Russia at war 1941-1945

psychological impact. London was the first great city the bombing of which was being reported in the Soviet press in some detail. There had been practically nothing about the bombing of Polish cities, and the devastating German air-raid on Rotterdam had scarcely been mentioned at all. But now the papers were full of stories about "gigantic fires", casualties, evacuees, shelter difficulties, and the like, and the Russian reader began to see it all in terms of a human drama. Significantly, after reporting for several days that most of the German bombing was done in the East End, in the London docks, "in the poorer areas of the city", it was also reported some days later that "bombs had been dropped on Buckingham Palace".

And then about a month after the beginning of the bombing of London, there was the first major first-hand report in the Soviet press from the TASS correspondent in London. In Pravda on October 5, there appeared an account of "A Visit by the TASS Correspondent to one of the Field Batteries of Anti-Aircraft Guns in the London area". "The present system of anti-aircraft defences in England", it said, "is much more impressive than anything the Luftwaffe has yet encountered." After describing the battery's night operations, the TASS correspondent [The TASS correspondent was Andrew Rothstein.

Significant is not the fact that a British subject and a communist should have written so sympathetically of the British people, but that the Soviet press should have published every word of his story. Such things do not happen by accident in Russia.] went on:

In the morning I was able to get more closely acquainted with the twenty soldiers manning the battery. Mostly these were young workers of twenty-three or twenty-four—miners, transport workers, printers, mechanics, besides a smaller number of

employees and unskilled labourers. Nine of the soldiers were trade union members, among them two miners. The food rations they got were satisfactory. The battery

had been there only a few weeks. The cook (a corporal) who was a miner, coming

from the same village as Jack Horner, the communist chairman of the South Wales

miners' federation, showed me the menu. For breakfast they had tea, porridge,

bacon (or sausage) and egg; for lunch, meat and two vegetables, and a sweet; at 5

p.m. they had tea, bread and butter (or marge), jam and biscuits; at 7 p.m. supper including another meat course. They were getting 12 oz of bread a day, 12 oz of

meat, 0.5 lb of vegetables, 2 oz of fresh fruit, and a weekly ration of 3.5 oz of butter.

The TASS correspondent added that there were "dozens of such batteries" in the London area, and commented on the comradely atmosphere amongst all these men: "The

behaviour of the sergeants is entirely different from what it used to be during the 1914-18

war." This article caused a real stir in Russia. It was something quite new. There had never been any "human interest" stories in the Soviet press about the Germans and their

"menus", let alone about Frenchmen and Norwegians. There was also a clear suggestion that this was a "people's war" in which the "proletariat" were playing as active a part as any, including Jack Horner's fellow villagers who could reasonably be supposed to be communists.

For a time, at any rate, a subtle kind of fellow-feeling for the British people was thus created in Russia. The intellectuals felt it, of course, most acutely. Anna Akhmatova wrote a poem on the bombing of London, which was not, however, to be published until 1943:

Time, with its bony hand,

Is now writing Shakespeare's twenty-fourth drama.

No, let us sooner read Hamlet and Caesar and Lear

Above the leaden river.

No, let us rather accompany darling Juliet

With singing and torches to her grave.