Ivan’s War (43 page)

Stalin’s regime waged war in the same spirit as it prosecuted peace. The first rule was that human life counted for little in the scale of history, which meant compared to interests of state; the second, that insiders, the citizens in whose name everything was done, should band together against enemies. By 1943, the first of these was causing strain. The supply of healthy troops was running out. The campaigns that winter would be constrained in practice because manpower was scarce.
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The second rule, however, seemed to be going strong.
Kulaks
, spies, Trotskyists and members of the civil-war white guard had been admirable scapegoats in the decade leading up to war. But fascists – ‘Hitlerites’ – were real foes. Soviet citizens answered the call to arms in epic style. The collective clarity of purpose that inspired millions was unprecedented, but it was not true that the entire people stood together. The war created hierarchies, winners and losers, millions of dead. And physical separation, hunger and violence do not unite communities. The mythic wartime solidarity that everyone remembers was another sleight of Stalin’s hand. It was possible to believe in it because of the third rule of this regime, which was to control the things people were allowed to know.

Among the winners in the midst of war, at least compared with private soldiers at the front, were the officials who stayed well behind the lines. On 6 November 1943, an invited crowd of them gathered in Moscow to hear Stalin speak. The occasion was the eve of the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. Outside, the early winter capital was grey, subdued by black-out drapes and power cuts. Inside, beneath the chandeliers, the audience basked in self-congratulation. In the twelve months since their last anniversary meeting, the prospects for these people’s world had changed completely. First there had been Stalingrad, with all those German prisoners and dead. But that had been a winter victory. What Kursk had proved was that the Red Army could beat the fascists in the summer, too. Since then, the news had told a story of unbroken success. Smolensk was recaptured on 25 September; the Taman peninsula – gateway to the Crimea – on 7 October. In
a feat of remarkable daring (and at shattering human cost), the Red Army had forced the river Dnepr on 7 October, breaching the fascists’ most secure defensive line. And on 6 November, the élite would learn what everybody heard the following day, which was that Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, had fallen to the Soviets at last.

The Red Army was the country’s undoubted saviour, but Stalin used his speech to emphasize that it had not been working on its own. It was time to celebrate the party and the government, the men and women who had stayed at home. He began with some real heroes, those of wartime labour. If the army no longer lacked for weapons and supplies, Stalin explained, it had to thank ‘our working class (stormy and prolonged applause)’. It also owed a great deal to ‘the patriotism of the collective farm peasants’, to ‘our transport workers’, and even, for their initiatives in design and engineering, to ‘our intelligentsia (prolonged applause)’. Stalin’s message was unmistakable: he was declaring revolution vindicated. ‘The lessons of the war,’ he announced, ‘teach us that Soviet power is not only the best form of organization for the economic and cultural development of a country in years of peace, but also the best form for mobilizing all the resources of the people for repelling an enemy in time of war … The Soviet power that was established twenty-six years ago has turned our country – in a brief historical period – into an inviolable fortress.’
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The men and women at the front – or those at least who had survived to join in that November’s celebration – were just as proud of victory, although they tended to assume most credit for themselves. Vitaly Taranichev, the engineer, found a few moments to write home to his wife. ‘It’s one o’clock in the morning,’ he explained, ‘the night of 7 November 1943. I’ve been at my military post since the eve of the 26th anniversary of the Great October revolution … At 1600 hours today we heard the order of our Supreme Commander comrade Stalin about the capture of the capital of our Ukraine, the city of Kiev, by our valiant troops. Natalochka! I can imagine how delighted you must be by this news! The time has passed when the fascists controlled the skies, – today they made a pathetic effort to disrupt the work at our station, but it didn’t come to anything, everything is working like clockwork, and everything is moving forward, towards the west, towards the destruction of fascism!’
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Thousands of front-line soldiers shared this view. They knew that they were on the road to victory. Like many other successful armies, they found themselves embracing some of the values of their nation and culture with new confidence and zeal. They also began to imagine that their sacrifice
could build a better world within that framework. Many believed that they were laying new foundations for the peace, perhaps burning away the hatreds and confusion of the pre-war years. Soldiers’ friendships with front-line comrades felt like a foretaste of the brotherhood to come. And then there was the thrill of new machines. The tank battle at Kursk, the evidence of Soviet air superiority that summer, the deadly music of the Katyushas – all this seemed like a vindication of the five-year plans, a promise of a better, mass-producing world. Zhukov, not Stalin, was probably the army’s real hero (and each veteran will happily describe the wartime general he admired most, like sports fans arguing over star players), but even Stalin, because he lived mainly in men’s imaginations, seemed to embody the qualities that success now promised: progress, unity, heroism, deliverance. In word, at least, it looked as if soldiers and leadership subscribed to the same goals.

The starkest ideological lessons were drawn by looking at the legacy of fascism. ‘I’ve had to drive round a good many of the settlements that the Germans have abandoned in the recent past,’ Taranichev wrote home. ‘You cannot imagine what these places, that used so recently to be blossoming centres of population, look like: not one dwelling without damage, everything burned, and what they didn’t manage to burn has been destroyed by aerial bombing.’
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‘I’ve been marching day and night,’ a twenty-year-old machine-gunner wrote home in October 1943. He had travelled on from Orel to the river Desnya and beyond, crossing country the retreating German army had torched. ‘The population meets us warmly, I didn’t even think that our welcome would be like this. They weep, they hug us, everyone brings us whatever they can.’ The reason for the people’s joy was obvious. ‘I’ve seen how the German burns villages, the bitch. I’ve seen the victims of his violence.’
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For soldiers, the Red Army was now the instrument of collective redemption, the arm of vengeance and of liberation. The greeting that soldiers received from the people of western Russia and eastern Ukraine was often overwhelming. But though many were proud of their collective power, it was also possible, for large numbers of men, to catch a sense of individual progress. The army furthered thousands of careers. Vasily Ermolenko was at school in Kharkov when the war broke out. The first year of the invasion saw his home overrun, his mother trapped and his father enlisted into the Red Army. But young Vasily, now a refugee, received a training. When the Red Army liberated his native city in 1943, he was already working elsewhere on the front as a radio operator and communications engineer. Technology became his life, the more so because every other landmark in it had been
wrecked. He joined the party in the spring of 1944. As he noted in his diary at the time, the war had taught him to love his motherland, but it had also confirmed his belief in socialism, ‘which will lead people to a happy life’. In his mind, all the Red Army’s successes had become linked to the party and its leader.
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The party spirit (the Soviets had a word for it:
partiinost
’) that soldiers like Ermolenko evinced was far removed from the careful sophistry of Stalin’s ideologues. The soldiers’ brand of communism was also distinct from that of their political officers, many of whom had joined the party well before the war. Rank and file belief arose from experience as much as from preaching, and it often co-existed with an impatience for paperwork, a dislike of propaganda. ‘Considerable empirical evidence exists that indoctrination affects troops in much the same way as rain affects a duck,’ a specialist on combat motivation has observed. ‘It glances off their backs.’
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The men’s beliefs, though shaped by everything they had been told (and limited because there was so much that they would never be allowed to say or hear), felt like their own philosophy. ‘If the
politruks
had let us,’ the nationalist writer Victor Astaf’ev remarked, ‘we’d have lost the war in six weeks … Our first victories started when we stopped listening to them.’
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Front-line ideology was strong and deeply rooted, but it was also so distinct from that of the civilian élite that it might have been evolving in another universe.

The nation tried to make soldiers its own, especially as most were conscripts, everybody’s sons. The press cultivated the image of the bereaved mother listening to stories told by soldiers of her son’s age, of local people supporting the troops as if they were their own. In return, many soldiers learned to love Russia and its people with a new warmth. ‘It was war,’ the soldier in one of Simonov’s famous poems remembers, ‘that brought me together for the first time / With longing for travel from village to village, / With the tear of a widow, with a woman’s song.’
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While the soldiers explored a new and larger motherland, however, they struggled to hold on to the lives that they had left behind, to wives and children, and also to the memory of their younger selves. Combat had estranged them utterly. Front-line troops had long despised the ‘rats’ who followed in the rear, the supply teams, staff officers and caravans of reservists, but as time passed, soldiers were also becoming alienated from the civilians they were trying to save, and even from the families they loved.

Red Army men might have imagined that the bonds that united them to one another had replaced these old loyalties, and to some extent this was true. Life at the front even fostered nostalgia for lost homelands – or for
imagined ones – and soldiers who learned that someone from their own province had arrived within travelling distance of their camp would often rush to greet them, hungry for news from home. War was so strange, and Soviet territory so unthinkably vast, that such people were deemed to be instant ‘neighbours’. Women veterans told Alexiyevich that whenever newcomers from home arrived at the front their fellow soldiers pressed around hoping to catch a whiff of the familiar smells that might cling to their clothes.

For all the rhetoric of unity, however, close friendships still aroused suspicion in police circles. The NKVD monitored soldiers’ conversations at the front, while the Special Section, and its successor, SMERSh, whose name was an acronym for the Russian expression ‘death to spies’, pursued each rumour of dissension.
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SMERSh, or some form of it, was a necessary evil. The army was moving west, retaking territory that the enemy had held. In every town there would have been collaborators, men and women who had fed and sheltered Nazis, denounced partisans, or worse, executed orders to imprison or shoot their own neighbours. There were also German agents in the liberated zone, some of them
hiwis
,
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defectors from the Red Army, whose Russian voices and Soviet style concealed their real allegiances. The threat of SMERSh helped to deter all forms of treachery, as well as terrorizing anyone whose labour was needed for the front,
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but while they struck at real enemies, the informers of Stalinist counter-intelligence also betrayed the spirit of the front. If they could find no real spies, the agents would not hesitate to fabricate a plot, making scapegoats of their own comrades. Soldiers had constantly to watch their tongues. ‘We knew that we could talk about our victories,’ Samoilov wrote, ‘but not about defeats. We knew that our junior officers also walked in this shadow. The fear of “SMERSh” … corrupted the lofty notion of a people struggling against the invader … We seldom knew,’ he added, ‘which people in our midst were informers.’ Although comrades in arms still felt true solidarity, the quality of human relations was marred by ‘the Stalinist bacillus of mistrust’.
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