The Road to Berlin (21 page)

Wherever possible, Stalin applied pressure on his allies, though he was careful to strike some cordial notes, most of which coincided with Soviet successes. The Allies came in for some praise for their North Africa operations at the time of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad; with the Germans on the rampage at Kharkov, Stalin in his February order of the day passed over the Western Allies in silence; after an ugly incident when the American ambassador in March complained of Russian denigration of Lend-Lease help, public tribute was paid forthwith. The acrid correspondence between Churchill and Stalin in May and June followed this pattern consistently, for Stalin knew that he was facing another major German attack. At the same time, a new (or rather a refurbished) theme entered the exchanges—that Russia was a ‘second-class ally’, whose interests were considered only at second-hand. From the Russian side, the picture was not vastly encouraging, in spite of all the organized
bonhomie
in the press about Western contributions. The convoys through ‘the northern route’ were again suspended; the ‘aerial second front’, which was formally opened with the United States Air Force daylight raids into the Ruhr in January 1943, scarcely held up the supply of new weapons to the German armies in the east. The cross-Channel invasion was postponed yet again when by Soviet estimates only twenty-five German divisions, many of them withdrawn from the east where they had been battered on the Russian front and were therefore in the process of re-fitting, held northern France, Belgium and Holland (about which Stalin could gain first-hand information from Soviet intelligence operating in western Europe through an ‘arrangement’ with SOE—(Special Operations Executive). In spite of Churchill’s efforts to convince him, Stalin was reluctant to admit much merit in the ‘Mediterranean strategy’ (which he had earlier endorsed): he had complained that for ‘unexplained reasons’ Allied operations in North Africa seemed to have stalled, and he then turned on
Husky
(the proposed invasion of Sicily) as a wholly unacceptable substitute for operations across the Channel. The British Prime Minister piled on the detail about the
massive bomber offensive against Germany, which again failed to evince much of a response from Stalin (though Soviet airmen felt the effects of German fighter strength drawn westwards as the Soviet air offensive opened in the spring of 1943).

Stalin pounded on obstinately, arguing that out of present circumstance and previous commitment the Americans and British should disregard all else in favour of priority for the second front in northern France, an invasion before the end of the summer of 1943. His 16 March message to President Roosevelt put this at its bluntest: ‘… I consider it my duty to state that the early opening of a second front in France is the most important thing [and] it is … particularly essential for us that the blow from the West be no longer delayed, that it be delivered this spring or in early summer.’ In May Joseph E. Davies, former ambassador to the Soviet Union during the period of the great purges and author of
Mission to Moscow
, which had so favourably mirrored those purges, arrived in Moscow bearing a private message from the President suggesting ‘an informal and completely simple visit for a few days between you [Stalin] and me [Roosevelt], possibly on the American or Russian sides of the Bering Straits’. The President hoped for a ‘meeting of minds’. By way of intelligence, President Roosevelt added that ‘our estimates’ were that ‘Germany will deliver an all-out attack on you this summer’, which American officers indicated would fall ‘against the middle of your line’. In his reply (26 May), Stalin referred straightway to the military situation: ‘… this summer—possibly as early as June—we should expect the Hitlerites to launch a new major offensive.… Hitler has already concentrated about 200 German divisions and up to 30 divisions of his allies.… We are getting ready to repel the new German offensive and to launch counter-attacks, but we are short of aircraft and aircraft fuel.’ For that reason, since ‘the summer months will be exceedingly trying for the Soviet armies’, Stalin could not commit himself to leave Moscow in June but he would plan it for July or August. The degree of Stalin’s concern over the forthcoming German attack was constant; his pressure upon his Allies to win from them a major re-ordering of priorities reached its peak late in June, though by that time his hopes for any solution along these lines must have been faint indeed. From this point his concern was preparation for the high-level meetings which were already clearly foreshadowed, though Stalin lost not a single opportunity to remind his allies of their ‘obligation’ and of his own ‘difficulties’.

In spite of the sense of dislocation and the exchange of recriminations, the coalition was not coming apart at the seams. The very real acrimony of the Stalin–Churchill exchange in May and June led the British Prime Minister to wonder if the Russians might be contemplating ‘a change of policy’—negotiating their way out of the war—but the Foreign Office, though aware of one ‘peace-feeler’ waved vaguely about in neutral circles, dismissed this as a most unlikely eventuality. Moreover, Stalin fixed to his public standards in no uncertain fashion both ‘unconditional surrender’ and going on to victory in the company of his
allies; in his May Day order Stalin referred to the ‘peace-feelers’ as a mere German trap, while the real prize was victory, the rout of Nazi Germany and its allies, accomplished by the Red Army
together with the Allied armies
. This public proclamation also served another purpose, as an indirect warning to these allies by Stalin not to dicker too deviously behind his back.

There had been one bout of abortive negotiation between the United States and Finland; the Russians were inevitably curious about rumours of the Rumanians considering surrender to the ‘Anglo-American command’, a situation that became seriously contorted when Antonescu visited Mussolini in Rome in June 1943, just before the fall of Mussolini, and the ensuing negotiations for an armistice with Italy. In North Africa, Stalin had already opened a passage for his presence, even by proxy, by recognizing the French National Committee of Liberation in Algiers and by ‘legitimizing’ de Gaulle. On 26 June Stalin informed Churchill that ‘the Soviet government had no information that could support the British government’s present attitude [witholding recognition]’ and had none in the respect concerning General de Gaulle, but ‘the Soviet Government’ would meet the British Government ‘half-way’ if ‘the Soviet interest in French affairs’ was recognized and if ‘timely information’ on these events was not denied to ‘the Soviet Government’. Information of a kind the Soviet government did indeed possess: on 11 May 1943 Ambassador Bogomolov in London (accredited to the Allied governments in exile and to the Free French) had listened to General de Gaulle’s list of difficulties and reservations, the latter directed towards General Giraud:

I [Bogomolov] said that I completely understood the difficulties in the situation of the National Committee, which the Soviet Union looked upon with a sympathetic attitude, sympathy which might well find its expression in a formula of recognition of the National Committee by the Soviet government. On the other hand, the policy of the Soviet Union comprised support or encouragement for all those anti-Hitlerite forces which, whatever their shape or form, took an active part in the struggle against Hitlerite Germany.

At this, which apparently did not please de Gaulle, de Gaulle reaffirmed his view, that if Giraud acquired full power in his own hands and influence in France, then France would become a weapon in the hands of reactionary American circles and the people of Vichy inside France itself, which outcome would not be favourable for Russia.

… Further, I asked de Gaulle how he appraised the present situation in Africa. De Gaulle outlined the successes of the English and the Americans in moderate terms and in reproachful tone said that neither England nor America, nor anybody else for that matter, had mentioned the part of his troops in the Tunis operation. I asked de Gaulle how many Frenchmen had taken part in the operation. He said that there had been about 50,000 of Giraud’s men and about 30,000 of his troops.

To my question as to how he placed himself in present conditions in the matter of the Soviet–Polish conflict, de Gaulle made this reply: on the one hand, France was concerned that a free and independent Poland should exist, yet, on the other hand, France was also concerned that Russia should have a most favourable strategic frontier
to the west and, of course, on the Baltic. In this connection de Gaulle added that should he come to power, then France, without reservation, would support Russia over the question of the frontiers in the spirit of the Curzon Line.
[Sov./Frantsuzskie Otnosheniya
, no. 55, pp. 132–3.]

From both sides, Soviet and Free French, this was a skillfully angled conversation.

On the same day that Stalin sent his soothing reply to Churchill on de Gaulle (26 June), he followed up his concession with an immediate request, that Bogomolov be allowed to proceed to North Africa to ‘report on the situation’. This produced Anglo-American objections, which in turn met with a furious intervention by Molotov on 2 July, demanding of the American ambassador in Moscow that ‘the Soviet government’ be allowed some first-hand representation in North Africa. While the invasion of Sicily went forward, Soviet pressure for representation in North Africa was relaxed, but in August, when the Italian armistice negotiations were afoot, Stalin intervened personally to complain once more of ‘not being kept informed of the Anglo-American negotiations’, with delays in the transmission of highly important matters which Stalin found hard to understand. The time had come to set up a tripartite military–political commission to deal with ‘various governments falling away from Germany’: ‘To date it has been like this: the USA and Britain reach agreement between themselves while USSR is informed of the agreement between the two Powers as a third party looking passively on.’

Viewed in their collectivity, these events and
démarches
did not suggest that Stalin was embarking on any new major policy initiatives, but he was certainly establishing bridgeheads, enlisting lesser allies within the alliance and clearing the ground for action against a number of eventualities. To the consternation of the rigidly orthodox, he did away with the
Komintern
, which gave him a double advantage—it had the air of a concession to the West, and it rid him of a wholly obsolete political organization, the ‘grocer’s shop’, the
lavochka
, which had for so long been a symbol in East and West of a virulent, menacing communism. (If anything, the Stalinist techniques of 1943–4 were strongly reminiscent of Civil War days, with separate national ‘liberation committees’ and the widespread agitation in the prisoner-of-war camps, out of which now came a German committee and a ‘prisoner-of-war congress’ quite on the lines of its famous ancestor held in Samara in 1918.) While Stalin set about brow-beating the London Poles, he was careful to handle the Czech government in London with great care and punctiliousness. Benes himself in May propounded plans to discuss Soviet–Czech relations with Stalin, though in June Eden raised objections with Benes over any move to formalize agreement, since a treaty at this stage might impinge damagingly on Soviet–Polish relations. After hearing further from Molotov early in July, Eden persisted in his objection since any Soviet–Czech treaty would contribute to the isolation of Poland. That point certainly did not escape Stalin’s attention.

Late in July Stalin evoked another minor sensation with the revelation of the ‘Free German Movement’, the National Committee for a Free Germany
(Nationales
Komitee für ein Freies Deutschland: NKD)
, whose ‘preparatory committee’ included Walter Ulbricht, Erich Weinert and Lieutenant Count Heinrich von Einsiedel (a prisoner of war and Bismarck’s great-grandson). On 12–13 July 1943 a special conference at Krasnogorsk, not far from Moscow, brought the
NKD
officially into existence: Weinert became president, Count von Einsiedel and Major Karl Hetz vice-presidents. The newsheet of this body was
Freies Deutschland
—flamboyantly and evocatively ‘national’ with the Imperial German colours of black–white–red emblazoned across; and if this was not something to set the teeth of the exiled German Communists on edge, then there were the six broadcasts each day going out on twelve wave-lengths, all preceded by the patriotic song of the first ‘Liberation War’ of 1813,
‘Der Gott, der Eisen wachsen liess
…’. But the
NKD
, for all the special fanfare, cut little ice with senior German officers in Russian captivity;
Institute 205
(successor to the
Komintern
, so ostentatiously ‘dissolved’) deliberately stressed the ‘national’ line, but the captured German generals were largely unmoved by this. Another ‘special committee’ set about organizing a new body, the
Bund Deutscher Offiziere (BDO)
, the ‘League of German Officers’; in July Generals Seydlitz, Lattmann and Korfes were transferred to a special camp at Lyunovo, also near Moscow, and though at first unwilling to participate in activities smelling of a ‘stab in the back’, on being persuaded on 11 September 1943 of the existence of a ‘reasonable’ Soviet policy in the event of the war in the East ending through the German military’s action against Hitler, the generals agreed to the
BDO
. The
BDO
subsequently ‘merged’ with the
NKD
.

During the summer of 1943 also the campaign against the captured Soviet general Vlasov, engaged in forming the ‘Russian Liberation Army’
(ROA)
, hotted up—the
Anti-Wlassow Aktion
, with its highly organized and carefully differentiated propaganda programme, considered methods of infiltrating the ‘Vlasov movement’ and even of killing Vlasov himself. It was not just Vlasov however. Before the Kursk offensive, the Germans had begun a large-scale propaganda campaign designed to restore the confidence and to excite the allegiance of the population in the occupied districts, at the same time aiming to recruit former Soviet citizens for military or para-military service on the German side and to incite Red Army troops to desert. Vlasov was a name to exploit, and it was exploited in the
Smolensker Aufruf
, the ‘Smolensk manifesto’, of early 1943. A real change in German policy, a definite shift from the barbarities and inhuman excesses which had worked automatically to alienate the population, had serious implications for the further development of the Soviet partisan movement. If the Vlasov movement was to be a catalyst of important changes on the German side, then it was doubly dangerous: in an interrogation of Captain Boris Rusanov, who had served on the staff of Col.-Gen. Strokach (chief of staff to the Soviet partisan movement in the Ukraine), the Germans learned that the Soviet leadership had seen considerable menace in this new German ‘initiative’. Stalin himself had apparently commented on Vlasov that he was ‘at the very least a large obstacle on the road to victory
over the German Fascists’. General Strokach repeated that as Stalin’s own words. Because it was in the German-occupied areas that ‘the Vlasov movement’ had become very well known in a relatively short period, it was here that Soviet counter-effort first made its real appearance.