When the one I loved finally left me, it didn’t hurt too much at first, but then my own heart, not yet killed, began to sicken with drop after drop of her poisonous absence. Then all my friends seemed to fall away, which simply means that they didn’t seem like friends anymore, being no substitute for her; and with each moment that I could no longer expect to see her, my heart grew a little more inflamed with grief. As yet it was still strong, for our love had been strong (at least I thought so); therefore the death-agony must expand, elongate, and wriggle endlessly like a parasitic worm. A strong organism can’t die. And so Vlasov still clung to the past time when he’d been intimate with his integrity. (She’d said to him: We can lie down together for a minute if you need to, as long as it’s not too intimate. I can’t do that anymore, or I’ll get confused… )
She was a statue now, safe from him behind that thick glass. She wanted to be his friend. Merciful and distant, she pitied him. He was free now. He must make his own way in life.
They sent him on a tour of the occupied territories to drum up support. On 28.2.43 he arrived in Smolensk, where he spoke to the helots to great acclaim. (This man led the Fourth Mechanized against us at Lvov! Strik-Strikfeldt was explaining to everybody in a reverential voice.)—Russia must be independent, Vlasov kept saying.—Standing on a scorched and icy plinth which had once been burdened by a marble titan, he gazed down at his audience: shivering old men unfit for labor service, displaced peasant women in dark head-scarves, hungry office workers who’d been given Vlasov in lieu of a more expensive treat. To these people, who even yet hadn’t entirely abandoned their hope that the Germans might bring something good, his speech was electrifying. That one of their own—a famous general, no less—would be permitted to say anything at all, much less shout out a call for a Russo-German alliance against Stalin, while Wehrmacht officers stood around smiling indulgently, was a sign that some middle path, however provisional and solitary, to the salvation which most of them after more than two decades of reeducation continued to cast in religious terms, might be more than a tragic figment. (We told you so! the old men whispered. What with the partisans, and Stalingrad, and that breakout at Leningrad, Adolf can’t be so arrogant anymore… ) Vlasov’s right arm rose high in salute to forthcoming Russian victories. Then he was photographed again, at attention in a file of Fascist officers each of whom was wearing shiny knee-length boots. He toured the newly reopened cathedraclass="underline" Hitler the Liberator was bringing back religion! (But wily Stalin had begun reopening churches, too.) That night, he addressed a full house at the state theater, standing room only. As yet, his sponsors dared not permit him to broadcast on the radio. He propagandized here and there for three weeks, calling for volunteers. The first Vlasov Men already stood on parade for his inspection. (Let’s assume that he didn’t know about the Russian prisoners of war who were being gassed at Auschwitz, shot at Dachau and Buchenwald. At Smolensk alone the death rate was hundreds per day.) Insisting that he was no puppet, he quoted the old peasant proverb: A foreign coat never fits a Russian. (The uniform they’d fashioned for him was brown like a Storm Trooper’s.) To hostile questioners he replied: The Germans have begun to acknowledge their mistakes. And, after all, it’s just not realistic to hope to enslave almost two hundred million people…
(You can’t hang all hundred and ninety million of us, Zoya had said.)
His erstwhile captor General Lindemann came to congratulate him, and they clinked glasses.
I must say, that was a riveting speech! These people believe in you, there’s no doubt about it…
Frankly, I’m in despair, said Vlasov, for he’d just learned that the formations of Russian volunteers had all been broken up and distributed among German units.
Upon my word now, what kind of thing is that for a military man to say? Just be patient a little longer, and Berlin will come around, I promise you!
You see, it’s not just the war crimes, it’s the absurdity. How can your leadership fail to understand that by alienating the masses, they’re obstructing their own purpose?
The German general sighed and said: Never mind, my dear fellow. The East and the West are two worlds, and they cannot understand each other.
On his return to Berlin, the spring mud of the Reich now mouse-green like Hitler’s field jacket, he sent another memorandum admonishing the Reich government: The mass of the Russian population now look upon this conflict as a German war of conquest. (Zykov lost at solitaire and recited another stanza from Pushkin.) He advised his masters that even now it might still be possible to regain good relations with the people, so terribly had they suffered under Communism, but it was essential to make immediate changes in occupation policy.
Olenka the typist had disappeared, but her replacement, a Latvian brunette named Masha, was an even more fun-loving girl.33 One morning he awoke at the Russian Court Hotel with her still sleeping in his arms. Gazing into this gentle face, he seemed to see the closed eyes of his broken wife. (And I myself, I see the big brown eyes of the woman who finally left me, the one who would have stayed with me forever if I’d only made a certain promise. She was my integrity.)
I repeat: Thus far, the assault on Vlasov’s character had accomplished only a limited tactical breakthrough. The attackers did not know how to achieve operational shock. As Strik-Strikfeldt so wisely aphorized: Too much propaganda is merely propaganda.
33
Here we might note that in several accounts, Vlasov is said to have fallen into German hands in the company of a certain Maria Voronova, whose husband was being reeducated at the expense of the state, in a certain unknown location in Siberia. To make ends meet, she cooked for the Vlasov family. At Vlasov’s wife’s behest, Maria Voronova supposedly made her way to the Volkhov pocket. In a photograph commemorating their capture, the pair sit in a military vehicle whose machine-guns face the sky. Vlasov’s taut, exhausted face can be seen only in near-profile. His glasses have slipped halfway down his nose. In his hand he clutches a tapering object which might well be a German cartridge, Geco 7.65 millimeter. Maria Voronova, if indeed this pallid, kerchiefed young woman is she, has managed to retain some of her attractiveness. She sits at his side, almost smiling.