Ivan’s War (22 page)

‘The retreat has caused blind panic,’ the head of the Belorussian Communist Party, Ponomarenko, wrote to Stalin on 3 September. To make things worse, ‘the soldiers are tired to death, even sleeping under artillery fire … At the
first bombardment, the formations collapse, many just run away to the woods, the whole area of woodland in the front-line region is full of refugees like this. Many throw away their weapons and go home. They regard the possibility of being surrounded extremely anxiously.’
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This frank report would translate for secret police into a case of collective ‘betrayal of the motherland’, but moralistic talk was wasted on the leaderless and lost. Millions of men that summer were simply encircled, trapped. Others, with little training and scant knowledge of their companions, let alone the foibles of their equipment, were thrown into battle against an enemy that was still, until the first snow fell, as confident as it had been when it marched into Paris thirteen months before. The ones who simply made for home were the most natural of all. ‘In June 1941 our unit was surrounded by some German troops near the town of Belaya Tserkov,’ an ex-soldier explained. ‘The
politruk
mustered the remaining troops and ordered us to leave the encirclement in groups. I and two other soldiers from our unit … changed into civilian clothes and decided to go home where we used to live. We took this decision,’ he explained, ‘because, according to rumour, the German troops moving up towards us had advanced far away to the east.’
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The Germans themselves were unprepared for the number of prisoners they took. By the end of 1941, at a conservative estimate, they held between 2 and 3 million Red Army troops. No thought had been given to these men’s accommodation, for their lives, in Nazi thinking, had never been worth a plan. As the Wehrmacht swept eastward, many of its prisoners were herded into their own former barracks or prisons; others squatted in the open air, enclosed by nothing more protective than barbed wire. The shock that June was so severe that it took time for the tales of atrocity to circulate, the stories of Jews and communists singled out for torture and illegal execution, the tales of beatings, hunger, crude sadism and collective slow death. In the first few days of the war, Red Army soldiers simply gave up when they found themselves surrounded and outgunned.

On 22 June, the Supreme Soviet granted the army power to punish deserters. That day, provision was made for the establishment of three-man military tribunals. These would operate at the front and in all other areas affected by the war. Tribunals had the right to order death sentences if they chose, although a clause in their regulations asked them to inform Moscow by telegraph when they did. If they failed to receive a reply within seventy-two hours, the sentence could be carried out without appeal, and any other punishments they ordered, some of which amounted to death sentences by other means, could be imposed directly.
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These powers were comprehensive
enough, but in practice commanders often acted on their own. On 14 July, Mekhlis received a note from his deputy on the South-Western Front that complained of the excessive use of the death penalty within an army desperately short of men. As always, lurid examples were attached. In one case, a lieutenant had shot two leaderless Red Army men and a woman who had come to his unit to beg for food.
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Reports like this changed nothing at the front. Few officers knew their men well, and none could have known all of them, so rapidly did whole units dissolve and new ones form. Pavlov’s execution, and others like it, proved that the penalty for an officer’s failure was either a fascist bullet or one from NKVD troops. Foot soldiers were coerced because their commanders in turn feared for their skins. Cruelty became a way of life. In August 1941, the officers’ vulnerability to punishment was emphasized again. Order no. 270, which Stalin himself signed, was never published at the time, but its contents were widely disseminated, read out at meetings that the front-line
politruks
were forced to call. It followed the surrender, on a single day, of 100,000 men. The victims at Uman had little choice, since, unlike Boldin, they were encircled on the open steppe and not in woods and marshes where soldiers could hide. But with its customary moralism, Moscow judged them disgraceful and cowardly. Henceforth, its order stated, any officer or political officer who removed his distinguishing marks in battle, retreated to the rear or gave himself up as a prisoner would count as a malicious deserter. Officers who tried to desert could be shot in the field by their superiors. Even reluctance to lead from the front could count as desertion if this suited the authorities on the spot.
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The order’s other provision was that the families of malicious deserters would now be liable to arrest. This was a cruel notion, although in its essence it was not entirely new. For years, deserters’ families had been punished by the withholding of pensions and other material rights, but the threat of prison was an awesome one in a system where everything, even a child’s schooling, depended on a family’s collective honour in official eyes. The order came to mean that anyone whose corpse was lost – which tens of thousands were, shot down over rivers and marshes, blown to pieces or gnawed away by rats – counted as a deserter for the army’s purposes. To go missing in action was a dishonourable fate. That first summer, however, there were plenty of men who shrugged off rules like this. As Nikolai Moskvin observed after his own thirteen troops disappeared, ‘I’ve talked to our commander. He’s warned the rest about responsibility. He’s told them that there is a list, we have a list, of all their relatives. But the truth is that lots
of these boys come from places the fascists have already taken. They don’t care about addresses any more.’
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Moskvin shot his first deserter on 15 July. The soldier came from western Ukraine. Three weeks of shelling, marching, sleeplessness and terror had brought the man to breaking point, and maybe it made little odds what pretext he chose at the time. His crime was to urge all his comrades to surrender, or at least to hold their fire. He then confronted Moskvin. ‘He made a salute to, I suppose, Hitler, shouldered his rifle and walked off towards the scrub,’ Moskvin wrote. It was too much for one of the other Ukrainians in the group. ‘Red Army private Shulyak brought him down with a bullet in the back,’ the
politruk
went on. The dying man swore at his former comrades from the dust. ‘They’ll kill the lot of you,’ he said. ‘And you, you bloodstained commissar, they’ll hang you first.’ Moskvin did not hesitate. He raised his Nagan revolver and shot the victim in front of the whole company. ‘The boys understood,’ he wrote. ‘A dog’s death for a dog.’

Whatever tales he had to tell the men, however, Moskvin’s own confidence was gone. At the end of July, his unit was shattered in a German attack. Moskvin himself was injured. His companions could not transport him, so he and two other men were left to wait for rescue in the woods. No help arrived, and they convinced themselves that their mates had forgotten them. In fact, most of the regiment was dead, betrayed by a deserter in their ranks a few hours after they had left their wounded. ‘I am on the verge of a complete moral collapse,’ Moskvin wrote on 4 August. His wounds were painful and he was afraid of gangrene. ‘We got lost,’ he went on, ‘because we did not have maps. It seems we didn’t have maps in this war any more than we had aeroplanes.’ The two lads slept beside him, but he could not rest. ‘I feel guilty because I am helpless and because I know that I should pull myself together,’ the
politruk
despaired. Communist Party faith was supposed to make him a hero, but instead, ‘I just don’t have the strength.’

The woods where Moskvin lay were not far from a village in the region of Smolensk. After three days, during which, as he slept, someone had found the time to steal his small arms, a group of peasants rescued him. Moskvin would learn later that his rescuers had also discussed the possibility of betraying the group to the German police. The decision to hide the three may have been clinched by the thought that reasonably healthy men could help at harvest time. Moskvin described the work he put in when the beets and potatoes had grown large enough to lift. He had to keep his mouth shut when the peasants told him that they had dissolved their collective farm and no longer worked to Soviet rules. He had to tolerate the hard work and the mud, the crude delight in Stalin’s discomfort, the speculative hope for change. ‘Not everything works the way it was described in the books we had to study,’ the
politruk
scribbled one night. These villages, he wrote, were nothing like the buzzing, cultured towns that everyone had been so proud of in that other universe, the peacetime one. Perhaps, he pondered, even Soviet power could not have changed the village, the primeval world, that he was now coming to know. Moskvin had been at war less than two months. It was still summer, and the woods were green, but he had lost touch with the certainties of Soviet life.