A Writer at War (35 page)

Bulatov: ‘I love hunting blackcock. I used to dream about them feverishly day and night.’ (The corps commander presented Bulatov with his sniper’s rifle. Bulatov began to sweat all over and cursed.)

Ivanov, Dmitry Yakovlevich, from Yaroslavl: ‘I was cut off for eighteen days in an enemy encirclement. For about five days we had to live without food, and for about three days we had no water. We swam across the Don, found our people, and they sent us on a reconnaissance mission.’ (He winks at the corps commander and laughs.)

Romanov (small, with a big mouth): ‘I’ve killed 135. Please, put our scores on the table, and I will tell you all about it.’

50th Guards Rifle Division.
¹¹
Conversation with soldiers about defence. ‘[Commanders told us] “Get ready, we are going to advance!” And we had wanted to plant some tobacco here.’

Red Army soldier Ostapenko, Dmitry Yakovlevich. He had been captured in the Caucasus, then escaped and walked back to his father’s village near Voroshilovgrad. He suddenly read in the newspaper that he had been made a Hero of the Soviet Union, posthumously, for fighting against German tanks. He didn’t get particularly excited about the newspaper. And his father, immediately after he saw the newspaper, went to see the regiment commander. ‘You know, comrades have taken my barley, by accident.’ Petukhov said to him: ‘Oh, shit, please don’t tell anyone we’ve taken your barley. I’ll give you ten carts of barley.’

Meeting of Red Army soldiers at the regiment. Theme: ‘The Red Army – an army of avengers.’ When Red Army soldier Prokhin spoke about girls who were sent to Germany against their wishes from the station at Millerovo and how they had shouted from the locked wagons: ‘Mama, Mama, save me!’, soldiers started to cry. ‘We have to wipe Hitler’s men off the face of the Earth.’
¹²

Grossman visited Krasnodon, a large mining town of the Donets basin in the most eastern part of the Ukraine.

Conditions of miners’ work under the Germans. Those who were working underground got six hundred grams of ersatz bread, and those above ground, three hundred grams. One day of absence from work meant a concentration camp. ‘Under the Germans, there was a canteen. One could see Berlin at the bottom of a plate of soup.’ (There wasn’t a single gleam of fat in the soup.) They were beaten with lashes while working.

One of the miners he interviewed said: ‘When the Germans entered the city, we were coming out of the mine. I ran home, took a piece of bread, abandoned my family and went away.’ And who would worry about their family? ‘What we do worry about is the mine. If the mine is all right, we’ll be all right too.’

A woman told him: ‘A German was billeted in my house. He received a letter and cried. His wife and children had been killed by a bomb. Another one took a harmonica and started to play: “Volga, Volga, my own mother.”

‘I met eight men, soldiers. “Take off your clothes! Wash!” Each of them gave me his underwear. They said to me: “We’ve come to you like we would come to our mother and father.”’

He carried on to Voroshilovgrad, now called Lugansk, just over one hundred kilometres to the north-west.

Platoon Commander Vasilenko has been killed. The Party commission was giving people Party membership during the approach march
to the fighting. Vasilenko became a Party member at the battery during a battle in the snow near Stolskoe.

Grossman was struck by the change in morale during the course of the past few months since the victory at Stalingrad.

An artillery officer recounted his experience: ‘The enemy attacked us two to three times a day with groups of ten to fifteen tanks. We took up all-round defence. We had twenty field guns. We felt calm and were in good spirits.’ (Just imagine what it would have been like in 1941.)

‘The batteries are in the snow all the time. There’s no forest, and no time to dig bunkers. Frost, wind, we’ve gone through so much. There’s only one thing that my men want: to advance.’

People killed. Telephone operator Tupitsin is dead. He used to run with a cable to the forward observation group which moved with the infantry. He would carry a reel in one hand and a grenade in the other hand. He used to say: ‘Though I’m old, my feet are bound to take me to Voroshilovgrad.’ But he never reached it.

Advance through the mud. Its advantages and shortcomings. Germans wrote: ‘Russians didn’t start the attack because the weather was good.’
¹³
It’s not true! Both sides have difficulties moving in the mud.

However, Germans are not so well prepared for the physical hardships, when a ‘naked’ man is facing nature. A Russian man is brought up to hardship, and his victories are hard earned. Germans, on the other hand, are prepared for easy victories that would be based on technological superiority, and they give in to the hardship caused by nature. General Mud and General Cold are helping the Russian side. (But it is true that only those who are strong can make nature work for them, while the weak are at the mercy of nature.)

Grossman was frustrated by the lack of action in the Donbass and by his editor’s failure to allow him time to write. He complained in a letter to his father on 20 March.

They keep promising to give me leave
to write a novel, but so far it is only talk. That has been going on for three months. My health is fine. It is true that I have had problems with my heart, but now it is all right.

I see Mama in my dreams. She was right in front of my eyes, and so vivid, the whole night while I was travelling. After this I felt very strange all of the following day. No, I don’t believe she is still alive. I travel all the time around areas that have been liberated, and I see what these accursed monsters have done to old people and children. And Mama was Jewish. A desire to exchange my pen for a rifle is getting stronger and stronger in me.

He wrote again to Ortenberg.

Comrade Editor . . . Under the circumstances, I deem my continued stay on the Bukovskoi sector useless and inexpedient. Therefore I would like to ask you to summon me back.

Grossman’s request did him no good. He was sent off on another assignment in April which exasperated him, as he recounted to his father.

Just as I thought, my trip was useless
. There was a complete lull [in the fighting], and with spring thaws, the river flooded the area, and because of this it was impossible to travel anywhere. I still haven’t collected my wits to write for the newspaper again. It is hard for me to write about everyday matters after Stalingrad . . . Take your letter to Captain Tikhomirov at
Krasnaya Zvezda
and ask him to send it with someone who’ll be travelling in my direction, or, even better, with the secret post.

1
Dzherzhinsky, Feliks (1877–1926), the son of a Polish landowner, became in December 1917 Commissar for Internal Affairs and chief of the Cheka, the All-Russian Extraordinary Committee for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, which became the GPU (State Political Administration) in 1922.

2
Bazhan, Mykola Platonovich (1904–1983), poet, critic and subsequently member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, he was later forced by the Soviet authorities to refuse his candidature when nominated for a Nobel Prize.

3
Levada, Aleksandr Stepanovich (1909–), Ukrainian writer and poet.

4
No less than eleven generals of the name of Belov served in the Red Army during the Second World War, so it is hard to be certain, but Grossman is probably referring to General (later Colonel-General) P.A. Belov, soon to become the commander of 61st Army.

5
General M.M. Popov’s ‘Front Mobile Group’ was ordered by General Vatutin to keep advancing, towards Stalino and Mariupol even though he had lost most of his tanks and was low on fuel. Meanwhile, XXV Tank Corps, which did run out of fuel, was within fifty miles of Zaporozhe on 19 February, just as Hitler was leaving Manstein’s headquarters there. It was during this meeting that the basic plan for Operation Citadel, the attack on the Kursk salient, was conceived.

6
The Red Army used the term ‘reconnaissance’ to cover both the Western military idea of reconnaissance and also military intelligence as a whole.

7
Belov means since 19 November 1942, when Operation Uranus turned the tables on the Germans.

8
A
zemlyanka
was a dugout bunker, usually reinforced with beams and earth overhead. It was also the name of one of the favourite songs of the war, about a soldier in a snow-bound
zemlyanka
thinking of his girlfriend.

9
A ‘tongue’ was slang for an enemy soldier snatched for interrogation.

10
Vladimir Ilich was, of course, Lenin’s first name and patronymic. First names were even invented acronyms, such as Lemar, standing for Lenin and Marx. To give a son a conspicuously political name was a sign of communist devotion and thus a target for Nazi anti-Bolshevik fervour.

11
The 50th Guards Rifle Division had been with the 5th Tank Army in Operation Uranus, the encirclement of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad. From December 1942 until April 1943, it was part of the newly formed 3rd Guards Army.

12
Unfortunate girls like these were not, however, treated with any sympathy by Red Army soldiers when Soviet forces reached Germany. Many of them were raped, as Grossman himself discovered in 1945.

13
German front-line soldiers on the Eastern Front were indeed convinced that the Red Army always waited for the worst weather conditions before attacking. As mentioned above, they referred to it as ‘weather for Russians’.

On 1 May 1943, Grossman returned with great anticipation to see once more those whom he had come to know so well in Chuikov’s army, now in reserve, forming part of the Steppe Front behind the Kursk salient. The reunion, however, was to prove a shock to him.

I’ve arrived at the 62nd Stalingrad Army
. It is now stationed among gardens that are beginning to blossom – a wonderful place with violets and bright green grass. It is peaceful. Larks are singing. I was excited on the way here, I so wanted to see the people of whom I have so many memories.

Meeting and dinner with Chuikov on the terrace of a dacha. Garden. Chuikov, Krylov, Vasilyev, two colonels – members of the military council.

The meeting was a cold one, but they were all boiling. Dissatisfaction, ambition, insufficient awards, hatred of anyone who had received greater awards, hatred of the press. They spoke of the film
Stalingrad
and cursed.
¹
Great people producing a heavy, bad impression. Not a single word about the fallen men, about memorials, about immortalising the memory of those who never came back. Everyone is only talking about themselves and their accomplishments.

Morning with Gurtyev. The same picture.

There’s no modesty. ‘I did it, I, I, I, I, I . . .’ They speak about other commanders without any respect, recounting some ridiculous gossip: ‘I was told that Rodimtsev said the following . . .’ The main idea is, in fact: ‘All the credit belongs to us, the 62nd Army. And in the 62nd Army, there’s just me. All the others are unimportant.’ Vanity of vanities.

In a way, Grossman should have been prepared for this. Already in Stalingrad he had encountered senior commanders, especially Yeremenko, who were prepared to belittle their subordinates in conversations with him, a journalist. Yeremenko had made remarks such as: ‘
Rodimtsev’s division could have fought better
’; ‘I used to reprimand Gurtyev’; ‘I transferred Chuikov into the [Tsaritsa] tunnel’; ‘Red Army soldiers have produced a good impression on me, unlike the officers. There is a lack of power of will in them that comes from ignorance.’

Presumably one of the reasons why Chuikov was so bitter and why he loathed Marshal Zhukov so much – a resentment which surged up again just before the battle of Berlin – was that he had not been told about the plans for Operation Uranus until almost the last moment. It must have appeared to him that he and his 62nd Army, instead of being the principal heroes of Stalingrad, had become little more than the tethered goat while the armies of General Rokossovsky’s Don Front had been the hunters surrounding the tiger.
²

Grossman could not have known that his unease at the lack of activity in April and May 1943 reflected an argument right at the top. Stalin wanted to push on with further offensives. He could not entirely accept the idea that the war still had to go through a number of stages and that it could not be ended with a single dramatic push. Marshal Zhukov, Marshal Vasilevsky and General A.I. Antonov, the
Stavka
chief of operations, had a very hard time convincing him that the Red Army should stay on the defensive, ready to deal with the German onslaught being prepared. While waiting, they would prepare a huge strategic reserve for their own summer offensive immediately afterwards, something which the Red Army had not yet attempted. Stalin, with great reluctance, had accepted their arguments in a crucial Kremlin meeting on 12 April.

The major German summer offensive, Operation Zitadelle, as it was called, probably achieved less surprise than any other offensive in the whole war. The German plan of attack could, logically, take only one form, with armoured spearheads aiming for the base of the Kursk salient, one from the north and the other from the south. Hitler allocated fifty divisions, of which nineteen were armoured with 2,700 tanks and assault guns. The whole operation was supported by more than 2,600 aircraft.