Russia at war 1941-1945

The Soviet Government considers that such a policy is the only one that will bring about an early peace, rid peoples of further sacrifices and sufferings and enable the Japanese people to avert the dangers and destruction that Germany suffered after

her refusal to surrender unconditionally.

As from August 9, the Soviet Union would consider herself in a state of war with Japan.

On that night of August 8 Molotov received the press, simply to communicate to it the text of the Soviet declaration of war. He looked even more stony-faced than usual and, after answering only two or three quite innocuous questions, hastened to end this "press conference". Molotov did not mention the Hiroshima bomb; and nor did anyone else.

Yet the Bomb was the one thing everybody in Russia had talked about that whole day.

The bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima on the morning of the 6th, but it was not till the morning of the 8th that the Soviet press published, almost at the bottom of the foreign page, a short item—one-third of a column to be exact—which was part of the Truman

statement on Hiroshima. The bomb, this statement said, was equal in power to 20,000

tons of TNT.

Although the Russian press played down the Hiroshima bomb, and did not even mention

the Nagasaki bomb until much later, the significance of Hiroshima was not lost on the Russian people. The news had an acutely depressing effect on everybody. It was clearly realised that this was a New Fact in the world's power politics, that the bomb constituted a threat to Russia, and some Russian pessimists I talked to that day dismally remarked that Russia's desperately hard victory over Germany was now "as good as wasted".

The news, that same day, that Russia had declared war on Japan aroused no enthusiasm at all. The idea of fighting another war, so soon after all the losses suffered in the war against Germany, had never been popular. Knowing nothing about the Yalta Agreement,

most Russians now felt that the new war had been forced on Russia, or at any rate

precipitated, by the Hiroshima Bomb. It had, of course, been known for a long time that masses of Russian troops were being sent to the Far East, but everybody felt that there must be some connection between the news about Hiroshima in the morning, and

Russia's declaration of war on Japan a few hours later.

On August 7—the day after Hiroshima—Stalin summoned to the Kremlin five of the

leading Russian atomic scientists and ordered them to catch up with the United States in the minimum of time, regardless of cost. Beria was placed in charge of all the

laboratories and industries which were to produce the atom bomb. Contrary to American expectations, the first Soviet A-bomb was exploded in the Ust-Urt Desert, between the Caspian and the Aral Sea on July 10, 1949; two further A-bombs were exploded within

the next week. The Soviet H-bomb followed four years later.

But this was in the future, and the thought that the Americans had a monopoly of the atom bomb had a deeply depressing effect on Russian opinion. The Russian press

continued to be silent about it, and the issue of the English weekly Britansky Soyuznik which was the first paper inside Russia to give any details on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sold in the black market for sixty roubles, instead of the official two roubles, or the usual

"black-market" price of twenty roubles.

The feeling of resentment against those who had dropped the atom bomb was so acute

that any feeling of animosity against Japan was conspicuously absent. I remember that evening of August 8 only too well. There was feverish activity amongst the many

Japanese living at the Hotel Metropole in Moscow. They were packing their bags in order to take them to the Japanese Embassy before midnight. They looked morose but

dignified, and—partly perhaps because they always tipped well—the hotel staff were

very helpful. Nobody else showed any malice either. Shortly before midnight, as they were piling their last trunks on lorries, something of a crowd gathered around, but no hostility was shown and many people even lent a hand with the trunks. It was like a

subtle little demonstration of sympathy.

The papers the next day did little more than paraphrase the Note declaring war on Japan, and recall all the evil that Japan had done to Russia and the Soviet Union in the past—