Ivan’s War (4 page)

The Soviets were not the only people to create an Ivan myth. With their passion for racial labelling, the Nazis had their own ideas about the Slav in uniform. For Goebbels, Soviet soldiers were a ‘red horde’, half-Asiatic savages who threatened Europe’s way of life. Wartime intelligence was necessarily more scientific. Nazi military observers made their notes by watching combat, interviewing their own men and questioning the prisoners they took.
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But though they admired Russian tank crews, took comfort when the infantry lacked training, and envied the men’s willingness to die, even practically
minded spies could not avoid the language of biology. ‘The two large [st] groups’ within the Red Army, Great Russians and Ukrainians, ‘absorbed the same racial elements, the product of which they represent today,’ a German officer wrote. ‘In this racial mixture there can be traced a weak Germanic blood strain from the Gothic period and the Middle Ages. Of special importance, however, I consider the infusion of Mongol blood.’
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These remarks might have little more than antiquarian significance but for the readership they reached. For soon after the Third Reich collapsed, in March 1947, some of its former officers’ racially based analyses of the Red Army were being dictated to members of the American intelligence service. The Soviets were no longer the allies of democracy by then. The Cold War was already tightening its grip, and policy-makers in the United States of America needed to find out more about the superpower they faced. Even the humblest US soldiers required a briefing on their enemy’s strengths and weaknesses. To help with the educational process, the US Department of the Army prepared a pamphlet, ‘Russian Combat Methods in World War II’, the second part of which described ‘The peculiarities of the Russian soldier.’

‘The characteristics of this semi-Asiatic,’ the pamphlet begins, ‘are strange and contradictory.’ The captured Nazi officers had done their job. ‘The Russian,’ continued the pamphlet, ‘is subject to moods which to a westerner are incomprehensible; he acts by instinct. As a soldier, the Russian is primitive and unassuming, innately brave but morosely passive when in a group.’ At the same time, ‘his emotions drive the Russian into the herd, which gives him strength and courage’. Hardship was no deterrent for these primitives. The Red Army’s wartime endurance at Stalingrad was explained as a side effect of culture and those Asiatic genes. ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the Russian soldier is unaffected by season and terrain … The Russian soldier requires only very few provisions for his own use.’ Finally, the Red Army could not be trusted to play by the rules. ‘The Germans found,’ the summary concluded, ‘that they had to be on their guard against dishonesty and attempts at deception by individual Russian soldiers and small units … An’ unguarded approach often cost a German his life.
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Cold-War commentaries like these, racist parentage and all, helped shape the image of Red Army soldiers for English-speakers of the later twentieth century. Most combatants dehumanize their enemy. It is much easier to kill someone who seems entirely alien, whose individuality has gone. And Russia always seemed to be so difficult, even in the brief four-year spell when Stalin was the ally of democracy. Red Army soldiers might well be brave, ‘probably the best material in the world from which to form an army’
in the view of one British observer, but their ‘astonishing strength and toughness’ and ‘their ability to survive deprivations’ were disconcerting, even in an ally.
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Setting the racist labelling aside, it remains true that Soviet soldiers served one of the most ambitious dictatorships in history and that most had been educated according to its precepts. In that sense, most were more deeply saturated in their regime’s ideology than soldiers in the Wehrmacht, for Soviet propaganda had been working on its nation’s consciousness for fifteen years by the time that Hitler came to power in Berlin. Soviet citizens also tended to be more isolated from foreign influences, and very few (except, perhaps, the veterans of the First World War) would have had the opportunity for international travel. They shared a common language, a kind of lens that was engineered to show the world in the colours of Marxism–Leninism. But beyond that, the idea that Red Army soldiers were an undifferentiated horde, or even scions of one race, is wrong.

Russians were in a majority in the Soviet armed forces throughout the war. Ukrainians were the second largest nationality, and the Red Army included scores of other ethnic groups, from Armenians to Yakuts, as well as large numbers of people who preferred to call themselves ‘Soviet’, evading traditional categories in favour of a new kind of citizenship.
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Conscripts included skilled workers, young men who could turn their acquaintance with industrial machines into an easy mastery of tanks. But though such people were the army’s favourite recruits, its ranks also numbered boys from the villages, many of whom had never seen an electric light, let alone an engine, before they were called up. Recruits from desert and steppe regions had yet to see broad rivers, yet to learn to swim. They were the ones who drowned most quickly when the order came to wade through the Crimean marsh or storm across the icy river Dnepr.

There were also wide variations in the soldiers’ ages. The majority of conscripts were born between 1919 and 1925, but older men, including tens of thousands in their forties, were also called up. These were the veterans who remembered the First World War, the men who had known what life under tsarism was like. Their mentality and expectations were entirely different from those of young lads straight from Soviet schools. Some even remembered different kinds of army. That of the Tsars had been hierarchical, its discipline severe, but in the 1920s there had been a brief experiment with classlessness, an attempt to build a people’s army that was free of bombast, formality and gold braid.
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Men who remembered those experimental days were suspicious of drill, watchful, and quick to condemn (or even shoot)
their inexperienced young officers. There never was a single army type. After a few months on the road with former peasants, small-time crooks, career soldiers, adolescents, and would-be poets like himself, one conscript, David Samoilov, concluded that ‘a people is not like the processed stuffing ready for history’s sausage-machine … A single language, culture and fate give rise to characteristics that many seem to share, the things that we call national character. But in reality a people is a multiplicity of characters.’
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If Soviet culture was not capable of turning out a single type of man, there could be grounds for suspecting that war itself might do so. It is hard to conceive of individuality against a background of industrialized slaughter or even to imagine sensitivity where so much would have been obliterated by smoke, stench and deafening noise. Brutalization – or, as Omer Bartov has it, barbarization – is the word that springs to mind.
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And yet these soldiers, like any others, had dreams and aspirations of their own, ambitions that ranged from promotion or Communist Party membership to a bit of leave, some new boots or a German wristwatch. They continued to write their letters home, to notice changes in the weather, landscapes, the health and breed of local pigs. They made friends, too, and exchanged stories from back home, rolled cigarettes, stole vodka, learned new skills. The front was not merely a theatre of living death. Paradoxically, for those who survived the war presented a new world, landscapes that they would not have seen if they had stayed on the farm. The German army went through the reverse process, marching into a land that struck former workers from Bavaria or Saxony as primitive, barbarous, unlit, unheated, and unwashed. Where some detachments of the Wehrmacht motored to the front, initially, from Paris, the best Red Army soldiers often came from villages where travel meant a five-day walk to town. Some of the riflemen who ransacked Berlin, drinking old cognac out of Meissen cups, had never set foot in a train before the army and this war.

Comparisons with other armies do more than suggest the things that were specific in the Red Army’s culture; they also point to themes that Soviet sources may not highlight on their own. One question, which no writer born in Stalin’s world would even think to ask, is what made any Soviet soldier fight? Combat motivation, like national character, was an issue that preoccupied military experts in the US in the 1950s. The result was a theory about small-group loyalty, the notion that men give their best in battle if they have ‘buddies’, ‘primary groups’, which, unlike ideology or religion, truly command their love.
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The notion eventually inspired new policies on training and the use of reserves, and it has become conventional wisdom for
social psychologists and policy-makers alike. But the Red Army does not readily fit the mould. To be sure, battalions would train together behind the lines whenever they were joined by new reserves; or that, at least, was the plan. But when the rates of loss were high, when the average front-line tour of duty for an infantryman, before he was removed by death or serious disability, was three weeks, the small groups seldom lasted long.

High casualty rates afflicted the Wehrmacht as well, and it has been suggested that the place of primary groups in German lines was taken by ideology on the one hand and fear on the other.
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Fear played its part in the Red Army, too, although at first soldiers were more frightened of German guns than of their own officers, paralyzing their ability to fight.
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Ideology also featured centrally in Soviet soldiers’ lives. They had been shaped to see themselves not merely as citizens in uniform but as the self-conscious vanguard of a revolution, the spearhead of just war. But how effective ideology could be in motivating them, and how it jarred or scraped against older beliefs, including religion and traditions of nationalism, remains an open question. Communist rhetoric may have contributed a certain zeal, but it was not accepted universally. Nor was the god-like status of Stalin. In the 1930s, the leader’s name, in capitals, had appeared in pamphlets, newspapers and posters everywhere that Soviet people looked. His face loomed out of wartime newspapers and pamphlets, too, and his name was spelled out on the painted banners that were strung between birch trees to hallow soldiers’ meeting places in the open air. But it is another matter to read allegiance into Stalin’s ubiquitous presence, least of all among troops at the front line. ‘To be honest about it,’ the poet Yury Belash wrote later, ‘in the trenches the last thing we thought about was Stalin.’
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To some extent, training built men’s confidence when ideology had failed to convince and comfort them. In 1941, Soviet recruits faced the most professional fighting force the continent had ever seen. By 1945, they had defeated it. Between those dates, there was a revolution in Red Army soldiers’ preparation, in military thinking, in the use and deployment of technology, and in the army’s relationship with politics. These changes, one of the keys to Soviet triumph, affected every soldier’s life, and many wrote and spoke about them. For some, the whole business was irksome, especially when, in honour of the Soviet fascination with American styles of management, the methods used resembled preparation for production lines. But the tide turned, Stalingrad held, and its progress in the next two years suggested that Red Army training methods were increasingly effective. How much they resembled German methods, how much the two sides learned
from each other, is one question. Another is the place of party rhetoric, of communist belief, in this most technical of fields.

Finally, there is a problem on which almost every Soviet source is silent. Trauma, in the Red Army, was virtually invisible. Even the toll that the war took on soldiers’ family lives was seldom discussed,
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but shock, and the distress of all that the men witnessed at the front, was virtually taboo. There can have been few battlefields more terrible than Stalingrad, Kerch or Prokhorovka, and few sights more disturbing than the first glimpse of mass extermination, of Babi Yar, Maidanek or Auschwitz. But official accounts say nothing about trauma, battle stress, or even depression. Mental illness, even among troops, is scarcely mentioned in contemporary medical reports. In the guise of heart disease, hypertension or gastric disorders, it haunts post-war hospital records without getting specific attention. The question is not so much whether Red Army soldiers suffered stress as how they viewed and dealt with it.