Zhukov’s assessment, which drew on detailed intelligence from British sources, was correct, although the timing of the blow was difficult to calculate. For once, too, Stalin accepted the military analysis, including the advice to prepare, in the first instance, for resolute defence. It was not what pre-war propaganda had prescribed, with its images of bold strikes at the fascist barricades, but the strategy that summer would be to take the German blow, absorbing it with line after line of defence. Only then, when the extravagant advance had been stalled, would the Soviets go on to the attack. The preparations would begin at once. Training programmes in all types of specialism would be intensified, and preference would be given to men with secondary-school education.43 Even front-line troops would face new drills and classes, and tank crews would receive special attention. Once ready, hundreds of thousands of men would march towards the south and west, travelling at night. In anticipation of heavy casualties – a prediction that would prove entirely correct – 450 hospitals and field treatment stations would be refurbished, rebuilt or equipped. Two hundred of these were planned for the Voronezh Front alone.44 Meanwhile, around Kursk itself, and for over 100 miles behind the front, militia groups and soldiers were set to shifting dirt. By July, when the bombardment finally began, a total of 3,000 miles of trenches had been prepared behind the front, criss-crossing in an angular geometry.45 The rich black earth was also sown with metal in unnumbered tons. On average, by July, there were just over 5,000 anti-tank or anti-personnel mines for every mile of fortification.46
The military plan was brilliant, but obstacles remained. Battlefields are not pieces of bland green baize. The future front-line zone was home to thousands of civilians. The next four months would see the army interacting all too closely with the local population. At their best, such relationships were warm and appreciative. Some men found friends who would share their last crust with a soldier from their own side. The local people had suffered – some had survived a German occupation – and almost everyone had a son or husband at the front. Soldiers could count on the support of patriots. ‘The directors of the collective farm and its farmers treated me really well,’ an engineer called Vitaly Taranichev wrote to his wife at the end of 1942. ‘They sent me on my way like a member of the family, they baked pies and biscuits for me to take, cooked some mutton, got hold of some makhorka and all that; I agreed to stay in touch with the kolkhoz chairman, an old guy of seventy who has four sons at the front.’47 It was all very well, but Taranichev was some distance behind the lines at this point, still in the reserve. His hosts had not seen the war as the peasants of the Kursk region had come to know it. In the spring and summer of 1943, parts of the black-earth zone were far from welcoming to anyone.
‘Our conditions are very good,’ Aleksandr Slesarev wrote to his father, who was also in the Red Army. The young man had been on the road for several weeks, but now he and his comrades had dug in. ‘We are living not far from a wood, in zemlyanki of course. Our food is first-class – and apart from that we get an extra ration because we’re at the front. My work is interesting, and I get to travel about.’ His only complaint, which others heartily endorsed that spring, was that ‘there isn’t much free time’.48 Slesarev, who came from Smolensk, was in the newly formed first guards tank army. He was supposed to spend his spring on exercises, improving the co-ordination and field tactics that tank units had so badly lacked in previous years. There were indeed many classes, especially in his own élite formation, but military work was once again neglected, on occasion, in favour of other tasks. That spring, even tank men’s duties would include helping on collective farms and working with the engineers whose job it was to rebuild the region’s communications, stores and hospitals.
Nikolai Belov was still with his rifle division. Based just outside Maloarkhangel’sk in the Orel region, he, too, was working very hard. ‘We’ve got to do some intense training,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘We’ll have to work in earnest again now, and you can’t protect yourself from the intensity of it.’ He was exhausted, but activity agreed with him. By 22 May, after a fortnight in his front-line camp, he had ‘got used to the work a bit’. Practical problems, not depression, would disturb him most that spring. ‘The regiment hasn’t really come together,’ he observed. The training would soon see to that. But nothing he could do would remedy the shortage of guns and other supplies.49
The men in Belov’s regiment did not enjoy the waiting or the drill. Belov himself noted a steady drip of desertions. On 27 May, five infantrymen slipped away from his unit to join the German side. ‘It’s hard to understand what brought that on,’ he wrote. ‘Evidently the general tiredness.’ The Germans were also dropping leaflets, encouraging the men to believe that changing sides would save their lives. On 30 May, two further men would disappear – ‘it’s a real nightmare’, commented Belov. One of them, Belov observed, was a candidate member of the Communist Party.50 The total number of Red Army troops deserting to the German side seemed to be growing by the month. Just over 1,000 were recorded by German intelligence in February. In April, the figure would rise to 1,964, in May, 2,424, and in June, 2,555.51 But these figures do not reflect the real picture. For one thing, fugitives did not always make for the German lines. As the Red Army moved west, the NKVD searched the bombed-out towns for truant soldiers masquerading as civilians. Kursk and its province turned out to be full of them. Many were life-long criminals; others would now begin careers in crime. In March 1943, for instance, the Kursk NKVD reported on a deserter called Ozerov who had escaped to the occupied zone in 1942. An ex-convict before the war, his violence surfaced again when he battered and killed the woman who was hiding him, as well as her elderly mother. He was captured and shot.52
Kursk itself was little more than ruins. In fourteen months, the occupying forces had plundered its factories and stores, destroyed its official buildings and murdered hundreds of its citizens. They had left such residents as they did not murder or deport to starve, or at least to sicken with the diseases of poverty and filth – typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis and syphilis. Those who were still alive to greet the Red Army that spring had witnessed scenes they could never forget, but they had also learned that survival depended on unusual kinds of skill. As the city had emptied late in 1941, the marooned residents had looted anything that they could carry. Months later, they had also taken supplies that the Germans left as they hurried away. Now, with the city full of troops again, the locals sought to feed themselves by selling their eccentric hoards. A woman was apprehended by police in March for peddling sheets. When her flat was searched, she was also fined for the possession of a stockpile consisting of two mattresses, three blankets, forty electric light bulbs and 18 kg of soap. This last was like a kind of currency. One man was found with sixty-seven bars of it, all taken from the German army’s stores, together with eight pairs of trousers, four pairs of German army boots, three woollen blankets and a sewing machine. Another had ten bars of household soap, eighty-seven tins of meat and 500 German cigarettes. Among the other trophy goods were German bicycles and cart-loads of their fine white flour.53