Ivan’s War (60 page)

Like almost every other human pleasure in the land of brotherhood, sex was something that went underground. The public emphasis on strict morality and sheer hard work pushed it into the darkness, to a twilight hazed by sweat, tobacco and whatever vodka could be found. The gap between ideal and reality was nowhere more apparent than among the soldiers at the front. It was a male world, a world of
makhorka
, cheap spirit, and decaying boots. The nearest many soldiers got to the women they cared about was in a letter or perhaps in the stories that they sometimes told. ‘My army friend is telling us about his life,’ Aronov wrote one evening. ‘It’s not the first time he’s done that. Right now he’s got to the bit where he falls in love for the first time.’
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His pre-war life had faded into fantasy, and like all dreams, it could be better than the truth. ‘After the war,’ another man told his friends, ‘I’m going to go to the south somewhere, and I’m going to teach
maths and physics in a girls’ boarding school, somewhere where the rules are that no girl can go out on the street. I’ll use all my military experience.’
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The longing was there, and the desire for escape, for the feminine, but these feelings were miles away from gang rape and a bayonet in the belly.

Whatever lust they may have felt, large numbers of the men had stronger reasons for resenting and even hating representatives of the female sex. All through the war, they had been getting sad letters from home. Some were tales of hunger, others told of rape and death, but many were letters of farewell. Families were unravelling, new lives asserting themselves in separate worlds. The strain between soldier and family was part of the general gulf between combatants and civilians. It was also a symptom of the overpowering maleness of army life. Women were objects of suspicion, aliens, in a misogynistic world. The soldiers’ letters became more suspicious of women, and also more repressive, with the passing years. ‘We fought for our country from the very first days,’ a Red Army man wrote to Kalinin, the Soviet president, at this time. ‘Some of us have been wounded several times, but we did not begrudge our very lives for our motherland and families. And now our complaint is that some women are betraying us … and our children are losing their fathers … We must take severe legal measures against these women-betrayers for their treachery and the insult to their husbands.’
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The letter is one among hundreds.

Official policy was changing, too. In July 1944, the Soviet Union began its campaign to create iconic mothers, striking medals for the women who had given birth to large broods of healthy, surviving young. The ideal woman, if the photographs could be believed, was stern and provident, tough as a tank driver, the nurse and teacher of armies to come.
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She was also sweet, innocent and untroubled by hardship, let alone by war. Frivolity and sex (the many children notwithstanding) had no place in her life. Soldiers began to praise the type, to dream of faithful, moon-faced women and their healthy, well-nourished sons. The gentleness, the sentimentality, of many Soviet troops towards small children was noted at the time. By April at least, a woman with a baby, local people learned, was practically immune from rape. But even sentimental troops, the men who kept their pockets full of sweets for hungry German kids, worried about their families back home. It was a long time since any had seen their children.

There were reasons to be concerned. Even the strongest marriages were showing signs of strain by this time. The classic letter, received by thousands of men, contained an image of cold homecoming: ‘Our flame was not hot enough to last.’
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Each gap between her letters prompted Belov to suspect
that his own marriage was faltering. ‘I’ve had a note from my wife,’ he scribbled in March 1944. ‘I get the feeling that she and I are heading for a major row. It’s an unpleasant feeling, a kind of general inertia.’
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Perhaps she had been worrying, as Taranichev’s Natalya had, about the cost of separation. ‘You won’t know us at all if the war goes on much longer,’ Natalya wrote in October 1944. ‘It’s a pity that you have become so remote from us.’
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‘I try to write whenever I can,’ her husband replied in a brisk, reproving tone. ‘Even when I’m on the march. But I would remind you that there are moments when my mood is so lousy, because of the general situation, that I can’t bring myself to write so much as a postcard, even if I have the time. I will remember Stalingrad for a long time!’
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The men whose marriages collapsed were angrier still, whatever infidelities they had committed for themselves. Part of the problem was the wartime idealization of the Soviet wife, the waiting girlfriend, the family for whom each soldier fought. Back home, where survival was a matter of humiliation, of exhausting struggle, real life was nothing like the image, and real women could not match up to the soldiers’ dreams. At the front, too, a new morality prevailed. Kopelev was a father and a married man. He fully expected to return to his old life when the war ended. But at the front, he took a second ‘wife’, as countless officers like him would do. ‘I told her that since we had to work together day and night, we couldn’t avoid sleeping together, so why put it off?’ The point was that ‘perhaps we would be killed together by the same shell’.
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Sauce for the front-line gander, however, was not supposed to be enjoyed by geese back home. Among their petitions from these last months of war were soldiers’ appeals for new laws to give them control over their children, to allow for postal divorces and to punish the women who had shamed and betrayed them.
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But fighting men were powerless to change things back at home. The only world they could affect was here, in Germany, where the women who had brought on their ruin, the spoiled
Frauen
, still wrapped themselves in silk and fur, or so the soldiers fantasized, while Russian children starved. Where Russian women wore their peasant blouses and embroidered
sarafans
(in theory and in folklore, anyway), these German females dressed in provocative western styles, wore make-up, teetered on high heels.
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The whole culture that had produced them seemed sick, disgusting – and wickedly seductive. Some German women were accused of deliberate whoring. ‘German ladies are … ready to begin payment of “reparations” at once,’ a disgusted Soviet officer observed. ‘It won’t work!’
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‘Europe is a dirty abyss,’ a soldier wrote home from Prussia that winter. ‘I have taken a look at
German magazines, and they disgust me … Even their music is indecent! Is this Europe? Give me Siberia every time!’
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Another discovered a cache of pornographic pictures (probably not, in this case, the Venus de Milo) in an abandoned German position near Koenigsberg. ‘What could be more disgusting?’ he asked. ‘Our culture must be higher than that of the Germans, because you would never find such images among our ranks.’
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Rape, then, combined the desire to avenge with the impulse to destroy, to smash German luxuries and waste the fascists’ wealth. It punished women and it reinforced the fragile manliness of the perpetrators. It also underscored the emotional ties between gangs of the men, and it was as a gang, not individuals, that the men usually acted, drawing an energy and anonymity from the momentum of the group. It was the collective triumph of these males, certainly, that rape purported to celebrate. And though women bore the brunt of the violence, German men were also victims of a kind. It was no accident that many rapes took place in view of husbands and fathers. The point was being made that they were now the creatures without power, that they would have to watch, to suffer this most intimate degradation.
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One woman recounted the tale of a lawyer who had stood by his Jewish wife all through the Nazi years, refusing to divorce her in spite of the risks. When the Russians arrived, he protected her again, at least until a bullet from a Russian automatic hit him in the hip. As he lay bleeding to death, he watched as three men raped his wife.
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The anecdotes fill stacks of files, but the precise statistics will remain unknown. The violence was worst in East Prussia, but rape was a problem wherever the Red Army encountered its enemies. Tens of thousands of German women and girls undoubtedly suffered rape at the hands of Soviet troops; indeed, it is virtually certain that the figure ran to hundreds of thousands.
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However, numbers are dangerous tools, creating certainties on paper that have nothing much to do with life. This was a world of propaganda, a world coloured, to the last, by Goebbels’ pen. Numbers could make the Russians seem more terrible, turn Germans into victims, perhaps wipe out some dark stains from the Nazi past. They clearly helped to reinforce the image of the Red Army as an Asiatic horde.
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But though the stories told by the rates of abortion and venereal disease infection after 1945 are evidence of a kind,
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some other numbers are less definite. When a Berlin newspaper reported that a seventy-two-year-old woman had been raped twenty-four times, the anonymous Berlin diarist wearily asked, ‘Who counted?’
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It is just as problematical to estimate the number of perpetrators. The veterans themselves are unlikely to volunteer new lists of names. Some officers
I came to know would mention cases where they restored discipline, as Kirill did in East Prussia by threatening two perpetrators (‘not from my unit, of course’) with his own pistol, but rank and file soldiers, who must at least have witnessed the atrocity, refused to talk of it. ‘They say there were rapes,’ one man told me. ‘I never saw any. The thing is, we never actually saw any Germans. They had always run away before we got to any town.’ For many, the silence suggested a kind of selective amnesia, no doubt the child of shame. But other pressures operated, too. No army trumpets its crimes, but the Soviet official silence about rape was numbing. It is enough to look at the records of the NKVD troops. Officials with responsibility for discipline and for maintaining order among civilians in the front-line zones were in a position to report cases of rape whenever they chose. Their records, after all, were marked ‘absolutely secret’. But even these internal documents mention almost no incidents of gang rape and few individual crimes. It was as if the officers conspired to keep it out of their written accounts, filling the space with incidents of drunkenness or absence without leave instead.

The NKVD troops who served with the 1st Belorussian Front were in the eye of the Red Army storm, but the tone of their reports at the time remained cool. ‘In one house we found eight Germans,’ an officer observed, ‘an old man, five women and two youths of twelve–thirteen.’ Like many others – hundreds – they had hanged themselves. The officers who reported the scene explained that local witnesses had suggested that, ‘despite the fact that most of the women in the settlement are of a certain age’, the victims had been afraid because ‘Russian soldiers are raping German women’.
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The allegation is reported with the scepticism usually reserved for sightings of the Virgin Mary, but this was January 1945. For six months already, the same army had been anxious about the rates of venereal disease among its troops in Poland, the Baltic and Romania. Monthly inspections had been ordered among all soldiers of either sex.
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However, when it came to the reports on discipline, more space – many times more – was given to ideological wavering than to rape. It was only in April and May 1945, when Stalin himself had intervened, that ‘relations with German civilians’ began to feature in reports on discipline.
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Just as seriously, rape was seldom punished, especially at first. In the early months, up to the spring of 1945, the soldiers were still fighting under an order to take revenge. Thereafter, when even the Soviet leadership had begun to appreciate the cost – to discipline and to the army’s combat capability – of the unmilitary violence, some officers took stricter control, and there were even executions for rape in the Red Army. In April 1945, when his
army joined Konev’s troops in Silesia, Rabichev recalled that forty men and officers were shot in front of their units to discourage further atrocities.
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‘Some commanders!’ the soldiers would mutter. ‘They’ll shoot their own men over a German bitch.’
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More usually, however, the perpetrators whose crime was not condoned might be given relatively light punishments. Five years was a standard sentence, but it could be reduced to two or less on appeal, especially for soldiers with good war records.
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In any case, these men were needed at the front. Their sentences were almost all deferred until the fighting stopped, and many, in the best Red Army style, had ‘redeemed their crime with their own blood’ – died or been incapacitated – by that stage. Rape, in other words, was treated more leniently than desertion, theft or – as in Kopelev’s case – a unilateral attempt to protect German civilians. A few cases were singled out (usually when other breaches of discipline were involved) but the majority simply disappeared from Soviet records.