Ivan’s War (19 page)

The trance soon faded for the new recruits as well. The Red Army had not changed overnight, and nor had its recruitment and supply structures. Prewar contingency plans for mobilization had allowed three days for organizing the call-up of those liable for immediate front-line service. In the panic that midsummer, these guidelines were scrapped and the Supreme Soviet called for the process to be completed in twenty-four hours. The chaos this produced would last until the following spring.
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More immediately, the mass movement of troops became acutely dangerous in the front-line regions, up to 200 kilometres into Soviet territory, that the Luftwaffe already controlled. ‘The normal mobilization of remaining soldiers… was impossible,’ a report on the 8th Army, based in the north-west, noted, ‘because most of the border divisions had lost their mobilization bases.’
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Safe for a while behind the lines that summer afternoon, the volunteers of Moscow also found the army unprepared. Photographs of the recruitment process show crowds of young men and women pressed together round some junior officer’s desk, waving their passports and pushing their mates aside like shoppers on the first day of a sale. The propaganda image suggests young men squaring up for immediate combat, as if they were ready to grab the nearest German by the scruff and throw him out of Russia straight away. The truth was that raw volunteers – unlike reservists – would need to be assessed, equipped and trained for some weeks before they faced their first fascist. Their experience that day, after the first moments of glory and resolve, was usually prosaic. The officer in charge gave them a glance to weed the hopeless cases from the healthy young. Then came a quick check of their documents, and then, for those who made the grade, a long wait. At this stage, as the veterans attest, there were not even medical examinations.

There were no barracks, food or transport, either. Most recruitment stations were set up in local schools. When the suitable applicants had been selected and their papers stamped they were in the army. They were no longer free. But there was nowhere warm or dry for them to go to either, and the authorities had not thought to lay on food or entertainment while they waited. In Moscow they crowded into classrooms, they spilled into the streets and they gathered on the platforms of the Belorussian station as if they hoped for trains to take them to the front. By the time the party’s reporter arrived at the station to check on this last group most had been there for several days. There were no beds, so they slept on the floor. Some had brought bread or biscuits with them, others had nothing at all to eat, but somehow they had all found a supply of vodka.
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The same fate had befallen reservists from the capital. The city was thronged with groups of men, several hundred at a time, just sitting, waiting, talking, drinking and reflecting on their fate. ‘A good many volunteers have a drunken appearance,’ the police primly observed.
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It was traditional, of course, but this was war.

In places nearer to the front the new recruits waited less long, drank less vodka and indulged their illusions not at all. Misha Volkov worked in Kiev’s fast-growing metal industry. A married man with a small child, his main concern for years had been his fragile health. He suffered from a heart condition that his own taut nerves made worse, but his illness had not been serious enough to excuse him from military service years before, and he was recalled in the first round of mobilization that summer. On 24 June, he and a group of fellow junior officers were ordered to join a unit in Lvov. Volkov was so anxious to get on with his new task that he did not even spend a last night at home with his wife and daughter. The memory of his hasty departure for the barracks would haunt him for five years.

As Volkov worried himself to sleep in a strange bed on his first night in uniform, Lvov was burning. The local NKVD, in preparation for their own retreat, spent their night murdering the inmates of its crowded jails.
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Volkov knew none of this. His problem would be getting there. His call-up papers included a pass that paid his train fare, but there were no special carriages or requisitioned seats. Like everyone else, he had to fight to get a place on the first train that looked as if it might make the twelve-hour journey west. Here was another piece of Stalinist logic: no means of getting to Lvov was guaranteed, but failure to appear on time would count as desertion. The result, as always, was a desperate scrum. Volkov somehow managed to shove a dozen other conscripts aside. He hauled himself up the iron steps of a carriage, clutching at the folds of someone else’s coat. But then he tripped. His
boot slipped and he fell hard. He would have injured his back on the rails, he wrote to his wife, if another man had not already slumped across them, softening his fall. ‘It was my first incident,’ he wrote. It was a fitting prelude to the journey in the overcrowded train. ‘On the way,’ he went on, ‘we passed columns of refugees from Lvov and other cities in western Ukraine. They told us that there was street fighting in Lvov and that life in the city had come to a standstill.’

Volkov and his friends soon came under bombardment, but ‘I was lucky again, because I’m still alive.’ When he arrived in Lvov, a city now in complete chaos, he discovered that the unit he was meant to join had fled. Again he faced a troubling dilemma. There was no sign of his commanding officer, but if he did not report for duty he would count as a deserter once again. He lingered in Lvov for three more days, but still no orders came. The street fighting was never far away, the shops were empty and the nights macabre. The locals, many of whom were patriots for a free western Ukraine, were as likely to spit in a Soviet soldier’s face as they were to offer him directions, let alone a meal. At last Volkov decided to leave, taking the twenty men who seemed to be in his command. There was no one to help with advice or supplies. None of the men had even seen a map, for these counted as secret documents back then. All the recruits could do was set out for the east, braving the constant shelling and machine-gun fire. ‘We walked without a break for forty-eight hours,’ Volkov told his wife. ‘There was nothing to eat, and we were very thirsty. We walked through ravines and woods, through mud, we fell into potholes. Ten people got left behind on the way; they didn’t have the strength to go on.’ A hundred miles later, the remnants of his group arrived at Tarnopol and joined up with their main unit at last. ‘When I remember this,’ he wrote, ‘I still can’t understand where I got the strength from, where I found the stamina, especially since I’d had no time to toughen up.’
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Volkov’s letter was written when he was safely reunited with the Red Army. For him, the story of those panic-stricken weeks ended quite well. But he knew how complete the insecurity had been. That June, he would not have been able to guess whether Lvov was the last stronghold the Germans held, or conversely, if it were true, as the leaflets dropped from German planes announced, that Moscow had fallen and Stalin was dead. His walk through the woods and hills of western Ukraine was a last act of faith. As a Jew, he may have known what kind of reception he would have met in German hands. To remain in Lvov, he may have guessed, would mean capture and certain death. Other soldiers at the front, including tens of thousands of ethnic Ukrainians and Russians, chose to surrender to the invaders
rather than plunging eastwards through the wild. Still others simply picked up their greatcoats and their heavy packs and walked back home. The choices of those first few days were lonelier than any they had ever made.

The turning point, for many, came on 3 July. On that day Stalin finally addressed the Soviet people, reading from a script and pausing frequently, as if distressed, to drink from a glass at his elbow. The speech itself, beginning with its famous address to Soviet citizens as ‘brothers and sisters, friends’, was a calculated break with communist formality and a watershed in Stalin’s relationship with his people. As a recent Russian history of the time affirms, it was a crucial moment for morale. ‘Although Stalin admitted that the country was in mortal danger,’ writes O. V. Druzhba, ‘this was better than the untamed fear of leaderlessness and betrayal.’
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One of the few outsiders to witness it all was Alexander Werth, a journalist who was based in Moscow to report for the
Sunday Times
. In his great history of the war, written from notes that he made inside Russia, he described Stalin’s performance as ‘extraordinary’. Its effect, he considered, ‘addressed to a nervous, and often frightened and bewildered people, was very important. Until then, there had been something artificial in the adulation of Stalin; his name was associated not only with the stupendous effort of the Five Year Plans, but also with the ruthless methods employed in the collectivisation campaign and, worse still, with the terror of the purges. The Soviet people now felt that they had a leader to look to.’
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The speech was indeed shrewd, admitting to the country’s mortal crisis without breathing a word about the panic at the front. Stalin did not spell out the extent of the German advance, but he conceded that the enemy was ‘wicked and perfidious … heavily armed with tanks and artillery’. There was also a deft admission of unpreparedness. ‘Soviet troops had not been fully mobilized,’ the people learned, ‘and had not been moved to the frontier’ when ‘Fascist Germany unexpectedly and perfidiously violated the 1939 non-aggression pact’. Such crumbs seem to have satisfied some members of an audience that hungered for real news. ‘The Leader did not remain silent about the fact that our troops have had to retreat,’ a Moscow plastics worker commented. ‘He does not hide the difficulties that lie ahead for his people. After this speech I want to work even harder. It has mobilized me for great deeds.’ The call for volunteers to train for civil defence, as well as the injunction to tireless effort in the factories, seemed to inspire thousands of people and make them take heart. Others, encouraged by Stalin’s assurance that the enemy would not prevail, declared that they were leaving for the front at once. ‘If our leader says that victory is certain, it means that we will win.’
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The reports of improved morale and collective determination far outweigh those that describe dissension. For millions, Stalin’s speech was the real start of patriotic struggle. Without their dedication and their faith, the war might have been lost within a year. But there were others who could not be soothed with slogans and fine words; the speech did not allay suspicion everywhere. Werth might not have known it – and he certainly could not have reported the fact – but Stalin’s speech was met with bitter laughter in some quarters, even in the capital. People had learned to read between the lines whenever an official spoke. Now some of them gave in to their worst fears. ‘All this talk about mobilizing the people and organizing civil defence just goes to show that the situation at the front is absolutely hopeless,’ said one Moscow engineer. ‘It’s clear that the Germans will take Moscow soon and Soviet power will not hold out.’ ‘It’s too late to start talking about volunteers now,’ a woman muttered to friends in her office. ‘The Germans are practically in Moscow already.’ ‘Some kind of collapse is inescapable,’ another office worker said. ‘Everything that we have been building for twenty-five years has turned out to be a chimera. The collapse is obvious from Stalin’s speech, in his desperate summons to the colours.’
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The leader’s words made even less impact in villages where people still distrusted Soviet power. In Kursk province, for instance, there were peasants who resented the order to dig tank traps and defence trenches. ‘Shoot me if you like,’ an angry woman told local police, ‘but I’m not digging any trenches. The only people who need trenches are the communists and Jews. Let them dig them for themselves. Your power is coming to an end and we’re not going to work for you.’
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‘A war has started and people are going to get killed,’ a man told fellow villagers at their meeting. ‘I personally am not opposed to Soviet power, but I hate communists.’
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‘Your war isn’t anything to do with me,’ another told the party men. ‘Let the communists fight.’
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Collectivization was one focus for this opposition to Soviet power, political repression another. ‘It’s a good thing Hitler has invaded the Soviet Union,’ a dinner lady whose husband was in prison commented that July. ‘They’ll have to let the prisoners out.’
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Such views were amplified, in different ways, among members of the non-Russian ethnic groups.

The greatest test of Stalin’s speech, however, was the reaction in the Red Army itself. Official histories and memoirs published under Soviet power agree that many saw it as the first true ray of hope. ‘It is hard to describe the enormous enthusiasm and patriotic uplift’ with which the speech was met, recalled front-line General I. I. Fedyuninsky. ‘We suddenly seemed to feel much stronger. Where circumstances permitted, short meetings would be
held by the army units.’
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These meetings, sometimes the first that
politruks
had dared to call, provided an opportunity to discuss the gravity of the attack at last. Instead of lies and silences, the men now learned what kind of effort each of them would have to make if the invaders were to be driven from Soviet soil. War that had been unreal until that point, like a play that had suddenly deviated from its script, now became serious, the fear as well as sacrifice more valid. In his war novel
The Living and the Dead
, Konstantin Simonov recalled the men’s response. ‘Stalin did not describe the situation as tragic,’ he has a wounded soldier muse. ‘The truth he told was a bitter truth, but at last it was uttered, and people felt that they stood more firmly on the ground.’ The speech, wrote Simonov, left its audience with ‘a tense expectation of change for the better’.
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