Belonging was also treated as a proof of faith. Lectures on ideology were so much a part of daily life that no one thought it odd to hear them in a social setting, including at the Osoaviakhim camp. The days of philosophical analysis and free debate were gone. Instead, youths who itched to try out their new skis or parachutes would have to sit through lectures on such topics as ‘Let us strengthen the international links of the working class of the USSR with the working class of capitalism!’30 The clumsy phrases sounded as ungainly in Russian as they do in translation, but these people had grown up with them. The Russian language had evolved in step with Soviet man, losing the sharpness and elegance of the last tsarist years. The multisyllabic, Latinate slogans of the new regime were now as common as the garlic on a peasant’s breath. Even ungainly acronyms – partkom for party committee, komsomol for the young communists’ league, kolkhoz for collective farm – were ordinary currency by 1938. Each innovation from the government needed a set of new slogans and several longer words. Young people knew no other way.
Another acronym made sure that no one ridiculed it all. In 1917, Lenin’s comrade, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, was put in charge of internal security in the new state. He assembled a secret police force with terrifying powers and called it the Extraordinary Commission, Chrezvychainaya Kommissiya in Russian, abbreviated to Cheka. By 1938, it had gone through several changes of title, although its fondness for murder, torture and imprisonment without trial remained the same. For the entire period of the war, it would be known as the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Its main task was to enforce the state’s will, and its victims included party members, army officers, intellectuals and even loyal engineers. It was police force, spy and prison warder, provider of forced labour, judge, executioner and burial service. It also had a paramilitary branch. This monitored dissension and indiscipline among soldiers, though certain detachments were also trained to fight. But in the last few years of peace its main role was to operate a system of surveillance, summary arrest and state terror that would almost destroy the regime that it claimed to serve. Young komsomols and parachutists would have known of its work. Many of the arrests and even the death sentences were public. But protest was not possible, and nor, in any real sense, was discussion. There were no outlets for dissent, and critics would have found no public audience. ‘You become an accomplice even though you are an adversary,’ a former Bolshevik wrote later, ‘because you are unable to express dis approval even if you are ready to pay with your life.’31
Illegal arrests and mass executions were state policy during the civil war. Thereafter, the scale of police terror was greatly reduced, at least for a decade or so. However, in December 1934, the popular chairman of Leningrad’s communist party committee, Sergei Kirov, was shot by a member of the public while working late in his office. It was the pretext for a fresh campaign of fear. First came the arrests and the show trials in which leading figures from Lenin’s time were disgraced and sentenced to death in public view. But these were followed by more secretive operations, including mass arrests and disappearances. Piles of bodies appeared in city-centre cemeteries, each one of which had been shot at close range with a police gun. The purges, the process by which tens of thousands of innocent people were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and ultimately, in unnumbered cases, executed without trial, cast a shadow across all areas of public life. The armed forces were not immune, despite the certainty of war. In June 1937, the Deputy Minister of Defence (and former Chief of the General Staff), Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevsky, was arrested. Many of his senior aides, including several civil-war heroes, were also implicated in the trumped-up case. The entire group was put on trial, found guilty and sentenced to death on charges that included conspiracy and treason. No one fully believed the tales, but no one could express their disbelief aloud. Two years later, a local official in the city of Kursk would be arrested for using old newspapers to protect the surface of his desk during a public meeting. One of them, dating from before the purge, showed a photograph of Tukhachevsky’s face.32
While happy workers licked cherry ice cream, their revolution steeped itself in blood. To be an enemy of the people – kulak, Trotskyist, foreign agent, parasite – was to be cast out of the community of true believers for ever. Even those who escaped alive would pay a cruel price. By the end of the 1930s, the population of the Gulag, the network of NKVD prison camps and labour colonies, exceeded 1,670,000.33 Those who remained at liberty, Stalinism’s loyal sons and daughters, were bound together by shared awe, shared faith, shared dread. They sang the revolutionary anthems loudly, as if the sound might drown the protests or the echo of thousands of shots. And they tried to find ways of making sense of the unspeakable. ‘I regarded the purge trials of 1937 and 1938 as an expression of some farsighted policy,’ Kopelev wrote. ‘I believed that, on balance, Stalin was right in deciding on these terrible measures in order to discredit all forms of political opposition once and for all. We were a besieged fortress; we had to be united, knowing neither vacillation nor doubt.’34
It was as if people could build walls in their minds. In private, they might have their own stories, their private doubts, but their public world was deferential, Soviet, delighted to breathe the same oxygen that flowed through Comrade Stalin’s lungs. ‘The sun shines on us in a different way now,’ ran a popular song. ‘We know that it has shone on Stalin in the Kremlin, too… And however many stars there may be in the sky, there cannot be as many of them as there are thoughts in Stalin’s brilliant head.’35 Irony, that staple of Second World War culture in Britain and the United States, was never part of Stalinism’s public style.36 Zhenya Rudneva, who would become a flying ace and die in 1944, kept a diary before the war. As she wrote in it: ‘In ten days it will be Constitution Day, in seventeen days, the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR… How can I not love my motherland, which gives me such a happy life?’37
People like Rudneva were not automata. They all had stories and they all had inner worlds. But they survived by evolving to fit the framework of a monstrous state, adopting individual routes towards the longed-for secure and productive life. It was far easier, even the doubters found, to join the collective and share the dream than to remain alone, condemned to isolation and the threat of death. A veteran of Stalingrad told me about his own process of choice. Ilya Natanovich would fight unflinchingly in 1943, remaining in the field until he was wounded so badly that he was left for dead. The courage that sustained him as he lay on the frozen steppe defies imagination, as does the pain he suffered from an arm and shoulder wound that never really healed. He agrees that his Soviet identity, the optimism of Stalin’s people, helped to build his resolve. But only months before this episode, Ilya, an infantryman in Stalin’s army, might easily have fallen victim to the purge. The problem was his background, although his sharp mind and sense of humour must have made things worse. It was never a good idea to be perceptive, let alone to laugh.
Ilya Natanovich was born in Vitebsk province, part of today’s Belarus, in the summer of 1920. His father was a Bolshevik, but it was his mother’s family, his aunts, who brought the colour and excitement that made his childhood such fun. They would turn up without notice, blowing in from Warsaw or Moscow, talking as they stepped across the threshold. They would still be talking as he lay awake in his room, listening to the grown-ups laughing and arguing round the dinner table. On summer nights, as the dawn broke, someone might open the piano and then the songs would start – Russian songs, Jewish songs, anthems of the revolution. ‘I knew from my childhood that I was growing up in a family where interesting things were happening,’ he recalls. ‘Things connected to revolution.’
Ilya’s aunts had been involved in the revolutionary underground for decades. They were old hands by the time of Lenin’s coup in 1917. One had worked in a secret revolutionary group in Baku, the oil port on the shore of the Caspian Sea. It was there that she encountered the young man who later gave himself the name of Stalin. Ilya
’s own image of the future leader was shaped by a tale she liked to tell about his cruelty. One afternoon, she said, it must have been in April, some time before 1904, she and a group of comrades were out for a walk. Their path lay by a river which had swollen after the spring thaw. A calf, newborn, still doubtful on its legs, had somehow become stranded on an island in the middle. The friends could hear its bleating above the roar of the water, but no one dared to risk the torrent. No one, that is, except the Georgian, Koba, who ripped off his shirt and swam across. He reached the calf, hauled himself out to stand beside it, waited for all the friends to watch, and then he broke its legs.
Ilya lived half his life in that man’s shadow. His father was the first to suffer directly. The Bolshevik revolutionary had made good, and by the 1930s he was a senior official in Stalin’s government. The trappings of power included a move to Moscow and a new wife, younger than the first, childless and unencumbered by loquacious relatives. Ilya and his mother and brother were installed in a separate apartment, and it was this arrangement, probably, that saved their lives. In 1937, Ilya’s father was arrested. He disappeared for ever, and although his estranged family escaped the terror, they carried a taint because of their association with an enemy of the people. This burden, combined with young Ilya’s Jewishness, would dictate the choices the teenager was forced to make. First, a sympathetic teacher advised him to give up his plan to study at the prestigious foreign-languages institute in the capital and to set his sights on a teaching career instead. Accordingly, Ilya pursued his studies in a humble college, avoiding even the komsomol for fear of unwelcome enquiries. Then, when war broke out in 1941, his request to serve at the front was refused. Instead of joining the army, he was sent to a building site in the Urals to help construct a factory. It was only when the army was in danger of collapse that the young man was permitted to transfer to the infantry, but although he fought at Stalingrad, he never managed to wipe the slate clean of his father’s supposed shame. After the war, he took a job in the provincial city of Smolensk. It was a long way to a decent library – eight hours by train to his beloved Moscow – but it was inconspicuous, and that meant relatively safe.
Ilya Natanovich ought to remember Stalin with disgust. He ought to recall angry conversations round the table when those lively and observant aunts dropped by. But what the veteran remembers, with a smile of recognition, is an attitude that bordered on religious faith. ‘When we heard him speaking on the radio,’ he explains, ‘and there was a pause, we used to whisper, “There, Stalin’s having a drink.”’ The image may have come from Konstantin Simonov’s famous novel The Living and the Dead, where people who are listening to Stalin’s greatest wartime speech in July 1941 must catch their breath each time he takes a drink. Veterans’ memories are often overlaid with images from books or films. The war is all so long ago. But then Ilya remembers more. ‘It was like listening to the voice of God,’ he adds. ‘And I dreamed about him like a father. I dreamed, of course, about my own father as well. I still do. When the repressions started, I began to have some doubts… I didn’t believe that my father was guilty, or any of the other people I knew. But Stalin embodied the future, we all believed that.’
‘Our generation lived through 1937 and 1938,’ another veteran of these years recalled. ‘We were witnesses to those tragic events, but our hands were clean. Our generation was the first to be truly formed after the revolution.’ This man had been at school when the first show trials were staged. He read about the purges on the displays called wall newspapers, sheets of newsprint that were pinned up like posters for people to stand and read. Whatever private thoughts he had, he maintained his faith in the utopian cause. He believed, too, in victory, the easy triumph that had been described so vividly in the war films of 1938. The same faith would impel millions of young people to volunteer as soon as the news of invasion broke. Faith in the cause could make them fight, but faith was no defence from German shells. This was the generation that the war devoured. As this same veteran recalled, there were 138 young people in his rifle regiment. After their first battle, thirty-eight were left, and ten days later there were only five.38 The state, with all its promises, had let them down. ‘They were prepared for great deeds,’ the historian Elena Senyavskaya remarked. ‘But they were not prepared for the army.’39
2
A Fire Through All the World
The first real test for Stalin’s Red Army came at the end of 1939. On 30 November, Soviet troops invaded Finland. The campaign was a disaster. Within a month, nearly 18,000 men, almost half of those who had crossed the border that first day, were missing, captured or dead. The slaughter was so terrible, and the panic that accompanied it so confusing, that it is difficult even now to establish just how many soldiers lost their lives in the short war that followed. The men were thrown headlong at Finnish guns. Tanks and their crews were shelled and burned, whole regiments of infantry encircled. Entire battalions of troops, the spearhead of the Red Army, were cut off from their reinforcements and supplies, while leaderless soldiers rioted in the face of starvation and cold. Tales of atrocities began to circulate. Men talked of Soviet corpses without penises or hands. Some had seen human faces with their tongues and eyes gouged out. When the war was over, the basis for many of these stories turned out to be the horror felt by inexperienced conscripts as they marched in succession, wave after helpless wave, over their own unburied dead; past corpses frozen, brittle, gnawed or torn apart by dogs.1 Red Army losses – deaths – exceeded 126,000.2 Nearly 300,000 more were evacuated through injury, burns, disease and frostbite.3 Finland’s losses in the war were 48,243 killed and 43,000 wounded.4
Sheer numbers – of men and heavy guns – told in the Soviets’ favour in the end. Fresh troops were brought to the Karelian Front. A new assault, as crushing as a battering ram, destroyed the Finnish lines. The forests to the north of the medieval city of Viipuri, today’s Vyborg, were turned into a wasteland of charred metal and dead pine. The Finns capitulated in late March. Readers of the Soviet daily newspaper Pravda would learn that justice had been done and that the war had put a stop to yet another threat to proletarian freedom. But even they might well have heard the rumours that returning soldiers spread, and outside Russia, there were none who viewed the outcome as a victory for Moscow. Military planners in Hitler’s Germany were ready that spring with fat reports about the Soviet army’s weakness.5 An American correspondent in Stockholm concluded that the Soviet–Finnish war had ‘revealed more secrets about the Red Army than the last twenty years’.6
The secrets that he had in mind were mainly about training, tactics and equipment. Surveying the events of those four months with a military eye, a good spy would have noted that the Red Army had been tried and failed on almost every count. Intelligence units had overlooked the existence of the line of fortified bunkers that blocked the infantry’s advance. Even the Finns were surprised by the carnage that followed, the ease with which a few gunners could kill or terrify entire regiments of men. It helped, they found, that the Soviets were poorly equipped for arctic combat. In spite of their own cold winters, Red Army troops had not been trained to fight in the deep snow, and many were unnerved when Finnish ski troops loomed like ghosts out of the fog. They were also surprised to meet resistance. Later, as the first Soviet tanks broke through, the Finns were gratified by the success of their home-made anti-tank device, a bottle – the usual one was an empty from the state ‘Alko’ monopoly – filled with kerosene and lit with a simple wick. They followed a prototype developed by Franco’s troops in Spain, but it would be the Finns who gave the new missiles a name. In honour of the Soviet foreign minister, who featured most nights on Finnish radio that year, they called them Molotov cocktails. ‘I never knew a tank could burn for quite that long,’ a Finnish veteran recalled.7
An outsider would also have noticed that the Soviets’ own equipment – the tanks, shells, guns and radio sets that the socialist planned economy had turned out with such fanfare in the past decad
e – was ill-designed for actual combat. More seriously, young officers, often fresh from the classroom, lacked the imagination, and failing that, the training, to co-ordinate its use. They also lacked supplies and spares. Whole regiments faced the Finns without food, ammunition, or boots. In January, Finnish troops reported taking prisoners who had kept themselves alive by tearing flesh from the carcasses of frozen horses or filling their mouths with snow. The wounded who were carried back to their own side often fared little better. The hospitals in nearby Leningrad were well-equipped and lovingly staffed, but young men died of wounds, cold, and disease as they waited for the transport that would take them there.8 Morale, the morale of the liberating army, the people’s Red Army, was miserably low. ‘The whole thing is lost now,’ an infantryman from a Ukrainian battalion complained that December. ‘We’re going to certain death. They’ll kill us all. If the newspapers said that for every Finn you need ten Russkies [moskalei], they’d be right. They are swatting us like flies.’9
This question of morale was one that fascinated foreign spies. To outsiders, the Red Army was an enigma. Everyone knew what Russian soldiers were supposed to be like. Tolstoy elaborated the stereotype after observing them in the Crimean War, and his masterpiece, War and Peace, was full of brave, stoical peasant sons, their hearts as great as Russia’s steppe. These soldiers were the backbone of the army that had beaten Napoleon, the men who kept on fighting through the severest months of winter, and their image among foreigners changed little after 1812. ‘They probably provide the best material in the world from which to form an army,’ the British Lieutenant-General Martel concluded after watching Soviet manoeuvres as an invited visitor in the 1930s. ‘Their bravery on the battlefield is beyond dispute, but the most outstanding feature is their astonishing strength and toughness.’10
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