A Writer at War (12 page)

In some villages – for example, the village of Krasnoye – the Germans built concrete pillboxes concealed inside houses. They destroyed one of the walls of a house, pushed a field gun in and built a concrete wall.

When they approach a wood, Germans start firing like madmen and then rush through it at full speed.

Germans opening fire. In the evenings they would go to the edge of a wood and open fire with sub-machine guns. Captain Baklan approached to a distance of fifty metres. He lay there watching. They spotted him. Their behaviour reminded him of madmen. They started running about with terrible shouting. Dozens of rockets soared into the air, artillery started firing without aim, machine guns started rattling away, sub-machine guns too. They were firing all over the place, and Baklan lay there watching the Germans in astonishment.

Grossman, perhaps tiring slightly of journalism, seems to have longed to convey his thoughts and feelings about the war in fictional form. At this stage, when the Soviet Union was fighting for its life, his ideas were very close to that of the Party line. It was only at Stalingrad, a year later, that
his view of the Stalinist regime began to change. This outline, may well have formed part of the idea for
The People Immortal
, his novel written and published the following year:

Sketch for a short story: ‘Notes of signals officer Egorov.’ Idea of the story: a young, jovial Soviet man is full of interest and curiosity when he goes to the war. In the flames of war, seeing the suffering of people, having himself suffered some personal, severe losses, he turns into a hardened, stern warrior, full of hatred for the oppressor of his people. The main theme of the story is hatred, irreconcilability. In this story, we want broadly to show the army and the fighting people, our generals, officers, soldiers, collective farmers, workers, our towns and villages, conducting the great defence. Its inner idea: the iron characters of the Soviet people, whose only fate can be victory, having become hardened in the flames of burning towns, in villages destroyed by Germans.

Egorov was probably the prototype for Ignatiev in the novel, a happy-go-lucky character turned avenger.

‘
It’s a fact, Comrade Commissar
,’ he said, ‘it’s as if I’ve become a different person in this war: only now have I seen Russia as she really is. Honestly, I mean it. You walk along and you get to feel so sorry for every river and every bit of woodland that your heart aches . . . I thought can it really be true that this little tree will go to the Germans?’

It is very hard to track Grossman’s exact movements during this period. The Soviet defenders were fortunate with the weather. Frosts and then sudden thaws turning earth roads into churned-up swamps delayed the German Army’s advance. On 14 October, the 10th Panzer Division and the SS Das Reich reached the old battlefield of Borodino, 120 kilometres west of Moscow. Meanwhile, the 1st Panzer Division had seized Kalinin on the Volga northwest of the capital, and to the south Guderian’s tanks had advanced round Tula. On 15 October, foreign embassies were told to prepare to abandon Moscow and leave for Kuibyshev. Panic gripped the capital. Grossman, like other war correspondents, was desperate for any examples of German demoralisation which could bring hope to readers rather than despair.

His notebooks – at least one and probably two are missing – contain little about his experiences in November, when General Georgi Zhukov ground
down the German attacks, while preparing a great counter-offensive with fresh troops brought in from Siberia and the Far East. Stalin was finally convinced, partly by Richard Sorge, the Soviet spy in Tokyo, but mainly by signals intercepts, that Japan was going to attack the United States Navy in the Pacific at Pearl Harbor, and not the Soviet Union.

In mid-November, Grossman was allowed back to Moscow, but he was distraught to find that he had missed his father by a day. His wife, along with the families of many members of the Writers’ Union, had been evacuated to Chistopol.

My dear and good [Father], I was mortally upset
when I arrived in Moscow and didn’t find you there. I arrived the day after you left for Kuibyshev. My dear one, we shall see each other again, remember this. I hope for it and believe it . . . Lyusya is working hard at the collective farm [in Chistopol]. She’s become as thin as a rail. It is likely that I will leave for the front soon, perhaps for the Southern Front.

In the end Grossman may have met up with his father in Kuibyshev, because, according to Ilya Ehrenburg, Grossman stayed with him there for a short time. ‘
We were given an apartment
at that moment, and we put up Grossman and Gabrilovich. Endless conversations went on into the night, and during the day we sat there writing. Vasily Semyonovich [Grossman] had been in Kuibyshev for two weeks, when an order came from the editor of
Krasnaya Zvezda
for him to fly to the Southern Front. He had told me a lot about confusion and about resistance, that some units were standing firm, that grain was not being harvested. He told me about Yasnaya Polyana. It was then that he started his novel
The People Immortal
, and when I read it later, many of its pages seemed to me very familiar. He found himself as a writer during the war. His pre-war books were nothing more than searching for his theme and language. He was a true internationalist and reproached me frequently for saying “Germans” instead of “Hitler’s men” when describing the atrocities of the occupiers.’ Ehrenburg was persuaded that it was Grossman’s all-embracing world view which made the xenophobic Stalin hate him.

It appears that Grossman went not to the Southern Front itself, but just north of it, to the 21st Army with the South-Western Front. The situation in the south was as volatile as round Moscow. On 19 November, Field Marshal von Kleist’s First Panzer Group broke through to Rostov-on-Don,
the entrance to the Caucasus. But his armoured divisions were soon forced to pull back as a result of Marshal Timoshenko’s counter-attacks, harsh frosts for which the German troops were not prepared and overextended supply lines. Hitler was furious, because it was the first German retreat of the war. The Soviet press reported surprisingly little. Perhaps Stalin did not want to admit that the Germans had got as far as Rostov.

On the South-Western Front, Grossman was attached to the headquarters of the 1st Guards Rifle Division commanded by General Russiyanov.
⁷
None of his notebooks covering this journey remain. In any case, he missed one of the most dramatic moments in Moscow’s history. The Kalinin Front to the north of the city launched its counter-attack on 5 December through snow more than a metre deep. The ground really was as hard as iron, and the Germans had to light fires under their armoured vehicles before they could start the engines. The Western Front attacked just afterwards. The rapid German retreat saved the Wehrmacht from disaster, but the Soviet capital was saved.

Although it was hard to distinguish at the time, this was the turning point of the war in the sense that the Wehrmacht stood no further chance of winning. And the United States, which was to supply the Red Army with the trucks and jeeps it needed for rapid advances in 1943 and 1944, had just entered the war. In the euphoria of the counter-attack round Moscow, Grossman sensed a new mood in Soviet ranks.

Grossman returned to Moscow on 17 December, and three days later Ortenberg remarked on his method of working. ‘
Vasily Grossman has returned
. . . He did not manage to submit the article for the next issue of the newspaper, and we didn’t ask him to hurry up. We knew how he worked. Although he had taught himself to write in any conditions, however bad, in a bunker by a wick lamp, in a field, lying in bed or in an
izba
stuffed with people, he always wrote slowly, persistently giving all of his strength to this process.’ That same day, 20 December, Grossman took the chance to catch up on his own correspondence. He wrote to a friend, M.M. Shkapskaya.

‘
It is still too early to be looking
at your son’s fate in such a dark light, he is probably alive and healthy. And the post is so bad now.
There are lots of people here who cannot get in touch with their families. I am living well here, and it is interesting. I am in good spirits, the situation at the front is good, very good even . . . By the way, I very nearly lost the chance to contact my relatives ever again: I found myself under attack from five Junkers and had a narrow escape climbing out of the house which they destroyed with a bomb and machine-gun fire. Of course, you shouldn’t write to Chistopol about this.

Chistopol was where his wife, Olga Mikhailovna Guber, was staying. He wrote to her too, but naturally omitted to recount his narrow escape from the air attack.

There are very nice people around me
. By the way, Tvardovsky
⁸
is here too. He is a good chap. Could you tell his wife that he looks extremely well and everything is absolutely fine with him? I came back from the front three days ago and now I am writing. I have seen a lot. Everything is very different to how it was in the summer. There are lots of broken German vehicles on the roads and in the steppe, lots of abandoned guns, hundreds of German corpses, helmets and weapons are lying everywhere. We are advancing!

Grossman, like many Russians at this time, was convinced by the sudden turnaround in December, that the Germans, suffering so badly in their thin uniforms from the vicious winter, were collapsing under the weight of the Soviet general offensive launched by Stalin after the counter-attacks either side of Moscow. His last article for
Krasnaya Zvezda
to be published that year bore the title ‘Accursed and Derided’.

When marching into European capitals
, they tried to look impressive, these fascist
frontoviki
. And it was the same men who entered this Russian village one morning. There were shawls over these soldiers’ heads. Some were wearing women’s bonnets under their black helmets
and women’s knitted pantaloons. Many soldiers were dragging sledges loaded with quilts, pillows, bags with food, or old buckets.

A soldier with an old woman in a newly liberated village near Moscow. The village had been occupied for about two months.

Germans were camping in this
izba
just six hours ago. Their papers, bags, helmets are still on the table. The
izbas
that they had set on fire are still smouldering. Their bodies smashed by Soviet steel are lying around in the snow. And women, feeling that the nightmare of the last days is over at last, suddenly exclaim through sobs: ‘You are our dear ones, you are back at last!’

‘Well, this is how it was [one of the women recounted]. The Germans came. They knocked at the door, crowded into the house, and stood by the stove like sick dogs, their teeth chattering, shaking, putting their hands right into the stove, and their hands were red like raw meat. “Light the stove, light it!” they shouted as their teeth chattered. Well, as soon as they got warmer, they began to scratch themselves. It was awful to watch, and funny. Like dogs, scratching themselves with their paws. Lice had started moving again on their bodies because of the warmth.’

1
Stalin’s Falcon
, a Red Army Aviation newspaper.

2
Prince Bolkonsky in
War and Peace
had to leave his house of Lysye Gory on the approach of Napoleon’s Grande Armée.

3
Leo Tolstoy’s granddaughter.

4
Presumably
Krasnaya Zvezda
.

5
Zhenni Genrikhovna, the family’s Volga German nanny, appeared in her own guise and under her own name in
Life and Fate
. She was fortunate not to have been arrested as a spy in Moscow during the panic of October 1941 as she still spoke a broken Russian with a heavy German accent.

6
LXI Guards Rifle Corps was formed on 27 September as part of the
Stavka
Reserve. It consisted of 5th Guards Rifle Division, 6th Guards Rifle Division, 4th Tank Brigade and 11th Tank Brigade. The Corps headquarters then became the basis for 5th Army.

7
The 1st Guards Rifle Division had been formed on 18 September from the 100th Rifle Division, which had been badly mauled in the retreat from Minsk and Smolensk, and then the counterattack at Elyna, where it won its Guards designation. Lt. Gen. I.N. Russiyanov later commanded I Guards Mechanised Corps in Operation Little Saturn in December 1942 during the latter stages of the Stalingrad campaign.

8
Tvardovsky, Aleksandr Trifonich (1910–1971), poet and later editor of the literary journal
Novy Mir
, 1950–4 and 1958–70, in which he published Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
and
Cancer Ward
. Tvardovsky came originally from a village near Smolensk. His father, a kulak, suffered deportation under Stalin. Tvardovsky, however, had just won a Stalin Prize for his long poem
Strana Muraviya
(
The Land of Muraviya
), about a kulak who sets off on a quixotic journey to find somewhere in Russia where there were no collective farms, but finally returns home to a collective farm and happiness.