The answer was an arid, brutal discipline. In preparation for the tank battle at Kursk, Moskvin’s battalion was ordered to make a raid on the station at Chaus. When it was over, Moskvin catalogued the dead and injured. Three people had been killed outright and eighteen suffered wounds, among whom three would later die, including the battalion commander, Makarov, and Moskvin’s own friend, Ivan Rakhin. One of the women who went on the raid, a medical officer called Pasha, was critically wounded in the arm. The only way to save her was to amputate the limb, an operation that was carried out with vicious home-brewed spirit for an anaesthetic. They poured it neat into her throat. ‘The woman’s fortitude is striking,’ Moskvin observed, but ‘we took 140 rifles and four machine guns… as well as a new radio’. It was a strange economy of war. Strangest of all, the raid also produced a quantity of French champagne and cognac, tobacco and Havana cigars.99 These would have been outrageous prizes for a band of outlaws in an earth dugout, but they were not the ones who got to taste the wine. Moskvin’s battalion was under strict command. The bosses claimed all trophies for the state.
As the Red Army crashed on to Orel, conditions in the woods of western Russia worsened. The mood in Moskvin’s regiment was tense, but its overall leader, Grishin, seemed to withdraw into a dream world of his own. ‘Only my deep respect for his talent makes me so tolerant,’ Moskvin observed. The retreating German army posed new threats to partisans whose territory had up till then been deep behind the front. Grishin’s instructions were to travel east and join the Red Army as it approached Smolensk, but within days of setting out, he and his men were encircled. They had not reached their own front line. Instead, they faced the vengeful hatred of an enemy that was itself in flight. By 16 October 1943, Moskvin was sure that he would die. ‘I have one main desire,’ he wrote miserably. ‘If it is going to be death, then let it be quick, not with a serious injury, which would be the most frightening of all.’100 By then, as he added, the men had already eaten all their horses. As winter approached, and despite all the triumph to the east, they were starving to death.
The blockade lasted for about three weeks. It was Grishin who enforced Stalinist order. ‘We are encircled,’ he wrote on 11 October. ‘The exits from the forest are blocked. You can hear for yourself that the front is approaching… Therefore, we must hold our positions. Retreat would mean extinction. There must be no cowards or panic-raisers among us. Every honest patriot of our fatherland must shoot such people on the spot.’101 ‘In the last few days life has lost its overall meaning,’ Moskvin wrote on 17 October. He was coming close to breakdown. ‘My instinct for self-preservation isn’t working the way it used to. It’s not gone altogether, but it’s become really dull, like a headache after a good dose of aspirin.’102 These thoughts remained private, for he was a political officer and it was his job to maintain morale. The feelings of less motivated men are clear enough. ‘For leaving his post without orders,’ runs an order dated 13 October 1943, ‘for cowardice, for being panicky and for nonfulfilment of orders, Squad Leader Bacharov is to be shot.’103
Moskvin was destined to escape. On 18 October, just after his most desolate diary entry, he and his men received orders to break the enemy blockade. It was an almost suicidal act. As they rushed at the German lines they were defenceless targets. Fifteen people were killed within a few seconds; one for each metre, Moskvin noted, that they ran. The losses were enormous, but the regiment was free. Its orders were to move south-west, not east, to evade German fire. The manoeuvre was conducted under military discipline, but the group received no help from the Red Army. Moskvin observed, without comment, that it was but a dozen miles away.
The Red Army’s advance provided many opportunities for Stalin to demonstrate his policy on unity and brotherhood. By the end of 1943, almost the entire region of Ukraine was in Soviet hands, but one prize still eluded recapture. Hitler himself was determined to hold on to the Crimea. It was not simply that the peninsula represented a strategic gateway to the oilfields of Romania; it was also a place of striking beauty. The Germans had declared it to be a Black Sea version of Gibraltar, their second homeland, as soon as they had captured it. During their two-year occupation of the peninsula, they had even planned a direct highway from Berlin to Yalta, and there were rumours that Hitler had chosen the seaside palace at Livadiya as his eventual retirement home.104 With both sides set on taking it, the Crimea witnessed fighting as bitter as any in the entire war, but the aftermath, for thousands of the peninsula’s inhabitants, would be crueller still. When Stalin talked about the Soviet people and their great collective epic, there were already tens of thousands who would never share in the rewards.
The liberation of the Crimea was accomplished in the space of a few weeks from April 1944. The Soviet military operation, a co-ordinated strike from both the north and east, was bold, effective and prodigal of human life. It was also physically gruelling. As Alexander Werth observed, the men who headed the invasion from the north, across the grim and fog-bound Sivash marshes, had to ‘spend hours waist-deep or shoulder-deep in the icy and very salt water of the Sivash – the salt eating into every pore and causing almost unbearable pain’ as they laid the first pontoons across the inlet.105 But once they reached the firm Crimean soil, their progress was faster. Within two days the first Red Army troops had reached the capital, Simferopol, which lies at the heart of the Crimea’s inland steppe. Meanwhile, a second group, starting near Kerch, began its rapid westward drive along the coast road to the south, securing Kerch itself and then the port of Feodosia. From there, their way lay round the pointed crags that shelter the resort of Koktebel, and beyond that, passing terraces of vineyards and sunlit forests of beech, they would speed through the Tatar fishing village of Gurzuf, through Yalta, Livadiya, Alubka and – eventually – to the outskirts of Sevastopol itself.
It was spring in the Crimea. The place was an exotic paradise after a winter rotting on the steppe. ‘I spent the May Day holiday in a wonderful way,’ Vitaly Taranichev’s brother-in-law, Fedor, wrote home. ‘In the first place, for fulfilling the military duties that my commanders assigned to me I have been awarded the Order of the Red Star, and secondly it was jolly because of all the wine we drank and the great company.’ He was writing a full week after the party, but he added that ‘I will only be in a sober enough condition to work and to continue with the rout of our enemies tomorrow.’106 The wine was not just local stuff. Since 1941, high-ranking German officers had often spent their leave in the Crimea. To help them to relax, their staff had imported the best products from Alsace, Champagne and the Rhine. No one had time, in the emergency, to pack it up. When they arrived in places that the Germans had vacated days before, Red Army officers like young Fedor could drown in vintage Riesling if they chose. Like many other Soviet troops on this campaign, the young man vowed to make the Crimea his future home.