Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  Thousands of front-line soldiers shared this view. They knew that they were on the road to victory. Like many other successful armies, they found themselves embracing some of the values of their nation and culture with new confidence and zeal. They also began to imagine that their sacrifice could build a better world within that framework. Many believed that they were laying new foundations for the peace, perhaps burning away the hatreds and confusion of the pre-war years. Soldiers’ friendships with front-line comrades felt like a foretaste of the brotherhood to come. And then there was the thrill of new machines. The tank battle at Kursk, the evidence of Soviet air superiority that summer, the deadly music of the Katyushas – all this seemed like a vindication of the five-year plans, a promise of a better, mass-producing world. Zhukov, not Stalin, was probably the army’s real hero (and each veteran will happily describe the wartime general he admired most, like sports fans arguing over star players), but even Stalin, because he lived mainly in men’s imaginations, seemed to embody the qualities that success now promised: progress, unity, heroism, deliverance. In word, at least, it looked as if soldiers and leadership subscribed to the same goals.

  The starkest ideological lessons were drawn by looking at the legacy of fascism. ‘I’ve had to drive round a good many of the settlements that the Germans have abandoned in the recent past,’ Taranichev wrote home. ‘You cannot imagine what these places, that used so recently to be blossoming centres of population, look like: not one dwelling without damage, everything burned, and what they didn’t manage to burn has been destroyed by aerial bombing.’4 ‘I’ve been marching day and night,’ a twenty-year-old machine-gunner wrote home in October 1943. He had travelled on from Orel to the river Desnya and beyond, crossing country the retreating German army had torched. ‘The population meets us warmly, I didn’t even think that our welcome would be like this. They weep, they hug us, everyone brings us whatever they can.’ The reason for the people’s joy was obvious. ‘I’ve seen how the German burns villages, the bitch. I’ve seen the victims of his violence.’5

  For soldiers, the Red Army was now the instrument of collective redemption, the arm of vengeance and of liberation. The greeting that soldiers received from the people of western Russia and eastern Ukraine was often overwhelming. But though many were proud of their collective power, it was also possible, for large numbers of men, to catch a sense of individual progress. The army furthered thousands of careers. Vasily Ermolenko was at school in Kharkov when the war broke out. The first year of the invasion saw his home overrun, his mother trapped and his father enlisted into the Red Army. But young Vasily, now a refugee, received a training. When the Red Army liberated his native city in 1943, he was already working elsewhere on the front as a radio operator and communications engineer. Technology became his life, the more so because every other landmark in it had been wrecked. He joined the party in the spring of 1944. As he noted in his diary at the time, the war had taught him to love his motherland, but it had also confirmed his belief in socialism, ‘which will lead people to a happy life’. In his mind, all the Red Army’s successes had become linked to the party and its leader.6

  The party spirit (the Soviets had a word for it: partiinost’) that soldiers like Ermolenko evinced was far removed from the careful sophistry of Stalin’s ideologues. The soldiers’ brand of communism was also distinct from that of their political officers, many of whom had joined the party well before the war. Rank and file belief arose from experience as much as from preaching, and it often co-existed with an impatience for paperwork, a dislike of propaganda. ‘Considerable empirical evidence exists that indoctrination affects troops in much the same way as rain affects a duck,’ a specialist on combat motivation has observed. ‘It glances off their backs.’7 The men’s beliefs, though shaped by everything they had been told (and limited because there was so much that they would never be allowed to say or hear), felt like their own philosophy. ‘If the politruks had let us,’ the nationalist writer Victor Astaf’ev remarked, ‘we’d have lost the war in six weeks… Our first victories started when we stopped listening to them.’8 Front-line ideology was strong and deeply rooted, but it was also so distinct from that of the civilian élite that it might have been evolving in another universe.

  The nation tried to make soldiers its own, especially as most were conscripts, everybody’s sons. The press cultivated the image of the bereaved mother listening to stories told by soldiers of her son’s age, of local people supporting the troops as if they were their own. In return, many soldiers learned to love Russia and its people with a new warmth. ‘It was war,’ the soldier in one of Simonov’s famous poems remembers, ‘that brought me together for the first time / With longing for travel from village to village, / With the tear of a widow, with a woman’s song.’9 While the soldiers explored a new and larger motherland, however, they struggled to hold on to the lives that they had left behind, to wives and children, and also to the memory of their younger selves. Combat had estranged them utterly. Front-line troops had long despised the ‘rats’ who followed in the rear, the supply teams, staff officers and caravans of reservists, but as time passed, soldiers were also becoming alienated from the civilians they were trying to save, and even from the families they loved.

  Red Army men might have imagined that the bonds that united them to one another had replaced these old loyalties, and to some extent this was true. Life at the front even fostered nostalgia for lost homelands – or for imagined ones – and soldiers who learned that someone from their own province had arrived within travelling distance of their camp would often rush to greet them, hungry for news from home. War was so strange, and Soviet territory so unthinkably vast, that such people were deemed to be instant ‘neighbours’. Women veterans told Alexiyevich that whenever newcomers from home arrived at the front their fellow soldiers pressed around hoping to catch a whiff of the familiar smells that might cling to their clothes.

  For all the rhetoric of unity, however, close friendships still aroused suspicion in police circles. The NKVD monitored soldiers’ conversations at the front, while the Special Section, and its successor, SMERSh, whose name was an acronym for the Russian expression ‘death to spies’, pursued each rumour of dissension.10 SMERSh, or some form of it, was a necessary evil. The army was moving west, retaking territory that the enemy had held. In every town there would have been collaborators, men and women who had fed and sheltered Nazis, denounced partisans, or worse, executed orders to imprison or shoot their own neighbours. There were also German agents in the liberated zone, some of them hiwis,11 defectors from the Red Army, whose Russian voices and Soviet style concealed their real allegiances. The threat of SMERSh helped to deter all forms of treachery, as well as terrorizing anyone whose labour was needed for the front,12 but while they struck at real enemies, the informers of Stalinist counter-intelligence also betrayed the spirit of the front. If they could find no real spies, the agents would not hesitate to fabricate a plot, making scapegoats of their own comrades. Soldiers had constantly to watch their tongues. ‘We knew that we could talk about our victories,’ Samoilov wrote, ‘but not about defeats. We knew that our junior officers also walked in this shadow. The fear of “SMERSh”… corrupted the lofty notion of a people struggling against the invader… We seldom knew,’ he added, ‘which people in our midst were informers.’ Although comrades in arms still felt true solidarity, the quality of human relations was marred by ‘the Stalinist bacillus of mistrust’.13

  These tensions preyed on soldiers’ minds as the campaigning season dragged into the winter. The closing months of 1943 were a time of continuous movement. Tanks and motorized infantry contested the steep banks of the Dnepr. Whole armies slithered through the fields of sugar beet. Day after day, the heavy rain of the south-west soaked through greatcoats and leather boots. And then the shelling started, and precarious advances across saturated ground. Tanks sank through treacherous mats of sedge, losing entire crews. Infantrymen from central Asia drowned in the Dnepr be
cause they had never learned to swim. Shtrafniki, the members of the punishment battalions, were sent to defuse mines, storm banks of guns or locate hidden foxholes. Soviet death rates were falling, but this was now a campaign of attack. Red Army losses after each engagement ran as high as 25 per cent.14 For men exhausted after the battles of the late summer, the challenges must have seemed intolerable. In other years, both armies had found some moments in the cold months to regroup and make repairs. This time the mild winter of the south allowed for no respite.

  Movement meant retaking Soviet towns and villages. The men were often driving through the places where they had grown up. But this was no homecoming. The Wehrmacht had orders to burn the countryside as it retreated west. Whatever had been left after two years of Nazi rule was torched, including livestock and harvested grain. The ruined landscape was made more macabre by the flotsam of battle. ‘There are heaps of German corpses by the roads,’ Belov observed in January 1944. The rotting bodies did not bother anyone, still less excite pity. Local civilian authorities would only become concerned when the weather warmed; typhus had claimed too many lives already.15 For now, as Belov knew, ‘No one’s clearing them away… they won’t move them till the spring.’16 It took the unexpected, incongruities, to surprise soldiers now. As he marched west in the spring of 1944, Ermolenko, a native of Ukraine, watched the migratory birds that he had always welcomed as a boy returning to their nesting sites. The creatures seemed confused. They could not settle. The landscape they were looking for had vanished and the trees where they had nested just a year before had disappeared.17

  Nothing would set the troops apart more than the shared experience of combat. Even the men who tried to talk, to tell their wives or friends, found that they could not bridge the gulf between those who had seen battle and all the rest. David Samoilov, who considered his own wartime poetry to be ‘hopelessly bad’, thought that the problem lay in war itself. When people sat down to write after surviving carnage, he wrote later, their goal was not to re-experience the hell but to escape it.18 ‘I can’t write much to you – it’s not allowed,’ a tank mechanic wrote to his mother in September 1943. It was convenient to hide behind the censor’s broad shoulders. ‘When we meet, I’ll tell you about the terrible battles that I’ve had to get through.’19 Ageev tried to explain why he could not write more about the fighting itself. ‘I got back from operations only tonight,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘In these situations the same well-known reaction always sets in. The strain of effort is replaced by inertia. When you’re under stress, you don’t think about anything, and all your efforts are directed towards a single goal. But when the stress is replaced by inertia, which is explained by tiredness, then you really need a bit of a shaking, because for a moment nothing seems to matter.’20

  Civilians would never understand about battle. ‘I cannot describe all my feelings and all my experiences,’ another man wrote to his wife. He felt he could not reach her with words, nor she him. ‘The question of our meeting after the victory,’ he continued, ‘that’s what is worrying a lot of us right now.’21 ‘Many of my friends have died,’ an officer called Martov wrote to his family in February 1944. ‘The truth is that we fight together, and the death of each is our own. Sometimes there are moments of such strain that the living envy the dead. Death is not as terrible as we used to think.’22 Grief held the men together as much as shared hardship, but battle marked them out from everybody else. Whatever Stalin said about the whole nation’s collective work, by 1943 most front-line soldiers valued only combat and the comradeship of risk. By setting soldier against civilian, by raising fears of spies and stool pigeons, by setting the frontovik against the whole community of military ‘rats’ who did not fight, the war had shattered, not united, the Soviet people. Worst of all, combat had exiled front-line soldiers from themselves.

  ‘What’s the definition of effrontery?’ Ageev wrote one evening. ‘Effrontery means being somewhere far behind the lines, sleeping with the wives of frontoviki, beating one’s breast and crying “death to the fascist occupiers” and looking for one’s name in the lists of people who have been decorated for valour.’23 The men had been away for months, and the Red Army made scant provision for home leave.24 As the fear of defeat faded, terrors of a more intimate variety began to haunt the soldiers’ nights. They were crossing Soviet territory now. They knew about the hardship and the crime, the people’s desperation after two winters of total war. The married soldiers saw how local women often acted when they found a willing man, someone with food or cash, perhaps, or even just a guitar and some vodka. They all began to wonder what was going on at home.

  Some of their fears were natural to soldiers on any long campaign, but Red Army troops faced more depressing terrors than the prospect of a ‘Dear John’ letter. ‘Write me something about Mama,’ a young lieutenant asked his godmother in February 1944. ‘There’s been no news from her since September 1941.’ The last time he had heard from her, his mother had been in her flat in Leningrad.25 In this, as in so many other cases, there would be no more news again. The fascist occupation had torn families apart. Aleksandr Slesarev, the tank lieutenant from Smolensk province, at least knew that some of his relatives were alive. The partisans had brought one letter out in 1942, a note from his young sister, Mariya.26 It was a catalogue of death and violation under Nazi rule. As the Germans retreated, more letters came, and now – with agonizing gaps – the family’s story began to take shape. As Slesarev fought south and west across Ukraine, he had to wait for weeks to receive news. Mariya wrote to their father in the first instance, and then the old man passed the news on to his soldier sons. Fourteen-year-old Mariya, working from dawn to dusk on the collective farm, could not find time to write to everyone at once.

  The family had fled their village before the invaders came. For two winters they had been living in an earth dugout. It was cold and damp and the children were constantly ill, but at least they were alive. ‘They burned Danilkin’s family,’ Mariya wrote, ‘and the Germans took Yashka away. They burned the whole Liseyev family and the Gavrikovs too, and another fourteen girls who were on their way back from work in Yartsevo… At the same time we also lost Uncle Petya, he was coming from Ruchkovo, and the Germans caught him and burned him too.’ Then news came that the Red Army was close. The Germans started seizing cattle and sheep, leaving the local villagers to starve. Winter brought typhus, then pneumonia. There was another string of deaths. ‘At the time of the [Germans’] last retreat, Mama, Yura and I took cover with Uncle Mitya in a trench,’ Mariya finished. ‘Kolya, Uncle Egor and Shura all ran off to the woods at the same time, they were there for four days and nights. They liberated us on 18 March, and [those three] came out of the woods the next day.’27

  Lieutenant Slesarev must have been relieved to read that his mother, sister and two little brothers had survived. He sent them money when he could, but inflation, shortages and a severe housing crisis had made their lives desperate. ‘It’s not great for food at the moment,’ Mariya wrote in January 1944, ‘and clothes are really a problem, especially shoes.’28 It was the same in Kursk, the same wherever either of the great armies had been. ‘It’s hard now that we don’t have cows,’ a peasant woman wrote from Kursk province. ‘They took them from us two months ago… We’re ready to eat each other… there isn’t a single young man at home now that they’re fighting.’29 ‘Everything was destroyed by the front,’ another woman told her soldier son. She had lost her home, her cow and her land. She was living, as many did, in a corridor outside her sister’s one-room flat. ‘We have not had bread for two months now,’ wrote another. ‘It’s already time for Lidiya to go to school, but we don’t have a coat for her, nor anything to put on her feet. I think Lidiya and I will die of hunger in the end. We haven’t got anything… Misha, even if you stay alive, we won’t be here…’30

  Soldiers felt betrayed by their wives’ hardship stories. The least they had expected, while they risked their lives, was that the state would provide for
their families. The begging letters read like accusations. In January 1943, the central committee of the Communist Party responded with a secret resolution on the families of serving troops. Aleksei Kosygin, a rising star, was put in charge of welfare. His job was to make sure that flour, potatoes and fuel would be provided on the usual sliding scale of privilege from officers to men. But officials in the provinces could not turn rubble into houses overnight, nor conjure flour from ash. In May 1944, a survey in the Kursk region found 17,740 orphans and nearly half a million soldiers’ families in need of urgent help. Of the families, just 32,025 were in receipt of pensions and supplies of food.31 The same story was repeated across European Russia. There were over a quarter of a million soldiers’ families on the register in Smolensk region by 1944. More than 12,000 of these were living in earth dugouts. Nearly 11,000 soldiers’ children in the region could not attend the newly opened local schools because they had no shoes.32

  A scene of destruction (village of Kuyani; courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)

  The families of decorated soldiers, the heroes, were supposed to get extra help. It was an incentive with genuine appeal. The promise of privileged access to food and heating fuel for their wives and mothers was all it took to convince some soldiers that they were valued more than their comrades. But when the promise was not kept, such men’s indignation was also proportionately greater. Letters of protest, angry demands from combatants who felt entitled to an audience, piled up on bureaucratic desks, but all the outrage in the world could not ease this crisis. In the spring of 1944, rural soviets in some regions were warning that the hunger in their villages would soon lead to fatalities. Hero of the Soviet Union P. L. Pashin went home to one of the affected districts to visit his family. He found them in a desperate condition. He appealed to the local collective farm to issue them with bread or potatoes, but the committee was unable to meet his request. Another Hero’s family was found to be in ‘severe need’ of clothes, shoes and dry accommodation.33 Mariya Slesarev continued to write to her father. ‘It’s a really bad situation for bread,’ she wrote in July 1944, ‘and with potatoes also.’ The prices were impossible. Her brother was sending her fifty roubles a month, occasionally supplementing it with more, but a litre of milk cost fifteen roubles, a cup of salt as much as twenty-four and flour 800 roubles a pood.34