Mikhail Ivanovich’s OSMBON unit was among the first to hazard the route back into country that the Germans held. His task was to round up Red Army stragglers, shoot provocateurs and shape some kind of discipline behind the lines. The groups of partisans that he helped form became the face of Soviet power in the remote woods of Smolensk province. His men brought more than discipline; their revolvers were backed up with the promise (not always kept) of supplies. Later, they would also help to establish the routes by which letters (carefully censored) could be exchanged across the front-line zone. News from the ‘big country’ off to the east fostered new hope and loyalty in some beleaguered villages.77 OSMBON troops even wooed the peasants by helping them in the fields. They carried out agitational work, collecting and disseminating Sovinformburo reports to counteract German propaganda. They organized party meetings to celebrate anniversaries, teach hygiene and basic survival tactics, and generally to remind people of the joys of Soviet life. Their efforts helped to form a new, parallel army in the woods. By November 1942, according to Soviet reports, there were about 94,000 partisans behind the German lines from the Baltic to the Crimea. Just under 10 per cent of these were in the Smolensk region.78 It was to them that Nikolai Moskvin eventually turned.
The politruk had not been able to decide, at first, if he should join the partisans or make for the nearest Red Army base. Rumour reached him in October 1941 that there was fighting near Vyaz’ma, but then the trail went cold, and he began to fear that the army had fled beyond his reach. What sustained him through the first snow was the news, brought by escaping prisoners, of Stalin’s speech of 7 November, the address made to soldiers in Red Square. ‘Everyone is still at their posts,’ he wrote. ‘Soon there will be a celebration everywhere.’ But this relief was premature. It would be months before the fugitive could make a bid to break through to the Soviet zone. In March, when the winter began to lift, he headed east, his goal the Red Army beyond Kaluga. Moskvin was captured as he neared the German lines. German troops took him to the camp at Granki, a front-line holding station, little more than a large yard. There he met the survivors of the previous autumn’s encirclement at Vyaz’ma. They had been in the camp for six long months. ‘If you haven’t seen this,’ Moskvin wrote, ‘you won’t be able to imagine the utter horror of this human tragedy. I saw it with my own eyes. People were dying of exhaustion, cold and beatings.’
Moskvin was not destined to die with them. Healthy and determined, he still had the will to evade guards who were themselves cold and depressed after the winter. Six days after his capture he was on the run again. But he had lost his papers. Loyal though he was, he knew that the reds could easily shoot him as a deserter. It was this knowledge that impelled him to head west, not east. That June, he joined a partisan group made up of former soldiers like himself. ‘It’s really satisfying to fight the fascists this way,’ he wrote jauntily that month. ‘We can get them on the roads, from hiding, with almost no cost to our own men.’ On 29 July, his battalion killed a group of German guards, taking a score of politzei as prisoners and seizing two new machine guns. ‘I’m really doing business,’ he wrote. And then, in August, came the best news of the year. ‘A really great joy for me today,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve received three letters at once from the big country.79 My parents are alive. Mariya is alive. Hurrah!’
If letters could get through and men escape, then many partisans, including skilled fighters, might also have gone back to strengthen the Red Army. But the state had use for them just where they were. As ever, the policy was callous, for though the men had orders to remain, they received neither food nor weapons. ‘We have instructions to stay in the triangle near Smolensk and keep on fighting,’ Moskvin noted in September 1942. His optimism had begun to ebb. ‘The winter will be hard. Half our men don’t have the right shoes or clothes.’ Like the outlaws they had become, his troops began to desert. Moskvin himself would soon curse Moscow’s callousness. ‘We’re supposed to live by stealing from the enemy and appealing to the locals,’ he wrote, but there was nothing for it but to extort food if everyone was starving. ‘In many places groups of enemies masquerading as partisans are engaging in banditry,’ a party report from Smolensk alleged. However, the looters were more likely to be Soviet men. ‘It’s not surprising that local people run off and complain to the Germans,’ Moskvin confirmed. ‘A lot of the time we’re just robbing them like bandits.’80
Once again, the Germans’ own atrocities were all that held the Soviets in place. ‘At present,’ a partisan leader stated, ‘the situation is this: we in the forest believe that communism (which 70 or 80 per cent of us hate) will at least let us live, but the Germans, with their National Socialism, will either shoot us or starve us to death.’81 ‘Are you alive? I don’t know,’ a soldier called Vasily Slesarev wrote to his wife, three sons and daughter in December 1941. It would be seven months before he heard from them. They, too, were trapped behind the German lines. It was a letter from his twelve-year-old daughter Mariya, brought out by partisans, that told the older man their news. ‘We had already started to think that no one was alive, but it looks as if you are and Shura, though we have not heard from Sergei,’ the child wrote. Near Smolensk, in her village, there had been deaths. ‘Papa,’ Mariya went on, ‘our Valik died and is in the graveyard at Sumarokovo. Papa, the German monsters set fire to us.’ The family home had been razed to the ground on 30 January 1942. Survivors and their animals had been driven away. The boy Valery had died of pneumonia in the damp shelter where his family were hiding. ‘Many people have been killed in the villages round here,’ Mariya told her father. ‘And all they think about is the bloodthirsty monsters, you can’t even call them human, they’re just robbers and drinkers of blood. Papa, kill the enemy!’82
Among the many secrets of this war was its true cost. On 23 February 1942, Red Army Day, Stalin announced that the Germans had lost the advantage. The Red Army was driving them towards the west, he said, and it had cleared them completely from the provinces of Moscow and Tula.83 Fighting talk like this was one of the few resources that the leader still commanded.84 In reality, those weeks in February were among the darkest of the war. Moscow had not fallen, but Leningrad was under siege, its citizens facing a ‘white death’ by starvation. To the south, the Crimea, with its strategic command of the Black Sea coast and the gates of the Caucasus, was almost entirely in German hands. Only the port of Sevastopol, besieged and under constant fire, still held out through the winter. Tula, as Stalin said, was free, but almost every other town and city to the west had been destroyed. The Germans had certainly lost large numbers of men, and Stalin was also right to say that their reserves were stretched. But Soviet losses had been greater by far. In addition to nearly 3 million captured men, the Red Army had lost 2,663,000 killed in action by February 1942. For every German who was killed, twenty Soviet soldiers had died.85