Russia at war 1941-1945

I found the Lenin Mausoleum closed, and was waved away, but without any explanation, by two bayoneted guards. On the surface, life seemed, in many ways, to go on as before.

Fourteen theatres were open and invariably crowded, and restaurants and hotels

continued to be packed.

For all that, Moscow was preparing for air raids. Already on July 9, special trucks began to run along the tram-lines, distributing heaps of sand. That week I wrote an article on the London blitz and on British air raid precautions, and this was promptly published in Izvestia, was much talked about, and even produced some polemics on the pros and cons of pouring buckets of water over incendiaries, which I had declared to be wrong. My

story of the London blitz was widely discussed, all the more so as during the Soviet-German Pact the Russian press had not dwelt very much on Britain's experiences of

bombing.

The prospect of German air raids led, by the second week of July, to a large-scale

evacuation of children from Moscow. Many women were also urged to leave and to work

on kolkhozes. Railway stations were crowded with people who had permits to leave Moscow. Many of the women I saw at the Kursk Station on the night of July 11, on their way to Gorki, were weeping; many thought they would not get back to Moscow for a

long time, and perhaps, for all they knew, the Germans would come.

*

Anglo-Russian relations were rapidly improving. Sir Stafford Cripps, who had been cold-shouldered by the Russians right up to the beginning of the Nazi invasion, had two

meetings with Stalin in the second week of July, and on July 12 the Anglo-Soviet

Agreement was solemnly signed by Molotov and Cripps in Molotov's office at the

Kremlin, in the presence of Stalin, Admiral Kuznetsov, General Shaposhnikov, General Mason MacFarlane, and Laurence Cadbury, head of the British Trade Mission. Stalin,

through an interpreter, talked at some length to Mason MacFarlane, and chocolates and Soviet champagne were served.

At Lozovsky's [ A Deputy Foreign Commissar and the Deputy-Chief of Sovinform-

bureau. His chief in the latter organisation was that extremely hard "Stalinist" party boss, member of the Politburo, A. S. Shcherbakov] press conference on the following

afternoon, the Russians were still showing surprise at the signing of the agreement

providing for mutual aid and promising not to make a separate peace with Germany.

Lozovsky himself seemed pleasantly surprised, and said it was the biggest blow for

Hitler, since it smashed his plan for fighting East and West separately. Asked whether the USA could be considered a silent partner to this agreement, he said gallantly: "The USA is too great a country to be silent."

The press set-up in Moscow during those first weeks of the war was a very strange one.

The only official sources of information were the Soviet press with their war

communiqués and their war reportages, and these press conferences held three times a week by Lozovsky.

The reportages in the press dealt chiefly with isolated cases of Russian bravery and heroism, though, occasionally, especially in the army paper, Red Star, there were some useful analytical articles. The communiqués tended to be cagey and often gave only the vaguest indications of where the fighting was actually taking place, but people soon learned to read between the lines. Fighting in "the Minsk direction" or "the Smolensk direction" usually meant that these cities had already been lost, and a study of the communiqué vocabulary taught one to understand the degree of the Russian setbacks;

thus "heavy defensive battles against superior enemy forces" meant that the Russians were in full and disorderly retreat; this was the worst of all the communiqué phrases.

The general tendency of Lozovsky's press conferences was to suggest that all the Russian setbacks were temporary; that, whatever the loss of territory, the Germans were not going to win; that Moscow and Leningrad, in any case, would not be lost; that Russian losses were admittedly high, but that German losses were higher still —the most questionable of his arguments; that relations between Germany and her satellites were highly strained, also a questionable proposition in the summer and autumn of 1941. Occasionally he

revealed important facts—such as the destruction by the Russians of the Dnieper Dam or the deportation to the east of the entire population of the Volga-German Autonomous

Soviet Republic—a matter of about half-a-million people. Major disasters, such as the capture by the Germans of many hundreds of thousands of prisoners, and the stupendous losses in aircraft, were not mentioned at all. On the other hand, he tended, if anything, to exaggerate the number of German tanks and aircraft engaged on the Russian Front; thus, he spoke of 10,000 German tanks taking part in the fighting.

Lozovsky was an Old Bolshevik, with a smooth, cosmopolitan veneer, a first-vintage