Ivan’s War (35 page)

Some reserves on the Volga steppe did not revolt because their lives, paradoxically, were improving. Ilya Nemanov explained how the process worked in his own case. As the son of a so-called enemy of the people, he had not been allowed, at first, to hold a gun. Instead, he had been assigned, back in 1941, to a labour battalion. It was a version of conscription, since he had no choice, but it involved back-breaking work, not battlefields. The government sent him to work on a construction site for evacuated industry in the Siberian town of Zlatoust. The men, a mixture of convicts, conscripts and supposed political misfits like himself, felt that they had been exiled to the middle of nowhere. ‘We worked in Asia,’ Nemanov joked, ‘and came back to shit in Europe.’ Like front-line soldiers, they lived in dugouts, and like the soldiers, too, they worked until they collapsed. Nemanov himself relied on help from a couple of Kazakh herdsmen, who finished his work for him every day so that the group’s norms would be met. The foreman could be rough, the criminals were violent. ‘It is not at the front that war is frightening,’ Nemanov told me. ‘It’s when you’re destroyed, when you have exhausting work to do, when people are dropping around you for no reason, when there’s hunger, when there’s no way you can help yourself – except by risking your life – when they give you frozen potatoes to eat, when you’ll even eat carrion, when you’ll take the rations off a dead comrade. That’s what’s frightening, not bullets!’

At the end of 1942, a group of men from Nemanov’s labour unit were taken off and trained to handle mortars. When they boarded a train heading towards the south, they knew that they were going to Stalingrad. It was bitterly cold. They were apprehensive, exhausted and hungry. One man tried to run away and was taken aside and shot. For several nights they slept in all their clothes and used their own boots for pillows. When they arrived at the front, their first order was to go to the baths and wash. Obediently, the men all rubbed themselves with vicious medicated soap, but then they found out that there was no water left to rinse it off. Gritty and itching, they dressed again, hauled the mortars across their backs and headed out, as Nemanov explained, ‘to where the lives were needed’. Lives, it seemed, but not mortars. ‘We’ll get you some rifles, you’re infantrymen now,’ the men were told. It was by luck that they were spared. ‘We froze, but they never sent us into battle.’

It was a grim version of progress, but for Nemanov the front line was a better place than Zlatoust. Like thousands of other suspect citizens, he knew that war service was likely to clear his good name. He was working his way back into Soviet society as he aimed his unwieldy gun, not serving time like a convict.
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What’s more, the young man had learned skills in the camp that
made survival easier now. ‘We were rogues,’ he told me. The men soon made the front a kind of home, adjusting daily life until they felt they had some individual control of it. Like soldiers everywhere, they improvised, and failing that, they stole. Local people were often kind, too, although they had little enough to share. ‘They all loved us,’ Nemanov said, ‘and we used that. One of my mates found a house, walked in and crossed himself. The old lady immediately started up with all that stuff – “You lovely, darling man, my darling” – and sat him down at the table.’ Mistaking the lad for a devout Christian soul, she ladled out the tea and cabbage and a crust of bread. ‘Lots of us,’ Nemanov added, ‘naturally, had affairs. War’s about that – it’s a time of death and love.’ This account squares with others of its kind, with those of men who found the front line – even this one – better than the camps.
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Life was not easy anywhere, but near the front there was a chance that soldiers could carve niches, make connections, for themselves.

The chance of killing Germans was also a source of joy.
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Soldiers had good reasons, specific ones, to hate these foreigners. The men who had seen combat were exhausted, and their dreams would be forever haunted by the stink of war. Others already knew that they would never see their families again, and everyone, including new conscripts, had lost comrades and close friends by this stage. It did not take much effort to foment their hate, but even so the Soviet wartime press encouraged it. Few writers were more popular at this point in the war than Ilya Ehrenburg, the publicist who called on every Soviet citizen to ‘Kill the German. If you have killed one German,’ he wrote simply, ‘kill another. There is nothing jollier than German corpses.’
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But Ehrenburg, whose prose was at its most lurid in 1942, was not the only source of hate propaganda. Simonov, the soldiers’ poet, joined in with ‘Kill Him!’, a lyric exhortation to revenge.
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Cartoonists sketched the enemy in every kind of trouble; Romanians panicking, Italians sneaking under cooking pots, Germans dying. A pun on the Russian word for snowdrop,
podsnezhnik
, whose literal meaning is ‘under the snow’, showed the thaw that spring giving up new ‘snowdrops’ in the form of German corpses.
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When a Soviet commander died in Stalingrad that winter, the order was to fire a salvo in his honour, ‘not in the air, but at the Germans’.
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Strangely, soldiers in other theatres often envied the action that comrades on the Volga saw. Even the men who knew exactly what combat involved could yearn for a chance to get moving, to re-enter the war. ‘When the devil are we going to attack?’ an officer called Nikolai Belov wrote in his diary in January 1943. The twenty-seven-year-old was stationed near Lipetsk, well to the north of Stalingrad. His unit was within range of the German army near
Voronezh, but its orders were to sit and wait. Belov knew just what real war was like. He had joined up as soon as the fighting began. Wounded that first summer, he had been evacuated for treatment, which meant that he had escaped the capture and death that awaited his comrades. Instead, he had returned to active service in the grim summer of 1942, retreating before an enemy that now controlled the entire Russian south.

That Christmas, as Rokossovsky’s armies swept across the snowfields of the Volga steppe, Belov was sitting tight. He found himself digging in, drilling the men and waiting. It was less tiring than the previous July’s long marches, less dangerous than fighting hand to hand in Stalingrad. But it was hardly pleasant. The weather was cold, and the occasional slight thaws brought freezing rain and fog. Every few days there was some German shelling, and then there were the suicides, the desertions, the self-inflicted injuries and brawls. ‘I’ve become terribly irritable,’ Belov added, ‘and I’ve developed this awful apathy towards everything. I feel as if the whole thing is making me as tired as hell. If we could only attack, I’d probably come to my senses again.’
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His chance to test that thought would come the following July. Stuck in his snow-bound dugout, meanwhile, he grew painfully depressed.

It would have been a different tale for everyone if Stalingrad had fallen. Victory was the greatest inspiration of them all. Red Army men began to believe that their efforts might one day bear fruit. Though many knew that they were still likely to die, it mattered that there was some chance of victory. The news from Stalingrad flew round the entire Soviet world. ‘I long to leave and go and live permanently at the front,’ Belov told his diary one night. At the beginning of November, he had been cheered by the story of Allied activity in Africa. ‘It’s a long way, but it seems it’s also quite close. What a comfort.’ But nothing matched his delight at the triumph nearer home. ‘Our soldiers are having nothing but success at Stalingrad,’ he wrote on 27 November. ‘According to the news this morning they have taken 70,000 prisoners since the beginning of the attack. The figures for seized goods are astronomical. Our joy for the soldiers at Stalingrad knows no bounds.’
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Far to the west, Moskvin, who would be listening for news through the new year, was also overjoyed. ‘There’s been a great victory at the front!’ he wrote on 19 January 1943. The tide had turned at last. ‘Every one of us wants to cry with all his might “hoorah!” Stalingrad has turned into a huge trap for the Hitlerites.’ For weeks now, he and his fellow partisans had been hiding out in dark
zemlyanki
waiting for instructions from Moscow. There had been skirmishes that autumn, and Moskvin at last felt that he had a real job,
but boredom and physical hardship had taken their toll as a second winter closed in. Now there was something to rejoice about. As ever, Moskvin turned his pen upon himself. ‘I want to tear out the pages of my diary where I wrote about the collapse of my will,’ he wrote. ‘But let them stay there as a lesson in life that it’s wrong to jump to conclusions just because things aren’t going well.’
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The victory even helped soldiers overlook the hardship of their daily lives. It was as if triumph itself could alter consciousness. Frostbitten Russian soldiers, hungry, injured, desperate, gloated when German troops appeared to suffer more. They seized on every scrap of compensation, every sign that life might change. Their enemy abandoned weapons, trucks and food in its retreat. It was an unimaginable hoard of loot for half-starved Soviet troops. Some gorged themselves on German stores; others fell on the 6th Army’s supplies of spirits, occasionally discovering too late that what the attractive-looking bottles contained was anti-freeze.
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‘At the moment there are colossal battles going on and terrible things are happening all the time,’ a forty-seven-year-old Red Army man wrote to his wife. ‘But all the same don’t worry about me … The Germans are on the run, we’re taking loads of prisoners and supplies. These days we only eat meat and tinned stuff, honey and all that rubbish, though there isn’t any bread.’
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Most amazing of all were the new prisoners of war. 91,545 men were captured by the Red Army in January 1943. They were in such poor physical condition that they might have perished anyway, but the state of the NKVD’s prison camps made sure of it. Fewer than a fifth received hot food. Among the minority who did, death often followed when they ate too fast. Others dropped dead on the journey to the camps or died of their old wounds or of the typhus and dysentery that consumed their bodies within hours. Poor diet and hunger accounted for two thirds of the deaths in Soviet POW camps in 1943. Those who survived would face a growing threat from the tuberculosis that thrived in their cramped, unhealthy quarters.
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Things would become so bad that even the NKVD took steps to reform the system after Stalingrad, though its motive was to preserve a potential labour force, not to spare human lives. But every haggard, frightened prisoner brought the war’s end closer. That was the main thought in most people’s minds. The victory at Stalingrad felt like a turning point.

‘The Germans are throwing everything away as they run,’ that forty-seven-year-old wrote in his last letter home. He now believed the propaganda about Soviet strength. ‘We’re feeding ourselves with their supplies. The Germans are running, and the Hungarians and Italians are giving
themselves up. Just now fifty of our guys took five hundred prisoners, they freeze like flies, they can’t stand the cold at all … There are loads of dead ones on the roads and streets, but the more the better.’
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Less than a month after he wrote these lines, this man also would die. He was no less a victim of the cold than the invaders whom he scorned, but his discovery that fascist troops could be beaten had made the winter bright. Ageev would have understood. ‘I’m in an exceptional mood,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘If you only knew, then you’d be just as happy as I am. Imagine it – the Fritzes are running away from us!’
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