Russia at war 1941-1945

to be stretched out naked on the floor, so that amid hatred, cries and tears, three German curs should take what belongs to your manly love;

If you don't want to give away all that which you call your Country,

Then kill a German, kill a German every time you see one...

And so on, and so on.

The young Communists' paper, Komsomolskay a Pravda tended rather more than Pravda to invoke the memory of Lenin, as well as memories of the Civil War. On the whole, it went in for "pep talks" rather than lamentations of the Ehrenburg variety. On July 24, foreshadowing, as it were, the more determined tone of the post-Rostov period, it recalled the heroic battles of the Civil War "under the banners of Stalin and Kirov, Voroshilov and Ordjonikidze"—

Yes, we remember how Stalin saved the south in incomparably more difficult

conditions than the present ones. "We had no line of retreat left," Voroshilov later related, "but comrade Stalin did not worry about that. His one thought was to smash the enemy, to win at any price..." So it was at Tsaritsyn in the autumn of 1918. So it will be again now. Our army is convinced of it. Our entire people areconvinced of it... So let us close our ranks, young friends, more vigorously, andsmash the hated invaders...

[ It is curious that the paper should have then prophesied that the Germans would be stopped at Stalingrad (the former Tsaritsyn).]

The first press reactions to the fall of Rostov were still fairly mild, and the Pravda editorial of July 28 tended to blame the absence of the Second Front for what had

happened, enumerating the nine infantry and two armoured divisions that had arrived

"from France and Holland " in the last few weeks. But something clearly happened on July 29 at the highest Government and Party level; for, on July 30, (the day of Stalin's

"Not a step back" order) Pravda set a new tone altogether:

Iron discipline and a steady nerve are the conditions of our victory. "Soviet soldiers!

Not a step back!"—Such is the call of your country. .. Our Soviet country is large and rich, but there is nothing worse than to imagine that you can, without making a maximum effort, yield even an inch of ground, or abandon this or that town without fighting to the last drop of blood. The enemy is not as strong as some terrified panic-mongers imagine.

What followed was even stronger meat:

Every soldier must be ready to die the death of a hero rather than neglect his duty to his country.

Four times in the editorial the phrase "iron discipline" was used.

During the Civil War Lenin used to say: "He who does not help the Red Army

wholeheartedly, and does not observe its order and iron discipline is a traitor"...

And at the 8th Congress of the Party, Stalin said: "Either we shall have a strictly disciplined army, or we shall perish." Today the officer's order is an iron law.

Red Star that day was even more explicit. It gave the same quotation from Lenin with this addition from the same speech: "He who does not observe order and discipline is a traitor, and must be mercilessly destroyed."