Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  The prices were forced up by wartime spivs, but the army – sometimes illicitly – also sucked local farmers dry. Much as they feared for their own families, some men showed little qualm for other people’s. ‘Everything for the front’ was a slogan that was easily abused. If there was nowhere for soldiers to sleep, they drove the locals from their huts. When they needed horses, they helped themselves from the collective farms. Sometimes they used their new transport to seize and market peasants’ grain. Illegal trading flourished with the army’s unofficial help.35 No rank or type of soldier was blameless. In February 1944, a member of the NKVD’s own border troops was heard asserting that ‘our lot go barefoot and half-dressed, and it’s right that we go looting, or else we wouldn’t be able to survive…’36

  One of the key commodities was home brew, samogon. The rough spirit could be distilled wherever sugar and grain or potatoes could be obtained. Troops on patrol noted the barns that held illegal stills and timed their raids for the moment when the stuff was ready. It raised a good price with their mates. Accidents and fights, even murders, were common results of its excessive use. But it was not just fighting that spirit provoked. Samogon was currency. Networks of crime supported its production. Grain was stolen to make it, goods were looted to finance it.37 The Nazis had gone, Soviet power was not yet established, and in the chaos that followed as the front moved westwards a primitive barter economy emerged with raw spirit at its centre and a variety of other goods as change. In October 1943, a group of men stationed near Belyi Kholm in Smolensk province commandeered four tons of potatoes from local collective farms, but they also stole on a more individual scale, helping themselves to flour, sugar, honey and even the peasants’ boots.38 The guilty parties in this case were on a training course for junior lieutenants.

  Among the most prestigious items of black-market trade were German goods. They were, everyone knew, well made, advanced, and hard to get in normal times. The law on ‘trophies’, the spoils of war, was redefined and tightened repeatedly in 1942 and 1943. Special teams, made up mainly of women and of teenage boys, were sent around abandoned battlefields and other military sites. Their task was to retrieve whatever debris they might find – bodies, weapons or personal effects.39 The state claimed it all for the war. But there was a pathetic pecking order round this carrion. Front-line soldiers were the first, although their opportunity was usually brief. ‘I came across a German corpse in the corner of one of their field cemeteries,’ Anatoly Shevelev told me. ‘They’d buried all the rest but they missed him. I took his wallet – I was curious, really. There was a photograph in it, his Frau. A photograph and a condom – we didn’t have those. No safe sex in the Red Army. But what I wanted were his boots. I tried to pull them off. But I pulled, I pulled hard, and the man’s leg was so decomposed that it came with the boot. I left him after that.’

  Behind the combat soldiers came the support troops, the ‘rats’, as well as any local people who could find their way. The boot Shevelev wanted would have been no problem for experts like these. Frozen or decomposing limbs merely required the right technique. In the winter of 1941, Vasily Grossman met a peasant with a sack of frozen human legs, each one severed as if for harvest. His plan was to thaw them on the stove to make the leather boots easier to remove.40 Meanwhile, discarded helmets and insignia were turned into children’s toys, although the children themselves seemed to prefer grenades and knives.41 Officials collected toys of a more sophisticated kind. Orest Kuznetsov was a military lawyer. One of his perks was to inspect the trophies that the German army left behind before they were packed up for despatch to the rear. In February 1944, he helped himself to ‘a very pretty radio set, which currently does not work, because it needs an electricity supply’.42

  The basic norms of peacetime life had long ago dissolved. Among the patterns that emerged was a new attitude to sex. The front line, though not quite a club exclusively for males, was pungent with misogyny. ‘In the army they regard women like gramophone records,’ a young man wrote in 1943. ‘You play it and play it and then throw it away.’43 It was a prejudice that would erupt with vicious force a year later, when the army crossed into Prussia. But attitudes to sex, among both men and women, were already changing. The least offensive of the new arrangements was a matter of short-term, and often mutual, convenience. Male officers were notorious for ‘adopting’ attractive women. Sometimes they added them to the company list, creating a fictitious staff role somewhere so that they could bring a mistress with them on campaign.44 The army slang for the girls involved was ‘marching field wives’, pokhodno-polevye zheny, or PPZh, a pun on the mobile field guns, PPSh. It was not uncommon for a man to have five or more such ‘wives’ at once. And there were always more in line. Ageev knew a lieutenant who reacted to a farewell letter from his pre-war wife by sending a card to the main post office in Moscow and addressing it to ‘the first girl who gets her hands on this’. As Ageev added, ‘This correspondence has been carrying on for some months in the most active manner.’45

  ‘Wives’ at the front were usually a perk of rank. ‘There was a bit of a tale,’ Nemanov remembered. ‘My commanding officer was fifty, a teacher by profession, the father of soldiers, fierce, though everyone loved him. And he had a twenty-year-old lover, Nina. She was already pregnant. And she liked me. I didn’t get the idea and just carried on without paying her any attention. She invited me to listen to the gramophone, and we stood there together, leaning close to each other. Someone saw us and reported it to the commander, although there was nothing in it. He flew into a rage. He held a pistol at me and said, “If the Germans don’t kill you, I’ll shoot!” But he didn’t shoot me, he just moved me away from her. He made me work as a telephonist, and he gave me the heaviest equipment to carry as well as my rifle.’ ‘You must think I have affairs with the girls, Polya,’ a private soldier wrote in 1944. ‘No, my dear, I’ll never go for that bait. When we meet, I’ll tell you a lot of things about military life. But my character hasn’t changed, and for another thing, if you… have girlfriends you can end up in a punishment unit pretty fast.’46

  As long as the men were on Soviet soil, vodka, not sex, was the mainstay of leisure time, but women who lived near their billets knew that trouble started if they could slip out in search of both. Rates of venereal disease were set to soar. The Wehrmacht had done its bit to spread infection wherever it camped. Now it was the Soviet army’s turn. Reports at the time affected surprise, but syphilis infected officers – and even Communist Party members – as readily as the men.47 In Smolensk province alone, the reported (and therefore underestimated) rate of syphilis infection increased by a factor of twelve between 1934 and 1945.48 To some extent, the double impact of invasion and then reconquest explained the scale of the epidemic, but the Soviet attitude to sex was also much to blame. The men received no education and, as Shevelev observed, they got no condoms, either. Soldiers who contracted venereal disease were treated like varieties of traitor. Medical treatment was sometimes deliberately withheld in punishment for what was seen as immorality.49 For some soldiers, the shame – or even the fear of it – was one anxiety too many. Reports of men who shot themselves after contracting venereal diseases began to accumulate from 1943.50 Meanwhile, the civilian authorities considered deporting local women if they were known to frequent troops. They also dreamed (although they had no resources to run the scheme) of forcing them to undergo medical examinations and hospital treatment.51

  Women would always find the culture punitive. Soviet morality judged them by a double standard, condemning behaviour that would be admired, or at least condoned, in men. Some of the field ‘wives’ hoped to marry their military patrons, but most were looking, as everyone was, for comfort and intimacy. It was male prejudice that painted them as whores. ‘I’ve had four letters from you,’ Ageev wrote to his wife, Nina, in the early spring of 1944. ‘At least I have some basis for believing that my family has been preserved intact. Nina! It’s the biggest question for all of us frontovi
ki. What’s going to happen when the war ends. The madness is happening on the men’s side and the women’s with just this one difference, that the women – with the aim of making sure they’ll be set up for the future – forget the norms and go in for ten times more madness than the men do.’52

  Veterans often mentioned that the war was cruel to girls. It aged them even faster than the men, especially if they chose combat roles. Nurses and telegraph operators were more prestigious, as girlfriends, than female soldiers. ‘We did not look on them as women,’ veterans told Svetlana Alexiyevich in the 1980s. ‘We looked on them as friends.’53 This was the kindly version, anyway. In fact, the front-line women, wrecked or not, faced prejudice based on their wild reputation. One described what happened after she married her wartime sweetheart. Her new husband’s parents were furious. They thought that he had cheapened their good name. ‘An army girl,’ they barked. ‘Why, you have two younger sisters. Who will marry them now?’54 It was assumed that women slept with officers as a way of getting on. At the very least, a pregnancy would guarantee their escape from the front. Women veterans with medals were treated with suspicion for years after the war. When it was worn by a woman, the coveted medal ‘for military service’ (za boevye zaslugi) was jokingly held to be ‘for sexual service’ (za polevye zaslugi).55

  Cruel humour was a mask for insecurities. Laughter – the shared, male laughter of soldiers at rest – was like a kind of whistling in the dark. As long as they joked as a group, men did not have to face their private fears. The boys, recruited straight from school, laughed to conceal their virginity, and it had been a long time since the older, married men had seen their wives. The problem was not just a matter of the passing months. It was that wartime moved at an accelerated pace. Soldiers in their thirties, who might have looked forward, in peacetime, to a last decade of youth, turned into old men overnight. A single day in a trench could age a man like a small death. Their hair turned grey, their skin dried out, the lightness (and numbers of teeth) vanished from their smiles. And then there were the injuries, truncated limbs and scars. ‘There are lots of stories of this kind on both sides,’ Ageev wrote home in 1943. ‘When officers are wounded and lying in hospital, they get a letter from their wives, who have found out about the injury and write to tell them that they are ending the marriage on the grounds of the men’s incapacity…’56

  Soldiers imagined that their wives remained the women they had left, still youthful while their husbands aged. If they did not start fretting that these sirens were deceiving them, they feared rejection, knowing what they had become themselves. The faithful Taranichev was afraid that his grey hair would drive his wife, Natalya, away. It was a metaphor for all the change he had endured, the violence that fascinated and appalled him. Ageev was frank about war’s impact on his body. ‘You may ask – what about me?’ he wrote to Nina. ‘I can tell you that the desire… is more than enough, but the fear of catastrophe after two head injuries has forced me to give up the whole idea.’ He had been worried for some months about his grey hair and the premature lines of aging on his face. Now he was telling Nina he was impotent.57

  The Soviet wartime myth skirts round divorce, promiscuity and venereal disease. Instead, it focuses on the pathos of waiting, drawing inspiration from Simonov’s famous poem. The images are still, reflective, but real life behind the lines was fraught with change and hardship. Simonov’s poem evokes a woman at home, patiently counting out the days, but in fact soldiers’ wives were obliged to learn new skills, to master techniques for survival and to work exceptionally long and arduous hours. Few had time to sit and count the days as they stared longingly towards the west. Few, indeed, spent much time on their own. Housing was scarce, refugees constantly at the gate, and by 1943 the family that waited back at home was likely to consist of cousins, sisters, neighbours and networks of generations.

  Vitaly Taranichev’s family lived well behind the lines, in Ashkhabad, a city that was not far from the border with Iran. He had brought his wife there from her native Kiev before the war. Such grand upheavals were the lot of thousands of engineers like them, moved to the steppe – or in their case, to Turkestan – because the railways or the mines needed their skills. Natalya was installed in a house with Vitaly’s mother. If the arrangement had ever suited the two women, the war made sure that they would feud. First of all, their household lacked Vitaly, the one person they both loved and trusted. But in his place had come a string of refugees. By 1943, the house was home to Taranichev’s mother, wife and two children, to his wife’s mother, newly arrived from Ukraine, to his wife’s sister and her children, and from time to time to a range of ‘wives’ associated with Natasha’s errant brother, Fedor.

  The women squabbled over everything from money to the children’s diet. They also competed for Vitaly’s material support. The officer assigned parts of his pay to them by sending money orders, payable each month. ‘I’ve sent you two money certificates for this year,’ he wrote to Natalya in April 1944. ‘One for 350 roubles a month in your name and the other for Mama for 100 roubles. I think you won’t have any objection to this arrangement, since you told me that Mama is always complaining that she has to pay all the taxes and so on… By doing this I’m giving my mother some happiness in her old age – of course, not because of 100 roubles a month, but because I’m taking care of her; you must understand me on this question.’58

  The women went on falling out. Each summer, the orchard produced a valuable crop of apricots; Vitaly’s mother claimed them for herself. The children played truant from school; Vitaly’s mother accused the hard-pressed Natalya of negligence. In 1943, Natalya and her mother were reduced to selling some of Vitaly’s old clothes to raise some cash; Vitaly’s mother flew into hysterical tears and swore that they wanted to see him dead. ‘I beg you,’ Vitaly asked Natalya, ‘not to pay attention to words that were spoken in the heat of the moment. I could never believe that my mother would wish you and our children ill… Read these words of mine to her and you will see that I’m right.’ Meanwhile, there was the question of the clothes. Vitaly told his wife to sell his trousers, coat and summer things. He would come home, he said, in uniform. ‘Just keep my shoes, because it will be hard to find shoes in size 45 when the war is over.’59 He also told her to keep their hand gun. They would be grateful for that piece of foresight when the war ended.

  Despite his help, and despite her own wages and the income from selling apricots, Natalya and the children suffered. ‘I’ve lost a lot of weight,’ she wrote to Vitaly in the summer of 1943. ‘I weigh 48 kilograms. We all manage with food, my love, however we can…’ It was a story any wife could have written at this time, a tale of hunger, not just making do.60 ‘The canteen at work doesn’t really feed us much,’ Natalya continued. ‘The local administration sees fit to use some kind of blended oil that gleams with all the colours of the rainbow.’61 As for the children, they were going barefoot, running wild. School had become an intermittent event, and discipline at home, with everyone preoccupied, was lax. In the Taranichev household, only the baby, Kolya, still made everybody smile. Natalya had found him some coloured bricks for his third birthday. ‘He can sit at the table and build for hours,’ she wrote to his father. ‘He says, “The Germans knocked it down, and Kolya’s going to build it.”’ The little boy was not yet three when he had learned to shout, ‘For the motherland and Stalin!’62

  Field post arriving for soldiers in the Kaluga region, 1942

  Their regular letters were all the contact that Natalya and Vitaly would have for several more years. The post had not improved since 1942, when letters disappeared or turned up after months of inexplicable delay. ‘It’s such a shame that I’m getting your letters so irregularly,’ Natalya wrote in June 1943. ‘I’m getting the ones from March at the moment. But the state of our morale depends on it, doesn’t it?’ She was also concerned about the money – 650 or 750 roubles – that still had not arrived.63 But Taranichev himself was suffering as well. That June, he had
received the first bundle of letters from home that he had seen in six entire months. ‘At last,’ he wrote, ‘I knew that you were alive and well, – you can’t imagine how pleased I was when they handed over these letters to me, and for three whole days I’ve been carrying them around in my pocket and re-reading them whenever I have a spare minute!’64 This time he did not mention that the long wait had sown wretched doubt in his imagination, but other letters that he wrote, including sharp rebukes to her, showed that it often did.

  In some cases, a soldier hungry for news of his wife might find that he was stationed within miles of his old home. ‘There are some commanders among us, and even more of the soldiers, whose houses are 20–50 kilometres from the front line,’ Ageev wrote to his wife in 1943. ‘But they don’t have the right to go there. There are some cases where women have contrived to work their way to the front (which is absolutely forbidden) to be with their husbands, but it’s rare, and for the most part they intercept them and escort them back in convoys to face an enquiry.’65 It would be three more years, well after the victory, before Vitaly and Natalya would meet, and longer than that before they lived together again. Their children had been fatherless, effectively, for six years. It was a miracle that pre-war marriages survived at all.