“Configuration?” Timoshenko repeated.
“The disposition of our various units,” said Bykov, realizing that Timoshenko was irritated by the word “configuration.” “The enemy, however, then began to pressure an adjacent sector, achieving at two points a tactical success that could have led to the encirclement of the army’s right wing. Chistyakov therefore ordered a withdrawal to a new defensive line, thus forcing our army to retreat.”
“So it was Chistyakov who made us retreat, was it?” said Timoshenko with a smile. “And there was I thinking it had been the enemy. But how are things going further south?”
“The front line has been stabilized, but it seems as if the enemy, after encountering strong resistance and suffering significant losses, is now concentrating his forces to the north.” Bykov then began listing dates, battlefronts and the names of towns and villages. Everything he said bore witness to his military experience and ability to cross-check and organize information—yet his report did not satisfy his listeners. The extraordinary difficulty of their position made them want to hear something equally extraordinary. To Novikov it seemed that this was the time for them to be discussing the strategy of swift, fluid, highly mobile warfare he had advocated in his memorandum.
Glancing every now and then at Timoshenko, he kept wondering, “Has he read my memo?”
After the report, Timoshenko asked a few questions. Several generals spoke about mistakes they had made. There was talk about how things might turn out on the new defensive lines, on the approaches to the Don.
There was talk about a commander’s responsibilities towards the commander-in-chief—for a retreat from an agreed line of defence, for the loss of valuable ordnance, for abandoning a bridge to the enemy instead of blowing it up. This kind of responsibility—the responsibility of one commander before another—was discussed openly. Deep down, however, everyone felt that what mattered now was another, still more onerous responsibility: that of a son before his mother, of a soldier before his conscience and his people.
“We’ve been trapped by our own strongpoints, by our fortified zones,” said the artillery general. Everyone looked at him, then at Marshal Timoshenko.
“Say more,” said Timoshenko, turning towards him.
“We need mobility!” said the artillery general, his face flushing. “We need freedom of manoeuvre. As for positional warfare, look where it’s got us.” He flung out his hands. “We simply don’t have an intact front line any longer.”
“Freedom of manoeuvre all the way from Chuguev to Kalach!” said Bykov, smiling sceptically.
“Yes!” said Timoshenko. “From the Donets to the Don. There’s no denying it. Warfare today is mobile warfare!”
Novikov’s palms were tingling. The artillery general had given voice to his most cherished dream. But neither he, nor Timoshenko, nor anyone else at this meeting had any conception of what the next months would bring, of the events that time was already beginning to shape, if only in secret.
The city of Stalingrad, where even the most conservative commanders had finally come to recognize the absolute triumph of mobile warfare, was to become the theatre for months of positional warfare such as the world had never seen—a battle more grinding, more relentless than Thermopylae or even the Siege of Troy.
With some irritation, Timoshenko said, “We’re talking a lot about tactics. What matters is initiative. Whoever holds the initiative turns out to have the right tactics.”
Novikov immediately wondered if he had been like a novice chess player watching a master and desperately, overexcitedly wanting to give him advice. Had he only been imagining he could see the decisive move? Had he, perhaps, failed to realize that the master had considered this move long ago—and dismissed it for good reason?
“Everything comes down to one thing,” said Timoshenko. “Each of us must carry out his duty in the position assigned to us by the Supreme Command.”
The general in charge of transport had been speaking, but Timoshenko had interrupted him. Timoshenko now asked this general to continue.
“I wanted to say a few words about repairs to trucks and the availability of spare parts,” the general began. He felt awkward, concerned that, after a discussion of such important matters, his report would appear banal.
Timoshenko turned towards him, listening attentively.
At other times, when he was the one initiating events, Timoshenko could be harsh and impatient, only too aware of his subordinates’ incompetence, lazy thinking and readiness to talk too much. Now too he was probably well aware of their failings, but at present it was the enemy who held the initiative and the last thing he wanted was to criticize. He had no wish to blame the swiftness of the Soviet retreat on the failings of his subordinates.
When the meeting was over and the generals all put their papers together, closed their files and got to their feet, the commander-in-chief went up to each of them in turn to shake his hand. His calm, broad face was quivering. It was as if he were struggling against something alarming, something that had suddenly burnt him inside.
The generals’ drivers woke with a jolt and started their engines. Like a series of gunshots, car doors slammed shut. The dark and deserted street filled with noise and light—with the roar of engines and the blue beams of headlamps—then swiftly returned to darkness and silence. The road and the walls of the buildings still gave off the warmth accumulated during the day, but now and again there was a cool breath from the Volga.
Clicking his heels against the pavement so as not to arouse the suspicions of a patrol, Novikov made his way back to his billet.
Unexpectedly, he found himself thinking of Zhenya. In spite of everything, deep in his heart lay an expectation of something good, of happiness. He had no idea where this obstinate, irrational certainty of happiness had sprung from.
It seemed to be the intensity of his own thoughts that was making it hard to breathe, making the streets feel hot and stifling.
The following morning, in the canteen, Cheprak said quietly to Novikov, “What I told you yesterday’s been confirmed. A new Front has been created. The C-in-C flew off to Moscow at dawn, by Douglas.”60
“Oh!” said Novikov. “In that case I’ll apply again to be transferred to a combat unit. To the front line.”
“That’ll be the end of you,” said Cheprak. He sounded calm and serious.
“What do you mean?” Novikov replied with a laugh. “I also intend to get married.”
Hearing his own words, which were meant to sound like a little joke, he blushed.
26
THE SOUTHWESTERN Front’s long retreat, from Valuiki to Stalingrad, was now over.
People say that on his first day in Stalingrad, Marshal Timoshenko bathed in the Volga, washing away the dust of this long, agonizing retreat. Thick dust had penetrated men’s veins and coated their hearts. The task entrusted to Timoshenko—to save his men and equipment from the Germans—had been sad and painful.61
The enemy had done everything they could to turn a retreat into a rout. There had been times when the front line had fragmented, when German tanks had broken through to the Soviet rear. There had been times when German tank columns and Soviet columns of trucks carrying people, arms and equipment had moved within sight of each other, in clouds of dust, with no shots being fired, along parallel roads. The same had happened in June 1941, around Kobrin, Beroza-Kartuzka and Slutsk. It had also happened in July 1941 on the Lvov highway, when German tanks moving from Rovno to Novograd-Volynsky, Zhitomir and Korostyshev overtook columns of Soviet troops retreating towards the Dnieper.
Marshal Timoshenko saved many divisions from encirclement, getting them safely across the Don. This success, however, was achieved at a cost that went largely unnoticed. Neither the main commissariat, nor the medical section, nor the cadres section was able to register that the tens of thousands of soldiers who crossed the Don had lost all faith in themselves and their future. It was impossible to appreciate the seriousness of this loss
unless you had seen with your own eyes those vast columns of worn-out men marching east, day and night.
Marshal Timoshenko carried out the task entrusted to him. And on reaching Stalingrad, he spent several hours down by the Volga. He and his deputies and adjutants stood in the river, up to their waists in the flowing water, letting out little moans and grunts as they soaped their shaven heads and red necks.
Thousands of other Red Army soldiers did the same. They went carefully down the steep slope towards the water. They saw the sand in front of them shining with quartz grains and fragments of mother-of-pearl. Sometimes they winced as they walked over sharp, prickly blocks of sandstone that had fallen from the cliff.
The breath of the river touched their inflamed eyelids. Slowly and carefully they took off their boots. Many of these men had marched all the way from the Donets and their feet hurt badly; even a faint gust of wind could make the pain worse. They unwound their foot cloths as delicately as if they were bandages.
The more fortunate washed with slivers of soap; the less fortunate rubbed their skin with handfuls of sand or scratched at it with their fingernails.
Blue and black clouds of dust and dirt spread through the water. Like their commanders, the men moaned with pleasure as they peeled off a thick, ingrained crust as dry and abrasive as sandpaper.
Newly washed tunics and underwear were spread out to dry in the sun, protected by small yellow stones from the merry Volga breeze that wanted to snatch them up and toss them back into the water.
We do not know Marshal Timoshenko’s thoughts. We do not know whether he, or any of these thousands of men throwing water over themselves, understood that they were performing a symbolic ritual.
This mass baptism, however, was a fateful moment for Russia. This mass baptism before the terrible battle for freedom on the high cliffs of the west bank of the Volga may have been as fateful a moment in the country’s history as the mass baptism carried out in Kiev a thousand years earlier, on the banks of the Dnieper.
When they had finished washing, the men sat on the shore, beneath the steep cliff, and looked at the dismal, sandy semi-desert stretching beyond the far bank. Whoever they were—elderly drivers, spirited young gun-layers or Marshal Timoshenko himself—their eyes filled with sadness. The foot of the cliff was Russia’s eastern boundary; the far bank marked the beginning of the Kazakh steppe.
Should future historians wish to understand the turning point of this war, they need only come to this shore. They need only imagine a soldier sitting beneath this high cliff; they need only try, for a moment, to imagine the thoughts of this soldier.
27
LUDMILA Nikolaevna, Alexandra Vladimirovna’s eldest daughter, did not see herself as one of the younger generation. Hearing her talk to her mother about Marusya and Zhenya, anyone would have thought this was a conversation between two friends, or two sisters—not between mother and daughter.
Ludmila took after her father. She had broad shoulders, blonde hair and clear, pale blue eyes set far apart. She was selfish yet sensitive, hard-working yet sometimes happy-go-lucky, pragmatic yet capable of carefree generosity.
Ludmila had married when she was eighteen but had not stayed long with her first husband; they separated soon after Tolya’s birth. She got to know Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum when she was a student in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, and she married him a year before finishing her degree. She had specialized in chemistry and begun to study for a doctorate, but she never completed this. She often blamed this on material difficulties, on the difficulties of looking after a household and feeding her family. The true reason, however, may have been almost the opposite; Ludmila abandoned her experiments in the university laboratory at a time when her husband was doing well in his career and they were better off than ever. They had been given a large apartment in a new building in Kaluga Street and a dacha in Otdykh with a plot of land. Ludmila had been swept up by the excitement of managing all this. She had gone on long shopping trips, buying china and furniture. Come spring, she had started working in the garden, planting tulips, asparagus, pineapple tomatoes and Michurin apple trees.62
•
On 22 June 1941, when she first heard the news of the German invasion, Ludmila had been on the corner of Theatre Square and Okhotny Ryad. She had stood there in the crowd, near the loudspeaker. Women were crying; she felt tears running down her own cheeks too.
The first air raid on Moscow had been on 22 July, exactly a month after the beginning of the war. Ludmila had spent the night on the roof of their building, together with her son, Tolya. She had extinguished an incendiary bomb and in the pink light of dawn she had stood beside Tolya on the flat roof that had been their solarium. She was pale and covered in dust. Though clearly shaken, she looked proud and resolute. To the east the sun was rising in a cloudless summer sky; to the west stood a wall of dense black smoke—from the tarpaper factory at Dorogomilovo and the depot beside the Belorussky station. Ludmila looked at the sinister fire without fear; her only anxieties were on behalf of her son. She was holding him close, her arms around his shoulders.
Regularly keeping watch on the roof, she became a living reproach to those who went off to spend the night with friends and relatives living near metro stations. She was particularly scornful of an eminent scientist who took shelter in a cellar after saying that his life was essential to science. She also talked about a well-known writer, a middle-aged man, who had quite lost his head during an air raid, rushing about the bomb shelter, crying out and wailing. During those summer months she made friends with firemen, house managers, schoolchildren with no fear of death and young vocational-school students. In the second half of August she left for Kazan with Tolya and Nadya. When Viktor suggested she take some of their most valuable possessions with her, she looked at the fine china dinner service she had bought from an antique shop and said, “What do I need all this junk for? Goodness knows why I wasted so much time on it all.”
Viktor had looked at her, and at the china in the glass-fronted cupboard. Remembering her excitement on first acquiring these cups, bowls and plates, he had laughed and said, “That’s wonderful. If you don’t need any of this, I can certainly get by without it myself!”
In Kazan, Ludmila, Tolya and Nadya were put in a small two-room apartment not far from the university. But when Viktor arrived a month later, he found that Ludmila was no longer there: she had gone to work on a Tatar kolkhoz, in the Laishev district. He wrote to her, reminding her of all her various illnesses—myocarditis, metabolic problems, bouts of vertigo—and begged her to return to Kazan.
Only in October had she finally joined him. She was slim and tanned. Working on a kolkhoz had evidently done more for her health than consultations with four eminent professors, dietary regimes, spa cures in Kislovodsk, massage and pine-needle baths, or courses of photo-, electro- and hydrotherapy.
She had resolved to go out to work. Viktor found her a position in the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry, but Ludmila said, “No, I don’t want special treatment. I’d rather go and work on the shop floor.”
She got a job as a factory chemist. And in due course it emerged how diligently she had worked at the kolkhoz; at the end of December a sledge drew up outside their building and an old Tatar, along with a young boy, brought in four sacks of wheat—Ludmila’s payment for the days she had worked there. Throughout the next four or five months Varya, their domestic worker,63 made weekly trips to the market and bartered this wheat for apples, milk and sour cream. Varya liked to talk and she told everyone proudly that it was the wife of a member of the Academy of Sciences who had earned this wheat through her work on a kolkhoz. “There she is,” the Tatars at the market used to say, “the academician’s old woman, come for her sour cream!”
It was a harsh winter. Tolya was called up and sent to military school in Kuibyshev. Ludmila caught a cold in the factory and fell ill with pneumonia. She was in bed for over a month. Instead of going back to the factory, she set up a collective
to knit gloves, socks and sweaters to be given to wounded soldiers being discharged from hospital. Then the political commissar of one hospital invited her to join his women’s committee. Ludmila read books and newspapers to the wounded and, being on good terms with most of the scholars and scientists evacuated from Moscow, she arranged for professors and members of the Academy of Sciences to give lectures to the convalescent patients.
But she often reminisced about her nights on duty on her Moscow rooftop. “If I didn’t have you and Nadya to think about,” she would say to her husband, “I’d be going back to Moscow tomorrow!”
28
LUDMILA’S first husband—Tolya’s father—had been a fellow student called Abarchuk. Ludmila had married him during her first year at university and separated from him at the beginning of her third year. He had been a member of the university commission responsible for checking the social background of students and exacting payment from those of non-proletarian origin for the right to matriculate.
The sight of this lean, fine-lipped university Robespierre in his worn leather jacket had often provoked outbursts of excited whispering from the female students. To Ludmila he had once said that it was unthinkable—even criminal—for a proletarian student to marry a young woman of bourgeois background. And if he had to choose between a sexual liaison with a bourgeois girl or a humanlike monkey, he would not hesitate to choose the monkey.
He was uncommonly hard-working. He was busy with student affairs from morning till late at night. He gave talks, which he always prepared scrupulously; he set up links between the university and the new workers’ faculties; and he waged war against the last devotees of Tatyana’s Day and its drunken celebrations.64 None of this got in the way of his conducting experiments in the chemistry laboratory—in quantitative and qualitative analysis—and getting high marks in all his tests and exams. He never slept for more than four or five hours. He had been born in Rostov-on-Don, where his sister still lived, now married to a factory administrative worker. His father, a medical assistant, had been killed by a shell during the Civil War, when the White artillery was bombarding Rostov; his mother had died before the Revolution.
Stalingrad Page 20
