Russia at war 1941-1945

Moscow had had a great moral effect on both the population, and on the soldiers fighting their deadly battle on the outskirts of the capital.

But by February it was clear that the German rout had not been complete. The Germans were still holding a mighty springboard at Gzhatsk, Viazma and Rzhev, and this required a large concentration of Russian troops to protect Moscow. Smolensk, which the

Russians had hoped to recapture, still remained far in the enemy rear. There was a note of disappointment in Stalin's Red Army Day Order of February 23.

And, in June 1942, there were many persistent rumours that something had already

seriously gone wrong at Kharkov, and that the Germans were preparing for an all-out

offensive in the south.

I had many opportunities, during the early summer months of 1942, of seeing something of the devastation the Germans had caused around Moscow. On the road to Klin, for

instance, there was a great deal of destruction, barely fifteen or twenty miles north-west of the capital—bombed, burned and shelled houses, and a church with half its dome

blown away by a shell. This church was at Loshki, twenty-eight miles from Moscow, and the town had been occupied by the Germans in November 1941. At Istra, three houses

had survived out of 1,000, and, instead of 16,000 people there were now only 300, most of them living in dugouts. At Klin over 1,000 houses had been destroyed out of 12,000; this, according to later German standards of destruction, could be called almost generous.

It was only because they had had to pull out in a hurry. Under their three weeks'

occupation, only 1,500 people had remained in the town, out of 30,000; now 15,000 were back. Even if most of the town was standing, the Germans had still done an enormous

amount of looting; and the kolkhozes in the neighbourhood had suffered great losses.

Before the Germans came, 3,000 cows belonging to the kolkhozes had been evacuated; but of the 4,500 cows belonging to the peasants themselves, 3,000 had been driven away by the Germans. All this had seriously affected Moscow's food supplies. Soviet

propaganda at the time made much of the "destruction" and "desecration" of Tchaikovsky's house at Klin, and of Tolstoy's house at Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, but the houses themselves were still standing, though much had been stolen from them or

damaged. The Germans had, moreover, buried a lot of their dead right round Tolstoy's solitary grave in the park, and this, no doubt, was a form of "desecration". The Russians, after recapturing Yasnaya Polyana, threw all the German bodies out.

The large Tolstoy Centenary School, built near Yasnaya Polyana in 1928, had been

burned down by the Germans, and here, as in so many other places they had committed

various atrocities. I shall mention here just a couple of examples of what I saw and heard during those months.

Near the Tolstoy School, I went into one of the cottages of the village. Here I saw a young woman with a sad face. Her husband had been hanged right here, in the village.

The Germans had suspected him of having punctured one of their tyres. They had hanged him along with another man, whom nobody in the village knew. On a bed, in the dark

corner of the room, a child was sleeping. The woman told how she had gone away to

another village to see her sister a few days before. And she then told the wild tormented story of her home-coming that day, when she had heard the news. Twice the Germans

had stopped her on the way and had ordered her to peel potatoes. As she spoke, the child woke up, and as we sat there in the dark hut, her story was interrupted by the small girl's pranks and laughter.

Then the hanged man's mother arrived. She was a stronger character than the wife; she had seen it all happen, and she told her story firmly and coherently. She told how the Russian troops retreated, and then how the German tanks came into the village. And,

soon after, there was a knock on the door of the hut, and a German with a torch said: "Six men will live here."

"They came and lived here," she said. "They were rough and coarse, but the Finns—for two of them were Finns and four were Germans—were even worse. The moment they

took him away, one of the Finns, with a leer, told me they were going to hang him. I pushed him aside, trying to run after my son, but he knocked me down and pushed me

into that small store-room and locked the door. Later a German came, and unlocked the door and said: 'Your Kolya's kaputt.' He and the other man remained hanging there for three days, and I could not go near them, but I could see them from this window swaying in the wind. Only three days later did the Commandant allow the bodies to be taken

down. They were brought into this room, and laid down, right here. I untied their stiff creaking arms, and, as they began to thaw, I wiped the sweat and dirt off their poor faces.

And so we buried them."