The Eastern Front

RUSSIA AT WAR: 1941-1945 by Alexander Werth. 1,100 pages. Dutton. $10.

Though it ended months before the Atomic Age began, the Russo-German portion of World War II was in almost every way a conflict on a thermonuclear scale. Upwards of 20 million Russian civilians and soldiers lost their lives. Over 3,000,000 German soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing. The U.S.S.R. lost over 60% of its coal production; total industrial output declined by one-half. Whole cities were heroes: the Battle of Stalingrad lasted seven months with as many as 40,000 people killed in one day, while the siege of Leningrad went on for 21 years and killed nearly 1,000,000.

In the two decades since the war ended, there has not been in English a complete history, in both military and human terms, of Russia's remarkable role. Author Alexander Werth is uniquely qualified to make the attempt. He is an English journalist who was born and raised in St. Petersburg and is perfectly bilingual. He spent all but a few months of the war actually in Russia. As a sympathetic left-wing nonCommunist, he was given unusual freedom of travel. He was one of the only two Western journalists allowed into Leningrad during the siege. He kept a day-by-day diary, filed innumerable dispatches to British and U.S. papers, and turned his Russian war experiences into several personal-history books in the '40s. Now he has put it all into one book, drawing also on the voluminous official histories and the published memoirs of commanding officers and common soldiers on both sides of the Eastern Front.

Stuffed with Shredded Paper. Many of the details are unfamiliar and fascinating. Strategically, for example, Werth rates the Battle of Kursk (north of Kharkov), in July 1943, as "Hitler's last chance to turn the tide," and thus as important as Stalingrad the previous year. Werth is at his best in eyewitness accounts of Leningrad or of his tour (in -40DEG C. weather) through the Stalingrad area just after the mop-up there. The item about Russian children using the stiffly frozen body of a German soldier as a sled makes a one-sentence summary of the horror of war.

Yet, for all its excellences, Werth's book is as irritating as the kind of Christmas present that has dozens of valuable tiny pieces to be groped for in a large box stuffed with shredded paper and excelsior. The style swings from a somewhat wide-eyed journalese to a plodding heroic prose. The best parts, it turns out, are lifted in great chunks from his earlier books of war reporting. He quotes endlessly from Pravda and Red Star editorials; he pads out his pages with Supreme Soviet speeches complete with the ritual enthusiasm of "(prolonged, stormy applause)"; he is mercilessly repetitious.

Questions & Exonerations. Worse are the omissions and persistent seeming biases. In his account of Russian unpreparedness for war, Werth does not mention that the Soviets received a clear and correct warning of Hitler's timetable from their trusted agent in Japan, the German journalist Richard Sorge. He gives no more than a sentence to the three-to-four-week delay of the attack on Russia that was caused by Yugoslav and Greek resistance in the spring of 1941, although that delay may well have been the most important single factor in the German failure (by 15 miles and some bad weather) to capture Moscow before winter.

Too often, Werth converts his justifiably high regard for the heroic Russian people into excuse-making for tyrannies of the Soviet state, such as the confiscation of all private radio receivers or the summary street-corner execution of suspected civilian traitors. The most egregious example is his treatment of the controversy over the tragic Warsaw uprising in the summer of 1944. The consensus of Western historians holds that Stalin apparently held back the capture of that city until the anti-Communist Polish underground was destroyed by the Germans. After a seesawing summary of the argument, but without substantial new evidence, Werth chooses to agree for the most part with the official Soviet self-exoneration.

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