He was now a Lieutenant-General. Throughout those years of pale men staring down at maps there were many careers of a meteoric character—instant promotions and executions, loyal initiatives, heroes’ funerals—but none more dramatic than his. He was a modest, bookish sort who knew well enough when to leave politics alone—namely, always.30 Until now, to be sure, that abstinence had been a virtue. In meetings with his staff officers he was less inclined to cite the inevitability of a Soviet victory than to bring to their attention some brilliant field maneuver of Peter the Great’s. From somewhere he’d obtained a treatise by the executed Tukhachevsky. Later it was also remembered against him that he’d dared to praise the operational genius of the Fascist Panzergruppe commander Guderian. Vlasov felt that knowing the enemy well enough to steal away his science was sufficient; he need not squander time in detesting him. Priding himself on his rationalism, which was truly a species of courage (indeed, it bears comparison with the noble atheism of the true Bolshevik, who fights and dies without hope of any unearthly reward), he failed to foresee how weak a perimeter it might prove against the spearheads of an alien will.
At the end of February he embraced his wife for the last time. The hollows beneath her eyes were yellow and black like snow-stains where a German Nebelwerfer shell has exploded. She whispered goodbye almost with indifference; he couldn’t tell whether she’d decided to endure.
In March, shortly before the premiere of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, Comrade Stalin appointed him Deputy Commander of the Volkhov Front. The strategic aim: to break the siege of Leningrad. Of course the assignment was impossible, but at this stage of the war, what wasn’t?—Vlasov said: Comrade Stalin, I accept the responsibility.
That night they airlifted him into a sinister taiga zone beset by snow. Two divisions of nearly prewar strength awaited his command. No retreat would be tolerated. Nor could anyone allow himself to be captured by the Fascists; for that meant collaboration. Vlasov therefore had every motivation for success.
He is said to have infused his sector with an almost monastic resolution. His untrained, half-starved Siberians adored him. (In our memory, why not depict them with the scarlet cloaks and haloes of Russian icons, the forest darkness between their faces traced with capillaries of gold?) Mild whenever possible, yet plain-speaking always, getting his point across with common proverbs (he was, like any Communist hero, the son of poor peasants), he reminded them that in victory lay their only hope of delaying death. Some of them were equipped with antitank rifles. Every other nation had long since given these up, for the man who fights a tank can hardly hope to win the contest, but in those days the Soviet army had no other recourse.31 The Siberian
They dwelled in a pocket shaped like a hammerhead, its neck crossing the front line between Novgorod and Spaskaya Polist, then widening to a rounded flatness on the west side of the Luga River. German tanks pointed guns at them, although the tanks were frozen and the gunbarrels filled with snow. As long as the cold endured, Second Shock Army was safe. (Ranged against him: Eighteenth German Army’s two hundred tanks and twelve hundred self-propelled guns.) Sleeplessly poring over that static gameboard, Vlasov reread the essays of Guderian. A certain reference to the errors of military traditionalists haunted him: These men remain essentially unable to break free of recollections of positional warfare, which they persist in viewing as the combat form of the future, and they cannot muster the required act of will to stake all on a rapid decision. Guderian’s criticism rang true. The only question was in what wastes of operational philosophy he, Vlasov, remained frozen. Positional warfare had superseded cavalry charges because a single machine-gun nest could decimate the bravest, most inspired brotherhood of horsemen. What could warriors do but dig themselves into trenches? Then came tank and plane, the Panzer group, the Blitzkrieg. Positional warfare was obsolete forever. And yet the very success of Blitzkrieg had already afflicted it with its own traditionalists. Panzer warriors charged ahead with the same recklessness as their cavalrymen fathers. Supply lines lengthened; the Fascist machine had run out of fuel before Moscow. How could this phenomenon be exploited across the map?
Disobeying the commissar’s recommendation, he reread Tukhachevsky, who insisted that Blitzkrieg could be defeated through planning, determination and operational reserves. Of these he could call upon neither the first nor the last. He said to the commissar: If we only had a hundred tanks…
He reread Caulaincourt’s account of Napoleon’s defeat at Moscow. Time, space and weather had worn Napoleon down.
Once in a great while, his sentries at the rear might see a truck convoy’s many furry eyes of light in the night on the ice-road. The Fascists rarely shot at it. Sometimes an airplane landed, bearing emissaries of Comrade Stalin whose task it was to brief and debrief him. Ensconced in a ring of minefields, he was now full Commander. They’d promised to send him Sixth Guard Rifle Corps, but it didn’t happen. They assured him that First Shock Army would rejoin him before the thaw, and then he could outflank the Fascists at Lyuban, save Novgorod, liberate starving Leningrad. They demanded to know why he hadn’t already broken through. His appearance deteriorated rapidly. He knew very well that Second Army could expect nothing other than what the enemy called Kesselschlacht, cauldron-slaughter. Meanwhile he ate no better than his infantrymen, and never hesitated to expose himself to enemy fire. Call it emblematic that beside the dugout which served as his command post that spring, a corpse’s frozen hand was seen upraised from a heap of ice and steel.
By 24 April, General K. A. Meretskov, Vlasov’s erstwhile superior, was more than anxious about the situation of Second Shock Army.—If nothing is done then a catastrophe is inevitable, he said to Comrade Stalin.—Stalin shrugged his shoulders.
This Meretskov had already been arrested once on suspicion of anti-Soviet activity. The fact that no evidence of guilt was ever found only made the case more serious. At the very least, he could be convicted of defeatism. Like far too many commanders, he kept demanding reinforcements and begging permission to withdraw. (There were no reinforcements; and any further withdrawals would mean the fall of Moscow.) That was why Stalin had dismissed him from the Volkhov Front just yesterday. He was lucky. Several of his colleagues had been shot for losing battles. On 8 June, this roundfaced, curving-eyebrowed Hero of the Soviet Union would be restored to all his dignities, with Stalin’s apologies. Indeed, he’d outlast Stalin himself. Assistant Minister of Defense, Deputy to the Supreme Soviet, seven-time recipient of the Order of Lenin (Vlasov had received it only once), he lived to be buried honorably in the Kremlin wall.
Meanwhile, Vlasov’s infantrymen kept sighing to one another: If Comrade Stalin only knew to what extent his policies are being sabotaged!
A black cloud hovered above a tank for a photographic millisecond, soft, almost like an embryonic sac, but then it fell, comprised of earth, rubble and steel beams.
Vlasov was summoned to speak with Comrade Stalin on the V-phone.
What’s your objection to continuing this offensive, Comrade Vlasov?
We can hold the sector for a few days longer, but deep enemy penetration has compressed our bridgeheads.
30
In our Soviet Union, of course, one may only be apolitical in the most enthusiastic and even militant fashion. It’s said that on one occasion Vlasov, having just denounced the brutal, hypocritical murderousness of a certain article in
31
Here we might as well insert another allegory. The metal of the day was steel. Hitler and Mussolini had their Pact of Steel, “Stalin” is a quite literally steely pseudonym; all hearts riflemen smiled at Vlasov, smoking their mahorka cigarettes. Then they went and died for him. The arc-welder’s glare whenever a tank was hit became their own eternal flame. Nonetheless, our attack faltered and froze. were supposed to be hardened and armored. But it remains a sad fact that in our Soviet smelting plants we most often find steel being alloyed against corrosion by means of neither that utopian substance platinum nor even the perfectly adequate nickel; rather, manganese gets pressed into this role, because it’s abundant and cheap in the USSR. So it is also with our weapons and even our fighters…