The Soviet state was so secretive about its armed forces that even their social composition and age structure were unknown. Outsiders who thought of investigating for themselves would soon find that their path was blocked. A foreigner could hardly move in the Russia of the 1930s without attracting attention. Spies who attempted to blend with the crowds found that they could not even manage the new diet, let alone Soviet manners. ‘You try to drink an ounce and a half of 40–50% vodka in one gulp without practice,’ one agent complained, ‘or to smoke a cigarette with a cardboard mouthpiece.’11 The vodka made him cough, and when he tried to chase it with hot tea he burned his fingers on the thin, cheap glass in which it had been served. ‘Mistakes,’ an officer in the German intelligence service noted, ‘could cost an agent his life.’12
It was for these reasons that German officers seized on information coming out of Finland. Soviet prisoners of war seemed to offer a healthy source of facts about real army life. But once again, the reports could be treacherous. Exhausted prisoners, as Germans interrogators would find at first hand from 1941, would say almost anything if they thought that it would save their skins. Their very suffering clouded their minds. And the war against Finland was not a fair predictor of the Red Army’s likely response to invasion on a massive scale. Even the army that was fighting in the Finnish snow, the Red Army of 1939, would be flooded, in 1941, by millions of new conscripts and volunteers, the patriotic youths who longed to do great deeds. The veterans of Finland were among the tens of thousands facing capture, death and disability within weeks of Hitler’s offensive. The old Red Army, the men of 1939, did not survive for long enough to fight at Stalingrad. But what the story of this early disaster can still do is show why the collapse was so swift and also just how far that army would evolve, how fast, when there was a real crisis, an invasion that threatened to engulf and even to destroy the motherland, men’s families, the homes and landscapes that they loved.
The best clues to morale come from a source inside the army, not from outsiders. A network of political officers acted as agitators and teachers in every regiment. They also worked as the party’s spies, which meant that someone would be listening whenever groups of men gathered to talk. Police agents, of course, were on the lookout for trouble. The army was one place, after all, where former peasants gathered in sufficient numbers for the weight of their discontent to coalesce, for factions to threaten to form. Agents were under some pressure to report, or even to fabricate, evidence about the dissent that their masters expected to find. But poor morale among the men also reflected on the political officers themselves, implying that their leadership was failing to inspire, and for this reason, too, the reports that they dared to file must be treated with caution. Each document is likely to begin with pages of enthusiastic nonsense. If these writers could be believed, the men had never been cleaner, happier or more sober; their training always progressed well and they were all lice-free. These were all platitudes. In reality, it was a far cry from the Osoaviakhim and the parachute clubs to any barracks that held private soldiers, riflemen, in 1939.
One thing that army and civilian worlds did share was propaganda. There was no escape from the lectures and slogans. Every soldier was taught that he was privileged to serve in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, a mouthful that the state abbreviated to its Russian initials, RKKA.13 Recruits were also told that they were the standard-bearers of the future and the heirs of an heroic past. Whatever it was called upon to do, this was an army that would muster under banners coloured red with martyrs’ blood.14 Language like this found its best audience in the training schools for officers. There it was possible to view a career in the army with real revolutionary pride. Some of the schools – Kirill’s was one – were preparing a genuine professional élite, and some of the cadets could thank Stalin for their escape from poverty, their new-found skills, their hope. The Soviet Union was no longer a place where officers were drawn from distinct social élites. In terms of family background, there was not much to choose, often, between large numbers of élite trainees and the mass of the men. But everything else was different, from education and prospects to political ideas. Among the men, especially the conscripted mass, the mood in the last pre-war years was best described as sour resignation.
The resentment was muted, deadened by exhaustion, habit, and the fear of informers. But soldiers did not have to talk much anyway. The memory of the war in the villages was still quite fresh. Some men had gone hungry themselves when the state seized peasants’ grain; others were still getting letters from their families, still reading about shortages and fear. Collectivization did not need to be discussed because it was as pervasive in the men’s minds as the damp in their bones. At lecture time, no subject could provoke more questions than the fate of Soviet farms. The army recruited peasants; sheer numbers made that necessary. The Soviet Union remained, up to the summer night when German forces crossed its borders, a place where most people had started life in village huts. Such folk had once made sterling servicemen, and sons of peasants were among the stars of Stalin’s officer élite. But after 1929, it was taken for granted that the best soldiers would be drawn from families in the towns.15
Even the sons of workers, once in uniform, would soon become aware of collectivization’s legacy. Although the Red Army was never used to drive peasants into the hated farms, its troops were asked to help in the fields at harvest time, replacing men and animals after they vanished into common graves. Farm work would become a feature of the Soviet soldier’s life; digging potatoes, herding pigs, mending equipment in the rain. The political officers who had to work among troops like this would not find much good news to write about as they licked their pencils and prepared to report in 1939. ‘They tell us that collective farmers live well,’ one soldier was heard muttering. ‘In fact, they have nothing at all.’ ‘I’m not going to defend Soviet power,’ another conscript told a mate. ‘If it comes to it I will desert. My father was a fool to die in the civil war, but I’m not a fool. The Communist Party and Soviet power robbed me.’16 Another recruit told his comrades, after reading a letter from home, that he could not decide what to do. ‘I have to study,’ he said, ‘but I keep worrying about my family.’ ‘My family is starving,’ complained another. ‘Nothing else interests me.’17
In 1939, the age for conscription was nineteen. The latest crop of new recruits, born at the end of the civil war, was drafted that September. Joining up was part of life, as traditional in Russian villages as wife-beating and painted eggs. The army had always taken men. ‘The Tsar commands and God permits,’ conscripts had muttered in the First World War. In those days, military service, like famine, warts and childlessness, was seen as punishment for sin.18 A generation later the process had changed, but the men’s fatalism was much the same. Soviet recruits were meant to pass some tests; the army wanted men who could read, although it did not always get them. As late as the end of the 1920s, psychologists had found that the vocabulary of the average infantryman varied between 500 and 2,000 words.19 At that time, too, some of these men had not been able to tell their officers who Stalin was, a finding that so shook the army’s political administration that it had to be suppressed.20 Political education was hastily stepped up, and by 1939 fewer recruits were failing reading tests and none was ignorant about the leader. But the most able were creamed off for work in the NKVD.21 The army got the next-best ones.