The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  The war shaped Simonov’s entire outlook on the world. His values were measured on a military scale. ‘The army is a sort of school,’ he later said. ‘Serving in the army teaches one for life to carry out one’s duties to society. Not to have this strict sense of duty is not to be a complete human being.’ Simonov was meticulous and diligent in performing his duties, rigidly adhering to routines and rules, rational to the point of seeming cold and uncaring, and sometimes rather domineering in his dealings with people. In many ways his model of behaviour was a figure he had introduced to Russian prose: the officer-intelligent who understands the logic of the orders handed down by the authorities and carries them out conscientiously. In later years, he tended to judge people by the way they had behaved during the war:

  Not to blacken the name of someone

  But to know them in the dark

  The winter of forty-one

  Gave us a true mark

  And if you will, it is useful from here on,

  Not letting it slip from our hands,

  With that mark, straight and iron,

  To check now how someone stands.37

  Simonov applied this harsh measure to Lugovskoi, his charismatic teacher at the Literary Institute who had inspired a whole generation of Soviet poets. Lugovskoi was badly shaken by an incident in 1941 when he was serving at the front and fell under heavy bombardment. Retreating through a town that had been attacked by the Germans, he had stumbled on a bombed-out house where he found the blown-up bodies of several women and children. Lugovskoi suffered a nervous breakdown. He was evacuated to Tashkent. Many friends came to Lugovskoi’s assistance, including Elena Bulgakova, the widow of the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, who tried, unsuccessfully, to lift the ban on the publication of Lugovskoi’s poetry (which had been condemned as ‘politically harmful’ in 1937). Sonia and Zhenia Laskina also reached out to Lugovskoi. They wrote to him with deep affection and friendship. ‘You must come to Moscow,’ Zhenia wrote in 1943, shortly after the Laskins had returned to the capital from Cheliabinsk. ‘You are needed here, and people always come when they are needed. We are not just people, but your friends, you cannot refuse friends.’ Sonia even promised to marry Lugovskoi (‘I shall surround you with the comforts of a family’) if he returned and lived with them in the Laskin apartment in Sivtsev Vrazhek, where eight people were already cramped in the three tiny rooms. But Simonov had no such sympathy. He considered Lugovskoi’s remove to Tashkent a sign of cowardice and ceased to count him as a close friend.38

  The war was the making of Simonov as a ‘Stalinist’: that was when he placed his faith in Stalin at the centre of his life, when he assumed his place in the regime’s hierarchy of political and military command, internalized the values of the system and accepted the directions of the Party leadership. Simonov had joined the Party as a candidate member on the outbreak of the war, becoming a full member in 1942. As he later explained, he had joined the Party because he wanted to have a say in the direction of the war effort – he thought that was his duty as an officer – and he did not think the war could be won without the Party’s leadership. The Party ‘alone was a mass force, capable of making the necessary decisions and sacrifices in the conditions of war’, and he wanted to be part of that force. Simonov identified with the Party, and in particular with its leader, even to the point of growing a moustache, brushing back his hair in the ‘Stalin style’, and posing with a pipe.

  Simonov in 1943

  According to Dolmatovsky, Simonov did not smoke the pipe but adopted it as a ‘way of life’.39

  Simonov’s major service to the Party was through his writing. He was an outstanding military journalist, at least the equal of Vasily Grossman and Ilia Ehrenburg, although Grossman, who is better known to Western readers because of his later novels, such as Life and Fate (published in the West in the 1980s), was the better novelist and morally perhaps the more courageous man. This was not a matter of physical bravery. Simonov never shied away from the fiercest point of the fighting. He reported from all the major fronts in 1942: from the Kerch peninsula, where the Soviet attempt to retake the Crimea from the German forces ended in catastrophe during the spring; from the Briansk Front, where the Red Army lost Voronezh in July as the Germans drove south-east towards the grain supplies of Ukraine and the Don and the rich oil-fields of the Caucasus; from Stalingrad, where the Germans launched their first attack, fighting street by street for the Soviet stronghold, in August; and from the northern Caucasus, where the Germans pushed the Soviet forces south to Krasnodar and Ordzhonikidze by December. The only front from which Simonov did not report was Leningrad, where the city continued under siege for a second year, though he did write from the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, where Lend-Lease supplies from the Western Allies began to arrive on British ships in the summer of 1942.

  As a military man, who had himself experienced the bloody fighting at Khalkin Gol, Simonov understood the war from the soldiers’ point of view as well as from the viewpoint of the officer who was obliged to carry out his orders from above. His war reporting was distinguished by its direct observation and humanity. But he also fully accepted the propaganda role the regime assigned him as a journalist. All his war reports were written with the aim of strengthening morale and discipline, fostering love for Stalin and hatred of the enemy. He wrote that patriotic Soviet troops were fighting for the glory of Stalin. ‘United by their iron discipline and Bolshevik organization,’ he reported from Odessa, ‘our Soviet forces are dealing to the enemy a heavy blow. They are fighting without fear, without tiring in the struggle, as we have been taught by the great Stalin… For our Odessa! For the Motherland! For Stalin!’ In Simonov’s reports Stalin’s leadership was a constant inspiration to the Soviet troops. For example, he wrote about an officer he had encountered on the front near Stalingrad who ‘gained all his strength from the idea that our great leader directs everything in our enormous cause from his office in Moscow and thus invests in him, an ordinary colonel, part of his genius and spirit’. He had expressed the same idea in his poem commemorating the anniversary of the Revolution on 7 November 1941:

  Comrade Stalin, do you hear us?

  You must hear us, we know that.

  Neither son nor mother in this frightful hour,

  It is you we remember first.

  Simonov’s belief in Stalin was genuine. In later years he never tried to deny it. In his memoirs, he acknowledged that the huge significance which he had attributed to Stalin in this poem ‘had not been an exaggeration’ of his true opinion.40

  Some of his war correspondence served the regime’s campaign to get the troops to fight. In August 1941, after the collapse of the Soviet front, Stalin had issued his merciless Order Number 270, condemning all those who surrendered or were captured as ‘traitors to the motherland’. Several senior commanders were arrested and shot, including the commander of the Western Army Group, General Dmitry Pavlov, who had made a desperate effort to hold the front together in the first weeks of the war. The wives of captured officers were also subject to arrest (even the wife of Stalin’s son, Iakov, who was captured by the Germans in July, was arrested and sent to a labour camp). Simonov accepted – and argued in his reports of 1941 – that the collapse of the Soviet front had been caused by the ‘criminal behaviour of certain generals, at best cowards and at worst German agents’, who ‘were shot deservedly’. He also peddled the idea that the bravest soldiers were the ones least likely to be killed – a propaganda myth that encouraged many troops to fight in situations where they were almost bound to die.41

  Alongside this service to the Stalinist regime, Simonov pursued yet another objective in his war writings, especially in the unpublished notes and observations which he later used for his great war novel The Living and the Dead. A Soviet patriot and firm believer in the Soviet Union’s victory, he attempted to discern the signs of that victory in the actions, ideas and emotions of the people. He had spotted the first sign amidst the chaos of the Soviet retreat in J
une 1941, when he had seen the two junior officers walking west towards the front at Minsk to locate their military command.42 Simonov could not forget this scene – it symbolized for him the patriotic spirit of the ordinary people – and he would return to it in his later writings as he struggled to develop a populist conception of the Soviet victory. But at the time he had only a vague sense of the forces that moved the people to fight.

  3

  Simonov arrived in Stalingrad in September 1942, at the height of the battle for the streets. The last Soviet defenders were confined to the factory districts of the north, the area around the railway station and the small hill in the centre, while all around them the city had collapsed under the bombardment of the German tanks, artillery and planes. Simonov was astonished by the extraordinary determination of the Soviet soldiers to fight for every street, and every ruined building, against the superior German forces. Even as the Germans pushed them back towards the river bank, the Soviet soldiers would not give up the city and evacuate to the eastern shore of the Volga, where the main Soviet army was massed. It was this determination – a spirit that cannot be explained by military discipline or ideology – that tipped the scales in this decisive battle of the war.

  In his diary on 16 September, A. S. Chuianov, the head of the Stalingrad Defence Committee, recorded a conversation he had overheard between a group of newly arrived troops and a wounded soldier who had been evacuated from the burning city:

  ‘What is going on in the city?’ [the men asked the wounded soldier].

  ‘There’s no making head or tail of it. Look,’ he pointed with his good arm towards the Volga – ‘the whole town is on fire.’

  ‘But why is it burning for so long?’ the troops asked in astonishment.

  ‘Everything is on fire: the houses, the factories, the land, all the metal is melting…’

  ‘And the people?’

  ‘The people? They are standing! Standing, and fighting!…’

  The courageous determination of the Soviet forces was indeed decisive in the war and cannot be dismissed as a propaganda myth. Yet its origin has never been satisfactorily explained. Why did so many Soviet soldiers fight with such fierce disregard for their own lives in the battles for Moscow, Kiev, Stalingrad and a dozen other Soviet cities?

  Terror and coercion provide part of the explanation. The practices of the pre-war terror system were reimposed to keep the soldiers fighting in the war. At the height of the Soviet collapse, on 28 July 1942, as the Germans threatened Stalingrad, Stalin issued the notorious Order Number 227 (‘Not One Step Backwards!’), calling on the troops to defend every metre of Soviet territory ‘to the last drop of blood’ and threatening the severest punishments for ‘panickers’ and ‘cowards’ who shirked their duty.* Special ‘blocking units’ (zagradotriady) were set up to bolster the existing NKVD units: their orders were to sweep behind the Soviet front and shoot any soldiers who lagged behind or tried to run from the fighting. During the course of the war approximately 158,000 soldiers were sentenced to be shot (many more were shot without any formal sentencing or record of their deaths); 436,000 were imprisoned; while 422,000 were made to ‘atone with their blood’ for the crimes they had ‘committed before the motherland’ by serving in the special penal battalions (shtrafroty) used for the most dangerous tasks, such as clearing minefields or storming German fortifications. The impact of Order Number 227, like the terror system in the army as a whole, should not be exaggerated, however. The Order was enforced at desperate moments, like the battle for Stalingrad, when an estimated 13,500 Soviet troops were shot in the space of a few weeks. But otherwise the Order was frequently ignored by the commanders and their political officers, who learned from experience that military unity and effectiveness were not served by such wholesale drastic punishments. Indeed, despite the introduction of the Order, desertion from the army continued to increase, prompting even Stalin to acknowledge that terror was becoming ineffective as a way to make the soldiers fight, and that other means of persuasion should be developed.43

  Appeals to the patriotism of the Soviet people were more successful. The vast majority of Soviet soldiers were peasant sons: their loyalty was not to Stalin or the Party, which had brought ruin to the countryside, but to their homes and families, to their own vision of the ‘motherland’. As Stalin put it to Averell Harriman in September 1941, the Russian people were fighting ‘for their homeland, not for us’. To appeal to them, Soviet propaganda increasingly jettisoned Soviet symbols in favour of older images of Mother Russia that carried greater weight among the troops. Thus Stalin’s picture became less conspicuous in 1941–2, the period of military catastrophe (although he reappeared as the national figurehead and inspiration of the Soviet victories in 1943–5); the ‘Internationale’ was replaced by a new national anthem; new Soviet medals were produced featuring military heroes from Russian history; and the Church was granted a new lease on life, as the state lifted many of its pre-war political controls on religious activities in exchange for Church leaders’ moral support in the war. The result of this communion between Church and state was a curious blend of religious faith and Soviet belief. The journalist Ralph Parker saw a Siberian soldier at a Moscow railway station preparing to leave for the front. He was listening to a broadcast on the loudspeaker, and when he recognized Stalin’s voice, he crossed himself and cried out ‘Stalin!’44

  Soviet propaganda also played on the emotions of hatred and revenge. By the winter of 1941, the German invasion had brought so much suffering to Soviet families that all it took to get the people fighting was to fan their rage against the enemy. According to Lev Pushkarev, a young soldier and ethnographer who made a detailed study of the culture and beliefs of the Red Army rank and file, it was hatred of the Germans, more than anything else, that made the soldiers fight. The force of this emotion was so powerful and unpredictable – containing as it did much pent-up fury over the suffering people had endured long before the war – that it needed to be carefully manipulated by propagandists to focus it against the foreign enemy. Poets played a vital part. Simonov was one of several Soviet writers, along with Ilia Ehrenburg and Aleksei Surkov, who lent their literary talents to the hate campaign. ‘Kill Him!’ was the best known poem in this call to arms. Written by Simonov in July 1942 – at a desperate moment of the war when the Germans threatened to break through to the Volga and the Caucasus – it was essentially a reiteration of the fight-to-the-death spirit of Order Number 227. Officers would read the poem to their men before they went into battle to instil in them the spirit of defiance and determination to fight to the end:

  If you cherish your mother,

  Who fed you at her breast

  From which the milk has long since gone,

  And on which your cheek may only rest;

  If you cannot bear the thought,

  That the Fascist standing near her,

  May beat her wrinkled cheeks,

  Winding her braids in his hand;

  …

  If you have not forgotten your father,

  Who rocked you in his arms,

  Who was a good soldier

  And fell in the Carpathian snows,*

  Who died for the Volga and the Don,

  For the future of your native land;

  If you cannot bear the thought

  That he will turn in his grave,

  That his soldier’s portrait on the cross

  Should be smashed on to the ground

  And stamped on by a German

  Before your mother’s eyes…

  …

  Then kill a German – make sure to kill one!

  Kill him as soon as you can!

  Every time you see him,

  Make sure that you kill him every time!

  Simonov’s play The Russian People strove for a similar effect. Published in the pages of Pravda at the end of July 1942, it was performed in theatres across the Soviet Union. The play was very weak, but extremely timely, and its message – that all Rus
sians were united against the enemy – caught the mood of defiance (it won the Stalin Prize in 1943). Aleksandr Werth, who was in Moscow to report for the Sunday Times, witnessed a performance at the Moscow Art Theatre:

  There was complete silence for at least ten seconds after the curtain had fallen at the end of the third act; for the last words had been: ‘See how Russian people are going to their death.’ Many women in the audience were weeping.45

  Coercion, patriotism, hatred of the enemy all played a part, but perhaps the most important element in the soldiers’ determination to fight was the cult of sacrifice. The Soviet people went to war with the psychology of the 1930s. Having lived in a state of constant revolutionary struggle, where they were always being called upon to sacrifice themselves for the greater cause, they were ready for war. As Simonov remarked, the people were prepared for the privations of the war – the sharp decline in living standards, the breaking up of families, the disruption of ordinary life – because they had already been through much the same in the name of the Five Year Plans.46