Reports like this changed nothing at the front. Few officers knew their men well, and none could have known all of them, so rapidly did whole units dissolve and new ones form. Pavlov’s execution, and others like it, proved that the penalty for an officer’s failure was either a fascist bullet or one from NKVD troops. Foot soldiers were coerced because their commanders in turn feared for their skins. Cruelty became a way of life. In August 1941, the officers’ vulnerability to punishment was emphasized again. Order no. 270, which Stalin himself signed, was never published at the time, but its contents were widely disseminated, read out at meetings that the front-line politruks were forced to call. It followed the surrender, on a single day, of 100,000 men. The victims at Uman had little choice, since, unlike Boldin, they were encircled on the open steppe and not in woods and marshes where soldiers could hide. But with its customary moralism, Moscow judged them disgraceful and cowardly. Henceforth, its order stated, any officer or political officer who removed his distinguishing marks in battle, retreated to the rear or gave himself up as a prisoner would count as a malicious deserter. Officers who tried to desert could be shot in the field by their superiors. Even reluctance to lead from the front could count as desertion if this suited the authorities on the spot.94
The order’s other provision was that the families of malicious deserters would now be liable to arrest. This was a cruel notion, although in its essence it was not entirely new. For years, deserters’ families had been punished by the withholding of pensions and other material rights, but the threat of prison was an awesome one in a system where everything, even a child’s schooling, depended on a family’s collective honour in official eyes. The order came to mean that anyone whose corpse was lost – which tens of thousands were, shot down over rivers and marshes, blown to pieces or gnawed away by rats – counted as a deserter for the army’s purposes. To go missing in action was a dishonourable fate. That first summer, however, there were plenty of men who shrugged off rules like this. As Nikolai Moskvin observed after his own thirteen troops disappeared, ‘I’ve talked to our commander. He’s warned the rest about responsibility. He’s told them that there is a list, we have a list, of all their relatives. But the truth is that lots of these boys come from places the fascists have already taken. They don’t care about addresses any more.’95
Moskvin shot his first deserter on 15 July. The soldier came from western Ukraine. Three weeks of shelling, marching, sleeplessness and terror had brought the man to breaking point, and maybe it made little odds what pretext he chose at the time. His crime was to urge all his comrades to surrender, or at least to hold their fire. He then confronted Moskvin. ‘He made a salute to, I suppose, Hitler, shouldered his rifle and walked off towards the scrub,’ Moskvin wrote. It was too much for one of the other Ukrainians in the group. ‘Red Army private Shulyak brought him down with a bullet in the back,’ the politruk went on. The dying man swore at his former comrades from the dust. ‘They’ll kill the lot of you,’ he said. ‘And you, you bloodstained commissar, they’ll hang you first.’ Moskvin did not hesitate. He raised his Nagan revolver and shot the victim in front of the whole company. ‘The boys understood,’ he wrote. ‘A dog’s death for a dog.’
Whatever tales he had to tell the men, however, Moskvin’s own confidence was gone. At the end of July, his unit was shattered in a German attack. Moskvin himself was injured. His companions could not transport him, so he and two other men were left to wait for rescue in the woods. No help arrived, and they convinced themselves that their mates had forgotten them. In fact, most of the regiment was dead, betrayed by a deserter in their ranks a few hours after they had left their wounded. ‘I am on the verge of a complete moral collapse,’ Moskvin wrote on 4 August. His wounds were painful and he was afraid of gangrene. ‘We got lost,’ he went on, ‘because we did not have maps. It seems we didn’t have maps in this war any more than we had aeroplanes.’ The two lads slept beside him, but he could not rest. ‘I feel guilty because I am helpless and because I know that I should pull myself together,’ the politruk despaired. Communist Party faith was supposed to make him a hero, but instead, ‘I just don’t have the strength.’
The woods where Moskvin lay were not far from a village in the region of Smolensk. After three days, during which, as he slept, someone had found the time to steal his small arms, a group of peasants rescued him. Moskvin would learn later that his rescuers had also discussed the possibility of betraying the group to the German police. The decision to hide the three may have been clinched by the thought that reasonably healthy men could help at harvest time. Moskvin described the work he put in when the beets and potatoes had grown large enough to lift. He had to keep his mouth shut when the peasants told him that they had dissolved their collective farm and no longer worked to Soviet rules. He had to tolerate the hard work and the mud, the crude delight in Stalin’s discomfort, the speculative hope for change. ‘Not everything works the way it was described in the books we had to study,’ the politruk scribbled one night. These villages, he wrote, were nothing like the buzzing, cultured towns that everyone had been so proud of in that other universe, the peacetime one. Perhaps, he pondered, even Soviet power could not have changed the village, the primeval world, that he was now coming to know. Moskvin had been at war less than two months. It was still summer, and the woods were green, but he had lost touch with the certainties of Soviet life.
4
Black Ways of War
The summer lingered till the first week of October. It was an alien, an uncanny, treacherous season. Perfect weather ripened crops whose fate would be to mellow, colour, choke and rot. Across the steppelands of Ukraine, fields that had teemed with cattle were now rank with weeds. Berries ripened in the woods untasted; few people were around to care. Those who passed by heading east were not travelling for pleasure. On Moscow’s orders, entire industries were being crated up and moved to the deep hinterland; it seemed as if the whole world was bound for the rails. Families who had no special rights, no contacts, set off on foot along the roads. Columns of dust followed the people and the carts, the droves of livestock, children, and the long thin lines of troops. After the refugees had gone, and after the last Soviet soldiers, the tanks came, and the trucks and horses, and the plague of grey-clad men.
The Baltic, Belorussia and most of Ukraine were all in German hands by the end of August 1941. Kiev itself fell in the middle of September. By then, too, Leningrad had been cut off from its main sources of supply. The railway at Mga, the last transport route into the city, fell to the invaders in late August. Now German heavy guns and fighter planes closed in on Russia’s second capital, their sights fixed on its industry, its wealth. The Wehrmacht was so sure of victory on this front now that some troops were diverted south to seize an even greater prize. Hitler’s orders were to capture Moscow and then to gouge it from the earth, to turn the city into a huge lake. That autumn, German troops looked set to carry out their task. On 2 October, they captured Orel, and by mid-month they had taken both Kaluga, on the Oka river to the south-west of Moscow, and Kalinin, modern Tver, towards the north. They were within a hundred miles of the Kremlin.