Russia at war 1941-1945

The Germans Trapped at Stalingrad

The Russian Winter Offensive 1942-3

The Kursk Battle

The Russian Spring 1944 Offensive in the South

The Russian Summer 1944 Offensive in Belorussia and Poland

The Liberation of Poland and Invasion of Germany

Towards Victory

Folding maps:

The German Offensive 1941-2

The Russian Counter-offensive 1942-5

Endpaper maps:

The USSR

MAPS DRAWN BY FREDERICK BROMAGE

INTRODUCTION

In his speech before the American University in Washington on June 10, 1963—a speech that foreshadowed the Moscow test-ban treaty two months later—the late President

Kennedy said:

Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries (the USA and the Soviet

Union) have in common, none is stronger than the mutual abhorrence of war.

Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with

each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the

Russians suffered in the course of the Second World War.

And he went on to say:

At least twenty million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's [European] territory, including nearly

two-thirds of its industrial base, were turned into a waste-land.

Some six months later, in a less conciliatory-sounding speech at Kalinin, delivered in the presence of Fidel Castro, Khrushchev thundered against the "imperialists", urged them to clear out of Panama "before they got kicked out", swore that the Soviet Union could defend Cuba from rocket sites on Russian territory, and, with more than usual truculence, declared:

We are building communism in our country; but that does not mean that we are

building it only within the framework of the Soviet borders and of our own

economy. No, we are pointing the road to the rest of humanity. Communism is being built not only inside the Soviet borders, and we are doing everything to secure the victory of communism throughout the world.

But, having got that chinoiserie off his chest, he then declared, with a nod at Peking: Some comrades abroad claim that Khrushchev is making a mess of things, and is

afraid of war. Let me say once again that I should like to see the kind of bloody fool who is genuinely not afraid of war. Only a small child is afraid of nothing, because he doesn't understand; and only bloody fools.

He then recalled that his son, an airman, was killed in World War II, and that millions of other Russians had lost their sons, and brothers, and fathers, and mothers and sisters.

True, for Castro's benefit, he ended on an unusual note of bravado, saying that, although Russia did not want war, she would "smash the enemy" with her wonderful new rockets if war were to be inflicted on the Soviet people.

[ Izvestia, January 18, 1964.]

Which has, of course, to be read in the light of his usual line that it is no use trying to build socialism or communism "on the ruins of a thermo-nuclear war".

In all this there was much play-acting. Significantly, the passage in his speech which the Kalinin textile workers cheered more loudly and wholeheartedly than any other was that about the "bloody fools" who were not afraid of war. Kalinin, the ancient Russian city of Tver, only a short distance from Moscow, had been occupied by the Germans in 1941,

and its older people remembered only too well what it had been like.

Kennedy had spoken of the twenty million Russian dead of World War II. Officially, the Russians have been chary about mentioning this figure; when a speaker mentioned it at a meeting of the Supreme Soviet in October 1959, Pravda omitted it in reporting his speech the next day.

[See the author's The Khrushchev Phase (London, 1961), p. 161.]