Ivan’s War (6 page)

Whenever people think that they will have to fight a war, they start to try to picture what it will be like. Their stories seldom correspond to reality, but forecasting is not the purpose. Instead, the idea that the boys will soon be back or that the enemy will be destroyed with surgical precision, like the myth that it will all be over by Christmas, serve to foster a confident, even optimistic, mood at times when gloom might be more natural. In 1938, as the momentum for large-scale war gathered, the citizens of Stalin’s empire, like Europeans everywhere, attempted to allay their fears with comforting tales. The Soviet vision of future conflict was destined to inspire a generation of wartime volunteers, but the images were created deliberately by a clique of leaders whose ideology had set them on the path to international hostilities. The favoured medium of communication was the cinema. The epic struggle of utopia and backwardness played out in moving pictures, black and white. Stirring music reinforced the mood. At other moments, Soviet people opened their newspapers to columns of portentous diplomatic reportage; their country was preparing for battle. But though the news that citizens could read was full of threat, films were designed to inculcate the view that the people’s vanguard, the Red Army, was certain to triumph.

The greatest epic of the time was Sergei Eisenstein’s
Alexander Nevsky
, an anti-fascist parable of Russian victory over German invaders. Although it was set in the thirteenth century, in the age of Slavic princes and Teutonic knights, Eisenstein’s great spectacle, released in 1938, made direct reference to the politics of the 1930s, even to the point of adding swastikas to some of the Teutonic knights’ shields and standards. The message was not one that Soviet audiences, attuned to every nuance of state-controlled propaganda, would miss. For all its deliberate sermonizing, however, the film, which boasted a musical score by Sergei Prokofiev, was destined to endure as a classic of Soviet cinema. Inferior productions with similar themes have stood the test of time less well, but in the 1930s, their audiences were rapt. On the surface at least,
Alexander Nevsky
was set in the deep past. For cinema-goers
who preferred to look forwards, another film, Efim Dzigan’s
If There Is War
Tomorrow
, also released in 1938, foretold Russia’s victory in the face of a future invasion, the one that kept people awake at nights.

Efim Dzigan set out to reassure. The impact of his hour-long film was created by blending fictitious action with clips of genuine newsreel, splicing documentary footage into an unfolding fantasy of effortless victory. The message – resolute and stoical but also full of hope – was strengthened by the repetition of a musical refrain with words by the popular songwriter Vasily Lebedev-Kumach.
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If There Is War Tomorrow
struck so live a chord with Soviet audiences that they went on watching it after the real war began. By the winter of 1941, the invader had overrun a third of Soviet territory. The planes that droned across Dzigan’s black-and-white screen had been destroyed, the tanks burned out, the brave soldiers corralled in prison camps. It was no longer possible to dream that this war would be over soon. That winter, the audiences crowding into old schoolrooms and empty huts included evacuees from Ukraine and Smolensk, people whose homes were now in German hands. As they huddled together, relying on each other’s breath for warmth, they needed patience as the hand-cranked dynamo was turned. But all the same, a spell seemed to be cast.
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This film was not about the war, but faith. That faith, and the images that sustained it, was part of what defined the generations that would bear the brunt of Russia’s war. In the terrible years ahead, people would hum the music from this film to keep their spirits up. As they marched across dusty steppe, as they strummed a guitar by the light of a campfire, it would be Lebedev-Kumach’s song that soldiers often sang.

The film’s action opens in a fairground, probably the newly opened Gorky Park, Moscow’s Park of Culture and Rest. The Kremlin towers are visible in the distance, each topped with a glowing electric star. It is night, but the city is full of jollity, with ferris wheels and fireworks and young people strolling about with ice creams in their hands. This is the socialist paradise, and it is a place of well-earned leisure, happy couples, brightly coloured food. There is an innocence about it, crimeless, sexless, blandly without sin. In this land, Stalin and his loyal aides do all the worrying so that the children of the revolution can be free. But their freedom is under threat. The film cuts to the Soviet border, where fascist troops, ant-like, are climbing into tanks. There is no chance that we will sympathize with them. These are not the seductive species of villain but absurd buffoons. Their officers wear large moustaches, look pompous, and move with the bow-legged gait of cavalrymen. The infantrymen crawl, the airmen stoop. Throughout the action they
speak German, but they are more like cartoon Prussians from a children’s book than leather-booted Nazis. Even the swastikas on their helmets and collars are slightly eccentric. This is picture-book fascism, not the real thing.

The invasion takes place at night. It could be frightening, and we may briefly worry for the stout young woman who is making soup a stone’s throw from the front, but border guards hold the aggressor at bay. Our housewife joins the men, throwing off her apron and taking her place in the line of skilful gunners, proving that patriots can turn their hands to anything. Unfortunately, however, this is just the beginning of a series of perfidious attacks. The next comes from the air. The fascist biplanes buzz with menace, but danger is averted for a second time. Soviet planes, a fleet of shining new machines, take to the skies, and at this point the audience should recognize the aces that have rushed to pilot them. There is Babushkin, the hero of an Arctic rescue mission several years before, and Vodopyanov and Gromov, flying stars, their names printed across the screen in case we did not manage to identify their faces straight away. The 1930s were the age of heroes, and pilots were the true élite. In a scene whose irony would become apparent three years later, when the Luftwaffe carried out its devastating attacks of June and July 1941, the famous aces run audacious raids into the fascists’ lair, destroying enemy aircraft on the ground and flying home without a single loss.

And now it is the Red Army’s own turn. The volunteers stream in from every corner of the Soviet land. There is an old man with a grey beard in the queue at the recruitment point. He fought against the white general, Denikin, in the civil war and now he wants to crush the enemy again. He holds a fist towards the screen, assuring us that the enemy ‘will remember this from last time’. The fascists, like the whites, have become the sworn enemies of right-thinking citizens everywhere. But not all citizens are fit to fight, and we now learn that front-line service is to be regarded as a privilege. Working and waiting are the lot of older people and the very young. Some women will remain at home, too, but others, every bit as trained and warlike as the men, line up in uniform, jaws set, prepared to do great deeds. It is not just Russians who come forward. The Commissar for Defence, Kliment Voroshilov, appears in his best uniform and appeals to the peoples of the east, the Uzbeks in particular. Hardbitten men in sheepskin hats respond at once. Voroshilov’s speech becomes a turning point for everyone. Soon Soviet troops will move into attack, driving the fascists from their trenches. The war is going to be fought on the aggressor’s soil, and it is going to be won.

The story never gets more frightening than that. Whenever Soviet forces engage with the enemy, the fascists end up running for their lives. Not all the fighting is high-tech, and in fact the biggest set-piece battle in the film involves cavalry and bayonets, but there is no blood. Indeed, there is only one serious wounding. Its victim is a member of a tank crew who joined up in the first wave, together with his brother, and set off for adventure straight away. The men – accompanied by a pretty young nurse – spend a few moments trundling happily along in their Soviet tank, a surprisingly spacious vehicle with a cabin that looks like the inside of a caravan. They could be setting off on holiday, even at the point where their machine grinds to a sudden halt. Our hero, smooth and cheerful as a young Cliff Richard, is certainly undaunted. He grabs a handy spanner, climbs out through the hatch, and then there is a bang, the sound of a man at work, and though we cannot see the actor we can hear him whistling the theme song as he puts the problem right. But then the music stops in a flurry of gunfire. Inside, the other brother’s face sets to a mask of grief. A couple of seconds of suspense follow, accompanied by violins, and we may catch our breath in expectation of a tragedy. But Stalin’s children need not cry for long. The lad’s hand has been hurt, but that is all. Once he has climbed back in and the nurse has bandaged him, he is as good as new. The whole crew starts that song again, and off they go to win the war.

The story ends in Berlin. Soviet planes, wave after wave of them, are flying in formation like so many wild geese. They are not dropping bombs. Their payload is made up of leaflets calling on the population to put down their arms and join the international proletarian socialist revolution. The message is timely, for a large meeting is already under way. The workers in this other land are preparing to desert the slavery of capitalism. Slogans begin to fill the screen. War, we are told, will lead to the destruction of the capitalist world. The fighting will not take place on Soviet soil. These reassuring messages are backed up by fanfares and more banners. The audience is smiling; it is saved. As the music fades another slogan reminds us that the price of freedom is to be prepared for war. To be prepared, that is, to ride to Berlin in a shiny tank, to be a handsome pilot or a pretty nurse, to point a gun at a healthy man and shoot him down without spilling a single drop of blood.

The dream of quick and easy victory might not have been so potent if it had remained confined to the big screen. It might not have been quite so devastating, either. The problem, by 1938, was that the fantasy had affected real strategic thinking. ‘Decisive victory at low cost’ was not just a vision of the propagandists; it was the Red Army’s official goal. Dzigan’s script may
have helped to inure citizens to war, but less constructively it was also the scenario for a generation of military thinkers. In 1937, when Stalin replaced his leading strategists with people chosen for their political, as opposed to purely military, distinction, a new approach to national security was adopted in Moscow. In the past, a good deal of planning had gone into strategies for defence. Now the entire orientation of Red Army training began to be directed at offensive operations. The plans and training exercises needed for prolonged defence were scaled down, as were the fledgling preparations for partisan operations inside Soviet territory.
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The notion that the enemy would be repelled and beaten on his own soil was not just a romantic dream; from the late 1930s it was the centrepiece of Stalinist military planning.

It was as if a whole people could share a delusion. As Hitler and his generals were drilling the greatest professional army on the continent, Stalin’s advisers seemed lost in fantasy. There had been dissident voices – powerful ones – but by 1938 the critics had vanished into the silence of the prison camps, the covert graves. If the Bolsheviks could win the civil war, the propagandists shrieked, if they could dam the Dnepr, banish God, and fly to the North Pole, then surely they could keep the fascist invader at bay. History, the ineluctable drive that was moving all humanity towards a common goal, was on their side, after all. The delusion was expressed in many other films of this same era, including one that features yet more tanks. In this production,
The Tank Men
, the hero, Karasev, is ordered to make a reconnaissance raid across the enemy lines. But he decides to go beyond the line of duty. He engages the sinister enemy in battle, cripples a few machines, and then drives on towards Berlin. When he gets there, he pushes on into the Reichstag and takes Hitler prisoner. ‘Well done, Karasev,’ his mates applaud when he gets home. ‘There’s not a damn thing left for us to do!’
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In 1938, the audiences who watched these films would leave the hall and step into a real Russian night. The cheerful crowds and well-lit parks that people had seen on the screen would be nowhere in evidence. Instead, their way home would lie through the bleak construction sites, along the muddy paths between poor peasant shacks or past desolate streets where lights glimmered for just a few blocks before they gave in to the dark. Many were going home to apartments so crowded that two families and three whole generations were packed into one room. Others, the young, might well be finding their way back to dormitories, barrack-style, where dozens of boarders slept in rows. The revolution had not made these Russians rich. It had not even made their land the great industrial power of its own boast,
although the rate of change was prodigious, the output staggering. But what distinguished them from other hard-pressed workers struggling to survive was the belief that they were the chosen. They might be hungry, ill-shod, crowded into slums, but they were working to transform the world. They had to win. That was the public face of Soviet culture anyway.