The men began deserting in their hundreds. Sometimes they simply walked away, taking advantage of what looked like mere confusion to find a fire and warm themselves, steal the supplies, or simply disappear.104 One infantryman ‘surrendered’ to the Finns on behalf of two entire battalions.105 Not merely individuals, and not only private soldiers, but whole regiments abandoned their posts in this way. Sometimes they left their heavier weapons, too, allowing the Finns to help themselves to field guns, ammunition and rifles. Deserters could escape unnoticed because no one knew who was responsible for whom. At the same time, the chaos all along the line gave men a chance to get their hands on any loot they found. One man stole bicycles to sell when he got home. Others preferred to stock up with thick winter gear. A politruk, Malkov, was caught with two leather coats, four suits, shoes and a suitcase full of stolen children’s clothes.106
Stalin’s generals, as was their custom, adopted savage measures to bring their ragtag army into line. That winter, orders were given to shoot stragglers and deserters. According to its own figures, eleven deserters from the 8th Army had been shot by early January,107 but meanwhile other soldiers had begun to shoot themselves. Cases of samostrel, self-inflicted wounds, increased alarmingly in the new year. There was not much else that desperate men could do. Zagradotryady – another new word for the Soviet lexicon – were the troops whose job it was to stand behind the lines and pick off any man who tried to run away. Unlike the regulars, they had machine guns for the job. Meanwhile, officers faced NKVD firing squads. In January 1940, a string of tribunals sentenced scores of them to death for cowardice and failure. Even the Soviet high command began to wonder if there might not be a better way to organize a war. Perhaps, one of their memoranda carefully suggested, ‘the highest form of punishment is being overused’.108
A survivor of the Winter War recalled the ‘dull apathy and indifference towards impending doom’ that pushed men ahead when there was no alternative but death.109 It was a far cry from quick victory and party spirit. Back in Moscow, reformers read of the ‘negative effect’ that the men experienced when they found the frozen bodies of earlier waves of soldiers pushing out of shallow graves along the ice roads heading north. Tales of catastrophe pervaded the barracks where fresh soldiers were waiting for their battle orders. ‘I’m not going to Finland,’ a conscript in Kharkov told his politruk. ‘Two of my brothers are there and that’s enough.’110 Shocked by the gulf between their expectations and the real war, Stalin’s generals gathered in Moscow to consider a programme of reforms. There was almost no time for thought. As they pored over plans, the Germans were preparing an attack on France whose devastating swiftness would put paid to any hope of peace along the Eastern Front.
3
Disaster Beats Its Wings
June is a special month all over northern Europe. In European Russia and Ukraine, it is magical. Winter’s bitter dark and ice are barely even memories, spring’s mud and rain forgiven. Kiev’s famous chestnut trees come into bloom, and so do Moscow’s lilacs, Yalta’s Judas trees. It is the month of the peony and the green willow; the month, in the north, of the white nights. Midsummer night fell on a Saturday in 1941. In Sevastopol, the home of the Soviet Union’s Black Sea Fleet, it was, as naval officer Evseev remarked in his diary, ‘a wonderful Crimean evening’. That Saturday, ‘all the streets and boulevards in the city were lit. The white houses were bathed in light, the clubs and theatres beckoned the sailors on shore leave to come inside. There were crowds of sailors and local people, dressed in white, packing the city’s streets and parks. As always, the famous Primorsky boulevard was full of people out for a stroll. Music was playing. There were jokes and happy laughter everywhere on the evening before the holiday.’1 A week before, the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, had insisted that rumours of Germany’s intention to break its pact with Moscow and launch an attack on the Soviet Union were completely without foundation.2 The temptation to believe him must have been overwhelming.
One source of all the light across the city’s twin harbours that night was the Upper Inkerman lighthouse. With its help, the German planes could navigate their way unerringly towards the port.3 They came from the east, flying low out of the steppe, their route a great arc across Soviet space. They knew their targets in advance: the fleet, the warehouses, the anti-aircraft guns. Soon the Black Sea reflected new lights from the shore: incandescent trails and flares, searchlights, the evil glow of a landscape on fire. ‘Are those planes ours?’ someone asked Evseev as the sailors scrambled into boats to get back to their ships. ‘It must be another exercise.’ But his neighbour had been taking careful stock. ‘Our anti-aircraft batteries are firing live rounds,’ he said. ‘And those bombs don’t look at all like dummies.’ ‘So we’re at war, then?’ said a third. ‘But with whom?’4
Hundreds of miles to the north, along the new border in formerly Polish land, Red Army men were winding down for their free day on Sunday. Those who could get local leave had gone off to town, to cosmopolitan Lvov or Minsk, to get a decent meal and forget their worries. Colonel-General D. G. Pavlov, the commander-in-chief of the western special military district, was at the theatre. A comedy called The Wedding at Malinovka was playing to a full house at the officers’ club in the Belorussian capital.5 The good commander did not allow his enjoyment of the play to be disrupted by the news, brought by his intelligence chief, Colonel Blokhin, that German troops along the border appeared to be preparing for action. There were even some reports, Blokhin whispered, of shelling. ‘It can’t be true,’ Pavlov replied, and pointed at the stage. It was time to get back to the play.6 The whole army, in fact, was under orders to keep calm. Kamenshchikov, an officer in the western air defence force, was accompanied to the theatre that night by his wife, son and father. They had come up from their home in Stalingrad that week for a short summer break.7 They also watched their play through to the end and then returned to his quarters for supper and bed.
At nine o’clock that evening, while Pavlov was still at the play, a German sapper called Alfred Liskow stole across the Soviet lines. Liskow was one of the few German internationalists that Soviet troops would ever meet. Before his call-up in 1939, he had worked in a furniture factory in the Bavarian town of Kolberg, which is where he had become acquainted with the works of Marx and Lenin. That night he came to warn his proletarian brothers of their imminent danger. He told his Soviet captors that German artillery units along the border had orders to start shelling targets on the Soviet side within the next few hours. At first light, he continued, ‘rafts, boats and pontoons’ would be thrown across the Bug, the marshy river that divided German-occupied Poland from the Soviet sector to the east.8 The attack on the Soviet Union was poised to begin with devastating force. Information of the same kind was relayed by deserters elsewhere on the land frontier. It was not news to the political leadership in Moscow. British and even Soviet intelligence had been warning of this plan for weeks, but Stalin had chosen to ignore the tales, and border troops had made no preparation for an imminent attack. As far as they were concerned, the deserters that night looked like provocateurs. One, a German from Berlin, was shot on that basis. Liskow himself was still under interrogation when mortars started ripping through the dark.9