Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  The Red Army itself boasted a set of regulations about anti-Semitism, including a stipulation that the insulting zhid (yid) should not be used in reference to Jews. Soldiers were liable to punishment if they made anti-Semitic remarks or used offensive, racist language. Idealistic communists (many of whom were in fact Jews) believed that Soviets had truly overcome the hatreds of the tsarist past, but it would only have been in a burst of passionate idealism that a Jew could have seen the Red Army as a benign environment. Official rhetoric was scrupulous, but among themselves the soldiers – and even many officers – were liberal with their racist jibes. The authorities’ response, too, was generally feeble. The NKVD kept a record of the cases that it heard, together with the penalties imposed. A thirty-one-year-old got five days in the guardhouse for telling a Jewish comrade that ‘My father despised yids, I despise them, and my children are going to despise them too.’90 Another soldier was expelled from the komsomol for spitting ‘What are you on about, Jew-face?’ at another rifleman. It was better than fascism, but there was a long way still to go.

  The jokes, that humour that the NKVD controlled so closely, were worse. According to the vulgar story, Jews in the army had pulled off their usual trick. In other words, they had managed to dodge the front line and secured the safer office jobs. When tens of thousands fled their homes in the first months of war, they were christened ‘Tashkent partisans’ after the city where so many had found refuge. ‘They have formed a battalion by themselves,’ a joke went among Russian troops, ‘and conquered Tashkent and Alma-Ata.’91 ‘The soul of a Jew is always at the front line,’ went another, ‘but his body stays behind the Urals.’ The context was contemporary, but the basic stereotypes were primeval. Jews were even said to favour crooked rifles.92

  Other rumours built on ancient themes of Passover blood sacrifice and cabbalistic magic. Jewish doctors were accused of passing wounded Russians fit for active service before they could even stand.93 An anecdote from 1944 played on the theory of international Zionist conspiracy. Rifleman Abram Abramovich keeps coming back from battle with trophies: a German gun, German maps, even the colours of a German regiment. When he is decorated for his deeds, someone asks him how he has managed to do quite so much. ‘Ach,’ he replies, ‘I have a friend on the German side, Mark Markovich, and he brings me the German stuff and I take Red Army trophies round to him.’94 The story may have made some soldiers laugh, but if they had paused to look at their German enemies, they would have noticed that there were no Mark Markoviches left.

  The persecution of Jews was one fascist atrocity that Soviet publicity evaded. The core of the problem, from 1944, was an imagined hierarchy of suffering. This was a war in which Russia saw itself as the most important victim. It had been invaded, its land violated. It had stood alone while Europe slept; its people had bled themselves white in the defence of Stalingrad. The Soviet Union waged this war, but more Russians served in the Red Army than any other ethnic group, and soldiers frequently – and in their view, generously – overlooked distinctions among their comrades, calling them all ‘Russian’ in their hearts.95 Russian soldiers were the largest single group among the multitude who starved and died as German prisoners of war, and Russian civilians suffered unimaginably in the years of invasion and struggle.96 On almost any reckoning there could be no comparison between the price that Russia and the other Soviet peoples paid for war and that paid by their allies. But victimhood, at home as well as on a diplomatic stage, was like a kind of capital. Internationally, it permitted the aggrieved party to claim substantial reparation, to say nothing of allowing a certain moral leverage. At home, it raised a storm of patriotism which was Soviet in name but generally Russian in nature. The epicentre of it all (his Georgian nationality notwithstanding) was Stalin himself. While the people had suffered, Stalin had laboured and bled with them. He was identified with every moment of their pain.

  The details were genuinely appalling. More than 3 million Soviet (principally Russian) prisoners of war were killed in Nazi camps, many as a result of direct acts of brutal – and illegal – violence. Even a German witness, a soldier writing about the Wehrmacht’s successes in 1942, was surprised at the effect of his own regime. His prisoners, who were entitled to food and shelter (and even, arguably, to Red Cross parcels), had been reduced by fear and hunger to such a state that, as he wrote, ‘They whined and grovelled before us. They were human beings in whom there was no longer a trace of anything human.’ Perhaps that judgement helped their captors to torture the men. The German guards amused themselves by throwing a dead dog into the prisoners’ compound. ‘Yelling like mad,’ the witness wrote, ‘the Russians would fall on the animal and tear it to pieces with their bare hands… The intestines they’d stuff in their pockets – a sort of iron ration.’ The very few who did not perish in these camps remember the terror, the humiliation and the dark stories of lyudoedstvo, the dismemberment and eating of corpses.97 No other army suffered on this scale, not even in Asia.

  Civilians, too, would endure every kind of violence. From the first days of the invasion, in 1941, the Wehrmacht declared war on partisans. In reality, bystanders were shot or hanged alongside real guerrillas. Then came the requisitioning of food and other property. The famine that resulted was so desperate in some regions that local people would turn up at German camps ‘and ask for relief or beg to be shot’.98 Hardship resulted in epidemics among the civilian population of the occupied zone, the most serious of which, in 1943, was typhus. Nearly 7.5 million Soviet civilians are thought to have been killed under the Nazi occupation, the greatest numbers in Ukraine (3.2 million), Russia (1.8 million) and Belorussia (1.5 million).99 But other victims did not even remain in their homes, since the other major impact of Nazi control was the enslavement of civilians for forced labour. At least 3 million men and women (one famous Russian source gives a figure of over five million) were shipped off to the Reich to work as slaves. Many of these – probably more than 2 million – were worked so hard that they joined Europe’s Jews in the death camps, discarded by the Reich for disposal like clapped-out nags sent to the knacker’s yard.100

  Russia’s long torment, then, was real, and like most cases of persecution, it created in the sufferers a sense of outrage, of entitlement, of solidarity. No one had borne the weight of war more patiently, no one had fought or endured more. That was the story, and it became a political refrain. However, Russia’s access of outrage – and Stalin’s pre-eminence within it – could not have been sustained if two specific truths had been considered. First, the group that faced the Nazis’ most concentrated violence, a cruelty unparalleled even in this most vicious war, was not the Russian people but the Jews. Second, Soviet citizens in the occupied zones, including thousands of Ukrainians and Balts, had not only colluded in the genocide but welcomed and abetted it.

  It was the army that made all the discoveries, soldiers who knew the most about the real fate of Jews. The first evidence of the mass killings was unearthed near Kerch in 1941, when Soviet troops began their ill-fated attempt to retake the Crimea,101 but it was not until the great march west from 1943 that the full picture began to take shape. A harrowing story emerged from Krasnodar, where 7,000 Jews were gassed in an experiment involving special sealed wagons (the NKVD had already mastered a version of this technology in 1937, but it was a shock to see it used by someone else). When the mass grave was found, a group of corpses was ceremonially exhumed, dressed in fresh linen (as befits a Russian corpse) and buried with full honours before weeping crowds.102

  Russian POW with his prisoner number (courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)

  The secret of the ravine near Kiev, Babi Yar, which held the bodies of at least 100,000 Jews by the end of 1943, was printed in the Soviet press in tones of justifiable outrage. But it had been a real challenge for the Sovinformburo. Those Jewish corpses, petrol-soaked and stained with ash, raised spectres that Moscow could not confront. The Holocaust, as one account puts it, was ‘an indigestible l
ump in the belly of the Soviet triumph’.103 Moscow could never approve of the mass killing of Jews, but nor was it eager to accord to them a special place in the myth of the war. If it had done so, Russia would have had to share its victimhood, and its communist leadership would also, by implication, have been forced to countenance the idea of a special closeness between Jews and Bolsheviks, a notion that Stalin had done his best to extirpate (not least by arresting Jewish comrades) for years. Those bodies, like those of Polish officers in the woods near Smolensk, threatened to pollute the fragile ecologies of Soviet righteousness and Russian certitude.

  Equally dangerous was the fact that some Ukrainian nationalists had welcomed the genocide at the time. The drive for ethnic purity that beset central Europe in the 1930s and 1940s was not confined to Germany, and nor was loathing of the Bolsheviks. During the German occupation, the head of the wartime Ukrainian government himself had delivered the view, in 1941, that ‘Jews help Moscow to consolidate its hold on Ukraine. Therefore I am of the opinion that the Jews should be exterminated and [see] the expediency of carrying out in Ukraine the German methods for exterminating the Jews.’104 Sturdy, peasant-farming Ukrainians were encouraged to loathe all ‘Jewish-Muscovite proletarians’. Some responded by joining the murder squads.105 But to repeat all this now would be to shatter the brittle framework of Soviet brotherhood. It would certainly jeopardize Moscow’s relations with the bulk of the Ukrainian population, including those who were currently fighting in its name across the Western Front.

  The answer was to edit every report from the killing fields. Stories of genocide were presented as parts of a larger and appalling whole. Special care was taken to make sure that the burdens Russians had borne were emphasized. While the investigators were preparing the first report on the first death camp that the army discovered, readers of Pravda learned about a place in Ukraine where Red Army prisoners had starved, and even of a camp where Russians had been infected deliberately with typhus and allowed to die.106 The policy of censorship was helped by the fact that the truth, as it emerged, was so appalling that it tended to overwhelm imagination. When Alexander Werth filed his first report from a Nazi extermination camp, ‘The Death Factory’, for the BBC, the corporation would not broadcast it. The story was so terrible, its directors argued, that it could only be another Soviet propaganda stunt.107

  The truth began to surface in the summer of 1944. Lublin lies just beyond the Polish–Soviet border. When the Red Army freed it in July, they found a town scarred by the occupation and bombardment. However, despite the damage, it remained the attractive mass of churches and whitewashed houses that it had been for centuries. Its secret, like a cold shadow, lay just two miles away. Maidanek was the first extermination camp that any army would discover. It was a vast and tightly organized facility, a group of prisons, gas chambers and chimneys that covered twenty-five square kilometres. One and a half million people had been murdered there. The smell of corpses and of burning flesh forced Lubliners to shut their windows. They could not breathe, and even with the windows shut, they could not sleep. The scale of the atrocity shocked every witness at the time.

  Maidanek foreshadowed the genocide before the discoveries of Auschwitz and Belsen. There was the forlorn little road, the barbed-wire fence, the watchtowers. An entrance gateway arched above the track, and looming in the mist beyond were barrack huts and sinister-looking chimneys. There was a gallows, strongly built and square, in every yard. There were concrete shower blocks, the units labelled ‘bath and disinfection’. These were the chambers into which thousands of frightened, naked human beings had been herded, roughly, half-guessing their fate. As he toured them, Werth found himself reflecting on those last moments, imagining the blue crystals of Zyklon tumbling through a ceiling grille and gently steaming into life. He was standing where the SS guards had stood, watching the room as they had done. Averting his gaze for a moment, he looked down at the concrete yard. At his feet was a blue mark, a scribble that still just made out the word vergast. A skull and crossbones had been scrawled beside it. ‘I had never seen this word before,’ he wrote, ‘but it obviously meant “gassed” – and not merely “gassed”, but with that elegant little prefix ver, “gassed out.” That’s this job finished, and now for the next lot.’108

  Werth claims that Pravda covered everything, but this is not quite true. The reporting was vivid, and its impact must have been immense, but Jews were not presented as the main victims. Conveniently, perhaps, Maidanek was a genuinely mixed-race camp, and its victims included large numbers of Europeans, Russians and Poles, as well as ethnic Jews. That catholicity made it the easier to describe in the press. By contrast, the existence of the camp at Oświȩcim (Auschwitz) was not reported to the Soviet public until 7 May, just hours before the victory, although the Red Army had found it (and counted out each set of clothes, over a million of them) in January 1945.

  It is an open question what the soldiers thought about it all. At Maidanek, they were ordered to make a tour of the whole camp. At Auschwitz, too, they saw each horror for themselves. The images of atrocity helped to reinforce their hatred of Hitler, to make them pitiless and brave. So did the sight of Klooga, outside Tallinn, where murdered Jews were piled among great stacks of logs, soaked in petrol, and torched like lumps of kindling.109 The pictures of the charred remains show Red Army troops standing in the snow nearby, viewing the ghastly shapes while plain-clothes officials catalogue them for history. But what these soldiers later read was not the same as what they knew. Pravda helped to form an alternative set of memories, to cover images so terrible that they could neither be considered nor forgotten. In place of the appalling reality of the Final Solution, the paper offered a simpler lesson to its readers: Soviet rage was justified; Russian revenge was just.

  Bonfire of logs and corpses photographed as evidence of German war crimes, Klooga, Estonia (courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)

  Those lessons help to explain the violence that followed. The things that fascists did, in soldiers’ minds, had long been kept apart from anything that ‘we’ – they – might ever do. Soviet propaganda had debased the enemy to such an extent that he was scarcely human. There could be no comparison with ‘us’. Meanwhile, the Russian people’s victim status called for revenge and reparation. Within a few months, atrocities in East Prussia – Soviet killings, rapes and thefts – would be perpetrated under the concealing cover of a double standard. The same inconsistency applied to the treatment of ‘our’ Jews. When a Russian muttered that the Jews were better dead, it was not quite the same as when a fascist did it. In 1944, the NKVD heard men muttering that ‘Hitler did a good job, beating up the Jews.’110

  The army, or rather, some of its invalid veterans, brought its rough prejudices back to share with Soviet civilians. The stories were predictable enough. Jews did not fight, they said, but sat around in warm offices or anywhere that money might be found lying about. Then came the jokes, the judgements, the resentment. In the early summer of 1943, members of the editorial board of the army newspaper, Red Star, even discussed the need to find and publish some stories of Jews who were heroes of the Soviet Union or front-line generals. Something needed to be done to avert racial violence. ‘There is a real agitation for pogrom,’ one of them wrote that May.111 The predicted lynching followed months later. Kiev’s pogrom of 1945 began after a fight between two drunken Ukrainians and a Jewish NKVD agent. The agent shot his assailants, whose funeral became the spark for anti-Jewish riots.112 But post-war Russia, very soon, would target Jews with all the power of the state. From 1948, they were the objects of new arrests, denunciations and public humiliation. They lost their jobs, they lost esteem, their children were denied the education that had been their right. Finally, Jews were the intended victims of the last great purge of Stalin’s life.113

  When I collected testimonies for this book, I found that Jews were disproportionately represented among the veterans who talked. This was not accidental, and nor was it some
prejudice of mine. One reason is that veterans still believe that they should keep Soviet secrets. The state whose rules they promised to uphold has gone, but many hold on to it because it is the only stable image in their political imagination. For Jews, so many of whom were marginalized in the post-war world, it may be easier than it is for ethnic Russians to see these old rules as absurd. Then there are questions of loyalty, for Jews suffered when communism fell and few have reason to welcome the new and chauvinistic Russian state. So it is easier for them to talk. The stories that I heard were vivid, terrible, humorous and often sad, but they were never tales of office staff. Jews were among the most determined combatants on every Soviet front. They had a great deal to avenge. Beyond that, members of this special generation tended to be loyal to the internationalist cause, to the utopian dream of communism, to just war, revolution and new forms of brotherhood. Nemanov fought near Stalingrad and onwards towards Kursk; Kirill survived the siege of Leningrad and led his men through Prussia. They both took part in some of the most dangerous operations of the war.

  I remember a morning spent with another Jewish combatant. Boris Grigorevich was born in Kiev. His parents were both Jews, though he identified himself as Soviet. ‘Was there racism?’ he repeated, smiling at my question. ‘Of course not. We were all Soviet citizens, all the same.’ His best friend, as he explained, was a Mingrelian from the Caucasus. ‘We were like brothers,’ he told me. The friend had died, but ‘I am still part of his family, they treat me like a son.’ That was not his last word on the subject, however. I asked him what his fears had been during the long nights before battle. ‘I was afraid of being thought a coward,’ he answered. ‘I knew that I was a Jew, and so I had to prove that I was not afraid.’ It would be years before he knew for certain that his father had been killed at Babi Yar.