Most amazing of all were the new prisoners of war. 91,545 men were captured by the Red Army in January 1943. They were in such poor physical condition that they might have perished anyway, but the state of the NKVD’s prison camps made sure of it. Fewer than a fifth received hot food. Among the minority who did, death often followed when they ate too fast. Others dropped dead on the journey to the camps or died of their old wounds or of the typhus and dysentery that consumed their bodies within hours. Poor diet and hunger accounted for two thirds of the deaths in Soviet POW camps in 1943. Those who survived would face a growing threat from the tuberculosis that thrived in their cramped, unhealthy quarters.137 Things would become so bad that even the NKVD took steps to reform the system after Stalingrad, though its motive was to preserve a potential labour force, not to spare human lives. But every haggard, frightened prisoner brought the war’s end closer. That was the main thought in most people’s minds. The victory at Stalingrad felt like a turning point.
‘The Germans are throwing everything away as they run,’ that forty-seven-year-old wrote in his last letter home. He now believed the propaganda about Soviet strength. ‘We’re feeding ourselves with their supplies. The Germans are running, and the Hungarians and Italians are giving themselves up. Just now fifty of our guys took five hundred prisoners, they freeze like flies, they can’t stand the cold at all… There are loads of dead ones on the roads and streets, but the more the better.’138 Less than a month after he wrote these lines, this man also would die. He was no less a victim of the cold than the invaders whom he scorned, but his discovery that fascist troops could be beaten had made the winter bright. Ageev would have understood. ‘I’m in an exceptional mood,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘If you only knew, then you’d be just as happy as I am. Imagine it – the Fritzes are running away from us!’139
6
A Land Laid Waste
At last there was a kernel of real hope amid the dreary mass of promises. A year before, when the German army had turned back from Moscow, there had been relief, even modest celebration. But the crisis had been too deep, and the shock of invasion too recent, for anyone to sense a real turning of the tide. Now, like February’s first false hint of spring, the Soviet army’s westward progress appeared to signal the approach of peace. On 26 January 1943, Voronezh fell to General Golikov’s advancing troops. On 8 February, the Red Army marched into Kursk. Just six days later, it had re-entered Rostov, and on 16 February, it liberated Kharkov, the largest and most important city in the region. The places it retook were depopulated husks of cities; nests of fear and hunger, crime and mutual suspicion. Apartment buildings had been mined or shelled, windows blown out, power and water systems wrecked. Uneven soil beneath the melting snow hinted at vast mass graves. The people who had seen it all could find no words for their distress. But Stalin’s propagandists supplied images of triumph. The enemy was on the run, and when he had been driven back to his own lair, when he had been defeated and the dead avenged, the Soviet people would rebuild to make an even better world.
The politicians rushed to make the victory their own. The Red Army, ‘the army that defends peace and friendship between the peoples of every land’, as Stalin called it on its twenty-fifth anniversary that February, came in for plenty of loud praise. It had ‘carried out an historic struggle without precedent in history’, its ‘valiant soldiers, commanders and political workers’ had ‘covered its military colours in unfading glory’.1 But mere soldiers had not done this alone. Stalin’s own role assumed a greater prominence now that there was something glorious to claim. His wise leadership, his ‘military genius’, began to be invoked in explanation of successes for which tens of thousands of people had given their lives. The party, too, now came to feature as the guide and teacher of the masses. The people might regard this as their war, their epic struggle for freedom and dignity, but their leaders were already getting down to work. The first Museum of the Great Patriotic War was established in March 1943.2 The version of the war that it began to generate would soon become the template for official truth.
The birth of the glorious wartime myth was managed all the way along. The censors ensured that words like ‘retreat’ and ‘surrender’ would never feature in the annals of Red Army operations, but more cruelly they also suppressed evidence of the war’s true human cost. The victory at Stalingrad had been won at the expense of just under half a million Soviet soldiers’ and airmen’s lives, but this truth would remain concealed. All the way through, and even at Berlin, more men and women in the Red Army would die than soldiers of the side that they were supposed to be defeating. On average, Soviet losses outnumbered those of the enemy by at least three to one,3 but every pressure worked to hide this statistic. Red Army deaths might go entirely unrecorded at moments when there was no time to mark mass graves, let alone to count the bodies that had been pitched into them.4 The pressure would relent a little after 1943, but even so, it was a common practice for the army to report fewer losses, and even fewer bodies to bury, than it in fact sustained. Graves that contained hundreds of men were marked with the names of thirty.5 Meanwhile, official reports understated casualty rates – and also the loss of Soviet military hardware – while carefully enumerating scores of German deaths. Emotions, too, were censored. Grief was allowed – as long as it stirred soldiers to revenge – but other reactions to danger and pain remained unspoken. The Sovinformburo made sure that nothing that was published referred to men’s fear or doubt. By 1943, even the first year of the war had been rewritten for the public as a tale of grand heroic feats.6
Censorship worked. Sixty years on, many of the enforced silences hold. Government policy was effective in this case because it keyed into much deeper instincts and desires; people seldom enjoy revisiting the memory of pain. The bland version, the glorious one, suited the soldiers and the state alike. It kept things simple, after all, and allowed a ration of dignity – on Stalin’s terms – to veterans. Personal anecdotes, the real ones, began to look as odd as fragments of a coloured picture glued to black and white, and some still do. In 2002, Ilya Nemanov struggled to recall his own response to the grave wound that he had sustained in 1943. Part of his right side had been blown off by a German bomb, and his first thought had been ‘That’s it.’ But then other ideas jumbled across his mind. ‘I remembered that before the war even began my mother had said that they wouldn’t kill me, but my hand would be cut off,’ he recalled. ‘And then a mate in one of the shelters on the way had explained that if your hand was injured, you should try to get them to sew the fingers on again, because if it worked, and there were still nerves there, you might save the hand itself.’7 These thoughts sustained him as he bled into the aching dust, waiting for rescue or for death. But superstition was not part of the official story of the Soviet war, and memories like this, personal ones, became increasingly difficult to recover as the long campaign progressed, let alone when it was over.