Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  The order had some effect in the weeks that followed. Each military base, at least, reported a drop in recorded crime. Later, investigations would suggest that officers were still colluding with their men, suppressing details of infringements to keep Zhukov’s military police off everyone’s backs. But there is a consistency to the figures that suggests a real change of mood.41 Zhukov’s prestige and the men’s deep regard for him may well have played a part. So did the gradual effects of peace. Rape, for instance, became less common from late June, but one reason for this was that soldiers were striking up more stable friendships with the local women. Some would even form households of sorts, hoping to stay and make a life where chance had thrown them. The practice was so common that only the most brazen immorality was disciplined, such as the case of an officer who had left six ‘wives’ pregnant from Poland to Berlin.42 According to the Mayor of Koenigsberg, the only Germans in his town who were adequately fed that winter were the women whom Soviet troops had made pregnant.43 The most frequent military crimes from the late summer would be drunkenness, failure to wear proper uniform, and lack of respect for senior officers.44 The thirst for vengeance had abated.

  The other problem in the zone was to persuade the men that peacetime work was important. Frontoviki, including former members of punishment units, scoffed at the idea of discipline and regular working hours. ‘I’ve seen it all,’ one veteran remarked. ‘They’ll never keep me here.’45 Men who had trained their bodies and their minds to kill must have found guard duties a bore, and many resented clearing debris from Germany’s streets. It was widely felt, indeed, that German civilians should be given the dangerous task of mine clearance, and in many cities squads of volunteers did this work under military supervision in exchange for extra food.46 But at least the disarming and demilitarization of the Soviet zone felt like a real job. The dismantling and shipping of the large factories that were to be seized as reparations must have been a stranger task. Wherever they saw evidence of German wealth, the men would wonder why the war had been started at all, what such rich people could have wanted with their Soviet land. But through it all, whatever their demeanour, Red Army men had to believe that they were victors. Whatever tasks they undertook, they had to think that life was getting better from now on. Frontoviki, with all their problems, were an élite within the occupied zone.

  It was a different matter for the other Soviet troops, the ones whose war had ended with their capture. Only a fraction of the millions of prisoners taken by Hitler’s forces in the first years of the war were still living in 1945, but the total number of prisoners had been so great that there were still thousands of men in central Europe waiting for rescue when the peace was signed. If they had hoped for swift release, let alone for reinstatement in their former homes, they were mistaken. On 11 May 1945, Stalin signed the order that provided for the establishment of another web of camps in central Europe. There were to be forty-five on the 1st and 2nd Belorussian Fronts alone, each one designed to hold up to 10,000 men. By June, there were sixty-nine camps for special prisoners on Soviet territory and a further seventy-four in Europe.47 Their purpose was to intern former Red Army soldiers who had been prisoners of war with the intention of ‘filtering’ them, which meant looking for spies, fingering cowards and assigning punishment to so-called ‘betrayers of the motherland’.

  The fate of one, P. M. Gavrilov, who was among the very few survivors of the battle of Brest in 1941, would prove the quality of Soviet justice. Gavrilov was a real hero. Although he had been wounded, and although certain that he would die, he fought to his last bullet, saving one grenade to hurl at the enemy as he passed out from loss of blood. His courage so impressed the Wehrmacht (which was seldom given to sentimental acts) that German soldiers carried his almost lifeless body to a dressing station, whence he was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp. It was for this act of ‘surrender’ that he stood accused after the liberation of his German camp in May 1945. His next home was a camp again, this time a Soviet one. In all, about 1.8 million prisoners like him would end up in the hands of SMERSh.48

  Building prisons to hold these ‘special’ veterans was a challenge when resources were stretched, but Soviet secret policemen were always willing to adapt. ‘The camp is located well outside the town,’ an NKVD report on a likely facility commented that summer. ‘It is enclosed with secure fencing, and has structures suitable for housing special contingent prisoners.’ Nazis had always known exactly how to build a jail. The site, just beyond the town of Oranienburg, was the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. Thirty thousand people had been murdered there under the recently defeated Nazi regime. The Red Army had liberated it on 22 April, finding a few hundred survivors in conditions so desperate that many would die before doctors could save them. But though the gas chambers were empty and the guard-posts abandoned, it was a well-built and convenient prison. For years to come, it would house consignments of expatriates waiting for the attentions of SMERSh, the cells and darkness, and the train ride to the east.49

  The most miserable fate was reserved for the so-called ‘Vlasovites’, most of whom had also been prisoners of war at some stage in their lives. They included the men who had caved in and agreed to fight for the Reich rather than face starvation in the camps. A minority were also active anti-Soviets, especially the leaders of the so-called national legions from the Caucasus, the Baltic and Ukraine. Some of these ended their war in western Europe, since they had been fighting in France and Belgium. Like tens of thousands of other Soviet citizens, they would be solemnly ‘repatriated’ by Stalin’s former European allies in the eighteen months that followed Berlin’s fall. In all, about 5.5 million Soviet citizens had been sent back to their former homeland by the end of 1946. Of these, something like a fifth were either executed at once or sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labour. Others took their own lives, and even those of their accompanying families, rather than face the mercy of Soviet military police.50

  Detachments of Red Army guards whose job was to escort these men forgot about Soviet brotherhood. Their politruks told them that Vlasovites were the worst traitors, and soldiers treated their prisoners accordingly. Entire groups would be robbed, their cases opened and the soap, tobacco, razor blades and socks removed for sale. ‘I took his shirt to clean my gun,’ a soldier told military police. It happened all the time.51 ‘Specials’ were treated as convicts while they awaited filtration. The onus was always on them to prove their innocence. The process could take months, even years. SMERSh and its successors were still ‘filtering’ displaced persons in the 1950s.52 While they waited, the wretched prisoners faced insults and bullying, and the same treatment would continue when they were assigned to labour camps. By August 1945, just over half a million were already at work. Quotas of former prisoners and ‘traitors’ were assigned to the coal-mining and power industries, to construction work, timber, steel, fisheries, engineering, chemicals – anywhere labour was needed and money was scarce. The condemned were supposed to be grateful to Stalin for sparing their lives.

  The conditions for the disgraced men, as one survivor remarked, rivalled the hardships of a Nazi camp. Ex-combatants were sent to the Caucasus to work in timber yards with neither outer clothing nor footwear. With no solid housing and no means of bathing, they had no defence against the endless plagues of lice.53 Others went hungry, and most worked without pay. ‘I won’t pay you a penny,’ one labour organizer told his team. ‘You were sent to us as betrayers of the motherland, as self-seekers, and you’re just here to work.’ The foreman of a Siberian mine assured a member of his work contingent that ‘a ton of coal is dearer to us than your life’.54 His hatred drew on bitter roots. Many of the toughs who managed former soldiers had originally been victims themselves. The camps and mines of Siberia were ruled by former kulaks, the peasants whom communism had dispossessed in the early 1930s. Now they could vent their rage on disgraced soldiers. ‘As soon as your officers’ backs are turned,’ one of them hissed, ‘we’re going to kill y
ou with hunger and hard labour. And you deserve it because in 1929/30 you were the ones who dekulakized us.’55

  The Soviet authorities pressed for the repatriation of the ‘specials’ for several reasons. They wanted to make examples of some traitors, and in almost every case they feared, as Richard Overy puts it, that Vlasovites in western Europe would prove to be ‘undesirable witnesses against communism’.56 But on their journey home, the prisoners would often turn out to be equally undesirable advocates of capitalism. There was always some contact between prisoners and their Red Army escorts. Thousands of these frontoviki had been impressed with the capitalist farms and private businesses they had seen, and they discussed it all with their new prisoners. ‘I never had enough to eat in my whole life,’ one young soldier declared. ‘So how come they live in such a cultured and orderly way in Poland, when we have none of that?’57 The former Vlasovites could laugh at such naïveté. Poland, they explained, was backward, war-ravaged, scarcely a place to envy. Some of them had seen France, Holland, even Belgium. An entire contingent of Georgian troops had been billeted on foggy Texel island; Ukrainians had been sent to fight in France. ‘Belgium is a country of high culture,’ one veteran told his audience. ‘It has a highly developed economy. You can live well there.’ When some smart komsomol snapped back that the Belgians had high rates of unemployment – a common Soviet defence when faced with the glamour of capitalism – the veteran’s reply was ready. ‘Oh yes,’ he agreed. ‘The women there have nothing to do, so they can exist exclusively for love.’58

  The party’s answer was the usual combination of lectures and cold threats. Soldiers and prisoners alike were subjected to homilies with titles like ‘Comrade Stalin’s views on the goals of the Red Army and Soviet people and on relations with the population of Germany’, ‘The fundamental economic tasks of the USSR’ and ‘We must be more watchful on alien soil’.59 Meanwhile, SMERSh listened and watched for treacherous talk. ‘Filtration’ was to be the fate of every former prisoner of war or deportee, and many buckled under the weight of suspicion. But even good frontoviki were watched for signs of weakness. The only sanction that Stalin’s regime could use on a mass scale was the labour camp. During the war, the population of the Gulag had dropped sharply, mainly through hardship and death. By 1946, the camps were filling up again.

  Red Army soldiers had not triumphed so that they could run a jail. The longer Soviet troops remained in Germany, the less they cared for Moscow’s homilies and threats. A culture developed among the old hands. Drink, women, secrets and hard currency were its main constituents. Eighteen months after the peace, it was clear to Stalin’s officials that almost no veterans could be allowed to remain abroad. Their influence was too liberal, too damaging to the regime of discipline and ideological rigidity. Those who had worked with former prisoners of war and Vlasovites were deemed to be the worst. By the spring of 1947, the Soviet military authorities in Germany had come round to the view that all soldiers with two or more years of service on German soil (which meant all combat veterans) and also anyone who had worked closely with candidates for repatriation should be sent home without delay.60 They were to be replaced by more reliable, younger, less capricious types. The frontovik was fine for winning wars, but authoritarian military rule demanded people with the souls of bureaucrats.

  The first soldiers to be demobilized were told of their good fortune at the end of June. The military authorities began with selected categories of men aged thirty or over (these were deemed to be ‘in the older age groups’) and also with women who did not have important specialisms. It was assumed that older men would be the keenest to get home and also that they might have family responsibilities to tend. ‘You should set up a committee and demobilize all soldiers of thirty and above,’ a letter to Kalinin demanded, as if on cue, on 20 June. ‘We all agree about that… What am I going to do with my wife if I’m over thirty and I still don’t have a single son? In five–ten years a man will lose his chances with the female sex. The season for that doesn’t go on after age thirty-five to forty, it’s not a secret to anyone.’ A law on demobilization followed three days later, although it was far from comprehensive, even for the older men. ‘What would you do,’ the same impatient veteran continued, ‘if every soldier demanded to go home on the same day? Our guards and officers wouldn’t be able to do a thing, because they want to go home too. It’s the power of the people.’61

  The reality was that the soldiers were trapped, at least in the short term. For one thing, the abused, bomb-damaged transport system that stuttered between Berlin and Brest could not take them all home at once. From their own government’s point of view, however, the real problems were inside the soldiers’ minds. To send them home without careful preparation was too much of a risk in ideological terms. The dismal, bloody victory needed its garland of heroes, which meant laying the ground for their reception, and that would take time and thought. Then there was the danger that the veterans might brag about capitalism or about life without collective farms. They might talk of brutality, of front-line executions, SMERSh, or even the horror of battlefield death. The free thinking that had started to stalk the front would have to be suppressed before it could infect the civilian world.

  Demobilization, then, began to be presented as a kind of privilege, not as the duty of a grateful state to every man and woman who had fought for it. The politruks called more of those eager small-group meetings and explained what was wanted. Their duty, the soldiers were told, was ‘to keep military and state secrets as closely at home as at the front. Let the demobilized person preserve his warm recollections about the unit and about his wartime friends.’ But let him not discuss much else. ‘We had to sign something,’ the veterans admit. In fact, they were warned that their demobilization, and the material assistance that went with it, depended on their agreement to keep most of their wartime experience to themselves, from death rates and atrocities to missing rations and cold feet.62 The veterans’ discretion now, which often borders on a string of outright lies, dates back to the moment when they signed that document.

  And sign they did, for it was only then that the business of real life could begin. True, some soldiers would choose to stay and make their careers in the military – Kirill was one – but the majority were anxious to get home. The chosen men and women were issued with civilian clothes and a pair of shoes. They were given travel passes and the papers that would see them safely home. They also hefted packages of food and other small gifts from a grateful state. Their luggage would soon overflow the racks and boxes of their passenger trains, spilling into the corridors and contributing to the shared fug of tobacco, garlic, damp blankets and diesel. Soldiers demobilized from Erfurt in 1946 could expect to be issued with ‘a sports suit, sweater, underwear, leather and slippers’, as well as, for officers only, ‘a pair of women’s shoes’. They also received 5 kg of sugar, 10 kg of flour, a kettle, spoons, a carpet bag, a towel, and some biscuits for their journey home.63 Most also received money, the sum depending upon their rank and length of service.64 But this largesse was offset by continual surveillance. The men were warned not to attempt to carry weapons home. Their bags were searched before they left the base.65 The ritual was futile, for anyone could help themselves to weapons and explosives any time by digging in the scarred fields at home.

  Eventually, with the inevitability of a dream, the moment came to cross the boundary, to walk away from army life for good. Most veterans recall an aching loss. However much they yearned for home, it was a sudden wrench to leave the boys. The last few hours such men spent at a base were given up to speeches and to singing. ‘We sang our manly, stern soldiers’ marching songs,’ Pushkarev wrote. But these were the songs of victory. The real emotion surrounded the music of defeat, the songs of loss and homesickness from 1942 – ‘Wait for Me,’ ‘Zemlyanka’, ‘Oh, the Long Road’, ‘Dark Night’ – the songs that had sustained a vanishing generation as they struggled with despair.66 The tunes would never sound the same again, n
or evoke so much meaning. Many of the men would cry before their trains pulled out. As they said goodbye to the people who knew just what war was about, to the only people who could ever understand their stories, they were losing their true spiritual family. They would miss them – and most would keep in touch with almost all of them – for the rest of their lives.

  It must have been a strange ride home. There was that inconveniently heavy bag to stow, and then the smaller one, the knapsack with the tobacco and the travel pass. Inside this was the salvage of a war, the material evidence of all that a man had seen and experienced. In almost every instance, that began with medals – for victory, for service, for valour, even a grand red star or red banner. Then came the photographs. During the war, press photographers earned petty cash by taking snapshots of the troops, portraits to send home to the wife, group pictures to remind them of their mates. Already, as the train rattled towards Brest and Smolensk, the men on board must have been thumbing these, wondering at the looming shapes of guns, the sunlight through last summer’s trees, the smiles on young faces long dead. However long they lived, there would never be time to explain all this. And the gifts, the shoes and watches, these seemed to have a different meaning now. At the front, they had been easy booty, fragments of abundant victory. But now, as the world of triumph and comradeship began to fall away, they became totems, precious, rare, and at the same time tarnished by the secret guilt of having lived, not died.