Reporting on World War II From the Soviet Union

Posted On October 10, 2020

I have just had a post published on the BBC History Research web page. You can read the post, which includes pictures from the BBC archives, here. Full text follows below.

JOURNALISM AND HISTORY: the former is frequently called the first draft of the latter, but often drawing on the former can make the latter great. In the winter and spring of 2019, I made several trips to the BBC Written Archive. Wanting to stretch my legs after the train journey, I walked from Reading station up the hill—each step taken with growing anticipation and excitement about what I might read that day.

The subject that interested me was the BBC’s reporting of the Soviet Union: in particular, the despatches sent by Alexander Werth from Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad, during World War II. For Werth it was journalism tied up with intensely personal history. His family had fled Saint Petersburg after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. He was not to return until the autumn of 1941, when he was working as a correspondent for the Sunday Times.

In June of that year, Hitler’s forces had invaded the Soviet Union. In early October, they drew closer and closer to Moscow. For the BBC, the capital of world socialism was by then also the capital city of an ally—and therefore a crucially important dateline for news organizations. Radio had firmly established itself as the dominant medium both for information and propaganda—but the BBC had no correspondent in the Soviet Union.

They needed one. The archives show that a number of names were considered, among them Henry Shapiro, who had been the correspondent for United Press International in Moscow since the 1930s. ‘His lack of BBC background’ was considered a ‘disability’—and presumably a factor in his eventually not being appointed.  

After rejecting some other possible candidates, and realizing that they had to have a correspondent in the Soviet capital—however censorship and lack of freedom to travel might prove restrictive—the BBC decided to approach Werth.

Any appointment involved dealing with matters of great sensitivity. United in their war against Nazi Germany, Britain and the USSR had hastily become allies. Stalin even sent Churchill—an unashamed capitalist and imperialist—birthday greetings later that year. Yet the BBC still had to tread carefully with the government. There was resistance to the corporation’s decision to play the Internationale—then, the Soviet anthem—along with the anthems of other allies. Later in the war, Churchill would angrily accuse the BBC of being ‘a nest of Communists.’

Nerves over government relations may have been what led to one involved in the appointment of Werth to raise—in handwritten comments on a typed memo relating to plans to get material from Werth in Moscow—concerns over whether he was ‘objective enough in his reporting’.

Did this matter so much? These were not objective times. In his history of the BBC, Asa Briggs wrote that, in 1940, ‘BBC staff felt themselves to be on the front line’. The memo of 18 February 1942—on which the issue of Werth’s own objectivity was raised—says editors are looking for ‘any dispatches which pay a tribute to the extent of British help’. ‘Tribute’ is not a word that usually appears among  the characteristics of objective journalism.

Radio may have been the principal propaganda battleground during World War II, but the technology was not always there to support it. Werth’s despatches from Moscow were cabled from the Soviet capital, and then read out by an announcer in London. The task usually fell to Joseph Macleod.

While audiences did not get the chance to hear a voice from the Soviet Union under attack from the Nazis, they did have the benefit of Werth’s words. His Russian language skills enabled him to bring to his reporting an understanding of the country that few others could match: scenes of ordinary activities in extraordinary times. Olga, the factory worker labouring days on end to support the war effort was one example—made all the more moving when listeners learnt that Olga had had two brothers who had been killed at the front.

Werth’s greatest moment—and the greatest example of his journalism being the first draft of history—came in the aftermath of the Battle of Stalingrad. The Soviet authorities usually kept the correspondents in Moscow under the watchful eyes of secret policemen and censors. Victory at Stalingrad was too great a propaganda prize to be missed. ‘But what a story everything tells here,’ Werth wrote in a despatch broadcast on February 9^th, 1943. He described a single ‘little wooden house’—the only building standing ‘in a town the size of Manchester.’ He also witnessed captured German generals ‘with their monocles and iron crosses and new Nazi decorations’. In Werth’s eyes, ‘Behind lock and key they radiated venom.’

After victory over Nazi Germany the warmth of wartime alliance faded. The Cold War dawned. Werth left Moscow where it had become even harder to work. The BBC were not, after all, his greatest fans. ‘He is not, as you probably know already, a good broadcaster’ noted the uncharitable writer of a 1949 memo.

A former BBC Moscow correspondent myself, remarks like that made me wonder what might once have been said about me. Perhaps people are more discreet in an age when emails leak so very easily. That may make for rather less exciting visits to the archives 70 or 80 years hence.