The policies and public style of Stalin’s ruling clique would set the bitter tone. Their vengeful treatment of liberated prisoners of war, the calls for sustained vigilance for spies, the new rounds of arrests and trials all worked to fuel suspicion, not build communities. The veterans were not to blame for Stalin’s genocidal schemes, but many would connive in them, becoming willing heirs of tyranny. For those who could not face a quiet night, there were still regions where the war had yet to end. In Ukraine and the Baltic, nationalist guerrillas went on fighting until the late 1940s. Special troops, the successors of Mikhail Ivanovich’s OSMBON, were ranged against them, backed up by security police. By 1950, an estimated 300,000 people had been arrested and deported from western Ukraine. Large mass graves continue to surface from beneath those pretty orchards and neat lupin fields.84 Red Army veterans who fulfilled their wartime dream of moving to Ukraine would settle on stolen land, in empty houses that were thick with ghosts. So would the thousands who moved to the Crimea, a favoured place for soldiers to retire. The crime against the Tatars was officially ignored. For veterans, the coastal villages of the Black Sea were attractive enough to soothe whatever doubts might linger in their minds. They were the conquerors, after all, and this was Soviet soil.
War itself, too, had shattered Soviet family and social networks and debased further the values of mercy, co-operation, and even simple good manners. Society was divided, and all sides viewed the others with dismay. Prisoners, ex-soldiers, and civilians were almost like unrelated tribes. Veterans like Vasily Grossman were shocked by the callousness of post-war cities. It was, he wrote, as though ‘ordinary people had made an agreement to refute the view that one can always be sure of finding kindness in the hearts of people with dirty hands’.85 But the comradeship of the front line was also set to shatter in the peacetime world. Crimes like theft and drunken violence would persist even when the peace was signed. They were, if anything, made easier by the movements of people, refugees, and settlers, not to mention all the guns.86
The family ought to have been a haven for war-damaged men. Stalinist propaganda, and much post-war writing, tried to present it that way.87 But as they rattled home on those garlanded trains, few soldiers could have anticipated the toll that war had taken on domestic life. The so-called home front had been very hard on women. Some, working like oxen, had given up on femininity for good.88 It served no purpose, brought no joy. In rural areas, too, there were almost no males. ‘I was left with three sons,’ a widow told Alexiyevich. ‘They were too young to look after each other. I carried sheaves of corn on my back and wood from the forest, potatoes and hay… I pulled the plough myself and the harrow, too. In every other hut or so there was a widow or a soldier’s wife. We were left without men. Without horses, they were taken for the army, too.’89 These women would grow tough, unblinking. Some even nursed resentment against the army that had abandoned them to the Germans for so many months. When their invalid husbands returned home, the shelter that they gave them was not always warm. Indeed, some women deliberately married invalids in order to claim the handouts – pensions, food, fuel and medical supplies – that their husbands’ documents provided for.90 The trick was to know where to sell them on.
‘What games did we play?’ a man who grew up in this grim decade wondered for a moment. ‘We didn’t play much at all. We had to grow up fast.’ It was the truth. Children were taught that there was more to life than games. Many had gone without schooling for several years, including Slesarev’s young sister, Masha, and the thousands of ‘sons of the regiment’ who were now coming home. As they recalled, no extra teaching now would ever buy those years of schooling back, and nothing could wipe out the images of war. Masha Slesareva, who was already working full-time in the fields at fourteen, was typical of the millions of children who started work as soon as they could shift a shovelful of earth. But though war’s children could not remember much fun, some pastimes had proved unforgettable. ‘That’s it,’ one man recalled. ‘We used to play “the ravine of terror”. We used to throw grenades into this gully near the town and wait to see which ones were live.’ The game had cost his best friend both his hands.91
Home, then, was not the haven that the soldiers had dreamed about as they sat up writing to their wives. Even the couples who managed to rebuild their lives together were aware of a gap, of a blank space that no amount of talking could enliven. It was a cruel payment for the waiting and the letters. Vitaly Taranichev and Natalya Kuznetsova would pull through, but the journey towards reunion was difficult. Vitaly’s letters grew more impatient through the summer of 1945. By August, even his army food was poorer, especially after his deployment to western Ukraine. In September, there was a spark of hope that he might be demobilized, but instead he was moved south-east, to yet another haunted region, Chechnya, where his job was to rebuild the rail links near Groznyi. His requisitioned quarters were nearer to Ashkhabad. ‘Our apartment has two rooms and an enclosed verandah,’ Vitaly wrote home. ‘The second room is not a through-room, and I’ve taken it. If you can come, we’ll be really nice and comfortable; we’ll even be able to cook and eat together.’92
Vitaly could not get leave, so the travelling and the strain fell on Natalya. In October 1945, she took time off from her own engineering job, queued and bought tickets, left the children, and embarked on an unscheduled adventure. She took a train west over the semi-desert to the Caspian, crossed the inland sea by steamer and then fought her way on to another train into the foothills of the Caucasus. The journey to and from Chechnya would have taken longer than the brief time that she had with her husband. For Vitaly, so used to travelling, the price seemed well worth paying, but Natalya was unsettled by it all. ‘Your silence really makes me miserable,’ she wrote to him when she got home. ‘You haven’t written a single line to me since I left. You don’t want to write anything… Perhaps you were disappointed by the way I was, and you have already stopped thinking about me the way you used to do before our meeting in Groznyi?’ It was the November holiday, and Vitaly was, in fact, writing at the same moment. ‘My landlady and I talk about you all the time,’ he began. ‘I have become so used to your being here that every time I come home I half expect to find you.’ He was unable to imagine her insecurity before the uniformed, preoccupied stranger that he had become. ‘Can it be, Vitya,’ she wrote, ‘that you are not the same as you once were, and I am no longer dear to you any more? It’s so hard for me to think like that. I’m waiting impatiently for you at home,’ she finished. ‘I need to know by looking in your eyes exactly who you really are.’93 Ten months later, she was still waiting.
Vitaly’s and Natalya’s story was about as good as homecomings would get. Another story, that of Valentina and her husband, was probably more typical of younger men. As Valentina explained, she and her husband, married just before the war, had spent almost no time together before he was called up to the front. They were still almost strangers, and the war would perpetuate the gulf. His letters home were regular, but they arrived at intervals, in bundles, scored through by the censor’s pen. They also had to find Valya at the munitions factory to which, as a chemist, she had been evacuated. She worked there for the war’s duration, supervising a production line that hummed without a break. Her own shifts could be ten hours long, or twelve, and all that time the NKVD watched her every move. As she recalled the war, the strain was still clear from her voice, although a patch of light relief came from an unexpected source. ‘The German prisoners were nice,’ she said, referring to the prisoners of war who worked near her own site. ‘They were so clean. They even swept the shelves they kept potatoes on.’ I asked her if she ever talked to one. ‘Talked?’ she replied. ‘We danced with them. They were the only men for miles, and they were such good dancers, too.’