Russia at war 1941-1945

to speak to Stalin himself. But Stalin still said no, though he was only a few steps from the telephone. After "listening" in this manner to our plea, Stalin said: "Let everything remain as it is."

And what was the result? The worst that could be expected. The Germans

surrounded our armies and we lost hundreds of thousands of our soldiers.

[ The Dethronement of Stalin: Full Text of the Khrushchev Speech {Manchester

Guardian reprint, 1956), p. 21. I have slightly abridged the text, and made a few corrections in the rather clumsy translation of this version of the "Secret Report".]

Whether in reality the Russians lost, as Khrushchev claimed, "hundreds of thousands of our soldiers", the Germans, at any rate, claimed 200,000 prisoners.

In any case, the facts about the "Battle of Kharkov" were kept extremely dark at the time, except for a strange communiqué at the end of May which put the Soviet losses at "5,000

killed and 70,000 missing", in its own way an admission that something had gone seriously wrong. It caused considerable consternation. There was even a clumsy attempt to represent the "Battle of Kharkov" as a Russian victory: early in June, the foreign press were specially taken to a German war prisoners' camp near Gorki; the 600 or 700

prisoners we were shown had, indeed, been captured during the first stage of the Kharkov Battle—i.e. during the Russian offensive of May 12-17. Most of them, while deploring their Pech, their "bad luck", were extremely cocky for all that; they claimed to be convinced that Germany would smash Russia in 1942, and they did not believe for a

moment in any Second Front materialising in time.

[A visit to this camp, a former monastery, in which the Germans were fairly comfortably housed and better fed than most Russian civilians, and many conversations with the

Germans there, are described in The Year of Stalingrad, pp. 87-89. Most striking was the Germans' Herrenvolk attitude to their Rumanian fellow-prisoners, of whom there were half a dozen in the camp.]

The third great defeat suffered by the Russians in the summer of 1942 was at Sebastopol; but, unlike Kerch and Kharkov, Sebastopol was one of the most glorious defeats of the Soviet-German war. In many ways, except for its tragic end, the nine-months' siege of Sebastopol had the same quality of human endurance and solidarity as the siege of

Leningrad. Local patriotism, based on the historic memories of the other siege of Sebastopol in 1853-4, complete with "great ancestors" like Admirals Nakhimov and Kornilov, besides the peculiar revolutionary and patriotic traditions of the Black Sea Navy, had a decisively important effect on the morale of both soldiers and civilians.

Important, too, were the very strong and efficient local party and Komsomol

organisations. Towards the end, the last-ditch resistance was also encouraged by the simple and tragic fact that, with the exception of a very, very few top-ranking personnel, who got away dangerously by submarine, there was no alternative to imprisonment by the Germans but a fight to the last round.

As we have seen, the Germans had overrun the whole of the Crimea in October 1941—

with the exception of Sebastopol. The siege of the great naval base began on October 30, and the first attempt by the German 11th Army under von Manstein to break through to Sebastopol, defended on land by a semi-circle of three more or less well-fortified fines, lasted from October 30 to November 21. A very important part in repelling this first great German onslaught was played by the guns of the Black Sea Navy, and by the naval

marines fighting on land; these, like the men of the Baltic Fleet at Leningrad, were among the toughest Russian troops. The most famous case of suicidal resistance by the Russians during that first German attack was that of the five Black Sea sailors, with politruk (political instructor) Filchenkov at their head who, having run out of ammunition, threw themselves with their last remaining hand-grenades under the

advancing German tanks, and so prevented a break-through to Sebastopol from the northeast. This heroic deed of the "five sailors of Sebastopol" was to become the subject of many songs and poems, among them a very beautiful song by Victor Belyi.

Although the Germans and Rumanians already had a great superiority in manpower, as