Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  The story ends in Berlin. Soviet planes, wave after wave of them, are flying in formation like so many wild geese. They are not dropping bombs. Their payload is made up of leaflets calling on the population to put down their arms and join the international proletarian socialist revolution. The message is timely, for a large meeting is already under way. The workers in this other land are preparing to desert the slavery of capitalism. Slogans begin to fill the screen. War, we are told, will lead to the destruction of the capitalist world. The fighting will not take place on Soviet soil. These reassuring messages are backed up by fanfares and more banners. The audience is smiling; it is saved. As the music fades another slogan reminds us that the price of freedom is to be prepared for war. To be prepared, that is, to ride to Berlin in a shiny tank, to be a handsome pilot or a pretty nurse, to point a gun at a healthy man and shoot him down without spilling a single drop of blood.

  The dream of quick and easy victory might not have been so potent if it had remained confined to the big screen. It might not have been quite so devastating, either. The problem, by 1938, was that the fantasy had affected real strategic thinking. ‘Decisive victory at low cost’ was not just a vision of the propagandists; it was the Red Army’s official goal. Dzigan’s script may have helped to inure citizens to war, but less constructively it was also the scenario for a generation of military thinkers. In 1937, when Stalin replaced his leading strategists with people chosen for their political, as opposed to purely military, distinction, a new approach to national security was adopted in Moscow. In the past, a good deal of planning had gone into strategies for defence. Now the entire orientation of Red Army training began to be directed at offensive operations. The plans and training exercises needed for prolonged defence were scaled down, as were the fledgling preparations for partisan operations inside Soviet territory.3 The notion that the enemy would be repelled and beaten on his own soil was not just a romantic dream; from the late 1930s it was the centrepiece of Stalinist military planning.

  It was as if a whole people could share a delusion. As Hitler and his generals were drilling the greatest professional army on the continent, Stalin’s advisers seemed lost in fantasy. There had been dissident voices – powerful ones – but by 1938 the critics had vanished into the silence of the prison camps, the covert graves. If the Bolsheviks could win the civil war, the propagandists shrieked, if they could dam the Dnepr, banish God, and fly to the North Pole, then surely they could keep the fascist invader at bay. History, the ineluctable drive that was moving all humanity towards a common goal, was on their side, after all. The delusion was expressed in many other films of this same era, including one that features yet more tanks. In this production, The Tank Men, the hero, Karasev, is ordered to make a reconnaissance raid across the enemy lines. But he decides to go beyond the line of duty. He engages the sinister enemy in battle, cripples a few machines, and then drives on towards Berlin. When he gets there, he pushes on into the Reichstag and takes Hitler prisoner. ‘Well done, Karasev,’ his mates applaud when he gets home. ‘There’s not a damn thing left for us to do!’4

  In 1938, the audiences who watched these films would leave the hall and step into a real Russian night. The cheerful crowds and well-lit parks that people had seen on the screen would be nowhere in evidence. Instead, their way home would lie through the bleak construction sites, along the muddy paths between poor peasant shacks or past desolate streets where lights glimmered for just a few blocks before they gave in to the dark. Many were going home to apartments so crowded that two families and three whole generations were packed into one room. Others, the young, might well be finding their way back to dormitories, barrack-style, where dozens of boarders slept in rows. The revolution had not made these Russians rich. It had not even made their land the great industrial power of its own boast, although the rate of change was prodigious, the output staggering. But what distinguished them from other hard-pressed workers struggling to survive was the belief that they were the chosen. They might be hungry, ill-shod, crowded into slums, but they were working to transform the world. They had to win. That was the public face of Soviet culture anyway.

  The Soviet state was born in war. If any nation should have known the face of violence, it was this one. First there had been the Tsar’s war against Germany, in which more Russian soldiers died than those from any other European state.5 The prospect of defeat in this, the First World War, along with the hardship that came with the war effort, sparked the riots of February 1917, the outburst of popular rage that toppled the Tsar and swept a new government into power. But it took yet another upheaval, the Bolshevik coup under Lenin, to get the Tsar’s exhausted troops back home. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which the new state dropped its former allies, Britain and France, in favour of a truce with Germany, brought peace for a few weeks at the beginning of 1918. Those servicemen who had not managed to desert rejoiced at the news that they no longer had to fight. But civil war followed, a conflict that blazed across the future Soviet world like a consuming fire, recalling soldiers to the colours and conscripting bystanders of every age. Its violence, more bitter even than conventional fighting, was only one face of this new war’s cruelty. Wrecked towns and villages were also ravaged by epidemics – typhus in particular – while harvests failed and entire regions starved. By 1921, when the fighting ended in all but the last corners of the emergent state, most Soviet people knew exactly what war really meant.

  The greatest promise of the new regime was peace. The word itself had been the most potent element in Bolshevik propaganda back in 1917, and there would be few things, in years to come, that Soviet people wanted more. But though the leaders talked conciliation, declaring that their long-term goal was nothing less than harmony and brotherhood, their policies set them on a collision course with the rest of the world. Marxism–Leninism assumed a prolonged war with capitalism, and while the struggle was certain to end with communism’s triumph, no one believed it would be bloodless. As the ultimate victory of communism drew closer, the ideologists explained, its opponents would fight with ever more determination, clinging for dear life to the power and wealth they had amassed. Some kind of armed conflict was bound to erupt before the world reached its final state of brotherhood and plenty. More locally, there were still remnants of those same elements – bourgeois capitalism, imperialist oppression – to be overcome at home. The state, the self-appointed instrument of the people’s will, set about extirpating them. Class war – a brand-new kind of violence – raged for the next decade. By 1938, its casualties approached 15 million dead and many times that number homeless, broken, orphaned or bereaved.

  The prospect of a golden future and the fear that enemies were gathering to subvert it formed the carrot and stick of the Stalinist dictatorship. Opposition to aspects of policy endured, and so did cynical evasion and crime. But this was a state that aimed to transform human lives, not just a humdrum tyranny. To some extent, a person’s response depended on his age. The revolution was a watershed, and anyone who had a stake in the old world was likely to feel threatened by upheavals in the new. For older people, fear and hardship threw a chilling shadow over communism’s dawn, while memories of war and terror fostered cautious vigilance. But the young – the generation that would constitute the majority of soldiers after 1941 – grew up learning the bright language of hope. The schisms were largely concealed. For years before the war, the Soviet people had been trained to work as one. Each November and May, when it was time to celebrate the gains of revolution, the crowds turned out in their millions to march and sing. Stalin’s image, reproduced on countless posters and banners, gazed down upon the spectacle of unity. In reality, the people who would form the core of the Red Army and fight the coming war were divided by everything from generation to class, ethnicity, and even politics. The thing that kept them together, moulding them into a nation that remained distinct from any other, was their almost complete isolation from the outside world.

  Within this sealed un
iverse, the most contentious issue for most people was the transformation of the countryside. The Soviet Union was still a country where four fifths of the population came from villages. For generations, the sons of peasants had shouldered packs and tramped off to the cities in pursuit of work. But they often left wives and children behind, and almost all dreamed of returning one day, if only to die. The Russian countryside, or that of Ukraine, the Caucasus, the steppe, was a vision of motherland that anyone born there was bound to cherish. Its traditions, folklorists imagined, stretched back into the dawn of time. This was not true – Russia had changed dramatically even in the nineteenth century – but it was a comforting fantasy, especially for people who now worked at building sites and steel mills. For the peasants themselves, what mattered was their land, their stock, and the next harvest. In 1929, this whole economy and way of life would be turned upside down.

  The Soviet government had decided that its agricultural sector was inefficient. Peasant farming, a culture ingrained even more deeply than religion, had to be streamlined, managed more efficiently, controlled. In the winter of 1929–30, police and volunteers spread out across the countryside to impose a second revolution, this time from above. Their aim was to create collectives, abolishing individual farms and setting up a system based on mechanized wage labour. To give it a more revolutionary bite, the campaign was cast as a new class war and its enemies – the scapegoats of the coming agony – were identified as the wealthier peasants, the kulaks, a social category largely invented for the purpose. Kulaks were destined to lose everything: their stock and equipment, their homes, their civil rights, and frequently, their lives. In the spring of 1930, the countryside came close to open war. In the years that followed, millions of those who worked the farms would be driven to the cities, unable to support themselves on the irregular rations of grain that took the place of wages. Millions more would starve. By 1939, the rural population had declined from 26 to 19 million households.6 Of the men and women who had disappeared from the countryside, an estimated 10 million were dead.

  No policy would cause more anguish during Stalin’s rule, and none provoked such opposition. It was a constant irritant despite the fact that its prime victims remained invisible. Famine victims were silent even as they died, while exiled kulaks were forced to vanish, largely, from the public gaze, or rather, from all European eyes. Their lives and deaths in sparsely populated settlements to the far north and east were an irrelevance as far as Moscow was concerned. They were not even considered suitable candidates for army service. Their children, too, were treated as suspect at first. Members of the second generation tended to begin their military service working like slaves in labour battalions, building factories and digging rock, not fighting at the front.7 But even supposedly loyal peasants, the surly, taciturn majority, included millions who resented the collectives and all the hardships they had brought. Many were hungry, overworked, disorientated. As the state took more and more grain from the countryside for sale abroad, their families scattered like chaff. People were forced to live like vagabonds, moving around in search of food and work. When these sons of the village were called up, they made uncertain soldiers. At best, they resented and feared their arbitrary government. At worst, they waited for a chance to put things right.

  The new collectives survived. They weathered the storm because enough people believed in them, and believed with sufficient passion to face the violence that their zealotry unleashed. During the campaign of collectivization, words seem to have blinded Stalin’s activists to the reality before their eyes. A leaden language muffled other people’s pain. ‘I did not trouble myself with why “humanity” should be abstract,’ wrote one activist, the future Red Army officer Lev Kopelev, ‘but “historical necessity” and “class consciousness” should be concrete.’8 ‘Historical necessity’ called for armed gangs and mass arrests. The task of enforcement was assigned to secret-police troops. These men included simple thugs, as well as affectless professional bullies whose careers stretched back to tsarist times, but their vanguard was made up of real enthusiasts. ‘In the terrible spring of 1933 I saw people dying from hunger,’ Kopelev recalled. ‘I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing, but with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses, corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots, corpses in peasant huts… I saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide… Nor did I lose my faith.’9 The new Russia had staked its claim against the old.

  Like the Red troops in Dzigan’s film, the forces of the Stalinist regime were set to win. For one thing, the peasants, numerous as they were, remained remote, a group fragmented by distance, dialect and their own misery. Decisions were taken in Moscow, not in some mud-locked village miles from the nearest road. In a democracy, dispossessed peasants might have formed a powerful faction, their protests stirring others to take up the cause. But a democracy would not have driven the peasants into collectives in the first place. Soviet power offered no outlet for protest: unless a person was religious, his choices were to nurture his resentment in obscurity or to embrace the new regime and hope for a better future. Religious faith offered an alternative set of beliefs for a large minority, but even the churches were powerless against the saturating propaganda of this state, and the more so because collectivization was accompanied by an assault on organized worship. Churches were closed, turned into barns and pigsties, priests arrested, believers exiled. And with religion shattered, no creed could stand up to the communist world view, no group sustain itself for long without collapsing under state pressure. The very depth of people’s suffering increased their sense of isolation. As one survivor remarked, ‘Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friends.’10

  But repression alone could not have achieved the state’s triumph, nor even the idealism of an élite of young activists. This Soviet state also commanded real support among large numbers of ordinary citizens. Such people’s fundamental motive was more positive than fear, more tangible than hope. ‘Life is getting better,’ the huge posters told them, ‘better and more joyful.’ Inch by inch, and almost shamefully, for millions, it was. With Europe and America in economic depression, the Soviets could boast full employment and rapid growth. A village boy who sought work in the towns would not be looking long. The older generation might not manage to adapt, but for the young the prospects started to look bright. As a worker in the Soviet state, too, a young man might bask in a patriotic pride. By 1938, the Soviet Union had the largest engineering industry in Europe. The proof was there to be seen in the airships, dams, and polar ice-breakers. Millions of tons of coal were dug from Soviet earth each year – 166 million tons in 1940. ‘In all fields,’ Pravda wrote on the last New Year’s Eve of peace, ‘our successes have been stupendous.’11 Readers would all have known about the tanks and planes. Indeed, the Soviet state had more tanks at its disposal in 1941 than the rest of the world combined.12 But more immediately, people could also point to improvements at home. Things had been so bad for so long, after all, that almost anything looked like progress.

  Here was a paradox. This was a state that proclaimed its altruism, commanding its citizens to forsake private property. One of its most potent selling points, however, was the material prosperity it promised, an abundance that was measured, even in the censored newspapers, in terms of wristwatches and bicycles, not merely public goods. In consequence, although the papers did not usually mention it, a population already hardened by suffering and violence learned to look for opportunities at every turn. Even before the war, Soviet citizens could be resourceful when it came to trade, stockpiling, and the networking that makes black markets hum.13 In the land of brotherhood, most people’s first thoughts centred on themselves. Publicly, meanwhile, the rhetoric was all about collective happiness, and this was also pictured in material terms. Wristwatches, the symbol of modernity that people seemed to covet most, were still a dream for almost everyone, but one day, ran the tale, the factories that kept on s
pringing up were bound to produce them. Lev Kopelev put his own view in similarly concrete terms. ‘The world revolution,’ he wrote, ‘was absolutely necessary so that justice would triumph.’ When it was over, there would be ‘no borders, no capitalists and no fascists at all… Moscow, Kharkov and Kiev would become just as enormous, just as well-built, as Berlin, Hamburg and New York… we would have skyscrapers, streets full of automobiles and bicycles’ and ‘all the workers and peasants would go walking in fine clothes, wearing hats and watches’.14

  For the time being, the state provided citizens with the small compensations that appeared to presage more. The planners’ choices could seem callously ironic. This was a land where children had been left to starve as famine raged in 1933, and many Soviet villages would remain sunk in poverty through the decades to come. Even the cities faced shortages of meat and butter, while bread rationing continued until 1935. The quality of mass-produced staples was always suspect, and there were constant rumours of dust or sand in the flour, gristle in place of meat. But Anastas Mikoyan, the minister responsible for food supplies, had plans to cheer life up for everyone who had a spare rouble to spend. His aim was to provide the people with irresistible snacks, so he focused the might of the planned economy on the task of processing frankfurters and ice cream. The Soviets had imported new mass-production methods from America and Germany, allowing fast food of a basic kind to be manufactured in prodigious amounts. There might not be fresh vegetables, there might not be much milk, but there would be ice cream for everyone. The new industry was portrayed as a harbinger of the good life that was soon to be. The more processed the food, moreover, the greater its supposed appeal for a generation hoping to transform the world. How could the Soviet people not be glad when they could eat not only plain but even cherry, chocolate, and raspberry ice cream?15