Ivan’s War (56 page)
Authors: Catherine Merridale
The army, or rather, some of its invalid veterans, brought its rough prejudices back to share with Soviet civilians. The stories were predictable enough. Jews did not fight, they said, but sat around in warm offices or anywhere that money might be found lying about. Then came the jokes, the judgements, the resentment. In the early summer of 1943, members of the editorial board of the army newspaper,
Red Star
, even discussed the need to find and publish some stories of Jews who were heroes of the Soviet Union or front-line generals. Something needed to be done to avert racial violence. ‘There is a real agitation for pogrom,’ one of them wrote that May.
111
The predicted lynching followed months later. Kiev’s pogrom of 1945 began after a fight between two drunken Ukrainians and a Jewish NKVD agent. The agent shot his assailants, whose funeral became the spark for anti-Jewish riots.
112
But post-war Russia, very soon, would target Jews with all the power of the state. From 1948, they were the objects of new arrests, denunciations and public humiliation. They lost their jobs, they lost esteem, their children were denied the education that had been their right. Finally, Jews were the intended victims of the last great purge of Stalin’s life.
113
When I collected testimonies for this book, I found that Jews were disproportionately represented among the veterans who talked. This was not accidental, and nor was it some prejudice of mine. One reason is that veterans still believe that they should keep Soviet secrets. The state whose rules they promised to uphold has gone, but many hold on to it because it is the only stable image in their political imagination. For Jews, so many of whom were marginalized in the post-war world, it may be easier than it is for ethnic Russians to see these old rules as absurd. Then there are questions of loyalty, for Jews suffered when communism fell and few have reason to welcome the new and chauvinistic Russian state. So it is easier for them to talk. The stories that I heard were vivid, terrible, humorous and often sad, but they were never tales of office staff. Jews were among the most determined combatants on every Soviet front. They had a great deal to avenge. Beyond that, members of this special generation tended to be loyal to the internationalist cause, to the utopian dream of communism, to just war, revolution and new forms of brotherhood. Nemanov fought near Stalingrad and onwards towards Kursk; Kirill survived the siege of Leningrad and led his men through Prussia. They both took part in some of the most dangerous operations of the war.
I remember a morning spent with another Jewish combatant. Boris Grigorevich was born in Kiev. His parents were both Jews, though he identified himself as Soviet. ‘Was there racism?’ he repeated, smiling at my question.
‘Of course not. We were all Soviet citizens, all the same.’ His best friend, as he explained, was a Mingrelian from the Caucasus. ‘We were like brothers,’ he told me. The friend had died, but ‘I am still part of his family, they treat me like a son.’ That was not his last word on the subject, however. I asked him what his fears had been during the long nights before battle. ‘I was afraid of being thought a coward,’ he answered. ‘I knew that I was a Jew, and so I had to prove that I was not afraid.’ It would be years before he knew for certain that his father had been killed at Babi Yar.
1
Accounts of the precise starting point vary because of the scale of the operation. In some places, the first shots were fired on 21 June. Elsewhere the starting date is taken as 22 or 23 June.
2
The front itself was about 450 miles long. Werth, pp. 860–1.
3
Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, RH2-2338, 1 (January 1944).
4
Belov, p. 468 (21 March 1944).
5
Ibid
., p. 462 (28 November 1943).
6
Ibid
., p. 465 (12 January 1944).
7
Ibid
., p. 468 (13 March 1944).
8
Ibid
., p. 470 (7 April 1944).
9
Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, monthly report, March 1944, pp. 1–2.
10
Belov, p. 464 (12 December 1943); p. 465 (17 January 1944).
11
Ermolenko, p. 39.
12
See Catherine Merridale, ‘The Collective Mind’,
Journal of Contemporary History
, 35:1, January 2000, p. 41.
13
Generally, they were lumped together with other ‘amoral’ or ‘extraordinary’ incidents. If they were explained at all, it was with reference to any suicide note or final remark that existed. Since the soldiers themselves did not know the word ‘trauma’, they naturally attributed their agony to more immediate causes, often unrequited love or political disappointment. For examples from Belarus in 1944, see RGVA, 32925/1/516, 177.
14
For a parallel discussion of the death penalty in the British army at this time, see David French, ‘Discipline and the Death Penalty in the British Army in the War against Germany during the Second World War’,
Journal of Contemporary History
, 33:4, October 1998, pp. 531–45.
15
I am grateful to Professor Simon Wessely for drawing my attention to the correlation between the statistics for Soviet mental casualties and the average incidence of adult-onset schizophrenia.
16
Richard A. Gabriel,
Soviet Military Psychiatry
(Westport, CT, 1986), p. 47. This estimate is based on interviews with survivors and their psychologists, as a result of which Gabriel produced a rough figure of 6 per thousand mental casualties for the Red Army as a whole. However crude, this figure compares strikingly with the equivalent 36–39 per thousand in the US army in the Second World War.
17
See
Night of Stone
, p. 304. The consensus among psychiatrists in Russia had shifted by 2002, when I asked these questions again. Contact with European and American medicine had clearly changed the prevailing wisdom, at least among doctors currently in practice. But retired wartime medical staff, including nurses and psychiatrists interviewed in Kursk, Smolensk and Tbilisi, had not changed their position.
18
The point is made in Amnon Sella’s optimistic book.
The Value of Human Life
, p. 49.
19
Gabriel, p. 56.
20
I am grateful to Dr V. A. Koltsova, of the Moscow Institute for Military Psychology, for sharing this unpublished material with me in 2002. See also Albert R. Gilgen
et al.,
Soviet and American Psychology during World War II
(Westport, CT, 1997).
21
Gabriel, p. 63.
22
Some were released, although they carried the stigma of mental illness for ever. Many of these ended up in prison camps later in life. Others joined the colonies of the crippled in the White Sea and lived out their lives in isolation. The worst fate, probably, was to remain in a Soviet psychiatric hospital of this era.
23
Gabriel, pp. 42–8.
24
Vyacheslav Kondrat’ev, cited by George Gibian, ‘World War 2 in Russian National Consciousness,’ in Garrard and Garrard,
World War II and the Soviet People
(London, 1993), p. 153.
25
Order of the deputy defence commissar, no. 004/073/006/23 ss; 26 January 1944,
Velikaya otechestvennaya
, 2 (3), p. 241.
26
On the use of convicts for this work, see the captured report of the 4th tank army, Bundesarchiv RH-2471, p. 16, 4 August 1944. See also RH-2471, 33 (prisoner of war reports). Temkin (p. 124) also recalled that a convicted murderer was used for reconnaissance work in his own unit.
27
Viktor Astaf’ev,
Tam, v okopakh (Vospominaniya soldata)
(Moscow, 1986), p. 24.
28
Examples are to be found in GARF 7523/16/388, which contains the records of the commission that dealt with the reinstatement of medals to soldiers who had been convicted of crimes at the front.
29
Drobyshev, p. 94.
30
For a parallel from the British army in the First World War, see Frank Richards,
Old
Soldiers Never Die
(London, 1933), p. 194.
31
Drobyshev, p. 94.
32
Vasily Chuikov,
The End of the Third Reich, trans. Ruth Kisch
(London, 1976), p. 40.
33
Drobyshev, p. 94.
34
Velikaya otechestvennaya
, 14, p. 619; report dated 1 October 1944.
35
Lev Kopelev,
No Jail for Thought
, trans. Anthony Austin (London, 1977), p. 38.
36
Velikaya otechestvennaya
, 2 (3), pp. 265–6.
37
Ibid
., p. 295.
38
Velikaya otechestvennaya
, 6, p. 247, on the sorry state of the kitchens in the reserve political units of the 2nd Baltic Front.
39
TsAMO, 523/41119s/1, 17; see also similar reports from German intelligence, RH2-2338, 10 (1944).
40
RGVA, 32925/1/516, 177 (April 1944).
41
RGVA, 32925/1/515, 139–40.
42
RGVA 32925/1/516, 4 and 178.
43
Velikaya otechestvennaya
, 14, 590.
44
TsAMO, 523/41119s/1, 169.
45
Ermolenko, p. 52.
46
See Overy, pp. 238–9; Erickson,
Berlin
, pp. 198–200.
47
Chuikov,
Third Reich
, p. 27.
48
Belov, p. 469 (31 March 1944).
49
Ibid
., pp. 473–4 (18 June 1944).
50
Glanz and House, p. 209.
51
Cited in Garthoff, p. 237.
52
Erickson,
Berlin
, p. 225.
53
RH2-2338, 44-07, 1‒2.
54
GASO, R1500/1/1, 63.
55
Chuikov,
Reich
, p. 28.
56
RH2-2467, 118, for the leave. Cash incentives for planes and ‘tongues, see RH2-2338.
57
Sidorov, pp. 99 and 108.
58
Pravda
, 19 July 1944; Werth, p. 862.
59
Ermolenko, p. 46.
60
Ibid
., p. 50.
61
Pis’ma s fronta i na front
, p. 92.
62
Stalin,
O velikoi otechestvennoi voine
, pp. 145–6.
63
RH2-2338, March and April 1944.
64
See, for example,
Pravda
, 26 August 1944.
65
German intelligence reports consistently stressed this. See, for example, RH2-2338; 4408 (monthly intelligence report for August 1944).
66
On ethnically based Ukrainian nationalism, see Amir Weiner,
Making Sense
, pp. 240–1.
67
See Leo J. Docherty III, ‘The Reluctant Warriors: The Non-Russian Nationalities in Service of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945,’
JSMS
, 6:3 (September 1993), pp. 432–3.
68
RH2-2468, 35.
69
Ibid
., 80.
70
Ibid
., 35 and 38.
71
Details from RGASPI, 17/125/241, 93–4.
72
RH2-2468, 35.
73
A point made specifically – and understandably believed – by German intelligence. See RH2-2338, 44-09, 1.
74
This finding confirms the comments in RH2-2468, 80.
75
RGASPI, 17/125/241, 88.
76
Ibid
., 89.
77
Ibid
., 91–2; 95.
78
Ibid
., 95.
79
Velikaya otechestvennaya
, 6, pp. 292–5.
80
Ermolenko, pp. 59 and 62.
81
Kopelev, p. 53.
82
The agitation department’s concern was fully justified. See Senyavskaya,
Frontovoe
pokolenie
, p. 91.
83
For other evidence of this, see Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, 45-02, 2–3.
84
Beevor,
Berlin
, p. 34.
85
Their comments were faithfully collected. For examples from the summer of 1944, see RGVA, 32925/1/515.
86
Chuikov,
Reich
, p. 34.
87
RH2-2468, 6–7, 27.
88
See, for example, the assessment in Glantz and House, p. 214. A more detailed account is given in Erickson,
Berlin
, pp. 247–90.
89
Weiner, p. 149.
90
RGVA 32925/1/516, 176 (April 1944).
91
RH2-2337, 58.
92
The idea was that these shot around corners.
93
Bundesarchiv, RH2-2337, 70–71.
94
These jokes are among those recalled for me by veterans, and they came up in more than one interview. They can also be found, lovingly collected, in Bundesarchiv, RH2-2337, the Wehrmacht’s own report on Soviet anti-Semitism.
95
For a 1943 soldier’s letter to exactly this effect, see Senyavskaya,
Frontovoe pokolenie
, p. 83.
96
In fact, civilian casualties were highest among Ukrainians, and proportionately, though not numerically, highest of all in Belorussia.
97
Werth, pp. 702–6.
98
Bartov,
The Eastern Front
, p. 132.
99
Velikaya otechestvennaya voina
, 4, p. 289.
100
See
ibid
., p. 289; see also
Vserossiiskaya kniga pamyati
,
1941–45
(Moscow, 1995); Obzornyi tom, p. 406; Glantz and House, p. 51.
