A Peasant and His Land

(See Cover)

Semion Timoshenko, the peasant from Bessarabia, had seldom seen a better stand of wheat. It was high and golden, ripening in the sun, nodding with the blue cornflowers in the summer winds which swept the valley of the Don. The grain, his peasant eyes told him, was almost ready for harvest when the Germans came.

The tanks rolled through the grain. Their treads crushed the food of Russia into the Russian earth. Or, where the Russian scorchers were quick and thorough--and they were usually both--fire curled through the grain. The print of the tanks was harsh and clear in the stubble, and the smell of the burning was bitter in the nostrils of the retreating armies. Many Russians fell in the fields, and the hot, black ash which should soon have been bread pressed into their mouths, their wounds, their souls.

The peasant from Bessarabia did not forget.

Face of the Earth. Semion Timoshenko was a peasant before he became a soldier, Marshal of the Red Army and the defender of the Don. The chances are that his parents could read nothing but the skies and fields, the winds and weathers of Bessarabia when he was born, 47 years ago, in the village of Furmanka. He was 20, long out of the village school and hardened to the farm, when the last Tsar's armies drafted him in 1915. He was a hardening young trooper in the cavalry when he went over with his regiment to the Red Revolution in 1917.

Now only four other soldiers--and Stalin-rank with him or above him in the Red Army scale. Between the cap of an officer and the starred, medaled tunic of a Marshal, his face is still a peasant's face. It is heavy, broad and brooding, cruel and kind, the face of Soviet Russia and the Red Army. In his face, in the whole person and history of Timoshenko, are the qualities by which Soviet Russia must now live or die.

Hate is the Banner. It was to the peasant face and soul of Timoshenko and all Russia that Stalin, the man with the superlative Russian face, spoke last May Day: "They [Red soldiers, sailors and airmen] have learned to hate the German fascist invaders. They know it is impossible to conquer the enemy without learning to hate him with all their souls' fibers."

It was of that face and soul, common to soldier and worker alike, that a Moscow trade-union secretary, Mme. Nikolaeva, spoke when she cried to women in the mills: "All work in the rear is being done under the banner of hatred."

It is a defensive hatred, and the Red Army is a defensive army, which has never yet been outstandingly successful on the offensive and is now learning whether defense can be enough. It is to that hatred that Moscow's communiques appeal, forever stressing the killing of Germans, the destruction of German tanks, guns, planes. These communiques sometimes seem to be deliberately deceptive, recounting the deaths of a few hundred Germans in battalion engagements, when great fronts are falling. But for the Russians it is not deception; it is the feeding of the Russian conviction which a Moscow writer expressed to Correspondent-Author Maurice Hindus: "The loss of territory is never much in Russian wars, so long as our armies make it a graveyard for German soldiers."

They Are the Army. The love of land, the hatred of trespassers was strong and deep in the Russian soldier long before political commissars appeared to share and fan it, to shape and use it as a weapon. The tunes that Tsar Alexander's soldiers sang at Borodino, when they fought Napoleon, rang over the Red Army's lines last week. In War and Peace Leo Tolstoy's Andrey Bolkonsky said to Pierre: "Victory never can be, and never has been, the outcome of position, numbers and character of arms."

"Of what, then?" Pierre asked.

Tolstoy's Andrey pointed to another soldier and replied: "Of the feeling in me, and in him, and in every soldier."

British and U.S. correspondents, trying to seize in words the feeling of the Red soldier and the Red Army, often sense a profound simplicity, a directness which is likely to seem spurious to western readers. But the feeling is there:

>> Private Sergei Sazonovich Sviridov, a farm boy from Roga, wept on his hospital bed and cried to the New York Times's C. L. Sulzberger: "I didn't ever get a chance to join in the real attack. I was wounded. If my feet would permit. . . ." His hospital record said: "Feet blown off by shell. . . ."

>> Sergeant Shapovalov is (or was) an anti-tank rifleman. "What is a tank?" said he. "I can see it, but it can't see me. My rifle is small and hard to hit, but a tank is big. All you have to do is aim at it."

>> Red officers and privates had one of their frequent after-battle conferences swopping knowledge and correcting mistakes beside a campfire. There was Private Vyazmin, excitedly babbling to his officers instruction on how to improve trench-mortar fire; and Sergeant Smirnov, that joker among scouts, telling how he distracted and captured a German motorcyclist by tying a bunch of foliage to a long cord, dragging the foliage across the road. . . .

>> Tikhonov, a scout, was supposed to bring his prisoners in alive, for questioning. But his prisoners always had their heads and bodies bashed and were dead or dying. Scout Tikhonov wept, and wrung his hands, and promised to do better, and never did. He said that he had seen the Germans rape and kill a girl in the barn at home.

>> Lieut. Maslov commanded a British Valentine (16-ton) tank. He had trouble pronouncing Valentine, but liked the tank. He had a snub nose, tow hair and knew English. He talked of Dickens, Chaucer and Sterne by the hour. He and others in his tank regiment gave Russian Correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg the best measure yet recorded of Allied aid to the U.S.S.R.: "Were our front only 100 miles long, we could say we have enough British tanks." The Russian front is 2,000 miles long.*

Red Is the Banner. Ankara's rumor mills last week ground out the report that Joseph Stalin was on his way from Moscow to Stalingrad, one of the southern cities which Timoshenko was trying to save. If the story was true, it completed a parallel of Red Army history: Timoshenko fought at Stalingrad (then Tsaritsyn) after the Revolution, when the White Armies of Denikin and Kolchak were trying to crush the new Russia, and (according to orthodox Communist history) Stalin himself superseded the Red generals, saved the city and Russia with a series of campaigns over the land where the Nazis advanced last week.

Stalin then vented a contempt and conviction which have stayed with him, and have done much to shape the modern Red Army. He had no use for the man who was merely a professional militarist; for Stalin, officers and men had to be citizens of the revolution as well. When the Red cause seemed all but lost in south Russia, Stalin wrote to Lenin: "The fact is that our experts are not only psychologically incapable of ruthlessly combatting the counterrevolution, but likewise, being staff workers who know only how to make field sketches and draft plans for realignment, are absolutely indifferent to actual operations, and in general regard themselves as outsiders, as guests."

Timoshenko took care to be no guest at the Red table. He conformed to the pattern of almost all the great careers in the Red Army: he was successively a local, regional and national official of the Party; the while he attended Red Army schools, commanded Red troops in the field. His associates, superiors and teachers were often the generals whom Stalin purged, with the active or passive consent of Timoshenko and the others who survived and rose in the aftermath. The western world has never made up its mind about the purges. It may be that, as Moscow said, traitors to the U.S.S.R. dominated the Red Army, that the first battles of the war with Hitler were won by Stalin's firing squads. At any rate, the Red Army which emerged from the bloodbath must win or lose the last ones. So far, it has lost all but the ones which counted most.

"On Us Alone." Semion Timoshenko came out of the Finnish war with the Order of Lenin, the cherished title of Hero of the Soviet Union, a Marshalship and credit for smashing the Mannerheim Line. Actually he had to share the credit with two others: Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, then & now Stalin's Chief of Staff (TIME, Feb. 16), and Marshal Grigory Kulik, an artillery expert who has lately dropped out of sight.

It was between the wars with the Finns and with the Nazis that Semion Timoshenko cemented his reputation, received his highest honors. He came as near as he ever dared, and nearer than most of his brother officers, to outright conflict with the Communist Party. Reorganizing the army to correct the defects of the Finnish campaign, he booted out the Party commissars who had been attached to every important Army unit. With General Georgy Zhukov, a reputedly brilliant newcomer to the High Command, he simplified Army organization, improved communications, cut tape which in any other army would be called red. Zhukov last week commanded the central front just north of Timoshenko's and probably had a lot to do with the local success near Voronezh. For reasons best known to Joseph Stalin, Zhukov has never been upped to the rank of Marshal--possibly because he took no trouble to hide his deep hatred for the Germans, his disapproval of the late Moscow-Berlin pact.

Timoshenko kept his membership in the Party, held one of the high government offices when he was People's Commissar for Defense. Soon after Hitler invaded Russia, Stalin took the Commissar's title; Timoshenko returned to the field; the political commissars returned to the Red Army.

Only events can fairly judge the Red Army and its commanders. And known events may be deceptive. Thus it was generally supposed that when Timoshenko did none too well in the early defense of Moscow last year, he was summarily shifted to his present front in the southwest to replace gay, heady Marshal Semion Budenny, who had done worse. But a German record presents another story: that Timoshenko asked Stalin to put him where he expected the decisive fighting to develop some day. That fighting had developed in south Russia last week.

On the cruelly bare and insufficient evidence visible to the non-Russian world, Timoshenko has not consistently distinguished himself in the war with Hitler. His concrete achievements: the heroic defense of Smolensk, which gave Moscow time to prepare its still unbreached defenses, and the recapture of Rostov last November. But, whether the outcome was good or ill, Timoshenko with his peasant hardiness never shifted blame or credit. Said he to his troops before Rostov last year, when the world tended to believe (with Hitler) that the Russian winter alone was stopping the Germans: "Neither rain nor snow is going to win the battle of Rostov. The outcome depends on our efforts alone."

This week Rostov is again in peril. Timoshenko is outnumbered in material, even in men on most of his fronts. In great peril was the land of the Volga and the Caucasus, which Timoshenko had called the decisive area of Russia. But the decision had not yet been reached, and the world could easily guess what the stolid, big-boned peasant from Bessarabia was saying to his harried, divided, tired and retreating troops in the ruined fields of the Don. He was saying: "Brothers, our country is in your hands. The outcome depends on us alone."

* Along with tanks and planes, the U.S. has sent Russia 10,000 Ford trucks, 500,000 rolls of adhesive tape, 100 medical books, tin, wheat, flour, butter, steel, aviation gasoline, machine tools and machinery to drill oil wells, laundry and toilet soap, sulfa drugs.

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