Ivan’s War (37 page)

By 1943, the army had been at war for two years, and at almost every level below that of the high command its ranks were dominated by recruits whose military careers had started since the invasion. The gap between officers and men was closing. No one could doubt the basic cause for which they were all working, and a sense of common interest was vital for morale. The better young officers, including Samoilov himself, worked with the men, attempting to meet them half-way rather than taking cover in privilege.
Although entitled to food of his own, and also to private quarters, Lev Lvovich insisted on eating with the soldiers in his regiment, sharing the thin soup and the buckwheat porridge that they all called shrapnel.

It was becoming easier for a junior officer like him to befriend the men because the gulf in experience between the ranks had narrowed so much by this stage in the war. The Red Army of 1941 had almost disappeared. The twenty-six-year-old lieutenant, his head full of advice from an uncle who had served under Nicholas II, set out to encourage and cajole young men and aging reservists, not disaffected veterans. Remembering names was a little easier, too, because he never managed to muster a full complement of troops. As a lieutenant, Lvovich should have commanded 120 infantrymen, but he seldom had to get to know more than sixty. There were never enough recruits and reserves to keep Red Army units up to strength. What this meant was that the young officer could talk to a frightened first-timer personally, although ‘a bit of swearing was often the best thing for the rest of them’. Good relations paid off. As he recalled, the men thought it mere child’s play, during operations, to get rid of an officer they hated, just as Samoilov’s comrades had planned to do. ‘It happened,’ Lev Lvovich assured me. ‘Of course it happened quite a lot.’
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Even the best officers, however, could not entirely close the gulf between the semi-literate and men who could read, between townsmen and all the rest. ‘This was the last Russian war,’ Samoilov wrote, ‘in which most of the soldiers were peasants.’
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True, they were now collective farmers, Soviets, not Tolstoy’s archetypal sons of earth, but all the same they were not fond of taking notes. As the party wrote itself into the war, the voices of the mass of troops were edited or lost. Political officers occasionally reported their talk, but only where soldiers’ comments concerned their own preoccupations – communism, Stalin’s orders, the digest of most recent news. The men’s culture, the bedrock of the soldiers’ fighting spirit and morale, of their survival and perhaps of Russia’s own, would vanish with the settling wartime dust. There are a few survivors still, but even they look back across a fog of time, and they, too, have been influenced by post-war newspapers and films. To reach back to the infantrymen’s world is to explore beyond the range of memory, beyond the scope of the archival mountains of buff-covered files. Even their contemporaries, Moscow-based staff officers and bureaucrats, had trouble understanding soldiers’ real lives. The peasant village was exotic, almost foreign to Stalin’s officials, a site for ethnographers and folklore expeditions. By 1943, the army, with its closed ranks, its male intimacies and its violence, was like another universe.

This universe was ruled by fate, just as the quality of men’s daily lives depended on the weather. If they stuck to the regulations, as soldiers, the men would have no say in their own existence, no right to run away from danger, no way of telling where they would be sent to die or even what they would eat every night. Their response was to develop a cosmology of their own, a system for predicting, and thus taming, the madness that threatened to engulf them. Parts of it were very old, inherited through their fathers and uncles from the armies that had defeated Napoleon. There were taboos about sex – a wounded, even an unconscious, man would die if he touched his own genitals – about swearing, and about the advisability of wearing clean linen before battle. There were many predictions based on the vagaries of the weather. Some men believed it was unlucky to swear while loading a gun, others that a man should never swear before a battle. It was also unlucky to give anything to a comrade before going into combat, and soldiers all had tales of borrowed greatcoats that brought death.
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They also favoured talismans. Many carried a photograph in their tunic pockets; others kept a copy of Konstantin Simonov’s love poem ‘Wait for Me’ folded against their hearts. The veterans explained that they did this for good luck. It was also safe. Officers from the Special Section searched men’s pockets on the eve of any operation, and if they discovered personal, let alone incriminating, information the owner might well end up in trouble with the military police. A scrap of paper that was just like all the rest was reassuring, but it was also beyond reproach.

Religion was a controversial matter for the men. Prayer had always been a woman’s job. Since 1917, the party had taught everyone that faith in God was an outmoded relic. The
politruks
and many
komsomols
within the ranks agreed. As one explained to me, ‘When you see the atrocities that are taking place minute by minute, you just think, God! If you’re so omnipotent and just, how can you let so many innocent souls suffer this torment and die? I’m a communist, an atheist, a materialist. To the marrow of my bones.’ The Red Army would give the lie to the old saying that ‘there are no atheists in a foxhole’.
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But though this was a generation that had seldom visited a church, everyone observed the lads who wore small silver crosses round their necks, hiding them under their shirts and explaining, if they were challenged, that the trinkets were gifts from their grandmothers. Some made their own crosses by cutting shapes out of old tins.
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‘They burned their party cards if they were going to die,’ a veteran remembered. ‘But they did not throw away the crosses.’ Very large numbers – perhaps a majority of rank and filers – crossed themselves in the old Russian way before they faced the guns. The gestures and the words were totemic; echoes, rather than formal evidence, of
faith. ‘They said things like, “God save me,” but what they believed, I couldn’t say,’ a veteran explained. ‘I’m an atheist myself, but not very strongly. I came back alive. I suppose I live under a lucky star.’ ‘I had a guardian angel,’ Ivan Gorin explained. ‘I could feel her beside me all the time.’ The angel, he told me, was, in fact, the spirit of his mother.

Faith might have mutated, but one passion that did not falter was the men’s love for their songs. They sang while they were marching and they sang for festivals and parades. They also sang, more mutedly, in hospitals, which is where they swapped lyrics and developed new rhymes.
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The songs that have survived are poignant and lyrical, maudlin rather than tragic. Many were adapted from the patriotic ballads of 1812.
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Others were written at the time by Stalin’s favourite hacks, including Lebedev-Kumach and Demyan Bednyi. Songs about women naturally multiplied, many of them based on a pre-war classic, ‘The Blue Scarf’, whose words promised one of the things men wanted most: a happy ending, a tender reunion between the soldier and his girl. In the same vein, Simonov’s ‘Wait for Me’, with its recurrent promise, ‘Wait for me, and I’ll come back,’ offered a protective totem, a sort of individual spell. The soldier who sang the words – for they were quickly set to music – was thinking of his own survival, for, as the poem concludes, ‘Only you and I will know / how I survived. / It’s just that you knew how to wait / as no other person.’
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A soldiers’ choir on the Kalinin Front, May 1942 

 

New ballads of a different kind dealt with the soldier himself; the simple, stout-hearted and earthy conscript who fought for his motherland. Hack poets such as Lebedev-Kumach wrote Stalin into the lyrics of some of these, but veterans claim to have preferred more traditional material, and the leader does not feature when they sing their wartime favourites today. The most popular song of all, a folk song with its origins in tsarist times, was about a Russian girl, Katyusha. This classic developed hundreds of variations in the course of the war, many of them playing on Katyusha’s new role as a rocket-launcher. Technological versions of Katyusha ended up killing Hitler and his cronies, and her unearthly music deafened and defeated the generic Fritz. What she did not do, on the record at least, was stoop to obscenity. Even subversive irony does not feature in her repertoire. Whatever the men may have sung in private, and political reports describe their ‘crude eroticism’, no one allowed a folklorist to collect disrespectful versions of the army’s songs.
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Singing, like careless talk, was a public act. It was forbidden except at designated times.
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Everyone knew that songs were vital for morale. ‘You can’t have a war without songs,’ a former partisan remembered. ‘It’s easier to die or go hungry if you have a song.’
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Svetlana Alexiyevich found the same when she talked to women who had fought in the war. ‘When I asked them what they remembered best about their departure for the front,’ she wrote, ‘the answer was unanimous. They had sung their favourite songs!’
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Songs were even used to teach the men commands. In 1941, two sergeants wrote a ballad, which they sang in off-key male voices to the new recruits. It was a love story, and each line included one of the commands that every man needed to know – left, right, down, attention, fire!
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The song caught on in other companies, and eventually soldiers sang it as a kind of joke, imitating the voices of their sergeants and commanding officers in the roles of a young woman and her naïve lover.

The point was that music like this worked better than the prim rote-learning of the
politruks
. Wartime tunes were lilting, easily learned and hummed. They were so attractive, in fact, that even the Germans could fall under their spell. Later in the war, members of a Soviet artillery regiment were surprised to hear a German accordion player on the other side of no-man’s-land playing the song they had been singing since they pitched their camp. A few days later still, a piece of paper was found in a shell case near their lines asking – in broken Russian – for the right words to go with the tune.
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Poetry was just as vital to morale as song, and the two often overlapped. Verse came naturally to Russian speakers, even peasants, for whom it
recalled the oral culture of the recent past, and they listened eagerly to recitations of their favourite ballads. The most famous, Aleksandr Tvardovsky’s ‘Vasily Tyorkin’, described a soldier for everyman, a brave but fallible soul who endured shelling, forced marches and even a freezing river crossing with the same stoical good humour and unflinching sense of duty. Crucially, Tyorkin always survived, although his comrades often came close to despairing of his life. ‘Boys – it’s him!’ they shout as he emerges from yet another close call. This time, he has crossed an icy river where ‘even fishes must be cold’. The men stand peering on the bank when ‘Large as life, Vasily Tyorkin / Rose alive – and in he swam. / Smooth and naked, as from bathing, / Out he staggered to the shore.’ The rhythms recall Tennyson or Longfellow, and so, in their cartoon-like narrative, do the words, but Tyorkin is a Russian through and through. As the doctor massages him with alcohol in the recovery hut, he sits up and blearily asks to drink the stuff: ‘“Pity on my skin to waste it!” / Had a glass – and came alive.’
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Verse was easy to learn, pleasant to recite and valuable because it compressed emotion to an intensity that seemed normal in war. As well as memorizing other people’s work, the men themselves wrote rhymes and aphorisms. Their letters home were full of poems: creaking rhymes of love and homesickness, stirring patriotic odes. Caught in the spirit of the times, some wrote about the red flag or the Communist Party. The more romantic took their cue from famous published work. Simonov’s ‘Wait for Me’ fathered hundreds of wartime love poems, while others turned to the Russian landscape or to heroic deeds for inspiration. Those who could not write would memorize and develop the short folk poems,
chastushki
, that peasants had been composing for generations. The
politruks
wrote some of these, adapting the folk themes of fate and motherland to the current world of Stalin and the party. But
chastushki
were as catchy as limericks. The men composed thousands of them, with themes that ranged from grief and thwarted love to the irregularity of field post. ‘Tell me / in God’s name / if my dear is alive / in Stalingrad,’ ran one. The news was often bad. ‘From far away a brother writes, / dear little sister, / they killed before my eyes / your own beloved.’ ‘I’ve had a little letter,’ sang another, ‘that the censor has gone over. / He died heroically / but it doesn’t say any more.’
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