Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  Moskvin sustained one of his frequent stabs of spiritual pain. ‘I realize how naïve our army training was,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘We excluded the idea of becoming prisoners entirely from our view of what was acceptable in war, but what we told the soldiers and ourselves was that the enemy would use prisoners to extract secrets, that he would torture people to persuade them to betray. All our examples were drawn from the last war, the imperialist war, and from notions of class war. But now we’re dealing with the Gestapo and the SS, and as far as they’re concerned we’re nothing more than reds.’69 It was a lesson others also slowly learned. This enemy was not fighting a cartoon battle with the Bolsheviks; its sole aim was to wipe them out.

  ‘In the town of Rzhev there is a concentration camp with fifteen thousand captured Red Army soldiers in it and five thousand civilians,’ ran a smuggled report of December 1941. ‘They are holding them in unheated huts, and they feed them one or two frozen potatoes each a day. The Germans threw rotten meat and some bones through the barbed wire at the prisoners. This has made them ill. Every day 20–30 people are dying. The ones who are too ill to work are shot.’70 It was a holocaust that devoured millions. Until the German rout at Stalingrad, most Soviet prisoners were held near the front line. ‘Many of them died on the bare ground,’ a German witness admitted at Nuremberg. ‘Epidemics broke out and cannibalism manifested itself.’ ‘It was not until well into 1942,’ Werth commented, ‘that the surviving Russian war prisoners began to be looked on as a source of slave labour.’71

  Among the minority of captured soldiers who survived, a disproportionate number belonged to non-Slavic ethnic groups. They owed their lives to German racist fantasies and to the handful of quixotic nationalists, based in Berlin, who had escaped from their own countries during the troubled founding years of Soviet power. These men now toured the camps in search of fellow countrymen. The rescue that they offered was conditional. Those they selected were considered to have volunteered for the so-called legions – Georgian, Cossack, Turkestan – whose sacred duty was to free their homelands from Bolshevism. But the men’s choice could seldom be described as free; their decisions say more about the torment they endured than about their real loyalties.

  Ibrai Tulebaev escaped in just this way. In 1942, he was recruited for the Turkestan legion, but he defected back to the Soviet side in 1943. The police who interrogated him filed every detail of his account of the camps that he survived between August 1941 and the spring of 1942. The first of these was on Polish soil. It consisted of twelve blocks, each housing between 1,500 and 2,000 inmates. The men were penned inside at dusk. Any who stepped outside were shot. Each night, ten or fifteen of them died in this way. By day, the German guards used prisoners for target practice and baited some of them with dogs. Sometimes they placed bets on the animals – not on the men – to see which could fight hardest. There was so little food that hungry prisoners ripped flesh from corpses. Disease killed those who survived German sport. But Tulebaev was moved on; the Germans had noted his ethnicity and had already begun to segregate potential nationalist freedom fighters. They had a cruel way of breaking the men’s hearts. In December 1941, Tulebaev calculated, there were about 80,000 prisoners in his new camp. Most were in the light uniforms they had been wearing back in June. By February, all but 3,000 or so had died of cold, malnutrition, typhus and dysentery. Twelve men were shot for cannibalism that December; too few survived for punishment to matter much when the snow melted in April.72

  The same stories were repeated in camps across Poland, Belorussia and Ukraine. At Dubno, they beat men to death. In Minsk, they tortured naked victims with alternate jugs of icy and of boiling water. Wherever prisoners were held, the politruks and Jews were shot as soon as they were recognized, and then the Germans started sifting out the non-Russians. It would be months before the new legions were fit to bear arms on the German side. Many had first to spend weeks in special hospitals recovering from the purgatory of their imprisonment. They were not always fully conscious of the turn that events were about to take. ‘They did it for an extra crust of bread,’ the daughter of Georgia’s wartime nationalist leader, Shalva Maglakelidze, told me. ‘They knew my father had saved their lives.’ Maglakelidze, who had not set foot on Soviet soil since 1921, believed that he was raising an army to liberate his people. The Georgians he rescued, by contrast, were clutching at a slender chance of life.

  The threat of death was sometimes just as real for the people who found themselves on the wrong side of German lines. This was a war, they soon learned, of annihilation; a war of scorched earth, mass deportation and easy, public slaughter. With little information and no faith in either the Soviet or the German state, each person had to weigh the options for his own survival. In July 1941, thousands of local people joined the German side as politzei, agents of Nazi power in the occupied zone. Some were willing enough; they were the ones who celebrated the coming defeat of every hated feature of the empire that they saw as a Soviet, Bolshevik or even Jewish monster. Others made their choice on impulse, to avoid imprisonment or a bullet. ‘During the retreat of the Red Army our agitation was very weak,’ a Soviet intelligence report conceded in September 1942. It insisted that many joined the politzei and the 1,000-strong paramilitary ‘Ukrainian legion’ that had terrorized the partisans of the Smolensk region that summer to escape death or torture in a German prison camp, but the implication was that, for others, the Soviet dream (if it had ever held appeal) had soured.

  In Soviet eyes, the problem was that far too many people in the occupied regions, finding themselves leaderless and stateless, had ‘listened to the Hitlerites and followed them’. 73 Moscow’s answer was to reach these people through a new group of combatants: the partisans. Scant planning had been made for guerrilla war in the months leading up to Barbarossa, but the potential of partisan detachments was soon understood in Moscow. ‘There must be diversionist groups for fighting enemy units,’ Stalin had ordered in July 1941. ‘In the occupied areas intolerable conditions must be created for the enemy and his accomplices.’74 The wartime myth still celebrates these tough guerrilla fighters, the men and women who cut German supply lines by blowing up railways and bridges, the heroes who prepared the way for the Red Army’s troops. That was indeed part of their work – a costly part – but it is doubtful that their true value was sabotage. As a 1942 report put it, ‘nature abhors a vacuum’.75 The partisans’ main task was to maintain the grip of Soviet power.76

  Mikhail Ivanovich’s OSMBON unit was among the first to hazard the route back into country that the Germans held. His task was to round up Red Army stragglers, shoot provocateurs and shape some kind of discipline behind the lines. The groups of partisans that he helped form became the face of Soviet power in the remote woods of Smolensk province. His men brought more than discipline; their revolvers were backed up with the promise (not always kept) of supplies. Later, they would also help to establish the routes by which letters (carefully censored) could be exchanged across the front-line zone. News from the ‘big country’ off to the east fostered new hope and loyalty in some beleaguered villages.77 OSMBON troops even wooed the peasants by helping them in the fields. They carried out agitational work, collecting and disseminating Sovinformburo reports to counteract German propaganda. They organized party meetings to celebrate anniversaries, teach hygiene and basic survival tactics, and generally to remind people of the joys of Soviet life. Their efforts helped to form a new, parallel army in the woods. By November 1942, according to Soviet reports, there were about 94,000 partisans behind the German lines from the Baltic to the Crimea. Just under 10 per cent of these were in the Smolensk region.78 It was to them that Nikolai Moskvin eventually turned.

  The politruk had not been able to decide, at first, if he should join the partisans or make for the nearest Red Army base. Rumour reached him in October 1941 that there was fighting near Vyaz’ma, but then the trail went cold, and he began to fear that the army had fled beyond his reach. What sustained him th
rough the first snow was the news, brought by escaping prisoners, of Stalin’s speech of 7 November, the address made to soldiers in Red Square. ‘Everyone is still at their posts,’ he wrote. ‘Soon there will be a celebration everywhere.’ But this relief was premature. It would be months before the fugitive could make a bid to break through to the Soviet zone. In March, when the winter began to lift, he headed east, his goal the Red Army beyond Kaluga. Moskvin was captured as he neared the German lines. German troops took him to the camp at Granki, a front-line holding station, little more than a large yard. There he met the survivors of the previous autumn’s encirclement at Vyaz’ma. They had been in the camp for six long months. ‘If you haven’t seen this,’ Moskvin wrote, ‘you won’t be able to imagine the utter horror of this human tragedy. I saw it with my own eyes. People were dying of exhaustion, cold and beatings.’

  Moskvin was not destined to die with them. Healthy and determined, he still had the will to evade guards who were themselves cold and depressed after the winter. Six days after his capture he was on the run again. But he had lost his papers. Loyal though he was, he knew that the reds could easily shoot him as a deserter. It was this knowledge that impelled him to head west, not east. That June, he joined a partisan group made up of former soldiers like himself. ‘It’s really satisfying to fight the fascists this way,’ he wrote jauntily that month. ‘We can get them on the roads, from hiding, with almost no cost to our own men.’ On 29 July, his battalion killed a group of German guards, taking a score of politzei as prisoners and seizing two new machine guns. ‘I’m really doing business,’ he wrote. And then, in August, came the best news of the year. ‘A really great joy for me today,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve received three letters at once from the big country.79 My parents are alive. Mariya is alive. Hurrah!’

  If letters could get through and men escape, then many partisans, including skilled fighters, might also have gone back to strengthen the Red Army. But the state had use for them just where they were. As ever, the policy was callous, for though the men had orders to remain, they received neither food nor weapons. ‘We have instructions to stay in the triangle near Smolensk and keep on fighting,’ Moskvin noted in September 1942. His optimism had begun to ebb. ‘The winter will be hard. Half our men don’t have the right shoes or clothes.’ Like the outlaws they had become, his troops began to desert. Moskvin himself would soon curse Moscow’s callousness. ‘We’re supposed to live by stealing from the enemy and appealing to the locals,’ he wrote, but there was nothing for it but to extort food if everyone was starving. ‘In many places groups of enemies masquerading as partisans are engaging in banditry,’ a party report from Smolensk alleged. However, the looters were more likely to be Soviet men. ‘It’s not surprising that local people run off and complain to the Germans,’ Moskvin confirmed. ‘A lot of the time we’re just robbing them like bandits.’80

  Once again, the Germans’ own atrocities were all that held the Soviets in place. ‘At present,’ a partisan leader stated, ‘the situation is this: we in the forest believe that communism (which 70 or 80 per cent of us hate) will at least let us live, but the Germans, with their National Socialism, will either shoot us or starve us to death.’81 ‘Are you alive? I don’t know,’ a soldier called Vasily Slesarev wrote to his wife, three sons and daughter in December 1941. It would be seven months before he heard from them. They, too, were trapped behind the German lines. It was a letter from his twelve-year-old daughter Mariya, brought out by partisans, that told the older man their news. ‘We had already started to think that no one was alive, but it looks as if you are and Shura, though we have not heard from Sergei,’ the child wrote. Near Smolensk, in her village, there had been deaths. ‘Papa,’ Mariya went on, ‘our Valik died and is in the graveyard at Sumarokovo. Papa, the German monsters set fire to us.’ The family home had been razed to the ground on 30 January 1942. Survivors and their animals had been driven away. The boy Valery had died of pneumonia in the damp shelter where his family were hiding. ‘Many people have been killed in the villages round here,’ Mariya told her father. ‘And all they think about is the bloodthirsty monsters, you can’t even call them human, they’re just robbers and drinkers of blood. Papa, kill the enemy!’82

  Among the many secrets of this war was its true cost. On 23 February 1942, Red Army Day, Stalin announced that the Germans had lost the advantage. The Red Army was driving them towards the west, he said, and it had cleared them completely from the provinces of Moscow and Tula.83 Fighting talk like this was one of the few resources that the leader still commanded.84 In reality, those weeks in February were among the darkest of the war. Moscow had not fallen, but Leningrad was under siege, its citizens facing a ‘white death’ by starvation. To the south, the Crimea, with its strategic command of the Black Sea coast and the gates of the Caucasus, was almost entirely in German hands. Only the port of Sevastopol, besieged and under constant fire, still held out through the winter. Tula, as Stalin said, was free, but almost every other town and city to the west had been destroyed. The Germans had certainly lost large numbers of men, and Stalin was also right to say that their reserves were stretched. But Soviet losses had been greater by far. In addition to nearly 3 million captured men, the Red Army had lost 2,663,000 killed in action by February 1942. For every German who was killed, twenty Soviet soldiers had died.85

  These figures should have been enough to cause a collapse of morale, if not a revolution, on their own. But they were not released. No one could calculate the total human cost of the war they were living through. Civilians who witnessed fighting, like the soldiers who fought, knew plenty about individual battles, but their knowledge was anecdotal, and even they could scarcely have guessed the true scale of the carnage. The very magnitude of the Soviet people’s loss put it beyond imagination. And no figure could ever represent the truth of so much pain, or even the enormous heaps of bodies; rotting, semi-frozen flesh. The dead were not yet skeletons, their graves not yet those solid monuments of black granite. Their faces still showed shock and agony, their fingers clutched at mud and snow. In some places, the bodies lay on other bodies, heaps of human corpses rising up as if to stem some bloody tide. The only places where images like this were known and shared, apart from front-line camps, were hospitals. It was not for nothing that cheerful komsomols were sent to sit with convalescing troops, to read them letters, poems and selected extracts from the press. Only at night were the real stories whispered round the wards.

  The most desperate, that spring, came from the south. The men caught up in campaigns there learned to expect and even welcome death. ‘We used to say that whoever survives this winter will live a long time,’ a soldier who fought near Feodosia, in eastern Crimea, told his diary. The road along the coast was strewn with bodies, but his comrades could not bury them because of German fire. ‘I’m ready now,’ he added, ‘for a death of any kind.’86 With Sevastopol still in Soviet hands, a major expedition had been launched in December 1941 to liberate eastern Crimea. Its aim was to take the Kerch peninsula and use it as a bridgehead to relieve the pressure on Sevastopol and recapture the entire region. The project was doomed. As one young conscript wrote in February, ‘Our troops have abandoned Feodosia. What was the point in taking it, if we had not made preparations for its defence? If we’ve got to take every city twice like this, then maybe in 1945 we’ll get to the end of this war.’87 A Soviet force remained in the lowlands round Kerch, the easternmost point on the Crimea, but its prospects were bleak. In early May, the Germans attacked for a final time, driving the Soviets towards the narrow strait that separates Kerch and its ancient harbour from the Russian mainland.

  Kerch saw several kinds of tragedy that spring. First came the fighting itself. Stalin’s favourite, Lev Mekhlis, was put in charge. For him, the struggle was a matter of morale. What that meant in practice was that military preparation for the last defence was minimal. ‘Everyone had to go forward, forward!’ Simonov, who witnessed some of it, recalled. Ten kilometres behind the lines, h
e observed, there was nothing; no support, no reserve and no transport. Mekhlis believed that trenches sapped the spirit of aggression. None was ever dug. This was particularly unfortunate, for beyond the port itself, the landscape of the Kerch peninsula is gently rolling steppe, treeless and sometimes marshy, offering no shelter to men fighting for their lives. The infantry divisions of the 51st Army, many of them Georgians recently arrived from an entirely different countryside and climate, had neither plan nor cover as they faced the guns. Simonov was horrified when an initial round of German shelling left the land strewn with more corpses than he had seen at any time in the whole war. ‘There were no officers anywhere,’ he added. ‘It all took place on an open, muddy, absolutely barren field.’88 The next day, more infantrymen were driven over the same ground, passing the bodies of their comrades in the fog as they rushed on towards their deaths. A hundred and seventy-six thousand men were slaughtered at Kerch in just twelve days.89

  The outcome was as Simonov predicted. In mid-May, the last remnants of Mekhlis’s army boarded small boats and set off across the five-mile strait towards the mainland. But the German advance had been so swift that many – several thousand – remained trapped in limestone hills behind the town. These men and women looked down on the strait below – they must have dreamed of walking across it – and knew there could be no escape. What came next was anguish of a kind that even this war would see only once or twice. It was typical because it involved individual courage, shattered faith and then a cruel waste of life. It was unique because the drama took place underground. The heroes of the story found their graves in a maze of tunnels deep within the Crimea’s rock.