Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  In December, Twentieth Army and First Shock Army launched successful counterblows against the German Fascist command. Solnechnogorsk was liberated; the enemy had already set fire to Volokolamansk in preparation for retreat. And so the commissar called upon the soldiers of Twentieth Army to increase their efforts. He pointed out that thanks to Comrade Stalin we now had fifty-four tanks. He invoked the neck-high pyramids of antitank traps made entirely by girls in Leningrad. Vlasov, who’d been studying the strategic maxims of Napoleon, emerged from his dugout, at which the commissar’s speech got routed by many cheers. Vlasov smiled shyly. That night he led them back into battle, showing admirable contempt for his own safety. Abnormally tall, he stood out above the other shapes of men bulked and blocked by winter clothes, heads swollen and flattopped like immense boltheads, shoulders swollen and squared. They conquered Volokolamansk. General Rokossovsky sent a radio message of thanks and congratulations; the commissar for his part warned the security “organs” that A. A. Vlasov might be an unreliable element.

  By New Year’s Eve, when his photograph appeared in the portrait-gallery of prominent generals in Izvestiya, they’d recovered ground all the way to the Lama-Riza line. More than half a million Germans died in the snow. Their corpses were often found clad in clumsy straw overshoes, for the Fascist high command had not issued them any winter supplies. The liberation of Mozhaisk was imminent. On 24 January 1942, Vlasov received the Order of the Red Banner.

  He was now a Lieutenant-General. Throughout those years of pale men staring down at maps there were many careers of a meteoric character—instant promotions and executions, loyal initiatives, heroes’ funerals—but none more dramatic than his. He was a modest, bookish sort who knew well enough when to leave politics alone—namely, always.30 Until now, to be sure, that abstinence had been a virtue. In meetings with his staff officers he was less inclined to cite the inevitability of a Soviet victory than to bring to their attention some brilliant field maneuver of Peter the Great’s. From somewhere he’d obtained a treatise by the executed Tukhachevsky. Later it was also remembered against him that he’d dared to praise the operational genius of the Fascist Panzergruppe commander Guderian. Vlasov felt that knowing the enemy well enough to steal away his science was sufficient; he need not squander time in detesting him. Priding himself on his rationalism, which was truly a species of courage (indeed, it bears comparison with the noble atheism of the true Bolshevik, who fights and dies without hope of any unearthly reward), he failed to foresee how weak a perimeter it might prove against the spearheads of an alien will.

  At the end of February he embraced his wife for the last time. The hollows beneath her eyes were yellow and black like snow-stains where a German Nebelwerfer shell has exploded. She whispered goodbye almost with indifference; he couldn’t tell whether she’d decided to endure.

  In March, shortly before the premiere of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, Comrade Stalin appointed him Deputy Commander of the Volkhov Front. The strategic aim: to break the siege of Leningrad. Of course the assignment was impossible, but at this stage of the war, what wasn’t?—Vlasov said: Comrade Stalin, I accept the responsibility.

  That night they airlifted him into a sinister taiga zone beset by snow. Two divisions of nearly prewar strength awaited his command. No retreat would be tolerated. Nor could anyone allow himself to be captured by the Fascists; for that meant collaboration. Vlasov therefore had every motivation for success.

  He is said to have infused his sector with an almost monastic resolution. His untrained, half-starved Siberians adored him. (In our memory, why not depict them with the scarlet cloaks and haloes of Russian icons, the forest darkness between their faces traced with capillaries of gold?) Mild whenever possible, yet plain-speaking always, getting his point across with common proverbs (he was, like any Communist hero, the son of poor peasants), he reminded them that in victory lay their only hope of delaying death. Some of them were equipped with antitank rifles. Every other nation had long since given these up, for the man who fights a tank can hardly hope to win the contest, but in those days the Soviet army had no other recourse.31 The Siberian

  They dwelled in a pocket shaped like a hammerhead, its neck crossing the front line between Novgorod and Spaskaya Polist, then widening to a rounded flatness on the west side of the Luga River. German tanks pointed guns at them, although the tanks were frozen and the gunbarrels filled with snow. As long as the cold endured, Second Shock Army was safe. (Ranged against him: Eighteenth German Army’s two hundred tanks and twelve hundred self-propelled guns.) Sleeplessly poring over that static gameboard, Vlasov reread the essays of Guderian. A certain reference to the errors of military traditionalists haunted him: These men remain essentially unable to break free of recollections of positional warfare, which they persist in viewing as the combat form of the future, and they cannot muster the required act of will to stake all on a rapid decision. Guderian’s criticism rang true. The only question was in what wastes of operational philosophy he, Vlasov, remained frozen. Positional warfare had superseded cavalry charges because a single machine-gun nest could decimate the bravest, most inspired brotherhood of horsemen. What could warriors do but dig themselves into trenches? Then came tank and plane, the Panzer group, the Blitzkrieg. Positional warfare was obsolete forever. And yet the very success of Blitzkrieg had already afflicted it with its own traditionalists. Panzer warriors charged ahead with the same recklessness as their cavalrymen fathers. Supply lines lengthened; the Fascist machine had run out of fuel before Moscow. How could this phenomenon be exploited across the map?

  Disobeying the commissar’s recommendation, he reread Tukhachevsky, who insisted that Blitzkrieg could be defeated through planning, determination and operational reserves. Of these he could call upon neither the first nor the last. He said to the commissar: If we only had a hundred tanks . . .

  He reread Caulaincourt’s account of Napoleon’s defeat at Moscow. Time, space and weather had worn Napoleon down.

  Once in a great while, his sentries at the rear might see a truck convoy’s many furry eyes of light in the night on the ice-road. The Fascists rarely shot at it. Sometimes an airplane landed, bearing emissaries of Comrade Stalin whose task it was to brief and debrief him. Ensconced in a ring of minefields, he was now full Commander. They’d promised to send him Sixth Guard Rifle Corps, but it didn’t happen. They assured him that First Shock Army would rejoin him before the thaw, and then he could outflank the Fascists at Lyuban, save Novgorod, liberate starving Leningrad. They demanded to know why he hadn’t already broken through. His appearance deteriorated rapidly. He knew very well that Second Army could expect nothing other than what the enemy called Kesselschlacht, cauldron-slaughter. Meanwhile he ate no better than his infantrymen, and never hesitated to expose himself to enemy fire. Call it emblematic that beside the dugout which served as his command post that spring, a corpse’s frozen hand was seen upraised from a heap of ice and steel.

  2

  By 24 April, General K. A. Meretskov, Vlasov’s erstwhile superior, was more than anxious about the situation of Second Shock Army.—If nothing is done then a catastrophe is inevitable, he said to Comrade Stalin.—Stalin shrugged his shoulders.

  This Meretskov had already been arrested once on suspicion of anti-Soviet activity. The fact that no evidence of guilt was ever found only made the case more serious. At the very least, he could be convicted of defeatism. Like far too many commanders, he kept demanding reinforcements and begging permission to withdraw. (There were no reinforcements; and any further withdrawals would mean the fall of Moscow.) That was why Stalin had dismissed him from the Volkhov Front just yesterday. He was lucky. Several of his colleagues had been shot for losing battles. On 8 June, this roundfaced, curving-eyebrowed Hero of the Soviet Union would be restored to all his dignities, with Stalin’s apologies. Indeed, he’d outlast Stalin himself. Assistant Minister of Defense, Deputy to the Supreme Soviet, seven-time recipient of the Order of Lenin (Vlasov had received it on
ly once), he lived to be buried honorably in the Kremlin wall.

  Meanwhile, Vlasov’s infantrymen kept sighing to one another: If Comrade Stalin only knew to what extent his policies are being sabotaged!

  A black cloud hovered above a tank for a photographic millisecond, soft, almost like an embryonic sac, but then it fell, comprised of earth, rubble and steel beams.

  Vlasov was summoned to speak with Comrade Stalin on the V-phone.

  What’s your objection to continuing this offensive, Comrade Vlasov?

  We can hold the sector for a few days longer, but deep enemy penetration has compressed our bridgeheads.

  Explain this failure.

  Well, their tanks aren’t frozen anymore. The Fascists have regained their mobility . . .

  For a moment Vlasov could hear nothing but heavy, weary breathing, and then the metallic voice said: We can spare you no reinforcements.

  Perhaps if First Shock Army—

  Impossible. Northwest Front would be endangered.

  Then Sixth Guard Rifle Corps—

  No.

  In that case, I request permission to break out immediately.

  Your analysis is incorrect, Stalin replied. You will hold the line at all costs.

  The connection ended then. Vlasov sat mournfully in his candle-lit dugout. Holding the receiver against his ear for a moment, he nodded. He even smiled. He remembered a sentence: These men remain essentially unable to break free of recollections of positional warfare.

  Well, Comrade General? said the commissar.

  Withdrawal is premature, he says.

  I understand how you must feel. Still, once Comrade Stalin has laid down the line, there’s nothing for us to do but follow it.

  Then we’re doomed. Within a week, they’ll enfilade us with artillery fire—In an exasperated voice, the commissar replied: Everything you say may be correct from the military viewpoint, but politically speaking it’s quite incorrect. You’d better be more careful. I’ve heard that your eldest brother was shot for anti-Bolshevik activity during the Civil War . . .

  There came the “general alarm” signal.

  Telephone communications are broken, sir!

  Send me the liaison officer.

  He’s dead.

  On 24 June, the German pincers having long since squeezed shut, Vlasov informed his soldiers that no further hope remained unless they could break out in small groups. This having been said, he wished them good luck, and Second Shock Army disbanded into fugitives.

  3

  That twenty-day interval when Vlasov dwelled between the Soviet and the Nazi systems was, as biographers love to say, “crucial to his development.” In the first stage, he continued in all good faith to discover a gap in the Fascist lines, so that he could repeat the near-miracles of Lvov and Kiev. This period came to an end on the day after he, the lieutenant-colonel and the scout had eaten a family of drowned fieldmice somewhere near Mostki. The scout was already through the barbed wire and the lieutenant-colonel was holding two corroded strands apart for Vlasov to crawl between when the upraised needle of a distant tank-gun began to move. When he’d returned to his body, he found himself covered with blood, but it wasn’t his. Sun-flashes on German helmets and German guns sought him out. Rolling down into the shell crater where his companions lay, he closed his eyes, but could no longer remember his wife’s face. In good time, when the artillery explosions seemed to be growing louder to the east, he dodged south, into the swamps. He continued to seek a way back to immaculateness, but he’d lost confidence, and the sounds of motors harassed him almost as much as the flies on his bloodstained uniform. Silver streams and silver skies, sandy ooze, immense trees, and every now and then a uniform containing something halfway between flesh and muck—this taiga bogscape, shrinking limbo of Soviet sovereignty, remained as blank on both enemies’ maps as a hero’s forehead.—Should Vlasov have entombed himself there? Ask Comrade Stalin.—In any event, hunger flushed him out.

  He was well into the second stage when just off the Luga road, not far from where Pushkin had fought his fatal duel, he came across the bodies of fifty peasant women in the open air by their ruined hearths. They’d perished variously, as people will, some ending face-down in the dirt, others on, say, their left side, legs twisted in a final spasm, and one even lay inexplicably on her back, with her hands folded across her heart, as if somebody who loved her had laid her out for a funeral. What welded these manifestations of individualism into an enigmatic parable of universal fatality was the fact that each victim had been shot in the base of the skull—a method of execution which the German language, so capable of inventing words for all eventualities, names a Nackenschuss. Cartridges glittered in the bloodstained grass. I suspect that not even Vlasov himself could have described his feelings at the moment, although he’d seen as many horrors as any other military man, especially during the fall of Kiev. On the battlefield, corpses tend to clump randomly together, their nested kneescapes and elbowscapes resembling mountain ranges photographed from high altitudes. Vlasov had taught himself to look upon such deaths as accidents. But these women lay in an evenly spaced line, like deserters after the commissar imposes sentence. It may not be out of place to mention that in the course of Thirty-second Army’s retreat to Moscow, certain secret dispatches inadvertently left behind (orders to hold the long since overrun Stalin Line) had given Vlasov occasion to return to a village they’d evacuated an hour before. I am sorry to say that he found the peasants, with utter contempt for Soviet power, already preparing the bread and salt of traditional welcome, which they clearly meant to offer to the oncoming Fascists. Not without difficulty, Vlasov prevented his machine-gunner from feasting those traitors on lead. Perhaps this inaction is something to reproach him for. Indeed, his aversion to murder was the very reason he’d requested permission to withdraw from the Volkhov pocket. What was the use of allowing Second Shock Army to be slaughtered without hope of any operational or tactical breakthrough? But Comrade Stalin had replied: You will hold the line at all costs.—These fifty corpses (fifty exactly) proved the correctness of Comrade Stalin’s order. Had the collapse of Second Shock Army been prevented, these women would still be alive. Exhausted by heartache, anxiety and guilt, Vlasov came near to regressing to the first stage. But then he heard engines. Scavenging through the ashes of the nearest hearth, he found a few charred potatoes, tumbled them into his coat pockets and ran across wet, sandy ground, circling the village until he reached the place where he could hide. He thought of Zoya the Partisan’s last words (as reported by the Pravda journalist Lidin): You can’t hang all hundred and ninety million of us. Closing his eyes, he seemed to see that photograph of her frozen, mutilated breasts. It was not strange that that image could still cause him to feel wounded in his own heart, for he still retained his immaculateness. Like Zoya, who perhaps had wept quietly before the Fascists executed her, he could be enveloped and annihilated, but no one could break through the impregnable marble of his convictions. Not long after he’d crawled into the tall grass to eat his potatoes, a line of mobile assault guns came grinding up the Luga road, their barrels and tank treads shining, and helmeted German boys were sitting on top, half-smiling into the lens of history. What had Second Army ever possessed to oppose them? A few Sokolov Maxim 7.62-millimeter machine-guns, which resembled farm machinery with their two wheels and towing yoke, their fat barrels pointing backwards as if to drop leaden seeds into the fields (five hundred per minute of them)—how ludicrous!—And with this reflection, he entered the third stage.

  All this time he’d kept one of the cartridges from the massacre clenched in his left hand so tightly that the fingers bore greenish stains. When the Fascists had gone, he brought it close to his spectacles, to read the marking: Geco, 7.65 millimeter, of German manufacture.

  4

  The fourth stage in General Vlasov’s development followed inescapably from the third, given his logical bent. The intellect which read Napoleon, Caulaincourt, Guderian, Tukhachevsky and
Peter the Great with fairness to all prided itself on its willingness to admit the sway of physical laws, even and especially if those laws operated to its own disadvantage. He who says I have failed is more likely to be sincere than he who declares victory. Datum: The Fascist invaders outnumbered the Soviet military forces by a factor of 1.8 in personnel, 1.5 in medium and heavy tanks, 3.2 in combat planes, and 1.2 in guns and infantry mortars. Leningrad must fall this summer, and likewise Moscow. The enemy would soon control the oil fields of the Caucasus. They could not be defeated. This was the fact. Therefore, any attempt to defeat them was absurd.

  (He remembered the lieutenant-colonel’s last words: I don’t understand how the Fascists were able to cross the Stalin Line . . . )

  Here, in the roofless ruin of the dacha he hid in (on the wall behind the bed’s skeleton, someone had drawn a heart with the initials E. K. and D. D. S.), other facts and memories seemed to linger like his wife’s miserable face peering around a half-lifted blackout curtain whenever he left her. So many sad chances faced him now! General Meretskov had whispered in confidence that ten thousand lives were lost in the evacuation of Tallinn alone. How many of these could be ascribed simply to numerical inferiority, how many to incompetent leadership, and how many to madness beyond cruelty? (Andrei, said his wife, how can you live with yourself?)

  Consider the case of the Kazakhstan’s Captain Kalitayev. (Meretskov had told Vlasov that tale, too.) Knocked unconscious by a German shell, he fell into the water. The Kazakhstan sailed on without him. After his rescuers carried him to Kronstadt, he was shot for desertion.

  For that matter, everybody knew that Stalin and Beria had shot Army Group General Pavlov, then Generals Klimovskikh and Klich, for the crime of defeat. Their understrength, untrained battalions had rushed into action with a few bullets apiece, commanded to hold the line while the Fascists got vanquished by half a dozen tanks “donated” by some collective farm. No enemy breakthrough could be permitted. The last thing those dying soldiers heard was a metallically amplified speech of Comrade Stalin, played over and over again, reminding them of the virtues of the new Soviet Constitution.