Russia at war 1941-1945

man in a semi-military tunic, who looked a typical Party man, but who declared himself to be a banker. "A banker!" I said, "how do you mean?" Yes, he was a banker all right; he was the head of the Moldavian branch of the Soviet State Bank; and now that the Red

Army was beyond the Bug and would soon be in Bessarabia, he was expecting soon to

take up his former duties again.

The Mayor was not an Ukrainian, but a Russian. He had been appointed Mayor by the

military—"subject to the population's subsequent approval." It made me wonder whether the Army did not prefer to see real Russians in responsible administrative jobs in large Ukrainian towns, immediately they recaptured them, rather than Ukrainians—who might

be more tolerant of the frailties of Ukrainian human nature. Was it a coincidence that in Uman, and before that in Kharkov, and after that, in Odessa., the Mayor should have been a Russian? Yet, in the purely Russian town of Voronezh, the Mayor was an Ukrainian.

In the Ukraine, with only small forests, the Mayor said, the partisans could operate only in small groups; the largest of the five groups he had organised were two of 200 to 300

men each, operating in the Vinnitsa forests. They had their wireless receiving sets, and they multigraphed leaflets with Soviet war news for distribution in the towns and

villages. They were short of arms, and as a general rule they accepted no one without arms; volunteers were told to join the Ukrainian police force, obtain as many arms and as much ammunition as possible, and then come back. The Vinnitsa partisans had had many bloody battles with both German punitive expeditions and Cossacks, and, compared with Belorussia and other more wooded parts of the country, their casualties were very heavy.

Working round Uman was particularly difficult, because there were hardly any forests around here. Nevertheless, the five units had succeeded in derailing forty-three trains with military equipment in 1943 alone, and had other daring exploits to their credit.

Being wounded in July 1941, Zakharov said, he had been unable to follow the Red Army, and had been taken prisoner by the Germans. But he escaped and came to Uman, which

was already under German occupation; he had arrived in October 1941, and, since then, he had been "working for the good of his country." In 1942 he was arrested by the Gestapo and savagely beaten and injured in the spine; "so I know how the Gestapo question people". He was later released, and disappeared for a while, appearing afterwards at Vinnitsa, complete with a beard and priestly robes. For long intervals he would vanish to the woods where the partisans knew him as "Uncle Mitya".

"It was a hard and grim life", he said, "they were merciless and so were we. And we shall be merciless with the traitors now." He spoke in a soft, rather tired voice. "It's no use crying in wartime," he remarked. "Though there were not many of us, we still managed to worry the Germans a lot; in the smaller towns and the villages round Vinnitsa, we would put up notices at night saying: 'You are the bosses from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.; we are the bosses from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., and you are forbidden to come out of your houses.' And, by heaven, they usually obeyed the order; and when they didn't they were often sorry..."

As for life in the town of Uman during the occupation it was, on a small scale, much what I had already seen in Kharkov—the virtual abolition of schools, and a great deterioration in the health services; the number of clinics was cut down by three-quarters. Most of the small workshops had disappeared with the killing of the Jews. The one important industry of the town, the large sugar refinery, had been destroyed by the Germans. It was urgent to restore it. In one respect though, it was very different from Kharkov; in this rich

agricultural area, there was always sufficient food to keep people more or less alive.

I asked Zakharov about the agricultural policy and administration.

[ The best and most detailed account we have on the German agricultural policy in the Ukraine will be found in Alexander Dallin's German Rule in Russia. This shows that the underlying policy was exploitation pure and simple, and that the attempt to depart from the kolkhoz system and make other concessions to the peasants so that they should produce more were either very half-hearted or were sabotaged by Untermensch maniacs like Erich Koch, the German overlord of the Ukraine. What with future plans for

colonising the Ukraine with Germans, the Ukrainian peasants' distrust of the Germans was complete.]