He dreamed that once again he was standing over the massacred peasant women in the burnt weeds where the Geco cartridges glittered, but this time he understood enough to bend down and gently cleanse the blood from their faces with a black scarf dipped in the river; and as soon as he had done this he realized that the blood wasn’t even theirs; unwounded, immaculate, they opened their eyes, sat up and kissed his lips in turn.
Summoning him back to the commandant’s office, Second Lieutenant Dürken invited him to sign a propaganda leaflet calling upon Soviet troops to surrender.
Vlasov replied: As a soldier, I cannot ask other soldiers to stop doing their duty.
Then we’ll take out the part asking them to desert, Dürken replied eagerly.
Vlasov signed.
On 10.9.42, just as General Paulus’s Sixth Army began to run into trouble at Stalingrad, the Germans dropped leaflets on the Red Army, inviting them to desert. These leaflets bore Vlasov’s name.
On 17.9.42, thanks to a word from Second Lieutenant Dürken, the Fascists installed him in the Department of Propaganda on Viktoriastrasse, Berlin. (Reader, think of them as the mechanized corps of the third echelon, meant to exploit breakthroughs.)—You may feel a bit fettered here in the Old Reich, Strik-Strikfeldt had warned him. There’s more legalism here than in the occupied territories—more obstructionism, I should say. As for the men in the office, I don’t really know them that well. If you have any problems, just ring me up, old fellow. I won’t desert you…
When will I meet Hitler?
Oh, right now he’s busy trying to decide how quickly our Tiger tanks ought to be fitted with the new eighty-eight-millimeter cannons—
Vlasov’s new offices were brightly lit, if windowless, and the administration gave him plenty of liquor. On the wall glared the face of HITLER—THE LIBERATOR. Sometimes there were hilarious drinking parties with the secretaries, who almost seemed to have been selected for their voluptuousness (if I may be permitted to employ that word to describe creatures of the Slavic racial type). Sitting back on a faded green sofa, he smiled a little awkwardly while a drunken Cossack poet whose parents had been shot by the Bolsheviks back in ’21 declaimed strophes pertaining to this antipodal realm / where summer burns eternal. (You’re quite the relativist, but I don’t blame you! laughed a lieutenant-general who hailed from the coldest part of Siberia.) A German girl was desperately kissing a Russian girl in the corner.—Well, let them all take their pleasure where they can, thought Vlasov with an impersonally pitying affection. Soon enough they’ll be fighting for their lives.—Perhaps because he himself had become a little drunk, they reminded him of the mahorka-smoking troops he’d commanded during the battle of Moscow. Bivouacking under the snow (for the Fascists had burned down all the peasant huts), they too got tipsy, sang songs (I’m warm in this freezing bunker / thanks to your love’s eternal flame!), played chess, crushed lice, cleaned their weapons and prepared to die. At those times Vlasov found his war stories much in demand. Pouting, a typist named Olenka demanded to know why he hadn’t saved his Chinese Order of the Golden Dragon for her.—I would have worn it around my neck, Andrei Andreyevich, I really really would. And do you know what else? Every night I would have kissed it…—Vlasov chuckled and pinched her, his face relaxing into goodnatured ugliness.
It was on this very same green sofa that in company with a certain M. A. Zykov (soon to be liquidated on account of his Jewish antecedents) Vlasov wrote the famous Smolensk Declaration, which begins: Friends and brothers! BOLSHEVISM IS THE ENEMY OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE. Their colleagues toasted them with vodka and then again with schnapps. It was signed on 27.12.42 and published on 13.1.43, one day after having been approved by the Führer. Although it was meant for the Red Army, Reich Minister Rosenberg arranged for it to fall on the occupied territories, where, in Strik-Strikfeldt’s words, one could come across grey wraiths who subsisted on corpses and tree-bark.
By then the Germans had already lost the strategic initiative. Rommel was in trouble at El Alamein; then came the landing in French North Africa; Stalingrad was encircled.—Even the Führer kept saying now: The Russians will break through somehow. They always do.—As the Barons of the East began to perceive an alarmingly fluid operational situation, they cast about for a way to redirect policy. Maybe their fiefdoms could still be saved, if somebody like Vlasov…
And so Vlasov felt that he had somewhat reestablished himself in the world (or, if you prefer, that he’d stabilized his defensive front). This new life offered no “security,” it’s true, but nobody had been secure under Comrade Stalin, either. Nor had he stained his conscience in any way. To be sure, all of our decisions, even self-destructive ones, contain opportunistic elements; but really the safest, most comfortable thing would have been to ensconce himself in that office on Viktoriastrasse and sign leaflets dictated by his German masters. He refused to do that. He wanted to fight for the liberation of Russia. And so the propaganda officers, promising him an imminent escape from this pleasant limbo, photographed Vlasov in his new regalia, raising his right hand in a sort of Indian salute, with smiling German officers at his side as he paced down the wall of imaginary volunteers.
Listening to Liszt on the gramophone in his new quarters at the Russian Court Hotel, he continued to believe in a German victory, if only because any other kind would have such evil consequences for his dreams. (What were his dreams? He lay down, his feet hanging off the edge of the bed, and dreamed that his wife was embracing him, but she was a six-armed monster with a face of brass and she was choking him and he could not break free. He woke up gasping, and for the remainder of the night lay staring up at the ceiling in infinite bewilderment and distress.) Europe was becoming (to appropriate Guderian’s words) a fortress of unlimited breadth and depth, and there was no reason why that fortress could not thwart any breakthrough. The disaster at Stalingrad gave him pause, but in the end he merely thought it all the more urgent to return to the front line and apply his talents, instead of signing his name to other people’s propaganda. His colleagues kept invoking the Führer with such reassuring conviction that the forthcoming meeting would obviously settle everything. And Strik-Strikfeldt rang him up again with the news that he’d now obtained the support of a powerful faction in the Supreme Command…
Indeed, our merry Balt, whose motives gamboled within an inviolable perimeter of goodness, continued to do whatever he could to set up his friend on what he called “solid foundations.” If his influence was not quite as powerful as Vlasov imagined, it remained nonetheless considerable. He wrote poems and plays about the misery which Germany had brought to the East. He sent them to a winnowed list of Wehrmacht officers, many of whom were quite moved. To his more immediate colleagues he insisted: We cannot alter policy. But in the name of improved security for our combat troops, we can introduce a new factor which may persuade Berlin to reconsider policy.—And to a third constituency he proved capable of speaking still a third language. Thanks to the war, staples, goods and even luxuries kept flowing from the occupied territories into the Old Reich, where (as seemed only right) they sold for more than they had cost, which was nothing. Strik-Strikfeldt happened to be in touch with certain sources of supply. All he needed to do was bring them into contact with some factory owner, general’s nephew or bored actress in order to retain his financial freedom. So when he became Vlasov’s partisan, he got in touch with a few well-chosen individuals and said, putting the case in their language for the sake of courtesy: Gentlemen, it’s like this. Since the Slavic-Asiatic character only understands the absolute, disobedience is non-existent among them. They’ll follow our orders blindly, don’t you see? We’ll require Vlasov to do the impossible, and there’ll be no complaint—