels".

In that part of Russia, Leningrad was an obsession with many of the people; they had seen thousands of Leningrad evacuees, many of them half-dead, and had heard the real and unvarnished truth about the dreadful famine winter there; many had friends and

relatives in Leningrad, among them my friend Tamara, whose step-father was a

Leningrad railwayman.

Civilians were extremely short of food, though the soldiers were well-supplied, and at railway stations it was only the soldiers who did a lot of trading with the peasants, bartering a small piece of soap or an ounce of tobacco for a dozen eggs or even half a chicken. The civilians had nothing to trade, and money was as good as useless; the

peasants weren't interested. The civilians spoke with some bitterness of the "shameless profiteering" of which both the peasants and the soldiers were guilty.

The attitude to the Allies was extremely mixed. Many of these people had been travelling all the way from Murmansk, where they had seen ships bringing tanks and munitions and sacks of Canadian flour, but, on the whole, they tended to think that all this was small stuff. An old elementary school-teacher, suffering from scurvy, and now on his way to join his family in a fishing-village on the White Sea where he hoped to get more

"wholesome food", talked to me a lot about England, saying that Churchill was, of course, an old enemy of the Soviet Union, and the Russians should, therefore be grateful that he at least wasn't on the side of the Germans; but he doubted whether there would be a Second Front for a very long time, at least so long as Churchill was in charge.

There was a moment of real excitement in the carriage when somebody brought in the

news of a British 1,000-bomber raid on Cologne; suddenly England seemed to have

become wonderfully popular. But the next day the mood was much less cheerful; it had been learned from somewhere that the Russians had just lost 5,000 men in the Battle of Kharkov, and that "70,000 were missing". This struck everybody as extremely disturbing and ominous, and the soldiers from the Ukraine and the Caucasus seemed particularly

alarmed.

At last, on the fifth day, the train reached the great railway junction of Vologda. There were hundreds of evacuees at the station —mostly women and children—who had waited

literally for days for their train, sleeping on railway platforms or in waiting-rooms, and with very little to eat, beyond the daily half-pound of bread which was distributed

regularly—even though little else was.

Here I also saw several trains with hundreds of emaciated evacuees from Leningrad, and also a number of hospital trains, with hundreds of wounded from the Leningrad and

Volkhov Fronts where there was heavy fighting again.

Having missed our connection at Vologda, we were stuck there for a whole day, and it was not till nearly a week after leaving Murmansk that I finally reached Moscow. During the last lap of the journey, the carriage was even more crowded than before; many

soldiers had squeezed in at Vologda. I particularly remember one giant of a soldier, looking like Chaliapin in his youth, who devoured a pound of bread and six hard-boiled eggs all at one go. "You've got a pretty good appetite," I remarked. "I should say so," he replied. "I've got to make up for all last winter. You'd stuff yourself if you'd been there."

He turned out to be one of the soldiers who had fought at Leningrad right through the winter.

One thing struck me at the time as very curious: throughout that week in the train from Murmansk to Moscow, nobody had mentioned the name of Stalin. Was his leadership

being taken for granted, or were there some silent doubts about the great quality of his leadership? Was it not because the people of the north were more closely concerned with the Leningrad tragedy than with Moscow, and that it was in Moscow, which had been