Among the winners in the midst of war, at least compared with private soldiers at the front, were the officials who stayed well behind the lines. On 6 November 1943, an invited crowd of them gathered in Moscow to hear Stalin speak. The occasion was the eve of the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. Outside, the early winter capital was grey, subdued by black-out drapes and power cuts. Inside, beneath the chandeliers, the audience basked in self-congratulation. In the twelve months since their last anniversary meeting, the prospects for these people’s world had changed completely. First there had been Stalingrad, with all those German prisoners and dead. But that had been a winter victory. What Kursk had proved was that the Red Army could beat the fascists in the summer, too. Since then, the news had told a story of unbroken success. Smolensk was recaptured on 25 September; the Taman peninsula – gateway to the Crimea – on 7 October. In a feat of remarkable daring (and at shattering human cost), the Red Army had forced the river Dnepr on 7 October, breaching the fascists’ most secure defensive line. And on 6 November, the élite would learn what everybody heard the following day, which was that Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, had fallen to the Soviets at last.
The Red Army was the country’s undoubted saviour, but Stalin used his speech to emphasize that it had not been working on its own. It was time to celebrate the party and the government, the men and women who had stayed at home. He began with some real heroes, those of wartime labour. If the army no longer lacked for weapons and supplies, Stalin explained, it had to thank ‘our working class (stormy and prolonged applause)’. It also owed a great deal to ‘the patriotism of the collective farm peasants’, to ‘our transport workers’, and even, for their initiatives in design and engineering, to ‘our intelligentsia (prolonged applause)’. Stalin’s message was unmistakable: he was declaring revolution vindicated. ‘The lessons of the war,’ he announced, ‘teach us that Soviet power is not only the best form of organization for the economic and cultural development of a country in years of peace, but also the best form for mobilizing all the resources of the people for repelling an enemy in time of war… The Soviet power that was established twenty-six years ago has turned our country – in a brief historical period – into an inviolable fortress.’2
The men and women at the front – or those at least who had survived to join in that November’s celebration – were just as proud of victory, although they tended to assume most credit for themselves. Vitaly Taranichev, the engineer, found a few moments to write home to his wife. ‘It’s one o’clock in the morning,’ he explained, ‘the night of 7 November 1943. I’ve been at my military post since the eve of the 26th anniversary of the Great October revolution… At 1600 hours today we heard the order of our Supreme Commander comrade Stalin about the capture of the capital of our Ukraine, the city of Kiev, by our valiant troops. Natalochka! I can imagine how delighted you must be by this news! The time has passed when the fascists controlled the skies, – today they made a pathetic effort to disrupt the work at our station, but it didn’t come to anything, everything is working like clockwork, and everything is moving forward, towards the west, towards the destruction of fascism!’3
Thousands of front-line soldiers shared this view. They knew that they were on the road to victory. Like many other successful armies, they found themselves embracing some of the values of their nation and culture with new confidence and zeal. They also began to imagine that their sacrifice could build a better world within that framework. Many believed that they were laying new foundations for the peace, perhaps burning away the hatreds and confusion of the pre-war years. Soldiers’ friendships with front-line comrades felt like a foretaste of the brotherhood to come. And then there was the thrill of new machines. The tank battle at Kursk, the evidence of Soviet air superiority that summer, the deadly music of the Katyushas – all this seemed like a vindication of the five-year plans, a promise of a better, mass-producing world. Zhukov, not Stalin, was probably the army’s real hero (and each veteran will happily describe the wartime general he admired most, like sports fans arguing over star players), but even Stalin, because he lived mainly in men’s imaginations, seemed to embody the qualities that success now promised: progress, unity, heroism, deliverance. In word, at least, it looked as if soldiers and leadership subscribed to the same goals.
The starkest ideological lessons were drawn by looking at the legacy of fascism. ‘I’ve had to drive round a good many of the settlements that the Germans have abandoned in the recent past,’ Taranichev wrote home. ‘You cannot imagine what these places, that used so recently to be blossoming centres of population, look like: not one dwelling without damage, everything burned, and what they didn’t manage to burn has been destroyed by aerial bombing.’4 ‘I’ve been marching day and night,’ a twenty-year-old machine-gunner wrote home in October 1943. He had travelled on from Orel to the river Desnya and beyond, crossing country the retreating German army had torched. ‘The population meets us warmly, I didn’t even think that our welcome would be like this. They weep, they hug us, everyone brings us whatever they can.’ The reason for the people’s joy was obvious. ‘I’ve seen how the German burns villages, the bitch. I’ve seen the victims of his violence.’5
For soldiers, the Red Army was now the instrument of collective redemption, the arm of vengeance and of liberation. The greeting that soldiers received from the people of western Russia and eastern Ukraine was often overwhelming. But though many were proud of their collective power, it was also possible, for large numbers of men, to catch a sense of individual progress. The army furthered thousands of careers. Vasily Ermolenko was at school in Kharkov when the war broke out. The first year of the invasion saw his home overrun, his mother trapped and his father enlisted into the Red Army. But young Vasily, now a refugee, received a training. When the Red Army liberated his native city in 1943, he was already working elsewhere on the front as a radio operator and communications engineer. Technology became his life, the more so because every other landmark in it had been wrecked. He joined the party in the spring of 1944. As he noted in his diary at the time, the war had taught him to love his motherland, but it had also confirmed his belief in socialism, ‘which will lead people to a happy life’. In his mind, all the Red Army’s successes had become linked to the party and its leader.6
The party spirit (the Soviets had a word for it: partiinost’) that soldiers like Ermolenko evinced was far removed from the careful sophistry of Stalin’s ideologues. The soldiers’ brand of communism was also distinct from that of their political officers, many of whom had joined the party well before the war. Rank and file belief arose from experience as much as from preaching, and it often co-existed with an impatience for paperwork, a dislike of propaganda. ‘Considerable empirical evidence exists that indoctrination affects troops in much the same way as rain affects a duck,’ a specialist on combat motivation has observed. ‘It glances off their backs.’7 The men’s beliefs, though shaped by everything they had been told (and limited because there was so much that they would never be allowed to say or hear), felt like their own philosophy. ‘If the politruks had let us,’ the nationalist writer Victor Astaf’ev remarked, ‘we’d have lost the war in six weeks… Our first victories started when we stopped listening to them.’8 Front-line ideology was strong and deeply rooted, but it was also so distinct from that of the civilian élite that it might have been evolving in another universe.