Ivan’s War (64 page)

May 9 was a glorious day in Moscow. That night, just after one o’clock, the familiar voice of Yury Levitan, the Sovinformburo’s wartime announcer, had confirmed that the war with Germany was over. The news flew round the city within minutes. People woke their neighbours, abandoning the caution that normally regulated social contact in the capital city. Whole families rushed out into the streets, the men clutching the bottles that they had been saving for this very hour, and a great party began that would roar into the coming evening. Dawn would bring yet more people to town, and as many as 3 million had crushed into the open spaces round the Kremlin by the afternoon. A day like this would have been unforgettable enough without the night to come, but then, well after nine o’clock, as the spring horizon began to fade, hundreds of searchlights were switched on. They flooded the famous ensemble of buildings – the art deco hotel façades, the crenellated walls and towers – with waves of purple, red and gold. A fleet of planes flew low above Red Square, releasing coloured flares into the darkness, and then the fireworks were lit, the best that even Russians could remember. ‘For once,’ wrote a delighted Werth, ‘Moscow had thrown all reserve and restraint to the winds. The people were so happy,’ he added, ‘that they did not even have to get drunk.’
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The victory seemed to belong to everyone. There was no real distinction, for a moment, between factory workers and office staff, typesetters, engineers, collective farmers and the designers of tanks; they had all paid a price, not least in prodigious effort, for the defeat of fascism. But no one felt prouder, or more entitled to claim ownership of this victory, than the soldiers themselves. ‘On these joyful, happy days these lines are being written in Berlin by me!’ Orest Kuznetsov wrote to his sister on 10 May. He was scribbling on a postcard of Unter den Linden, blotting out the German caption with his army pen. ‘There are no words,’ he wrote, ‘you can’t choose them, to reflect the future joy of this victory, a participant in which you have been and saw it all with your own eyes, walking round the centre of the “den” as a
conqueror, as the owner. The faces of every officer and soldier shine with the indescribable joy of our achievement! The Great Patriotic war is over – it is a golden book of history. I congratulate you on this great Festival!’
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Few people were in any mood to weigh the price that had been paid for this euphoric day or even to forecast what peace might cost in future. A calculation like that might well have raised some doubt about the victory itself. Could a nation consider that it was triumphant when approximately 27 million of its citizens were dead? What plaudits could the army really claim when twice as many civilians as soldiers had died? It was a strange species of victory that left 25 million people homeless, living in
zemlyanki
or squeezed into windowless corridors. Only Poland could claim that it had lost proportionately more, and it was now a bitter, shattered semi-colony.
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The Germans, certainly, had paid a heavy price, and almost three quarters of their military losses – human and material – were accounted for along the Eastern Front. The Red Army had truly punished and defeated the invader, but the toll was heavier for the Soviets than for their adversaries.
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It is a testimony to the scale of wartime carnage that the estimates of military losses should vary by margins of millions. The nearest anyone has come to a consensus is to say that no fewer than 8.6 million Soviet military personnel were killed during the war, either as prisoners in Nazi camps or on the battlefield. This is the ‘safe’ figure – there are much greater estimates – but nonetheless it represents nearly a third of the total number of men and women who were mobilized into the Soviet armed forces.
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The Soviet dead included many of the country’s best, fittest, and most productive citizens. Three quarters of the men and women who died in military uniform were aged between nineteen and thirty-five. Of the generation of young men that was born in 1921, the conscripts who had been called up in time for the battles of Kiev and Kharkov, or for the calvary of Stalingrad itself, up to 90 per cent were dead. The war left whole towns without young adults, and for some years into the future there would be fewer young couples and fewer children. In other words, besides the grief, a burden that Soviet women, in particular, would bear for decades, there was a long-term economic price, even for death. And in terms of strict profit and loss, the war had cost just under three and a half trillion roubles, an estimated one third of the Soviet Union’s national wealth.
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For the exhausted and depleted labour force, the prospect of rebuilding must have seemed almost as daunting as another winter under fire.

Nonetheless, pessimism was in short supply that May. In Russia, and in large parts of the Soviet empire generally, civilians paused from their work
in the fields or among ruined buildings to celebrate deliverance. The victory seemed to attest that this people could never be enslaved. The Soviet state, their Soviet system – and their now revered leader, Stalin – had also secured a pre-eminent place in world affairs, the right to determine futures that stretched beyond the pre-war borders. At the front, in Berlin, Prague and across central Europe, soldiers – and young officers especially – allowed themselves to dream of the utopia to come. The notion that a better life would be the people’s just reward was commonplace. ‘When the war is over,’ a Soviet writer had remarked in 1944, ‘life in Russia will become very pleasant.’ His hope – like that of millions of others – was that the new friendship with America and Britain would bear lasting fruit, that the Soviet Union’s prestige in the world would open doors that had been shut since 1917. ‘There will be much coming and going,’ he continued, ‘with a lot of contacts with the West. Everybody will be allowed to read anything he likes. There will be exchanges of students, and foreign travel will be made easy.’
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Each person’s hopes reflected their experience and interests. Officers, for the most part, favoured reforms that maintained Soviet discipline and a conservative morality, but they still believed in the changes to come, and many felt that they had a right, even an obligation, to put their views about the peace to the government. Since 1942, military personnel had been learning how to think. In 1945, they brought their new-found skills and sense of individual responsibility to bear on post-war reconstruction. The task would be hard work at first, but these people were used to that. Real change, not promises of future happiness, was the priority now. ‘To search for friends in the future,’ a fictitious teacher tells a veteran in a story from this time, ‘is the doom of loneliness.’
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Konstantin Simonov captured the determined, hopeful and reformist mood in the musings of another fictional character, Sintsov. ‘Something wasn’t right even before the war,’ the veteran reflects. ‘I’m not the only one who thinks it; practically everyone does. Both the people who sometimes talk about it and the people who never do … Sometimes, it is true, I think about the time after the war simply as a silence … But then I remember again how the war started, and I already know that I don’t want it to be the same after the war as it used to be.’
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The question was exactly how to implement this change, and even where to start. Again, Red Army officers were never lost for words. Still billeted wherever they had seen the victory salutes – forgetful, maybe, of the Soviet world that waited to the east – they wrote to their advocate back in Moscow, to the Soviet president, Mikhail Kalinin. ‘I have a series of considerations to put to the next meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet,’ a lieutenant
wrote that July.
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Like thousands of others, he had seen what a dictatorship, admittedly a fascist one, looked like when it was viewed from the outside. He had also been to Maidanek, and the impression made by its death camp lingered in his mind. The law on political prisoners, he wrote to Kalinin, should be reviewed. The Soviet state had Maidaneks of its own. If there had ever been a justification for these, the sacrifice that citizens had made swept it away. It was a view whose echo could be heard in almost any army camp. Whatever guilt the people had incurred before the war for failing Lenin’s great historic cause, for failing their own destiny, it had been expiated now. The shadows of the 1930s deserved to be exorcised.

The lieutenant’s criticisms were not confined to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. He also tackled the issue of the collective farms. ‘Give the land to the people themselves,’ he suggested. He had been listening to his men and knew their view on peasant life. With them, he had seen the condition of agriculture in Romania and Poland. Compared with the abundant world of fat Romanian cattle and well-stocked barns, the memory of Soviet collectives was like a miserable dream. And then there were the smaller things, the irritations that his men had asked him to convey. They wanted to receive their letters more promptly, he wrote, and they wanted the families of their dead comrades to receive parcels just as their own people did. They also wanted to be sure of a fair bread ration for everyone. Finally, like soldiers everywhere, they wanted to complain about the yobbish violence on ravaged, lawless Russian streets. ‘We need to fight all kinds of hooliganism.’
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A similar list might have been written by almost any officer that summer.
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The idea that its sacrifices in the war had earned the Russian people something more than slavery was almost commonplace, and the perception was made sharper and more urgent by the ghosts of the dead. A price so high, surely, could not be paid for nothing. The idea that so much blood bought only war, that it paid for the ambitions of dictators and not for any of their people’s dreams, was unthinkable. Officers’ letters that summer asked for more freedom, more education, and a livelier cultural life. One man wanted a unified Ministry of Works to supervise the building of new homes, the provision of food, and the refitting of hospitals. Another, anxious about the neglect of education in the war, asked for a Ministry of Culture with powers to supervise all aspects of literary life, from the provision of public libraries to the editing of newspapers.
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But none, not even the reformers, demanded democracy, let alone Stalin’s scalp. The relative modesty of their claims against the Soviet state – especially in view of the
sacrifice that had been made – makes the leader’s reply even more callous. For there was never any chance. Not one request on these forgotten lists would ever be fulfilled.