Russia at war 1941-1945

Chapter V PATRIE-EN-DANGER AND THE POST-ROSTOV

REFORMS

It is often assumed that what was published in Russia during the war was "just

propaganda", as indeed it often was, and that the real truth is told in the present post-Stalin histories, which it often is not.

To anyone who, like myself, was in Russia at the time, present-day Soviet histories depict the whole period in over-simple terms.

I noted in my Moscow diary, which I quote in The Year of Stalingrad, the extraordinarily emotional atmosphere that summer, for instance even at any routine Tchaikovsky concert

—as though all Russian civilisation were now in deadly danger. I remember the countless tears produced on one of the worst days in July 1942 by the famous love theme in

Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture. Irrational no doubt, but true!

Significant of the sense of deadly danger was also the poem called Courage that Anna Akhmatova wrote during that summer (though it was not to be published until a year

later):

We know what today lies in the scales

And what is happening now.

The hour of courage has struck on the clock

And courage will not desert us.

It is not frightening to fall dead under enemy bullets

It is not bitter to remain homeless.

But we shall preserve you, our Russian speech,

Our great Russian word.

We shall carry you to the end, free and pure,

And give you to our grandchildren and save you from bondage,

For ever.

It was during that summer that Shostakovich's famous Leningrad Symphony was first performed in Moscow. The impact of the first movement depicting the German invasion

—which was now continuing—was truly overwhelming.

These emotional undertones, with the frantic patrie-en-danger mood, and in particular the psychological shock deliberately provoked after the fall of Rostov (and the changes it paved the way for) are scarcely mentioned at all in the Soviet histories. Curiously, a better picture of the mood of the people can be gained from the literature and indeed from the propaganda articles in the press at the time.

So far two feelings had characterised the literature and propaganda of that summer of 1942. One was the same love of Russia that had been so typical of all the writing at the height of the Battle of Moscow—only it was now a love that had even greater warmth

and greater tenderness. It was, too, specifically a love of Russia proper, to which—apart from the Caucasus—the German advances had by now reduced the European part of the

U.S.S.R. The other was hate— hate, no longer mingled with ridicule, or scarcely so

(except for the "Winter Fritz" who still loomed large at the Moscow Circus). It grew during those summer months till it reached a paroxysm of frenzy during the blackest days of August. "Kill the German" became like Russia's Ten Commandments all in one.

Sholokhov's The School of Hate, the story of a Russian prisoner who had suffered hell at the hands of humorously-sadistic Germans, published in several papers on June 23 had a profound effect. Poignant and convincing, it set the tone of much of the hate propaganda during the weeks that followed.

Ehrenburg, too, was a very important factor in the great battle for Russian morale in the summer of 1942; every soldier in the Army read Ehrenburg; and partisans in the enemy rear are known to have readily swopped any spare tommy gun for a bundle of Ehrenburg clippings. One may like or dislike Ehrenburg as a writer, but during those tragic weeks he certainly showed a genius for putting into biting, inspiring prose the burning hatred Russia felt for the Germans; this man, with his cosmopolitan background and his French culture, had grasped by intuition what the ordinary Russian really felt. Ideologically, it was unorthodox, but tactically, in the circumstances, it was thought right to give him a free hand. Read later in book form, his articles no longer make the same impression; but one must imagine oneself in the position of a Russian in the summer of 1942 who was

watching the map and seeing one town going after another, one province going after

another; one must put oneself in the position of a Russian soldier retreating to Stalingrad or Nalchik, saying to himself: How much farther are we going to retreat? How much

farther can we retreat? The Ehrenburg articles helped such a man to pull himelf together.