Red Sky at Noon

Author’s Note

This is a work of fiction. The main characters, Benya, Fabiana, Jaba, Panka, Melishko, Kapto and many others, are entirely imagined and so is the story and the plot – and it should be enjoyed as a novel, no more no less.

Some of these characters, especially Benya and Satinov, appear in the other two novels in my series, Sashenka and One Night in Winter. This now completes my Moscow Trilogy, but this novel – like the others – stands alone. There is a special pleasure in writing about characters and families that one has come to know well – like old friends. This is a novel about love, survival, courage, life and death at a time and place of astonishing horror in what was perhaps the most atrocious moment in the human experience. It is also about a short, desperate relationship between a soldier and a nurse; all these novels are really about the agony and the magic of love – in any circumstances. And of course it is a novel of action, of horsemen on the steppes of Russia – and one of my favourite characters is not a human at all but a horse, Silver Socks.

Anyone interested in the novel’s plot, in my inspirations and in great books on these subjects should read on. The background of the penal battalions, Cossacks, Italians and Russian defectors are lesser-known parts of World War II history but many of the characters are instantly recognizable: Stalin, his daughter Svetlana and son Vasily, his henchmen Beria and Molotov, and his marshals Vasilevsky and Zhukov are accurate portraits, as is Budyonny, Cossack and breeder of the Budyonny horses. Many of the things Stalin says are based on his own words: for example sometimes he did telephone quite junior officers to encourage and threaten them in the heat of battle. The bizarre but fearsome idiosyncrasies of Stalin’s system of terror and favour are accurate too. As is the case with my character Melishko, some of Russia’s greatest generals were prisoners in Camps or prisons, having been arrested and tortured by Beria, but when the Nazis invaded on 22 June 1941 they were suddenly restored to their rank and welcomed by Stalin as if nothing had happened.

My Cossacks, their lore and songs and behaviour, are based on three masterpieces, first Red Cavalry and 1920 Diary by Isaac Babel, which tell how a Jewish writer rode with the Red Cossacks during the Civil War, and then Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel And Quiet Flows the Don, set amongst Don Cossacks during World War I. I have used these as sources for my Soviet horsemen. For the Italians in Russia, I have used as my source The Sergeant in the Snow by Mario Rigoni Stern, a novel/memoir that deserves to be read more.

Svetlana did have a love affair with an older Jewish screenwriter but actually it took place a year later than it does in the novel and his name was Alexei Kapler, not Lev Shapiro. He really did have the chutzpah to address her in a newspaper article and some of the story is based on Svetlana’s memoirs Twenty Letters to a Friend. As research for my histories I interviewed Martha Peshkova Beria, who appears in the novel: she was the granddaughter of the novelist Maxim Gorky and she married Beria’s son Sergo, who also features. When I interviewed her she was still a beautiful woman. To learn more on Stalin and these other characters, see my Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

In the novel, Hitler appears at his Ukrainian headquarters at Vinnitsa (code name: Werwolf). On 28 June 1942, he launched his southern offensive, Case Blue, to knock the Soviet Union out of the war. During the fighting on the plains, the villages are invented and so is the entire plot that takes place there but the battles of the Don Bend are real; the crisis was dire. Stalin, faced with this relentless German advance, created the penal battalions in his Not One Step Back decree 227 – and Benya’s experiences reflect how they worked, based on Penalty Strike: The Memoirs of a Red Army Penal Company Commander by A. V. Pulcyn. I have also used the classic books – Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad and Absolute War by Chris Bellamy. To create a realistic Soviet war journalist in Lev Shapiro I read A Writer at War by Vasily Grossman (edited by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova).

The peculiar but horrifying hell of the gold mines and Gulag Camps of Kolyma is based on many books but particularly Man is Wolf to Man by Janusz Bardach who survived them; Gulag Boss by F. V. Mochulsky, an unusual account by a Gulag guard; and the classic history Gulag by Anne Applebaum. For those intrigued by Jaba’s tattoos, read Russian Criminal Tattoos by D. Daldaev and S. Valiev.

My espionage plot of Stalin’s effort to misinform Hitler is totally invented. In my fictional conceit he deploys an agent to lure more German forces into the Stalingrad trap. In fact, Stalin only realized the potential to trap and surround German forces later during the battle. But Soviet intelligence specialized in just this sort of operation: later in the year, when Stalin launched Operation Uranus to encircle the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad, he used a double agent, Heine, to warn the Germans that he was about to launch a huge offensive, Operation Mars, around Rzhev further north – in order to dissuade the Germans from sending reinforcements to aid their beleaguered forces in Stalingrad. In effect Stalin was betraying one group of armies in order to help another; his ruthlessness cost hundreds of thousands of Soviet lives; Rzhev became known as the Slaughterhouse. But Stalingrad was won.

The summer campaign of 1942 was the last use of cavalry in warfare on a large scale.

Both the Soviets and the Germans used millions of horses at the front, not only to pull artillery and supplies but also for their speed on the steppes: in 1940, the Red Army had around twenty million cavalry horses of which around ten million were lost in the initial campaign so Stalin had a reserve of around ten million. The Red Army started the war with around four cavalry divisions – about 115,000 cavalrymen – but the destruction of tanks during 1941 led Stalin to create another eighty-seven cavalry divisions in early 1942 so that at the time of this novel there were over 500,000 sabres of cavalry including many Cossack units. Meanwhile the Germans had six cavalry divisions on the Eastern Front as well as SS cavalry units. They also deployed four regiments of Cossacks who had defected from the Soviet side and Kalmyk cavalry corps too. The Italians, Romanians and Hungarians, who were less mechanized than their German masters, fielded even more cavalry.

By the summer of 1942, the Italian army in Russia numbered 235,000 men, reinforced by Mussolini, who did not want to miss out on a German victory. Few Italians supported this mission – except his special Fascist troops, the Blackshirts, led in the novel by Malamore. Absurdly Mussolini did invent Roman ranks for his Blackshirts, such as ‘consul’, and their units were named ‘legions’ because he was hoping to create his own Roman empire. The Italians fielded the 3rd Cavalry Division Amedeo Duca d’Aosta with a total of 25,000 horses. They were extremely proud of their famed cavalry regiments such as the Savoia Cavalleria and they did win a few successes: on 24 August 1942, the Savoy Cavalry launched a spectacular headlong charge, one of the last in history, against Soviet infantry and routed them at Izbushensky near the Don River. Albino, one of the Italian horses, was blinded in the charge but lived on as an equine hero until 1960. But ultimately the Italian adventure in Russia was a catastrophe that shook the Fascist regime. They were destroyed in the Battle of Stalingrad where 25,000 Italians were killed and 60,000 captured and they had to fight their way out. Altogether it is believed around 90,000 Italians were killed in Russia. The return of the cadaverous survivors speeded the fall of Mussolini, who was deposed in 1943.

In the novel, defectors from the Soviet side such as Mandryka and Kaminsky, Tonya and the doctor, are based in fact. Like Mandryka, the founder of a pro-Nazi militia of Russians named Konstantin Voskovoinik was assassinated by partisans in January 1942. But he was succeeded by Bronislav Kaminsky, who built up his security unit into his Russian National Liberation Army, later transformed into a Waffen-SS unit, more usually known as the Kaminsky Brigade, which assisted in the murder of civilians and Jews and the suppression of partisans. He was allowed to rule a small area of Belorussia, the so-called Lokot Republic. Soviet partisans repeatedly tried to assassinate him. He served alongside various murderous SS units including that of degenerate German SS officer Oskar Dirlewanger, who also appears in the novel with his penal brigade of German criminals and psychopaths who murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands of Jews, Russians and Poles. Kaminsky was decorated with the Iron Cross by Himmler. In 1944 the Kaminsky and Dirlewanger Brigades helped crush the Warsaw Uprising, during which Kaminsky and his deputy Shavykin killed tens of thousands of Polish civilians, looted brazenly and were so out of control that in August they were executed by the order of Himmler himself. The Dirlewanger Brigade helped murder tens of thousands in Warsaw. In June 1945, Dirlewanger was arrested by the French and died in custody, possibly beaten to death by his Polish guards. Even by the grotesque standards of the SS, Kaminsky, Dirlewanger and their men were extreme monstrosities. For more, see Mark Mazower’s excellent Hitler’s Empire; and a personal story, Rita Gabis’s powerful quest for her grandfather’s role in the Holocaust, A Guest at the Shooter’s Banquet.

Tonya is based on one of Kaminsky’s executioners, a girl named Antonina Makarova, nineteen years old, who joined his unit and, while drinking heavily and having sexual liaisons with German officers, specialized in mass executions which she called ‘cutting the nettles’ – killing 1,500 civilians. At the end of the war, the Soviet secret police searched for her, never giving up the hunt – but she had vanished, marrying (possibly a Jewish husband, named Ginzburg) and having two children. She was only exposed over thirty years later in 1978 by a coincidence. In maybe the last execution for World War II atrocities, she was shot in 1979.

Hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens defected to the Germans or volunteered to serve them, as many as 600,000 or even a million: these Hiwis – Hilfswillige, meaning ‘voluntary assistants’ – performed a variety of tasks, from guarding Nazi death camps to fighting at the front. It was estimated that during the Battle of Stalingrad, 20 per cent of German manpower were ex-Soviet citizens. Some 250,000 served as auxiliary security police, known in German as the Schuma, who appear in the novel; and around 50,000 served in regular German units. Hitler resisted the creation of any Russian forces because he regarded Slavs as subhuman Untermenschen and feared they would try to create a strong nationalist Russia after the war. But, later, a captured Soviet general Andrei Vlasov was allowed to form a Russian Liberation Army that fought the allies in the last year of the war.

Around 5,000 Kalmyks fought for the Germans and Italians, often serving as scouts. As for the Cossacks, many had fought against the Soviets during the Civil War and loathed the Communists. The Germans formed their first unit of defecting Don Cossacks in December 1941 and ultimately there were around 25,000 Cossacks fighting for Hitler: they were used for anti-partisan actions in Russia and later in the Balkans. To be fair, far more Cossacks served with the Red Army – seventeen corps on the southern fronts as opposed to just two corps of German collaborators. After the war, the Cossack and Russian collaborators captured by Britain were handed over to the Soviet secret police who either executed them or despatched them to the Gulags.

Finally the Germans issued their troops with Pervitin, a methamphetamine that allowed them to overcome fatigue and fight more viciously; the pills were addictive and often abused by units involved in the Nazi genocidal mass murders. They were nicknamed Stuka-tablets since their extreme ups and downs resembled the flight of the Stuka dive-bombers.

In many ways this is meant to be a homage to some of my favourite writers: I have mentioned Isaac Babel and Mikhail Sholokhov. But even though this is a very Russian, very Soviet and very Second World War novel, it is impossible to write about horsemen riding across sunbaked grasslands in times of unrelenting cruelty without recalling the brilliant Western masterpieces of Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy and Elmore Leonard. This is also a homage to them.