Russia at war 1941-1945

reached complete agreement as to the scope and timing of the operations which will be undertaken from the east, west and south. Our offensive will be merciless and

cumulative.

The Russians were going to get their real Second Front at last. It was on this note—

which caused immense satisfaction in Russia— that the victorious but very hard year of 1943 ended for her. A year that had carried the Red Army all the way from Stalingrad and the Caucasus to Kiev and beyond. Over two-thirds of the German-occupied territory had been liberated. But it was still a long way to Berlin.

Perhaps Stalin was not bluffing when he said at Teheran that the Red Army was growing war-weary, and that it needed something to encourage it. The Teheran communiqué did

it.

It came as a shock to many when, less than two months after Teheran, Pravda published its famous "Cairo Rumour" story about secret separate peace negotiations going on between Britain and Germany "somewhere in the Iberian Peninsula". Was this calculated to discourage that excessive post-Teheran euphoria that had developed in Russia, or was it a reflection of Stalin's irritation with Churchill who had been much more "difficult" at Teheran than Roosevelt had been? Significantly., the Americans did not figure in the

"Cairo Rumour" story; Roosevelt was treated throughout as a very loyal friend and ally of the Soviet Union.

This is not altered by the fact that Roosevelt failed to give any serious thought to the tentative Russian suggestions—both in 1943 and in 1944—for large-scale economic cooperation between Russia and America after the war, complete with a seven-billion-dollar loan for Russian reconstruction. Such "co-operation" was known to be favoured by certain important American business interests, but frowned upon by others, among

whom, it was believed, was Ambassador Averell Harriman.

PART SEVEN 1944: Russia Enters Eastern

Europe

Chapter I SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF 1944

1943 was, in the Russian phrase, the perelom year—the year of the great turning point.

Since Stalingrad and especially since Kursk the Red Army had been sweeping west

almost without a break. Two-thirds of the vast territory occupied by the Germans in

1941-2 had been liberated by the end of 1943, and although the Germans still held most of the Western Ukraine and of Belorussia and the whole Baltic area, and were still

shelling Leningrad, the Russians were preparing for the final expulsion of the Germans from the Soviet Union in 1944. What is more, the Red Army, on its way to Germany, was going to find itself in non-Russian territory all the way from the Balkans to Poland, and this was going to create a number of new political, diplomatic and psychological

problems. Since Stalingrad and especially since the fall of Mussolini, Germany's satellites (Finland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia) were looking for ways and means of

getting out of "Hitler's war" with the minimum damage to themselves. Already very early in 1944 the first peace-feelers were put out by Finland, Hungary and Rumania. The

Teheran Conference had finally convinced these countries that the fighting alliance of the Russians and Anglo-Americans was a much more solid enterprise than German

propaganda had tried to make out. The more conservative elements in these countries

were hoping to soften the rigours of a Russian occupation by an active participation of Britain and the United States in any kind of peace settlement. Thus, Admiral Horthy, in his first peace-feeler, was ready to break with Hitler provided Hungary was jointly

occupied by Soviet and Anglo-American troops.

Poland continued to be the central problem in East-West relations, and was to lead to many new complications in the course of 1944; not that it was, in essence, a problem very different from say, Rumania, Bulgaria or even Czechoslovakia; but it turned out to be the test-case on which a seemingly uncompromising stand was taken by both the Russians

and the Western Powers. In the case of Czechoslovakia, for instance, there was some

friction and unpleasantness between Benes and the London Government-in-exile on the

one hand, and Gottwald, Kopecky and the other "Moscow Czechs" on the other, but it did not come to an open conflict until long after the war.

[ Gottwald, for example, criticised the Czechoslovak Government in London (in some

articles in Pravda and elsewhere) for not encouraging a more vigorous resistance to the Germans inside Czechoslovakia.]

The Russians maintained reasonably correct relations with the Czechoslovak "London Government", and never attempted to set up a rival pro-Communist Czechoslovak

Government either in Moscow or in the liberated part of Czechoslovakia. Whether the