Russia at war 1941-1945

It would, however, have been quite insufficient to rely entirely on my own observations, however numerous, and on contemporary press accounts, in writing this account of the war years in Russia. During the first few months of the Invasion it was possible to guess a great many things, but it was virtually impossible to explain with any accuracy just why, within two months, the Germans reached the outskirts of Leningrad and, within three-and-a-half months, the outskirts of Moscow. During those months when, in Pasternak's phrase, autumn was advancing in steps of calamity, I shared the general bewilderment and consternation of the Russian people. Much else remained obscure during the war.

Many such obscure points have been clarified by the enormous amount of literature

published in Russia in recent years—since the XXth Congress of 1956 and, more

particularly, since 1959-60 of which I have made a careful study, and which has helped me greatly. Thus, the first volume of the official History of the War, already mentioned, contains, for all its shortcomings, some amazing facts to explain the many military, economic, political and psychological reasons for the unprepared-ness of the Red Army to meet the German onslaught. I have also drawn on some remarkable personal

reminiscences by Russian soldiers, such as Generals Boldin and Fedyuninsky, describing the first days of the war in the Invasion areas. The silence and discretion with which all this was treated in the Stalin days is now at an end. Whether in war histories, memoirs, novels, or even poetry, more perhaps has been written in recent years about those fearful first months of the war than about any other. A novel like Konstantin Simonov's The Living and the Dead [ Published in the United Slates by Doubleday in 1962.] is, in fact, the best, though belated, piece of reporting there is on these months between the Invasion and the Battle of Moscow. Recent Russian books, included in the bibliography at the end of this volume, throw light on many other 1941 disasters, such as the Kiev encirclement, in which the Germans claimed 660,000 prisoners, or the early stages of the Battle of Moscow, including the equally disastrous Viazma encirclement.

Or take Leningrad, that unique story of a city of three million people, of whom nearly one-third died of hunger, but would not surrender. In Leningrad, a book I published in 1944, I gave, in human terms, a full and accurate account of what had happened there during the famine. But I obviously could not, at the time, obtain statistical data, for instance, on the exact amount of food available in the city when the German ring closed round it, or on the exact quantities delivered at various periods across the ice of Lake Ladoga. Today the precise facts are to be found in such invaluable recent books as D. V.

Pavlov's and A. V. Karasev's on the Leningrad Blockade. These are first-class historical documents by any standard.

I have also used dozens of other books recently published on other important episodes of the war—the grim summer of 1942, the tragedy of Sebastopol, the Stalingrad story,

Partisan warfare during the different stages of the war, and so on.

I have also dealt in some detail with the diplomatic story of the war, some of the episodes on which I was able to observe closely. My many talks with Sir Stafford Cripps in 1941, and with Sir Archibald Clark Kerr later in the war, were of great value in throwing light on Anglo-Soviet relations. I also kept in close touch with the U.S. Embassy, and one of my most valuable contacts was the very shrewd M. Roger Garreau, General de Gaulle's

representative in Moscow.

Politically, one of the main strands in this book is the story of Soviet-Polish relations, which were in the very centre of Stalin's preoccupations, and which had important effects on his relations with his allies: first, the crisis culminating in the breach of diplomatic relations with the Polish Government in London in April 1943; then the formation of a Polish Army on Russian soil; the whole lurid Katyn business, then the setting up of the Lublin Committee and the tragedy of Warsaw in the autumn of 1944. It will be seen that, with a few important reservations, and after careful reflection, I tend to agree with the Russian version of Warsaw, but not at all with the Russian version of Katyn—at least pending further information, which is remarkably slow in appearing. Mr Khrushchev has done nothing to clear that matter up.