Ivan’s War (74 page)
Authors: Catherine Merridale
13 March: Germany declares Austria to be part of the Third Reich
29 September: Munich conference agrees to the transfer of the Sudetenland to Germany, but guarantees the remaining borders of Czechoslovakia
15 March: Germans invade ‘post-Munich’ Czechoslovakia
31 March: British guarantee to Poland
23 August: Non-aggression pact signed between Germany and the Soviet Union
1 September: German troops invade Poland and annex Danzig
3 September: Britain and France declare war on Germany
17 September: Red Army enters Poland from the east
28 September: German troops capture Warsaw
30 November: Russians invade Finland
14 December: Soviet Union expelled from the League of Nations
11 February: Soviet attack on the cd
3 March: Red Army captures Vyborg (Viipuri)
12 March: Finland signs peace treaty with USSR, ceding the Karelian isthmus and the shores of Lake Ladoga
10 May: Germans invade Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg
29 May: Beginning of British evacuation from Dunkirk (to 3 June)
14 June: Germans enter Paris
17–23 June: Russians occupy Baltic states
22 June: France signs armistice with Germany
11–18 August: Peak of the Battle of Britain
7 September: First blitz over London
9 December: 8th Army begins offensive in north Africa
22 June: Germany invades the Soviet Union; Finland attacks Soviet Karelia
27 June: Romania declares war on Russia
28 June: Germans capture Minsk
3 July: Stalin’s first wartime broadcast to the Soviet people
16 July: Germans reach Smolensk
25 July: Germans capture Tallinn
30 August: Mga, the last rail link to Leningrad, is captured by the Germans
17 September: Encirclement of Soviet troops near Kiev
30 September: Beginning of the Battle of Moscow
2 October: Germans capture Orel
12 October: Germans capture Kaluga
13 October: Germans capture Kalinin (Tver)
16 October: Height of the ‘Moscow panic’
20 October: State of siege declared in Moscow
30 October: Siege of Sevastopol begins in the Crimea
3 November: Germans capture Kursk
22 November: Germans break into Klin
26 November: Germans capture Istra
6 December: Soviet counter-offensive begins near Moscow
7 December: Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and raid British Malaya
8 December: USA and Britain declare war on Japan
15 December: Soviets recapture Klin and Istra
25 December: Russians begin to establish bridgehead in eastern Crimea
30 December: Soviets recapture Kaluga
15 February: Singapore falls to Japanese
8 May: Germans attack in eastern Crimea
12 May: Unsuccessful Soviet offensive opened near Kharkov
20 May: Germans retake the Kerch peninsula
3 July: Fall of Sevastopol
30 July: Stalin’s order no. 227, ‘Not a Step Back.’
23 August: 40,000 killed in air raid on Stalingrad
13 September: Launch of German offensive to take Stalingrad
23 October: Beginning of Battle of El Alamein
19 November: Launch of Soviet counter-offensive near Stalingrad
31 January: Paulus surrenders at Stalingrad
2 February: Final German surrender at Stalingrad
8 February: Soviets recapture Kursk
14 February: Soviets take Rostov
16 February: Soviets take Kharkov
15 March: Germans recapture Kharkov
5 July: Beginning of German offensive at Kursk
12 July: Soviet counter-offensive launched near Kursk
5 August: Russians take Orel and Belgorod
23 August: Soviets capture Kharkov
3 September: Allies invade Italy
25 September: Smolensk recaptured by Red Army
6 November: Soviets recapture Kiev
27 January: Final relief of Leningrad
2 April: Soviets enter Romania
9 May: Liberation of Sevastopol
13 May: Final defeat of Germans in the Crimea
18 May: NKVD troops round up Crimean Tatars, who are exiled to central Asia
6 June: Allies invade Normandy
22 June: Launch of Operation Bagration in Belorussia
3 July: Soviets recapture Minsk and take about 100,000 German prisoners
18 July: Red Army troops under Rokossovsky enter Poland
1 August: Beginning of Warsaw Rising
25 August: Liberation of Paris
2 October: Surrender of Polish nationalist forces in Warsaw
17 January: Soviet troops take the ruined city of Warsaw
4 February: Beginning of Yalta conference
13 February: Budapest falls to Soviets
9 April: Surrender of Koenigsberg to Soviets
13 April: Russians take Vienna
16 April: Launch of final offensive for Berlin
23 April: Russians reach Berlin
30 April: Hitler and his closest aides commit suicide
2 May: Berlin surrenders to Russians
8 May: ‘VE Day’. Keitel surrenders to Zhukov near Berlin (final documents signed just after midnight on 9 May)
9 May: Russians take Prague. Official ‘Victory Day’ in Soviet Union
17 July: Potsdam conference opens
6 August: Atomic bomb on Hiroshima
8 August: Soviet Union declares war on Japan
9 August: Atomic bomb on Nagasaki
14 August: Japan agrees to surrender
2 September: Japan signs capitulation on board USS
Missouri
This book draws on extensive comparative literatures on soldiers, combat and the Second World War. The bulk of it, however, is based on several kinds of primary source. Most of the detail comes directly from archives in the former Soviet Union and Germany. A list of these, together with the abbreviations used in notes to the text, appears below.
The sets of documents involved include soldiers’ letters and diaries, the reports of political officers and secret-police operatives, reports intended for use as the basis for political agitation, military intelligence reports and the evidence of prisoner-of-war interrogations. In addition, I have used Soviet government sources, including documents associated with the trials of former soldiers accused of anti-government agitation in the immediate postwar years. Many of these include evidence gathered from otherwise semi-literate respondents, so they provide insights into the world of soldiers who could not – or chose not to – write. Finally, I have gathered evidence from civilian sources about the army’s impact on the regions it liberated or occupied, and also about the conditions and morale of civilian members of soldiers’ families. I have often found myself reading documents that have not been opened – except for routine checking at the archive – since they were filed sixty years ago. In every case, whatever the source, I have changed the names of all parties unless the material has already been published elsewhere.
I have also used a range of published sources, and notably the multi-volume editions of wartime documents that have appeared in Russian bookshops in the last ten years. Literally tens of thousands of individual documents are involved, and although the most sensitive material has been withheld, such volumes constitute a formidable primary source in their own right.
I have been more circumspect in the use of memoirs, war novels and other literary sources. War memoirs are notoriously unreliable whoever writes them, and this is especially true in a regime where the censor wields a heavy pen. In the Soviet Union, purportedly ethnographic material, even the texts of songs, was collected on a selective, controlled basis. Novels and films about the war were never spontaneous. What literature can do, however, is provide a clue about the style and content of surviving veterans’ accounts. A reading of Simonov, for instance, or an awareness of the extensive range of war films of the 1960s and 1970s, can enable us to decode the testimonies of veterans who have come to believe that the public tale – the story that the state has woven over many years – is actually their own.
Those testimonies have been my other source. I collected approximately 200 interviews in writing this book, most of which I conducted myself, alone or with the help of a Russian assistant. The interviews were usually collected in the veterans’ own homes, whether in Moscow, the Russian provinces, Ukraine or Georgia. In some cases, I was privileged to talk to the same person several times, building friendships that remain among the greatest pleasures of my working life. Many former soldiers were able to correct my misapprehensions as I worked, while others brought documents and photographs from their own collections for us to discuss. I am grateful to them all.
I was surprised by the willingness of elderly people to revisit wartime memories and delighted by the wealth of detail, much of it about daily life, that former combatants recall. Much has been forgotten or suppressed, and much, no doubt, embellished, but the value of testimony lies in the human link that it provides with war itself, and also with the long years of adaptation and recollection that have followed it. The story of post-war remembering – and of selective oblivion – is itself part of the larger story of survival. Suspicion, or at least a reasonable degree of caution, is another. For many veterans, I was an outsider in every respect – a woman, a civilian, an academic and a foreigner. In answer, as a way of checking the bias that my presence imposed, I asked a male ex-soldier to collect some additional interviews, and another set was gathered in Ukraine by a native Ukrainian speaker. Accordingly, I have been able to consider a range of types of testimony and a broad spectrum of political opinions. If the interviews convey a largely uncritical and patriotic, Soviet, view, it is because that is how most survivors see this war even today. That imaginative hold, too, is part of the story I must tell.
GARF: Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State archive of the Russian Federation)
RGAKFFD: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofonofotodokumentov (Krasnogorsk, Moscow region) (Russian state archive of cinema, recording, and photography)
RGALI: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskustva (Russian state archive of literature and art)
RGASPI: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (Russian state archive of social-political history)
RGASPI-M: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii – molodezh (Archive of the Komsomol)
RGVA: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (Russian state military archive)
TsAMO: Tsentral’nyi arkhiv ministerstva oborony (Podol’sk, Moscow region) (Central archive of the Ministry of Defence)
GAOPIKO: Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii Kurskoi oblasti
GAKO: Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Kurskoi oblasti (State archive of Kursk oblast)
GASO: Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Smolenskoi oblasti (State archive of Smolensk oblast)
TsDNISO: Tsentr dokumentatsii noveishei istorii Smolenskoi oblasti (Centre for the Documentation of Contemporary History, Smolensk oblast)
Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (State military archive)
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