Men like Volkov had no chance of returning home. They had to trust the army as a whole, even the state, to protect families in danger. If they had doubted Moscow and its ideology before, and even if they went on doing so in a part of their minds, the only way to sleep at night would be to attempt to believe that Stalin, the government, and their own fellow soldiers would take care of the people whom they loved. And they were learning fast about this war. They might not have believed the rumours in the first few weeks – the propaganda machine had always generated lies – but before long they could see and touch the evidence for themselves. That winter, the first mutilated bodies – burned, butchered, bruised and left to freeze in the thin snow – were found and photographed by front-line Soviet troops retaking villages near Moscow.
Their enemy seemed to rejoice in violence. Escaping refugees told of mass shootings, the torturing of partisans. The fascists drank and laughed as the corpses of their victims burned on petrol-sodden pyres. ‘According to the local people,’ wrote a man from Smolensk, ‘on 13 December 1941 the enemy locked captured Red Army men in a four-storey building surrounded by barbed wire. At midnight the Germans set fire to it. When the Red Army soldiers started jumping from the windows the Germans fired at them. About seventy people were shot and many burned to death.’32 Some Wehrmacht soldiers treasured souvenirs of violence. A snapshot found in the breast pocket of a fallen German infantryman that winter showed the massacre of Kovno’s Jews. Another showed a German soldier contemplating two hanged Russians swinging from a rope. Even the most hardened Red Army men could not ignore the gruesome truth these pictures showed. It was no longer wise to argue that any dictator would do if Russia could just have some peace.
Not every soldier reached this view at once – some never did – and few reached it with ease or lightly. It was as if each person’s world, their pre-war world, had to collapse, to fail them, before they understood the purpose of their lives. Volkov had nightmares about his wife and child; Moskvin, in his dark hut, had to rethink his communism. Older men seemed to look back over their time, the dream-like years of state-directed change, with something like bewilderment. The past now shimmered like a story-book paradise. Contrast alone made every image clearer. Those years of peace, years that had seemed so hard, had been accepting, easy, safe; a time of opportunities that each man valued only now, in retrospect. But strangely, when there could be no escape, the rush of wartime action brought a sense of renewed worth. ‘It’s like the way that a healthy person is not aware of his body,’ a soldier wrote of this feeling. ‘It’s only when something starts to hurt that you understand what health really is.’33
The fear of death also gave some people – including grown men in their late thirties or older – their first real taste of life. At this stage, the effect was often bleak. Veterans fell prey to fatalism; a sense, based upon fact and not on premonition, that though they had just learned to value life they were as good as dead. Their hopes now focused, if they had them, on their families and children. ‘It’s hard to know how long I will remain alive,’ a man wrote to his wife in January 1942. She was expecting their first child, but he knew he would never see it. He told her that he could not describe the things he had witnessed at the front. Instead, he wanted to think about her future and that of the child. ‘Deal with my things as you see fit,’ he wrote. ‘They are yours, as I am yours and you are mine. Simochka, whether it is a boy or a girl, please bring it up according to your own beliefs. Tell it about me, about your husband and its father.’34 ‘You couldn’t say that I’m alive – no,’ another soldier wrote to his wife and daughter. ‘A dead person is a blind one, and for that reason the only thing that interests me is your life, my only concern is to remember you.’35
The pre-war sense of homeland dissolved just as quickly as the dream of easy victory. Gordon had been a naïve internationalist at school. The first Germans he met were prisoners, an officer and two infantrymen. One of the soldiers was a worker. ‘He didn’t understand at first,’ Gordon recalled, ‘what the interpreter meant when he asked him how a proletarian could take up arms against the land of the Soviets, the first homeland of the proletariat of the whole world. He answered that most of the men in his unit were either peasants or workers, and that for them the “fatherland” was not Russia but Germany. That answer made us all reflect on the meaning of the phrase “The Soviet Union – homeland of the world proletariat.”’36 So did first-hand exposure to that homeland’s cold realities: forced marches, blizzards, fog, hunger, and digging, endless digging in chill, clammy earth. ‘The party told us that there was nothing dearer than motherland,’ a Belorussian veteran declared. But the way that motherland was imagined was changing for everyone. For some, like Moskvin, the notion enlarged to encompass a new landscape, villages, unlettered peasants, and dour local fighters whose toughness equalled his own. For others, the idea narrowed, shrinking away from universal brotherhood in a xenophobic tide of holy Russian chauvinism.
It was at this time, in the late autumn of 1941, that Stalin began to revise his own rhetoric regarding the motherland. His address that November at the Red Army’s state parade on the twenty-fourth anniversary of Lenin’s revolution spoke of Russia’s heroic past. The bitter trials of the civil war, when Lenin’s government so nearly died, were recalled at length – nothing else was possible on this of all occasions – but older epics joined them in a catalogue of struggle. Russian soldiers were called to emulate their ancestors: Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoi, Minin and Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov.37 ‘May you be blessed,’ the leader continued, ‘by Lenin’s victorious banner!’38 Russia’s defending troops could also hope for blessings from the Orthodox Church. From the first day of this war, Metropolitan Sergii of Moscow and Kostroma had insisted that it should stand by the people in their struggle.39 The state’s pre-war restrictions on worship were gently eased. But though they cherished totems – tin crosses or copies of poems – formal religion, so comforting to some civilians, was little use to soldiers at the front. Rage and hatred, which the state also nurtured, were more likely to inspire men on the brink of combat. In 1941, Pravda dropped its peacetime masthead, ‘Proletarians of all lands, unite!’ The slogan that replaced it was ‘Death to the German invaders!’
‘I never lost the feeling that this was a genuine People’s War,’ wrote Alexander Werth. ‘The thought that this was their war was, in the main, as strong among civilians as among the soldiers.’40 It would have been hard to remain neutral after witnessing the effects of that year’s German conquest. When Kursk fell in November, its able-bodied men were rounded up and interned wherever the barbed wire could be unrolled. The lucky ones were herded into the central cinema; most others shivered in the open air. They were not fed at all. Then they were made to work, and those who failed to satisfy their captors were beaten with rubber truncheons and threatened with death. On the second day of the occupation, fifteen communist activists, including four young women, were made to dig graves in the black loam near the central square, and then each one was shot. Rumour had it that about 700 other young women had been rounded up and forced to work as prostitutes in makeshift brothels for the German troops. ‘The streets are empty,’ Soviet intelligence reported. ‘The shops have been looted. There is no mains water and no electricity. Kursk has collapsed. Life there has frozen.’41