Ivan’s War (46 page)

Vitaly Taranichev’s family lived well behind the lines, in Ashkhabad, a city that was not far from the border with Iran. He had brought his wife there from her native Kiev before the war. Such grand upheavals were the lot of thousands of engineers like them, moved to the steppe – or in their case, to Turkestan – because the railways or the mines needed their skills. Natalya was installed in a house with Vitaly’s mother. If the arrangement had ever suited the two women, the war made sure that they would feud. First of all, their household lacked Vitaly, the one person they both loved and trusted. But in his place had come a string of refugees. By 1943, the house was home to Taranichev’s mother, wife and two children, to his wife’s mother, newly arrived from Ukraine, to his wife’s sister and her children, and from time to time to a range of ‘wives’ associated with Natasha’s errant brother, Fedor.

The women squabbled over everything from money to the children’s diet. They also competed for Vitaly’s material support. The officer assigned parts of his pay to them by sending money orders, payable each month. ‘I’ve sent you two money certificates for this year,’ he wrote to Natalya in April 1944. ‘One for 350 roubles a month in your name and the other for Mama for 100 roubles. I think you won’t have any objection to this arrangement, since you told me that Mama is always complaining that she has to pay all the taxes and so on … By doing this I’m giving my mother some happiness in her old age – of course, not because of 100 roubles a month, but because I’m taking care of her; you must understand me on this question.’
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The women went on falling out. Each summer, the orchard produced a valuable crop of apricots; Vitaly’s mother claimed them for herself. The children played truant from school; Vitaly’s mother accused the hard-pressed Natalya of negligence. In 1943, Natalya and her mother were reduced to selling some of Vitaly’s old clothes to raise some cash; Vitaly’s mother flew into hysterical tears and swore that they wanted to see him dead. ‘I beg you,’ Vitaly asked Natalya, ‘not to pay attention to words that were spoken in the heat of the moment. I could never believe that my mother would wish you and our children ill … Read these words of mine to her and you will see that I’m right.’ Meanwhile, there was the question of the clothes. Vitaly told his wife to sell his trousers, coat and summer things. He would come home, he said, in uniform. ‘Just keep my shoes, because it will be hard to find shoes in size 45 when the war is over.’
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He also told her to keep their hand gun. They would be grateful for that piece of foresight when the war ended.

Despite his help, and despite her own wages and the income from selling apricots, Natalya and the children suffered. ‘I’ve lost a lot of weight,’ she wrote to Vitaly in the summer of 1943. ‘I weigh 48 kilograms. We all manage
with food, my love, however we can …’ It was a story any wife could have written at this time, a tale of hunger, not just making do.
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‘The canteen at work doesn’t really feed us much,’ Natalya continued. ‘The local administration sees fit to use some kind of blended oil that gleams with all the colours of the rainbow.’
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As for the children, they were going barefoot, running wild. School had become an intermittent event, and discipline at home, with everyone preoccupied, was lax. In the Taranichev household, only the baby, Kolya, still made everybody smile. Natalya had found him some coloured bricks for his third birthday. ‘He can sit at the table and build for hours,’ she wrote to his father. ‘He says, “The Germans knocked it down, and Kolya’s going to build it.”’ The little boy was not yet three when he had learned to shout, ‘For the motherland and Stalin!’
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 Field post arriving for soldiers in the Kaluga region, 1942 

 

 

Their regular letters were all the contact that Natalya and Vitaly would
have for several more years. The post had not improved since 1942, when letters disappeared or turned up after months of inexplicable delay. ‘It’s such a shame that I’m getting your letters so irregularly,’ Natalya wrote in June 1943. ‘I’m getting the ones from March at the moment. But the state of our morale depends on it, doesn’t it?’ She was also concerned about the money – 650 or 750 roubles – that still had not arrived.
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But Taranichev himself was suffering as well. That June, he had received the first bundle of letters from home that he had seen in six entire months. ‘At last,’ he wrote, ‘I knew that you were alive and well, – you can’t imagine how pleased I was when they handed over these letters to me, and for three whole days I’ve been carrying them around in my pocket and re-reading them whenever I have a spare minute!’
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This time he did not mention that the long wait had sown wretched doubt in his imagination, but other letters that he wrote, including sharp rebukes to her, showed that it often did.

In some cases, a soldier hungry for news of his wife might find that he was stationed within miles of his old home. ‘There are some commanders among us, and even more of the soldiers, whose houses are 20–50 kilometres from the front line,’ Ageev wrote to his wife in 1943. ‘But they don’t have the right to go there. There are some cases where women have contrived to work their way to the front (which is absolutely forbidden) to be with their husbands, but it’s rare, and for the most part they intercept them and escort them back in convoys to face an enquiry.’
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It would be three more years, well after the victory, before Vitaly and Natalya would meet, and longer than that before they lived together again. Their children had been fatherless, effectively, for six years. It was a miracle that pre-war marriages survived at all.

The people who adapted best, as ever, were the very young. ‘Those who got married at the front,’ an old couple told Alexiyevich, ‘are the happiest people and the happiest couples.’
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The remark sounds sweet, like a happy ending, but real stories were usually grounded in loss. Kirill Kirillovich met his wife in Leningrad during the darkest months of the blockade. It was 1942, and Kirill and an older, married friend were on point duty near the Kirov theatre. A young woman caught their eye, a teenager in military uniform who carried a Nagan revolver and a gas mask. ‘I’ve lived thirty years,’ the older man said, ‘and I’ve never seen such a pretty policeman.’ Eighteen-year-old Nina was a survivor. That winter, only weeks before, her family had starved to death. Her father had lain dead inside their flat for three weeks before anyone strong enough could be found to move him. Only her youth, the instinct for life, had saved the teenager, but she thought of the choice between life and death in terms of duty. When she had made her decision,
she volunteered to donate blood, which meant that she received a guaranteed ration of bread.
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The tiny quantities of food restored her strength.

What motivated Nina to volunteer for night patrol was the desire for revenge. By her own account, narrated through tears sixty years later, she was determined to see the lovely city rise again, determined to avenge her parents. She was also careless of her safety, willing to try anything. When the older man asked, she gave him her telephone number and address. Kirill, still shy at twenty-three, hung back. It was only later, back at the barracks, that he asked for the piece of paper. The couple began to meet in the city’s bombed-out streets and ruins. Both had lost parents since the war began, and neither knew where home would ever be again. In 1944, Nina gave birth to their daughter. That was also the moment when the couple decided to register their marriage. ‘I was a deputy commander,’ Kirill laughed as he told the story. ‘And even then I was ashamed because we had an illegitimate daughter.’

More tenuous were the affairs that sprang up around correspondence. From the earliest days of the war, civilians had been invited to adopt battalions of troops, to write them cheering letters and send parcels and pictures. The morale-boosting work was organized as part of everybody’s contribution to the war, but the letters were escapist on both sides, based on the private hopes that seemed so similar but which in fact related to entirely different worlds. Vladimir Anfilov was another victim of the Leningrad blockade. While he was at the front, his wife, children and two sisters died somewhere in the siege. In March 1944, he announced that he was ready to look for another confidante and friend. His letters to the new woman, the peacetime neighbour of one of the men who served with him, were full of cultural gossip, snippets about the latest film or poem, but they offered no clue about his real life. ‘Tonya,’ he wrote, ‘it’s all so gloomy and it’s best not to think about it.’ A month after their first exchange of letters, Vladimir wanted Tonya’s photograph.
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The letters grew more intimate. Tonya would be heartbroken, months later, when the friend who had introduced them told her that she was just one in a whole string of ‘wives’.

Samoilov helped a young lad called Anis’ko to write replies to the women who sent letters to him. ‘You’re literate,’ Anis’ko said. ‘You’ll know what to write.’ Samoilov ended up composing versions of the same letter to several young women at a time. It always explained that Anis’ko was alone, that his family had been killed and that he was ready to give his heart to any woman who could love him enough to trust him with her photograph. When the replies arrived, Anis’ko would pass them round for his mates to read aloud.
He gave it up after the joke backfired. ‘My son,’ he heard one of his comrades reading out, ‘you’re writing to me about love, but I’m already well into my seventh decade.’
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The state was always ready with a project. The Sovinformburo and party organs were not bothered by the lack of comprehension between front-line soldiers and the people at home. They knew that they could foster an imaginary collectivity, not least because so many millions truly were working to support the front. This patriotic impulse was constantly stoked. In campaign after campaign, the state assembled parcels for the front. In February 1942, one of the grimmest months in a hard wartime winter, the citizens of Omsk despatched an entire train to the soldiers around Leningrad. Its cargo included 12,760 patriotic letters, but the twenty-four wagons were also crammed with 18,631 parcels, each of which contained meat, cold bacon, salami, smoked cheese, honey, fish and tobacco. The train was also well supplied with vodka and other spirits, and someone had added 183 watches, stationery, a toilet and 1,500 copies of a special edition of
Omskaya Pravda
.
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‘Gifts’ for the armed forces did not stop with consumables. Everyone, even the soldiers themselves, was under pressure to subscribe to state war loans, but some enthusiasts went further and bought weapons for the front. In 1943, a hero beekeeper stepped forward in Kursk province. His first gift to the armed forces was 750 kg of honey, but grander ambitions filled his heart. Throughout the summer of 1943, he saved the proceeds of his honey sales until he had raised the 150,000 roubles needed to buy a Yak-9 aeroplane. The new machine would bear his name, Bessmertnyi, which in Russian means ‘immortal’, and the pilot who flew it swore that it was a lucky plane.
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Another patriotic couple donated 50,000 roubles to buy a heavy tank, trained at Chelyabinsk side by side and then served in their own machine, fighting all the way to Germany. A woman called Mariya Oktyabrskaya donated her life savings when her husband died and bought a T-34. She, too, became a tank driver and was killed near Vitebsk in 1944.
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As Bessmertnyi himself put it, ‘The more I work, the more food the Red Army gets, and the nearer becomes our victory over the enemy.’
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While civilians were busily adopting troops, the soldiers were taking on a few strays of their own. The simple kinds of affection were best. Among the veterans I met at Kursk was a comparatively young man – still in his early seventies – called Vasily Andreyevich. He told me how he had joined a regiment when he was just thirteen. It was after the Germans had left, taking his mother and leaving their hut to burn. The boy, an orphan now, had run away to hide in the woods. He was there alone for three days, he remembers, maybe more. He tried to eat pine needles and rough grass. All he could think of was his hunger. And then he stumbled on a Red Army encampment. Sixty years on, his eyes grew wider as he remembered that kitchen. ‘There was an enormous cauldron,’ he told me, ‘and the men were lining up to get a ladleful of the soup from it.’ The boy joined the queue. Realizing that the men all had tin bowls, he took off his cap and held it out. By then, the cook was trying not to laugh, and all the men had realized that they had picked up a new ‘son’. The regiment ‘adopted’ him, providing a uniform and food in exchange for his work – which, naturally, involved cleaning that cauldron every day. ‘All through the war I stayed with them,’ he finished. Even when he was injured in the leg he travelled on, refusing to retire to a field hospital. As he recalled, ‘I could not bear to be separated from that kitchen.’