Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  For many, what awaited was a mutilating wound or death. But that is not the whole tale of this war. The paradox is chilling, but nonetheless it remains true that foot soldiers on the Soviet side, if they survived, could genuinely talk of progress. Those that lived would meet foreigners: German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, Finnish, even possibly American. They would fight beside Soviet citizens who did not speak their Russian language, some of whom, the Muslims, invoked Allah, not Stalin, before battle. They would see and handle new machines; learn to shoot, learn to drive, to strip parts out of heavy guns and tanks. They would also become adepts in black-market trade and personal survival. As conquerors in the bourgeois world they would use its fine china for their meat, drink its sweet Tokay wine till they passed out, force their masculine bodies on its women. By the war’s end, they would have gained a sense of their own worth. But even as they entered villages like Valeriya’s, so like their own lost peacetime homes, they would have sensed the extent of their transformation, the distance each had travelled since their first call-up.

  The people who greeted them had seen their fill of violence as well. The German occupation was far worse than Valeriya’s memory describes. Even in the villages, communists and Jews were hanged, women raped and men – such as there were – shipped off to work as slave labour in Hitler’s Reich. The Red Army would free them from all that, but it would also make demands, forcibly evacuating some people from front-line zones, requisitioning precious food and goods, destroying crops and buildings. A survivor would know this, and there are papers in the archive that describe the civil strife, the crime and anger. But Valeriya’s emotion when she saw that tall Russian at the door was not the product of propaganda, even in retrospect. It reflected a hope, an act of faith, the loyalty that Russians felt towards their own, a gratitude that still feeds many veterans’ hearts.

  Local people talking to Red Army soldiers, September 1943

  Valeriya Mikhailovna never travelled. Her schooling was interrupted by the war and she never managed to complete it, remaining in the province of her birth. The Soviet system under which she spent her adult life did not indulge its citizens with information. An old person now, she has not had the chance to buy and read the glossy magazines that crowd the bookshop windows of the new Russia. She has the same curiosity about outsiders, the same sense of the exotic, as a new soldier might have had in 1943. ‘Tell me about England,’ she asked. I wondered if she wanted to know about Tony Blair, to talk, as many veterans had, about the war in Iraq. ‘Do you have a sea?’ she began. I explained that England was part of a group of islands. We had several seas. ‘But tell me,’ she continued, smiling warmly over her own cups and saucers, ‘is it all right for food in England? Can you get everything you need?’ She wanted to make up a parcel for me with some bread and cucumbers. It is the custom when a journey starts.

  Notes – Introduction

  1 John Garrard and Carol Garrard (Eds), World War 2 and the Soviet People: Selected Papers from the IV World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Houndmills, 1993, pp. 1–2.

  2 G. F. Krivosheev, (general editor),Grif sekretnosti snyat: Poteri vooruzhennykh sil SSSR v voinakh, boevykh deistviyakh i voennykh konfliktakh (Moscow, 1993), p. 127.

  3 Ibid., p. 141.

  4 It remains impossible to give precise figures for the number of Soviet prisoners of war the Germans captured, not least because so many of the captives died. German figures are still around 2,561,000 for the first five months of the war (Krivosheev, p. 336). The total for the entire war may be higher than 4,500,000. Krivosheev, p. 337; N. D. Kozlov, Obshchestvennye soznanie v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny (Saint Petersburg, 1995), p. 87 (gives a figure of over 5 million).

  5 Krivosheev, p. 161.

  6 John Erickson, ‘The System and the Soldier’ in Paul Addison and Angus Calder, eds, Time to Kill: The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West (London, 1997), p. 236.

  7 The figure that commands most support is a ‘demographic loss’ (i.e. excluding returned POWs) of 8,668,400. For a discussion, see Erickson, ‘The System,’ p. 236. Statistics in this war are notoriously unreliable, and it is possible that the true figure is higher by several million.

  8 See Chapter 4, p. 109, and Chapter 5, p. 145.

  9 Antony Beevor, Stalingrad (London, 1998), p. 30.

  10 Krivosheev (p. 92) gives a figure of 34,476,700 for the women and men who ‘donned military uniform during the war’.

  11 The classic American accounts include S. L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future Wars (New York, 1947) and Samuel A. Stouffer et al., The American Soldier (2 vols, Princeton, 1949).

  12 Among the first post-war studies was E. Shils and M. Janowitz,’ Cohesion and disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War Two’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 12:2, 1948. The Wehrmacht’s performance is examined comparatively in Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance, 1939–1945 (London and Melbourne, 1983). A more recent, but classic, account is Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis and the Third Reich (New York, 1992).

  13 Cited in Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (London, 2000), p. 218. For a moving account of the famine, see R. Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford, 1986).

  14 The story of this violence is explored in my Night of Stone.

  15 Richard Overy, Russia’s War (London, 1997), pp. xviii–xix.

  16 For a more detailed commentary on wartime poetry, see K. Hodgson, Written with the Bayonet: Soviet Russian Poetry of World War Two (Liverpool, 1996).

  17 Grossman himself was condemned when his great war novel, Life and Fate, was judged to be ‘devoid of human feelings, friendship, love and care for children’. The banning of Life and Fate, including the references that his critics made to the needs of veterans, is discussed in Night of Stone, pp. 319–20.

  18 The phrase is used as the title for one of the tales in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (London, 1991).

  19 Among the most energetic exponents of this is Elena Senyavskaya, of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, whose generous help and warm encouragement of colleagues, including me, has fostered an entire school of new research. See, for example, her Psikhologiya voiny v XX veke: istoricheskii opyt rossii (Moscow, 1999).

  20 The most treasured series is Russkii Arkhiv’s Velikaya Otechestvennaya, a multi-volume set of reprints of wartime laws, regulations and military orders published in Moscow since the 1990s. Its striking scarlet bindings came to seem like a trophy of true veteran status, at least in the capital.

  21 Some, such as the results of the 2000–1 competition, have been published. See Rossiya-XX vek, sbornik rabot pobeditelei (Moscow, 2002).

  22 Oksana Bocharova and Mariya Belova, a social scientist and an ethnographer respectively, at different times also carried out interviews alone, as well as staying in touch with veterans after the interviews. In several cases, the result was a correspondence that continued for months.

  23 Cited in John Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (London, 1980), p. 109.

  24 For a discussion, see Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York, 1994).

  25 The surviving fruits of those interrogations and enquiries, which I was able to consult thanks to the help of German colleagues, are archived in the military section of the Bundesarchiv in Freiburg.

  26 Donald S. Detwiler et al. (Eds), World War II German Military Studies (24 vols, New York and London, 1979), vol. 19, document D-036.

  27 Russian Combat Methods in World War II, Department of the Army pamphlet no. 20–230, 1950. Reprinted in Detwiler, vol. 18.

  28 The observation, by Lt-Gen Martel, applied to Soviet troops in 1936. Cited in Raymond L. Garthoff, How Russia Makes War (London, 1954), p. 226; see also ibid., p. 224.

  29 Some people used this designation to answer the question on ‘nationality’ in the census of 1937. At the other extreme
were individuals who answered ‘anything but Soviet’. See Catherine Merridale, ‘The USSR Population Census of 1937 and the Limits of Stalinist Rule,’ Historical Journal, 39:1, March 1996, pp. 225–40.

  30 This democratic army – or quasi-democratic one – is the subject of Mark von Hagen’s Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca and London, 1990).

  31 David Samoilov, ‘Lyudi odnogo varianta: Iz voennykh zapisok’, part 2, Avrora, 1990, no. 2, p. 51.

  32 See Bartov’s important book The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (London, 1985).

  33 First discussed in the 1940s, the theory was placed in the policy agenda by the work of Shils and Janowitz, op. cit.

  34 This argument is developed in Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army.

  35 See Chapters 3 and 4.

  36 Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 173.

  37 The problem did concern post-war authorities. See Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, 1976), especially pp. 214–24.

  1

  Marching with Revolutionary Step

  Whenever people think that they will have to fight a war, they start to try to picture what it will be like. Their stories seldom correspond to reality, but forecasting is not the purpose. Instead, the idea that the boys will soon be back or that the enemy will be destroyed with surgical precision, like the myth that it will all be over by Christmas, serve to foster a confident, even optimistic, mood at times when gloom might be more natural. In 1938, as the momentum for large-scale war gathered, the citizens of Stalin’s empire, like Europeans everywhere, attempted to allay their fears with comforting tales. The Soviet vision of future conflict was destined to inspire a generation of wartime volunteers, but the images were created deliberately by a clique of leaders whose ideology had set them on the path to international hostilities. The favoured medium of communication was the cinema. The epic struggle of utopia and backwardness played out in moving pictures, black and white. Stirring music reinforced the mood. At other moments, Soviet people opened their newspapers to columns of portentous diplomatic reportage; their country was preparing for battle. But though the news that citizens could read was full of threat, films were designed to inculcate the view that the people’s vanguard, the Red Army, was certain to triumph.

  The greatest epic of the time was Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, an anti-fascist parable of Russian victory over German invaders. Although it was set in the thirteenth century, in the age of Slavic princes and Teutonic knights, Eisenstein’s great spectacle, released in 1938, made direct reference to the politics of the 1930s, even to the point of adding swastikas to some of the Teutonic knights’ shields and standards. The message was not one that Soviet audiences, attuned to every nuance of state-controlled propaganda, would miss. For all its deliberate sermonizing, however, the film, which boasted a musical score by Sergei Prokofiev, was destined to endure as a classic of Soviet cinema. Inferior productions with similar themes have stood the test of time less well, but in the 1930s, their audiences were rapt. On the surface at least, Alexander Nevsky was set in the deep past. For cinema-goers who preferred to look forwards, another film, Efim Dzigan’s If There Is War Tomorrow, also released in 1938, foretold Russia’s victory in the face of a future invasion, the one that kept people awake at nights.

  Efim Dzigan set out to reassure. The impact of his hour-long film was created by blending fictitious action with clips of genuine newsreel, splicing documentary footage into an unfolding fantasy of effortless victory. The message – resolute and stoical but also full of hope – was strengthened by the repetition of a musical refrain with words by the popular songwriter Vasily Lebedev-Kumach.1 If There Is War Tomorrow struck so live a chord with Soviet audiences that they went on watching it after the real war began. By the winter of 1941, the invader had overrun a third of Soviet territory. The planes that droned across Dzigan’s black-and-white screen had been destroyed, the tanks burned out, the brave soldiers corralled in prison camps. It was no longer possible to dream that this war would be over soon. That winter, the audiences crowding into old schoolrooms and empty huts included evacuees from Ukraine and Smolensk, people whose homes were now in German hands. As they huddled together, relying on each other’s breath for warmth, they needed patience as the hand-cranked dynamo was turned. But all the same, a spell seemed to be cast.2 This film was not about the war, but faith. That faith, and the images that sustained it, was part of what defined the generations that would bear the brunt of Russia’s war. In the terrible years ahead, people would hum the music from this film to keep their spirits up. As they marched across dusty steppe, as they strummed a guitar by the light of a campfire, it would be Lebedev-Kumach’s song that soldiers often sang.

  The film’s action opens in a fairground, probably the newly opened Gorky Park, Moscow’s Park of Culture and Rest. The Kremlin towers are visible in the distance, each topped with a glowing electric star. It is night, but the city is full of jollity, with ferris wheels and fireworks and young people strolling about with ice creams in their hands. This is the socialist paradise, and it is a place of well-earned leisure, happy couples, brightly coloured food. There is an innocence about it, crimeless, sexless, blandly without sin. In this land, Stalin and his loyal aides do all the worrying so that the children of the revolution can be free. But their freedom is under threat. The film cuts to the Soviet border, where fascist troops, ant-like, are climbing into tanks. There is no chance that we will sympathize with them. These are not the seductive species of villain but absurd buffoons. Their officers wear large moustaches, look pompous, and move with the bow-legged gait of cavalrymen. The infantrymen crawl, the airmen stoop. Throughout the action they speak German, but they are more like cartoon Prussians from a children’s book than leather-booted Nazis. Even the swastikas on their helmets and collars are slightly eccentric. This is picture-book fascism, not the real thing.

  The invasion takes place at night. It could be frightening, and we may briefly worry for the stout young woman who is making soup a stone’s throw from the front, but border guards hold the aggressor at bay. Our housewife joins the men, throwing off her apron and taking her place in the line of skilful gunners, proving that patriots can turn their hands to anything. Unfortunately, however, this is just the beginning of a series of perfidious attacks. The next comes from the air. The fascist biplanes buzz with menace, but danger is averted for a second time. Soviet planes, a fleet of shining new machines, take to the skies, and at this point the audience should recognize the aces that have rushed to pilot them. There is Babushkin, the hero of an Arctic rescue mission several years before, and Vodopyanov and Gromov, flying stars, their names printed across the screen in case we did not manage to identify their faces straight away. The 1930s were the age of heroes, and pilots were the true élite. In a scene whose irony would become apparent three years later, when the Luftwaffe carried out its devastating attacks of June and July 1941, the famous aces run audacious raids into the fascists’ lair, destroying enemy aircraft on the ground and flying home without a single loss.

  And now it is the Red Army’s own turn. The volunteers stream in from every corner of the Soviet land. There is an old man with a grey beard in the queue at the recruitment point. He fought against the white general, Denikin, in the civil war and now he wants to crush the enemy again. He holds a fist towards the screen, assuring us that the enemy ‘will remember this from last time’. The fascists, like the whites, have become the sworn enemies of right-thinking citizens everywhere. But not all citizens are fit to fight, and we now learn that front-line service is to be regarded as a privilege. Working and waiting are the lot of older people and the very young. Some women will remain at home, too, but others, every bit as trained and warlike as the men, line up in uniform, jaws set, prepared to do great deeds. It is not just Russians who come forward. The Commissar for Defence, Kliment Voroshilov, appears in his
best uniform and appeals to the peoples of the east, the Uzbeks in particular. Hardbitten men in sheepskin hats respond at once. Voroshilov’s speech becomes a turning point for everyone. Soon Soviet troops will move into attack, driving the fascists from their trenches. The war is going to be fought on the aggressor’s soil, and it is going to be won.

  The story never gets more frightening than that. Whenever Soviet forces engage with the enemy, the fascists end up running for their lives. Not all the fighting is high-tech, and in fact the biggest set-piece battle in the film involves cavalry and bayonets, but there is no blood. Indeed, there is only one serious wounding. Its victim is a member of a tank crew who joined up in the first wave, together with his brother, and set off for adventure straight away. The men – accompanied by a pretty young nurse – spend a few moments trundling happily along in their Soviet tank, a surprisingly spacious vehicle with a cabin that looks like the inside of a caravan. They could be setting off on holiday, even at the point where their machine grinds to a sudden halt. Our hero, smooth and cheerful as a young Cliff Richard, is certainly undaunted. He grabs a handy spanner, climbs out through the hatch, and then there is a bang, the sound of a man at work, and though we cannot see the actor we can hear him whistling the theme song as he puts the problem right. But then the music stops in a flurry of gunfire. Inside, the other brother’s face sets to a mask of grief. A couple of seconds of suspense follow, accompanied by violins, and we may catch our breath in expectation of a tragedy. But Stalin’s children need not cry for long. The lad’s hand has been hurt, but that is all. Once he has climbed back in and the nurse has bandaged him, he is as good as new. The whole crew starts that song again, and off they go to win the war.