Ivan’s War (53 page)

Away to the south, another soldier, the tank officer Slesarev, was also falling for a new country. ‘I am writing to let you know that I am alive and well,’ he wrote to his father. ‘I have not written to anyone for some time,’ he explained, ‘because I have been on the road for ages. We travelled day and night, for four whole days and nights we did not sleep. This summer I have been in a lot of places.’
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His favourite was western Ukraine, with all its little hills and orchards. ‘The nature there is wonderful, there are pretty towns and villages, abundant gardens, lots of sweet and sour cherries.’ In contrast with the cheerless winter steppe, the gardens round ruined Lvov, ablaze with lupins, marigolds and roses, must have looked like a glimpse of Eden.

The problem was that these places were hardly Soviet lands. It was one thing to retake a Russian city like Orel, or even a loyal provincial capital like Kharkov, but as the Red Army moved west it crossed into the territories that Stalin had annexed after 1939. Ermolenko might not have looked beyond the anxious smiles of the young women in the streets, but many villagers in western Belarus were mistrustful of their supposed liberators. To them, all that had occurred was the exchange of one imperial master for another. What’s more, they knew already that the red flag was a harbinger of fear. Their farmsteads bore the recent scars of forced collectivization and the accompanying mass arrests. It was worse in western Ukraine. Lvov, the capital of Ukrainian
nationalism, would never accept the authority of Moscow. The nationalists’ pre-war message, that supra-national empires were bent on crushing Ukraine’s noble culture, seemed proven by events of recent years. Lvov had seen violence on violence: the Soviets, the Wehrmacht, bandits, SS murder squads and partisans. What mattered to the locals now was to avoid enslavement. They knew how Stalin treated nations that defied his rule.

The same story would be repeated later in the Baltic, where the Red Army symbolized all that was hated about Bolshevik dominion. At least, the anxious locals muttered, the Nazis had brought order, driven out the reds. For that, many had welcomed them and even applauded their racist, anti-internationalist, anti-Slav and anti-Jewish policies. No one could forget the arrests and deportations of 1939, the swelling prisons and the echoing of shots. Significant numbers of Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians had helped the Germans, including the murder squads, because that seemed the way to build a decent, ordered, European life. Now they would have to watch the war unfold in helpless apprehension. Perhaps, just possibly, the Americans would reach the Baltic first. That was the dream in Tallinn and in Vilnius that summer. It was the gall within the Soviet triumph, the seed of greater bitterness to come. As they swept north and west, Soviet men and women, Russians and soldiers from further east, would face successive populations who were either hostile to them or at best suspicious of their entire way of life.

Stalin had prepared the army for its new task earlier that year. His speech on 1 May 1944 had confirmed that German fascist troops had been driven out of three quarters of the Soviet territory that they had occupied. ‘But our tasks cannot end with the clearing of enemy troops from within the bounds of our motherland,’ he announced. ‘The German troops today are reminiscent of a wounded beast, which has to creep away to the border of its own lair, Germany, to lick its wounds. But a wounded beast that goes off to its lair does not stop being a dangerous beast. If we are to deliver our country and those of our allies from the danger of enslavement, we must pursue the wounded German beast and deliver the final blow to him in his own lair.’
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The Russian word for the beast’s lair was
berlog
, and from this time some Soviet troops renamed Berlin accordingly. The slogan ‘To Berlog!’ was written in red paint on the sides of many travel-hardened T-34s. German intelligence reported that
komsomols
and officers especially were eager for the new challenge.
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The front-line press worked hard to convince soldiers that any westward advance would be an adventure. It was also sold as justifiable revenge. As soon as the first detachments crossed the border, newspapers started featuring pictures of tank men and gunners planting red flags on the foreign soil.
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But all the propaganda was not idle. There was real resistance to be overcome. The truth was that not all Russian soldiers, and far from all the recruits from other Soviet lands, were keen to step across the international border.
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A young man like Slesarev could revel in the tourist aspect of his job because he was heart-free, but older men, the fathers and husbands, and the tired ones, the injured in body and mind, believed that their job would be completed when the last fascist was driven from Soviet soil. They had no desire to fight on beyond that point. The rest of the world, which had left Russia on its own so long, could sort out Europe for itself. Behind that view lay fear, and not merely the fear of death. No one knew, among the mass of Russian troops, just what capitalism was, for none had seen it. For thirty years they had been told that it was dangerous, a monster (
Pravda
’s cartoonists were inventive) poised to undermine the workers’ happiness. To cross the border would be little stranger than stepping on to the moon.

This view was common among peasant soldiers from Russia and the countries to the east, but the greatest resentment was expressed by a group new to army life, and ironically, also a group whose knowledge of the capitalist world came at first hand. These were the recruits from the newly liberated zones, from western Ukraine and the western provinces of Belorussia. These people – survivors of the darkest times – now found themselves swept into the Red Army and forced to take the Soviet oath. Large numbers of the new recruits had been reared in nationalist traditions that were antipathetic to the Soviet, internationalist, cause.
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Few felt any allegiance to Moscow. Many had to be drafted forcibly, even at gunpoint,
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while others were pushed into the ranks when NKVD troops threatened reprisals on their families.
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The conscripts knew that many of their Russian comrades regarded their mere survival of Nazi rule as evidence of guilt, a dark stain to be washed away with their own blood.
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Now they faced an indeterminate period of service in what – effectively – was a foreign army. ‘They are treated as second-class soldiers,’ German intelligence reported. ‘They are branded “
zapadniki
” [westerners], and treated like prisoners, with mistrust.’
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The first Soviet troops to cross into the capitalist world did so in the spring of 1944. Their journey to Romania began in the south-western provinces of Ukraine. The crack troops in the advance guard were seasoned professionals, but the reserves that followed to augment their ranks looked
like a caravan of refugees. Few had received the correct papers, let alone a training, political or military. They did not march into Romania; some sauntered, others limped along. In some units, up to 90 per cent of them had no shoes, let alone the standard boots. In one group, fifteen were marching in their shirts and underclothes. Their discipline was weak when they arrived. Indeed, large numbers of them never did arrive, since it was so easy to slip away.
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Those who remained resented their exposure to danger, the fact that they were being sent to the front ‘so soon before the end of the war’,
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but they could at least hope for some compensation. Loot was the ultimate reward for hardship, a temptation that many could not resist.
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It had been little more than weeks since their own country had been recaptured by Moscow’s troops, and now they were encamped in another one. The point was that this time they were the occupiers.

Romania was not Prussia. This first incursion on to foreign soil was not an orgy of revenge. The shock to both sides was also mitigated by the fact that most Red Army troops were billeted in underpopulated country. Bucharest, with all its glittering temptations, was still several months of campaigning away. Meanwhile, there was a relaxed, almost blasé, attitude to ideology among the troops. Their political officers had almost given up working on their Soviet consciousness.
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The Sovinformburo urged that more should be done to publicize Romanian atrocities, to instil hatred, but no one seemed inclined to work at this. Indeed, some units would not hear a lecture about ideology for months. Soldiers were either fighting – and the enemy, backed up at first by German officers, could be cruel – or they were encamped in the rear, where the danger of war seemed almost like a dream. In some areas, Romanian soldiers laid their weapons down and begged the Soviets not to shoot.
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The only casualties in the 251st rifle regiment that May were victims of carelessness and horseplay in their own encampment.
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It was in this context that some of the former victims of German rule in Ukraine would test the skills that they had learned from the Aryan supermen.

Moldavian wine would play its part. A group of Soviet engineers made themselves rapidly at home during their mission to rebuild the region’s roads and bridges. One officer was drunk for ten entire days. The alcohol removed whatever sexual inhibitions any of the men retained. As they watched officers leading their neighbours off at gunpoint, local women would soon learn to hide. Two sergeants who raided a village near their camp in search of women discovered that every hoped-for prostitute had fled. Their revenge was to shoot a local woman and her daughter and to try to rape their neighbour. A particularly calculating man posed as an intelligence agent and demanded
that the women in his district present themselves for inspection. The one he chose and raped was later found buried in a trench with a Soviet bullet through her skull. Checks were carried out one night in May in the town of Botoshani. One hundred soldiers, mainly officers, were found in bed with local women.
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Thefts and extortion from civilians were daily occurrences, but there were also systematic schemes. One group of entrepreneurs ordered the villagers near their posting to bring them 200 sheep. When these were delivered, they demanded another 200 for the next morning.
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No doubt, as any officer would do, they had already made sure of the transport and the market for their meat.

This kind of story caused alarm among political commissars. That June, a special resolution on the state of political education among the troops in Romania was passed in Moscow. The
politruks
were told to get their textbooks out.
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The example of the second Ukrainian Front in Romania was also used as a warning to others. Far to the north, near the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, Ermolenko heard a lecture about the Romanian ‘excesses’ that August. ‘The Red Army is a just army,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘We are not robbers or marauders. Of course, if we meet armed resistance we will destroy it. But we will not allow illegal robbery and murder.’ The trouble was that it was just a few days since he and ‘the boys’ had ‘gone for trophies’ themselves.
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Their orders seemed to be confused. The world around these men was already violated, wrecked. Everyone had lost the things they treasured. Sometimes, the men received direct orders to live off the land. Property rights, which Soviet citizens always found perplexing, had little meaning in shattered, even deserted, territory. And then there was the desire for revenge, to say nothing of the soldiers’ simple, obvious material needs. The
politruks
could preach, but even they were unclear of the rules. And every day, the trucks would rattle past with crates of booty for staff officers at home.

In all, the late summer of 1944 was a disorienting, anxious time. The liberating army, the vanguard who had fought to free their mothers and wives, was evolving into a rabble. New kinds of men were taking the places of the dead, but that was not the only change. Even the veterans, the heroes of Kursk and Orel, were facing unimagined challenges, temptations they could not resist. Exhausted men, freshly bereaved again by battle, surveyed the border through a web of emotion. This was epiphany, and there would be no going back. It was far better, as Lev Kopelev would learn, to turn a blind eye to some kinds of disorder and just get on with life. ‘I was saturated with French cognac,’ he remembered, and ‘my shoulder bag was stuffed with Havana cigars … They made you dizzy at first; then you got used to it. The
constant inebriation from the cognacs, schnapps and liqueurs, and the biting smoke of those powerful cigars, seemed to steady us against the nastiness of what was going on all around.’
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