Ivan’s War (26 page)

According to the patriotic myth, whole armies used the same slogan to raise their spirits on the brink of battle. Though German veterans mainly recall the Soviets’ blood-curdling ‘Hoorah!’, the official war cry that millions of Red Army survivors remembered later was ‘For the motherland! For Stalin!’ In recent years, some old soldiers – especially those who were never officers – have expressed doubts about the use of this phrase. ‘Did we shout that?’ Ivan Gorin, a soldier and the son of peasants, laughed. ‘I’m sure we shouted something when we went at the guns, but I don’t think it was that polite.’ The officers and policemen were too far back behind the lines to hear. Those who used the slogan, however, had good reason to chorus the familiar words. Whatever Gorin claimed later, or writers like the veteran Vasil Bykov, superstition forbade swearing on the eve of battle.
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And it would have been hard to have agreed on an alternative expression without alerting the secret police. Though the men muttered lots of things, and all used the drawn-out, terrible ‘Hoorah!’, the famous words may also have been as common as survivors have claimed. The point was that it hardly mattered what names the men used. They needed a war cry, a loud noise that united every pair of lungs and forced their muscles on. The sound, and not the meaning, was the point. The slogan became sacred in its own right. And then the real man slowly assumed the charisma surrounding it.
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At this early stage, however, the people who cared most about Stalin and his image were the propagandists. Despite the pressures of likely defeat, some officers considered that time should be spent, as it had always been,
fostering myths and grooming spurious internal enemies. In February 1942, a recruit from Siberia was sent north to the Volkhov Front near Leningrad. The ski battalion he had joined was broken up by German fire within a week, and he was redeployed to a regular infantry division, the 281st. This was a war of position, and he and his comrades spent their days digging new trenches, dodging shells and wondering what they were fighting for. ‘All we knew,’ the old man later told his children, ‘was that we were fighting for the motherland.’ His surname, Khabibulin, suggests that motherland for him had once been to the east of Russia itself, which probably explains why he was picked when the Special Section needed a scapegoat. The pretext was a casual remark he made to a Ukrainian soldier who had botched an attempt at shooting his own thumb off. ‘You could have done that better,’ Khabibulin observed. ‘They’d have demobilized you.’ The young man asked him sharply if he did not want to fight. ‘What can I say?’ Khabibulin answered. ‘We’re fighting.’ And then, less cautiously, and maybe out of pity for the boy, he added something about the sad loss of life.

Khabibulin was arrested three days later and accused of fomenting opposition to the popular struggle on behalf of the motherland and Stalin. The charges carried the death penalty, but Khabibulin escaped with a ten-year sentence, part of which, ironically, he served in a prison where Stalin himself had languished forty years before. So he survived, and much later, after the fall of communism, he was able to see his own files at the KGB. It was then that he learned how other men, his comrades, had agreed to testify against him, and how the investigators had been obsessed, of all things, by his attitude to Stalin. The depositions would have been dictated by police; they tell us more about the state’s own propaganda needs than about real soldiers’ thinking at the time. So it is interesting that a man who scarcely seemed to have given the leader a thought until his arrest found testimonies that quoted him as saying, ‘I won’t fight for Stalin. If it’s for Stalin, I won’t fight.’
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When they were fighting, the men scarcely thought of food, but every other waking moment was coloured by incessant hunger. Their usual diet, according to a
politruk
who served in the defence of Moscow, was breakfast at 6 o’clock, including soup ‘so thick that a spoon could stand in it any way up you liked’, a lunch of buckwheat kasha, tea and bread, and then more soup and tea at nightfall. A medical orderly supervised the preparation of all food, testing each dish before it could be served up to the men.
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In 1941, the daily ration for front-line soldiers theoretically included nearly a kilogram of
bread, 150 g of meat, buckwheat, dried fish and a healthy lump of lard or fat.
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But even the
politruk
conceded that ‘in battle, it was much harder with food’.
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Artillerymen dining beside their weapons, 1941

 

 

What that meant was that most combat soldiers received nothing but dry rations, and sometimes nothing at all, for days on end. ‘We’re living in dugouts in the woods,’ a soldier wrote home at this time. ‘We sleep on straw, like cattle. They feed us very badly – twice a day, and even then not what we need. We get five spoonfuls of soup in the morning … we’re hungry all day.’
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Mere discomfort, in those conditions, was the least serious consequence. That winter, temperatures dropped well below thirty degrees of frost. ‘Seven of our lads have frostbite in their legs,’ a soldier wrote to his mother in February 1942. ‘They’re in hospital now. We had to go seven days
without a crust, we were exhausted and starved. I’ve done nothing since I got back but eat. My legs have started swelling up a bit at night, I eat a lot, and my stomach aches all the time.’
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Even the bureaucrats became concerned. That winter saw a stream of orders about hot food and vital supplies for the front line.
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Men were also short of basic clothing. Russian people feel the cold like every other European does. They have no magic inner warmth, whatever their shivering opponents thought as the October rain began to turn to sleet. After the Finnish war, the General Staff had reviewed the whole question of cold-weather gear for Soviet troops, and there is no doubt that
valenki
, padded jackets and trousers, fur gloves and warm hats saved thousands of lives in the Red Army through the war. One of the stock characters of Soviet wartime farce, by contrast, was the ‘winter Fritz’, the hapless German forced to clothe himself in stolen mitts, newspaper padding and some babushka’s outlandish drawers.
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But the Red Army had problems, too. With manufacturing at a near standstill, new supplies could not be guaranteed. In 1942, for instance, the Soviet footwear industry would turn out enough boots to supply just 0.3 pairs to every person in the land.
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Storage, repairs and salvage were vital for mere survival. But habits learned through years of coexistence with state bureaucrats and planners could be difficult to break. In September 1941, inspectors found a forgotten shipment of 266,000 pairs of army trousers stacked without covers and already dripping with mildew.
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Tens of thousands of winter boots awaited overdue repair while hundreds of recruits faced winter without footwear of any kind.
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By the next spring, the situation was so critical that officers and men who served behind the lines were barred from receiving greatcoats with their summer kit. Instead, they had to be content with cast-off padded jackets from the front.
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The black market grew and flourished. All kinds of military property were diverted or filched, including boots and other clothing, fuel, food and even kitchen pots.
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Tobacco had become so scarce by 1942 that Muscovites would light a cigarette and offer passers-by the chance, for two
valenki
, to take a puff.
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Army supplies – wholesale, anonymous and so easy to steal – were treasure even honest patriots could not resist. Another thriving trade sprang into life in response to the introduction, on 25 August 1941, of a front-line ration of vodka. The idea was to issue every soldier on active duty with 100 g per day. Special officers were charged with measuring the portions, and the unused surplus was supposed to be accounted for every ten days.
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But vodka is too precious to be treated with such pedantry. Officers and men who were not entitled to a ration helped themselves from the
stores. Hard-pressed quartermasters sold them off.
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In Moscow, Simonov observed, people were drinking more vodka than tea by January 1942. Drunkenness remained a problem among front-line troops,
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and everyone knew that the supply would increase after a battle. ‘It was always good to serve with the infantry,’ a survivor remembered. ‘The infantry or the artillery. The death rates among them were highest. And no one was checking how much vodka we sent back.’

Humorous portrayal of the ‘Winter Fritz’, from a Red Army theatrical review called ‘The Thieving Army’, February 1942

 

 

No one checked up on the dead, either. ‘Not rarely,’ ran one of Mekhlis’s mealy-mouthed notes, ‘the corpses of soldiers … are not collected from the battlefield for several days and no one cares, although it would be entirely possible to bury our comrades with full military honours.’ He mentioned a
case where fourteen bodies had lain unburied for five days, a not surprising outcome in December, on frozen ground, with every soldier needing to conserve his strength. ‘Corpses on the field,’ Mekhlis observed, ‘have a political resonance that affects the political–moral condition of the soldiers and the authority of commissars and commanders.’
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More urgently, the dead had possessions that living soldiers needed more. New uniforms were reserved for each new army as it formed; front-line troops needing fresh supplies relied on recycled clothes and equipment. ‘After very severe battles,’ recalled a
politruk
, ‘we had to send our soldiers back into the field to gather the dead with their weapons so that we could use them again the next morning.’
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That December, Mekhlis would order that all bodies should be buried promptly with the proper respect (and careful documentation).
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Ten months later, the authorities complained that corpses were still being pitched into trenches and shell holes, or worse, that they were being left out for the rats. As for their possessions, a further order, dated 29 November 1942, listed the items that burial parties were expected to retrieve, including ‘greatcoats, tunics, hats, padded trousers and jackets, sweaters, gloves, boots and
valenki
’.
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Burial teams were not considered to have recovered a corpse unless they also carried back a gun.