Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  Obligatory repetition turned the leader’s words to cliché. The new instructions, once ignored, could sound as stale, if not as benign, as orders to eat more carrots or be vigilant for lice. The message was drummed into every soldier’s head for weeks. Some hack in Moscow composed pages of doggerel verse to ram it home. Inelegant in the first place, it loses nothing in translation. ‘Not a step back!’ it rattles. ‘It’s a matter of honour to fulfil the military order. For all who waver – death on the spot – there’s no place for cowards among us.’20 Groups of soldiers, weary of government lies, were always quick to identify hypocrisy, and that autumn they watched their commanders evading the new rules. Few officers were keen to spare their best men for service in the blocking units. They had been in the field too long; they knew the value of a man who handled weapons well. So the new formations were stuffed with individuals who could not fight, including invalids, the simple-minded and – of course – officers’ special friends. Instead of aiming rifles at men’s backs, these people’s duties soon included valeting staff uniforms or cleaning the latrines.21 In October 1942, the idea of regular blocking units at the front (as opposed to the autonomous forces of the NKVD) was quietly dropped.22

  Meanwhile, the retreat that had provoked the order in July continued in the south. German troops took another 800 kilometres of Soviet soil on their way to the Caucasus. The defence of their Caspian oil that autumn cost the Red Army another 200,000 lives.23 Even at Stalingrad, and even in the fatal month of September, army inspectors would observe that ‘military discipline is low, and order no. 227 is not being fulfilled by all soldiers and officers’.24 It was not mere coercion that changed the fortunes of the Red Army that autumn. Instead, and even in the depth of their crisis, the soldiers appeared to find a new resolve. It was as if despair itself – or rather, the effort of one final stand – could wake men from the torpor of defeat. Their new mood was connected to a dawning sense of professionalism, a consciousness of skill and competence, which the leaders had started to encourage. For years, Stalin’s regime had herded people like sheep, despising individuality and punishing initiative. Now, slowly, even reluctantly, it found itself presiding over the emergence of a corps of skilled and self-reliant fighters. The process would take months, gathering pace in 1943. But rage and hatred were at last translating into clear, cold plans.

  The first move was to clear the officer corps of its burden of incompetents. Voroshilov, the champion of the pre-war dream of easy victory, was demoted to a desk job for failures on the Volkhov Front round Leningrad in April 1942.25 In May, Mekhlis was relieved of his Crimean command, and eventually he was also removed from his positions as Deputy Defence Commissar and head of the Main Political Administration of the Red Army.26 Budyennyi, the aging hero of the civil war, was placed in charge of the Red Cavalry. ‘He was a man with a past,’ Marshal Ivan Konev remarked, ‘but no future.’27 Their places were taken by younger, more professional officers with recent battlefield experience; leaders like Zhukov and Konev himself, and generals like Vasily Chuikov, the ambitious forty-two-year-old who led the 62nd Army at Stalingrad.

  Mekhlis’s downfall signalled a change of fortune for the army’s multitude of political officers. The first hint of reform was a campaign of whispering. ‘It is not unusual,’ a report ran, ‘for political workers in the units to fail to notice that there has been no salt in the men’s food for three days in a row, although there is salt in the stores; or that the men have had to sit for 30–40 minutes in the canteen without getting their food, for no other reason than that the quartermaster has failed to provide a ladle. And after all this,’ it continued, ‘they claim that they have been engaged in political work.’28 Quite rightly, politruks were also said to be ‘complacent’ about the men’s attitude to order no. 227.29 With Mekhlis gone, there was no one in Moscow to protect them. One group of recruits to the army’s political wing, men who had hoped to make their mark as high priests of the party line, discovered when they reached their training camp that it was their turn to eat the thin soup, go without boots, and shiver in unfinished, overcrowded huts.30 The money seemed to dry up overnight. On 9 October 1942, their privilege within the structure of command ended.31 Politruks still had a role. Their tasks would be to work on political consciousness and morale, and also to keep everyone informed of the official news. But their approval was no longer needed for much else. Military decisions were henceforth to be taken by the generals alone.

  Professional commanders would find that they had increasing measures of autonomy. ‘The most important thing that I learned on the banks of the Volga,’ Chuikov would later write, ‘was to be impatient of blueprints.’32 He and his peers cherished the right to make decisions, and not only the short-term kind that any officer takes on the spot. A new pragmatism was apparent everywhere, the measure of a leader shifting from his political background to his competence and skill. The reports that Stalin heard from favoured advisers now dealt with the demands and pressures of contemporary war. They noted the weak liaison between the Soviet Union’s infantry, artillery and tanks. They noted the poor state of military intelligence. They noted, above all, the lack of discipline that led to random fire, wastage of shells, and panic on the battlefield.33 The conclusion they drew was that more emphasis should henceforth be placed on drill and less on comic-strip heroics.

  Habits that dated from the civil war were abandoned. There would be no more suicidal leaping on to barricades, no more distracting competitions to see which unit could march fastest or form into the straightest line.34 A new culture was slowly taking shape. Its key values were professionalism and merit. Where a man’s class or social origin had defined him before, the army started emphasizing skill. Orders to improve training, and especially the tactical preparation of infantrymen, streamed from the General Staff.35 That autumn, the soldiers massing near Stalingrad heard about a new play by Aleksandr Korneichuk, the text of which was also serialized in Pravda in late August. Front!, which was staged by Moscow’s prestigious Art Theatre itself, was designed to ‘answer the questions of every Soviet patriot about the successes and failures of the Red Army’. As the correspondent of the local soldiers’ paper, Red Army, put it in his review, the play showed that ‘nothing in the Soviet land will sustain an ignorant or unskilled leader – not personal courage, not honours from the past’. The time for ‘conservatism’ was over. The war, it added, ‘would test them all’.36

  Hard economic fact would underscore the change of mood. That summer, the Soviets’ capacity to turn out weapons, shells and tanks recovered after months of dislocation. The revival of manufacturing seemed like a miracle. Tanks and aeroplanes soon came to symbolize the Soviet recovery, with Chelyabinsk, the new manufacturing centre in the Urals, earning the nickname Tankograd. Mass production accelerated everything. Manufacture of the world-beating T-34 medium tank, for instance, was adapted so that the turrets could be stamped, not cast. Troops still dubbed it the ‘matchbox’, partly because they expected it to catch fire as readily as its predecessors, which had been nicknamed zazhigalki, ‘lighters’, but also because T-34s poured off the production lines in such prolific numbers after 1942.37 Meanwhile, lend-lease military aid, principally from the United States, began to make a crucial difference to the supply of weapons, aeroplanes and food.38 Studebaker trucks, 200,000 of which were to be shipped to the Red Army by 1945, began to rattle round encampments at the front, and soldiers learned to recognize the taste of Spam.39 It was a small step – and the allied aid package, crucially, did not include the promise of a second front – but for men who had seen raw despair and death the slightest improvement was like a turning of the tide.

  The change was subtle, for the men still faced the shortages that left them without basic kit, but that autumn the leadership also began to take an interest in hierarchy and even in style. Defeat was written in the shabby uniforms and depressed gait of too many Red Army men. Complacency about the men’s appearance had to end. On 30 August, a campaign began to get
the soldiers’ boots mended and polished, to inspect officers’ uniforms, eliminate dirt, and drill the ranks in self-respect.40 The men themselves were set to cobbling leather soles and sewing seams. Armies of women scrubbed and laundered in makeshift wash-houses near the front. ‘We used “K”soap to get rid of the lice,’ one laundrywoman remembered. It stank, and it ‘was black, like earth. Many girls suffered hernias from picking up the heavy loads, or developed eczema on their hands from the “K” soap. Their nails broke and they thought they would never be able to grow them again.’41 Women workers might suffer, but the prize was a morale boost for élite soldiers. ‘Nina, don’t worry about our uniforms,’ an officer wrote to his wife just before Stalingrad. ‘We dress better these days than any commander from the capitalist countries.’42

  Red Army troops repair their boots, 1943

  With the new focus upon looks came new features to distinguish a man’s rank. On 11 November, orders were promulgated to establish clear new rules for the award of military decorations. These would soon prove a wild success. In an army where there was no chance of leave, the medals, some of which had romantic names, recalling Russia’s military past, became a vital currency for reward. Eleven million decorations were awarded to members of the Soviet military between 1941 and 1945. By contrast, the United States awarded only 1,400,409.43 The US army often took as long as six months to process individual awards. In Stalin’s army the equivalent was frequently three days.44 The message was conveyed that military professionalism would not go unrewarded. While individuals wore stars and ribbons, the number of units, and even of armies, that were awarded the title and material privileges of ‘guards’ increased from 1942. Individually or in groups, as ‘guards’ or as the wearers of golden or scarlet ribbon, soldiers who made the grade could expect more substantial things than gratitude. Each honour carried specific rights, including increased pay-outs for men’s families and benefits like free travel or extra meat. Officers were singled out still further. In mid-November, they received the news that shoulder boards were going to be restored.45 Rank and authority had not enjoyed such ostentation since the fall of the Romanovs.

  Women launder soldiers’ clothes on the 1st Ukrainian Front, 1943

  ‘They’ll bring the Tsar back next,’ the older men complained. Shoulder boards had long symbolized the arbitrary cruelty of the imperial Russian army. In almost every film of Lenin’s revolution angry soldiers crowded on the screen to rip the gold braid from the jacket of some army toff. A few veteran sergeants, remembering their own rage back then, refused to wear the new boards, risking a tribunal and a charge of insubordination.46 But though the malcontents suspected that their revolution had just been betrayed, some of the younger men thought they perceived the dawning of new hope. According to an officer whom the Germans later captured, some soldiers held the reintroduction of epaulettes – along with the reopening of many churches – to be the first sign that the government was going to disband the hated collective farms.47 The new insignia began to appear on officers’ uniforms in January 1943, and became standard for the entire military that spring.48 By then, the German invaders had been encircled and defeated in the city of Stalingrad, and the Red Army had redeemed its long record of shame. For the first time, soldiers could really think that the pre-war order – bosses, prison camps and all – was coming to an end. They could believe that they were fighting to create the promised, longed-for, better world.

  A change of mood, in other words, was evident before the battles at Stalingrad. At this stage, it was barely more than a shift of inflexion, a fragile change of emphasis in letters and in some men’s talk. New policies took months, not days, to influence a culture dating from the pre-war years, while fourteen months of hardship took a heavy toll. Morale was still low. Defeat at Stalingrad would almost certainly have extinguished hope entirely, engulfing it in terror and despair, but even in August and September, a sense of individual responsibility, of a last chance, was emerging. There was a mood of expectation everywhere. As Alexander Werth wrote in his diary in mid-July, ‘Black as things are, I somehow feel that Stalingrad is going to provide something very big.’49

  As Stalin’s generals prepared for the battle that would alter the whole balance of morale, another change was taking place within the army. It was a shift of generations. The Soviets entered the war with just under 5 million men in active service. Reserves and replacements flooded westwards in preparation for the battles around Moscow in October 1941, but the carnage of the war’s first fourteen months was indescribable. By the late summer of 1942, a man who had been in the field for six months was an old hand, a real veteran. Large numbers returned to the front after sustaining wounds. On average, just under three quarters of injured men were patched up and sent back to fight during the war.50 But this was still the era of defence to the death. The old army, the army that had seen surrender, mutiny and defeat, was literally dying.

  The ghosts of pre-war infantry might well have shuddered to see what was coming next. The most conspicuous innovation, which began in earnest in the summer of 1942, was the recruitment of young women.51 In the first weeks of the war, women had been discouraged from applying for active service roles, but a labour shortage everywhere, at the front line and in the factories, changed everything. That summer, the military expressed itself keen to recruit ‘healthy young girls’.52 To some extent the idea was to shame the men to greater effort. The other goal was to make civilian women more effective, to shame them, too, into forced labour in armaments plants or long hours working on the farms. Either way, some 800,000 women would serve at the front during the war. Smirks and official condescension followed them. Unlike the men, they found it hard to fit their bodies into the heroic mould, to see themselves as warriors. There had been women at the front in Russia’s other wars, but never on this scale.53

  Old soldiers did not know whether to call the women feminine or comradely. New female recruits suffered agonies of embarrassment when faced with field latrines (or no latrines). Their uniforms, designed for men, would never fit. They did not know whether to welcome the muscles and dirt that changed their bodies into those of troops. They curled short haircuts, washed with moss, shared tiny scraps of soap. Equally confused, the authorities introduced, on an experimental basis, mobile front-line tea shops, forty-three of which, equipped with hairdressers, small cosmetics counters and supplies of dominoes and draughts, had been deployed by August 1942.54 The same month, a decree was signed that authorized the issue of rations of chocolate, in place of the standard tobacco, to female soldiers who did not smoke.55 One veteran recalled taking a suitcase full of chocolate when she went to the front. Another was disciplined for picking violets after target practice and tying them to her bayonet.56

  Femininity turned out to be no obstacle to certain kinds of soldiering. Among the military specialisms to which women would eventually be assigned – and at which, in the field, they could excel – was sniper training.57 Accounts of this hint at the level of expertise that new recruits of either sex might expect to acquire. ‘We learned to mount and demount a sniper’s rifle with closed eyes,’ a female veteran remembered, ‘to determine wind velocity, to evaluate the movement of the target and the distance to it, to dig in and crawl… I remember that the most difficult thing was to get up at the sound of alarm and to get ready in five minutes. We would take boots a size or so bigger so as not to lose much time putting them on.’58 Women like this, or like the aviators of Marina Raskova’s all-female 588th night bomber squadron, which flew its first missions in the summer of 1942, began to make the front pages of newspapers, setting a standard for self-sacrifice, professional pride and patriotism.59 However, those who were not famous struggled with a confused, physically draining role, surviving – they report – only because youth and their comrades remained on their side.

  New male blood also replenished the Red Army that season. Despite the losses of the war’s first year, there were more than 6 million troops in the field at the end
of 1942. Among the other population groups that the army now tapped were former kulaks and their families, for the law that banned them from front-line service was repealed in April 1942, but the majority were drawn from a new generation. These newest recruits had been teenagers, children really, when the war began. They had anticipated their call-up for some months, over a year, but their expectations and mentality were unlike those of the old guard. For them, army service was not a chore hijacked by circumstance; it was a sacred duty, mortal sentence, fate. Their culture, the idiom of their growing up, had been shaped by the war itself. The process was a brutal, shocking one. Not all were eager. Some evaded service, and new laws had to be passed to force youngsters to take the oath.60 Few, if any, came to the front from secure, settled lives, but they had no time to mull over the discontents that had preoccupied their predecessors in the pre-war years. ‘Just three months,’ one veteran told me, describing the training camp. ‘They taught us fast. And what was there for us to complain about? They taught us, they sent us, they killed us.’61