Ivan’s War (29 page)
Authors: Catherine Merridale
1
Velikaya otechestvennaya
, 15: 4(1), Moscow, 1997, p. 40. The captured German document is Hoepner’s ‘Storming the Gates of Moscow: 14 October–5 December 1941’, dated December 1941.
2
Ibid
., p. 41.
3
Krivosheev, p. 139; Erickson, ‘The System’, p. 225.
4
S. G. Sidorov,
Trud voennoplennykh v SSSR 1939–1956 gg
. (Volgograd, 2001), p. 60.
5
Ibid
., p. 61.
6
Erickson, p. 233.
7
Erickson, ‘The System,’ p. 238.
8
Velikaya otechestvennaya
, 4 (1), p. 41.
9
Werth, pp. 238–9.
10
V. I. Yutov and others,
Ot brigady osobogo naznacheniya k ‘vympely’, 1941–1981
(Moscow, 2001), p. 45.
11
Interview with Mikhail Ivanovich, April 2001; M. M. Gorinov
et al. (Eds), Moskva voennaya,
1941–1945: memuary i arkhivnye dokumenty
(Moscow, 1995), p. 103.
12
Velikaya otechestvennaya
, 4 (1), p. 56.
13
Overy, p. 118.
14
A. E. Gordon, ‘Moskovskoe narodnoe opolchenie 1941 goda glazami uchastnika’,
Otechestvennaya istoriya
, 2001: 3, pp. 158–61.
15
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii kurskoi oblasti (GAOPIKO), 1/1/2773, 18–21.
16
Gordon, pp. 158–63.
17
Report dated 14 January 1942, Knyshevskii, p. 227.
18
Ibid
., p. 226.
19
Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Oberkommando des Heeres, RH2-1924, p. 23.
20
Overy, pp. 116–7.
21
Knyshevskii, p. 184. Report from Volokolamsk Front, 27 October 1941.
22
N. D. Kozlov,
Obshchestvennye soznanie v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny
(St. Petersburg, 1995), p. 24.
23
Knyshevskii, p. 313.
24
Moskva voennaya
, p. 167.
25
Velikaya otechestvennaya
, 2 (2), pp. 108–9.
26
Moskva voennaya
, pp. 167–8.
27
RGALI, 1814/4/5, 42.
28
Tsentr dokumentatsii noveishei istorii smolenskoi oblasti (TsDNISO), 8/1/212, 4.
29
Knyshevskii, pp. 187–8.
30
Omer Bartov, in his study of the Wehrmacht, also suggests that harsh discipline, a raw ideological belief and the fear of death created bonds of a kind between the men. See
The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare
(Houndmills, 1985), pp. 144–5.
31
Archive of the
Komsomol
, hereafter RGASPI-M, 33/1/360, 3–8.
32
TsDNISO, 8/2/99, 1–2.
33
E. M. Snetkova,
Pis’ma very, nadezhdy, lyubvy. Pis’ma s fronta
(Moscow, 1999), p. 1.
34
RGASPI-M, 33/1/276, 4.
35
Stroki, opalennye voiny. Sbornik pisem voennykh let, 1941–1945
, 2 izd. (Belgorod, 1998), pp. 115–6.
36
Gordon, pp. 160–1.
37
Alexander Nevsky defeated the Teutonic knights in 1242. Dmitry Donskoi’s defeat of the Tatars followed in 1380. Minin and Pozharsky drove out the Poles in the seventeenth century and the last two generals, Suvorov and Kutuzov, led the campaign against Napoleon in 1812.
38
Stalin, ‘Rech’ na parade krasnoi armii’, in
O velikoi otechestvennoi voine Sovetskogo
Soyuza
(Moscow, 1947), pp. 37–40.
39
Moskva voennaya
, pp.44–5.
40
Werth, p. xvi.
41
Kursk NKVD report, GAOPIKO, 3605/1/307, 1–3.
42
TsDNISO, 8/1/25, 7–8.
43
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv smolenskoi oblasti (GASO), 1500/1/1, 16–18.
44
See Vasil Bykov, ‘Za Rodinu! Za Stalina!’,
Rodina
, 1995, no. 5, pp. 30–7.
45
On swearing, see E. S. Senyavskaya,
Frontovoe pokolenie: istoriko-psikhologicheskoe
issledovanie, 1941–1945
(Moscow, 1995), p. 83.
46
Memorial essay no. 2272: ‘Memoirs of Valish Khusanovich Khabibulin,’ Ed. Nina Pavlovna Bredenkova (Tyumen’ 2002).
47
TsDNISO, 1555/1/3, 3–5.
48
Knyshevskii, p. 355.
49
TsDNISO, 1555/1/3, 5.
50
Moskva voennaya,
p. 167.
51
RGASPI-M, 33/1/1395, 6.
52
Velikaya otechestvennaya
, 2 (2), p. 155.
53
See photo on facing page, which is a typical representation.
54
Sidorov, p. 60.
55
Velikaya otechestvennaya
, 2 (2), p. 114–5.
56
Ibid
., p. 155.
57
Ibid
., pp. 114–5; 193–4.
58
Ibid
., p. 166, 6, p. 120.
59
Werth, p. 370.
60
Velikaya otechestvennaya
, 2 (2), p. 73.
61
Ibid
., pp. 252–3; 166 (on thieving).
62
For an example from the battle of Moscow, see Knyshevskii, p. 184.
63
Cited in Knyshevskii, p. 164.
64
TsDNISO, 1555/1/3, 3.
65
Velikaya otechestvennaya
, 6, p. 97, order no. 307 of Glav PURKKA.
66
TsAMO, 206/298/2, 15, 49–50.
67
Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, RH2-124, p. 22.
68
Werth, p. 422.
69
GASO, 1/1/1500, p. 15.
70
TsDNISO, 8/2/82, 50.
71
Werth, pp. 705–7.
72
RGASPI, 17/125/169, 5–8.
73
TsDNISO, 8/1/25, 12.
74
‘Vystuplenie po radio’, 3 July 1941, in Stalin,
O velikoi otechestvennoi voine
, p. 15.
75
TsDNISO, 8/1/25, 12.
76
See John A. Armstrong (Ed.),
Soviet Partisans in World War II
(Madison, 1964), p. 3.
77
On field post in general, see
Velikaya otechestvennaya
, 6, pp. 76 and 134.
78
Ponomarenko’s figures, from RGASPI 69/1/19, 129.
79
The ‘big country’ –
bol’shaya zemlya
– was the partisans’ term for the unoccupied part of the USSR.
80
GASO, 1500/1/1, 25–35; TsDNISO, 8/2/99, 17.
81
Armstrong, p. 170.
82
Pis’ma s fronta i na front 1941–1945
(Smolensk, 1991), pp. 77 and 94–5.
83
Stalin,
O velikoi otechestvennoi voine
, p. 43.
84
Bundesarchiv, RH2-1924, p. 21.
85
Overy, p. 117.
86
V. L. Bogdanov et al. (Eds),
Zhivaya pamyat’: pravda o voine
, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1995), pp. 392–6.
87
Rodina
, 1995, no. 5, p. 68.
88
RGALI, 1814/4/5, 32.
89
Werth, pp. 388–9.
90
Information from the Adzhimuskai museum and from local people in Kerch.
91
Evseev, cited in Knyshevskii, pp. 334–7.
92
Werth, p. 398.
93
Rodina
, 1991, nos. 6–7, p. 68.
94
Ibid
., p. 60 (voenyurist Dolotsev).
95
Zhivaya pamyat
, (diary of Vladimir Ivanov), p. 388.
The second summer of the war blew with an arid wind that offered neither victory nor hope. The campaign that was meant to end with triumph in Berlin now threatened stalemate, if not unthinkable defeat. ‘We never doubted that we would win,’ the veterans have claimed. But the delusion of invincibility, sustained through the first months of shock, could not endure the truth of constant failure. The police did their duty, demanding rigid cheerfulness from everyone. One soldier was arrested merely for observing that ‘we’re retreating, and we won’t be coming back’.
1
But by August 1942, the men themselves were getting tired of the despair and shame, of the reproachful stares that followed them as they abandoned, one by one, the gaunt, semi-deserted townships of the steppe. They had been dragging back across the wheatfields of Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban for months. Behind them, somewhere over the eastern horizon, flowed the Volga, the river that divides the European part of Russia from the gates of Asia. Eastwards again stretched thousands of miles of dust, a landscape little changed since Tamurlane, and one that sons of Russia’s gentler, settled heart found alien. Symbolically at least, the time was coming when the army would have nowhere left to go.
The mindset that Stalin’s regime had fostered in its people – in public, optimistic and naïve; in private, wry and cynical – had failed the soldiers in these bitter months. For years, they had been incited to blame their misfortunes on others, the scapegoats that the state chose to call enemies and spies. Stalinism had shaped a culture that discouraged individuals from standing out. Buck-passing, for which its mandarins would coin a special word,
obezlichka
, became, during the purges after 1937, a matter, literally, of life and death. More than a year into the war, these patterns of behaviour had brought the Red Army to the edge of defeat. Now it was clear that every soldier’s effort, and perhaps his life, would be required. But months of humiliation had left the men edgy, prone to panic at the first rumour of German tanks.
2
Morale was at its lowest ebb. ‘We wept as we retreated,’ a veteran
recalled. The tears flowed from exhaustion, but they also signalled shame. ‘We were running anywhere to get away from Kharkov; some to Stalingrad, others to Vladikavkaz. Where else would we end up – Turkey?’
3
