He was a delegate of the Twenty-fifth Party Congress in Moscow. I’ve seen him smile resolutely at the East German leader, Honecker, whose returning smile seems more strained, more like Hilde Benjamin’s; Karmen for his part remained natural all his life. That is why we all liked him: Dolores Ibarruri, head of the Spanish Communist Party, praised him and smiled eternally; Castro said of him: In the name of our people we thank you for your free and deep friendship for us; Salvador Allende mentioned my friend Roman Karmen. For the same reason, at the Moscow Academy of Film he was renowned for his easy closeness with the younger students, men and women both. But these details shunt his story away from its true end.
In 1965 “The Great Patriotic War” appeared under his name. Two famous shots: A haunted old man clutches his hat to his chest; a calm old soldier salutes.
In 1966, shortly before returning to Spain as a tourist, he was named a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union. (I remember how he used to be dark and skinny like a French gamin as he stood at the panning lever of his cinematic camera in 1933, shooting “Moscow-Kara-Kum-Moscow.”) That year’s edition of the Moscow Kinoslovar describes the character of his films as strikingly emotive, but the feelings are faithfully bright, which is to say remarkably dramatic, but always in a public-spirited context. Drobaschenko names him in the same breath as the great Dziga Vertov.
In 1968 he co-directed “Granada, Granada, My Granada”29 with K. M. Simonov, with whom he’d always got on well. One shrouded female figure halfway through the first reel, some of whose archival footage dates from 1936, is rumored to be Elena Konstantinovskaya. ‣
BREAKOUT
With few, but courageous allies… we must take upon ourselves the defense of a continent which largely does not deserve it.
Until July 1942, Lieutenant-General A. A. Vlasov, Commander of the Second Shock Army of the Volkhov Front, remained one of those heroically immaculate men of Soviet marble, each of whom bears a glittering star centered in his forehead like an Indian woman’s caste mark (why didn’t German snipers shoot at it?), each holding his gleaming black gun in white hands, aiming with confidence. So the old photographs portray them, all highlights bleached into blank purity. Vlasov cannot be descried among them now. Nor has he been found deserving of a citation in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. There is, indeed, an angry entry about “Vlasov Men.” That befits, for the crime which Vlasov committed was of a collective nature: He organized an army of traitors to fight against their own motherland.
He is said to have been both brave and coolheaded in the foredoomed defense of Lvov. In a series of energetic attacks, he led a breakout right through the German pincers, saving his troops for future fighting. Repeating this dangerous and thankless accomplishment when the enemy took Kiev, he preserved the remnants of Thirty-seventh Army. (No doubt he was aided both times by the rumors, each day less deniable, that the Fascists were machine-gunning prisoners by the thousands.) He reached Moscow shortly before that city came under siege. The people around him were as faint and intermittent as his reflection in the broken, blacked out windows. Most of them had never even thrown a hand grenade. Vlasov visited his wife and tried to prepare her for the worst. On 10 November 1941, he was summoned beneath the five-pointed Kremlin stars of ruby glass (each of which weighed one ton, and each of which was illuminated from within by incandescent lamps), and so he came into the presence of Comrade Stalin himself. It was literally the stroke of midnight. Rigidly polite, he awaited honor or death.
Stalin demanded his opinions on the protection of Moscow. Vlasov gave them without mitigation but without defeatism, either, recommending a deeply echeloned defense to delay the Fascist Army Group Center until winter. In particular, the Mozhaisk defensive line should be strengthened. Ground might be given, in Kalinin for instance, but it must be contested. Meanwhile, it was essential that we use the time purchased with the lives of a few more hundred thousand peasant boys to form up the Siberian reserves.
Stalin raised his haggard head. He asked: Where will the enemy break through?
Vlasov rose, approached the situation map, and said: I’ve already mentioned Mozhaisk. Generally speaking, the Iartsevo axis will soon be endangered.
Speak the truth, like a Communist. Will we lose Moscow?
I think not. By the end of this month they’ll start freezing to death, and then we can counterattack…
With what?
Well, Comrade Stalin, as I said, with the Siberian reserves.
Anybody can defend Moscow with reserves.
Vlasov nodded obediently.
Nevertheless, your analysis is correct, Comrade Vlasov. I’m going to give you fifteen tanks. As for this echeloned defense, you’ll present your diagrams to Comrade Zhukov in one hour’s time…
And that very day, the four hundred and fifty thousand shivering, famished Muscovites who’d been mobilized (three-quarters of them women, for all conditionally fit men had been sent to the front long ago) began reifying the Mozhaisk defensive line with their shovels. Mozhaisk fell. The survivors regrouped to dig more trenches according to Vlasov’s specifications: deep and narrow, like the corridors of the Lubyanka. Within hours there were blanket-wrapped corpses in one ditch—magnified representations of the worms which would eat them come summer. Firepoints of concrete blocks sank down into place like tombstones. As for the still-immaculate man, he went to take command of Twentieth Army with his fifteen shopworn tanks. The night sky was already turning pink under Fascist artillery fire. This time he had no chance to say farewell to his wife, who, white-faced in her dark winter coat and shawl, too sick to dig trenches, sat against her cold samovar, hugging herself for warmth with her hands inside her coat-sleeves, the apartment lightless but for a candle. Soon she’d be sleeping underground with the others, beneath the arched roofs of the Metro station. Somebody in raspberry-colored boots was asking a railroad man which train for Kuibyshev would be the last. As for Vlasov, he expected to be dead within a week at most.
In December, Twentieth Army and First Shock Army launched successful counterblows against the German Fascist command. Solnechnogorsk was liberated; the enemy had already set fire to Volokolamansk in preparation for retreat. And so the commissar called upon the soldiers of Twentieth Army to increase their efforts. He pointed out that thanks to Comrade Stalin we now had fifty-four tanks. He invoked the neck-high pyramids of antitank traps made entirely by girls in Leningrad. Vlasov, who’d been studying the strategic maxims of Napoleon, emerged from his dugout, at which the commissar’s speech got routed by many cheers. Vlasov smiled shyly. That night he led them back into battle, showing admirable contempt for his own safety. Abnormally tall, he stood out above the other shapes of men bulked and blocked by winter clothes, heads swollen and flattopped like immense boltheads, shoulders swollen and squared. They conquered Volokolamansk. General Rokossovsky sent a radio message of thanks and congratulations; the commissar for his part warned the security “organs” that A. A. Vlasov might be an unreliable element.
By New Year’s Eve, when his photograph appeared in the portrait-gallery of prominent generals in Izvestiya, they’d recovered ground all the way to the Lama-Riza line. More than half a million Germans died in the snow. Their corpses were often found clad in clumsy straw overshoes, for the Fascist high command had not issued them any winter supplies. The liberation of Mozhaisk was imminent. On 24 January 1942, Vlasov received the Order of the Red Banner.