Russia at war 1941-1945

The answer to the first question was, almost invariably, something like this: "Everybody thought it nasty and unpleasant to have to pretend to make friends with Hitler; but, as things were in 1939, we had to gain time at any price, and there was no choice. We did not think that Stalin himself particularly liked the idea, but we had tremendous faith in his judgment; if he decided on the non-aggression pact with Hitler, he must have thought that there was no other way." The answer to the second question was invariably along these lines: "We started getting really nervous when we saw that Hitler had managed to smash the French Army within a month, or less. We had had considerable confidence in the

French Army and had also heard a lot about the Maginot Line and—let's face it—we

thought the war in France would last a long time, and that the Germans would be greatly weakened as a result. Selfish?—well, yes, we were, but who isn't? That we were

frightened may be seen from the frantic haste with which, while the Germans were busy finishing off the French, we grabbed the Baltic States, Bessarabia and Northern

Bukovina. And then came those draconian labour laws, the reorganisation of the Red

Army, and all the rest of it. We never expected for a moment that the Germans would

attack and above all invade us the way they did, but we felt that we had to prepare for a very hard fight if Hitler were mad enough to turn our way."

And then there was a supplementary question which I liked to ask. It was this: "Between the fall of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union there was the war between

Germany and England— and what did you think of that?" Here the answers became

much more confused but, roughly, they boiled down to this: "We developed a sudden contempt—yes, contempt—for the French. On England our feelings were very divided.

We had been conditioned to be anti-British, what with Chamberlain, Finland and the rest.

But gradually, very gradually we began to admire the English—for standing up to Hitler.

There was a good deal in our papers about the bombing of London, Coventry, and so on.

We also began to feel sorry for the English people, and—began to feel that, sooner or later, we might have to face something similar. Our intellectuals felt particularly strongly about it. The idea of a 'just war', a 'people's war' began to cross some people's minds. But then, in May, there was Hess, and we got fearfully suspicious of the English again."

Ever since September 1939, the official Soviet line had been that the war between

Britain, France and Germany was an "imperialist" war; but, since the partition of Poland, the powers guilty of pursuing this "imperialist" war were Britain and France, but not Germany. They, and not Germany, were now the "aggressors". During the Finnish War, Germany had been "neutral", while Britain and France had demonstrated their deep hostility to the Soviet Union by helping Finland with arms and volunteers, and by

expelling Russia from the League of Nations. The German occupation of Denmark and

Norway was at first widely attributed in the Soviet press to Anglo-French "provocation", though soon afterwards the Russian pleading with Germany not to occupy Sweden

showed that they were anxious to limit the damage in Scandinavia.

Soviet relations with Britain and France remained badly strained, and the Soviet press angrily reported the persecution of the French Communists—whom Moscow itself had

put in a hopelessly awkward and difficult position with its "imperialist war" slogans. The French working-class—and the Communists in particular—who in any other

circumstances would have fought Nazi Germany wholeheartedly, were precisely the

people who were being told by the Russians—and, more particularly by Dimitrov and the Comintern— that the war against Nazi Germany was an "imperialist" war and so, in consequence, not a "just" war. A different morale of the French Communists might not have made any great difference at the time of the German break-through into France in May 1940, and the French Army would probably have capitulated in any case; but,

undoubtedly, Moscow helped in some degree to weaken French resistance, even though it was obviously in the Russians' interest to strengthen it and to keep Hitler pinned down in France as long as possible.

It was all very well for communist propaganda later to adopt the fashionable Ehrenburg line that France had been "betrayed" by her bourgeoisie, but the morale of the whole nation was low in May-June 1940, including that of the French working-class. The

Soviet-German Pact and the subsequent Russian and Comintern propaganda about the

"imperialist war" had placed the French Communists—whether leaders or rank-and-file

—in a truly tragic dilemma. Many of them strongly suspected that they—and France—

were being sacrificed by Moscow, to whom the survival of the Soviet Union, with the

help of the Soviet-German Pact, was the Number One priority.