Akhmatova, one of the greatest poets of this century, would turn over in her grave if she knew that her poetry was used in defense of Stalin. As for the piece by Simonov, it is a typical piece of nationalistic clap trap--having nothing whatsoever to do with the heroic and selfless fight of the Russian/Soviet people against genocide and enslavement...but probably worthy of whatever little privileges were thrown his way as a reward for his writing this kind of stuff.
You must understand, I grew up in Romania (1954-1963), still under the shadow of Stalin and saw my parents generation cower in abject terror at what Stalin's influence had wrought. I grew up watching Russian films about WWII, I grew up reading Russian authors writing about this same experience; however, it was possible for me to distinguish between the "orthodoxy" that dictated the format of these pieces, and the reality of people's deep longing for peace and justice, which also informed films like "Ballad of a Soldier" and "The Cranes are Flying."
While I can appreciate the courage it would take for an American to become any kind of red, I must demur at the idealization of Stalin. This will not help revolutionary consciousness; this will not help people achieve any kind of freedom.
Joanna
At 11:10 PM 11/05/2002 +0000, you wrote:
Joanna wrote: > The short answer is that during WWII the soviet people fought against a > fascism whose explicit aim was their enslavement; in 1989, they were sold > out by Stalinist bureaucrats and black marketeers. > > The shorter answer is that if Stalin had not sabotaged the revolutionary > opposition during the Spanish civil war, there might not have > been a WWII. > You know that old riddle: Q: What happened to the great poets of > the WWII? > A. They died in Spain.Here is what one Soviet poet and patriot wrote in 1942: COURAGE Now we know well how each can bear the shock, What each must do: nothing can break us, The Hour of Courage peals from every clock, Courage will not forsake us. It is not terrible for us to give Our blood beneath the murderous hail, If we know you, O Russian speech, shall live, And the great Russian Word not fail. Shining and free it shall be said we gave You to our children, and thus from bondage saved The centuries to come. The poet's name is Anna Akhmatova. There were many other celebrated Soviet war poets. This was how the great war-novelist and journalist Konstantin Simonov described Moscow in 1943: 'It is really beautiful but we have grown so accustomed to its beauty that most often we do not even notice it. And yet one only has to leave it for half a year, a month, a week, and it is there before you, morning, noon and night - beautiful, unique, almost fabulous. The cool rosy autumn dawn rises behind the Kremlin, over its embattled walls and its tall spires. The dark November waters swirl silently under the high bridges - the Moskvoretsky, Kamenny, Krymsky and Borodinsky. Standing on the Borodinsky bridge, with its granite emblems of military glory towering over the heavy spans, with the Borodino field behind it and the Kremlin in front, one can take in the whole of Moscow at a glance: its embankments deserted in the morning; the tenuous, silvery chains of the Krymsky Bridge rising beyond the bend in the river, and on the other side, the tiny subway cars, looking like toys from here, whistling lightly past over the river. Stretching up from the bridge is the Arbat, with its lanes and byways, the Starokonyushenny (Old Mews), Skatertny (Table Cloth Lane), Khlebny (Bread Lane), the narrow streets whose very names tell of the profession of the Russian craftsmen who lived there and who built this city for themselves and their descendants, built it with their capable hands, with a merry song and a strong word, putting all their generous, great-hearted Russian soul into it. Try to imagine for a moment, just for a moment, that you are no longer a Muscovite, that you are homeless, that this fair city is no longer yours, that the Germans have seized its houses, streets and boulevards, that they have taken all that goes to make Moscow, this city so dear to the heart of every Russian. Take a stroll through Moscow with this thought in mind; go up to the Vorobyevy or the Poklonnaya Hills, where Napoleon stood in his time, and look down, look around you, see how great and majestic is the city; how beautiful are its houses, its limitless streets, how alive it is, how warm, how much your own. And you feel that you cannot bear this thought another moment, that you cannot really conceive even for a moment that all this is not yours, your very own. The German soldiers read the Volkischer Beobachter. 'Moscow is in flames,' it said, 'Moscow is in flames and burning on all sides.' ... in twenty languages, in German and French, Dutch and Polish, Italian and Finnish, in Rumanian and Hungarian, the brazenly exultant radio bawled and gloated over crushed and prostrate Europe. In twenty languages Moscow burned down, Moscow was in ruins, Moscow passed into German hands. And yet, over a year later, we stride up to the Vorobyevy Hills, over a parkway straight a narrow, bestrewn with yellow autumn leaves, and see Moscow extending before us. It has remained just as fair, just as majestic. And the same rosy dawn rises over its ancient walls; the cupolas flash with the same glint of old bronze in the rays of the rising sun; the Moscow River flows just as silently between its granite embankments, and the clock on the Spacey Tower sends forth its usual deep, sonorous chimes. ... Fuel will be short this winter [1943]. The city will economise, but it does not ant to freeze and it will not do so. Eighty thousand Muscovites, men and women, mostly women, have been working without let-up for months on end in the forests around Moscow, Kalinin and Ryazan. They have been felling, chopping and sawing trees.... Moscow needed it, and so they became woodcutters...Great stacks of birch and fir trunks can be seen on the Moscow pavements at dawn... This winter smoke will go curling from the chimneys of warm Moscow houses... The monument to Timiryazev, which had toppled over a the result of an explosion, again stands in its place... You can walk for hours without seeing a trace of the recent bombardments and siege. ...In his novel The Fall of Paris Ilya Ehrenburg describes the first day of the war in France. Read these pages, read them without fail. Picture to yourself the turmoil in Paris, its people at one time utterly distraught, at others trying to pluck up courage; picture that maze of treason, avarice, smugness and dread. And then recall the first day of the war in Moscow. It is true, we did not want this war and the first day was hard and joyless. But how calm and steadfast the people were, how united in their thoughts and aspirations. How calmly Moscow blacked out its lights and how quickly and resolutely it became accustomed to the idea of the inevitable air-aids; how gamely it met the war. I recall the dark Byelorussian Station, with its small blue lights, and the numerous trains chugging and panting a they pulled out one after another for the West. I remember the dark platform - everything in apple-pie order, silent and calm. People were saying goodbye here... The first days were days of furious fighting and bitter failures... Minsk was ablaze, Smolensk was burning and Dorogobuzh was a mass of flames. But it was for Moscow that the fight was raging, for Moscow above all. It was towards Moscow that the German tanks were crawling, towards Moscow that their transports were moving, towards Moscow that their motorcyclists were speeding and their infantry marching. And it was for Moscow that our Red Armymen died at the Smolensk Railway Station, for Moscow that our guns pounded the Breezing crossing, for Moscow that the regiments defending Moghilev fought to the last cartridge. Not a hillock, not a bit of wood, and not the smallest ravine or tiniest village in the Smolensk region could be surrendered. for those were not simply places, not simply kilometres of territory, but kilometres on the way to Moscow. This bit of woodland had to be held, because once the Germans captured it, they would be nearer Moscow. It was necessary to lie in this small ravine and defend it to the last cartridge, for if the German seized it they would be 200 metres nearer Moscow. In this village every house had to be a pillbox, for the milepost at the end of the village was one verst nearer Moscow than the preceding one. ...I remember a wood somewhere beyond Moghilev and our radio operator reading back Stalin's speech, which had been taken down on a piece of paper. "My friends..." he read. There were only a few of us. We listened to his agitated voice and although it was only the voice of the radio operator speaking, although it was his voice we heard, it seemed to us that it was Stalin speaking to us. He spoke to us of grim things, called for supreme sacrifices. He spoke to us of the fate of our native land, of the fate of Russia, of the fate of Moscow... ...People exempt from military service for years, in some cases quite ill, nevertheless wanted to go to the front. They sent in applications stating that they could fight, that they were not really ill... There was a shortage of uniforms, of modern arms and equipment. Columns f men dressed partly in 'civvies' and partly in military uniform assembled on the road from Moscow to the West. They sang the 'Internationale' and the songs of the Civil War... In the centre of the city, with its public gardens and park benches that were formerly playgrounds for children and havens for lovers, anti-aircraft guns raised grim muzzles to the sky... In October the Germans mustered their forces for a powerful thrust... the front was nearing the capital... Plants, the People's Commissariats, factories, institutes and offices were evacuating Moscow... Moscow mobilised all its forces and sent reinforcements in men and materiel... to the West every day. On October 13, a meeting of representatives of the Moscow Party organisation was held, at which the Moscow Committee called on the District Party Committees to form workers' Communist brigades. On the 13th and 14th the offices of the District Committees were crowded with people who wanted to join these brigades... Wherever two hundred men were called for, three hundred came, in place of five hundred, a thousand came.... Half the men were members of the Communist Party or the Young Communist League. The flower of the capital, the finest representatives of... Moscow were in these divisions.... much later, after they became divisions in the regular army with their own numbers, they still on to their original name - the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Moscow Communist Divisions.... The German offensive continued...At that time, naturally, no-one... had any idea of the strategic plans of the High Command. But their desperate and fierce resistance, their fighting retreat - then considered by the division an almost irreparable misfortune - proved to be a great and particular service. At the price of untold sacrifice, at the cost of their life's blood, the [4th Moscow People's Guard] division... made it possible to concentrate troops for a blow against he Germans. All through October, November and the beginning of December, the Germans kept coming closer to Moscow with every day. Their rout near Moscow began on December 5, when our troops launched their counteroffensive. The question of future victory had been decided when the country learned that the State Defence Committee, with Stalin at its head, was remaining in Moscow; and particularly, on November 6 and 7, when, in accordance with the great Soviet traditions, the meeting of the Moscow Soviet was held and the Parade passed through Red Square, at both of which occasions Stalin spoke. On these days, the Germans were at the very gates of Moscow... the danger was great and menacing. But just because the danger was so tremendous - in this Parade, in the words of Stalin there was such great force, such confidence in victory, such lofty, calm courage, that every Soviet citizen, whether at the front or in the rear, no matter where he was on that day, felt with all his heart that Moscow would never be surrendered... The Germans continued to advance... and our troops continued to retreat. But actually this could no longer be called a retreat. There was a feeling that near Moscow an enormous steel spring was slowly contracting, acquiring tremendous force in the process. ... Tens of thousands of Moscow women erected fortifications, dug trenches and anti-tank pits at the approaches to Moscow. They worked tirelessly, in mud and sleet and cold. They worked in the same clothes they wore when they arrived... And Moscow itself was cold and uninviting, there was no fuel for heating purposes- every train from the East brought arms and arms alone. There were fewer people in Moscow... The whole city seemed to have turned into a military camp. People spent their nights at the factories, sleeping two or three hours a day. The front was so close that newspaper correspondents managed to visit the forward positions and return with fresh news for their papers twice a day.... Moscow youngsters in the winter of 1941-42! ...They were everywhere. They replaced their fathers in the factories. They turned out automatic rifles, shells, grenades and mines. They replaced nurses in hospitals. They went on duty during air raids at the local A.R.P. posts. In their school workshops they made... tin mugs and knitted mittens and gloves... Moscow was calm and stern in those days. The closer the Germans came, the closer it was to the beginning of December, the more alarmed, it seemed, the Muscovites should have become at the constantly decreasing distance between the Germans and Moscow, the calmer and more confident they became, the more furiously they fought the front, the more intensely they worked in Moscow itself... The thinned divisions of the Moscow defenders fought with the fury of men whose backs are to the wall- thus far and no further. And they went no further. If the Germans succeeded in capturing a village or gained a bit of territory in those days it meant that there was not a single defender left alive there. And while the few remaining barriers of Soviet defenders near Zvenigorod, Dedovsk, Chernaya Gryaz, Shkodnaya, near Kashira and in the suburbs of Tula were harassing and bleeding white Hitler's divisions, which were already beginning to doubt their ultimate success and growing more savage as a result, echelons carrying tanks, cannon of various calibre, and regiments and battalions of eager young Red Armymen, well clad in warm winter uniforms and equipped with new arms, were speeding regularly, a new echelon every ten or fifteen minutes, over the few trunk lines connecting the capital with the rear. None knew where these echelons were unloaded, where the tremendous number of people, tanks, and guns disappeared. They had been moving through the whole of November and the beginning of December. But none of them appeared at the front. Only with their hearts and their soldier's intuition did the men at the front guess their presence. And this increased the force of their resistance tenfold. Scores of divisions and tank brigades were swallowed up in the great forests around Moscow, somewhere quite near the front. These divisions and brigades were like a heavy, executioner's sword which Stalin had raised over the heads of the Germans, who were already appointing quartermasters for billeting troops in the warm houses of Moscow. By December 4, the steel spring had contracted to its limit, and on December 5 all the reserves concentrated near Moscow, all that had been made ready for the blow with such painstaking care and iron self-restraint, all the troops and artillery, all the tanks, in a word, all that had been concentrated around and beyond Moscow in accordance with Stalin's strategic plan to form a huge fist of crushing power, struck out at the Germans. The spring had contracted as far as it would go and now it was released with incredible force. The word which the whole country was waiting to hear with bated breath - "Offensive" - became a reality. ... Moscow! Winter again is approaching. The first snowflakes glitter in the deflected white rays of automobile headlights. With a clattering of hoofs, a mounted patrol rides through a deserted square. The slender spires of the Kremlin towers pierce and vanish in the dark November skies. Moscow! Millions of Soviet fighters, from the snow-covered peaks of the Caucasus to the leaden waves of the Barents Sea, dream of you today. They see you before them - proud and invincible, having thrown back from your walls the alien, iron-clad hordes. Moscow - to the Russian people... the symbol of life.'
