In Belorussia, the army’s swift progress was helped by the co-ordinated work of partisans. Moskvin, however, was nursing a neck wound that would plague him for the rest of his life. His war was coming to an end, though it would have an awe-inspiring finale. Camped in the woods near Mogilev, the politruk had seen no Soviet troops in combat since 1941. Now he could hear the pounding of the heavy guns and see the red stars on the swooping planes. Everything was new, everything spectacular. The Red Army of his memory, defeated and shamed, had been transformed into a technological marvel. To witness it, after so long, was electrifying. ‘And now,’ he scribbled on 4 July, ‘we are in the Soviet rear! The Red Army passed by like a typhoon. The enemy has scuttled off in disarray. Four days ago we were on occupied territory, and today the front is two hundred kilometres away from us.’ The pace of it all, after such a long wait, was breathtaking. ‘Even the Germans did not manage this in 1941.’54
The chance of action on this scale was one thing that helped the soldiers to fight. It was better to get out and kill some Fritzes than to sit around burning off lice. The men longed for a chance to do the job, to put away the books and boot-black and get on. But officials ascribed the success of the troops to talk and comradeship. For weeks before the great assault, the political officers were detailed to discuss aspects of it in small groups with soldiers of every rank. They also listened to the men, hearing out their worries about home and their growing concerns for the future. The success of these conversations depended on the individuals, both man and politruk. Sometimes the whole thing was an insult or a sinister waste of time, though that was less true of the pep talks that experienced veterans gave to the new recruits. ‘These personal talks,’ Chuikov insisted, ‘meant a great deal.’55 More tangibly, the men were offered cash and even leave incentives to take German prisoners or shoot down planes. The prices varied, but a German plane could be worth a week’s pay, while the capture of a German officer at the front might (in theory) promise a man an extra two weeks’ leave.56 Even a rumour of a reward could be inspiring, the prospect of some extra cash more enticing than chatting to the politruk.
The Germans themselves came as a surprise. By now, large numbers of Wehrmacht soldiers were laying down their guns. One of the largest groups included the survivors of July’s Soviet encirclement of Minsk and Bobruisk. Almost half the area’s fascist defenders, some 40,000 troops, were killed. Their bodies lay in the streets and ditches like fallen apples, split and rotting. But that left 57,000 men, including several senior officers. Their captors, the Soviets, had learned how to keep prisoners alive since Stalingrad, but there was no prospect of comfort. Most prisoners were taken to interrogation camps – abandoned German ones often served very well – before they were deployed to the forced labour projects that were springing up across the Soviet Union.57 The men from Minsk were treated differently. They were herded into trains as usual – those NKVD wagons worked without a break that summer – but then they were transported straight to Moscow. A unique demonstration had been organized.
Stalin wanted the world to know that there were still real enemies along the Eastern Front, that D-Day had not eased the pressure on his men. Fifty thousand captured soldiers from a single battle were brought on to make the point. The prisoners, like captives in some ancient Roman triumph, were paraded beneath the Kremlin walls. They marched briskly and passed by twenty abreast, but still it took three hours for the entire host to pass. ‘Some were smiling,’ Pravda’s correspondent told readers. They were glad to be alive, and possibly, like tourists, glad to see Russia’s historic heart – or so the patriots assumed. But the audience could not fail to conclude that Germany was broken, Russia the victorious power.58 Prompted by the political officers, whose lectures now included information about Germany’s manpower crisis and the mobilization of teenagers and the sick, Red Army soldiers had begun to notice that their prisoners were not storm troopers any more. Many were semi-invalids, malnourished and covered in sores. Some were teenagers, others weary shopkeepers or clerks. ‘They all looked pitiful,’ Ermolenko wrote in late June when he had prisoners of his own. ‘They are like bank clerks. Many of them wear glasses. This, no doubt, is the result of total mobilization in Germany.’59
Like Ermolenko, most soldiers concluded that the Germans were as good as defeated. The moment of triumph was intense, heartbreaking and bittersweet. The threat to the motherland was past. Even the territories that the enemy had occupied lay open for the Soviets to take. Like most Ukrainians, Ermolenko had never seen the villages of Belarus. ‘Most people speak the Belorussian language,’ he wrote in some surprise. The evidence of German destruction was everywhere, from ruined buildings to fresh-turned mass graves. Whatever joy the men felt at their victory, it would always be coloured by their rage, their hatred of the invaders. But other feelings now surfaced as well. Ermolenko was convinced that the local people welcomed him. Their red flags fluttered from the ruined buildings in his path. ‘The girls in the villages are very pretty,’ the soldier decided. ‘Many of them dress in national costume. I should come here after the war and marry one of them.’60
Away to the south, another soldier, the tank officer Slesarev, was also falling for a new country. ‘I am writing to let you know that I am alive and well,’ he wrote to his father. ‘I have not written to anyone for some time,’ he explained, ‘because I have been on the road for ages. We travelled day and night, for four whole days and nights we did not sleep. This summer I have been in a lot of places.’61 His favourite was western Ukraine, with all its little hills and orchards. ‘The nature there is wonderful, there are pretty towns and villages, abundant gardens, lots of sweet and sour cherries.’ In contrast with the cheerless winter steppe, the gardens round ruined Lvov, ablaze with lupins, marigolds and roses, must have looked like a glimpse of Eden.
The problem was that these places were hardly Soviet lands. It was one thing to retake a Russian city like Orel, or even a loyal provincial capital like Kharkov, but as the Red Army moved west it crossed into the territories that Stalin had annexed after 1939. Ermolenko might not have looked beyond the anxious smiles of the young women in the streets, but many villagers in western Belarus were mistrustful of their supposed liberators. To them, all that had occurred was the exchange of one imperial master for another. What’s more, they knew already that the red flag was a harbinger of fear. Their farmsteads bore the recent scars of forced collectivization and the accompanying mass arrests. It was worse in western Ukraine. Lvov, the capital of Ukrainian nationalism, would never accept the authority of Moscow. The nationalists’ pre-war message, that supra-national empires were bent on crushing Ukraine’s noble culture, seemed proven by events of recent years. Lvov had seen violence on violence: the Soviets, the Wehrmacht, bandits, SS murder squads and partisans. What mattered to the locals now was to avoid enslavement. They knew how Stalin treated nations that defied his rule.