Ivan’s War (16 page)

These ideas were neither strange nor alien to the young men whose job it was to fight in Finland. Soviet troops were children of their time and culture, and to varying extents – even if they joked about them – the ideas of the party had become their own. There were a few who had no dearer wish than to defend the Soviet motherland. Their heroes were the airmen and explorers of the 1930s, their dream to be as skilful and as brave themselves. There were others, too, caught up in the enthusiasm of the times, who saw themselves as vanguard communists, the heirs, perhaps, of the civil-war fighters they had heard about at school. Such men might ‘beg’ to serve on the front line. ‘I want to go into battle for the Motherland and Stalin,’ one soldier wrote, perhaps taking dictation from a
politruk
. And he added, as many did, a formal request to join the party. ‘I will fight in the party spirit, as a Bolshevik.’
⁸⁹

It was as if the cinema had come to life. Twenty years after the Red Army’s first campaigns, its troops had little idea of battle beyond the stock pictures of manliness, heroism and self-sacrifice. The real demands of modern war, including calculated tactics, self-restraint, and a facility with sophisticated weapons, would have looked almost tawdry to this generation. It was reported with pride, for instance, that ‘the deputy political officer of the 5th battalion of the 147th rifles led his men into an attack shouting, “For the Motherland and Stalin!”’ He was among the first to catch a Finnish bullet.
⁹⁰
Komsomols
in another regiment mounted a spate of pointless raids in celebration of Stalin’s birthday on 21 December. Still others pledged themselves always to complete training classes with full marks, as if any other outcome were desirable.

Good comradeship, the formation of what the sociologists who study other armies have described as ‘primary groups’ among the soldiers, would have been a better way to improve both discipline and co-ordination.
⁹¹
A stronger sense of loyalty between the men would have built stronger trust. But close relationships between soldiers were not encouraged. They might be a sign of deviance, the spies worried, conspiracies in embryo. Thirteen of the forty-six rifle divisions that the Red Army fielded in Finland had been formed for less than a year by the winter of 1939–40.
⁹²
The others tended, as was the policy at this time, to have been brought up to strength – peopled with strangers – in the last weeks before their mobilization for the front.
⁹³
In place of long-established trust the
politruks
nurtured these people’s party spirit, or worse, a fabricated ‘friendliness’. ‘The soldiers, commanders and political workers in our regiment show courage, heroism and a willingness to give each other friendly help during battle,’ ran one of their reports.
⁹⁴
‘Friendliness’ of this kind was no substitute for absent professionalism, let alone mutual trust. These men had failed to train together. ‘Friendly’, perhaps, described the spirit of an artillery division that fired without orders near the Finnish village of Makela ‘to help the infantry keep its spirits up’.
⁹⁵
The next stage in that battle was a mass and uncoordinated panic.

Party spirit was no help when the men were afraid, either. Soviet soldiers in Finland were unprepared for the battlefields that their own weapons would create. Even their officers had no idea of the co-ordination that would be necessary to make use of infantry, big guns and tanks.
⁹⁶
Without a basic understanding of their role, soldiers found battles incomprehensible and terrifying. Some were afraid of their own shadows. An infantryman in the 7th Army caused havoc one morning when he shrieked so loudly that his whole battalion took fright. He explained later that he had glimpsed his own face in a mirror and taken it to be a Finnish sniper. His terrified scream disturbed
the nearby signals unit. The men there started firing wildly, without orders, wasting precious bullets in the air. Not far away, members of the railway guard corps also heard the noise and joined in with more shooting of their own.
⁹⁷
Tardily, even desperately, political officers tried to instil some sense of fighting spirit in the men. Their priority, it was agreed, should henceforth be field training. The memoranda that they wrote along these lines make pathetic reading. ‘It is too late and almost impossible to organize party-political work during battle itself,’ a senior commissar explained. Among the things that it was ‘too late’ to tell soldiers who were in the field, he said, was how to lie down when the Finnish gunners opened fire.
⁹⁸

‘They told us that the Red Army would smash the White Finns with a lightning strike,’ men started to complain by the new year, ‘but the end of the war is not in sight.’ They had come up against the Mannerheim Line, the Finnish bunkers that Soviet reconnaissance had overlooked. If they had been afraid before, their mood was closer now to sheer despair. The party’s tale of easy victory had turned out to be false. ‘We’re going to find these bunkers everywhere. We cannot even collect our injured and dead. The infantry cannot overcome emplacements like these.’
⁹⁹
A new brochure, ‘Three Weeks of Fighting the White Finns’, was hastily assembled, along with a more practical ‘Specific Problems of This War and How to Improve Our Effort’.
¹⁰⁰
But the basic Soviet tactic did not change. Red Army troops were supposed only to attack. It was an approach that suited the Finns, whose machine-gunners slaughtered Soviet soldiers almost at their leisure. It helped them that some senior Soviet officers regarded the use of camouflage as a sign of cowardice.
¹⁰¹

The poor conditions played on everybody’s nerves. Even in the first week of the war, the infantry suffered dozens of cases of frostbite. By the end of December 1939, the reported figure, which included only the men whose ability to fight was seriously impaired, had increased to 5,725.
¹⁰²
At the same time, officers were reporting shortages of
valenki
(the traditional Russian felt boots), fur hats, footcloths and winter jackets. To make matters worse, sometimes there was no hot food, not even tea, for days.
¹⁰³
The temperature had plunged to an exceptional low for early winter, well below –30°C, and many soldiers had come straight from the milder climate of Ukraine. But the cold should have been easy to predict, for Karelia had been a province of the Russian empire for decades; conditions there were part of recent, living, memory.

The men began deserting in their hundreds. Sometimes they simply walked away, taking advantage of what looked like mere confusion to find a
fire and warm themselves, steal the supplies, or simply disappear.
¹⁰⁴
One infantryman ‘surrendered’ to the Finns on behalf of two entire battalions.
¹⁰⁵
Not merely individuals, and not only private soldiers, but whole regiments abandoned their posts in this way. Sometimes they left their heavier weapons, too, allowing the Finns to help themselves to field guns, ammunition and rifles. Deserters could escape unnoticed because no one knew who was responsible for whom. At the same time, the chaos all along the line gave men a chance to get their hands on any loot they found. One man stole bicycles to sell when he got home. Others preferred to stock up with thick winter gear. A
politruk
, Malkov, was caught with two leather coats, four suits, shoes and a suitcase full of stolen children’s clothes.
¹⁰⁶

Stalin’s generals, as was their custom, adopted savage measures to bring their ragtag army into line. That winter, orders were given to shoot stragglers and deserters. According to its own figures, eleven deserters from the 8th Army had been shot by early January,
¹⁰⁷
but meanwhile other soldiers had begun to shoot themselves. Cases of
samostrel
, self-inflicted wounds, increased alarmingly in the new year. There was not much else that desperate men could do.
Zagradotryady
– another new word for the Soviet lexicon – were the troops whose job it was to stand behind the lines and pick off any man who tried to run away. Unlike the regulars, they had machine guns for the job. Meanwhile, officers faced NKVD firing squads. In January 1940, a string of tribunals sentenced scores of them to death for cowardice and failure. Even the Soviet high command began to wonder if there might not be a better way to organize a war. Perhaps, one of their memoranda carefully suggested, ‘the highest form of punishment is being overused’.
¹⁰⁸

A survivor of the Winter War recalled the ‘dull apathy and indifference towards impending doom’ that pushed men ahead when there was no alternative but death.
¹⁰⁹
It was a far cry from quick victory and party spirit. Back in Moscow, reformers read of the ‘negative effect’ that the men experienced when they found the frozen bodies of earlier waves of soldiers pushing out of shallow graves along the ice roads heading north. Tales of catastrophe pervaded the barracks where fresh soldiers were waiting for their battle orders. ‘I’m not going to Finland,’ a conscript in Kharkov told his
politruk
. ‘Two of my brothers are there and that’s enough.’
¹¹⁰
Shocked by the gulf between their expectations and the real war, Stalin’s generals gathered in Moscow to consider a programme of reforms. There was almost no time for thought. As they pored over plans, the Germans were preparing an attack on France whose devastating swiftness would put paid to any hope of peace along the Eastern Front.