Russia at war 1941-1945

"liberal" of all the Stalin era. We ranked as Allies, and were treated accordingly—on the whole, very well. In the circumstances, and especially as I speak Russian as a native (I was born in old St Petersburg), I was able to speak freely and informally to thousands of soldiers and civilians. Moreover, as the correspondent of the Sunday Times and the writer of the "Russian Commentaries" for the BBC, read by Joseph McLeod, I was given some exceptional opportunities for travelling about the country and visiting the Front. Some of these trips were made by small groups of about five or six correspondents, but I also often went on solo trips; among the most memorable of these were my stay in blockaded Leningrad, and the ten days spent in the Ukraine at the height of the Konev offensive in March 1944 which swept the Red Army right into Rumania. On all these trips I took

every opportunity of talking to all and sundry; and Russian soldiers and officers, I soon found, were among the most candid and uninhibited talkers in the world. They were

human beings, each with marked individual traits of his own, and were quite unlike the uniform heroic robots that they are often made to look in some of the more official Soviet books on the war. During those trips I also had the opportunity of meeting many famous generals—among them General Sokolovsky at Viazma in the tragic autumn of 1941;

Chuikov and Malinovsky in the Stalingrad area; Rokossovsky in Poland; and, finally,

Marshal Zhukov in Berlin.

In Moscow I got to know personally some of the top Soviet political leaders, particularly Molotov, Vyshinsky and Shcherbakov, but I cannot say that I attempted any serious

Kremlinological studies during the war. At the time all seemed to be going reasonably smoothly inside the Kremlin, especially after Stalin had given the necessary weight and authority to the "new" generals in the autumn of 1941. What we know about Stalin and his immediate entourage during the war comes chiefly from what a few Russians, such as Marshal Yeremenko, and some distinguished foreign visitors, such as Churchill, Hopkins, Deane and Stettinius, have published since the war. There are also the entertaining

Russian minutes of the Stalin-de Gaulle and Bidault-Molotov talks in December 1944. A more sordid picture is provided by some (inevitably hostile) Poles like Anders and

Mikolajczyk. Though this evidence gives us a general idea of how the Russian leadership worked, a detailed account of the inner workings of the Kremlin during the war will not be possible until all the documents and records become available —if they ever do.

[The goings on among the Nazi hierarchy have become public property only because

Germany was defeated and countless documents were captured. This has had, I feel, one bad effect on books on Germany during the war: they have concentrated on the actions of the Nazi thugs, and have told us too little about the reactions of the German people.]

It is most unlikely that they will, because they would show how great was the part played by people whose names are now taboo. But while we do not usually know exactly how

certain far-reaching decisions were taken by the Kremlin, we do know what their effects were.

While I made no attempt to spy on high government spheres, I was, on the other hand, able to observe, day after day, everyday life among Russian workers and other civilians, and the changes of mood among them from the consternation of 1941-2 to the optimism

and elation of 1943 onward—despite countless personal losses and the great hardships that most, though not all, continued to suffer. (The inequality, especially in food

rationing, was one of the most unpleasant aspects of ordinary life in Russia during the war—and, indeed, long after.) I also saw a great deal of writers, artists and other

intellectuals—Pasternak, Prokofiev and Eisenstein among them—and also some very

queer political animals, such as the members of the "Union of Polish Patriots", that foetus which soon emerged from the womb of Mother Russia as the Lublin Committee.

All these contacts with both "important" and "unimportant" people gave me a good cross-section of Russian opinion, with its many nuances, during the various stages of the war—

whether in Moscow, or at the Front, or in the newly-liberated areas—and I do not think it necessary to apologise for having devoted a substantial part of this book to personal observations of the life and moods in the Soviet Union during the war years.

[In the earlier part of this book I have used some of the descriptive material from my earlier books on Russia, particularly The Year of Stalingrad, which are now out of print.]

I even venture to think that they will fill a substantial gap in so much of the more-or-less official Soviet writing on the war.