Ivan’s War (69 page)

Initially, the easiest thing to offer to returning combatants was material help. Each meeting of Kalinin’s soviet seemed to propose a new pension or handout for the sick, the orphaned, the widowed and demobilized. The needy families of veterans were supposed to receive heating fuel – logs or turf – as the winter approached; they were given sacks of flour and potatoes. They were supposed to head the queue for whatever housing had been patched up and deemed habitable, and their children were exempted from school fees, issued with clothing coupons, and promised more milk. The veterans themselves received a pension, graded by their length of service, rank, and any injury. But all these scraps and packets were controlled by overworked officials of the state. Resources in each town or village were managed by local networks, bureaucrats who had spent their war at work behind the lines. To veterans, these office wallahs were a breed apart, ‘rats’ whose priorities would never match their own. The tensions between those who had fought and those who stayed at home found expression in quarrels over flats and heating, food and children’s shoes.

The situation was even more poignant in the case of invalids. In the first months of peace, it was beyond official means to calculate the total number of these men, and many of the critically ill would die before the end of 1945. However, by the spring of 1946, the state reckoned that there were roughly 2.75 million surviving invalids of the war.
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Like everything this government would touch, these people were considered in a range of categories, depending on the extent of their disability and their need for hospital care. All received pensions as a form of compensation for their inability to work, and many were entitled to parcels containing delights like kasha, dried fish, and eggs. They were also supposed to receive the best available medical attention, and here things became more difficult. Many hospitals were housed in
shacks or former schools; there were so few sound buildings left.
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Then there were shortages of doctors, nurses, drugs and prosthetic limbs. Young men who had lost their legs were forced to trundle around on their own home-made carts, and maimed beggars became a common sight in Russian towns.

The disabled were handicapped in several cruel ways. True, the Soviet Union was desperately poor, unable to meet the most basic needs for lack of funds, but the blind, the deaf or crippled might have tolerated that, at least for a time. It was the public attitude that hurt. This was a haunted nation, but it was also a nation trying to forget. The jazz and foppish clothing that enjoyed an unofficial vogue among the young in 1946 were part of a larger quest for release, for deliverance from the shadow of wartime austerity. Disabled people were a nuisance, an embarrassment. Since most had once been foot soldiers, they usually lacked education, influence or cash.
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Instead of gratitude, Ivans like this could meet resentful silence. The more they talked about the war, the more they made their case, the more unwelcome they became, the more irrelevant. The last blow fell in 1947, when Stalin ordered that the streets of Soviet cities should be cleared of beggars, many of whom were amputees. Maimed veterans who had chosen urban life were herded back into trains, this time bound for the north, and especially for an island on the far side of Lake Ladoga, Valaam. Stalin’s unwilling lepers often died in exile.
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For those who lived in the remoter villages, the peasant riflemen, a disability of any kind was a different kind of trap. A man with one leg or no arms could not get on a horse and ride,
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but it might be scores of miles to the nearest rail station. The peasant hut became a prison. An invalid could be deprived for years of medical attention, company and work. The state occasionally proposed new training schemes, but the details were an insult to men who had fought. Blind veterans, for instance, were encouraged to learn to play musical instruments. The idea was to lift them out of depression, to help them earn their keep, but many had no aptitude for music, or no desire to learn it, let alone to busk like beggars on the street.
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People’s real skills were left to rot for want of more imaginative help. For their part, invalids began to avoid medical care. Faced with imprisoning hospital walls, the petty tyranny of orderlies, it seemed a better plan to stay at home, nurse memories and soothe the pain with
samogon
.
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Drink was the remedy of choice for pain of a more universal kind, the shock and trauma that followed the war. There was little official recognition of war’s psychological effects and almost none for the condition that is now
called post-traumatic stress disorder. For one thing, everyone had nightmares. The entire nation had suffered, even children. To complicate matters still more, such violence, though new in its scale and vehemence, was not unprecedented in a country that had seen both civil war and state repression over several decades. It was not clear where the line should be drawn between the shock, depression and exhaustion that everyone felt and genuine psychological disorder. Physicians went on noting cases of contusion, and they also responded to the most acute problems, with diagnoses of neurosis, schizophrenia and mania piling up on hospital desks. But veterans were unlikely to get treatment for battle shock. They might be given vitamins, and in extreme cases they might be locked away, but most were urged to think of duty and get on with life.
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Madness carried a real stigma, and dependency of any kind was treated as weakness.

Conscientious doctors still observed and made note of changes that official dogma was unable to explain. For a few months after the war’s end, there were increases in blood-pressure problems, digestive complaints and even heart disease,
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but these could readily be dismissed as the universal effects of wartime life. Moreover, the post-war hospitals to which sufferers were referred were so uninviting, and the treatments so uncertain, that the number of sufferers who were prepared to report symptoms dropped rapidly from 1946.
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When veterans talk of the good old days, the great communal struggle, they never mention the sleeplessness and long-term malnutrition that afflicted almost everyone. They also forget the untreated toothache, the chronic infestations of lice, the diarrhoea and boils. The soldiers who survived to tell their stories for this book were a small élite in purely physical terms. War injuries, poor diet and strain would shorten millions of lives.

No fantasy of the good war, however, was stronger than the idea that the people pulled together. It was tempting, of course, to look for hidden benefits to balance the war’s obvious cost, to hope that all the suffering had brought out something good. And it is true that singleness of purpose – and achievement – gave some people an extraordinary inner strength. But the idea of a warm community was either propaganda or wishful thinking. For those whom the state punished, post-war life was cruel. For all the rest, it was a time when relief was tinged with disquiet. Everyone would find, too, that Soviet society was visibly harder, more brutal and cold.

The policies and public style of Stalin’s ruling clique would set the bitter tone. Their vengeful treatment of liberated prisoners of war, the calls for sustained vigilance for spies, the new rounds of arrests and trials all worked to fuel suspicion, not build communities. The veterans were not to blame
for Stalin’s genocidal schemes, but many would connive in them, becoming willing heirs of tyranny. For those who could not face a quiet night, there were still regions where the war had yet to end. In Ukraine and the Baltic, nationalist guerrillas went on fighting until the late 1940s. Special troops, the successors of Mikhail Ivanovich’s OSMBON, were ranged against them, backed up by security police. By 1950, an estimated 300,000 people had been arrested and deported from western Ukraine. Large mass graves continue to surface from beneath those pretty orchards and neat lupin fields.
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Red Army veterans who fulfilled their wartime dream of moving to Ukraine would settle on stolen land, in empty houses that were thick with ghosts. So would the thousands who moved to the Crimea, a favoured place for soldiers to retire. The crime against the Tatars was officially ignored. For veterans, the coastal villages of the Black Sea were attractive enough to soothe whatever doubts might linger in their minds. They were the conquerors, after all, and this was Soviet soil.

War itself, too, had shattered Soviet family and social networks and debased further the values of mercy, co-operation, and even simple good manners. Society was divided, and all sides viewed the others with dismay. Prisoners, ex-soldiers, and civilians were almost like unrelated tribes. Veterans like Vasily Grossman were shocked by the callousness of post-war cities. It was, he wrote, as though ‘ordinary people had made an agreement to refute the view that one can always be sure of finding kindness in the hearts of people with dirty hands’.
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But the comradeship of the front line was also set to shatter in the peacetime world. Crimes like theft and drunken violence would persist even when the peace was signed. They were, if anything, made easier by the movements of people, refugees, and settlers, not to mention all the guns.
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The family ought to have been a haven for war-damaged men. Stalinist propaganda, and much post-war writing, tried to present it that way.
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But as they rattled home on those garlanded trains, few soldiers could have anticipated the toll that war had taken on domestic life. The so-called home front had been very hard on women. Some, working like oxen, had given up on femininity for good.
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It served no purpose, brought no joy. In rural areas, too, there were almost no males. ‘I was left with three sons,’ a widow told Alexiyevich. ‘They were too young to look after each other. I carried sheaves of corn on my back and wood from the forest, potatoes and hay … I pulled the plough myself and the harrow, too. In every other hut or so there was a widow or a soldier’s wife. We were left without men. Without horses, they were taken for the army, too.’
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These women would grow tough,
unblinking. Some even nursed resentment against the army that had abandoned them to the Germans for so many months. When their invalid husbands returned home, the shelter that they gave them was not always warm. Indeed, some women deliberately married invalids in order to claim the handouts – pensions, food, fuel and medical supplies – that their husbands’ documents provided for.
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The trick was to know where to sell them on.

‘What games did we play?’ a man who grew up in this grim decade wondered for a moment. ‘We didn’t play much at all. We had to grow up fast.’ It was the truth. Children were taught that there was more to life than games. Many had gone without schooling for several years, including Slesarev’s young sister, Masha, and the thousands of ‘sons of the regiment’ who were now coming home. As they recalled, no extra teaching now would ever buy those years of schooling back, and nothing could wipe out the images of war. Masha Slesareva, who was already working full-time in the fields at fourteen, was typical of the millions of children who started work as soon as they could shift a shovelful of earth. But though war’s children could not remember much fun, some pastimes had proved unforgettable. ‘That’s it,’ one man recalled. ‘We used to play “the ravine of terror”. We used to throw grenades into this gully near the town and wait to see which ones were live.’ The game had cost his best friend both his hands.
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Home, then, was not the haven that the soldiers had dreamed about as they sat up writing to their wives. Even the couples who managed to rebuild their lives together were aware of a gap, of a blank space that no amount of talking could enliven. It was a cruel payment for the waiting and the letters. Vitaly Taranichev and Natalya Kuznetsova would pull through, but the journey towards reunion was difficult. Vitaly’s letters grew more impatient through the summer of 1945. By August, even his army food was poorer, especially after his deployment to western Ukraine. In September, there was a spark of hope that he might be demobilized, but instead he was moved south-east, to yet another haunted region, Chechnya, where his job was to rebuild the rail links near Groznyi. His requisitioned quarters were nearer to Ashkhabad. ‘Our apartment has two rooms and an enclosed verandah,’ Vitaly wrote home. ‘The second room is not a through-room, and I’ve taken it. If you can come, we’ll be really nice and comfortable; we’ll even be able to cook and eat together.’
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Vitaly could not get leave, so the travelling and the strain fell on Natalya. In October 1945, she took time off from her own engineering job, queued and bought tickets, left the children, and embarked on an unscheduled adventure. She took a train west over the semi-desert to the Caspian, crossed
the inland sea by steamer and then fought her way on to another train into the foothills of the Caucasus. The journey to and from Chechnya would have taken longer than the brief time that she had with her husband. For Vitaly, so used to travelling, the price seemed well worth paying, but Natalya was unsettled by it all. ‘Your silence really makes me miserable,’ she wrote to him when she got home. ‘You haven’t written a single line to me since I left. You don’t want to write anything … Perhaps you were disappointed by the way I was, and you have already stopped thinking about me the way you used to do before our meeting in Groznyi?’ It was the November holiday, and Vitaly was, in fact, writing at the same moment. ‘My landlady and I talk about you all the time,’ he began. ‘I have become so used to your being here that every time I come home I half expect to find you.’ He was unable to imagine her insecurity before the uniformed, preoccupied stranger that he had become. ‘Can it be, Vitya,’ she wrote, ‘that you are not the same as you once were, and I am no longer dear to you any more? It’s so hard for me to think like that. I’m waiting impatiently for you at home,’ she finished. ‘I need to know by looking in your eyes exactly who you really are.’
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Ten months later, she was still waiting.