Ivan’s War (54 page)

Though each would find the border at a different time, no one can forget what he felt. Every veteran has a tale to tell. ‘We wept when we saw the houses,’ one man told me. ‘Such pretty houses, small, and all of them painted white.’ A former peasant, Ivan Vasilevich, now living in Moscow province, remembered how he took a fancy to the cattle. The farm where he was billeted that summer was empty. The owners had fled, as thousands did, when they heard the first Soviet guns. The corn could take care of itself, but no one had attended to the cows for days. Ivan Vasilevich admired them, touched them, felt the solid flesh. More urgently, he set about milking them. Their lowing was the sound that he would remember most vividly from these first days.

Ivan Vasilevich would milk many other cows before the peace, and he would feed them, too. ‘The animals were hungry,’ he remembered. ‘There was a haystack nearby. So I fed the animals straight away. They had to eat. And then I thought I’d leave their barn open. They could feed themselves when we had gone.’ The private farms were fascinating to this child from a collective, used to communist neglect. ‘It was interesting to compare them,’ he began. ‘I mean, because I was brought up in this same thing, in agriculture.’ He stumbled, trying not to say something. Like thousands of others, he had discovered a truth that raised doubts about the entire war, about the revolution and about the Soviet dream.
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So far, the dawning understanding was still dim, uncertain. But it could never be forgotten. ‘The word for it is rich,’ he said. ‘The capitalist farms were richer.’
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Soldiers had various ways of dealing with the real face of capitalism. Some were envious, some intrigued. Later, when they entered Germany, their main reaction would be rage. No one could understand why wealthy Germans wanted to invade their neighbours to the east, why anyone who had this much could ever search for more. ‘I’d just love to smash my fist into all those tins and bottles,’ was one soldier’s response.
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Wherever they went in Europe, Red Army men were repelled as well as fascinated by the
burzhui
, the bourgeoisie, with their ordered lives and strange views about property. But that summer, the
burzhui
that the armies in the south were meeting were Romanians; former enemies, but scarcely storm troopers or millionaires. The sight of the better lives that these
burzhui
led inspired resentment and even anti-Soviet talk among the men. If communism was so good, they
argued, why did these peasants live so much better?
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Instead of putting Romanian farms to the torch, the soldiers satisfied themselves with looting them.

The shock of relative plenty would be the same in Poland, except that there was less in that blighted countryside left to take. But as they crossed its sandy plains and pine woods, Soviet troops were forced to confront a new, equally painful, issue, a fresh betrayal of cherished belief. Internationalism had disappeared from Stalin’s rhetoric when war broke out, but the myth that Soviet troops were on a liberating, a fraternal, mission was revived as they crossed the border. In theory, Poles were supposed to see themselves as beneficiaries of Soviet power. As victims of fascist aggression, their people awaited liberation. That, indeed, had been the original cause of the Allied declaration of war in September 1939. Back then, however, the Soviet Union had been Hitler’s ally, and Poland had been dismembered by both dictatorships at once. Now that the Red Army was fighting beside the democracies of Europe and the United States, its arrival in Poland was supposed to be a cause for celebration. Fascist occupation, after all, had truly been a nightmare. But ethnic Poles had good reason to wonder what they might expect from Stalin’s cynical embrace. There is a joke that some Poles still relate that starts when a small bird falls from the sky into a cowpat. A passing cat is kind enough to rescue it but then, naturally, eats the bird. ‘The moral,’ a Polish friend explained, ‘is that not everyone who gets you out of the shit is necessarily your friend.’

In the short term, some Poles were willing to fight beside Red Army troops. The first Polish army on Soviet soil was formed in April 1943. Poles broke open the route to Lublin for Chuikov’s 8th guards army in July 1944, and they would go on fighting with these men until the fall of Berlin ten months later.
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However, Stalin’s sympathies were never with the Polish nation, and most Polish soldiers knew it. They would complain that their uniforms and kit were sub-standard, that they were not issued with warm clothes as winter approached and that they were given the most dangerous military tasks.
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Their morale would plummet furthest when they heard news of the fate of their fellow countrymen in Warsaw.

In August 1944, encouraged by the real prospect of their liberation, Warsaw’s nationalist underground staged an uprising of Polish citizens. Its aim was to destroy the German garrison. With Rokossovsky’s troops camped on the Vistula, the chances for concerted action appeared bright. But the Warsaw rising failed. The Polish capital’s entire population paid in blood. As thousands of its citizens were slaughtered, Hitler ordered that the 
entire city should be razed. What most outraged the Polish troops was that the Soviets made no effort to intervene. Rokossovsky’s men were probably in no condition to relieve Warsaw in August 1944, and it would have been difficult for Stalin to find fresh reserves.
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The momentum of Operation Bagration had been used up in the great strike at Minsk. But the destruction of Polish nationalists in Warsaw suited Stalin’s long-term goals. The tragedy, like the 1940 Katyn massacre, would poison Russo–Polish relations for decades.

In answer – or at least by way of self-justification – the Soviets would claim that they were fighting for a cause that transcended national interests. Internationalism had been downplayed since the war began – Russian troops themselves had found it redundant when they met their putative German brothers at the front in 1941 – but the idea that the Soviet Union was a unique, pioneering, supra-national state was never abandoned. Former Red Army troops and partisans still claim that their identity was ‘Soviet’, a way of getting over the awkward divisions between the ethnic Russians at the front and all the rest. The Poles, like the
zapadniki
, could simply join the brotherhood. That way their future in the Soviet system, as opposed to fascist tyranny, was guaranteed.

This neat answer would never fit the facts. For one thing, Stalin himself had embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing. By the summer of 1944, the Gulag and the central Asian labour camps were overflowing with Volga Germans, Chechens, Tatars, Kalmyks and other so-called ‘punished’ groups. Ukrainians and Poles began to join them in the last year of the war. Ethnicity had replaced economic or class status as a pretext for wholesale arrest.
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Soviet rhetoric did not work among the people, either. Russians might claim that there were no distinctions between ethnic groups in uniform, but they were not in a minority at any point. ‘We were all the same’ is an imperialist thought, dismissing the claims and perspectives of subaltern peoples. Large numbers – millions – of Poles, Ukrainians, Georgians, Jews, Kazakhs and all the rest fought beside Russians, some of them explicitly for Soviet power, but minority groups were neither identical nor invisible within the army. There was even a slang, and usually derogatory, word to describe them.
Natsmen
, an ugly term formed from the Russian words for ethnic minority, captured, amalgamated and dismissed individuals whose homes might have been anywhere from Odessa and Tallinn to Ulan Bator.

Ironically, it was the Jews who seemed most readily at ease with the internationalist dream. The Soviet state, officially, deplored and punished anti-Semitism. In this respect, it marked an advance on tsarism and a stark 
contrast with the Third Reich. Its internationalist rhetoric, like its appeal to science and to the superiority of urban values, also attracted a people whose history had fixed them mainly in the towns. In 1941, Jews signed up in their thousands for the Soviet cause. Students from Moscow set their books aside; young communists in government roles asked to be assigned to the front. Jews were among the keenest volunteers for every kind of army service. Not all the volunteers were Soviet-born. Refugees streamed east from Poland and from western Ukraine in the spring of 1941, finding their way into the Red Army by summer. As they would learn when their families perished in the old homelands, their loyalty to Stalin’s cause was justified.

The Red Army itself boasted a set of regulations about anti-Semitism, including a stipulation that the insulting
zhid
(yid) should not be used in reference to Jews. Soldiers were liable to punishment if they made anti-Semitic remarks or used offensive, racist language. Idealistic communists (many of whom were in fact Jews) believed that Soviets had truly overcome the hatreds of the tsarist past, but it would only have been in a burst of passionate idealism that a Jew could have seen the Red Army as a benign environment. Official rhetoric was scrupulous, but among themselves the soldiers – and even many officers – were liberal with their racist jibes. The authorities’ response, too, was generally feeble. The NKVD kept a record of the cases that it heard, together with the penalties imposed. A thirty-one-year-old got five days in the guardhouse for telling a Jewish comrade that ‘My father despised yids, I despise them, and my children are going to despise them too.’
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Another soldier was expelled from the
komsomol
for spitting ‘What are you on about, Jew-face?’ at another rifleman. It was better than fascism, but there was a long way still to go.

The jokes, that humour that the NKVD controlled so closely, were worse. According to the vulgar story, Jews in the army had pulled off their usual trick. In other words, they had managed to dodge the front line and secured the safer office jobs. When tens of thousands fled their homes in the first months of war, they were christened ‘Tashkent partisans’ after the city where so many had found refuge. ‘They have formed a battalion by themselves,’ a joke went among Russian troops, ‘and conquered Tashkent and Alma-Ata.’
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‘The soul of a Jew is always at the front line,’ went another, ‘but his body stays behind the Urals.’ The context was contemporary, but the basic stereotypes were primeval. Jews were even said to favour crooked rifles.
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Other rumours built on ancient themes of Passover blood sacrifice and cabbalistic magic. Jewish doctors were accused of passing wounded Russians fit for active service before they could even stand.
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An anecdote
from 1944 played on the theory of international Zionist conspiracy. Rifleman Abram Abramovich keeps coming back from battle with trophies: a German gun, German maps, even the colours of a German regiment. When he is decorated for his deeds, someone asks him how he has managed to do quite so much. ‘Ach,’ he replies, ‘I have a friend on the German side, Mark Markovich, and he brings me the German stuff and I take Red Army trophies round to him.’
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The story may have made some soldiers laugh, but if they had paused to look at their German enemies, they would have noticed that there were no Mark Markoviches left.

The persecution of Jews was one fascist atrocity that Soviet publicity evaded. The core of the problem, from 1944, was an imagined hierarchy of suffering. This was a war in which Russia saw itself as the most important victim. It had been invaded, its land violated. It had stood alone while Europe slept; its people had bled themselves white in the defence of Stalingrad. The Soviet Union waged this war, but more Russians served in the Red Army than any other ethnic group, and soldiers frequently – and in their view, generously – overlooked distinctions among their comrades, calling them all ‘Russian’ in their hearts.
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Russian soldiers were the largest single group among the multitude who starved and died as German prisoners of war, and Russian civilians suffered unimaginably in the years of invasion and struggle.
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On almost any reckoning there could be no comparison between the price that Russia and the other Soviet peoples paid for war and that paid by their allies. But victimhood, at home as well as on a diplomatic stage, was like a kind of capital. Internationally, it permitted the aggrieved party to claim substantial reparation, to say nothing of allowing a certain moral leverage. At home, it raised a storm of patriotism which was Soviet in name but generally Russian in nature. The epicentre of it all (his Georgian nationality notwithstanding) was Stalin himself. While the people had suffered, Stalin had laboured and bled with them. He was identified with every moment of their pain.