Armistice

by Harry Turtledove

  What with all that and with stops to let women off, it took two hours to get to Fulda. Luisa and Trudl and the other locals stepped out onto the street. Luisa stared. The Americans had bombed the town again and again after she was taken to Russia. She walked to her block of flats. It was nothing but more burnt-out wreckage. She stood in the street and started crying again.

  —

  Somewhere out beyond the air base’s perimeter, a machine gun let loose with a long, ripping burst. Boris Gribkov looked up from his shchi and his fried pork cutlet. So did half the other Red Air Force men stuffing their faces in the mess hall.

  “What is the world coming to?” a major exclaimed in disbelief. By his ruddy cheeks and double chin, he liked the world just fine as it was. “This is Beylorussia! There aren’t any stinking bandits in Beylorussia.”

  Another burst from the gun said he didn’t know everything there was to know. Some rifle shots followed, perhaps aimed at the machine gun, perhaps to clean up whatever it hadn’t. Boris glanced down to the automatic pistol on his hip. It wasn’t the kind of weapon a flyer often thought about using. Things weren’t the way they often were, though.

  No bandits tried to waylay him when he went back to his quarters. Twenty minutes later, though, a private who looked about fourteen hurried in and said, “Excuse me, sir, but Colonel Petlyura wants to talk with you right away.”

  “I serve the Soviet Union!” Boris said, and then, as he followed the kid to the base commandant’s office, “Did he tell you what it was about?”

  “No, sir. He called me and he said, ‘Go get Gribkov. Quick, you hear?’ So I did,” the private replied. Boris realized he’d asked a stupid question; a colonel wouldn’t tell an enlisted man one word more than he had to.

  When he walked into the office, he got a surprise: Volodymyr Petlyura had a liter of vodka and two glasses sitting on the card table that did duty for his desk. Pretending he didn’t see the bottle, Boris said, “Reporting as ordered, Comrade Colonel.”

  By the way Petlyura returned the salute, he hadn’t started drinking yet. He waved Boris to a folding chair. Then he asked, “Do you speak English, Gribkov?”

  “No, Comrade Colonel. I’m sorry. Some German, but no English. May I ask why, sir?”

  “I started learning during the Great Patriotic War. The Americans and English were our allies, and it was useful to the state to have men who could follow what they said. Then they became our enemies, and that grew more useful yet. There is a poem in English called ‘The Second Coming.’ ”

  “A religious poem, sir?” Boris asked. How did the state gain from religious poetry?

  “No, or not exactly—and I have never been a believing Christian. But religious or not, it is a striking poem. It is about ends and beginnings, you might say, and two lines are ‘Things fall apart./ The center cannot hold.’ I have been thinking about that poem a lot lately.” Volodymyr Petlyura opened the liter of vodka and filled the glasses. He shoved one toward Boris.

  Boris lifted it. He knew without a doubt the toast he needed to make: “Comrade Colonel, I serve the Soviet Union!” He knocked back the vodka. It was so smooth, he barely felt it going down.

  Petlyura drank with him, with the wrist snap of a practiced toper. “Ah!” he said. “That’s the straight goods!” He poured two more shots. “To the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!” Up went his glass, and Boris’. Down the hatch went the vodka.

  After that, Boris toasted the USSR’s workers and peasants. And after that, he started noticing he was getting toasted himself. Supper slowed things, but you couldn’t drop three depth charges like that without feeling the blast.

  The colonel raised a glass to the Red Air Force, the Red Army, and the Red Fleet. Boris gulped that one down, too. By then, they’d put a considerable dent in the bottle. “Don’t worry about it,” Petlyura said. “I’ve got more.”

  “Sir, I wasn’t worried,” Boris said truthfully. The only thing that worried him was how thick his head would be come morning.

  “Good, good.” The more the colonel drank, the less Russian and more Ukrainian he sounded. “ ‘Things fall apart./ The center cannot hold,’ ” he repeated. Then he said something in what might have been English—perhaps words with the same meaning. He said, “You know what the spring rasputitsa is like.”

  “Oh, yes, Comrade Colonel. Who doesn’t?” Boris said.

  As if he hadn’t spoken, Volodymyr Petlyura went on, “All winter long, it’s ice and snow. Everything is frozen hard. Then spring comes, and the ice and snow melt, and it all turns to mud for six weeks, and nothing moves. Am I wrong or am I right?”

  “You’re right, sir. You’re so very right.” Boris would have agreed to anything just then.

  Petlyura’s thoughts took a turn he hadn’t expected: “And that’s what’s happening to the Soviet Union right now, dammit. We’ve been hard and strong and frozen for years and years. Now we’re in the rasputitsa, and the whole country is flailing around in the mud. The center can’t move to bring the outer parts back into line.”

  “I never looked at it that way before, Comrade Colonel.” Again, Boris told the truth. Stalin’s iron hand hadn’t let anyone get even a centimeter out of line. The longtime ruler had killed or sent to the gulag those bold enough to disagree with him. But now the iron hand was gone. All the restlessness that had been frozen in place was bubbling up at once.

  And Petlyura had managed to get that across without once mentioning Stalin’s name. He seemed very clever to Boris, especially after almost half a liter of vodka.

  He filled the glasses again, and threw the dead bottle in the trash can. Boris said, “To victory over the bandits!”

  “Tak!” Volodymyr Petlyura said. The commandant went on, “The Soviet Union means everything to me. It educated me. It gave me something bigger than my village to care about. Why do people want to destroy it? It is great. It is glorious.” He reached behind him and produced another liter of antifreeze. “Marx! Lenin! Stalin! Molotov!”

  As with the others, that was a toast that had to be drunk. Though his head was seriously spinning, Boris thought he understood what the Hammer and Sickle meant to Volodymyr Petlyura. Without it, he would have been just another Ukrainian peasant with cowshit on his boots. Under it, he’d become a New Soviet Man, as good as any other New Soviet Man, regardless of whether his Russian had an accent. No wonder he thought the state Lenin and Stalin had built was worth preserving.

  But old prejudices kept more life than the base commandant wanted to see. Most citizens of the Soviet Union, like most citizens of the Russian Empire before it, disliked and distrusted Jews. Most of them thought people who came out of the Turkic republics in the East didn’t deserve to be anything more than second-class citizens. They called people from the Caucasus blackasses and were sure snooty Balts walked around with their noses stuck high in the air.

  So was it any wonder the Georgians and the Armenians and the Balts and the Kazakhs had had a bellyful of the USSR? Was it any wonder so many Ukrainians had sided with Hitler against Stalin and still resented their Great Russian neighbors? Was it any wonder there’d been machine-gun fire even here in placid Byelorussia?

  Petlyura looked expectantly at Boris. The pilot realized he had to offer the next toast. He did: “To peace in the Soviet Union and peace in the world!”

  “To peace!” the commandant echoed, and drank. But then he shook his head and sighed like a man mourning a lost love. “Why don’t the Poles and the Hungarians and the Czechoslovakians show us thanks for setting them free? No wonder we drop bombs on the ungrateful sons of bitches!”

  Since the end of the Great Patriotic War, they’d done what Stalin told them to do almost as if they were republics of the USSR themselves. Not everyone in them could have been happy about that. Unfortunate things happened to people who let their unhappiness show, though. Both the MGB and the Red Army made sure of that.

  Now the USSR was badly battered from its war against America. Now Stalin’s s
trong hand was off the wheel. No wonder the satellites were tying to spin out of the Soviet orbit.

  Boris knew he couldn’t explain that to Volodymyr Petlyura. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t explain anything to Petlyura. The colonel had passed out, slumped down onto the card table. Dumb muzhik can’t hold it, Boris thought, a moment before he slumped down unconscious himself.

  —

  Ihor Shevchenko listened to Radio Moscow with a radio hooked up to a truck battery. Roman Amfiteatrov reeled off a stream of Soviet successes in the Baltics, in the Caucasus, and in Czechoslovakia. He didn’t say anything about Hungary or Poland. Ihor had a pretty good idea why, at least when it came to Poland: Red Army propagandists couldn’t even invent successes here.

  “And furthermore, Fascist broadcasters abroad are reporting significant unrest in the Ukraine,” Amfiteatrov said indignantly. “General Secretary Molotov has directed me to inform the nation and the world that these are shameless lies, and that the Ukrainian SSR remains as loyal to the Soviet Union as it has always been.”

  As loyal as always? Where a Russian wouldn’t, Ihor heard the irony there. When he was a boy, Stalin had starved the Ukraine into submission and collectivization. Was it any wonder, then, that some Ukrainians greeted the invading Nazis with bread and salt and flowers? After what Stalin had done, Hitler looked like a liberator.

  The Ukrainians rapidly discovered the cure was worse than the disease. Stalin killed till he broke the survivors to his will. Hitler killed till he couldn’t kill any more. Some Ukrainians didn’t care. With German encouragement, they hunted and slaughtered Russians and Jews. Some went right on fighting the Red Army after it rolled the Wehrmacht out of the Ukraine in late 1943. A few skulkers still raided and stole and sometimes fought even as the new war broke out.

  Now Radio Moscow was denying that the Ukraine held any unrest? Were the men trying to run things now that Stalin was gone really so stupid? Didn’t they understand that the quickest way to confirm a rumor was to deny it?

  Up till this moment, Ihor hadn’t wanted to get back to the Ukraine till the powers that be released him from Soviet service. But now, he judged, they might not do that till the Ukraine, or big chunks of it, had broken away from the central government’s control. Where would that leave him? Could he even get home if he was discharged? Would people at the border think he was some kind of Russified foreigner?

  He’d told Captain Pavlov he wouldn’t desert. Pavlov was one of the better officers he’d served under. He decided he owed the man at least a glimpse of what was on his mind. Pavlov could give him to the MGB as soon as he finished talking, of course. Had he thought Pavlov would do that, he wouldn’t have wanted to give him that glimpse to begin with.

  He hunted up the captain—which, given how thin-spread the Red Army was here, took a while. Then he had to wait while Pavlov waded through a squabble between two corporals. Pavlov settled it: sensibly, or so Ihor thought. As the corporals ambled off, the captain said, “And what’s on your mind, Sergeant?”

  “Talk to you for a few minutes, sir?” Ihor said.

  Pavlov caught his tone, one of the things that marked him as a good officer. He started walking across the field in which his tent was pitched. Ihor followed at his heels like a well-trained hound. After they’d gone a couple of hundred meters, the captain said, “All right, nobody’ll eavesdrop on us here. Now what’s on your mind?”

  “Comrade Captain, d’you know how bad it really is in the Ukraine?” Ihor spoke Russian, not his birthspeech. But he could hear himself using his native h for g and putting more Ukrainian endings on Russian verbs than usual.

  “Why would you ask me that right now?” Captain Pavlov sounded as if he really wanted to know.

  “When Radio Moscow goes out of its way to say there’s no trouble…” Ihor didn’t go on, or think he needed to.

  He proved right. Pavlov looked disgusted. He sounded disgusted, too, as he answered, “You heard the news, did you? What I’ve heard is, it’s not as bad as Latvia or Lithuania or Georgia. It’s not an all-out war, not most places. The west isn’t so good, but everything else could be worse.”

  What was now the western Ukraine had been part of southeastern Poland until 1939. The people there had lived under Soviet rule for only a few years, not since the Russian Revolution. They were still getting used to their new masters. Resistance to Soviet authority had always been strongest there. The Nazis had recruited an SS infantry division there, too. Life was rarely as simple as you wished it would be.

  Ihor said, “Sir…” He had trouble getting the words out.

  “You want to head east and see what’s going on wherever it is you call home.” He didn’t need to say anything. Pavlov already knew.

  “Comrade Captain, I do.” Ihor let out a wry chuckle. “I don’t want to catch a noodle in the neck while I’m doing it, though.”

  “Funny how that works,” the captain said dryly. “And why should I give you an authorization to leave the war?”

  “Because I caught a shell fragment for the Soviet Union, sir. Because I got radiation sickness for the Red Army. Because I haven’t seen my wife in years.”

  “Do you suppose you’re the only soldier who can say things like that?” Pavlov asked after a moment’s thought.

  “Of course not, Comrade Captain. All the men my age can. But you asked why, and I tried to tell you.”

  Captain Pavlov thought some more. At last, he said, “I can’t do it on my own. They wouldn’t pay any attention to a captain’s order, not for something like that. Let me talk to the colonel commanding the division.”

  “Sir?” Ihor said in alarm. He hadn’t set eyes on the colonel more than twice. “He won’t give me to the Chekists?”

  “Yob tvoyu mat’, Shevchenko, he won’t,” Pavlov said. As it could with mat, obscenity turned to promise. “He’ll have to give me to them, too. But he’s a human being, so he won’t.”

  “Maybe you should just forget the whole thing,” Ihor said.

  “I’ll make it work,” Pavlov told him. Ihor nodded. What else could a sergeant do when a captain said something like that? But was Pavlov giving him a promise or a threat?

  Action picked up over the next couple of days, and Ihor almost forgot what he’d asked the captain. Then Pavlov came to him the way he’d gone looking for the battalion CO. Pavlov held out a folded sheet of paper. Ihor opened it. It was divisional stationery, something of whose existence he’d been ignorant till that moment. It was festooned with official, or at least official-looking, stamps.

  A strong hand had written The bearer, Sergeant Ihor Semyonovich Shevchenko, is ordered to report to Kiev Military District headquarters to instruct raw troops in weapons and tactics, as directed by the KMD chief of staff. Express transport is authorized. The signature, in the same bright blue ink as the order, read V. I. Rogozin, division commander.

  “Bozhemoi!” Ihor whispered. “You did it! How did you do it, uh, sir?”

  “I got lucky,” Pavlov said. “It turns out that the assistant chief of staff in the Kiev Military District is Vsevolod Ivanovich’s brother-in-law.”

  “How about that?” Ihor said. Even in the classless, rational Soviet Union, whom you knew counted for more than what you knew.

  “A car should be here—had better be here—in a few minutes. It’ll take you to the airstrip,” Pavlov told him. “When Colonel Rogozin says express transport, he means it.”

  “He must, sir.” Ihor felt dizzy. He’d never flown in his life, or expected to. There was a first time for everything.

  The car was an old, wheezing Mercedes someone must have commandeered for the Red Army, likely at gunpoint. The driver seemed astonished he’d been sent out for a sergeant. The pilot of the Kukuruznik at the airstrip seemed even more astonished he was supposed to fly a sergeant to Kiev. But Colonel Rogozin’s orders had the power to bind and to loose. The little Po-2 biplane buzzed into the air with Ihor in the front cockpit and the man who could actually fly the plane behind him.


  They had to stop for fuel twice along the way. The flight took all day; it was about a thousand kilometers to Kiev, and the trainer only made 150 going flat out. Ihor didn’t care. They never went very high—he didn’t think the Po-2 could go very high—and the view was fascinating.

  He reached an airstrip outside of Kiev as it was getting dark. The plane bounced hard when it landed. Ihor was glad to make it in one piece. No one on the ground seemed to have any idea what to do with him. “Nothing will happen till tomorrow anyway,” another sergeant said. They fed him borscht and black bread. Somebody gave him a pack of Belomors.

  He got a blanket and some tent floor to sleep on. The other sergeant apologized. Ihor took it all in stride. He heard no gunfire anywhere. That put this tent way ahead of where he’d slept the night before.

  —

  A German underofficer sat behind a card table that housed a typewriter. He gave Max Bachman a weary nod. You couldn’t just release people from the armed forces. You had to collect information from them first. You did if you were German, anyhow. Max wondered whether the Americans wasted time with such foolishness. For their sakes, he hoped not.

  This fellow took his name, birthdate, and home town. He took his rank. He took his blood group. Then he asked, “And did you serve in the last war?”

  “What business of yours is that?” Max said. “What difference does it make now?”

  “It’s on the form,” the underofficer said. “I’m required to enquire.”

  “Look at me. Do I look like a virgin?” Max said.

  “I’ll take that for a yes.” The military bureaucrat hit the space bar several times so the X he typed would go into the right box. Then he asked, “And where did you serve in the last war?”

  “Where do you think, sonny?” Max said—the underofficer might have been too young to go through the last grinder. Something like three-quarters of the Wehrmacht had fought in the east. Russia was the main event, everything else just a sideshow. However many men Hitler sent to the Ostfront, though, he never had enough, not after the first year. He should have seen that sooner. He should have seen a lot of things sooner.