Armageddon - Max Hastings [93]
After the defeat of their Rising, the plight of the Poles was dreadful indeed. Since Stalin had seized eastern Poland in 1939, his minions had laboured to eliminate potential resistance to communist domination. It is now known that the 4,000 Poles whose bodies were found by the Nazis at Katyn in 1943 represented only a sample of at least 26,000 Polish officers murdered by Beria’s NKVD. A single Soviet executioner achieved an unspeakable record, by killing 7,000 men personally, with a German Walther pistol. To this day, mass graves of Stalin’s victims continue to be uncovered in eastern Poland. As the Soviet armies advanced into the country in 1944, the NKVD followed in their wake, killing Polish resisters who had survived the struggle for Warsaw. Russia waged war upon the Army Krajowa long after the last German had been driven from Polish soil. Moscow’s policy was implacable. For all Churchill’s passionate pleadings for the nation for whose freedom Britain had gone to war, he received no glint of comfort from Moscow, its determination fortified by confidence in Washington’s acquiescence. Stalin liked Roosevelt personally, while disliking Churchill. The Soviet leader acknowledged after the war, however, that his attitudes were formed by the fact that the American president would humour his purposes, while the British prime minister would not. And nothing could alter the reality that Soviet troops stood upon Polish soil, while the American and British armies were immeasurably remote.
FEAR, LOVE AND THE PARTY
THEY WERE A strange mixture, the soldiers of the Red Army, the largest fighting force the world had ever seen, deployed from the Baltic to the Balkans. There were great masses of illiterate peasants from the Soviet republics, who performed the worst of the Red Army’s brutalities, and from whom neither human thought processes nor tactical skills were demanded. In the better formations and technical arms, by contrast, many officers and some soldiers were educated, sensitive men and women, cultured within the limits permitted to Stalin’s Russia. It was a paradox, that while the Red Army was capable of terrible brutalities, many of its soldiers were deeply puritanical. Captain Vasily Krylov, twenty-two, had only once kissed a girl in his life before he went to the war, though he made up for lost time when he encountered Red Army nurses. Twenty-one-year-old Major Yury Ryakhovsky professed himself shocked to discover pornographic pictures in a German bunker. When he was wounded and in hospital, he formed a warm friendship with Klava, his nurse. They sometimes sang songs together, but never went to bed. “I was a very sensitive, innocent young man.” Like so many of his generation of educated Russians, Ryakhovsky read voraciously—never whodunits or romances, but Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin and endless poetry. Vasily Krylov carried a volume of Shakespeare in his pack beside his lucky teddy bear. Half the Red Army had read Anna Akhmatova’s patriotic poem “Courage,” published in 1942:
We know what lies in balance at this moment,
And what is happening right now,
The hour for courage strikes upon our clocks,
And courage will not desert us.
We’re not frightened by the hail of lead,
We’re not bitter without a roof overhead –
And we will preserve you, Russian speech,