Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  Detachments of partisans posed different problems. By this stage, many were working as adjuncts of the Red Army. It was they who disrupted German supply lines before the campaigns at Kursk, Orel and Kharkov. They also helped regular troops to capture the potential informers – ‘tongues’ – who might betray the enemy’s planned manoeuvres. Partisans could send reports from deep behind German lines, informing Moscow about training bases, repair shops and even German pigeon coops.93 Moskvin’s diary for 1943 reads like a list of military engagements, each with its own objective. ‘Every day we have carried out some kind of action against the enemy,’ he wrote in April. Their usual targets were the railways and roads. It was like army life again. The men were formed into battalions, each including about ten explosives groups. They were becoming expert in laying and in clearing mines. At the end of a ‘month of uninterrupted battle’, Moskvin felt ‘the same creative sense that I had when we destroyed the Vitebsk aerodrome in 1941, except that then our tragedy was about to begin’.94

  The problem was that renewed battle meant increased numbers of casualties. ‘I am writing for posterity that partisans undergo inhuman suffering,’ Moskvin noted on 25 March.95 The losses could only be made up by recruiting new people. That spring and summer, and especially after Kursk, the task became easier as ‘1943 partisans’ – peasants who saw which way the war was going and resolved to save themselves – made their way to the dugouts and the camps. The Grishin regiment, which included Moskvin’s own battalion, increased in size from about 600 to over 2,000 members by the late summer of 1943.96 All these people had to be retrained. There was the usual rough military drill, including target practice using captured guns. Recruits also needed to learn ‘equanimity in the face of death’ and to combat ‘cowardice, panic and whining’.97 But there were other types of lesson to be learned as well. There was a cultural gulf between the older generation of partisans, many of whom had once belonged, before 1941, to the élite of working-class soldiers and officers, and these young village toughs.98 ‘We have to strengthen the discipline of the whole group,’ Moskvin wrote. ‘We have to improve their relations with the local population, not allowing cases of coarseness and shameful behaviour by Soviet citizens.’

  The answer was an arid, brutal discipline. In preparation for the tank battle at Kursk, Moskvin’s battalion was ordered to make a raid on the station at Chaus. When it was over, Moskvin catalogued the dead and injured. Three people had been killed outright and eighteen suffered wounds, among whom three would later die, including the battalion commander, Makarov, and Moskvin’s own friend, Ivan Rakhin. One of the women who went on the raid, a medical officer called Pasha, was critically wounded in the arm. The only way to save her was to amputate the limb, an operation that was carried out with vicious home-brewed spirit for an anaesthetic. They poured it neat into her throat. ‘The woman’s fortitude is striking,’ Moskvin observed, but ‘we took 140 rifles and four machine guns… as well as a new radio’. It was a strange economy of war. Strangest of all, the raid also produced a quantity of French champagne and cognac, tobacco and Havana cigars.99 These would have been outrageous prizes for a band of outlaws in an earth dugout, but they were not the ones who got to taste the wine. Moskvin’s battalion was under strict command. The bosses claimed all trophies for the state.

  As the Red Army crashed on to Orel, conditions in the woods of western Russia worsened. The mood in Moskvin’s regiment was tense, but its overall leader, Grishin, seemed to withdraw into a dream world of his own. ‘Only my deep respect for his talent makes me so tolerant,’ Moskvin observed. The retreating German army posed new threats to partisans whose territory had up till then been deep behind the front. Grishin’s instructions were to travel east and join the Red Army as it approached Smolensk, but within days of setting out, he and his men were encircled. They had not reached their own front line. Instead, they faced the vengeful hatred of an enemy that was itself in flight. By 16 October 1943, Moskvin was sure that he would die. ‘I have one main desire,’ he wrote miserably. ‘If it is going to be death, then let it be quick, not with a serious injury, which would be the most frightening of all.’100 By then, as he added, the men had already eaten all their horses. As winter approached, and despite all the triumph to the east, they were starving to death.

  The blockade lasted for about three weeks. It was Grishin who enforced Stalinist order. ‘We are encircled,’ he wrote on 11 October. ‘The exits from the forest are blocked. You can hear for yourself that the front is approaching… Therefore, we must hold our positions. Retreat would mean extinction. There must be no cowards or panic-raisers among us. Every honest patriot of our fatherland must shoot such people on the spot.’101 ‘In the last few days life has lost its overall meaning,’ Moskvin wrote on 17 October. He was coming close to breakdown. ‘My instinct for self-preservation isn’t working the way it used to. It’s not gone altogether, but it’s become really dull, like a headache after a good dose of aspirin.’102 These thoughts remained private, for he was a political officer and it was his job to maintain morale. The feelings of less motivated men are clear enough. ‘For leaving his post without orders,’ runs an order dated 13 October 1943, ‘for cowardice, for being panicky and for nonfulfilment of orders, Squad Leader Bacharov is to be shot.’103

  Moskvin was destined to escape. On 18 October, just after his most desolate diary entry, he and his men received orders to break the enemy blockade. It was an almost suicidal act. As they rushed at the German lines they were defenceless targets. Fifteen people were killed within a few seconds; one for each metre, Moskvin noted, that they ran. The losses were enormous, but the regiment was free. Its orders were to move south-west, not east, to evade German fire. The manoeuvre was conducted under military discipline, but the group received no help from the Red Army. Moskvin observed, without comment, that it was but a dozen miles away.

  The Red Army’s advance provided many opportunities for Stalin to demonstrate his policy on unity and brotherhood. By the end of 1943, almost the entire region of Ukraine was in Soviet hands, but one prize still eluded recapture. Hitler himself was determined to hold on to the Crimea. It was not simply that the peninsula represented a strategic gateway to the oilfields of Romania; it was also a place of striking beauty. The Germans had declared it to be a Black Sea version of Gibraltar, their second homeland, as soon as they had captured it. During their two-year occupation of the peninsula, they had even planned a direct highway from Berlin to Yalta, and there were rumours that Hitler had chosen the seaside palace at Livadiya as his eventual retirement home.104 With both sides set on taking it, the Crimea witnessed fighting as bitter as any in the entire war, but the aftermath, for thousands of the peninsula’s inhabitants, would be crueller still. When Stalin talked about the Soviet people and their great collective epic, there were already tens of thousands who would never share in the rewards.

  The liberation of the Crimea was accomplished in the space of a few weeks from April 1944. The Soviet military operation, a co-ordinated strike from both the north and east, was bold, effective and prodigal of human life. It was also physically gruelling. As Alexander Werth observed, the men who headed the invasion from the north, across the grim and fog-bound Sivash marshes, had to ‘spend hours waist-deep or shoulder-deep in the icy and very salt water of the Sivash – the salt eating into every pore and causing almost unbearable pain’ as they laid the first pontoons across the inlet.105 But once they reached the firm Crimean soil, their progress was faster. Within two days the first Red Army troops had reached the capital, Simferopol, which lies at the heart of the Crimea’s inland steppe. Meanwhile, a second group, starting near Kerch, began its rapid westward drive along the coast road to the south, securing Kerch itself and then the port of Feodosia. From there, their way lay round the pointed crags that shelter the resort of Koktebel, and beyond that, passing terraces of vineyards and sunlit forests of beech, they would speed through the Tatar fishing village of Gurzuf, through Yalta, Livadiya, Alubka and –
eventually – to the outskirts of Sevastopol itself.

  It was spring in the Crimea. The place was an exotic paradise after a winter rotting on the steppe. ‘I spent the May Day holiday in a wonderful way,’ Vitaly Taranichev’s brother-in-law, Fedor, wrote home. ‘In the first place, for fulfilling the military duties that my commanders assigned to me I have been awarded the Order of the Red Star, and secondly it was jolly because of all the wine we drank and the great company.’ He was writing a full week after the party, but he added that ‘I will only be in a sober enough condition to work and to continue with the rout of our enemies tomorrow.’106 The wine was not just local stuff. Since 1941, high-ranking German officers had often spent their leave in the Crimea. To help them to relax, their staff had imported the best products from Alsace, Champagne and the Rhine. No one had time, in the emergency, to pack it up. When they arrived in places that the Germans had vacated days before, Red Army officers like young Fedor could drown in vintage Riesling if they chose. Like many other Soviet troops on this campaign, the young man vowed to make the Crimea his future home.

  However, this was not a holiday. The port of Sevastopol remained in the enemy’s hands. As each mile of hinterland fell to the Red Army, more refugee detachments of the Wehrmacht and its Romanian allies arrived in the port city. At the beginning of May, the commander of the German Seventeenth Army in Sevastopol, Generaloberst Edwin Jaenicke, expressed doubts that his troops were in a condition to withstand the predicted Soviet blow. He was replaced by a more loyal Nazi, Karl Allmedinger. Hitler had ordered that there was to be no question of surrendering the port. It had held out for 250 days at the beginning of the war and now it was commanded to sustain a second siege. The city’s readiness for this would be tested at once. On 5 May, two days after Jaenicke’s removal, the Soviets attacked.

  The first onslaught came from the north. On 7 May, a second wave advanced towards the famous Sapun ridge, whose name evokes the foaming sweat of horses galloping to reach the higher ground.107 Less than a hundred years before, when British and French forces had faced Todleben’s Russians in the Crimean War, the valley all around had echoed to the sound of cannon fire, the smoke and dust of battle breaking for a second now and then to show a glint of gold braid or a flash of steel. This time the landscape trembled to the shudder of Katyushas and the drone of planes. After the mortars came the men. Some were professionals and some mere boys, some communists and some, the blighted, shtrafniki. But for the most part, they were nothing like the ill-equipped, half-trained conscripts of 1941. The troops of 1944 knew their business, and for this campaign they were well supplied. Soviet industry had filled their ammunition belts, American lend-lease provided them with transport and tinned food. Among the corpses, when the scavengers came by, there would be pickings of watches, knives, pens and Gillette razor blades. Even their boots, these days, were often better than the German ones.108

  The port of Sevastopol held less than a week. A more realistic leadership might have evacuated the remaining German troops well in advance of the collapse, but Hitler still refused to cede his prize. Now the frightened, injured and leaderless men who remained in the city panicked before the Soviet advance. Some managed to cram into the few ships that were putting out towards the west, while others surrendered with their backs to the ruined harbour. The rest fled down the coast towards the ancient settlement of Kherson. Its cliff-top ruins would become a killing field. The Soviets trapped the survivors on the limestone rocks and blasted them with every kind of fire. Those who were not cut down in the grey dust drowned when they leapt into the sea. Werth, who arrived within days of the last battle, described the place as ‘gruesome’. ‘All the area in front of the Earth Wall and beyond was ploughed up by thousands of shells,’ he wrote, ‘and scorched by the fire of Katyusha mortars… The ground was littered with hundreds of German rifles, bayonets, and other arms and ammunition.’ It was also ‘scattered with thousands of pieces of paper – photographs, snapshots, passports, maps, private letters – and even a volume of Nietzsche carried to the end by some Nazi superman’.109 Estimates vary, but it is likely that at least 25,000 people perished or were captured in this one defeat.110

  The liberation of the Crimea was complete by 13 May, but there was one group of Soviet citizens who would not celebrate for long. The Tatars, a people who could claim the Scythians, Goths and Greeks among their ancestors, had lived and farmed in the Crimea for at least 600 years.111 Russian settlement, which dated from the eighteenth century, had never brought them luck. Their loyalties, like their language, their architecture and their easygoing Muslim faith, were more inclined towards the Turks of the Black Sea’s opposite shore. Like peasants everywhere, the farmers among them also hated the collectives, and in 1941, some of them saw the invasion as a chance to throw off the unwanted yoke of Soviet rule. Though many thousands of ethnic Tatars fought in the Red Army, a number of those who remained behind welcomed the Germans as liberators, or at least as an alternative to Stalinist dictatorship. Meanwhile, a small number of the Tatar soldiers held as prisoners of war in German camps had taken the only route to survival, as they saw it, and joined the anti-Soviet Tatar legion.112 Just one week after the rout at Kherson, the entire Tatar population of the Crimea would pay the price.

  That night, 18 May 1944, thousands of Tatar families were woken in the small hours before sunrise by a knock on the door. When they answered, they found that their visitors were armed. While the Red Army had been clearing the last fascists from the Crimea, tens of thousands of NKVD soldiers had been brought into the rural settlements and coastal villages where Tatars lived. Now these police were giving orders to pack quickly, to collect the children and to be ready outside, on the road, in fifteen minutes. Many Tatars had seen the Nazis doing much the same in 1941, when local Jews were rounded up, each carrying a precious cardboard case of clothes and food. ‘We all thought we were going to die,’ survivors of this other night recall. The irony was that this time the men with the guns were Soviet fellow citizens.

  Just under 200,000 people, or 47,000 families, most of them headed by women or older men, were herded to the stations and locked into cattle trucks that night.113 The process was efficient, quick. Indeed, the NKVD troops already had experience. The wagons that were used to take the Tatars east had just returned from other human transport missions – most recently, the deportation of the mountain peoples of Chechnya, Ingushetiya and the autonomous republic of Kabardino-Balkariya.114 The process, organized by NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria, amounted to a smooth routine. The trucks, as witnesses observed, were still smeared with the faeces and dried blood of the last consignments of deportees.115 There would be stops along the way – if the passengers were lucky – to bundle out the bodies of those who died from heat, thirst or the typhus that soon raged within the crowded cars. About 8,000 deportees are thought to have perished in the air-less, stinking wagons. The rest would have to build new lives from nothing when they arrived in central Asia. They would find little welcome there. Their new hosts, fellow Muslims as well as fellow Soviets, would accept, for a while, the tale that all Tatars, as a people, were traitors.

  Some of the deportees were genuine collaborators; some had indeed helped to support the new Nazi regime.116 But many had been dedicated to the Soviet cause. Among the latter were numbers of partisans, including the political officers Ahmetov and Isaev, both of whom, as members of the 5th partisan brigade, had been helping the Red Army as recently as April 1944. At least four Heroes of the Soviet Union, all of them decorated for their part in the Soviet landings at Kerch in November 1943, were also in the trucks.117 So were the wives, parents and children of soldiers who were still serving at the front, to say nothing of the families of combatants who had died. While Russian soldiers, including Fedor Kuznetsov, looked forward to new lives in the Crimea, delighted to have found, through army life, a place where they could thrive after the war, the Tatars in the same army would soon find that they had no home.

  ‘There were thirty-f
our different nationalities in the forest,’ a partisan who spent her war in the Crimea remembered. ‘Most of them were Russians, of course, but there were Ukrainians, Belorussians, Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Armenians, Georgians, Slovaks, Czechs and Spanish veterans of the civil war. We made absolutely no distinction between them all.’ The citizenship that she assigned to herself, and that she still honours, was ‘Soviet’. It was the label that made greatest sense in the political universe in which she lived, the name that conjured dreams of brotherhood, equality and proletarian justice for all. It also matched the government’s official line, the propaganda of the Sovinformburo. But by the war’s end, 1,600,000 Soviet members of minority ethnic groups had been singled out, tarred with a racist brush and deported – in the Soviet Union’s name – from the lands in which their ancestors had lived. Within a few years – just after the peace – about a third were dead.

  8

  Exulting, Grieving and Sweating Blood

  April and May are often warm in the Crimea, but in Belarus, more than 500 land-locked miles off to the north, the wind across the marshes is still cold and sour. In 1944, the state that was called Belorussia was a desert; bleak, snow-covered, wasted by two armies and three years of war. Nikolai Belov had been trapped for nearly six months in its landscape of ice and mud. As an officer, he could not complain about his lodgings. He had a cabin lined with local logs, not an oozing dugout; unlike his men, too, Belov was well supplied with food and heating fuel. But the monotony of the Belorussian winter depressed him, the endless pine and fetid swamp suggesting shipwreck. He was bored, apathetic and restive. To pass the time, he tried to read biography, starting with a life of Napoleon. In April 1944, he finished the second book of his war. Its hero was a Georgian general who had fought and died at Borodino. The general’s name was Bagration. If Belov had known what Moscow was planning next for him, he might have smiled at the irony.