Inferno - Max Hastings [118]
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. In the United States, the Republicans’ 1940 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 the 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, and the 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 were obliged to declare their gratitude, because Russia’s suffering and sacrifice saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of young British and American soldiers. Even if no exalted assertion of principle—instead, only a grapple between rival monsters—caused Russia to become the principal battleground of the war, it was there that the Third Reich encountered the forces that would contrive its nemesis.
1 In this text the italicised word front is used as the Red Army did, to denote an army group.
CHAPTER EIGHT
AMERICA EMBATTLED
THE PEOPLE OF the United States observed the first twenty-seven months of the struggle in Europe with mingled fascination, horror and disdain. The chief character in J. P. Marquand’s contemporary novel So Little Time says: “You could get away from the war for a little while, but not for long, because it was everywhere, even in the sunlight. It lay behind everything you said or did. You could taste it in your food, you could hear it in music.” Many saw the conflict, and the triumphs of Nazism, as reflecting a collective European degeneracy. There was limited animosity