Apricot Jam: And Other Stories

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  And so, if you don’t count the members of the Politburo, it was you who had closer professional contact with him than anyone. There were some very bitter moments, to be sure. (Stalin never minced words when he was angry and could offend people undeservedly; the target of his wrath had to have a thick skin. A certain sign that he was in one of his coldblooded, brutal moods was when he carried his unlit pipe in his hand. Then his wrath could pour down on your head at any moment.) But there were also moments when he showed you his amazing, heartfelt trust.

  So now the problem was to find a way to write an honest, worthy account of it all.

  Something else to think about: the many things that the two of you shared in those very tense—and deceptive!—months before the war also meant that you shared the responsibility for what happened. Was the Supreme Commander wrong? Did he blunder? Did he miscalculate? Then why didn’t you set him right? Why didn’t you warn him, even if it cost you your own head? Didn’t you see that this dogma of “Attack! Attack! Attack!” which was hammered into everyone in the 1930s and practiced in all the maneuvers till 1940 and 1941, left the enemy with a huge advantage? It meant that we rarely practiced the defense, never practiced the withdrawal, and breaking out of an encirclement never entered our heads. Did you support these dogmas as well? You completely ignored that huge concentration of German forces near the border! German aircraft kept flying over Soviet territory, while Stalin accepted Hitler’s apologies for his “young and inexperienced” pilots. What about 1941, when the Germans suddenly needed to look up their World War I cemeteries on our side of the border? It’s all right, go ahead and look . . . What an intelligence coup they made out of that! But at the time, Zhukov believed that there was no man on earth better informed, more profound, and more shrewd than Stalin. And if he hoped to the last to be able to delay a war with Hitler, then who were you to cry out, “No!” even though it might be your last word?

  Who was not paralyzed, even from a distance, by the fearsome name of Stalin? And going to meet him in person was always like taking the final steps up to the gallows. (Still, he did persuade him to release Rokossovsky from a labor camp.) Zhukov was also paralyzed by his lack of confidence in strategic matters, his sense that he was in over his head as chief of the General Staff. He was paralyzed even more, of course, by never knowing how the Supreme Commander might react. He could never guess why he had been summoned. What was the safest way to answer when he was asked, “So what do you propose? What are you afraid of?” Stalin had little patience for listening to reports and sometimes even seemed disdainful. And there were many things that others reported to Stalin that he did not share with his chief of the General Staff. For him, Zhukov was like Stalin’s personal fire department—someone he could suddenly call and send off to deal with some emergency.

  During these first hours after war broke out, Stalin was in a state of confusion that no one had seen before and that he could not conceal. Four hours passed before anyone ventured to order the military districts to resist the enemy, and by then it was too late. What he did was send Zhukov, his chief of the General Staff, rushing to Kiev to save the situation there (“We can get by without you here,” he told him.) But the whole of the high command was operating simply by hit-and-miss. Three days later, Zhukov had to rush back to Moscow: What needed saving, it seemed, was not the Southwestern but the Western Army Group. Stalin began in a tone of complaint: “In a situation like this, what can be done?” (Zhukov had the foresight to offer a few pieces of advice, one of which was to form unarmed divisions from the people of Moscow. There were more than enough people available, and going through the Military Committees would take too long. Stalin announced on the spot the formation of a Home Guard.)

  Given Stalin’s obvious unsteadiness, Zhukov ventured to offer more strong advice. At the end of July, he was bold enough to suggest that Kiev should be abandoned and the troops withdrawn beyond the Dnieper: this would keep some major forces intact and ensure they would not be surrounded. Stalin and Mekhlis both bawled him out for his policy of capitulation. It was then that Stalin dismissed Zhukov as chief of the General Staff and sent him to push back the Germans near Yelnya. (It could have been worse: in those same weeks, about a dozen highly placed and excellent generals who had won victories in the war in Spain were executed; on the other hand, Meretskov was suddenly let out of prison.)

  The battle near Yelnya was a meat grinder, to be sure, but it was a real operation, not just staff work, and Zhukov won it within a week. (Of course, it would have made more sense just to cut off and surround this Yelnya salient, but in those days we still were lacking confidence.)

  As for Kiev, it had to be abandoned in any case, but now with masses of our troops caught in the pocket. (Vlasov did manage to bring a good many of them out and pull back some 500 kilometers, but nowadays his name can’t even be mentioned.) And so if Zhukov had remained in command of the Southwestern Army Group, he might well have had to shoot himself like Kirponos.

  Something extraordinary happened: when Stalin summoned him at the beginning of September, he admitted that Zhukov had been right about Kiev. And then he went on to dictate an order, top secret, numbered 001919: Blocking detachments were to be formed from regiments of NKVD troops; they were to occupy a line in the rear of our forces and fire on anyone who retreated. (How about that! But what else could you do if they would not stand and fight to the death but ran off?) And then he sent Zhukov to save Leningrad, which had been cut off. Zhukov had to hand over to others the central sector of the western front that he had saved. The whole time, though, Zhukov held on to his post in General Headquarters, and this allowed him to learn a great deal from people like Shaposhnikov, Vasilevsky, and Vatutin, all of them with a solid military education. (And he wanted to learn, and had to—it was urgent.) He picked up a lot from them, but still remained their shield or battering ram or blunt instrument: they would send Zhukov charging into the most dangerous sector.

  Stalin managed the war in its first weeks by giving orders that were not to be questioned, and his mistakes piled up, one after another. He had no idea of strategy and operations and no sense of how to coordinate the operations of various branches of the army (what he had were a few ideas left over from the Civil War). But then he became more cautious. Boris Mikhailovich Shaposhnikov was again named chief of the General Staff. He was the only one of the military leaders whom Stalin addressed politely by his first name and patronymic and the only one allowed to smoke in Stalin’s office. (Stalin rarely greeted the others even with a handshake.)

  But Stalin respected the members of the Politburo, particularly his favorite, Mekhlis (until Mekhlis made a complete mess of the bridgehead in the eastern Crimea), far more than any of his military leaders. Often when he and a few other members of the Politburo had heard some general give his report, Stalin would say, “Leave us for a few minutes while we discuss this.” The general would leave and meekly await a decision on the fate of his project or even his head but not feel slighted in the least. We were all communists, but the members of the Politburo, and even Shcherbakov, were the highest among us, and it was quite natural that they would make decisions without us. If Stalin was angry at any of them, it was never for long and never final. Voroshilov botched the Finnish War and lost his post for a time, but when Hitler attacked, it was he who was given the whole Northwestern Army Group. He botched that as well, along with the defense of Leningrad, and was dismissed once more. But he came back again as the lucky marshal and most trusted member of Stalin’s entourage. It was the same with the two Semyons, Timoshenko and the hopeless Budyonny, who made a mess of both the Southwestern and the Reserve Army Groups; yet they all remained members of the General Headquarters as before. Stalin had still not included Vasilevsky or Vatutin in the GHQ, but all the marshals kept their posts there. Zhukov was not promoted to marshal either for saving Leningrad or for saving Moscow or for the victory at Stalingrad. Still, what did rank matter at a time when Zhukov was running operations far more signifi
cant than any the marshals ran? Only after lifting the blockade of Leningrad was Zhukov suddenly promoted. It was not just that he had felt hurt by the delay; he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been promoted. Was it to make him strive all the harder? Was Stalin afraid to make a mistake, to promote someone prematurely and then not be able to get rid of him? He needn’t have worried. The Supreme Commander could not see into the guileless soldier’s heart of his Zhukov. In fact, when could he have learned anything about a soldier’s heart? He never spent so much as an hour at the front during the war and had never chatted with an ordinary soldier. He would summon Zhukov, who would make a long flight back to Moscow, and after many weeks in the constant roar of the front lines, the silence in Stalin’s Kremlin office or at a private supper in Stalin’s dacha seemed quite agonizing.

  Then there was something he could not help but learn from Stalin: the Supreme Commander was always interested to hear about enemy casualties, but he never asked about our own. He simply shrugged them off with a four-fingered wave: “That’s what war means.” He certainly didn’t want to learn how many had surrendered. He ordered that the surrender of Smolensk not be announced for almost a month, still hoping that it might be won back and frantically sending more and more divisions there to be ground to pieces. Zhukov learned that if you first consider the potential casualties and then the actual losses, you will truly never be a military commander. The commander cannot weaken himself by compassion, and all he needs to know about casualties is the number of replacements to be sent up from the reserve and when to send them. There’s no point calculating whether the casualties suffered in winning over some little Yelnya Salient were justified.

  He had to learn how to instill in all the generals serving under him the cold-bloodedness he had himself achieved. (More and more stories were repeated about him: How harsh he was! A will of iron! Give him your hand and he’ll want your whole arm! A voice that rings like steel! But how else could you manage such a huge military machine?)

  And so Zhukov saved Leningrad in September 1941. (The blockade, though, went on for 900 days . . .) Then, the day after Guderian took Oryol, Stalin called him back, now to save Moscow itself.

  Before a day had passed, our troops had been caught in the huge encirclement at Vyazma, more than half a million of them ... a catastrophe. (Stalin had decided to put Konev on trial for the collapse of the western front; Zhukov stood up to him and saved Konev from Stalin’s rage.) All the roads to the capital were open to the enemy. Did Zhukov himself believe that Moscow could hold out? He no longer hoped to maintain a defensive line along the Mozhaysk-Maloyaroslavets arc and was preparing a defense from Klin to Istra and Krasnaya Pakhra. But after summoning up his iron will (what about Stalin’s will? He had one, though it was shaken more than once. In October, he would bring up some of the benefits of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and speculate whether it now might be possible to arrange a truce with Hitler . . .), Zhukov rushed here and there (and it must have been the finger of fate that led him past his own Kaluga village, from which he managed to extricate his mother, sister, and nephews). He summoned up strength he never realized he had, and after five days of battles near Yukhnov, Medyn, and Kaluga itself, he had broken the German advance on Moscow.

  At the same time, twelve divisions of the Home Guard were marching westward (to be swallowed up, some at Smolensk, others in the encirclement at Vyazma). They were all in addition to the regular mobilization. And now, squelching through the autumn mud, a quarter million women and youths had hauled up three million cubic meters of heavy, wet earth as they dug trenches. A scorching wave of panic from the approaching front blew over them. On October 13, the diplomats and staff of the central administrative bodies began being evacuated from Moscow; at the same time, some of those not being evacuated began running away and, shameful to admit, there were even some communists from the Moscow regional committees among them. Uncontrollable panic broke out in Moscow on October 16, when everyone believed that the city was already lost.

  It had always remained a mystery why, precisely during this terrible, decisive week, the Supreme Commander never once gave Zhukov a sign, a word, or even a telephone call. Zhukov never dared approach Stalin himself. And it remained another mystery just where Stalin was in the middle of October. Certainly he did not appear in Moscow until the end of October, when Zhukov and Rokossovsky (and even Vlasov) had stopped the Germans along the arc from Volokolamsk to Naro-Fominsk. At the beginning of November, Stalin was on the phone demanding an immediate counterattack along this whole line so as to have a victory in hand for the November 7 anniversary. He would not listen to Zhukov’s objections and hung up the receiver as he had done more than once before, simply crushing your soul.

  A counterattack like that now, given our weakness, was utterly senseless. Zhukov decided not to do it. The Germans themselves were exhausted and had temporarily halted their advance. And Stalin, as if nothing had happened, called Zhukov to ask him to release some troops from the front for the parade through Red Square on November 7.

  And now here he is, sitting on his veranda with a view over the peaceful Moskva River, looking at the meadows on the opposite bank where the water laps at the city beach in Serebryanny Bor, trying to make sense of it all. So this is the problem: Should he write about all this? In fact, could he write about it?

  It’s not easy.

  But a communist should be able to do it, because a communist sees by the light of a truth that never fails. And always and in everything you tried to be a worthy communist.

  That was so from the beginning. In those days we had a weak grasp of Marxist-Leninist theory. Studying it was a long and hard job. It was only later that I achieved a deeper understanding of the organizing role of our party and realized that the brain of the Red Army, from the very first days of its existence, was the Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). Young people today, unfortunately, don’t have much of a grasp of statistics, but they show that our growth rate before the war gave solid evidence of our progressive system. Industrialization, though, can’t take place without some limits to mass consumption. (And long before that, when I was young in the time of the tsar, there was poverty and starvation in the villages, and the kulaks were sucking the blood of the village poor. Isn’t that true? It certainly is.)

  What about that awful year of 1937? You know it yourself, and you have to remind others, that those groundless violations of legality were not an expression of the essence of our system. The Soviet people trusted the party and followed steadfastly in its footsteps. The damage came from the unprincipled suspicions of some of the leaders. But the superiority of the socialist system and our Leninist principles still emerged victorious. And our people were unequalled in their endurance.

  And what happened when war broke out? Sending political officers— communists with years of training in propaganda—to the army meant a decisive strengthening of our ranks. Then there was the important directive from the Political Directorate of the Red Army—to strengthen the role of communists in the leadership. Yes, I remember what a huge effect that directive had. It’s true, there still were cases when our troops didn’t put up as much resistance as they should have. Yet why did our GHQ emerge stronger than Hitler’s? Precisely because it was based on Marxism-Leninism. And our troops showed amazing fortitude. They fought to the death, just as the Central Committee and the High Command expected them to do.

  The Germans, though, had a first-class army. We never write about that or, if we do, it’s done with contempt. Yet an attitude like that only cheapens our victory.

  In the middle of October, when the Germans halted their advance because their front lines and their communications had grown too extended, we should have been doing the very same thing in the smaller arc that we were holding: bringing in reinforcements, weapons, and supplies, and strengthening our defense. Then we could have faced the next German offensive in mid-November, perhaps without having to fall back much at all. But the Supreme Comm
ander clung to his unfortunate idea of winning some quick victories by November 7, and he insisted on a counterattack on every sector of the front, from Klin to Tula. Who could ever accomplish that? Zhukov now felt bold enough to object and argue, but the Supreme Commander wouldn’t listen. And so he had to throw poorly armed and completely untrained divisions into battle. We wasted those precious two weeks on unnecessary counterattacks that achieved nothing; they won us not a single kilometer of ground, but they did sap our last strength. Then, on November 15, the Germans began the second stage of their attack on Moscow, and on the 18th they attacked near Tula. Guderian took Uzlovaya and was advancing on Kashira. He had come as far as Mikhailov, in Ryazan: he was moving eastward to encircle Moscow! That would have ended it all.

  On November 20, Stalin phoned Zhukov. He could not hide his alarm. In a tone that Zhukov had never heard before, his voice cracking, he asked: “Are you certain that we can hold Moscow? I ask with pain in my heart. Tell me frankly, like a communist.”

  Zhukov was shaken that Stalin was unable to conceal his panic and his pain and was not even trying to do so. And he was moved to hear the trust he had in his general. Summoning up every single ounce of his truly iron will, Zhukov, as if swearing an oath before Stalin, the Motherland, and himself, replied: “We will hold it!”

  Carefully calculating the days remaining, Zhukov set the possible date of his counteroffensive for December 6. Stalin at once tried to bargain with him: it had to be December 4. (This was not because he had made his own calculations; he wanted it for Constitution Day on the 6th, that was it.)