Very well, General Vlasov. What if it’s not true? What if we are in fact monsters? Tell me why that should invalidate our critique of your monsters. Think about that. And now I’m afraid our lads in Military Intelligence must impose on you a little…
And so he was swallowed up by Germany. Germany was a monster of rubber, oil, gold, steel and chromium ore.
The man behind the steel desk offered him a cigarette. A blackout curtain covered something on a wall, perhaps a military map. The man said: Don’t think I approve of all these measures.
Which measures?
And now he talks back to me, the man said. Imagine that. It’s 1942, and I have to tolerate a Slav talking back to me. I don’t give a shit what the General says. This must be happening in another country. This must not be Russia. What do you think, Slav? You think that explains what’s going on here?
Vlasov waited to be tortured or shot.
Where were you?
I was captured in Tukhovetchi Village.
We know that. Now tell me why it took so long for us to catch you.
I never stayed in one place.
Who hid you?
I’ve heard about your Barbarossa Decree, said Vlasov, expecting to be shot.
So you don’t want your partisan friends executed. Your little Zoya took care of you, eh? Well, we can understand that. We’ll get their names and locations out of you later. But maybe you have incorrect ideas about us. We don’t mind working with people who admit their mistakes in full.
I’ve made mistakes, said Vlasov palely. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.
Well, think about it, said the man behind the desk. You have all the time in the world.
How much time?
The rest of your life.
They all kept telling him to think about it. General Lindemann, who was an extremely handsome man, and rendered still more resplendent by the black cross at his throat, the glittering metal eagle, the row of six buttons each as glowing and glaring as the sun, had advised him to consider the issue of moral equivalency. Vlasov was compelled to remind himself that such arguments were not in the least objectively motivated; nevertheless, they might be true. He thought about it. Even when they asked him how many tanks and artillery pieces he’d commanded in the Volkhov pocket and he told them, they asked him to reconsider, just in case he might be forgetting something. When they asked him about Meretskov’s new divisions, he told them (his head awkwardly bowed just as it would usually be in the official photographs of the propagandists, his dark strange new uniform—plain and brown, not German—too big for him, enwrapping him like bends of sheet-metal) that his soldier’s honor prohibited him from any comment, and they said that they understood. Then they suggested that he contemplate the matter further. Pale and anxious, he traced invisible arcs on a map with his forefinger while General Lindemann looked on. Their typist recorded everything. They thanked him for his information, which they said was very helpful and important. Half-guilty now, he wondered what he’d given away, or whether that was just one of their tricks…
But he said to himself: I need to be realistic. I need to save what can be saved.
A military intelligence officer poured out two glasses of cognac from Paris. Vlasov was shocked by his own gratitude. The officer remarked: I admire your fanatical determination. The Polish campaign won’t get more than a paragraph in the history books. But we’re going to have to write an entire chapter about you Slavs! Do you know what I told my wife last summer? I told her what my commanding officer promised me. Don’t worry, I said. The Russian question will be solved in six weeks.
Vlasov laughed a little, not disliking the man. Outside an amplified voice sang almost pleasantly: Jews and commissars, step forward!
Nonetheless, with our new eighty-eight-millimeter guns, your tanks won’t have a chance.
Anyway, said Vlasov with a sad smile, we’ve already lost twenty thousand tanks.
After a thorough but correct interrogation at Lotzen, they sent him to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, where a comfortable prison camp awaited him—a really nice one, in fact, where each of the reprieved lay licking up sleep as a cat does drops of milk. It was a hot journey, but the Fascists kept him in a special train-car where he could stretch his legs, in company with some perfectly correct S.D. policemen.—Don’t be alarmed, said the captain, but before crossing into the Reich, every Russian must be deloused at Eydtkuhnen Station…—Composing his face into an aloof smile, Vlasov awaited developments. His former life’s freedom of action now seemed wondrous, but he reminded himself that it had hardly been his choice to get inserted into the Volkhov pocket to fight there uselessly. What if something good could come of all this? Certainly when Comrade Stalin had dispatched him to China, he hadn’t known what to expect, and yet he’d been able to do his duty there without disappointing anyone; he’d even been awarded the Order of the Golden Dragon by Chiang Kai-shek, although as soon as he reentered the Soviet Union, the secret police confiscated it, for reasons of state. His wife had been disappointed; she’d wanted to see his golden dragon… Hoping and believing that he could break out of his new difficulties, he replied courteously but not obsequiously to the small talk of the S.D. men, who wanted to know which features of the Crimean landscape he considered most beautiful. (He’d fought there with distinction in 1920, against the monarchists.) After that, the S.D. captain told him about a certain sailing excursion he’d once taken on the Bodensee, seven years ago it was, when his lucky number came up, thanks to the Führer’s “Strength Through Joy” program. Had General Vlasov heard of the Bodensee? Vlasov nodded, clearing his throat.
Seeing that he made no attempt to escape, they finally told him where he was going.—Yes, Vinnitsa, he replied with one of his meaningless smiles. I remember when that was General Tyulenev’s headquarters…
(Over one-third of the people’s armed forces were already out of commission—if we didn’t count all those schoolgirls now dying for the sake of useless antitank obstacles. That figure kept exploding within his forehead, malignantly trying to break through.)
Although their conveyance passed several of the newborn concentration camps in which Russians huddled in bare fields sealed off by barbed wire, thirsting and sickening, digging up mice and earthworms with their bare hands so as to extend the term of starvation, Vlasov is said to have seen nothing. After all, window-gazing is not one of the pastimes permitted to prisoners-of-war. Nor would it have been fair to impute any evil to the German administration on the basis of those camps, for it takes time to put conquered dominions in order. Soon, when these zones were better Germanized, the survivors, the one-in-ten, would be inducted into striped uniforms. They’d wear a red triangle superimposed with the letter R.
Vinnitsa, where in the words of a German policeman-poet, we saw two worlds, and will permit only one to rule, had only recently been cleansed of Jews. Nowadays we’d probably label it a “strategic location,” for it was rapidly becoming a junction for military traffic of all kinds. From behind barbed wire, the prisoners could often see processions of armored troop carriers cobblestoned with German faces and helmets. (Yes, it’s all true, a grief-crazed major muttered into Vlasov’s ear. At Smolensk alone, they caught a hundred thousand of us… ) Long hospital trains clanked rearward; truckloads of ammunition and jaunty dispatch riders went the other way. Just a couple of weeks ago the Führer had established his latest military headquarters on the edge of town, in a discreet little forest compound called “Werewolf.” Precisely because Werewolf was such a secret, even the inmates of the prison camp knew all about it. It was said that the Führer wanted to give the drive against the Caucasus oil-fields his personal direction. Stalingrad wouldn’t halt him for long! Nobody knew when Moscow was slated to fall at last, but the drama of approaching victory excited everyone into a rage of impatience at considerable variance from the resignation one might have expected; for the “Prominente” could not help but feel that six months from now, when the war was over, it would be too late to prove themselves to their new masters. As for Vlasov, his unexpected proximity to the head of the German government gave him hope. (Every wall regaled him with posters which said HITLER—THE LIBERATOR.) He sufficiently understood his own worth to be aware that rationality itself required the Führer to redeem him into usefulness. At this point, he still didn’t know what he wanted. He remained determined to ensconce his own integrity within the deepest, most concentrated defenses. But on his face he felt the seductive breath of opportunity.