She fell in love with him and continued to love him throughout her life. No doubt she was attracted by his good looks, by his poetic talent and intelligence, by his masculinity, and by his qualities of leadership, which had always made him stand out at the institute.
Zhenia and Konstantin on their honeymoon in the Crimea, 1939
Eight months after their wedding, in August 1939, their son Aleksei was born. After a difficult delivery, Zhenia and Aleksei were both ill and kept in isolation in the hospital for several days. ‘I love you very much my little darling, everything in our lives together will be fine, I am convinced of that,’ Simonov wrote to Zhenia.
I talked with the doctor, he said all is well. And the baby will recover gradually. Write to me what you like most about our son… Today I began on a new poem. Now I shall write every day… My sweetie, I so want to hear your voice, to see your little face which is no doubt pale and thin… Ask if I can send you Jewish liver.61
Shortly after the birth of their son, Simonov received his first assignment as a military correspondent. The newspaper
I did not bring your photographs on my travels,
Without them, as long as we remember, we will see.
On the fourth day, the Urals far behind,
I did not show them to my curious neighbours.62
The battle of Khalkin Gol (known in Japan as the Nomonhan Incident) was the decisive engagement of a border war that had been brewing since the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the establishment of the Manchukuo puppet state in 1932. Stalin was afraid of Japan’s imperial ambitions in Siberia as well as Mongolia, which though nominally part of China had been under Soviet influence since 1921. When skirmishes broke out on the disputed border between the Mongolians and the Japanese, Stalin sent in his heavy troops: 57,000 infantry, massed artillery, 500 tanks, and the best planes of the Soviet Air Force, all under the command of the rising star of the Red Army, General Georgii Zhukov. The Soviet forces pushed the Kwantung Army back from the Khalkin Gol River, where the Japanese maintained the border was, to Nomonhan, 16 kilometres further east, the border according to the Russians. Surprised by the heavy concentration of Red Army tanks and artillery, the Japanese bid for a cease-fire on 16 September. The Soviets claimed a mighty victory. The Red Army’s invincibility – proclaimed by Soviet propaganda – had been confirmed, it seemed. The reality, however, was significantly less inspiring. As Simonov knew from his own experience, the losses on the Soviet side were far greater than acknowledged by the government (the Red Army claimed 9,000 killed and wounded but the actual number was 24,000, of whom 7,000 men were killed).63 And there was no end of dreadful sights. Frustrated by the censorship of the military press, Simonov tried to offer a truer picture in his poetry. ‘Tank’ tells the story of a platoon of Soviet soldiers who suffer heavy losses in their hard-won victory against the Japanese. The soldiers leave behind a burned-out tank, which the poet puts forward as a monument to their bravery and sacrifice. Simonov’s political minder, who was no less than Vladimir Stavsky, the former leader of the Writers’ Union who had reprimanded him for ‘anti-Soviet’ conversations in 1937, blocked the poem’s publication. He warned Simonov to stick more closely to the propaganda mission of the writer, namely to present an upbeat vision of the war. To that end, Stavsky suggested he replace the burned-out tank in the poem’s final image with a brand new one.64
The border conflict with Japan strengthened Stalin’s fears of becoming embroiled in a two-front war against the Axis powers. In the spring of 1939, Hitler’s armies had marched into Czechoslovakia, unopposed by the British or the French, who continued to appease Hitler and who, it seemed to Stalin, were encouraging the Nazis and the Japanese to direct their aggressions against the Soviet Union. Although France and Britain were engaged in negotiations with the Soviet government for an alliance to defend Eastern Europe and the Baltic states against Nazi aggression, the Czechoslovak crisis demonstrated to Stalin that the Western powers were not acting in good faith. Throughout the spring of 1939, the British and the French had been dragging out the negotiations with the Soviets, using the reluctance of the Poles to allow Soviet troops to cross their borders as a stumbling block; they wanted the Soviet Union on their side to deter the Nazis diplomatically but were not prepared to sign a military pact. Meanwhile, the Germans were making overtures to the Soviet government, whose neutrality was essential if they were to launch their planned invasion of Poland. They proposed to divide Eastern Europe into separate spheres of influence, with the Soviet Union gaining Eastern Poland and the Baltic lands. By August, Stalin could no longer wait for the British and the French. Convinced that a European war was imminent, he knew that the Soviet Union would not be able to resist Nazi Germany, especially with so many of its forces in Manchuria; as he saw it, he had little option but to come to an agreement with Hitler. It was these immediate events of 1939, rather than a long-term calculation, as many have supposed, that persuaded Stalin to sign the notorious Pact of Non- Aggression with Hitler’s Germany on 23 August 1939. As the Soviet leader saw it, the pact would provide the Soviet Union with the breathing space it needed to arm itself as well as create a useful buffer zone in Eastern Europe and the Baltic lands. By remaining neutral in a war between two forces he considered hostile to the Soviet Union – the capitalist powers of the West and the Fascist states – Stalin hoped to see them wipe each other out in a long and draining conflict that might spark revolutions in both camps (as the First World War had done in Russia in 1917). As he told the Comintern, ‘We are not opposed [to war], if they have a good fight and weaken each other.’65
Assured of Soviet neutrality, Germany invaded western Poland on 1 September; two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany; and shortly afterwards the Red Army entered Poland from the east, in accordance with the secret protocols of the Nazi–Soviet Pact which had divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet zones. After the occupation of Poland, the Soviet Union began to pressure the Baltic states and Finland to accept territorial changes and Soviet bases on their soil. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania gave in to the Soviet demands, signing pacts of ‘defence and mutual assistance’, which allowed their occupation by the Red Army. The invading Soviet troops were accompanied by NKVD units to carry out arrests and executions: 15,000 Polish POWs and 7,000 other prisoners were shot by the NKVD in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk; and at least a million ‘anti-Soviet elements’ were deported from Poland and the Baltic lands. Finland proved less compliant, rejecting Soviet demands for army bases on its soil. The Soviets launched an invasion of Finland in November 1939, certain of victory after their military successes in Manchuria, Poland and the Baltic states. But the war in Finland went disastrously. The Soviet troops were unprepared for winter fighting and could not breach the solid Finnish defences. In four months, 126,000 Soviet troops were killed and nearly 300,000 injured, until Soviet reinforcements finally broke through the Finnish lines and forced the Finns to sue for peace.66
For Simonov, as for many Communists throughout the world, the Nazi–Soviet Pact was a huge ideological shock. The struggle against Fascism was a fundamental aspect of the Communist mentality and rationale. ‘My generation – those of us who turned eighteen around the time when Hitler came to power in 1933 – lived in constant expectation of a war with Germany,’ Simonov recalled in the 1970s. ‘For us that war began, not in 1941, but in 1933.’ The Spanish Civil War was of particular significance to this generation, not least because they had been too young to fight in the Russian Civil War, whose history had inspired their heroic dreams. But also because they fervently believed that the Spanish Civil War was the opening battle in the last great struggle between Communism and Fascism that would reach its climax in a fight to the death between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. ‘At Khalkin Gol,’ Simonov recalled, ‘that fight was no longer imaginary, it was no longer something we anticipated in the future, but something we had seen with our own eyes.’ Simonov was at Khalkin Gol when he heard the news of the Nazi–Soviet Pact. His mind full of the bloody struggle the Soviet forces were then waging against the Japanese, he initially understood the pact as a pragmatic measure to keep the Germans from ‘delivering a fatal blow to our backs’. He even welcomed the Soviet invasion of Poland and the Baltic lands as a necessary defensive measure against German military expansion. But morally, he was troubled. He felt the pact was a betrayal of Europe, of the Communist promise to defend the weak against tyrants, and he was uncomfortable with the new ideological order in which it was suddenly not acceptable to criticize Nazi Germany. ‘They were still the same Fascists,’ Simonov recalled, ‘but we could no longer write or say aloud what we thought of them.’67
