Ivan's War
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64 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 17.
65 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 61.
66 Alexiyevich, p. 79.
67 On blood donors, see Overy, p. 227.
68 RGASPI-M, 33/1/493, 1–6.
69 Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 1, p. 70.
70 RGASPI, 17/125/80, 3.
71 GAKO, 5166/1/24, 4–7.
72 Reina Pennington, ‘Women in Combat in the Red Army,’ in Addison and Calder (Eds), Time to Kill, p. 257.
73 GAKO, 5166/1/24, 4.
74 Reese, The Soviet Military Experience, p. 110.
75 Leonid Piterskii, ‘Deti na voine,’ Istochnik, 1994, no. 1, 54–60.
76 Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 2, p. 79.
77 Soldiers seem to crave the companionship of animals. On other armies, see Keegan, p. 242. On other front-line dogs, see Bykov, Ataka s khody, p. 189.
78 Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 2, pp. 68–70.
79 V. A. Zolotarev, G. N. Sevost’yanov et al. (Eds), Velikaya otechestvennaya voina, 1941–1945 (Moscow, 1999), book 4, pp. 189–90.
80 For figures relating to Ukraine, see Weiner, p. 173.
81 Velikaya otechestvennaya voina, 4, p. 190.
82 One such band, Leshchinskii’s, was liquidated near Smolensk on the grounds that it had refused to ‘accept the leadership of the Communist Party’. GAOPIKO, 8/1/36, 14–16.
83 Werth, p. 792.
84 Drugaya voina, pp. 318–9; the latter fate awaited Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for instance, and also Lev Kopelev. See Chapter 9, p. 268.
85 TsDNISO, 8/1/9, 10.
86 GASO, 1500/1/1, 42.
87 Overy, pp. 130–1.
88 RGASPI, 17/125/94, 34–6; 17/125/165, 46 and 46r.
89 Early in the war, Ukrainian nationalists had worked with the German army, since both appeared to share the goal of driving out the Bolsheviks. The shaky alliance was already in tatters by 1942.
90 Stalin’s Generals, pp. 296–7; Overy, p. 311. It was in revenge for acts like this that suspected guerrilla nationalists, as well as prominent collaborators, would be hanged in public in Kiev in 1944.
91 See Weiner, pp. 248–50.
92 RGASPI-M, 33/1/73, 1–5.
93 See the report reproduced in Armstrong, p. 735.
94 GASO, 1500/1/1, 40.
95 Ibid., 39.
96 Armstrong, p. 731.
97 GASO, 1500/1/1, p. 44.
98 See Armstrong, p. 45.
99 GASO, 1500/1/1, 46.
100 Ibid., 52.
101 Cited in Armstrong, p. 738.
102 GASO, 1500/1/1, 52.
103 Cited in Armstrong, p. 737.
104 Werth, p. 827.
105 Ibid., p. 830.
106 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1406, 57.
107 As the guides tell you when you walk up to the ridge, ‘Sapun’derives from the Turkish word for soap.
108 Excavations in today’s Crimea still bring the bodies of soldiers to light. As a man who spends his life exhuming such corpses told me, the Soviet dead were much better equipped, by 1944, than those of the Germans they were fighting.
109 Werth, pp. 838–9.
110 Ibid., p. 835; Erickson, Berlin, p. 195.
111 Brian Glyn Williams, ‘The Exile and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37:3 (July 2002), pp. 325–7.
112 Most of the Tatars in the so-called ‘Tatar legion’, which anyway amounted to no more than seven battalions by the autumn of 1943, were from the Volga, not the Crimea. See S. I. Drobyazko, ‘Sovetskie grazhdane v ryadakh vermakhta’ in the essay collection, Velikaya otechestvennaya voina v otsenke molodykh (Moscow, 1997), p. 128.
113 The figure that most sources quote is N. F. Bugai’s estimate of just over 191,000 people, or 47,000 families. See P. Polyan, Ne po svoei vole (Moscow, 2001), p. 126; Williams, p. 334.
114 On the deportations from the Caucasus, see Polyan, pp. 116–27.
115 Williams, p. 333.
116 For a discussion of Tatar ‘guilt’, see Alan Fisher, The Crimean Tatars (Stanford, CA, 1978), pp. 153–64.
117 Ibid., p. 166.
8 Exulting, Grieving and Sweating Blood
1 Accounts of the precise starting point vary because of the scale of the operation. In some places, the first shots were fired on 21 June. Elsewhere the starting date is taken as 22 or 23 June.
2 The front itself was about 450 miles long. Werth, pp. 860–1.
3 Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, RH2-2338, 1 (January 1944).
4 Belov, p. 468 (21 March 1944).
5 Ibid., p. 462 (28 November 1943).
6 Ibid., p. 465 (12 January 1944).
7 Ibid., p. 468 (13 March 1944).
8 Ibid., p. 470 (7 April 1944).
9 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, monthly report, March 1944, pp. 1–2.
10 Belov, p. 464 (12 December 1943); p. 465 (17 January 1944).
11 Ermolenko, p. 39.
12 See Catherine Merridale, ‘The Collective Mind’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35:1, January 2000, p. 41.
13 Generally, they were lumped together with other ‘amoral’ or ‘extraordinary’ incidents. If they were explained at all, it was with reference to any suicide note or final remark that existed. Since the soldiers themselves did not know the word ‘trauma’, they naturally attributed their agony to more immediate causes, often unrequited love or political disappointment. For examples from Belarus in 1944, see RGVA, 32925/1/516, 177.
14 For a parallel discussion of the death penalty in the British army at this time, see David French, ‘Discipline and the Death Penalty in the British Army in the War against Germany during the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 33:4, October 1998, pp. 531–45.
15 I am grateful to Professor Simon Wessely for drawing my attention to the correlation between the statistics for Soviet mental casualties and the average incidence of adult-onset schizophrenia.
16 Richard A. Gabriel, Soviet Military Psychiatry (Westport, CT, 1986), p. 47. This estimate is based on interviews with survivors and their psychologists, as a result of which Gabriel produced a rough figure of 6 per thousand mental casualties for the Red Army as a whole. However crude, this figure compares strikingly with the equivalent 36–39 per thousand in the US army in the Second World War.
17 See Night of Stone, p. 304. The consensus among psychiatrists in Russia had shifted by 2002, when I asked these questions again. Contact with European and American medicine had clearly changed the prevailing wisdom, at least among doctors currently in practice. But retired wartime medical staff, including nurses and psychiatrists interviewed in Kursk, Smolensk and Tbilisi, had not changed their position.
18 The point is made in Amnon Sella’s optimistic book. The Value of Human Life, p. 49.
19 Gabriel, p. 56.
20 I am grateful to Dr V. A. Koltsova, of the Moscow Institute for Military Psychology, for sharing this unpublished material with me in 2002. See also Albert R. Gilgen et al., Soviet and American Psychology during World War II (Westport, CT, 1997).
21 Gabriel, p. 63.
22 Some were released, although they carried the stigma of mental illness for ever. Many of these ended up in prison camps later in life. Others joined the colonies of the crippled in the White Sea and lived out their lives in isolation. The worst fate, probably, was to remain in a Soviet psychiatric hospital of this era.
23 Gabriel, pp. 42–8.
24 Vyacheslav Kondrat’ev, cited by George Gibian, ‘World War 2 in Russian National Consciousness,’ in Garrard and Garrard, World War II and the Soviet People (London, 1993), p. 153.
25 Order of the deputy defence commissar, no. 004/073/006/23 ss; 26 January 1944, Velikaya otechestvennaya, 2 (3), p. 241.
26 On the use of convicts for this work, see the captured report of the 4th tank army, Bundesarchiv RH-2471, p. 16, 4 August 1944. See also RH-2471, 33 (prisoner of war reports). Temkin (p. 124) also recalled that a convicted murderer was used for reconnaissance work in his own unit.
27 Viktor Astaf�
��ev, Tam, v okopakh (Vospominaniya soldata) (Moscow, 1986), p. 24.
28 Examples are to be found in GARF 7523/16/388, which contains the records of the commission that dealt with the reinstatement of medals to soldiers who had been convicted of crimes at the front.
29 Drobyshev, p. 94.
30 For a parallel from the British army in the First World War, see Frank Richards, Old Soldiers Never Die (London, 1933), p. 194.
31 Drobyshev, p. 94.
32 Vasily Chuikov, The End of the Third Reich, trans. Ruth Kisch (London, 1976), p. 40.
33 Drobyshev, p. 94.
34 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 14, p. 619; report dated 1 October 1944.
35 Lev Kopelev, No Jail for Thought, trans. Anthony Austin (London, 1977), p. 38.
36 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 2 (3), pp. 265–6.
37 Ibid., p. 295.
38 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 6, p. 247, on the sorry state of the kitchens in the reserve political units of the 2nd Baltic Front.
39 TsAMO, 523/41119s/1, 17; see also similar reports from German intelligence, RH2-2338, 10 (1944).
40 RGVA, 32925/1/516, 177 (April 1944).
41 RGVA, 32925/1/515, 139–40.
42 RGVA 32925/1/516, 4 and 178.
43 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 14, 590.
44 TsAMO, 523/41119s/1, 169.
45 Ermolenko, p. 52.
46 See Overy, pp. 238–9; Erickson, Berlin, pp. 198–200.
47 Chuikov, Third Reich, p. 27.
48 Belov, p. 469 (31 March 1944).
49 Ibid., pp. 473–4 (18 June 1944).
50 Glanz and House, p. 209.
51 Cited in Garthoff, p. 237.
52 Erickson, Berlin, p. 225.
53 RH2-2338, 44-07, 1‒2.
54 GASO, R1500/1/1, 63.
55 Chuikov, Reich, p. 28.
56 RH2-2467, 118, for the leave. Cash incentives for planes and ‘tongues, see RH2-2338.
57 Sidorov, pp. 99 and 108.
58 Pravda, 19 July 1944; Werth, p. 862.
59 Ermolenko, p. 46.
60 Ibid., p. 50.
61 Pis’ma s fronta i na front, p. 92.
62 Stalin, O velikoi otechestvennoi voine, pp. 145–6.
63 RH2-2338, March and April 1944.
64 See, for example, Pravda, 26 August 1944.
65 German intelligence reports consistently stressed this. See, for example, RH2-2338; 4408 (monthly intelligence report for August 1944).
66 On ethnically based Ukrainian nationalism, see Amir Weiner, Making Sense, pp. 240–1.
67 See Leo J. Docherty III, ‘The Reluctant Warriors: The Non-Russian Nationalities in Service of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945,’ JSMS, 6:3 (September 1993), pp. 432–3.
68 RH2-2468, 35.
69 Ibid., 80.
70 Ibid., 35 and 38.
71 Details from RGASPI, 17/125/241, 93–4.
72 RH2-2468, 35.
73 A point made specifically – and understandably believed – by German intelligence. See RH2-2338, 44-09, 1.
74 This finding confirms the comments in RH2-2468, 80.
75 RGASPI, 17/125/241, 88.
76 Ibid., 89.
77 Ibid., 91–2; 95.
78 Ibid., 95.
79 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 6, pp. 292–5.
80 Ermolenko, pp. 59 and 62.
81 Kopelev, p. 53.
82 The agitation department’s concern was fully justified. See Senyavskaya, Frontovoe pokolenie, p. 91.
83 For other evidence of this, see Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, 45-02, 2–3.
84 Beevor, Berlin, p. 34.
85 Their comments were faithfully collected. For examples from the summer of 1944, see RGVA, 32925/1/515.
86 Chuikov, Reich, p. 34.
87 RH2-2468, 6–7, 27.
88 See, for example, the assessment in Glantz and House, p. 214. A more detailed account is given in Erickson, Berlin, pp. 247–90.
89 Weiner, p. 149.
90 RGVA 32925/1/516, 176 (April 1944).
91 RH2-2337, 58.
92 The idea was that these shot around corners.
93 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2337, 70–71.
94 These jokes are among those recalled for me by veterans, and they came up in more than one interview. They can also be found, lovingly collected, in Bundesarchiv, RH2-2337, the Wehrmacht’s own report on Soviet anti-Semitism.
95 For a 1943 soldier’s letter to exactly this effect, see Senyavskaya, Frontovoe pokolenie, p. 83.
96 In fact, civilian casualties were highest among Ukrainians, and proportionately, though not numerically, highest of all in Belorussia.
97 Werth, pp. 702–6.
98 Bartov, The Eastern Front, p. 132.
99 Velikaya otechestvennaya voina, 4, p. 289.
100 See ibid., p. 289; see also Vserossiiskaya kniga pamyati, 1941–45 (Moscow, 1995); Obzornyi tom, p. 406; Glantz and House, p. 51.
101 Werth, pp. 387–8.
102 Ibid., 702; Bundesarchiv, RH2-2337, 104.
103 Garrard and Garrard, Bones, p. 174.
104 Weiner, p. 260.
105 For a discussion of this, see Garrard and Garrard, Bones, pp. 180–7.
106 Pravda, 3 August 1944.
107 Werth, p. 890.
108 Ibid., p. 892.
109 Ibid., p. 702.
110 RGVA 32925/1/515, 2.
111 RGASPI, 17/125/190, 16.
112 I have heard a number of explanations for the pogrom in the city’s Podol district. This one was offered to me by Antony Beevor and is based on archival documents he saw in Moscow.
113 Overy, pp. 309–11; on the Doctors’ Plot, see Louis Rapoport, Stalin’s War Against the Jews (New York, 1990); Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov,Stalin’s Last Crime: The Doctor’s Plot (London, 2003).
9 Despoil the Corpse
1 Chuikov, Reich, p. 18.
2 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 9 and 24.
3 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1409-19, 6.
4 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 29.
5 Intercepted field post, Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 51 (January 1945).
6 I am grateful to Professor W. Brus, himself a witness to Russia’s war at the time, for this insight into Ehrenburg’s wartime standing.
7 Christopher Duffy, Red Storm on the Reich (London, 1991), p. 274.
8 Cited in Werth, p. 965.
9 See Beevor, Berlin, p. 34.
10 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2467, 82.
11 Khronika chuvstv (Vladimir, 1991), pp. 175–6.
12 Pis’ma s fronta i na front, p. 93. Letter dated 26 February 1945.
13 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2467, 86.
14 Werth, p. 944.
15 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 27.
16 Kopelev, p. 14.
17 Ibid., p. 13.
18 Julius Hay, cited in Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–49 (Cambridge, MA, 1995), p. 70.
19 See Naimark, loc. cit., and also RH2-2686, 37.
20 See Glantz and House, p. 235.
21 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, 45-01.
22 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2686, 33.
23 Kopelev, p. 36.
24 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2467, 9.
25 Ibid.
26 Stalin, O velikoi otechestvennoi voine, p. 100 (23 February 1945). This formula echoed a time-honoured earlier phrase about capitalism, used in the harsh years of class war (collectivization). Then, the catchword was that the class enemy would resist with greatest desperation as the victory of the proletariat approached.
27 Ermolenko, p. 105.
28 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 35.
29 Ibid., 38.
30 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 13 (captured letter).
31 For a parallel story of captivating inhumanity, see the account of the slaughtered buffalo in Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, pp. 75–6.
32 Leonid Rabichev, ‘Voina vse spishet’, Znamya, 2005, no. 2, p. 163.
33 Ibid, p. 163.
34 Ibid, p. 159.
35 Ibid, p. 165.
37 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, 44-10, 3.
38 Kopelev, p. 50.
39 Werth, p. 964.
40 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 12.
41 Kopelev, p. 39.
42 Ibid., pp. 46–53.
43 Naimark, p. 74.
44 This seems clear despite the bland statement by Werth (p. 964) that the rapes were just an outlet for the soldiers’ sexual frustration.
45 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 13.
46 Overy, p. 260.
47 For discussions, see Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (London, 1975); Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter (Eds), Rape: An Historical and Social Enquiry (Oxford, 1986).
48 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1409-19, 6.
49 Rabichev, p. 164.
50 Set in a culture of almost total denial, Rabichev’s article and Kopelev’s book are, to date, among the only discussions of this question in Russian. The time for an honest assessment of the war is still far off, as the Victory Day celebrations in Moscow in 2005 testified.
51 Atina Grossman, ‘A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers,’ October, 72, spring 1995, p. 51.
52 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 13.
53 Cited in Naimark, p. 112.
54 Anonymous (sic), A Woman in Berlin, trans. James Stern (London, 1955), pp. 93–4.
55 Temkin, p. 197.
56 Beevor, Berlin, p. 326.
57 A Woman in Berlin, p. 64.
58 Temkin, p. 202.
59 Igor Kon and James Riordan, Sex and Russian Society (London, 1993), pp. 25–6.
60 For a more recent parallel, see Gilles Kepel’s comments about Algerian Islamists, those ‘impoverished young men’ whose crowded family conditions forced them into abstinence and who, in consequence, ‘condemned the pleasures of which they had been so wretchedly deprived’. Cited in Jason Burke, Al Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam (London, 2004), p. 133.
61 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 27.
62 N. Inozemtsev, Tsena pobedy v toi samoi voine: frontovoi dnevnik N. Inozemtseva (Moscow, 1995), p. 108.
63 GARF 7523/16/79, 56.
64 For an example of such propaganda, see Pravda, 13 July 1944, p. 3 (account of Olga Ivanovna Kotova and her ten children).
65 Pushkarev, Po dorogam voiny, p. 154.
66 Belov, p. 469.
67 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1414, 57.
68 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 67.
69 Kopelev, p. 29.
70 GARF, 7523/16/79, 59, has another letter demanding that soldier fathers have control over their children.