Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  These ideas were neither strange nor alien to the young men whose job it was to fight in Finland. Soviet troops were children of their time and culture, and to varying extents – even if they joked about them – the ideas of the party had become their own. There were a few who had no dearer wish than to defend the Soviet motherland. Their heroes were the airmen and explorers of the 1930s, their dream to be as skilful and as brave themselves. There were others, too, caught up in the enthusiasm of the times, who saw themselves as vanguard communists, the heirs, perhaps, of the civil-war fighters they had heard about at school. Such men might ‘beg’ to serve on the front line. ‘I want to go into battle for the Motherland and Stalin,’ one soldier wrote, perhaps taking dictation from a politruk. And he added, as many did, a formal request to join the party. ‘I will fight in the party spirit, as a Bolshevik.’89

  It was as if the cinema had come to life. Twenty years after the Red Army’s first campaigns, its troops had little idea of battle beyond the stock pictures of manliness, heroism and self-sacrifice. The real demands of modern war, including calculated tactics, self-restraint, and a facility with sophisticated weapons, would have looked almost tawdry to this generation. It was reported with pride, for instance, that ‘the deputy political officer of the 5th battalion of the 147th rifles led his men into an attack shouting, “For the Motherland and Stalin!”’ He was among the first to catch a Finnish bullet.90 Komsomols in another regiment mounted a spate of pointless raids in celebration of Stalin’s birthday on 21 December. Still others pledged themselves always to complete training classes with full marks, as if any other outcome were desirable.

  Good comradeship, the formation of what the sociologists who study other armies have described as ‘primary groups’ among the soldiers, would have been a better way to improve both discipline and co-ordination.91 A stronger sense of loyalty between the men would have built stronger trust. But close relationships between soldiers were not encouraged. They might be a sign of deviance, the spies worried, conspiracies in embryo. Thirteen of the forty-six rifle divisions that the Red Army fielded in Finland had been formed for less than a year by the winter of 1939–40.92 The others tended, as was the policy at this time, to have been brought up to strength – peopled with strangers – in the last weeks before their mobilization for the front.93 In place of long-established trust the politruks nurtured these people’s party spirit, or worse, a fabricated ‘friendliness’. ‘The soldiers, commanders and political workers in our regiment show courage, heroism and a willingness to give each other friendly help during battle,’ ran one of their reports.94 ‘Friendliness’ of this kind was no substitute for absent professionalism, let alone mutual trust. These men had failed to train together. ‘Friendly’, perhaps, described the spirit of an artillery division that fired without orders near the Finnish village of Makela ‘to help the infantry keep its spirits up’.95 The next stage in that battle was a mass and uncoordinated panic.

  Party spirit was no help when the men were afraid, either. Soviet soldiers in Finland were unprepared for the battlefields that their own weapons would create. Even their officers had no idea of the co-ordination that would be necessary to make use of infantry, big guns and tanks.96 Without a basic understanding of their role, soldiers found battles incomprehensible and terrifying. Some were afraid of their own shadows. An infantryman in the 7th Army caused havoc one morning when he shrieked so loudly that his whole battalion took fright. He explained later that he had glimpsed his own face in a mirror and taken it to be a Finnish sniper. His terrified scream disturbed the nearby signals unit. The men there started firing wildly, without orders, wasting precious bullets in the air. Not far away, members of the railway guard corps also heard the noise and joined in with more shooting of their own.97 Tardily, even desperately, political officers tried to instil some sense of fighting spirit in the men. Their priority, it was agreed, should henceforth be field training. The memoranda that they wrote along these lines make pathetic reading. ‘It is too late and almost impossible to organize party-political work during battle itself,’ a senior commissar explained. Among the things that it was ‘too late’ to tell soldiers who were in the field, he said, was how to lie down when the Finnish gunners opened fire.98

  ‘They told us that the Red Army would smash the White Finns with a lightning strike,’ men started to complain by the new year, ‘but the end of the war is not in sight.’ They had come up against the Mannerheim Line, the Finnish bunkers that Soviet reconnaissance had overlooked. If they had been afraid before, their mood was closer now to sheer despair. The party’s tale of easy victory had turned out to be false. ‘We’re going to find these bunkers everywhere. We cannot even collect our injured and dead. The infantry cannot overcome emplacements like these.’99 A new brochure, ‘Three Weeks of Fighting the White Finns’, was hastily assembled, along with a more practical ‘Specific Problems of This War and How to Improve Our Effort’. 100 But the basic Soviet tactic did not change. Red Army troops were supposed only to attack. It was an approach that suited the Finns, whose machine-gunners slaughtered Soviet soldiers almost at their leisure. It helped them that some senior Soviet officers regarded the use of camouflage as a sign of cowardice.101

  The poor conditions played on everybody’s nerves. Even in the first week of the war, the infantry suffered dozens of cases of frostbite. By the end of December 1939, the reported figure, which included only the men whose ability to fight was seriously impaired, had increased to 5,725.102 At the same time, officers were reporting shortages of valenki (the traditional Russian felt boots), fur hats, footcloths and winter jackets. To make matters worse, sometimes there was no hot food, not even tea, for days.103 The temperature had plunged to an exceptional low for early winter, well below –30°C, and many soldiers had come straight from the milder climate of Ukraine. But the cold should have been easy to predict, for Karelia had been a province of the Russian empire for decades; conditions there were part of recent, living, memory.

  The men began deserting in their hundreds. Sometimes they simply walked away, taking advantage of what looked like mere confusion to find a fire and warm themselves, steal the supplies, or simply disappear.104 One infantryman ‘surrendered’ to the Finns on behalf of two entire battalions.105 Not merely individuals, and not only private soldiers, but whole regiments abandoned their posts in this way. Sometimes they left their heavier weapons, too, allowing the Finns to help themselves to field guns, ammunition and rifles. Deserters could escape unnoticed because no one knew who was responsible for whom. At the same time, the chaos all along the line gave men a chance to get their hands on any loot they found. One man stole bicycles to sell when he got home. Others preferred to stock up with thick winter gear. A politruk, Malkov, was caught with two leather coats, four suits, shoes and a suitcase full of stolen children’s clothes.106

  Stalin’s generals, as was their custom, adopted savage measures to bring their ragtag army into line. That winter, orders were given to shoot stragglers and deserters. According to its own figures, eleven deserters from the 8th Army had been shot by early January,107 but meanwhile other soldiers had begun to shoot themselves. Cases of samostrel, self-inflicted wounds, increased alarmingly in the new year. There was not much else that desperate men could do. Zagradotryady – another new word for the Soviet lexicon – were the troops whose job it was to stand behind the lines and pick off any man who tried to run away. Unlike the regulars, they had machine guns for the job. Meanwhile, officers faced NKVD firing squads. In January 1940, a string of tribunals sentenced scores of them to death for cowardice and failure. Even the Soviet high command began to wonder if there might not be a better way to organize a war. Perhaps, one of their memoranda carefully suggested, ‘the highest form of punishment is being overused’.108

  A survivor of the Winter War recalled the ‘dull apathy and indifference towards impending doom’ that pushed men ahead when there was no alternative but death.109 It was a far cry from quick victory and party sp
irit. Back in Moscow, reformers read of the ‘negative effect’ that the men experienced when they found the frozen bodies of earlier waves of soldiers pushing out of shallow graves along the ice roads heading north. Tales of catastrophe pervaded the barracks where fresh soldiers were waiting for their battle orders. ‘I’m not going to Finland,’ a conscript in Kharkov told his politruk. ‘Two of my brothers are there and that’s enough.’110 Shocked by the gulf between their expectations and the real war, Stalin’s generals gathered in Moscow to consider a programme of reforms. There was almost no time for thought. As they pored over plans, the Germans were preparing an attack on France whose devastating swiftness would put paid to any hope of peace along the Eastern Front.

  3

  Disaster Beats Its Wings

  June is a special month all over northern Europe. In European Russia and Ukraine, it is magical. Winter’s bitter dark and ice are barely even memories, spring’s mud and rain forgiven. Kiev’s famous chestnut trees come into bloom, and so do Moscow’s lilacs, Yalta’s Judas trees. It is the month of the peony and the green willow; the month, in the north, of the white nights. Midsummer night fell on a Saturday in 1941. In Sevastopol, the home of the Soviet Union’s Black Sea Fleet, it was, as naval officer Evseev remarked in his diary, ‘a wonderful Crimean evening’. That Saturday, ‘all the streets and boulevards in the city were lit. The white houses were bathed in light, the clubs and theatres beckoned the sailors on shore leave to come inside. There were crowds of sailors and local people, dressed in white, packing the city’s streets and parks. As always, the famous Primorsky boulevard was full of people out for a stroll. Music was playing. There were jokes and happy laughter everywhere on the evening before the holiday.’1 A week before, the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, had insisted that rumours of Germany’s intention to break its pact with Moscow and launch an attack on the Soviet Union were completely without foundation.2 The temptation to believe him must have been overwhelming.

  One source of all the light across the city’s twin harbours that night was the Upper Inkerman lighthouse. With its help, the German planes could navigate their way unerringly towards the port.3 They came from the east, flying low out of the steppe, their route a great arc across Soviet space. They knew their targets in advance: the fleet, the warehouses, the anti-aircraft guns. Soon the Black Sea reflected new lights from the shore: incandescent trails and flares, searchlights, the evil glow of a landscape on fire. ‘Are those planes ours?’ someone asked Evseev as the sailors scrambled into boats to get back to their ships. ‘It must be another exercise.’ But his neighbour had been taking careful stock. ‘Our anti-aircraft batteries are firing live rounds,’ he said. ‘And those bombs don’t look at all like dummies.’ ‘So we’re at war, then?’ said a third. ‘But with whom?’4

  Hundreds of miles to the north, along the new border in formerly Polish land, Red Army men were winding down for their free day on Sunday. Those who could get local leave had gone off to town, to cosmopolitan Lvov or Minsk, to get a decent meal and forget their worries. Colonel-General D. G. Pavlov, the commander-in-chief of the western special military district, was at the theatre. A comedy called The Wedding at Malinovka was playing to a full house at the officers’ club in the Belorussian capital.5 The good commander did not allow his enjoyment of the play to be disrupted by the news, brought by his intelligence chief, Colonel Blokhin, that German troops along the border appeared to be preparing for action. There were even some reports, Blokhin whispered, of shelling. ‘It can’t be true,’ Pavlov replied, and pointed at the stage. It was time to get back to the play.6 The whole army, in fact, was under orders to keep calm. Kamenshchikov, an officer in the western air defence force, was accompanied to the theatre that night by his wife, son and father. They had come up from their home in Stalingrad that week for a short summer break.7 They also watched their play through to the end and then returned to his quarters for supper and bed.

  At nine o’clock that evening, while Pavlov was still at the play, a German sapper called Alfred Liskow stole across the Soviet lines. Liskow was one of the few German internationalists that Soviet troops would ever meet. Before his call-up in 1939, he had worked in a furniture factory in the Bavarian town of Kolberg, which is where he had become acquainted with the works of Marx and Lenin. That night he came to warn his proletarian brothers of their imminent danger. He told his Soviet captors that German artillery units along the border had orders to start shelling targets on the Soviet side within the next few hours. At first light, he continued, ‘rafts, boats and pontoons’ would be thrown across the Bug, the marshy river that divided German-occupied Poland from the Soviet sector to the east.8 The attack on the Soviet Union was poised to begin with devastating force. Information of the same kind was relayed by deserters elsewhere on the land frontier. It was not news to the political leadership in Moscow. British and even Soviet intelligence had been warning of this plan for weeks, but Stalin had chosen to ignore the tales, and border troops had made no preparation for an imminent attack. As far as they were concerned, the deserters that night looked like provocateurs. One, a German from Berlin, was shot on that basis. Liskow himself was still under interrogation when mortars started ripping through the dark.9

  It was Kamenshchikov’s wife who woke him. Perhaps it was her inexperience, she said, but she had never heard so many planes flying above a town at night. Her husband assured her that what she was hearing were manoeuvres. There had been lots of exercises lately. All the same he threw a coat over his shoulders and stepped outside to take a closer look. He knew at once that this was real war. The very air was different; humming, shattered, thick with sour black smoke. The town’s main railway line was picked out by a rope of flame. Even the horizon had begun to redden, but its glow, to the west, was not the approaching dawn. Acting without orders, Kamenshchikov went to the airfield and took a plane up to meet the invaders at once, which is why, exceptionally among the hundreds of machines that were parked in neat formations as usual that night, his was brought down over the Bialystok marshes and not destroyed on the ground.10 By midday on 22 June, the Soviets had lost 1,200 planes. In Kamenshchikov’s own western district alone, 528 had been blown up like fairground targets by the German guns.11

  Unlike Kamenshchikov, Colonel-General Pavlov had never even gone to bed. There had been an awkward briefing with a few staff officers straight after the play and then, at one in the morning, he had been called to front headquarters for a telephone conversation. The man at the other end of the line in Moscow was the Soviet Defence Commissar, Semen Konstantinovich Timoshenko.12 He was calling to check the situation of the border troops. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘how is it where you are – quiet?’ Pavlov replied that there had been very considerable German activity at the front line, including a build-up of motorcycle regiments and special forces. ‘Just try to worry less and don’t panic,’ Timoshenko replied. ‘Get the staff together anyway this morning, because something unpleasant may happen, perhaps, but don’t rise to any provocation. If there is a specific provocation, ring me.’13

  Pavlov later recollected that he spent the next two hours with his senior officers. One by one they reported on their troops, on the dismal problem of supplies and on their lack of readiness for battle. Some units had been dispersed on exercises, others needed stocks of fuel or ammunition, and all were more or less paralyzed by inadequate or poorly organized transport. The railways were still running to peacetime schedules, and almost every front-line regiment was short of motor vehicles. The army could not even requisition trucks, for there were almost no civilian vehicles in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Pavlov and his men were still busy with these questions at 3.30 a. m., the moment scheduled for the German land assault. Coincidentally, it was also the time when Timoshenko rang again. ‘He asked me what was new,’ Pavlov recalled. ‘I told him that the situation had not changed.’14 By then, a dozen cities in the borderlands had been engulfed in flames.

  The Luftwaffe had flown high into Soviet
territory earlier that night. At dawn they swept westwards to bomb a string of strategic cities, including Bialystok, Kiev, Brest, Grodno, Rovno and Kovno, as well as the Baltic ports of Tallinn and Riga. The land attack, the core of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, began just as the eastern sky began to lighten. At 3.15 a.m. on 22 June, the Soviet border guards in charge of the bridge over the river Bug at Koden were summoned by their German counterparts to discuss ‘important matters’. When they obediently appeared, they were machine-gunned by the advance guard of a German assault party. Arriving at the railway bridge at Brest, German sappers tore the crude explosives from its central pier and waved their men across.15 By 5.30 a. m., which, on Moscow time, was when the German Ambassador, von Schulenburg, delivered his declaration of war to Molotov, Pavlov’s command was under attack from thirteen infantry and five tank divisions, together with artillery and airborne cover.

  Shock led to misreporting and confusion. Grodno was under such heavy air attack that the commander of the Soviet 3rd Army, Kuznetsov, had barricaded himself in a basement well before first light. But other messages talked of calm for a few hours more, and even, in the case of Golubev’s 10th Army, of a successful repulse of the German troops. By 7 o’clock, some officers were starting to report that they had lost contact with their men, that whole units had simply disappeared. As Pavlov would later tell his interrogators, ‘Kuznetsov informed me, with a tremble in his throat, that the only thing that was left of the 56th rifle division was its number.’16 The men may have been dead or captured, or, like those of the 85th division, they may simply have fled towards the south. Radio and telephone links were broken, messages and orders were not getting through. The answer was to send a trusted deputy to take control. That morning, Pavlov assigned Lieutenant-General Ivan Vasilevich Boldin to the 10th Army’s headquarters in the border town of Bialystok. He was to fly there straight away from Minsk.