Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  The man was a master of self-deception. His army would prove capable of every kind of crime. But it was also poised to suffer yet more violence and strain. This was a time of extremes, of contrasts, and of the daily likelihood of injury or death. The town of Insterburg itself would soon be renamed Chernyakovsk as a memorial to the young general who died in the battle for Koenigsberg. That January, the place was wreathed in flame. Its castle and elegant, spired churches loomed out of the layers of dusty, acrid smoke like sinister bones. Corpses, the bodies of humans and of horses, lay in the streets beside abandoned trucks and burned-out furniture. Smoke hung over the wrecks. The stores, however, had yet to be destroyed. ‘They have butter, honey, jam, wine and various kinds of brandy,’ Ermolenko noted happily. ‘The civilians have left their houses in order. Our radio team has taken a room on the first floor. In the corner is a piano, two sofas, pretty chairs and armchairs, cupboards, flowers. In a German kitchen, on German crockery, we made a fantastic dinner.’27

  A column of Soviet troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front arriving in an East Prussian city, 24 January 1945

  Aronov was in Insterburg that January as well. His last letter to his sister was a postcard, a German one, a picture of the cathedral and its delightful square. The NKVD would soon stop soldiers from making use of bourgeois images like this, but he would never need to care. ‘Hello, dear sister,’ he wrote. ‘Greetings from Insterburg. I am alive and well and send you this with best wishes. I kiss you.’28 Some time later, for these days the field post was getting held up on the railways by all the crates of German plunder, his sister would receive another letter. ‘The person who is writing to you is an unknown soldier,’ she read. He was writing from hospital, two days after receiving a grave wound, but he had made the effort to get paper and a pencil as soon as he was able to sit up. ‘Perhaps someone has already told you the sad news,’ he wrote, ‘but as Yasha’s best friend I could not keep to myself, or from you, the news of his death. Your brother and I were together from 10 May 1944 until the end of his army life. How many sorrows and hardships we bore together! And now, right on the outskirts of Koenigsberg, we have been cut apart. I cannot write any more.’29

  The close relationships between the men (the soldier who wrote that letter to Aronov’s sister would soon marry her, as if the bond to his best friend could never break) in part explain what happened next, for much of the Red Army’s terrible revenge was enacted in gangs. The relations that mattered here were not between the men and their German victims, but between the men and their mates, and even between the men and their shared memories of horror. The victims themselves scarcely seemed to feature in their minds as people. ‘They do not speak a word of Russian,’ a soldier wrote to a friend in February 1945, ‘but that makes it easier. You don’t have to persuade them. You just point a Nagan and tell them to lie down. Then you do your stuff and go away.’30 The war had inured men like this to violence, but what was happening was far more than an outpouring of rage. The events in Prussia involved the soldiers’ hopes and passions as well as their hate. The passion in question was largely their love for each other, and also their grief – undrownable despite oceans of wine and schnapps – for all the people and the chances they had lost.31 The objects of the hate, whose corpses would soon litter the roads that led to the west, were German women and girls.

  Among the Soviet troops who overtook the tide of Prussian refugees as it poured out of Insterburg and Goldap was a young officer called Leonid Rabichev. Decades later, this man would find the strength to write about the atrocity he witnessed. ‘Women, mothers and their children lie to the right and left along the route,’ he wrote, ‘and in front of each of them stands a raucous armada of men with their trousers down.’ He might have added that the baying crowd included adolescent boys, for whom this gruesome ritual amounted to the first sexual experience of their lives. ‘The women who are bleeding or losing consciousness get shoved to one side,’ Rabichev continued, ‘and our men shoot the ones who try to save their children.’ Meanwhile, a group of ‘grinning’ officers stood nearby, one of whom was ‘directing – no, he was regulating – it all. This was to make sure that every soldier without exception would take part.’32

  That night, Rabichev and his men were sent to sleep in an abandoned German shelter. Every room contained bodies: the corpses of children, of old men, and of women who had evidently suffered serial rape before their deaths. ‘We were so tired,’ Rabichev wrote, ‘that we lay down on the ground between them and fell asleep.’33 Mere corpses, after all, were barely shocking any more. When they came upon another building and found the bodies of women who had been raped and then mutilated one by one, each with an empty wine bottle in their vaginas, Rabichev’s men were less composed.34 The problem was that sympathy for enemy females was actively discouraged; group pressures also worked to bind the men together in their crime. On another occasion, when Rabichev was invited to select a German girl from among a group of terrified captives, his first fear was that his own men might take him for a coward if he refused to accept. Worse, perhaps, they might think that he was impotent.35

  The first atrocity that Lev Kopelev would witness was the burning of a Prussian town. There was no military reason for it. Valuable food and other products – blankets, clothing, even medicines – were all consumed in the fire. It was this kind of profligacy, the waste of resources, that would eventually bring the great rampage across Prussia to an end. The interests of the war, as Rokossovsky would insist, called for more discipline. But military thinking seemed to have been suspended in those first wild hours; or rather, a new tactic had become widespread. The word, Kopelev observed, is ‘smash, burn, have your revenge’. Many of his fellow officers were shocked, especially at the wanton waste, but the political officer in charge dismissed the incident. ‘The Fritzes have plundered all over the world,’ he said. ‘That’s why they’ve got so much. They burned down everything in our country, and now we’re doing the same in theirs. We don’t have to feel sorry for them.’36 Kopelev’s own concern would soon be dubbed ‘bourgeois humanitarianism’, and within a few weeks of his first complaint he was arrested for it.

  There was nothing bourgeois or humanitarian about most Soviet troops in those cold days. ‘In the few German areas that have been occupied by the Red Army,’ German intelligence reported, ‘the behaviour of the soldiers is exactly as predicted earlier in the war – in most cases it is horrifying. Brutish killings, rapes of young women and girls as well as senseless destruction are taking place on a daily basis.’ A prisoner of war told his German captors that a specific order from Stalin had decreed all this by stating that revenge should be taken for German atrocities. ‘A confirmation of the Stalin order,’ the author observed, ‘is not available yet.’37 It would not be, for nothing as specific as an order to rape and destroy was ever issued. Indeed, all through these months the penalty for rape and looting, technically at least, was death on the spot,38 but the men read licence into every order they received to take revenge. ‘Red Army soldier!’ a poster of the time declared. ‘You are now on German soil. The hour of revenge has struck!’39 A packet of the men’s letters, intercepted by German intelligence in February 1945, required no editing to make the point. ‘Happy is the heart as you drive through a burning German town,’ wrote one man to his parents. ‘We are taking revenge for everything, and our revenge is just. Fire for fire, blood for blood, death for death.’40

  ‘It was evening when we drove into Neidenburg,’ Kopelev wrote. It was a small town, meaner than Insterburg, and like all the others it was almost deserted. The Red Army had torched the place. Through the smoke, the officer made out the body of a dead old woman. ‘Her dress was ripped,’ he saw, and ‘a telephone receiver reposed between her scrawny thighs. They had apparently tried to ram it into her vagina.’ The pretext was that she could easily have been a spy. ‘They got her by the telephone booth,’ one of the men explained. ‘Why fool around?’41 It was the first of several murders he would witness in t
hat cursed place. Then came Allenstein, and more fire, more death. Near the post office, he met a woman with a bandaged head, clutching the hand of a young girl with blond pigtails. Both had been crying, and the child’s legs were stained with blood. ‘The soldiers kicked us out of our house,’ she told the Russian officer. ‘They beat us, they raped us. My daughter is only thirteen. Two of them did it to her. And many of them to me.’ She wanted him to help her find her little boy. Another woman begged Kopelev to shoot her.42

  The violence was on a scale that no one could have overlooked, and yet it disappeared from Soviet consciousness. Witnesses like Kopelev were soon outcast, the German victims dismissed or silenced. It would take foreign observers, historians especially, to rediscover it, collect the testimonies and to describe how, in some East Prussian towns, almost all the women were raped. ‘The screams of help from the tortured,’ one witness remembered, ‘could be heard day and night.’43 It did not matter, in this polyglot, transition zone, if the women were Germans or Poles and thereby Russia’s allies. It did not matter, either, if the women were young or old, for the women themselves were not the main object.44 The victims of the gang rapes were just meat, embodiments of Germany, all-purpose Frauen, recipients for Soviet and individual revenge. Many soldiers, purportedly, found them ‘disgusting’.45

  Rape was not the only crime that Soviet soldiers would commit on their sweep through Prussia. Towns were burned, officials murdered, and columns of refugees were strafed and shelled as they fled west towards Berlin.46 But of the violent crimes, rape was the most prevalent. One reason was that women far outnumbered men among German civilians, and probably in the entire surviving population, since so few soldiers were left. However, other pressures were at work as well. Rape is a common instrument of war, a chillingly familiar accompaniment to conquest and military occupation.47 The atrocities in East Prussia could be compared to others, such as those in Bosnia or Bangladesh. But this was not just any war, nor fascism just any system. Red Army soldiers on Prussian soil felt they were dealing with an enemy people, a people that would never rest until it had destroyed their world. ‘It’s absolutely clear,’ Bezuglov’s letter to his friends ended, ‘that if we don’t really scare them now, there will be no way of avoiding another war in future.’48 In his own memoir, Rabichev speculates that Stalin might informally have encouraged Chernyakovsky to drive his men to commit what a later generation would describe as ethnic cleansing.49 The murders around Koenigsberg, after all, would clear the way for future Soviet settlement, and rape ensured a generation of fresh Soviet stock.

  It would certainly be convenient, now, to lay the blame for this war crime on Stalin and his leadership. As if in echo of post-war German debates on the same theme, the Russian heirs of this atrocity will one day have to grapple with the question of individual responsibility in conditions of totalitarian rule.50 There is no doubt that the men’s actions were encouraged, if not orchestrated, from Moscow. Propaganda played an active part in shaping their perceptions of the enemy and in justifying vengeance. The Sovinformburo stoked the collective rage with manufactured images that could score themselves so deeply into a man’s mind that he came to think of them as part of his own experience. The universality of the men’s own tales is evidence of this. As Atina Grossman observed in her reflections on the rapes, ‘Again and again in German recollections of what Russian occupiers told them, the vengeful memory summoned was not a parallel violation by a German raping a Russian woman, but of a horror on a different order: it was the image of a German soldier swinging a baby, torn from its mother’s arms, against a wall – the mother screams, the baby’s brains splatter against the wall, the soldier laughs.’51

  That said, the men had motives of their own. They were not passive, and despite the power of their state, they were not helpless. If many acted in a kind of dream, it was in part because the majority, for understandable reasons, chose to use alcohol to numb their senses. ‘It is nearly impossible not to be drinking,’ a soldier wrote home in February. ‘What I am going through is indescribable; when I am drunk everything is easier.’52 ‘A drunken Russian is a wholly different person than the sober one,’ a German writer noted at the time. ‘He loses all perspective, falls into a fully wild mood, is covetous, brutal, bloodthirsty.’53 ‘Alcohol makes men lecherous,’ the anonymous author of a diary of the rapes observed. ‘It increases considerably their sexual desire (though not their potency, as it has been my lot to learn). I am convinced that had the Russians not found much alcohol here, there would not have been half the number of rapes. These Ivans are not Casanovas. To commit acts of sexual aggression they have to work themselves up artificially, drown their inhibitions.’54 Sometimes the result was a binge that could leave scores of victims in its wake. Sometimes it was the alcohol that won. Gabriel Temkin was among the many troops who sampled the wines of Tokay in Hungary. The sweet liquor was greatly, and in this case fatally, to the Russian taste. ‘When I entered a huge wine cellar with rows of tall, black oak barrels I saw an incredible scene,’ the old soldier recalled. ‘The floor was knee-deep in wine, and floating in it lay three drowned soldiers. They had used their sub-machine guns to make holes in the barrels as “the easiest way” to fill up their mess tins, and then, having tasted it, evidently could not stop drinking and became so intoxicated that they drowned in it.’55

  Those who were not entirely drunk might well have explained their actions in terms of pent-up lust. Later on, certainly, some Russian troops treated German women as legitimate spoils of war, selecting the prettiest ones whenever they had the chance to choose.56 The anonymous author of the Berlin diary, watching from her basement room, observed that ‘they prefer the fat ones. Fat equals beauty because it’s more female, more distinct from the male body.’ It was a taste that she deemed ‘primitive’, although she took some pleasure in the thought that Berliners who had stolen or hoarded food were paying for their anti-social acts.57 But whether the troops picked their prey or not, purely sexual desire was not their main motive in Prussia. In those first vicious weeks, the rapes were both systematic and extraordinarily savage.

  There would have been reason enough for lust. Unlike the Germans (who made use of captured Soviet women for the purpose), the Soviets did not have field brothels near the front. Sex, in official terms, scarcely existed. Gabriel Temkin recalled how one regiment reacted when it found a cache of German condoms. ‘They blew them up,’ he wrote, ‘and the soldiers played with them like balloons.’58 The whole culture of party and motherland was dedicated to struggle and sacrifice. Women were chaste, waiting at home, while men – in the theory, at least – thought only of their duty. If they fought bravely and kept up their leisure reading of Lenin and Marx, there would be no time left for soldiers’ erotic selves.

  This sterile blandness was not confined to the army and it began long before the war. Lenin himself had taken a dim view of lust, preferring healthy exercise and long sessions with piles of books. The flowering of sexual licence that had accompanied the revolution, the silver age of the erotic, was crushed under the boots and hammers of Stalinist collectivism. Sexual passion was for the bourgeoisie (and, privately, for members of the Bolshevik élite). Good workers gave their energy to long shifts at the bench, and when they had finished turning out ball bearings, they went to a meeting or caught up with Pravda. ‘Dialogue in a Soviet picture,’ the satirist Ilya Ilf wrote in his diary. ‘Love is the most awful vice.’ Even the Venus de Milo was deemed ‘pornographic’.59 Licence gave way to ever-stricter laws about divorce, abortion and the family. Meanwhile, more and more people found themselves sharing their living space. Often they shared one room with children, who slept behind curtains or on wooden shelves, but sometimes they also shared with other adults, other entire families. If the good worker of Soviet iconography has a stern expression, his chiselled features lacking irony or humour, it may just be because he seldom got the chance to waste an afternoon in bed.60

  Like almost every other human pleasure in the land
of brotherhood, sex was something that went underground. The public emphasis on strict morality and sheer hard work pushed it into the darkness, to a twilight hazed by sweat, tobacco and whatever vodka could be found. The gap between ideal and reality was nowhere more apparent than among the soldiers at the front. It was a male world, a world of makhorka, cheap spirit, and decaying boots. The nearest many soldiers got to the women they cared about was in a letter or perhaps in the stories that they sometimes told. ‘My army friend is telling us about his life,’ Aronov wrote one evening. ‘It’s not the first time he’s done that. Right now he’s got to the bit where he falls in love for the first time.’61 His pre-war life had faded into fantasy, and like all dreams, it could be better than the truth. ‘After the war,’ another man told his friends, ‘I’m going to go to the south somewhere, and I’m going to teach maths and physics in a girls’ boarding school, somewhere where the rules are that no girl can go out on the street. I’ll use all my military experience.’62 The longing was there, and the desire for escape, for the feminine, but these feelings were miles away from gang rape and a bayonet in the belly.

  Whatever lust they may have felt, large numbers of the men had stronger reasons for resenting and even hating representatives of the female sex. All through the war, they had been getting sad letters from home. Some were tales of hunger, others told of rape and death, but many were letters of farewell. Families were unravelling, new lives asserting themselves in separate worlds. The strain between soldier and family was part of the general gulf between combatants and civilians. It was also a symptom of the overpowering maleness of army life. Women were objects of suspicion, aliens, in a misogynistic world. The soldiers’ letters became more suspicious of women, and also more repressive, with the passing years. ‘We fought for our country from the very first days,’ a Red Army man wrote to Kalinin, the Soviet president, at this time. ‘Some of us have been wounded several times, but we did not begrudge our very lives for our motherland and families. And now our complaint is that some women are betraying us… and our children are losing their fathers… We must take severe legal measures against these women-betrayers for their treachery and the insult to their husbands.’63 The letter is one among hundreds.