Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  Other cities went through the same procedures when the call to arms went out. In many places, militias showed courage, if not conspicuous success. Alexander Werth regarded the response of his native Leningrad as a model of local patriotism, but the use of opolchentsy there involved heartbreaking loss of life. Wherever they were made to fight, unprepared and unmilitary opolchentsy would die in their thousands. Others never expected to join combat. In Fatezh, a small town in Kursk province, the 3,000 volunteers who stepped forward in July had received no training by September 1941. They did not know how to hold or aim a gun. Many had never fired one in their lives. They had not even decided where to locate the main defensive positions round the town. Among collective farmers in the region the appeal for volunteers fell on unwilling and resentful ears, while in nearby Kursk itself training sessions were poorly attended after the first heady week. Even communists neglected blackout and no smoking rules.

  Some people still believed that their country’s huge size would protect them. As late as the last week of September, the danger to Kursk province felt distant enough for locals to focus on other things, including their own private plans to get away.15 They paid a high price six weeks later when the region was crushed by the tracks of German tanks. But some had calculated that obsolete guns and home-made bombs were useless in the face of this invader anyway. There were plenty of deserters in the villages with fatalistic tales to tell. Near Moscow, too, Gordon heard terrible stories from the lips of refugees. By day, the volunteers were buoyed up by collective spirit; at night their private fears ran free.

  Like many other opolchenie groups of its kind, Gordon’s division was absorbed into the Red Army in August. In the presence of members of his local Communist Party branch, he and his friends took the Red Army oath and exchanged their black uniforms for the infantry’s olive green. By then, he estimated, most of them had scarcely handled a real gun. Gordon had fired a training rifle twice. These men became the refounded 113th rifle division that September; refounded because the first division with that number had been wiped out near the Soviet border several months before. This version, too, would be consumed and reborn in the coming weeks, first in October 1941 and again in the opening months of 1942. Gordon’s incarnation of the division was destroyed in a single day.

  The disaster took place in the skeletal woods of birch and pine that line the Warsaw highway leading to the capital. Gordon’s division had the task of blocking the predicted German advance, but the men panicked at the first whiff of an enemy. Like greenhorn soldiers anywhere, they could not hold their fire. By the time the enemy was within range, they had almost no bullets left. The Molotov cocktails ran out next. Gordon watched young researchers he had known from Moscow University’s geology and physics faculties hurling bottles of burning kerosene at looming German machines. The lucky ones died instantly. Others suffered terrible injuries, dying slow deaths in the woods after their friends had retreated or facing the mercy of the German SS detachment that went round the next day to clear debris from the battlefield.

  Only 300 members of Gordon’s division survived till nightfall, and most of these would perish in the coming days as they tried to break out of the German ring that now surrounded them. Gordon himself was captured. He would have died in the camps, but the vast size of his column of prisoners saved him. The bemused German guards could not keep watch on everyone, and Gordon slipped away into a haystack, hiding overnight and through most of a second day. His own future would lie with the regular army, but he never forgot his first comrades in arms. In a final irony, he observed that they included many, patriotic to the last, whose names had not been entered correctly in the Red Army’s rolls when they made the transition from opolchentsy to regular troops. Their papers were not in the required order, and that meant that they counted as missing in action. The rules on this were unambiguous. The state regarded them as deserters. Instead of praise and much-needed financial help, their families carried the stigma for another fifty years.16

  The slaughter of Gordon’s 113th rifle division stalled a panzer unit for a day or so. The waste of life and talent for so little gain was heartbreaking. But these were months when men were dying in their tens of thousands. Whatever else Stalin’s regime might lack, it did not begrudge human lives. The Germans put the carnage down to some trick of exotic guile, declaring the Red Army to be ‘the craftiest and most stubborn enemy that we have ever faced’. If you want to resist a Russian-style attack, a captured report advised that winter, ‘you need strong nerves’.17 But German observers had also noted the lines of special troops behind the riflemen, the men with machine guns who waited to cut the stragglers down. ‘As a rule,’ a report of the time declared, ‘they do not fight out of some ideology, nor for their Motherland, but out of fear of their officers, especially their commissars.’18 ‘Fear and hate,’ agreed another observer, ‘leave Russian soldiers to fight with nothing but the courage of desperation.’19

  The soldiers were indeed afraid. Among Moscow’s defenders were some, like the famous twenty-eight ‘Panfilov men’, who fought to the last bullet in part at least because retreat would mean tribunals and a death sentence.20 But threats were not sufficient on their own. For one thing, some still dreamed of simply giving up. The illusion that fascism would turn out to be no worse for Slavs than Stalin’s rule was a temptation to these hungry and exhausted men. ‘We should stop fighting,’ a soldier in the 16th Army muttered to his friends that October. ‘It won’t make any difference whether we beat the Germans or not.’ ‘Half of our collective farmers are against Soviet power,’ added another. ‘Our generals shouted on about how we were going to defeat the enemy on his own soil, but it’s turned out the opposite. We Russian people have been betrayed by our generals.’ His friends seemed to agree. ‘They are trying to starve us to death now. They’ll kill us all,’ another rifleman complained. ‘They treat the Red Army like dogs.’21 Secret police wrote all this down, not least because the bitterness so readily translated into action. That October, nearly 130,000 people were detained in Moscow for ‘breaches of military regulations’. Nearly 5,000 of these were Red Army deserters, and 12,000 more were charged with evading military service.22

  Desertions on this scale were evidence that tyranny alone could not make heroes out of frightened men. It merely wasted yet more lives. The number of death sentences that military tribunals passed rose steadily between November 1941 and February 1942. The accused, most frequently, were charged with desertion and fleeing the battlefield.23 While all armies take measures of this sort to some extent, even this leadership was horrified by some tales of its own brutality. Investigators singled out a case where a lieutenant had shot a soldier for no reason (or none that they could see). In another case, a commissar shot his sergeant for smoking and a major for outspoken language. It was a cruel regime, but even so the desertions continued. The men feared battlefield death and mutilation more than their gun-toting commissars. ‘You won’t need to be in the army long,’ a soldier wrote home, ‘perhaps a month or so, before, no doubt, you end up in the German meat-grinder.’24

  Stalin, the expert, observed that terror was becoming ineffective. In October 1941, anticipating the army’s total collapse, he ordered that ‘persuasion, not violence’ should be used to motivate the men.25 Obediently, the political administration and Sovinformburo took every measure to ‘persuade’, maintaining a stream of distortions and lies about the army’s courage and the enemy’s distress. It did not work. ‘Don’t believe the newspapers,’ a soldier wrote. ‘Don’t believe the papers or the radio; the things they say are lies. We’ve been through it all and seen it all, the way the Germans are driving us – our own people don’t know where to run; we’ve nothing to fight with; and when the Germans catch up with us, our men have nothing to escape in. We’ve got no fuel, so they abandon our cars and tanks and run for it…’ Another bleakly added that ‘they make us keep our mouths shut’.26

  The task of inspiring these wretched men should have falle
n to their officers. Some of these would prove to be extraordinary men, but many, including some of the most efficient, were tyrants whose coarse language and rough discipline came straight from the primeval world of the village. The rest were often so inexperienced that seasoned troops despised them as mere boys, or worse, as bureaucrats. The worst offenders here included men promoted in the atmosphere that followed Stalin’s purge, the ones whose talents had appealed to politicians. It was absurd to think these people could inspire anyone. Konstantin Simonov described the type. At Kerch, in 1942, he met an officer he called Sorokin – ‘I can’t quite recall his name’ – who struck him as ‘unwarlike, knowing nothing about war. His only good quality,’ said Simonov, ‘was the fact that he knew he understood nothing, and so he did whatever he could not to interfere, or if he had to, he just made it look as if he was involved, although he was not really doing anything at all.’27

  ‘We never saw an officer,’ surviving opolchentsy muttered as they limped home from the front. ‘The generals ran away, they changed their trousers, and left us to fight.’28 Their story is repeated among divisions of experienced troops. In October 1941, the commander of the 50th rifle division of the 5th Army, Dorodnyi, reported that his men had received none of the artillery support they had been promised for the defence of Moscow’s Mozhaisk highway. ‘We had to hold the tanks at bay with rifles and machine guns,’ he complained. The commanding officer, General Kamera, listened for a few moments before barking that the artillery commander, Vasyukov, should be shot at once. The measure was beside the point. Vasyukov and his big guns were still needed for the next morning’s campaign. ‘I’ll look into it,’ Kamera replied, and climbed into his car. ‘I never saw him again,’ Dorodnyi wrote. ‘He seems to strengthen his authority by doing nothing, letting other people shed their blood.’29

  The officers who remained in the field, men like Dorodnyi, acted from a sense of duty and probably from military experience that dated from the civil war. Some were professionals, and some stiffened their trained resolve with real communist faith. The men, however, had fewer incentives. If they stayed in the field that winter, it was from inertia, from loyalty to their friends, or from the team spirit that the shared experiences of terror, hardship, and isolation from their former lives instilled.30 Their worlds had shrunk, their desires attenuated. Instead of choosing a future, they had become the creatures of their fate. The world beyond the lines of trenches and the army’s controlling routines was frightening in its own right, and the tales that were coming through from refugees and stragglers made it seem more terrible and uncanny still. But one emotion could be singled out among the confused impulses of almost every serviceman that winter, and it was the desire for revenge.

  ‘At last after half a year I am on your trail,’ Misha Volkov wrote to his wife in February 1942. ‘My joy is without bounds today, though it will be complete only when I receive a letter from your hand.’ That consummation came soon after. ‘Today is the happiest day of my life,’ the artilleryman wrote. ‘At last, after all the searching, I have found you.’ Volkov had been tortured by his worries. The last time he had seen his wife, she and their daughter had been settled in their home in Kiev. There had been no time for letters after that, for Volkov himself had been at the front line, and then, in September, Kiev had fallen. The rumour was that all its Jews were dead. Desperate for news, Volkov wrote to everyone he knew. Finally, in the new year, he made a public appeal on the radio. Three letters came from people he had scarcely met. His wife was safe. They told him how to find her new address.

  ‘In the last eight months I’ve been through quite a lot,’ Volkov wrote. ‘But my troubles can’t be compared in any way with all that you, no doubt, have been through. First that time in Kiev, then the evacuation and the uncertainty over me. I can imagine how difficult all that must have been for you, but at least you did not stay in Kiev to fall into the hands of the fascist monsters.’ For once, he wrote, the papers were failing to blacken the enemy enough. He was beginning to understand what he was fighting for. ‘However much they write in the newspapers about their atrocities,’ he went on, ‘the reality is much worse. I’ve been in some of the places where the beasts have been. I’ve seen the burned-out towns and villages, the corpses of women and children, the unhappy, plundered residents, but also I’ve seen the tears of joy when these people encountered us… The spirit of these places has affected me and it has grown in all our soldiers…’31

  Men like Volkov had no chance of returning home. They had to trust the army as a whole, even the state, to protect families in danger. If they had doubted Moscow and its ideology before, and even if they went on doing so in a part of their minds, the only way to sleep at night would be to attempt to believe that Stalin, the government, and their own fellow soldiers would take care of the people whom they loved. And they were learning fast about this war. They might not have believed the rumours in the first few weeks – the propaganda machine had always generated lies – but before long they could see and touch the evidence for themselves. That winter, the first mutilated bodies – burned, butchered, bruised and left to freeze in the thin snow – were found and photographed by front-line Soviet troops retaking villages near Moscow.

  Their enemy seemed to rejoice in violence. Escaping refugees told of mass shootings, the torturing of partisans. The fascists drank and laughed as the corpses of their victims burned on petrol-sodden pyres. ‘According to the local people,’ wrote a man from Smolensk, ‘on 13 December 1941 the enemy locked captured Red Army men in a four-storey building surrounded by barbed wire. At midnight the Germans set fire to it. When the Red Army soldiers started jumping from the windows the Germans fired at them. About seventy people were shot and many burned to death.’32 Some Wehrmacht soldiers treasured souvenirs of violence. A snapshot found in the breast pocket of a fallen German infantryman that winter showed the massacre of Kovno’s Jews. Another showed a German soldier contemplating two hanged Russians swinging from a rope. Even the most hardened Red Army men could not ignore the gruesome truth these pictures showed. It was no longer wise to argue that any dictator would do if Russia could just have some peace.

  The massacre of Jews at Kovno (photograph found in the pocket of a German NCO captured later in the war, courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)

  German soldiers with the bodies of their Russian victims (another photograph that its German owner had cherished, courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)

  Not every soldier reached this view at once – some never did – and few reached it with ease or lightly. It was as if each person’s world, their pre-war world, had to collapse, to fail them, before they understood the purpose of their lives. Volkov had nightmares about his wife and child; Moskvin, in his dark hut, had to rethink his communism. Older men seemed to look back over their time, the dream-like years of state-directed change, with something like bewilderment. The past now shimmered like a story-book paradise. Contrast alone made every image clearer. Those years of peace, years that had seemed so hard, had been accepting, easy, safe; a time of opportunities that each man valued only now, in retrospect. But strangely, when there could be no escape, the rush of wartime action brought a sense of renewed worth. ‘It’s like the way that a healthy person is not aware of his body,’ a soldier wrote of this feeling. ‘It’s only when something starts to hurt that you understand what health really is.’33

  The fear of death also gave some people – including grown men in their late thirties or older – their first real taste of life. At this stage, the effect was often bleak. Veterans fell prey to fatalism; a sense, based upon fact and not on premonition, that though they had just learned to value life they were as good as dead. Their hopes now focused, if they had them, on their families and children. ‘It’s hard to know how long I will remain alive,’ a man wrote to his wife in January 1942. She was expecting their first child, but he knew he would never see it. He told her that he could not describe the things he had wi
tnessed at the front. Instead, he wanted to think about her future and that of the child. ‘Deal with my things as you see fit,’ he wrote. ‘They are yours, as I am yours and you are mine. Simochka, whether it is a boy or a girl, please bring it up according to your own beliefs. Tell it about me, about your husband and its father.’34 ‘You couldn’t say that I’m alive – no,’ another soldier wrote to his wife and daughter. ‘A dead person is a blind one, and for that reason the only thing that interests me is your life, my only concern is to remember you.’35

  The pre-war sense of homeland dissolved just as quickly as the dream of easy victory. Gordon had been a naïve internationalist at school. The first Germans he met were prisoners, an officer and two infantrymen. One of the soldiers was a worker. ‘He didn’t understand at first,’ Gordon recalled, ‘what the interpreter meant when he asked him how a proletarian could take up arms against the land of the Soviets, the first homeland of the proletariat of the whole world. He answered that most of the men in his unit were either peasants or workers, and that for them the “fatherland” was not Russia but Germany. That answer made us all reflect on the meaning of the phrase “The Soviet Union – homeland of the world proletariat.”’36 So did first-hand exposure to that homeland’s cold realities: forced marches, blizzards, fog, hunger, and digging, endless digging in chill, clammy earth. ‘The party told us that there was nothing dearer than motherland,’ a Belorussian veteran declared. But the way that motherland was imagined was changing for everyone. For some, like Moskvin, the notion enlarged to encompass a new landscape, villages, unlettered peasants, and dour local fighters whose toughness equalled his own. For others, the idea narrowed, shrinking away from universal brotherhood in a xenophobic tide of holy Russian chauvinism.