meetings with Stalin in the second week of July, and on July 12 the Anglo-Soviet
Agreement was solemnly signed by Molotov and Cripps in Molotov's office at the
Kremlin, in the presence of Stalin, Admiral Kuznetsov, General Shaposhnikov, General Mason MacFarlane, and Laurence Cadbury, head of the British Trade Mission. Stalin,
through an interpreter, talked at some length to Mason MacFarlane, and chocolates and Soviet champagne were served.
At Lozovsky's [ A Deputy Foreign Commissar and the Deputy-Chief of Sovinform-
bureau. His chief in the latter organisation was that extremely hard "Stalinist" party boss, member of the Politburo, A. S. Shcherbakov] press conference on the following
afternoon, the Russians were still showing surprise at the signing of the agreement
providing for mutual aid and promising not to make a separate peace with Germany.
Lozovsky himself seemed pleasantly surprised, and said it was the biggest blow for
Hitler, since it smashed his plan for fighting East and West separately. Asked whether the USA could be considered a silent partner to this agreement, he said gallantly: "The USA is too great a country to be silent."
The press set-up in Moscow during those first weeks of the war was a very strange one.
The only official sources of information were the Soviet press with their war
communiqués and their war reportages, and these press conferences held three times a week by Lozovsky.
The reportages in the press dealt chiefly with isolated cases of Russian bravery and heroism, though, occasionally, especially in the army paper, Red Star, there were some useful analytical articles. The communiqués tended to be cagey and often gave only the vaguest indications of where the fighting was actually taking place, but people soon learned to read between the lines. Fighting in "the Minsk direction" or "the Smolensk direction" usually meant that these cities had already been lost, and a study of the communiqué vocabulary taught one to understand the degree of the Russian setbacks;
thus "heavy defensive battles against superior enemy forces" meant that the Russians were in full and disorderly retreat; this was the worst of all the communiqué phrases.
The general tendency of Lozovsky's press conferences was to suggest that all the Russian setbacks were temporary; that, whatever the loss of territory, the Germans were not going to win; that Moscow and Leningrad, in any case, would not be lost; that Russian losses were admittedly high, but that German losses were higher still —the most questionable of his arguments; that relations between Germany and her satellites were highly strained, also a questionable proposition in the summer and autumn of 1941. Occasionally he
revealed important facts—such as the destruction by the Russians of the Dnieper Dam or the deportation to the east of the entire population of the Volga-German Autonomous
Soviet Republic—a matter of about half-a-million people. Major disasters, such as the capture by the Germans of many hundreds of thousands of prisoners, and the stupendous losses in aircraft, were not mentioned at all. On the other hand, he tended, if anything, to exaggerate the number of German tanks and aircraft engaged on the Russian Front; thus, he spoke of 10,000 German tanks taking part in the fighting.
Lozovsky was an Old Bolshevik, with a smooth, cosmopolitan veneer, a first-vintage
émigré, who had spent many years in Geneva and Paris, had known Lenin, spoke good
French, and, with his barbiche and carefully cut clothes, looked rather like an old boulevardier, whom one could well imagine on the terrace of the Napolitain during la belle époque. After the Revolution, he had been active on the Profintern, the Red Trade Union International, a body of small consequence, and later became a member of the Foreign Affairs Commissariat. With his Old Bolshevik background, he must have had some
anxious moments during the Purges; nor can he have been happy during the Soviet-
German Pact. However, Lozovsky was a good survivor though, personally, he did not fit very well into the Stalin-Molotov milieu. In 1943 he became a leading member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and this led, in the end, to his downfall; in 1949, along with other prominent members of this Committee, that perfectly harmless old man was
shot.
In 1941 he was considered—wrongly perhaps—as one of the Foreign Commissariat's
survivors of the Litvinov era, more sympathetic to the West than Molotov, though, on one notable occasion, he very clearly dissociated himself from Litvinov. It was a curious incident: just a couple of days before the signing of the Cripps-Molotov agreement,
Litvinov—who had been under a cloud since May 1939—was to speak on Moscow radio;
but when it came to the point, he spoke only on the foreign wave-lengths, and in English.
On the following morning, the Soviet press gave a few scraps of his broadcast; leaving out his "Let bygones be bygones" and "we have all made mistakes", it concentrated, instead, on the passage in which he asserted that the Germans were the common enemy
and that "there must be no de facto armistice in the West". When Lozovsky was asked what role Litvinov was going to play in future, he replied, very reluctantly, that "Mr Litvinov would presumably broadcast again."
The sources of information available to the Russian public were pretty watertight. At the very beginning of the war all private wireless sets had to be handed in to the militia; only foreign diplomats, journalists and certain Russian officials were allowed to keep theirs: everyone else had only loudspeakers giving the Moscow programme. It certainly would
have been unfortunate if some of the German propaganda stories had got round,
especially from those rusty old White-Russian colonels with their alcoholic voices—
that's at least how they sounded—who bellowed about "Stalin and his zhidy (yids)"
preparing to flee the country, about their "fat bank balances at Buenos Aires", about the
"millions of prisoners" taken by the Germans, the "desperate plight of the Red Army",
"the imminence of the fall of Moscow and Leningrad", about the Germans bringing "real socialism to Russia", and the like.
Not that the news was by any means good—even without these German commentaries.
Already, by July 11, it was known that the Germans were getting near Smolensk, and that most of the Baltic republics had been overrun; by the 14th, it was announced that fighting was taking place "in the direction of Ostrov"—which suggested a rapid German advance towards Leningrad from the south; by the 22nd, it was learned that the Finns were
fighting "in the direction of Petrozavodsk"; by July 28, that the Germans were advancing on Kiev. But the fact that, by the middle of July, the Germans seemed to have got stuck at Smolensk created in Moscow a curious state of euphoria, a feeling that perhaps the worst was over—even though the news from both the Leningrad Front and the Ukraine
continued to be distressingly bad.
The first air raid on Moscow took place on the night of July 21; what was most
impressive was the tremendous anti-aircraft barrage, with shrapnel from the anti-aircraft shells clattering down on to the streets like a hailstorm; and dozens of searchlights lighting the sky; I had never seen or heard anything like it in London. Fire-watching was organised on a vast scale. Later I heard that many of the fire-watchers had been badly injured by incendiary bombs, sometimes through inexperience but usually through sheer Russian foolhardi-ness. Youngsters would at first just pick up the bombs with their bare hands!