Other post-war governments would work harder to help their veterans adapt.18 Some did so despite the hardship and cost of war. It was difficult everywhere, but no other combatant nation emerged with quite the cold dictatorship that Stalin built. War alone was not to blame for this, and nor were veterans or memories of death. It was Stalin himself, the leader who took credit for the victory while Zhukov’s ink was still wet on the page, who determined the post-war relationship between people and state. Stalin, that is, and the swarm of acolytes and bureaucrats who flourished in the system that his brand of government created. As the spontaneous joy of early May began to cool, the leaders of a dictatorial regime made plans for their own victory parade. The people’s carnival was to be superseded by a ceremony along proper Soviet lines, something that put every person in their place.
It took several weeks to finalize the scheme. By then, some people had begun to wonder whether grandeur was what they wanted. Some muttered about the expense, others about their private grief. ‘I won’t be going to the parade,’ one Muscovite observed. ‘They killed my son. I’d rather go to a requiem.’19 Others of the same view began to call for a day of mourning, or even an annual week of it; no gesture could do justice to the loss that gaped in people’s lives. For the next fifty years, real memories would infuse the annual victory holiday in early May with a solemnity that other socialist festivals, including the anniversary of Lenin’s coup and Red Army Day, would lack. Wartime bereavement was a shadow that would never lift. For some, it meant the end of family happiness. ‘I have two children and no help from anywhere,’ a woman muttered to someone. ‘That’s why I don’t have a chance of celebrating, and I’ve got nothing to be pleased about.’20
Anxiety, loneliness, and the fear of penury would grow more troubling for widows and orphans as winter approached. But still, that June, the consensus favoured a state event, something to embody and contain the chaos of pride, victory, shock and apprehension for the future. As usual, that meant a rehearsed ceremony and a hand-picked crowd. The cost must have been staggering. Selected soldiers, sailors and airmen were brought home from Germany and the Baltic. The cavalry got to shine its boots, the regimental bands tuned up, tanks, guns and death-dealing Katyushas were lovingly oiled. Whole companies of cadets from Moscow training schools, future artillerymen and engineers, took lessons in advanced parade-ground drill.21 Each gesture and each step was choreographed, including even those of Zhukov and the generals. The only thing that could not be controlled – apart from Zhukov’s grey horse, which was known for its bad temper – was the Moscow weather. The grand parade, the culmination of four years of war, took place on 24 June in drenching rain.
The change of mood since 9 May could scarcely have been clearer, though thousands of Muscovites, still shocked and overjoyed by the war’s end, might well have overlooked the shift. Instead of happy chaos, this was a day of geometrical precision. Red Square was filled with shapes, not individual people. Each rectangle in the parade was composed of scores of uniformed men. In the best traditions of authoritarian states (but for its massive scale, the event could have been a Nazi festival of sport), they all moved to exact routines, none even looking in a direction that had not been agreed and rehearsed in advance. The parade was blatant with gold braid. This was an army with a sharp hierarchy and strong leaders, not a people’s militia or even the sword of the world’s proletariat. Zhukov himself reviewed the troops, perching on that tetchy grey and soaking in the endless rain. The themes that day were triumph and authority. The victory, it was made clear, was about Germany’s defeat, not Russia’s liberty. In a grand gesture of conquest, the captured German colours, each topped with a silver eagle, were hurled down in a pile before the Lenin mausoleum. They might have gleamed in the June light. Instead they made a sodden pile of red and black in the grey damp.
Stalin watched from the safety of his stand. He was, by all accounts, exhausted, and he had visibly aged. But he had lost none of his anxious jealousy. That night, at a banquet for 2,500 Red Army officers and men, the leader would propose a toast to the Soviet people. It should have been the supreme moment of glory and gratitude. Instead, the words he used might well have made an entire nation shudder. For though Stalin acknowledged that this had been a real people’s war, he was in no mood to elevate rivals. The time for homespun pride was past. While they might have been hailed as heroes, the people who had struggled, the millions whose efforts had kept the soldiers fed and bullets in their guns, became ‘the little screws and bolts’ in the great engine of his state.22 They were to be no more significant in the next decade than the replaceable parts of a machine. A peace on terms like this would be a disappointment to many civilians, but for frontoviki, with all their hopes and new-found strengths, it would turn out to be a kind of death, a loss of self. In many ways, it was also a betrayal.
‘We’ve been living in peacetime conditions for about a week already,’ Taranichev wrote to Natalya on 15 May. ‘The cannons and machine guns aren’t firing any more, and the planes aren’t flying; we don’t have to observe a blackout any more – we work at night with the windows open and breathe the fresh air. But… there is still plenty of work to do. We will probably be here for a couple of months at least.’ It was no real hardship, as he went on to explain. He and a comrade had been billeted with a family near their base in Czechoslovakia. Their hosts were deferential, generous. ‘They offered us every convenience: we had a bath as soon as we arrived and we have been given a room of our own with wonderful beds and snow-white linen.’23 There was even a radio in the room – another excellent German one – that Taranichev (notwithstanding the kind hosts) already planned to take home when he left. Indeed, a good part of his letter was about the parcels that were on their way to Ashkhabad. His other main preoccupation was the future. Like his comrades, he yearned to know the date he would go home.
The bulk of front-line troops were stationed in central and eastern Europe. Their demobilization was not just desirable in human terms, for the Soviet state could not afford to keep an army several million strong in uniform. But what the older men dreamed of – a swift, joyful reunion with their families – would not be possible for most. No army simply dissolves overnight. And while it finalized its plans to debrief and transport over a million men, the Soviet state was content to use soldiers as cheap labour for some of the tougher jobs in construction and transport. As Taranichev hinted, these ranged from rebuilding the roads to securing the ruins of Berlin and dealing with the human columns of former prisoners and refugees. If soldiers in the European theatre were bored, it was only because the peace would always be dull – thankfully – after the extreme world of the war. But some Red Army men still had some fighting left to do.
The war did not end on that much-celebrated evening in May. In August 1945, ninety divisions of the Red Army found themselves stationed in Manchuria. Some of these were drawn from the Far East, from Soviet Mongolia; but others, including the group that Ermolenko travelled with, were simply ordered east from stations in the Baltic and central Europe. Ermolenko himself had been in uniform since 1942. The last action he saw in Europe had been the battle for Koenigsberg, one of the bitterest of 1945. His surprise order to take the train east followed an argument with a superior officer in late April. Six weeks later, while his former comrades cracked open another crate of bottles in Berlin, he was setting up his radio station in the shadow of the Grand Khingan mountains. ‘We heard with interest that there has just been a law on the demobilization of soldiers aged thirty and above,’ he told his diary on 28 June. ‘It’s not for me. No one is leaving here for now.’24
The fighting in Manchuria was short but savage. Ostensibly, the Red Army had been sent east to honour obligations to its allies. If human blood could buy goodwill, the Soviets would pay. In eleven days of fighting, 12,031 Soviet troops would die, the victims of a war that could have little meaning back at home.25 What Stalin was really doing was attempting to secure the Soviet Far East, as well as backing up
his claim to valuable territories such as the Kurile islands and Sakhalin. Swift action became more important after 6 August, when the United States dropped its atomic bomb on Hiroshima, foreshadowing the war’s end and making Soviet aid appear redundant. The very day that Soviet hostilities against Japan began, indeed, a second bomb would devastate Nagasaki. Washington’s terrible demonstration of its power was a warning that Stalin was swift to heed. The Red Army went on to the offensive, mounting an attack over some of the remotest and least habitable land in Asia. Stalin’s dream was to occupy a portion of Hokkaido island. A few more weeks of fighting could have realized that hope. What Ermolenko was witnessing, in other words, apart from hunger, fear, and personal confusion, was one of the first shots of the cold war.
The shadow of this new conflict would haunt the Red Army in Germany as well. Ostensibly, the allies – America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union – were still working in harness, assisting each other with supplies, the restoration of communications and the all-important repatriation of displaced persons. But tensions were never far below the surface. The Bomb, which crystallized relations between the two sides, was scarcely mentioned in the soldiers’ writings in August. It may have seemed so appalling that it could only be accommodated after Molotov declared it safe, announcing to the world that Russia could make one of its own. But fear of America was not the main problem among Red Army veterans in Europe. From Moscow’s point of view at least, the most dangerous development in their ranks was the soldiers’ half envious, half naïve admiration for the lords of capitalism.
The superpowers were destined to be enemies for decades, but for a while their soldiers seemed to be making friends. The attraction was based on respect, gratitude, and complementary social skills. American troops enjoyed the Russians’ spontaneity, their talent for impromptu drinks and music.26 Red Army men were grateful for the razor blades, the cigarettes, the bright packets of gum. For Soviet utopians, too, Chicago was a prototype, these square-jawed, healthy men the models for their own children to come. America was starting to look dangerously glamorous. The devil, they say, always has the best tunes, and it worried the politruks that blues and jitterbug was gaining ground on the Red Army’s hymns. The longer they remained in Germany, the more uncertain – from an ideological and disciplinary point of view – the war heroes seemed likely to become.
It took a while for wartime discipline and the fear of the shtraf unit to crumble among victorious Soviet troops. The new mood developed in a setting of lawless devastation. The Red Army’s own campaigns had destroyed Germany, but now – just like their former enemies – they had to make a life amid the dust and rubble that they had created. A stone’s throw from Berlin itself, for instance, was the city of Potsdam. In July 1945, this once-elegant suburb would become the setting for a summit meeting between Stalin, Churchill, and the new American president, Harry Truman. But it was no luxury spa. Scarcely a single large building remained intact. On 14 April, Allied bombers had destroyed the city’s main industrial plants, as well as the power stations, railway depots, food warehouses, water treatment plants and the tram park. When the Red Army reached it on 27 April, it was already without supplies of medicine, clean water, electricity or gas. Its civilian population had received no fresh supplies of food for two entire weeks. Without clean water or functioning sewers, they were living amid filth and rapidly spreading disease, including typhus and dysentery. Children were especially vulnerable, but the population as a whole was close to moral and physical collapse. To make matters worse, the city had become a staging post for refugees. Finally, in late April, it would host a pitched battle, complete with all the devastation of the howitzers and mines.27
The reconstruction of this wasteland – and the scores of others like it – would have been a daunting task at any time. There were no resources to call upon, no food or fuel reserves to spare. Just as seriously, there was a shortage of experienced personnel. Typically, the Red Army employed its less able officers to take charge of reconstruction after the front line had moved on. In Potsdam, the teams of men who helped to rebuild bridges and clear up the streets were staffed by individuals who were unfit for front-line service, by ex-prisoners of war and by volunteers drawn from the thousands of expatriates the Soviets discovered as they liberated German soil. ‘Many of these… are extremely undisciplined,’ the military authorities lamented. They ‘take part in drinking sessions and in looting’. Getting the locals to assist was essential, but most civilians feared to work. The women whose job was to cart away the rubble that blocked Potsdam’s streets knew that they risked assault and rape. On one occasion, all six young women in a work brigade were raped at the end of their working day. The bodies of others would turn up like old timber in the piles of debris that littered the streets.28
After the peace, rape was sporadic, provoked by impulse or the arrival of new troops. Some German officials believed the Soviets tacitly sanctioned it, especially on public holidays, which were perilous times for women near the soldiers’ bases.29 Frontoviki now claim that the offenders in cases like this were rearguard rats and civilians, but there is evidence against all groups of men. Indeed, the mood that allowed for disciplinary infringements was often strongest among former front-line soldiers. Back home, staff officers and politicians were enforcing distinctions of rank, but at the former front a cosy familiarity was developing between officers and men. Ironically, the effort of defeating fascism had been a catalyst for breaking down the fear and mutual suspicion that Stalin’s regime had worked so long to engineer. It was against regulations, for instance, but many officers habitually used the friendly and informal ‘ty’, for ‘you’, in place of the more formal ‘vy’ in conversations round the camp. Sergeants were the worst offenders, and old soldiers especially, but even lieutenants seemed to neglect the rules, including those that detailed how to wear the correct uniform.30 As they settled down, assigned the chores, and whitewashed the new barracks walls, the soldiers’ lives, viewed from outside, had begun to look like versions of domestic bliss.31
During the war, good officers had learned to know their men, to lead them by building their trust as well as showing who was boss. Too often now – or too often as far as the NKVD’s observers could see – these same officers were making themselves comfortable amid the men, condoning crimes if that helped everyone to thrive. Beyond their base, a whole country was in collapse, but inside the perimeter life could almost feel pleasant. At Potsdam that June an army village sprang up round the troops. The soldiers built it themselves, creating versions of bourgeois houses by seizing timber, glass and even window frames from German ruins. Their main preoccupation after that might have been called housekeeping. It was such a domestic business, such a matter of bedlinen, eggs and heating fuel that a report at the time referred to their activities as ‘self-service’.32 There were even gramophones – another piece of loot – on which the men could play American jazz and jitterbug. And self-service did not stop at the barracks fence. Elsewhere in Germany, soldiers were taking food from farms, demanding regular supplies of eggs and meat. One captain was caught with a haul of three horses and a pony trap, 30 kg of butter and twenty-one live geese. Another had demanded that the German population near his base deliver a daily tithe consisting of 100 eggs and twenty-five litres of milk.33
A good deal of this requisitioned food was sold on for stupendous sums in cash. The black market continued to do well. Almost no item was deemed valueless. Even if the wires were down, a telephone receiver had a future somewhere in Europe. The trick was only to find a buyer. In one small town, Red Army troops corralled a total of 1,500 bicycles within a few weeks of the peace. Fuel was also a valuable commodity, especially as soldiers themselves liked to screech through narrow streets in lend-lease trucks and stolen motorbikes. And for the connoisseur, there was a chance of works of art. Many German treasures, including valuable paintings and other objects looted from western Europe, were designated as reparations by the Soviets in 1945, but the wareh
ouses in which the crates awaited shipment were no more secure than any other army base. The black market that dealt in art involved soldiers of every rank, including military police.34 Later on, such people might embark on even more perilous deals. By 1946, the highest prices could be fetched for hard currency, tickets and precious safe conducts to the West.35
As usual, the Soviet authorities monitored everything that locals said. ‘It is clear,’ one report read, ‘that apart from a few genuine anti-fascists, the entire population is unhappy with the presence of the Red Army on German soil, and hope and pray for the arrival of the Americans or English.’36 Germans expressed their views in a variety of ways. Bilingual signs appeared outside the few cafés or bars that still functioned, the Russian text inviting custom while the German ‘translation’ proferred some form of disdainful abuse.37 More seriously, soldiers who went out on their own at night, or even travelled in small groups, were likely to turn up at first light with their throats slit or a bullet in their skulls.38 If the occupation were to last, and above all if the Soviet zone were not to be a drain on Stalin’s resources, some kind of rapport needed to be built between the Red Army and its reluctant hosts. It was not just a case of taming ex-frontoviki. The core of professional soldiers and their officers was outnumbered by conscripts, ex-prisoners and displaced Soviet civilians. All were in shock, uncertain that the war had really ended. That June, the political administration set to work to build a new consensus for the peace.
The first step was to put a stop to hate. On 11 June, an order from the Red Army’s political administration removed the words ‘Death to the German occupiers!’ from the mastheads of all magazines and newspapers for military circulation. In their place appeared the blander slogan ‘To our Soviet homeland!’39 Soldiers also heard lectures on the errors of their former idol, Ehrenburg. The idea was to turn their minds to other things than killing Germans. Violence, however, had become something of a habit. It would take more than slogans to reverse the hatred that haunted veterans for years. Zhukov, fresh from his triumph in Moscow’s Red Square, applied practical threats. ‘Many complaints continue about robbery, rape and individual cases of banditry on the part of individuals wearing Red Army uniforms,’ he observed in an order dated 30 June. He gave his army just five days to put a stop to anti-German acts. Henceforth, he ordered, all troops should be confined to army premises unless they were engaged in official business and closely supervised. In answer to the growing problem of Red Army officers and men who took informal German ‘wives’, the new order stipulated that anyone seen entering or leaving a private house was to be arrested and punished. Knowing that officers connived with men in every kind of crime, the marshal added that any officer deemed incapable of maintaining a strict disciplinary regime was to be named and recalled from service.40
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