Five years ago, when Hitler had made an impassioned speech to Nazi youth, demanding "unquestioning obedience to the Leader" as the highest virtue, Pravda broke into a long editorial that denounced the Nazi ideal and declared that the Soviet ideal was the exact reverse.
"Not submission and blind faith but consciousness, daring, decision, strong and original individuality, inseparably connected with the strong collective of the working people." This was set up as the Soviet ideal. To people accustomed to think of the Soviet people as "regimented," the words may come as a surprise. But Stalin, in his first radio speech after the German attack, appealed to the "daring initiative and intelligence that are inherent in our people." The events of the war have shown that these were no careless words. One recalls the guerrilla band which, lacking rifles, stopped Nazi ammunition trucks by spiked boards placed at night in the roads and then demolished them with homemade grenades. Or the Ukrainian farmer who crept up to a German armored car, using a camouflage of three sheaves of wheat; then shouting: "The robbers want our bread, let's give it to them," he threw the dry wheat under the car and set it afire by tossing a flaming bottle of gasoline after it, thus converting the car into blackened iron. Or the guerrilla detachment which captured six German planes, destroyed five of them, and sent the sixth to the Red Army, piloted by an amateur air enthusiast, who was a tractor driver in ordinary life.
Lt. Talalikhin's initiative is already a Soviet aviator's tradition. Exhausting his ammunition in a fight with three enemy planes, he rammed the tail of one enemy with his propeller, smashed the tail of another enemy plane with his wing tip, and then bailed out of his own plane safely. Moscow parks displayed the wreckage of the German planes, and other Soviet pilots quickly copied the tactics. An aviation technician, Konikov, won renown by attaching the fuselage of a plane he was repairing to the front platform of a military train whose locomotive had been bombed by the enemy; he thus pulled the most necessary parts of the train to safety. Railway repairman Sigachev poured water on his clothes and walked on a board into the furnace of a locomotive, raked the burning coals aside, and replaced in forty minutes some fire bars whose displacement would normally have halted the military train five hours.
These are a few of the pictures that flicker rapidly across the screen in the motion picture of the Soviet people's endless initiative. "The most valuable capital of our land is people," is a famous Stalin slogan.
I remembered those words when I heard that the Red Army had blown up the great Dnieper Dam and surrounding industries worth a quarter of a billion dollars all told. I know how the Soviet people loved that dam. I saw it three times during its building. I saw the workers competing on both sides of the river, putting up red stars at night to signal the progress of their work. That dam was the pride not only of its builders, but of the whole people. It symbolized Lenin's great dream of electrifying the land. [...] Millions of men and women went without meat and butter and clothes that the Dnieper Dam might be swiftly built. They said: "We tighten our belts to build our future!" But every Soviet citizen would blow it up swiftly rather than see it fall to Hitler and be used to enslave the Ukrainian people. The greatest thing the Dnieper Dam produced was not power, not light. The greatest thing it made was people. Out of illiterate peasant laborers, the Dnieper Dam made modern mechanics. Out of a passive folk, sunk in the farming and superstitions of the Middle Ages, the Dnieper Darn made tens of thousands of men and women of initiative, conscious of their own power.
Hitler's newspaper tried to explain the fighting temper of the Red Army by saying: "The Russians fight beyond human endurance because Communism has stamped all humanity out of them." It is a rather odd slant on the war.
I think the Russians have a better slant. It may be propaganda, but it's pretty good propaganda when the Russians at the front report that what surprises them most is the lack of individual initiative shown by the German "superior race." They say that when German officers are killed, the rank and file shout for somebody to give them orders. When Germans are captured, they do not seem to know what they are fighting for.
One of the best anecdotes is that of a German corporal from Breslau who, when questioned by a Soviet reporter, said he didn't know why the Germans had attacked the U.S.S.R.
"Don't you read the newspapers?" asked a Red Army inquirer. "No, I fulfil the orders of my superior," said the man with the Nazi soul. "Are you a human being or a machine?" persisted the Red Army representative. The corporal stared for a moment at the unexpected question and then answered sullenly: "We are all of us machines."
I don't know whether he meant to refer to the German army or expressed the wider philosophy that all men are puppets of fate. But I know those words would shock all Soviet people as the ultimate sacrilege, as the symbol of the slavery against which they war.
Russians know they are not machines. Russians know they are people. People who can make and break machines!
Anna Louise Strong, The Soviets Expected It (1941).
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