by Masha Gessen
On June 23 and 24, when his classmates gathered at the university to be assigned to People’s Militia regiments, Grisha had the flu. He reported as soon as he could, and, though he had brought no clothes and no food with him, was immediately put on a bus with a group from a different faculty. The bus took them to a train station, and they piled into cattle cars, and they traveled. It may have been two or three or four days—however long it takes to start passing out from hunger, the lingering effects of the flu, and the heat and odor of the cattle car.
The account Ruzya received from Grisha’s friend was short, and delivered in a monotone—overrehearsed, she thought, even as she listened to it. But the speech contained enough details to enable Ruzya to imagine what happened—and keep imagining it, obsessively. First, she imagines him running. He is running, or he thinks he is running, because he cannot keep up with his comrades, who are marching off the train. Wherever they are now, this place must have gotten a lot of rain lately, because there are puddles everywhere. Grisha’s shoes and socks quickly become waterlogged, which makes it even more difficult to run. It is slippery too: the ground, a glistening light-brown color, must be pure clay. He slips once but manages to break his fall, landing on his knee and his right hand, and he gets up again, but it is even more difficult to run now because his trousers, wet from the fall, are heavy and slipping down, and he has to hold them up with his hand, which hurts. He lifts his head to look around for the first time since they got off the train. He is looking for something—a sympathetic face, an end to this road, a patch of dry land—when he feels he is slipping again, falling forward, and he cannot land on his hand because he is still holding on to his belt, and he hears the splash when his face hits the puddle. He should lift his head, but he manages only to turn it. The clay feels warm against his cheek. There are people marching all around him, some of them already wearing heavy army boots. He puts his hands over his head.
Grisha Petrosyan is Ruzya’s first war death.
It had been less than twenty years since the Russian Civil War ended; that had followed World War I virtually without interruption. For the purposes of collective memory, twenty years is a short time: all adults knew the devastation of war. There were also the more recent experiences of disastrous warfare: the Soviets’ failed intervention in the Spanish Civil War and the 1939 war with Finland, with its meaningless and massive carnage. At noon on June 22, when the Soviet government finally acknowledged that the country was at war, though German troops were still hundreds and thousands of miles away from most Soviet cities, the people knew enough to expect the worst. The Soviet leadership’s ill-concealed state of disarray, indecisiveness, and fear added to the general sense of dread.
Stalin had clung to his belief in German good faith and the nonaggression pact to the last—and then some. This placed the Red Army, already outnumbered and outgunned, at an unimaginable disadvantage: not only had the military failed to mobilize for a potential attack, but for the first several hours of the German incursion Soviet troops were forbidden to defend themselves. On the first day of war, the German military succeeded in destroying twelve hundred Soviet military planes, most of which were bombed in the airfields before they had a chance to take off. By the end of the second day, two thousand aircraft had been destroyed. After another three weeks, that number had tripled.
Four days into the war, German troops had advanced nearly two hundred miles into Soviet territory and taken more than three hundred thousand prisoners. A week after the fighting began, the Belarusian capital, Minsk, had fallen; nearly two million Soviet soldiers, including many officers, were dead—a loss all the more devastating for a military force already decimated by Stalin’s own purges, which had taken nearly forty thousand officers. This was when Stalin finally emerged from his apparently catatonic state to address his nation on the radio. He acknowledged that the enemy had penetrated deep inside Soviet territory and called on the people to mobilize to defend their motherland.
Even before his call came, men and women all over the country were besieging draft offices. Women, especially students, were shipped to dig trenches outside any number of large towns and cities—an assignment in which many got stuck for months, dying in the trenches they were digging, of hunger, cold, and German bombs. Those who did not qualify for regular military service—men who were too old, too young, too frail, untrained, or even exempt from conscription, as well as those who, like Grisha Petrosyan, fell victim to bureaucratic accidents—joined the ranks of the Narodnoye Opolcheniye, or the People’s Militia. Over three hundred thousand people from Moscow alone joined the militia. These unfit soldiers were armed with antique rifles literally pilfered from museums, with trowels, and often with nothing at all, and were used to form what amounted to human shields. The British military historian Anthony Beevor writes of the militia, “The waste of life was so terrible, it is hard to comprehend: a carnage whose futility was perhaps exceeded only by the Zulu king marching an impi of his warriors over a cliff to prove their discipline.”
By mid-October the Moscow People’s Militia had been destroyed. The vast majority fell on the battlefield, which saw no battle—only killing; some, like Grisha, died before they ever got to the battlefield; the rest were taken prisoner and herded west, which, for the many Jews among them, meant a slower and more painful death. German troops were just outside the Soviet capital.
OCTOBER 16, 1941
Cars and trucks are roaring down the streets of Moscow, all headed east, east, east—fleeing the Germans. The vehicles buckle visibly under their various burdens: all carry people and their possessions, some of which fly off the backs of trucks, but this does not make their owners stop: nothing can. A rug here, a batch of documents there—what the fleeing see fit to salvage. What was prized yesterday has now been reduced to trash: piles of books have grown in the courtyards—the complete collected works of Lenin and Stalin, Marx and Engels. No one sees any reason, anymore, to doubt that Nazi occupation of Moscow is now just days, if not hours, away, and Muscovites who have not found a way out of the city are unloading whatever may compromise them in the eyes of the occupiers. This morning the radio announcer, whose reports are usually peppered with reassuring phrases like “retreat to strategic positions,” “heroic effort,” and “heavy losses sustained by the enemy,” stuck grimly to the point: “During the night of October 14, the situation on the western front deteriorated. The Germans, with a large number of tanks, broke through our defenses.”
At the Military Law Academy, Ruzya collects more news: roads leading east out of the city are clogged with people traveling on foot, lugging backpacks, wheelbarrows, and baby carriages; some of those who are staying have begun compiling lists of Jews living in their buildings—presumably to get in the occupiers’ good graces; some academy staff have disappeared, likely having assumed civilian identities; there is widespread looting of abandoned shops and homes.
Ruzya has come to the academy today to make the final arrangements for the job she has managed to get: she will teach German to the academy’s military lawyers, who will need the language to interrogate prisoners. The job means she, too, will be leaving Moscow, following Samuil to his posting in Ashkhabad. After months of waiting for an assignment, he finally left about a week ago to accompany the academy commissar, the two of them part of the advance guard charged with making arrangements for the academy’s imminent evacuation to Central Asia.
This is not how Samuil and Ruzya planned it. They wanted to go to the front, not to Ashkhabad. For the almost four months since the war began they have been writing appeals asking to be allowed to volunteer. As they envisioned it, he would be a politruk, or “political leader,” a Soviet-era equivalent of chaplain, and she would be a translator: translators were needed at the front to debrief prisoners. But the academy refused to release him in advance of the evacuation—and military institutions are among the last to be evacuated.
Meanwhile, Ruzya and Samuil have been making their life together right here, in
the heart of the disaster. Both sets of parents left the city back in the summer, part of the early wartime exodus. Before they left, in the shocked first days of the war, Ruzya and Samuil conducted a quick round of introductions: she brought Samuil home to meet Eva and Moshe, and he dragged Ruzya out to the dacha to meet his parents, Batsheva and Lev. As usual in Ruzya’s house, no one knew quite how to behave: Eva was preoccupied with some sort of scuffle between the twins, and with worry about what would now happen to Yasha the pilot; Samuil and Ruzya sat in the kitchen for a while with a hospitable but restless Moshe before finding an excuse to leave. At Batsheva’s dacha the next day, it was all homey food, hugs, a bit of crying, and a ready dose of reproach for Samuil’s transparent soldiering plans. Ruzya found herself thrilled at becoming, finally, a part of what felt like a real family with a real home.
Then, within a couple of weeks, they were alone: both their fathers worked as accountants at large industrial plants that were moved hastily to the Urals. Although Moshe never made it to his dream dacha, as he had been so determined to do that summer, his letters soon, bizarrely, boasted of his vegetable-growing feats in the East: his squash even fetched a prize at a country fair. Meanwhile, Samuil and Ruzya made a home in the basement on First Kolobovsky Lane and learned the basics of being a couple. At some point they registered their marriage at the civic registrations office down the street, but neither of them thought enough of the occasion to fix the date in memory: they agreed it was a mere formality. The art of deciding jointly without speaking came with the choice to stop running the half mile to the metro during the air raid alerts: they were in a basement anyway. They did not budge, even after the practice alerts were replaced with real ones on July 22 and, one by one, familiar buildings started to disappear from view. The knowledge of being joined inextricably came in early autumn, during the weeks of worry after Samuil shot himself in the foot while cleaning his handgun. Terrified of being accused of deserting by maiming himself, he sought care underground, from a doctor friend of a friend, and to everyone else explained away his limp by claiming to have burst a blister.
They learned something, too, that alternately thrilled and shamed them. It is possible to be ecstatically, deliriously, foolishly happy even when your country is bleeding and danger’s breath is audible just behind you. It is possible to cry from helpless rage while reading the newspaper posted in the morning on the stand outside the circus building and minutes later to cry for joy while hugging your husband before he goes off to work.
Now, as the city breaks apart and away all around her, Ruzya, alone, tries to hold on to that feeling. Her daily visits to the academy help it linger. Talking to Samuil in her head while she puts away things in the apartment—wrapping the clock and the dishes in blankets and towels before stuffing them in the cupboard, to safeguard them against a partial collapse of the building—helps her too. Knowing that the academy will ship out within a day or two, as she learned today, helps her even more. She has heard all about the pandemonium at the stations, about stampedes that have killed people, but these seem like negligible obstacles if the trip will reunite her with Samuil.
CHAPTER NINE
AUGUST 1941
And now, where do they get a corkscrew? They lost sight of the little things during their buying spree. They are Ester, her IFLI roommate Eda, and Lena Zonina, Ester’s instant best friend going back to her first semester in Moscow (they bonded after they both got “excellent” from an instructor known for his picky strictness). Ester and Eda had to find a place to live about a week after Germany invaded, when their dormitory was turned into an army barracks and students were moved to a school building in the center of the city, where they had to sleep on desks. A friend helped get them into a room in a communal apartment vacated by a fellow student who had already been evacuated. So Ester and Eda moved into this room, and Lena joined them weeks ago, when her mother was hospitalized. Lena, who alone among their friends lived in an apartment with just her mother and no flatmates, did not want to stay there by herself.
Today they have bought things they have not tasted in months, maybe years, maybe ever, Georgian red wine among them. Best to keep the celebration muted, of course, for the occasion is somber. They have come into an inheritance of sorts. A young pilot has died. They never knew him, but it seems a year or so ago he saw Eda’s photograph at the home of a mutual friend in the Soviet-occupied territories, so he sent her a letter. She responded, and romance ensued. About eight weeks ago he wrote that he was going off to the front, and in another three weeks he sent her the details of a bank transfer with a brief explanation: he was getting a large allowance as an air force officer, and he had no use for the money there at the front—and no one in the rear but his beloved Eda. They picked up the transfer and bought food. And now they have received news that he has been killed, and another bank transfer, an astronomical sum of money, something like a year’s student stipend. They have bought wine.
Before the windfall, they had been struggling for a long time. First semester was hard enough: it seemed to Ester both she and Eda were constantly working to scale down their expectations. But once you did that—once you put words like dessert out of your mind, once you accepted that your selection of underwear was limited to the two garments you washed every night and put on the heater so you could put them on in the morning, once you developed the habit of telling yourself, “Look, everyone around here lives like this—and survives and even manages to have fun and create”—then you could learn to live on a student stipend. In their letters they both told their parents that the stipend afforded a perfectly suitable existence and assured them they needed nothing: everything their families could spare should go to relatives in the Warsaw Ghetto. Then, in February, Eda did not make the grade: to qualify for the stipend, students had to have straight “excellent’s” on their exams, and Eda got a “good” on two of her midyears. After nearly five months sharing a room, studying Russian together and helping each other find their way in the realities of their new country, they were practically family, so Ester said they could both live on her stipend.
Somewhere around that time she first heard the word ‘vpro-golod’. It means “a life of hunger”—not the crisis of famine but the habitual, year-to-year, day-to-day, painful light-headedness and sucking sensation in the esophagus—and it described their way of life exactly.
And now this wine and bread bought by the loaf and pinkish brown smoked meat must be her reward. Their reward? For a second Ester actually believes there is a sort of higher justification for the good fortune of having a full stomach for once. She lifts the wineglass—well, the thick yellowish glass with wine in it—to her mouth. It tastes kind of sour: she realizes she expected the sweet taste of Shabbat wine. She has never been a wine drinker before. But she might become one: even with Lena living with them, they can probably afford to buy wine at least once a week.
SEPTEMBER 1941
War sometimes seems all about food. Or at least Ester’s life is all about food. Here she is now, behind the wheel of a truck stalled at an intersection, on her way to the front to deliver the chickens and potatoes stacked in the back of the truck. Also sitting in the back are two loaders, skinny, sickly guys in their late thirties—clearly not strong enough to be soldiers, but perfectly capable of loading and unloading soldiers’ food (and loading up on it while Ester drives). Now Ester faces a choice: either get out and turn the unbearably heavy crank in the front to get the engine started, or go around the back to ask the loaders to do it. The first option is nearly impossible physically; the second, impossibly humiliating.
“Hey, young men, could you give me a hand with the crank again?” she shouts over the wooden planks that fence in the truck bed.
There is shuffling and groaning in the dark recesses of the truck, then the pair emerge in a cloud of invectives. They refer to sexual relations with the makers of the GAZ-AA truck, Ester, Ester’s mother, and whoever came up with the idea of putting women behind the wheel.
This was not, of course, where Ester planned to end up. She and Eda tried just about everything else to join the war effort. They both tried to enlist but were rejected. They tried catching spies. This was Ester’s friend Boris Kravets’s doing, mostly. A classmate from IFLI, he is another frustrated soldier: too nearsighted to be allowed to join. But not so nearsighted as to not notice, as he stood on Ester and Eda and Lena’s balcony one night, that an odd blinking light was visible somewhere in the maze of buildings across the street. This was a couple of months ago, right after the first air raids, and the radio was regularly imploring Muscovites to be vigilant, always on the lookout for people who may be directing German bomber planes to strategic objects (not that they seemed to be bombing anything particularly strategic—just a lot of different buildings). They called the police, and two NKVD officers came, set up some sort of equipment on their balcony, and stayed two nights. They came on the third night, as well, to thank them for their service: they seemed to indicate, without quite saying it, that the young people had indeed helped apprehend a spy.
Ester was beside herself with pride for a day or so, but her spy-fighting fervor lessened considerably when Salomea came by to tell them about her recent misadventure. She was apparently spotted by one of those newly vigilant Muscovites who had heard her say something on a tram—with an accent, naturally, a Polish one. She was forced to go to the police station to prove she was not a spy. Fortunately, she succeeded. She was lucky: every foreigner was suspect, and a Pole was, to the NKVD, just someone from the other side of the front line.