Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  The officers of the Special Section, hardened agents in the mould of Mikhail Ivanovich and the OSMBON, took charge at once. Barking their orders and fingering loaded guns, they gathered every straggler and mustered the men. Then they produced a group of local guides, people who knew the landscape and its secret caves. These men led the entire company into a quarry, an enormous labyrinth of pits and tunnels from which the stone to build a fortress for the port’s defence had been taken eighty years before. This cave city would now become the soldiers’ home. Three thousand people, including nurses and refugees from Kerch (these people had survived one episode of German rule and knew to fear a second even more), huddled away into the darkness. They dragged their horses and their guns; they carried bundles of supplies. If they had glanced behind them as they shuffled down into the earth, they would have glimpsed the grassy steppe, the blue spring light, burgeoning yellow tansy and the crimson splashes of the first poppies. These colours would have been the last that they saw. Few would blink in daylight again, or even feel a cool breeze on their skin.

  The cave city was organized; that is, the men from the Special Section knew their work. They split their company into detachments and assigned clear tasks to each. Some were organized into sentry rotas; others sent off down dank tunnels to look for hidden exits, search for water or scrape together any food or fuel. The men in charge made their headquarters in the largest, safest cave. The hospital was set up in the deepest one. It was soon needed. Without a regular supply of food, the refugees began to eat the flesh of horses that had died in the escape. Three months later, this meat was still the only food they had. At first, scouts from the quarry made raids to the surface, seizing whatever they could steal and harassing the German guards who watched over the site, but in a few weeks all that stopped as well. The quarry people were trapped. As they waited for death, they lit their darkness with thin, stinking candles made from burning strips of rubber tyre.

  The Germans planted explosives around the exits from the site. Rocks and splinters rained down on the fugitives below. Then poison gas was released into the tunnels, killing all but a few score of the Soviet defenders. These last died hungry and despairing in the next few weeks, but they did not surrender. In Soviet myth, the quarry at Adzhimuskai became another Leningrad, a Brest fortress, a place where heroes held out to the last. But in fact, these brave men and women had no choice. Although some of the officers, the Special Section men with their revolvers and their survival training, must have escaped and reported the tale, the others were forced to remain. They were kept in the pit at gunpoint, threatened with death by comrades from their own side. If they would not behave like heroes, choosing a noble end, they would die from a Soviet bullet in the neck.90

  The fall of Kerch sealed Sevastopol’s fate. Since the previous autumn, the city had been holding out, although it was a grim shadow of the Black Sea resort that Messerschmidts had bombed a year before. In late May 1942, the defenders heard that German troops were converging on the city, and some of its residents – women, the elderly and children – were evacuated by sea from the port that week. Among the many who remained was the writer and humorist Evgeny Petrov, who died during the last days of the siege. The NKVD guards, meanwhile, disposed of their prisoners – allegedly in caves near Inkerman – and then made their escape into the night. The bombardment began. There were so many planes, the naval officer Evseev wrote, that there was no space above the town for them to circle. The sound, ‘a hellish cacophony’, was so constant and deafening that citizens found any silence troubling. ‘And the heavier the bombing,’ Evseev remarked, ‘the greater and more strong became our rage and hatred of the enemy.’

  It was a passionate but futile anger. By early July, Junkers were flying as low as 100 metres above the northern suburbs of the city. The pavements and boulevards where sailors had once strolled were strewn with corpses now, the lovely buildings gutted, thick with smoke. ‘Heat,’ Evseev wrote. ‘We were all desperately thirsty. But no one had any water in his flask.’ He and a group of other men had taken shelter in the caves and tunnels underneath the port. Someone was sent to find water, and the others passed the time by dreaming of the things they might have liked to drink: ‘lemonade, kvass, seltzer water, beer, and, if you please, ice cream. But we agreed on one thing. We’d drink anything, even if it was not cold fresh water, even if it were polluted, even if it had been flowing through the corpses.’ He added that ‘We had been drinking water from under corpses for several days.’ The bodies had been thrown into the concrete tanks and reservoirs around the town. As Evseev commented, ‘We never managed to clear them out.’

  Evseev was among the many who escaped, shipped off the coast within a few days of the city’s fall. Thousands of others, many of them military personnel like him, remained behind to face a pitiless enemy. ‘The city was unrecognizable,’ Evseev lamented, looking back from an army truck. ‘It was dead. The snow-white city of a little while ago, Sevastopol the beautiful, had turned into a ruin.’ As the men boarded their boat to cross a perilous Black Sea, they swore they would be back to take revenge.91 It was a brave boast, and one that some eventually fulfilled, but for the 90,000 or so women and men of the Red Army and Fleet captured with the town, it offered little hope.92

  The Soviet retreat continued. Kharkov had fallen to the enemy in May. With the Crimea securely under their control, the Germans now launched an attack on Rostov, a vital gateway to the Caucasus and to the Volga citadel of Stalingrad. By mid-July, most of the Don basin was occupied. Only Voronezh, to the north, held out. Staryi Oskol was taken, the Don crossed. ‘The majority of our commanding officers are cowards,’ a young man called Gudzovsky wrote. ‘Surely we did not need to run away, we could have stood our ground and faced them. Give us an order to go west! To hell with retreating! I’m sick to death of pulling back from the places where I grew up.’93 It was the last thing he would write before his death. The army could not even save the local people it would leave behind. ‘They shared their last crusts with us,’ a front-line officer remembered. ‘I ate that bread and knew that in an hour I’d be leaving, retreating. But I said nothing! I didn’t have the right!… If we had told them, they would have run away as well, and then there would have been bottlenecks along the road for us.’94

  The old man added that he felt ashamed. The army was failing in the rawest human terms. Many civilians in the threatened districts lost faith in Soviet troops that summer. ‘God knows what’s going on,’ a woman from a village wash-house hissed at two soldiers one evening. ‘We work and work, and they are just abandoning our towns!’ One of the men shot her a pained look and walked out. The other thought despairingly of his own home, Voronezh, which was under fire and which, because the road north was still blocked, he could not even dream of defending.95 Worse news was to follow. On 28 July, the Soviet people learned that Rostov and Novocherkassk had fallen. There was no stronghold now between the Germans and the Caucasus, and little to detain them on their way to Stalingrad.

  5

  Stone by Stone

  The second summer of the war blew with an arid wind that offered neither victory nor hope. The campaign that was meant to end with triumph in Berlin now threatened stalemate, if not unthinkable defeat. ‘We never doubted that we would win,’ the veterans have claimed. But the delusion of invincibility, sustained through the first months of shock, could not endure the truth of constant failure. The police did their duty, demanding rigid cheerfulness from everyone. One soldier was arrested merely for observing that ‘we’re retreating, and we won’t be coming back’.1 But by August 1942, the men themselves were getting tired of the despair and shame, of the reproachful stares that followed them as they abandoned, one by one, the gaunt, semi-deserted townships of the steppe. They had been dragging back across the wheatfields of Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban for months. Behind them, somewhere over the eastern horizon, flowed the Volga, the river that divides the European part of Russia from the gates of Asia. Eastwards again stretche
d thousands of miles of dust, a landscape little changed since Tamurlane, and one that sons of Russia’s gentler, settled heart found alien. Symbolically at least, the time was coming when the army would have nowhere left to go.

  The mindset that Stalin’s regime had fostered in its people – in public, optimistic and naïve; in private, wry and cynical – had failed the soldiers in these bitter months. For years, they had been incited to blame their misfortunes on others, the scapegoats that the state chose to call enemies and spies. Stalinism had shaped a culture that discouraged individuals from standing out. Buck-passing, for which its mandarins would coin a special word, obezlichka, became, during the purges after 1937, a matter, literally, of life and death. More than a year into the war, these patterns of behaviour had brought the Red Army to the edge of defeat. Now it was clear that every soldier’s effort, and perhaps his life, would be required. But months of humiliation had left the men edgy, prone to panic at the first rumour of German tanks.2 Morale was at its lowest ebb. ‘We wept as we retreated,’ a veteran recalled. The tears flowed from exhaustion, but they also signalled shame. ‘We were running anywhere to get away from Kharkov; some to Stalingrad, others to Vladikavkaz. Where else would we end up – Turkey?’3

  Years of habit drove each man to lay the blame on someone else. Troops from the Russian heartland pointed fingers at Ukrainians, especially the ‘westerners’ from former Polish lands. ‘Whole companies were abandoning the front line, the Ukrainians were melting away,’ Lev Lvovich, now an officer, recalled. ‘They weren’t going to the German side, but just back home.’ ‘Only the Russians are fighting these Germans,’ a young infantryman grumbled at the time. ‘Most of the Ukrainians have just stayed at home.’ As he looked out across the Kalmyk steppe, he added that ‘my own home is a long way from here, too. Why should I lay my bones in foreign soil?’4 The tens of thousands of Ukrainians at the front line, naturally, found other scapegoats for it all. ‘There were many, many cases… where people deliberately shot themselves in the hand, or the shoulder, just in the flesh,’ recalled a Kiev-based infantryman. ‘Then they’d be in hospital and wouldn’t have to go to the front line.’ And there was always a new ethnic minority to blame. ‘There were all those men from central Asia,’ he continued. ‘When it was their mealtime, or after a bit anyway, they’d throw themselves on the ground and start up with their “O Allah!” They were praying, and they weren’t going to rush at the enemy, or even get involved in combat at all.’5 Racism was so prevalent that even Moscow grew alarmed.6 The armed forces, like the society from which they came, were shattering like bombed-out glass.

  The tales of cities lost and farmland left to burn or rot arrived in the capital almost by the day. To the north, embattled Leningrad was holding, though the country’s leaders knew that its survival was as fragile as a hair. But to the south, the news was bleak. By late July, Stalin himself could stand no more. Interrupting a report that his chief of staff, Aleksandr Vasilevsky, was delivering, he ordered the general to draft a new command to the troops, a piece of paper that would come to symbolize that summer’s crucial turning point.7 The object was to change the mental habits of a generation. In fact, defeat itself was starting to break the old patterns, and there would be more changes in the coming months. Order no. 227 came at the army’s lowest point, but war itself would be the crucible in which a new mentality was forged.

  Order no. 227 was issued on 28 July. At Stalin’s insistence, it was never printed for general distribution. Instead, its contents were conveyed by word of mouth to every man and woman in the army. ‘Your reports must be pithy, brief, clear and concrete,’ the politruks were told. ‘There must not be a single person in the armed forces who is not familiar with Comrade Stalin’s order.’8 In ragged lines, huddled against the sun and wind, the soldiers listened to a roll-call of disgrace. ‘The enemy,’ they heard, ‘has already taken Voroshilovgrad, Starobel’sk, Rossosh’, Kupyansk, Valuiki, Novocherkassk, Rostov-on-Don and half of Voronezh. A section of the troops on the Southern Front, giving in to panic, abandoned Rostov and Novocherkassk without offering any serious defence and without waiting for Moscow’s orders. They covered their colours in shame.’ The troops then heard their leaders spelling out what every soldier knew, which was that the civilian population, their own people, had lost almost all faith in them. The time had come to stand their ground whatever proved to be the cost. As Stalin’s order put it, ‘Every officer, every soldier and political worker must understand that our resources are not limitless. The territory of the Soviet state is not just desert, it is people – workers, peasants, intellectuals, our fathers, mothers, wives, brothers, and children.’ Even Stalin conceded that at least 70 million of these were now behind the German lines.9

  Stalin’s remedy was embodied in a new slogan. ‘Not a step back!’ was to become the army’s watchword. Every man was told to fight until his final drop of blood. ‘Are there any extenuating causes for withdrawing from a firing position?’ soldiers would ask their politruks. In future, the reply that handbooks prescribed would be ‘The only extenuating cause is death.’10 ‘Panic-mongers and cowards,’ Stalin decreed, ‘must be destroyed on the spot.’ An officer who permitted his men to retreat without explicit orders was now to be arrested on a capital charge. And all personnel were confronted with a new sanction. The guardhouse was too comfortable to be used for criminals. In future, laggards, cowards, defeatists and other miscreants would be consigned to penal battalions. There they would have an opportunity ‘to atone for their crimes against the motherland with their own blood’. In other words, they would be assigned the most hazardous tasks, including suicidal assaults and missions deep behind the German lines. For this last chance they were supposed to feel gratitude. Death (or, the regulations stated, certain kinds of life-threatening injury) was a means for outcasts to redeem their names, saving their families and restoring their honour before the Soviet people. Meanwhile, to help the others concentrate, the new rules called for units of regular troops to be stationed behind the front line. These ‘blocking units’ were to supplement existing zagradotryady, the NKVD troops whose task had always been to guard the rear. Their orders were to kill anyone who lagged behind or attempted to run away.11

  Order no. 227 was not made public until 1988, when it was printed as part of the policy of glasnost, or openness. More than forty years after the end of the war, the measure sounded cruel to people reared on the romantic epic of Soviet victory. A generation that had grown up through decades of peace baulked at the old state’s lack of pity. But in 1942, most soldiers would have recognized a restatement of current rules. Deserters and cowards had always been in line for a bullet, with or without the benefit of a tribunal. Since 1941, their families had also been caught up in their record of shame. Like a slap in the face, the new order was intended to remind the men, to call them to account. And their response was frequently relief. ‘It was a necessary and important step,’ Lev Lvovich told me. ‘We all knew where we stood after we had heard it. And we all – it’s true – felt better. Yes, we felt better.’ ‘We have read Stalin’s order no. 227,’ Moskvin wrote in his diary on 22 August. ‘He openly recognizes the catastrophic situation in the south. My head is full of one idea: who is guilty over this? Yesterday they told us about the fall of Maikop, today Krasnodar. The political information lads keep asking if there isn’t some treachery at work in all this. I think so too. But at least Stalin is on our side!… So, not a step back! It’s timely and it’s just.’12

  To the south, where the retreat Moskvin abhorred was taking place, news of the order chilled the blood of depressed, tired men. ‘As the divisional commander read it,’ a military correspondent wrote, ‘the people stood rigid. It made our skin crawl.’13 It was one thing to insist on sacrifice but quite another to be making it. But even then, all that the men were hearing was a repetition of familiar rules. Few soldiers, by this stage in the war, would not have seen or heard about at least one summary execution, the laggard or deserter drawn asid
e and shot without reflection or remorse. The numbers are hard to establish, since tribunals were seldom involved, but it is estimated that about 158,000 men were formally sentenced to be executed during the war.14 However, the figure makes no allowance for the thousands whose lives ended in roadside dust, the stressed and shattered conscripts shot as ‘betrayers of the motherland’, nor for the thousands more shot for retreating – or even for seeming to retreat – as battle loomed. At Stalingrad, as many as 13,500 men are thought to have been shot in the space of a few weeks.15

  ‘We shot the men who tried to mutilate themselves,’ a military lawyer said. ‘They weren’t worth anything, and if we sent them to prison we were only giving them what they wanted.’16 It was helpful to have a better use for able-bodied men; that much was a real outcome of Stalin’s order. Copied from German units that the Soviets observed in 1941, the first penal battalions were ready well in time for Stalingrad. Though most assignments in this war were dangerous, those in the shtraf units were wretched, one step removed from the dog’s death that awaited deserters and common crooks. ‘We thought it would be better than a prison camp,’ Ivan Gorin, who survived a penal battalion, explained. ‘We didn’t realize at the time that it was just a death sentence.’17 Penal battalions, in which at least 422,700 men eventually served, were forlorn, deadly, soul destroying.18 But there could not have been a soldier anywhere who doubted that in this army, in any role, his life was cheap.

  Though Stalin’s order formalized existing regulations, the process of its implementation exposed a real problem of mentalities. Indeed, its reception in many quarters was symptomatic of the very problem that it was supposed to remedy. People brought up in a culture of denunciations and show trials were used to blaming others when disaster struck. It was natural for Soviet troops to hear Stalin’s words as yet another move against identifiable – and other – anti-Soviet or unmanly minorities. The new slogan was treated, initially at least, like any other sinister attack on enemies within. Political officers read the order to their men, but acted, as some inspectors observed, as if it ‘related solely to soldiers at the front… Carelessness and complacency are the rule… and officers and political workers… take a liberal attitude to breaches of discipline such as drunkenness, desertion and self-mutilation.’ The warm summer nights seemed to encourage laxity. In August, the month after Stalin’s order, the number of breaches of discipline continued to increase.19