Russia at war 1941-1945

émigré, who had spent many years in Geneva and Paris, had known Lenin, spoke good

French, and, with his barbiche and carefully cut clothes, looked rather like an old boulevardier, whom one could well imagine on the terrace of the Napolitain during la belle époque. After the Revolution, he had been active on the Profintern, the Red Trade Union International, a body of small consequence, and later became a member of the Foreign Affairs Commissariat. With his Old Bolshevik background, he must have had some

anxious moments during the Purges; nor can he have been happy during the Soviet-

German Pact. However, Lozovsky was a good survivor though, personally, he did not fit very well into the Stalin-Molotov milieu. In 1943 he became a leading member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and this led, in the end, to his downfall; in 1949, along with other prominent members of this Committee, that perfectly harmless old man was

shot.

In 1941 he was considered—wrongly perhaps—as one of the Foreign Commissariat's

survivors of the Litvinov era, more sympathetic to the West than Molotov, though, on one notable occasion, he very clearly dissociated himself from Litvinov. It was a curious incident: just a couple of days before the signing of the Cripps-Molotov agreement,

Litvinov—who had been under a cloud since May 1939—was to speak on Moscow radio;

but when it came to the point, he spoke only on the foreign wave-lengths, and in English.

On the following morning, the Soviet press gave a few scraps of his broadcast; leaving out his "Let bygones be bygones" and "we have all made mistakes", it concentrated, instead, on the passage in which he asserted that the Germans were the common enemy

and that "there must be no de facto armistice in the West". When Lozovsky was asked what role Litvinov was going to play in future, he replied, very reluctantly, that "Mr Litvinov would presumably broadcast again."

The sources of information available to the Russian public were pretty watertight. At the very beginning of the war all private wireless sets had to be handed in to the militia; only foreign diplomats, journalists and certain Russian officials were allowed to keep theirs: everyone else had only loudspeakers giving the Moscow programme. It certainly would

have been unfortunate if some of the German propaganda stories had got round,

especially from those rusty old White-Russian colonels with their alcoholic voices—

that's at least how they sounded—who bellowed about "Stalin and his zhidy (yids)"

preparing to flee the country, about their "fat bank balances at Buenos Aires", about the

"millions of prisoners" taken by the Germans, the "desperate plight of the Red Army",

"the imminence of the fall of Moscow and Leningrad", about the Germans bringing "real socialism to Russia", and the like.

Not that the news was by any means good—even without these German commentaries.

Already, by July 11, it was known that the Germans were getting near Smolensk, and that most of the Baltic republics had been overrun; by the 14th, it was announced that fighting was taking place "in the direction of Ostrov"—which suggested a rapid German advance towards Leningrad from the south; by the 22nd, it was learned that the Finns were

fighting "in the direction of Petrozavodsk"; by July 28, that the Germans were advancing on Kiev. But the fact that, by the middle of July, the Germans seemed to have got stuck at Smolensk created in Moscow a curious state of euphoria, a feeling that perhaps the worst was over—even though the news from both the Leningrad Front and the Ukraine

continued to be distressingly bad.

The first air raid on Moscow took place on the night of July 21; what was most

impressive was the tremendous anti-aircraft barrage, with shrapnel from the anti-aircraft shells clattering down on to the streets like a hailstorm; and dozens of searchlights lighting the sky; I had never seen or heard anything like it in London. Fire-watching was organised on a vast scale. Later I heard that many of the fire-watchers had been badly injured by incendiary bombs, sometimes through inexperience but usually through sheer Russian foolhardi-ness. Youngsters would at first just pick up the bombs with their bare hands!

It was soon learned that there were three circles of anti-aircraft defences round Moscow, and that, during the first raid, barely ten or fifteen German planes (out of 200) had broken through. Some high explosive bombs and some incendiaries could be heard dropping, but only very few. There were quite a number of broken windows the next morning, a few

bomb-craters, including one in Red Square, a few fires, which were rapidly put out, but nothing very serious. On the night of July 22, there was a second blitz, which also caused only limited damage, except that over a hundred people were killed when one big shelter off Arbat Square received a direct hit. But, as on the first night, only a very small number of planes got through.