Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  The town-bred children of the pre-war years remember only happiness. ‘We never went hungry. And there was no crime, either.’ It is a rosy view, more revealing about the censored press and the romance of long hindsight than about real life. Pilfering and theft were rife in the 1930s, while the exploitation of personal connections was often the only way to secure valuable goods.16 One writer recalls queuing all night outside a Moscow shop when his mother wanted to buy him a new suit. ‘Even so,’ he adds, ‘we had to wait for five hours in the shop, emerging at 1 p. m.’ The suit itself had cost a month’s wages.17 But what people remember now is that they could in fact buy suits. It had not been so long since there had been no goods of any kind for purchase, and soon there would be none again. Moreover, back in 1938, few people in the Soviet Union had the means to compare their quality of life with that of foreigners. Their leaders constantly told them that they lived in a better and more equal society, a place where the right kind of effort would soon deliver abundance for everyone. For all they knew – and most believed it – the queues in capitalist countries were even longer, the workers not permitted to wear suits at all.

  Whatever else, the Soviet regime offered work. Not surprisingly, its most enthusiastic supporters were the people whose careers flourished in a fast-transforming labour market. One of the best routes to a richer life, at least for those of humble origin, was military service. Even peasants (with the exception of kulaks) could make new futures for themselves this way. The first people to discover the opportunities that military service could offer under Soviet power were the tsarist conscripts who put their First World War experience at the disposal of the Red Army. Almost the entire officer élite of Stalin’s army in the Second World War had started life as peasants and followed this route. Ivan Konev, one of the future heroes of Berlin, was born in the province of the Northern Dvina in 1897. He would have spent his days as a labourer in the local sawmill had he not been called up to serve in the Tsar’s war. Similarly, young Semen Timoshenko was fated to till fields in Odessa province until he was called up to serve as a machine-gunner. In 1940, he would succeed Voroshilov as Commissar for Defence. Ivan Vasilevich Boldin, who played a conspicuous role in the first days of Hitler’s invasion, was born in the Volga region and took his first job as a village baker just before the First World War. Even the greatest of them all, Georgy Zhukov, the marshal who claimed the laurels for Berlin, was born in a village, although he moved to Moscow as a youth to learn the cobbling trade.18 Each of these men built their professional careers during the civil war. Their political convictions inclined them to fight for the reds, and the army repaid them with promotion, fulfilment, and substantial quantities of cash.

  Their efforts paved the way for other promotees. Many professional soldiers, future officers, made careers despite the whirlwind that had swept through the villages of their birth. Kirill Kirillovich’s story unfolds like a fable for the time. I listen to it in his flat in Moscow, a prestigious address a stone’s throw from the Park of Victory and the Borodino panorama. He begins with the war itself. He remembers that he was in Tallinn, the capital of the Soviet Union’s newly acquired republic of Estonia, when the news came. Night after night that summer, German planes – Kirill remembered them as ‘Messers’ – had flown over the port city.19 The artillerymen in Kirill’s unit obeyed their orders not to fire. But in the small hours of 22 June 1941, they received new instructions. ‘We were told to consider that the situation was a genuine state of war,’ Kirill remembered. ‘We were not afraid. I suppose it was the age we were. I wouldn’t want to have to do it now. But I can truly say there was no fear. Perhaps we were just trained to be that way.’ The next few weeks were confused, sleepless and demoralizing. ‘We had to prepare,’ Kirill told me, ‘for the surrender – no, I mean, er, for leaving Tallinn.’ The sea-borne evacuation of Soviet troops from the Estonian capital was an operation that would later be described as ‘harrowing… a kind of Dunkirk without air cover’.20 Kirill insists that no one doubted that the Soviet side would win. They had been trained that way as well.

  Kirill was twenty-one when the war started, but he was already a lieutenant. His education had promoted him at record speed. ‘I wanted to be independent,’ he explained. ‘The military was a career. I went to a special artillery school.’ The students had the usual classes, but there were extra sessions in the evenings and at weekends when they were sent on exercises. ‘Most children did that kind of thing,’ Kirill explained, remembering the militaristic spirit of the 1930s, ‘but we did more of it. Mainly training with rifles.’ They also worked particularly hard at their mathematics and at German, as if in conscious preparation for the war that everyone expected they would have to fight. ‘We knew it was coming,’ Kirill confirmed. Every newspaper and wall poster warned Stalin’s people about fascism, and so did every broadcast speech that talked about the world. ‘We saw the films. There was one I remember, the title was something like Professor Mamlok, it was about what people would suffer under fascism. It told us exactly what Hitler would do if he was in power here. We knew,’ he added, ‘about the Jews in Germany.’21

  Kirill was talented, but he was also lucky. The place they sent him to was more than just a high school offering a bit of rifle practice. His fellow students included Timur Frunze, the son of the late Commissar for War, as well as Sergo Mikoyan, son of the ice-cream king, and even Vasily Stalin. These boys turned up with bodyguards and slipped away in smooth black cars when they had finished class. It would be easy to assume that Kirill, like them, was born to privilege. But his story is complicated, poignant, and in many ways, more typical of his generation. Kirill was neither wealthy nor secure. He did not come from Moscow, or even from Russia, he did not speak the Russian language fluently and when he arrived in the Soviet capital he was penniless. Listening to him, it is not hard to understand why soldiers of his kind were grateful to Stalin’s regime. It is not hard at all to understand their loyalty in war.

  Kirill was born in Dubrovno, a small town in rural Belarus, in 1919. His early memories are of the countryside: the horses that came down to the Dnepr river to drink as the sun set, the fields of flax and beets stretching away, the yellow dust in summer and the autumn mud. The whole community was poor. On Saturdays, the girls would walk to town barefoot, carrying their only pair of boots so that the leather would not spoil. His family could not own land because they were Jews. Instead, his mother worked as a weaver at the local factory. It was the main employer, apart from farms, for miles around. Kirill’s father had died of typhus just before the boy was born. He was his mother’s only child. But there were half-brothers and sisters, the children of his father’s first wife, and it was one of these who brought the boy to Moscow. No one suspected that he would decide to train for the artillery, working all night so that he excelled in arithmetic and languages. A teacher noticed him and helped to ease his path to that élite high school, but his whole family would oppose it when he told them what he planned. In reply, all he could say was that he needed an education of some kind. There was no chance of that in Dubrovno. Children who stayed there would barely have learned to read and count before they had to join their parents at the mill.

  With Kirill gone, his mother was left alone in the family house. It was her plan to join the others in Russia, but she kept insisting that it would take some time to pack. Kirill dismisses the excuse, seeing instead the inertia, the fear of the unknown, that trapped his mother in her home. ‘Mother was scarcely able to read,’ he continued. ‘It was like that in her village. Almost everyone was illiterate. She wrote me one letter after the war began. I could hardly make it out. The writing was so difficult. She said that she was going to leave, to come to Moscow to our sister. But she never did. She was there when the Germans came. I knew at the time what that would mean, but I waited till the war was over before I went back to find out.’ In 1941, Dubrovno’s Jews were driven like cattle into the main square. When he revisited the place, Kirill asked people who had once b
een his neighbours to describe what had happened next, but no one chose to recollect the scene. All they could say was that the bodies, probably including his mother’s, lay somewhere in an unmarked trench.

  Kirill has reason, then, to thank the Soviet power that saved his life, trained and promoted him, and in some way avenged his mother’s murder. He is nostalgic for the Soviet past, though not for Dubrovno or poverty. What he remembers is the discipline that formed him, the rewards for hard work, and his own faith in victory. He knew the system had its cruel side. He had seen plenty as a child. Dubrovno was not far from the Ukrainian border, and the refugees from the successive famines there began to turn up after 1929. They brought their stories of collectivization, of the slaughter of animals, the looting, the fear. Soon after that, his own family too was hungry, though the potatoes they grew on a corner of land saved them from real starvation. Nothing would shake the young man’s faith in socialism. What he went on to witness in the war would make his belief firmer still. He still thinks that collectivization brought more benefits than costs. The horses grew thinner, he remembers. People were hungry for a while. But all this was just a prelude. In time, the peasants would have tractors, each of which could do the work of a dozen men. One day there would also be hot water and electric light. Kirill was back in Tallinn later in the war. He saw what Nazi rule had done. He knew, and not from that visit alone, which system had destroyed his world and which rebuilt it brick by brick.

  ‘Education has brought amazing results,’ a German officer discovered as he marched through Soviet territory in the summer of 1941. ‘On the wall of every Russian schoolroom I found a large map of Europe and Asia on which all of Russia was marked in bright red while the rest was shown without color. The insignificant size of the European peninsula was contrasted unmistakably with the vastness of Russia.’ Beyond the schoolrooms, he reported little scepticism in adults below the age of fifty. Only the very old or the religious dared to be critical of Soviet power. ‘I talked with many young soldiers,’ he reported, ‘farmers, labourers, and also women. All of their thinking was patterned along the same line, and they were all convinced of the infallibility of that which they had been taught.’ Twenty years of schooling and propaganda seemed to have worked. To the officer’s racist surprise – for he considered Russians to be inert and long-suffering, more animal than man – the state had even instilled the need for ‘enthusiasm, initiative and vigor, the most essential prerequisites for great accomplishments not only in peace, but still more in war’.22

  What this German was observing was the impact of a national policy whose aim, for twenty years, had been to engineer new kinds of consciousness among the young. There was still widespread hardship, to say nothing of resentment of the collectives and of harsh working regimes in factories and on construction sites, but the crucial generations, the soldiers who would fight at Stalingrad and Kursk, were born into the Soviet system and knew no other. Though older people might never be reconciled to the new world, and even younger ones made jokes and cynical remarks, the language and priorities of Soviet communism provided the war generation with the only mental world they knew, not least because alternatives were excluded. Even the offspring of peasants, the most resentful section of the population, had no chance of developing a different political outlook, or not, at least, in public. Children’s training began from the moment they stepped through the door of their infant school. As future Soviet citizens, they would start to learn about the revolution as soon as they could pick out the Cyrillic letters forming Stalin’s name. Where once their grandparents had chorused extracts from the psalms, these children chanted lessons on the triumphs of electrification, science, and communist morality. They also learned to be grateful that their elementary schools existed in the first place, for it was the Soviet regime, they were told, that cared to cultivate their literacy.23 By 1941, there were 191,500 primary schools among the Soviet Union’s villages and farms. Twenty-four million children were enrolled in them. If they worked hard, the best of them might be picked to join the 800,000 youngsters who enrolled each year in the country’s 817 colleges and universities. The very fortunate might even win a place at one of the Red Army’s special military academies.24

  All children were taught that love for their motherland involved preparedness for future wars. While their parents were labouring to bring in the grain or working monotonous shifts to help fulfil the nation’s economic plan, these offspring learned that military service would be an adventure, a privilege. It would mean taking up the banner of the revolution, continuing the struggle for which the heroes of their Soviet picture books had died. Some Nazis might have envied Soviet educators their task. For one thing, unlike Nazism, communism had held sway for more than twenty years when the war came, so several entire generations had grown up under its influence. And for another, there were no defeats to be explained, no stab in the back, as Germany claimed to have suffered in 1918, to avenge. The Soviets spoke only of success. But both regimes presented service – military or civil – as an honour to which only the élite would be called, and portrayed death as something from which no hero would shrink. Such lessons at least motivated certain kinds of youth to train for war, whatever happened later on the battlefield.

  Soviet students harked back to the civil war (not to the shameful defeats that tsarism had suffered) and celebrated the Communist Party as their inspiration and guide. The Communist Party identified itself with military struggle, presenting the Red Army as its instrument of progress, weaving ideology and war together. Every child would learn about the army’s record, and in particular about the model for all future wars, the historic success of the Red troops against the massed ranks of the Whites. While other European children were reading about the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele, Soviet students learned about the Don Front and the struggle to save Petrograd. In their free time, they played at ‘Reds and Whites’. The implication was that future conflict would be just the same, and in particular that morality and ideological passion were the keys to victory. ‘Our teachers were the people who had taken part in the revolution, in the civil war,’ wrote one future Red Army combatant. His physics teacher came to every class he gave dressed in a soldier’s uniform, complete with green tunic and gaiters.25 It was his way of being prepared to take up a gun again, just as he had in 1918 when the revolution faced its crisis. The pupils that he taught would never doubt that they lived in a beleaguered, embattled state. Many obediently believed that their own happy lives depended on armed struggle and pure-hearted sacrifice.

  In this way, schoolchildren – or those from towns, at least – imbibed ideology and patriotism together, identifying field trips and sports clubs with the faces of Lenin and Stalin. When they volunteered to clear snow from the streets on their free days, these children’s energy was inspired, in part, by faith in future progress. The altruism natural to young people was channelled into a sense of duty to the party. Soviet teenagers would study, hike and train as part of a larger campaign to improve, to change, to build a better world. ‘It was both possible and necessary to alter everything,’ a Muscovite, Raisa Orlova, recalled. ‘The streets, the houses, the cities, the social order, human souls.’ She believed firmly in the new life, a life in the future. It would start, ‘properly speaking’, when she lived ‘in a new and sparkling white house. There I would do exercises in the morning, there the ideal order would exist, there all my heroic achievements would commence.’26

  Young adults would have many opportunities to test their would-be heroism. The state was keen to acquaint them with weapons, drill, and maps. By 1938, the voluntary organization Osoaviakhim, which translates roughly as the Society for Air and Chemical Defence, had been training youngsters for more than a decade. Its membership topped 3 million each year. Serious and hearty in what had become the Soviet tradition, it offered classes in everything from marksmanship and map-reading to first aid.27 Young volunteers spent weeks in summer camps, embarking on forced marches, digging practic
e foxholes and bandaging notional fractures of each other’s healthy limbs. Osoaviakhim’s members also led the way when the state needed loans. They were the ones who painted campaign banners to raise the cash for funding new planes, and on some pay days they would even stand in lines, red armbands to the fore, to collect workers’ money outside factory gates.

  The dream that teenagers all shared was powered flight. This was the fantasy of progress and modernity that caught a generation’s mood. For a time, in the early 1930s, the trademark craft was the dirigible, and youngsters campaigned for the cash to fund an airship named for tubby, smooth-faced Voroshilov, the Defence Commissar. Airships hung over Red Square on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in November 1932, and more were planned as part of the new state’s invincible defence. But by the late 1930s, it was the plane, albeit just a wooden biplane, and above all the parachute, that inspired youths to join the military clubs. Parachuting became a national craze. Towers were built for practice jumps in many city parks. By 1936, there were over 500 of them, backed up by 115 new parachute-training schools. Young Soviet citizens would make nearly 2 million jumps in that one year. The state-run Krokodil, the satirical magazine, even suggested that the bell towers of churches could be converted for the new sport.28 Joking apart, it has been estimated that the Soviet population included more than a million trained parachutists at the end of 1940. It was ironic, one of many ironies, that parachute troops would prove marginal to the war effort when the crisis came.29

  The craze for training camps was not purely about defence, at least as far as the young people who took part in them were concerned. Social activity of approved kinds was regarded as a sign of good citizenship. Young people who wanted to get on in the world knew that they had to join things, show their zeal. The élite of clubs was the komsomol, the young communists’ league, and anyone who aspired to a good career, or even to a place at university, would join it. But most had joined already anyway because this was a place to make new friends. ‘It was only later,’ a former officer recalled, ‘that I realized that in fact it was necessary for my career.’ This man, Lev Lvovich Lyakhov, would study geology before the war, a subject that he chose because, like so many of his generation, he was entranced by travel and adventure. Komsomol and Osoaviakhim were largely routes to social contact and good field trips. To grow up in these years was to enjoy the clutter and collective discipline of hiking boots and summer camps and marching with red flags. It was also a matter of gymnastics, and not just the physical kind.