It was the campaign that Belov had been preparing for. The bombardment of 5 July was audible from his own base, although some distance to the south. ‘In the area of Belgorod and along the Kursk–Orel part of our front – to the south of us, there are fierce tank battles going on,’ he wrote on 8 July. ‘The sound of distant artillery cannonades can be heard here.’ So could the music of Katyushas, which gladdened every Soviet who listened. ‘The forces are very concentrated,’ Belov noted the next day, ‘every valley is bursting with artillery and infantry. The nights are just an endless roar. Our aviation is working near the limit of the first defence lines. There’s a mass of tanks.’89 The young officer’s optimism was justified. Red Army units on the Central Front, under Rokossovsky’s command, withstood the German onslaught from the north with a resilience that their enemy could never have anticipated. On the first day, Model’s panzers advanced just four miles. They would make little headway in the week to come, although the defence effort cost the Soviets more than 15,000 lives.90 To the south, however, along the Voronezh Front, a smaller number of Soviet divisions under Vatutin were facing one of the deadliest struggles of the war.
The fighting would involve the 1st guards tank army, including Slesarev and his friends, the 5th guards tank army under Rotmistrov, and the gunners and riflemen of the 5th guards army, the one in which Lev Lvovich, the mild-mannered geologist-turned-lieutenant, was serving. On 5 July, when the onslaught began, the 5th guards army was more than 200 miles behind the front. Rotmistrov’s tank army was at a base not far beyond. Two days later, both would receive the order to cover the distance, on the march and under German bombardment, within three days. The scorching summer heat, the flies and the great clouds of dust were exhausting enough, yet after all that, the men would still need to be fit to fight successive eight-hour battles amid yet more shelling and machine-gun fire.91 Meanwhile, Slesarev and his comrades were already in the direct path of an onslaught whose ferocity exceeded even Soviet fears. Recovering from the unexpected setback of their first day under fire, Hoth’s men, spearheaded by more than 500 tanks, pushed forward towards Oboyan. As Soviet infantry units shattered under the intolerable pressure of bombardment, the 1st tank army was almost the only barrier that held – or tried to hold – on 7 July.92 Slesarev had no time to write home. He was lucky to have survived, but the courage and tenacity of men like him forced Hoth to change his plans. Instead of driving straight for Oboyan, the Germans shifted their objective to a piece of relatively high ground near the small steppe town of Prokhorovka.
The fiercest tank battle in history took place in open fields near settlements with names like ‘October’ and ‘Komsomol’. To have lost here, to have allowed the Germans to push through to Kursk, would almost certainly have meant losing the entire defensive campaign. Six hundred German tanks were poised for this great strike. Concealed in scrub, orchards, and the rank grassland of a wet July, 850 Soviet tanks prepared to halt them. At dawn, as the first light filtered through the mist, the future battlefield was silent, ‘as if there were no war’.93 The first blackbirds began to call across the valley. ‘I watched my friend spreading fat on a chunk of bread,’ a veteran remembered. ‘He was doing it slowly, taking his time. I kept telling him to get a move on because the Germans were coming.’ But he smiled. “Don’t rush me,” he said, with a prescience his friend would later find uncanny. “I’m going to enjoy this. It’s the last meal I’ll eat in this world.”’94 He had finished eating just before 6.30 a. m., when the calm was shattered by the first of hundreds of Junkers swooping to dive-bomb the Soviet lines.95 But it was not to be a repeat of the summer of 1941. This time, there were hundreds of Soviet planes to answer with equal determination. The tank battle began with an aerial dogfight that would fill the air with smoke and burning metal well before the great machines began their duel.
Prokhorovka was destined to be remembered for those tanks. The German and Soviet machines advanced to meet through a fog of smoke and driving rain. By mid-morning, the rolling fields were strewn with lumps of twisted metal and the charred bodies of men. Survivors talk about the summer heat, but in fact the weather that day was cool. What the veterans are probably remembering is the inferno of burning metal, burning fuel and rubber, burning air. Faced with the superior Panther and Tiger tanks, Soviet crews refused to yield. If they could do no more, they rammed their enemy, locking metal on to metal. This was the way that Gusev and his crew would die. ‘The lieutenant’s tank was moving forward,’ friends from his regiment would tell his parents, ‘maintaining fire from every kind of gun. But an enemy shell set fire to the machine. The firing from the burning tank did not cease. The mechanic, selecting the machine’s highest gear, contrived to drive it at one of the enemy’s advancing tanks. The fire from Lt Gusev’s tank continued. They were firing, so they must still be alive. Our tank and Lt Gusev’s tank drove forward at full throttle straight towards the enemy tank. The Tiger wanted to turn round and get out, but it succeeded only in turning sideways. Our burning tank rammed into the Tiger and both tanks exploded. The crew of heroes perished.’96
Tank crews were not the only men who died. Brigades of riflemen and artillery, including Lev Lvovich’s unit, were also sent to hold the tanks. When all else failed, infantrymen would hurl grenades and flaming bottles at the monsters in the spirit of the old war films. They also tackled German infantry, sometimes in hand-to-hand combat. They found the footsoldiers less awe-inspiring than élite tank men and SS. Some of them (and probably some Russians, too) were drunk, their courage stoked with quantities of schnapps,97 but that did not make the fighting less deadly. ‘The sky thunders, the earth thunders, and you think your heart will explode and the skin on your back is about to burst,’ a woman combatant told Alexiyevich. ‘I hadn’t thought that the earth could crack. Everything cracked, everything roared. The whole world seemed to be swaying.’ But this was just the setting for what followed. Hand-to-hand fighting, she remembered, ‘isn’t for human beings… Men strike, thrust their bayonets into stomachs, eyes, strangle one another. Howling, shouts, groans. It’s something terrible even for war.’98 What kept Lev Lvovich going was not his abstract sense of duty but the concrete, the specific hourly goals. Orders would come, he said, ‘to aim for this bank or trench, to focus on this oak tree, aim three fingers’ width towards the left… That sort of thing helps very much.’ It also helped that he was too proud to allow his men to understand that he, too, was afraid.
At least 700 tanks lay charred and twisted on the battlefield by nightfall. The fighting would continue for two more days, but it was the first that decided the outcome of the battle, and also of the whole campaign. Prokhorovka would come to rank in Russian myth beside Kulikovo Pole, the field where Dmitry Donskoi defeated the Golden Horde in 1380, and Borodino, the site of the great battle against Napoleon. Like them, it was regarded as a place where Russia’s sacred destiny was saved. But as then, too, the human casualties were huge. For weeks to come the air for several miles would reek of bloated corpses, decomposing human flesh. Parties of sanitary workers and local volunteers helped to remove the wounded from the area. High-tech gave way to the old world as the heavy bodies were piled on to waiting horse-drawn carts. Local teams would also help to dig mass graves for the soldiers. There is no village in the district that does not maintain such a site today. Unless the Germans retrieved them in time, their own dead would be buried later, piled into massive pits not for the sake of dignity but to prevent infectious disease. Meanwhile, it would be decades before the area was cleared of mines, discarded weapons and metal debris. To this day, children are warned not to explore the woods. The fields were turned to desert, but they bore a bitter crop.
A medical orderly loads a soldier’s body on to a horse-drawn stretcher, 1943
There was not one but several battles at Kursk, arrayed across at least two fronts, but the campaign was regarded as a single struggle by both sides. On the same day as the defence of Prokhorovka, 12 July, the Soviets launched a counter
-attack in the north, striking westwards at Orel. In anticipation of this, and to the Red Army’s relief, a portion of Hoth’s assigned tanks had been diverted north before the Prokhorovka battle.99 But the Germans had not prepared for the storm that was to come. At midnight on 11 July, Belov wrote a hasty, excited entry in his diary: ‘We’re going to attack… at Shchelyabug.’ It would be two more weeks before he managed to record another word. As he would put it on the twenty-fifth, ‘There has been absolutely no possibility of making notes in these past days.’ The Red Army had fought its way across the heavily defended German lines. The aim was to disrupt the German central front.100 Belov’s regiment suffered extremely heavy losses – more than 1,000 men – in fourteen days. The compensation was that they were now within twelve kilometres of German-occupied Orel. They had also ‘killed a lot of Fritzes, which is really great’. 101 The battle for the old city was yet to come, but the enemy had been pushed back far behind the lines it held before the campaign had been launched.
Dog teams transporting the injured, August 1943
To the south, meanwhile, Slesarev also found a moment to scribble a note home. ‘You will know from the newspapers,’ he wrote to his father on 18 July, ‘that stubborn and fierce battles are taking place here. We’re beating the Fritzes good and proper, the battles don’t stop day or night. You can hear the “music of war” twenty-four hours a day.’ On the twenty-seventh, he was even more sanguine, his tone an echo of the party’s own victorious mood. Indeed, his letter of that day reflects his new-found status as a real communist. Like hundreds of other tank men, Slesarev applied to join the party on the field at Kursk, marrying his own perception of progress, social justice and victory to the ideological message of the politruks. ‘Hundreds of planes, thousands of enemy tanks, including Tigers and Panthers, have found their grave on the fields of battle,’ he wrote. ‘Tens of thousands of Fritzes have fertilized the Ukrainian earth. The Germans are retreating. The moment to settle our account with them has come.’102
Behind the brave words, there were plenty of exhausted, frightened, even disaffected people. German sources suggest that the rate of Soviet defections increased sharply when battle was joined – from 2,555 in June to 6,574 in July and 4,047 in August.103 The haemorrhage was no longer one-sided, however.104 As the Red Army sensed its approaching triumph, morale among the German ranks was crumbling fast. The process had begun among the non-élite troops well before the campaign’s launch. ‘The SS officers are surprised by the levels of pessimism in our division,’ a lieutenant, Karl-Friedrich Brandt, wrote in his diary on 6 July. If the SS frightened the Soviets, its arrogance and privilege offended German soldiers in the Wehrmacht’s ranks. ‘The very sight of them stirs in our troops, exhausted and strained as they are, a sense of utter class hate,’ Brandt went on. ‘Our soldiers have been drawn from whatever pitiful dregs can still be scraped together in Germany. They [the SS] are drawn from the finest human material in Europe.’105
That summer saw the first large-scale humiliation of those ‘dregs’. As the Soviets pushed forward, Brandt and his men fled so fast that they could not even pray over their dead. ‘We are not even in a condition to establish where each of our men lies any more,’ Brandt wrote on 1 August, ‘because we haven’t been able to snatch away their papers or their soldier’s tags. We have not even had the water with which to wash the poison of the corpses from our skin… How fortunate were the men who died in France and Poland. They could still believe in victory.’106 Now that belief was growing on the Soviet side. On 2 August, Belov went into action for a second time. Three days later he was in the vanguard that would liberate Orel. ‘Last night the Germans withdrew altogether,’ he wrote on 5 August. ‘This morning we arrived in the western outskirts of the city. The whole of Orel is in flames. The population is greeting us with exceptional joy. The women are weeping with joy.’ The next day, his regiment, like all the others in the division, was renamed an ‘Orel Regiment’ in honour of the great campaign.107 That night, too, far away in Moscow, the first 120-gun salute of the war was ordered to mark the triumph. ‘I express my thanks to all the troops that took part in the offensive,’ Stalin’s telegram declared. ‘Eternal glory to the heroes who fell in the struggle for the freedom of our country. Death to the German invaders.’108
To the south, on the road to Kharkov, Slesarev was also on the move. Belgorod had fallen to Red Army troops on the same day as Orel. Now the formations on the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts were racing southwards in pursuit of even larger goals. Slesarev’s mood was bittersweet. On 10 August, his dearest friend was killed, the man with whom he had fought closely from the very first. But the cause he died for was no longer vain. ‘We’re crossing liberated territory,’ Slesarev wrote to his father, ‘land that was occupied by the Germans for more than two years. The population is coming out to greet us with joy, bringing us apples, pears, tomatoes, cucumbers and so on. In the past, I knew Ukraine only from books, now I can see it with my own eyes: the picturesque nature, lots of gardens.’109 Just for an instant, the Red Army could revel in its own hard-won success. On 25 August, it recaptured Kharkov.
Infantry and tanks near Kharkov, 1943
7 May Brotherhood Be Blessed
Stalin’s regime waged war in the same spirit as it prosecuted peace. The first rule was that human life counted for little in the scale of history, which meant compared to interests of state; the second, that insiders, the citizens in whose name everything was done, should band together against enemies. By 1943, the first of these was causing strain. The supply of healthy troops was running out. The campaigns that winter would be constrained in practice because manpower was scarce.1 The second rule, however, seemed to be going strong. Kulaks, spies, Trotskyists and members of the civil-war white guard had been admirable scapegoats in the decade leading up to war. But fascists – ‘Hitlerites’ – were real foes. Soviet citizens answered the call to arms in epic style. The collective clarity of purpose that inspired millions was unprecedented, but it was not true that the entire people stood together. The war created hierarchies, winners and losers, millions of dead. And physical separation, hunger and violence do not unite communities. The mythic wartime solidarity that everyone remembers was another sleight of Stalin’s hand. It was possible to believe in it because of the third rule of this regime, which was to control the things people were allowed to know.
Among the winners in the midst of war, at least compared with private soldiers at the front, were the officials who stayed well behind the lines. On 6 November 1943, an invited crowd of them gathered in Moscow to hear Stalin speak. The occasion was the eve of the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. Outside, the early winter capital was grey, subdued by black-out drapes and power cuts. Inside, beneath the chandeliers, the audience basked in self-congratulation. In the twelve months since their last anniversary meeting, the prospects for these people’s world had changed completely. First there had been Stalingrad, with all those German prisoners and dead. But that had been a winter victory. What Kursk had proved was that the Red Army could beat the fascists in the summer, too. Since then, the news had told a story of unbroken success. Smolensk was recaptured on 25 September; the Taman peninsula – gateway to the Crimea – on 7 October. In a feat of remarkable daring (and at shattering human cost), the Red Army had forced the river Dnepr on 7 October, breaching the fascists’ most secure defensive line. And on 6 November, the élite would learn what everybody heard the following day, which was that Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, had fallen to the Soviets at last.
The Red Army was the country’s undoubted saviour, but Stalin used his speech to emphasize that it had not been working on its own. It was time to celebrate the party and the government, the men and women who had stayed at home. He began with some real heroes, those of wartime labour. If the army no longer lacked for weapons and supplies, Stalin explained, it had to thank ‘our working class (stormy and prolonged applause)’. It also owed a great deal to ‘the patriotism of the
collective farm peasants’, to ‘our transport workers’, and even, for their initiatives in design and engineering, to ‘our intelligentsia (prolonged applause)’. Stalin’s message was unmistakable: he was declaring revolution vindicated. ‘The lessons of the war,’ he announced, ‘teach us that Soviet power is not only the best form of organization for the economic and cultural development of a country in years of peace, but also the best form for mobilizing all the resources of the people for repelling an enemy in time of war… The Soviet power that was established twenty-six years ago has turned our country – in a brief historical period – into an inviolable fortress.’2
The men and women at the front – or those at least who had survived to join in that November’s celebration – were just as proud of victory, although they tended to assume most credit for themselves. Vitaly Taranichev, the engineer, found a few moments to write home to his wife. ‘It’s one o’clock in the morning,’ he explained, ‘the night of 7 November 1943. I’ve been at my military post since the eve of the 26th anniversary of the Great October revolution… At 1600 hours today we heard the order of our Supreme Commander comrade Stalin about the capture of the capital of our Ukraine, the city of Kiev, by our valiant troops. Natalochka! I can imagine how delighted you must be by this news! The time has passed when the fascists controlled the skies, – today they made a pathetic effort to disrupt the work at our station, but it didn’t come to anything, everything is working like clockwork, and everything is moving forward, towards the west, towards the destruction of fascism!’3
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