Alexander Werth Reporting from Stalingrad in World War II–Conclusion
This is the second and final part of my article on Alexander Werth’s reporting from the Soviet Union during World War II. You can read the first part here, and the whole article on the website of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television where it was first published last month. The pictures are mine, from my trips to Volgograd and Saint Petersburg in 2019.
ASIDE FROM THE EXPERIENCE OF WITNESSSING such horrific sights, and coming face to face with the commanders of the army responsible, Werth must have had a busy week. The Times of February 10th, the morning after the broadcast of his Russian Commentary on Stalingrad, published a piece ‘In Devastated Stalingrad’[i] ‘from our Special Correspondent.’ The report includes the same scenes and incidents, including a meeting with the captured generals, that featured in the radio broadcast. Newspapers then did not generally use bylines—hence the ‘special correspondent’—but given Werth’s status as Sunday Times correspondent (and the next edition of that newspaper did name him as ‘“Sunday Times” Special War Correspondent’—by then he was back in Moscow), he presumably was also the author of that piece. [ii] In the Sunday Times the following weekend, Werth reported on his trip to Stalingrad, and quoted soldiers already anticipating the next stage of the war; the Red Army on the advance. ‘“We are going to the Ukraine to give them more Stalingrads,” said one young soldier, his merry eyes gleaming between his muffler and fur cap.”[iii] In this newspaper report, Werth begins to assess the strategic significance of what he has witnessed, yet even in his later writing, after many years of reflection, the face of Von Arnim seems to have continued to haunt him. In a book not published until 1964, Russia At War, Werth still recalled, writing of the moment the correspondents were brought before the captured Nazi commanders. ‘The most unpleasant of them was General Von Arnim.’[iv] This was not the only occasion when Werth and other correspondents were shown captured German soldiers. Haldane wrote of an encounter in the fall of 1941, when she concluded of a captured German airman, ‘I could not see any hope, in a civilized world, for such as he.’[v] Haldane wrote this after realizing that one of the air crew she had met had not only been responsible for a raid in which she and fellow correspondents had been bombed, but learning too that one of them had flown bombing raids over London, where she had seen ‘corpses of mothers and little children’ in a mortuary after one such raid. [vi] For correspondents during the Second World War, the professional and the personal inevitably merged. Werth had returned to the country his family had fled when he was a boy to witness its suffering under attack from a hostile power bent on destroying its government, and seizing its territory.
Journalism, the personal and the professional
It is a challenge for any international correspondent in any era to strike the balance between becoming familiar with a country, its people, and its culture, in order better to explain it, and becoming so absorbed that they see it too closely, and thus lack the perspective that might better assist their audiences’ understanding. Even if Werth, as a foreign correspondent from an allied power, enjoyed certain privileges, they did not blind him to the extreme hardship that surrounded him. The piece on the fate of the brothers of the shopkeeper catering to ‘privileged foreigners’ showed the proximity of privilege and great misfortune. Werth’s task was to tell the story of what he saw, but inevitably—given what he witnessed, and his own family history—the listener must also have got a sense of what he felt. This was despite the fact that his actual words were often read by another—perhaps not always for purely technical reasons (these being the difficulty of reliable broadcast connexions between Moscow and London). A BBC memorandum from later in Werth’s career, in 1949, offered the view that, ‘he is not, as you probably know, a great broadcaster.’[vii]
Whatever the circumstances of his family’s departure from revolutionary Russia, Werth’s work is shot through with a sense of outrage at what was being done to his native land, and especially his native city, by then called Leningrad. Werth was the only British correspondent to reach Leningrad while it was under German blockade, an experience he wrote about in his later book Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege, ‘even now, after an absence of more than 25 years, I knew every street corner, and the stones of Leningrad had more meaning to me than those of any other town except perhaps London and Paris.’[viii]At times, Werth’s reporting sought to bridge the geographical, cultural, and political distances between those cities he held so dear. ‘What’s the attitude of Russians to their Allies at the present moment?’ he asked in a despatch broadcast in late June 1943. He went on to answer his rhetorical question, ‘I think they’re as friendly as ever, and that lasting co-operation with the Allies will help solve two great problems in their minds: post-war security for their country […] and, secondly, a vast programme for their country’s reconstruction.’ Werth continued in the same piece by reporting on Soviet hopes for a ‘Second Front on the European Continent.’[ix] This, of course, was a long-standing Soviet request to their allies. As Reynolds and Pechatnov’s work has made clear, it was also a frequent theme of correspondence between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt—one which, in a message as early as September 1941 (almost two years before Werth wrote that line) conveyed something close to ‘gut-churning panic.’[x]
Did Werth himself experience something similar at times? It must have been hard not too, being in Moscow in the fall of 1941 as German forces approached the Soviet capital. In addition to the passages in Russian Commentary where Werth strove to stress similarities between Russia and the cities and countryside of England, he was also happy sometimes to be more direct, relaying Soviet propaganda, one example being in the summer of 1943, as the Battle of Kursk began. In the Russian Commentary broadcast on July 7th, Werth translated a lengthy extract from an editorial that had appeared in Red Star, the Soviet military newspaper. ‘We are sons of the Soviet Union, sons of Russia. Great is our anger and our fury and our hatred towards the base invaders; great is our love for our country’. Hit back hard!’[xi] Later the same month, the battle won by the Soviets, Werth sought to correct perceived shortcomings on the part of his fellow journalists. ‘I think there was some feeling here that the Kursk victory didn’t get a good enough showing in the British-American press.’[xii] This seems to have been a sensitive matter. The copy of the script held in the BBC archives has hand-written corrections: ‘feeling’, for example, is written in over a crossed-out ‘annoyance’ in the original typescript. It is impossible to be certain at this distance whether such corrections were agreed with Werth, or simply added by editors. This despatch was broadcast was about a year and a half after the BBC internal memo, cited above, that had referred to earlier ‘difficulties’ with Werth, and had questioned his objectivity—so this seems to have been a continuing internal debate at a time when the BBC was acutely aware of its role in the propaganda battle that was part of the war that was consuming so much of Europe. Nor did Werth balk writing of some of the grimmer details of that war. On July 21st, he reported in Russian Commentary, ‘the public hanging of eight traitors’ in an area recently liberated from Nazi occupation. [xiii] The execution, he said, ‘was unreservedly welcomed by everybody in Russia. It is no use being squeamish. The Russian people have suffered at the hands of the Gestapo what most of us never dreamed of.’[xiv] A more objective account of these hangings might have considered whether such a spectacle was justifiable. Werth, having admonished any audience member tending to squeamishness, conveys the propaganda value he sees it carrying. ‘It is a signal that the day of reckoning is near. It is a stern warning to all Russians who in the occupied parts of the country may still be co-operating with the Gestapo.’[xv]
For a discussion of Werth’s objectivity, it is instructive for context to look beyond his BBC work, too. Werth was technically freelance—hence his work at the same time for the Sunday Times—and also a prolific author, including of Moscow War Diary, published in 1942. Here, the BBC had little control over what a freelance contributor might write. Recounting discussions with westerners in Moscow, Werth suggests that, ‘Stalin has been severely handicapped by the absence of effective propaganda on his behalf.’[xvi] Werth also defends Stalin’s decision to purge the Red Army (although he concedes it ‘probably became more extensive than was at first considered necessary’) and the Soviet policy of ‘appeasement towards Nazi Germany’ on the grounds that for the Soviets ‘another year without war meant invincibility.’ [xvii] [xviii] One of Werth’s interlocutors questions the Soviets’ ‘turning Estonia and Latvia into Soviet Republics, instead of leaving them their old régime’. Werth suggests—in a turn of phrase that to contemporary ears cannot fail to echo some of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in his justification of his invasion of Ukraine, that the answer is ‘perhaps because Estonia and Latvia aren’t really countries’ (italics in original). [xix]
Yet Werth’s vision then was not of Europe today where large-scale war has returned. In common with his reporting in Russian Commentary of the Russian hope for post-war security and reconstruction, Werth too hoped to see such a future for Europe. Moscow War Diary concludes with the uplifting vision that, ‘With a rapprochement between Russia and Britain, Russia will, I am convinced, become increasingly democratic and European—the Russian people want to be both.’[xx] It was not how things were to turn out. This kind of idealism was soon dashed by the coming of the Cold War. Werth, though, did not lose faith in the Soviet system. His 1969 book, Russia: Hopes and Fears, praised ‘The Soviet Union, with 236 million inhabitants,’ as ‘the world’s greatest welfare state.’[xxi] The book had ‘been intended as a companion volume to my Russia at Warfirst published in 1964.’[xxii] Its original title had been Russia At Peace. With the Soviet Union having sent troops into Czechoslovakia earlier in 1968, as Werth was finishing the book, the title was changed on the grounds that the original would have been, as the author himself admitted, ‘slightly incongruous, if not downright offensive.’[xxiii]
‘Russian Commentary’: the historiographical significance of a twentieth century Window to the West
Werth remained in the Soviet Union until after the end of the war. In the fall of 1943, he was able—with the permission of the Soviet authorities—to make a return to the city of his birth, Leningrad, as the day approached that the murderous blockade of the former Russian imperial capital, and ‘cradle of the revolution, as Soviet mythology termed it, approached. The following year, he became the first correspondent to enter the Nazi death camp at Majdanek in Poland. According to Werth’s son, Nicolas, the BBC refused to broadcast the report in which Werth ‘described the gas chambers, and the methods of mass extermination of the Jews.’[xxiv] Werth, previously suspected of not being objective enough, was now told he had been caught up in, ‘a Soviet propaganda operation, a set-up. You have been tricked.’[xxv] Even eyewitness testimony could not make the distant listener believe the monstrous horrors they heard described. It was too shocking to be true.
‘Russian Commentary’ was in one sense very much a product of its time, and of the correspondent who provided it. Yet in precisely this sense it raises broader questions. The wartime Soviet Union Werth saw was the one about which the BBC’s audiences heard about: in short, the Soviet Union he saw was the one they saw. And the Soviet Union Werth saw was, in turn, one he wanted to see: the one whose people he ‘knew’. For, despite his family’s history in having fled Russia when the Bolsheviks took power, Werth clearly desperately wanted to believe in the noble and democratic intentions of the regime. The BBC’s internal debates about his objectivity—reliability, even—or otherwise are echoed wherever a correspondent is suspected of having sympathies in war or other conflict, especially when those sympathies are suspected on grounds of nationality, or faith. In his book on the Six Day War, the BBC’s Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, refers to the incredulity with which despatches by the corporation’s correspondent in Jerusalem, Michael Elkins, were received in London. Elkins was ahead of the rest of the press corps when he correctly reported Israel’s stunning military victory, but, because he was an Israeli and a Jew, he was thought to have ‘spoken with the tongue of the prophets’, and his work was suspected of being overly influenced by Israeli propaganda.[xxvi]
The USSR shown to BBC audiences was seen through Werth’s own personal and political lens, yes, but he was able to show—by talking to shopkeepers, soldiers, and factory workers—a picture others could not capture. One is reminded of Hobsbawm’s assessment of the work of another British correspondent seen, in his time, as too close to the Soviets: Morgan Philips Price. ‘Talking to peasants, merchants, soldiers, overhearing conversations on Volga boats, Price recorded what he correctly described as “the only true voice of Russia”. And he got it right.’[xxvii] Price got it right in the sense that he predicted that the Bolshevik regime would survive, when the British and American political and editorial establishments, as noted above, confidently, and wrongly, predicted it could not. Werth’s optimism about Soviet society after the war was not vindicated, and the comparison of the Stalin-era Soviet constitution with the Magna Carta made in one ‘Russian Commentary’ broadcast did not age well. [xxviii] Yet a journalist writing material to be broadcast almost immediately cannot be too harshly criticized for failing to predict the future. One strength of Werth’s work today is that it gives us a sense of what life was like in the wartime Soviet Union, and it gave him a starting point for more profound reflections in his work of later years.
A comparative study between the predictions in his journalism and his more considered later writing on Soviet history and politics is potentially an interesting field for future research. Such inquiry might further understanding of the relationship between journalism and history written by journalists, especially if it were to consider too the disaffection in the later work of correspondents such as Haldane, Jordan, and Malcolm Muggeridge. In each case, their experience of living in the Soviet Union left them deeply disaffected, even disgusted, with a system in which they had once fervently believed. In her later memoir, Truth Will Out, Haldane recounted the experiences that destroyed her faith, particularly the memory of seeing in 1941 a toddler who had starved to death. This, she wrote, made her resolve never again to take to a platform in an attempt to convince people ‘that the Soviet Union was the hope of the toilers of the world.’[xxix] This too is a reminder of the methodological imperative of considering the circumstances in which journalism is created—and therefore the nature of news reporting as a source for historical research. Correspondents’ own political transitions, and the passage of time to reflect on the longer term significance of events experienced in the moment, are all important influences on their later work—while Werth’s witnessing of the single wooden house speaks to us who never saw Stalingrad in a way that subsequent analysis of military strategy never could.
From a human point of view, much of what Werth witnessed in wartime would have been distressing in the extreme. From a professional point of view, he was one of a small number of international correspondents (although he proudly identified with his Russian roots) who were privileged to witness an extraordinary moment in Russian history and share it with a global audience of millions through the new medium of radio. In his poem The Bronze Horseman, Alexander Pushkin imagines the Russian tsar, Peter the Great, deciding on the location for the new city, Saint Petersburg, that will bear his name. The site is chosen to threaten western foes, in this case Sweden, and to ‘cut a window’ through to Europe. Werth’s reporting did that for audiences during the Second World War, telling the stories of one of those times in European history when Russia made common cause with allies on the other side of the continent, and eventually intervened to change the course of that history.
[i] The Times, 10 February 1943, 3.
[ii] The Sunday Times, 14 February 1943, 1.
[iii] The Sunday Times, 14 February 1943, 5.
[iv] Alexander Werth, Russia at War (London: Pan Books, 1965), 499.
[v] Haldane, Russian Newsreel, 79.
[vi] Ibidem.
[vii] BBC Written Archives Centre, R47/973/1 Miss CGH Reeves to Miss A Kallinn 17 November 1949.
[viii] Alexander Werth, Leningrad 1943: Inside A City Under Siege (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), x.
[ix] BBC WAC, Russian Commentary by Alexander Werth, 30 June 1943.
[x] Reynolds and Pechatnov, The Kremlin Letters, 22.
[xi] BBC WAC, Russian Commentary by Alexander Werth, 7 July 1943.
[xii] BBC WAC, Russian Commentary by Alexander Werth, 31 July 1943.
[xiii] BBC WAC, Russian Commentary by Alexander Werth, 21 July 1943.
[xiv] Ibidem.
[xv] Ibidem.
[xvi] Werth, Moscow War Diary, 49.
[xvii] Werth, Moscow War Diary, 49.
[xviii] Werth, Moscow War Diary, 53.
[xix] Ibidem.
[xx] Werth, Moscow War Diary, 296.
[xxi] Alexander Werth, Russia: Hopes and Fears (London: Pelican, 1969), 121.
[xxii] Alexander Werth, Russia at War 1941-1945 (London: Pan, 1964).
[xxiii] Werth, Russia: Hopes and Fears, 8.
[xxiv] Nicolas Werth, introduction to Alexander Werth Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), xviii.
[xxv] Ibidem.
[xxvi] Jeremy Bowen, The Six Day War (London: Pocket Books, 2004), 172.
[xxvii] Morgan Philips Price Dispatches from the Revolution: Russia 1916-18. Edited by Tania Rose. (London: Pluto Press, 1997), xi.
[xxviii] Werth, ‘Britain Speaks’, broadcast 31 January/ 1 February 1942.
[xxix] Charlotte Haldane, Truth Will Out, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1949), 233.