Russia at war 1941-1945

questions should take the trouble to become acquainted with the Soviet Constitution and with that democratic plebiscite which took place in these Republics; and let him also remember that we know how to defend our Constitution.

As for Finland and Poland, not to mention the Balkan countries, the Soviet Union

will manage to thrash things out with them, without any assistance from Mr Willkie.

Zaslavsky indeed thought it "most peculiar" and highly suspect that Willkie should dare suggest that a "crisis" among the United Nations might be approaching over this question of Russia's small neighbours.

Appearing in Pravda a month after Teheran, this strident cry of "Hands off Eastern Europe", with its suggestion of a definite Russian "sphere of influence" was much more indicative of coming disagreements than Willkie's article to which Zaslavsky had so

violently objected.

All kinds of little pinpricks continued in the Soviet Press, particularly against the British; thus, in March, Pravda publicised a story of German war prisoners—now re-taken by the Russians—who had allegedly been exchanged for British war prisoners in North Africa

on the understanding that they would not fight the British again, but were, however, free to go and fight the Russians.

Above all, there continued to be a chronic irritation over the Polish Problem. The Russian offer to amend the Curzon Line in Poland's favour by giving her Bialystok and a large area around it failed to meet with any favourable response from the Polish London

Government. This was also held responsible for alleged anti-Russian activities by the Armija Krajowa in Poland who wrote in their clandestine press that there was "nothing to choose between Hitler and Stalin", and who (the Russians alleged) even directly collaborated with the Germans by denouncing to them certain Belorussian underground

leaders as Communists. It was also reported in the Russian press that General Anders had arrested fifty Polish officers in Teheran for wanting to join the Polish Army in the Soviet Union. Then, in January 1944, the Russians were greatly annoyed by the reservations and innuendos in the British and American press concerning the Soviet methods of

conducting the investigation into the whole lurid business of the Katyn murders.

However, with the Second Front in Normandy approaching, the Russian attitude to the

West grew considerably more cordial, though the Polish Problem still continued to

poison East-West relations, which became particularly strained at the time of the Warsaw rising in August. But, by October, the atmosphere again changed for the better, and

Anglo-Soviet relations never seemed as overwhelmingly good as during the Churchill-

Eden visit to Moscow that month. Even the most sceptical became convinced that, by that time, both Stalin and Churchill thought it expedient to remain on the best of terms, at least so long as the war with Germany was still going on. It was, indeed, not till some weeks after Yalta in February 1945 and very near the end of the war in Europe that the Polish Problem became acute again, only to go from bad to worse once the war was over.

In 1944, with the end of the war in sight, a great deal of stock-taking began to be done by Stalin and the Party. The reconstruction and population problems in Russia required some long-term decisions; also, the ideological "deviations" and the Russian-nationalist departures from "Leninist purity" during the war—and, indeed, for some time before the war—required some serious adjustments. Finally, the very fact that millions of Russian soldiers were now fighting in "bourgeois" countries in Eastern and Central Europe raised a number of altogether new psychological problems. One of these was to be created by the Russian soldiers' first contact with the department stores of Bucharest.

Chapter II CLOSE-UP I: UKRAINIAN MICROCOSM

A "Little Stalingrad" on the Dnieper

Nikopol with its manganese, Krivoi Rog with its iron ore, and the whole of Right-Bank Ukraine (i.e. the Ukraine west of the Dnieper) —that great colonial domain of Erich

Koch and that future (if not present) No. 1 granary of the greedy Herrenvolk—it was not easy for Hitler to say goodbye to all these. Without them, Grüne Mappe [Göring's June 1941 "Directives for the Control of Economy in the Occupied Eastern Territories ".] and the rest of his superman blueprints were only fit for the waste-paper basket.

At the end of 1943 the Russians had already eaten some distance into Right-Bank