Soon after that Sikorski referred in a broadcast to the destruction of Poland by Germany and Russia in 1939, and demanded that Poland be restored within her 1939 frontiers.
Izvestia immediately protested:
Sorry, but frontiers are not immutable, and the British Government realises this, and has not guaranteed any East-European frontiers. Mr Eden said so the other
day. But with goodwill on both sides, Poland and the Soviet Union will settle this question, as they settled so many other questions. Moreover, Russia did not want to
"destroy" Poland, but merely wanted to prevent the Germans from getting too near Minsk and Kiev.
Diplomatic relations were also resumed with the exiled governments of Yugoslavia,
Belgium and Norway. An important Anglo-Soviet decision was to occupy Iran; a
decision which was to produce some unintentionally amusing stories in Pravda, whose correspondent, describing the enthusiasm with which the Soviet troops were welcomed
by the Persian population, quoted one old man as saying: "I welcome you in the name of Article 6 of the Treaty of 1921." This also gave rise to some bitter jokes like this one:
"Thank God we've occupied Persia; when the Germans have occupied the whole of
Russia, we'll have somewhere to run away to."
The highlight of diplomatic activity during that grim summer was Harry Hopkins's visit to be followed later by the Beaverbrook visit. All this, especially the Hopkins visit, had a cheering effect on the Russians. The exact purpose of the Hopkins visit was, of course, not disclosed at the time, except that it was assumed that the Americans were going to
"help". Needless to say, among ordinary Russians there was already much talk about the necessity of a Second Front; why couldn't the British land in France? Very little was, as yet, said about this officially, but Party propaganda had, clearly, spread the word that this was very important, if not absolutely decisive. A good deal was made, as a sop to Russian morale, of British air raids on Germany, though everybody seemed to feel that that wasn't enough... But of the active and, at times, cantankerous correspondence that was already going on between Churchill and Stalin, nothing was yet known to the Russian public.
Both Sir Stafford Cripps and General Mason MacFarlane, the head of the British Military Mission, were well-disposed to the Russians, even though MacFarlane occasionally
spoke of "this blood-stained régime" and Cripps had had to suffer a good many humiliations at the time of the Soviet-German Pact. I used to see a great deal of both of them during that summer and early autumn. Both considered the situation at the Russian front serious, but never hopeless, and were, clearly, convinced that the Russians would not be crushed, even though there were times when things looked pretty desperate—at the very beginning, and then after the Germans had captured Kiev and forced the Dnieper, and then again when they closed in on Leningrad, and started their "final" offensive against Moscow. But throughout, both considered Russia as a lasting and decisive factor in the struggle against Nazi Germany. Both were greatly impressed by Stalin, by his
knowledge of details, though Cripps told me, about the middle of August, that, at least on one occasion, he had found Stalin "badly rattled", adding, however, that he may have been play-acting, and simply trying to get Britain and America to do more than they were doing. Cripps was, above all, impressed by the fact that, with possibly one exception, Stalin in his negotiations with the British and the Americans always expressed himself in terms of a long war, his request for aluminium, in particular, was taken by Cripps as an indication of Stalin's thinking a long way ahead.
Some of the younger British and American diplomats and journalists, however, tended to think that the Russians were heading for catastrophe. One American woman-journalist
thought she would, "as a nootral", stay on to see from her Hotel National window the Germans march through Red Square. Some even gloated over the enthusiasm with which
the Latvians and Estonians were said to be welcoming the Germans. But, in the main,
there was among the journalists a feeling of goodwill and admiration for the Russians.
Apart from the "bourgeois" journalists—who were very few at the beginning of the war, but who received reinforcements as time went on—there were the so-called "Comintern"
journalists—correspondents of communist papers. They had had a difficult time during the Soviet-German Pact, and now kept rather aloof. Nor were the communist leaders
from foreign countries—Pieck, Thorez, Ulbricht, Gottwald, Anna Pauker, Dimitrov—to
be seen at all in 1941. It was scarcely known even whether they were still in Moscow.
Apart from the very small number of official communist correspondents—at least three of these were Americans and two were Spaniards—there were some other people vaguely
connected with the Comintern, with the foreign services of Moscow radio, or with
Moscow News, among them the once-famous Borodin, who had been Soviet Russia's foremost emissary in China; many of these were survivors of all kinds of purges, and some had been only recently allowed to return from exile; they were, as it were, the flotsam and jetsam of a now bygone era. The Russians did not encourage them to mix
with "respectable" allied, though bourgeois, correspondents. One of the best of these seemingly lost souls was John Gibbons, a convinced Glasgow communist, who had
fought the Black-and-Tans in his early youth and had, since the closing down of the
Daily Worker in 1939, been working on Moscow Radio. He was one of the few people I knew who lived in the famous Comintern hotel, the Lux, in Gorki Street. His wife, a cosy sentimental fat woman, continued to pine for her native Southampton. But John Gibbons, though he had lived through many sombre crises since 1936, remained a strangely happy and balanced man. True, during the next grim winter of 1941-2, he was to suffer deeply from having tea without sugar and only a piece of dry bread, while his boss on Moscow Radio, with a higher-category ration card, was in the same office eating ham and eggs.
"It's part of the system," he would say, "and no doubt they are right, but it was bloody unpleasant to smell the ham and eggs. All the more so as the boss thought it was quite normal, and never offered me even a scrap of the ham."
Chapter VI CLOSE-UP TWO: AUTUMN JOURNEY TO THE
SMOLENSK FRONT
The Battle of Yelnya, south-east of Smolensk, which went on throughout the whole of
August, was not a major battle of the Soviet-German war, and yet one has to live back into the fearful summer of 1941 to realise how vital it was for Russian morale.
Throughout August and part of September it was built up by the Russian press and by
Russian propaganda out of all proportion to its real or ultimate importance, and yet here was not only, as it were, the first victory of the Red Army over the Germans; here was also the first piece of territory—perhaps only 100 or 150 square miles—in the whole of Europe reconquered from Hitler's Wehrmacht. It is strange to think that in 1941 even that was considered a vast achievement.
After the capture of Smolensk, the Germans were held up along most of the Central
Front; but they had managed to drive a wedge south-east of Smolensk, capturing the town of Yelnya and a number of villages.
According to Guderian, there was some dispute among the German generals whether to
defend the Yelnya salient, or to evacuate it; in the end it was decided to evacuate it, though at heavy loss of life—which clearly suggests that the Russians actually drove the Germans out, after weeks of heavy fighting. The price paid in human lives by the