Close on twenty years have passed since the end of the war in Russia, and I am perhaps the only surviving Westerner to have lived in Russia right through the war years and to have kept an almost day-to-day record of everything I saw and heard there.
Paradoxically, as far as foreigners were concerned, the war years were by far the most
"liberal" of all the Stalin era. We ranked as Allies, and were treated accordingly—on the whole, very well. In the circumstances, and especially as I speak Russian as a native (I was born in old St Petersburg), I was able to speak freely and informally to thousands of soldiers and civilians. Moreover, as the correspondent of the Sunday Times and the writer of the "Russian Commentaries" for the BBC, read by Joseph McLeod, I was given some exceptional opportunities for travelling about the country and visiting the Front. Some of these trips were made by small groups of about five or six correspondents, but I also often went on solo trips; among the most memorable of these were my stay in blockaded Leningrad, and the ten days spent in the Ukraine at the height of the Konev offensive in March 1944 which swept the Red Army right into Rumania. On all these trips I took
every opportunity of talking to all and sundry; and Russian soldiers and officers, I soon found, were among the most candid and uninhibited talkers in the world. They were
human beings, each with marked individual traits of his own, and were quite unlike the uniform heroic robots that they are often made to look in some of the more official Soviet books on the war. During those trips I also had the opportunity of meeting many famous generals—among them General Sokolovsky at Viazma in the tragic autumn of 1941;
Chuikov and Malinovsky in the Stalingrad area; Rokossovsky in Poland; and, finally,
Marshal Zhukov in Berlin.
In Moscow I got to know personally some of the top Soviet political leaders, particularly Molotov, Vyshinsky and Shcherbakov, but I cannot say that I attempted any serious
Kremlinological studies during the war. At the time all seemed to be going reasonably smoothly inside the Kremlin, especially after Stalin had given the necessary weight and authority to the "new" generals in the autumn of 1941. What we know about Stalin and his immediate entourage during the war comes chiefly from what a few Russians, such as Marshal Yeremenko, and some distinguished foreign visitors, such as Churchill, Hopkins, Deane and Stettinius, have published since the war. There are also the entertaining
Russian minutes of the Stalin-de Gaulle and Bidault-Molotov talks in December 1944. A more sordid picture is provided by some (inevitably hostile) Poles like Anders and
Mikolajczyk. Though this evidence gives us a general idea of how the Russian leadership worked, a detailed account of the inner workings of the Kremlin during the war will not be possible until all the documents and records become available —if they ever do.
[The goings on among the Nazi hierarchy have become public property only because
Germany was defeated and countless documents were captured. This has had, I feel, one bad effect on books on Germany during the war: they have concentrated on the actions of the Nazi thugs, and have told us too little about the reactions of the German people.]
It is most unlikely that they will, because they would show how great was the part played by people whose names are now taboo. But while we do not usually know exactly how
certain far-reaching decisions were taken by the Kremlin, we do know what their effects were.
While I made no attempt to spy on high government spheres, I was, on the other hand, able to observe, day after day, everyday life among Russian workers and other civilians, and the changes of mood among them from the consternation of 1941-2 to the optimism
and elation of 1943 onward—despite countless personal losses and the great hardships that most, though not all, continued to suffer. (The inequality, especially in food
rationing, was one of the most unpleasant aspects of ordinary life in Russia during the war—and, indeed, long after.) I also saw a great deal of writers, artists and other
intellectuals—Pasternak, Prokofiev and Eisenstein among them—and also some very
queer political animals, such as the members of the "Union of Polish Patriots", that foetus which soon emerged from the womb of Mother Russia as the Lublin Committee.
All these contacts with both "important" and "unimportant" people gave me a good cross-section of Russian opinion, with its many nuances, during the various stages of the war—
whether in Moscow, or at the Front, or in the newly-liberated areas—and I do not think it necessary to apologise for having devoted a substantial part of this book to personal observations of the life and moods in the Soviet Union during the war years.
[In the earlier part of this book I have used some of the descriptive material from my earlier books on Russia, particularly The Year of Stalingrad, which are now out of print.]
I even venture to think that they will fill a substantial gap in so much of the more-or-less official Soviet writing on the war.
It would, however, have been quite insufficient to rely entirely on my own observations, however numerous, and on contemporary press accounts, in writing this account of the war years in Russia. During the first few months of the Invasion it was possible to guess a great many things, but it was virtually impossible to explain with any accuracy just why, within two months, the Germans reached the outskirts of Leningrad and, within three-and-a-half months, the outskirts of Moscow. During those months when, in Pasternak's phrase, autumn was advancing in steps of calamity, I shared the general bewilderment and consternation of the Russian people. Much else remained obscure during the war.
Many such obscure points have been clarified by the enormous amount of literature
published in Russia in recent years—since the XXth Congress of 1956 and, more
particularly, since 1959-60 of which I have made a careful study, and which has helped me greatly. Thus, the first volume of the official History of the War, already mentioned, contains, for all its shortcomings, some amazing facts to explain the many military, economic, political and psychological reasons for the unprepared-ness of the Red Army to meet the German onslaught. I have also drawn on some remarkable personal
reminiscences by Russian soldiers, such as Generals Boldin and Fedyuninsky, describing the first days of the war in the Invasion areas. The silence and discretion with which all this was treated in the Stalin days is now at an end. Whether in war histories, memoirs, novels, or even poetry, more perhaps has been written in recent years about those fearful first months of the war than about any other. A novel like Konstantin Simonov's The Living and the Dead [ Published in the United Slates by Doubleday in 1962.] is, in fact, the best, though belated, piece of reporting there is on these months between the Invasion and the Battle of Moscow. Recent Russian books, included in the bibliography at the end of this volume, throw light on many other 1941 disasters, such as the Kiev encirclement, in which the Germans claimed 660,000 prisoners, or the early stages of the Battle of Moscow, including the equally disastrous Viazma encirclement.
Or take Leningrad, that unique story of a city of three million people, of whom nearly one-third died of hunger, but would not surrender. In Leningrad, a book I published in 1944, I gave, in human terms, a full and accurate account of what had happened there during the famine. But I obviously could not, at the time, obtain statistical data, for instance, on the exact amount of food available in the city when the German ring closed round it, or on the exact quantities delivered at various periods across the ice of Lake Ladoga. Today the precise facts are to be found in such invaluable recent books as D. V.