Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  ‘The characteristics of this semi-Asiatic,’ the pamphlet begins, ‘are strange and contradictory.’ The captured Nazi officers had done their job. ‘The Russian,’ continued the pamphlet, ‘is subject to moods which to a westerner are incomprehensible; he acts by instinct. As a soldier, the Russian is primitive and unassuming, innately brave but morosely passive when in a group.’ At the same time, ‘his emotions drive the Russian into the herd, which gives him strength and courage’. Hardship was no deterrent for these primitives. The Red Army’s wartime endurance at Stalingrad was explained as a side effect of culture and those Asiatic genes. ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the Russian soldier is unaffected by season and terrain… The Russian soldier requires only very few provisions for his own use.’ Finally, the Red Army could not be trusted to play by the rules. ‘The Germans found,’ the summary concluded, ‘that they had to be on their guard against dishonesty and attempts at deception by individual Russian soldiers and small units… An’ unguarded approach often cost a German his life.27

  Cold-War commentaries like these, racist parentage and all, helped shape the image of Red Army soldiers for English-speakers of the later twentieth century. Most combatants dehumanize their enemy. It is much easier to kill someone who seems entirely alien, whose individuality has gone. And Russia always seemed to be so difficult, even in the brief four-year spell when Stalin was the ally of democracy. Red Army soldiers might well be brave, ‘probably the best material in the world from which to form an army’ in the view of one British observer, but their ‘astonishing strength and toughness’ and ‘their ability to survive deprivations’ were disconcerting, even in an ally.28

  Setting the racist labelling aside, it remains true that Soviet soldiers served one of the most ambitious dictatorships in history and that most had been educated according to its precepts. In that sense, most were more deeply saturated in their regime’s ideology than soldiers in the Wehrmacht, for Soviet propaganda had been working on its nation’s consciousness for fifteen years by the time that Hitler came to power in Berlin. Soviet citizens also tended to be more isolated from foreign influences, and very few (except, perhaps, the veterans of the First World War) would have had the opportunity for international travel. They shared a common language, a kind of lens that was engineered to show the world in the colours of Marxism–Leninism. But beyond that, the idea that Red Army soldiers were an undifferentiated horde, or even scions of one race, is wrong.

  Russians were in a majority in the Soviet armed forces throughout the war. Ukrainians were the second largest nationality, and the Red Army included scores of other ethnic groups, from Armenians to Yakuts, as well as large numbers of people who preferred to call themselves ‘Soviet’, evading traditional categories in favour of a new kind of citizenship.29 Conscripts included skilled workers, young men who could turn their acquaintance with industrial machines into an easy mastery of tanks. But though such people were the army’s favourite recruits, its ranks also numbered boys from the villages, many of whom had never seen an electric light, let alone an engine, before they were called up. Recruits from desert and steppe regions had yet to see broad rivers, yet to learn to swim. They were the ones who drowned most quickly when the order came to wade through the Crimean marsh or storm across the icy river Dnepr.

  There were also wide variations in the soldiers’ ages. The majority of conscripts were born between 1919 and 1925, but older men, including tens of thousands in their forties, were also called up. These were the veterans who remembered the First World War, the men who had known what life under tsarism was like. Their mentality and expectations were entirely different from those of young lads straight from Soviet schools. Some even remembered different kinds of army. That of the Tsars had been hierarchical, its discipline severe, but in the 1920s there had been a brief experiment with classlessness, an attempt to build a people’s army that was free of bombast, formality and gold braid.30 Men who remembered those experimental days were suspicious of drill, watchful, and quick to condemn (or even shoot) their inexperienced young officers. There never was a single army type. After a few months on the road with former peasants, small-time crooks, career soldiers, adolescents, and would-be poets like himself, one conscript, David Samoilov, concluded that ‘a people is not like the processed stuffing ready for history’s sausage-machine… A single language, culture and fate give rise to characteristics that many seem to share, the things that we call national character. But in reality a people is a multiplicity of characters.’31

  If Soviet culture was not capable of turning out a single type of man, there could be grounds for suspecting that war itself might do so. It is hard to conceive of individuality against a background of industrialized slaughter or even to imagine sensitivity where so much would have been obliterated by smoke, stench and deafening noise. Brutalization – or, as Omer Bartov has it, barbarization – is the word that springs to mind.32 And yet these soldiers, like any others, had dreams and aspirations of their own, ambitions that ranged from promotion or Communist Party membership to a bit of leave, some new boots or a German wristwatch. They continued to write their letters home, to notice changes in the weather, landscapes, the health and breed of local pigs. They made friends, too, and exchanged stories from back home, rolled cigarettes, stole vodka, learned new skills. The front was not merely a theatre of living death. Paradoxically, for those who survived the war presented a new world, landscapes that they would not have seen if they had stayed on the farm. The German army went through the reverse process, marching into a land that struck former workers from Bavaria or Saxony as primitive, barbarous, unlit, unheated, and unwashed. Where some detachments of the Wehrmacht motored to the front, initially, from Paris, the best Red Army soldiers often came from villages where travel meant a five-day walk to town. Some of the riflemen who ransacked Berlin, drinking old cognac out of Meissen cups, had never set foot in a train before the army and this war.

  Comparisons with other armies do more than suggest the things that were specific in the Red Army’s culture; they also point to themes that Soviet sources may not highlight on their own. One question, which no writer born in Stalin’s world would even think to ask, is what made any Soviet soldier fight? Combat motivation, like national character, was an issue that preoccupied military experts in the US in the 1950s. The result was a theory about small-group loyalty, the notion that men give their best in battle if they have ‘buddies’, ‘primary groups’, which, unlike ideology or religion, truly command their love.33 The notion eventually inspired new policies on training and the use of reserves, and it has become conventional wisdom for social psychologists and policy-makers alike. But the Red Army does not readily fit the mould. To be sure, battalions would train together behind the lines whenever they were joined by new reserves; or that, at least, was the plan. But when the rates of loss were high, when the average front-line tour of duty for an infantryman, before he was removed by death or serious disability, was three weeks, the small groups seldom lasted long.

  High casualty rates afflicted the Wehrmacht as well, and it has been suggested that the place of primary groups in German lines was taken by ideology on the one hand and fear on the other.34 Fear played its part in the Red Army, too, although at first soldiers were more frightened of German guns than of their own officers, paralyzing their ability to fight.35 Ideology also featured centrally in Soviet soldiers’ lives. They had been shaped to see themselves not merely as citizens in uniform but as the self-conscious vanguard of a revolution, the spearhead of just war. But how effective ideology could be in motivating them, and how it jarred or scraped against older beliefs, including religion and traditions of nationalism, remains an open question. Communist rhetoric may have contributed a certain zeal, but it was not accepted universally. Nor was the god-like status of Stalin. In the 1930s, the leader’s name, in capitals, had appeared in pamphlets, newspapers and posters everywhere that Soviet people looked. His face loomed out of wartime newspapers and pamphlets,
too, and his name was spelled out on the painted banners that were strung between birch trees to hallow soldiers’ meeting places in the open air. But it is another matter to read allegiance into Stalin’s ubiquitous presence, least of all among troops at the front line. ‘To be honest about it,’ the poet Yury Belash wrote later, ‘in the trenches the last thing we thought about was Stalin.’36

  To some extent, training built men’s confidence when ideology had failed to convince and comfort them. In 1941, Soviet recruits faced the most professional fighting force the continent had ever seen. By 1945, they had defeated it. Between those dates, there was a revolution in Red Army soldiers’ preparation, in military thinking, in the use and deployment of technology, and in the army’s relationship with politics. These changes, one of the keys to Soviet triumph, affected every soldier’s life, and many wrote and spoke about them. For some, the whole business was irksome, especially when, in honour of the Soviet fascination with American styles of management, the methods used resembled preparation for production lines. But the tide turned, Stalingrad held, and its progress in the next two years suggested that Red Army training methods were increasingly effective. How much they resembled German methods, how much the two sides learned from each other, is one question. Another is the place of party rhetoric, of communist belief, in this most technical of fields.

  Finally, there is a problem on which almost every Soviet source is silent. Trauma, in the Red Army, was virtually invisible. Even the toll that the war took on soldiers’ family lives was seldom discussed,37 but shock, and the distress of all that the men witnessed at the front, was virtually taboo. There can have been few battlefields more terrible than Stalingrad, Kerch or Prokhorovka, and few sights more disturbing than the first glimpse of mass extermination, of Babi Yar, Maidanek or Auschwitz. But official accounts say nothing about trauma, battle stress, or even depression. Mental illness, even among troops, is scarcely mentioned in contemporary medical reports. In the guise of heart disease, hypertension or gastric disorders, it haunts post-war hospital records without getting specific attention. The question is not so much whether Red Army soldiers suffered stress as how they viewed and dealt with it.

  Linked to this is the long-term problem of their adaptation to the peace. In four short years, Red Army conscripts had turned into professionals, skilled fighters, conquerors. There would be little call for qualities like these while Stalin lived. The journey home could be as confusing as a soldier’s long-forgotten first few weeks in uniform. For many, the confusion continued in the decades to come. The process of adjustment could encompass family problems, poverty, depression, alcohol abuse, violent crime. Perhaps the survivors’ ultimate victory should be measured, in their old age, by their achievement of a kind of ordinariness, by the sharing of tea and sweets, pictures of grandchildren, home-grown tomatoes from the dacha. That triumph, the least spectacular but most enduring, is part of the uniqueness of this generation, an aspect of the special quality that the schoolchildren who helped to inspire this book could sense but did not name.

  It is a Friday evening in mid-July and my assistant, Masha Belova, and I have an invitation to tea. We have been working in Kursk’s local archive, reading about the chaos that gripped the province as the front drew near in 1943. The documents tell a confusing tale. The army’s advance was a trail of liberation, but not everyone was pleased when the soldiers arrived, ransacking their homes for food, demanding horses to transport their guns. And then there was the danger in the streets: not only shelling, but the looting, mugging and the unexploded mines. After nine hours reading documents like these, the war seems real and the quiet afternoon a dream; it always takes a while to readjust. But it is hard to stay solemn for long once we have left the square. The building we are visiting stands in a courtyard shaded by plane trees. Windows are open on every floor, some swagged with drying laundry, some crowded with tomato plants or marigolds in plastic tubs. A man in a tracksuit is fixing his car. Another is watching, spitting the husks of sunflower seeds into an arc around his feet. The lady we have come to see is waiting by the stairs. We take off our shoes by her front door and pad through to the living room.

  Valeriya Mikhailovna was born near Kursk in 1932. She is a village woman, the daughter of peasants, and when she speaks her accent is guttural, the consonants slurred, a hybrid of Russian and Ukrainian. ‘It was terrible,’ she repeats, ‘frightening. God forbid! Dear girls, good girls, what can I tell you about the horrible war?’ She is sitting on a low stool opposite us, and as she starts to tell her story, she begins to rock. ‘They came, I don’t remember when. There were tanks, the tanks came by, and there were planes, German planes, our planes. The whole sky was black. God forbid! The tanks were on fire, they were burning. And the bombs were flying. There were battles raging, battles. I was nine years old. People were crying, everyone was crying, mother was crying. My dear girls.’ She rocks, she smiles, and then her face grows stern again. ‘There were bodies lying everywhere. Our conditions were so bad, so bad. There were prisoners of war. We saw them. Our father was taken, he was a prisoner of war. Mother was still young and pretty, it was terrible. You cannot imagine. It was cold. I remember there was ice. They took the wounded soldiers to our barn. And the wounded soldiers were all crying, “Let us die, let us die.” They put them in our barn. And then, dear girls, they came and took the clothes from the dead ones. Their shirts and coats. They took them and they put them on. Without even washing them or anything, God forbid!’

  Valeriya Mikhailovna is not rich, but her flat has electricity and gas and she owns a black-and-white television that probably works most of the time. She also has a job; she is not living in some isolated forest hut. When she begins to talk, however, her words come out in the authentic cadence of the village, the peasant village of a hundred years ago. Catastrophes come from the blue, the people suffer, God forbids. The narrative rolls in blank verse, punctuated by that refrain – good girls, my dear girls, God forbid! The mothers of the boys who fought Napoleon no doubt spoke in the same rhythm, weaving their stories on a warp of repetition. Like theirs, this fable recognizes fate, it designates the good and bad, it offers details to substantiate its truths. The Austrian soldiers were good people, kind. The Finns were the worst. Even the Germans were afraid of them. The Germans hated the cold, dear girls. They hated the winter, they were afraid of it. When it was warm, they liked to look for eggs, they liked their eggs and lots of milk. But the Germans, they bombed us, they burned our homes, we were there with them for two years. It was very frightening.

  Valeriya Mikhailovna’s face is full of concern for us. She wants us to understand, she wants us to get whatever it is that we have come for. She has told this story before many, many times, but she is trying very hard to make it come alive. How much of what she is saying is based on her own memory and how much is drawn from local folklore, it is impossible to say. But there is a moment when the rhythm breaks, when all her years and later stories fall away and she is standing in her mother’s hut beside the door. I asked her to tell us about the moment when the Red Army recaptured her village. ‘We lived near a bridge,’ she began. ‘The Germans blew it up because they were retreating. We watched them going by, going by. They were retreating from Voronezh. They took everything. They took our food, our pots.’ She paused. ‘We weren’t expecting ours. But there was a knock on the door. Mother said it would be some kind of German. But it was one of ours…’ Valeriya Mikhailovna began to cry, but she was smiling, too, and she hugged herself and shook her head, apologizing for the pause. ‘He picked me up. He was one of ours. They came, they knocked on our door. They picked me up. They were knocking, and they said, “We have come…”’

  ‘I always cry when I remember them,’ she told me later as we drank our tea. ‘They were ours. I could not believe it.’ The little girl may well have cried in 1943. But then, as she explained, ‘They could not stay, of course.’ The liberators were on their way, and all that remained was a snapshot in her memory, a so
ldier from her own side at the door. Sixty years of propaganda have altered the grander stories of the war, but the eleven-year-old Valya’s joy cannot be faked. As I listen to the tape of her story I can almost hear the shuffle of heavy boots, the deep voices, Russian being spoken without fear. The men that she so skilfully conjured for me are no longer ordinary peasants. In her account, they are more like the heroes of a Russian epic tale.

  ‘There’s nothing much for us in that one,’ Masha told me as we walked back home. ‘She was very nice, but she didn’t really see anything, did she?’ Compared with some of the other interviews we had recorded, this was true. That very morning we had spent an hour arranging to hear the memories of local veterans, including one or two who could have known the soldier who had knocked on Valeriya’s door in 1943. We had listened to others describing the day they were called up, their experiences of training, their first battles, the German soldiers they had killed. A few days earlier, at Prokhorovka, which is where the fiercest tank battle of the whole war took place, a veteran had described his terror as the fields of ripening corn caught fire around him and the horizon burst into flame. Valeriya Mikhailovna was younger than most war veterans, she had not been a soldier, and she was a woman.

  It was only as I thought about the interview that night that I realized how crucial it had really been. Without it, in fact, nothing that the soldiers said had a real context. For most of the soldiers young Valeriya knew had come precisely from her world. Nearly three quarters of the Soviet infantry in the Second World War had started life as peasants. Their horizons had been no larger than Valeriya Mikhailovna’s, their mental universe as tightly bound by God and soil. The stories of their lives could easily have been as repetitious: cycles of harvest, winter, death and hardship; the main events dealt to them, not within their power. But then the army took them and their world would change for ever.