Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  Whatever doubts he may have had, Boldin learned the truth that afternoon. His light aircraft came under German fire before he even reached the border, and when he landed on a dirt strip outside Bialystok someone told him that parachutists had been sighted coming down nearby. The atmosphere, as he recalled later, was ‘incredibly hot and the air smelt of burning’. His main feeling, as he climbed into the one truck that the army had been able to requisition, was one of shock, of helplessness. The truck made slow progress through the bewildered lines of refugees. Most people were on foot, heading anywhere to get away from the noise and searing flames, but then came a small motorcade, led by a smart new ZIS-101. ‘The broad leaves of an aspidistra were protruding from one of the windows,’ Boldin observed. ‘It was the car of some local top official. Inside were two women and two children.’ Boldin looked at the group with undisguised disgust, suggesting tartly that they might have ditched the plant to make space for another human being. But as the women turned away in shame, a plane dipped low above the road and there were three cracks of machine-gun fire. Boldin managed to jump aside in time, although his driver was killed. In the ZIS-101 the women, the children and the driver were all dead. As Boldin recollected, ‘Only the evergreen leaves of the aspidistra were still sticking out of the window.’17

  It would be evening before Boldin made contact with the 10th Army. Like all the frightened refugees, it had retreated from Bialystok that very day. Its new headquarters were in the birch woods to the east and consisted of two tents with a table and chairs. A shaken General Golubev told Boldin that all his divisions had sustained terrible losses. His light tanks, the elderly T-26s, had proved themselves good ‘only for firing at sparrows’. The Luftwaffe had targeted the army’s fuel dumps, aircraft and anti-aircraft guns. His men, he said, were fighting ‘like heroes’, but they were powerless against an enemy like this. The 10th Army, effectively, had been wiped out.18

  The news was reported to Minsk as soon as a radio could be made to work. Pavlov would also learn that night that the 3rd Army had abandoned Grodno. Reports from Brest suggested that this city, too, was not likely to hold. The Germans had known exactly where to target their artillery and air strikes, beginning with the army’s command centres and then aiming for railways and factories.19 Pavlov responded with a stream of orders that read like a propaganda script. This was the Red Army, and it was not meant to retreat. Accordingly, the general ordered men he could not see or even contact to mount a bold counter-attack. The aim, as ever, was to push the Germans back behind the frontier and defeat them on their own soil.20 Weeks later, with his life in the balance, Pavlov would tell his interrogators that he was still thinking strategically at that stage, confident that Brest could be held and the tide of attack turned. But Boldin, who was ordered to mount an offensive on 23 June with forces that were either dead or hopelessly dispersed, considered that Pavlov was merely covering his back. He was rapping out the orders, Boldin thought, just to show Moscow that something was really being done. The culture of the purge, of empty gestures, lies and fear, was still alive and well.

  It was to Boldin’s credit that he tried to organize the remnants of the 10th Army to fight on 23 June. Within a few hours, their supplies of fuel and ammunition ran out. The two planes that they sent to Minsk begging for help were soon shot down. Like thousands of other Soviet troops, they were encircled in the tongue of Soviet territory that would become famous as the Bialystok pocket, surrounded by German forces and cut off from their comrades and supplies. Boldin was lucky. He headed east towards Smolensk with a ragtag following of uniformed refugees. After nearly seven weeks of retreat and sporadic fighting in the woods the general and 1,654 of his men were reunited with the main Red Army.21 Pavlov, meanwhile, had been arrested, questioned, scapegoated for cowardice and shot. Eight other senior officers, all of whom had been as helpless in the face of Germany’s attack that June, died with him. As the State Defence Committee noted on 16 July, the men were considered to be guilty of ‘lack of resolve, panic-mongering, disgraceful cowardice… and fleeing in terror in the face of an impudent enemy’.22 Failure in this war, whatever its cause, would be blamed on the moral bankruptcy of individuals like this. No one would mention the war plans that had no chance of succeeding, the untrained armies or the breakdown of morale. They would not point out, either, that this was a war that, at first, Stalin had not permitted anyone to fight.

  David Samoilov, the poet and future front-line soldier, described the shock everyone felt in those few days. ‘We were all expecting war,’ he wrote later. ‘But we were not expecting that war.’ As the fortress city of Brest began to burn and the garrison in charge of nearby Kobrin fled into the Pripet marshes, the people of Moscow, more than a whole day’s train ride to the east, relied on little more than rumour. The news did not become official till just after noon. In those days, important radio announcements were broadcast in the public squares. Soon, indeed, the possession of a radio for private use would be outlawed altogether.23 So people heard the news that Sunday as a crowd, standing in the midday sunshine with their faces turned towards the tin throats of loudspeakers. ‘Today, at four o’clock,’ the voice of their foreign minister, Molotov, announced, ‘without any declaration of war, and without any claims being made on the Soviet Union, German troops attacked our country.’ It was an outrage, but the speaker did not reveal the full scale of the disaster. The crowds were told that there were now ‘more than two hundred dead’. It would be many years before they learned how great an understatement that had been. But the essence of the message was quite clear. ‘The government calls on you, men and women citizens of the Soviet Union, to rally even more closely around the glorious Bolshevik party,’ Molotov went on, ‘around the Soviet government and our great leader, Comrade Stalin. Our cause is just. The enemy will be smashed. Victory will be ours.’24

  Every account of the war goes on to talk about the surge of patriotism that these words produced. War veterans remember their proud indignation still. ‘I was a boy, fifteen years old,’ one told me. ‘I had lived my whole life in a Siberian village. I’d never even seen Moscow. But still it came from somewhere, that patriotism. I knew that I would volunteer straight away.’25 In every city in the land the would-be heroes stepped forward to fight. The scenes, again, were reminiscent of an epic film. The war that volunteers imagined they would have to wage was an illusion too. The men’s words, certainly, read like a 1930s script. ‘I lived through German rule in the Ukraine in 1918 and 1919,’ a gnarled collective farmer from Kursk province told the crowd. ‘We will not work for landlords and noblemen. We’ll drive that bloodstained Hitler out bag and baggage. I declare myself mobilized and ask to be sent to the front to destroy the German bandits.’26 ‘The workers feel a profound patriotism,’ a secret police report agreed. ‘There have been significant numbers of applications to join the army from young people from the cities and the farms.’27 But the state did not leave anything to chance. Extra officers were drafted into the secret police that very night, and suspected counter-revolutionaries, including hundreds of foreign nationals, were arrested at once.28

  The tight security was justified, for Stalin’s people had cause to be angry and to demand real facts. In his announcement, Molotov had reminded them that just a few hours earlier Germany had been the Soviet Union’s ally in a pact, ‘the terms of which were scrupulously observed by the Soviet Union’. It was a deal with fascism that the Soviet people had been doubting for two years. Now came the news of unprovoked attack. The natural response, apart from shock, was scepticism. Veterans of the civil war remembered the daily reports and public debates of that time and complained that they were getting no hard news. Many assumed – correctly – that the truth was much blacker than they were permitted to know.29 At the same time, other people, dazzled by the pre-war myth, believed the rumours that Germany was in retreat, that Warsaw had already fallen, that Ribbentrop had shot himself and that the Red Army was heading for Berlin.30 The fictions blossomed round th
e silence of one man. Stalin himself did not address the people until 3 July.

  The truth about the people’s mood in that first week is still hard to unravel from the web of propaganda. No one, not even the NKVD, could measure the relative strengths of patriotism and panic, anger and mistrust. No one could predict what the crowds would do. One fear, that there would be a run on stocks of food and fuel, proved accurate. Police agents were posted around the capital to prevent looting. One of these remembered his watch on a macaroni factory in the Sokolniki district, a three-day vigil that ended in a violent confrontation with local people, including his own cousin. ‘I told him that I would shoot if he did not leave,’ the old policeman said. ‘I can still remember the look in his eyes. It was necessary and it was my job. I would have shot him without hesitating.’31 The country might have dissolved into civil war, but most reports from the first night described relative calm. Rubbing their eyes as the dawn broke, police informers scribbled down the good news first. Perhaps they even believed it.

  On 24 June, two state security officers in Moscow submitted a summary of the popular mood in the capital to their superior, counter-intelligence chief V. S. Abakumov. In general, they noted, the city’s working people had responded admirably, offering to work extra shifts and volunteering to train for civil defence. ‘We will put up with any hardships,’ one man declared, ‘to help our Red Army ensure that the Soviet people utterly destroys the fascists.’ ‘We must be firmly organized and observe the strictest steadfastness and discipline,’ another pronounced. ‘Our indignation has no limits,’ affirmed a printworker. ‘Hitler has violated the sacred borders of the first socialist country in the world… We will win because there is no power in the world that can vanquish a people who have risen up in patriotic war.’32 The same reactions were recorded in provincial centres, including the city of Kursk. The Communist Party there called an emergency meeting at midnight on 22 June. Unusually, ran its report, the members all turned up on time. ‘The feeling of unlimited love for their motherland, for the party and for Stalin, and the people’s deep outrage and hatred of bestial fascism were reflected in every speech the members made.’33

  This was the most important theme for everyone that June. The patriotic declarations read like excerpts from a script, but the emotions that lay behind them were powerful and real. Twenty years of meretricious talk, of communist jargon, had furnished Soviet patriots with an impressive stock of wooden phrases. The younger generation knew no other language for this kind of thing. At the moment of greatest shock, it was natural that people would fall back on the sentences they had been trained to use, the notions of Stalinist collectivism and service. The crisis of the next few months would test the credibility of the official line, but it would also show how many people were prepared to risk their lives, to die, for their country and its future. ‘Anti-Soviet behaviour,’ wrote Moscow’s Comrade Zhigalov after his visit to the city’s Paris Commune factory on 26 June, ‘is non-existent.’34

  If he had stepped outside the party cells and strongholds of the ethnic Russian working class, however, his report might have sounded an alarm. In Moscow, the secret police were particularly interested in the views of citizens with German names. ‘Soviet power wasn’t elected by the will of the people,’ a Muscovite named Kyun observed. ‘And now the people will have their say.’ ‘The peasants will greet the news of the war with joy,’ a woman called Mauritz allegedly remarked. ‘It will free them from the Bolsheviks and the collective farms they hate so much. Russia may be strong, but it isn’t a problem for Germany.’35 These comments were collected partly as a prelude to that night’s arrests, but they were not uncommon anywhere. Beyond the cities, talk of this kind was likely to be overheard among older people, especially those who resented not just the collective farms but godlessness as well.36 And then there was the problem of hostility to Russian rule itself. There were good communists in every republic of the Soviet Union, and there were enemies of fascism, too, and patriots who could not tolerate invasion. But although volunteers came forward almost everywhere to fight, there were also some who held back, quietly, considering the possibilities that the turn of events might bring. Even in remoter places, such as Georgia, that were not under immediate threat, there was a sense that Moscow’s crisis might, perhaps, prove to be someone else’s opportunity.37

  Meanwhile, the mass of the loyal Soviet public threw themselves into a surge of volunteering. In Kursk province, 7,200 people applied for front-line military service in the first month of hostilities.38 In Moscow, where recruitment centres were jammed around the clock, more than 3,500 applications were received in the first thirty-six hours.39 People attended crisis meetings at their factories, they heard the patriotic speeches as a group, and then, also in groups, they trooped off to local recruiting stations, like boy scouts, to volunteer. The eager patriots were not exclusively male. Women – the reports always call them girls – also appeared, also in groups. They made a strange impression as potential troops. ‘They looked at my manicure and my little hat,’ a woman veteran recalled. ‘They said they wouldn’t last if I was going to the front.’ Such women were sometimes accepted for a training scheme, often as nurses, but most were talked into enrolling as blood donors and staying at home.40 Either way, the whole process took place in an atmosphere of trance. Few of the early volunteers had much idea what they were signing up to do.

  People who did were often cynical about it all. Onlookers with direct experience of army life doubted that public fervour would change anything on the front line. ‘Our leaders seem to think they’ll conquer the German people through agitation,’ a veteran of the tsarist army remarked. ‘But it won’t work at all. There’s a lot of discontent in the Red Army.’41 Reservists could be doubtful about taking arms again. That June, there were reports of suicide among young people liable for service at the front, and several cases of deliberate self-mutilation were recorded by Moscow’s police.42 As the initial shock of Molotov’s announcement faded, too, the patriotic trance began to lose its grip. ‘I’ll only volunteer for mobilization when they mobilize everyone,’ a komsomol in Kursk was heard deciding with his friends. A rumour had just reached him that Kiev and Minsk were under fire. Though this was true, no one was supposed to believe it. The official disclaimers tempted cynics to despair. Clerks in government offices could be paralyzed by fear, while many more, resignedly awaiting the arrival of the German troops, stayed home and found their solace through a haze of drink.43

  The trance soon faded for the new recruits as well. The Red Army had not changed overnight, and nor had its recruitment and supply structures. Prewar contingency plans for mobilization had allowed three days for organizing the call-up of those liable for immediate front-line service. In the panic that midsummer, these guidelines were scrapped and the Supreme Soviet called for the process to be completed in twenty-four hours. The chaos this produced would last until the following spring.44 More immediately, the mass movement of troops became acutely dangerous in the front-line regions, up to 200 kilometres into Soviet territory, that the Luftwaffe already controlled. ‘The normal mobilization of remaining soldiers… was impossible,’ a report on the 8th Army, based in the north-west, noted, ‘because most of the border divisions had lost their mobilization bases.’45

  Safe for a while behind the lines that summer afternoon, the volunteers of Moscow also found the army unprepared. Photographs of the recruitment process show crowds of young men and women pressed together round some junior officer’s desk, waving their passports and pushing their mates aside like shoppers on the first day of a sale. The propaganda image suggests young men squaring up for immediate combat, as if they were ready to grab the nearest German by the scruff and throw him out of Russia straight away. The truth was that raw volunteers – unlike reservists – would need to be assessed, equipped and trained for some weeks before they faced their first fascist. Their experience that day, after the first moments of glory and resolve, was usually prosaic. The officer in charge
gave them a glance to weed the hopeless cases from the healthy young. Then came a quick check of their documents, and then, for those who made the grade, a long wait. At this stage, as the veterans attest, there were not even medical examinations.

  There were no barracks, food or transport, either. Most recruitment stations were set up in local schools. When the suitable applicants had been selected and their papers stamped they were in the army. They were no longer free. But there was nowhere warm or dry for them to go to either, and the authorities had not thought to lay on food or entertainment while they waited. In Moscow they crowded into classrooms, they spilled into the streets and they gathered on the platforms of the Belorussian station as if they hoped for trains to take them to the front. By the time the party’s reporter arrived at the station to check on this last group most had been there for several days. There were no beds, so they slept on the floor. Some had brought bread or biscuits with them, others had nothing at all to eat, but somehow they had all found a supply of vodka.46 The same fate had befallen reservists from the capital. The city was thronged with groups of men, several hundred at a time, just sitting, waiting, talking, drinking and reflecting on their fate. ‘A good many volunteers have a drunken appearance,’ the police primly observed.47 It was traditional, of course, but this was war.