Whatever else, the Soviet regime offered work. Not surprisingly, its most enthusiastic supporters were the people whose careers flourished in a fast-transforming labour market. One of the best routes to a richer life, at least for those of humble origin, was military service. Even peasants (with the exception of kulaks) could make new futures for themselves this way. The first people to discover the opportunities that military service could offer under Soviet power were the tsarist conscripts who put their First World War experience at the disposal of the Red Army. Almost the entire officer élite of Stalin’s army in the Second World War had started life as peasants and followed this route. Ivan Konev, one of the future heroes of Berlin, was born in the province of the Northern Dvina in 1897. He would have spent his days as a labourer in the local sawmill had he not been called up to serve in the Tsar’s war. Similarly, young Semen Timoshenko was fated to till fields in Odessa province until he was called up to serve as a machine-gunner. In 1940, he would succeed Voroshilov as Commissar for Defence. Ivan Vasilevich Boldin, who played a conspicuous role in the first days of Hitler’s invasion, was born in the Volga region and took his first job as a village baker just before the First World War. Even the greatest of them all, Georgy Zhukov, the marshal who claimed the laurels for Berlin, was born in a village, although he moved to Moscow as a youth to learn the cobbling trade.18 Each of these men built their professional careers during the civil war. Their political convictions inclined them to fight for the reds, and the army repaid them with promotion, fulfilment, and substantial quantities of cash.
Their efforts paved the way for other promotees. Many professional soldiers, future officers, made careers despite the whirlwind that had swept through the villages of their birth. Kirill Kirillovich’s story unfolds like a fable for the time. I listen to it in his flat in Moscow, a prestigious address a stone’s throw from the Park of Victory and the Borodino panorama. He begins with the war itself. He remembers that he was in Tallinn, the capital of the Soviet Union’s newly acquired republic of Estonia, when the news came. Night after night that summer, German planes – Kirill remembered them as ‘Messers’ – had flown over the port city.19 The artillerymen in Kirill’s unit obeyed their orders not to fire. But in the small hours of 22 June 1941, they received new instructions. ‘We were told to consider that the situation was a genuine state of war,’ Kirill remembered. ‘We were not afraid. I suppose it was the age we were. I wouldn’t want to have to do it now. But I can truly say there was no fear. Perhaps we were just trained to be that way.’ The next few weeks were confused, sleepless and demoralizing. ‘We had to prepare,’ Kirill told me, ‘for the surrender – no, I mean, er, for leaving Tallinn.’ The sea-borne evacuation of Soviet troops from the Estonian capital was an operation that would later be described as ‘harrowing… a kind of Dunkirk without air cover’.20 Kirill insists that no one doubted that the Soviet side would win. They had been trained that way as well.
Kirill was twenty-one when the war started, but he was already a lieutenant. His education had promoted him at record speed. ‘I wanted to be independent,’ he explained. ‘The military was a career. I went to a special artillery school.’ The students had the usual classes, but there were extra sessions in the evenings and at weekends when they were sent on exercises. ‘Most children did that kind of thing,’ Kirill explained, remembering the militaristic spirit of the 1930s, ‘but we did more of it. Mainly training with rifles.’ They also worked particularly hard at their mathematics and at German, as if in conscious preparation for the war that everyone expected they would have to fight. ‘We knew it was coming,’ Kirill confirmed. Every newspaper and wall poster warned Stalin’s people about fascism, and so did every broadcast speech that talked about the world. ‘We saw the films. There was one I remember, the title was something like Professor Mamlok, it was about what people would suffer under fascism. It told us exactly what Hitler would do if he was in power here. We knew,’ he added, ‘about the Jews in Germany.’21
Kirill was talented, but he was also lucky. The place they sent him to was more than just a high school offering a bit of rifle practice. His fellow students included Timur Frunze, the son of the late Commissar for War, as well as Sergo Mikoyan, son of the ice-cream king, and even Vasily Stalin. These boys turned up with bodyguards and slipped away in smooth black cars when they had finished class. It would be easy to assume that Kirill, like them, was born to privilege. But his story is complicated, poignant, and in many ways, more typical of his generation. Kirill was neither wealthy nor secure. He did not come from Moscow, or even from Russia, he did not speak the Russian language fluently and when he arrived in the Soviet capital he was penniless. Listening to him, it is not hard to understand why soldiers of his kind were grateful to Stalin’s regime. It is not hard at all to understand their loyalty in war.
Kirill was born in Dubrovno, a small town in rural Belarus, in 1919. His early memories are of the countryside: the horses that came down to the Dnepr river to drink as the sun set, the fields of flax and beets stretching away, the yellow dust in summer and the autumn mud. The whole community was poor. On Saturdays, the girls would walk to town barefoot, carrying their only pair of boots so that the leather would not spoil. His family could not own land because they were Jews. Instead, his mother worked as a weaver at the local factory. It was the main employer, apart from farms, for miles around. Kirill’s father had died of typhus just before the boy was born. He was his mother’s only child. But there were half-brothers and sisters, the children of his father’s first wife, and it was one of these who brought the boy to Moscow. No one suspected that he would decide to train for the artillery, working all night so that he excelled in arithmetic and languages. A teacher noticed him and helped to ease his path to that élite high school, but his whole family would oppose it when he told them what he planned. In reply, all he could say was that he needed an education of some kind. There was no chance of that in Dubrovno. Children who stayed there would barely have learned to read and count before they had to join their parents at the mill.
With Kirill gone, his mother was left alone in the family house. It was her plan to join the others in Russia, but she kept insisting that it would take some time to pack. Kirill dismisses the excuse, seeing instead the inertia, the fear of the unknown, that trapped his mother in her home. ‘Mother was scarcely able to read,’ he continued. ‘It was like that in her village. Almost everyone was illiterate. She wrote me one letter after the war began. I could hardly make it out. The writing was so difficult. She said that she was going to leave, to come to Moscow to our sister. But she never did. She was there when the Germans came. I knew at the time what that would mean, but I waited till the war was over before I went back to find out.’ In 1941, Dubrovno’s Jews were driven like cattle into the main square. When he revisited the place, Kirill asked people who had once been his neighbours to describe what had happened next, but no one chose to recollect the scene. All they could say was that the bodies, probably including his mother’s, lay somewhere in an unmarked trench.