Although it was hard to distinguish at the time, this was the turning point of the war in the sense that the Wehrmacht stood no further chance of winning. And the United States, which was to supply the Red Army with the trucks and jeeps it needed for rapid advances in 1943 and 1944, had just entered the war. In the euphoria of the counter-attack round Moscow, Grossman sensed a new mood in Soviet ranks.
Grossman returned to Moscow on 17 December, and three days later Ortenberg remarked on his method of working. ‘Vasily Grossman has returned . . . He did not manage to submit the article for the next issue of the newspaper, and we didn’t ask him to hurry up. We knew how he worked. Although he had taught himself to write in any conditions, however bad, in a bunker by a wick lamp, in a field, lying in bed or in an izba stuffed with people, he always wrote slowly, persistently giving all of his strength to this process.’ That same day, 20 December, Grossman took the chance to catch up on his own correspondence. He wrote to a friend, M.M. Shkapskaya.
‘It is still too early to be looking at your son’s fate in such a dark light, he is probably alive and healthy. And the post is so bad now. There are lots of people here who cannot get in touch with their families. I am living well here, and it is interesting. I am in good spirits, the situation at the front is good, very good even . . . By the way, I very nearly lost the chance to contact my relatives ever again: I found myself under attack from five Junkers and had a narrow escape climbing out of the house which they destroyed with a bomb and machine-gun fire. Of course, you shouldn’t write to Chistopol about this.
Chistopol was where his wife, Olga Mikhailovna Guber, was staying. He wrote to her too, but naturally omitted to recount his narrow escape from the air attack.
There are very nice people around me. By the way, Tvardovsky8 is here too. He is a good chap. Could you tell his wife that he looks extremely well and everything is absolutely fine with him? I came back from the front three days ago and now I am writing. I have seen a lot. Everything is very different to how it was in the summer. There are lots of broken German vehicles on the roads and in the steppe, lots of abandoned guns, hundreds of German corpses, helmets and weapons are lying everywhere. We are advancing!
Grossman, like many Russians at this time, was convinced by the sudden turnaround in December, that the Germans, suffering so badly in their thin uniforms from the vicious winter, were collapsing under the weight of the Soviet general offensive launched by Stalin after the counter-attacks either side of Moscow. His last article for Krasnaya Zvezda to be published that year bore the title ‘Accursed and Derided’.
When marching into European capitals, they tried to look impressive, these fascist frontoviki. And it was the same men who entered this Russian village one morning. There were shawls over these soldiers’ heads. Some were wearing women’s bonnets under their black helmets and women’s knitted pantaloons. Many soldiers were dragging sledges loaded with quilts, pillows, bags with food, or old buckets.
A soldier with an old woman in a newly liberated village near Moscow. The village had been occupied for about two months.
Germans were camping in this izba just six hours ago. Their papers, bags, helmets are still on the table. The izbas that they had set on fire are still smouldering. Their bodies smashed by Soviet steel are lying around in the snow. And women, feeling that the nightmare of the last days is over at last, suddenly exclaim through sobs: ‘You are our dear ones, you are back at last!’
‘Well, this is how it was [one of the women recounted]. The Germans came. They knocked at the door, crowded into the house, and stood by the stove like sick dogs, their teeth chattering, shaking, putting their hands right into the stove, and their hands were red like raw meat. “Light the stove, light it!” they shouted as their teeth chattered. Well, as soon as they got warmer, they began to scratch themselves. It was awful to watch, and funny. Like dogs, scratching themselves with their paws. Lice had started moving again on their bodies because of the warmth.’
1 Stalin’s Falcon, a Red Army Aviation newspaper.
2 Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace had to leave his house of Lysye Gory on the approach of Napoleon’s Grande Armée.
3 Leo Tolstoy’s granddaughter.
4 Presumably Krasnaya Zvezda.
5 Zhenni Genrikhovna, the family’s Volga German nanny, appeared in her own guise and under her own name in Life and Fate. She was fortunate not to have been arrested as a spy in Moscow during the panic of October 1941 as she still spoke a broken Russian with a heavy German accent.
6 LXI Guards Rifle Corps was formed on 27 September as part of the Stavka Reserve. It consisted of 5th Guards Rifle Division, 6th Guards Rifle Division, 4th Tank Brigade and 11th Tank Brigade. The Corps headquarters then became the basis for 5th Army.
7 The 1st Guards Rifle Division had been formed on 18 September from the 100th Rifle Division, which had been badly mauled in the retreat from Minsk and Smolensk, and then the counterattack at Elyna, where it won its Guards designation. Lt. Gen. I.N. Russiyanov later commanded I Guards Mechanised Corps in Operation Little Saturn in December 1942 during the latter stages of the Stalingrad campaign.
8 Tvardovsky, Aleksandr Trifonich (1910–1971), poet and later editor of the literary journal Novy Mir, 1950–4 and 1958–70, in which he published Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward. Tvardovsky came originally from a village near Smolensk. His father, a kulak, suffered deportation under Stalin. Tvardovsky, however, had just won a Stalin Prize for his long poem Strana Muraviya (The Land of Muraviya), about a kulak who sets off on a quixotic journey to find somewhere in Russia where there were no collective farms, but finally returns home to a collective farm and happiness.
PART TWO
The Year of Stalingrad
1942
In the Donbass, January to March 1942
EIGHT
In the South
In January 1942, Grossman was sent to cover operations to the southeast of Kharkov. This appears to have been at his own request. ‘Vasily Grossman persuaded me to send him to the South-Western Front,’ Ortenberg wrote soon afterwards. ‘This is the part of the country that he comes from.’ Grossman, although not born or brought up there, knew the region from his days as a mining engineer in the Donbass. In any case, it was Grossman’s articles during this period which opened Ortenberg’s eyes to his talents. ‘The ruthless truth of war!’ he wrote. ‘Vasily Grossman, whose talent as a writer was developing right in front of our eyes, remained true to it.’
Ortenberg may well have been surprised by Grossman’s request. The other correspondents were keen to stay close to Moscow since everyone expected the key battles to take place on the central axis. Yet it was almost as if Grossman was drawn to the region and the enemy – the German Sixth Army – which would create the defining period of his life: in Stalingrad.
When Field Marshal von Rundstedt demanded permission from OKH, the Army High Command, to pull back to the line of the River Mius, Hitler was outraged at the idea of withdrawal. Rundstedt insisted that it was essential and offered his resignation. Hitler dismissed him and appointed Field Marshal von Reichenau, the commander of the Sixth Army and a convinced Nazi, in his place. Yet Reichenau too insisted on withdrawal to the Mius. Hitler, who flew down to see for himself, discovered to his amazement that even Sepp Dietrich, the commander of the SS Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, was of the same mind.
Reichenau’s Sixth Army had captured the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. At the end of September 1941, his troops were used to help transport 33,771 Jews to the ravine of Babi Yar outside the city, where they were systematically slaughtered by SS Sonderkommando 4a. The Sixth Army also took Kharkov, and the 38th Army, to which Grossman was attached in that January of 1942, faced them.
Division commander Lazko and his wife Sofya Efimovna.1 Night. The izba is hot. Bukovsky and I enter the house after having spent the long night in the cold, travelling.
They are both extremely hospitable. There is a large as
sortment of home-made foods: dumplings, pastries, pickles. While we wash the cold away with water, Lazko is holding for us a white canvas towel with Ukrainian embroidery. Polyak is the chief of staff of the division. Before the war he was a high official at the Foreign Ministry. He is a rude and morose man.
Grossman went to watch the attack being prepared on the enemy-occupied village of Zaliman some twenty kilometres south of Svatovo. An earlier reconnaissance mission found that the Germans had pegged out live geese along the sector to act as a warning device. The geese made a great deal of noise.
Night. Snowstorm. Vehicles. Artillery. They are moving in silence. Suddenly a hoarse voice is heard at a road junction: ‘Hey, which is the road to Berlin?’ A roar of laughter.
We are able to watch a German counter-attack from a small hill. They run a few steps and then lie down. A little figure is running about, waving its arms. It’s an officer. A few more steps forward, then they rush back and the figure appears again. Again, several steps forward and more rushing about. The counter-attack failed.
Dreams do come true. As soon as the Germans form up in a group: Bang! Here’s a shell for them. It’s Morozov, the gun-layer. As soon as there’s an accumulation of Germans and one begins to think it would be wonderful to scatter them, then: Bang! A shell! Even we jump up in amazement.
The Red Army loved to vaunt any soldier who demonstrated a particular skill with his weapon, whether a sniper, a champion grenade thrower or a gun-layer like Morozov. They were exalted like Stakhanovite workers and their achievements were often wildly exaggerated in the retelling.
Battle for Zaliman, the second day. It’s very cold. Haze. Artillery is firing, an ear-splitting racket. The regiment of Lieutenant Colonel Elchaninov is fighting for Zaliman. They have brought field guns right into the village and hidden them behind the houses. When they spot a machine gun, they wheel the gun out, fire point-blank and then push it back behind the house.
Problems for the artillery: battle in a village. Everything has got mixed up. One house is ours, another one is theirs.
Talking to a woman: ‘There were forty Germans walking – I even shut my eyes, ah, my God – straight into the village, and when I opened my eyes, some of them were lying on the ground, and some were running back.’ (That was gun-layer Morozov.)
How Zaliman was taken. We leaped in when the Germans were regrouping. Some units had already left and others hadn’t replaced them. We lost only three men wounded. Had we chosen a different way we would have lost thousands. The Germans had wire fences, log bunkers, concrete pillboxes, trenches and dugouts. There were even fireplaces in the bunkers tiled like those in houses. Company reconnaissance had provided detailed reports about the pillboxes. When our troops took Zaliman, these reports proved totally accurate, almost as if we had built the pillboxes ourselves.
Grossman picked up on the ‘fireplaces in the bunkers tiled like those in houses’, because Red Army soldiers were frequently amazed at how German troops often tried to make their defensive positions so homely. It seemed so sedentary and civilian in an army which believed in martial qualities and Blitzkrieg. Grossman joined the commander and staff of the regiment which had carried out the attack.
At the regimental command post. The izba has been stripped bare. The Germans had taken everything away. Chairs, beds, brooms, stools. Colonel Pesochin is fat and big. He looks like a member of the intelligentsia, but people say that he punches his subordinates in the face with his fist. He has hit the editor of the divisional newspaper.
Divisional Commissar Snitser is fat, big. They are making fun of one another all the time and constantly muffle each other up, button up each other’s collars. There are jokes the whole time. German heavy artillery is firing. ‘Why don’t you destroy it?’
‘It’s hard to grasp it,’ comes the jovial answer.
‘Of course it’s easier to grasp women.’
Grossman took down a number of these bantering exchanges of heavy military humour.
‘You are growing fatter all the time, Major Kostyukov.’
‘I am competing with my chief, Comrade Divisional Commander.’
‘I am sure you are going to win this competition.’
‘No. My weight stabilised in 1936.’
‘Everyone is fat in your regiment.’
‘It would be too great an honour to the Germans to lose weight because of them.’
Dinner at regimental headquarters. ‘Cook, how long has it taken you to make such tiny pelmeni?’
‘I began making them when he [a German aircraft] was diving down at us. The serpent wouldn’t let me finish my pelmeni.’
A captain runs in while we are having dinner. ‘May I report, up to three hundred [enemy] sub-machine-gunners have been sighted.’
Snitser, pouring the vodka: ‘Ha-ha-ha! Divide that by ten.’
Pesochin punches commissars and divisional commissar Serafim Snitser punches his own politruks [political officers]. Each of them has his own chain of command of punching. They are both huge, massive men, with fat, meaty fists. Actions have been brought against both of them in the Army Party Commission, but they aren’t deterred. They give promises, but are unable to keep them, like drunkards. They blow their top every time. Spitser punched a tankist yesterday in an argument about ‘trophies’ [i.e. loot].
Grossman, despite such depressing relics of the Red Army at its most unenlightened, was optimistic about the new mood developing.
The spirit of the army – a great, subtle force. It is a reality.
He compared this change with the stiff new measures introduced for the Wehrmacht (even though these were no more ruthless than the sanctions meted out by the NKVD’s Special Departments attached to Soviet formations).
Hitler’s address to the troops: ‘Not a step back from the captured territory.’ The order had been read out and people were forced to sign. ‘A death sentence was read out to us, and we signed it,’ the [German] prisoners say.
Grossman was evidently allowed by Lieutenant Colonel Elchaninov to see the regiment’s records over the previous months. As well as examples of Soviet heroism, Grossman noted down ‘extraordinary events’, which was the official euphemism for cowardice, desertion, treason, anti-Soviet activities and all other crimes which carried the death penalty. Grossman was clearly fascinated by military phraseology and the bizarre juxtaposition of observations. His own notes, however, were far more dangerous, for they recorded many incidents of desertion and insubordination. If any of his notebooks had been discovered by the ‘Special Detachments’, the NKVD military agents of counter-intelligence which were reformed as SMERSh in the spring of 1943, he would have been in very serious trouble.
8 October [1941]. Kravtsov in the 3rd Mortar Company constantly tried to stop for rest on the march without his superior’s permission, thus putting his company in danger.
13 October. Red Army soldier Matrosov distinguished himself on a mounted reconnaissance mission. He got killed. One of our squads surrendered to the enemy, under the slogan ‘Down with Soviet government’.
19 October. Red Army soldier shot in the 8th Company for collaborating in a desertion to the enemy.2
24 October. Squad Commander Marchenko isn’t certain of the Red Army winning. He says: ‘Hitler is going to push us back to Siberia.’
15 November. Machine-gunner declared: ‘Comrade Stalin’s report gave me more strength.’ Red Army soldier Oska declared: ‘I give you my word, Comrade Stalin, I’ll go on fighting the enemy as long as my heart beats.’
At the meetings conducted by commissars or ‘politruks’, soldiers were told of heroic acts and encouraged to come up with slogans and suitable declarations themselves.
PolitrukGlyanko broke into the village Kupchinovka, shouting ‘Ura!’
Horse driver Klochko was captured by Germans. They led him to a house where [Soviet] soldiers were stationed. When he approached the entrance, Klochko shouted: ‘Corporal! Germans!’
‘I request the execution of the two Germ
ans who have personally killed a soldier from the 9th Rifle Company, Comrade Gorelov.’
Red Army soldier Pilyugin said: ‘General Frost is happy to help us. Boys are dying in the [German] army, too.’
Red Army soldier Ryaboshtan declared: ‘I am going to dig a trench right now and no enemy fire will force me to retreat from here.’
Red Army soldier from the 9th Company Kozyrev said: ‘It is hard to surrender one’s own land. If only we could advance soon.’
Red Army soldier Zhurba: ‘Death is better than fascist captivity.’
Some soldiers, on the other hand, were dangerously naive in their complaints. They risked being handed over to the Special Department as defeatists and enemy agitators.
Red Army soldier Manyuk stated: ‘We won’t get any rest at all if we are on duty every day.’
Red Army soldier Burak refused to accept a sub-machine gun: he says he’s got bad eyes. Company Commander Kovalenko swore at him with obscene language.
Grossman noted many examples of soldiers and even officers expressing their religious belief. It is not clear, however, whether soldiers had been told of Stalin’s recognition of the Orthodox Church in the hour of the Motherland’s crisis.
Red Army soldier Golyaperov declared: ‘I will only take the oath if there is a cross [to swear on].’
A Writer at War Page 9