forgoing on more or less official "missions" to these newly-recovered territories in order to replenish their wardrobes and buy other nice things continued to be a standing joke.
The elections in the three Baltic Soviet Republics followed the usual Soviet pattern, but Russians who visited these countries in the autumn of 1940 had no great illusions about their peoples' unanimous love for the Soviet Union. There were strong pro-Soviet
currents among the Latvian working class, but that was about all. When the Germans
overran the Baltic States in June-July 1941, they met with very little opposition from the population; certain elements continued to be violently anti-Soviet, as is admitted in much of the Russian post-war writing on that stage of the war. The Estonians, although most of them disliked the Germans, had strong affinities with Finland, and Finland was at war with Russia...
Chapter VI RUSSIA AND THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN: A
PSYCHOLOGICAL TURNING-POINT?
In post-war Soviet histories of the war, there is a marked tendency to minimise the
importance of Britain's resistance to Germany between the fall of France and the summer of 1941; one Soviet author went so far as to say that the Battle of Britain was something of a myth; there had really been no such thing. There had been important air battles over Britain, but it had never come to a real clash between the "bulk" of the German and British forces. One explanation currently offered in recent histories is that Hitler's fear of the Red Army stopped him from making an all-out attempt to invade England.
Although this assertion may have some substance, one might as well recall that, on
August 23, 1940, i.e. just as the Battle of Britain was about to start in real earnest, Pravda as good as egged Hitler on to attack England. In its editorial that day, celebrating the first anniversary of the Soviet-German Pact, it wrote:
The signing of the Pact put an end to the enmity between Germany and the USSR,
an enmity which had been artificially worked up by the warmongers... After the
disintegration of the Polish State, Germany proposed to Britain and France a
termination of the war— a proposal which was supported by the Soviet
Government. But they would not listen, and the war continued, bringing hardships
and sufferings to all the nations whom the organisers of the war had dragged into the bloodbath... We are neutral, and this Pact has made things easier for us; it has also been of great advantage to Germany, since she can be completely confident of
peace on her Eastern borders.
[Emphasis added.]
After referring to the Economic Agreement of February 11, 1940, the article concluded that Soviet-German relations had "honourably stood the test of time", which was all the more valuable with a great war raging elsewhere.
The most notable news items in the Soviet press during the last week of August and the beginning of September were a brief announcement on August 24 of Trotsky's death
[This read as follows: "London, August 22 (TASS). London radio reports that Trotsky has died in hospital in Mexico City of a fractured skull, the result of an attempt on his life by one of the persons in his immediate entourage."]; another Timoshenko speech on the reorganisation of the Red Army; a TASS denial of a Japanese report that Stalin had, at the end of August, discussed with Ambassador Schulenburg an agreement between the
USSR, Germany, Italy and Japan on the abolition of the Anti-Comintern Pact: "TASS is authorised to state that this is a pure invention. During the last six or seven months Comrade Stalin has had no meeting with Schulenburg." On September 5, there was a report on the destroyers that the United States had given to Britain. From September 9 on, following the first great German air-raid on London on the night of September 7, more and more space was devoted to the Battle of Britain—though it was never called that.
There was at first scarcely any first-hand reporting of news from "our own
correspondent", but the coverage, consisting chiefly of official German and British communiqués, extracts from DNB and Reuter reports, and quotations from the British
and American press, etc., ran into two or three columns every day, and was reasonably well-balanced. Thus, on September 16 TASS reported from London: "According to
Reuter, it was officially stated that the Germans lost today 185 planes, and the British 25." On October 1, there was a similar report from London saying that, during
September, the Germans had lost 1,102 planes and at least 2,755 airmen, against a loss of 319 British planes. "168 British airmen baled out over British territory."
Despite the dryness of this reporting, the news from England undoubtedly stirred the imagination of the Russian public. Several Russians later told me that the most common reaction at the time had been: "Well, at last these German bastards are getting it in the neck from somebody." There was something else that made an even greater
psychological impact. London was the first great city the bombing of which was being reported in the Soviet press in some detail. There had been practically nothing about the bombing of Polish cities, and the devastating German air-raid on Rotterdam had scarcely been mentioned at all. But now the papers were full of stories about "gigantic fires", casualties, evacuees, shelter difficulties, and the like, and the Russian reader began to see it all in terms of a human drama. Significantly, after reporting for several days that most of the German bombing was done in the East End, in the London docks, "in the poorer areas of the city", it was also reported some days later that "bombs had been dropped on Buckingham Palace".
And then about a month after the beginning of the bombing of London, there was the first major first-hand report in the Soviet press from the TASS correspondent in London. In Pravda on October 5, there appeared an account of "A Visit by the TASS Correspondent to one of the Field Batteries of Anti-Aircraft Guns in the London area". "The present system of anti-aircraft defences in England", it said, "is much more impressive than anything the Luftwaffe has yet encountered." After describing the battery's night operations, the TASS correspondent [The TASS correspondent was Andrew Rothstein.
Significant is not the fact that a British subject and a communist should have written so sympathetically of the British people, but that the Soviet press should have published every word of his story. Such things do not happen by accident in Russia.] went on:
In the morning I was able to get more closely acquainted with the twenty soldiers manning the battery. Mostly these were young workers of twenty-three or twenty-four—miners, transport workers, printers, mechanics, besides a smaller number of
employees and unskilled labourers. Nine of the soldiers were trade union members, among them two miners. The food rations they got were satisfactory. The battery
had been there only a few weeks. The cook (a corporal) who was a miner, coming
from the same village as Jack Horner, the communist chairman of the South Wales
miners' federation, showed me the menu. For breakfast they had tea, porridge,
bacon (or sausage) and egg; for lunch, meat and two vegetables, and a sweet; at 5
p.m. they had tea, bread and butter (or marge), jam and biscuits; at 7 p.m. supper including another meat course. They were getting 12 oz of bread a day, 12 oz of
meat, 0.5 lb of vegetables, 2 oz of fresh fruit, and a weekly ration of 3.5 oz of butter.