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IVAN'S WAR
Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
CATHERINE MERRIDALE
METROPOLITAN BOOKS
First Edition 2006
To my father Philip Merridale
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
INTRODUCTION * True War Stories
ONE * Marching with Revolutionary Step
TWO * A Fire through All the World
THREE * Disaster Beats Its Wings
FOUR * Black Ways of War
FIVE * Stone by Stone
SIX
*
A Land Laid Waste
SEVEN * May Brotherhood Be Blessed
EIGHT * Exulting, Grieving, and Sweating Blood
NINE * Despoil the Corpse
TEN
*
Sheathe the Old Sword
ELEVEN * And We Remember All
Chronology of Main Events
Sources
List of Archives
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Page
5 A soldier's farewell to his wife and children, Don Front, 1941
Page 20
Local people talking to Red Army soldiers, September 1943
Page 57
Soldiers at the
banya,
September 1941
Page 58
A senior sergeant teaches a young recruit to wrap footcloths
Page 64
A political officer reads to the troops, 1944
Page 101
Red Army soldiers receiving their supply of shells before battle, 1941
Page 104
Artillery moving into firing position, Southern Front, 1942
Page 110
Soldiers near Leningrad receiving a consignment of books and paper, 1942
Page 121
Soviet infantry in their trenches, winter 1941
Page 130
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)
Page 131
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)
Page 137
Artillerymen dining beside their weapons, 1941
Page 138
Humorous portrayal of the "Winter Fritz," from a Red Army theatrical revue called
The Thieving Army,
February 1942
Page 162
Red Army troops repair their boots, 1943
Page
163
Women launder soldiers' clothes on the First Ukrainian Front, 1943
Page 170
Sappers from the 193rd Dnepr Rifle Division building a shelter, 10 December 1943
Page 195 A soldiers' choir on the Kalinin front, May 1942
Page 211
Soviet refugees, a mother and son, rest on their journey, April 1942 (courtesy of the
State Archive of the Russian Federation)
Page 221
A medical orderly loads a soldier's body onto a horse-drawn stretcher, 1943
Page 222
Dog teams transporting the injured, August 1943
Page 224
Infantry and tanks near
Kharkov, 1943
Page 236
A scene of destruction in the village of Kuyani (courtesy of the State Archive of the
Russian Federation)
Page 244
Field post arriving for soldiers in the Kaluga region, 1942
Page 249
The cook arrives with the soldiers' soup
Page 250
Tank drivers pose with their mascot, 1944
Page 266
Red Army soldiers on the central front sleeping after battle, 1943
Page 276
Machine gunners of the Second Baltic Front fording a river, 1944
Page 292
Russian POW with his prisoner number (courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian
Federation)
Page 296
Bonfire of logs and corpses photographed as evidence of German war crimes, Klooga,
Estonia (courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)
Page 308
A column of Soviet troops of the Third Belorussian Front arriving in an East Prussian
city, 24 January 1945
Page 324
Infantrymen of a guards regiment stowing their bicycles for shipment, May 1945
Page 330
The Soviets in Berlin, May 1945
Page 359
A train carrying demobilized soldiers arrives in Moscow, 1945
Page 360
Demobilized troops arrive in the town of Ivanovo, 1945
IVAN'S WAR
Introduction
TRUE WAR STORIES
There is no shade in the center 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 center and you will find street vendors hawking fat cep mushrooms, homemade
pies, eggs, cucumbers, and peaches. Walk around 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 fields or 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-hour
intervals, an old bus, choking under its own weight, lumbers toward 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-
gray 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 center 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 had taken part in a series of battles in Kursk province. The rolling fields
that stretch away toward Ukraine saw fighting then that would decide not only Russia's fate and
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 six million soldiers,
German and Soviet, prepared to fight along a front that wove more than a thousand miles
through marsh and forest, coastal dune and steppe.
1
The Soviets had another two million troops
already under arms in territories far off to the east. They would need them within weeks. As the
conflict deepened in 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 time on the eastern front to exceed eleven
million.
2
The rates of loss were similarly extravagant. By December 1941, six months into the conflict, the
Red Army had lost four and a half 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 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 two and a half million Red Army troops they captured in the
first five months.
4
One single campaign, the defense of Kiev, cost the Soviets nearly 700,000
killed or missing in a matter of weeks.
5
Almost the entire army of the prewar 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 percent, 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 twenty-seven million. Most of these were civilians, unlucky victims of deportation,
hunger, disease, or direct violence. But Red Army losses—deaths— exceeded eight million of
the gruesome total.
7
This figure easily surpasses 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 amounted to fewer than a
quarter of a million for each. The Red Army, as one recruit put it, was a "meat-grinder." "They
called us, they trained us, they killed us," another man recalled. The Germans likened the
process, dismissively, to mass production, but the regiments kept marching, even when a third of
Soviet territory was in enemy hands.
8
By 1945, the total number of people who had been
mobilized into the Soviet armed forces since 1939 exceeded thirty million.
9
The epic story of this war has been told many times, but the stories of those thirty million
soldiers are still 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.
10
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.
11
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 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.
A soldier's farewell to his wife and children, Don Front, 1941
Theirs was no ordinary generation. By 1941, the Soviet Union, a state whose existence began in
1918, had already suffered violence on an unprecedented scale. The seven years after 1914 were
a time of unrelenting crisis; the civil war between 1918 and 1921 alone would bring cruel
fighting, desperate shortages of everything from heating fuel to bread and blankets, epidemic
disease, and a new scourge that Lenin chose to call class war. The famine that came in its wake
was also terrible by any standards, but a decade later, in 1932-33, when starvation claimed more
than seven million lives, the great hunger of 1921 would come to seem, as one witness put it,
"like child's play."
12
By then, too, Soviet society had torn itself apart in the upheaval of the first
of many five-year plans for economic growth, driving the peasants into collectives, destroying
political opponents, forcing some citizens to work like slaves. The men and women who were
called upon to fight in 1941 were the survivors of an era of turmoil that had cost well over fifteen
million lives in little more than two decades.
13
"The people were special," the old soldiers say. I heard this view expressed dozens of times in
Russia, and the implication was that torment, like a cleansing fire, created an exceptional
generation. Historians tend to accept the assessment, or at least to respect the evidence of stoical
endurance and self-sacrifice on the part of an entire nation. "Material explanations of Soviet
victory are never quite convincing," writes Richard Overy in his authoritative history of Russia's
war. "It is difficult to write the history of the war without recognising that some idea of a
Russian 'soul' or 'spirit' mattered too much to ordinary people to be written off as mere
sentimentality."
14
"Patriotism," the veterans would shout at me. "You will not find it among our
young people now." This may be true, but few have reflected on the motivation of soldiers
whose lives had been poisoned by the very state for which they were about to fight. Few wonder,
too, what insights future soldiers might have gleaned from parents or from older comrades who
had survived other wars, seen other Russian governments, or learned the way to stay alive by
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IVAN'S WAR
Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
CATHERINE MERRIDALE
METROPOLITAN BOOKS
First Edition 2006
To my father Philip Merridale
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
INTRODUCTION * True War Stories
ONE * Marching with Revolutionary Step
TWO * A Fire through All the World
THREE * Disaster Beats Its Wings
FOUR * Black Ways of War
FIVE * Stone by Stone
SIX
*
A Land Laid Waste
SEVEN * May Brotherhood Be Blessed
EIGHT * Exulting, Grieving, and Sweating Blood
NINE * Despoil the Corpse
TEN
*
Sheathe the Old Sword
ELEVEN * And We Remember All
Chronology of Main Events
Sources
List of Archives
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Page
5 A soldier's farewell to his wife and children, Don Front, 1941
Page 20
Local people talking to Red Army soldiers, September 1943
Page 57
Soldiers at the
banya,
September 1941
Page 58
A senior sergeant teaches a young recruit to wrap footcloths
Page 64
A political officer reads to the troops, 1944
Page 101
Red Army soldiers receiving their supply of shells before battle, 1941
Page 104
Artillery moving into firing position, Southern Front, 1942
Page 110
Soldiers near Leningrad receiving a consignment of books and paper, 1942
Page 121
Soviet infantry in their trenches, winter 1941
Page 130
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)
Page 131
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)
Page 137
Artillerymen dining beside their weapons, 1941
Page 138
Humorous portrayal of the "Winter Fritz," from a Red Army theatrical revue called
The Thieving Army,
February 1942
Page 162
Red Army troops repair their boots, 1943
Page
163
Women launder soldiers' clothes on the First Ukrainian Front, 1943
Page 170
Sappers from the 193rd Dnepr Rifle Division building a shelter, 10 December 1943
Page 195 A soldiers' choir on the Kalinin front, May 1942
Page 211
Soviet refugees, a mother and son, rest on their journey, April 1942 (courtesy of the
State Archive of the Russian Federation)
Page 221
A medical orderly loads a soldier's body onto a horse-drawn stretcher, 1943
Page 222
Dog teams transporting the injured, August 1943
Page 224
Infantry and tanks near
Kharkov, 1943
Page 236
A scene of destruction in the village of Kuyani (courtesy of the State Archive of the
Russian Federation)
Page 244
Field post arriving for soldiers in the Kaluga region, 1942
Page 249
The cook arrives with the soldiers' soup
Page 250
Tank drivers pose with their mascot, 1944
Page 266
Red Army soldiers on the central front sleeping after battle, 1943
Page 276
Machine gunners of the Second Baltic Front fording a river, 1944
Page 292
Russian POW with his prisoner number (courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian
Federation)
Page 296
Bonfire of logs and corpses photographed as evidence of German war crimes, Klooga,
Estonia (courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)
Page 308
A column of Soviet troops of the Third Belorussian Front arriving in an East Prussian
city, 24 January 1945
Page 324
Infantrymen of a guards regiment stowing their bicycles for shipment, May 1945
Page 330
The Soviets in Berlin, May 1945
Page 359
A train carrying demobilized soldiers arrives in Moscow, 1945
Page 360
Demobilized troops arrive in the town of Ivanovo, 1945
IVAN'S WAR
Introduction
TRUE WAR STORIES
There is no shade in the center 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 center and you will find street vendors hawking fat cep mushrooms, homemade
pies, eggs, cucumbers, and peaches. Walk around 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 fields or 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-hour
intervals, an old bus, choking under its own weight, lumbers toward 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-
gray 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 center 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 had taken part in a series of battles in Kursk province. The rolling fields
that stretch away toward Ukraine saw fighting then that would decide not only Russia's fate and
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 six million soldiers,
German and Soviet, prepared to fight along a front that wove more than a thousand miles
through marsh and forest, coastal dune and steppe.
1
The Soviets had another two million troops
already under arms in territories far off to the east. They would need them within weeks. As the
conflict deepened in 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 time on the eastern front to exceed eleven
million.
2
The rates of loss were similarly extravagant. By December 1941, six months into the conflict, the
Red Army had lost four and a half 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 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 two and a half million Red Army troops they captured in the
first five months.
4
One single campaign, the defense of Kiev, cost the Soviets nearly 700,000
killed or missing in a matter of weeks.
5
Almost the entire army of the prewar 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 percent, 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 twenty-seven million. Most of these were civilians, unlucky victims of deportation,
hunger, disease, or direct violence. But Red Army losses—deaths— exceeded eight million of
the gruesome total.
7
This figure easily surpasses 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 amounted to fewer than a
quarter of a million for each. The Red Army, as one recruit put it, was a "meat-grinder." "They
called us, they trained us, they killed us," another man recalled. The Germans likened the
process, dismissively, to mass production, but the regiments kept marching, even when a third of
Soviet territory was in enemy hands.
8
By 1945, the total number of people who had been
mobilized into the Soviet armed forces since 1939 exceeded thirty million.
9
The epic story of this war has been told many times, but the stories of those thirty million
soldiers are still 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.
10
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.
11
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 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.
A soldier's farewell to his wife and children, Don Front, 1941
Theirs was no ordinary generation. By 1941, the Soviet Union, a state whose existence began in
1918, had already suffered violence on an unprecedented scale. The seven years after 1914 were
a time of unrelenting crisis; the civil war between 1918 and 1921 alone would bring cruel
fighting, desperate shortages of everything from heating fuel to bread and blankets, epidemic
disease, and a new scourge that Lenin chose to call class war. The famine that came in its wake
was also terrible by any standards, but a decade later, in 1932-33, when starvation claimed more
than seven million lives, the great hunger of 1921 would come to seem, as one witness put it,
"like child's play."
12
By then, too, Soviet society had torn itself apart in the upheaval of the first
of many five-year plans for economic growth, driving the peasants into collectives, destroying
political opponents, forcing some citizens to work like slaves. The men and women who were
called upon to fight in 1941 were the survivors of an era of turmoil that had cost well over fifteen
million lives in little more than two decades.
13
"The people were special," the old soldiers say. I heard this view expressed dozens of times in
Russia, and the implication was that torment, like a cleansing fire, created an exceptional
generation. Historians tend to accept the assessment, or at least to respect the evidence of stoical
endurance and self-sacrifice on the part of an entire nation. "Material explanations of Soviet
victory are never quite convincing," writes Richard Overy in his authoritative history of Russia's
war. "It is difficult to write the history of the war without recognising that some idea of a
Russian 'soul' or 'spirit' mattered too much to ordinary people to be written off as mere
sentimentality."
14
"Patriotism," the veterans would shout at me. "You will not find it among our
young people now." This may be true, but few have reflected on the motivation of soldiers
whose lives had been poisoned by the very state for which they were about to fight. Few wonder,
too, what insights future soldiers might have gleaned from parents or from older comrades who
had survived other wars, seen other Russian governments, or learned the way to stay alive by
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