Ivan’s War (63 page)

One witness to it all was Nikolai Belov. ‘I wanted to write to you so much on the first of May,’ he wrote to Lidiya on 3 May, ‘but the way it’s worked out is that we’ve been in battle the whole time, and what’s more they’ve been really hard and drawn-out battles, the kind where you don’t have time to talk, let alone to think about writing.’ Four of her letters had arrived on 1 May, but he had been in the thick of the shelling in the Tiergarten, and when it was over he was too tired to open them. Then came the city’s capitulation, a lull in the thunder of guns, and finally, a chance to rest. ‘I haven’t slept like I did just now for a long time – I was like a corpse,’ he wrote. But he knew the war was coming to an end. ‘I don’t know if there’ll be another lot of fighting like we’ve just seen, but I doubt it. It’s all finished in Berlin.’ When Weidling signed the capitulation papers, Belov had been asleep.

The lieutenant had not witnessed the end of Operation Bagration. He had been wounded just weeks after writing the last entry in his diary, in the late summer of 1944. His reward had been the first home leave of his entire war, a second honeymoon with Lidiya. It was of home that he was thinking as he wrote on 3 May. A fellow officer had invited him to celebrate the first of May – belatedly – in his ‘baronial’ quarters in Berlin, ‘where, as they say, you probably can relax a bit’, but the thought of luxury repelled the weary officer at that moment. ‘To hell with all this stuff,’ Belov declared. ‘I’d rather be in a hut somewhere – anywhere, as long as it’s in Russia, so that I could relax and forget the whole nightmare of this war, including the bloodstained German race.’ The luxuries reproached his conscience, too, for he had not had time to send a parcel home, although he longed to help his family. He was exhausted and sick of the war, but his letter also contained a germ of real hope.

The point was that Lidiya was expecting their baby, a child conceived during his leave. He called the pregnant woman ‘fatty’, affectionately telling her to eat well and get lots of rest. More seriously, he also contemplated the things his unborn children would think later on, when they asked what their father had done in the war. He had no reason to reproach himself, and the thought made him proud. They would, he thought, ‘not be ashamed, because we fulfilled our duty to the end’. But all that was still in the future. In those first days of May the war was not quite over, and nor was the stress, the sense of endless combat, in his brain. ‘No doubt you are celebrating,’ he
wrote. ‘I can imagine how delighted our whole nation must be, but for us, soldiers, it’s difficult to grasp the true extent of our victory, our aim has been to take a city or to win a battle, and we’re used to weighing the effect of a given battle, and we’ll only start thinking about the victory when we have heard the last shot.’

He knew that there would not be long to wait. ‘Perhaps,’ he concluded, ‘the war will have ended before you even get this letter.’ Five days later, Zhukov accepted Germany’s unconditional surrender. The ceremony was as dignified, as final, as wartime conditions could make it. The cameras of the world’s press flashed as Keitel, the German head of state, took off his glove to sign the act of capitulation just after midnight on 9 May. When the German delegation had left the hall, the Soviet and Allied delegations collapsed with relief, the wine and vodka appeared on the green baize tables, and Zhukov himself danced to the applause of his generals.
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Outside, the men greeted their victory with salvoes of heavy gunfire, rifle shots, and yet more drink. But Belov never heard the last shot of his war, nor did he ever see the daughter who was born a month later. He was sent west, to Burg on the Elbe, on 4 May. The next day, 5 May, he was killed there.
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More than 360,000 soldiers of the Red Army and of its Polish comrades perished in the campaigns for Berlin, perhaps a tenth of them in the battles around the capital itself.
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Those men and women were the ghosts at the feast on 9 May. But for a few hours, most soldiers remembered life, not death. ‘We heard the joyful news on the radio at three o’clock this morning,’ Taranichev wrote home to his wife. ‘Anyone who was already asleep was woken up, and we organized a gathering straight away: we fired volleys out of every kind of gun till morning, which means that right up till dawn the town was under such heavy fire that it looked as if a real battle was going on. My dears, you cannot imagine what joy there is among our officers and men because of the war’s ending; it’s true that you suffered very greatly back home behind the lines, and that our rearguard together with the valiant Red Army defeated the fascist beast, but all the same for us at the front it was hardest of all, and you’ve got to understand us,
frontoviki
!’
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Ageev spoke for many when he declared that ‘there has never been such happiness and pride in history as the Soviet people are experiencing today’.
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At Samoilov’s base, the soldiers had been celebrating since the fall of Berlin on 2 May. On 7 May, they heard a rumour that the war was finally over, and some began to fire into the air. They fired again on 8 May, this time because the BBC had
announced Germany’s capitulation, but it was not until Keitel surrendered to Zhukov himself that they got really drunk.
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Elsewhere the men had not waited that long. On 5 May, a soldier in the NKVD’s border guards happened to find a canister of wood alcohol in the courtyard of one of SMERSh’s Berlin stations. He drained an experimental portion into a teapot and shared it with two other troops in the security service. The single pot was not enough, and so they filled a three-litre container and shared that out, fetching yet more when the cook turned up and invited himself to the party. That night, another seven men joined in – or helped themselves, because the original drinkers had passed out by this stage, happily forgetting that the war was not yet won. They did not live to see the victory. The first three men died on the second day. The rest would die before Keitel had signed the final papers.
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Such cases were repeated all along the front. Wood alcohol was frequently to blame, but so were antifreeze, white spirit, and even too much looted schnapps.
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At least the victims never knew the disappointments of the peace.

The next day, 10 May, Berlin would feel deserted, silent. The streets were empty, and the public squares, where the Wehrmacht had felled trees in preparation for its own artillery, felt blank, bereft even of songbirds. Most soldiers were sleeping off their hangovers. But not everyone had remained in the German capital to greet the end of European war. Ermolenko was among the thousands of men already heading east. His company received the news of victory as their train approached the Ural mountains.
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He did not know the details of his mission yet, but he was heading for Manchuria. The European war was over, but the Soviets would now join in the struggle to defeat Japan.

It was the first straw in the wind, the first hint that Germany’s defeat would not mean the end of military service for Red Army troops. They had fulfilled their duty, as Belov had said, not flinching even to the last, but now the first of many disappointments loomed. It would not be a few weeks but some months, and even years, before most men would see their wives and families again. As for their hopes, the dreams that they had nurtured through long evenings of talk and writing, it would be a longer wait still. As Kopelev had understood as he watched the flames rising above Neidenburg, it was not clear what these people were now equipped to do. It would never be clear how they would deal with peace. The only thing that they could count on as they watched the spring unfold around the ruins of Berlin was the ruthless power of the state for which so many had died. They had saved it. Now they would learn the measure of its gratitude.