The Whisperers
Page 55
The commander of an infantry platoon reported that the war had made him think again about human values and relationships:
At the front people soon discovered what the most important qualities in others were. The war was a test, not just of their strength but of their humanity as well. Baseness and cowardice and selfishness were immediately revealed. Instinctively, if not intellectually, human truths were understood in a very short time – truths which can take many years to learn, if they are learned at all, in times of peace.
Little wonder that the war appeared to many as a sort of spiritual purification, a violent purging of the ‘inhuman power of the lie’ that had stifled all political discussion in the years before. ‘The war forced us to rethink our values and priorities,’ remarks Lazarev, ‘it enabled us, the ordinary soldiers, to see a different kind of truth, even to imagine a new political reality.’85
This rethinking became more widespread as the war neared its end and much of the vast Soviet army entered into Europe, where the soldiers were exposed to different ways of life. By the start of 1944, the Soviets had amassed an army of 6 million men, more than twice the size of the German army on the Eastern Front. In June 1944, just as the Allies launched the invasion of northern France, the Red Army burst through the bulk of the German forces on the Belorussian Front, retaking Minsk by 3 July and pushing on through Lithuania to reach the Prussian border by the end of August. Meanwhile the Soviet troops on the Ukrainian Front swept through eastern Poland towards Warsaw. In the southern sector, where the German forces soon collapsed, the Red Army swept across Romania and Bulgaria to reach Yugoslavia by September 1944. The Soviet advance was relentless. By the end of January 1945, the troops of the Ukrainian Front had penetrated deep into Silesia, while Zhukov’s Belorussian Front had reached the Oder River and had Berlin in its sights.
Hardly any of the Soviet soldiers had ever been to Europe. Most of them were peasant sons who had come into the army with the small-world views and customs of the Soviet countryside and an image of the wider world shaped by propaganda. They were not prepared for what they discovered. ‘The contrast between the standard of living in Europe and our own in the Soviet Union was an emotional and psychological shock, and it changed the views of millions of troops,’ observed Simonov. Soldiers saw that ordinary people lived in better houses; they saw that the shops were better stocked, despite the war and looting by the Red Army; and that the private farms they passed on their way to Germany, even in their ruined state, were far superior to the Soviet collective farms. No amount of propaganda could persuade them to discount the evidence of their own eyes.
The encounter with the West shaped the soldiers’ expectations of the future in their own country. Peasant soldiers were convinced that with the end of the war the collective farms would be swept away. There were many rumours of this sort in the army, most of them involving promises by Zhukov to the troops. Retold in a million letters from the soldiers to their families, these expectations spread throughout the countryside, resulting in a series of peasant strikes on the collective farms. Other soldiers talked about the need to open the churches, about the need for more democracy, even about the dismantling of the Party system root and branch. The film director Aleksandr Dovzhenko remembered a discussion with a military driver, a ‘Siberian lad’, in January 1944. ‘Our life is bad,’ the driver had said. ‘And all of us, you know, just wait for changes and improvements in our lives. We all wait. All of us. It’s just that we don’t all say it.’ ‘I was astonished by what I heard,’ Dovzhenko noted in his diary afterwards. ‘The people have a tremendous need for some other kind of life. I hear it everywhere. The only place where I don’t hear it is among our leaders.’86
Officers were in the forefront of this army movement for reform. They openly expressed their criticisms of the Soviet system and their hopes for change. One lieutenant wrote to the Soviet president Mikhail Kalinin in 1945 with a ‘series of considerations to put to the next meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet’. Having been to Maidanek, the Nazi death camp in Poland, and having seen the consequences of a dictatorship in Germany, the officer demanded an end to arbitrary arrests and imprisonment in the Soviet Union, which, he said, had its own Maidaneks; the abolition of the collective farms, which he knew were a disaster from what he had been told by his own troops; and a list of other, more minor grievances, which his soldiers had asked him to convey to the president.87
Party leaders were understandably anxious about the return of all these men with their reformist ideas. For those who cared to look back at history, there was an obvious parallel with the war against Napoleon in 1812–15, when the returning officers brought back to tsarist Russia the liberal thought of Western Europe which then inspired the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Political activists attending a conference at the Second Belorussian Front in February 1945 called for efforts to counteract the pernicious influence of the West:
After the war of 1812 our soldiers, having seen French life, compared it with the backward life of tsarist Russia. At that time the French influence was progressive… The Decembrists came to see the need to struggle against the tsarist dictatorship. But today it is different. Maybe the estates of East Prussia are better off than some collective farms. That impression might lead a backward person to conclude in favour of the landed estates against the socialist economy. But that is regressive. So there must be a merciless struggle against this frame of mind.88
There was particular concern about the influence of these Western ideas on Party members, more than half of whom were serving in the military by 1945. Their demobilization, the leadership assumed, was bound to infect civilian organizations with dangerous liberal notions of political reform.
In fact such ideas were already spreading among civilians, especially within the political and educated classes. The alliance with Britain and the USA had opened Soviet society to Western influence long before the end of the war. After years of isolation, Soviet cities were flooded with Hollywood films, Western books and goods imported by the Lend-Lease agreement with America. Millions of people got a taste of what life in the West was really like – not the ideal of Hollywood perhaps, but a long way from the gloomy images retailed by Soviet propaganda during the 1930s. Restaurants and commercial shops reappeared on Moscow’s streets, suggesting perhaps that something like the NEP might be restored. All this fuelled the expectation that life in the Soviet Union would become easier and more open to the West once the war was over. As the writer and propagandist Vsevolod Vishnevsky put it in a speech to the Society for External Cultural Relations in the summer of 1944:
When the war is over, life will become very pleasant… There will be much coming and going, and a lot of contacts with the West. Everybody will be allowed to read whatever he likes. There will be exchanges of students, and foreign travel for Soviet citizens will be made easy.
Ideas of political reform were openly discussed by the intelligentsia without fear of censorship (and perhaps with the approval of the Party leadership, which was willing to offer such inducements to keep the people fighting until the end of the war). ‘A large circle of the intelligentsia was for liberalization,’ recalls Simonov. ‘There was a general atmosphere of ideological optimism.’ For most people in these circles liberalization meant a ‘dialogue’ with the government about reform. Few people were prepared to challenge the Communist dictatorship openly, but many wanted greater involvement in political decision-making so that they could open up the system from within. In the words of the poet David Samoilov:
Civic duty to our minds consisted of serving political missions in whose usefulness we believed… It was our sense that if we took on a civic mission, we were entitled to honesty from the government… We needed an explanation of its ideas and to be convinced of the wisdom of its decisions. We certainly did not want to be the witless executors of whatever the government was pleased to do.
Even economic reform was an acceptable topic for discussion. Ivan Likhachyov, the di
rector of the Stalin Factory in Moscow, the biggest car producer in the Soviet Union, advanced the idea of introducing an internal market into the industrial economy with more finanicial freedom at the local level to stimulate the workers through higher rates of pay – a programme that would change the fundamental nature of the planned economy. Some economists, too, were openly critical of the planning system and suggested a return to the market to stimulate production after the war.89
In this atmosphere of public openness, people felt emboldened to question the principles and values of the Soviet regime in their private lives as well.
Elga Torchinskaia, a teenage Stalinist before the war, recalls a particular episode that made her reconsider her political beliefs. As an activist in the Komsomol, Elga had been sent with a group of students from the university to dig ditches outside Leningrad during the defence of the city in 1941. The students slept in the trenches. One of them was less than satisfied with the conditions and complained to the leader of the brigade, who responded by punishing him, bullying him and finally denouncing him at a meeting of the Komsomol. The student was arrested and sent to jail. For Elga this act of persecution was a moment of awakening. When her father had been arrested, in 1937, she had assumed that he must have done something wrong. She had believed the regime’s propaganda about ‘enemies of the people’. But now she saw that people were arrested for no reason. She joined a group of students to protest against their friend’s arrest, but to no effect. From this point Elga began to view the Komsomol and Party in a different light, not as democratic institutions, but as enclaves of an elite that abused its power. She thought about resigning from the Komsomol and ceased to attend its meetings. Her new perceptions carried over to her actions in the communal apartment where she lived throughout the siege of Leningrad:
It was a pleasant apartment. There were rarely arguments. But there was a woman who lived in the room at the back: she was always arguing with her husband, a drunkard, who beat her. Then she joined the Party. Suddenly she became very self-important. She took over our room. She had bread, she had furniture, she had everything. And I actually dared tell her that I did not agree with the Party. I remember it very well. I could have been arrested.90
For Marksena Karpitskaia, working in the Public Library in Leningrad and living on her own in a communal apartment after the arrest of her parents, the moment of awakening came when she herself was summoned to the NKVD headquarters and pressured to join in the denunciation of a retired tsarist officer who hung around in the library and helped the staff with petty tasks in order to stay warm. When she refused, the NKVD interrogator turned to her and said that it was no wonder because she herself was the daughter of an ‘enemy of the people and therefore you protect such enemies’. The insult caused something to snap in Marksena, and from some inner sense of justice, some need to defend both the harmless officer and her parents, she launched herself into a brave if foolish act of defiance:
I exploded with rage. I said that nobody had yet proved that my parents were enemies of the people, and that what he was saying was itself a crime. For me that was suddenly clear. But imagine my saying it! Only the foolishness of youth could have possessed me to be so brave! He jumped up and came towards me, as if to hit me. No doubt he was used to beating people. I stood up and grabbed my stool, as if to protect myself. He would have hit me had it not been for the stool. He came to his senses, sat down at his desk and asked for my papers.
A few days later, Marksena received an NKVD order to leave Leningrad. But she refused to go. ‘Leningrad was my home, it was everything to me, and the idea of leaving it was inconceivable,’ recalls Marksena. ‘I thought, why should I go? The only thing I have is this little corner [in the communal apartment]. Let them arrest me, I will not leave.’ The next day Marksena was helped by one of the senior librarians, Liubov Rubina, a courageous Party member, who defended many Leningraders from the NKVD terror in the war and post-war years. Rubina had known Marksena’s stepfather – a former secretary of the district Party cell – and considered him a decent man. She herself had lost a brother and a sister in the purges of the 1930s (she would lose more relatives in the anti-Jewish Terror of 1948–53). An outspoken Communist, ‘she did not mince her words in criticizing Stalin and the other leaders of the Party,’ Marksena recalls: ‘they were all “reptiles” in her view’. Rubina made up a bed for Marksena in her office and told the library staff to conceal her whereabouts from the police. Hiding the girl was a courageous act that could have landed Rubina in jail, but such was her moral authority among the librarians that no one said a word, and Marksena lived there for the better part of a year. ‘She took care of me as if I was her child,’ recalls Marksena. Their conversations in Rubina’s office were a political education for Marksena, reconnecting her to the values of her parents, who had never had the freedom to speak so openly:
Rubina was an extraordinary person, brave and strong, a Communist idealist, with a deep commitment to justice for everyone. She allowed herself to speak openly to me. We talked about everything – not just about Stalin. There was one conversation in which she told me that collectivization had been a terrible mistake that had ruined the country; and others where she said that the White Sea Canal and other building projects had all been built by prisoners… She talked about the arrests [of 1937–8] and said that my parents had been innocent. She explained many things that I had not understood. She talked all night. She knew that I would not betray her, that I would not say a word to anyone, and when she talked to me she opened up her heart.91
5
Simonov was in Berlin for the final battle of the war. ‘Tanks, more tanks, armoured cars, Katiushas, lorries in their thousands, artillery of every size,’ he wrote in his diary on 3 May:
It seems to me that it is not divisions and army corps but the whole of Russia that is entering Berlin from every side… In front of the huge and tasteless monument to Wilhelm I a group of soldiers and officers are being photographed. Five, ten, a hundred of them at a time, some with guns and some without, some exhausted, some laughing.92
Five days later Simonov was in Karlshorst to report on the signing of the German surrender. He then returned to Moscow for the victory celebrations and parades.
The centre of Moscow was filled with soldiers and civilians for the festivities on 9 May. Samuil Laskin’s nephew Mark was struck by the crowds outside the US Embassy on Manezh Square who had ‘gathered with home-made placards in support of the Allies and cheered wildly when the American diplomats and soldiers waved to them, many of them holding whiskey bottles, from the windows and the balconies’. It seemed to him the closest thing that he had seen since 1917 to a ‘street demonstration for democracy’. Later, Mark returned to the Laskin apartment at Sivtsev Vrazhek for a family celebration. All the Laskins – Samuil and Berta, Fania, Sonia, Zhenia and her son Aleksei – had returned to Moscow from Cheliabinsk in 1943. ‘We drank a toast to the victory,’ Mark recalls, ‘we drank to Stalin (a toast to him was mandatory), and there was joy in all our hearts.’ That evening there were even more people in the centre of Moscow to salute a giant portrait of Stalin, the ‘father of the nation’, which was raised above the Kremlin and illuminated by projectors for crowds to see from miles around.93
Six weeks later, on 24 June, there was a formal victory parade on Red Square. Riding on a white Arab stallion, Marshal Zhukov led the column of troops and tanks out on to the square in pouring rain, while military bands played Glinka’s patriotic hymn ‘Slavsya!’ (‘Glory to You!’). Two hundred soldiers carrying Nazi flags marched to the Lenin Mausoleum, where they turned to face Stalin and flung their flags to the ground. At a grand banquet for his senior commanders, Stalin made a famous toast to the ‘tens of millions’ of ‘simple, ordinary, modest people… who are the little screws (vintiki) in the great mechanism of the state, but without whom all of us, marshals and commanders of the fronts and armies, would not be worth a damn’.94
The victory was greeted by the Soviet peo
ple with universal joy. This was a moment – perhaps the only moment during Stalin’s rule – of genuine national unity. Even prisoners in the Gulag’s labour camps received the end of the war with patriotic pride: they felt that they had made their contribution to the victory and no doubt hoped that it would mean an amnesty for them. ‘Never in my life have I kissed so many people out of simple joy and happiness,’ wrote one ALZhIR prisoner to her son on the evening of 9 May:
I even kissed the men. This was the first day in our seven-and-half-year separation when I forgot all my sorrows and suffering. In the settlement [the outer zone of the prison camp] they are playing the accordion, the young ones are dancing. It is as if we were not here, but there, with you.95
Gradually the soldiers returned home. Many men and women experienced enormous problems of adjustment to civilian life. Two million came back from the war as invalids. Criminally neglected by the Soviet authorities, from which they received a tiny allowance, they found it hard to get jobs; many ended up as beggars on the street. An even greater number returned from the war with psychological wounds, battle stress or trauma or schizophrenia, but since few of these illnesses were recognized by the Soviet medical profession and veterans themselves were far too stoical to report them, the true scale of the problem remains unknown.96
For others the return to ‘normal life’ was full of disappointments. The loss of homes and families, the difficulty of communicating their experiences in the war to friends and relatives, the absence of the comradeship and sense of mutual understanding they shared with other soldiers at the front – all led to widespread depression in the post-war years. ‘Most of my old comrades from the army drank themselves to death or killed themselves when the war ended – one killed himself only recently,’ Kondratiev wrote in the 1990s.