Kursk had not been a city with a large community of Jews. If it had been, it would have seen larger mass graves, more killing, and even more fear as newly blooded executioners enjoyed the privilege of power. The mass shootings in any town began as soon as the Wehrmacht arrived. Some, such as the massacre at Kiev’s Babi Yar, were carried out by special Einsatzgruppen, but many, including the shooting of 650 Jews at Klintsy, 540 at Mglin, 350 at Kletna and thousands more in the old Jewish Pale, were treated as routine military operations. The first killings terrified local people, but as a Soviet agent near Smolensk observed, eventually their effect was to harden them. ‘They laugh at the Germans now,’ affirmed a report in 1942. ‘People have become braver in the face of death, they know that they must fight the enemy with every ounce of their strength.’ There had been many willing collaborators in the early weeks, but by that first autumn the people’s ‘hatred of the enemy’ was ‘growing and growing’.42
Moskvin observed the same shift in the peasants’ mood. In late August 1941, the politruk came close to absolute despair. The shooting of Jews would not have troubled his peasant hosts, he realized, for they blamed them for most of the troubles communism had brought. Their anti-Semitism went hand in hand with a ‘fanatical belief in God’, a faith that the invading Germans wisely indulged everywhere. Some even volunteered to become fascism’s local agents – politzei – but at heart it was not politics but survival that impelled them. ‘After each battle,’ Moskvin noted, ‘they rush to the field to loot the corpses for whatever they can find.’ The dearest hope of these peasants was for an end to Soviet power, but in September 1941, they learned that the Germans had ordered that the collective farms should stay. Like the pre-war Soviet authorities, the conquerors cared only for the ease with which the peasants’ grain could be collected and shipped off. It was an irreversible mistake. ‘The mood of the local population has changed sharply,’ Moskvin wrote on 30 September. His heart still sickened at the news that reached him from the front. Like everyone around him, he was desperate for advice.43 But he was no longer in danger of cheap betrayal.
Moskvin was also lonely. The army of his memory glowed with the warmth of comradeship, but regular troops could have corrected him about the chance of this. At this stage in the war, few referred to their mates in any letters home. The primary groups, ‘buddies’, that mattered so much to American soldiers in Vietnam seem hardly to have featured in the shadow of defeat. Units were butchered and entire divisions smashed. The survivors, shocked and exhausted, were redeployed piecemeal wherever men were needed. Tank and air crews, both of them types of soldier who form strong bonds through mutual dependence and shared risk, were not as evident at this stage in the war as they would be from 1943. And the army was in retreat, disordered, scattering across a giant space. Men still formed friendships in this extreme world, truer and stronger than their peacetime ones, but most were doomed to loss. Peer loyalties, indeed, could well be retrospective, grieving. The strongest sentimental ties, in 1941, were often with the dead, the strength of every soldier’s resolve made holy by blood sacrifice.
The other missing character in the soldiers’ imaginary worlds at this stage in the war was Stalin. Moskvin scarcely mentioned him. The leader was an irrelevance in his remote village. Only the memory of peace seemed still to conjure the great man. Older people would never forgive the betrayals of 1929, the pain of poverty and loss. Now Stalin was failing them again. But the young, and the millions who rethought their universe as they watched comrades die, looked for solace as the winter drew on. This was the process by which the leader turned into a totem, the one constant that promised rescue, remained strong. The Stalin who fulfilled this role was not the same man, in imagination, as the leader of the 1930s; or rather, he represented the lost paradise remembered from a vanished world. He was a talisman, a name, a hollow image that some privately abhorred. But it was better, in this darkness, to find something to believe in than to die in utter desolation.
According to the patriotic myth, whole armies used the same slogan to raise their spirits on the brink of battle. Though German veterans mainly recall the Soviets’ blood-curdling ‘Hoorah!’, the official war cry that millions of Red Army survivors remembered later was ‘For the motherland! For Stalin!’ In recent years, some old soldiers – especially those who were never officers – have expressed doubts about the use of this phrase. ‘Did we shout that?’ Ivan Gorin, a soldier and the son of peasants, laughed. ‘I’m sure we shouted something when we went at the guns, but I don’t think it was that polite.’ The officers and policemen were too far back behind the lines to hear. Those who used the slogan, however, had good reason to chorus the familiar words. Whatever Gorin claimed later, or writers like the veteran Vasil Bykov, superstition forbade swearing on the eve of battle.44 And it would have been hard to have agreed on an alternative expression without alerting the secret police. Though the men muttered lots of things, and all used the drawn-out, terrible ‘Hoorah!’, the famous words may also have been as common as survivors have claimed. The point was that it hardly mattered what names the men used. They needed a war cry, a loud noise that united every pair of lungs and forced their muscles on. The sound, and not the meaning, was the point. The slogan became sacred in its own right. And then the real man slowly assumed the charisma surrounding it.45
At this early stage, however, the people who cared most about Stalin and his image were the propagandists. Despite the pressures of likely defeat, some officers considered that time should be spent, as it had always been, fostering myths and grooming spurious internal enemies. In February 1942, a recruit from Siberia was sent north to the Volkhov Front near Leningrad. The ski battalion he had joined was broken up by German fire within a week, and he was redeployed to a regular infantry division, the 281st. This was a war of position, and he and his comrades spent their days digging new trenches, dodging shells and wondering what they were fighting for. ‘All we knew,’ the old man later told his children, ‘was that we were fighting for the motherland.’ His surname, Khabibulin, suggests that motherland for him had once been to the east of Russia itself, which probably explains why he was picked when the Special Section needed a scapegoat. The pretext was a casual remark he made to a Ukrainian soldier who had botched an attempt at shooting his own thumb off. ‘You could have done that better,’ Khabibulin observed. ‘They’d have demobilized you.’ The young man asked him sharply if he did not want to fight. ‘What can I say?’ Khabibulin answered. ‘We’re fighting.’ And then, less cautiously, and maybe out of pity for the boy, he added something about the sad loss of life.