I set out to write this book with the aim of reaching beyond the myths in search of what another writer from another war has called ‘true war stories’.18 The idea began as I completed a different work, a study of death and bereavement that dealt principally with Stalin’s victims. I had talked to veterans for that project, and longed to find out more about the silences that lay behind their tales. I also wanted to explore the double-edged quality of their self-esteem as soldiers, for though Red Army veterans are always portrayed as victors and continue to regard themselves this way, most were also the victims of one of the cruellest regimes of modern times. They handled guns, and were empowered to use them, but they had grown up in a world where citizens lived in the shadow of arbitrary and humiliating state violence, and when their soldiering was done they would return to it. Their contribution, as a group, was acknowledged, but much of what they fought for – more open government, for instance, and an end to fear – would never come to pass. It was ironic that their state should have instilled in them a sense of pride so powerful that few could see how thoroughly it disinherited them.
The project followed naturally from my earlier work, then, but because it concerned the war I could not have begun it until recently. The crumbling of the single-party state, as Soviet communism collapsed, loosened the grip of the official tales on people’s minds, allowing a wider range of memories to surface. It is now possible to say – and think – things that were taboo in the days of Soviet power. The restrictions on researchers are also easing all the time. Documents that were once closed to scholars – and therefore also denied to Soviet collective memory – have been declassified in their millions. This book could not have been written without the bundles of soldiers’ letters, the reports of the military and secret police, the army’s own internal notes about morale. It was illegal for soldiers to keep a diary at the front, but some ignored the regulations, and I was able to read dozens of surviving texts, some in the original pencil manuscript. I also found and studied the reports of witnesses, for this war was fought, until its last months, entirely on Soviet soil, through villages and farmyards where civilians were still attempting to live. I travelled to the battle sites, to Kursk, for instance, and also to Sevastopol, Kerch, Kiev, Istra, Vyaz’ma and Smolensk, and in each place I tried to find out who had fought, what they had done, what local people saw. In the old days of Soviet rule, this would have been impossible.
But something else has also changed, more subtle and more crucial than travel and archival laws. In Soviet times, the war was not a topic for right-thinking scholarly research. My friends at Moscow University in the 1980s viewed it with a mixture of boredom – for they had to hear about it all too frequently – and horror, mainly at the way that genuine memories of death and struggle had been turned into a patriotic myth. The war seemed to belong to a corrupt and ideologically bankrupt state. Like the ungainly second-hand furniture in our cramped student rooms, it was too recent to be history, too large entirely to avoid. But generations change, and young people who are growing up in Russia now have never known Soviet power. Few can remember dreary state parades, the enforced piety of nationalist myths of war, and this means that they can be free to ask new questions. A renewed interest in the Soviet Union’s war, shorn of much of the cant of the last half century, is sparking new research, new conversations and new writing.19 In some cases the veterans themselves, freed from Soviet culture’s prim constraints, have also started to revisit and rethink their war. Most of the people that I met had shelves that were bowing under hardback books, new histories, new memoirs, reprints of classified commands.20
In 2001, at the very beginning of my work for this book, I applied to teach some history classes in Russian schools. In each case, I asked the students, teenagers, what historical subject they would most like to see revived and researched. Without hesitation, they all talked about the Second World War. ‘Those old people,’ one girl said, ‘they really had something special. I wish I had listened to my grandmother’s stories more carefully while she was still alive.’ But other children’s relatives, sometimes great-grandparents, survived. The students agreed to help me to approach them and also to collect some of their stories for themselves. Some of the testimonies that helped to shape this book were the result of that collaboration. Other students’ energy and interest has blossomed into contributions to the essay competitions that the Moscow-based human rights association, Memorial, has run for several years. Many of the prize essays were based on interviews, others on private collections of letters. Together, they constitute an informal archive of the human experience of war.21
In all, about 200 veterans provided interviews for this book. Most talked to me directly, alone or with one of the assistants who helped to locate them and put them at their ease.22 We were sometimes conscious of awkwardness, of a restraint that might have been the result of my foreignness or my lack of military experience. It did not always help to be a woman, either. To address all this, I asked a colleague, a Russian army veteran and professional interviewer, to conduct some interviews on his own. Aleksei went back to his home in Kaluga and spent a summer talking to old soldiers, many of whom he had known since childhood. We found that some constraints still held, such as the taboos about sex and death that separate the war generation from our own. We also found – all of us – that the weight of years and of the patriotic myths, of a self-image that was manufactured for the soldiers in the very midst of war, was hard to lift now in people’s extreme old age. Nonetheless, some interviews turned into friendships, dialogues that lasted over several years. Problems that no written archival source could answer were solved or transmuted over tea and vodka, Georgian wine. But though the veterans talked vividly of love, food, travel, countryside and weather, and though they happily recalled the friends they made, few could return to the world of combat itself.
This constraint, I would find, is not unique to Soviet troops. John Steinbeck, who visited Russia just after the war, had seen battle himself. But even he – like almost every other soldier who reflects on combat – was aware that certain things, and battle most of all, remain beyond communication. As they are withdrawn from operations, Steinbeck explained, soldiers are physically and emotionally weary and tend to escape into sleep. ‘When you wake up and think back to the things that happened,’ he continued, ‘they are already becoming dreamlike. You try to remember what it was like, and you can’t quite manage it. The outlines in your memory are vague. The next day the memory slips further, until very little is left at all… Men in prolonged battle are not normal men. And when afterwards they seem to be reticent, perhaps they don’t remember very well.’23 Soviet soldiers’ letters and the testimonies of the survivors today tell this same story almost every time. Perhaps there are some aspects of violence where lack of memory is a boon. I have used every source I can find, from testimony to poetry, police reports to scarred woodland, to try to reconstruct the universe of war. I have also used accounts from Hitler’s army, for sometimes an enemy perceives more than combatants on the other side. But in the end, some silences reflect the truth more closely than pages of prose.
Others, however, are merely frustrating. There is still much resistance in Russia (though less in most other former Soviet republics) to reinterpretations of the war. Commemoration is an industry of sorts, and many of the beneficiaries resent enquiries about fact and detail as they prepare for large-scale parades and solemn memorial ceremonies.24 The Russian government, too, has an interest in preserving a positive image of the war, for its victory over fascism remains the greatest achievement that modern Russia can boast. Accordingly, research into the conflict is not encouraged. There have been worries about reparations claims, about the possibility of European demands for the return of looted art, but these are not the real core of the issue. The point is that commemoration comforts the survivors and raises national morale. It also helps to bolster faith in the armed forces at a time when all the evidence points to moral neglect and gathering financial crisis. And secrecy can be a habit. The Ministry of Defence still guards its massive archive city at Podolsk, near Moscow. The main reason, probably, is fear of exposing systematic evidence of official brutality, or of cowardice, or even of organized mutiny. But there do not need to be reasons. For a state body whose power relies on its inaccessibility, secrecy is also an end in itself.