The wartime censors’ ambitions were staggering. Nemanov reminded me of another instance, more graphic even than his own story. In January 1943, the siege of Leningrad was lifted. The city was still exposed to German shelling, still encircled, but now convoys of medicines, fuel and flour could cut through by rail where previously they had relied on a fragile – and seasonal – track across the ice of Lake Ladoga. Another year would pass before Leningrad was entirely free, but relief for the desperate remnant of its population had arrived at last. The moment called for reflection, for mourning and some muted celebration, but for Stalin’s men it was a propaganda minefield. They did not like to draw attention to the fact that Soviet people had been left to starve to death, and the ban on discussion extended to the army. In the spring of 1943, when a soldier who was assigned to Nemanov’s unit from the Volkhov Front near Leningrad tried to describe the siege to his new comrades, he disappeared, arrested. ‘He had mentioned starvation,’ Nemanov remembered. ‘That wasn’t something we were supposed to hear about.’
Ol’ga Berggolts, the poet of the Leningrad blockade, discovered the same thing when she visited Moscow at the end of 1942 to broadcast her reflections on the siege. ‘I have become convinced that they know nothing about Leningrad here,’ she wrote to her family. ‘No one seemed to have the remotest idea what the city is going through. They said that the Leningraders are heroes, but they don’t know what that heroism consists of. They didn’t know that we starved, they didn’t know that people were dying of hunger… I couldn’t open my mouth on the radio, because they told me: “You can talk about anything, but no recollections of the starvation. None, none. On the courage, on the heroism of the Leningraders, that’s what we need… But not a word about hunger.”’8
As ever in the surreal Soviet world, people were being asked to say one thing, subscribe in public to one version, while knowing something else, at least with some part of their minds. The Red Army, the people’s saviour, was prime territory for the myths. A set of stereotypical propaganda images – the noble warrior, the courageous Russian son, the defiant partisan – was being struck somewhere inside the Sovinformburo. Real people were picked to represent each type, for there was no shortage of personal heroism from which to choose, but Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the martyred partisan, or Vasily Zaitsev, the Stalingrad sniper, were ideals, as inspiring and popular – and also as typical of the mass – as sports personalities or saints. Among Red Army men, the hero types were almost always snipers, gunners or members of doomed tank crews. They were relatively literate, in other words, and they were likely to be sympathetic to the Communist Party, while if they were not dead when stardom came, they could at least be certain to behave themselves in public. Although the press selected dozens of private soldiers for star treatment, the style and values that these men displayed resembled those of officers, and certainly those of communists. The culture of the rank and file, the dark world of real men, was jostled out of view.
Soldiers themselves adapted to this double standard. They seemed to have at least two cultures: an official one, which included everything they were allowed to do in front of officers and journalists; and a concealed, almost tribal one, the culture of vodka, makhorka, the lilting sayings – spontaneous verses – that they called chastushki, and crude peasant jokes. David Samoilov, who observed the men with a poet’s eye for the unexpected, summed up this flexibility. In the presence of an officer, he wrote, a Russian soldier would be ‘subdued and tongue-tied’. Perhaps there was no common language to unite commander and man across the divide of ideology and rank; perhaps there was not a great deal to say. There was certainly no time for any words in battle, when, Samoilov said, the tongue-tied private would turn out to be ‘a hero’. The manner of his dying was remarkable, too. ‘He will not abandon a comrade in trouble,’ Samoilov wrote. ‘He dies in a manly and workmanlike way, as if it were his accustomed craft.’ But the price of the subservience and stress had to be paid somewhere. When the officers were off the scene, the same soldier, Samoilov wrote, became ‘querulous and abusive. He boasts and threatens. He’s ready to take a swipe at anything and to come to blows over nothing at all.’ This was not merely boorishness. ‘This touchiness,’ added Samoilov, ‘shows that the existence of a soldier is a burden to him.’9
By 1943, the army had been at war for two years, and at almost every level below that of the high command its ranks were dominated by recruits whose military careers had started since the invasion. The gap between officers and men was closing. No one could doubt the basic cause for which they were all working, and a sense of common interest was vital for morale. The better young officers, including Samoilov himself, worked with the men, attempting to meet them half-way rather than taking cover in privilege. Although entitled to food of his own, and also to private quarters, Lev Lvovich insisted on eating with the soldiers in his regiment, sharing the thin soup and the buckwheat porridge that they all called shrapnel.
It was becoming easier for a junior officer like him to befriend the men because the gulf in experience between the ranks had narrowed so much by this stage in the war. The Red Army of 1941 had almost disappeared. The twenty-six-year-old lieutenant, his head full of advice from an uncle who had served under Nicholas II, set out to encourage and cajole young men and aging reservists, not disaffected veterans. Remembering names was a little easier, too, because he never managed to muster a full complement of troops. As a lieutenant, Lvovich should have commanded 120 infantrymen, but he seldom had to get to know more than sixty. There were never enough recruits and reserves to keep Red Army units up to strength. What this meant was that the young officer could talk to a frightened first-timer personally, although ‘a bit of swearing was often the best thing for the rest of them’. Good relations paid off. As he recalled, the men thought it mere child’s play, during operations, to get rid of an officer they hated, just as Samoilov’s comrades had planned to do. ‘It happened,’ Lev Lvovich assured me. ‘Of course it happened quite a lot.’10
Even the best officers, however, could not entirely close the gulf between the semi-literate and men who could read, between townsmen and all the rest. ‘This was the last Russian war,’ Samoilov wrote, ‘in which most of the soldiers were peasants.’11 True, they were now collective farmers, Soviets, not Tolstoy’s archetypal sons of earth, but all the same they were not fond of taking notes. As the party wrote itself into the war, the voices of the mass of troops were edited or lost. Political officers occasionally reported their talk, but only where soldiers’ comments concerned their own preoccupations – communism, Stalin’s orders, the digest of most recent news. The men’s culture, the bedrock of the soldiers’ fighting spirit and morale, of their survival and perhaps of Russia’s own, would vanish with the settling wartime dust. There are a few survivors still, but even they look back across a fog of time, and they, too, have been influenced by post-war newspapers and films. To reach back to the infantrymen’s world is to explore beyond the range of memory, beyond the scope of the archival mountains of buff-covered files. Even their contemporaries, Moscow-based staff officers and bureaucrats, had trouble understanding soldiers’ real lives. The peasant village was exotic, almost foreign to Stalin’s officials, a site for ethnographers and folklore expeditions. By 1943, the army, with its closed ranks, its male intimacies and its violence, was like another universe.