The same story would be repeated later in the Baltic, where the Red Army symbolized all that was hated about Bolshevik dominion. At least, the anxious locals muttered, the Nazis had brought order, driven out the reds. For that, many had welcomed them and even applauded their racist, anti-internationalist, anti-Slav and anti-Jewish policies. No one could forget the arrests and deportations of 1939, the swelling prisons and the echoing of shots. Significant numbers of Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians had helped the Germans, including the murder squads, because that seemed the way to build a decent, ordered, European life. Now they would have to watch the war unfold in helpless apprehension. Perhaps, just possibly, the Americans would reach the Baltic first. That was the dream in Tallinn and in Vilnius that summer. It was the gall within the Soviet triumph, the seed of greater bitterness to come. As they swept north and west, Soviet men and women, Russians and soldiers from further east, would face successive populations who were either hostile to them or at best suspicious of their entire way of life.
Stalin had prepared the army for its new task earlier that year. His speech on 1 May 1944 had confirmed that German fascist troops had been driven out of three quarters of the Soviet territory that they had occupied. ‘But our tasks cannot end with the clearing of enemy troops from within the bounds of our motherland,’ he announced. ‘The German troops today are reminiscent of a wounded beast, which has to creep away to the border of its own lair, Germany, to lick its wounds. But a wounded beast that goes off to its lair does not stop being a dangerous beast. If we are to deliver our country and those of our allies from the danger of enslavement, we must pursue the wounded German beast and deliver the final blow to him in his own lair.’62 The Russian word for the beast’s lair was berlog, and from this time some Soviet troops renamed Berlin accordingly. The slogan ‘To Berlog!’ was written in red paint on the sides of many travel-hardened T-34s. German intelligence reported that komsomols and officers especially were eager for the new challenge.63
The front-line press worked hard to convince soldiers that any westward advance would be an adventure. It was also sold as justifiable revenge. As soon as the first detachments crossed the border, newspapers started featuring pictures of tank men and gunners planting red flags on the foreign soil.64 But all the propaganda was not idle. There was real resistance to be overcome. The truth was that not all Russian soldiers, and far from all the recruits from other Soviet lands, were keen to step across the international border.65 A young man like Slesarev could revel in the tourist aspect of his job because he was heart-free, but older men, the fathers and husbands, and the tired ones, the injured in body and mind, believed that their job would be completed when the last fascist was driven from Soviet soil. They had no desire to fight on beyond that point. The rest of the world, which had left Russia on its own so long, could sort out Europe for itself. Behind that view lay fear, and not merely the fear of death. No one knew, among the mass of Russian troops, just what capitalism was, for none had seen it. For thirty years they had been told that it was dangerous, a monster (Pravda’s cartoonists were inventive) poised to undermine the workers’ happiness. To cross the border would be little stranger than stepping on to the moon.
This view was common among peasant soldiers from Russia and the countries to the east, but the greatest resentment was expressed by a group new to army life, and ironically, also a group whose knowledge of the capitalist world came at first hand. These were the recruits from the newly liberated zones, from western Ukraine and the western provinces of Belorussia. These people – survivors of the darkest times – now found themselves swept into the Red Army and forced to take the Soviet oath. Large numbers of the new recruits had been reared in nationalist traditions that were antipathetic to the Soviet, internationalist, cause.66 Few felt any allegiance to Moscow. Many had to be drafted forcibly, even at gunpoint,67 while others were pushed into the ranks when NKVD troops threatened reprisals on their families.68 The conscripts knew that many of their Russian comrades regarded their mere survival of Nazi rule as evidence of guilt, a dark stain to be washed away with their own blood.69 Now they faced an indeterminate period of service in what – effectively – was a foreign army. ‘They are treated as second-class soldiers,’ German intelligence reported. ‘They are branded “zapadniki” [westerners], and treated like prisoners, with mistrust.’70
The first Soviet troops to cross into the capitalist world did so in the spring of 1944. Their journey to Romania began in the south-western provinces of Ukraine. The crack troops in the advance guard were seasoned professionals, but the reserves that followed to augment their ranks looked like a caravan of refugees. Few had received the correct papers, let alone a training, political or military. They did not march into Romania; some sauntered, others limped along. In some units, up to 90 per cent of them had no shoes, let alone the standard boots. In one group, fifteen were marching in their shirts and underclothes. Their discipline was weak when they arrived. Indeed, large numbers of them never did arrive, since it was so easy to slip away.71 Those who remained resented their exposure to danger, the fact that they were being sent to the front ‘so soon before the end of the war’,72 but they could at least hope for some compensation. Loot was the ultimate reward for hardship, a temptation that many could not resist.73 It had been little more than weeks since their own country had been recaptured by Moscow’s troops, and now they were encamped in another one. The point was that this time they were the occupiers.
Romania was not Prussia. This first incursion on to foreign soil was not an orgy of revenge. The shock to both sides was also mitigated by the fact that most Red Army troops were billeted in underpopulated country. Bucharest, with all its glittering temptations, was still several months of campaigning away. Meanwhile, there was a relaxed, almost blasé, attitude to ideology among the troops. Their political officers had almost given up working on their Soviet consciousness.74 The Sovinformburo urged that more should be done to publicize Romanian atrocities, to instil hatred, but no one seemed inclined to work at this. Indeed, some units would not hear a lecture about ideology for months. Soldiers were either fighting – and the enemy, backed up at first by German officers, could be cruel – or they were encamped in the rear, where the danger of war seemed almost like a dream. In some areas, Romanian soldiers laid their weapons down and begged the Soviets not to shoot.75 The only casualties in the 251st rifle regiment that May were victims of carelessness and horseplay in their own encampment.76 It was in this context that some of the former victims of German rule in Ukraine would test the skills that they had learned from the Aryan supermen.
Moldavian wine would play its part. A group of Soviet engineers made themselves rapidly at home during their mission to rebuild the region’s roads and bridges. One officer was drunk for ten entire days. The alcohol removed whatever sexual inhibitions any of the men retained. As they watched officers leading their neighbours off at gunpoint, local women would soon learn to hide. Two sergeants who raided a village near their camp in search of women discovered that every hoped-for prostitute had fled. Their revenge was to shoot a local woman and her daughter and to try to rape their neighbour. A particularly calculating man posed as an intelligence agent and demanded that the women in his district present themselves for inspection. The one he chose and raped was later found buried in a trench with a Soviet bullet through her skull. Checks were carried out one night in May in the town of Botoshani. One hundred soldiers, mainly officers, were found in bed with local women.77 Thefts and extortion from civilians were daily occurrences, but there were also systematic schemes. One group of entrepreneurs ordered the villagers near their posting to bring them 200 sheep. When these were delivered, they demanded another 200 for the next morning.78 No doubt, as any officer would do, they had already made sure of the transport and the market for their meat.
This kind of story caused alarm among political commissars. That June, a special resolution on the state of political education among the troops in Romania wa
s passed in Moscow. The politruks were told to get their textbooks out.79 The example of the second Ukrainian Front in Romania was also used as a warning to others. Far to the north, near the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, Ermolenko heard a lecture about the Romanian ‘excesses’ that August. ‘The Red Army is a just army,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘We are not robbers or marauders. Of course, if we meet armed resistance we will destroy it. But we will not allow illegal robbery and murder.’ The trouble was that it was just a few days since he and ‘the boys’ had ‘gone for trophies’ themselves.80 Their orders seemed to be confused. The world around these men was already violated, wrecked. Everyone had lost the things they treasured. Sometimes, the men received direct orders to live off the land. Property rights, which Soviet citizens always found perplexing, had little meaning in shattered, even deserted, territory. And then there was the desire for revenge, to say nothing of the soldiers’ simple, obvious material needs. The politruks could preach, but even they were unclear of the rules. And every day, the trucks would rattle past with crates of booty for staff officers at home.
In all, the late summer of 1944 was a disorienting, anxious time. The liberating army, the vanguard who had fought to free their mothers and wives, was evolving into a rabble. New kinds of men were taking the places of the dead, but that was not the only change. Even the veterans, the heroes of Kursk and Orel, were facing unimagined challenges, temptations they could not resist. Exhausted men, freshly bereaved again by battle, surveyed the border through a web of emotion. This was epiphany, and there would be no going back. It was far better, as Lev Kopelev would learn, to turn a blind eye to some kinds of disorder and just get on with life. ‘I was saturated with French cognac,’ he remembered, and ‘my shoulder bag was stuffed with Havana cigars… They made you dizzy at first; then you got used to it. The constant inebriation from the cognacs, schnapps and liqueurs, and the biting smoke of those powerful cigars, seemed to steady us against the nastiness of what was going on all around.’81
Though each would find the border at a different time, no one can forget what he felt. Every veteran has a tale to tell. ‘We wept when we saw the houses,’ one man told me. ‘Such pretty houses, small, and all of them painted white.’ A former peasant, Ivan Vasilevich, now living in Moscow province, remembered how he took a fancy to the cattle. The farm where he was billeted that summer was empty. The owners had fled, as thousands did, when they heard the first Soviet guns. The corn could take care of itself, but no one had attended to the cows for days. Ivan Vasilevich admired them, touched them, felt the solid flesh. More urgently, he set about milking them. Their lowing was the sound that he would remember most vividly from these first days.
Ivan Vasilevich would milk many other cows before the peace, and he would feed them, too. ‘The animals were hungry,’ he remembered. ‘There was a haystack nearby. So I fed the animals straight away. They had to eat. And then I thought I’d leave their barn open. They could feed themselves when we had gone.’ The private farms were fascinating to this child from a collective, used to communist neglect. ‘It was interesting to compare them,’ he began. ‘I mean, because I was brought up in this same thing, in agriculture.’ He stumbled, trying not to say something. Like thousands of others, he had discovered a truth that raised doubts about the entire war, about the revolution and about the Soviet dream.82 So far, the dawning understanding was still dim, uncertain. But it could never be forgotten. ‘The word for it is rich,’ he said. ‘The capitalist farms were richer.’83
Soldiers had various ways of dealing with the real face of capitalism. Some were envious, some intrigued. Later, when they entered Germany, their main reaction would be rage. No one could understand why wealthy Germans wanted to invade their neighbours to the east, why anyone who had this much could ever search for more. ‘I’d just love to smash my fist into all those tins and bottles,’ was one soldier’s response.84 Wherever they went in Europe, Red Army men were repelled as well as fascinated by the burzhui, the bourgeoisie, with their ordered lives and strange views about property. But that summer, the burzhui that the armies in the south were meeting were Romanians; former enemies, but scarcely storm troopers or millionaires. The sight of the better lives that these burzhui led inspired resentment and even anti-Soviet talk among the men. If communism was so good, they argued, why did these peasants live so much better?85 Instead of putting Romanian farms to the torch, the soldiers satisfied themselves with looting them.
The shock of relative plenty would be the same in Poland, except that there was less in that blighted countryside left to take. But as they crossed its sandy plains and pine woods, Soviet troops were forced to confront a new, equally painful, issue, a fresh betrayal of cherished belief. Internationalism had disappeared from Stalin’s rhetoric when war broke out, but the myth that Soviet troops were on a liberating, a fraternal, mission was revived as they crossed the border. In theory, Poles were supposed to see themselves as beneficiaries of Soviet power. As victims of fascist aggression, their people awaited liberation. That, indeed, had been the original cause of the Allied declaration of war in September 1939. Back then, however, the Soviet Union had been Hitler’s ally, and Poland had been dismembered by both dictatorships at once. Now that the Red Army was fighting beside the democracies of Europe and the United States, its arrival in Poland was supposed to be a cause for celebration. Fascist occupation, after all, had truly been a nightmare. But ethnic Poles had good reason to wonder what they might expect from Stalin’s cynical embrace. There is a joke that some Poles still relate that starts when a small bird falls from the sky into a cowpat. A passing cat is kind enough to rescue it but then, naturally, eats the bird. ‘The moral,’ a Polish friend explained, ‘is that not everyone who gets you out of the shit is necessarily your friend.’
In the short term, some Poles were willing to fight beside Red Army troops. The first Polish army on Soviet soil was formed in April 1943. Poles broke open the route to Lublin for Chuikov’s 8th guards army in July 1944, and they would go on fighting with these men until the fall of Berlin ten months later.86 However, Stalin’s sympathies were never with the Polish nation, and most Polish soldiers knew it. They would complain that their uniforms and kit were sub-standard, that they were not issued with warm clothes as winter approached and that they were given the most dangerous military tasks.87 Their morale would plummet furthest when they heard news of the fate of their fellow countrymen in Warsaw.
In August 1944, encouraged by the real prospect of their liberation, Warsaw’s nationalist underground staged an uprising of Polish citizens. Its aim was to destroy the German garrison. With Rokossovsky’s troops camped on the Vistula, the chances for concerted action appeared bright. But the Warsaw rising failed. The Polish capital’s entire population paid in blood. As thousands of its citizens were slaughtered, Hitler ordered that the entire city should be razed. What most outraged the Polish troops was that the Soviets made no effort to intervene. Rokossovsky’s men were probably in no condition to relieve Warsaw in August 1944, and it would have been difficult for Stalin to find fresh reserves.88 The momentum of Operation Bagration had been used up in the great strike at Minsk. But the destruction of Polish nationalists in Warsaw suited Stalin’s long-term goals. The tragedy, like the 1940 Katyn massacre, would poison Russo–Polish relations for decades.
In answer – or at least by way of self-justification – the Soviets would claim that they were fighting for a cause that transcended national interests. Internationalism had been downplayed since the war began – Russian troops themselves had found it redundant when they met their putative German brothers at the front in 1941 – but the idea that the Soviet Union was a unique, pioneering, supra-national state was never abandoned. Former Red Army troops and partisans still claim that their identity was ‘Soviet’, a way of getting over the awkward divisions between the ethnic Russians at the front and all the rest. The Poles, like the zapadniki, could simply join the brotherhood. That way their future in the Soviet system, as opposed
to fascist tyranny, was guaranteed.
This neat answer would never fit the facts. For one thing, Stalin himself had embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing. By the summer of 1944, the Gulag and the central Asian labour camps were overflowing with Volga Germans, Chechens, Tatars, Kalmyks and other so-called ‘punished’ groups. Ukrainians and Poles began to join them in the last year of the war. Ethnicity had replaced economic or class status as a pretext for wholesale arrest.89 Soviet rhetoric did not work among the people, either. Russians might claim that there were no distinctions between ethnic groups in uniform, but they were not in a minority at any point. ‘We were all the same’ is an imperialist thought, dismissing the claims and perspectives of subaltern peoples. Large numbers – millions – of Poles, Ukrainians, Georgians, Jews, Kazakhs and all the rest fought beside Russians, some of them explicitly for Soviet power, but minority groups were neither identical nor invisible within the army. There was even a slang, and usually derogatory, word to describe them. Natsmen, an ugly term formed from the Russian words for ethnic minority, captured, amalgamated and dismissed individuals whose homes might have been anywhere from Odessa and Tallinn to Ulan Bator.
Ironically, it was the Jews who seemed most readily at ease with the internationalist dream. The Soviet state, officially, deplored and punished anti-Semitism. In this respect, it marked an advance on tsarism and a stark contrast with the Third Reich. Its internationalist rhetoric, like its appeal to science and to the superiority of urban values, also attracted a people whose history had fixed them mainly in the towns. In 1941, Jews signed up in their thousands for the Soviet cause. Students from Moscow set their books aside; young communists in government roles asked to be assigned to the front. Jews were among the keenest volunteers for every kind of army service. Not all the volunteers were Soviet-born. Refugees streamed east from Poland and from western Ukraine in the spring of 1941, finding their way into the Red Army by summer. As they would learn when their families perished in the old homelands, their loyalty to Stalin’s cause was justified.
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