It was a passionate but futile anger. By early July, Junkers were flying as low as 100 metres above the northern suburbs of the city. The pavements and boulevards where sailors had once strolled were strewn with corpses now, the lovely buildings gutted, thick with smoke. ‘Heat,’ Evseev wrote. ‘We were all desperately thirsty. But no one had any water in his flask.’ He and a group of other men had taken shelter in the caves and tunnels underneath the port. Someone was sent to find water, and the others passed the time by dreaming of the things they might have liked to drink: ‘lemonade, kvass, seltzer water, beer, and, if you please, ice cream. But we agreed on one thing. We’d drink anything, even if it was not cold fresh water, even if it were polluted, even if it had been flowing through the corpses.’ He added that ‘We had been drinking water from under corpses for several days.’ The bodies had been thrown into the concrete tanks and reservoirs around the town. As Evseev commented, ‘We never managed to clear them out.’
Evseev was among the many who escaped, shipped off the coast within a few days of the city’s fall. Thousands of others, many of them military personnel like him, remained behind to face a pitiless enemy. ‘The city was unrecognizable,’ Evseev lamented, looking back from an army truck. ‘It was dead. The snow-white city of a little while ago, Sevastopol the beautiful, had turned into a ruin.’ As the men boarded their boat to cross a perilous Black Sea, they swore they would be back to take revenge.91 It was a brave boast, and one that some eventually fulfilled, but for the 90,000 or so women and men of the Red Army and Fleet captured with the town, it offered little hope.92
The Soviet retreat continued. Kharkov had fallen to the enemy in May. With the Crimea securely under their control, the Germans now launched an attack on Rostov, a vital gateway to the Caucasus and to the Volga citadel of Stalingrad. By mid-July, most of the Don basin was occupied. Only Voronezh, to the north, held out. Staryi Oskol was taken, the Don crossed. ‘The majority of our commanding officers are cowards,’ a young man called Gudzovsky wrote. ‘Surely we did not need to run away, we could have stood our ground and faced them. Give us an order to go west! To hell with retreating! I’m sick to death of pulling back from the places where I grew up.’93 It was the last thing he would write before his death. The army could not even save the local people it would leave behind. ‘They shared their last crusts with us,’ a front-line officer remembered. ‘I ate that bread and knew that in an hour I’d be leaving, retreating. But I said nothing! I didn’t have the right!… If we had told them, they would have run away as well, and then there would have been bottlenecks along the road for us.’94
The old man added that he felt ashamed. The army was failing in the rawest human terms. Many civilians in the threatened districts lost faith in Soviet troops that summer. ‘God knows what’s going on,’ a woman from a village wash-house hissed at two soldiers one evening. ‘We work and work, and they are just abandoning our towns!’ One of the men shot her a pained look and walked out. The other thought despairingly of his own home, Voronezh, which was under fire and which, because the road north was still blocked, he could not even dream of defending.95 Worse news was to follow. On 28 July, the Soviet people learned that Rostov and Novocherkassk had fallen. There was no stronghold now between the Germans and the Caucasus, and little to detain them on their way to Stalingrad.
5
Stone by Stone
The second summer of the war blew with an arid wind that offered neither victory nor hope. The campaign that was meant to end with triumph in Berlin now threatened stalemate, if not unthinkable defeat. ‘We never doubted that we would win,’ the veterans have claimed. But the delusion of invincibility, sustained through the first months of shock, could not endure the truth of constant failure. The police did their duty, demanding rigid cheerfulness from everyone. One soldier was arrested merely for observing that ‘we’re retreating, and we won’t be coming back’.1 But by August 1942, the men themselves were getting tired of the despair and shame, of the reproachful stares that followed them as they abandoned, one by one, the gaunt, semi-deserted townships of the steppe. They had been dragging back across the wheatfields of Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban for months. Behind them, somewhere over the eastern horizon, flowed the Volga, the river that divides the European part of Russia from the gates of Asia. Eastwards again stretched thousands of miles of dust, a landscape little changed since Tamurlane, and one that sons of Russia’s gentler, settled heart found alien. Symbolically at least, the time was coming when the army would have nowhere left to go.
The mindset that Stalin’s regime had fostered in its people – in public, optimistic and naïve; in private, wry and cynical – had failed the soldiers in these bitter months. For years, they had been incited to blame their misfortunes on others, the scapegoats that the state chose to call enemies and spies. Stalinism had shaped a culture that discouraged individuals from standing out. Buck-passing, for which its mandarins would coin a special word, obezlichka, became, during the purges after 1937, a matter, literally, of life and death. More than a year into the war, these patterns of behaviour had brought the Red Army to the edge of defeat. Now it was clear that every soldier’s effort, and perhaps his life, would be required. But months of humiliation had left the men edgy, prone to panic at the first rumour of German tanks.2 Morale was at its lowest ebb. ‘We wept as we retreated,’ a veteran recalled. The tears flowed from exhaustion, but they also signalled shame. ‘We were running anywhere to get away from Kharkov; some to Stalingrad, others to Vladikavkaz. Where else would we end up – Turkey?’3
Years of habit drove each man to lay the blame on someone else. Troops from the Russian heartland pointed fingers at Ukrainians, especially the ‘westerners’ from former Polish lands. ‘Whole companies were abandoning the front line, the Ukrainians were melting away,’ Lev Lvovich, now an officer, recalled. ‘They weren’t going to the German side, but just back home.’ ‘Only the Russians are fighting these Germans,’ a young infantryman grumbled at the time. ‘Most of the Ukrainians have just stayed at home.’ As he looked out across the Kalmyk steppe, he added that ‘my own home is a long way from here, too. Why should I lay my bones in foreign soil?’4 The tens of thousands of Ukrainians at the front line, naturally, found other scapegoats for it all. ‘There were many, many cases… where people deliberately shot themselves in the hand, or the shoulder, just in the flesh,’ recalled a Kiev-based infantryman. ‘Then they’d be in hospital and wouldn’t have to go to the front line.’ And there was always a new ethnic minority to blame. ‘There were all those men from central Asia,’ he continued. ‘When it was their mealtime, or after a bit anyway, they’d throw themselves on the ground and start up with their “O Allah!” They were praying, and they weren’t going to rush at the enemy, or even get involved in combat at all.’5 Racism was so prevalent that even Moscow grew alarmed.6 The armed forces, like the society from which they came, were shattering like bombed-out glass.