Red Army soldiers had not triumphed so that they could run a jail. The longer Soviet troops remained in Germany, the less they cared for Moscow’s homilies and threats. A culture developed among the old hands. Drink, women, secrets and hard currency were its main constituents. Eighteen months after the peace, it was clear to Stalin’s officials that almost no veterans could be allowed to remain abroad. Their influence was too liberal, too damaging to the regime of discipline and ideological rigidity. Those who had worked with former prisoners of war and Vlasovites were deemed to be the worst. By the spring of 1947, the Soviet military authorities in Germany had come round to the view that all soldiers with two or more years of service on German soil (which meant all combat veterans) and also anyone who had worked closely with candidates for repatriation should be sent home without delay.60 They were to be replaced by more reliable, younger, less capricious types. The frontovik was fine for winning wars, but authoritarian military rule demanded people with the souls of bureaucrats.
The first soldiers to be demobilized were told of their good fortune at the end of June. The military authorities began with selected categories of men aged thirty or over (these were deemed to be ‘in the older age groups’) and also with women who did not have important specialisms. It was assumed that older men would be the keenest to get home and also that they might have family responsibilities to tend. ‘You should set up a committee and demobilize all soldiers of thirty and above,’ a letter to Kalinin demanded, as if on cue, on 20 June. ‘We all agree about that… What am I going to do with my wife if I’m over thirty and I still don’t have a single son? In five–ten years a man will lose his chances with the female sex. The season for that doesn’t go on after age thirty-five to forty, it’s not a secret to anyone.’ A law on demobilization followed three days later, although it was far from comprehensive, even for the older men. ‘What would you do,’ the same impatient veteran continued, ‘if every soldier demanded to go home on the same day? Our guards and officers wouldn’t be able to do a thing, because they want to go home too. It’s the power of the people.’61
The reality was that the soldiers were trapped, at least in the short term. For one thing, the abused, bomb-damaged transport system that stuttered between Berlin and Brest could not take them all home at once. From their own government’s point of view, however, the real problems were inside the soldiers’ minds. To send them home without careful preparation was too much of a risk in ideological terms. The dismal, bloody victory needed its garland of heroes, which meant laying the ground for their reception, and that would take time and thought. Then there was the danger that the veterans might brag about capitalism or about life without collective farms. They might talk of brutality, of front-line executions, SMERSh, or even the horror of battlefield death. The free thinking that had started to stalk the front would have to be suppressed before it could infect the civilian world.
Demobilization, then, began to be presented as a kind of privilege, not as the duty of a grateful state to every man and woman who had fought for it. The politruks called more of those eager small-group meetings and explained what was wanted. Their duty, the soldiers were told, was ‘to keep military and state secrets as closely at home as at the front. Let the demobilized person preserve his warm recollections about the unit and about his wartime friends.’ But let him not discuss much else. ‘We had to sign something,’ the veterans admit. In fact, they were warned that their demobilization, and the material assistance that went with it, depended on their agreement to keep most of their wartime experience to themselves, from death rates and atrocities to missing rations and cold feet.62 The veterans’ discretion now, which often borders on a string of outright lies, dates back to the moment when they signed that document.
And sign they did, for it was only then that the business of real life could begin. True, some soldiers would choose to stay and make their careers in the military – Kirill was one – but the majority were anxious to get home. The chosen men and women were issued with civilian clothes and a pair of shoes. They were given travel passes and the papers that would see them safely home. They also hefted packages of food and other small gifts from a grateful state. Their luggage would soon overflow the racks and boxes of their passenger trains, spilling into the corridors and contributing to the shared fug of tobacco, garlic, damp blankets and diesel. Soldiers demobilized from Erfurt in 1946 could expect to be issued with ‘a sports suit, sweater, underwear, leather and slippers’, as well as, for officers only, ‘a pair of women’s shoes’. They also received 5 kg of sugar, 10 kg of flour, a kettle, spoons, a carpet bag, a towel, and some biscuits for their journey home.63 Most also received money, the sum depending upon their rank and length of service.64 But this largesse was offset by continual surveillance. The men were warned not to attempt to carry weapons home. Their bags were searched before they left the base.65 The ritual was futile, for anyone could help themselves to weapons and explosives any time by digging in the scarred fields at home.
Eventually, with the inevitability of a dream, the moment came to cross the boundary, to walk away from army life for good. Most veterans recall an aching loss. However much they yearned for home, it was a sudden wrench to leave the boys. The last few hours such men spent at a base were given up to speeches and to singing. ‘We sang our manly, stern soldiers’ marching songs,’ Pushkarev wrote. But these were the songs of victory. The real emotion surrounded the music of defeat, the songs of loss and homesickness from 1942 – ‘Wait for Me,’ ‘Zemlyanka’, ‘Oh, the Long Road’, ‘Dark Night’ – the songs that had sustained a vanishing generation as they struggled with despair.66 The tunes would never sound the same again, nor evoke so much meaning. Many of the men would cry before their trains pulled out. As they said goodbye to the people who knew just what war was about, to the only people who could ever understand their stories, they were losing their true spiritual family. They would miss them – and most would keep in touch with almost all of them – for the rest of their lives.
It must have been a strange ride home. There was that inconveniently heavy bag to stow, and then the smaller one, the knapsack with the tobacco and the travel pass. Inside this was the salvage of a war, the material evidence of all that a man had seen and experienced. In almost every instance, that began with medals – for victory, for service, for valour, even a grand red star or red banner. Then came the photographs. During the war, press photographers earned petty cash by taking snapshots of the troops, portraits to send home to the wife, group pictures to remind them of their mates. Already, as the train rattled towards Brest and Smolensk, the men on board must have been thumbing these, wondering at the looming shapes of guns, the sunlight through last summer’s trees, the smiles on young faces long dead. However long they lived, there would never be time to explain all this. And the gifts, the shoes and watches, these seemed to have a different meaning now. At the front, they had been easy booty, fragments of abundant victory. But now, as the world of triumph and comradeship began to fall away, they became totems, precious, rare, and at the same time tarnished by the secret guilt of having lived, not died.