Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  9

  Despoil the Corpse

  The Red Army took more than three and a half years, from that first night in June 1941, to make good its threat to carry the war on to the fascists’ own soil. Stalin had argued for a drive against Berlin at the end of 1944, but the momentum of Bagration was really exhausted by October. The troops involved spent the last months of that autumn in Polish villages or camped among the foothills of the Carpathian mountains. As they drank to the new year, 1945, the armies that comprised Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front had yet to take Warsaw, or at least, what was left of it. The 2nd and 3rd Belorussian Fronts, led respectively by Konstantin Rokossovsky, the charismatic hero of Kursk, and the brilliant thirty-eight-year-old, Ivan Chernyakovsky, had still to close the ring around the Baltic citadel of Koenigsberg. But the sense of anticipation among their soldiers was palpable. The hour of revenge was at hand.

  Yakov Zinovievich Aronov was swept into the army from his home town of Vitebsk, in Belorussia, in May 1944. He would die near Koenigsberg just nine months later. In between, there had been little time to train him. His service began as it would end, in a storm of German fire. In June, as the battle to take Vitebsk was drawing to an end, he was assigned to an artillery unit, part of the 3rd Belorussian Front. Their path lay west, across mosquito-ridden woods and sour lowland farms. They moved so fast that they had reached Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, by early July. It was a hard and not always rewarding journey. In Lithuania, the men encountered glum resistance more often than carnations and red flags. The roads into Prussia were littered with burned-out tanks, ‘like camels on their knees’.1 By winter, other shapes loomed from the snow, the huddled silhouettes of corpses, mercifully semi-frozen. ‘We are having to fight for every metre of Russian [he meant Lithuanian] soil,’ Aronov wrote to his sister. But his letters home contained no hint of fear. ‘You cannot defeat a people who are led by the Communist Party,’ he declared. ‘You will say that I am doing agitation on you again. But no, it’s not agitation. I’m writing what I think now. If you knew how much of the German “New Order” I had seen, you would clench your teeth in fury and the tears would well up in your eyes. But you bear it. We are clenching our fists and moving unrelentingly towards the west.’2

  Aronov’s westward progress would halt for some weeks between October and the new year. The strategists needed more time to prepare the co-ordinated campaign for Berlin, a set of operations that would draw in armies from the Gulf of Finland to southern Ukraine. Elsewhere, however, the Red Army was storming ahead. By January, it had neutralized Romania, taking Bucharest on 30 August, and on 20 October, a combined Soviet and Yugoslav force had recaptured Belgrade. Budapest, the capital of the only country, Hungary, that remained allied with the Reich, was under siege. Red Army troops were spilling into Europe in their millions. The border, that daunting barrier, had been breached comprehensively, and the exotic world of capitalism was scarcely a mystery in front-line culture now. But Germany was a different matter. The prospect of exacting vengeance on real German soil was prize enough to make even the darkest winter inviting. On 12 January, the Red Army launched the campaign that would take it through Poland to Prussia and onwards to the suburbs of Berlin.

  It was rage that gave the troops their energy. Everything, from the deaths of beloved friends to the burning of cities, from the hunger of the children back at home to the fear of facing yet another hail of shells, everything – even the wealth of bourgeois homes – was blamed on the Germans. Consciously or not, too, Red Army soldiers would soon be venting anger that had built up through decades of state oppression and endemic violence. By the time they crossed into the enemy’s territory at last, in the second half of January 1945, the men’s anger could fix on almost any object. They were no deeper into Europe than East Prussia, a windswept enclave on the Baltic coast, but this was Germany, the homeland that had nurtured Russia’s tormentors, and every detail that the soldiers saw was taken as a proof of greed, corruption, arrogance. ‘We are proud that we have made it to the [fascist] beast’s lair,’ a soldier called Bezuglov wrote to his friends back at the collective farm. ‘We will take revenge, revenge for all our sufferings… It’s obvious from everything we see that Hitler robbed the whole of Europe to please his bloodstained Fritzes. They took livestock from the best farms in Europe. Their sheep are the best Russian merinos, and their shops are piled with goods from all the shops and factories of Europe. In the near future, these goods will appear in Russian shops as our trophies.’3

  The men knew that their own conduct was turning brutal. ‘I have to say that the war has changed me a lot,’ Aronov wrote. ‘War does not make people tender. On the contrary it makes them reserved, rather coarse, and very cruel. That’s a fact.’4 But he was not really apologizing, and his comrades would also show little sense of shame. ‘Our soldiers have not dealt with East Prussia any worse than the Germans did with Smolensk,’ a Russian combatant wrote home from a town inside the Prussian border. ‘We hate Germany and the Germans deeply. In one house, for example, our boys found a murdered woman and her two children. You can often see civilians lying dead in the street, too. But the Germans deserve the atrocities that they unleashed. You only have to think about Maidanek… It’s certainly cruel to have killed those children, but the cold-bloodedness of the Germans at Maidanek was a thousand times worse.’5

  The organs of political education in the Red Army encouraged this kind of thinking. Until the spring of 1945, when Stalin’s propaganda chief, G. F. Aleksandrov, finally curbed him, it was Ehrenburg, with his message of implacable hatred for the Germans as a nation, who shaped the army’s thinking about vengeance. By this stage his writing had become so sacred among the troops that printed pages of it were among the few items of newsprint that were never recycled to roll men’s cigarettes.6 The venom that poured from his pen suited the soldiers’ wartime mood, and there was no diminution in its intensity as the Red Army approached Prussian soil.7 ‘Not only divisions and armies are advancing on Berlin,’ he wrote. ‘All the trenches, graves and ravines with the corpses of the innocents are advancing on Berlin… As we advance through Pomerania, we have before our eyes the devastated, blood-drenched countryside of Belorussia… Germany, you can whirl round in circles, and howl in your deathly agony. The hour of revenge has struck!’8 Revenge was justified, revenge was almost holy. It was enough that a man’s best friend had been killed, his sister abducted, a village on his route ransacked and burned. It was enough, too, to find a German kitchen hung with gleaming pots, a cupboard stacked with china. If there were no Germans to kill, machine-gun blasts could smash their antique glass, or the Red Army’s fire consume their tidy cottages, their barns, even their stores of food.9

  The anger of exhausted men, of frightened, anxious, super-vigilant men, stressed by the war and wrung with endlessly repeated grief, would have been easy to provoke, but in the early months of their incursion on to German soil, these men were also under orders. Their new task, said the politruks, was to take revenge on behalf of their people, to become the agents of natural justice. ‘The soldier’s rage in battle must be terrible,’ a slogan of the time declared. ‘He does not merely seek to fight; he must also be the embodiment of the court of his people’s justice.’10 That last phrase turns up in hundreds of letters from the time, proof that it struck a chord among the men. ‘We’ve met our first bunch of “fraus”,’ a soldier from Vladimir wrote in February 1945. ‘What a pitiful and cowardly lot they are when they feel the blows on their own skin for a change. You can sense the crushing strength of the Red Army everywhere. The court has opened, and now it’s here. We’ll try them all on the spot, and our accusation is the same everywhere – we will get our revenge.’11 ‘I’ve already written to you that I’m in Germany,’ Slesarev told his father that winter. ‘You said that we should do the same things in Germany as the Germans did to us. The court has begun already; they are going to remember this march by our army over German territory for a long, long time.’12

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bsp; Slesarev was a communist, as was Aronov by the time he died, and tens of thousands of the other olive-clad Soviets who streamed into East Prussia from January 1945. The party they belonged to proclaimed strict morality, the virtue of the citizen who aligns himself with history, devoting his life to the creation of a better world. It portrayed human progress as a struggle between good and evil, although the epic that the soldiers understood owed more to Russian folk tales or the psalmists than to Marx. Simple moral messages were woven across the dull warp of ideology like scarlet threads. Good communists spent their whole lives fighting for self-improvement, for literacy and cleanliness, and then for the perfection of society itself. A soldier washed his neck to sluice the lice, but a communist was on a cleansing mission that would end with the whole world. Party members in the army were to be ‘true leaders of the masses, aware of their responsibility to maintain iron discipline and the high political–moral condition of the troops, so that they can bring success on the battlefield and protect the honour and fight ing glory of their unit or army section’.13

  ‘The ideological training of party members is now more necessary than ever,’ the soldiers’ paper, Red Star, confirmed in September 1944. No one could forget the undoing of those armies in Romania. The troops who faced the border were in grave peril. ‘To find his way about in these new condi tions, a communist needs a sound ideological equipment more than ever.’14 In answer, the party tried to make its recruitment procedures more rigorous. It also established new courses for the politruks. But troops were too fond, by this stage, of thinking for themselves. Frontoviki would remain their own men, scornful of soft-fleshed propagandists from the rear. When it came to brotherhood and moral purpose, too, no preaching could improve on the front-line experience itself. For Aronov, the war, the boys and the party were all bound up in one sacred idea. ‘We are from various parts of the Soviet Union,’ he wrote in November, describing his comrades in their dugout. ‘But we all have one aim: to defeat the enemy as fast as possible and get back home to the motherland. We have travelled from Vitebsk to East Prussia together. We remember all about our battles, but we try to talk of the good things, about our lives and dreams, about the good, bright future.’15

  The irony was heartbreaking then, and so it still remains. For that winter, large numbers of these heroes, the agents of the bright future, would embark on an orgy of war crimes. Historians have called them bestial and crude, as if they acted from some instinct, like animals. But their preparation for it all, the party’s careful work, included a good deal of talking and persuasion, deliberate and sophisticated flooding of their minds. As if in reaction to that, too, the men who rampaged through Prussia were giving vent to the frustrations that had built up over years of suffering; not only in the war but through decades of humiliation, of disempowerment and fear. The party that had preached at them and reproved their most human weaknesses now gave them licence, and they took it. The same party also offered them a cloak of indemnity. None of its speeches and reports, and none of the journalism that made it to the columns of Pravda, would ever mention Soviet atrocities. They simply did not exist in the language of official life. Accordingly, they did not intrude into the things that soldiers wrote. The brutal images may well have burned into the consciousness of thousands of front-line troops, but though many witnessed murder and rape, their letters home continued to describe the weather.

  Lev Kopelev, a Soviet officer and ardent party member, was an exception. He found the words to describe the horrors he saw, and he was brave enough to think about them for himself, to escape from the moral context of the times. He did not blame the men. He did not even blame the enemy, although it was the war itself that gave birth to the violence. His anger was reserved for his own party, or at least for some of the people who controlled it. Whatever the appalling record of the Nazis, it was the communist leadership, in his view, that had created the specific crisis, the humanitarian disaster, that would now unfold. ‘Millions of people had been brutalized and corrupted by the war,’ he wrote, ‘and by our propaganda – bellicose, jingoistic and false. I had believed such propaganda necessary on the eve of war, and all the more so for the war’s duration. I still believed it, but I had also come to understand that from seeds like these came poisoned fruit.’16 The bitter harvest began well before the troops crossed their own border, but it was in Prussia that it would be most abundant. The teaching that had helped to win the war now seemed to justify atrocity. ‘These young fellows,’ Kopelev added as he watched his fellow troops, ‘who had come to the front straight from school – what would they be like… having learned nothing except how to shoot, dig trenches, crawl through barbed wire, rush the enemy and toss grenades? They had become inured to death, blood and cruelty, and each new day brought them fresh evidence that the war they read about in their papers and heard about on their radios and in their political meetings was not the war they saw and experienced themselves.’17

  The first rumours of Red Army atrocities came out of Hungary. The fall of Budapest was followed by a rampage by surviving Soviet troops. As one visitor remembered, ‘It was impossible to spend a day or even an hour in Budapest without hearing of the brutalities committed by [Russian] soldiers.’18 Hungarian women and girls were locked into Soviet military quarters on the city’s Buda side and repeatedly raped; houses and cellars were ransacked for food and wine as a prelude to the multiple rape of their female occupants. There was even a story that soldiers from the Red Army had broken into the mental hospital at Nagy-Kallo and raped and killed female patients ranging in age from sixteen to sixty.19

  This was nothing like the marauding of soldiers in Romania. The cruelty in Budapest was something new. The background was a prolonged battle for the city, the last stages of which recalled the blackest days of Stalingrad.20 Eighty thousand Soviet troops were killed. It had been a frustrating, slow and deadly campaign. When the civilians of the shattered city emerged from their homes, some of them bearing bread, as well as bacon, eggs and bottles of the local wine, they found a conqueror whom gifts would not appease.21 It did not help, in Hungary as in Germany, that the two sides spoke different languages. From the earliest days of the Hungarian campaign, incomprehension had added to the Soviet wrath that brought catastrophe to local women. Survivors’ depositions tell a graphic tale. ‘Malasz Maria, married, mother of four children, has been raped by three Russian soldiers one after another in the presence of her husband… Additionally, they were robbed of 1,700 pengo… Berta Jolan, born 1923, Berta Ida, born 1925, and Berta Ilona, born 1926. These three sisters were subjected to attempted rape by three Russian soldiers after their parents had been locked up. The soldiers only decided to stop after the girls’ screams called other civilians to the scene…’22 The testimonies could go on and on.

  In East Prussia the story would be darker still. Here above all, three years of hate (and of the propaganda of hate) were to be focused into one cathartic act. As they approached the border the soldiers were entering the beast’s own lair. It was a move with overtones of violation in itself, the breaching of a boundary that no one had invited them to cross. Lev Kopelev had always admired German culture, and he spoke German well, but even he called on his men to get out of their trucks and piss on to the hated soil. ‘This is Germany,’ he said. ‘Everyone out and relieve yourselves.’23 Another group crept to the border on an active mission near Goldap, a town just south of Koenigsberg. Their politruks crawled through the ranks as they advanced, telling each rifleman to look ahead. ‘There,’ they whispered, ‘there behind the trenches, behind the barbed-wire obstacles, there is Germany.’ They added a reminder that this was not merely invasion. The Red Army could still believe itself a liberator, this time of the tens of thousands of Soviets who had been forced to work in German camps. ‘Over there,’ the political officers hissed, ‘over there in Germany our sisters are suffering in slavery… onwards to the destruction of the enemy in his own lair.’24

  At the border itself, Soviet troops would se
t a small red flag into the earth. They often gathered for another short political meeting. They heard again about the crimes that they had come to avenge, about the abduction and abuse of Russian women, the tears of bereaved mothers back at home. At Goldap, seventeen men took advantage of this occasion to apply for Communist Party membership.25 This was the regiment that would go on to surround and capture Goering’s castle, but like so many others, it was not the tough, seasoned formation that it might have been. Thousands of soldiers on the Prussian campaign, including Aronov himself, had been pressed into service from the occupied zones of Belorussia and Ukraine. Some had received no training, others lacked equipment, and few had combat experience. At Goldap, predictably, the conscripts panicked. Their mutiny had to be quelled at gunpoint. The heavy rate of casualties that followed was not surprising and nor, maybe, was the anger that exploded when the fighting was over. These men had been frightened beyond endurance, they had been forced to savour their own weakness, and most were in shock. But the party reassured them that the Germans were at fault. It positively urged them to take their revenge. ‘The nearer we get to victory,’ Stalin told everyone in February 1945, ‘the greater our vigilance must be and the fiercer our blows against the enemy.’26

  It must have been a dream-like, surreal interlude. First came the border and the lectures about vigilance and justified revenge. The troops were warned that German agents might have poisoned any food or wine they found, that women might conceal grenades, that everyone they met could be a spy. And then came the abandoned settlements, the ghost towns full of unattended loot. Goebbels had warned his people that the Soviets were an Asiatic horde, a barbarous rabble of savages bent on destruction and a primitive revenge. In answer, hundreds of thousands of Prussian civilians packed their bags and fled, braving the bitter winter cold and the threat of bombardment to form the greatest single tide of refugees that would be seen in Europe in the entire war. ‘There’s not one civilian inhabitant left in the town,’ Ermolenko noted on 23 January when he arrived in a town called Insterburg. ‘So what. We wouldn’t have eaten them.’