Russia at war 1941-1945

officers' posts. The article emphasised that the latest ukase was, in effect, the last phase of a process that had gone on for a long time. Distorting history pretty mercilessly by omitting all that had happened in the late 1930's and also since the war, it set out to show that the latest reform, was in effect, merely an application of the army reform Frunze had advocated back in the early 'twenties. Tukhachevsky, that opponent of "dual command"

was, of course, not mentioned.

Having extolled the merits of "single command", Red Star nevertheless went on to say that the new reform did not mean any lowering in the standard of political education and Bolshevik agitation in the army.

The officers' deputies in the political field must continue this propaganda ... They must go on forging men of iron, capable of the greatest fearlessness, of the greatest spirit of self-sacrifice in this battle against the hated Hitlerites.

In conclusion it said that the Red Army would very shortly be endowed with 200 new

regimental commanders and 600 new battalion commanders drawn from the ranks of the

ex-commissars.

All this was, in a sense, a clear victory of the "Army" over the "Party".

Together with this reform came the introduction of the new uniforms. A little later, in 1943, in addition to new uniforms, a whole code of manners was introduced for officers; above a certain rank, for instance, they could not travel by public transport, and were not allowed to "carry paper parcels". Altogether a number of points from the etiquette of the old Tsarist Army were revived.

Chapter VI STALIN ROPES IN THE CHURCH

The establishment of correct and even seemingly cordial relations between Church and State had been one of the imperatives of Soviet Government policy ever since the

beginning of the war. Even before the war, especially since the publication of the "Stalin"

Constitution of 1936 which guaranteed freedom of religious beliefs, the cruder forms of anti-religious propaganda had been largely abandoned. As we have seen, one of the most comic episodes in this process had been the decease, a fortnight after the German

invasion, of Emelian Yaroslavsky's famous "anti-God" weekly, Bezbozhnik.

The aim of the Soviet Government was to create absolute national unity; and, with a very high proportion of soldiers in the Army coming from peasant families, among whom

religious traditions were still strong, it was important to do nothing that would offend their religious "prejudices". With government propaganda becoming more and more patriotic and nationalist, complete with invocations of the great national heroes of the past, including a saint of the Orthodox Church—St. Alexander Nevsky—it was

impossible to treat the Church as a hostile element in what soon came to be known as

"the Great Patriotic War". It was, indeed, essential to secure the utmost co-operation from the Church, and to induce the clergy to do patriotic propaganda among the faithful, and support the Soviet regime, rather than look for salvation to the Germans who, despite all the monstrosities of their occupation policy, still gave some encouragement to the

Orthodox Church which they regarded (not unreasonably) as an element with serious

grievances against the Soviet system. To the Soviet Government the Church was, in

effect, a potential Fifth Column, which it was imperative to win over.

Some of the Orthodox clergy in the occupied areas certainly collaborated with the

Germans, or pretended to—particularly during the earlier stages of the war—while some members of the Ukrainian church hierarchy were wholly subservient to Berlin to the end.

In 1941 and 1942 there were many instances of the Germans posing as liberators of the Christian faith in the occupied areas. General Guderian mentions, for example, the town of Glukhov, near Briansk, where "the population asked our permission to use their church as a place of worship once again. We willingly handed it over to them."

[Guderian, op cit., p. 228.]

In their radio propaganda the Germans made much of this "revival" of religion in the areas they had occupied, and the fact that some priests were said to have joined the partisans was insufficient to cancel out these German claims entirely. Moscow was

particularly sensitive, in 1942, to hostile propaganda, especially in the United States, on the ground that there was no "freedom of religion" in Russia.

A curious landmark in the story of the Russian church during the war was the publication by the Moscow Patriarchate, in August 1942, of a sumptuously-bound and admirably