Ivan’s War (10 page)

Ilya Natanovich was born in Vitebsk province, part of today’s Belarus, in the summer of 1920. His father was a Bolshevik, but it was his mother’s family, his aunts, who brought the colour and excitement that made his childhood such fun. They would turn up without notice, blowing in from Warsaw or Moscow, talking as they stepped across the threshold. They would still be talking as he lay awake in his room, listening to the grown-ups laughing and arguing round the dinner table. On summer nights, as the dawn broke, someone might open the piano and then the songs would start – Russian songs, Jewish songs, anthems of the revolution. ‘I knew from my childhood that I was growing up in a family where interesting things were happening,’ he recalls. ‘Things connected to revolution.’

Ilya’s aunts had been involved in the revolutionary underground for decades. They were old hands by the time of Lenin’s coup in 1917. One had worked in a secret revolutionary group in Baku, the oil port on the shore of the Caspian Sea. It was there that she encountered the young man who later gave himself the name of Stalin. Ilya’s own image of the future leader was shaped by a tale she liked to tell about his cruelty. One afternoon, she said, it must have been in April, some time before 1904, she and a group of comrades were out for a walk. Their path lay by a river which had swollen after the spring thaw. A calf, newborn, still doubtful on its legs, had somehow become stranded on an island in the middle. The friends could hear its bleating above the roar of the water, but no one dared to risk the torrent. No one, that is, except the Georgian, Koba, who ripped off his shirt and swam across. He reached the calf, hauled himself out to stand beside it, waited for all the friends to watch, and then he broke its legs.

Ilya lived half his life in that man’s shadow. His father was the first to suffer directly. The Bolshevik revolutionary had made good, and by the 1930s he was a senior official in Stalin’s government. The trappings of power included a move to Moscow and a new wife, younger than the first, childless and unencumbered by loquacious relatives. Ilya and his mother and brother were installed in a separate apartment, and it was this arrangement, probably, that saved their lives. In 1937, Ilya’s father was arrested. He disappeared for ever, and although his estranged family escaped the terror, they carried a taint because of their association with an enemy of the people. This burden, combined with young Ilya’s Jewishness, would dictate the choices the teenager was forced to make. First, a sympathetic teacher advised him to give up his plan to study at the prestigious foreign-languages institute in the capital and to set his sights on a teaching career instead. Accordingly, Ilya pursued his studies in a humble college, avoiding even the
komsomol
for fear of unwelcome enquiries. Then, when war broke out in 1941, his request to serve at the front was refused. Instead of joining the army, he was sent to a building site in the Urals to help construct a factory. It was only when the army was in danger of collapse that the young man was permitted to transfer to the infantry, but although he fought at Stalingrad, he never managed to wipe the slate clean of his father’s supposed shame. After the war, he took a job in the provincial city of Smolensk. It was a long way to a decent library – eight hours by train to his beloved Moscow – but it was inconspicuous, and that meant relatively safe.

Ilya Natanovich ought to remember Stalin with disgust. He ought to recall angry conversations round the table when those lively and observant aunts dropped by. But what the veteran remembers, with a smile of recognition, is an attitude that bordered on religious faith. ‘When we heard him speaking on the radio,’ he explains, ‘and there was a pause, we used to whisper, “There, Stalin’s having a drink.”’ The image may have come from Konstantin Simonov’s famous novel
The Living and the Dead
, where people who are listening to Stalin’s greatest wartime speech in July 1941 must catch their breath each time he takes a drink. Veterans’ memories are often overlaid with images from books or films. The war is all so long ago. But then Ilya remembers more. ‘It was like listening to the voice of God,’ he adds. ‘And I dreamed about him like a father. I dreamed, of course, about my own father as well. I still do. When the repressions started, I began to have some doubts … I didn’t believe that my father was guilty, or any of the other people I knew. But Stalin embodied the future, we all believed that.’

‘Our generation lived through 1937 and 1938,’ another veteran of these years recalled. ‘We were witnesses to those tragic events, but our hands were
clean. Our generation was the first to be truly formed after the revolution.’ This man had been at school when the first show trials were staged. He read about the purges on the displays called wall newspapers, sheets of newsprint that were pinned up like posters for people to stand and read. Whatever private thoughts he had, he maintained his faith in the utopian cause. He believed, too, in victory, the easy triumph that had been described so vividly in the war films of 1938. The same faith would impel millions of young people to volunteer as soon as the news of invasion broke. Faith in the cause could make them fight, but faith was no defence from German shells. This was the generation that the war devoured. As this same veteran recalled, there were 138 young people in his rifle regiment. After their first battle, thirty-eight were left, and ten days later there were only five.
³⁸
The state, with all its promises, had let them down. ‘They were prepared for great deeds,’ the historian Elena Senyavskaya remarked. ‘But they were not prepared for the army.’
³⁹

The first real test for Stalin’s Red Army came at the end of 1939. On 30 November, Soviet troops invaded Finland. The campaign was a disaster. Within a month, nearly 18,000 men, almost half of those who had crossed the border that first day, were missing, captured or dead. The slaughter was so terrible, and the panic that accompanied it so confusing, that it is difficult even now to establish just how many soldiers lost their lives in the short war that followed. The men were thrown headlong at Finnish guns. Tanks and their crews were shelled and burned, whole regiments of infantry encircled. Entire battalions of troops, the spearhead of the Red Army, were cut off from their reinforcements and supplies, while leaderless soldiers rioted in the face of starvation and cold. Tales of atrocities began to circulate. Men talked of Soviet corpses without penises or hands. Some had seen human faces with their tongues and eyes gouged out. When the war was over, the basis for many of these stories turned out to be the horror felt by inexperienced conscripts as they marched in succession, wave after helpless wave, over their own unburied dead; past corpses frozen, brittle, gnawed or torn apart by dogs.
¹
Red Army losses – deaths – exceeded 126,000.
²
Nearly 300,000 more were evacuated through injury, burns, disease and frostbite.
³
Finland’s losses in the war were 48,243 killed and 43,000 wounded.
⁴