Russia at war 1941-1945

No, let us sooner look into Macbeth's window,

And tremble, together with the hired murderers.

But not this, not this, not this.

This one we cannot bear to read.

[Anna Akhmatova, Izbrannoye (A Selection) (Tashkent, 1943), p. 12.]

And Nikolai Tikhonov, full of foreboding, wrote another poem which was finally

published in 1956:

Through the night, through sheets of rain, and the wind cutting his cheeks,

Learning his lesson as he goes along,

The man of London winds his way to the shelter,

Dragging his rug along the watery pavement.

There's the cold steel key in his pocket,

A key to rooms now turned to prickly rubble.

We still are learning lessons at our school desk,

But at night we dream of the coming exam.

[ Literaturnaya Moskva (Moscow, 1956), p. 499.]

Especially among the intellectuals, there had, all along, been a distaste for the Soviet-German Pact, and a growing feeling that what was now happening to England would,

sooner or later, happen to Russia too: "At night we dream of the coming exam"...

On October 25 Pravda contained three news items, each significant in its own way:

"Hitler meets Franco", which suggested that Russia was certainly in very strange company; "The Evacuation of Children from Berlin", which suggested that England was hitting back hard; and another TASS message from London saying that there had been

great improvements lately in the organisation of air-raid shelters. And, two days later:

"Roosevelt warns Pétain against collaboration with Germany and against declaring war on England." After that came the news of the Italian attack on Greece —suggesting that the war was now spreading to the Balkans, a point about which Russia had always been very sensitive.

[Another curious news item during that week was the arrival in Moscow of Matias

Rakosi, the Hungarian communist leader. It was stated that he had been in jail for fifteen years, and had now been released as a result of the recent Soviet-Hungarian negotiations.]

Chapter VII DISPLAY OF RUSSIAN MILITARY MIGHT—

MOLOTOV'S TRAGICOMIC VISIT TO BERLIN

And then came November 1940. The Soviet Government clearly felt that the people

needed reassuring. The November 7 celebrations of the 23rd anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution were marked by a spectacular display of the Soviet Union's military might; this was not only meant to restore the Soviet public's confidence, but also to impress Germany. At the Bolshoi Theatre, on the eve of Revolution Day, there was the usual

meeting at which Kalinin, the venerable President of the Soviet Union, spoke, saying that

"of all the large States, the USSR is, in fact, the only one not to be involved in war, and is scrupulously observing its neutrality". To this Pravda added: "What we see in the capitalist world is a process of savage destruction of what generations of human beings had created. People, cities, industries, culture are being ruthlessly destroyed."

[ Pravda, November 9, 1940.]

In his Order of the Day, on November 7, the Commissar of Defence, Marshal

Timoshenko declared: "The Red Army is prepared, at the first summons of the Party and the Government, to strike a crushing blow at anyone who may dare to violate the sacred frontiers of our socialist state."

As Pravda described it on November 9, the November 7 military display was a very big affair:

The military parade in the capital of our country was truly dazzling. Troops of

every kind demonstrated before Comrade Stalin and the leaders of the Party and

the Government their preparedness for the defence of the sacred frontiers of the

Soviet Union.

The parade demonstrated the real might of the Soviet Army. The squares of cities

shook with the thunder of mighty engines, and the rhythmic march of the battalions.

Our combat planes flew over our cities in impeccable formation. There were many