Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  There was nothing fortuitous or arbitrary in the Russian decision to celebrate the victory of Kursk with those first victory salvoes and fireworks. The Russian command knew that by winning the Battle of Kursk Russia had, in effect won the war.

  This is also the view taken by post-war German historians. Thus, in the opinion of Walter Goerlitz, Stalingrad was the politico-psychological turning-point of the whole war in the east, but the German defeat at Kursk and Belgorod was its military turning-point.

  [Walter Goerlitz. Paulus and Stalingrad, p. 288. (London, p. 288).]

  Chapter IX OREL: CLOSE-UP OF A PURELY RUSSIAN CITY

  UNDER THE GERMANS

  The recapture of the ancient Russian city of Orel and the complete liquidation of the Orel Salient which, for two years, had constituted a threat to Moscow, were a direct sequel of the German rout at Kursk.

  Orel was, in 1943, among the first of the larger purely Russian cities to be liberated; it was, moreover, one where (as distinct from the Don country and the Kuban) the Germans had been for nearly two years—since October 1941.

  In the second week of August I was able to travel by car from Moscow to Tula, and then to Orel. The following account, based on notes written at the time, describes what the edge of the Orel Salient looked like, and what I found inside the Salient, particularly at Orel itself.

  The thistles were as tall as a man; the thistles and the weeds formed a thick jungle, making a belt some two miles wide, and stretching west and east, and then south, nearly all the way round the Orel Salient. In this jungle, through which the dusty road from Tula now ran, there was death at every footstep. "Minen" in German, "Miny" in Russian, old and new notice-boards were saying; and, in the distance, up on the hill, under the hard blue summer sky, were distorted shapes of ruined churches and fragments of houses, and chimney-stacks. These miles of weeds and thistles had been a no-man's-land for nearly two years. Those ruins on the hill were the ruins of Mtsensk; two old women and four cats were the only living creatures the Russians had found there when the Germans pulled out on July 20. Before departing they had blown up or set fire to everything—churches and houses and peasant cottages and all. In the middle of last century Leskov's—and

  Shostakovich's—"Lady Macbeth" had lived in this town; it was strange to think that this drama of blood and passion should have taken place in a town now smelling of blood

  shed for such different reasons.

  We drove through the jungle up to Mtsensk. No, one small brick house had somehow survived. "Feeding Point", a notice outside said. "Here you can receive your dry ration, breakfast, lunch and dinner." And, beside it, was another notice: "The enemy has destroyed and looted this town, and driven away its inhabitants; they are crying for revenge."

  Achtung, Minen. Achtung, Minen... "They're the devil," said the colonel who met us at Mtsensk. "Along only 100 yards just off this road we dug up 650. There was very tough fighting round here. German Jaeger—tough troops, very good troops, can't deny them that. But the mines are bad, very bad. Every damned day something happens. Yesterday a colonel came down this road on horseback; the horse kicked an anti-personnel mine—and there you are: horse and colonel both phut." He talked of new delayed-action mines found in German dugouts. Contraptions in which the acid eats through the metal; some take two months to blow up. And there were also booby-traps, plenty of them. These mines and

  booby-traps had become one of the Germans' most important weapons in 1943. and were

  the Russian soldiers' greatest worry and chief topic of conversation.

  [Many mines—both Russian and German—made in 1943, were cased in wood and so

  were particularly hard to detect.]

  Mines had caused terrible casualties to the Russians in the Orel fighting, and were going to cause many more at Kharkov and elsewhere. As we talked to the colonel, a horse-cart drove past and in it were two moaning soldiers, with blood streaming from their heads; they had just been blown up on a mine...

  In the last few days, only about 200 people had come back to Mtsensk, out of its original population of 20,000. These two hundred had been hiding somewhere in the countryside.

  Along the road to Orel, with fields and beautiful woods on either side, there were no villages anywhere, and only notice-boards among the rubble giving the name the village had had. The German "desert zone" had now spread all the way from Rzhev and Viazma to Orel.

  Orel, not so long ago a pleasant provincial backwater, still full of Turgeniev memories and associations, was badly shattered. More than half the town was destroyed, and some of the ruins were still smoking. The bridges over the Oka had been blown up, but a

  temporary wooden bridge had already been built, and army lorries were driving west, and ambulances were coming in from Karachev— thirty miles further west—where there was

  heavy fighting.

  How had Orel lived through nearly two years of German occupation? Of 114,000 people

  now only 30,000 were there. Many had been murdered; many had been hanged in the

  public square—that very square where there were now new graves of the first Russian

  tank crew that had broken into Orel, and also of General Gurtiev, of Stalingrad fame, who was killed here the morning the Russians fought their way into the city. Altogether, 12,000 people were said to have been murdered, and about twice as many deported to

  Germany. But there were also many thousands who had joined the partisans in the forests round Orel and Briansk—for this (especially the Briansk area) was active partisan

  country.

  The Germans had appointed a Russian burgomaster, who had now fled with them; and

  they had brought to the Orel countryside some former Russian landowners or landowners'

  sons—White Guardists they called them. But whether they got their former estates back was not quite clear. In most places, the kolkhozes had not been dissolved. A little private enterprise was encouraged—but goods were so short that it never came to anything. True, I found in a pile of junk in a street a broken bottle, and on it a label saying first in Russian and then in German: "Fruchtwasser-Fabrik, NOS-DRUNOW UND Co., Orel, Moskauer

  Str. 6." It would have been interesting to talk to Nosdrunow, the Mr Schweppes of German Orel; but he was not to be found.

  The winter of 1941-2 had been the hardest of all. People had died by the hundred of

  starvation. Later, they began to receive 7 ounces of bread a day if they worked for the Germans in one way or another. And then there was all the horror of the Russian war

  prisoners' camp; and here I first learned at first hand of the German policy towards Russian war prisoners, as it changed after Stalingrad. Until then, they were allowed to die like flies; after that they were being blackmailed or flattered into joining the Vlasov Army.

  Stiff, pop-eyed, blue-eyed General Sobennikov, now chief of the Garrison of Orel, had taken part in the great July offensive and now talked about it. By July 15, after three days'

  heavy fighting, the Russians had broken through the main lines of the German defences round the Orel salient. There had never been, he said, such a heavy concentration of Russian guns as against these defences; in many places the fire-power was ten times

  heavier than at Verdun. The German minefields were so thick and widespread that as

  many mines as possible had to be blown up by the super-barrage, in order to reduce

  Russian casualties in the subsequent break-through. By July 20, the Germans tried to stop the Russian advance by throwing in hundreds of planes; and it was a job for the Russian anti-aircraft guns and fighters to deal with them. In the countless air-battles there were very heavy casualties on both sides. Many French airmen were killed, too, during those days.

  How important it was for the Germans to hold Orel, he said, could be seen from the order of General von Schmidt (since replaced by General Model) saying that Orel must be held to the bitter end.

  "And it certainly was," said the General. "The
German troops were tough; nearly all held out and only very few surrendered. None of the prisoners we took were older than thirty

  —picked troops, healthy, good troops; when Comrade Ehrenburg now talks about the

  German army being composed of gouty old men suffering from piles, he is talking

  through his hat. Yes, good troops, though morally damaged, all the same. Kursk and the rest has had a demoralising effect on them. Prisoners also told us that the fall of

  Mussolini had made a deep impression on the German soldiers—though some continued

  to believe their officers' stories that Mussolini was a very sick man."

  Then he told the complicated story of how Orel has been almost completely surrounded by August 3, and how, finally, in the early hours of August 5, the Russians broke into Orel.

  Our broadcasting armoured car, playing the International and The Holy War and

  The Little Blue Scarf, was among the first to break into the city; it had a tremendous effect on the population, who poured into the streets, even though the fighting was still going on. The Germans were still using mobile guns and tanks against us, and their tommy-gunners in the attics also bothered us a great deal. General Gurtiev

  was killed by one of them. Delayed action mines were still exploding, and in the

  midst of all this din, the loud-speaker was bellowing its patriotic songs. It was not till the next day that the tommygunners were all wiped out, though a few may still be in hiding. And there may still be hundreds of delayed-action mines at Orel, though

  we've already picked up 80,000 in the area. That's why no troops are stationed in Orel yet...

  Yes, I drove into Orel on the morning of the 5th. You can imagine the dawn, and the houses around still blazing, and our guns and tanks driving into town, covered with flowers, and the loud-speaker bellowing The Holy War, and old women and children running among the soldiers, and pressing flowers into their hands and kissing them.

  There was still some firing going on. But I remember how an old woman stood at

  the corner of Pushkin Street, and she was making the sign of the Cross, and tears were rolling down her wrinkled face. And another elderly woman, well-educated

  judging by her speech, ran towards me and gave me flowers, and threw her arms

  round my neck, and talked, and talked and talked; through the din I couldn't hear what she was saying, except that it was about her son who was in the Red Army.

  Now there's heavy fighting going on at Karachev. We have some British and

  American tanks there, but not many. The German air force is again very active,

  making a thousand sorties a day. What they are fighting is much more than a

  rearguard action, now that we are pushing on to the Dnieper.

  *

  Orel had been liberated only five days before, but already the Soviet authorities were fully established here. Most public buildings had been destroyed, but in a small house in a side street, Comrade M. P. Romashov, Partisan chief of the area, and Hero of the Soviet Union, was installed as president of the Provincial Executive Committee. He had many stories to tell of partisan warfare, of battles with punitive expeditions, and of partisan raids on columns of civilians who were being driven west. The partisans would kill the German escort, and the civilians would then scatter through the forests.

  A check-up was going on among civilians at Orel, and party members especially had to account for their behaviour during the twenty months of occupation. Orel had been

  captured on October 2, 1941 by Guderian's tanks with such suddenness that many people had been trapped. On Romashov's desk I saw a note, written in an illiterate hand by a woman who said that she—a member of the Communist Party—and her two children had

  been trapped here on October 2, and that, to keep herself and her children alive, she had had to take a job as a cleaner at a German office.

  They looked, from a distance, like soft greenish-brown rag dolls lying over the parapet of a trench from which they had been exhumed. Two Russian officials were sorting out

  skulls, some with bullet-holes at the back, others without. From the trench came a

  pungent mouldy stench. The rag dolls were bodies dug from trenches outside the large brick building of Orel Prison. Two hundred had been exhumed, but, judging from the

  length and depth of the trenches, there were at least 5,000 more. Some of these "samples"

  were women, but most were men; half of them were Russian war prisoners who had died

  of starvation or various diseases; the rest were soldiers and civilians who had been shot through the back of the skull. Many of them had been killed at 10 a.m. on Tuesdays or at 10 a.m. on Fridays; methodically, the Gestapo firing squads would visit the prison twice a week. Besides these, many others had been murdered at Orel; some had been publicly

  hanged as "partisans" in the main square.

  *

  One day at Orel I went to a charming old-time house, with classical pillars and an

  overgrown garden, which had once belonged to a relative of Turgeniev's. Turgeniev

  himself had often lived here, and this was obviously, in his mind, the scene of The Nest of Gentlefolk. The place could have scarcely changed since the 1840's, when the good and saintly Liza decided, in this very house, to retire to a convent since happiness in this world had been denied her.

  The house had been the Turgeniev Museum, and I talked to the old man who was still in charge. He had been in the Gestapo prison for three months, and had heard the volleys on those Tuesday and Friday mornings. Both his assistants at the Museum had been shot as

  "communist suspects".

  The old man—whose name was Fomin—spoke of the fearful famine in Orel. For a long

  time no food at all, not even the tiny ration of bread, had been given to the people. As you went along the streets in the winter of 1941-2, you would stumble over people who had collapsed and died. That winter, with great difficulty, he and his wife had bartered what possessions they had for some potatoes and beetroot. What later helped people to survive was their vegetable gardens.

  Ten thousand books of the Turgeniev Library, he said, had been taken away by the

  Germans and many other exhibits—Turgeniev's own shotgun, for instance—had simply

  been looted. However, he said, thank God, the house had survived. Turgeniev's country house, at Spas Lutovino, between Orel and Mtsensk, had been burned down.

  One night at the gorsoviet (town soviet), with a starry sky outside and a red glow of burning villages in the west, Karachev way, I met a strangely assorted pair—a local

  doctor and a local priest.

  Dr Protopopov who, with his little beard and pince-nez, looked like something out of Chekhov, told how in spite of everything, the Germans allowed him to attend to the sick and wounded Russian war prisoners. It was a nightmarish story of starvation and neglect, which only he and a few devoted assistants had tried to remedy in a small way, by

  collecting food from the local population—even though they had less than nothing to

  spare—and by smuggling it into the hospital. Some of the severely ill prisoners, were moved by the Germans in horse-sleighs, at the height of winter, to another hospital, many miles away. The Russian staff had protested in vain, and had wrapped as many of the

  men as possible in blankets. But nearly half of them died during the journey. That other

  "hospital", from what he had heard, was little better than a death-camp, anyway.

  The priest was a grubby old man of seventy-two, very deaf, with a white beard and a

  silver chain and cross, who said that if many Russians worked for the Germans, it was only because they would have died of hunger otherwise. He was allowed to visit the

  Russian war prisoners; they were being starved; on some days, twenty or thirty or forty would die. But after Stalingrad the Germans had begun to feed them a little better; and then started urging them to join the Russian Liberation A
rmy.

  He said that, up to a point, the Germans had encouraged the churches: it was part of their anti-communist policy. But in reality it was the churches which had unofficially

  organised Russian "mutual aid circles" to help the poorest people and also to do what they could for the war prisoners. Father Ivan said that "in view of the circumstances", he had ceased to be a village priest in 1929, and when the Germans came he thought he

  could help the Russian cause by serving in a church again. "Around me," he said, "there gathered a nucleus of believers, and we were given a church. I must say that, under the Germans, the churches flourished in Orel; and they became—that's what the Germans

  didn't expect—active centres of Russian national consciousness." But the man who supervised the churches for the German command was not, as one would have expected,

  a bishop, but a civilian functionary called Konstantinov, a "white" Russian; the churches were thus deprived of all autonomy, and even the rubber stamp of each church was

  locked up in Konstantinov's desk—a fact Father Ivan thought particularly outrageous. His immediate senior was Father Kutepov, who had a much larger church; and Father

  Kutepov told him never to mention the Metropolitan Sergius of Moscow, and to pray for Metropolitan Serafim, who was in Berlin and was approved by the Germans.

  "I didn't like that," said Father Ivan, "and I avoided mentioning either. Yes, the churches were crowded—and there were five of them at Orel. Sometimes German soldiers—five

  or ten at a time—would come to our service, and they behaved very well, I must say."

  Then the old man told the strange story of how on Easter Night in 1942 and again in 1943

  a few hundred war prisoners were allowed to come to church.

  "When our people were told that the war prisoners would attend service, there was great rejoicing, and they swarmed to the church bringing the prisoners gifts... It was so

  wonderful to see our poor war prisoners come to church on Holy Easter Night. They were very sad, but there was great happiness shining in their eyes as they saw all the love and affection the people of Orel were showing them."