Along the front, a problem that was not a problem in official terms soon seemed to disappear. In that sense, the Soviet approach to trauma was effective. American troops, whose symptoms were taken very seriously, dropped out of active service at four to six times the Red Army’s rate in this war.23 Stalin’s soldiers learned that citing battle stress was not the best way to complain of exhaustion, panic and the inability to sleep. Physical injuries, which soon followed the mental ones, provided a more effective ticket home, or at least to a field station and a bed. ‘There was only one thought,’ a veteran later suggested. ‘To be wounded quickly, to get it over with, to get to a hospital, or at least for a convalescence, for a rest.’24 The lucky ones would escape long-term invalidity, but even the tens of thousands of supposedly healthy men who were camped along the Belorussian Front in the spring of 1944 could scarcely be considered whole.
Front-line culture had to evolve to make room for exhausted, frightened and aggressive men. At the same time, it also took on consignments of criminals. Trainloads of murderers and small-time crooks had long been running west out of the Gulag to restock the army, but now almost all felons convicted of banditry, robbery and what were vaguely referred to as ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ were held close to the front, assessed, and in almost every case, made to serve out their term in shtraf units.25 Originally, these had fought in formations that remained separate from the mass of serving troops, but now the criminals and shtrafniki could find themselves assigned to regular units, their task to carry out the dangerous work, especially sorties behind the German lines.26 More than ever, the culture and the language of the shtrafniki prevailed within the ranks. The press might call the men heroes, but when they gathered at the front, their idiom was that of slaves, or else of convicts.27 It was not just the patriotic rage of 1941 that was fading; a kind of buttoned-up communist morality was disappearing under other values, too.
Violence was everywhere, whatever the men’s current military orders. When they were not in combat, they could quarrel over booty, drink, status or women. Most often the result was a brawl, but sometimes the authorities were left to deal with corpses. The victims might be found at first light with their heads blown off, or else they might be beaten up with rifle butts.28 Sometimes the motive was euphoria. Where the Germans had set fire to villages as a calculated act of terror, the Red Army was capable of doing so – even on its own soil – by firing at dry straw in an orgy of celebration.29 Drink – which scarcely anyone consumed for the pleasure of the taste – was often involved. Its purpose now – which the Tommies of the First World War would have entirely understood – was just to kill the mind, to escape from the war without leaving one’s post.30 In some units, the men would pool their vodka ration so that each in turn could have the chance to drink it all and lose himself entirely for one night.31
It was the proof strength, not the quality, of the liquor that counted. Chuikov took the precaution of sealing the cellars of fine wine that his men discovered when they overran Nazi quarters in Poland. But sometimes he arrived too late. When he visited one cellar, he found the driver from an artillery regiment already rummaging through the piles of crates. ‘I can’t find any strong spirits like ours,’ the man muttered. He had been working his way through a succession of bottles of fine champagne. ‘This is the sixth case I’ve opened,’ he complained, ‘and all they’ve got is fizzy stuff.’32 Disgustedly, the soldier let the thin liquid spill on to the floor. But though they spurned imported wine, men of his tastes would drink anything that smelled like spirit, including samogon and anti-freeze. ‘When our soldiers find alcohol,’ a Soviet lieutenant confided, ‘they take leave of their senses. You can’t expect anything from them until they have finished the last drop.’ In his view, expressed in 1945, ‘if we hadn’t had drunkenness like this we would have beaten the Germans two years ago’.33
Crime was also increasing with the soldiers’ growing confidence. By this point in the war its scale was nothing short of heroic. The recent improvement in supplies was like an invitation to potential crooks. The business began at the top. Indeed, as the army’s inspectors observed, a ‘significant proportion of officers’ in front-line regions had been tried for large-scale theft and speculation between January 1943 and July 1944. The figures, which were based on ‘incomplete data’ and covered only the first six months of 1944, told their own vivid story. This was an army that was billeted on its own Soviet territory. The glory days of German plunder were still months away. And yet, in that half year, detected thefts by officers alone included 4.5 million roubles in cash, 70 tons of flour and bread products, 22 tons of meat and fish, 5 tons of sugar, 4,872 items of equipment, 33 tons of petrol, seven motor cars and ‘other military property to the value of two million roubles’.34
The global figures were impressive, but a string of individual cases suggested that they were wild underestimates. This was a time when food was currency in every hungry village on the steppe. ‘Back home,’ Lev Kopelev, now serving as a Soviet officer, would muse, ‘there were villages where the war had passed like a column of fire, or where, invisibly from afar, it had sucked out the bread and blood; where a piece of sugar was a thing of wonder, and the children, with their enormous eyes and bluish-white faces, choked and chewed on some kind of mud-black, bitter bread made of the devil only knew what.’35 With stores to spare, a group of officers in the 203rd reserve army put their minds to wartime profit. In two months in the autumn of 1943, they diverted 34 tons of bread, 6.3 tons of sugar, 2.6 tons of fats, 15 tons of grits and 2 tons of meat from the soldiers’ supplies. The trade was used to fund the luxuries that made life better in an army camp. As the report on the criminals’ activities commented, this was a barracks where ‘drinking, carousing and theft were a normal part of life’.36
The following June, an even more ambitious racket came to light among tank officers serving on the first Ukrainian Front. Mere theft was only part of it. The other side was corruption. Officers in the field, it seemed, were eager to secure favours from their military bosses in the capital. The major-general in this case had smoothed his path with a stream of generous bribes to Moscow, including – in just one consignment – 267 kg of pork, 125 kg of mutton and 114 kg of butter. On another occasion, his munificence included five live goats. Meanwhile, among the items that had gone missing from army stores on this one front that June were 15,123 kg of meat, 1,959 kg of sausage, 3,000 kg of butter, 2,100 kg of biscuits, 890 kg of boiled sweets, 563 kg of soap, 100 winter coats, 100 greatcoats, eighty fur gilets, 100 pairs of valenki and 100 pairs of boots.37 Reports of this kind were a weekly, if not daily, event for the military courts. They testify to the presence of large-scale, organized and well-established networks. But this was an army in which there was at least one spy in almost every company. What the reports also demonstrate, therefore, is that corruption extended to the security police, who no doubt enjoyed their live goats and butter, too.