Russia at war 1941-1945

It wasn't Ehrenburg only; but Ehrenburg certainly holds a central place in the battle for Red Army morale. His articles were printed chiefly in Red Star, the army paper, and reprinted in hundreds of Front sheets. Some of the writings of Alexei Tolstoy, Simonov, Surkov and many others, also had an important effect on morale.

Simonov's play, The Russian People, printed in full in Pravda in July and performed in hundreds of theatres throughout the country, was typical of the "all Russians are united "

motif: here, in a seaside town, a sort of miniature Sebastopol, a handful of Russians, an old ex-Tsarist officer among them, fight the Germans till nearly all are killed; they are touchingly frail human creatures fighting against a terrible inhuman machine. The

emotional appeal of the play was overwhelming in the conditions of 1942; I remember

how, at the Filiale of the Moscow Art Theatre, there was complete silence for at least ten seconds after the curtain had fallen at the end of the third act; for the last words had been:

"See how Russian people are going to their death". Many women in the audience were weeping. Needless to say, there was a happy ending; in the last act the town was

recaptured by the Red Army. It could not have been otherwise in those days: for a

Journey's End driven to the very end, would have been too depressing. The feeling of hate for the Germans, already very strong in The Russian People (significant that it should have been called Russian, rather than "Soviet People") grew in intensity during the summer and culminated in Simonov's famous Kill Him! poem.

[It was later, but only later, when the danger was over, that Simonov was rather sharply criticised in retrospect for having made his characters look such "amateur partisans", guided no doubt by the finest patriotic motives, but still lacking all the organisational precision of the Communist Party. Their resistance was marked, as it were, by

partisanshchina in the bad sense, i.e. a spontaneous act of self-sacrifice, without proper organisation behind it. This criticism was very similar to that which, in 1948, condemned Fadeyev's famous novel, The Young Guard, published two years before. Here also the young heroes of a Resistance group in the mining town of Krasnodon were charged, in

retrospect, with partisanshchina. Worse still, Fadeyev, the official criticism said, had failed to point out that "in reality" all the Resistance Movement in the occupied territories had been directed by the Party, i.e. more or less directly from Moscow and by its

representatives in German-occupied areas. Fadeyev was made to rewrite the novel.]

Another writer of considerable importance as a morale-builder was Alexei Surkov, the

"soldier's poet", as distinct from Simonov, more the "officer's poet", besides many others like Semyon Kirsanov, Dolmatovsky, etc. Surkov's poem I Hate was published in Red Star of August 12 and concluded with the Unes:

My heart is as hard as stone,

My grievances and memories are countless,

With these hands of mine

I have lifted the corpses of little children...

I hate them deeply

For those hours of sleepless gloom.

I hate them because in one year

My temples have grown white.

My house has been defiled by the Prussians,

Their drunken laughter dims my reason.

And with these hands of mine

I want to strangle every one of them.

And here was Ehrenburg at the height of the Russian retreat in the Northern Caucasus, and with the Germans breaking through to Stalingrad:

. . . . One can bear anything: the plague, and hunger and death. But one cannot bear the Germans. One cannot bear these fish-eyed oafs contemptuously snorting at

everything Russian ... We cannot live as long as these grey-green slugs are alive.

Today there are no books; today there are no stars in the sky; today there is only one thought: Kill the Germans. Kill them all and dig them into the earth. Then we can go to sleep. Then we can think again of life, and books, and girls, and happiness.