Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  One answer was to grow food on the army’s land. Here was one thing that former peasants could really be asked to do. As Roger Reese records in his account of pre-war army life, ‘By the late summer of 1932, one regiment already had more than two hundred hogs, sixty cows, more than one hundred rabbits and forty beehives.’39 Nothing had changed by 1939. The soldiers dug potatoes and cut hay, they milked cows and they slaughtered pigs.40 The work could be heavy, dirty and cold, so field duties were sometimes used as punishments. In all cases, farming took the men away from their military training and distracted them from the real purpose of their army service. But everyone’s priority was filling empty stomachs, and successful regimental farms made a real difference to the men’s diet. They also helped to lift morale. This was a time when almost everyone – not only soldiers, but collectivized peasants and even some communities of workers – was going hungry. While brightly painted new kiosks sold ice cream to the masses, most people were still forced to scrape and queue to buy staples like butter and meat. The soldiers had a guaranteed allocation, even if the quality was poor. It is a bleak commentary on Soviet life, but Reese himself concludes that ‘despite their poor accommodations, officers and soldiers generally had a slightly higher standard of living in the 1930s than the rest of Soviet society’.41

  The point was that the soldiers did not have to forage. They did not have to walk for miles, as their parents might, or exchange their own wedding rings for food. Instead, they could expect to be issued with most of what they needed. They also had access to a network of closed military stores, the ZVK. At a time when goods at any price were scarce on the open market, Red Army men could buy, if their local store were reasonably run, a range of luxuries that included matches and tobacco, thread, razors, toothbrushes and pens. Like everything else in the Soviet Union, however, experience varied from place to place. Sometimes the stores were badly managed or the storekeepers corrupt. Sometimes the stores themselves were little more than barns. And everyone complained about the shortages. There never was enough tobacco, and the butter seemed to vanish within hours.

  Soap, too, was a scarce item, and many soldiers mention that they never had the means to clean their teeth. Running water, after all, was only to be had on the occasions when the barracks’ bathroom worked. For a real wash, the soldiers knew they had to visit the steam baths, the famous Russian banya. This ritual was not purely for comfort. A hot bath (and a change of clothes) every ten days was the minimum needed to keep typhus-bearing lice at bay. But banyas were usually in town, perhaps a half-hour’s march away. One man remembered bathing every fortnight; others that they bathed no more than once a month.42 When war broke out in 1941, new conscripts would complain about the dirt that made them itch and stink and brought them out in boils. But the old hands were used to it. In peacetime, the life of Red Army soldiers was mostly about getting used to things. Whatever understanding a young conscript may have had of Soviet life – and some had nurtured schoolboy dreams, however garbled, about opportunity and social justice – the army narrowed them and rubbed them coarse.

  Another source of inconvenience was crime. The army’s warehouses and stores always attracted local spivs. Pilfering was common in soldiers’ kitchens despite the unappealing quality of the food. Cooks were often accused of selling the meat and fats that should have gone to thicken army soup, but kitchens were the last link in a chain that stretched back to the warehouses and transport trains. Small thefts – a typical case involved 50 metres of footcloth material – were daily events,43 but if there was a chance, perhaps because of troop movements, to evade the police, there were livings to be made on a much grander scale. ‘Our checks in the units have shown that the supply workers connive in theft if they are not directly involved in it themselves,’ a 1941 report declared. In one district, ‘583 greatcoats, 509 pairs of boots and 1,513 belts have disappeared.’ Among the other stolen goods was food.44

  The army, then, was certainly a training ground, but some of what it taught would find no place in any decent service manual. As the men dug their potatoes or joined teams working on the barracks roof, they may have wondered when their formal army work might start. They would, in fact, find little time to be real soldiers, not least because their ideological training was never supposed to slip. In any working day, men would attend at least one class about politics; a lecture on Stalin’s analysis of capitalism, perhaps, or a question-and-answer session about the moral qualities of the ideal officer. Ideology was not regarded as an adventitious growth on army life, or even as a mere morale-booster, equivalent to religion. In these last years before the war, the Soviet state cast soldiers in the role of propaganda ambassadors. As the people’s vanguard, its sword and defender, they were supposed to represent right thinking for society as a whole. Part of the idea was that conscripts would return to their civilian lives and act as models, examples in word and deed. But to achieve this they had first to be transformed. To be a decent soldier, let alone, for the minority, a communist, a person was supposed to be sober, thoughtful, chaste and ideologically literate.

  The party built an empire of its own within the army’s ranks to work upon men’s minds. Its interests were represented by an organization called PURKKA, the Political Administration of the Red Army. Among the most powerful operators at the top of this unmilitary structure was Lev Mekhlis, a sinister figure more identified with covert arrests than soldiering. His influence on the Red Army would be a baleful one, and his removal, after 1942, signalled a turning point in the culture of the General Staff. But in 1939, the army still laboured with the burden of political interference. As far as the men were concerned, this aspect of their lives was ruled by political commissars, who operated at regimental and battalion level, and political officers – the Soviet term is politruk – who worked within the companies and lower units. A second tier included young communists, komsomols, whose agents among the men were known as komsorgs.

  An individual politruk was likely to combine the functions of a propagandist with those of an army chaplain, military psychiatrist, school prefect and spy. ‘The politruk,’ the army’s orders state, ‘is the central figure for all educational work among soldiers.’45 The range of topics that they taught was wide indeed. Politruks were present at classes in target shooting, drill practice and rifle disassembly. They were the individuals who typed up individual scores, noting how many men were ‘excellent’ in any field and inventing excuses for the many who were not. They wrote monthly reports on their units’ discipline, on morale and on ‘extraordinary events’, including desertion, drunkenness, insubordination and absence without leave. They were also the men behind the party’s festivals, including the anniversary of the October Revolution (which, since the calendar itself had been reformed, now fell on 7 November each year), Red Army Day (23 February), and the workers’ carnival on 1 May. Enlisted men looked forward to these holidays. The lecture that they had to sit through from the politruk was just a prelude, after all, to a bit of free time and some serious drinking.

  A political officer reads to the troops, 1944

  A politruk who really thumped the propaganda drum was bound to meet resistance. It is impressive that some – earnest, ambitious or just plain devout – tried everything to mould their men according to the rules. They kept up a barrage of discussions, meetings and poster campaigns. They read aloud to the troops in their spare time, usually from newspapers like the army’s own Red Star. Some managed small libraries, and almost all ran propaganda huts where posters were designed and banners hung. Political officers in all units taught basic literacy, too, as well as investigating complaints and answering the men’s questions about daily life. It was never easy work. Like every other type of officer, the politruks battled with shortages. ‘We do not have a single volume of the works of Lenin,’ one man informed his commissar in 1939. Worse, units that were bound for Finland discovered that they had no portraits of the leader, Stalin. ‘Send urgently,’ a telegram commands.46 Although they seem a
bsurd in retrospect, some of these politruks, and their younger comrades, the komsorgs, believed in their mission and made real sacrifices in its name. Maybe some of the soldiers appreciated it in 1939; they would do, some of them, in the confusion of the Second World War. But more looked at the politruks’ clean boots, smooth hands, and unused cartridge belts and sensed hypocrisy.

  The politruks were hated, too, because they had an overall responsibility for discipline. Denunciations often originated with them, and it was usually their reports that brought the military police, the Special Section, into a mess room or barracks. This function was in direct conflict with another of the politruks’ roles, which was to foster an atmosphere of mutual trust. ‘Revolutionary discipline is the discipline of the people, bound solidly with a revolutionary conscience…,’ their regulations said. ‘It is based not on class subordination but on a conscious understanding of… the goals and purpose of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army.’47 Some people may have found that shared values like this built networks of political comradeship, but the culture of double standards, of secret denunciations and hypocritical demands was hardly conducive to the kind of group spirit that an army requires. Soldiers and officers who needed to rely on comrades absolutely in the event of an attack – whose lives depended on sentries, on gunners, and above all, on their mates – soon found that fluency in Marxism– Leninism was no guarantee of steadfastness under fire. For the next three years, however, the politruks talked on. Communists were reliable, the argument went. Shared ideology ought to be quite enough to reassure a man that the soldier beside him would cover his flank when the shooting started. Known enemies would be removed. The party would take care of everything.

  Even in peacetime the system floated on a morass of false piety. The politruks – like party members everywhere – included plenty of poor role models, including little empire-builders who controlled the vodka and the girls. ‘Junior politruk Semenov must be turned over to a military tribunal,’ ran a telegram of 1940. ‘He is morally corrupt… He continues to drink, bringing the name of an officer into disrepute.’ He had been discovered that week with a prostitute, helpless, in the bottom of a rubbish bin.48 But more evaded censure than were ever caught. It fell to the men to express their views. ‘If I end up in combat,’ an infantryman told his communist neighbour, ‘I’ll stick my revolver in your throat first.’ ‘The first person I’ll shoot will be politruk Zaitsev,’ threatened another conscript as he packed for Finland. Two young deserters whose unit was also bound for the north were locked up when they were returned to base. ‘As soon as we get to the front,’ one of them said, ‘I’ll kill the deputy politruk.’49 It may have been to spite the party that soldiers daubed swastikas over their barracks walls. The fact that many politruks, as men whose education tended to be better than the average, were Jews was probably a factor, too. Reports from early 1939 noted the ‘anti-Semitic remarks and pro-Hitler leaflets’ that some politruks had found among the men.50

  Tensions and resentments of this kind were a large part of the reason for the Red Army’s unpreparedness for war, but the nature of the soldiers’ combat training also had a part to play. With ideology so prominent in the men’s timetable each day, extra hours had to be found to accommodate conventional forms of training. In 1939, the ‘study day’ was ten hours long; from March 1940, following the Finnish disaster, it was increased to twelve. ‘I don’t have time to prepare for all this studying,’ a recruit muttered. ‘I don’t even have time to wash.’51 In fact, the only skills that most recruits had time to learn were very basic ones. The men were taught to march, to lie down or jump up on a command, and most exhaustingly, to dig. They learned to get up and to dress in minutes, winding the long cat’s cradle of their footcloths as they chewed on their first hand-rolled cigarette. The drill might appear pointless, but at least it was the first step to real soldiering, to reflex-like obedience and greater physical strength. If there had been the time – to say nothing of the clarity of command – to build on it, things might have worked out better for the men. But political meddling constantly undermined their confidence, and lack of time restricted the skills that they were able to learn.

  All infantry must learn to shoot. The Russian word for footsoldier translates as rifleman. The rifle in question, at this stage, was a magazine-fed, bolt-action model with a bayonet. Its design dated from the 1890s, but it was reliable and trusted by the men. The problem was that even when the factories in Tula and Izhevsk stepped up production after 1937, there were not enough guns available for every recruit to handle. Spare parts were another problem everywhere.52 The men who faced the Finns in 1939 had often trained for weeks with wooden replicas; enough, perhaps, to learn some drill, to try the handling when lying down or kneeling in a trench, but hopeless when it came to taking aim, to testing weight or balance in your hand. It was the same with tanks, where cardboard training replicas were sometimes used. And though Soviet factories had produced a sub-machine gun of world class, Vasily Degtyarev’s PPD, it took the Finnish war to persuade Stalin of its value in the field. Suspicion prevented wider deployment. Until the end of 1939, the smart new guns were reserved for military police and all the army’s stock was locked away in stores.53

  Not surprisingly, reports from military camps painted a dismal picture of training and its effects. Large numbers of recruits, both officers and men, regularly failed to meet expected standards of rifle competence.54 Accidents, too, were alarmingly frequent. Even during daytime training there were instances of soldiers firing randomly when they were drunk. There was no reason, after all, to be on top form all the time, for this was an army where men who turned up for parade were often left to sit around and wait.55 As any faith in their officers that they still nurtured ebbed away, bright soldiers learned to put their time to better use. ‘You’ll never teach me anything,’ observed a Ukrainian conscript. ‘I slept at my post and I’ll go on sleeping.’56 In March 1939, an enterprising group of men sent a detachment out on horseback every morning to work in the local woodyard. The pay that each received was then divided up, although a part was reserved, tactfully enough, for the political officers.57

  The raw recruits of 1938 and 1939 would also learn from older generations. In 1939, the reserves were called up as a preparation for campaigns in Poland, the Baltic and Finland. These mature men, sometimes in their late thirties or early forties, arrived already smouldering with wrath. They had been forced to leave their jobs and families behind to go back to an army most had worked hard to forget. Their resentment was seldom far below the surface. ‘It’s worse in the army than doing forced labour on the Baikal–Amur railway,’ one grumbled to his mates. Some harked back to the Red Army in its democratic years, the early 1920s, when they talked to officers through clouds of cheap tobacco smoke and treated orders as the signal for a general debate. The memory rankled like a broken promise. ‘Red Army discipline is worse than under the old tsarist regime,’ the veterans complained. The young heard all of this and learned. ‘We’ll only get leave when we’re dead.’58

  Potential officers, the future élite of the Red Army, could hope for a better deal than this. A select group began their training while they were still at school. Others started as private soldiers and made their way up by impressing superiors with their political convictions and practical skill. As the army grew in the 1930s, the demand for new cadets increased as well. ‘No calling is higher than the calling of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army,’ ran the communist slogan. ‘No profession is more honoured than the profession of commander in this army.’59 In fact, it was only after 1934 that infantry platoon commanders began to make more money than blue-collar workers in Soviet factories.60 Only the élite could expect the trappings of power and wealth enjoyed by senior managers and politicians in the civilian world. But poor pay was no deterrent to enthusiasts. The army offered the romance of adventure, travel, and good comradeship. It did not matter if cadets came from poor peasant huts or city-centre apartments. As they po
red over their lessons in languages, mathematics, field tactics and history, officer trainees were embarking on solid careers.

  At least, that was the hope until a few years before 1939. True, the shortages and physical misery that beset their men could affect junior officers as well; it was hard enough to get things done in an army that went short of greatcoats, boots and guns. But those were irritations, and good communists ignored them unless they were working to relieve the hardships of their troops. Far more oppressive, from 1937, was the constant fear of political error. Stalin’s purge of the political and military élite, which began that spring and continued through the months to come, would change officer culture for the worse. One of the highest profile victims, after all, was Tukhachevsky, the Chief of the General Staff himself.61 The charges that he and his colleagues faced included treason, so a sentence of death was inescapable. Where formerly the victims of political repression had been civilians, this time a trial had sent a shudder through the military establishment.