Ivan’s War (38 page)

Chastushki
were the nearest folklorists would get to the coarse humour that soldiers loved. In her old age, Krupyanskaya, the famous wartime ethnographer, told one of her colleagues that the censors had forbidden her to record erotic, satirical, subversive or criminal lyrics. She was not permitted to write down words that denigrated national minorities, including 
Jews, and the songs she collected would not be published if they lacked a patriotic theme.
²⁶
This strict political correctness guaranteed that she would overlook a large part of reality. The songs and aphorisms that have made their way into Soviet textbooks about soldiers’ lore are prim, polite and Stalinist. Their sentiments were truly part of wartime idiom – people really believed, in some part of their brains, in the ultimate triumph of virtuous communism – but they offer little clue about the way men coped with their tough, dangerous lives. Humour, much of it obscene and most very dark, was central to the front-line way of life.

One problem for outsiders wanting to know more – whether wartime ethnographers or historians writing today – was that the men’s language was meant to exclude strangers from their own close groups. Among themselves, the men larded their sentences with expressions that were so profane that few are willing to repeat them to this day. In its developed form, obscenity amounted to a parallel language on the scale of cockney rhyming slang. The word for it – and the object of many of the crude sexual jibes – was
mat
, mother. No outsider could follow
mat
’s staggering twists. A real man not only swore, he used ‘three-storey mother’, piling the profanities in stacks. It was crude, creative, visual and exclusive; strictly for the lads. Little – if any – of it has made its way into the histories of Stalin’s war.

It is the same with soldiers’ humour. Lev Pushkarev was embarking on a research degree in ethnography when the war broke out. He decided to use his time in the army to collect material for a dissertation about the soldiers’ culture. The NKVD quickly found his notes. At first, they wanted to suppress them all, but when they had established, by writing to his university department in Moscow, that he was a genuine scholar, they agreed to let him keep a record of some of the words, the decent ones, to the men’s songs. He came home with a briefcase stuffed with polite ballads and rhymes. Laughter, however, was a different matter. Pushkarev had also been collecting jokes. The NKVD seized his notebooks of these at the outset, and he was forbidden to collect any more. Humour, which sustained so many people and which reflected their authentic, spontaneous voice, was deemed to be too dangerous for record. There must be a file somewhere in the bowels of the Ministry of Defence that contains examples of the men’s uncensored talk. Till that is opened, there is only memory, or failing that, the screeds of poisonous anti-Semitism that German intelligence officers collected from captive soldiers and filed for future propaganda use.

Today, the veterans find it hard to remember the things that used to make them laugh. So much was instantaneous, based on the foibles of an officer,
non-Russian or newcomer to the unit. Sometimes, too, there is a hint of shame. Some soldiers hesitate to recollect the way they used to mock specific ethnic groups. Jokes based on bodily functions, too, might have seemed funny once, but now these men are old. ‘I’m not sure I can tell you those,’ people would say to me. It was easy, however, to laugh at the enemy. By 1943, the Germans were alleged to be so desperate for conscripts that they would take men with almost any disability. ‘But I can’t be fit,’ a soldier tells the Berlin medical board. ‘In Russia they shot off both my legs, both arms, both lungs, and even gave me a bad back.’ ‘In that case,’ the doctors reply, ‘nothing can happen now that hasn’t happened to you already.’
²⁷
This kind of thing was suitable for satirical newspapers, but the warped landscape of the Soviet state was fertile ground for humour of a more subversive kind. If the military police got hold of you, the men knew all too well, the charges would be absurd and the procedures byzantine. ‘You have to prove,’ the wags explained, ‘that you are not a camel.’
²⁸
Another story comes straight from the world of
politruks
and spies. One evening, an officer is telling a joke to his men. They are all laughing except for one, whose glum expression does not change. The officer calls the
politruk
over to find out if the man is all right. ‘Have you had bad news from home?’ the
politruk
asks. The man has not. No one in his unit has died recently, either, and he is not feeling frightened or unwell. ‘So why aren’t you laughing?’ the
politruk
enquires. ‘I’m from another regiment,’ the glum man says. ‘That’s not my commanding officer.’
²⁹

Laughter could lighten the heavy atmosphere of propaganda. At times, it also helped to dissipate the cloud of fear. But its other effect was to bind groups of soldiers together, cementing the front-line friendships that sustained each man in this world of extremes. Stalin’s regime was suspicious of groups. All through the war, spies from the Special Section were detailed to pry whenever unsanctioned new friendships formed, but trust was crucial for team-building. Effective tactics demanded that men knew and relied on their mates. Reluctantly, for they despised most sentiment, the country’s leaders began to mimic their enemy.
³⁰
From March 1942, units in need of new blood were withdrawn from front-line service before they were allowed to receive reserves and replacements. Ideally, the new formations were supposed to train together for some weeks before they faced real danger as a group.
³¹
This was not always possible, but it was known to work. Team-building was a trick the US army would not learn till after 1945, when it looked back on the mistakes and lessons of this war’s campaigns.
³²

Red Army friendships might not last long, but they certainly were fierce. At this stage in the war, an infantryman was unlikely to serve with his friends for
more than three months before a wound, death or even a promotion removed him from the group. ‘It’s enough for a person to be with you for two to seven days,’ soldiers would explain, ‘and you will know his qualities, all his feelings, the things it takes a year to know in civvy street.’
³³
It is a testimony to the power of soldiers’ loyalties that many petitioned time and time again, even after each discharge from hospital, to be allowed to get back to their mates.
³⁴
‘We were like a boy and girl,’ a veteran remembered. ‘Like lovers, you’d have said. We couldn’t bear to be apart.’ He was not talking about homosexuality. No one ever broke that taboo. Sex was in any case the last thing on a soldier’s mind when he was hungry, tired and frightened. This was a difference between the front line and the rear, between the trenches and the officers’ mess. Friendships were close, but the pleasures that men shared and talked about at the front line centred on food, drink, warmth and smoking. When David Samoilov’s unit was at the front, the men sat up for hours, ‘tormented without tobacco’. They talked endlessly, and a favourite subject was each man’s wedding. What interested them, however, was not the wedding night and sex, or even thoughts of love and home, but the scale and contents of the feast that had been set for each successive celebration.
³⁵

Subversive and passionate, brutal or dark, this was a world that the Sovinformburo did its best to keep well out of sight. ‘Our soldiers’ portrayed in the Soviet press were no more realistic than the brave boys of adventure comics. Survivors had a lot to gain, after the war, by endorsing the myth, but there was one group that had nothing left to lose. These were the
shtrafniki
, the members of the punishment units. Not many are alive to tell their tales. Ivan Gorin, for instance, was the only survivor in a group of 330 men. All the rest died in a single morning when they were sent, armed with rifles and rushing over open ground, to storm a battery of entrenched German guns. When this man remembers the war, his starting point is a prison.

Gorin’s father had disappeared when the police drove the
kulaks
away in 1930. That is, he deserted his wife and children and made for the south. Gorin himself was fostered to a family who despised him for his supposed bourgeois roots. It was an inauspicious start. The boy lived on the edge of the illegal world, and when the war broke out he turned to forging ration cards. When he was caught, the judge gave him a choice: the Gulag or the front. He had already decided to fight, for when he was in prison, pending sentence, he had imbibed the patriotic mood. ‘Lots of people asked to go,’ he said. ‘There was enthusiasm for the front even among prisoners.’ At least it felt a bit like tasting life. Soon everyone would learn that it was merely execution by another means.

The
shtrafniki
discovered that their lives counted for less than those of Budyennyi’s beloved horses. The only food they ever saw was thin grey soup. ‘The old hands told us that we got a tenth of the normal army ration,’ another survivor remembered. ‘Whether that was right or not, our menu consisted of four spoonfuls of food a day … and unlimited quantities of best quality profanities.’ Convicts were herded into camps to await military orders. These barracks were as murderous as the Gulag, and much of their atmosphere derived from it. A man could be skinned alive for losing in a game of cards; he could be murdered in his bed for his boots or a crust of hoarded bread.
³⁶
Everyone lived in fear of the
starshiny
, the old lags who ran everything. Reaching the front, even without a scrap of professional training, came as a relief for the inexperienced Gorin. ‘We wanted to get to the front as fast as possible,’ he said, ‘so as to escape from the torment of that reserve base.’
³⁷

Once there, with a gun in his hand, Gorin realized that he was someone officers respected. They could not know, after all, which way he was planning to shoot. ‘We went into battle,’ another remembered, ‘and we never shouted for the motherland and Stalin. We were all effing and blinding. That was the “Hoorah!” of the
shtrafniki
.’ Gorin agreed, but added that the men regarded their leader with a fatalistic respect. ‘If Stalin dies,’ they muttered, ‘another will come in his place of the same kind.’ They were not alienated nihilists, either. Russians fought on because they believed in a real cause, and even surviving
shtrafniki
remember their love of the motherland. ‘We all wanted to defend it,’ Gorin said. ‘I think that the criminals felt more devotion, more love for their native soil than the high-ups in the leadership, the bosses.’ And there was pride even in death. ‘He doesn’t run away, the
shtrafnik
,’ another survivor told journalists. ‘Ordinary soldiers are more likely to do that.’
³⁸

The convicts’ life expectancy was short, but their culture, raw and vivid, distinct from that of the party cell and officers’ mess, infused that of the front line as a whole. The same was often true of the criminals who were shipped to the front from the Gulag after April 1943.
³⁹
Cast into this most murderous war, their survival depended on skills they had learned first, perhaps, in the hungry villages of the 1930s and then in the hard school of Kolyma. They had the peasant
muzhik
’s eye for a deal, the convict’s for self-preservation. Brutal conditions made survivors of them all. And yet most of them cared about the outcome of this war. ‘This war was a war of extermination,’ a rank and file soldier later recalled. ‘It stirred up hatred, the thirst for revenge, finally ripening into a cause, which would inspire the Red Army
into furious battles over a four-year period.’ It was the bosses, however, ever ready with their slogans, who gave that cause its official name. ‘This cause was named “patriotism”.’
⁴⁰

The celebrations had been premature. The victory at Stalingrad had wounded the enemy severely, but it had not permanently broken him. Even the gains of February 1943 were not to last. The Soviets held on to Kharkov for barely a month. In March, they were driven back, leaving the city to the fascists once again. It was a bitter moment for the army, and a catastrophe for Kharkov’s citizens, who now faced the redoubled anger of their conquerors as well as the privations of another hungry spring. Far away, in the unimaginable light of the Tunisian desert, Montgomery’s troops were driving Rommel and his men towards the sea. The outcome of the Soviet Union’s war was still unclear.