Stalin's Children (11 page)

The steppes of the eastern Ukraine were flat and featureless, a land of giant skies as big as the whole world. In summer, Lenina would often go down to the Dniepr with the other children to bathe in the wide, slow-moving river, sliding on its muddy banks as they scrambled into the water. The stern rhythms of orphanage life left Lenina little room for reflection. And among hundreds of parentless children like themselves, the Bibikov sisters were more fortunate than most. They at least had each other.

But the peace the sisters found at Verkhne-Dneprovsk was soon shattered in its turn.

In the summer of 1941, Lenina was sixteen and Lyudmila seven. Lyudmila was looking forward to starting her first year of school, and Lenina was a senior member of the Young Pioneers, proud to wear the smart, starched uniform. Most mornings there was a parade, the various school classes dragooned into neat rows, with two older children acting as honour guards as the Soviet flag was run up the flagpole to a scratchy recording of the Soviet national anthem. Lenina and the older children sometimes sat reverently in front of a large Bakelite radio, listening to improving speeches and homilies on the children's programme of Soviet State Radio. Later, in private, the adults listened to the evening news of the war that Germany had unleashed on France and Britain. But the conflict seemed a distant thing, the death throes of the decadent capitalist world as it turned in upon itself. The Soviet Union and Germany had signed a non-aggression pact two years before. The war concerned other people, far from the Dniepr plains.

It was a scorching summer. The steppe wind blew in clouds of dust from the dry fields, covering the orphanage buildings and the trees in the playground with a fine brown pall. For the children, life continued as normal during those baking days, as the German Army massed on the Soviet-Polish border.

Then, on 22 June 1941, Hitler launched the
blitzkrieg
assault codenamed Operation Barbarossa, which quickly crushed Soviet resistance. Unbeknown to the sisters, their uncle Isaac, the engineer now turned pilot, was shot down and killed over Belarus in the first days of the war at the controls of his Polikarpov fighter, outmanoeuvred and outgunned by the swarms of Messerschmitt fighters who cleared the skies ahead of the advancing Wehrmacht. His family never found out where, or even if, he was buried.

Lenina and Lyudmila only heard the news of the attack days later from their solemn teachers, who had in turn heard it on the radio, which announced that the Red Army was heroically repulsing the invaders. It wasn't true. Within ten days, Minsk had fallen. By 27 June, two German armies had advanced 200 miles into Soviet territory, a third of the way to Moscow. By 21 August the Werhmacht had cut the Moscow-Leningrad railway line and German Panzer divisions were advancing fast across the wheat fields of the Ukraine, pushing towards Stalingrad and the Caucasus oilfields.

Kiev fell on 26 September. Days later, the sound of distant guns could be heard at Verkhne-Dneprovsk, carried eastwards on the wind. Lenina was at school when the trucks came to mobilize the older orphanage children to dig trenches. They were told to leave their books and load up as quickly as they could. Lenina thought that they would be back soon, even in time for supper. Her sister, at school with the junior class, didn't see her leave.

Lenina never returned to Verkhne-Dneprovsk. Her detachment of child trench-diggers was driven to the outskirts of the city, where they spent days shovelling the black earth on to the four-handled trays Russians use in place of wheelbarrows. Within days they began to fall back eastwards as the Germans advanced. They slept when they could, on sacks on the floors of hastily evacuated factories, or on the soft freshly dug earth. They would dig during the day and walk at night, moving back daily before the German offensive. There was no way to return to the orphanage, or to find news of Lyudmila or the other children they had left behind.

Lyudmila herself remembers very little of what happened next. Her recollection of that time seems as opaque as Lenina's is clear. Lenina only heard the story after the war from one of her classmates who had stayed behind to do chores the day the older children were taken to dig, and again from Yakov Michnik, the director of the children's home, who came to be a friend and benefactor.

As the front line approached Verkhne-Dneprovsk in the first days of October, the children left at the orphanage and at the hospital were stranded. All available transport had been mobilized, and as the bombing grew closer the last remaining staff decided to evacuate the infants by the only route still open to them - via the great steppe river which ran by the end of the orphanage's territory. The orphanage director commandeered two large river rafts, designed to be hauled up river by horses, from a local collective farm. He loaded the forty remaining children on board. Then, as dusk fell and an artillery barrage flashed in the sky, the six remaining staff pushed the barges full of children out into the stream, propelling the rafts with poles until the current caught them and carried them away into the darkness.

6
War

Die, but do not retreat.
Iosif Stalin

The barges drifted in the Dniepr's slow stream all night. At dawn they ran aground near a village on the eastern bank of the river. The local peasants still had carts and horses, and the orphanage director arranged for the children to be loaded up and transported to the nearest railhead at Zaporozhiye. There, amid the tumult of a city preparing to be overrun by the Germans, Michnik passed his children into the care of the local authorities. He saw no more of them - except for a few who survived the war and came, as Lenina did, to visit, in curiosity and gratitude, as adults. At Zaporozhiye, the children joined a giant, chaotic stream of human flotsam fleeing before the German advance.

Lyudmila's own memory of her evacuation through the chaos of the Red Army's retreat in the autumn and winter of 1941 is a disjointed series of images. She remembers standing at a high window, looking out over a flat landscape, watching bombs falling in the distance with great white flashes, feeling the percussion through the floorboards. She remembers standing with the other orphanage children in a line by the side of a muddy road one rainy autumn day, holding out mugs of water for an endless stream of soldiers trudging by on their way to the front. She recalls spending nights in the forest, shivering under thin blankets and listening to the eerie woodland silence.

They were constantly on the move. Some nights there were searchlights and explosions. One day, Lyudmila remembers, she and other children travelled in a heavy peasant cart, with each child holding a branch to camouflage them from the aeroplanes which buzzed overhead. The horse was a huge lumbering thing, and its harness was also covered in branches. This is the image which has lodged, for some reason, most vividly in my mind's eye - my mother, sitting in the bed of the cart among other children, hopefully clutching a branch like a talisman against the German planes, a small crippled child alone and frightened, trundling eastwards into the emptiness of the Volga steppes.

The children were evacuated in stages, deeper and deeper into the hinterland of Russia, spending a few days or weeks wherever their transport ran out, waiting for someone to take charge of them, to pass them to safety. Somewhere to the west of Stalingrad they got stuck, washed up by the stream of men and machines which filled the steppes. Lyudmila spent the harshest winter months billeted in a snowbound village, chewing dry ears of corn filched from the barns and fighting with the local children for food. In the early spring of 1942, someone remembered the beleaguered little party and moved them to a collective farm closer to the Volga. Mila remembers scavenging for berries in the quiet, cold woods and helping peasant women scrub floors in exchange for crusts of bread.

Somehow, in a small miracle of war, just as the German Sixth Army began its advance on Stalingrad, somebody managed to find the children places on a big American Studebaker truck, the luxury of luxuries. It drove them to the city, reaching the Volga just days ahead of the Germans. The date must have been shortly after 23 August 1942, the day Red Army sappers blew the bridges, because Lyudmila remembers crossing the Volga with the other orphanage children on a steel barge, packed to the gunwales with refugees. She saw the girders of the blown-up bridges dipping into the river at a crazy angle. The windows of all the schools and public buildings in the city were filled with wounded soldiers swathed in bandages. That image became one of Lyudmila's most vivid memories of that time - 'They stood there, all wrapped in bandages, so many of them, by every window.'

On the other side of the river, Lyudmila and the other children found themselves stranded once again. In the scramble to reinforce the city before the arrival of the Germans, and during the first, chaotic weeks of the battle, every available form of transport was needed to ferry men and supplies to the stricken city, and to bring back casualties.

The orphans were billeted in villages near the river. Lyudmila remembers crowds of refugees passing through her village on foot, sleeping in the fields when their strength failed, packing into barns and peasant huts so tightly that they couldn't close the door. Their snoring made an eerie rumbling noise in the darkness, as though the earth itself was trembling. There were air raids at night, and Mila remembers running for safety into the tall grass of the steppe as the black bombs tumbled slowly out of the sky.

Day and night, horse carts trundled through the village full of horribly injured soldiers, covered in blood, some missing limbs. At night the river glowed red from the burning city, and when the wind blew eastwards it carried the heat and smoke of the great battle. She saw bodies and parts of bodies floating past in the water.

Food was the only thing Mila thought about. The children ran wild, fending for themselves, begging for scraps from the streams of refugees, hunting in packs for wheat and barley stalks. Mila and the other children would gather up dry leaves and crumble them with the tobacco of cigarette butts they would find by the roadside. They would sell the mixture as
makhorka,
rough soldiers' tobacco, to the lines of troops who passed every day, exchanging it for sugar cubes or lumps of bread. Many of the soldiers had flat, Mongolian faces. They had come all the way from Siberia, marching days from the nearest railhead and sleeping on the roadsides before moving in inexorable human waves into the city.

Half a century later, I witnessed the Russian Army in action myself. I stood on the Russian front lines in the northern outskirts of Grozny, Chechnya, as a mighty firestorm of artillery roared overhead and the rebel city burned around us. The city centre was obscured by a drifting pall of bittertasting gun smoke. All around were the jagged husks of buildings, nibbled by gunfire and then shelled and shelled again. Sukhoi fighter bombers screamed in fast and low every minute to deliver half-ton bombs, which fell with terrible grace towards their targets before exploding with a boom which seemed powerful enough to fell the whole city. The bombardment was so overwhelming it felt like a physical presence; it thundered under my feet like giant doors slamming deep in the earth.

I spent days with Russian soldiers in trenches dug out of the sandy soil, and slept side by side with snoring conscripts in bivouacs they'd made in the ruined houses. Their faces were filthy with smoke and dirt, and they swore and spat and laughed uproariously at the slightest joke. One evening as we ate bully beef from tins one young sergeant tossed a grenade to me across the room by the light of a hissing kerosene pressure lamp. The pin was out and the safety handle gone - for a moment I stared at the little steel egg in incomprehension before the room cracked up. It was a dummy.

They were just kids, delirious from danger and war. But when we went out on patrols, crunching house to house through broken glass and piles of bricks, they went silent and tense, as all infantrymen do in battle. Their technique was to move forward until they came under fire, then locate the shooter and call in artillery before scrambling back to their forward base as fast as they could move, praying that the Russian gunners weren't drunk or ranged their rounds short. It was a tactic little changed since the street fighting of Stalingrad. As we settled in for the night the young soldiers would kick off their high pigskin boots and unwind the foot cloths which Russian soldiers wear instead of socks before plumping their fur hats into makeshift pillows. Outside, some other unit was coming under fire, and we could feel the roaring rip-riprip of multiple rocket launchers resonating through the concrete floor. The scene, down to the candle stubs and wooden matchboxes the kids carried in their top pockets and used to light their cardboard-filtered
papiros
cigarettes, could have been from their grandfathers' war.

Today, the steppe country around Stalingrad is empty and silent. The collective farm fields stretch as far as the eye can see, ploughed with crooked furrows and punctuated by halfruined log cabins and long concrete barns. The far bank of the huge river is lost in the mist, and the slow grey water swells and falls as it laps the banks. It seems as though the giant fields and swaying trees are brooding on the strange convulsion which brought so many humans here, half a century ago, to spill their blood on the sandy soil.

I visited Volgograd, as Stalingrad has become, in the winter of 1999. A heavy, soul-sapping blandness covered the city like a dirty snowfall, oppressive as the winter sky which hung low over the landscape. It was depressingly similar to other provincial backwaters, a place where the bitter concentrate of reality withered the spirit like a pickle in a jar of brine.

On Mamayev Kurgan, a low, partly man-made hill
in west Stalingrad, scene of some of the bitterest fighting, stands a monument to Mother Russia. It is a concrete statue 279 feet high depicting a woman brandishing a giant sword aloft, calling for vengeance, or victory. She is a young woman with strong arms and thighs, and she half-turns to call over her shoulder for her children to follow. She is Russia as a vengeful goddess, Russia as a consuming force of nature, demanding impossible sacrifices from her children as her right.