precarious "peace in our time" after barely six months.
That winter of 1938-9 was an uneasy winter in Russia. True, the Purges had been largely discontinued by the end of 1938, but thousands had been sent to exile or to labour camps; and many—no one could tell how many—had been shot. At the Lenin Commemorative
Ceremony at the Bolshoi Theatre on January 21, 1939, Yezhov, Stalin's No. 1
executioner, was still to be seen amongst the top Party and Army leaders—Stalin, Beria, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Shcherbakov, Andreyev, Kalinin, Shkiriatov, Malenkov,
Molotov, Budienny, Mekhlis, Zhdanov, Voroshilov, and Badayev. It was to be Yezhov's
last public appearance.
Now, at the end of the Second Five-Year Plan, living—though not housing—conditions
in Russia, and particularly in Moscow, had greatly improved. Stalin's zhit' stalo legche, zhit' stalo veselei—"life has become easier, life has become more cheerful"—had become the country's official slogan. Trivial musical comedies, operettas and comic films were in vogue. Popular song writers like Pokras, Blanter and Dunaevsky were at the height of their fame; Blanter had just composed his famous Katyusha (which was, alas, to become one of the favourite soldiers' marching songs in 1941) and Dunaevsky his Shiroka strana moya rodnaya (Vast is my Country) with the more than incongruous line "I know of no other country where man breathes so freely". (This at the height of the Purges!) Alongside popular slapstick comic films like Volga-Volga starring Lubov Orlova, a sort of Soviet Gracie Fields, and illustrating how cheerful life had become in the Soviet Union under the "Sun of the Stalin Constitution", there were the patriotic films, among them Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky—showing what would happen to the descendants of the villainous Teutonic Knights if they ever dared invade Holy Russia. Another famous film, Doctor Mamlock, denounced Hitler's persecution of the Jews.
More or. less consciously everybody was aware of the Nazi danger. There was an uneasy feeling that everywhere in the world the "aggressors" were having it their own way—
except where they dared touch the Soviet Union and her Mongolian ally, as Japan had
done at Lake Hassan only a few months before. But Japan, Italy and Germany were
becoming increasingly arrogant, and throughout that winter the news from Spain was
more and more depressing despite the meaningless assurances in Pravda that "the Spanish people would not lay down their arms until final victory". At the beginning of January, Colonel Beck, Poland's strong man, was on his way to Berchtesgaden to see
Hitler. Had Russia any friends, a few wondered on the quiet—except, of course, gallant little Mongolia?
No wonder that in those days people looked to the Army for protection and that for
example some women ace-fliers like Valentina Grizodubova, Polina Osipenko and
Marina Raskova became popular idols. When in May 1939 one of them, Polina
Osipenko, and the ace-flier Serov were killed in an air-crash, it was like a day of national mourning; they were given a public funeral in Red Square, and the pall-bearers included Stalin, Molotov, Beria and other leaders.
Every opportunity was taken to glorify the Armed Forces of the Soviet homeland,
though, as some observers later recalled, all this was a little like whistling in the dark; below all the bluster about the invincibility of the Red Army there was a good deal of anxiety. On January 1, 1939, in its New Year's Day editorial, Pravda recalled a recent warning by Stalin himself: "We must be ready at any moment to repel an armed attack on our country, and to smash and finish off the enemy on his own territory."
Significantly, at the Lenin Commemorative Ceremony on January 21, 1939, a large part of the long address delivered by Shcherbakov was devoted to the Red Army:
The Socialist Revolution has triumphed in one country. The Socialist State is
encircled by the capitalist world, and this encirclement is only waiting for an
opportunity to attack our state. In such conditions there can, of course, be no
question of any withering-away of the State...In 1919 our Party programme
provided for the transformation of the Red Army into a People's Militia. But
conditions have changed, and we cannot build up a mighty army on a militia basis.
In these conditions our Party and our Government have built up a mighty Red
Army and Red Navy, and a mighty armaments industry, and have lined with steel
and concrete the frontiers of this land of triumphant socialism. The Soviet Union, which was weak and unprepared for defence, is now ready for all emergencies; it is capable, as Comrade Stalin said, of producing modern weapons of defence on a
mass scale, and of supplying our Army with them in the event of a foreign attack.
The Party and the Government are maintaining our people in a state of military
preparedness, and no enemy can catch us unawares.
Shcherbakov recalled how, only a few months before, "the Japanese Samurai had felt on their own skin the might of Soviet arms; there, at Lake Hassan, where the Japanese
militarists had tried to provoke us into war, our air force and artillery turned the Japanese guns into litter and their pillboxes into dust".
This clash with the Japanese had, in fact, been the Red Army's only real experience of war for many years past, and it was, a little rashly, being held up as a stern warning to all other aggressors. At the same time, there still seemed to be a certain muddleheadedness about modern warfare—an attitude curiously reminiscent of certain French military
theorists at the time, who pooh-poohed the concept of the blitzkrieg. Thus Pravda wrote on February 6, 1939, in connection with the twentieth birthday of the Frunze Military Academy:
In the land of triumphant socialism, the working class, under the leadership of the Party of Lenin and Stalin, is building up new military concepts. Following the
directives of the Party and Comrade Stalin, the Frunze Academy has discarded a
good number of old fetishes, cast aside quite a few mouldy traditions, and liquidated the enemies of the people who had tried to interfere with the training of Bolshevik military cadres devoted to the Party.
Was this intended as a nebulous reference to Tukhachevsky and the thousands of other purges of the Red Army? Anyway, Stalin and the present Red Army leadership knew
best:
Military thought in the capitalist world has got into a blind alley. The dashing
"theories" about a lightning war ( blitzkrieg), or about small select armies of technicians, or about the air war which can replace all other military operations—
all these theories arise from the bourgeoisie's deathly fear of the proletarian
revolution. In its mechanical way, the imperialist bourgeoisie overrates equipment and underrates man.
This debunking of the blitzkrieg and the primary reliance on "man" seems, looking back on it, about as incongruous as the alleged deadly fear of the "proletarian revolution" by which Hitler in particular was supposed to be obsessed.