Russia at war 1941-1945

fought under the barbarous Stalin régime. But the people fought, and fought, above all, for "themselves", that is, for Russia; and Stalin had the good sense to realise this almost at once. In the dark days of 1941 he not only explicitly proclaimed that the people were fighting this war for Russia and for "the Russian heritage", thus stimulating Russian national pride, and the national sense of injury to the utmost, but he succeeded in getting himself almost universally accepted as Russia's national leader. Even the Church was roped in. Later, he even deliberately singled out the Russians for special praise, rather at the expense of the other nationalities of the Soviet Union, for having shown the greatest power of endurance, and the greatest patience and for never having lost faith in the Soviet regime—arid, by implication, in Stalin himself. This was one way of saying that, in

fighting for Russia, the Russian people also fought for the Soviet system, which is at least partly true, especially if one considers that, practically throughout the war, the two became extraordinarily closely identified, not only in propaganda, but also in people's minds. Similarly, the Party did everything to identify itself with the Army—except on one occasion, in 1942, when an attempt was made to blame the insufficiently equipped Army for some grave military reverses.

This is not to say that the régime had no major share in the credit for Russia's ultimate victory: but for the vast industrialisation effort that had gone on since 1928, and the tremendous organisational feat of evacuating a large part of industry to the east at the height of the German invasion, Russia would have been destroyed. All the same, many

fearful mistakes had been made, both before the war and at the beginning of the war; and even Stalin admitted it.

In this book, I trace the varying attitudes of the Russian people to Russia, to the régime, and to Stalin himself. Marshal Zhukov, who did not like Stalin, nevertheless paid him this tribute: "You can say what you like, but that man has got nerves of iron." Among the rank-and-file Russian soldiers, Stalin was popular: as Ehrenburg recently put it, "they had absolute, confidence in him." A father-figure or, shall we say, a Churchill-figure was badly needed in wartime and, in spite of everything, Stalin provided it remarkably

successfully. All the same, as will be seen, his standing during the war had a great many ups and downs.

The popular reactions to the régime and to Stalin during the war are, of course, only one of the many aspects of Russian wartime mentality with which I deal in this book. I was also careful to watch people's reactions to the Germans and to the Western Allies. The attitude to the Germans was determined partly by direct experience, and partly by

propaganda lines—often seemingly contradictory lines—adopted by the Party and the

government at different stages of the war. In the course of my story I report on the mounting Russian anger against the Nazis, the near-racialist anti-German propaganda of Ehrenburg and others (a propaganda which was suddenly stopped in April 1945, with the Russians well inside Germany), and the effect of the German occupation on both the

local inhabitants and, later, the victorious Red Army. It is scarcely surprising that many of the Russian soldiers ran wild in Germany after all that the Germans had done in the Soviet Union. And yet the Russians' attitude to individual Germans at various stages of the war was often very far from following the "Ehrenburg" pattern.

Feelings about the Western Allies also varied considerably. The distrust of the West had been so great that the Russians heaved a real sigh of relief in 1941 when they found that Britain had not ganged up with Hitler. But, with things going from bad to worse on the Russian front, the clamour for the Second Front soon started— a clamour which became strident and abusive in the summer and autumn of 1942. Much of this anger was worked up by the Soviet press; but it would have been there, anyway; the Russians were suffering fearful reverses and the Allies "were doing nothing." By the middle of 1943, especially with considerable quantities of Lend-Lease deliveries arriving at the Russian Front, the attitude perceptibly changed, and in the Soviet air force in particular, the Western allies were distinctly popular. Russian airmen were, for instance, greatly impressed by the Anglo-American bombings of Germany. All the same, the "unequal sacrifices" were something of which the Russians were acutely conscious even at the best of times..

Close on twenty years have passed since the end of the war in Russia, and I am perhaps the only surviving Westerner to have lived in Russia right through the war years and to have kept an almost day-to-day record of everything I saw and heard there.

Paradoxically, as far as foreigners were concerned, the war years were by far the most