Ivan's War

1 Marching with Revolutionary Step

1 The music was composed by Dmitry and Daniil Pokrass, but it was Lebedev-Kumach whose name people remembered.

2 There is an account of just such a screening in O. V. Druzhba’s Velikaya otechestvennaya voina v soznanii sovetskogo i postsovetskogo obshchestva: dinamika predstavlenii ob istoricheskom proshlom (Rostov on Don, 2000), p. 22.

3 John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad (London, 1975), pp. 27–8.

4 Druzhba, pp. 22–3.

5 In round figures, roughly 1,700,000 Russian soldiers died, compared with 1,686,000 Germans, although Germany fought for ten months longer and was waging war on two fronts for most of the time. Troops of the British Empire lost about 767,000 killed, and those of the United States about 81,000.

6 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants (Oxford, 1994), pp. 80–1.

7 The children of former kulaks were permitted to join the front line from April 1942. See Chapter 5, p. 144.

8 Lev Kopelev, No Jail for Thought (London, 1977), p. 13.

9 Cited in Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford, 1986), p. 233.

10 Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales (Harmondsworth, 1994), p. 43.

11 A. Werth, Russia at War (London, 1964), pp. 112 and 136.

12 Stephen J. Zaloga and Leland S. Ness, Red Army Handbook, 1939–1945 (Stroud, 2003), p. 157. The number of armoured vehicles in the Soviet tank pool was just over 23,000.

13 See also Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1995), p. 238.

14 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford, 1999), p. 18.

15 Ibid., pp. 90–1.

16 See Kotkin, p. 246.

17 Vyacheslav Kondrat’ev, ‘Oplacheno krov’yu,’ Rodina, 1991, nos. 6–7, p. 6.

18 The details are taken from the excellent biographical summaries in Harold Shukman (Ed.), Stalin’s Generals (London, 1993 and 1997).

19 They were, in fact, more likely to have been Dornier 17s or Heinkel 111s. Kirill’s memory suggests that ‘Messer’ was a generic term for German planes before people began to know them all too intimately.

20 Werth, p. 200.

21 In his classic history of the years leading up to Stalingrad, Antony Beevor suggests that Soviet Jews did not suspect the fascists’ genocidal plans (Stalingrad, p. 56). In reality, while there was little reference to German anti-Semitism after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, and while no one suspected the full extent of the Final Solution, Soviet citizens had been bombarded with evidence of German racism, including anti-Semitism, before 1939, and many Polish and Austrian Jews fleeing Nazi rule confirmed their Soviet cousins’ fears.

22 Detwiler (Ed.), World War II German Military Studies, vol. 19, D-036, pp. 3–4.

23 This claim involved downgrading the achievements of late tsarism. See Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, NJ, 1985).

24 Druzhba, pp. 9–10.

25 Ibid., p. 29.

26 Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 69.

27 On the quality of the training, see William E. Odom, The Soviet Volunteers: Modernization and Bureaucracy in a Public Mass Organization (Princeton, NJ, 1973). See also Reina Pennington, Wings, Women and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (Lawrence, KA, 2001).

28 Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 75.

29 Zaloga and Ness, p. 147.

30 This one was from May 1941. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), 17/125/44, 57.

31 Angelica Balabanoff, cited in Merridale, Night of Stone, p. 148. The same perception has been voiced by citizens of other ideological dictatorships, including the Iranian author Azar Nafizi.

32 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii kurskoi oblasti (GAOPIKO), 1⁄1⁄2807, 14.

33 The NKVD’s own figure for 1939 is 1,672,438. For a discussion of numbers, see Anne Applebaum, Gulag, pp. 515–22.

34 Kopelev, p. 92.

35 V. M. Sidelnikov, compiler, Krasnoarmeiskii fol’klor (Moscow, 1938), pp. 142–3.

36 On irony in war narratives, see Samuel Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (London, 1998), especially p. 151.

37 Druzhba, p. 29.

38 Ibid.

39 E. S. Senyavskaya, ‘Zhenskie sud’by skvoz’ prizmu voennoi tsenzury’, Voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, 7:22, 2001, p. 82.

2 A Fire Through All the World

1 Reports of atrocities are frequent through the war. See Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (RGVA), 9/31/292, 315 (December 1939). On the unburied dead, see RGVA 9/36/3821, 56. As the reporter comments, the sight ‘influenced the political-moral condition of soldiers on their way into attack’.

2 Krivosheev, p. 78. The figure he gives is 126,875 for ‘irrecoverable losses’, a category which includes those who died in action or of wounds and disease as well as those who were reported missing in action.

3 Ibid., p. 79.

4 Ibid., p. 78.

5 Ibid., p. 64.

6 Carl van Dyke, ‘The Timoshenko Reforms: March–July 1940’, in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies (hereafter JSMS), 9:1, March 1996, p. 71.

7 The interview was for a documentary shown on Russian television in 2002.

8 RGVA 9/31/292, 257 (December 1939); 9/36/3821, 7 (December 1939).

9 RGVA 9/31/292, 318.

10 Ibid.

11 Donald S. Detwiler et al. (Eds), World War II German Military Studies (London and New York, 1979), vol. 19, p. 5.

12 Ibid.

13 See Roger R. Reese, Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers: A Social History of the Red Army, 1925–1941 (Lawrence, KA, 1996), pp. 2–3.

14 See Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca, NY, 1990), pp. 21–50.

15 Erickson, ‘The System and the Soldier’, in Paul Addison and Angus Calder (Eds), Time to Kill (London, 1997), p. 234.

16 RGVA 9/31/292, 137.

17 RGVA 9/36/3818 (information from the training camp at Chita), 292–3, 309.

18 O. S. Porshneva, Mentalitet i sotsial’noe povedenie rabochikh, krest’yan i soldat v period pervoi mirovoi voiny (Ekaterinburg, 2000), p. 221.

19 Von Hagen, p. 273.

20 The research was collected for I. N. Shpil’rein, Yazyk krasnoarmeitsa (Moscow and Leningrad, 1928). I am grateful to Dr V. A. Kol’tsova of the Moscow Psychological Institute for introducing me to this material.

21 See Mark von Hagen, ‘Soviet soldiers and officers on the eve of the German invasion: Towards a description of social psychology and political attitudes’, Soviet Union/Union Sovietique, 18, 1–3 (1991), pp. 79–101.

22 Victor Kravchenko, cited in Reese, p. 13.

23 Porshneva, p. 110.

24 Anna Politkovskaya, A Dirty War, trans. John Crowfoot (London, 2001), p. 44.

25 Reese, p. 51.

26 Gabriel Temkin, My Just War (Novato, CA, 1998), p. 104.

27 Reese, p. 4.

28 Ibid., p. 42.

29 RGVA 9/31/292, 2.

30 Ibid., 9.

31 The Belgorod military district housing crisis, which was typical, is described in KPA 1/1/2114, 13.

32 For examples of all these problems, see GAOPIKO, 1/1/2772, 16–17.

33 RGVA 35077/1/6, 16.

34 Ibid., 18.

35 GAOPIKO 1/1/2776, 85.

36 RGVA 9/31/292, 14–21.

37 RGVA 9/36/3818, 142, RGVA 9⁄36⁄4263, 29.

38 RGVA 9/31/292, 69.

39 Reese, p. 50.

40 RGVA 35077⁄1⁄6, 53.

41 Reese, p. 47.

42 Ibid., p. 44. See also Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Smolenskoi oblasti (GASO), 2482⁄1⁄12, 8.

43 RGVA, 35077/1/6, 403.

44 TsAMO, 308/82766/66, 25.

45 PURKKA order no 282, cited in RGVA 9/362/3818, 48.

46 RGVA 9/36/4229, 77–92.

47 Reese, p. 55, citing regulations.

48 RGVA 9/36/4229, 150.

49 These examples are from RGVA 9/36/4282, 147–9.

50 RGVA, 9/31/292, 43.

51 RGVA 9/36/3818, 292.

52 P. N. Knyshevskii (Ed.), Skrytaya pravda voiny: 1941 god. Neizvestnye dokumenty (Moscow, 1992), pp. 14–21.

53 See Zaloga and Ness, pp. 189–91; RGVA, 9/36/4262, 40–2.

54 RGVA 9/36/3818, 206.

55 RGVA 9/36/4262, 40.

56 RGVA 350077/1/6, 403.

57 RGVA 9/31/292, 91.

58 RGVA 9/36/3818, 249, 292–3.

59 Cited in Reese, p. 63.

60 Ibid., p. 124.

61 Stalin’s Generals, p. 255.

62 Knyshevskii, p. 218.

63 Roger R. Reese, ‘The Red Army and the Great Purges,’ in J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge, 1993), p. 213.

64 RGVA 9/31/292, 46–7. Monthly suicide statistics for 1939 appear in the same file.

65 Knyshevskii, p. 219.

66 Reese, Reluctant Soldiers, pp. 163–4.

67 RGVA 9/36/4282, 148 (January 1940).

68 RGVA 7/36/3818, 123–4.

69 Reese, Reluctant Soldiers, p. 93.

70 van Dyke, p. 79.

71 Werth, p. 71.

72 Interview, Kiev, April 2003.

73 Cited in von Hagen, Soviet Soldiers, p. 99.

74 L. N. Pushkarev, Po dorogam voiny (Moscow, 1995), p. 11.

75 The Red Army’s participation here is described in RGVA 9/31/292, 160–1.

76 Ibid., 209.

77 Ibid., 181–2.

78 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1406, 4.

79 M. Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941‒1944 (Houndmills, 2000), p. 9.

80 RGVA 9/31/292, 279.

81 TsAMO, 308/82766/66, 16, refers to directive of GlavPURKA of 14 January 1941.

82 Vestnik arkhivista, 2001: 3, 56–9.

83 GAOPIKO, 1/1/2772, 16 (22 April 1941).

84 TsAMO, 308/82766/66, 17.

85 RGASPI, 17/125/44, 23.

86 TsAMO, 308/82766/66, 17 (15 January 1941).

87 RGVA 9/31/292, 75.

88 For a discussion of this issue, see Garthoff, p. 231.

89 RGVA 9/31/292, 288 (15 December 1939).

90 Ibid., 250–1.

91 On primary groups, see the article by Shils and Janowitz cited above (p. 343).

92 Reese, p. 171.

93 On the lack of team spirit, see RGVA, 9/36/3821, 54.

94 RGVA 9/31/292, 245.

95 Ibid., 288 (15 December 1939).

96 RGVA 9/36/3821, 44.

97 RGVA 9/31/292, 255 (2 December 1939).

98 RGVA 9/36/3821, 2.

99 RGVA 9/31/292, 361.

100 Ibid., 351.

101 RGVA 9/36/3821, 8.

102 Krivosheev, p. 63.

103 RGVA 9/31/292, 290.

104 Ibid., 288 (15 December 1939).

105 Ibid., 253 (2 December 1939).

106 Ibid., 363.

107 Ibid., 360.

108 Ibid., 374.

109 Garthoff, p.236.

110 RGVA 9/36/4282, 47.

3 Disaster Beats Its Wings

1 Evseev’s memoir is cited in P. N. Knyshevskiiet al., Skrytaya pravda voiny: 1941 god. Neizvestnye dokumenty (Moscow, 1992), pp. 330–1.

2 John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad (London, 1975), p. 92.

3 Ibid., p. 112.

4 Knyshevskii, p. 331.

5 Erickson, Stalingrad, p. 104.

6 Werth, p. 150.

7 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI), 1710/3/49, 8.

8 Rossiya XX vek: Dokumenty. 1941 god v 2 knigakh, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1998), p. 422.

9 Erickson, Stalingrad, p. 106.

10 RGALI, 1710/3/49, 9.

11 Erickson, Stalingrad, pp. 118–9.

12 Timoshenko replaced the vain and inept Voroshilov after the Finnish debacle in May 1940.

13 Pavlov’s testimony at his interrogation on 7 July, reprinted in 1941 god, pp. 455–68.

14 Ibid., p. 456.

15 Erickson, Stalingrad, p. 116.

16 1941 god, p. 459.

17 Cited in Werth, pp. 152–3.

18 Ibid., pp. 153–4.

19 Pavlov’s testimony in 1941 god, p. 459.

20 Werth, p. 157; Stalin’s Generals, p. 49.

21 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2(2), p. 58 (text of order 270, where Boldin is singled out for praise).

22 1941 god, pp. 472–3.

23 Werth, p. 181.

24 1941 god, pp. 434–5.

25 Interview with Shevelev, Kursk, July 2003.

26 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii kurskoi oblasti (GAOPIKO), 1/1/2636, 40–2.

27 Moskva voennaya, p. 49.

28 Ibid., p. 43.

29 Druzhba, p. 302.

30 RGASPI, 17/125/44, 70, 72.

31 Mikhail Ivanovich, interview, Moscow province, April 2001.

32 Moskva voennaya, p. 51.

33 GAOPIKO, 1/1/2636, 41.

34 RGASPI, 17/125/44, 69.

35 Moskva voennaya, p. 52.

36 Detwiler (Ed.), vol. 19, D-036, pp. 3–4.

37 The story of one small and doomed nationalist group was related to me in a series of interviews in Tbilisi, September 2002.

38 GAOPIKO, 1/1/2636, 43.

39 Moskva voennaya, p. 53.

40 RGASPI, 17/125/44, 69–71.

41 Moskva voennaya, p. 52.

42 Ibid., pp. 53–5.

43 GAOPIKO, 1/1/2636, 51–2.

44 Knyshevskii, p. 59.

45 Ibid., pp. 60–1.

46 RGASPI, 17/125/44, 71–3.

47 Moskva voennaya, p. 55.

48 They shot them all. When the Germans took the city, the bodies were exposed in the prison yards for local people to see. It was an effective propaganda move that turned an already anti-Soviet city even more strongly against Stalin.

49 RGASPI-M, 33/1/360, 10–11.

50 Druzhba, p. 21.

51 Werth, p. 165.

52 Comments reported in Moskva voennaya, p. 68.

53 Ibid., p. 69.

54 GAOPIKO, 1/1/2638, 30.

55 GAOPIKO, 1/1/2807, 9.

56 GAOPIKO, 1/1/2636, 50–1.

57 GAOPIKO, 1/1/2807, 9.

58 Werth, p. 149.

59 Ibid., pp. 166–7.

60 GASO, R1500/1/1, 2–3.

61 Ibid., 6.

62 Knyshevskii, pp. 14–16.

63 Report to Mekhlis, July 1941. Cited in Knyshevskii, p. 66.

64 Temkin, p. 38.

65 Cited in Werth, p. 148.

66 1941 god, p. 499.

67 Erickson, Stalingrad, p. 162.

68 Zaloga and Ness, p. 69.

69 Knyshevskii, p. 204.

70 Detwiler (Ed.), vol. 19, C-058, pp. 18–19.

71 ‘O boevykh deistviyakh 6 armii pri vykhode is okruzheniya’, Voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, 7 (22), 2001, p. 109.

72 M. V. Mirskii, Obyazany zhizn’yu (Moscow, 1991), p. 19.

73 Knyshevskii, p. 65.

74 Erickson, Stalingrad, p. 121.

75 Knyshevskii, p. 266.

76 Ibid., pp. 264–5.

77 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 6, p. 61. Also barred were soldiers who had escaped encirclement ‘in small groups or singly’.

78 Krivosheev, p. 114.

79 1941 god, p. 469. The mass production of the crude missiles was ordered by secret order no. 631 of the GKO.

80 Knyshevskii, pp. 104–6.

81 Detwiler (Ed.), vol. 19, p. 123.

82 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 6, pp. 42–3 (order no. 081).

83 Ibid., p. 47 (no. 085).

84 Vstrechi s proshlym, 1988, no. 6, p. 443.

85 RGASPI, 17/125/87, 1.

86 RGASPI, 17/125/47, 47.

87 RGASPI, 17/125/47, 23.

88 Werth’s account of the battle is largely positive, describing it as the first Soviet victory of the war. For a different view, see Beevor, Stalingrad, pp. 28–9.

89 Cited in Werth, p. 172; Knyshevskii, p. 203.

90 Druzhba, p. 20.

91 Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44 (Houndmills, 2000), p. 26.

92 Knyshevskii, p. 55.

93 Ibid., p. 304.

94 Velikaya otechestvennaya, vol. 2, part 2, pp. 58–60.

95 GASO, R1500/1/1, 6.

4 Black Ways of War

1 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 15: 4(1), Moscow, 1997, p. 40. The captured German document is Hoepner’s ‘Storming the Gates of Moscow: 14 October–5 December 1941’, dated December 1941.

2 Ibid., p. 41.

3 Krivosheev, p. 139; Erickson, ‘The System’, p. 225.

4 S. G. Sidorov, Trud voennoplennykh v SSSR 1939–1956 gg. (Volgograd, 2001), p. 60.

5 Ibid., p. 61.

6 Erickson, p. 233.

7 Erickson, ‘The System,’ p. 238.

8 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 4 (1), p. 41.

9 Werth, pp. 238–9.

10 V. I. Yutov and others, Ot brigady osobogo naznacheniya k ‘vympely’, 1941–1981 (Moscow, 2001), p. 45.

11 Interview with Mikhail Ivanovich, April 2001; M. M. Gorinov et al. (Eds), Moskva voennaya, 1941–1945: memuary i arkhivnye dokumenty (Moscow, 1995), p. 103.

12 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 4 (1), p. 56.

13 Overy, p. 118.

14 A. E. Gordon, ‘Moskovskoe narodnoe opolchenie 1941 goda glazami uchastnika’, Otechestvennaya istoriya, 2001: 3, pp. 158–61.

15 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii kurskoi oblasti (GAOPIKO), 1/1/2773, 18–21.

16 Gordon, pp. 158–63.

17 Report dated 14 January 1942, Knyshevskii, p. 227.

18 Ibid., p. 226.

19 Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Oberkommando des Heeres, RH2-1924, p. 23.

20 Overy, pp. 116–7.

21 Knyshevskii, p. 184. Report from Volokolamsk Front, 27 October 1941.

22 N. D. Kozlov, Obshchestvennye soznanie v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny (St. Petersburg, 1995), p. 24.

23 Knyshevskii, p. 313.

24 Moskva voennaya, p. 167.

25 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 2 (2), pp. 108–9.

26 Moskva voennaya, pp. 167–8.

27 RGALI, 1814/4/5, 42.

28 Tsentr dokumentatsii noveishei istorii smolenskoi oblasti (TsDNISO), 8/1/212, 4.

29 Knyshevskii, pp. 187–8.

30 Omer Bartov, in his study of the Wehrmacht, also suggests that harsh discipline, a raw ideological belief and the fear of death created bonds of a kind between the men. See The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (Houndmills, 1985), pp. 144–5.

31 Archive of the Komsomol, hereafter RGASPI-M, 33/1/360, 3–8.

32 TsDNISO, 8/2/99, 1–2.

33 E. M. Snetkova, Pis’ma very, nadezhdy, lyubvy. Pis’ma s fronta (Moscow, 1999), p. 1.

34 RGASPI-M, 33/1/276, 4.

35 Stroki, opalennye voiny. Sbornik pisem voennykh let, 1941–1945, 2 izd. (Belgorod, 1998), pp. 115–6.

36 Gordon, pp. 160–1.

37 Alexander Nevsky defeated the Teutonic knights in 1242. Dmitry Donskoi’s defeat of the Tatars followed in 1380. Minin and Pozharsky drove out the Poles in the seventeenth century and the last two generals, Suvorov and Kutuzov, led the campaign against Napoleon in 1812.

38 Stalin, ‘Rech’ na parade krasnoi armii’, in O velikoi otechestvennoi voine Sovetskogo Soyuza (Moscow, 1947), pp. 37–40.

39 Moskva voennaya, pp.44–5.

40 Werth, p. xvi.

41 Kursk NKVD report, GAOPIKO, 3605/1/307, 1–3.

42 TsDNISO, 8/1/25, 7–8.

43 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv smolenskoi oblasti (GASO), 1500/1/1, 16–18.

44 See Vasil Bykov, ‘Za Rodinu! Za Stalina!’, Rodina, 1995, no. 5, pp. 30–7.

45 On swearing, see E. S. Senyavskaya, Frontovoe pokolenie: istoriko-psikhologicheskoe issledovanie, 1941–1945 (Moscow, 1995), p. 83.

46 Memorial essay no. 2272: ‘Memoirs of Valish Khusanovich Khabibulin,’ Ed. Nina Pavlovna Bredenkova (Tyumen’ 2002).

47 TsDNISO, 1555/1/3, 3–5.

48 Knyshevskii, p. 355.

49 TsDNISO, 1555/1/3, 5.

50 Moskva voennaya, p. 167.

51 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1395, 6.

52 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 2 (2), p. 155.

53 See photo on facing page, which is a typical representation.

54 Sidorov, p. 60.

55 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 2 (2), p. 114–5.

56 Ibid., p. 155.

57 Ibid., pp. 114–5; 193–4.

58 Ibid., p. 166, 6, p. 120.

59 Werth, p. 370.

60 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 2 (2), p. 73.

61 Ibid., pp. 252–3; 166 (on thieving).

62 For an example from the battle of Moscow, see Knyshevskii, p. 184.

63 Cited in Knyshevskii, p. 164.

64 TsDNISO, 1555/1/3, 3.

65 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 6, p. 97, order no. 307 of Glav PURKKA.

66 TsAMO, 206/298/2, 15, 49–50.

67 Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, RH2-124, p. 22.

68 Werth, p. 422.

69 GASO, 1/1/1500, p. 15.

70 TsDNISO, 8/2/82, 50.

71 Werth, pp. 705–7.

72 RGASPI, 17/125/169, 5–8.

73 TsDNISO, 8/1/25, 12.

74 ‘Vystuplenie po radio’, 3 July 1941, in Stalin, O velikoi otechestvennoi voine, p. 15.

75 TsDNISO, 8/1/25, 12.

76 See John A. Armstrong (Ed.), Soviet Partisans in World War II (Madison, 1964), p. 3.

77 On field post in general, see Velikaya otechestvennaya, 6, pp. 76 and 134.

78 Ponomarenko’s figures, from RGASPI 69/1/19, 129.

79 The ‘big country’ – bol’shaya zemlya – was the partisans’ term for the unoccupied part of the USSR.

80 GASO, 1500/1/1, 25–35; TsDNISO, 8/2/99, 17.

81 Armstrong, p. 170.

82 Pis’ma s fronta i na front 1941–1945 (Smolensk, 1991), pp. 77 and 94–5.

83 Stalin, O velikoi otechestvennoi voine, p. 43.

84 Bundesarchiv, RH2-1924, p. 21.

85 Overy, p. 117.

86 V. L. Bogdanov et al. (Eds), Zhivaya pamyat’: pravda o voine, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1995), pp. 392–6.

87 Rodina, 1995, no. 5, p. 68.

88 RGALI, 1814/4/5, 32.

89 Werth, pp. 388–9.

90 Information from the Adzhimuskai museum and from local people in Kerch.

91 Evseev, cited in Knyshevskii, pp. 334–7.

92 Werth, p. 398.

93 Rodina, 1991, nos. 6–7, p. 68.

94 Ibid., p. 60 (voenyurist Dolotsev).

95 Zhivaya pamyat, (diary of Vladimir Ivanov), p. 388.

5 Stone by Stone

1 RGVA, 32925/1/504, 34.

2 See Chuikov’s account in Werth, pp. 444–5.

3 Rodina, 1995, no. 5, p. 60.

4 Interview with Lev Lvovich, Moscow, April 2002; RGVA, 32925/1/504, 34.

5 I have cited one respondent for each of these explanations of wartime cowardice. In fact, almost every veteran interviewed blamed generic central Asians or Ukrainians for the army’s failures at different points in the war. Most also gave examples of ‘good’ representatives of those groups. Indeed, few could name a ‘bad’ one among the people they knew personally.

6 Special orders concerning the national minorities in the army, 17 September 1942. Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 6, pp. 173–4.

7 See Beevor, Stalingrad, pp. 84–5.

8 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 6, p. 153.

9 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2 (2), pp. 276–7. According to more recent Soviet figures, the true number was at least 90 million. See Sidorov, p. 60.

10 Cited in Vasily Chuikov, The Beginning of the Road, trans. Harold Silver (London, 1963), p. 175.

11 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2 (2), p. 278.

12 GASO, 1/1/1500, 31.

13 Cited in Roger R. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991 (London, 2000), p. 115.

14 All figures cited by Overy, p. 160.

15 Erickson, ‘The System’, p. 244.

16 Rodina, 1995, no. 5, p. 61.

17 Gorin’s story featured in a television documentary shown in Moscow in 2002, but he was kind enough to repeat it for me, and to answer questions, in Moscow in the same year.

18 Erickson, ‘The System’, p. 236. This figure is almost certainly too low. At least a million prisoners were released from the Gulag and sent to the front, and most of these served in penal units of some kind, though some were drafted into regular units and used for dangerous tasks like clearing mines by hand. See Chapter 6, below, pp. 174‒6.

19 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 6, pp. 176–7.

20 Ibid., p. 157.

21 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2 (2), 351.

22 See also Overy, p. 160.

23 Krivosheev, pp. 125–6; Werth, p. 408.

24 TsAMO, 1128/1/4, 61.

25 See Volkogonov’s biographical essay in Stalin’s Generals, pp. 317–21.

26 Erickson, Stalingrad, p. 349.

27 Anfilov’s biographical essay in Stalin’s Generals, p. 64.

28 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 6, p. 176.

29 Ibid., p. 161.

30 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2 (2), pp. 372–3.

31 Order no. 307 of the Defence Commissariat, ibid., pp. 326–7.

32 Chuikov, The Beginning, p. 284.

33 TsAMO, 1128/1/4, 61.

34 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2 (2), p. 359.

35 For examples, see ibid., pp. 281–3 and 318–20.

36 TsAMO, 206/298/4, 6. For more on the play, see also Werth, pp. 423–6.

37 Temkin, p. 137; Werth, p. 622. In fact, the T-34 had a diesel engine, which made it less prone to combustion than most previous Soviet models, although plenty of T-34s would burn in combat conditions through the war.

38 See Overy, p. 195.

39 Ibid., p. 197. Veterans remember both these brands by name today.

40 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2 (2), p. 287.

41 Svetlana Alexiyevich, War’s Unwomanly Face, trans. Keith Hammond and Lyudmila Lezhneva (Moscow, 1988), p. 128.

42 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 36.

43 Garthoff, p. 249.

44 Van Creveld, p. 112; RGASPI, 17/125/78, 123.

45 On decorations, see Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2 (2), pp. 360–1; on shoulder boards, see Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2 (3), pp. 30–1.

46 TsAMO, 523/41119c/5, 51 (relates to an artillery regiment).

47 Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, RH-2, 2467, p. 127.

48 V. V. Pokhlebkin, Velikaya voina i nesostoyavshiisya mir. 1941–1945–1994 (Moscow, 1997), p. 150.

49 Cited in Werth, p. 474.

50 Alexiyevich, p. 96.

51 Stalin and the GKO approved the recruitment of women into male combat roles in April 1942. See Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2 (2), pp. 212–3 and 214–5.

52 RGASPI-M, 1/47/26, 175.

53 For a telling discussion of this, see Chuikov, The Beginning, pp. 221–34. The marshal describes the work of women, but always with the condescending tone of one who saw them as mere girls.

54 RGASPI-M, 1/47/49, 87.

55 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2 (2), 285.

56 Alexiyevich, pp. 46–7.

57 The first women snipers were trained from February 1943.

58 Alexiyevich, p. 14.

59 Reina Pennington, Wings, includes a chapter tracing Raskova’s career.

60 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv rossiiskoi federatsii (GARF), R9550/6/62.

61 Interview, Kaluga, August 2002.

62 RGASPI-M, 33/1/563, 7.

63 Pis’ma s fronta i na front, p. 87.

64 Van Creveld, p. 73.

65 Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 1, pp. 52–3.

66 GASO, 2482/1/12, 12.

67 RGASPI-M, 33/1/19, 52.

68 Ibid., 72.

69 Ibid., 85.

70 Ibid., 84.

71 GASO, 2482/1/12, 7.

72 RGASPI-M, 33/1/19, 101.

73 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2 (2), 281.

74 RGASPI-M, 33/1/19, 36.

75 Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 1, p. 56.

76 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 6.

77 Po obe storony fronta: Pis’ma sovetskikh i nemetskikh soldat, 1941–1945 (Moscow, 1995), p. 43.

78 RGASPI-M, 33/1/360, 106.

79 Chuikov, The Beginning, p. 66.

80 Ibid., pp. 78–9.

81 Werth, pp. 448–9; Beevor, Stalingrad, pp. 104–6.

82 Cited in Werth, p. 450.

83 Cited in Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 201.

84 I. K. Yakovlev et al. (Eds), Vnutrennye voiska v velikoi otechestvennoi voine, 1941–45 gg., dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 1975), p. 16.

85 The version I heard, related by a retired general, was allegedly based on research in secret military archives. Until scholars can see the documents, the rumours will persist.

86 Krivosheev, p. 125. The total death toll for Soviet troops and airmen is estimated at 470,000 (Overy, p. 212). For the entire campaign, 17 July 1942 to 2 February 1943, the total of Soviet servicemen killed, wounded and missing, according to Krivosheev, was 1,129,619.

87 I heard this from several veterans, and a politer version appears in Temkin, p. 90.

88 Viktor Astaf’ev, ‘Snachala snaryady, potom lyudi’, in Rodina, 1991, nos. 6–7, p. 55.

89Alexiyevich, p. 59. The translator may have meant a mortar rather than a mine.

90 Interview, Kiev, May 2003.

91 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 8.

92 Ibid., 18–19.

93 Chuikov, The Beginning, p. 159.

94 For an analogy, drawn from a different war, see Philip Caputo’s brilliant account in A Rumor of War (London, 1985), p. 268.

95 John Garrard and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (New York, 1996), p. 159.

96 Werth, p. 467.

97 Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 195.

98 Cited in Chuikov, The Beginning, p. 253.

99 Krivosheev, p. 127.

100 Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 232.

101 Ibid., p. 249.

102 Ibid., p. 263.

103 TsDNISO, 8/1/25, 5.

104 Po obe storony, p. 194.

105 Ibid., pp. 195–6.

106 See, for example, Werth, p. 554.

107 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2 (3), pp. 36–7.

108 Werth, p. 560.

109 Po obe storony, p. 213.

110 Werth, p. 468.

111 TsAMO, 206/298/4, 11.

112 Cited in Werth, p. 490.

113 Politruks agree on this, and so, in an assessment of morale, does the historian of Soviet warfare Amnon Sella. See The Value of Life in Soviet Warfare (London, 1992), p. 170.

114 RGVA, 32925/1/504, 29.

115 RGASPI, 17/125/214, 97.

116 See Peter Kenez, ‘Black and White,’ in Richard Stites (Ed.), Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (Bloomington, 1995), p. 162.

117 Pis’ma s fronta i na front, p. 88.

118 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 66.

119 Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, RH2-2467, p. 54.

120 Cited by Vasil Bykov in ‘Za Rodinu! Za Stalina!’.

121 RGASPI-M, 1/47/24, 26–34.

122 RGVA 32925/1/514, 48.

123 RGVA 32925/1/504, 4 and 20.

124 Ibid., 31.

125 Tens of thousands of Gulag inmates applied to be permitted to serve at the front for the same reason. Their service would not only redeem them but reinstate their families as well. See Kozlov, Obshchestvennye soznanie, p. 11; Druzhba, p. 30; Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 2001), p. 148.

126 Viktor Astaf’ev’s novel Proklyaty i ubity, reissued Moscow 2002, presents this point of view in harrowing detail.

127 The first attacks in November were actually aimed at Romanians, but the point was to get at the enemy. On hatred of the Germans, see L. N. Pushkarev, ‘Pis’mennaya forma bytovaniya frontovogo fol’klora,’ Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, no. 4, 1995, pp. 27–9. Pushkarev, the ethnographer and historian, was at the front himself.

128 See Werth, pp. 411–4.

129 Simonov’s ‘Kill Him!’ is quoted in Werth, p. 417.

130 RGALI, 1828/1/25, 35.

131 Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 219.

132 Belov’s diary, ‘Frontovoi dnevnik N. F. Belova’ (hereafter Belov) is published in full in Vologda, issue 2 (Vologda, 1997), pp. 431–76; For this comment, see Belov, pp. 446–7.

133 Belov, p. 442.

134 GASO, 1/1/1500, 37–38.

135 RGVA, 32925/1/504, 94; Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 264.

136 RGASPI-M, 33/1/157, 2.

137 Sidorov, pp. 83–5.

138 RGASPI-M, 33/1/157, 3–4.

139 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 73.

6 A Land Laid Waste

1 ‘Prikaz verkhovnogo glavnokomanduyushchego’, 23 February 1943, in Stalin, O Velikoi otechestvennoi voine, pp. 89–90.

2 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 2 (3), p. 97.

3 At Stalingrad itself, German losses were 91,000 prisoners of war and 147,000 dead. Meanwhile, the November–February counter-offensive at Stalingrad alone, excluding the losses sustained in August–October, cost the Red Army approximately 485,735 killed, missing or wounded. Figures from John Erickson and Ljubica Erickson, The Eastern Front in Photographs (London, 2001), p. 137.

4 TsAMO, 223 SD/1/6, 10, gives details of the non-reporting practices of rifle divisions in January–February 1943.

5 Night of Stone, p. 274.

6 For an example relating to fear among the Panfilov men, see RGASPI, 17/125/185, 23. More generally, see D. L. Babichenko, Literaturnyi Front (Moscow, 1994).

7 Ilya Nemanov, interview, Smolensk, October 2002.

8 Druzhba, pp. 33–4.

9 Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 2, pp. 50–1.

10 Lev Lvovich, second interview, Moscow, July 2003. On Samoilov, see above, p. 148.

11 Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 2, p. 57.

12 E. S. Senyavskaya, Chelovek v voine, p. 80; RGALI 1814/6/144, 21 (Diaries of Konstantin Simonov).

13 Stouffer, vol. 2, p. 186.

14 Rodina, 1991, nos 6–7, p. 53.

15 L. N. Pushkarev, Po dorogam voiny: Vospominaniya fol’klorista-frontovika (Moscow, 1995), pp. 34–42.

16 Sidelnikov, p. 9.

17 Translation by Lubov Yakovleva, Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry, pp. 623–4.

18 Ya I. Gudoshnikov, Russkie narodnye pesny i chastushki Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (Tambov, 1997), p. 6.

19 Alexiyevich, p. 46.

20 Interview with Nina Emil’yanova, Moscow, 1998.

21 Sidelnikov, p. 9; Alexiyevich, p. 46.

22 Pushkarev, Po dorogam voiny, pp. 22–3.

23 Kozlov, p. 105.

24 ‘The Crossing’, trans. April FitzLyon, Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry, pp. 561–7.

25 Gudoshnikov, pp. 83–9.

26 Ibid., p. 5.

27 RGALI, 1828/1/25, 35.

28 Temkin, p. 90.

29 Interview, Kursk, July 2003.

30 Van Creveld, Fighting Power, discusses the way lessons were learned.

31 Erickson, ‘The System’, p. 239.

32 On the United States’ army, see Van Creveld, Fighting Power, especially pp. 77‒9.

33 Testimony cited in Senyavskaya, Frontovoe pokolenie, p. 85.

34 The petitions often served as evidence in alleged cases of desertion. See, for example, RGVA, 32925/1/526.

35 Samoilov, ‘Lyudi,’ part 1, p. 69.

36 See Rodina, 95, no. 5, p. 60; the same stories were related to me by another shtrafnik, Ivan Gorin, in 2002. See also Victor Astaf’ev’s controversial novel, Proklyaty i ubity (Moscow, 2002).

37 Interview with Ivan Gorin, November 2002.

38 Rodina, 95:5, p. 63.

39 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 2 (3), pp. 109–10.

40 Temkin, p. 34.

41 Stalin’s Generals, p. 354.

42 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 4 (4), pp. 17–18.

43 Erickson, ‘The System’, p. 246.

44 M. V. Mirskii, Obyazany zhizn’yu (Moscow, 1991), p. 193.

45 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 4 (4), p. 7; Overy, p. 201; Rokossovskii, Soldatskii dolg, pp. 207–10.

46 Suvorov, p. 99.

47 RGASPI-M, 33⁄1⁄1405, 1.

48 Pis’ma s fronta i na front, p. 90.

49 Belov, p. 452.

50 Ibid., p. 453.

51 Bundesarchiv, RH2/2624.

52 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kurskoi oblasti (GAKO), R 3322/10/21, 15.

53 GAKO, R 3322/10/21, 1–39.

54 Ibid., 1–3.

55 GAOPIKO, 1/1/3478, 14–15.

56 GAKO, R3322/10/5, 44.

57 GAKO, R3322/10/4, 511; 3322/10/5, 44.

58 GAKO, R 3322/9/106, 12–13.

59 GAKO, R3322/10/8, 27–33.

60 GAKO, R3322/10/14, 58–64.

61 GARF, R9550/6/339 (on nettles) and 527 (wild meat).

62 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1404, 16.

63 GAKO, R3322/10/1, 55.

64 Stroki, opalennye voiny (Belgorod, 1998), p. 71.

65 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 4(4), p. 7.

66 Zaloga and Ness, pp. 163–80; Velikaya otechestvennaya, 4 (4), p. 7.

67 Zaloga and Ness, p. 169.

68 In 1943, Soviet factories produced 15,529 of the standard T-34 tanks and (in December) 283 of the modified T-34-85s. Ibid., p. 180.

69 Ibid., p. 174.

70 See John Erickson, The Road to Berlin (London, 1983), p. 109.

71 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 4 (4), p. 7; Erickson, ‘The System’, p. 239.

72 Po obe storony fronta, p. 52.

73 Erickson, ‘The System’, pp. 239–40.

74 Detwiler (Ed.), vol. 19, C-058, p. 23.

75 Ibid.

76 Po obe storony fronta, p. 52.

77 L. N. Pushkarev, ‘Pis’mennaya forma bytovaniya frontovogo fol’klora,’ in Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie, 1995, no. 4, p. 30.

78 Po obe storony fronta, p. 51.

79 Krivosheev’s figures for 1943–5 suggest that losses among tank crews were roughly half those among riflemen (although the catastrophic months of 1941–2 are not included for lack of information), but in view of the enormous death rates in both cases, the statistic is not comforting. See Krivosheev, pp. 218–9, Table 79 (Red Army Losses by Arm of Service).

80 Erickson, ‘The System’, p. 239; see also Reina Pennington’s contribution to the same volume, especially pp. 257–8.

81 For descriptions, see John Ellis, The Sharp End, pp. 153–4.

82 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 4 (4), p. 26.

83 Ibid., p. 33.

84 Belov, p. 454.

85 Ibid., 456.

86 Overy, p. 203.

87 Ibid., 203.

88 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 4 (4), p. 250.

89 Belov, p. 456.

90 Krivosheev, p. 132.

91 M. V. Ovsyannikov (Ed.), 55 let Kurskoi bitve (Kursk, 1998), memoir of B. Ivanov, pp. 276–7.

92 Erickson, Berlin, pp. 104–5.

93 55 let Kurskoi bitve, memoir of B. Bryukhov, pp. 265–6.

94 Interview, Prokhorovka, July 2003.

95 55 let Kurskoi bitve, B. Bryukhov, pp. 265–6.

96 Po obe storony fronta, p. 53.

97 55 let Kurskoi bitve, memoir of B. Ivanov, p. 277; V. V. Drobyshev (Ed.), Nemtsy o russkikh (Moscow, 1995), p. 28.

98 Alexiyevich, p. 107.

99 Erickson, Berlin, p. 108.

100 Overy, p. 211.

101 Belov, p. 456.

102 Pis’ma s fronta i na front, pp. 90–1.

103 Bundesarchiv, RH2/2624.

104 Belov had observed this as early as July; Belov, p. 453.

105 Nemtsy o russkikh, p. 28.

106 Ibid., pp. 32–3.

107 Belov, p. 457.

108 Cited in Werth, p. 685.

109 Pis’ma s fronta i na front, p. 91.

7 May Brotherhood Be Blessed

1 Glantz and House, When Titans Clashed, p. 180.

2 Stalin, O velikoi otechestvennoi voine, pp. 117–20. In his assessment of the war economy, Richard Overy, among others, follows Stalin in conceding that only a centrally planned system of this type could have delivered the levels of output needed to sustain the Soviet war effort. See Overy, p. 227. This may be true, but it neither vindicates the brutality of the system nor establishes Stalin as the Soviet Union’s wartime saviour.

3 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 50.

4 Ibid., 109–10.

5 Po obe storony fronta, p. 86.

6 V. I. Ermolenko, Voennyi dnevnik starshego serzhanta (Belgorod, 2000), p. 37.

7 Van Creveld, p. 83.

8 Rodina, 1991, nos. 6–7, p. 53.

9 The poem is ‘Remember, Alyosha’, trans. Lyubov Yakovleva, Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry, pp. 619–21.

10 On SMERSh, which was established on 13 May 1942 and was independent of the NKVD, see Viktor Suvorov (pseud.), Inside the Soviet Army (New York, 1982), p. 240.

11 The word comes from the German Hilfswillige, or volunteer helper.

12 On the oppression of labour battalions, see Temkin, p. 53. On hiwis, and their confusion with Vlasovites, see Kopelev, p. 98.

13 Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 1, pp. 52 and 67.

14 Glantz and House, p. 180.

15 TsDNISO, 6/1/1484, 173 (refers to Smolensk region in April 1944).

16 Belov, p. 465.

17 Ermolenko, p. 36.

18 Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 2, p. 56.

19 Po obe storony fronta, p. 99.

20 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 52.

21 GASO, 2482/1/1, 35.

22 Snetkova, p. 38.

23 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 107.

24 Leave was sometimes used as a reward for outstanding bravery, but it was usually granted only after a man was so badly wounded that he would no longer be needed. At the time of Stalingrad (9 October 1942), provision was made for more regular leave (especially for officers), but in practice it was treated as a reward, not a right. TsAMO, 1128/1/4, 32.

25 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1189, 3.

26 See above, p. 127.

27 Pis’ma s fronta i na front, pp. 95–6.

28 Ibid., p. 97.

29 GAKO, 3322/10/21, 296.

30 GAKO, 3322/10/22, 2, 9 and 10.

31 GAOPIKO, 1/1/3478, 7. The CC resolution is reprinted in the same file, ll. 85 ff.

32 TsDNISO, 6/1/1697, 190.

33 GAKO, 3322/10/46, 30 and 41.

34 Pis’ma s fronta i na front, 98. A pood weighs about thirty-six pounds. Even if they supplemented their diet with potatoes, Masha’s family would get through a pood of flour in two months.

35 TsDNISO, 6/1/1695, 144, 219.

36 RGVA, 32925/1/515, 70.

37 TsDNISO, 8/2/109, 15.

38 TsDNISO, 6/1/1484, 33 and 39.

39 See, for example, GAKO, R 3322/10/1, which defines their role in February 1943, following the city’s liberation.

401 Garrard and Garrard, Bones, p. 155.

41 This preference, which survivors attest to, was also noted by local police and the officials in charge of trophies.

42 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1406, 52.

43 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1208, 71.

44 TsAMO, 136/24416/24, 275.

45 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1494, 48.

46 Stroki, opalennye voiny, p. 182.

47 RGVA, 32925/1/514, 47.

48 Yu. N. Afanas’ev (Ed.), Drugaya voina (Moscow, 1996), p. 433. This source claims that the comparable increase among British troops was 200 per cent.

49 Armstrong, p. 164.

50 For an example, see RGVA 32925/1/515, 267.

51 GAKO, R3322/9/93, 15.

52 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 78.

53 Alexiyevich, p. 65.

54 Pennington, Wings, p. 67.

55 Temkin, p. 202.

56 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1494, 48.

57 Ibid., 78–9.

58 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 100.

59 Ibid., 64–5.

60 Hunger was especially severe in the countryside, as rural people often had no right to ration cards. The theft of food anywhere in the Soviet Union was punishable by death. See William Moskoff, The Bread of Affliction, pp. 108–9.

61 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1404, 7.

62 Ibid., 8 and 5.

63 Ibid., 3.

64 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 17.

65 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 61.

66 Alexiyevich, p. 79.

67 On blood donors, see Overy, p. 227.

68 RGASPI-M, 33/1/493, 1–6.

69 Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 1, p. 70.

70 RGASPI, 17/125/80, 3.

71 GAKO, 5166/1/24, 4–7.

72 Reina Pennington, ‘Women in Combat in the Red Army,’ in Addison and Calder (Eds), Time to Kill, p. 257.

73 GAKO, 5166/1/24, 4.

74 Reese, The Soviet Military Experience, p. 110.

75 Leonid Piterskii, ‘Deti na voine,’ Istochnik, 1994, no. 1, 54–60.

76 Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 2, p. 79.

77 Soldiers seem to crave the companionship of animals. On other armies, see Keegan, p. 242. On other front-line dogs, see Bykov, Ataka s khody, p. 189.

78 Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 2, pp. 68–70.

79 V. A. Zolotarev, G. N. Sevost’yanov et al. (Eds), Velikaya otechestvennaya voina, 1941–1945 (Moscow, 1999), book 4, pp. 189–90.

80 For figures relating to Ukraine, see Weiner, p. 173.

81 Velikaya otechestvennaya voina, 4, p. 190.

82 One such band, Leshchinskii’s, was liquidated near Smolensk on the grounds that it had refused to ‘accept the leadership of the Communist Party’. GAOPIKO, 8/1/36, 14–16.

83 Werth, p. 792.

84 Drugaya voina, pp. 318–9; the latter fate awaited Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for instance, and also Lev Kopelev. See Chapter 9, p. 268.

85 TsDNISO, 8/1/9, 10.

86 GASO, 1500/1/1, 42.

87 Overy, pp. 130–1.

88 RGASPI, 17/125/94, 34–6; 17/125/165, 46 and 46r.

89 Early in the war, Ukrainian nationalists had worked with the German army, since both appeared to share the goal of driving out the Bolsheviks. The shaky alliance was already in tatters by 1942.

90 Stalin’s Generals, pp. 296–7; Overy, p. 311. It was in revenge for acts like this that suspected guerrilla nationalists, as well as prominent collaborators, would be hanged in public in Kiev in 1944.

91 See Weiner, pp. 248–50.

92 RGASPI-M, 33/1/73, 1–5.

93 See the report reproduced in Armstrong, p. 735.

94 GASO, 1500/1/1, 40.

95 Ibid., 39.

96 Armstrong, p. 731.

97 GASO, 1500/1/1, p. 44.

98 See Armstrong, p. 45.

99 GASO, 1500/1/1, 46.

100 Ibid., 52.

101 Cited in Armstrong, p. 738.

102 GASO, 1500/1/1, 52.

103 Cited in Armstrong, p. 737.

104 Werth, p. 827.

105 Ibid., p. 830.

106 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1406, 57.

107 As the guides tell you when you walk up to the ridge, ‘Sapun’derives from the Turkish word for soap.

108 Excavations in today’s Crimea still bring the bodies of soldiers to light. As a man who spends his life exhuming such corpses told me, the Soviet dead were much better equipped, by 1944, than those of the Germans they were fighting.

109 Werth, pp. 838–9.

110 Ibid., p. 835; Erickson, Berlin, p. 195.

111 Brian Glyn Williams, ‘The Exile and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37:3 (July 2002), pp. 325–7.

112 Most of the Tatars in the so-called ‘Tatar legion’, which anyway amounted to no more than seven battalions by the autumn of 1943, were from the Volga, not the Crimea. See S. I. Drobyazko, ‘Sovetskie grazhdane v ryadakh vermakhta’ in the essay collection, Velikaya otechestvennaya voina v otsenke molodykh (Moscow, 1997), p. 128.

113 The figure that most sources quote is N. F. Bugai’s estimate of just over 191,000 people, or 47,000 families. See P. Polyan, Ne po svoei vole (Moscow, 2001), p. 126; Williams, p. 334.

114 On the deportations from the Caucasus, see Polyan, pp. 116–27.

115 Williams, p. 333.

116 For a discussion of Tatar ‘guilt’, see Alan Fisher, The Crimean Tatars (Stanford, CA, 1978), pp. 153–64.

117 Ibid., p. 166.

8 Exulting, Grieving and Sweating Blood

1 Accounts of the precise starting point vary because of the scale of the operation. In some places, the first shots were fired on 21 June. Elsewhere the starting date is taken as 22 or 23 June.

2 The front itself was about 450 miles long. Werth, pp. 860–1.

3 Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, RH2-2338, 1 (January 1944).

4 Belov, p. 468 (21 March 1944).

5 Ibid., p. 462 (28 November 1943).

6 Ibid., p. 465 (12 January 1944).

7 Ibid., p. 468 (13 March 1944).

8 Ibid., p. 470 (7 April 1944).

9 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, monthly report, March 1944, pp. 1–2.

10 Belov, p. 464 (12 December 1943); p. 465 (17 January 1944).

11 Ermolenko, p. 39.

12 See Catherine Merridale, ‘The Collective Mind’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35:1, January 2000, p. 41.

13 Generally, they were lumped together with other ‘amoral’ or ‘extraordinary’ incidents. If they were explained at all, it was with reference to any suicide note or final remark that existed. Since the soldiers themselves did not know the word ‘trauma’, they naturally attributed their agony to more immediate causes, often unrequited love or political disappointment. For examples from Belarus in 1944, see RGVA, 32925/1/516, 177.

14 For a parallel discussion of the death penalty in the British army at this time, see David French, ‘Discipline and the Death Penalty in the British Army in the War against Germany during the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 33:4, October 1998, pp. 531–45.

15 I am grateful to Professor Simon Wessely for drawing my attention to the correlation between the statistics for Soviet mental casualties and the average incidence of adult-onset schizophrenia.

16 Richard A. Gabriel, Soviet Military Psychiatry (Westport, CT, 1986), p. 47. This estimate is based on interviews with survivors and their psychologists, as a result of which Gabriel produced a rough figure of 6 per thousand mental casualties for the Red Army as a whole. However crude, this figure compares strikingly with the equivalent 36–39 per thousand in the US army in the Second World War.

17 See Night of Stone, p. 304. The consensus among psychiatrists in Russia had shifted by 2002, when I asked these questions again. Contact with European and American medicine had clearly changed the prevailing wisdom, at least among doctors currently in practice. But retired wartime medical staff, including nurses and psychiatrists interviewed in Kursk, Smolensk and Tbilisi, had not changed their position.

18 The point is made in Amnon Sella’s optimistic book. The Value of Human Life, p. 49.

19 Gabriel, p. 56.

20 I am grateful to Dr V. A. Koltsova, of the Moscow Institute for Military Psychology, for sharing this unpublished material with me in 2002. See also Albert R. Gilgen et al., Soviet and American Psychology during World War II (Westport, CT, 1997).

21 Gabriel, p. 63.

22 Some were released, although they carried the stigma of mental illness for ever. Many of these ended up in prison camps later in life. Others joined the colonies of the crippled in the White Sea and lived out their lives in isolation. The worst fate, probably, was to remain in a Soviet psychiatric hospital of this era.

23 Gabriel, pp. 42–8.

24 Vyacheslav Kondrat’ev, cited by George Gibian, ‘World War 2 in Russian National Consciousness,’ in Garrard and Garrard, World War II and the Soviet People (London, 1993), p. 153.

25 Order of the deputy defence commissar, no. 004/073/006/23 ss; 26 January 1944, Velikaya otechestvennaya, 2 (3), p. 241.

26 On the use of convicts for this work, see the captured report of the 4th tank army, Bundesarchiv RH-2471, p. 16, 4 August 1944. See also RH-2471, 33 (prisoner of war reports). Temkin (p. 124) also recalled that a convicted murderer was used for reconnaissance work in his own unit.

27 Viktor Astaf’ev, Tam, v okopakh (Vospominaniya soldata) (Moscow, 1986), p. 24.

28 Examples are to be found in GARF 7523/16/388, which contains the records of the commission that dealt with the reinstatement of medals to soldiers who had been convicted of crimes at the front.

29 Drobyshev, p. 94.

30 For a parallel from the British army in the First World War, see Frank Richards, Old Soldiers Never Die (London, 1933), p. 194.

31 Drobyshev, p. 94.

32 Vasily Chuikov, The End of the Third Reich, trans. Ruth Kisch (London, 1976), p. 40.

33 Drobyshev, p. 94.

34 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 14, p. 619; report dated 1 October 1944.

35 Lev Kopelev, No Jail for Thought, trans. Anthony Austin (London, 1977), p. 38.

36 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 2 (3), pp. 265–6.

37 Ibid., p. 295.

38 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 6, p. 247, on the sorry state of the kitchens in the reserve political units of the 2nd Baltic Front.

39 TsAMO, 523/41119s/1, 17; see also similar reports from German intelligence, RH2-2338, 10 (1944).

40 RGVA, 32925/1/516, 177 (April 1944).

41 RGVA, 32925/1/515, 139–40.

42 RGVA 32925/1/516, 4 and 178.

43 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 14, 590.

44 TsAMO, 523/41119s/1, 169.

45 Ermolenko, p. 52.

46 See Overy, pp. 238–9; Erickson, Berlin, pp. 198–200.

47 Chuikov, Third Reich, p. 27.

48 Belov, p. 469 (31 March 1944).

49 Ibid., pp. 473–4 (18 June 1944).

50 Glanz and House, p. 209.

51 Cited in Garthoff, p. 237.

52 Erickson, Berlin, p. 225.

53 RH2-2338, 44-07, 1‒2.

54 GASO, R1500/1/1, 63.

55 Chuikov, Reich, p. 28.

56 RH2-2467, 118, for the leave. Cash incentives for planes and ‘tongues, see RH2-2338.

57 Sidorov, pp. 99 and 108.

58 Pravda, 19 July 1944; Werth, p. 862.

59 Ermolenko, p. 46.

60 Ibid., p. 50.

61 Pis’ma s fronta i na front, p. 92.

62 Stalin, O velikoi otechestvennoi voine, pp. 145–6.

63 RH2-2338, March and April 1944.

64 See, for example, Pravda, 26 August 1944.

65 German intelligence reports consistently stressed this. See, for example, RH2-2338; 4408 (monthly intelligence report for August 1944).

66 On ethnically based Ukrainian nationalism, see Amir Weiner, Making Sense, pp. 240–1.

67 See Leo J. Docherty III, ‘The Reluctant Warriors: The Non-Russian Nationalities in Service of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945,’ JSMS, 6:3 (September 1993), pp. 432–3.

68 RH2-2468, 35.

69 Ibid., 80.

70 Ibid., 35 and 38.

71 Details from RGASPI, 17/125/241, 93–4.

72 RH2-2468, 35.

73 A point made specifically – and understandably believed – by German intelligence. See RH2-2338, 44-09, 1.

74 This finding confirms the comments in RH2-2468, 80.

75 RGASPI, 17/125/241, 88.

76 Ibid., 89.

77 Ibid., 91–2; 95.

78 Ibid., 95.

79 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 6, pp. 292–5.

80 Ermolenko, pp. 59 and 62.

81 Kopelev, p. 53.

82 The agitation department’s concern was fully justified. See Senyavskaya, Frontovoe pokolenie, p. 91.

83 For other evidence of this, see Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, 45-02, 2–3.

84 Beevor, Berlin, p. 34.

85 Their comments were faithfully collected. For examples from the summer of 1944, see RGVA, 32925/1/515.

86 Chuikov, Reich, p. 34.

87 RH2-2468, 6–7, 27.

88 See, for example, the assessment in Glantz and House, p. 214. A more detailed account is given in Erickson, Berlin, pp. 247–90.

89 Weiner, p. 149.

90 RGVA 32925/1/516, 176 (April 1944).

91 RH2-2337, 58.

92 The idea was that these shot around corners.

93 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2337, 70–71.

94 These jokes are among those recalled for me by veterans, and they came up in more than one interview. They can also be found, lovingly collected, in Bundesarchiv, RH2-2337, the Wehrmacht’s own report on Soviet anti-Semitism.

95 For a 1943 soldier’s letter to exactly this effect, see Senyavskaya, Frontovoe pokolenie, p. 83.

96 In fact, civilian casualties were highest among Ukrainians, and proportionately, though not numerically, highest of all in Belorussia.

97 Werth, pp. 702–6.

98 Bartov, The Eastern Front, p. 132.

99 Velikaya otechestvennaya voina, 4, p. 289.

100 See ibid., p. 289; see also Vserossiiskaya kniga pamyati, 1941–45 (Moscow, 1995); Obzornyi tom, p. 406; Glantz and House, p. 51.

101 Werth, pp. 387–8.

102 Ibid., 702; Bundesarchiv, RH2-2337, 104.

103 Garrard and Garrard, Bones, p. 174.

104 Weiner, p. 260.

105 For a discussion of this, see Garrard and Garrard, Bones, pp. 180–7.

106 Pravda, 3 August 1944.

107 Werth, p. 890.

108 Ibid., p. 892.

109 Ibid., p. 702.

110 RGVA 32925/1/515, 2.

111 RGASPI, 17/125/190, 16.

112 I have heard a number of explanations for the pogrom in the city’s Podol district. This one was offered to me by Antony Beevor and is based on archival documents he saw in Moscow.

113 Overy, pp. 309–11; on the Doctors’ Plot, see Louis Rapoport, Stalin’s War Against the Jews (New York, 1990); Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov,Stalin’s Last Crime: The Doctor’s Plot (London, 2003).

9 Despoil the Corpse

1 Chuikov, Reich, p. 18.

2 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 9 and 24.

3 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1409-19, 6.

4 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 29.

5 Intercepted field post, Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 51 (January 1945).

6 I am grateful to Professor W. Brus, himself a witness to Russia’s war at the time, for this insight into Ehrenburg’s wartime standing.

7 Christopher Duffy, Red Storm on the Reich (London, 1991), p. 274.

8 Cited in Werth, p. 965.

9 See Beevor, Berlin, p. 34.

10 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2467, 82.

11 Khronika chuvstv (Vladimir, 1991), pp. 175–6.

12 Pis’ma s fronta i na front, p. 93. Letter dated 26 February 1945.

13 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2467, 86.

14 Werth, p. 944.

15 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 27.

16 Kopelev, p. 14.

17 Ibid., p. 13.

18 Julius Hay, cited in Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–49 (Cambridge, MA, 1995), p. 70.

19 See Naimark, loc. cit., and also RH2-2686, 37.

20 See Glantz and House, p. 235.

21 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, 45-01.

22 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2686, 33.

23 Kopelev, p. 36.

24 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2467, 9.

25 Ibid.

26 Stalin, O velikoi otechestvennoi voine, p. 100 (23 February 1945). This formula echoed a time-honoured earlier phrase about capitalism, used in the harsh years of class war (collectivization). Then, the catchword was that the class enemy would resist with greatest desperation as the victory of the proletariat approached.

27 Ermolenko, p. 105.

28 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 35.

29 Ibid., 38.

30 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 13 (captured letter).

31 For a parallel story of captivating inhumanity, see the account of the slaughtered buffalo in Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, pp. 75–6.

32 Leonid Rabichev, ‘Voina vse spishet’, Znamya, 2005, no. 2, p. 163.

33 Ibid, p. 163.

34 Ibid, p. 159.

35 Ibid, p. 165.

36 Kopelev, p. 37.

37 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, 44-10, 3.

38 Kopelev, p. 50.

39 Werth, p. 964.

40 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 12.

41 Kopelev, p. 39.

42 Ibid., pp. 46–53.

43 Naimark, p. 74.

44 This seems clear despite the bland statement by Werth (p. 964) that the rapes were just an outlet for the soldiers’ sexual frustration.

45 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 13.

46 Overy, p. 260.

47 For discussions, see Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (London, 1975); Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter (Eds), Rape: An Historical and Social Enquiry (Oxford, 1986).

48 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1409-19, 6.

49 Rabichev, p. 164.

50 Set in a culture of almost total denial, Rabichev’s article and Kopelev’s book are, to date, among the only discussions of this question in Russian. The time for an honest assessment of the war is still far off, as the Victory Day celebrations in Moscow in 2005 testified.

51 Atina Grossman, ‘A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers,’ October, 72, spring 1995, p. 51.

52 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 13.

53 Cited in Naimark, p. 112.

54 Anonymous (sic), A Woman in Berlin, trans. James Stern (London, 1955), pp. 93–4.

55 Temkin, p. 197.

56 Beevor, Berlin, p. 326.

57 A Woman in Berlin, p. 64.

58 Temkin, p. 202.

59 Igor Kon and James Riordan, Sex and Russian Society (London, 1993), pp. 25–6.

60 For a more recent parallel, see Gilles Kepel’s comments about Algerian Islamists, those ‘impoverished young men’ whose crowded family conditions forced them into abstinence and who, in consequence, ‘condemned the pleasures of which they had been so wretchedly deprived’. Cited in Jason Burke, Al Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam (London, 2004), p. 133.

61 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 27.

62 N. Inozemtsev, Tsena pobedy v toi samoi voine: frontovoi dnevnik N. Inozemtseva (Moscow, 1995), p. 108.

63 GARF 7523/16/79, 56.

64 For an example of such propaganda, see Pravda, 13 July 1944, p. 3 (account of Olga Ivanovna Kotova and her ten children).

65 Pushkarev, Po dorogam voiny, p. 154.

66 Belov, p. 469.

67 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1414, 57.

68 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 67.

69 Kopelev, p. 29.

70 GARF, 7523/16/79, 59, has another letter demanding that soldier fathers have control over their children.

71 Exotic German women’s clothes – ‘Gretchen knickers’ – would often scandalize the soldiers’ wives who received them as gifts from their husbands. See Beevor, Berlin, p. 407.

72 Cited in Naimark, p. 108.

73 RH2-2688, 51.

74 Ibid., 52.

75 On this aspect of rape, see Ruth Harris, ‘The “Child of the Barbarian”: Race, Rape and Nationalism during the First World War,’ Past and Present, 141 (November 1993), pp. 170–206.

76 A Woman in Berlin, p. 219.

77 The most comprehensive figure, from Barbara Johr, is a total of two million in the whole of Germany. See Naimark, p. 133. See also Helker Sander, ‘Remembering/Forgetting’, October, 72, spring 1995, p. 21.

78 Atina Grossman, ‘Silence’, p. 46.

79 Venereal disease statistics are available in NKVD files and also in the records of hospitals near the front throughout and just after the war. Although it generally maintained a cool attitude towards the epidemic, the NKVD did occasionally note the pace of infection, as in RGVA 32925/1/516, 178.

80 A Woman in Berlin, p. 17.

81 RGVA, 32925/1/526, 43. See also Naimark, p. 74.

82 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2(3), p. 304 (order of 11 July 1944).

83 For example, the three cases of gang rape dating from April 1945 are cited in RGVA, 32925/1/527, 132. The guilty men in each case were turned over to SMERSh.

84 Rabichev, p. 164.

85 Kopelev, p. 51; Temkin, p. 201.

86 GARF, 7523/16/424, 85 and 98, for example.

87 See Douglas Botting, In the Ruins of the Reich, pp. 23–4.

88 Naimark, p. 10.

89 Botting, p. 99.

90 Snetkova, p. 47.

91 GARF, R7317⁄6⁄16, 81.

92 This confirmed the GKO’s resolution of 23 December 1944. Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2(3), 344–5.

93 Temkin, p. 199.

94 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2(3), 344.

95 Kopelev, pp. 39–40.

96 Beevor, p. 35.

97 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 146.

98 Snetkova, p. 47.

99 See Beevor, Berlin, pp. 407–8.

100 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 157.

101 Ibid., 152.

102 Ibid., 158.

103 GAOPIKO, 1/1/3754, 5–9.

104 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 139.

105 TsAMO, 233/2354/1, 28.

106 A Woman in Berlin, p. 60.

107 See photo, p. 280.

108 For an account from Poland, see RGVA, 32925/1/527, 86–7.

109 Ibid., 108.

110 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 125.

111 Beevor, Berlin, pp. 177–8. For a different perspective, see Glantz and House, p. 255.

112 The numbers given are two and a half million Red Army and Polish troops and roughly a million German defenders. Glantz and House, p. 261; Overy, p. 266.

113 Glantz and House, p. 260.

114 Pis’ma s fronta i na front, p. 160.

115 Chuikov, Reich, p. 146.

116 Beevor, Berlin, p. 218.

117 Chuikov, Reich, p. 147.

118 Overy, p. 268.

119 Beevor, Berlin, p. 222.

120 Chuikov, Reich, p. 184.

121 A Woman in Berlin, pp. 13 and 17.

122 See Beevor, p. 412. As a military nurse who worked in Belorussia told me, ‘They were all infected with venereal diseases. All of them!’ This was an exaggeration, naturally, but she must have wondered when she would see a patient who was not.

123 A version appears in RGVA, 32925/1/527, 10–11.

124 A Woman in Berlin, p. 107.

125 Overy, p. 273; Beevor, Berlin, p. 372; Chuikov, Reich, pp. 242–9.

126 Glantz and House, p. 269.

127 Chuikov, Reich, p. 251.

128 Beevor, Berlin, p. 405.

129 Belov, p. 476.

130 Glantz and House, p. 269. The higher figure is based on Krivosheev’s global estimate for the campaign on three fronts (1st and 2nd Belorussian, 1st Ukrainian).

131 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 137.

132 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 146.

133 Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 2, p. 96.

134 RGVA, 32925/1/527, 50–3.

135 Other cases occur on almost every page of this same file. See, for example, RGVA, 32925/1/527, 48; 233.

136 Ermolenko, p. 126.

10 Sheathe the Old Sword

1 Werth, p. 969.

2 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1406, 70.

3 One reason for that was the annihilation of Polish Jews, which reduced the population by approximately 3 million. Poland’s total losses, approximately 6 million people, amounted to about 20 per cent of the pre-war total. See John Keegan, The Second World War (London, 1989), p. 493.

4 Figures vary, and to some extent, since all are estimates, it is impossible to compare the scale of losses. But a recent Russian account suggests that the ratio of Soviet to German military losses was 1.3:1 (even taking into account the losses of each adversary’s allies). In terms of battlefield deaths, the true figure may be higher than 1.6:1. See Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina, 4, p. 292; Glantz and House, pp. 292 and 307; Krivosheev, pp. 152–3 and 384–92.

5 Overy, pp. 287–8.

6 The official exchange rate in 1940 was 5.3 roubles to the dollar, but this has little real meaning in view of the currency controls in operation throughout the Soviet era. Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina, 4, p. 294; Overy, p. 291.

7 Vsevolod Vyshnevsky, cited in Werth, p. 942.

8 See Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, 1976), p. 11.

9 Cited in Drugaya voina, p. 298.

10 GARF, 7523/16/79, 173.

11 Ibid.

12 GARF, 7523/16/79 contains several others, including a demand for general amnesty and numerous requests to review the penal code.

13 Ibid., 17.

14 Overy, p. 292.

15 Dunham, p. 9; Merridale, Night of Stone, p. 323.

16 The rumour was repeated even in the soldiers’ letters home. See, for example, Snetkova, p. 48.

17 E. Yu. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, 1945–1964 (Moscow, 1993), p. 43.

18 On adaptation, see Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves (London, 2000), pp. 328–9.

19 Moskva voennaya, p. 708.

20 Ibid., p. 707.

21 Lists of the military participants occupy an entire number of Voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv – 12 (3), 2000. The instructions for the day are printed in ibid., no. 8, 2000, pp. 259–77.

22 Werth, pp. 1002–3.

23 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 157–8.

24 Ermolenko, p. 143.

25 For more detail of the campaign, see Glantz and House, pp. 278–82.

26 For an account, see Joseph Polowsky’s testimony in Studs Terkel, A Good War: An Oral History of World War II (New York, 1984), pp. 444–50.

27 GARF, 7077/1/19, 7–10.

28 GARF, 7399/1/3, 126.

29 Cited in Naimark, p. 74.

30 GARF 7317/7/147, 7317/7/118, 31.

31 GARF, 7077/1/19, 13.

32 Ibid.

33 GARF, 7399/1/3, 153–4.

34 Ibid., 125–7.

35 Ibid., 34; 7317/7/147, 76.

36 Ibid., 98.

37 GARF, 7077/1/178, 10–11.

38 GARF, 7399/1/3, 95.

39 GARF, 7399/1/1, 2.

40 Ibid., 14–15.

41 An example among many was Frankfurt on the Oder (GARF 7399/1/3, 11–15), where discipline had ‘become better than before’ by early July. See also GARF, 7317/7/124b, 36–9, which relates to Berlin.

42 GARF, 7317/10/23, 48–9.

43 Naimark, p. 74.

44 GARF, 7399/1/1, 16.

45 GARF, 7317/7/124b, 5.

46 On the duty of Germans to die for the clean-up, see GARF, 7523/16/79, 215.

47 Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina, 4, p. 191.

48 Ibid.

49 GARF, 7077/1/178.

50 Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina, 4, 191–2; Overy, pp. 302–3. For a discussion of the repatriations in general, see Nikolai Tolstoy, Victims of Yalta (London, 1977).

51 Incidents and interviews appear in GARF, 7317/20/15, 42–68.

52 Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina, 4, pp. 192–3.

53 GARF, 5446/48a/13, 9–11.

54 Ibid., 26–7.

55 Ibid., 27.

56 Overy, p. 302.

57 GARF, 7317/7/124v, 18–19.

58 GARF, 7317/20/13, 76.

59 GARF, 7399/1/3, 42; 7317/20/13, 74.

60 GARF, 7184/1/65, 180.

61 GARF, 7523/16/79, 163.

62 TsAMO, 136/24416/24, 19–21.

63 GARF, 7184/1/57, 347–8.

64 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2(3), 378.

65 GARF, 7184/1/57, 347.

66 Pushkarev, Po dorogam voiny, p 160.

67 GAOPIKO, 1/7/3755, 53.

68 TsDNISO, 6/1/2005, 16.

69 GAOPIKO, 1/13755, 5.

70 GARF, 7523/16/54, 1.

71 Smolensk figures from oblast records (TsDNISO, 6/1/2005, 12–16) and district reports (6/1/2005, 24, 47).

72 This story is told in Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, p. 104; Garrard and Garrard, Bones, pp. 215–6.

73 On the fulfilment (or otherwise) of Sovnarkom resolutions on war graves, see GAKO, R3322/10/81, 33–4. Simonov’s call for a kind of Soviet orderliness in place of the soldiers’ own tastes in memorials is noted in RGALI, 1814/6/144, 52.

74 GARF, 5446/48a/2657, 161.

75 Of 1,913 buildings commandeered as hospitals by May 1945, 333 were former educational institutions and eighty-four their former halls of residence. GARF, 5446/48a/2657, 161.

76 TsDNISO, 37/1/264, 8.

77 Tumarkin, p. 98.

78 GARF, 8009/35/20, 2.

79 Ibid., 2–3.

80 Night of Stone, p. 315.

81 For literary examples, see Dunham, pp. 10–11.

82 Report from Leningrad hospitals, TsGASPb, 9156/4/321, 14–15.

83 Night of Stone, p. 305, also referring to reports from post-war Leningrad.

84 See Overy, p. 312.

85 Grossman, Life and Fate, p. 141.

86 On Leningrad, see Ehrenburg, p. 11.

87 See Dunham, especially Chapter 13, pp. 214–224.

88 Doctors working in rural areas near Leningrad at the time would find that peasant women also stopped menstruating, which they ascribed to a kind of mourning, but which may as easily have been the result of poor diet and heavy manual work. See Night of Stone, pp. 312–3.

89 Alexiyevich, p. 206.

90 GARF, 8009/35/20, 2–3.

91 Night of Stone, p. 314; see also Werth, p. 520.

92 RGASPI-M, 129.

93 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1404, 131; 33/1/1405, 118.

94 For Vera Dunham’s tart summary, see In Stalin’s Time, p. 214.

95 See Overy, pp. 309–11; Bones, pp. 219–28; Night of Stone, p. 273.

96 Applebaum, Gulag, pp. 414–23.

97 Night of Stone, pp. 317–9; See also Robert Service, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (London, 1997), p. 319.

11 And We Remember All

1 On Stalinism and Russian nationalism among veterans after 1945, see Druzhba, p. 43.

2 Like Stalin, he also sacked Zhukov. See Robert Service, Twentieth-Century Russia, p. 372.

3 Khrushchev attacked what he described as the cult of Stalin’s personality, and with it, many of the excesses of Stalin’s dictatorship. See N. S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, trans. Strobe Talbott (London, 1970), pp. 559–618.

4 For the memorials, see Michael Ignatieff, ‘Soviet War Memorials,’ History Workshop Journal, 17 (Spring 1984), pp. 157–63.

5 For further evidence, see Ignatieff, ibid., and Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, which traces the Second World War cult over forty years.

6 On 1965 in the veterans’memories, see Kolomenskii almanakh, vyp 4 (Moscow, 2000), p. 238.

7 R. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution (Houndmills, 1988), p. 101.

8 For the story of Katyn, which emerged only after 1990, see R. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era (Houndmills, 1997), pp. 18–19.

9 This was a comment made to the Yugoslav diplomat, Milovan Djilas. See Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York, 1962), p. 111.

10 For the whole story, see Nina Tumarkin, ‘Story of a War Memorial’, in Garrard and Garrard (Eds), World War II, pp. 125–46.

11 See George Gibian’s ‘World War 2 in Russian National Consciousness’, in Garrard and Garrard, ibid., pp. 147–160.

12 Georgian veterans tended to be even more ‘Soviet’ in their outlook than Russians, not least because the notion of Georgian homeland is fragmented and, in the present, still troubled by ethnic hatreds inside the republic’s territory.

13 Werth, p. 155.

14 Druzhba, p. 43. The persistence of this kind of nationalism was apparent in the interviews I carried out in Georgia and eastern Ukraine in 2002 and 2003.

15 The testimonies in Rodina, 1991, 6–7, especially pp. 61–3, confirm what surviving members of punishment battalions said to me.

16 M. Gefter (Ed.), Golosa iz mira, kotorogo uzhe net (Moscow, 1995), p. 41.