Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  It was at this time, in the late autumn of 1941, that Stalin began to revise his own rhetoric regarding the motherland. His address that November at the Red Army’s state parade on the twenty-fourth anniversary of Lenin’s revolution spoke of Russia’s heroic past. The bitter trials of the civil war, when Lenin’s government so nearly died, were recalled at length – nothing else was possible on this of all occasions – but older epics joined them in a catalogue of struggle. Russian soldiers were called to emulate their ancestors: Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoi, Minin and Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov.37 ‘May you be blessed,’ the leader continued, ‘by Lenin’s victorious banner!’38 Russia’s defending troops could also hope for blessings from the Orthodox Church. From the first day of this war, Metropolitan Sergii of Moscow and Kostroma had insisted that it should stand by the people in their struggle.39 The state’s pre-war restrictions on worship were gently eased. But though they cherished totems – tin crosses or copies of poems – formal religion, so comforting to some civilians, was little use to soldiers at the front. Rage and hatred, which the state also nurtured, were more likely to inspire men on the brink of combat. In 1941, Pravda dropped its peacetime masthead, ‘Proletarians of all lands, unite!’ The slogan that replaced it was ‘Death to the German invaders!’

  ‘I never lost the feeling that this was a genuine People’s War,’ wrote Alexander Werth. ‘The thought that this was their war was, in the main, as strong among civilians as among the soldiers.’40 It would have been hard to remain neutral after witnessing the effects of that year’s German conquest. When Kursk fell in November, its able-bodied men were rounded up and interned wherever the barbed wire could be unrolled. The lucky ones were herded into the central cinema; most others shivered in the open air. They were not fed at all. Then they were made to work, and those who failed to satisfy their captors were beaten with rubber truncheons and threatened with death. On the second day of the occupation, fifteen communist activists, including four young women, were made to dig graves in the black loam near the central square, and then each one was shot. Rumour had it that about 700 other young women had been rounded up and forced to work as prostitutes in makeshift brothels for the German troops. ‘The streets are empty,’ Soviet intelligence reported. ‘The shops have been looted. There is no mains water and no electricity. Kursk has collapsed. Life there has frozen.’41

  Kursk had not been a city with a large community of Jews. If it had been, it would have seen larger mass graves, more killing, and even more fear as newly blooded executioners enjoyed the privilege of power. The mass shootings in any town began as soon as the Wehrmacht arrived. Some, such as the massacre at Kiev’s Babi Yar, were carried out by special Einsatzgruppen, but many, including the shooting of 650 Jews at Klintsy, 540 at Mglin, 350 at Kletna and thousands more in the old Jewish Pale, were treated as routine military operations. The first killings terrified local people, but as a Soviet agent near Smolensk observed, eventually their effect was to harden them. ‘They laugh at the Germans now,’ affirmed a report in 1942. ‘People have become braver in the face of death, they know that they must fight the enemy with every ounce of their strength.’ There had been many willing collaborators in the early weeks, but by that first autumn the people’s ‘hatred of the enemy’ was ‘growing and growing’.42

  Moskvin observed the same shift in the peasants’ mood. In late August 1941, the politruk came close to absolute despair. The shooting of Jews would not have troubled his peasant hosts, he realized, for they blamed them for most of the troubles communism had brought. Their anti-Semitism went hand in hand with a ‘fanatical belief in God’, a faith that the invading Germans wisely indulged everywhere. Some even volunteered to become fascism’s local agents – politzei – but at heart it was not politics but survival that impelled them. ‘After each battle,’ Moskvin noted, ‘they rush to the field to loot the corpses for whatever they can find.’ The dearest hope of these peasants was for an end to Soviet power, but in September 1941, they learned that the Germans had ordered that the collective farms should stay. Like the pre-war Soviet authorities, the conquerors cared only for the ease with which the peasants’ grain could be collected and shipped off. It was an irreversible mistake. ‘The mood of the local population has changed sharply,’ Moskvin wrote on 30 September. His heart still sickened at the news that reached him from the front. Like everyone around him, he was desperate for advice.43 But he was no longer in danger of cheap betrayal.

  Moskvin was also lonely. The army of his memory glowed with the warmth of comradeship, but regular troops could have corrected him about the chance of this. At this stage in the war, few referred to their mates in any letters home. The primary groups, ‘buddies’, that mattered so much to American soldiers in Vietnam seem hardly to have featured in the shadow of defeat. Units were butchered and entire divisions smashed. The survivors, shocked and exhausted, were redeployed piecemeal wherever men were needed. Tank and air crews, both of them types of soldier who form strong bonds through mutual dependence and shared risk, were not as evident at this stage in the war as they would be from 1943. And the army was in retreat, disordered, scattering across a giant space. Men still formed friendships in this extreme world, truer and stronger than their peacetime ones, but most were doomed to loss. Peer loyalties, indeed, could well be retrospective, grieving. The strongest sentimental ties, in 1941, were often with the dead, the strength of every soldier’s resolve made holy by blood sacrifice.

  The other missing character in the soldiers’ imaginary worlds at this stage in the war was Stalin. Moskvin scarcely mentioned him. The leader was an irrelevance in his remote village. Only the memory of peace seemed still to conjure the great man. Older people would never forgive the betrayals of 1929, the pain of poverty and loss. Now Stalin was failing them again. But the young, and the millions who rethought their universe as they watched comrades die, looked for solace as the winter drew on. This was the process by which the leader turned into a totem, the one constant that promised rescue, remained strong. The Stalin who fulfilled this role was not the same man, in imagination, as the leader of the 1930s; or rather, he represented the lost paradise remembered from a vanished world. He was a talisman, a name, a hollow image that some privately abhorred. But it was better, in this darkness, to find something to believe in than to die in utter desolation.

  According to the patriotic myth, whole armies used the same slogan to raise their spirits on the brink of battle. Though German veterans mainly recall the Soviets’ blood-curdling ‘Hoorah!’, the official war cry that millions of Red Army survivors remembered later was ‘For the motherland! For Stalin!’ In recent years, some old soldiers – especially those who were never officers – have expressed doubts about the use of this phrase. ‘Did we shout that?’ Ivan Gorin, a soldier and the son of peasants, laughed. ‘I’m sure we shouted something when we went at the guns, but I don’t think it was that polite.’ The officers and policemen were too far back behind the lines to hear. Those who used the slogan, however, had good reason to chorus the familiar words. Whatever Gorin claimed later, or writers like the veteran Vasil Bykov, superstition forbade swearing on the eve of battle.44 And it would have been hard to have agreed on an alternative expression without alerting the secret police. Though the men muttered lots of things, and all used the drawn-out, terrible ‘Hoorah!’, the famous words may also have been as common as survivors have claimed. The point was that it hardly mattered what names the men used. They needed a war cry, a loud noise that united every pair of lungs and forced their muscles on. The sound, and not the meaning, was the point. The slogan became sacred in its own right. And then the real man slowly assumed the charisma surrounding it.45

  At this early stage, however, the people who cared most about Stalin and his image were the propagandists. Despite the pressures of likely defeat, some officers considered that time should be spent, as it had always been, fostering myths and grooming spurious internal enemies. In February 1942, a recruit
from Siberia was sent north to the Volkhov Front near Leningrad. The ski battalion he had joined was broken up by German fire within a week, and he was redeployed to a regular infantry division, the 281st. This was a war of position, and he and his comrades spent their days digging new trenches, dodging shells and wondering what they were fighting for. ‘All we knew,’ the old man later told his children, ‘was that we were fighting for the motherland.’ His surname, Khabibulin, suggests that motherland for him had once been to the east of Russia itself, which probably explains why he was picked when the Special Section needed a scapegoat. The pretext was a casual remark he made to a Ukrainian soldier who had botched an attempt at shooting his own thumb off. ‘You could have done that better,’ Khabibulin observed. ‘They’d have demobilized you.’ The young man asked him sharply if he did not want to fight. ‘What can I say?’ Khabibulin answered. ‘We’re fighting.’ And then, less cautiously, and maybe out of pity for the boy, he added something about the sad loss of life.

  Khabibulin was arrested three days later and accused of fomenting opposition to the popular struggle on behalf of the motherland and Stalin. The charges carried the death penalty, but Khabibulin escaped with a ten-year sentence, part of which, ironically, he served in a prison where Stalin himself had languished forty years before. So he survived, and much later, after the fall of communism, he was able to see his own files at the KGB. It was then that he learned how other men, his comrades, had agreed to testify against him, and how the investigators had been obsessed, of all things, by his attitude to Stalin. The depositions would have been dictated by police; they tell us more about the state’s own propaganda needs than about real soldiers’ thinking at the time. So it is interesting that a man who scarcely seemed to have given the leader a thought until his arrest found testimonies that quoted him as saying, ‘I won’t fight for Stalin. If it’s for Stalin, I won’t fight.’46

  When they were fighting, the men scarcely thought of food, but every other waking moment was coloured by incessant hunger. Their usual diet, according to a politruk who served in the defence of Moscow, was breakfast at 6 o’clock, including soup ‘so thick that a spoon could stand in it any way up you liked’, a lunch of buckwheat kasha, tea and bread, and then more soup and tea at nightfall. A medical orderly supervised the preparation of all food, testing each dish before it could be served up to the men.47 In 1941, the daily ration for front-line soldiers theoretically included nearly a kilogram of bread, 150 g of meat, buckwheat, dried fish and a healthy lump of lard or fat.48 But even the politruk conceded that ‘in battle, it was much harder with food’.49

  Artillerymen dining beside their weapons, 1941

  What that meant was that most combat soldiers received nothing but dry rations, and sometimes nothing at all, for days on end. ‘We’re living in dugouts in the woods,’ a soldier wrote home at this time. ‘We sleep on straw, like cattle. They feed us very badly – twice a day, and even then not what we need. We get five spoonfuls of soup in the morning… we’re hungry all day.’50 Mere discomfort, in those conditions, was the least serious consequence. That winter, temperatures dropped well below thirty degrees of frost. ‘Seven of our lads have frostbite in their legs,’ a soldier wrote to his mother in February 1942. ‘They’re in hospital now. We had to go seven days without a crust, we were exhausted and starved. I’ve done nothing since I got back but eat. My legs have started swelling up a bit at night, I eat a lot, and my stomach aches all the time.’51 Even the bureaucrats became concerned. That winter saw a stream of orders about hot food and vital supplies for the front line.52

  Men were also short of basic clothing. Russian people feel the cold like every other European does. They have no magic inner warmth, whatever their shivering opponents thought as the October rain began to turn to sleet. After the Finnish war, the General Staff had reviewed the whole question of cold-weather gear for Soviet troops, and there is no doubt that valenki, padded jackets and trousers, fur gloves and warm hats saved thousands of lives in the Red Army through the war. One of the stock characters of Soviet wartime farce, by contrast, was the ‘winter Fritz’, the hapless German forced to clothe himself in stolen mitts, newspaper padding and some babushka’s outlandish drawers.53 But the Red Army had problems, too. With manufacturing at a near standstill, new supplies could not be guaranteed. In 1942, for instance, the Soviet footwear industry would turn out enough boots to supply just 0.3 pairs to every person in the land.54 Storage, repairs and salvage were vital for mere survival. But habits learned through years of coexistence with state bureaucrats and planners could be difficult to break. In September 1941, inspectors found a forgotten shipment of 266,000 pairs of army trousers stacked without covers and already dripping with mildew.55 Tens of thousands of winter boots awaited overdue repair while hundreds of recruits faced winter without footwear of any kind.56 By the next spring, the situation was so critical that officers and men who served behind the lines were barred from receiving greatcoats with their summer kit. Instead, they had to be content with cast-off padded jackets from the front.57

  The black market grew and flourished. All kinds of military property were diverted or filched, including boots and other clothing, fuel, food and even kitchen pots.58 Tobacco had become so scarce by 1942 that Muscovites would light a cigarette and offer passers-by the chance, for two valenki, to take a puff.59 Army supplies – wholesale, anonymous and so easy to steal – were treasure even honest patriots could not resist. Another thriving trade sprang into life in response to the introduction, on 25 August 1941, of a front-line ration of vodka. The idea was to issue every soldier on active duty with 100 g per day. Special officers were charged with measuring the portions, and the unused surplus was supposed to be accounted for every ten days.60 But vodka is too precious to be treated with such pedantry. Officers and men who were not entitled to a ration helped themselves from the stores. Hard-pressed quartermasters sold them off.61 In Moscow, Simonov observed, people were drinking more vodka than tea by January 1942. Drunkenness remained a problem among front-line troops,62 and everyone knew that the supply would increase after a battle. ‘It was always good to serve with the infantry,’ a survivor remembered. ‘The infantry or the artillery. The death rates among them were highest. And no one was checking how much vodka we sent back.’

  Humorous portrayal of the ‘Winter Fritz’, from a Red Army theatrical review called ‘The Thieving Army’, February 1942

  No one checked up on the dead, either. ‘Not rarely,’ ran one of Mekhlis’s mealy-mouthed notes, ‘the corpses of soldiers… are not collected from the battlefield for several days and no one cares, although it would be entirely possible to bury our comrades with full military honours.’ He mentioned a case where fourteen bodies had lain unburied for five days, a not surprising outcome in December, on frozen ground, with every soldier needing to conserve his strength. ‘Corpses on the field,’ Mekhlis observed, ‘have a political resonance that affects the political–moral condition of the soldiers and the authority of commissars and commanders.’63 More urgently, the dead had possessions that living soldiers needed more. New uniforms were reserved for each new army as it formed; front-line troops needing fresh supplies relied on recycled clothes and equipment. ‘After very severe battles,’ recalled a politruk, ‘we had to send our soldiers back into the field to gather the dead with their weapons so that we could use them again the next morning.’64 That December, Mekhlis would order that all bodies should be buried promptly with the proper respect (and careful documentation).65 Ten months later, the authorities complained that corpses were still being pitched into trenches and shell holes, or worse, that they were being left out for the rats. As for their possessions, a further order, dated 29 November 1942, listed the items that burial parties were expected to retrieve, including ‘greatcoats, tunics, hats, padded trousers and jackets, sweaters, gloves, boots and valenki’.66 Burial teams were not considered to have recovered a corpse unless they also carried back a gun.

  Death was probably a
better fate – if it were swift – than capture for Red Army troops. ‘Our treatment of prisoners of war,’ a German intelligence officer observed in February 1942, ‘cannot continue without consequences. It is no longer because of lectures from the politruks, but out of his own personal convictions that the Soviet soldier has come to expect an agonizing life or death if he falls captive.’67 The knowledge made Soviet troops fight bitterly and fuelled deeper hate. ‘If the Germans treated our prisoners well,’ a colonel told Werth in 1942, ‘it would soon be known. It’s a horrible thing to say, but by ill-treating and starving our prisoners to death, the Germans are helping us.’68

  The tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers who surrendered in June and July 1941 never imagined the fate that awaited them at German hands. But by the late summer, terrible stories had begun to spread. In August, Moskvin met the first of the many escaped soldiers that he would harbour in the coming months. The man’s account would chill his blood. ‘They say there’s no shelter,’ Moskvin wrote, ‘no water, that people are dying from hunger and disease, that many are without proper clothes or shoes. They are treated like slaves, shot for the slightest misdemeanour, or just from mischief, for a kind of fun.’ Ukrainian captives, who already enjoyed, if they so chose, a kind of privilege within the camps, were encouraged to finger communists and Jews. The victims suffered beatings, dug their graves, and died with bullets in their backs.