Russia at war 1941-1945

government officials who had more or less collaborated with the Germans, had either

followed them in their retreat, or were now lying low. All three countries had their own Nazis and their own Gestapo men. When I went to Tallinn in October 1944, I saw furtive and anxious looks on a good many faces, especially among the better-dressed people. The NKVD were becoming very active, and thousands of Balts were to be deported in the

next few years.

[ In Solzhenitsyn's famous One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, several seemingly quite harmless Balts figure among the convicts.]

By the end of October all the three Republics were liberated, with the exception of the Courland peninsula (where thirty German divisions were to remain trapped till the end of the war). By that time over 300 square miles of German territory in East Prussia had also been conquered by the Russians. The great exodus of the German population from East

Prussia had begun, many fleeing to Königsberg, others further west.

The fighting for these small areas of German territory had been extremely heavy. The Russians were also meeting with very strong German resistance in Slovakia and

Hungary, where the Red Army's progress was very much slower than it had been in

Rumania. Budapest was not to fall till February 13, 1945.

In Poland the front had become more or less stabilised in September, but it was generally expected that the final blow at Nazi Germany would be struck from here.

Fighting, however, continued on the Sandomierz bridgehead, south of Warsaw which the Germans were attacking with great determination. Among the Red Army soldiers there

was now a feeling of impatience—and distrust. In November 1944 I was shown a letter

from a soldier who was fighting "somewhere in Poland"— apparently at Sandomierz: As before, I am on my way to Berlin. True, we may not get there in time, but Berlin is precisely the place that we must reach. We have suffered enough, and we deserve the right to enter Berlin. Our "military rank" entitles us to it, while the Allies are not entitled to it. They probably wouldn't understand, but Fritz understands it only too well. Hence the frantic resistance with which we are meeting. They keep shelling us morning, noon and night, and must have brought pretty well everything they had in the west. They obviously prefer to be licked by the Allies, and not by us. If that happened, it would really hurt us. I trust, however, you will soon hear some good news from us. Our fellows' fury and thirst for revenge after all we have seen are more intense than ever. Even in the days of our retreat it was nothing like it...

But the question of who would reach Berlin first—and this had already become a real

obsession with many Russian soldiers—was now thought to be no longer a military, but a diplomatic question, which would have to be settled in the Russians' favour.

[At any rate, all Russians were convinced that there was such a diplomatic agreement, and the soldiers had no doubt whatsoever that the Allies could have taken Berlin had they wanted to, but that the Allied governments decided against it for political reasons—

namely, so as not to antagonise the Russians unduly. As we know, Eisenhower, fearing that German resistance might continue for a very long time in the mountainous "Southern Redoubt", gave priority over Berlin to the occupation of southern Germany and western Austria, despite angry protests from Churchill who thought it politically of the utmost importance for the Western Powers to occupy Berlin before the Russians got there. It has, nevertheless, been suggested that there was a Stalin-Roosevelt agreement behind