Ivan’s War (49 page)
Authors: Catherine Merridale
The liberation of the Crimea was complete by 13 May, but there was one group of Soviet citizens who would not celebrate for long. The Tatars, a people who could claim the Scythians, Goths and Greeks among their ancestors, had lived and farmed in the Crimea for at least 600 years.
111
Russian settlement, which dated from the eighteenth century, had never brought them luck. Their loyalties, like their language, their architecture and their easygoing Muslim faith, were more inclined towards the Turks of the Black Sea’s opposite shore. Like peasants everywhere, the farmers among them also hated the collectives, and in 1941, some of them saw the invasion as a chance to throw off the unwanted yoke of Soviet rule. Though many thousands of ethnic Tatars fought in the Red Army, a number of those who remained behind welcomed the Germans as liberators, or at least as an alternative to Stalinist dictatorship. Meanwhile, a small number of the Tatar soldiers held as prisoners of war in German camps had taken the only route to survival, as they saw it, and joined the anti-Soviet Tatar legion.
112
Just one week after the rout at Kherson, the entire Tatar population of the Crimea would pay the price.
That night, 18 May 1944, thousands of Tatar families were woken in the small hours before sunrise by a knock on the door. When they answered, they found that their visitors were armed. While the Red Army had been clearing the last fascists from the Crimea, tens of thousands of NKVD soldiers had been brought into the rural settlements and coastal villages where Tatars lived. Now these police were giving orders to pack quickly, to collect the children and to be ready outside, on the road, in fifteen minutes. Many Tatars had seen the Nazis doing much the same in 1941, when local Jews were
rounded up, each carrying a precious cardboard case of clothes and food. ‘We all thought we were going to die,’ survivors of this other night recall. The irony was that this time the men with the guns were Soviet fellow citizens.
Just under 200,000 people, or 47,000 families, most of them headed by women or older men, were herded to the stations and locked into cattle trucks that night.
113
The process was efficient, quick. Indeed, the NKVD troops already had experience. The wagons that were used to take the Tatars east had just returned from other human transport missions – most recently, the deportation of the mountain peoples of Chechnya, Ingushetiya and the autonomous republic of Kabardino-Balkariya.
114
The process, organized by NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria, amounted to a smooth routine. The trucks, as witnesses observed, were still smeared with the faeces and dried blood of the last consignments of deportees.
115
There would be stops along the way – if the passengers were lucky – to bundle out the bodies of those who died from heat, thirst or the typhus that soon raged within the crowded cars. About 8,000 deportees are thought to have perished in the air-less, stinking wagons. The rest would have to build new lives from nothing when they arrived in central Asia. They would find little welcome there. Their new hosts, fellow Muslims as well as fellow Soviets, would accept, for a while, the tale that all Tatars, as a people, were traitors.
Some of the deportees were genuine collaborators; some had indeed helped to support the new Nazi regime.
116
But many had been dedicated to the Soviet cause. Among the latter were numbers of partisans, including the political officers Ahmetov and Isaev, both of whom, as members of the 5th partisan brigade, had been helping the Red Army as recently as April 1944. At least four Heroes of the Soviet Union, all of them decorated for their part in the Soviet landings at Kerch in November 1943, were also in the trucks.
117
So were the wives, parents and children of soldiers who were still serving at the front, to say nothing of the families of combatants who had died. While Russian soldiers, including Fedor Kuznetsov, looked forward to new lives in the Crimea, delighted to have found, through army life, a place where they could thrive after the war, the Tatars in the same army would soon find that they had no home.
‘There were thirty-four different nationalities in the forest,’ a partisan who spent her war in the Crimea remembered. ‘Most of them were Russians, of course, but there were Ukrainians, Belorussians, Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Armenians, Georgians, Slovaks, Czechs and Spanish veterans of the civil war. We made absolutely no distinction between them all.’ The citizenship that she assigned to herself, and that she still honours, was ‘Soviet’. It was the
label that made greatest sense in the political universe in which she lived, the name that conjured dreams of brotherhood, equality and proletarian justice for all. It also matched the government’s official line, the propaganda of the Sovinformburo. But by the war’s end, 1,600,000 Soviet members of minority ethnic groups had been singled out, tarred with a racist brush and deported – in the Soviet Union’s name – from the lands in which their ancestors had lived. Within a few years – just after the peace – about a third were dead.
1
Glantz and House,
When Titans Clashed
, p. 180.
2
Stalin,
O velikoi otechestvennoi voine
, pp. 117–20. In his assessment of the war economy, Richard Overy, among others, follows Stalin in conceding that only a centrally planned system of this type could have delivered the levels of output needed to sustain the Soviet war effort. See Overy, p. 227. This may be true, but it neither vindicates the brutality of the system nor establishes Stalin as the Soviet Union’s wartime saviour.
3
RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 50.
4
Ibid
., 109–10.
5
Po obe storony fronta,
p. 86.
6
V. I. Ermolenko,
Voennyi dnevnik starshego serzhanta
(Belgorod, 2000), p. 37.
7
Van Creveld, p. 83.
8
Rodina
, 1991, nos. 6–7, p. 53.
9
The poem is ‘Remember, Alyosha’, trans. Lyubov Yakovleva,
Twentieth-Century
Russian Poetry,
pp. 619–21.
10
On SMERSh, which was established on 13 May 1942 and was independent of the NKVD, see Viktor Suvorov (pseud.),
Inside the Soviet Army
(New York, 1982), p. 240.
11
The word comes from the German
Hilfswillige
, or volunteer helper.
12
On the oppression of labour battalions, see Temkin, p. 53. On
hiwis
, and their confusion with Vlasovites, see Kopelev, p. 98.
13
Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 1, pp. 52 and 67.
14
Glantz and House, p. 180.
15
TsDNISO, 6/1/1484, 173 (refers to Smolensk region in April 1944).
16
Belov, p. 465.
17
Ermolenko, p. 36.
18
Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 2, p. 56.
19
Po obe storony fronta
, p. 99.
20
RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 52.
21
GASO, 2482/1/1, 35.
22
Snetkova, p. 38.
23
RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 107.
24
Leave was sometimes used as a reward for outstanding bravery, but it was usually granted only after a man was so badly wounded that he would no longer be needed. At the time of Stalingrad (9 October 1942), provision was made for more regular leave (especially for officers), but in practice it was treated as a reward, not a right. TsAMO, 1128/1/4, 32.
25
RGASPI-M, 33/1/1189, 3.
26
See above, p. 127.
27
Pis’ma s fronta i na front
, pp. 95–6.
28
Ibid
., p. 97.
29
GAKO, 3322/10/21, 296.
30
GAKO, 3322/10/22, 2, 9 and 10.
31
GAOPIKO, 1/1/3478, 7. The CC resolution is reprinted in the same file, ll. 85 ff.
32
TsDNISO, 6/1/1697, 190.
33
GAKO, 3322/10/46, 30 and 41.
34
Pis’ma s fronta i na front
, 98. A pood weighs about thirty-six pounds. Even if they supplemented their diet with potatoes, Masha’s family would get through a pood of flour in two months.
35
TsDNISO, 6/1/1695, 144, 219.
36
RGVA, 32925/1/515, 70.
37
TsDNISO, 8/2/109, 15.
38
TsDNISO, 6/1/1484, 33 and 39.
39
See, for example, GAKO, R 3322/10/1, which defines their role in February 1943, following the city’s liberation.
40
1 Garrard and Garrard,
Bones
, p. 155.
41
This preference, which survivors attest to, was also noted by local police and the officials in charge of trophies.
42
RGASPI-M, 33/1/1406, 52.
43
RGASPI-M, 33/1/1208, 71.
44
TsAMO, 136/24416/24, 275.
45
RGASPI-M, 33/1/1494, 48.
46
Stroki, opalennye voiny
, p. 182.
47
RGVA, 32925/1/514, 47.
48
Yu. N. Afanas’ev (Ed.),
Drugaya voina
(Moscow, 1996), p. 433. This source claims that the comparable increase among British troops was 200 per cent.
49
Armstrong, p. 164.
50
For an example, see RGVA 32925/1/515, 267.
51
GAKO, R3322/9/93, 15.
52
RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 78.
53
Alexiyevich, p. 65.
54
Pennington,
Wings
, p. 67.
55
Temkin, p. 202.
56
RGASPI-M, 33/1/1494, 48.
57
Ibid
., 78–9.
58
RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 100.
59
Ibid
., 64–5.
60
Hunger was especially severe in the countryside, as rural people often had no right to ration cards. The theft of food anywhere in the Soviet Union was punishable by death. See William Moskoff,
The Bread of Affliction
, pp. 108–9.
61
RGASPI-M, 33/1/1404, 7.
62
Ibid
., 8 and 5.
63
Ibid
., 3.
64
RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 17.
65
RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 61.
66
Alexiyevich, p. 79.
67
On blood donors, see Overy, p. 227.
68
RGASPI-M, 33/1/493, 1–6.
69
Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 1, p. 70.
70
RGASPI, 17/125/80, 3.
71
GAKO, 5166/1/24, 4–7.
72
Reina Pennington, ‘Women in Combat in the Red Army,’ in Addison and Calder (Eds),
Time to Kill
, p. 257.
73
GAKO, 5166/1/24, 4.
74
Reese,
The Soviet Military Experience
, p. 110.
75
Leonid Piterskii, ‘Deti na voine,’
Istochnik
, 1994, no. 1, 54–60.
76
Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 2, p. 79.
77
Soldiers seem to crave the companionship of animals. On other armies, see Keegan, p. 242. On other front-line dogs, see Bykov,
Ataka s khody
, p. 189.
78
Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 2, pp. 68–70.
79
V. A. Zolotarev, G. N. Sevost’yanov et al. (Eds),
Velikaya otechestvennaya voina
, 1941–1945 (Moscow, 1999), book 4, pp. 189–90.
80
For figures relating to Ukraine, see Weiner, p. 173.
81
Velikaya otechestvennaya voina
, 4, p. 190.
82
One such band, Leshchinskii’s, was liquidated near Smolensk on the grounds that it had refused to ‘accept the leadership of the Communist Party’. GAOPIKO, 8/1/36, 14–16.
83
Werth, p. 792.
84
Drugaya voina
, pp. 318–9; the latter fate awaited Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for instance, and also Lev Kopelev. See Chapter 9, p. 268.
85
TsDNISO, 8/1/9, 10.
86
GASO, 1500/1/1, 42.
87
Overy, pp. 130–1.
88
RGASPI, 17/125/94, 34–6; 17/125/165, 46 and 46r.
89
Early in the war, Ukrainian nationalists had worked with the German army, since both appeared to share the goal of driving out the Bolsheviks. The shaky alliance was already in tatters by 1942.
90
Stalin’s Generals
, pp. 296–7; Overy, p. 311. It was in revenge for acts like this that suspected guerrilla nationalists, as well as prominent collaborators, would be hanged in public in Kiev in 1944.
91
See Weiner, pp. 248–50.
92
RGASPI-M, 33/1/73, 1–5.
93
See the report reproduced in Armstrong, p. 735.
94
GASO, 1500/1/1, 40.
95
Ibid
., 39.
96
Armstrong, p. 731.
97
GASO, 1500/1/1, p. 44.
98
See Armstrong, p. 45.
99
GASO, 1500/1/1, 46.
100
Ibid
., 52.
101
Cited in Armstrong, p. 738.
102
GASO, 1500/1/1, 52.
103
Cited in Armstrong, p. 737.
104
Werth, p. 827.
105
Ibid
., p. 830.
106
RGASPI-M, 33/1/1406, 57.
107
As the guides tell you when you walk up to the ridge, ‘Sapun’derives from the Turkish word for soap.
108
Excavations in today’s Crimea still bring the bodies of soldiers to light. As a man who spends his life exhuming such corpses told me, the Soviet dead were much better equipped, by 1944, than those of the Germans they were fighting.
109
Werth, pp. 838–9.
110
Ibid
., p. 835; Erickson,
Berlin
, p. 195.
111
Brian Glyn Williams, ‘The Exile and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars’,
Journal of
Contemporary History, 37:3
(July 2002), pp. 325–7.
112
Most of the Tatars in the so-called ‘Tatar legion’, which anyway amounted to no more than seven battalions by the autumn of 1943, were from the Volga, not the Crimea. See S. I. Drobyazko, ‘Sovetskie grazhdane v ryadakh vermakhta’ in the essay collection,
Velikaya otechestvennaya voina v otsenke molodykh
(Moscow, 1997), p. 128.
113
The figure that most sources quote is N. F. Bugai’s estimate of just over 191,000 people, or 47,000 families. See P. Polyan,
Ne po svoei vole
(Moscow, 2001), p. 126; Williams, p. 334.
114
On the deportations from the Caucasus, see Polyan, pp. 116–27.
115
Williams, p. 333.
116
For a discussion of Tatar ‘guilt’, see Alan Fisher,
The Crimean Tatars
(Stanford, CA, 1978), pp. 153–64.
