Europe Central (44 page)

He was a delegate of the Twenty-fifth Party Congress in Moscow. I’ve seen him smile resolutely at the East German leader, Honecker, whose returning smile seems more strained, more like Hilde Benjamin’s; Karmen for his part remained
natural
all his life. That is why we all liked him: Dolores Ibarruri, head of the Spanish Communist Party, praised him and smiled eternally; Castro said of him: In the name of our people we thank you for your free and deep friendship for us; Salvador Allende mentioned
my friend Roman Karmen.
For the same reason, at the Moscow Academy of Film he was renowned for his easy closeness with the younger students, men and women both. But these details shunt his story away from its true end.

In 1965 “The Great Patriotic War” appeared under his name. Two famous shots: A haunted old man clutches his hat to his chest; a calm old soldier salutes.

In 1966, shortly before returning to Spain as a tourist, he was named a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union. (I remember how he used to be dark and skinny like a French
gamin
as he stood at the panning lever of his cinematic camera in 1933, shooting “Moscow-Kara-Kum-Moscow.”) That year’s edition of the Moscow
Kinoslovar
describes the character of his films as
strikingly emotive, but the feelings are faithfully bright,
which is to say
remarkably dramatic, but always in a public-spirited context.
Drobaschenko names him in the same breath as the great Dziga Vertov.

In 1968 he co-directed “Granada, Granada, My Granada”
²⁹
with K. M. Simonov, with whom he’d always got on well. One shrouded female figure halfway through the first reel, some of whose archival footage dates from 1936, is rumored to be Elena Konstantinovskaya. ‣

BREAKOUT

With few, but courageous allies . . . we must take upon ourselves the defense of a continent which largely does not deserve it.

—Joseph Goebbels (1944)

1

Until July 1942, Lieutenant-General A. A. Vlasov, Commander of the Second Shock Army of the Volkhov Front, remained one of those heroically immaculate men of Soviet marble, each of whom bears a glittering star centered in his forehead like an Indian woman’s caste mark (why didn’t German snipers shoot at it?), each holding his gleaming black gun in white hands, aiming with confidence. So the old photographs portray them, all highlights bleached into blank purity. Vlasov cannot be descried among them now. Nor has he been found deserving of a citation in the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
There is, indeed, an angry entry about “Vlasov Men.” That befits, for the crime which Vlasov committed was of a collective nature: He organized an army of traitors to fight against their own motherland.

He is said to have been both brave and coolheaded in the foredoomed defense of Lvov. In a series of energetic attacks, he led a breakout right through the German pincers, saving his troops for future fighting. Repeating this dangerous and thankless accomplishment when the enemy took Kiev, he preserved the remnants of Thirty-seventh Army. (No doubt he was aided both times by the rumors, each day less deniable, that the Fascists were machine-gunning prisoners by the thousands.) He reached Moscow shortly before that city came under siege. The people around him were as faint and intermittent as his reflection in the broken, blacked out windows. Most of them had never even thrown a hand grenade. Vlasov visited his wife and tried to prepare her for the worst. On 10 November 1941, he was summoned beneath the five-pointed Kremlin stars of ruby glass (each of which weighed one ton, and each of which was illuminated from within by incandescent lamps), and so he came into the presence of Comrade Stalin himself. It was literally the stroke of midnight. Rigidly polite, he awaited honor or death.

Stalin demanded his opinions on the protection of Moscow. Vlasov gave them without mitigation but without defeatism, either, recommending a deeply echeloned defense to delay the Fascist Army Group Center until winter. In particular, the Mozhaisk defensive line should be strengthened. Ground might be given, in Kalinin for instance, but it must be contested. Meanwhile, it was essential that we use the time purchased with the lives of a few more hundred thousand peasant boys to form up the Siberian reserves.

Stalin raised his haggard head. He asked: Where will the enemy break through?

Vlasov rose, approached the situation map, and said: I’ve already mentioned Mozhaisk. Generally speaking, the Iartsevo axis will soon be endangered.

Speak the truth, like a Communist. Will we lose Moscow?

I think not. By the end of this month they’ll start freezing to death, and then we can counterattack . . .

With what?

Well, Comrade Stalin, as I said, with the Siberian reserves.

Anybody can defend Moscow with reserves.

Vlasov nodded obediently.

Nevertheless, your analysis is correct, Comrade Vlasov. I’m going to give you fifteen tanks. As for this echeloned defense, you’ll present your diagrams to Comrade Zhukov in one hour’s time . . .

And that very day, the four hundred and fifty thousand shivering, famished Muscovites who’d been mobilized (three-quarters of them women, for all conditionally fit men had been sent to the front long ago) began reifying the Mozhaisk defensive line with their shovels. Mozhaisk fell. The survivors regrouped to dig more trenches according to Vlasov’s specifications: deep and narrow, like the corridors of the Lubyanka. Within hours there were blanket-wrapped corpses in one ditch—magnified representations of the worms which would eat them come summer. Firepoints of concrete blocks sank down into place like tombstones. As for the still-immaculate man, he went to take command of Twentieth Army with his fifteen shopworn tanks. The night sky was already turning pink under Fascist artillery fire. This time he had no chance to say farewell to his wife, who, white-faced in her dark winter coat and shawl, too sick to dig trenches, sat against her cold samovar, hugging herself for warmth with her hands inside her coat-sleeves, the apartment lightless but for a candle. Soon she’d be sleeping underground with the others, beneath the arched roofs of the Metro station. Somebody in raspberry-colored boots was asking a railroad man which train for Kuibyshev would be the last. As for Vlasov, he expected to be dead within a week at most.

In December, Twentieth Army and First Shock Army launched successful counterblows against the German Fascist command. Solnechnogorsk was liberated; the enemy had already set fire to Volokolamansk in preparation for retreat. And so the commissar called upon the soldiers of Twentieth Army to increase their efforts. He pointed out that thanks to Comrade Stalin we now had fifty-four tanks. He invoked the neck-high pyramids of antitank traps made entirely by girls in Leningrad. Vlasov, who’d been studying the strategic maxims of Napoleon, emerged from his dugout, at which the commissar’s speech got routed by many cheers. Vlasov smiled shyly. That night he led them back into battle, showing admirable contempt for his own safety. Abnormally tall, he stood out above the other shapes of men bulked and blocked by winter clothes, heads swollen and flattopped like immense boltheads, shoulders swollen and squared. They conquered Volokolamansk. General Rokossovsky sent a radio message of thanks and congratulations; the commissar for his part warned the security “organs” that A. A. Vlasov might be an unreliable element.

By New Year’s Eve, when his photograph appeared in the portrait-gallery of prominent generals in
Izvestiya,
they’d recovered ground all the way to the Lama-Riza line. More than half a million Germans died in the snow. Their corpses were often found clad in clumsy straw overshoes, for the Fascist high command had not issued them any winter supplies. The liberation of Mozhaisk was imminent. On 24 January 1942, Vlasov received the Order of the Red Banner.

He was now a Lieutenant-General. Throughout those years of pale men staring down at maps there were many careers of a meteoric character—instant promotions and executions, loyal initiatives, heroes’ funerals—but none more dramatic than his. He was a modest, bookish sort who knew well enough when to leave politics alone—namely, always.
³⁰
Until now, to be sure, that abstinence had been a virtue. In meetings with his staff officers he was less inclined to cite the inevitability of a Soviet victory than to bring to their attention some brilliant field maneuver of Peter the Great’s. From somewhere he’d obtained a treatise by the executed Tukhachevsky. Later it was also remembered against him that he’d dared to praise the operational genius of the Fascist Panzergruppe commander Guderian. Vlasov felt that knowing the enemy well enough to steal away his science was sufficient; he need not squander time in detesting him. Priding himself on his rationalism, which was truly a species of courage (indeed, it bears comparison with the noble atheism of the true Bolshevik, who fights and dies without hope of any unearthly reward), he failed to foresee how weak a perimeter it might prove against the spearheads of an alien will.

At the end of February he embraced his wife for the last time. The hollows beneath her eyes were yellow and black like snow-stains where a German
Nebelwerfer
shell has exploded. She whispered goodbye almost with indifference; he couldn’t tell whether she’d decided to endure.

In March, shortly before the premiere of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, Comrade Stalin appointed him Deputy Commander of the Volkhov Front. The strategic aim: to break the siege of Leningrad. Of course the assignment was impossible, but at this stage of the war, what wasn’t?—Vlasov said: Comrade Stalin, I accept the responsibility.

That night they airlifted him into a sinister taiga zone beset by snow. Two divisions of nearly prewar strength awaited his command. No retreat would be tolerated. Nor could anyone allow himself to be captured by the Fascists; for that meant collaboration. Vlasov therefore had every motivation for success.

He is said to have infused his sector with an almost monastic resolution. His untrained, half-starved Siberians adored him. (In our memory, why not depict them with the scarlet cloaks and haloes of Russian icons, the forest darkness between their faces traced with capillaries of gold?) Mild whenever possible, yet plain-speaking always, getting his point across with common proverbs (he was, like any Communist hero, the son of poor peasants), he reminded them that in victory lay their only hope of delaying death. Some of them were equipped with antitank rifles. Every other nation had long since given these up, for the man who fights a tank can hardly hope to win the contest, but in those days the Soviet army had no other recourse.
³¹
The Siberian

They dwelled in a pocket shaped like a hammerhead, its neck crossing the front line between Novgorod and Spaskaya Polist, then widening to a rounded flatness on the west side of the Luga River. German tanks pointed guns at them, although the tanks were frozen and the gunbarrels filled with snow. As long as the cold endured, Second Shock Army was safe. (Ranged against him: Eighteenth German Army’s two hundred tanks and twelve hundred self-propelled guns.) Sleeplessly poring over that static gameboard, Vlasov reread the essays of Guderian. A certain reference to the errors of military traditionalists haunted him:
These men remain essentially unable to break free of recollections of positional warfare, which they persist in viewing as the combat form of the future, and they cannot muster the required act of will to stake all on a rapid decision.
Guderian’s criticism rang true. The only question was in what wastes of operational philosophy he, Vlasov, remained frozen. Positional warfare had superseded cavalry charges because a single machine-gun nest could decimate the bravest, most inspired brotherhood of horsemen. What could warriors do but dig themselves into trenches? Then came tank and plane, the Panzer group, the Blitzkrieg. Positional warfare was obsolete forever. And yet the very success of Blitzkrieg had already afflicted it with its own traditionalists. Panzer warriors charged ahead with the same recklessness as their cavalrymen fathers. Supply lines lengthened; the Fascist machine had run out of fuel before Moscow. How could this phenomenon be exploited across the map?

Disobeying the commissar’s recommendation, he reread Tukhachevsky, who insisted that Blitzkrieg could be defeated through planning, determination and operational reserves. Of these he could call upon neither the first nor the last. He said to the commissar: If we only had a hundred tanks . . .

He reread Caulaincourt’s account of Napoleon’s defeat at Moscow. Time, space and weather had worn Napoleon down.

Once in a great while, his sentries at the rear might see a truck convoy’s many furry eyes of light in the night on the ice-road. The Fascists rarely shot at it. Sometimes an airplane landed, bearing emissaries of Comrade Stalin whose task it was to brief and debrief him. Ensconced in a ring of minefields, he was now full Commander. They’d promised to send him Sixth Guard Rifle Corps, but it didn’t happen. They assured him that First Shock Army would rejoin him before the thaw, and then he could outflank the Fascists at Lyuban, save Novgorod, liberate starving Leningrad. They demanded to know why he hadn’t already broken through. His appearance deteriorated rapidly. He knew very well that Second Army could expect nothing other than what the enemy called
Kesselschlacht,
cauldron-slaughter. Meanwhile he ate no better than his infantrymen, and never hesitated to expose himself to enemy fire. Call it emblematic that beside the dugout which served as his command post that spring, a corpse’s frozen hand was seen upraised from a heap of ice and steel.