The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes Read Free Book Online Page A

particular with its leader, even to the point of growing a moustache, brushing back his hair in the ‘Stalin style’, and posing with a pipe.

    Simonov in 1943
    According to Dolmatovsky, Simonov did not smoke the pipe but adopted it as a ‘way of life’. 39
    Simonov’s major service to the Party was through his writing. He was an outstanding military journalist, at least the equal of Vasily Grossmanand Ilia Ehrenburg, although Grossman, who is better known to Western readers because of his later novels, such as Life and Fate (published in the West in the 1980s), was the better novelist and morally perhaps the more courageous man. This was not a matter of physical bravery. Simonov never shied away from the fiercest point of the fighting. He reported from all the major fronts in 1942: from the Kerch peninsula, where the Soviet attempt to retake the Crimea from the German forces ended in catastrophe during the spring; from the Briansk Front, where the Red Army lost Voronezh in July as the Germans drove south-east towards the grain supplies of Ukraine and the Don and the rich oil-fields of the Caucasus; from Stalingrad, where the Germans launched their first attack, fighting street by street for the Soviet stronghold, in August; and from the northern Caucasus, where the Germans pushed the Soviet forces south to Krasnodar and Ordzhonikidze by December. The only front from which Simonov did not report was Leningrad, where the city continued under siege for a second year, though he did write from the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, where Lend-Lease supplies from the Western Allies began to arrive on British ships in the summer of 1942.
    As a military man, who had himself experienced the bloody fighting at Khalkin Gol, Simonov understood the war from the soldiers’ point of view as well as from the viewpoint of the officer who was obliged to carry out his orders from above. His war reporting was distinguished by its direct observation and humanity. But he also fully accepted the propaganda role the regime assigned him as a journalist. All his war reports were written with the aim of strengthening morale and discipline, fostering love for Stalin and hatred of the enemy. He wrote that patriotic Soviet troops were fighting for the glory of Stalin. ‘United by their iron discipline and Bolshevik organization,’ he reported from Odessa, ‘our Soviet forces are dealing to the enemy a heavy blow. They are fighting without fear, without tiring in the struggle, as we have been taught by the great Stalin… For our Odessa! For the Motherland! For Stalin!’ In Simonov’s reports Stalin’s leadership was a constant inspiration to the Soviet troops. For example, he wrote about an officer he had encountered on the front near Stalingrad who ‘gained all his strength from the idea that our great leader directs everything in our enormous cause from his office in Moscow and thus invests in him, an ordinary colonel, part of his genius and spirit’. He had expressed the same idea in hispoem commemorating the anniversary of the Revolution on 7 November 1941:
    Comrade Stalin, do you hear us?
    You must hear us, we know that.
    Neither son nor mother in this frightful hour,
    It is you we remember first.
    Simonov’s belief in Stalin was genuine. In later years he never tried to deny it. In his memoirs, he acknowledged that the huge significance which he had attributed to Stalin in this poem ‘had not been an exaggeration’ of his true opinion. 40
    Some of his war correspondence served the regime’s campaign to get the troops to fight. In August 1941, after the collapse of the Soviet front, Stalin had issued his merciless Order Number 270, condemning all those who surrendered or were captured as ‘traitors to the motherland’. Several senior commanders were arrested and shot, including the commander of the Western Army Group, General Dmitry Pavlov, who had made a desperate effort to hold the front together in the first weeks of the war.