Another thing that I am suffering from is a terrible shortage of money . . . I’ve written to Moscow, to all my publishers, but none of these sons of bitches has sent me a kopeck yet . . .
I often think of Katyusha. I would love to see her . . . She must be so grown up now. I’ve had two letters from her and I felt from those letters that she does not remember me well; they were such cold letters.
In the evenings I sit under the apple tree which is now in blossom, and I look at the lit windows of the house. It is so peaceful and quiet here. This amazes me. There’s a general called Ignatiev who once said that correspondents are the bravest people in war, because they have to leave the rear for the front so many times. And this moment is the most unpleasant one, this change from nightingales to aircraft.
I’ve had a card from the Migration Department, saying that Mama is not on the lists of those evacuated. I knew that she hadn’t managed to escape, but still my heart shrank when I read those typed lines.
It appears that Grossman did not need the extra time Ortenberg had allowed him. He delivered the manuscript on 11 June and wrote to his father the following day.
Things seem to be going well with my novel. The editor read it yesterday and approved it passionately. He summoned me at night and embraced me. He said lots of flattering things and promised to publish it in Krasnaya Zvezda without any cuts. And the novel is quite long . . . I am anxious about how the readers will receive it . . . By the way, the publication of the novel should greatly improve my financial affairs. I hope you’ll be able to see this for yourself in the very near future. This makes me pleased. You must have grown so skinny, my poor man.
At the same time, he wrote to his wife in Chistopol saying much the same as he had written to his father, but added, with touching pride:
I am a key person at the editorial office now. The editor summons me ten times a day. I sleep there in the office, as the proofs are read until two or three in the morning.
Ortenberg himself wrote: ‘[After] precisely two months, Vasily Semyonovich brought me The People Immortal, a manuscript which was about two hundred pages long. I read it, so to speak, without putting it down. Nothing of the sort had been written since the war began. We decided to publish it without delay. The first chapter was sent to the typesetters. When the three-column page was ready, I started proofreading it. Grossman was standing by my side watching my movements jealously. He feared that I would make unnecessary corrections.’
On 14 July, Grossman wrote in great excitement to his father.
Krasnaya Zvezda started serialising my novel today . . . I wired you 400 roubles the day before yesterday! I will be in Moscow for another three weeks or a month, while the newspaper serialises the novel.
On 12 August, Ortenberg wrote: ‘Today we published the final chapter of the novel The People Immortal by Vasily Grossman. It was serialised over eighteen issues of the newspaper, and after each one the interest of the readers increased. For eighteen days, and even nights, I stood with the writer by my desk proofreading one chapter after another in order to publish it in the next issue. There were no conflicts with Vasily Semyonovich. Only the end of the novel caused heated discussions: the main character, I. Babadzhanyan, gets killed. When I was reading the manuscript and when I was reading the proofed version of the final chapter, I kept asking the writer whether it wasn’t possible to resurrect the main character, of whom the reader had grown so fond? Vasily Semyonovich replied: “We have to follow the ruthless truth of war.”’
In fact, Grossman was to face acute embarrassment, the sort that any novelist dreads, even though it had been unusual to give the main character in the novel his real name as well as identity. Babadzhanyan had not been killed, as Grossman had been told. But this future general of tank troops forgave the novelist for his fictional death.
In Moscow, meanwhile, few seemed to have had any idea of the disaster taking place in the south as Hitler’s armies advanced on the Don and drove towards the Caucasus. Grossman’s letter to his wife on 22 July showed that even those coming back to Moscow from the region appeared oblivious to the dangers.
Yesterday Kostya Bukovsky returned from Stalingrad by air, and I gave a ‘reception’. We drank and sang songs . . . Tvardovsky read a wonderful chapter from his new work [‘Vasily Tyorkin’]. Everyone was moved to tears.1
Just over three weeks later, on 19 August, Grossman wrote to his father.
I am leaving for the front in a couple of days. Your parental heart would have rejoiced if you could see how I was welcomed by the Red Army after the novel was published. My God, I was so proud of myself and so touched. And it was received so well at every level, from the top to the bottom of the army. My dear, my situation is better than ever now. I have success and recognition, but there is a heavy, heavy feeling in my soul. My passionate desire is to help all my dear ones, to assemble you all in one place. I am tormented by the thought about Mama’s fate . . .
I’ve had a letter from Vadya’s son Yura. He is at the front, a lieutenant. He has fought in many battles and has been wounded.
Grossman’s young cousin, Yura Benash, was about to be sent to Stalingrad, which is where Grossman himself was bound.
1 Tvardovsky (see note p.63) was best known as the author of ‘Vasily Tyorkin’, the story of a fictional peasant soldier, a real optimist who always manages to survive. He had begun life in Tvardovsky’s newspaper column during the Russian-Finnish War. The character became a folk hero during the Great Patriotic War and won Tvardovsky another Stalin Prize in 1946.
THIRTEEN
The Road to Stalingrad
While Grossman was working on The People Immortal, the German general staff had been preparing the plans for Hitler’s great summer offensive, Operation Blue. In what was almost a relaunch of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler counted on charging into the Caucasus to seize the oilfields there. He was convinced that securing this source of fuel would enable him to hold out against the ‘Big Three’ powers now ranged against him. But on 12 May, six days before the German operation was scheduled to start, Marshal Timoshenko launched his own offensive south of Kharkov, as mentioned in the previous chapter. The Stavka was hoping to recapture the city. The Soviet attack, however, was doomed. The large concentration of German forces in the area, and their rapid reaction to the new situation led to another disastrous encirclement five days later when General Paulus’s Sixth Army sealed the trap on more than three Soviet armies. News of the disaster was a shock, especially for Grossman, who had spent so much time in that area and had met many men involved in the battle.
One important side effect of this engagement was to postpone the main phase of Operation Blue until the end of June. A German staff officer, with all the plans for the offensive in the south, was shot down on Soviet territory when his pilot lost his way, but Stalin refused to believe the evidence. He thought it was a trick, just as he had refused to believe warnings before Barbarossa. He was convinced that Hitler would again attack towards Moscow. It was not long, however, before he realised how serious his obstinacy had been. Timoshenko’s South-Western and Southern Fronts, already badly mauled near Kharkov, were soon in headlong retreat. Paulus’s Sixth Army pushed into the great bend of the River Don, while three other armies – Fourth Panzer, First Panzer and the Seventeenth Army, approached the lower Don to advance into the Caucasus.
Stalin began to panic. On 19 July, he personally ordered the Stalingrad Defence Committe to prepare the city for war immediately. It had seemed unthinkable that the Germans might reach the Volga, let alone attack the city named after him, for he had bolstered his reputation on a highly inflated version of its defence in the civil war when it was still called Tsaritsyn.
Hitler, meanwhile, began to meddle with the German general staff’s operational plan. In the original version, the task of Paulus’s Sixth Army had been to advance towards Stalingrad, but not to take it. The idea was simply to guard the whole of Operation Blue’s left flank along the Volga as the main thrust wen
t southwards into the Caucasus. But soon the plan changed. The Sixth Army, supported by part of the Fourth Panzer Army diverted back from the Caucasus, was ordered to capture the city which bore Stalin’s name.
On 28 July, just after the Germans took Rostov and three of their armies crossed the River Don into the Caucasus, Stalin issued the notorious Order No. 227, known as ‘Not One Step Back’. Anyone who retreated without orders or surrendered was to be treated as a ‘traitor to the Motherland’. Grossman’s daughter later heard of the following exchange in the editorial offices of Krasnaya Zvezda. ‘When the famous order was issued to shoot deserters, Ortenberg said to my father, Pavlenko and [Aleksei] Tolstoy,1 who all happened to be in the office at that moment: “Could one of you write a story on this subject, please?” My father replied immediately, without reflecting: “I am not going to write anything of the sort.” This made Pavlenko furious. He twisted his body and, hissing like a snake, said: “You are an arrogant man, Vasily Semyonovich, such an arrogant man!” But Tolstoy, who had just stood there and did not take part in this verbal exchange, soon wrote a story about a beast-like deserter who, when fleeing from the Red Army, goes into a house and kills little children there.’
The retreating Soviet armies were in chaos. Thousands of lives were wasted in futile counter-attacks. Many trapped in the bend of the River Don, some sixty kilometres west of Stalingrad, drowned trying to escape. Grossman later interviewed a number of men involved in the disaster.
This was the account which Grossman took down from Vassily Georgevich Kuliev, a twenty-eight-year-old military correspondent and former Komsomol head of Young Pioneers, who appointed himself commissar of the group.
‘We were retreating from the battle under fire from mortars and machine guns. At the Markovsky farmstead, we squatted in a trench, under a terrible fire, and then slipped through the encirclement. I appointed myself the commissar of a group of eighteen men. We lay down in [a field of] wheat. Germans appeared. A red-haired one shouted: “Rus, uk vekh!”2 We fired bursts from our sub-machine guns and knocked four Germans off their horses. We broke through, shooting with a sub-machine gun and a machine gun. There were about twenty-five Germans. Sixteen of us were left out of the eighteen.
‘At night, we walked through the wheat. It was overripe and rustled and Germans fired at us with a machine gun . . . Then I assembled the sixteen men again and took a compass bearing to avoid roads and villages on our way. We spent the night lying on the high bank of the Don.3 We tied groundsheets together into a rope in order to haul the wounded men across the river, but it wasn’t long enough. I suggested we swim the river. We put all our documents inside our forage caps and ammunition into a bag. I got tired halfway across the river and dropped the bag into the water. I kept my notepads in the forage cap.’
Once the Germans had finally cleared the west bank of the Don of Soviet troops, General Paulus redeployed his formations ready for the next leap forward. In the early hours of 21 August, German infantry in assault boats crossed the Don and seized bridgeheads on the east bank. Engineers went rapidly to work, and by the middle of the next day, a series of tank-bearing pontoon bridges were in place across the ‘Quiet Don’. Armoured units rapidly filled the bridgehead.
On Sunday 23 August 1942, the 16th Panzer Division led the charge across the steppe to reach the Volga just north of Stalingrad, late that same afternoon. Overhead, the bombers of General Wolfram von Richthofen’s Fourth Air Fleet waggled their wings in encouragement to the ground forces. Behind them lay the ruins of Stalingrad which they had carpet-bombed in relays. During that day and over the course of the next three, some 40,000 civilians are said to have died in the burning city.
It was also the day that Grossman, on Ortenberg’s orders, left the Soviet capital for Stalingrad to report on the approaching battle.
We left Moscow in the vehicle on 23 August. The chief fitters at the editorial board garage had spent time preparing our vehicle for the thousand-kilometre race from Moscow to Stalingrad. However, we suddenly came to a halt three kilometres outside Moscow. We had flat tyres on all four wheels at the same time. While Burakov, the driver, expressed his surprise at this incident and then started repairing the tyres in a leisurely fashion, we, the correspondents, began interviewing the population of the Moscow area, [in fact] a girl beside the main road. She had a tanned face, aquiline nose and cheeky blue eyes.
‘Do you like colonels?’
‘Why should I like them?’
‘And what about lieutenants with their cubes?’
‘Lieutenants get on my nerves. I like soldiers.’
Despite the urgency of their journey south, Grossman could not forgo a visit to Leo Tolstoy’s estate, which he had last seen just before it was occupied by General Guderian the previous October.
Yasnaya Polyana. Eighty-three Germans were buried next to Tolstoy. They were dug up and reburied in a crater made by a German bomb. The flowers in front of the house are magnificent. It’s a good summer. Life seems to be filled with honey and calm.
Tolstoy’s grave. Flowers again, and bees are crawling in them. Little wasps are hovering above the grave. And in Yasnaya Polyana, a big orchard has died from the frost. All the trees are dead, dry apple trees stand grey, dull, dead like crosses on graves.
The blue, ash-grey main road. Villages have become the kingdom of women. They drive tractors, guard warehouses and stables, queue for vodka. Tipsy girls are out singing – they are seeing a girlfriend off to the army. Women are carrying on their shoulders the great burden of work. Women dominate. They are coping with an enormous amount of work and send bread, aircraft, weapons and ammunition to the front. They feed us and arm us now. And we, men, do the second part of the job. We do the fighting. And we don’t fight well. We have retreated to the Volga. Women look and say nothing. There’s no reproach in [their eyes], not a bitter word. Are they nursing a grievance? Or do they understand what a terrible burden a war is, even an unsuccessful one?
The woman owner of the house where we spend the night is mischievous. She loves silly jokes. ‘Ah, it’s war now,’ she says. ‘The war will write everything off.’ She looks at Burakov intently, squinting. He is a handsome, good-looking guy. Burakov frowns, he is embarrassed. And she laughs, and begins ‘household talk’. She wouldn’t mind swapping some butter for a shirt or to buy half a litre [of vodka] from the military.
The woman owner of the house where we spend the next night is cleanliness itself. She rebuffs any dirty talk. At night, in the darkness she tells us trustingly about the household and about her work. She brings chickens and shows them to us, laughs, speaks of children, husband, the war. And everyone submits to her clear, simple soul.
That’s how the life of women is going, in the rear and at the front – two currents, one that is clear and bright, and the other a dark, military one. ‘Ah, it’s war now,’ [people say]. But the PPZh is our great sin.
The PPZh was the slang term for a ‘campaign wife’, because the full term, pokhodno-polevaya zhena, was similar to PPSh, the standard Red Army sub-machine gun. Campaign wives were young nurses and women soldiers from a headquarters – such as signallers and clerks – who usually wore a beret on the back of the head rather than the fore-and-aft pilotka cap. They found themselves virtually forced to become the concubines of senior officers. Grossman also scribbled down some bitter notes on the subject, perhaps for use in a story later.
Women – PPZh. Note about Nachakho, chief of administrative supplies department. She cried for a week, and then went to him.
‘Who’s that?’
‘The general’s PPZh.’
‘And the commissar hasn’t got one.’
Before the attack. Three o’clock in the morning.
‘Where’s the general?’ [someone asks].
‘Sleeping with his whore,’ the sentry murmurs.
And these girls had once wanted to be ‘Tanya’, or Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.4
‘Whose PPZh is she?’
‘A member of
the Military Council’s.’
Yet all around them tens of thousands of girls in military uniforms are working hard and with dignity.
Story about a general who escaped from an encirclement leading a goat on a rope. Some officers recognised him. ‘Where are you going, Comrade General?’ [they asked]. ‘Which way will you take?’ The general (Efimov) grinned sardonically. ‘The goat will show me the way.’
Krasivaya Mecha – the inexpressible beauty of this place. Lamentation over a cow during the night, in the blue light of a yellow moon. The cow had fallen into an anti-tank ditch. Women are wailing: ‘There are four children left.’5 In the blue moonlight, a man with a knife is running to bleed the cow. In the morning, the cauldron is boiling. Everyone has replete faces, red eyes and swollen eyelids.
Thin women and girls wearing shawls on their heads are working on the road, loading earth on wooden handbarrows, levelling uneven places using picks and spades.
‘Where are you from?’ [we ask]
‘We are from Gomel.’
‘We were in the fighting near Gomel.’
We look at each other and say nothing. We drive on. It was a bit alarming, this encounter near the village of Mokraya Olkhovka, just forty kilometres from the Volga.6
Women in the village. The whole heavy burden of work now rests entirely on them. Nyushka – as if made of cast iron, mischievous and whorelike. ‘Ah, it’s war now,’ she says. ‘I’ve already served eighteen [men] since my husband left. We have a cow between three women, but she lets only me milk her. She won’t have anything to do with the other two.’ She laughs. ‘Now it’s easier to persuade a woman than a cow.’ She grins, offering us her love in a simple and kind-hearted way.
The vastness of our Motherland. We’ve been driving for four days. The time zone has changed – we are now one hour ahead. The steppe is different. The birds are different: kites, owls, little hawks. Watermelons and melons have appeared. But the pain we see here is still the same.
A Writer at War Page 14