Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  The trains crossed the border again, this time heading eastwards and home. They passed the familiar string of Belorussian and then Russian towns, the names that had been shouted in euphoric triumph as the Red Army stormed west. Now, though, the men had time to look, and some would notice what the war had cost. Belorussia was a wasteland, Kiev blackened and destroyed. Whole swathes of farmland looked neglected, for there were fewer people living than five years ago and scarcely any men or horses to take on the heavy work. The landscape was deadly as well, seeded with unexploded shells and mines. Bridges and tracks had been repaired, but the men who chose to hitch a truck ride for the last miles home would find the roads in chaos: broken, muddy and still cluttered with the skeletons of tanks. It was one thing to glimpse all this in wartime, in a crowd, to know that all you had to do was fight. It was another to look at the pitted ruins of Leningrad, Pskov or Stalingrad and understand that the whole landscape would have to be cleared, secured, and rebuilt. Berlin had looked little better, but it had never been these soldiers’ own responsibility, their future.

  There would be one more act in every soldier’s odyssey before civilian reality took hold. As ever, Stalin’s feral face presided. His portrait was emblazoned on the trains, his name written across the banners that fluttered above the local party hall. But the ceremonies of welcome for returning veterans were heartfelt. It had not been the party alone but hundreds of families who paid for the flowers that decked veterans’ trains as they pulled into Kharkov, Kursk or Stalingrad. At every halt along the way, indeed, the red carpets had been unrolled, and the men had been offered gifts and food. There had been music – those Red Army hymns – and in some places there had been a real orchestra to play among the Stalins and the scarlet flags. Every platform had been a sea of red cloth, flowers, and cheering crowds. At its best, one of those early journeys was like an extended party.

  Perhaps this festive mood carried the soldiers through the shock of coming home, but there is no doubt that it was a tense and even terrifying time. They might have longed for this and even thought of little else, but the veterans’ reunion with parents, children, wives and friends was overcharged with feeling. As their train pulled into its final halt, the men would see a crush of people surging forward, eager strangers, so many women. They scanned the crowds, the printed summer frocks, the children with their photographs of vanished, younger men. And when they found their own people, they must have realized again, in a second, what the war had meant. Caught in the flash of cameras that July, the veterans look like members of a new species. Dusty and sunburned, blinking in a long-forgotten light, they seem to bear no relation to the civilians who press around them. They certainly look older, and their skin, as their own children reach to kiss it, looks tough and dry as leather. And yet, as the pictures also show, the moment shone with real joy.

  Demobilized troops arrive in the town of Ivanovo, 1945

  The welcoming ceremonies had been planned in detail by the local branches of the party. Attending to the former soldiers’ needs was not just a matter of proper gratitude – although it certainly was that. The orchestrated welcome was also meant to flood men’s minds. Where politruks had influenced the soldiers’ thinking at the front, the local party activists busied themselves providing education and approved kinds of entertainment. The men were kept supplied with newspapers and propaganda sheets. Their hostel rooms were provided with soft drinks, sweets and tobacco. Married men whose families had travelled down to meet them were sometimes put up in hotels until a horse and cart arrived to take them all back home. Single men, and especially the homeless, who faced long periods in transit, were given food parcels to supplement the ordinary ration cards civilians could use. They were also treated to lectures. In Kursk, which housed many transient ex-soldiers, that summer’s programme featured talks on the international situation, the heroic past of the Russian people, the life and times of Maxim Gorky, and ‘medical themes’, presumably lice, drinking and VD. Over 2,000 people attended. They also showed up for the free cinema shows and concerts that the town authorities laid on. Ex-soldiers could not be left to smoulder on their own.67

  A train carrying demobilized soldiers arrives in Moscow, 1945

  More seriously, someone had to attend to housing, family life, and work. Some of the ‘hotels’ where the men would stay were little more than tents. Wherever the Germans and then the Red Army had been, houses with solid walls were few. Men might go ‘home’ to find their wives and children in a one-room flat with no kitchen, no water and a leaking roof. They might find everyone in an earth dugout, worse even than the ones they remembered from Stalingrad or the Crimea. Local authorities scrambled to find homes for returning heroes after 1945. In Smolensk, a city that had suffered as much as any under the occupation, about a quarter of the returning veterans were still homeless in January 1946.68 But that still made ex-soldiers an élite. In Kursk, even the workshops where the men might get their shoes patched or their worn-out, pre-war clothes repaired were in ruins.69

  The first waves of returning soldiers received the greatest applause. Later, in 1946, new groups of veterans would come home to silence, or at best, to a speech and a bread queue. But everyone, even the first, would have trouble finding their feet. Most took a few days off, which the authorities approved. Some used the time to get to know their families. There was so much to talk about, or else so many silences, such doubts. But then came the question of work. At the top of the priority list for demobilization were teachers, especially those with experience in technical subjects, for the state needed its specialists more than ever. Next came students whose courses had been interrupted by war service. Like every veteran, they would go to the head of any queue for college places when the academic year began.70 For those equipped to benefit, war service could be the start of a better life.

  The first groups to be demobilized also included veterans with seven or more years of service, the elderly (in army terms), and soldiers who had received three or more serious wounds. Typically, these unskilled men were destined for the farms. Well over half the troops came home to rural areas, to villages that they had left four years or more before. By January 1946, nearly 44,000 soldiers had been demobilized to the Smolensk region alone. Of these, 32,000 had found jobs in agriculture. A few had been made kolkhoz chairmen or the leaders of the many rural work brigades. A veteran commanded some respect, at least if his body were whole. But the majority, three quarters of the total, had come back from the front to mud and cockroaches again.71 In 1946, the harvest failed. In Ukraine and southern Russia the people starved, their bodies swelled, and tales of strange murders, and even of cannibalism, began to circulate. Some returnees might well have wondered what it was that they fought and suffered for.

  They would have struggled, certainly, to find the promised better life. Their moment in the limelight was to be short-lived. It is probably never possible for post-war societies to cherish veterans enough. There are too many reasons to spurn the returning strangers, especially after the gaps that their departure left behind at home have closed. The Soviet state, and many individual families, made a genuine effort of welcome for the veterans it chose to celebrate in 1945 and 1946. The ones selected for disgrace and exclusion, naturally, soon vanished from view. But it would not be long before even the most triumphant of returning soldiers became old news in a country struggling to forget. Stalin would set a new official tone. He was proud to take credit for the victory but reluctant to share it. He was also aware that stories of his own mistakes were waiting to be told, especially those that focused on the debacle and slaughter of 1941. His solution was typically simple. The rivals for his victor’s crown, including Zhukov, were demoted, disgraced or imprisoned from the spring of 1946. By 1948, within three years of the peace, public remembrance of the war was all but banned.72 There were still attempts to commemorate the dead, and commissions that worked to clean up and arrange clusters of military graves, but veterans of a reflective turn of mind could well have
wondered if their state did not prefer dead heroes to the living kind.73

  Initially, the easiest thing to offer to returning combatants was material help. Each meeting of Kalinin’s soviet seemed to propose a new pension or handout for the sick, the orphaned, the widowed and demobilized. The needy families of veterans were supposed to receive heating fuel – logs or turf – as the winter approached; they were given sacks of flour and potatoes. They were supposed to head the queue for whatever housing had been patched up and deemed habitable, and their children were exempted from school fees, issued with clothing coupons, and promised more milk. The veterans themselves received a pension, graded by their length of service, rank, and any injury. But all these scraps and packets were controlled by overworked officials of the state. Resources in each town or village were managed by local networks, bureaucrats who had spent their war at work behind the lines. To veterans, these office wallahs were a breed apart, ‘rats’ whose priorities would never match their own. The tensions between those who had fought and those who stayed at home found expression in quarrels over flats and heating, food and children’s shoes.

  The situation was even more poignant in the case of invalids. In the first months of peace, it was beyond official means to calculate the total number of these men, and many of the critically ill would die before the end of 1945. However, by the spring of 1946, the state reckoned that there were roughly 2.75 million surviving invalids of the war.74 Like everything this government would touch, these people were considered in a range of categories, depending on the extent of their disability and their need for hospital care. All received pensions as a form of compensation for their inability to work, and many were entitled to parcels containing delights like kasha, dried fish, and eggs. They were also supposed to receive the best available medical attention, and here things became more difficult. Many hospitals were housed in shacks or former schools; there were so few sound buildings left.75 Then there were shortages of doctors, nurses, drugs and prosthetic limbs. Young men who had lost their legs were forced to trundle around on their own home-made carts, and maimed beggars became a common sight in Russian towns.

  The disabled were handicapped in several cruel ways. True, the Soviet Union was desperately poor, unable to meet the most basic needs for lack of funds, but the blind, the deaf or crippled might have tolerated that, at least for a time. It was the public attitude that hurt. This was a haunted nation, but it was also a nation trying to forget. The jazz and foppish clothing that enjoyed an unofficial vogue among the young in 1946 were part of a larger quest for release, for deliverance from the shadow of wartime austerity. Disabled people were a nuisance, an embarrassment. Since most had once been foot soldiers, they usually lacked education, influence or cash.76 Instead of gratitude, Ivans like this could meet resentful silence. The more they talked about the war, the more they made their case, the more unwelcome they became, the more irrelevant. The last blow fell in 1947, when Stalin ordered that the streets of Soviet cities should be cleared of beggars, many of whom were amputees. Maimed veterans who had chosen urban life were herded back into trains, this time bound for the north, and especially for an island on the far side of Lake Ladoga, Valaam. Stalin’s unwilling lepers often died in exile.77

  For those who lived in the remoter villages, the peasant riflemen, a disability of any kind was a different kind of trap. A man with one leg or no arms could not get on a horse and ride,78 but it might be scores of miles to the nearest rail station. The peasant hut became a prison. An invalid could be deprived for years of medical attention, company and work. The state occasionally proposed new training schemes, but the details were an insult to men who had fought. Blind veterans, for instance, were encouraged to learn to play musical instruments. The idea was to lift them out of depression, to help them earn their keep, but many had no aptitude for music, or no desire to learn it, let alone to busk like beggars on the street.79 People’s real skills were left to rot for want of more imaginative help. For their part, invalids began to avoid medical care. Faced with imprisoning hospital walls, the petty tyranny of orderlies, it seemed a better plan to stay at home, nurse memories and soothe the pain with samogon.80

  Drink was the remedy of choice for pain of a more universal kind, the shock and trauma that followed the war. There was little official recognition of war’s psychological effects and almost none for the condition that is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. For one thing, everyone had nightmares. The entire nation had suffered, even children. To complicate matters still more, such violence, though new in its scale and vehemence, was not unprecedented in a country that had seen both civil war and state repression over several decades. It was not clear where the line should be drawn between the shock, depression and exhaustion that everyone felt and genuine psychological disorder. Physicians went on noting cases of contusion, and they also responded to the most acute problems, with diagnoses of neurosis, schizophrenia and mania piling up on hospital desks. But veterans were unlikely to get treatment for battle shock. They might be given vitamins, and in extreme cases they might be locked away, but most were urged to think of duty and get on with life.81 Madness carried a real stigma, and dependency of any kind was treated as weakness.

  Conscientious doctors still observed and made note of changes that official dogma was unable to explain. For a few months after the war’s end, there were increases in blood-pressure problems, digestive complaints and even heart disease,82 but these could readily be dismissed as the universal effects of wartime life. Moreover, the post-war hospitals to which sufferers were referred were so uninviting, and the treatments so uncertain, that the number of sufferers who were prepared to report symptoms dropped rapidly from 1946.83 When veterans talk of the good old days, the great communal struggle, they never mention the sleeplessness and long-term malnutrition that afflicted almost everyone. They also forget the untreated toothache, the chronic infestations of lice, the diarrhoea and boils. The soldiers who survived to tell their stories for this book were a small élite in purely physical terms. War injuries, poor diet and strain would shorten millions of lives.

  No fantasy of the good war, however, was stronger than the idea that the people pulled together. It was tempting, of course, to look for hidden benefits to balance the war’s obvious cost, to hope that all the suffering had brought out something good. And it is true that singleness of purpose – and achievement – gave some people an extraordinary inner strength. But the idea of a warm community was either propaganda or wishful thinking. For those whom the state punished, post-war life was cruel. For all the rest, it was a time when relief was tinged with disquiet. Everyone would find, too, that Soviet society was visibly harder, more brutal and cold.

  The policies and public style of Stalin’s ruling clique would set the bitter tone. Their vengeful treatment of liberated prisoners of war, the calls for sustained vigilance for spies, the new rounds of arrests and trials all worked to fuel suspicion, not build communities. The veterans were not to blame for Stalin’s genocidal schemes, but many would connive in them, becoming willing heirs of tyranny. For those who could not face a quiet night, there were still regions where the war had yet to end. In Ukraine and the Baltic, nationalist guerrillas went on fighting until the late 1940s. Special troops, the successors of Mikhail Ivanovich’s OSMBON, were ranged against them, backed up by security police. By 1950, an estimated 300,000 people had been arrested and deported from western Ukraine. Large mass graves continue to surface from beneath those pretty orchards and neat lupin fields.84 Red Army veterans who fulfilled their wartime dream of moving to Ukraine would settle on stolen land, in empty houses that were thick with ghosts. So would the thousands who moved to the Crimea, a favoured place for soldiers to retire. The crime against the Tatars was officially ignored. For veterans, the coastal villages of the Black Sea were attractive enough to soothe whatever doubts might linger in their minds. They were the conquerors, after all, and this was Soviet soil.

  War itself, too, had shatt
ered Soviet family and social networks and debased further the values of mercy, co-operation, and even simple good manners. Society was divided, and all sides viewed the others with dismay. Prisoners, ex-soldiers, and civilians were almost like unrelated tribes. Veterans like Vasily Grossman were shocked by the callousness of post-war cities. It was, he wrote, as though ‘ordinary people had made an agreement to refute the view that one can always be sure of finding kindness in the hearts of people with dirty hands’.85 But the comradeship of the front line was also set to shatter in the peacetime world. Crimes like theft and drunken violence would persist even when the peace was signed. They were, if anything, made easier by the movements of people, refugees, and settlers, not to mention all the guns.86

  The family ought to have been a haven for war-damaged men. Stalinist propaganda, and much post-war writing, tried to present it that way.87 But as they rattled home on those garlanded trains, few soldiers could have anticipated the toll that war had taken on domestic life. The so-called home front had been very hard on women. Some, working like oxen, had given up on femininity for good.88 It served no purpose, brought no joy. In rural areas, too, there were almost no males. ‘I was left with three sons,’ a widow told Alexiyevich. ‘They were too young to look after each other. I carried sheaves of corn on my back and wood from the forest, potatoes and hay… I pulled the plough myself and the harrow, too. In every other hut or so there was a widow or a soldier’s wife. We were left without men. Without horses, they were taken for the army, too.’89 These women would grow tough, unblinking. Some even nursed resentment against the army that had abandoned them to the Germans for so many months. When their invalid husbands returned home, the shelter that they gave them was not always warm. Indeed, some women deliberately married invalids in order to claim the handouts – pensions, food, fuel and medical supplies – that their husbands’ documents provided for.90 The trick was to know where to sell them on.