The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  This readiness for personal sacrifice was the Soviet Union’s greatest weapon. In the first year of the war, especially, it was essential to the Soviet Union’s survival, as it struggled to recover from the catastrophic summer of 1941. The actions of ordinary soldiers and civilians, who sacrificed themselves in huge numbers, made up for the failures of the military command and the paralysis of nearly all authority. The ethos of sacrifice was particularly intense in the ‘generation of 1941’ (people born in the 1910s and early 1920s), which had been raised on the legendary tales of Soviet heroes who consecrated themselves to the interests of the state: record-breaking pilots and Stakhanovites, Arctic explorers, soldiers of the Civil War, Communists who went to fight in Spain. It was in emulation of their feats that so many youthful volunteers rushed into war. The call to arms in 1941 connected them to the heroic tradition of the Russian Civil War and the Five Year Plan of 1928–32 – the two great romantic episodes in Soviet history when great things were supposedly achieved by collective enterprise and sacrifice. In the words of the poet David Samoilov (who was twenty-one when he joined the army in 1941): ‘The Civil War – that was our fathers. The Five Year Plan – that was our older brothers. But the Patriotic War of ’41 – that is us.’ Many soldiers derived the strength to fight from a sense of being part of this continuum: ‘I am following in the footsteps of our father, who died fighting in the Civil War in 1919,’ wrote Leonid Kurin, a junior lieutenant, to his sister in 1943.

  He fought for my life. Now I am fighting for the lives of your children… Sonia, I have thought a lot about dying – is it frightening or not? It is not frightening when you know that you will die for a better future, for the happiness of our children. But you have to kill a dozen Germans before you die.47

  The generation of 1941 fought with selfless dedication and heroic bravery, even recklessness, from the first day of the war. It bore the greatest human cost. Only 3 per cent of the male cohort of soldiers born in 1923 survived until 1945.* Older men fought more cautiously – and were the ones who tended to survive. Viacheslav Kondratiev, born in 1920 and injured several times during the war, recalls that the older soldiers tried to help the younger ones:

  They fought more skilfully, more soberly, they did not charge ahead, but held us young ones back, because they understood the value of life more than we did. I had one such protector, a forty-year-old man, who often told me that I had to respect my own life, even in a war.48

  Rita Kogan was just eighteen when she joined the army in 1941. She was one of the million Soviet women who served in the Red Army and its partisan units – a number representing about 8 per cent of all Soviet combatants (though many more women were active in supporting roles, such as transport, supplies and medical assistance).49 Rita was born in 1923 to a Jewish family in Rechitsa, a small industrial town in Belorussia. It was, she says, a ‘modern family of the Soviet type’. Her father was a factory manager, her mother an accountant, and Rita and her sister were brought up in the ‘Soviet spirit of those times’, without Jewish customs or beliefs or the influence of grandparents. Rita’s world-view was shaped by her school, the Pioneers and the Komsomol. ‘I saw the Pioneers and the Komsomol as a type of children’s army that fought against injustice wherever it appeared,’ she recalls. ‘If at school I saw a boy who was bullying a girl or a smaller boy, I would deal with him so harshly that he would run to the teachers to complain.’ The ethos that inspired her was enshrined in the widely read children’s book by Arkadii Gaidar, Timur and His Team (1940), which tells the story of a juvenile militia in a dacha settlement near Moscow that guards the homes of Red Army officers who are away at the front. Timur’s story encouraged the military aspirations of many adolescents. And the training they had received in the Pioneers and the Komsomol (the organized marching and drilling, the strict discipline and subordination to authority, the paramilitary games) served explicitly as preparation for the Red Army. Being a girl was no bar: propaganda put forward positive images of Soviet women bearing arms and generally promoted the militarization of women as a mark of sexual equality.

  Rita was finishing her last year at school when the war broke out. Evacuated with her family to Stalingrad, she found work as an accountant in a school, but desperate to do something more directly for the war effort, she pleaded with the local Komsomol to enrol her in their military school. The Komsomol refused (at eighteen she was too young, they said) but sent her to work in a munitions plant, where she assembled parts for aeroplanes. In the summer of 1942, the Soviet press publicized the heroic feats of young Red Army women volunteers who were fighting as snipers and anti-aircraft gunners during the defence of Stalingrad; barely out of school, few of them had fired guns before. Rita was determined to follow their example and once again appealed to the Komsomol. Again she was refused and told to continue working in the factory. ‘I was furious,’ she recalls. ‘I had volunteered to fight, I said that I was ready to sacrifice my life, and they treated me like a little girl. I went straight home and cried.’ Rita formed her own group of young Komsomol women; together they ran away from the factory and applied to a military school that was training telegraph and radio operators in preparation for the launching of Operation Uranus, the Soviet counteroffensive against the German forces around Stalingrad, in November 1942. Rita joined the class for Morse-code signallers. She was sent with a group of girls to the headquarters of the South-west Front, between Stalingrad and Voronezh. During late December, she took part in Operation Little Saturn, when the combined forces of the South-west and Voronezh Fronts broke through to the rear of the German armies on the Don. ‘The senior communications officer to whom we reported at the front headquarters was an elderly gentleman, who had served in the tsarist army in the First World War,’ recalls Rita. ‘He had no idea how to deal with us girls, and spoke to us in a kindly manner, instead of giving us firm orders. But he was a first-rate specialist and protected us from the other officers, who looked for sex from us.’ In January 1943, Rita was stationed in an observation point on the front near Kharkov when it was overrun by German troops: struggling to escape with her radio equipment, she had her first taste of battle, killing two attackers in hand-to-hand fighting before managing to get away, severely wounded. After she recovered she went on to serve as a radio operator on several fronts; she fought as a gunner in Marshal Konev’s First Ukrainian Front against the Germans near Lvov in July 1944, before eventually reaching Budapest with the Fifty-seventh Army in January 1945.

  Reflecting on her determination to fight against the Germans, Rita could be speaking for the whole ‘generation of 1941’.

  I was just eighteen, I had only recently left school, and I saw the world in terms of the ideals of my Soviet heroes, the selfless pioneers who did great things for the motherland, whose feats I had read about in books. It was all so romantic! I had no idea what war was really like, but I wanted to take part in it, because that was what a hero did… I did not think of it as ‘patriotism’ – I saw it as my duty – that I could and should do everything in my power to defeat the enemy. Of course, I could have simply worked in the munitions factory and sat out the war there, but I always wanted to be at the centre of events: it was the way I had been brought up by the Pioneers and the Komsomol. I was an activist… I did not think of death and was not afraid of it, because, like my Soviet heroes, I was fighting for the motherland.50

  This was the spirit that Simonov attempted to explain in Days and Nights (1944), a story based on his diary observations of the battle for Stalingrad. For Simonov it was not fear or heroism that made the soldiers fight, but something more instinctive, connected to the defence of their own homes and communities, a feeling that grew in strength, releasing the people’s energy and initiative, as the enemy approached:

  The defence of Stalingrad was essentially a chain of barricades. Together they were linked as a large battlefield, but separately each one depended on the loyalties of a small group who knew that it was essential to stand firm, because if the Germans b
roke through in one place, the whole defence would be threatened.51

  As Stalingrad showed, soldiers fought best when they knew what they were fighting for and linked their fate to it. Leningrad and Moscow proved the same. Local patriotism was a powerful motivation. People were more prepared to fight and sacrifice themselves when they identified the Soviet cause with the defence of a particular community, a real network of human ties, than with some abstract notion of a ‘Soviet motherland’. The Soviet propaganda that invoked the defence of ‘rodina’ (a term that combines the local and the national meaning of ‘homeland’) tapped into this sentiment.

  Contrary to the Soviet myth of wartime national unity, Soviet society was more fractured during the war than at any previous time since the Civil War. Ethnic divisions had been exacerbated by the Soviet state, which scapegoated certain national minorities, such as the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens and the Volga Germans, and exiled them to regions where they were not welcomed by the local populace. Anti-Semitism, which had been largely dormant in Soviet society before the war, now became widespread. It flourished especially in areas occupied by Hitler’s troops, where a large section of the Soviet population was directly influenced by the Nazis’ racist propaganda, but similar ideas were imported to places as remote as Kazakhstan, Central Asia and Siberia by Soviet soldiers and evacuees from the western regions near the front. Many people blamed the Jews for the excesses of the Stalinist regime, usually on the reasoning of Nazi propaganda that the Bolsheviks were Jews. According to David Ortenberg, the editor of Krasnaia zvezda, soldiers often said that the Jews were ‘shirking their military responsibilities by running away to the rear and occupying jobs in comfortable Soviet offices’.52 More generally, this gulf between the front-line servicemen and the ‘rats’ who remained in the rear became the focus of a widening divide between the common people and the Soviet elite, as the unfair distribution of the military burden became associated in the popular political consciousness with a more general inequality.

  But if there was no genuine national unity, people did unite for the defence of their communities. By the autumn of 1941, 4 million people had volunteered for the citizens’ defence (narodnoe opolchenie), which dug trenches, guarded buildings, bridges and roads, and, when their city was attacked, carted food and medicine to the soldiers at the front, brought back the injured and joined in the fighting. In Moscow the citizens’ defence had 168,000 volunteers from over thirty nationalities, and another half a million people prepared for defence work; in Leningrad, there were 135,000 men and women organized in units of the citizens’ defence, and another 107,000 workers on a military footing, by September 1941.53 Fired up with civic patriotism, but without proper training in warfare, they fought courageously but died in shocking numbers in the first battles.

  Comradeship was also crucial to military cohesion and effectiveness. Soldiers tend to give their best in battle if they feel some sort of loyalty to a small group of trusted comrades, or ‘buddies’, according to military theorists.54 In 1941–2, the rates of loss in the Red Army were so high that small groups seldom lasted long: the average period of front-line service for infantrymen was no more than a few weeks, before they were removed by death or injury. But in 1942–3, military units began to stabilize, and the comradeship that men found within them became a decisive factor in motivating them to fight. The closeness of these friendships naturally developed from the dangers the men faced. The mutual trust and support of the small collective group was the key to their survival. ‘Life at the front brings people closer very fast,’ wrote one soldier to the fiancée of a comrade, who had been killed in the fighting.

  At the front it is enough to spend a day or two together with another man, and you will find out about all his qualities and feelings, which on Civvy Street you would not learn in a year. There is no stronger friendship than the friendship of the front, and nothing can break it, not even death.

  Veterans recall the intimacy of these wartime friendships with idealism and nostalgia. They claim that people then had ‘bigger hearts’ and ‘acted from the soul’, and that they themselves were somehow ‘better human beings’, as if the comradeship of the small collective unit was a cleaner sphere of ethical relationships and principles than the Communist system, with all its compromises and contingencies. They often talk as if they found in the collectivism of these groups of fellow soldiers a type of ‘family’ that was missing from their lives before the war (and would be missing afterwards).55

  By January 1943, Uranus and Little Saturn had forced the Germans back to the Donets River, 360 kilometres west of Stalingrad, where the spearhead of the German army, a quarter of a million men, was cut off by the Soviet troops. Battling as much against the cold and hunger as against the Soviet enemy, the trapped Germans kept up an intense resistance – they were terrified of capture by the Soviet troops – losing more than half their number before finally surrendering on 2 February. The victory was greeted by the Soviets as a major turning-point. It was a huge boost to morale. ‘Up till then,’ wrote Ehrenburg, ‘one believed in victory as an act of faith, but now there was no shadow of doubt: victory was assured.’ From Stalingrad, the Soviet army pushed on towards Kursk, where it concentrated 40 per cent of its soldiers and three-quarters of its armoured forces to defeat the bulk of the German forces in July. Kursk definitively ended German hopes of a victory on Soviet soil. The Red Army drove the demoralized Germans back towards Kiev, reaching the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital by September and finally recapturing it on 6 November, just in time for a massive celebration in Moscow for the anniversary of the Revolution the next day.56

  The bravery and resilience of the rank and file was a decisive factor in the Soviet military success. Another was the transformation in the structure of authority within the Red Army after the first disastrous twelve months of the war. Stalin at last recognized that the intervention of the Party in the military command (not least his own as the Supreme Commander) made it less efficient and that commanding officers were best left on their own. Zhukov’s appointment as Deputy Supreme Commander in August 1942 – enabling Stalin to step back from the active control of the armed forces – signalled a new relationship between the Party and the military command. The stategic planning and running of the war effort were gradually transferred from the politicians of the Military Council to the General Staff, which now took the lead and merely kept the Party leadership informed. The power of the commissars and other political officers, a legacy of the military purges of the 1930s, was drastically reduced in military decisions and eliminated altogether in many of the smaller army units, where the commanding officers were left in sole authority. Released from the Party’s tight control, the military command developed a new confidence; autonomy encouraged initiative and produced a stable corps of military professionals, whose expertise was crucial to the victories of 1943–5. To reinforce this professional ethos, in January 1943, the Party leadership restored the epaulettes that had been worn by tsarist officers, a hated symbol of the old regime that was destroyed in 1917; in July the title ‘officer’ was brought back to replace the egalitarian ‘comrade’. Gold braid was imported from Britain, whose officials were incensed at shipping what to them were fripperies, although in fact the braid was far more significant than that.57 Medals also played a vital role as a reward for the military professional. Eleven million medals were awarded to Soviet servicemen between 1941 and 1945 – eight times more than awarded by the United States. It took only a few days for the Soviet soldier to receive his reward after an operation, whereas US soldiers usually waited for six months. Soldiers who had distinguished themselves in battle were also encouraged to join the Party by a lowering of the requirements for entry from the ranks.

  Changes in the industrial economy also contributed to the Soviet military revival. In 1941–2, the Red Army had been poorly equipped compared to its adversary and therefore suffered enormous losses. But during 1942–3, dramatic improvements in the production of tanks, planes, ca
rs, radars, radios, artillery, guns and ammunition enabled the formation of new tank and mechanized divisions, which fought more effectively and at far less human cost. The rapid reorganization of Soviet industry was where the planned economy (the foundation of the Stalinist system) really came into its own. Without state compulsion, none of the necessary changes could have been achieved in such a short period of time. Thousands of factories and their workers were evacuated to the east; virtually all industrial production was geared towards the needs of the military; railways were built or redirected to connect the new industrial bases of the east with the military fronts; and factories were placed under martial law to tighten labour discipline and productivity. Under the new work regime there were severe punishments for negligence, absenteeism and unauthorized leave, or simply being late for work (failure to arrive within twenty minutes was counted as ‘desertion from the labour front’). There were a staggering 7.5 million court convictions for these crimes during the war years.58 In most factories seventy-hour weeks became the norm, with many workers taking all their meals and sometimes even sleeping in their factories, for fear of being late in the morning. Comprehensive rationing was introduced to reduce costs and keep people at their place of work (where they received their rations). Finally, a vast new army of Gulag labourers was mobilized through mass arrests to supply the country with much needed fuel and raw materials.

  One of the least-known aspects of the Soviet war effort is the role of the so-called ‘labour army’ (trudovaia armiia), which numbered well over a million conscripts. It was used for various tasks that could not be performed by free labour. There is no mention of the ‘labour army’ in official documents, which talk euphemistically of the ‘labour service’ (trudovaia povinnost’) and ‘labour reserves’ (trudovye rezervy), both terms that conceal the element of compulsion, but in fact the conscripts in these categories were unpaid labourers, subject to the same conditions as the prisoners of the Gulag. They worked in convoys under guard and were used for the same labour tasks (timber felling, construction, factory and agricultural work). Unlike the Gulag prisoners, many of the conscripts of the labour army had never been arrested or sentenced by a court. Most of them were simply rounded up by the NKVD and military units from deported nationalities, especially the Soviet Germans, who were exiled from the Volga region to Siberia and Kazakhstan on the outbreak of the war, although the labour army also contained large numbers of Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Kalmyks, Finns, Romanians, Hungarians and Koreans.