Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  Official policy was changing, too. In July 1944, the Soviet Union began its campaign to create iconic mothers, striking medals for the women who had given birth to large broods of healthy, surviving young. The ideal woman, if the photographs could be believed, was stern and provident, tough as a tank driver, the nurse and teacher of armies to come.64 She was also sweet, innocent and untroubled by hardship, let alone by war. Frivolity and sex (the many children notwithstanding) had no place in her life. Soldiers began to praise the type, to dream of faithful, moon-faced women and their healthy, well-nourished sons. The gentleness, the sentimentality, of many Soviet troops towards small children was noted at the time. By April at least, a woman with a baby, local people learned, was practically immune from rape. But even sentimental troops, the men who kept their pockets full of sweets for hungry German kids, worried about their families back home. It was a long time since any had seen their children.

  There were reasons to be concerned. Even the strongest marriages were showing signs of strain by this time. The classic letter, received by thousands of men, contained an image of cold homecoming: ‘Our flame was not hot enough to last.’65 Each gap between her letters prompted Belov to suspect that his own marriage was faltering. ‘I’ve had a note from my wife,’ he scribbled in March 1944. ‘I get the feeling that she and I are heading for a major row. It’s an unpleasant feeling, a kind of general inertia.’66 Perhaps she had been worrying, as Taranichev’s Natalya had, about the cost of separation. ‘You won’t know us at all if the war goes on much longer,’ Natalya wrote in October 1944. ‘It’s a pity that you have become so remote from us.’67 ‘I try to write whenever I can,’ her husband replied in a brisk, reproving tone. ‘Even when I’m on the march. But I would remind you that there are moments when my mood is so lousy, because of the general situation, that I can’t bring myself to write so much as a postcard, even if I have the time. I will remember Stalingrad for a long time!’68

  The men whose marriages collapsed were angrier still, whatever infidelities they had committed for themselves. Part of the problem was the wartime idealization of the Soviet wife, the waiting girlfriend, the family for whom each soldier fought. Back home, where survival was a matter of humiliation, of exhausting struggle, real life was nothing like the image, and real women could not match up to the soldiers’ dreams. At the front, too, a new morality prevailed. Kopelev was a father and a married man. He fully expected to return to his old life when the war ended. But at the front, he took a second ‘wife’, as countless officers like him would do. ‘I told her that since we had to work together day and night, we couldn’t avoid sleeping together, so why put it off?’ The point was that ‘perhaps we would be killed together by the same shell’.69 Sauce for the front-line gander, however, was not supposed to be enjoyed by geese back home. Among their petitions from these last months of war were soldiers’ appeals for new laws to give them control over their children, to allow for postal divorces and to punish the women who had shamed and betrayed them.70

  But fighting men were powerless to change things back at home. The only world they could affect was here, in Germany, where the women who had brought on their ruin, the spoiled Frauen, still wrapped themselves in silk and fur, or so the soldiers fantasized, while Russian children starved. Where Russian women wore their peasant blouses and embroidered sarafans (in theory and in folklore, anyway), these German females dressed in provocative western styles, wore make-up, teetered on high heels.71 The whole culture that had produced them seemed sick, disgusting – and wickedly seductive. Some German women were accused of deliberate whoring. ‘German ladies are… ready to begin payment of “reparations” at once,’ a disgusted Soviet officer observed. ‘It won’t work!’72 ‘Europe is a dirty abyss,’ a soldier wrote home from Prussia that winter. ‘I have taken a look at German magazines, and they disgust me… Even their music is indecent! Is this Europe? Give me Siberia every time!’73 Another discovered a cache of pornographic pictures (probably not, in this case, the Venus de Milo) in an abandoned German position near Koenigsberg. ‘What could be more disgusting?’ he asked. ‘Our culture must be higher than that of the Germans, because you would never find such images among our ranks.’74

  Rape, then, combined the desire to avenge with the impulse to destroy, to smash German luxuries and waste the fascists’ wealth. It punished women and it reinforced the fragile manliness of the perpetrators. It also underscored the emotional ties between gangs of the men, and it was as a gang, not individuals, that the men usually acted, drawing an energy and anonymity from the momentum of the group. It was the collective triumph of these males, certainly, that rape purported to celebrate. And though women bore the brunt of the violence, German men were also victims of a kind. It was no accident that many rapes took place in view of husbands and fathers. The point was being made that they were now the creatures without power, that they would have to watch, to suffer this most intimate degradation.75 One woman recounted the tale of a lawyer who had stood by his Jewish wife all through the Nazi years, refusing to divorce her in spite of the risks. When the Russians arrived, he protected her again, at least until a bullet from a Russian automatic hit him in the hip. As he lay bleeding to death, he watched as three men raped his wife.76

  The anecdotes fill stacks of files, but the precise statistics will remain unknown. The violence was worst in East Prussia, but rape was a problem wherever the Red Army encountered its enemies. Tens of thousands of German women and girls undoubtedly suffered rape at the hands of Soviet troops; indeed, it is virtually certain that the figure ran to hundreds of thousands.77 However, numbers are dangerous tools, creating certainties on paper that have nothing much to do with life. This was a world of propaganda, a world coloured, to the last, by Goebbels’ pen. Numbers could make the Russians seem more terrible, turn Germans into victims, perhaps wipe out some dark stains from the Nazi past. They clearly helped to reinforce the image of the Red Army as an Asiatic horde.78 But though the stories told by the rates of abortion and venereal disease infection after 1945 are evidence of a kind,79 some other numbers are less definite. When a Berlin newspaper reported that a seventy-two-year-old woman had been raped twenty-four times, the anonymous Berlin diarist wearily asked, ‘Who counted?’80

  It is just as problematical to estimate the number of perpetrators. The veterans themselves are unlikely to volunteer new lists of names. Some officers I came to know would mention cases where they restored discipline, as Kirill did in East Prussia by threatening two perpetrators (‘not from my unit, of course’) with his own pistol, but rank and file soldiers, who must at least have witnessed the atrocity, refused to talk of it. ‘They say there were rapes,’ one man told me. ‘I never saw any. The thing is, we never actually saw any Germans. They had always run away before we got to any town.’ For many, the silence suggested a kind of selective amnesia, no doubt the child of shame. But other pressures operated, too. No army trumpets its crimes, but the Soviet official silence about rape was numbing. It is enough to look at the records of the NKVD troops. Officials with responsibility for discipline and for maintaining order among civilians in the front-line zones were in a position to report cases of rape whenever they chose. Their records, after all, were marked ‘absolutely secret’. But even these internal documents mention almost no incidents of gang rape and few individual crimes. It was as if the officers conspired to keep it out of their written accounts, filling the space with incidents of drunkenness or absence without leave instead.

  The NKVD troops who served with the 1st Belorussian Front were in the eye of the Red Army storm, but the tone of their reports at the time remained cool. ‘In one house we found eight Germans,’ an officer observed, ‘an old man, five women and two youths of twelve–thirteen.’ Like many others – hundreds – they had hanged themselves. The officers who reported the scene explained that local witnesses had suggested that, ‘despite the fact that most of the women in the settlement are of a certain age’, the victims had been afraid becaus
e ‘Russian soldiers are raping German women’.81 The allegation is reported with the scepticism usually reserved for sightings of the Virgin Mary, but this was January 1945. For six months already, the same army had been anxious about the rates of venereal disease among its troops in Poland, the Baltic and Romania. Monthly inspections had been ordered among all soldiers of either sex.82 However, when it came to the reports on discipline, more space – many times more – was given to ideological wavering than to rape. It was only in April and May 1945, when Stalin himself had intervened, that ‘relations with German civilians’ began to feature in reports on discipline.83

  Just as seriously, rape was seldom punished, especially at first. In the early months, up to the spring of 1945, the soldiers were still fighting under an order to take revenge. Thereafter, when even the Soviet leadership had begun to appreciate the cost – to discipline and to the army’s combat capability – of the unmilitary violence, some officers took stricter control, and there were even executions for rape in the Red Army. In April 1945, when his army joined Konev’s troops in Silesia, Rabichev recalled that forty men and officers were shot in front of their units to discourage further atrocities.84 ‘Some commanders!’ the soldiers would mutter. ‘They’ll shoot their own men over a German bitch.’85 More usually, however, the perpetrators whose crime was not condoned might be given relatively light punishments. Five years was a standard sentence, but it could be reduced to two or less on appeal, especially for soldiers with good war records.86 In any case, these men were needed at the front. Their sentences were almost all deferred until the fighting stopped, and many, in the best Red Army style, had ‘redeemed their crime with their own blood’ – died or been incapacitated – by that stage. Rape, in other words, was treated more leniently than desertion, theft or – as in Kopelev’s case – a unilateral attempt to protect German civilians. A few cases were singled out (usually when other breaches of discipline were involved) but the majority simply disappeared from Soviet records.

  It is unlikely that every one of the scores of veterans who agreed to talk to me was guiltless in this gruesome tale, but they have no incentive to discuss it now. Back then, they had a war to win. They fought, they suffered, and many would end up as victims, as invalids, themselves. What they remember after sixty years may not be a moment of rage but the long days in hospital, or else the lads, the night marches, the songs. Women – baby in Russian, a dismissive word that translates somewhere on the scale between bitches and old bags – would not be worth a thought compared with the regiment, the victory. Baby were not worth much at home in Russia. Why should they be so special in this other world? Why should they count against the crime of Maidanek, the tears of Russian children? ‘You want to hear about the war,’ the old men say. ‘Let’s talk about that. Only journalists want to know about those scandals.’

  The men took more than memories from Prussia. This may have been a hard campaign, with tens of thousands of casualties, but it was also a time of strange abundance. Germany was rich. Hungary, too, and even Bucharest, were full of goods to loot. On paper, the last phase of the war marked the final triumph of communism. In reality, it was like the first day of a great bazaar. As with all other crimes, including rape, the Soviets were not the only guilty men. Their allies in this war ransacked cellars and wealthy homes as well, as did the thousands of former prisoners and other displaced persons who now found themselves at liberty on German soil.87 But the Red Army did everything on a monumental scale. It had suffered and lost more than anyone, and now it demanded its recompense. Stalin insisted that the Reich owed his people at least ten billion dollars’ worth of reparations.88 The army, more or less with government connivance, would set about securing a portion of this as soon as it set foot on German territory.

  A set of regulations was in place by 1944 to cover the capture and despatch of ‘trophies’. The list was comprehensive. Anything that was captured in battle or abandoned by the enemy, including weapons, supplies of ammunition, fuel, food, boots, livestock, rolling stock, railway track, automobiles, amber and cases of vintage champagne, was deemed to be the property of the Red Army and Soviet state. Whole factories would be dismantled later in the war. Eighty per cent of Berlin’s industrial machinery had been hauled away by the Soviets before their allies entered the city in 1945. ‘They had dismantled the refrigeration plant at the abattoir,’ an American officer observed, ‘torn stoves and pipes out of restaurant kitchens, stripped machinery from mills and factories and were completing the theft of the American Singer Sewing Machine plant when we arrived.’89 The context was the utter devastation of the western regions of their own empire, but even so, the destruction was often pointless, at least as far as observers from the West could see. Meanwhile, back in the Soviet Union, the labour of German prisoners, ex-soldiers, was deemed to be a war trophy as well. If anyone could reassemble the dismantled German plant, these were the men.

  It was inescapable that troops faced with the chaos of a battle zone would help themselves to anything they found. Indeed, some looting was essential to the war effort. The supply lines for Zhukov’s advancing armies were stretched to breaking point. When Aronov or Ermolenko sat down to German meals in Insterburg, they were getting the best rations that they had seen for weeks, not indulging mere gluttony. One officer wrote to his family about the meal he enjoyed with his exhausted and hungry men just after the fall of Koenigsberg. The unit was issued with passes to the local military store, a repository for all kinds of trophy food and other goods. They entered the premises at eleven and came out at five, having drunk beer, wine and vodka, eaten sausages, and stuffed themselves with tongue, biscuits, chocolates, truffles, raisins and dates.90

  When their own stomachs had been filled, some men began to think about their families at home. They knew that there was nothing in Russia to buy. Their leaders were already packing crates with fine china, bedlinen and rich German furs. Senior officers requisitioned cars to get the stuff home and even, later in the war, a fleet of special trains.91 The men began to think on the same lines. On 26 December 1944, well in time for the Russian new year, the Soviet ministry of defence confirmed a regulation that authorized all army personnel to send parcels back home from the front line.92 It was, effectively, a licence to loot. In fact, an officer who heard that his men were not sending much back home henceforth was liable to tell them to ‘get better at grabbing’.93

  As ever, the looting process was graded by privilege and rank. Only soldiers of good conduct were permitted to send their parcels back east, and even then they were supposed to send just one parcel a month. The permitted weight varied from 5 kg for soldiers to 16 kg (a notional limit in practice) for generals.94 Kopelev leafed through a library of exquisite rare books. His comrades in arms chose antique paintings, hunting rifles and even a piano.95 Frontoviki had the first pick and often destroyed anything they did not take.96 It could be a misfortune, suddenly, to be assigned to the second echelon. ‘I’m really miserable,’ Taranichev wrote to his Natalya. ‘They’ve just said that we can send ten kg of stuff a month [this was the allowance for officers], but I’m in a place where there is nothing, it’s all been looted, and the prices are absolutely crazy.’97 He would soon overcome his disappointment, for even the least warlike of officers and ‘rearguard rats’ could fill their quotas when they learned to look. A favourite item, predictably, was food. ‘Eat for your health,’ an officer scribbled to his wife and daughter as he enclosed canned meat, sugar and chocolate, ‘and don’t have any pangs of conscience, and don’t think of giving any of it away.’98 Other men sent packets of nails back home, or even panes of glass, as well as more attractive gifts like china, tools and piles of German shoes and clothes.99 The jamboree involved no guilt. Even today, the veterans can talk of it without embarrassment, like recounting a particularly fruitful jumble sale. Getting the best things was a sign of skill, of concern for one’s family, of an ability to deal with the new beast, capitalism.

  The men’s choices were sometime
s strange, or at least poignant. Soldiers took typewriters that they would never use, since the Cyrillic alphabet required completely different keys. Taranichev eventually picked out a radio (‘made by an excellent German firm’) but noted sadly that ‘for this, of course, we will need electricity. Wherever we decide to live after the war, we’re not going to be in a place that has no electricity.’100 He did not say it, but a radio was a truly exclusive item back at home. The Sovinformburo had seized the lot in 1941. But other things were scarce as well, including those with more immediate utility. The engineer went on to send home parcels of food, an overcoat, a feather eiderdown with a silk cover, several sets of sheets, and padded trousers for those hunting expeditions of the future. He added a bolt of black silk for his wife, together with some yellow leather to make boots.101 Like other Soviet wives in other provinces, Natalya was about to bring the fashions of 1940s central Europe to the steppes of post-war Turkestan, not always with accessories to match.