Explain this failure.
Well, their tanks aren’t frozen anymore. The Fascists have regained their mobility…
For a moment Vlasov could hear nothing but heavy, weary breathing, and then the metallic voice said: We can spare you no reinforcements.
Perhaps if First Shock Army—
Impossible. Northwest Front would be endangered.
Then Sixth Guard Rifle Corps—
No.
In that case, I request permission to break out immediately.
Your analysis is incorrect, Stalin replied. You will hold the line at all costs.
The connection ended then. Vlasov sat mournfully in his candle-lit dugout. Holding the receiver against his ear for a moment, he nodded. He even smiled. He remembered a sentence: These men remain essentially unable to break free of recollections of positional warfare.
Well, Comrade General? said the commissar.
Withdrawal is premature, he says.
I understand how you must feel. Still, once Comrade Stalin has laid down the line, there’s nothing for us to do but follow it.
Then we’re doomed. Within a week, they’ll enfilade us with artillery fire—In an exasperated voice, the commissar replied: Everything you say may be correct from the military viewpoint, but politically speaking it’s quite incorrect. You’d better be more careful. I’ve heard that your eldest brother was shot for anti-Bolshevik activity during the Civil War…
There came the “general alarm” signal.
Telephone communications are broken, sir!
Send me the liaison officer.
He’s dead.
On 24 June, the German pincers having long since squeezed shut, Vlasov informed his soldiers that no further hope remained unless they could break out in small groups. This having been said, he wished them good luck, and Second Shock Army disbanded into fugitives.
That twenty-day interval when Vlasov dwelled between the Soviet and the Nazi systems was, as biographers love to say, “crucial to his development.” In the first stage, he continued in all good faith to discover a gap in the Fascist lines, so that he could repeat the near-miracles of Lvov and Kiev. This period came to an end on the day after he, the lieutenant-colonel and the scout had eaten a family of drowned fieldmice somewhere near Mostki. The scout was already through the barbed wire and the lieutenant-colonel was holding two corroded strands apart for Vlasov to crawl between when the upraised needle of a distant tank-gun began to move. When he’d returned to his body, he found himself covered with blood, but it wasn’t his. Sun-flashes on German helmets and German guns sought him out. Rolling down into the shell crater where his companions lay, he closed his eyes, but could no longer remember his wife’s face. In good time, when the artillery explosions seemed to be growing louder to the east, he dodged south, into the swamps. He continued to seek a way back to immaculateness, but he’d lost confidence, and the sounds of motors harassed him almost as much as the flies on his bloodstained uniform. Silver streams and silver skies, sandy ooze, immense trees, and every now and then a uniform containing something halfway between flesh and muck—this taiga bogscape, shrinking limbo of Soviet sovereignty, remained as blank on both enemies’ maps as a hero’s forehead.—Should Vlasov have entombed himself there? Ask Comrade Stalin.—In any event, hunger flushed him out.
He was well into the second stage when just off the Luga road, not far from where Pushkin had fought his fatal duel, he came across the bodies of fifty peasant women in the open air by their ruined hearths. They’d perished variously, as people will, some ending face-down in the dirt, others on, say, their left side, legs twisted in a final spasm, and one even lay inexplicably on her back, with her hands folded across her heart, as if somebody who loved her had laid her out for a funeral. What welded these manifestations of individualism into an enigmatic parable of universal fatality was the fact that each victim had been shot in the base of the skull—a method of execution which the German language, so capable of inventing words for all eventualities, names a Nackenschuss. Cartridges glittered in the bloodstained grass. I suspect that not even Vlasov himself could have described his feelings at the moment, although he’d seen as many horrors as any other military man, especially during the fall of Kiev. On the battlefield, corpses tend to clump randomly together, their nested kneescapes and elbowscapes resembling mountain ranges photographed from high altitudes. Vlasov had taught himself to look upon such deaths as accidents. But these women lay in an evenly spaced line, like deserters after the commissar imposes sentence. It may not be out of place to mention that in the course of Thirty-second Army’s retreat to Moscow, certain secret dispatches inadvertently left behind (orders to hold the long since overrun Stalin Line) had given Vlasov occasion to return to a village they’d evacuated an hour before. I am sorry to say that he found the peasants, with utter contempt for Soviet power, already preparing the bread and salt of traditional welcome, which they clearly meant to offer to the oncoming Fascists. Not without difficulty, Vlasov prevented his machine-gunner from feasting those traitors on lead. Perhaps this inaction is something to reproach him for. Indeed, his aversion to murder was the very reason he’d requested permission to withdraw from the Volkhov pocket. What was the use of allowing Second Shock Army to be slaughtered without hope of any operational or tactical breakthrough? But Comrade Stalin had replied: You will hold the line at all costs.—These fifty corpses (fifty exactly) proved the correctness of Comrade Stalin’s order. Had the collapse of Second Shock Army been prevented, these women would still be alive. Exhausted by heartache, anxiety and guilt, Vlasov came near to regressing to the first stage. But then he heard engines. Scavenging through the ashes of the nearest hearth, he found a few charred potatoes, tumbled them into his coat pockets and ran across wet, sandy ground, circling the village until he reached the place where he could hide. He thought of Zoya the Partisan’s last words (as reported by the Pravda journalist Lidin): You can’t hang all hundred and ninety million of us. Closing his eyes, he seemed to see that photograph of her frozen, mutilated breasts. It was not strange that that image could still cause him to feel wounded in his own heart, for he still retained his immaculateness. Like Zoya, who perhaps had wept quietly before the Fascists executed her, he could be enveloped and annihilated, but no one could break through the impregnable marble of his convictions. Not long after he’d crawled into the tall grass to eat his potatoes, a line of mobile assault guns came grinding up the Luga road, their barrels and tank treads shining, and helmeted German boys were sitting on top, half-smiling into the lens of history. What had Second Army ever possessed to oppose them? A few Sokolov Maxim 7.62-millimeter machine-guns, which resembled farm machinery with their two wheels and towing yoke, their fat barrels pointing backwards as if to drop leaden seeds into the fields (five hundred per minute of them)—how ludicrous!—And with this reflection, he entered the third stage.
All this time he’d kept one of the cartridges from the massacre clenched in his left hand so tightly that the fingers bore greenish stains. When the Fascists had gone, he brought it close to his spectacles, to read the marking: Geco, 7.65 millimeter, of German manufacture.
The fourth stage in General Vlasov’s development followed inescapably from the third, given his logical bent. The intellect which read Napoleon, Caulaincourt, Guderian, Tukhachevsky and Peter the Great with fairness to all prided itself on its willingness to admit the sway of physical laws, even and especially if those laws operated to its own disadvantage. He who says I have failed is more likely to be sincere than he who declares victory. Datum: The Fascist invaders outnumbered the Soviet military forces by a factor of 1.8 in personnel, 1.5 in medium and heavy tanks, 3.2 in combat planes, and 1.2 in guns and infantry mortars. Leningrad must fall this summer, and likewise Moscow. The enemy would soon control the oil fields of the Caucasus. They could not be defeated. This was the fact. Therefore, any attempt to defeat them was absurd.