RUSSIA: The Beast of Berlin

On leave from the front, Maiya Sloboda, an army lieutenant in command of 100 men, looked more like a boy than an 18-year-old girl, in their olive-grey uniform with dispatch case hooked on the shoulder. In the case she carried pictures of her friends and family. In her heart she carried a hate undimmed by having shot, to her certain knowledge, 28 Germans in the past year. She paced the floor, her brown eyes shining, her hands moving restlessly through heavy black hair which she herself had bobbed. “I am nervous, yes,” she said to a U.S. correspondent. “It is just that I want to get back to the front so badly to fight for my beloved country.”

How greatly Russia needs Maiya Sloboda, and millions like her, Russians could plainly see last week. The gallant promises from Comrade Stalin himself were being drowned out in the clatter of German armies moving forward, over a carpet of dead Russians, to the oil of the Caucasus (see p. 21). From the east came the rumble of Jap armies massing to stab Siberia (see p. 21). Stormoviks of the Red Air Force smashed at tanks worming their way through the steppes of the Don. They splashed the skies with smoke, fighting through Messerschmitts toward airfields skulking just behind advance lines on smooth terrain. The Russians were not beaten yet, but they were bleeding from a thousand wounds.

Rimsky-Korsakov. In Moscow the wounds seemed more like things of the past than of the imminently fearful present. Factory girls still twined flowers in their hair. Water carts sprinkled streets deep with dust under a cloudless sky. Mobile soda fountains sold charged water for 30 kopecks. A lathe worker poked at tobacco plants in his spare-time garden plot, wondered if he would be lucky in a new national lottery in which each worker was asked to spend 10% of his salary. Tousle-haired children in costume played in the parks. A baboon escaped from the Moscow zoo. Jap and American diplomats played tennis in courts within a racket’s throw of each other. The ballet performed every night. There was a superb performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride before an audience of airmen wearing their wing-&-propeller insignia, tank soldiers, “intellectuals” and factory hands munching black bread at intermission time.

But Moscow knew there was a war. Sunburned survivors of Sevastopol limped through the streets. Every few hours Moscow heard the clump clump clump of marching feet. Often the marchers were new recruits—old men, young men, women—getting their initial training. Sometimes they were labor battalions. One afternoon there was the groan of airplane motors overhead and 50 huge black bombers sped low over the city, heading north. Unlike London, free from the pressure of bombing raids, and the U.S., stewing about inflation, a sense of grim reality hung over the heart of Russia.

Schoolboy. In three consecutive issues the Moscow News broke the first war year’s Russian stoicism by demanding action from Russia’s allies: “The beast of Berlin, badly mauled and bleeding, is fighting desperately to break through the principal link in the world chain around him. His rear is his weakest spot. . . . War abhors lost opportunities.”

None could deny that the best time to strike, if possible, was while Hitler’s mightiest armies were still tangled with Russia in the east. It is an opportunity, said one correspondent, “that may not recur;” and if not acted upon, “would cause a reaction fatal to Anglo-Soviet relations. It would be vain to attempt to conceal that there is now a very considerable popular impatience—and public opinion has become a powerful force in the Soviet Union.”

Sly as ever, the Germans fed this impatience with leaflets boasting that the Allies would never open a second front. A trickle of incoming U.S. war supplies, at first overoptimistically promised and now “scandalously overestimated,” was no antidote. From everyone Americans and Britons met throughout Russia came the question: “Kogda zhe budet vtory front?” In Russian this meant: “When will there be a second front?” It also meant that 170,000,000 Russian people, bred to nationalism and distrust of the rest of the world, might lose the small capital of good will being built up by allies joined in a common cause.

“All my friends are saying,” said a twelve-year-old schoolboy, “that when a dog shows his teeth, yank his tail.” To a schoolboy it was as simple as that. To millions of other Russians it was just as simple.