Ivan’s War (65 page)

It could be argued that the dreamers always wanted more than a devastated country could deliver. Even personal freedom, when there was so much work to do, was a luxury. To Stalin’s mind, only forced labour and compulsory unpaid ‘voluntary’ work could guarantee national recovery. By 1950, the Soviet economy was claimed to be twice the size it had been in 1945.
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This growth was not achieved by fostering the people’s leisure interests. And other post-war governments in Europe, including Britain’s, were also obliged to call for austerity. The war impoverished Europe for some years, but the oppressiveness, the lack of trust, and the sheer violence of late Stalinism exceeded any economic or security requirement. There had to be some other reason for the darkness that closed in.

Veterans of a contemplative disposition were apt to blame themselves. They realized too late that they had spent their energy at the front line. Many were injured, even permanently disabled, and few escaped some kind of stress and shock. They were also haunted by disabling guilt. A cloud of collective depression stalled and then blocked such people’s eagerness to call for change. ‘The dead are watching me,’ a soldier says in a poem of 1948, and it was a feeling all would have recognized. As Mikhail Gefter, himself a veteran and survivor, would later recollect, the doubt that ‘tortures memory’ is the thought that ‘I could, but did not, save them’.
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For some, the most absorbing peacetime project of the future would be the search for their comrades’ graves.

All found it difficult to adapt to peace. In war, an officer gave orders and they were fulfilled, his life was organized around clear goals, and there were secret little pleasures – plundered cognac or a pretty front-line wife – to compensate for military rigours. Infantrymen also had narrow daily worlds, and as peace loomed the routines and close comradeships seemed curiously safe. With the war over, there were no absolute priorities, no rules. Some soldiers found that they could never make the change. To this day, many veteran combatants get up at five-thirty, a habit that retirement and the inertia of poverty still cannot break, but at the time the real diehards could hardly bear the very thought of peace. They listened hungrily to rumours of another war, this time with Britain and America.
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Some even claimed to have seen the first lines of wounded men in Simferopol.
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It was tempting to hold fast to old anxieties and patterns of familiar stress. War justified the only way of life most of these people could imagine, while peace meant facing
the complicated worlds that they had left and even taking cognisance of all that they had lost.

Other post-war governments would work harder to help their veterans adapt.
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Some did so despite the hardship and cost of war. It was difficult everywhere, but no other combatant nation emerged with quite the cold dictatorship that Stalin built. War alone was not to blame for this, and nor were veterans or memories of death. It was Stalin himself, the leader who took credit for the victory while Zhukov’s ink was still wet on the page, who determined the post-war relationship between people and state. Stalin, that is, and the swarm of acolytes and bureaucrats who flourished in the system that his brand of government created. As the spontaneous joy of early May began to cool, the leaders of a dictatorial regime made plans for their own victory parade. The people’s carnival was to be superseded by a ceremony along proper Soviet lines, something that put every person in their place.

It took several weeks to finalize the scheme. By then, some people had begun to wonder whether grandeur was what they wanted. Some muttered about the expense, others about their private grief. ‘I won’t be going to the parade,’ one Muscovite observed. ‘They killed my son. I’d rather go to a requiem.’
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Others of the same view began to call for a day of mourning, or even an annual week of it; no gesture could do justice to the loss that gaped in people’s lives. For the next fifty years, real memories would infuse the annual victory holiday in early May with a solemnity that other socialist festivals, including the anniversary of Lenin’s coup and Red Army Day, would lack. Wartime bereavement was a shadow that would never lift. For some, it meant the end of family happiness. ‘I have two children and no help from anywhere,’ a woman muttered to someone. ‘That’s why I don’t have a chance of celebrating, and I’ve got nothing to be pleased about.’
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Anxiety, loneliness, and the fear of penury would grow more troubling for widows and orphans as winter approached. But still, that June, the consensus favoured a state event, something to embody and contain the chaos of pride, victory, shock and apprehension for the future. As usual, that meant a rehearsed ceremony and a hand-picked crowd. The cost must have been staggering. Selected soldiers, sailors and airmen were brought home from Germany and the Baltic. The cavalry got to shine its boots, the regimental bands tuned up, tanks, guns and death-dealing Katyushas were lovingly oiled. Whole companies of cadets from Moscow training schools, future artillerymen and engineers, took lessons in advanced parade-ground drill.
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Each gesture and each step was choreographed, including even those of Zhukov and the generals. The only thing that could not be controlled – apart
from Zhukov’s grey horse, which was known for its bad temper – was the Moscow weather. The grand parade, the culmination of four years of war, took place on 24 June in drenching rain.

The change of mood since 9 May could scarcely have been clearer, though thousands of Muscovites, still shocked and overjoyed by the war’s end, might well have overlooked the shift. Instead of happy chaos, this was a day of geometrical precision. Red Square was filled with shapes, not individual people. Each rectangle in the parade was composed of scores of uniformed men. In the best traditions of authoritarian states (but for its massive scale, the event could have been a Nazi festival of sport), they all moved to exact routines, none even looking in a direction that had not been agreed and rehearsed in advance. The parade was blatant with gold braid. This was an army with a sharp hierarchy and strong leaders, not a people’s militia or even the sword of the world’s proletariat. Zhukov himself reviewed the troops, perching on that tetchy grey and soaking in the endless rain. The themes that day were triumph and authority. The victory, it was made clear, was about Germany’s defeat, not Russia’s liberty. In a grand gesture of conquest, the captured German colours, each topped with a silver eagle, were hurled down in a pile before the Lenin mausoleum. They might have gleamed in the June light. Instead they made a sodden pile of red and black in the grey damp.

Stalin watched from the safety of his stand. He was, by all accounts, exhausted, and he had visibly aged. But he had lost none of his anxious jealousy. That night, at a banquet for 2,500 Red Army officers and men, the leader would propose a toast to the Soviet people. It should have been the supreme moment of glory and gratitude. Instead, the words he used might well have made an entire nation shudder. For though Stalin acknowledged that this had been a real people’s war, he was in no mood to elevate rivals. The time for homespun pride was past. While they might have been hailed as heroes, the people who had struggled, the millions whose efforts had kept the soldiers fed and bullets in their guns, became ‘the little screws and bolts’ in the great engine of his state.
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They were to be no more significant in the next decade than the replaceable parts of a machine. A peace on terms like this would be a disappointment to many civilians, but for
frontoviki
, with all their hopes and new-found strengths, it would turn out to be a kind of death, a loss of self. In many ways, it was also a betrayal.

‘We’ve been living in peacetime conditions for about a week already,’ Taranichev wrote to Natalya on 15 May. ‘The cannons and machine guns
aren’t firing any more, and the planes aren’t flying; we don’t have to observe a blackout any more – we work at night with the windows open and breathe the fresh air. But … there is still plenty of work to do. We will probably be here for a couple of months at least.’ It was no real hardship, as he went on to explain. He and a comrade had been billeted with a family near their base in Czechoslovakia. Their hosts were deferential, generous. ‘They offered us every convenience: we had a bath as soon as we arrived and we have been given a room of our own with wonderful beds and snow-white linen.’
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There was even a radio in the room – another excellent German one – that Taranichev (notwithstanding the kind hosts) already planned to take home when he left. Indeed, a good part of his letter was about the parcels that were on their way to Ashkhabad. His other main preoccupation was the future. Like his comrades, he yearned to know the date he would go home.

The bulk of front-line troops were stationed in central and eastern Europe. Their demobilization was not just desirable in human terms, for the Soviet state could not afford to keep an army several million strong in uniform. But what the older men dreamed of – a swift, joyful reunion with their families – would not be possible for most. No army simply dissolves overnight. And while it finalized its plans to debrief and transport over a million men, the Soviet state was content to use soldiers as cheap labour for some of the tougher jobs in construction and transport. As Taranichev hinted, these ranged from rebuilding the roads to securing the ruins of Berlin and dealing with the human columns of former prisoners and refugees. If soldiers in the European theatre were bored, it was only because the peace would always be dull – thankfully – after the extreme world of the war. But some Red Army men still had some fighting left to do.

The war did not end on that much-celebrated evening in May. In August 1945, ninety divisions of the Red Army found themselves stationed in Manchuria. Some of these were drawn from the Far East, from Soviet Mongolia; but others, including the group that Ermolenko travelled with, were simply ordered east from stations in the Baltic and central Europe. Ermolenko himself had been in uniform since 1942. The last action he saw in Europe had been the battle for Koenigsberg, one of the bitterest of 1945. His surprise order to take the train east followed an argument with a superior officer in late April. Six weeks later, while his former comrades cracked open another crate of bottles in Berlin, he was setting up his radio station in the shadow of the Grand Khingan mountains. ‘We heard with interest that there has just been a law on the demobilization of soldiers aged thirty and above,’ he told his diary on 28 June. ‘It’s not for me. No one is leaving here for now.’
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The fighting in Manchuria was short but savage. Ostensibly, the Red Army had been sent east to honour obligations to its allies. If human blood could buy goodwill, the Soviets would pay. In eleven days of fighting, 12,031 Soviet troops would die, the victims of a war that could have little meaning back at home.
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What Stalin was really doing was attempting to secure the Soviet Far East, as well as backing up his claim to valuable territories such as the Kurile islands and Sakhalin. Swift action became more important after 6 August, when the United States dropped its atomic bomb on Hiroshima, foreshadowing the war’s end and making Soviet aid appear redundant. The very day that Soviet hostilities against Japan began, indeed, a second bomb would devastate Nagasaki. Washington’s terrible demonstration of its power was a warning that Stalin was swift to heed. The Red Army went on to the offensive, mounting an attack over some of the remotest and least habitable land in Asia. Stalin’s dream was to occupy a portion of Hokkaido island. A few more weeks of fighting could have realized that hope. What Ermolenko was witnessing, in other words, apart from hunger, fear, and personal confusion, was one of the first shots of the cold war.

The shadow of this new conflict would haunt the Red Army in Germany as well. Ostensibly, the allies – America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union – were still working in harness, assisting each other with supplies, the restoration of communications and the all-important repatriation of displaced persons. But tensions were never far below the surface. The Bomb, which crystallized relations between the two sides, was scarcely mentioned in the soldiers’ writings in August. It may have seemed so appalling that it could only be accommodated after Molotov declared it safe, announcing to the world that Russia could make one of its own. But fear of America was not the main problem among Red Army veterans in Europe. From Moscow’s point of view at least, the most dangerous development in their ranks was the soldiers’ half envious, half naïve admiration for the lords of capitalism.