Red Army friendships might not last long, but they certainly were fierce. At this stage in the war, an infantryman was unlikely to serve with his friends for more than three months before a wound, death or even a promotion removed him from the group. ‘It’s enough for a person to be with you for two to seven days,’ soldiers would explain, ‘and you will know his qualities, all his feelings, the things it takes a year to know in civvy street.’33 It is a testimony to the power of soldiers’ loyalties that many petitioned time and time again, even after each discharge from hospital, to be allowed to get back to their mates.34 ‘We were like a boy and girl,’ a veteran remembered. ‘Like lovers, you’d have said. We couldn’t bear to be apart.’ He was not talking about homosexuality. No one ever broke that taboo. Sex was in any case the last thing on a soldier’s mind when he was hungry, tired and frightened. This was a difference between the front line and the rear, between the trenches and the officers’ mess. Friendships were close, but the pleasures that men shared and talked about at the front line centred on food, drink, warmth and smoking. When David Samoilov’s unit was at the front, the men sat up for hours, ‘tormented without tobacco’. They talked endlessly, and a favourite subject was each man’s wedding. What interested them, however, was not the wedding night and sex, or even thoughts of love and home, but the scale and contents of the feast that had been set for each successive celebration.35
Subversive and passionate, brutal or dark, this was a world that the Sovinformburo did its best to keep well out of sight. ‘Our soldiers’ portrayed in the Soviet press were no more realistic than the brave boys of adventure comics. Survivors had a lot to gain, after the war, by endorsing the myth, but there was one group that had nothing left to lose. These were the shtrafniki, the members of the punishment units. Not many are alive to tell their tales. Ivan Gorin, for instance, was the only survivor in a group of 330 men. All the rest died in a single morning when they were sent, armed with rifles and rushing over open ground, to storm a battery of entrenched German guns. When this man remembers the war, his starting point is a prison.
Gorin’s father had disappeared when the police drove the kulaks away in 1930. That is, he deserted his wife and children and made for the south. Gorin himself was fostered to a family who despised him for his supposed bourgeois roots. It was an inauspicious start. The boy lived on the edge of the illegal world, and when the war broke out he turned to forging ration cards. When he was caught, the judge gave him a choice: the Gulag or the front. He had already decided to fight, for when he was in prison, pending sentence, he had imbibed the patriotic mood. ‘Lots of people asked to go,’ he said. ‘There was enthusiasm for the front even among prisoners.’ At least it felt a bit like tasting life. Soon everyone would learn that it was merely execution by another means.
The shtrafniki discovered that their lives counted for less than those of Budyennyi’s beloved horses. The only food they ever saw was thin grey soup. ‘The old hands told us that we got a tenth of the normal army ration,’ another survivor remembered. ‘Whether that was right or not, our menu consisted of four spoonfuls of food a day… and unlimited quantities of best quality profanities.’ Convicts were herded into camps to await military orders. These barracks were as murderous as the Gulag, and much of their atmosphere derived from it. A man could be skinned alive for losing in a game of cards; he could be murdered in his bed for his boots or a crust of hoarded bread.36 Everyone lived in fear of the starshiny, the old lags who ran everything. Reaching the front, even without a scrap of professional training, came as a relief for the inexperienced Gorin. ‘We wanted to get to the front as fast as possible,’ he said, ‘so as to escape from the torment of that reserve base.’37
Once there, with a gun in his hand, Gorin realized that he was someone officers respected. They could not know, after all, which way he was planning to shoot. ‘We went into battle,’ another remembered, ‘and we never shouted for the motherland and Stalin. We were all effing and blinding. That was the “Hoorah!” of the shtrafniki.’ Gorin agreed, but added that the men regarded their leader with a fatalistic respect. ‘If Stalin dies,’ they muttered, ‘another will come in his place of the same kind.’ They were not alienated nihilists, either. Russians fought on because they believed in a real cause, and even surviving shtrafniki remember their love of the motherland. ‘We all wanted to defend it,’ Gorin said. ‘I think that the criminals felt more devotion, more love for their native soil than the high-ups in the leadership, the bosses.’ And there was pride even in death. ‘He doesn’t run away, the shtrafnik,’ another survivor told journalists. ‘Ordinary soldiers are more likely to do that.’38
The convicts’ life expectancy was short, but their culture, raw and vivid, distinct from that of the party cell and officers’ mess, infused that of the front line as a whole. The same was often true of the criminals who were shipped to the front from the Gulag after April 1943.39 Cast into this most murderous war, their survival depended on skills they had learned first, perhaps, in the hungry villages of the 1930s and then in the hard school of Kolyma. They had the peasant muzhik’s eye for a deal, the convict’s for self-preservation. Brutal conditions made survivors of them all. And yet most of them cared about the outcome of this war. ‘This war was a war of extermination,’ a rank and file soldier later recalled. ‘It stirred up hatred, the thirst for revenge, finally ripening into a cause, which would inspire the Red Army into furious battles over a four-year period.’ It was the bosses, however, ever ready with their slogans, who gave that cause its official name. ‘This cause was named “patriotism”.’40
The celebrations had been premature. The victory at Stalingrad had wounded the enemy severely, but it had not permanently broken him. Even the gains of February 1943 were not to last. The Soviets held on to Kharkov for barely a month. In March, they were driven back, leaving the city to the fascists once again. It was a bitter moment for the army, and a catastrophe for Kharkov’s citizens, who now faced the redoubled anger of their conquerors as well as the privations of another hungry spring. Far away, in the unimaginable light of the Tunisian desert, Montgomery’s troops were driving Rommel and his men towards the sea. The outcome of the Soviet Union’s war was still unclear.
That spring, the Soviet leadership gathered to consider the coming year’s campaign. On 8 April, Georgy Zhukov, newly created Marshal of the Soviet Union and decorated with the first ever Order of Suvorov, First Class,41 delivered his assessment of the enemy’s most likely plans. Grave and businesslike, he told the General Staff that Germany lacked the resources for a new push in the Caucasus or along the Volga. However, the fascists were far from beaten. Winter was never their best time of year, and nor were the sodden weeks of spring, when melted snow dissolved into thigh-high mud. But for two summers already, their tanks and horses had raced eastwards over sun-baked ground, driving the Soviet army back, encircling whole divisions at a time, instilling panic in too many of the rest. As the days lengthened and the mornings warmed, they would attack again. Zhukov believed that they would choose a narrow front and muster concentrated forces for a direct strike. Their ultimate objective would be Moscow. The blow would come from the places where German forces were strongest, namely the open wheatfields between Orel and Belgorod. Its likely focus would be the region around Kursk, a city in the black-earth zone near the border with Ukraine. The Soviet front line bulged westwards at this point, exposing the Red Army’s flanks from the north-west to the south-west. In Zhukov’s view, the onslaught, when it came, would be designed to devastate. The Wehrmacht was running short of men; this was a battle that would be decided by aircraft, artillery and tanks.42