Russia at war 1941-1945

completely weeded out, the restoration of the Ukrainian economy and national

culture is impossible.

But what worried the Party above all, perhaps, was the widespread hope, both in the

liberated territories, and inside the Army, with its millions of peasant conscripts, that the kolkhoz system would be "changed".

*

If the Germans, despite the general beastliness of their occupation régime, had succeeded, on the Russians' own admission, in creating anti-Soviet moods in both Belorussia and the Ukraine, particularly among private-enterprise enthusiasts, there was, obviously, also a parallel danger of Russian soldiers becoming infected by their contact with the bourgeois way of life in countries like Rumania, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

The problem was not, of course, entirely new. In 1939 the Red Army had occupied

eastern Poland and, in 1940, the Baltic States. There had then been a rush by Soviet citizens, on one pretext or another, to Lwow and Tallinn and Riga to buy up trunkfuls of clothes, and shoes and handbags while stocks lasted. But that had been relatively small stuff. Now hundreds of thousands, or millions of Russian soldiers were seeing countries where housing conditions were often better than in Russia, where farms were more

prosperous-looking, and where there was still something to be bought in the shops.

Rumania in 1944 was not overflowing with consumer goods, but there was much more to

be found in the Bucharest department stores than in the completely bare shops in the Soviet Union. About that time I remember Konstantin Simonov wearing in Moscow a

wonderfully loud tweed suit acquired in Bucharest. And, until further notice, Rumania was going to remain a "bourgeois country"; Moscow had assured the Western allies that no changes in Rumania's "social structure" were contemplated. There was all the more reason to debunk the Western way of life, as seen in Rumania, and to warn Russians

against being taken in by the "tinsel" of Bucharest.

Typical of this campaign was a series of articles by Leonid Sobolev in Pravda in September 1944:

Fantastic Transniestria has again become the Soviet province of Odessa. The

unfortunate Rumanian people have had to pay millions (sic) of lives for that spectacle... Our Soviet people were united, and that is why we have won. Here in

Rumania it is different: on the one hand there are the Rumanian people, on the

other, the political adventurers... What patriots there were in Rumania were lost in a bewildered, befuddled crowd... Rumanian intellectuals tell me that in 1939 all

resistance to Hitler would have been useless... One would think that one man's

resistance to one tank would also be useless— yet such things happened at

Sebastopol.

After a satirical and contemptuous description of Bucharest, with "its tinsel, vulgarity and commercialism", its "sickening cringing to the Red Army", and its "well-dressed people sitting at café tables", and "traders and speculators, sitting on the high seats of horse-carriages, and looking like old posters of burzhuis", Sobolev then said that "this tinsel of Bucharest" was not typical of Rumania. At Constanza there were 80,000 people, but not a single theatre, no concert hall, no local newspaper and only two secondary and two

elementary schools.

"We shall pass through many foreign countries yet. Soldiers! your eyes will often be dazzled; but do not be deceived by these outward signs of their so-called civilisation!

Remember, real culture is that which you carry with you... When the war is over,