sumptuous official Soviet receptions, were scarcely aware of the miserable standard of living that continued among "ordinary" Russians. Special efforts were made to give reasonably ample food to industrial workers, and to provide extra meals of sorts for schoolchildren; but most Russians still lived very poorly, their diet consisting almost entirely of bread, potatoes and vegetables, with very little sugar, fats, meat or fish. In 1945, I knew many families with clerical workers' ration-cards who, without actually starving, were having a worse than thin time, and to whom a whole lump of sugar in their tea was almost a luxury. The stopping of Lend-Lease, which had supplied a substantial amount of food to the Army— i.e. to about ten million people—caused an appreciable
drop in the total amount of food consumed in Russia.
[A small proportion of Lend-Lease food also went to the civilian population.]
UNRRA was of some help in Belorussia and the Ukraine, though it could not be said to be over-generous; and there was no UNRRA relief at all in the rest of the Soviet Union.
[There might have been UNRRA help in the western parts of Russia proper, but,
apparently as a matter of prestige, the Soviet Government declined it.]
For a time, the great drought of 1946 was to make food conditions in very large parts of the Soviet Union even more difficult.
These hardships at the end of the war, which were, after all, only a continuation of the war-time hardships, cannot, however, be said to have undermined Russian morale as a
whole, except that a certain relaxation in war-time discipline was to be reflected, before long, in intensified black-market activities and in a considerable increase in crime—a familiar post-war phenomenon in most countries.
But in the summer of 1945 the feeling of elation continued, with the homecoming of
millions of soldiers. In many places, life was already beginning to rise from the ruins; the Donbas mines were being rapidly put back into operation; the Kharkov Tractor Plant was beginning to turn out tractors again; villages in western Russia and in Belorussia were being rapidly rebuilt—though usually by only the most rudimentary methods; hundreds
of thousands of people were returning to Leningrad. The reconstruction that had already begun in the liberated areas in 1944 was being speeded up.
Along with this, there were also millions of personal tragedies— of women who had now lost all hope of seeing their husbands or sons return from captivity, and ex-war-prisoners who had survived the war, but were now being put through the NKVD mill, and of whom
so many were to spend years in camps. There were purges in which not only real, but also alleged collaborators were to suffer. These purges were probably heaviest of all in the Baltic Republics and in the western Ukraine. But officially, very little was known about all this at the time, and the full story of the 1944-5 purge still remains to be written—if the real facts ever come to light.
(c) International Pleasantness and Unpleasantness
A somewhat uneasy international atmosphere marked those three months of peace "twixt Germany and Japan". It cannot be said that a uniform process of Gleichschaltung was yet being applied by the Russians to the whole of eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia was to
remain for some time a sort of show-window of East-West coexistence, with the powerful Communist Party under Gottwald apparently co-operating loyally with the "bourgeois"
parties. President Benes, though not really trusted by the Russians, was, nevertheless, treated with a great show of respect.
[It was at this time that the Czechoslovak premier, Fierlinger, came to Moscow to sign the agreement whereby Ruthenia (the eastern tip of pre-war Czechoslovakia) was
"returned" to the Soviet Ukraine.]
More curious were the friendly gestures made by the Russians to King Michael of
Rumania, despite all the unpleasantness of the previous February. Now, in the summer of 1945, it was prominently reported that Marshal Tolbukhin had solemnly conferred on the young King the Order of Victory, the highest Russian military decoration, for the
courageous stand he had taken in August 1944 when he broke with Germany. On another
occasion it was almost equally prominently reported that some of the most famous
Russian singers and musical performers had given a special concert in Bucharest in
honour of King Michael and the Dowager Queen Helen and that, after the concert, the
artistes, as well as many eminent Soviet scientists who were there, were presented to
"Their Majesties".
Among other friendly gestures during that summer was the conferring by Marshal
Zhukov of the Order of Victory on Eisenhower and Montgomery; the compliment was
returned when Montgomery conferred the G.C.B. on Zhukov, the K.C.B. on
Rokossovsky, the O.B.E. on Sokolovsky and Malinin, and so on.
On the other hand, there was a good deal of unpleasantness of one kind or another. The Soviet press showed much indignation over Field-Marshal Alexander's "insolent and insulting" behaviour to the Yugoslavs at Trieste.
[Tito had tried to annex Trieste and Istria, which met with sharp opposition from
Churchill and Truman. Although Alexander was at first friendly to the Yugoslavs, he
later sharply opposed them on Churchill's instructions, and on one occasion even
compared Tito to Hitler and Mussolini, much to Stalin's indignation. (See Churchill, op.
cit., vol. IV, pp. 480-8). Later, in 1948, at the time of the Stalin-Tito quarrel, the Russians made a complete about-turn and accused the Yugoslavs of having behaved provocatively and irresponsibly and of nearly having dragged the Soviet Union into an unwanted war with the Western Allies by trying to grab Trieste.]
There had also been, as already said, some angry recrimination on the part of the
Russians about Churchill's "suspect patronage" of the "Flensburg Government". There were, further, some angry protests over the temporary arrest, in northern Italy, of Nenni and Togliatti, and a good deal of recrimination about British policy in Greece. Much was made, of course, of the leading part played by the communists in both the Italian and the French Resistance, but, for all that, the Russian attitude to the French, Italian and other Western Communist parties remained somewhat vague. Downright revolutionary
activities on their part were not encouraged; instead, both while the war lasted and for two years after, they were urged to "co-operate" with the bourgeois parties—and in France, with de Gaulle in particular—and to make their influence felt both in parliament and in the administration.
[The most striking example of communist "appeasement" vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie was the formal approval that Thorez—just back from Russia—gave on January 21, 1945 to de Gaulle's dissolution of the gardes patriotiques, the para-military formations of the predominantly communist part of the Resistance. This approval was given in the name of
"national unity", and with the defeat of Germany as No. 1 objective. Thorez's move, obviously taken with
Stalin's approval, if not simply on his instructions, annoyed a great part of the communist rank-and-file, and also some leaders like Marty and Tillon (the latter had been highly prominent in the Resistance inside France), both of whom were later to be charged by the communist leadership with irresponsible revolutionary romanticism and blanquisme.