These figures should have been enough to cause a collapse of morale, if not a revolution, on their own. But they were not released. No one could calculate the total human cost of the war they were living through. Civilians who witnessed fighting, like the soldiers who fought, knew plenty about individual battles, but their knowledge was anecdotal, and even they could scarcely have guessed the true scale of the carnage. The very magnitude of the Soviet people’s loss put it beyond imagination. And no figure could ever represent the truth of so much pain, or even the enormous heaps of bodies; rotting, semi-frozen flesh. The dead were not yet skeletons, their graves not yet those solid monuments of black granite. Their faces still showed shock and agony, their fingers clutched at mud and snow. In some places, the bodies lay on other bodies, heaps of human corpses rising up as if to stem some bloody tide. The only places where images like this were known and shared, apart from front-line camps, were hospitals. It was not for nothing that cheerful komsomols were sent to sit with convalescing troops, to read them letters, poems and selected extracts from the press. Only at night were the real stories whispered round the wards.
The most desperate, that spring, came from the south. The men caught up in campaigns there learned to expect and even welcome death. ‘We used to say that whoever survives this winter will live a long time,’ a soldier who fought near Feodosia, in eastern Crimea, told his diary. The road along the coast was strewn with bodies, but his comrades could not bury them because of German fire. ‘I’m ready now,’ he added, ‘for a death of any kind.’86 With Sevastopol still in Soviet hands, a major expedition had been launched in December 1941 to liberate eastern Crimea. Its aim was to take the Kerch peninsula and use it as a bridgehead to relieve the pressure on Sevastopol and recapture the entire region. The project was doomed. As one young conscript wrote in February, ‘Our troops have abandoned Feodosia. What was the point in taking it, if we had not made preparations for its defence? If we’ve got to take every city twice like this, then maybe in 1945 we’ll get to the end of this war.’87 A Soviet force remained in the lowlands round Kerch, the easternmost point on the Crimea, but its prospects were bleak. In early May, the Germans attacked for a final time, driving the Soviets towards the narrow strait that separates Kerch and its ancient harbour from the Russian mainland.
Kerch saw several kinds of tragedy that spring. First came the fighting itself. Stalin’s favourite, Lev Mekhlis, was put in charge. For him, the struggle was a matter of morale. What that meant in practice was that military preparation for the last defence was minimal. ‘Everyone had to go forward, forward!’ Simonov, who witnessed some of it, recalled. Ten kilometres behind the lines, he observed, there was nothing; no support, no reserve and no transport. Mekhlis believed that trenches sapped the spirit of aggression. None was ever dug. This was particularly unfortunate, for beyond the port itself, the landscape of the Kerch peninsula is gently rolling steppe, treeless and sometimes marshy, offering no shelter to men fighting for their lives. The infantry divisions of the 51st Army, many of them Georgians recently arrived from an entirely different countryside and climate, had neither plan nor cover as they faced the guns. Simonov was horrified when an initial round of German shelling left the land strewn with more corpses than he had seen at any time in the whole war. ‘There were no officers anywhere,’ he added. ‘It all took place on an open, muddy, absolutely barren field.’88 The next day, more infantrymen were driven over the same ground, passing the bodies of their comrades in the fog as they rushed on towards their deaths. A hundred and seventy-six thousand men were slaughtered at Kerch in just twelve days.89
The outcome was as Simonov predicted. In mid-May, the last remnants of Mekhlis’s army boarded small boats and set off across the five-mile strait towards the mainland. But the German advance had been so swift that many – several thousand – remained trapped in limestone hills behind the town. These men and women looked down on the strait below – they must have dreamed of walking across it – and knew there could be no escape. What came next was anguish of a kind that even this war would see only once or twice. It was typical because it involved individual courage, shattered faith and then a cruel waste of life. It was unique because the drama took place underground. The heroes of the story found their graves in a maze of tunnels deep within the Crimea’s rock.
The officers of the Special Section, hardened agents in the mould of Mikhail Ivanovich and the OSMBON, took charge at once. Barking their orders and fingering loaded guns, they gathered every straggler and mustered the men. Then they produced a group of local guides, people who knew the landscape and its secret caves. These men led the entire company into a quarry, an enormous labyrinth of pits and tunnels from which the stone to build a fortress for the port’s defence had been taken eighty years before. This cave city would now become the soldiers’ home. Three thousand people, including nurses and refugees from Kerch (these people had survived one episode of German rule and knew to fear a second even more), huddled away into the darkness. They dragged their horses and their guns; they carried bundles of supplies. If they had glanced behind them as they shuffled down into the earth, they would have glimpsed the grassy steppe, the blue spring light, burgeoning yellow tansy and the crimson splashes of the first poppies. These colours would have been the last that they saw. Few would blink in daylight again, or even feel a cool breeze on their skin.
The cave city was organized; that is, the men from the Special Section knew their work. They split their company into detachments and assigned clear tasks to each. Some were organized into sentry rotas; others sent off down dank tunnels to look for hidden exits, search for water or scrape together any food or fuel. The men in charge made their headquarters in the largest, safest cave. The hospital was set up in the deepest one. It was soon needed. Without a regular supply of food, the refugees began to eat the flesh of horses that had died in the escape. Three months later, this meat was still the only food they had. At first, scouts from the quarry made raids to the surface, seizing whatever they could steal and harassing the German guards who watched over the site, but in a few weeks all that stopped as well. The quarry people were trapped. As they waited for death, they lit their darkness with thin, stinking candles made from burning strips of rubber tyre.
The Germans planted explosives around the exits from the site. Rocks and splinters rained down on the fugitives below. Then poison gas was released into the tunnels, killing all but a few score of the Soviet defenders. These last died hungry and despairing in the next few weeks, but they did not surrender. In Soviet myth, the quarry at Adzhimuskai became another Leningrad, a Brest fortress, a place where heroes held out to the last. But in fact, these brave men and women had no choice. Although some of the officers, the Special Section men with their revolvers and their survival training, must have escaped and reported the tale, the others were forced to remain. They were kept in the pit at gunpoint, threatened with death by comrades from their own side. If they would not behave like heroes, choosing a noble end, they would die from a Soviet bullet in the neck.90
The fall of Kerch sealed Sevastopol’s fate. Since the previous autumn, the city had been holding out, although it was a grim shadow of the Black Sea resort that Messerschmidts had bombed a year before. In late May 1942, the defenders heard that German troops were converging on the city, and some of its residents – women, the elderly and children – were evacuated by sea from the port that week. Among the many who remained was the writer and humorist Evgeny Petrov, who died during the last days of the siege. The NKVD guards, meanwhile, disposed of their prisoners – allegedly in caves near Inkerman – and then made their escape into the night. The bombardment began. There were so many planes, the naval officer Evseev wrote, that there was no space above the town for them to circle. The sound, ‘a hellish cacophony’, was so constant and deafening that citizens found any silence troubling. ‘And the heavier the bombing,’ Evseev remarked, ‘the greater and more strong became our rage and hatred of the enemy.’