Ivan’s War (51 page)

For doctors operating in this war, ‘trauma’ meant physical damage, concussion
or contusion to the brain. In interviews in 1996, I was unable to persuade groups of veteran medical staff that any other kind of battle shock existed, beyond the qualms and exhaustion that all soldiers can feel. ‘Contusion’, implying shell damage, was an acceptable term, but they had never heard of trauma in the current western sense. Mishearing me, they asked me to explain what I meant by this new thing, this ‘post-dramatic [
sic
] stress’.
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Their surprise is not difficult to explain. Textbooks from their days at the front did not refer to mental trauma and nor did the memoirs of their fellow doctors or even of the combatants themselves. Panic was weakness, it was shame, and shame was written out of this war’s history along with drunkenness and crime.

The ignorance of medical orderlies in the field, most of whom were trained in the 1930s or even, with some haste, during the war itself, reflected a deliberate policy choice. Behind the lines, there were still specialists with all the necessary expertise, as well informed as any in the United States or Britain. Some of the older ones had led the European debate on stress during the First World War. As late as 1942, there had been some high-level discussion of shock, a conference or two,
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but the ideas never reached the front-line teams. Indeed, there were no psychiatric staff below the level of entire fronts and armies.
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Resources were one problem; another was that military psychology, if not the treatment of the sick, had taken a different turn since Stalin’s rise. A good deal of experimentation was devoted to a kind of Taylorism, the mental preparation of each soldier to fit the machine or weapon that he would have to use. Warfare was deemed to be susceptible to the same rules as mass production.
²⁰
Men and machines would work in harmony. No allowance was made for hysteria.

Some symptoms could not be ignored. Men suffering from mutism, convulsions and fugue states could not stand in straight lines, let alone clean and assemble guns or handle delicate equipment. They were generally treated close to the front line, not least because the larger hospitals were overflowing with wounded and dying men. The treatment was basic. Injections always seemed to help – they had a sort of mystic potency to peasants who had no idea of medicine. Let the men sleep, the idea went, and they will soon recover or at least be well enough to fight. In very many cases, this was true. Rapid attention to the problem – which was only possible at the front line – was also beneficial.

Some patients still refused to heal. Those needing long stretches of rest could be assigned to jobs in the warren of camps and transport depots just behind the lines. They worked as storemen, stretcher-bearers, cleaners,
cooks, but only a very few of these would ever see a psychiatric ward. To get there, they would have to sustain their symptoms through weeks of tests and ‘treatments’, including the administration of electric shocks (allegedly to stimulate the nerves) or the use of wet cloths and rubber masks to induce a sense of drowning (to test whether their symptoms were really under voluntary control).
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The brutality of these initial steps presaged the grim world of the psychiatric ward. For those whose diagnosis held, life would be wretched; hungry, loveless, submerged under drugs.
²²

Along the front, a problem that was not a problem in official terms soon seemed to disappear. In that sense, the Soviet approach to trauma was effective. American troops, whose symptoms were taken very seriously, dropped out of active service at four to six times the Red Army’s rate in this war.
²³
Stalin’s soldiers learned that citing battle stress was not the best way to complain of exhaustion, panic and the inability to sleep. Physical injuries, which soon followed the mental ones, provided a more effective ticket home, or at least to a field station and a bed. ‘There was only one thought,’ a veteran later suggested. ‘To be wounded quickly, to get it over with, to get to a hospital, or at least for a convalescence, for a rest.’
²⁴
The lucky ones would escape long-term invalidity, but even the tens of thousands of supposedly healthy men who were camped along the Belorussian Front in the spring of 1944 could scarcely be considered whole.

Front-line culture had to evolve to make room for exhausted, frightened and aggressive men. At the same time, it also took on consignments of criminals. Trainloads of murderers and small-time crooks had long been running west out of the Gulag to restock the army, but now almost all felons convicted of banditry, robbery and what were vaguely referred to as ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ were held close to the front, assessed, and in almost every case, made to serve out their term in
shtraf
units.
²⁵
Originally, these had fought in formations that remained separate from the mass of serving troops, but now the criminals and
shtrafniki
could find themselves assigned to regular units, their task to carry out the dangerous work, especially sorties behind the German lines.
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More than ever, the culture and the language of the
shtrafniki
prevailed within the ranks. The press might call the men heroes, but when they gathered at the front, their idiom was that of slaves, or else of convicts.
²⁷
It was not just the patriotic rage of 1941 that was fading; a kind of buttoned-up communist morality was disappearing under other values, too.

Violence was everywhere, whatever the men’s current military orders. When they were not in combat, they could quarrel over booty, drink, status 
or women. Most often the result was a brawl, but sometimes the authorities were left to deal with corpses. The victims might be found at first light with their heads blown off, or else they might be beaten up with rifle butts.
²⁸
Sometimes the motive was euphoria. Where the Germans had set fire to villages as a calculated act of terror, the Red Army was capable of doing so – even on its own soil – by firing at dry straw in an orgy of celebration.
²⁹
Drink – which scarcely anyone consumed for the pleasure of the taste – was often involved. Its purpose now – which the Tommies of the First World War would have entirely understood – was just to kill the mind, to escape from the war without leaving one’s post.
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In some units, the men would pool their vodka ration so that each in turn could have the chance to drink it all and lose himself entirely for one night.
³¹

It was the proof strength, not the quality, of the liquor that counted. Chuikov took the precaution of sealing the cellars of fine wine that his men discovered when they overran Nazi quarters in Poland. But sometimes he arrived too late. When he visited one cellar, he found the driver from an artillery regiment already rummaging through the piles of crates. ‘I can’t find any strong spirits like ours,’ the man muttered. He had been working his way through a succession of bottles of fine champagne. ‘This is the sixth case I’ve opened,’ he complained, ‘and all they’ve got is fizzy stuff.’
³²
Disgustedly, the soldier let the thin liquid spill on to the floor. But though they spurned imported wine, men of his tastes would drink anything that smelled like spirit, including
samogon
and anti-freeze. ‘When our soldiers find alcohol,’ a Soviet lieutenant confided, ‘they take leave of their senses. You can’t expect anything from them until they have finished the last drop.’ In his view, expressed in 1945, ‘if we hadn’t had drunkenness like this we would have beaten the Germans two years ago’.
³³

Crime was also increasing with the soldiers’ growing confidence. By this point in the war its scale was nothing short of heroic. The recent improvement in supplies was like an invitation to potential crooks. The business began at the top. Indeed, as the army’s inspectors observed, a ‘significant proportion of officers’ in front-line regions had been tried for large-scale theft and speculation between January 1943 and July 1944. The figures, which were based on ‘incomplete data’ and covered only the first six months of 1944, told their own vivid story. This was an army that was billeted on its own Soviet territory. The glory days of German plunder were still months away. And yet, in that half year, detected thefts by officers alone included 4.5 million roubles in cash, 70 tons of flour and bread products, 22 tons of meat and fish, 5 tons of sugar, 4,872 items of equipment, 33 tons of
petrol, seven motor cars and ‘other military property to the value of two million roubles’.
³⁴

The global figures were impressive, but a string of individual cases suggested that they were wild underestimates. This was a time when food was currency in every hungry village on the steppe. ‘Back home,’ Lev Kopelev, now serving as a Soviet officer, would muse, ‘there were villages where the war had passed like a column of fire, or where, invisibly from afar, it had sucked out the bread and blood; where a piece of sugar was a thing of wonder, and the children, with their enormous eyes and bluish-white faces, choked and chewed on some kind of mud-black, bitter bread made of the devil only knew what.’
³⁵
With stores to spare, a group of officers in the 203rd reserve army put their minds to wartime profit. In two months in the autumn of 1943, they diverted 34 tons of bread, 6.3 tons of sugar, 2.6 tons of fats, 15 tons of grits and 2 tons of meat from the soldiers’ supplies. The trade was used to fund the luxuries that made life better in an army camp. As the report on the criminals’ activities commented, this was a barracks where ‘drinking, carousing and theft were a normal part of life’.
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The following June, an even more ambitious racket came to light among tank officers serving on the first Ukrainian Front. Mere theft was only part of it. The other side was corruption. Officers in the field, it seemed, were eager to secure favours from their military bosses in the capital. The major-general in this case had smoothed his path with a stream of generous bribes to Moscow, including – in just one consignment – 267 kg of pork, 125 kg of mutton and 114 kg of butter. On another occasion, his munificence included five live goats. Meanwhile, among the items that had gone missing from army stores on this one front that June were 15,123 kg of meat, 1,959 kg of sausage, 3,000 kg of butter, 2,100 kg of biscuits, 890 kg of boiled sweets, 563 kg of soap, 100 winter coats, 100 greatcoats, eighty fur gilets, 100 pairs of
valenki
and 100 pairs of boots.
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Reports of this kind were a weekly, if not daily, event for the military courts. They testify to the presence of large-scale, organized and well-established networks. But this was an army in which there was at least one spy in almost every company. What the reports also demonstrate, therefore, is that corruption extended to the security police, who no doubt enjoyed their live goats and butter, too.

No veteran, of course, remembered any of this later. Thieving was another dark truth that time and collective memory would bury. The consequent shortages were also a source of grievance, an insult that could rankle, and as such they had no place in the bright memory of war. But the losers, naturally, were the men whose stores were being skimmed. On a daily basis, they
put up with watery soup, sugarless tea and the lumps of gristle that could not be sold for cash. Even when the food turned up, they might find that there were no bowls or spoons to serve it with.
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Everyone understood that reserve troops should suffer, but even at the front there were whole days when soldiers went without hot meals or tea.
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Complaining could put a man on a charge of anti-Soviet agitation. ‘On verifying the food,’ NKVD officers primly noted, ‘it was found to be of the required standard, and the portions were all in line with current norms.’
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The men had to choke down their fury with the cabbage soup. Statistics for recorded crime concealed the facts:
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if the overall figures in monthly reports are to be believed, fewer than 10 per cent of troops were disciplined for any crime, including theft.
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There could be no truth, then, in soldiers’ complaints, or so their officers alleged, but that was partly because high figures for crime reflected most of all upon the
politruks
and their bosses. The temptation to hold the statistics down was as hard to resist as the promise of a crate of contraband sardines.

Meanwhile, ordinary men and women found numerous ways to keep the hunger and the cold at bay. Pilfering, which was a sort of compensation for indignity, was one recourse. Another was extorting sheep and pigs from local people. Self-help, which could take many forms, was commonplace. As Zhukov was preparing for the great assault, soldiers in Belorussia were putting in their usual hours on the farms, digging the fields and shifting truckloads of young pigs for fattening.
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As ever, despite the demands of the war, farm work was deemed to be a part of army service. By now, however, it was profitable. Farms kept grain stores and chickens, not to mention larger animals for butchering. Beyond the cow sheds, too, there was more free food in the open country. Hunting accidents became so common on the Belorussian Front in the summer of 1944 that soldiers in the 11th guards army were banned from shooting deer and other wild game.
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