The TASS correspondent added that there were "dozens of such batteries" in the London area, and commented on the comradely atmosphere amongst all these men: "The
behaviour of the sergeants is entirely different from what it used to be during the 1914-18
war." This article caused a real stir in Russia. It was something quite new. There had never been any "human interest" stories in the Soviet press about the Germans and their
"menus", let alone about Frenchmen and Norwegians. There was also a clear suggestion that this was a "people's war" in which the "proletariat" were playing as active a part as any, including Jack Horner's fellow villagers who could reasonably be supposed to be communists.
For a time, at any rate, a subtle kind of fellow-feeling for the British people was thus created in Russia. The intellectuals felt it, of course, most acutely. Anna Akhmatova wrote a poem on the bombing of London, which was not, however, to be published until 1943:
Time, with its bony hand,
Is now writing Shakespeare's twenty-fourth drama.
No, let us sooner read Hamlet and Caesar and Lear
Above the leaden river.
No, let us rather accompany darling Juliet
With singing and torches to her grave.
No, let us sooner look into Macbeth's window,
And tremble, together with the hired murderers.
But not this, not this, not this.
This one we cannot bear to read.
[Anna Akhmatova, Izbrannoye (A Selection) (Tashkent, 1943), p. 12.]
And Nikolai Tikhonov, full of foreboding, wrote another poem which was finally
published in 1956:
Through the night, through sheets of rain, and the wind cutting his cheeks,
Learning his lesson as he goes along,
The man of London winds his way to the shelter,
Dragging his rug along the watery pavement.
There's the cold steel key in his pocket,
A key to rooms now turned to prickly rubble.
We still are learning lessons at our school desk,
But at night we dream of the coming exam.
[ Literaturnaya Moskva (Moscow, 1956), p. 499.]
Especially among the intellectuals, there had, all along, been a distaste for the Soviet-German Pact, and a growing feeling that what was now happening to England would,
sooner or later, happen to Russia too: "At night we dream of the coming exam"...
On October 25 Pravda contained three news items, each significant in its own way:
"Hitler meets Franco", which suggested that Russia was certainly in very strange company; "The Evacuation of Children from Berlin", which suggested that England was hitting back hard; and another TASS message from London saying that there had been
great improvements lately in the organisation of air-raid shelters. And, two days later:
"Roosevelt warns Pétain against collaboration with Germany and against declaring war on England." After that came the news of the Italian attack on Greece —suggesting that the war was now spreading to the Balkans, a point about which Russia had always been very sensitive.
[Another curious news item during that week was the arrival in Moscow of Matias
Rakosi, the Hungarian communist leader. It was stated that he had been in jail for fifteen years, and had now been released as a result of the recent Soviet-Hungarian negotiations.]
Chapter VII DISPLAY OF RUSSIAN MILITARY MIGHT—
MOLOTOV'S TRAGICOMIC VISIT TO BERLIN
And then came November 1940. The Soviet Government clearly felt that the people
needed reassuring. The November 7 celebrations of the 23rd anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution were marked by a spectacular display of the Soviet Union's military might; this was not only meant to restore the Soviet public's confidence, but also to impress Germany. At the Bolshoi Theatre, on the eve of Revolution Day, there was the usual
meeting at which Kalinin, the venerable President of the Soviet Union, spoke, saying that
"of all the large States, the USSR is, in fact, the only one not to be involved in war, and is scrupulously observing its neutrality". To this Pravda added: "What we see in the capitalist world is a process of savage destruction of what generations of human beings had created. People, cities, industries, culture are being ruthlessly destroyed."
[ Pravda, November 9, 1940.]
In his Order of the Day, on November 7, the Commissar of Defence, Marshal
Timoshenko declared: "The Red Army is prepared, at the first summons of the Party and the Government, to strike a crushing blow at anyone who may dare to violate the sacred frontiers of our socialist state."
As Pravda described it on November 9, the November 7 military display was a very big affair:
The military parade in the capital of our country was truly dazzling. Troops of
every kind demonstrated before Comrade Stalin and the leaders of the Party and
the Government their preparedness for the defence of the sacred frontiers of the
Soviet Union.
The parade demonstrated the real might of the Soviet Army. The squares of cities
shook with the thunder of mighty engines, and the rhythmic march of the battalions.
Our combat planes flew over our cities in impeccable formation. There were many
of them everywhere: in Moscow, Riga, Lwow, Orel, Tallinn, Czernowitz, Voronezh,
Kiev, Odessa, Archangel, Murmansk, Sebastopol, Tbilisi, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk,
Erevan, Viborg, Krasnoyarsk, Baku, Alma Ata, Vladivostok and other cities.
Altogether, over 5,000 combat planes of different types and classes took part in
these air parades and, but for the bad weather in some places, there would have
been 8,000. Our proud Stalin Hawks flew these remarkable planes, the work of our
glorious Soviet constructors.
[" Stalin Hawks" was the affectionate term for Soviet airmen.]
It then spoke lyrically of the "growing army of Stakhanovites" who had also taken part in the parade, and of the thousands of children—those "Soviet children who have a happy, cloudless today and a secure tomorrow".
There was, of course, no suggestion that a high proportion of the 5,000 planes that had taken part in these air parades near the German, Finnish and Japanese borders, and
elsewhere, were wholly obsolete. No doubt the general public knew no better, but the German military and air attachés at the Red Square parade may well have drawn more
professional conclusions.
In Leningrad, where there appears to have been no air display owing to bad weather, the parade was directed by the commander of the Leningrad Military District, Hero of the Soviet Union, Lt.-Gen. Kirponos, who was to come to a tragic end in the Kiev
encirclement, barely ten months later.
Looking back on this strange period, one has the curious feeling that, in his own way, Molotov was made to play in Russia the part of Laval; like Laval, he was le vidangeur, who had to do all the dirty work, while Pétain—and Stalin—tried to keep their hands
relatively clean, and refrained, as far as possible, from any direct dealings with the Germans. It was significant that, in the TASS denial published at the end of August, a point should have been made of the fact that Stalin had not seen the German Ambassador