5 A political officer reads to the troops, 1944
6 Red Army soldiers receiving their supply of shells before battle, 1941
7 Artillery moving into firing position, Southern Front, 1942
8 Soldiers near Leningrad receiving a consignment of books and paper, 1942
9 Soviet infantry in their trenches, winter 1941
10 The massacre of Jews at Kovno (photograph found in the pocket of a German NCO captured later in the war, courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)
11 German soldiers with the bodies of their Russian victims (another photograph that its German owner had cherished, courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)
12 Artillerymen dining beside their weapons, 1941
13 Humorous portrayal of the ‘Winter Fritz’, from a Red Army theatrical review called ‘The Thieving Army’, February 1942
14 Red Army troops repair their boots, 1943
15 Women launder soldiers’ clothes on the 1st Ukrainian Front, 1943
16 Sappers from the 193 Dnepr rifle division building a shelter, 10 December 1943
17 A soldiers’ choir on the Kalinin Front, May 1942
18 Soviet refugees, a mother and son, rest on their journey, April 1942 (courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)
19 A medical orderly loads a soldier’s body on to a horse-drawn stretcher, 1943
20 Dog teams transporting the injured, August 1943
21 Infantry and tanks near Kharkov, 1943
22 A scene of destruction (village of Kuyani; courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)
23 Field post arriving for soldiers in the Kaluga region, 1942
24 The cook arrives with soldiers’ soup
25 Tank drivers pose with their mascot, 1944
26 Red Army soldiers on the Central Front sleeping after battle, 1943
27 Machine-gunners of the 2nd Baltic Front fording a river, 1944
28 Russian POW with his prisoner number (courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)
29 Bonfire of logs and corpses photographed as evidence of German war crimes, Klooga, Estonia (courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation)
30 A column of Soviet troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front arriving in an East Prussian city, 24 January 1945
31 Infantrymen of a guards regiment stowing their bicycles for shipment, May 1945
32 The Soviets in Berlin, May 1945
33 A train carrying demobilized soldiers arrives in Moscow, 1945
34 Demobilized troops arrive in the town of Ivanovo, 1945
MAP: THE WAR ON THE EASTERN FRONT
Introduction: True War Stories
There is no shade in the centre of Kursk in July. Achieving this required an effort, for Kursk stands on some of the richest soil in Russia, the black earth that stretches south and west into Ukraine. Wherever there is water here there can be poplar trees, and all along the roads that lead to town the campion and purple vetch climb shoulder-high. The land is good for vegetables, too, for the cucumbers that Russians pickle with vinegar and dill, for cabbages, potatoes and squash. On summer Friday afternoons the city empties rapidly. Townspeople go out to their dachas, the wooden cottages that so many Russians love, and the fields are dotted with women stooping over watering cans. The tide reverses on weekdays. The countryside flows inwards to the city. Step away from the centre and you will find street vendors hawking fat cep mushrooms, home-made pies, eggs, cucumbers and peaches. Walk round behind the cathedral, built in the nineteenth century to celebrate Russia’s victory over Napoleon Bonaparte, and there are children squatting on the grass beside a flock of thin brown goats.
All this exuberance is banished from the central square. A hundred years ago there were buildings and vine-clad courtyards in this space, but these days it is all tarmac. The weather was so hot when I was there that I was in no mood to count my steps – two football pitches, three? – but the square is very, very large. Its scale bears no relation to the buildings on its edge and none at all to local people getting on with life. Taxis – beat-up Soviet models customized with icons, worry-beads and fake-fur seat covers – cluster at the end nearest the hotel. At half-hourly intervals, an old bus, choking under its own weight, lumbers towards the railway station several miles away. But living things avoid the empty, uninviting space. Only on one side, where the public park begins, are there trees, and these are not the shade-producing kind. They are blue-grey pines, symmetrical and spiky to the touch, so rigid that they could be made of plastic. They stand in military lines, for they are Soviet plants, the same as those that grow in any other public space in any other Russian town. Look for them by the statue of Lenin, look near the war memorial. In Moscow you can see them in a row beneath the blood-red walls of the Lyubyanka.
This central square – Red Square is still its name – acquired its current shape after the Second World War. Kursk fell to the advancing German army in the autumn of 1941. The buildings that were not destroyed during the occupation were mined or pitted with shots in the campaign to retake the place in February 1943. Many were ripped apart one bitter winter when the fuel and firewood ran out. Old Kursk, a provincial centre and home to about 120,000 people in 1939, was almost totally destroyed. The planners who rebuilt it had no interest in conserving its historic charm. What they wanted of the new Red Square was not a space where local people could relax – there were few enough of them left, anyway – but a parade ground for an army whose numbers would always swamp the city’s population. In the summer of 1943, well over a million Soviet men and women took part in a series of battles in Kursk province. The rolling fields that stretch away towards Ukraine saw fighting then that would decide not only Russia’s fate, or even that of the Soviet Union, but the outcome of the European war. When that war was over, the heart of the provincial city was turned into an arena for ceremonies of similarly monstrous size.
Whatever measure you decide to take, this war defied the human sense of scale. The numbers on their own are overwhelming. In June 1941, when the conflict began, about 6 million soldiers, German and Soviet, prepared to fight along a front that wove more than 1,000 miles through marsh and forest, coastal dune and steppe.1 The Soviets had another 2 million troops already under arms in territories far off to the east. They would need them within weeks. As the conflict deepened over the next two years, both sides would raise more troops to pour into land-based campaigns hungry for human flesh and bone. It was not unusual, by 1943, for the total number of men and women engaged in fighting at any one time on the Eastern Front to exceed 11 million.2
The rates of loss were similarly extravagant. By December 1941, six months into the conflict, the Red Army had lost 4.5 million men.3 The carnage was beyond imagination. Eyewitnesses described the battlefields as landscapes of charred steel and ash. The round shapes of lifeless heads caught the late summer light like potatoes turned up from new-broken soil. The prisoners were marched off in their multitudes. Even the Germans did not have the guards, let alone enough barbed wire, to contain the 2.5 million Red Army troops they captured in the first five months.4 One single campaign, the defence of Kiev, cost the Soviets nearly 700,000 killed or missing in a matter of weeks.5 Almost the entire army of the pre-war years, the troops that shared the panic of those first nights back in June, was dead or captured by the end of 1941. And this process would be repeated as another generation was called up, crammed into uniform and killed, captured, or wounded beyond recovery. In all, the Red Army was destroyed and renewed at least twice in the course of this war. Officers – whose losses ran at 35 per cent, or roughly fourteen times the rate in the tsarist army of the First World War – had to be found almost as rapidly as men.6 American lend-lease was supplying the Soviets with razor blades by 1945, but large numbers of the Red Army’s latest reserve of teenagers would hardly have needed them.