All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [116]
Near Tula, an old woman gave Vasily Grossman and his little party potatoes, salt and some firewood. Her son Vanya was fighting. She said to Grossman, ‘Oh, I used to be so healthy, like a stallion. The Devil came to me last night and gripped my palm with his fingernails. I began to pray: “May God rise again and may his enemies be scattered” … My Vanya came to me last night. He sat down on a chair and looked at the window. I said to him, “Vanya, Vanya!” but he didn’t reply.’ Grossman wrote: ‘If we do win this terrible, cruel war, it will be because there are such noble hearts in our nation, such righteous people, souls of immense generosity, such old women, mothers of sons who, from their noble simplicity, are now losing their lives for the sake of their nation with the same generosity with which this old woman from Tula has given us all that she had. There is only a handful of them in our land, but they will win.’
The British people, awed by Russian resistance, embraced the Soviet Union as an ally with an enthusiasm that dismayed and even frightened their own ruling caste. At a humble level, such sentiment was manifested by an elderly London cockney who said in an East End pub, ‘I never believed them Roosians was ’arf as black as they was painted. Seems to me a lot of them is better off than some of us. Here’s to ’em, anyway.’ In loftier circles, and assisted by exclusion from the media of all discussion of Soviet barbarities, intellectual apologists extolled the virtues of Stalin’s society. The Republicans’ 1940 US presidential candidate Wendell Willkie wrote in his contemporary book One World: ‘First, Russia is an effective society. It works. It has survival value … Second, Russia is our ally in this war. The Russians, more sorely tested by Hitler’s might even than the British, have met the test magnificently … Third, we must work with Russia after the war … There can be no continued peace unless we learn to do so.’ British academic Sir Bernard Pares wrote in the Spectator about his nation’s ‘grateful recognition of the immense burden shouldered by a great and gallant people in our common struggle against the forces of evil, together with the earnest wish that after the war there should be a continuation of this close friendship, without which no peace in Europe is possible’.
Pares applauded a new account of Soviet society published by an American admirer: ‘It is a picture of … fallible human beings, ready to learn from their mistakes, amidst enormous difficulties … trying to build up in one of the most backward countries in Europe a new human society in which the chief consideration of the State goes to … the great mass of the population.’ Many people happily swallowed such nonsense, nodding that the war proved the superiority of the Soviet system. A friend told British soldier Henry Novy, ‘It hasn’t half shown up Communism … no other country could have done it, only a Communist country, with the people really behind it.’
It was probably true that only Russians could have borne and achieved what they did in the face of the 1941 catastrophe. It was less plausible to attribute this to the nobility of communist society. Until Barbarossa, Stalin sought to make common cause with Hitler, albeit to attain different objectives. Even when Russia became joined with the democracies to achieve the defeat of Nazism, Stalin pursued his quest for a Soviet empire, domination and oppression of hundreds of millions of people, with absolute single-mindedness and ultimate success. Whatever the merits of the Russian people’s struggle to expel the invaders from their country, Stalin’s war aims were as selfish and inimical to human liberty as those of Hitler. Soviet conduct could be deemed less barbaric than that of the Nazis only because it embraced no single enormity to match the Holocaust. Nonetheless, the Western Allies