Interview with Anatoly Semiriaga
Q: In 1945, you were there at the moment when the capitulation [surrender] was signed. What were your feelings?
Semiriaga: By mid-April, 1945, we had launched the Berlin operation, which was the decisive operation of the World War II -- an extremely bloody and atrocious war -- in order to reach the river of Oder. From Oder to Berlin it took us one week, because the German troops realized perfectly that it was the decisive operation, not only for Berlin as a city, but for Germany itself.
At that moment, the German resistance stiffened. We encircled the city, but you couldn't imagine what it represents to introduce in a city, even a large city, three tank armies, each army counted approximately 900 to 1,000 tanks. So you could imagine the situation. Berlin, all the city had been practically submerged by three thousand tanks.... Practically every street leading into the center had a column of tanks of 400 to 500 tanks, and they were moving very slowly. Slowly, because from everywhere, from upper stories, they were attacked with grenades, ...and we lost a lot of tanks during this street combat before we managed to reach the center of the city.
So, on April 30, we heard that the resistance is weakening. We thought that maybe Hitler already left the city, as well as the other German leaders. We regretted very much that we didn't manage to catch them. But afterwards we learned that. At the Chuikov headquarters arrived one officer, and he brought with him the proposal of capitulation. I think it was on the 30th, or maybe the 31st of April. Well, it was clear that the Berlin garrison was about to capitulate, because they were desolated. And Chuikov called some interpreters, and I was included among them, to help with the negotiations. I am speaking about Berlin's capitulation, not the capitulation of Germany as such. And I remember the moment when this lieutenant general of the artillery came in. He was covered with dust, unshaved, and I was especially struck by the fact that he didn't have any shoes. Well, he had something on: usually all German generals had shiny boots on them, but in this case, he had put some kind of tissue on his feet. It reminded me of the dress we used to have at the start of the war. So, when we saw him, we just looked at each other trying to guess the meaning. Maybe he was trying to impress us and to look more pitiful than he was. And, in effect, he was talking to Chuikov, he started complaining that he lost his tank division, and he was begging for his pity, and that maybe it's about time to interrupt the combat, so they could evacuate the dead and the wounded. Chuikov called Zhukov and Zhukov said no. "No negotiations about a truce, there can be no truce." The only thing that we can talk about is immediate and unconditional capitulation.
Q: They accepted all your conditions. What did you feel at that time?
Semiriaga: Well, to be present at the capitulation of the city to which we were coming to since the very beginning of the war -- the city about which we dreamt at Stalingrad -- you could imagine our feelings. They are easy to imagine. We were the conquerors, we were the victors, and we were still alive. That was the essence. And when we heard over the radio that the third corps is capitulating, there was dead silence. We stopped fighting, the Germans did so too. It lasted for a hour and a half approximately, then on the radio it had been announced that it had been capitulation, and there was an explosion of fire. Everyone was firing at the sky. It was jubilation.
Q: The Allies were not too far away. What did you think about them? What were you told?
Semiriaga: One, two days [after the surrender] we had been summoned by our superiors and they said, "Listen, the real guilty ones of this war are not only Germans, not only Hitler, but the imperialist system as such. They are the responsible ones." And who are the representatives of these systems now? Well, the ones with whom we fought together -- that is, the United States, Great Britain, and France. So we had been given the possibility to think logically [of] what will come out of this idea. The imperialists were the instigators of the war, and now when the Soviet Union won, they wouldn't let us go in peace. So we were given the idea, "Just watch out. Yesterday's allies might be tomorrow's enemy." No one said this directly, but the idea was there.
And they seemed to be telling us, "Be vigilant. The allies are not here yet." Some of our troops had met them, but not us. They did not reach Berlin yet. And we had been informed that according to agreement, allies will be here soon. I wouldn't say that we were all convinced that Americans and the British are all imperialists and we had to fight them sooner or later, maybe one year later, maybe ten years later. No, I would say we didn't believe that, because everyone could think, "Why would those Americans and those British send us armaments and equipment in conformity with the land lease -- why would they send these arms which could be used against them?" So, I don't think we were very much convinced by all these tales.
Q: Did you know at that time that Germany was to become a socialist country?
Semiriaga: Well, it is hard to say whether we knew this. We were supposing that in the countries which had been freed by us -- Poland, for instance, Czechoslovakia, which was almost entirely freed by us, Rumania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia -- we knew that at the time communists came to power in those countries. We...knew that communists would seize the opportunity of the fascism defeat in order to build a socialist state.
We were taught that the defeat of Facism was an important step towards the victory of socialism all over the world. Since the Red Army had liberated eastern Europe, sooner or later socialism would be established there.
True, some communists were saying that they wanted to create something similar to the Soviet Union.... But at that time Stalin was wise enough to advise them against that, against trying to copy the Soviet Union. It has been even given as an instruction to our superiors.... We would try to create democratic governments, but take care that the majority of them would be composed of communists. It had been a maneuver in order not to frighten the population. Stalin demanded that they didn't have to imitate us. We understood the situation in the way we were taught about the October revolution. We had been taught that the socialist doctrine is invincible, that sooner or later socialism would triumph all over the world.
Q: Right after the surrender, how did the German people react?
Semiriaga: In the first days after the victory, in the first weeks, Germans had been afraid to talk to us and to open up to us. So it would have been absolutely useless to talk to them. They were only surviving. They wanted to be fed, they wanted to have some water, electricity. They didn't want to think about the future, they had no future. It was only later. I spent some time in Lotaringia. I had been sent back to Berlin; I became member of the Soviet occupational administration. I was in charge of the political parties, and I had daily contact with their representatives. We had permanent discussions, but it had been later, two years later. At that time, naturally, Germans already had some opinions, and sometimes very unfavorable [toward] us....
The situation was quite different in Poland after liberation. And I had been talking to Poles, and they would openly tell us that they were afraid of our kolkhoz [collective farm]. I asked why. And they said, "Because in your kolkhoz you have common wives. Wives were being made common property." And I would simply laugh and say it is absolute nonsense, we never had things like that. We had common land, yes. Common horses, and so on and so forth. But they wouldn't believe me, they were dead convinced that in kolkhoz everything was for everyone, everything is in common, that even they sleep together in one big room. So, it had been just a laughing matter for us. We hadn't been very enthusiastic about kolkhoz ourselves, but it seemed to us ridiculous that they had these ideas about kolkhoz. Germans, no, they wouldn't ask anything of this kind.
Q: Did you have any contact with any Allies?
Semiriaga: Personally, I met the Allies when the Americans moved into western Berlin. We have been told that we have to follow the last American lorry at a distance of one kilometer in order to avoid any contact with them. Officially, we had been told something else -- just avoid difficulties. But we were smiling and telling ourselves, "Well, our superiors must be afraid that we would be contaminated by Americans. We had been told that sooner or later, Americans would become our adversaries. But when we saw them in person, we saw very nice people, and we had been starting to doubt what we had been told. We were young at that time, and we were asking ourselves, "Why should we follow at a distance of one kilometer or two kilometers from the Americans?" Well, it was rather a theoretical distance. in practice, it was something different. Sometimes the Americans would stop in order that we could reach them, and were welcoming us, shaking our hands. We were somewhat hesitant, but then we would remember, why? They used to be our allies, they are still our allies, why should we be frightened? So we were shaking hands, we were exchanging canned foods, and the Americans would give us their canned meat.... I was driving a German car at that time, and very often I ran out of gas, and [the] Americans would say, "Well, fill it up and take as much as you want." So, these were our first contacts.
The second one [came] a few months later. At that time there were no strict borders, [just] a separation line between the zones. And the Americans invited us to Lotaringia, just to visit the area. I remember once I met an American captain. We went to a museum, we took pictures, and our attitude toward Americans was very friendly. And day after day, month after month, there were less contacts. At that time we were joking: "What's the difference between an American and a Russian captain? There is no difference at all, except for a tiny thing: when an American captain sits, he puts his feet on the table, we never do this. That's the only difference."
Q: Mikhail Ivanovich, now we want to ask about the blockade of West Berlin. What are your thoughts about the blockade and what did you think about it at the time?
Semiriaga: At the beginning...I thought that [the Allies] were the guilty party. But now, I must say, candidly, that we organized the blockade and we initiated it, unfortunately. We took an extremely shortsighted view. Of course it was disagreeable for us that in the center of our section of Berlin there were troops and military administration from other countries whose political aims were not in harmony with our own. We can understand that it was disagreeable. But purposefully making matters more difficult with our allies showed an absence of foresight about our future relations. Of cours we can understand the position of our leaders in Moscow and Berlin. They wanted the Allies to withdraw from West Berlin so that Berlin could be the capital of the area of Soviet Occupation without the presence of any other power. But our allies were entitled to be there by law. We would have to respect the law, to respect the agreement whereby we freely gave the Allies the right to be in West Berlin.
Q: How did the blockade begin? What was it like? Where were you at the time?
Semiriaga: It's hard for me to name a precise time becaue I knew about it -- it was planned for weeks in advance. It didn't happen overnight. It took a while. We did everything we could to make the Allies leave West Berlin willingly, because the Western part of Berlin felt like a thorn in our side. But they didn't want to leave, and could not, according to the agreement, which had been made by all the Allies, that we should concede this right.
So we (not me, of course -- I was just an observer), the leadership that is, with Moscow's knowledge, of course, decided to force [the Allies] to leave by making the circumstances intolerable in West Berlin. There was a pretext, but any would have done. The Western Allies introduced monetary reforms in the West. We wanted to introduce reforms thoughout the whole of Germany simultaneously. It didn't make sense to introduce monetary reforms in the Western part of Germany and not in the East. All the money would go to the West and everything here would lose its ccmmercial value. It would cause inflation for us, and our goods would all disappear to them. So our leaders decided to introduce monetary reforms in the eastern sector too. It looked as though the problem had been solved, but our people thought that the "island" of West Berlin, was a staging post for undermining the East German economy....
Q: How was the blockade organized?
Semiriaga: Well, this is what they said: There's a railway communication between the Western zones (American and English) and Berlin which runs through the Soviet Zone. It's about two hundred kilometers from Berlin to the border. So we and the Germans (at our prompting) began to repair the railway line. And we said [to the Western Allies] that because of the work we can't let your trains come through. They said, "All right, then, but you'll have to let us bring provisions in by bus." We didn't like that either, we would not achieve our aims this way. So we invented some repair work on the road, too. But it was a provocation which did not lead to anything good. So we closed the railway and the road. The only way left was by air. The Americans decided to provide the population of West Berlin with food and fuel by air. They used military planes to bring in fuel every night and day, and 24 hours a day they flew in supplies to fulfill the needs of West Berlin. They continued to do it for maybe two months.
Q: Did you hear the planes? Did you see them?
Semiriaga: These planes did a U-turn to land at Tempelhof. I've told you about the famous airfield at the centre of today's West Berlin. They turned, and above the houses were we lived in the military base they descended to about 100/150/200 meters above the ground to land at Tempelhof airport. You can imagine these enormous planes -- B24s, with four engines, huge bombers which had been used to bomb cities in strategic bombing attacks -- flying 150/200 meters above our heads and landing, one every ten minutes. And at night also. You can imagine the kind of impression this made on us. We didn't like it at all. But ourselves we officers said, "We're wasting our time. The Americans are not going to withdraw." They will supply West Berlin until.we are sick to death of our own seige. We didn't want to kill ourselves trying to make them leave. They would win anyway.
Q: Right at the beginning of the blockade, did you think that the Soviets could overcome the Americans?
Semiriaga: Yes we believed it. We believed that after about a month we would force the Americans, French, and English to leave West Berlin. But a month went by, six weeks and more, and they showed no signs of going, and our international prestige began to fall because of it. And the Germans were losing faith, not just in the East, but in the West. In fact, it was in the West first and then in the East that they realised that it was all a waste of time and that nothing good would come of it....
Q: Were you afraid that the blockade could turn into a war?
Semiriaga: Yes. I remember that the Soviet people were very worried by the blockade. They thought it was the beginning of another war. But we didn't believe it. I didn't believe it because we knew that it wasn't provocation by the Western Allies, but that it was our initiative, and as soon as we would give in to them, finish the road and railway repairs, everything would return to normal and there would be no need for the blockade to continue. It all depended on us. If we had gone any further and created tensions, then we would have been the guilty party....
Q: Do you remember Berlin as being a place and a subject of competition between the Soviets and the Western Allies? Between socialism and capitalism?
Semiriaga: An American journalist who was in the Soviet Zone at that time -- when journalists were still allowed to move quite freely across the borders -- asked one of our highranking generals, "What is your view of the position of relations between the Allies on German soil?" The general smiled and gave a sharpwitted reply: "It's like a game of chess. You have a board. one player is the Western Countries the other is the Soviet Union. The pieces which we re-arrange and then they re-arrange are the Germans."
Note: Red text is available in RealAudio.
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