Ivan’s War (68 page)

Eventually, with the inevitability of a dream, the moment came to cross the boundary, to walk away from army life for good. Most veterans recall an aching loss. However much they yearned for home, it was a sudden wrench to leave the boys. The last few hours such men spent at a base were given up to speeches and to singing. ‘We sang our manly, stern soldiers’ marching songs,’ Pushkarev wrote. But these were the songs of victory. The real emotion surrounded the music of defeat, the songs of loss and homesickness from 1942 – ‘Wait for Me,’ ‘Zemlyanka’, ‘Oh, the Long Road’, ‘Dark Night’ – the songs that had sustained a vanishing generation as they struggled with despair.
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The tunes would never sound the same again, nor evoke so much meaning. Many of the men would cry before their trains pulled out. As they said goodbye to the people who knew just what war was about, to the only people who could ever understand their stories, they were losing their true spiritual family. They would miss them – and most would keep in touch with almost all of them – for the rest of their lives.

It must have been a strange ride home. There was that inconveniently heavy bag to stow, and then the smaller one, the knapsack with the tobacco and the travel pass. Inside this was the salvage of a war, the material evidence of all that a man had seen and experienced. In almost every instance, that began with medals – for victory, for service, for valour, even a grand red star or red banner. Then came the photographs. During the war, press photographers earned petty cash by taking snapshots of the troops, portraits to send home to the wife, group pictures to remind them of their mates. Already, as the train rattled towards Brest and Smolensk, the men on board must have been thumbing these, wondering at the looming shapes of guns, the sunlight through last summer’s trees, the smiles on young faces long dead. However long they lived, there would never be time to explain all this. And the gifts, the shoes and watches, these seemed to have a different meaning now. At the front, they had been easy booty, fragments of abundant victory. But now, as the world of triumph and comradeship began to fall away, they became
totems, precious, rare, and at the same time tarnished by the secret guilt of having lived, not died.

The trains crossed the border again, this time heading eastwards and home. They passed the familiar string of Belorussian and then Russian towns, the names that had been shouted in euphoric triumph as the Red Army stormed west. Now, though, the men had time to look, and some would notice what the war had cost. Belorussia was a wasteland, Kiev blackened and destroyed. Whole swathes of farmland looked neglected, for there were fewer people living than five years ago and scarcely any men or horses to take on the heavy work. The landscape was deadly as well, seeded with unexploded shells and mines. Bridges and tracks had been repaired, but the men who chose to hitch a truck ride for the last miles home would find the roads in chaos: broken, muddy and still cluttered with the skeletons of tanks. It was one thing to glimpse all this in wartime, in a crowd, to know that all you had to do was fight. It was another to look at the pitted ruins of Leningrad, Pskov or Stalingrad and understand that the whole landscape would have to be cleared, secured, and rebuilt. Berlin had looked little better, but it had never been these soldiers’ own responsibility, their future.

There would be one more act in every soldier’s odyssey before civilian reality took hold. As ever, Stalin’s feral face presided. His portrait was emblazoned on the trains, his name written across the banners that fluttered above the local party hall. But the ceremonies of welcome for returning veterans were heartfelt. It had not been the party alone but hundreds of families who paid for the flowers that decked veterans’ trains as they pulled into Kharkov, Kursk or Stalingrad. At every halt along the way, indeed, the red carpets had been unrolled, and the men had been offered gifts and food. There had been music – those Red Army hymns – and in some places there had been a real orchestra to play among the Stalins and the scarlet flags. Every platform had been a sea of red cloth, flowers, and cheering crowds. At its best, one of those early journeys was like an extended party.

Perhaps this festive mood carried the soldiers through the shock of coming home, but there is no doubt that it was a tense and even terrifying time. They might have longed for this and even thought of little else, but the veterans’ reunion with parents, children, wives and friends was overcharged with feeling. As their train pulled into its final halt, the men would see a crush of people surging forward, eager strangers, so many women. They scanned the crowds, the printed summer frocks, the children with their photographs of vanished, younger men. And when they found their own people, they must have realized again, in a second, what the war had meant. Caught
in the flash of cameras that July, the veterans look like members of a new species. Dusty and sunburned, blinking in a long-forgotten light, they seem to bear no relation to the civilians who press around them. They certainly look older, and their skin, as their own children reach to kiss it, looks tough and dry as leather. And yet, as the pictures also show, the moment shone with real joy.

Demobilized troops arrive in the town of Ivanovo, 1945 

 

 

The welcoming ceremonies had been planned in detail by the local branches of the party. Attending to the former soldiers’ needs was not just a matter of proper gratitude – although it certainly was that. The orchestrated welcome was also meant to flood men’s minds. Where
politruks
had influenced the soldiers’ thinking at the front, the local party activists busied themselves providing education and approved kinds of entertainment. The
men were kept supplied with newspapers and propaganda sheets. Their hostel rooms were provided with soft drinks, sweets and tobacco. Married men whose families had travelled down to meet them were sometimes put up in hotels until a horse and cart arrived to take them all back home. Single men, and especially the homeless, who faced long periods in transit, were given food parcels to supplement the ordinary ration cards civilians could use. They were also treated to lectures. In Kursk, which housed many transient ex-soldiers, that summer’s programme featured talks on the international situation, the heroic past of the Russian people, the life and times of Maxim Gorky, and ‘medical themes’, presumably lice, drinking and VD. Over 2,000 people attended. They also showed up for the free cinema shows and concerts that the town authorities laid on. Ex-soldiers could not be left to smoulder on their own.
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A train carrying demobilized soldiers arrives in Moscow, 1945 

 

More seriously, someone had to attend to housing, family life, and work. Some of the ‘hotels’ where the men would stay were little more than tents. Wherever the Germans and then the Red Army had been, houses with solid walls were few. Men might go ‘home’ to find their wives and children in a one-room flat with no kitchen, no water and a leaking roof. They might find everyone in an earth dugout, worse even than the ones they remembered from Stalingrad or the Crimea. Local authorities scrambled to find homes for returning heroes after 1945. In Smolensk, a city that had suffered as much as any under the occupation, about a quarter of the returning veterans were
still homeless in January 1946.
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But that still made ex-soldiers an élite. In Kursk, even the workshops where the men might get their shoes patched or their worn-out, pre-war clothes repaired were in ruins.
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The first waves of returning soldiers received the greatest applause. Later, in 1946, new groups of veterans would come home to silence, or at best, to a speech and a bread queue. But everyone, even the first, would have trouble finding their feet. Most took a few days off, which the authorities approved. Some used the time to get to know their families. There was so much to talk about, or else so many silences, such doubts. But then came the question of work. At the top of the priority list for demobilization were teachers, especially those with experience in technical subjects, for the state needed its specialists more than ever. Next came students whose courses had been interrupted by war service. Like every veteran, they would go to the head of any queue for college places when the academic year began.
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For those equipped to benefit, war service could be the start of a better life.

The first groups to be demobilized also included veterans with seven or more years of service, the elderly (in army terms), and soldiers who had received three or more serious wounds. Typically, these unskilled men were destined for the farms. Well over half the troops came home to rural areas, to villages that they had left four years or more before. By January 1946, nearly 44,000 soldiers had been demobilized to the Smolensk region alone. Of these, 32,000 had found jobs in agriculture. A few had been made
kolkhoz
chairmen or the leaders of the many rural work brigades. A veteran commanded some respect, at least if his body were whole. But the majority, three quarters of the total, had come back from the front to mud and cockroaches again.
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In 1946, the harvest failed. In Ukraine and southern Russia the people starved, their bodies swelled, and tales of strange murders, and even of cannibalism, began to circulate. Some returnees might well have wondered what it was that they fought and suffered for.

They would have struggled, certainly, to find the promised better life. Their moment in the limelight was to be short-lived. It is probably never possible for post-war societies to cherish veterans enough. There are too many reasons to spurn the returning strangers, especially after the gaps that their departure left behind at home have closed. The Soviet state, and many individual families, made a genuine effort of welcome for the veterans it chose to celebrate in 1945 and 1946. The ones selected for disgrace and exclusion, naturally, soon vanished from view. But it would not be long before even the
most triumphant of returning soldiers became old news in a country struggling to forget. Stalin would set a new official tone. He was proud to take credit for the victory but reluctant to share it. He was also aware that stories of his own mistakes were waiting to be told, especially those that focused on the debacle and slaughter of 1941. His solution was typically simple. The rivals for his victor’s crown, including Zhukov, were demoted, disgraced or imprisoned from the spring of 1946. By 1948, within three years of the peace, public remembrance of the war was all but banned.
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There were still attempts to commemorate the dead, and commissions that worked to clean up and arrange clusters of military graves, but veterans of a reflective turn of mind could well have wondered if their state did not prefer dead heroes to the living kind.
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