(He remembered the lieutenant-colonel’s last words: I don’t understand how the Fascists were able to cross the Stalin Line… )
Here, in the roofless ruin of the dacha he hid in (on the wall behind the bed’s skeleton, someone had drawn a heart with the initials E. K. and D. D. S.), other facts and memories seemed to linger like his wife’s miserable face peering around a half-lifted blackout curtain whenever he left her. So many sad chances faced him now! General Meretskov had whispered in confidence that ten thousand lives were lost in the evacuation of Tallinn alone. How many of these could be ascribed simply to numerical inferiority, how many to incompetent leadership, and how many to madness beyond cruelty? (Andrei, said his wife, how can you live with yourself?)
Consider the case of the Kazakhstan’s Captain Kalitayev. (Meretskov had told Vlasov that tale, too.) Knocked unconscious by a German shell, he fell into the water. The Kazakhstan sailed on without him. After his rescuers carried him to Kronstadt, he was shot for desertion.
For that matter, everybody knew that Stalin and Beria had shot Army Group General Pavlov, then Generals Klimovskikh and Klich, for the crime of defeat. Their understrength, untrained battalions had rushed into action with a few bullets apiece, commanded to hold the line while the Fascists got vanquished by half a dozen tanks “donated” by some collective farm. No enemy breakthrough could be permitted. The last thing those dying soldiers heard was a metallically amplified speech of Comrade Stalin, played over and over again, reminding them of the virtues of the new Soviet Constitution.
Vlasov had known all these things, but in the interests of that certain kind of “realism” which allows us to live life, he’d never confessed them until now. Now he shuddered. He saw into himself. He grew more rational than ever before.
(Two days before he dissolved Second Shock Army, with the pocket already nearly as narrow as a corridor of the Lubyanka, the Supreme Command had sent a Lavochkin SFN fighter to fly him out. Vlasov refused, preferring to remain with his men. Was he brave? Everybody said so. But Comrade Stalin had told him that no retreat would be tolerated. He preferred not to share the doom of Generals Pavlov, Klimovskikh and Klich.)
Munching on a handful of bog billberries, he heard artillery bursts from the direction of Leningrad. How many ditch-digging schoolgirls were dying there today? Supposing that their bravery equaled, since nothing could excel, that of the pair of Russian soldiers at Smolensk who’d hid for ten days in a tank’s hulk beside the decomposing corpse of their comrade, radioing the positions of the German victors who passed all around them, what then?
(What must have happened to those two soldiers in the end?—Discovered, shot.)
Directed by German fires shining between roof-ribs, he found an old peasant who fed him. The peasant said: When there is no more Red Army, the Germans will give us our land back.
Mutely, Vlasov held up the Geco 7.65-millimeter shell.
The peasant said: Excuse me, Comrade General, but in the last war the Germans behaved very correctly.
Vlasov had his own memories of war. They resembled the hardened blood on his uniform, mementoes of the lieutenant-colonel and the scout.
On 12 July 1942, round about the time that Stalin issued Order Number 227 (“Not a Step Backward”), Lieutenant-General Vlasov was captured by the Fascists. He’d been betrayed yet again, this time by a village elder of whom he’d begged a little bread. How did he feel when the lock-bolt clicked behind him? Let’s call his night in the fire brigade shed the fifth stage of his political development. Nobody brought him even a cup of water. Late next morning, when he’d begun to swelter, he heard the growl of a vehicle, probably a staff car, coming up the bad road. He heard the hobnailed footsteps of German soldiers. The bolt slammed back. Through the opening door he saw two silhouettes with leveled machine-guns, and then a voice in German-accented Russian shouted: Out!
Don’t shoot, he murmured, exhausted. I’m General Vlasov…
For the moment they allowed him to keep everything except his pistol. (In the pocket of his greatcoat was a shelclass="underline" Geco, 7.65 millimeter.) Perusing his identification papers, which were bound in the finest morocco leather, they lighted upon the signature of none other than Comrade Stalin himself, and stroked it in a kind of awe. Just to be sure, they made him show them his gold tooth, which had been mentioned in the “wanted” messages.
Strangely enough, they did not place him within one of those open boxcars already crammed with Russians packed and stacked vertically—still alive, most of them (soon they’d commence eating each other). Nor did they give him unto those German murderers straight and clean whom archivists and war crimes prosecutors would later spy in photographs, lightheartedly posing halfway down the slope of the newest mass grave. Instead, they took him to the frontline Stalag to be classified.
Their field police recognized him immediately. They said to him: Don’t worry, General. You’re a politically acceptable element.
Vlasov kept expecting to be shot. But instead they conveyed him respectfully to the headquarters of a German general in a field-grey greatcoat. The name of the German general was H. Lindemann. He commanded Eighteenth Army. And General Lindemann said to Vlasov, with exactly the same gentleness as he would have bestowed upon one of his own wounded soldiers: Well, your war’s ended. But I must say you fought with honor. Upon my word, dear fellow, you gave us a devil of a time—
Vlasov bowed a little, sipping the tea which General Lindemann’s orderly had poured out for him.
If you’d ever gotten the reinforcements you deserved, you just might have outflanked us! Ha, ha, look at this map! Do you see that break in my line down here just behind Lyuban? Every day, oh, until almost April, I should say, I used to tell my staff officers: Gentlemen, we’d better pray that Vlasov doesn’t get reinforced…
General Lindemann, would a German officer in my place have shot himself?
Heavens, no! Capture’s no disgrace for someone like you, who’s fought with his unit up to the very last instant… Why do you look at me that way?
I beg your pardon, General Lindemann. I’m a little tired…
We are not the monsters your Premier Stalin makes us out to be. We are human beings.
Vlasov smiled drily, waiting to be shot.
I suppose you’ve wondered why we came, said Lindemann. Personally, I was against it, but personal opinions are of no importance nowadays. Fate has sent Germany a great genius: Adolf Hitler. We must obey his will.
Vlasov was silent.
Now let me tell you something, continued General Lindemann with the utmost kindness. To my mind, Bolshevism is a crime inflicted against the world in general, and Russia in particular. You Slavs are perfectly capable of ethical conceptions, as I know from Dostoyevsky and—hm, Tolstoy’s not really manly—and yet you’ve allowed yourselves to be tricked into following these, well, excuse me, these murderers.
On that subject I can hardly begin to answer you, General Lindemann.
Both of them heard the scream of the incoming shell, but that meant nothing. Then the adjutant rushed in with a dispatch, stood a little foolishly, then slowly backed out, still holding that piece of paper which after all must not have been so important. The Russian shell continued overhead and finally exploded dully somewhere to the west.