Some six months later, in a less conciliatory-sounding speech at Kalinin, delivered in the presence of Fidel Castro, Khrushchev thundered against the "imperialists", urged them to clear out of Panama "before they got kicked out", swore that the Soviet Union could defend Cuba from rocket sites on Russian territory, and, with more than usual truculence, declared:
We are building communism in our country; but that does not mean that we are
building it only within the framework of the Soviet borders and of our own
economy. No, we are pointing the road to the rest of humanity. Communism is being built not only inside the Soviet borders, and we are doing everything to secure the victory of communism throughout the world.
But, having got that chinoiserie off his chest, he then declared, with a nod at Peking: Some comrades abroad claim that Khrushchev is making a mess of things, and is
afraid of war. Let me say once again that I should like to see the kind of bloody fool who is genuinely not afraid of war. Only a small child is afraid of nothing, because he doesn't understand; and only bloody fools.
He then recalled that his son, an airman, was killed in World War II, and that millions of other Russians had lost their sons, and brothers, and fathers, and mothers and sisters.
True, for Castro's benefit, he ended on an unusual note of bravado, saying that, although Russia did not want war, she would "smash the enemy" with her wonderful new rockets if war were to be inflicted on the Soviet people.
[ Izvestia, January 18, 1964.]
Which has, of course, to be read in the light of his usual line that it is no use trying to build socialism or communism "on the ruins of a thermo-nuclear war".
In all this there was much play-acting. Significantly, the passage in his speech which the Kalinin textile workers cheered more loudly and wholeheartedly than any other was that about the "bloody fools" who were not afraid of war. Kalinin, the ancient Russian city of Tver, only a short distance from Moscow, had been occupied by the Germans in 1941,
and its older people remembered only too well what it had been like.
Kennedy had spoken of the twenty million Russian dead of World War II. Officially, the Russians have been chary about mentioning this figure; when a speaker mentioned it at a meeting of the Supreme Soviet in October 1959, Pravda omitted it in reporting his speech the next day.
[See the author's The Khrushchev Phase (London, 1961), p. 161.]
But whether the exact number of casualties that Russia suffered in the last war was
twenty million, or a little more or a little less, these appalling losses have left a deep mark on the Russian character, and have, whether we like it or not, been at the root of Soviet foreign policy since the war, both before and after Stalin's death. The Russian distrust of Germany, and of anyone helping Germany to become a great military power again,
remains acute. There is scarcely a Russian family which the German invasion did not
affect directly, and usually in the most tragic way, and if Germany remains divided in two, and we still have trouble over Berlin, it is partly due to the memories of 1941-5.
These are still fresh in every older Russian mind, and the young generation of Russians are constantly reminded by books, films, broadcasts and television shows of what Russia suffered and of how she had to fight, first for her survival, and then for victory.
It would be idle to speculate on what would have happened to Russia, Britain and the United States in 1941-5, if they had not been united in their determination to crush Nazi Germany. It may well have been a "strange alliance" (as it was described by General John R. Deane, head of the American Military Mission in Moscow towards the end of the
war), and its breakdown after the job was done may have been inevitable, despite the formal twenty-year alliance that Russia and Britain had signed in 1942, and other good wartime resolutions. Whatever members of the John Birch Society and other politically certifiable people (to use rny friend Sir Denis Brogan's phrase) may say today about our having fought "on the wrong side", we must still say "Thank God for the Strange Alliance".
For a year, in 1940-1, Britain fought Hitler almost single-handed; and so, in a very large measure, did Russia between June 1941 and the end of 1942; and in both cases the danger of being destroyed by the Nazis was immense. Britain held out in 1940^1; Russia held out in 1941-2. But even several months after Stalingrad Stalin still declared that Nazi Germany could not be defeated except by the joint effort of the Big Three.
Perhaps the young generation in the West knows very little about those days. The French radio recently questioned some young people about World War II, and quite a number of them said: "Hitler? connais pas" When I taught at an American university a few years ago I found that many young students had only the haziest notion of Hitler, Stalin and even Winston Churchill. But do even most adults in the West have a clear idea of how victory over Nazi Germany was achieved? Not unnaturally, Britons have been interested chiefly in the British war effort, and Americans in the American war effort, and this interest has been kept up by the plethora of memoirs by British and American generals.
But these memoirs have, on the whole, tended to obscure the important fact that, in
Churchill's 1944 phrase, it was the Russians who "tore the guts out of the German Army".
It so happened, for historical and geographical reasons, that it was, indeed, the Russians who bore the main brunt of the fighting against Nazi Germany, and that it was thanks to this that millions of British and American lives were saved. Not that the Russians chose to save these lives, and to sacrifice millions of their own people. But that is how it happened and, during the war, both America and Britain were acutely conscious of it. "A wave of national gratitude is sweeping England", Sir Bernard Pares said in 1942; and, even on the more official level, similar sentiments were freely expressed. Thus Ernest Bevin said on June 21, 1942:
All the aid we have been able to give has been small compared with the tremendous efforts of the Soviet people. Our children's children will look back, through their history books, with admiration and thanks for the heroism of the great Russian
people.
I doubt whether the children of Ernest Bevin's contemporaries, let alone the children's children, have any such feelings today; and I hope that this "history book" will remind them of a few of the things Ernest Bevin had in mind.
It should, of course, be added that the Russians were acutely conscious, throughout the war, of the "unequal sacrifices" made by the Big Three. The "little Second Front" (the landings in North Africa) did not materialise until the end of 1942, and the "big Second Front" not till the summer of 1944. The strangely mixed feelings towards the Allies among the Russian people during the war years are one of the recurring themes of this book.
What kind of book is this? It is least of all a formal history of the war. The very scale of the Soviet-German war of 1941-5, directly involving tens of millions and, indirectly, hundreds of millions of people, was so vast that any attempt to write a "complete" history of it is out of the question in one volume written by one man. A number of military
histories of this war have been written by both Russians and Germans; but even the
longest of them, the vast six-volume Russian History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union running to over two million words, and trying to cover not only the military operations, but "everything", is singularly unsatisfactory in many ways. It contains an immense amount of valuable information which was not available under Stalin; but it is overburdened with names of persons, regiments and divisions and an endless variety of military and economic details. It is full of ever-recurring "heroic" clichés; and yet fails completely, in my view, to tell the story of that immense nation-wide drama in purely human terms. It has the failing common to much, though not all, Soviet writing on the war of making practically all Russians look exactly alike. Since this book is about the wair in Russia, it contains, of course, numerous chapters on the main military operations.