Ivan's War Read online

  Ivan's War

  Catherine Merridale

  They died in vast numbers, eight million men and women driven forward in suicidal charges, shattered by German shells and tanks. They were the soldiers of the Red Army, an exhausted mass of recruits who confronted Europe’s most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. For sixty years, their experiences were suppressed, replaced by patriotic propaganda. We know how the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought. In this ambitious, revelatory history, Catherine Merridale uncovers the harrowing story of who these soldiers were, and how they lived and died during the war.

  Catherine Merridale

  IVAN’S WAR

  Inside the Red Army

  1939–1945

  To my father

  Philip Merridale

  Acknowledgements

  The opportunity to research and to write this book was a privilege, and I am indebted to many people for their generosity, patience, learning and support. The greatest burden was carried by a succession of research assistants and guides in the former Soviet Union, and in particular by the sociologist Oksana Bocharova and the ethnographer Mariya Belova. Elena Stroganova continued to offer wise and imaginative support at all stages, and I am also grateful to Ekaterina Pushkina and Aleksei Shimchuk in Moscow, to Khatuna Chkheidze in Tbilisi, and to Larisa Shipico in Yalta. The material from German archives was collected with the skilful assistance of Carsten Vogelpohl in Freiburg and Thomas Greis in Bristol.

  No project on this scale can succeed without funds, and I was particularly fortunate to secure the support of the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council, whose generosity enabled me to work and travel extensively in the former Soviet Union and then to read, reflect and write without the distractions of my normal university duties. The Council’s research support was invaluable in every way, and I am also grateful to the anonymous assessors who commented on my initial proposal. When I was in the process of completing the manuscript, a further period of leave, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, allowed me several more months’ peace of mind, and I am also grateful to the University of Bristol and to Queen Mary, University of London, for their patience and generous financial support. I owe a particular debt to the British Broadcasting Corporation, and especially to Tim Dee, one of its senior producers, for commissioning the programmes on Stalinism in Georgia and on the Crimea that enabled me to travel and work in two beautiful locations while benefiting from stimulating company and sparkling creative advice.

  One of the rewards of my travels was the opportunity to work in a range of archives and libraries. I would like to record my thanks to the staffs of the State Public History Library in Moscow, the Cambridge University Library, the British Library and the London Library. I would also like to thank the helpful staffs of the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Military Archive, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, and the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History and its affiliate, the Archive of the Komsomol. In Kursk, I was fortunate to work in both the State Archive of Social and Political History and the State Archive of the Kursk region, and a similar kindness enabled me to work efficiently in both the State Archive of the Smolensk region and the Centre for the Documentation of Contemporary History in Smolensk during my short stay there. I owe a great deal to the two researchers who found documents for me in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence in Podolsk, and should like to thank the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg for providing rich information from documents relating to German military intelligence. Finally, I am grateful to the staff of the Russian State Archive of Cinema, Sound and Photography for allowing me to find and reproduce so many of the photographs that illustrate this book.

  The lives of soldiers in war were a new research field for me. Fortunately, experts have been on hand at every stage to offer advice and comment. Among the many people whose conversation has enlivened my thinking I thank Ian Collins, Ira Katznelson, Vladimir Kozlov, Norman Naimark, David Reynolds, Artem Sheinin, Ben Shephard, Steve Smith and Simon Surguladze. Elena Senyavskaya in Moscow, whose own work continues to be an inspiration, was especially helpful in the early stages of research, as was her mentor, the ethnographer and war veteran Lev Pushkarev. I am also grateful to everyone who participated in the two workshops on culture and combat motivation that were organized at the Centre for History and Economics at King’s College, Cambridge, in 2004 and 2005. Thanks to Inga Huld Markan for organizing both meetings, and above all, as ever, to Emma Rothschild for her unfailing encouragement.

  The process of turning such abundant material into a single book was always likely to be daunting. Fortunately, I have been able to count on two prodigiously gifted editors, Neil Belton at Faber and Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan Books, both of whom were on hand from the very first with comments and encouragement. The finished book owes a great deal to each of them, while the writing of it was sustained by their friendship and enthusiasm. I am also indebted to their assistants and talented staff. My agent in London, Peter Robinson, has regularly astonished me with his willingness to read and comment on drafts, sort out tangles, and supply wine and sympathy at difficult moments. I have also been fortunate to work with Emma Parry in New York, whose sympathy – and perceptive conversation – more often seems to come with tea. My father, Philip Merridale, a veteran himself, read a first draft and fearlessly reminded me whenever I was missing the point. Jasper Kingston provided companionship throughout the long process of drafting and editing. Finally, I owe profound thanks to Antony Beevor and Sir Rodric Braithwaite, each of whom made time, in the course of a busy spring in 2005, to read the finished manuscript, to add their expert comments and to correct some of the most egregious mistakes.

  To work with any of these people would be privilege enough, but the unique aspect of this research was the opportunity it provided to meet and get to know the members of an extraordinary generation, the men and women who fought in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War. I am indebted to them all, not least for the inspiration of their stories of lives well-lived, of new hope and reconciliation at the end of so much pain. Two men in particular must be remembered here. Unlike most of their comrades, whose names were altered in the text in order to preserve their privacy, these two, Lev Lvovich Lyakhov and Ilya Natanovich Nemanov, appear without disguise. For one thing, each had said that he was happy to be named, and even that he would be proud to be. They both contributed so much that nothing less was justified. It was with great regret, therefore, that I learned, as I was writing, of each of their deaths. I hope that in some way their stories here will serve as memorials to their courage, intelligence, humour, and wisdom.

  The images that the old soldiers invoked still bring Russia, and even Stalin’s Russia, to life in my mind. I only have to reach for the tape of one of our conversations, for one of their admonitory letters, for a photograph, and the whole world that they described for me unfolds again in memory. For a singularly unmilitary woman, I have developed a surprising taste for old Red Army songs. The thought of the Crimean steppe or of the Dnepr cliffs brings on a sort of homesickness, as does the slightest whiff of archive dust. I have worn out a passport and two pairs of boots in the pursuit of Russia’s war, and even back in England I have often disappeared behind a wall of red-bound volumes printed with Cyrillic text. It is an odd life to ask anyone to share, let alone to understand. For all these reasons, and a great deal more, I owe an incalculable debt to Frank Payne.

  List of Illustrations

  (All illustrations, except those otherwise acknowledged, courtesy of the Russian State Archive of Cinema, Photography and Sound, Moscow.)

  1 A soldier’s farewell to
his wife and children, Don Front, 1941

  2 Local people talking to Red Army soldiers, September 1943

  3 Soldiers at the banya, September 1941

  4 A senior sergeant teaches a young recruit to wrap footcloths

  5 A political officer reads to the troops, 1944

  6 Red Army soldiers receiving their supply of shells before battle, 1941

  7 Artillery moving into firing position, Southern Front, 1942

  8 Soldiers near Leningrad receiving a consignment of books and paper, 1942

  9 Soviet infantry in their trenches, winter 1941

  10 The massacre of Jews at Kovno (photograph found in the pocket of a German NCO captured later in the war, courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)

  11 German soldiers with the bodies of their Russian victims (another photograph that its German owner had cherished, courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)

  12 Artillerymen dining beside their weapons, 1941

  13 Humorous portrayal of the ‘Winter Fritz’, from a Red Army theatrical review called ‘The Thieving Army’, February 1942

  14 Red Army troops repair their boots, 1943

  15 Women launder soldiers’ clothes on the 1st Ukrainian Front, 1943

  16 Sappers from the 193 Dnepr rifle division building a shelter, 10 December 1943

  17 A soldiers’ choir on the Kalinin Front, May 1942

  18 Soviet refugees, a mother and son, rest on their journey, April 1942 (courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)

  19 A medical orderly loads a soldier’s body on to a horse-drawn stretcher, 1943

  20 Dog teams transporting the injured, August 1943

  21 Infantry and tanks near Kharkov, 1943

  22 A scene of destruction (village of Kuyani; courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)

  23 Field post arriving for soldiers in the Kaluga region, 1942

  24 The cook arrives with soldiers’ soup

  25 Tank drivers pose with their mascot, 1944

  26 Red Army soldiers on the Central Front sleeping after battle, 1943

  27 Machine-gunners of the 2nd Baltic Front fording a river, 1944

  28 Russian POW with his prisoner number (courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)

  29 Bonfire of logs and corpses photographed as evidence of German war crimes, Klooga, Estonia (courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)

  30 A column of Soviet troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front arriving in an East Prussian city, 24 January 1945

  31 Infantrymen of a guards regiment stowing their bicycles for shipment, May 1945

  32 The Soviets in Berlin, May 1945

  33 A train carrying demobilized soldiers arrives in Moscow, 1945

  34 Demobilized troops arrive in the town of Ivanovo, 1945

  MAP: THE WAR ON THE EASTERN FRONT

  Introduction: True War Stories

  There is no shade in the centre of Kursk in July. Achieving this required an effort, for Kursk stands on some of the richest soil in Russia, the black earth that stretches south and west into Ukraine. Wherever there is water here there can be poplar trees, and all along the roads that lead to town the campion and purple vetch climb shoulder-high. The land is good for vegetables, too, for the cucumbers that Russians pickle with vinegar and dill, for cabbages, potatoes and squash. On summer Friday afternoons the city empties rapidly. Townspeople go out to their dachas, the wooden cottages that so many Russians love, and the fields are dotted with women stooping over watering cans. The tide reverses on weekdays. The countryside flows inwards to the city. Step away from the centre and you will find street vendors hawking fat cep mushrooms, home-made pies, eggs, cucumbers and peaches. Walk round behind the cathedral, built in the nineteenth century to celebrate Russia’s victory over Napoleon Bonaparte, and there are children squatting on the grass beside a flock of thin brown goats.

  All this exuberance is banished from the central square. A hundred years ago there were buildings and vine-clad courtyards in this space, but these days it is all tarmac. The weather was so hot when I was there that I was in no mood to count my steps – two football pitches, three? – but the square is very, very large. Its scale bears no relation to the buildings on its edge and none at all to local people getting on with life. Taxis – beat-up Soviet models customized with icons, worry-beads and fake-fur seat covers – cluster at the end nearest the hotel. At half-hourly intervals, an old bus, choking under its own weight, lumbers towards the railway station several miles away. But living things avoid the empty, uninviting space. Only on one side, where the public park begins, are there trees, and these are not the shade-producing kind. They are blue-grey pines, symmetrical and spiky to the touch, so rigid that they could be made of plastic. They stand in military lines, for they are Soviet plants, the same as those that grow in any other public space in any other Russian town. Look for them by the statue of Lenin, look near the war memorial. In Moscow you can see them in a row beneath the blood-red walls of the Lyubyanka.

  This central square – Red Square is still its name – acquired its current shape after the Second World War. Kursk fell to the advancing German army in the autumn of 1941. The buildings that were not destroyed during the occupation were mined or pitted with shots in the campaign to retake the place in February 1943. Many were ripped apart one bitter winter when the fuel and firewood ran out. Old Kursk, a provincial centre and home to about 120,000 people in 1939, was almost totally destroyed. The planners who rebuilt it had no interest in conserving its historic charm. What they wanted of the new Red Square was not a space where local people could relax – there were few enough of them left, anyway – but a parade ground for an army whose numbers would always swamp the city’s population. In the summer of 1943, well over a million Soviet men and women took part in a series of battles in Kursk province. The rolling fields that stretch away towards Ukraine saw fighting then that would decide not only Russia’s fate, or even that of the Soviet Union, but the outcome of the European war. When that war was over, the heart of the provincial city was turned into an arena for ceremonies of similarly monstrous size.

  Whatever measure you decide to take, this war defied the human sense of scale. The numbers on their own are overwhelming. In June 1941, when the conflict began, about 6 million soldiers, German and Soviet, prepared to fight along a front that wove more than 1,000 miles through marsh and forest, coastal dune and steppe.1 The Soviets had another 2 million troops already under arms in territories far off to the east. They would need them within weeks. As the conflict deepened over the next two years, both sides would raise more troops to pour into land-based campaigns hungry for human flesh and bone. It was not unusual, by 1943, for the total number of men and women engaged in fighting at any one time on the Eastern Front to exceed 11 million.2

  The rates of loss were similarly extravagant. By December 1941, six months into the conflict, the Red Army had lost 4.5 million men.3 The carnage was beyond imagination. Eyewitnesses described the battlefields as landscapes of charred steel and ash. The round shapes of lifeless heads caught the late summer light like potatoes turned up from new-broken soil. The prisoners were marched off in their multitudes. Even the Germans did not have the guards, let alone enough barbed wire, to contain the 2.5 million Red Army troops they captured in the first five months.4 One single campaign, the defence of Kiev, cost the Soviets nearly 700,000 killed or missing in a matter of weeks.5 Almost the entire army of the pre-war years, the troops that shared the panic of those first nights back in June, was dead or captured by the end of 1941. And this process would be repeated as another generation was called up, crammed into uniform and killed, captured, or wounded beyond recovery. In all, the Red Army was destroyed and renewed at least twice in the course of this war. Officers – whose losses ran at 35 per cent, or roughly fourteen times the rate in the tsarist army of the First World War – had to be found almost as rapidly as men.6 American lend-lease was supplying
the Soviets with razor blades by 1945, but large numbers of the Red Army’s latest reserve of teenagers would hardly have needed them.

  Surrender never was an option. Though British and American bombers continued to attack the Germans from the air, Red Army soldiers were bitterly aware, from 1941, that they were the last major force left fighting Hitler’s armies on the ground. They yearned for news that their allies had opened a second front in France, but they fought on, knowing that there was no other choice. This was not a war over trade or territory. Its guiding principle was ideology, its aim the annihilation of a way of life. Defeat would have meant the end of Soviet power, the genocide of Slavs and Jews. Tenacity came at a terrible price: the total number of Soviet lives that the war claimed exceeded 27 million. The majority of these were civilians, unlucky victims of deportation, hunger, disease or direct violence. But Red Army losses – deaths – exceeded 8 million of the gruesome total.7 This figure easily exceeds the number of military deaths on all sides, Allied and German, in the First World War and stands in stark contrast to the losses among the British and American armed forces between 1939 and 1945, which in each case amounted to fewer than a quarter of a million. The Red Army, as one recruit put it, was a ‘meat-grinder’. ‘They called us, they trained us, they killed us,’ another man recalled.8 The Germans likened it, dismissively, to mass production,9 but the regiments kept marching, even when a third of Soviet territory was in enemy hands. By 1945, the total number of people who had been mobilized into the Soviet armed forces since 1939 exceeded 30 million.10

  The epic story of this war has been told many times, but the stories of those 30 million soldiers still remain unexplored. We know a great deal about British and American troops, and they have become the case studies for much of what is known about combat, training, trauma and wartime survival.11 But when it comes to the war of extremes along the Soviet front, perversely, most of what we know concerns soldiers in Hitler’s army.12 Sixty years have passed since the Red Army triumphed, and in its turn the state for which the Soviet soldiers fought has been swept away, but Ivan, the Russian rifleman, the equivalent of the British Tommy or the German Fritz, remains mysterious. Those millions of conscript Soviet troops, for us, the beneficiaries of their victory, seem characterless. We do not know, for instance, where they came from, let alone what they believed in or the reasons why they fought. We do not know, either, how the experience of this war changed them, how its inhuman violence shaped their own sense of life and death. We do not know how soldiers talked together, what lessons, jokes or folk wisdom they shared. And we have no idea what refuges they kept within their minds, what homes they dreamed of, whom and how they loved.