Russia at war 1941-1945

After this statement the press became very warm to the Allies and, on the initiative of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade, only a few days after the opening of the

Second Front, the Soviet press published for the first time (and not merely in the form of a statement by Roosevelt or Stettinius) a long list of arms and other deliveries received since the beginning of the war from Britain, the United States and Canada.

[This list of deliveries from the three countries up to April 30, 1944, is given on pp. 625-6.]

Not long after D-Day all Russian attention was again focussed on the Soviet-German

Front. In a way, this was natural, for now the Red Army was making an all-out bid to put all Germany's satellites out of action, and to break into Germany itself. Only four days after D-Day the Russians, under Marshal Govorov, struck out at Finland and, after eleven days of heavy fighting on the Karelian Isthmus, Viipuri was captured. On June 23 began the great offensive in Belorussia, that was to carry the Red Army far into Poland. And no sooner had the front become more or less stabilised there in August than the Russians struck out at Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary—and, in Russian eyes, the war in the west again became relatively small stuff.

At first the Allies, held up at Caen and Saint-Lo, had made little progress—which

produced some critical notes in the Russian press; then it became "extraordinarily easy"; and when Paris was liberated, it was the French Resistance who received most of the

credit in the Russian press (even though only a few days before, à propos of Warsaw, an official Soviet statement ridiculed the suggestion that, in conditions of modern warfare, any city could be liberated by forces inside it). Indeed, it was not long after the Russian summer offensive had begun in Belorussia that Pravda wrote on July 16:

The Red Army's offensive has not only made an enormous gap in the eastern wall of Hitler's European fortress, but has also shattered the arguments of Nazi

propaganda. The myth that Germany's main front is now in the west has burst like

a soap bubble... German commentators are now speaking with terror of the battle in the east which, they say, has taken on apocalyptic proportions.

Naturally, the suggestions put forward by some military commentators in Britain that the Germans were deliberately pulling out of Belorussia as a result of the Normandy landing, were strongly resented by the Russians. As the Russian commentator was to say, "this nonsensical talk did not stop until we had paraded 57,000 newly-captured German

prisoners, complete with dozens of generals, through the streets of Moscow." That was on July 17, after the enormous German routs at Vitebsk, Bobruisk, and Minsk.

Even when the campaign in France was developing highly favourably, the Soviet press

still published little more than the official communiqués from the Western Front, and few despatches from the Russian correspondents attached to SHAEF appeared in print. It was not until the end of 1947 that one of them, A. Kraminov, wrote a long retrospective

account of the Second Front, and if the sentiments and ideas he expressed then were the same as they had been in 1944, it would scarcely have been good inter-allied manners to publish his cables while the war was still in full swing. He treated the institution of SHAEF war correspondents as a gigantic publicity machine for armies and even for

individual generals (Montgomery, in his view, was the worst publicity-monger of all); of Montgomery's military gifts he spoke with some disdain, gave the British army no credit for holding the Allies' left flank at Caen, and wrote with typical Russian anger of both the conception of strategic bombing and of the "barbarous and futile" use made of the air force in Normandy where cities like Caen were wrecked and thousands of civilians killed for no valid military reason. It is true that he spoke with admiration of both Patton and Bradley, but treated Eisenhower as a "good chairman", and no more.

In 1944, however, it was not yet the fashion to speak in rude terms of the Second Front.

Though terribly belated, it was still regarded as a real help and as a guarantee that the war would end soon. It made the imminent collapse of Germany more tangible than ever; and the Russians were not altogether surprised at the attempt made on July 20 to assassinate Hitler.

The failure of the attempt was received in Russia with undisguised relief. Although the Russians had, in a way, prepared for such an eventuality with their Free German