the "Memorandum of the German Government" which, they said, had been read over the radio by Goebbels. Two days later, TASS, in a message from Oslo, referred to Quisling as "the new head of the Norwegian Government". However, it did not deny the continued existence of the "other" Norwegian Government.
After that the German and British communiqués, as well as TASS reports from London
were published with a certain air of neutrality and impartiality. In a variety of ways the fact was emphasised that the Soviet Union kept strictly neutral in the Scandinavian war.
For example, on April 12, there was an angry official TASS denial of a New York Times story that most of the German troops that had occupied Narvik had travelled there by way of Leningrad and Murmansk.
Yet there seems little doubt that, in the eyes of the Soviet leaders, the war was spreading much too near home. Although at the time nothing was published about it in the Soviet press, much is made in the Soviet History of the War of the way in which direct Soviet diplomatic intervention saved Sweden from being occupied by the Germans: "After the Nazi invasion of Denmark and Norway, the Soviet Government informed Count
Schulenburg, the German Ambassador in Moscow, that it was definitely interested in the preservation of Swedish neutrality."
[ IVOVSS, vol. I. p. 395.]
According to Soviet diplomatic documents quoted by the History, "both the Swedish Premier and the Swedish Foreign Minister, in addressing (Mme) A. M. Kollontai, the
Soviet Ambassador, warmly thanked the Soviet Union for having restrained Germany
and for having saved Swedish neutrality".
Meanwhile, the Soviet press went on with its rather routine and seemingly "neutral"
coverage of the war in Norway, with occasional surveys stressing the general ineptitude of the Anglo-French operations. The last of these surveys appeared in Pravda on May 9, and concluded that the Germans had as good as won. On the following day the Germans
struck out in the west.
Inside Russia the most important developments during the Norwegian war concerned the reorganisation of the Red Army. On May 8, 1940 an ukase of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet announced the creation of new military titles—Major-General,
Lieutenant-General and Army General, in addition to the already existing title of Marshal of the Soviet Union.
[These replaced the clumsier and less "distinguished" titles, such as "Army Commander of the 1st Rank", the equivalent of "Army General".]
At that time four men held the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union: Voroshilov,
Timoshenko, Shaposhnikov and Kulik.
[Shaposhnikov, a highly professional soldier whom the Soviets had inherited from the Tsarist Army, was to be Chief-of-Staff during a large part of the 1941-5 war; he retired, in the end, owing to ill-health. Kulik, on the other hand, was a political upstart who was to fade out soon after the beginning of the war. He was to be blamed for much of the unpreparedness of the Red Army in 1941, and, in particular, for having failed to equip it with up-to-date machine-guns and other automatic weapons, which at first placed the
Russian infantryman at a terrible disadvantage against the German soldier.]
At the same time Voroshilov was appointed Deputy Premier and Chairman of the
Defence Committee of the USSR; his previous post of Commissar of Defence went to
Timoshenko. Corresponding titles were also created in the Soviet Navy. During the
months that followed, the press was filled with army nominations and promotions,
complete with pictures of all the new generals, which filled four pages of Pravda for days and days. Coinciding with the German invasion of France, this unprecedented publicity given to hundreds of Red Army generals was no doubt calculated to have a reassuring
effect on the public.
Chapter V RUSSIA AND THE FALL OF FRANCE-BALTIC
STATES AND BESSARABIA
During my war years in Russia I put these two questions to a great number of people:
"What did you feel about the Soviet-German Pact?" and "At what point, while the Pact was in force, did you begin to have serious doubts about it? "
The answer to the first question was, almost invariably, something like this: "Everybody thought it nasty and unpleasant to have to pretend to make friends with Hitler; but, as things were in 1939, we had to gain time at any price, and there was no choice. We did not think that Stalin himself particularly liked the idea, but we had tremendous faith in his judgment; if he decided on the non-aggression pact with Hitler, he must have thought that there was no other way." The answer to the second question was invariably along these lines: "We started getting really nervous when we saw that Hitler had managed to smash the French Army within a month, or less. We had had considerable confidence in the
French Army and had also heard a lot about the Maginot Line and—let's face it—we
thought the war in France would last a long time, and that the Germans would be greatly weakened as a result. Selfish?—well, yes, we were, but who isn't? That we were
frightened may be seen from the frantic haste with which, while the Germans were busy finishing off the French, we grabbed the Baltic States, Bessarabia and Northern
Bukovina. And then came those draconian labour laws, the reorganisation of the Red
Army, and all the rest of it. We never expected for a moment that the Germans would
attack and above all invade us the way they did, but we felt that we had to prepare for a very hard fight if Hitler were mad enough to turn our way."
And then there was a supplementary question which I liked to ask. It was this: "Between the fall of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union there was the war between
Germany and England— and what did you think of that?" Here the answers became
much more confused but, roughly, they boiled down to this: "We developed a sudden contempt—yes, contempt—for the French. On England our feelings were very divided.
We had been conditioned to be anti-British, what with Chamberlain, Finland and the rest.
But gradually, very gradually we began to admire the English—for standing up to Hitler.
There was a good deal in our papers about the bombing of London, Coventry, and so on.
We also began to feel sorry for the English people, and—began to feel that, sooner or later, we might have to face something similar. Our intellectuals felt particularly strongly about it. The idea of a 'just war', a 'people's war' began to cross some people's minds. But then, in May, there was Hess, and we got fearfully suspicious of the English again."
Ever since September 1939, the official Soviet line had been that the war between
Britain, France and Germany was an "imperialist" war; but, since the partition of Poland, the powers guilty of pursuing this "imperialist" war were Britain and France, but not Germany. They, and not Germany, were now the "aggressors". During the Finnish War, Germany had been "neutral", while Britain and France had demonstrated their deep hostility to the Soviet Union by helping Finland with arms and volunteers, and by
expelling Russia from the League of Nations. The German occupation of Denmark and
Norway was at first widely attributed in the Soviet press to Anglo-French "provocation", though soon afterwards the Russian pleading with Germany not to occupy Sweden
showed that they were anxious to limit the damage in Scandinavia.
Soviet relations with Britain and France remained badly strained, and the Soviet press angrily reported the persecution of the French Communists—whom Moscow itself had
put in a hopelessly awkward and difficult position with its "imperialist war" slogans. The French working-class—and the Communists in particular—who in any other