He knew that there would not be long to wait. ‘Perhaps,’ he concluded, ‘the war will have ended before you even get this letter.’ Five days later, Zhukov accepted Germany’s unconditional surrender. The ceremony was as dignified, as final, as wartime conditions could make it. The cameras of the world’s press flashed as Keitel, the German head of state, took off his glove to sign the act of capitulation just after midnight on 9 May. When the German delegation had left the hall, the Soviet and Allied delegations collapsed with relief, the wine and vodka appeared on the green baize tables, and Zhukov himself danced to the applause of his generals.128 Outside, the men greeted their victory with salvoes of heavy gunfire, rifle shots, and yet more drink. But Belov never heard the last shot of his war, nor did he ever see the daughter who was born a month later. He was sent west, to Burg on the Elbe, on 4 May. The next day, 5 May, he was killed there.129
More than 360,000 soldiers of the Red Army and of its Polish comrades perished in the campaigns for Berlin, perhaps a tenth of them in the battles around the capital itself.130 Those men and women were the ghosts at the feast on 9 May. But for a few hours, most soldiers remembered life, not death. ‘We heard the joyful news on the radio at three o’clock this morning,’ Taranichev wrote home to his wife. ‘Anyone who was already asleep was woken up, and we organized a gathering straight away: we fired volleys out of every kind of gun till morning, which means that right up till dawn the town was under such heavy fire that it looked as if a real battle was going on. My dears, you cannot imagine what joy there is among our officers and men because of the war’s ending; it’s true that you suffered very greatly back home behind the lines, and that our rearguard together with the valiant Red Army defeated the fascist beast, but all the same for us at the front it was hardest of all, and you’ve got to understand us, frontoviki!’131 Ageev spoke for many when he declared that ‘there has never been such happiness and pride in history as the Soviet people are experiencing today’.132 At Samoilov’s base, the soldiers had been celebrating since the fall of Berlin on 2 May. On 7 May, they heard a rumour that the war was finally over, and some began to fire into the air. They fired again on 8 May, this time because the BBC had announced Germany’s capitulation, but it was not until Keitel surrendered to Zhukov himself that they got really drunk.133
Elsewhere the men had not waited that long. On 5 May, a soldier in the NKVD’s border guards happened to find a canister of wood alcohol in the courtyard of one of SMERSh’s Berlin stations. He drained an experimental portion into a teapot and shared it with two other troops in the security service. The single pot was not enough, and so they filled a three-litre container and shared that out, fetching yet more when the cook turned up and invited himself to the party. That night, another seven men joined in – or helped themselves, because the original drinkers had passed out by this stage, happily forgetting that the war was not yet won. They did not live to see the victory. The first three men died on the second day. The rest would die before Keitel had signed the final papers.134 Such cases were repeated all along the front. Wood alcohol was frequently to blame, but so were antifreeze, white spirit, and even too much looted schnapps.135 At least the victims never knew the disappointments of the peace.
The next day, 10 May, Berlin would feel deserted, silent. The streets were empty, and the public squares, where the Wehrmacht had felled trees in preparation for its own artillery, felt blank, bereft even of songbirds. Most soldiers were sleeping off their hangovers. But not everyone had remained in the German capital to greet the end of European war. Ermolenko was among the thousands of men already heading east. His company received the news of victory as their train approached the Ural mountains.136 He did not know the details of his mission yet, but he was heading for Manchuria. The European war was over, but the Soviets would now join in the struggle to defeat Japan.
It was the first straw in the wind, the first hint that Germany’s defeat would not mean the end of military service for Red Army troops. They had fulfilled their duty, as Belov had said, not flinching even to the last, but now the first of many disappointments loomed. It would not be a few weeks but some months, and even years, before most men would see their wives and families again. As for their hopes, the dreams that they had nurtured through long evenings of talk and writing, it would be a longer wait still. As Kopelev had understood as he watched the flames rising above Neidenburg, it was not clear what these people were now equipped to do. It would never be clear how they would deal with peace. The only thing that they could count on as they watched the spring unfold around the ruins of Berlin was the ruthless power of the state for which so many had died. They had saved it. Now they would learn the measure of its gratitude.
10
Sheathe the Old Sword
May 9 was a glorious day in Moscow. That night, just after one o’clock, the familiar voice of Yury Levitan, the Sovinformburo’s wartime announcer, had confirmed that the war with Germany was over. The news flew round the city within minutes. People woke their neighbours, abandoning the caution that normally regulated social contact in the capital city. Whole families rushed out into the streets, the men clutching the bottles that they had been saving for this very hour, and a great party began that would roar into the coming evening. Dawn would bring yet more people to town, and as many as 3 million had crushed into the open spaces round the Kremlin by the afternoon. A day like this would have been unforgettable enough without the night to come, but then, well after nine o’clock, as the spring horizon began to fade, hundreds of searchlights were switched on. They flooded the famous ensemble of buildings – the art deco hotel façades, the crenellated walls and towers – with waves of purple, red and gold. A fleet of planes flew low above Red Square, releasing coloured flares into the darkness, and then the fireworks were lit, the best that even Russians could remember. ‘For once,’ wrote a delighted Werth, ‘Moscow had thrown all reserve and restraint to the winds. The people were so happy,’ he added, ‘that they did not even have to get drunk.’1
The victory seemed to belong to everyone. There was no real distinction, for a moment, between factory workers and office staff, typesetters, engineers, collective farmers and the designers of tanks; they had all paid a price, not least in prodigious effort, for the defeat of fascism. But no one felt prouder, or more entitled to claim ownership of this victory, than the soldiers themselves. ‘On these joyful, happy days these lines are being written in Berlin by me!’ Orest Kuznetsov wrote to his sister on 10 May. He was scribbling on a postcard of Unter den Linden, blotting out the German caption with his army pen. ‘There are no words,’ he wrote, ‘you can’t choose them, to reflect the future joy of this victory, a participant in which you have been and saw it all with your own eyes, walking round the centre of the “den” as a conqueror, as the owner. The faces of every officer and soldier shine with the indescribable joy of our achievement! The Great Patriotic war is over – it is a golden book of history. I congratulate you on this great Festival!’2
Few people were in any mood to weigh the price that had been paid for this euphoric day or even to forecast what peace might cost in future. A calculation like that might well have raised some doubt about the victory itself. Could a nation consider that it was triumphant when approximately 27 million of its citizens were dead? What plaudits could the army really claim when twice as many civilians as soldiers had died? It was a strange species of victory that left 25 million people homeless, living in zemlyanki or squeezed into windowless corridors. Only Poland could claim that it had lost proportionately more, and it was now a bitter, shattered semi-colony.3 The Germans, certainly, had paid a heavy price, and almost three quarters of their military losses – human and material – were accounted for along the Eastern Front. The Red Army had truly punished and defeated the invader, but the toll was heavier for the Soviets than for their adversaries.4 It is a testimony to the scale of wartime carnage that the estimates of military losses should vary by margins of millions. The nearest anyone has co
me to a consensus is to say that no fewer than 8.6 million Soviet military personnel were killed during the war, either as prisoners in Nazi camps or on the battlefield. This is the ‘safe’ figure – there are much greater estimates – but nonetheless it represents nearly a third of the total number of men and women who were mobilized into the Soviet armed forces.5
The Soviet dead included many of the country’s best, fittest, and most productive citizens. Three quarters of the men and women who died in military uniform were aged between nineteen and thirty-five. Of the generation of young men that was born in 1921, the conscripts who had been called up in time for the battles of Kiev and Kharkov, or for the calvary of Stalingrad itself, up to 90 per cent were dead. The war left whole towns without young adults, and for some years into the future there would be fewer young couples and fewer children. In other words, besides the grief, a burden that Soviet women, in particular, would bear for decades, there was a long-term economic price, even for death. And in terms of strict profit and loss, the war had cost just under three and a half trillion roubles, an estimated one third of the Soviet Union’s national wealth.6 For the exhausted and depleted labour force, the prospect of rebuilding must have seemed almost as daunting as another winter under fire.
Nonetheless, pessimism was in short supply that May. In Russia, and in large parts of the Soviet empire generally, civilians paused from their work in the fields or among ruined buildings to celebrate deliverance. The victory seemed to attest that this people could never be enslaved. The Soviet state, their Soviet system – and their now revered leader, Stalin – had also secured a pre-eminent place in world affairs, the right to determine futures that stretched beyond the pre-war borders. At the front, in Berlin, Prague and across central Europe, soldiers – and young officers especially – allowed themselves to dream of the utopia to come. The notion that a better life would be the people’s just reward was commonplace. ‘When the war is over,’ a Soviet writer had remarked in 1944, ‘life in Russia will become very pleasant.’ His hope – like that of millions of others – was that the new friendship with America and Britain would bear lasting fruit, that the Soviet Union’s prestige in the world would open doors that had been shut since 1917. ‘There will be much coming and going,’ he continued, ‘with a lot of contacts with the West. Everybody will be allowed to read anything he likes. There will be exchanges of students, and foreign travel will be made easy.’7
Each person’s hopes reflected their experience and interests. Officers, for the most part, favoured reforms that maintained Soviet discipline and a conservative morality, but they still believed in the changes to come, and many felt that they had a right, even an obligation, to put their views about the peace to the government. Since 1942, military personnel had been learning how to think. In 1945, they brought their new-found skills and sense of individual responsibility to bear on post-war reconstruction. The task would be hard work at first, but these people were used to that. Real change, not promises of future happiness, was the priority now. ‘To search for friends in the future,’ a fictitious teacher tells a veteran in a story from this time, ‘is the doom of loneliness.’8 Konstantin Simonov captured the determined, hopeful and reformist mood in the musings of another fictional character, Sintsov. ‘Something wasn’t right even before the war,’ the veteran reflects. ‘I’m not the only one who thinks it; practically everyone does. Both the people who sometimes talk about it and the people who never do… Sometimes, it is true, I think about the time after the war simply as a silence… But then I remember again how the war started, and I already know that I don’t want it to be the same after the war as it used to be.’9
The question was exactly how to implement this change, and even where to start. Again, Red Army officers were never lost for words. Still billeted wherever they had seen the victory salutes – forgetful, maybe, of the Soviet world that waited to the east – they wrote to their advocate back in Moscow, to the Soviet president, Mikhail Kalinin. ‘I have a series of considerations to put to the next meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet,’ a lieutenant wrote that July.10 Like thousands of others, he had seen what a dictatorship, admittedly a fascist one, looked like when it was viewed from the outside. He had also been to Maidanek, and the impression made by its death camp lingered in his mind. The law on political prisoners, he wrote to Kalinin, should be reviewed. The Soviet state had Maidaneks of its own. If there had ever been a justification for these, the sacrifice that citizens had made swept it away. It was a view whose echo could be heard in almost any army camp. Whatever guilt the people had incurred before the war for failing Lenin’s great historic cause, for failing their own destiny, it had been expiated now. The shadows of the 1930s deserved to be exorcised.
The lieutenant’s criticisms were not confined to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. He also tackled the issue of the collective farms. ‘Give the land to the people themselves,’ he suggested. He had been listening to his men and knew their view on peasant life. With them, he had seen the condition of agriculture in Romania and Poland. Compared with the abundant world of fat Romanian cattle and well-stocked barns, the memory of Soviet collectives was like a miserable dream. And then there were the smaller things, the irritations that his men had asked him to convey. They wanted to receive their letters more promptly, he wrote, and they wanted the families of their dead comrades to receive parcels just as their own people did. They also wanted to be sure of a fair bread ration for everyone. Finally, like soldiers everywhere, they wanted to complain about the yobbish violence on ravaged, lawless Russian streets. ‘We need to fight all kinds of hooliganism.’11
A similar list might have been written by almost any officer that summer.12 The idea that its sacrifices in the war had earned the Russian people something more than slavery was almost commonplace, and the perception was made sharper and more urgent by the ghosts of the dead. A price so high, surely, could not be paid for nothing. The idea that so much blood bought only war, that it paid for the ambitions of dictators and not for any of their people’s dreams, was unthinkable. Officers’ letters that summer asked for more freedom, more education, and a livelier cultural life. One man wanted a unified Ministry of Works to supervise the building of new homes, the provision of food, and the refitting of hospitals. Another, anxious about the neglect of education in the war, asked for a Ministry of Culture with powers to supervise all aspects of literary life, from the provision of public libraries to the editing of newspapers.13 But none, not even the reformers, demanded democracy, let alone Stalin’s scalp. The relative modesty of their claims against the Soviet state – especially in view of the sacrifice that had been made – makes the leader’s reply even more callous. For there was never any chance. Not one request on these forgotten lists would ever be fulfilled.
It could be argued that the dreamers always wanted more than a devastated country could deliver. Even personal freedom, when there was so much work to do, was a luxury. To Stalin’s mind, only forced labour and compulsory unpaid ‘voluntary’ work could guarantee national recovery. By 1950, the Soviet economy was claimed to be twice the size it had been in 1945.14 This growth was not achieved by fostering the people’s leisure interests. And other post-war governments in Europe, including Britain’s, were also obliged to call for austerity. The war impoverished Europe for some years, but the oppressiveness, the lack of trust, and the sheer violence of late Stalinism exceeded any economic or security requirement. There had to be some other reason for the darkness that closed in.
Veterans of a contemplative disposition were apt to blame themselves. They realized too late that they had spent their energy at the front line. Many were injured, even permanently disabled, and few escaped some kind of stress and shock. They were also haunted by disabling guilt. A cloud of collective depression stalled and then blocked such people’s eagerness to call for change. ‘The dead are watching me,’ a soldier says in a poem of 1948, and it was a feeling all would have recognized. As Mikhail Gefter, himself a
veteran and survivor, would later recollect, the doubt that ‘tortures memory’ is the thought that ‘I could, but did not, save them’.15 For some, the most absorbing peacetime project of the future would be the search for their comrades’ graves.
All found it difficult to adapt to peace. In war, an officer gave orders and they were fulfilled, his life was organized around clear goals, and there were secret little pleasures – plundered cognac or a pretty front-line wife – to compensate for military rigours. Infantrymen also had narrow daily worlds, and as peace loomed the routines and close comradeships seemed curiously safe. With the war over, there were no absolute priorities, no rules. Some soldiers found that they could never make the change. To this day, many veteran combatants get up at five-thirty, a habit that retirement and the inertia of poverty still cannot break, but at the time the real diehards could hardly bear the very thought of peace. They listened hungrily to rumours of another war, this time with Britain and America.16 Some even claimed to have seen the first lines of wounded men in Simferopol.17 It was tempting to hold fast to old anxieties and patterns of familiar stress. War justified the only way of life most of these people could imagine, while peace meant facing the complicated worlds that they had left and even taking cognisance of all that they had lost.
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