Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  ‘What games did we play?’ a man who grew up in this grim decade wondered for a moment. ‘We didn’t play much at all. We had to grow up fast.’ It was the truth. Children were taught that there was more to life than games. Many had gone without schooling for several years, including Slesarev’s young sister, Masha, and the thousands of ‘sons of the regiment’ who were now coming home. As they recalled, no extra teaching now would ever buy those years of schooling back, and nothing could wipe out the images of war. Masha Slesareva, who was already working full-time in the fields at fourteen, was typical of the millions of children who started work as soon as they could shift a shovelful of earth. But though war’s children could not remember much fun, some pastimes had proved unforgettable. ‘That’s it,’ one man recalled. ‘We used to play “the ravine of terror”. We used to throw grenades into this gully near the town and wait to see which ones were live.’ The game had cost his best friend both his hands.91

  Home, then, was not the haven that the soldiers had dreamed about as they sat up writing to their wives. Even the couples who managed to rebuild their lives together were aware of a gap, of a blank space that no amount of talking could enliven. It was a cruel payment for the waiting and the letters. Vitaly Taranichev and Natalya Kuznetsova would pull through, but the journey towards reunion was difficult. Vitaly’s letters grew more impatient through the summer of 1945. By August, even his army food was poorer, especially after his deployment to western Ukraine. In September, there was a spark of hope that he might be demobilized, but instead he was moved south-east, to yet another haunted region, Chechnya, where his job was to rebuild the rail links near Groznyi. His requisitioned quarters were nearer to Ashkhabad. ‘Our apartment has two rooms and an enclosed verandah,’ Vitaly wrote home. ‘The second room is not a through-room, and I’ve taken it. If you can come, we’ll be really nice and comfortable; we’ll even be able to cook and eat together.’92

  Vitaly could not get leave, so the travelling and the strain fell on Natalya. In October 1945, she took time off from her own engineering job, queued and bought tickets, left the children, and embarked on an unscheduled adventure. She took a train west over the semi-desert to the Caspian, crossed the inland sea by steamer and then fought her way on to another train into the foothills of the Caucasus. The journey to and from Chechnya would have taken longer than the brief time that she had with her husband. For Vitaly, so used to travelling, the price seemed well worth paying, but Natalya was unsettled by it all. ‘Your silence really makes me miserable,’ she wrote to him when she got home. ‘You haven’t written a single line to me since I left. You don’t want to write anything… Perhaps you were disappointed by the way I was, and you have already stopped thinking about me the way you used to do before our meeting in Groznyi?’ It was the November holiday, and Vitaly was, in fact, writing at the same moment. ‘My landlady and I talk about you all the time,’ he began. ‘I have become so used to your being here that every time I come home I half expect to find you.’ He was unable to imagine her insecurity before the uniformed, preoccupied stranger that he had become. ‘Can it be, Vitya,’ she wrote, ‘that you are not the same as you once were, and I am no longer dear to you any more? It’s so hard for me to think like that. I’m waiting impatiently for you at home,’ she finished. ‘I need to know by looking in your eyes exactly who you really are.’93 Ten months later, she was still waiting.

  Vitaly’s and Natalya’s story was about as good as homecomings would get. Another story, that of Valentina and her husband, was probably more typical of younger men. As Valentina explained, she and her husband, married just before the war, had spent almost no time together before he was called up to the front. They were still almost strangers, and the war would perpetuate the gulf. His letters home were regular, but they arrived at intervals, in bundles, scored through by the censor’s pen. They also had to find Valya at the munitions factory to which, as a chemist, she had been evacuated. She worked there for the war’s duration, supervising a production line that hummed without a break. Her own shifts could be ten hours long, or twelve, and all that time the NKVD watched her every move. As she recalled the war, the strain was still clear from her voice, although a patch of light relief came from an unexpected source. ‘The German prisoners were nice,’ she said, referring to the prisoners of war who worked near her own site. ‘They were so clean. They even swept the shelves they kept potatoes on.’ I asked her if she ever talked to one. ‘Talked?’ she replied. ‘We danced with them. They were the only men for miles, and they were such good dancers, too.’

  Her husband had his own experience of Germans. Valya’s file of wartime papers contained photographs of the soldier, sometimes in uniform, sometimes half naked, lolling in a boat. Berlin had been a good billet for the young man. It would be 1946 before he would come home. Again, the reunion worked, or rather, it did not end in divorce. He and Valya lived together until his death in 2001. They even had a son, although the young man, like so many others, had died before his father, a victim of the Soviet scourge of heart disease. The family were comfortable, respectable, and privileged to live in a private, three-bedroomed flat in the heart of Moscow.

  Valya let me read her husband’s wartime letters. She even invited me to dictate some of them into my tape recorder as she busied herself making tea. And then I noticed that she was sobbing, as if the memory were too painful to bear. I thought at once it was my fault. I put the recorder away and went to comfort her, guilty that I had revived old grief. ‘Oh no,’ she said as we carried the cups and biscuits through. ‘I don’t mind the old letters. But they were such lies. All that stuff about love and homesickness. All the time he was with her, the German woman. They even had a child. He left her the day after their baby was born.’ Valya’s rage was murderous. She never wanted the man back, but apartments were difficult to get, and married couples – especially veterans’ families – took precedence. All the same, when she became pregnant at the end of 1946, Valya could not bear to carry the child. Abortion was illegal, dangerous, but somehow she managed to find a doctor who would perform one, and somehow she went through with it.

  Stories like this would lie beneath so many tight-lipped silences after the war. The sacrifice, the epic hope, would peter out in the quest for a larger room in the communal flat, a holiday in newly Russified Crimea or maybe a collection of kitsch ornaments made from tank parts (clocks made from dials were briefly in demand).94 The flurry of altruism that had enlivened the first weeks of the victory, like the vogue for jazz, soon faltered. The favoured veterans were privileged, and it would be these small advantages, the knowledge that the neighbours envied them, that bound them, like a sort of post-war middle class, to Stalinism. Little advantages, that is, and the terror of chaos, disorder, arrest, and vengeance from anyone that post-war politics chose to exclude. The war that the heroes had fought had not been a campaign for holidays or sausage. It was a betrayal, albeit small, when the soldiers’ passion was allowed to dissolve into small lies, vodka, and homemade jam. But the real tragedy, the perfidy of Stalin’s final years, was the theft that forced decent citizens to acquiesce in tyranny because of fear, the theft of almost every grand ideal that they had fought to save.

  It was not a question of the long term: the Soviet Union’s collapse, communism’s ultimate defeat. Those problems waited for the veterans’ old age. The first betrayals were immediate. At the top of the list were the collectives. They would stay, and often it would be the veterans themselves who had the job of trying to make agriculture work. They even helped to export the detested model to the reconquered Baltic and western Ukraine, as well as watching it established in Soviet-controlled territories like Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Then there was Soviet brotherhood, the hope that everyone could pull together to build a society where class, religion and ethnicity were no longer divisive. That one was trampled by the hate campaigns, the deportations, and the racist language that Soviets learned from their Nazi invaders. Among the victims of the
new Soviet chauvinism, cruelly, were Jews.95 The Gulag swelled, hungrily drawing new contingents – including veterans themselves – into its twilight of forced labour.96 Even the arts, so dear to soldiers at the front, were subject to obscene and stifling attack, as were many of the poets and writers whose work had tried to capture the truth of the war.97 Once more, Stalin’s dictatorship relied on exclusion and fear, and the people with the most to lose (albeit pitifully little) became its strongest supporters.

  There is no doubt that Russia – and much of the Soviet Union – would have suffered terribly if Hitler had succeeded in capturing Moscow back in 1941, if Stalingrad had fallen or wartime Soviet government dissolved. Just as seriously, the whole of Europe, and even the United States, would have faced an unthinkable catastrophe. Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin were real victories, and not for Moscow only but its allies, too. Their human cost was paid by Stalin’s people, and whether they were willing soldiers or not, all but a small minority believed that they were on the right side in a true, just war. There had not been one kind of soldier, one Ivan, but there was one aspiration, and it was not served by fostering a tyranny no less oppressive than the one all had been fighting to destroy. Unfortunately, the Soviet people, who had acquiesced, however unwillingly, in the emergence of Stalinism and who had also fought and suffered to defend it, would now permit the tyrant to remain. The motherland was never conquered, but it had enslaved itself.

  11

  And We Remember All

  The myth of Ivan began in the midst of war. It was a product of the Sovinformburo, of wartime songs and poetry, and of the stories people loved to read. Even the troops, sometimes, imagined themselves as romantic volunteers, heroes who would do battle for the motherland. Real combat did not coincide with the ideal, but the propagandists’ wooden soldier was a useful figure to invoke before an operation and again when the survivors had to struggle with their exhaustion and shock. The simple hero and his skilful, selfless officers were models that gave the men a sense of purpose, glorified the brutal business of killing, and offered a cloak of indemnity for crimes that no one wanted to acknowledge. Given the soldiers’ love of irony, such mythic figures also – and simultaneously – served as objects for crude, self-deprecating jokes, for Ivan was not always master of his weapons or his body, let alone of the latest party directive. But though men mocked the stuffy rules and the solemnity, wartime propaganda keyed into some basic human needs. And it was just as important after the firing stopped. When the conscript army dispersed and soldiers rejoined the civilian world, the notion of the brave and simple rifleman gave them dignity, a public face, whatever private stories they kept to themselves.

  The slogans that the men had used acquired an almost holy resonance with time. The Soviet motherland was an inviolable space, its people bound together in their loyalty. But the repetition of familiar words concealed real changes in their meaning. Patriotism, in 1941, was a radical, liberating, and even revolutionary ideal. The notion, in fact, received a moral boost when Hitler’s troops invaded from the west. At last, true patriots had an invader to repel, rather than shadow traitors conjured up by the secret police. The surge of faith in 1941 even revived the ghost of internationalism, for to be patriotic, in the Soviet sense, was once again to be the proud leader of the proletarian campaign for universal brotherhood. It was to be opposed to fascism, the very cruelty of which, as it became manifest, forced millions to place their hope in socialism. More immediately, patriotism was a matter of self-defence, the collective struggle of the entire Soviet people against aggression. For those who entered into it – the majority of Russian, and probably even Soviet, citizens – the mood was self-righteous. ‘Our cause is just,’ Molotov assured the Soviet people in 1941. However far their army marched, and whatever atrocities it committed, most did not stop believing that.

  Mass death and suffering rendered the patriotic impulse sacred. The worst outcasts of the post-war years were the supposed betrayers of the motherland. But while it lost none of the sanctimonious passion of 1941, the meaning of patriotic pride had changed by the war’s end. The cause turned inwards, focusing on Stalin’s state and also, above all, on Russia.1 Instead of aspiring to freedom, patriots would henceforth – wittingly or not – become complicit with the repression of minorities, large-scale arrests, and above all, a bleak and deadly dogma that had almost nothing in common with the libertarian promises that had drawn such crowds to Palace Square in the revolutionary months of 1917. The new Soviet patriotism would be used to condemn and exclude all kinds of dissidents in years to come. War veterans, many of them still intoxicated with the original idealistic brew and still breathing the old pietism, were trapped. They could not be unpatriotic and they could not stand against the government. This was the country (and, in the early post-war years, the leader) in whose name oceans of blood had been spilled. It did not take the veterans long to turn into conservative bastions of Soviet rule.

  The process was not smooth, and there were always issues that made former soldiers boil with rage. Among them was a campaign launched by Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, to cut the size of the army.2 Coming on the heels of his famous denunciation of Stalin, the so-called secret speech of 1956,3 which confused and appalled many ex-soldiers, the apparent betrayal of the armed forces caused widespread disquiet. But the Indian summer of the veterans’ long affair with their state was soon to come. Leonid Brezhnev, whose own war record would not have merited a footnote if chance – including the wartime loss of his more talented potential rivals – had not propelled him into the political élite, emerged as the Soviet leader after 1965. His dedication to Bolshevik ideology was slight, his drive for power far stronger. Rather than trying to revive flagging Soviet unity by appealing directly to revolutionary ideals, he saw the war myth as a way of rebuilding the nation’s faltering sense of purpose. The years of Brezhnev’s rule would turn into a golden age of concrete and hot air, a time of state-sponsored multi-volume histories of the war, of solemn speeches of commemoration, hand-outs, new medals and the mass design and construction of memorials.4 The message was that the nation had fought as one, that young lives had been lost and that new generations owed the past (and also their current leaders) limitless loyalty and gratitude.

  The veterans, now in their middle age, were called upon to play a patriotic role again. They had always gathered to remember the war, but now they were encouraged to go into schools, talk of their battles, and fire the romantic imaginations of young citizens.5 The idea was to bind a generation that had never known the war more closely to the Soviet ideal. A mythic soldier, the Soviet hero, returned to stake his claim upon the nation’s loyalty. This man was stern, moral, and unflinchingly courageous. In many stories, conveniently, he was also dead. Although most veterans remember the great anniversary of 1965, the twentieth year after the victory, as the high point of war commemoration, the historical phoenix that rose from Stalingrad and Kursk in the 1960s was emblematic, two-dimensional.6 And real pressures worked to keep it so. Once the official histories had been passed by the censor, for instance, it was forbidden to publish any fact about the war that was not already in print.7 The archives themselves, those cities of manila files, were closed to almost everyone, and certainly to scholars. Whole areas of wartime life, including desertion, crime, cowardice and rape, were banned from public scrutiny, and several specific crimes, such as the Katyn massacre, were buried under mountains of denial.8 In place of the truth, so complex and so comprehensibly human, the state built a glittering and specious edifice of myth.

  Few veterans had much to gain by challenging this. For one thing, the myth suited them. Many used their war records as proof of character in the careers they later chose. War service, or at least the loyal kind, earned soldiers generous pensions, while denigrating what became known as ‘the great exploit’ would always seem like insulting the dead. The hero myth was also partly true, or true enough to make successive generations grateful. To rummage through it all in search
of weaknesses and crimes might end in collective tragedy; it might even raise questions about the value of Soviet power itself. Brezhnev’s regime would never lack for foreign critics, and that gave its supporters an excuse to advocate strict unity at home. ‘War is war,’ the veterans would say. And then it would be time to sing the songs again, get out the photographs and reminisce. The shadows of the past were dispelled by the glamour of collective glory, the accusations dissolved into euphemism. After all, even Stalin had referred to rape, famously, as ‘having a bit of fun with a woman’.9

  The set and props for Brezhnev’s remake of the war epic are still in use across his former empire. When it came to monumental masonry, Soviet output, even in the years of stagnation, was prodigious. The densest concentrations were clustered around former battlefields, and famous sites are still the best places to look for them. There is a granite monument, for instance, on the Sapun rise outside Sevastopol. It is composed of overbearing lumps of polished rock, like a prefabricated cathedral without a roof, or even like a giant crematorium, since gas jets feed a pallid line of eternal flames and pre-recorded music pipes out from loudspeakers hidden in the walls. Like most memorials, this one commemorates a triumph, the recapture of the Crimea, not the defeats of 1941. In Kiev, the scene of the Red Army’s great humiliation in the same year, a giant Mother Russia celebrates the city’s liberation in the same spirit. She towers over the banks of the Dnepr, her drawn sword raised to guarantee that she exceeds in height all other landmarks, including the nearby cupolas of the medieval Caves monastery. Her skirts swirl above another staple item of Brezhnevite mass production, the war museum. This one is the usual squat, graceless agglomeration of pointlessly extensive red-carpeted spaces. A visitor who is determined to see everything must walk for hours, mostly in semi-darkness, tramping the corridors that link the rooms where medals, blown-up photographs and guns moulder beneath the dusty flags.