Ivan’s War (39 page)

That spring, the Soviet leadership gathered to consider the coming year’s campaign. On 8 April, Georgy Zhukov, newly created Marshal of the Soviet Union and decorated with the first ever Order of Suvorov, First Class,
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delivered his assessment of the enemy’s most likely plans. Grave and businesslike, he told the General Staff that Germany lacked the resources for a new push in the Caucasus or along the Volga. However, the fascists were far from beaten. Winter was never their best time of year, and nor were the sodden weeks of spring, when melted snow dissolved into thigh-high mud. But for two summers already, their tanks and horses had raced eastwards over sun-baked ground, driving the Soviet army back, encircling whole divisions at a time, instilling panic in too many of the rest. As the days lengthened and the mornings warmed, they would attack again. Zhukov believed that they would choose a narrow front and muster concentrated forces for a direct strike. Their ultimate objective would be Moscow. The blow would come from the places where German forces were strongest, namely the open wheatfields between Orel and Belgorod. Its likely focus would be the region around Kursk, a city in the black-earth zone near the border with Ukraine. The Soviet front line bulged westwards at this point, exposing the Red Army’s flanks from the north-west to the south-west. In Zhukov’s view, the onslaught, when it came, would be designed to devastate. The Wehrmacht was running short of men; this was a battle that would be decided by aircraft, artillery and tanks.
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Zhukov’s assessment, which drew on detailed intelligence from British sources, was correct, although the timing of the blow was difficult to calculate.
For once, too, Stalin accepted the military analysis, including the advice to prepare, in the first instance, for resolute defence. It was not what pre-war propaganda had prescribed, with its images of bold strikes at the fascist barricades, but the strategy that summer would be to take the German blow, absorbing it with line after line of defence. Only then, when the extravagant advance had been stalled, would the Soviets go on to the attack. The preparations would begin at once. Training programmes in all types of specialism would be intensified, and preference would be given to men with secondary-school education.
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Even front-line troops would face new drills and classes, and tank crews would receive special attention. Once ready, hundreds of thousands of men would march towards the south and west, travelling at night. In anticipation of heavy casualties – a prediction that would prove entirely correct – 450 hospitals and field treatment stations would be refurbished, rebuilt or equipped. Two hundred of these were planned for the Voronezh Front alone.
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Meanwhile, around Kursk itself, and for over 100 miles behind the front, militia groups and soldiers were set to shifting dirt. By July, when the bombardment finally began, a total of 3,000 miles of trenches had been prepared behind the front, criss-crossing in an angular geometry.
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The rich black earth was also sown with metal in unnumbered tons. On average, by July, there were just over 5,000 anti-tank or anti-personnel mines for every mile of fortification.
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The military plan was brilliant, but obstacles remained. Battlefields are not pieces of bland green baize. The future front-line zone was home to thousands of civilians. The next four months would see the army interacting all too closely with the local population. At their best, such relationships were warm and appreciative. Some men found friends who would share their last crust with a soldier from their own side. The local people had suffered – some had survived a German occupation – and almost everyone had a son or husband at the front. Soldiers could count on the support of patriots. ‘The directors of the collective farm and its farmers treated me really well,’ an engineer called Vitaly Taranichev wrote to his wife at the end of 1942. ‘They sent me on my way like a member of the family, they baked pies and biscuits for me to take, cooked some mutton, got hold of some
makhorka
and all that; I agreed to stay in touch with the
kolkhoz
chairman, an old guy of seventy who has four sons at the front.’
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It was all very well, but Taranichev was some distance behind the lines at this point, still in the reserve. His hosts had not seen the war as the peasants of the Kursk region had come to know it. In the spring and summer of 1943, parts of the black-earth zone were far from welcoming to anyone.

‘Our conditions are very good,’ Aleksandr Slesarev wrote to his father, who was also in the Red Army. The young man had been on the road for several weeks, but now he and his comrades had dug in. ‘We are living not far from a wood, in
zemlyanki
of course. Our food is first-class – and apart from that we get an extra ration because we’re at the front. My work is interesting, and I get to travel about.’ His only complaint, which others heartily endorsed that spring, was that ‘there isn’t much free time’.
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Slesarev, who came from Smolensk, was in the newly formed first guards tank army. He was supposed to spend his spring on exercises, improving the co-ordination and field tactics that tank units had so badly lacked in previous years. There were indeed many classes, especially in his own élite formation, but military work was once again neglected, on occasion, in favour of other tasks. That spring, even tank men’s duties would include helping on collective farms and working with the engineers whose job it was to rebuild the region’s communications, stores and hospitals.

Nikolai Belov was still with his rifle division. Based just outside Maloarkhangel’sk in the Orel region, he, too, was working very hard. ‘We’ve got to do some intense training,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘We’ll have to work in earnest again now, and you can’t protect yourself from the intensity of it.’ He was exhausted, but activity agreed with him. By 22 May, after a fortnight in his front-line camp, he had ‘got used to the work a bit’. Practical problems, not depression, would disturb him most that spring. ‘The regiment hasn’t really come together,’ he observed. The training would soon see to that. But nothing he could do would remedy the shortage of guns and other supplies.
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The men in Belov’s regiment did not enjoy the waiting or the drill. Belov himself noted a steady drip of desertions. On 27 May, five infantrymen slipped away from his unit to join the German side. ‘It’s hard to understand what brought that on,’ he wrote. ‘Evidently the general tiredness.’ The Germans were also dropping leaflets, encouraging the men to believe that changing sides would save their lives. On 30 May, two further men would disappear – ‘it’s a real nightmare’, commented Belov. One of them, Belov observed, was a candidate member of the Communist Party.
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The total number of Red Army troops deserting to the German side seemed to be growing by the month. Just over 1,000 were recorded by German intelligence in February. In April, the figure would rise to 1,964, in May, 2,424, and in June, 2,555.
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But these figures do not reflect the real picture. For one thing, fugitives did not always make for the German lines. As the Red Army moved west, the NKVD searched the bombed-out towns for truant soldiers masquerading as civilians. Kursk and its province turned out to be full of
them. Many were life-long criminals; others would now begin careers in crime. In March 1943, for instance, the Kursk NKVD reported on a deserter called Ozerov who had escaped to the occupied zone in 1942. An ex-convict before the war, his violence surfaced again when he battered and killed the woman who was hiding him, as well as her elderly mother. He was captured and shot.
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Kursk itself was little more than ruins. In fourteen months, the occupying forces had plundered its factories and stores, destroyed its official buildings and murdered hundreds of its citizens. They had left such residents as they did not murder or deport to starve, or at least to sicken with the diseases of poverty and filth – typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis and syphilis. Those who were still alive to greet the Red Army that spring had witnessed scenes they could never forget, but they had also learned that survival depended on unusual kinds of skill. As the city had emptied late in 1941, the marooned residents had looted anything that they could carry. Months later, they had also taken supplies that the Germans left as they hurried away. Now, with the city full of troops again, the locals sought to feed themselves by selling their eccentric hoards. A woman was apprehended by police in March for peddling sheets. When her flat was searched, she was also fined for the possession of a stockpile consisting of two mattresses, three blankets, forty electric light bulbs and 18 kg of soap. This last was like a kind of currency. One man was found with sixty-seven bars of it, all taken from the German army’s stores, together with eight pairs of trousers, four pairs of German army boots, three woollen blankets and a sewing machine. Another had ten bars of household soap, eighty-seven tins of meat and 500 German cigarettes. Among the other trophy goods were German bicycles and cart-loads of their fine white flour.
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The penalty for holding on to groceries was seldom more than a stiff fine. Weapons were another matter. Violent crime, including robbery and rape, was now a daily problem. Guns were easy to acquire, and gangs formed readily among the orphaned teenagers and army fugitives. Deserters lived by picking pockets in the city streets or stealing pigs and cattle in the villages. Meanwhile, children were injured almost every day as they played with or near to unexploded mines and shells. Most desperate of all were the women who gave birth to children as a result of rape or informal relations with German soldiers. The babies had no fathers now, and the women no means to support them. Everyone was hungry, so there was no sense in keeping bastard mouths to feed. All through that spring, police and passers-by found the depressing bundles in ditches, shallow graves and even piles of rubble.
The reinstated city officers wrote each other anxious notes, but they knew that the military effort took priority. There were no resources to police, let alone support, civilians in the region.
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Instead, these same exhausted local people, however unfit for the job, were now ordered to help with physically demanding tasks that ranged from reconstructing roads to digging mud and clearing mines. That May, too, their leaders issued an appeal for them to start donating blood.
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The hardship in the countryside was indescribable. By the spring of 1943, 200,000 people in the region were deemed to be invalids, orphans or other dependants requiring support from state funds of food and fuel.
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The areas of enemy occupation had been plundered, the people’s livestock slaughtered or driven away, their crops destroyed or looted. Suspected partisans had been hanged, and then their neighbours – entire communities – had been punished for good measure. A total of nearly 40,000 houses, over half the region’s entire stock, had been burned to the ground.
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Many able-bodied adults had been dragged off to work for the Reich as forced labourers. There was no one left to rebuild houses, dig the fields or gather what was left of last year’s crop. Terrified householders, many of them widows or lone women with children, had often failed to sow their fields as the snow melted and the ground warmed up in 1942. The collectives were moonscapes of scorched scrub and thorn, nettle and tough wild grass. But the Red Army had played its part in all this devastation, too. The Kursk region had been its front line since September 1942. To prepare for the campaign of 1942–3, the army set out to evacuate civilians who lived within twelve (sometimes fifteen or twenty) kilometres of the front. What followed sometimes looked like civil war. This was not western Ukraine or the Baltic, where the Red Army would encounter resistance as it attempted to reimpose Soviet power the following year. It was not a region of nationalist banditry. But Kursk would prove that soldiers were not always welcome even among ethnic Russians.

The problems began in the autumn of 1942. When soldiers of the 13th and 38th armies arrived in the front-line zone that September to evacuate the villages, the population resisted en masse. Later reports suggested that the operation had been botched, allowing the peasants a chance to get together and foment a storm of rage. However, the real problem, as even the authorities understood, was that the locals feared a trick. This was the army that was losing battles by the day, the army that had yet to prove itself at Stalingrad, and now it wanted to take people’s cows and pigs and drive whole families from their homes. The campaign looked like a repeat of the hated process of collectivization. Troops had been used then, too, in some
places, and animals and people had been driven from their homes in the same violent way. Now the soldiers were back to steal everything again. Villagers were told that they would be given tokens for the animals they lost, they were assured that there were lodgings waiting for them far away behind the lines, but – not unwisely – they did not believe a word.

Hunger and fear made the peasants’ anger worse. The crowds who gathered to resist the soldiers were large and organized, 200 in one district, 300, ‘armed with pitchforks, spades and choppers’, in another, while in a third, ‘a hundred and fifty women and youths took part, most of whom were armed with staffs and bricks and suchlike’. This desperate mob hurled missiles at the troops, the women taunting them with cries of ‘deserter’ and ‘jailbird’. ‘If you try to evacuate me,’ an old man told a local official, ‘I’ll kill you. I’ve sharpened my axe and I can kill at least six people with it. And my wife and daughter can kill two each, and there surely won’t be ten of you. And if each household kills ten people, then there just won’t be an evacuation, will there?’
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