Armageddon (28 page)

The Red Army professed that the 125,000 women in its ranks were mere comrades in battle and in suffering. In reality, however, and despite earlier remarks about Russian puritanism, many girl soldiers found themselves employed off-duty as sexual playthings for their officers, “campaign wives.” Some men as well as women resented this practice. “There shouldn’t be any women at war,” said Corporal Nikolai Ponomarev of the 374th Rifle Division. “I felt terribly sorry for girls at the front—they couldn’t wash or change their clothes, they were exploited by officers: they had no choice.” “War and women in trenches do not mix well,” wrote Sergeant Gabriel Temkin. “I heard this many times, and I shared this view . . . A young, healthy woman, for months or even a couple of years without a furlough, always surrounded by so many equally young, healthy men did not have to be harassed or abused to become a willing sex partner . . . either because she fell in love, or just to satisfy sexual desire, or to improve her lot, or because she expected to find a husband, or she wanted to get pregnant and be released and go home.” Sergeant Natalia Ivanova once had to summon Thirty-third Army’s chief of operations to rescue her from his deputy, who became both drunk and predatory while giving her dictation. The brigade commander of Gennady Ivanov’s tank unit kept the same mistress from 1943 to 1946, an extremely pretty blonde headquarters telephonist named Katya. The women’s medal
Za Boyeuye Zaslugi,
“for military services,” was often derisively called
Za Polovye Zaslugi,
“for sexual services.” Abortions at the front were commonplace, acknowledged Nikolai Senkevich, a Red Army doctor. “Whole trainloads of girls were sent home pregnant,” said Gennady Klimenko contemptuously. “Every senior officer had his girlfriend.” “Hospitals were your best chance of getting lucky,” said Captain Vasily Krylov. His girlfriend, a nurse named Nina, told him quite coolly one day: “I want to get pregnant so I can get sent home.” She got her wish, but he never knew whether he himself was her benefactor.

Corporal Anna Nikyunas had suffered even more than most Russians of her generation. She was orphaned at fourteen in 1937 when her parents, Leningrad workers, were denounced and shot by the NKVD. She first went to the front in 1941 as a nurse. She neither wrote nor received any letters at the front, because she no longer had a family with which to correspond. The nurses carried sub-machine guns as well as medical bags, but found it very hard to grasp the reality of battle. “Tracer bullets looked like sparklers to us at first. They seemed too innocent and pretty to hurt anyone.” Their commanding officer would shout at them furiously under fire: “Get your heads down, girls!” Anna was wounded in the epic Leningrad battle by a shell which killed the girl next to her, and removed the legs from another. She herself was hit by fragments in the neck: “I felt little pain, just the warmth of blood running down my back.” After her recovery, she returned to the front. She, too, had a “field husband”: “He was a very handsome surgeon. He was married, but even after the war he would phone me and say ‘You are still my darling.’ ” For all its horrors, she always remembered the war with deep emotion. “That time was full of life,” she said.

Yet it would be mistaken to exaggerate the sexual role of women soldiers. Many served with cool and courageous professionalism. Women often fulfilled an intensely hazardous role as telephone linesmen, repairing signal links under fire. Vasily Krylov was manning a forward observation post when he lost contact with his battery and thought that a German attack had started. He was running hard for a bunker when he met a girl soldier who asked matter-of-factly: “Where are you going?” “It’s an attack!” he shouted. “The Germans are on the way!” The girl said: “Calm down. There’s no problem.” She set off under fire in pursuit of his telephone line, repaired the break caused by mortaring and cheerfully returned to reassure the troubled captain.

By the autumn of 1944, Sergeant Natalia Ivanova had seen more of war than most men. She was the twenty-three-year-old daughter of a Moscow dentist, herself a secretary at the Finance Ministry until she was called to the army in June 1941, and sent to Smolensk at twenty-four hours’ notice. “At first, it all seemed rather romantic,” she said. But before they even arrived at the front the truck carrying herself and other girls, still in civilian clothes and high heels, hit a mine. Several were killed. When she reached army headquarters, still shocked, a colonel told her to go and get some sleep, and pointed to a nearby shed. It proved to be already occupied by corpses. Soon afterwards, she was serving as a typist at Thirty-third Army when she and her section were ordered to attend small-arms practice in the woods. They returned to find the headquarters a blazing shambles following a Luftwaffe raid. The staff was hastily evacuating, with German tanks a mile away. Natalia was roundly cursed by an officer for insisting on running into the wreckage to retrieve her clothes before boarding a cart. “Girls are girls,” she shrugged. During the long retreat that followed, she found herself on a truck with two pilots and all Thirty-third Army’s files when they ran out of petrol. “You go and ask for some,” said the pilots. “Nobody will give it to a man.” She went to a nearby unit, who were tending scores of wounded. The soldiers said they would give her some fuel if she would first help with the casualties. “It was the first time I had dressed a wound,” she said. “My hands were shaking as I tried to deal with the stomach cases.” She ended up walking for hours through a forest, “slightly drunk and very frightened and hungry.” They picked potatoes from the gardens of houses they passed, and eventually escaped successfully, to reach Moscow.

She was reposted to the 222nd Rifle Division where, in her first battle, she and other girls were sent to recover wounded men under fire from German tanks. Because she was very small, the physical difficulties were very great: “It was hard to make oneself crawl out of cover, and then try to lift these big men. I was in shock.” She was awarded the Red Star for her part in that action. One day in 1943, she found herself in the middle of the German Dnieper counter-attack, with the men of their division running for their lives, as the Chief of Staff vainly lashed out at the fleeing soldiers with a fence post to check their flight. She herself swam the river with two other girls and the divisional files. At the far bank, having lost most of their clothes, they loaded their burden on to a wounded horse, which immediately collapsed. German tank fire from across the river killed a girl signaller beside her. At last, she found another horse to carry the files, and rejoined the division’s survivors, who were suitably amazed to see her arrive wearing only a bra and skirt. She was reposted to Thirty-third Army.

In 1944, she fell passionately in love with a gunner officer: “I met hundreds of nice men, but he was the best.” Dmitry Kalafati first caught her attention when, in an idle moment, he told the fortunes of some of the girls with a pack of cards. She told him mischievously that, if he made a wish, it would be granted. He immediately leaned over and kissed her. They began a passionate affair. When the chief of staff heard about it, he said to her: “Well, you must have been the one who made the running, because Dmitry wouldn’t have had the nerve.” In battle or out of it, the couple found time together. She sometimes scrounged a jeep and driver, and followed him to the front. Once, she was forcefully reprimanded by the head of operations, Viktor Grinyushin, when Dmitry was roused in the night at the Hungarian castle where he was billeted, and Natalia was found with him. The couple didn’t care, not least because the head of operations was in a weak position to complain, himself enjoying a passionate affair with another girl soldier named Lida, whom he married in 1945. But senior officers drew the line when Natalia was found to be sending cipher messages to Dmitry at his unit. This, they said not unreasonably, was an abuse of military communications. Natalia and Dmitry Kalafati were married after the war ended.

By September 1944, so desperate was the Red Army’s demand for manpower that 1,030,494 prisoners from the Gulag had been released for military service. Most of these men were, however, mere thieves and minor malefactors. Serious political criminals remained ineligible even for the privilege of dying for their country. Among the most savage manifestations of Soviet ruthlessness were the Red Army’s “penal battalions.” These punishment units rendered all those assigned to them players in a deadly roulette game. A man possessed perhaps one chance in thirty or forty of escaping death. Men were customarily posted to penal battalions as an alternative to execution. “[These units] are intended,” said Zhukov in his order No. 258 of 28 September 1942, “to enable senior officers and political officers to make use of men who are found guilty of cowardice, indiscipline, instability, to compound for their crimes towards the motherland by shedding their blood in the most difficult engagements with the enemy.” They were employed to clear minefields under fire, to probe enemy positions and to spearhead desperate advances in the manner of a “forlorn hope” in the wars of Napoleon.

An officer unfortunate enough to be posted to lead such units was expected to serve with them for only one to three months, each month counting sixfold for pension purposes, in the unlikely event that he survived to enjoy old age. Officers sent to penal battalions because they were themselves being punished were stripped of rank and decorations. Any breach of discipline in these battalions was punished by summary execution. “A soldier who distinguishes himself in action can receive remission of sentence . . . All those released from penal battalions are assumed to have completed their sentences. Any man wounded is automatically deemed to have served his sentence.”

“I once watched a penal battalion go into an attack,” said Major Yury Ryakhovsky with uncomplicated respect. “I have never seen infantry so brave. They were wearing blue tunics and black caps, and boots made from tree bark. They advanced shoulder to shoulder, with a rifle between three men.” The commander of Anatoly Osminov’s T-34 in Thirty-second Tank Army was so desperate to escape combat that he drained the radiator, causing the engine to overheat. Osminov threw the culprit out of the tank at pistol-point. The man ran away, and was later found wounded. The NKVD placed the entire crew under arrest pending trial. Afterwards, the others were acquitted, while their former commander was sent to a penal battalion. He was lucky. Men found guilty of
samostrel
—self-inflicted wounding—were customarily shot in front of their units like deserters, after digging their own graves. The regiment formed three sides of a square, and the command was given to the firing squad: “For our motherland . . . At the enemy . . . Fire!” Offenders were buried with a sign on their graves declaring “eternal shame on the coward who has betrayed his comrades and his motherland.” Vitold Kubashevsky, a survivor of a penal battalion who witnessed many such executions, found himself quite unmoved by them: “One felt no pity. At the front, all one’s sensibilities were dulled.” Notice of crime and punishment was sent to a man’s former factory or collective farm. The official Soviet view of penal battalions was simple: men were needed to perform military tasks which were likely to result in their deaths. Was it not appropriate that such duties should fall upon those deserving of death?

The image of the Soviet soldier as an unfeeling brute was justified by the immense rabble of Mongols (that is, from Central Asia) and conscripts from the eastern republics who followed the spearheads. But many men in Russian uniform shared the same misgivings about the experiences of battle as their American, British or German counterparts. Gabriel Temkin was appalled to see his friend Grishin torn open by a shell splinter: “I saw him crouching and squeezing his bloodied guts as if trying to push them back into his open belly. Pale and sweating, his lips trembling as bloody foam came from his mouth, he was half-conscious when I bid him farewell. He died on the shaking horse-drawn cart, even before reaching hospital.”

Although the Luftwaffe was a mere shadow of its former self by the winter of 1944, it still produced spasms of devastating activity. Twenty-two-year-old Vasily Kudryashov was conducting a fighting reconnaissance of a river crossing with two platoons of T-34s, tommy-gunners on their hulls, when German aircraft caught them in the open. Kudryashov ordered his crew to jump down and take cover beneath the hull, but he himself was still on the hatch when bomb fragments caught him in the leg and took off his foot. It was the eighth tank he had lost in action since 1942. Official notice was sent to his mother that he had been killed, but mercifully she had never received it when he returned home from hospital six months later. “I went away a boy and came back a man,” he said, “but I also possessed the sadness of a cripple.”

Even a surgeon, Nikolai Senkevich, never entirely reconciled himself to the sight of corpses that had been crushed beneath tank tracks, or of great sheets of white ice strewn with huddled dead. One day during an advance, he was appalled to come upon three abandoned German trucks, piled high with bandaged bodies—obviously wounded men who had died at a dressing station. His own field hospital handled almost 3,000 men in three days during an action in 1944. “It was a question of making very swift decisions about who had a chance of living, and concentrating on them. Some men already had gangrene. They were just left to die.” The Russian doctors were too short of morphine even to end the agony of doomed men. Combat fatigue, Senkevich professed, was unknown to the Red Army, and certainly not officially acknowledged: “I never saw such a case. By that stage of the war, people were feeling quite cheerful.” Yet Sergeant Nikolai Timoshenko described seeing men faint from fear. In the Red Army as in all armies, the real fighting in every battle was done by a small minority of men. Many others did little nor nothing save to attempt to stay alive. By the time it was all over, said Timoshenko drily, “one knew the difference between those who took part in a battle and those who were mere spectators.” Soviet soldiers were as vulnerable to terror and panic as any others. The sanctions for succumbing to it were merely incomparably more severe.