Ivan’s War (15 page)

Neither civilians nor troops knew what to think about this news. When their turn came to explain it, political staff were forced to draw upon the revolutionary rhetoric of historic progress. It was always possible to talk of international proletarian solidarity, and the German working class held a special place in Soviet imaginations, not least because its industry was so admired. But the idea of a treaty with Hitler could only be a shock. Cadets in one staff college thought the story was a spoof.
⁷²
When someone asked him if the next war would be an imperialist one, a
politruk
elsewhere simply gave up. ‘There’s no point,’ he answered, ‘in counting imperialist wars … When the war’s over, a [party] congress will convene, and they’ll tell us what type of war it was.’
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Left to themselves, the soldiers started cracking jokes based on the rhyme between German foreign minister Ribbentrop’s surname and the Russian word for arse.
⁷⁴

The Red Army was also about to engage in some unusual operations. A secret clause in the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939 provided for the partition of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union and also for the future division of the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The ink was hardly dry before the Germans invaded Poland from the west, and just over two weeks later, on 17 September, the first Soviet troops crossed into the country’s eastern provinces. Germany’s act of aggression prompted Britain and France to declare war on 3 September, but Poland was doomed. Warsaw fell to the Germans on 28 September, by which time the two armies, German and Soviet, had overrun the rest of the country from opposite directions. The Red Army drew up along its new boundary, confronting its ally for a prolonged interlude of uneasy co-operation. Its soldiers became an occupation force, assuming the part of liberators while daily confronting the hatred of the population among which they were stationed. The experience would be repeated the following June, when the Soviets continued their advance northwards to the Baltic, adding several million more unwilling citizens to Stalin’s western empire.

In 1939, Stalin’s priority was to establish a secure new border before the
Wehrmacht managed to alter the map a second time. Red Army troops along the new front line engaged in a token show of comradeship with equally sceptical German counterparts. Prisoners were exchanged. Behind the new border, soldiers were detailed to go from house to house in search of hidden weapons. ‘Diversionary bands’ of Polish nationalists, the remains of the Polish army, were rounded up, as were any outspoken or respected members of local communities.
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Tens of thousands of Polish soldiers, including reservists who had been called up only weeks before, were interned in prison camps. On Stalin’s orders, more than 20,000 of these would be murdered between March and May 1940. The execution of 4,000 Polish officers in the forests near Katyn, to the west of Smolensk, was carried out by secret police, as were the parallel shootings near Kharkov and Tver. The murders were also covert, though local people heard volleys of gunfire for hours, night after night. But while they were kept ignorant of specific events, regular soldiers knew that the state they represented, and whose policy they were enforcing every day, was not offering deliverance to fraternal peoples.

Stalin’s military advisers had considered the most likely problems in advance. The troops detailed for Poland and the Baltic were given special lectures. They were told that their efforts would bring security and happiness to the people of the new territories. But they were also left in no doubt that the new border would protect their own homelands and safety. The troops who went into the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were hand-picked, ‘politically reliable … provided with the best food, weapons and ammunition’.
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‘I am proud,’ one of these heroes said, ‘that I have been granted the honour of standing in the front line of the defence of our motherland.’ Meanwhile, the propagandists wove stories with happy endings for readers to celebrate. ‘The working people of western Ukraine and western Belorussia have greeted the Red Army with great joy and love,’ a report to the troops related. ‘The progress of units of the Red Army unfolds like a people’s festival. The inhabitants of the towns and villages, as a rule, come out to greet them in an organized way and dressed in their best clothes. They throw flowers in front of the advancing soldiers… Thank you, dear comrades,’ they were alleged to have said. ‘Thank you, Stalin. We have been waiting for you and now you have come.’
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The liberation was not entirely charade. Some people, and especially the region’s Jews, had good reason to prefer Soviet to Nazi rule. But even they would soon find that the Red Army was not the selfless sword of revolution that it pretended to be. To soldiers from the Soviet Union, these European towns and villages were a consumerist paradise. Life was suddenly pleasant
again, even if few soldiers could afford to join the locals for a beer or a long night of jazz. ‘They sit for hours,’ one envious Soviet officer wrote home, ‘nursing a beer and smoking cigarettes.’
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To prevent breaches of the law, the army had issued the soldiers involved in the occupation with a small allowance in cash. But there was just too much to spend it on. If the locals would not sell their goods for kopecks, the troops used threats to get the things they saw. They plundered simple cottages in search of loot. Favourite items included watches and pens, but even wooden doorknobs were briefly in vogue.
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Some veterans remember to this day how men from the Baltic occupying force sent clothes and money to their wives at home; for them, the borderlands were full of treasure. When an infantryman was arrested for buying a collection of anti-Soviet jokes in a Latvian bookshop, he was overheard remarking that the capitalists knew how to live.
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Nonetheless, regular Red Army men were relatively benign as an occupation force. Worse was to come in the new provinces. To harmonize the new regions with the rest of Soviet territory, the NKVD was sent in to collectivize all private farms. Protesters, the latest crop of
kulaks
, were arrested and deported on goods trains heading east. At the same time, amid the turmoil of a social revolution and a coming war, the military soviets arrived to start recruiting men. The army’s need for soldiers had become insatiable, and the new populations – above all, those in frontier states – were obliged to contribute their quota like everyone else. Some politicians also hoped that military service would turn the sons of capitalist families into upstanding Soviet citizens. Either way, recruitment was an urgent matter, demanding quick and decisive work. The fact that the new soldiers would disrupt the culture and morale of serving troops was considered far too late.

From 1940, thousands of nineteen-year-olds from the former Polish territories of Ukraine and Belorussia joined units in the Kiev, Leningrad and Bryansk military districts. In recognition of their likely impact, they were deployed in small groups of fifteen or so per company.
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Their command of the Russian language was a problem, for many spoke and wrote only Ukrainian or Polish. But it was not comprehension that made them difficult to teach. Unlike the lads whose minds had been formed under Soviet power, these people came with recent memories of a different world. Even the ones who felt grateful for Soviet protection against Germany – for few believed that Stalin’s pact would last – brought with them doubts about the newly formed collective farms. They all had questions about politics. Some had witnessed the mass arrests of supposed ‘enemies’ that followed Soviet occupation, for NKVD troops were never far from the front line.
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And some,
joining the army of a state that propagated atheism, nurtured a deeply held religious faith.

The commissars were overwhelmed. ‘A significant number of them are religious,’ they reported. ‘Some wear crosses which they refuse to remove even in the
banya
.’
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One officer discovered that some of his newest men began ‘their letters home with the words: Long live Jesus Christ. One soldier received an icon in the post from his mother in front of which, before going to sleep, he prays.’
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Youths like these came from villages where the faithful held vigils in the church at Easter. Some had neighbours whose religious beliefs forbade them even to bear arms.
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It was a mistake, the
politruks
’ bosses advised, to forget that these new men were politically untested and possibly even hostile to the Soviet regime. They might even harbour nationalist dreams. In the clumsy, eerily Orwellian language of its time one note warned that new conscripts ‘not rarely not only show unhealthy states of mind, complaining about the severity of discipline and the hardship of serving in the Red Army, but in some places are trying to form separatist groups’.
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Such men may well have been behind the daubs that turned up on the walls in barracks at this time. Humour, not religion, was probably the most serious challenge to the
politruks
’ authority. Graffiti of all kinds – ‘uncensored words’, as the informers put it – was getting bolder everywhere. Busts of Lenin and Stalin – one of which was given goggling, froggy eyes by an anonymous hand – were sitting targets, as were political posters. Some
politruks
were tempted to give up. ‘There is no political work in this unit,’ a report scolded, and it turned out that the men had stopped even expecting it. As a recruit – a Russian this time – in a communications unit put it in March 1939, ‘The fascists have not done a thing to me; I see no point in fighting them. From my point of view, it makes no odds if we have fascist or Soviet power. It would be better to die or run away than to fight for the motherland.’
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This was the army that mustered to fight the Finnish war. It was not the monolith of later Soviet myth. Instead, it was a piece of work in progress, an assemblage whose military readiness was still under construction. The lines of men who stood before their
politruks
to hear their marching orders in November 1939 included fathers as well as sons. The older men had memories of tsarism and its last war; the young, heads full of cant, had little but their energy. They knew, in theory, why they were being asked to fight. The story was that Finnish fascists had been threatening the border of the Soviet motherland. Like soldiers in the propaganda films, Red Army troops had to repel them fast. It would be a quick and easy task, or that, at least, was the story they were told. Those who believed it may have hoped that someone else would do the fighting for them. If victory were truly guaranteed, no individual would need to run much risk, after all, and history alone would make sure that justice prevailed. Meanwhile, there was a chance of travel and of duty done, or failing those, a Finnish wristwatch and some decent booze. Whatever the men’s hopes, however, the weather was turning colder. The boots and greatcoats they had brought would not stand up to a long war.

‘The political–moral condition of the troops is generally good,’ the
politruks
wrote for their masters’ benefit. It was their job to take care of morale in wartime, but what that meant, in the Soviet army, was very different from British or American notions of military psychology from the same period. The
politruks
were not concerned with individual minds. It was the soldier’s task, and not that of his officers, to prove himself worthy of military life. If he showed cowardice or doubt, he was a betrayer of the motherland, a disappointment to its revolution. His individual rights and interests were unimportant. All that a
politruk
needed to do, on this model, was to make sure the men knew that theirs was a just cause. Soldiers who understood and truly believed in their task would need no further help because they would know that they were doing what their own society – and the future of the proletarian revolution – required them to do.
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There was no place in this regime for ego. The indicators of a healthy political–moral situation were not cheerfulness or individual mental health but the number of applicants for party membership, the willingness of men to volunteer for dangerous work, and the overall level of conformity with collective norms.