Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  The people who adapted best, as ever, were the very young. ‘Those who got married at the front,’ an old couple told Alexiyevich, ‘are the happiest people and the happiest couples.’66 The remark sounds sweet, like a happy ending, but real stories were usually grounded in loss. Kirill Kirillovich met his wife in Leningrad during the darkest months of the blockade. It was 1942, and Kirill and an older, married friend were on point duty near the Kirov theatre. A young woman caught their eye, a teenager in military uniform who carried a Nagan revolver and a gas mask. ‘I’ve lived thirty years,’ the older man said, ‘and I’ve never seen such a pretty policeman.’ Eighteen-year-old Nina was a survivor. That winter, only weeks before, her family had starved to death. Her father had lain dead inside their flat for three weeks before anyone strong enough could be found to move him. Only her youth, the instinct for life, had saved the teenager, but she thought of the choice between life and death in terms of duty. When she had made her decision, she volunteered to donate blood, which meant that she received a guaranteed ration of bread.67 The tiny quantities of food restored her strength.

  What motivated Nina to volunteer for night patrol was the desire for revenge. By her own account, narrated through tears sixty years later, she was determined to see the lovely city rise again, determined to avenge her parents. She was also careless of her safety, willing to try anything. When the older man asked, she gave him her telephone number and address. Kirill, still shy at twenty-three, hung back. It was only later, back at the barracks, that he asked for the piece of paper. The couple began to meet in the city’s bombed-out streets and ruins. Both had lost parents since the war began, and neither knew where home would ever be again. In 1944, Nina gave birth to their daughter. That was also the moment when the couple decided to register their marriage. ‘I was a deputy commander,’ Kirill laughed as he told the story. ‘And even then I was ashamed because we had an illegitimate daughter.’

  More tenuous were the affairs that sprang up around correspondence. From the earliest days of the war, civilians had been invited to adopt battalions of troops, to write them cheering letters and send parcels and pictures. The morale-boosting work was organized as part of everybody’s contribution to the war, but the letters were escapist on both sides, based on the private hopes that seemed so similar but which in fact related to entirely different worlds. Vladimir Anfilov was another victim of the Leningrad blockade. While he was at the front, his wife, children and two sisters died somewhere in the siege. In March 1944, he announced that he was ready to look for another confidante and friend. His letters to the new woman, the peacetime neighbour of one of the men who served with him, were full of cultural gossip, snippets about the latest film or poem, but they offered no clue about his real life. ‘Tonya,’ he wrote, ‘it’s all so gloomy and it’s best not to think about it.’ A month after their first exchange of letters, Vladimir wanted Tonya’s photograph.68 The letters grew more intimate. Tonya would be heartbroken, months later, when the friend who had introduced them told her that she was just one in a whole string of ‘wives’.

  Samoilov helped a young lad called Anis’ko to write replies to the women who sent letters to him. ‘You’re literate,’ Anis’ko said. ‘You’ll know what to write.’ Samoilov ended up composing versions of the same letter to several young women at a time. It always explained that Anis’ko was alone, that his family had been killed and that he was ready to give his heart to any woman who could love him enough to trust him with her photograph. When the replies arrived, Anis’ko would pass them round for his mates to read aloud. He gave it up after the joke backfired. ‘My son,’ he heard one of his comrades reading out, ‘you’re writing to me about love, but I’m already well into my seventh decade.’69

  The state was always ready with a project. The Sovinformburo and party organs were not bothered by the lack of comprehension between front-line soldiers and the people at home. They knew that they could foster an imaginary collectivity, not least because so many millions truly were working to support the front. This patriotic impulse was constantly stoked. In campaign after campaign, the state assembled parcels for the front. In February 1942, one of the grimmest months in a hard wartime winter, the citizens of Omsk despatched an entire train to the soldiers around Leningrad. Its cargo included 12,760 patriotic letters, but the twenty-four wagons were also crammed with 18,631 parcels, each of which contained meat, cold bacon, salami, smoked cheese, honey, fish and tobacco. The train was also well supplied with vodka and other spirits, and someone had added 183 watches, stationery, a toilet and 1,500 copies of a special edition of Omskaya Pravda.70

  ‘Gifts’ for the armed forces did not stop with consumables. Everyone, even the soldiers themselves, was under pressure to subscribe to state war loans, but some enthusiasts went further and bought weapons for the front. In 1943, a hero beekeeper stepped forward in Kursk province. His first gift to the armed forces was 750 kg of honey, but grander ambitions filled his heart. Throughout the summer of 1943, he saved the proceeds of his honey sales until he had raised the 150,000 roubles needed to buy a Yak-9 aeroplane. The new machine would bear his name, Bessmertnyi, which in Russian means ‘immortal’, and the pilot who flew it swore that it was a lucky plane.71 Another patriotic couple donated 50,000 roubles to buy a heavy tank, trained at Chelyabinsk side by side and then served in their own machine, fighting all the way to Germany. A woman called Mariya Oktyabrskaya donated her life savings when her husband died and bought a T-34. She, too, became a tank driver and was killed near Vitebsk in 1944.72 As Bessmertnyi himself put it, ‘The more I work, the more food the Red Army gets, and the nearer becomes our victory over the enemy.’73

  While civilians were busily adopting troops, the soldiers were taking on a few strays of their own. The simple kinds of affection were best. Among the veterans I met at Kursk was a comparatively young man – still in his early seventies – called Vasily Andreyevich. He told me how he had joined a regiment when he was just thirteen. It was after the Germans had left, taking his mother and leaving their hut to burn. The boy, an orphan now, had run away to hide in the woods. He was there alone for three days, he remembers, maybe more. He tried to eat pine needles and rough grass. All he could think of was his hunger. And then he stumbled on a Red Army encampment. Sixty years on, his eyes grew wider as he remembered that kitchen. ‘There was an enormous cauldron,’ he told me, ‘and the men were lining up to get a ladleful of the soup from it.’ The boy joined the queue. Realizing that the men all had tin bowls, he took off his cap and held it out. By then, the cook was trying not to laugh, and all the men had realized that they had picked up a new ‘son’. The regiment ‘adopted’ him, providing a uniform and food in exchange for his work – which, naturally, involved cleaning that cauldron every day. ‘All through the war I stayed with them,’ he finished. Even when he was injured in the leg he travelled on, refusing to retire to a field hospital. As he recalled, ‘I could not bear to be separated from that kitchen.’

  The cook arrives with soldiers’ soup

  The adoption of ‘sons of the regiment’ was so haphazard that no one can say how many children were involved. One estimate suggests that as many as 25,000 children between the ages of six and sixteen marched with the army at some stage during the war.74 Some were mere infants. The men took pity on them and treated them as substitutes for the families they missed, if not as mascots. Not all were sheltered from real combat. Some rode in tanks, others hefted rifles or learned to fire field guns.75 It was the only schooling they would get. There were no classes, no fellow children to join them in reading or learning to write. Their bed-time stories were the men’s own tales of heroes and magical knights. Many were already hardened fighters when the army took them on. David Samoilov met a fifteen-year-old called Vanka who joined his regiment from a group of partisans. When Samoilov’s men captured a German prisoner, Vanka asked to escort the man to the compound where some other prisoners were being held. ‘He led him away for a few steps,’ Samoilov wrote, ‘a
nd then he shot him. Vanka could not bear to see a living Fritz. He was avenging his murdered family. Let God judge him, not people.’76

  The children almost certainly helped to sustain the men. It was a relief to take care of someone after months of military harshness and routine. If not a child, there might well be a horse or cow – this army marched with a whole range of barnyard stock.77 Samoilov’s unit developed a craze for puppies. While they were camped in Poland in 1944, their commanding officer was called away for two weeks. He returned to find the regiment boiling with dogs. Samoilov, too, had his own mutt. When it slept beside him, he wrote, his feeling was ‘almost paternal’. During the soldiers’ working day, the dogs ran wild, barking at anyone who wandered near the camp. The commanding officer, Captain Bogomolov, was appalled. He gave the men twenty-four hours to dispose of every canine in the camp. That afternoon, a makeshift dog show took place in the woods. The price was a litre of vodka for each puppy, and every one was sold.78 Perhaps the locals knew that other regiments would buy them back. A photograph from 1944 shows a tank crew smiling from their cockpit as their mascot, a young dog, grins out as broadly as the men.

  The era of front-line counter-insurgency truly arrived as the Red Army thundered west. The Soviets were now deep in territory that the enemy had ruled. Almost every able-bodied male in these regions was suspect. The public, the people in Moscow, thought of these as liberated populations, and it was certainly the case that millions saw the return of Soviet power, after the Nazis, as a true deliverance. Pictures showed smiling children greeting tough Red Army men, while ruined streets in places like Smolensk and Kiev thronged with adults in hungry, grateful crowds. On the ground, however, the agents of dictatorship nurtured their doubts. From 1942, a network of camps was established near the front where anyone the NKVD deemed to be suspect could be detained, even former soldiers whose skills were sorely needed in the ranks.79

  Tank drivers pose with their mascot, 1944

  There were two basic policies towards suspected enemies of Soviet power. The first was armed repression. NKVD border troops, backed up by units like OSMBON, hunted and killed known fascist agents and guerrillas in the borderlands from 1943. The conventions on prisoners of war seldom applied.80 Meanwhile, operatives employed by SMERSh gave themselves the task of ‘filtering’ remaining suspect adults in the captured zones. The whey-faced policemen held court in ramshackle front-line camps, sifting through information that included the tales local people told. Suspects had to prove themselves innocent; in this appalling theatre the burden of suspicion fell on anyone who was not dead. Ex-soldiers, for instance, customarily had to provide three witnesses to attest that they were neither deserters, collaborators nor cowards.81 But, though its operatives were indeed looking for spies and enemies, the most important – if unstated – task for SMERSh and its allies was to create a new order. Filtration, like terror, sent a message to the lawless populations of the battlefields. Soviet habits of discipline and fear were set to be rebuilt. Whatever they had thought or done in the anarchic summers after 1941, the people’s loyalty was now owed to one leader and one system of thought.

  The collapse of all forms of government in the front-line regions had been total. For months, the Nazis had been fighting for their lives. Even before the catastrophe of probable defeat, too, they had always been an occupying army, not to mention one whose goal was genocide. As they retreated, burning buildings and supplies, they left a wasteland in their wake. The Red Army, as it advanced, moved too fast and was too engaged with military affairs to care about the law. A vast belt of liberated territory on both banks of the Dnepr became the domain of armed gangs. In some places, the partisans had been the only effective government for months. In others, bandits or guerrillas ruled, sometimes under the leadership of onetime officers of the Red Army.82 The security organs set themselves the task of sifting the true patriots from all the rest. Demobilized partisans, the people best equipped to assess local stories from the party’s point of view, played a prominent role in the purging process. As one of these, a weary, soft-voiced survivor called ‘Uncle Mitya’, remarked to Alexander Werth, ‘We shall be merciless with traitors now. It’s no use crying in wartime.’83

  Dictatorship was reimposed – slowly – using the bullet or the punishment battalion. In each region’s chaotic network of government offices, a new structure of party rule was hammered into place. Here, counter-intelligence worked beside Communist Party officials, since the party always assessed its members’ records for itself. Communist survivors who were deemed suspect or even negligent were purged. Some were drafted at once into the Red Army. The rest were transferred to the Gulag. Later in the war, they would be joined by the thousands of communist troops who had grown tired or critical as the Red Army crossed into the capitalist world.84

  The group at the top of SMERSh’s wanted list, for now, was the Russian Liberation Army (ROA). This was a fascist-sponsored force composed mainly of ethnic Russians and identified with General Andrei Vlasov. The general, a former star in the Red Army, had turned traitor when he was captured on the Volkhov Front in July 1942. He came to symbolize the ragtag of desperate prisoners and disgruntled anti-communists who hoped to save themselves by working for the Germans. In 1943, partisans near Smolensk reported that leaflets bearing Vlasov’s portrait and that of his deputy, Malyshkin, had been dropped in the area, and there were rumours that Vlasov himself had visited Smolensk in July 1943.85 Moskvin encountered ‘Vlasovites’ when his group was surrounded and attacked in April 1943,86 but the term was a catch-all for the armed bands that the Germans liked to use when they destroyed partisan groups. By labelling local collaborators, including anyone who was fed up with partisan extortion, as ‘Vlasovites’, SMERSh fostered rumours of a larger and more sinister conspiracy. It was a technique that had always served the secret police well.

  The real Vlasov army, forlorn and poorly equipped, was sent off to France and southern Europe in the late summer of 1943.87 Vlasov’s German paymasters no longer trusted his troops on Soviet soil. Even before that, the general had not been responsible for every leaflet that called on Soviet citizens to resist Stalin’s rule. With or without him, a string of shadowy ‘Liberation Armies’ had been at work in Ukraine and the western provinces of Russia throughout 1943. There were ‘Russian committees’ and ‘People’s Parties of Russia’ in many occupied cities, each working, under German supervision, to undermine Soviet habits of thought. They revived long-forgotten flags and colours, promised (tardily and desperately) to dissolve collective farms, and swore that communism would end. One even used the letters ‘SSSR’, the initials of the Soviet Union, for its own masthead. But in this case they stood for a different slogan: ‘Smert’ Stalina spaset Rossiyu’ – ‘Stalin’s death will save Russia.’88 The whole thing was convenient for SMERSh. Wherever there were real traitors, there could be convincing arrests.

  Genuine Vlasovites, in fact, were thinner on the ground than collaborators and hiwis, and neither was as numerous as the rabble of small-time opportunists, local bosses, deserters and crooks. Ideology, as Stalin and Hitler defined it, was less of a priority for wartime populations than the fight for life. Given the choice, large numbers of people might have preferred to escape from dictatorship altogether, and this impulse found reflection in the appeal of nationalist bands. These had been active in some regions since the war began. Some were large and even, for a time, successful, imposing a kind of frontier law in the districts they controlled. In 1944, the most powerful guerrilla group in Ukraine was the UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.89 This movement, thought to number 20,000 members by the end of the war, scored a notable coup in February 1944, when one of its detachments shot and fatally wounded the talented Soviet general Nikolai Vatutin.90 But the UPA’s support would be strongest in the western, recently annexed regions of Ukraine. The history of intermarriage on the Soviet side of the Dnepr, together with its tradition of loyalty to Moscow, ensured that nationalism in this region posed little threat.
91 It was anarchy, not organized disloyalty, that disrupted the Red Army’s supply lines and support troops at this stage. Apart from arrests, the best remedy for that was forced conscription. People who served under the red flag, too, could not be recruited so easily by other gangs.

  In October 1943, a former soldier called Andreev experienced this form of liberation at first hand. The letter that he wrote to his mother, five pages in length, has the quality of a last testament. It was also the first news he had sent home since he was taken prisoner in August 1941. Back then, Andreev’s unit had been surrounded by tanks, but in the general chaos of the time, he had escaped from the escorting German guards and hidden in a village called Annovka. There he married Oksana, the daughter of the woman who was hiding him. Their own daughter, Nina, was born in 1943. What prompted him to write and tell his mother all this news was the approach of the Red Army. ‘There was a huge battle here today,’ he explained, ‘and I, Oksana and Ninochka had to cower in a hut with all the old people. They say that a military commission is coming here, and that it will examine all the former prisoners of war. The fit ones will be taken for the front, which means that instead of going home I may end up in the front line.’92 Andreev passed the tests that SMERSh set up, but he was unfit, untrained and without equipment. He died a few weeks later on the banks of the Dnepr.