Russia at war 1941-1945

Before long, as we shall see, the occupation by the Red Army of Eastern Poland was to be represented as "the liberation of Western Belorussia and the Western Ukraine" and as a means of saving these areas from the Nazis.

The present-day Soviet assessment of the Soviet-German Pact is that it was a measure that had been forced on Russia which simply had no alternative.

[For example ex-Ambassador Maisky's criticism of British foreign policy in 1939 in his memoirs.]

It is one of the very few points on which Khrushchev has never attacked or criticised Stalin, but has, on the contrary, fully justified his action.

Chapter III THE PARTITION OF POLAND

The coverage in the Soviet press of the German invasion of Poland was almost

unbelievably thin. It looked as though there were a desire to make people think and talk about it as little as possible. An attempt was made to give the impression that this was a small local war, of no particular consequence to the Soviet Union, where life, thanks to the wisdom of Comrade Stalin, was going on normally and peacefully.

Much space was given in the press to a great popular fête at the Dynamo Stadium in

Moscow on the eve of the German invasion of Poland, to another fête at Sokolniki a few days later, and to the International Youth Days which were celebrated in Moscow,

Leningrad and Kiev at the end of the first week of the war (though the question which nations were represented at these Youth Days was left remarkably vague—and no

wonder!).

In reporting the war itself, the Soviet press tried at first to sound as neutral and objective as possible. Both the German and the Polish communiqués were published; but

controversial matters like the "Operation Himmler" at Gleiwitz—where Germans, dressed in Polish uniform, attacked a German wireless station—were carefully avoided.

[In the Soviet post-war History of the war, on the other hand, the greatest prominence is given to this far-reaching Nazi provocation against Poland.]

Hitler's Reichstag speech announcing the invasion of Poland was given under a three-

column heading in Pravda on September 2. The speech was important since, in the course of it, Hitler said: "I can endorse every word that Foreign Commissar Molotov uttered in his Supreme Soviet speech," and proposed the ratification of the Soviet-German Pact. The news that Britain had declared war on Germany was given only a two-

column heading.

Relations with Nazi Germany were what seemed to interest the Soviet Government most.

On September 6, Pravda prominently reported that, in the presence of Ribbentrop, Hitler had received the new Soviet Ambassador, Comrade Shkvartsev and the Soviet Military

Attaché, Comrade Purkayev. "After presenting his credentials, the Soviet Ambassador had a lengthy talk with Hitler."

Events in Britain and France were only very thinly reported, but, significantly perhaps, considerable interest was shown in the American attitude to the war in Europe.

But that "objectivity" in reporting the war in Poland did not last long. Ten days after the German invasion Pravda published its first "survey" of the Polish-German war which, it said, was marked by an extraordinarily rapid advance of the German troops; the absence of any proper fortifications in Western Poland and great German air superiority, as a result of which practically all Polish airfields, most of the Polish air force and most communication centres had been destroyed. The "survey" stressed the great superiority of the German land forces, with their large numbers of tanks and heavy guns, and also

commented on the total lack of "any effective help" from Britain and France. Although, it concluded, a large part of the Polish Army had succeeded in crossing the Vistula, the Polish command was unlikely to continue strong resistance, since it had lost practically its entire military and economic base.

Better still was to come. Three days later, on September 14, a Pravda editorial argued that the Polish Army had practically not fought at all.

Why is this Polish Army not offering the Germans any resistance to speak of? It is because Poland is not a homogeneous country. Only sixty percent of the population are Poles, the rest are Ukrainians, Belorussians and Jews... The eleven million

Ukrainians and Belorussians are living in a state of national oppression... The