RUSSIA -2

The Twenty-Second of June

By TIBOR SZAMUELY

THE news was broadcast by Molotov at twelve o'clock noon. We had grown accus- tomed to his stuttering voice announcing im- portant events like the march into Poland, war with Finland, the annexation of Bessarabia. But this time it was different—he kemed to be suffocating, at times he could hardly pronounce the words: 'At four o'clock this morning, with- out declaration of war, and without any claims being made on the Soviet Union, German troops attacked our country. . . .' After Molotov had finished, the first mobilisation order was read out, calling up the 1905 to 1918 age groups. Russia was at war once more.

I spent most of the rest of the day, until the curfew, going around Moscow, from one friend to another. A steady stream of orders was issuing from the radio, interspersed with martial music. The general mood was calm, even buoyant. Towards evening a rumour swept through the city that the Red Army had already taken Warsaw and was marching on Berlin. A few days later this blithe optimism was to seem incredibly remote, like a hazy childhood memory, but at the time we were still under the influence of years of propaganda about the inviolability of Soviet frontiers and the swift retribution that would overtake any enemy.

The full grimness of the situation only came through after Stalin's speech of July 3. He had never spoken like that before. 'The old bastard must be in a hell of a fix if he calls us his brothers and sisters,' said many irreverently. But all realised that this time the country itself was in trouble.

Now the war was on in deadly earnest. For sheer bloodshed it surpassed anything recorded in history. Russian lost twenty-five million dead —almost half the present-day population of Great Britain. The postwomen dealt almost ex- clusively in two types of mail: call-up orders and death notices (popularly known as 'funeral notices'). All the boys from my class, who, with me, had taken their school-leaving examinations in that month of June twenty-five years ago, went into the army; three-quarters of them never returned.

Yet in a strange way people during the war felt happier than they had been for many years. Pasternak speaks about this in Doctor Zhirago: 'The war came as a breath of fresh air, an omen of deliverance, a purifying storm. . . . When the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death, were a blessing compared with the inhuman power of the lie.' In the twelve years before the war there had been, first collectivisation, and then the unspeakable horror of the Great Purge, the Yezhovshchina, when millions had watched their fathers, their husbands, their sons or their brothers being taken away for ever, to degradation, torture and death. Compared to that, the war, with its simplicity, its recognisable enemy and its comradeship, came as a genuine relief.

Russia was probably the only country in the world where war meant, not additional controls and compulsion, but a general relaxation of the rules. The British and the Americans were our allies, foreign films were being shown and books translated, hardly anyone WaS arrested, and a few people were even let out of prison camps. The Comintern was dissolved, and the Pain-

archaic re-established. Everybody talked about the better life that would surely come after the war. The people had proved their devotion— they deserved their reward. The killing went on, but there was hope in the air.

When I returned to Moscow in the spring of 1946, some of this hope was still alive. Then came Zhdanov's speech on literature, the failure of the harvest, the Cominform and the Cold War. We were back where we started.

The sacrifices had been immense, the suffer- ing incalculable. But apart from that, and from the shortage of men, nothing had changed in Russia. The relaxation was over, and everything was soon tightened up again, with new purges, new shortages, new enemies. This was very much in the Russian tradition: the great military vic- tories of the past had never brought the nation anything but glory. After them, things usually became wase. It was the defeats—the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War—which brought changes in their wake. In every other belligerent country, victor and van- quished alike, the Second World War became a great divide; in many it set the scene for pro- found social, political and economic change. Only in Russia did it lead to nothing—there the death of Stalin was a date of far greater significance than either 1941 or 1945.

What of the effects of the Russo-German War upon the world at large? Today, Hitler's attack on Russia is widely regarded as one of the turning-points of our time, an event which trans- formed the course of European and world history. The international balance of forces was radically changed : Russia became the dominant military power on the continent of Europe, and the second power in the world.

But seen from a wider historical perspective the Russo-German War, far from revolutionising world politics, in actual fact restored a much older and more traditional pattern of inter- national relations. It did not bring Russia into Europe: Russia only returned to a continent which her armies had frequented since the days of Peter the Great, entering Berlin in 1760, Paris in 1814, and Budapest in 1849.

Russia did not become the dominant continen- tal power: she had already been that in the past, notably between 1815 and 1855. The chief difference is that Britain's old balancing role was now taken over by the United States. The realisa- tion of Russia's overwhelming might came as a shock to mid-twentieth-century politicians and political writers—their Victorian predecessors would hardly have been surprised. Karl Marx, for one, that tireless anti-Russian 'hawk' of Queen Victoria's reign, might not even have noticed the difference. As for de Tocqueville- when he foresaw the future world dominance of two great super-powers, Russia and America, the startling part of his prophecy was that which related to the United States. Everyone knew about Russia.

Neither did the Russo-German War extend Russia's frontier into Europe: it merely restored the nineteenth-century status quo (not even fully, at that, for before 1917 both Poland and Finland had been parts of the Russian Empire).

In fact, Russia's present international position represents an extraordinary survival from an otherwise bygone age—if not quite a coelacanth,

then a well-preserved and successfully resusei. tated Siberian mammoth. The frontiers of Europe have shifted to and fro, and all the other great empires—the British, French, German, Austro. Hungarian, Italian, Japanese—are extinct. Russia alone stands fast, practically within her nine- teenth-century borders, her vast Asian empire intact. It may sound paradoxical, but Russia seems the one immutable feature of a constantly changing world.

Much has been said about Russia as a oung, revolutionary, vigorous nation, and people tend to forget that she has been around for a very long time indeed. Russia is, after England, probably the oldest European nation-state; she also holds the second-longest record for immunity from foreign conquest—since 1237. The decay of Tsarism, the Revolution, and Russia's isola- tion between the wars, all combined to blot out the past. But not within Russia. In his last war- time speech, on VJ-Day, Stalin spoke exultantly of the men of his generation having had to wait for forty years to erase the humiliation of 1905. Few in the West took notice of this remark. Yalta and the post-war settlements raised hardly any memories of Tilsit, Vienna, and Nicholas I.

Even fewer thought about this on June 22, 1941, when the Russian people started along the fearful road that was to lead to the destruction of Hitlerism—at the price of giving Stalinism a new lease of life. They restored their COuntr's greatness; they conquered half Europe: they obtained nothing for themselves. The high hopes born of their struggle remain unfulfilled. There is still a long way to go before the Russian people achieve their overdue reward.