Other post-war governments would work harder to help their veterans adapt.18 Some did so despite the hardship and cost of war. It was difficult everywhere, but no other combatant nation emerged with quite the cold dictatorship that Stalin built. War alone was not to blame for this, and nor were veterans or memories of death. It was Stalin himself, the leader who took credit for the victory while Zhukov’s ink was still wet on the page, who determined the post-war relationship between people and state. Stalin, that is, and the swarm of acolytes and bureaucrats who flourished in the system that his brand of government created. As the spontaneous joy of early May began to cool, the leaders of a dictatorial regime made plans for their own victory parade. The people’s carnival was to be superseded by a ceremony along proper Soviet lines, something that put every person in their place.
It took several weeks to finalize the scheme. By then, some people had begun to wonder whether grandeur was what they wanted. Some muttered about the expense, others about their private grief. ‘I won’t be going to the parade,’ one Muscovite observed. ‘They killed my son. I’d rather go to a requiem.’19 Others of the same view began to call for a day of mourning, or even an annual week of it; no gesture could do justice to the loss that gaped in people’s lives. For the next fifty years, real memories would infuse the annual victory holiday in early May with a solemnity that other socialist festivals, including the anniversary of Lenin’s coup and Red Army Day, would lack. Wartime bereavement was a shadow that would never lift. For some, it meant the end of family happiness. ‘I have two children and no help from anywhere,’ a woman muttered to someone. ‘That’s why I don’t have a chance of celebrating, and I’ve got nothing to be pleased about.’20
Anxiety, loneliness, and the fear of penury would grow more troubling for widows and orphans as winter approached. But still, that June, the consensus favoured a state event, something to embody and contain the chaos of pride, victory, shock and apprehension for the future. As usual, that meant a rehearsed ceremony and a hand-picked crowd. The cost must have been staggering. Selected soldiers, sailors and airmen were brought home from Germany and the Baltic. The cavalry got to shine its boots, the regimental bands tuned up, tanks, guns and death-dealing Katyushas were lovingly oiled. Whole companies of cadets from Moscow training schools, future artillerymen and engineers, took lessons in advanced parade-ground drill.21 Each gesture and each step was choreographed, including even those of Zhukov and the generals. The only thing that could not be controlled – apart from Zhukov’s grey horse, which was known for its bad temper – was the Moscow weather. The grand parade, the culmination of four years of war, took place on 24 June in drenching rain.
The change of mood since 9 May could scarcely have been clearer, though thousands of Muscovites, still shocked and overjoyed by the war’s end, might well have overlooked the shift. Instead of happy chaos, this was a day of geometrical precision. Red Square was filled with shapes, not individual people. Each rectangle in the parade was composed of scores of uniformed men. In the best traditions of authoritarian states (but for its massive scale, the event could have been a Nazi festival of sport), they all moved to exact routines, none even looking in a direction that had not been agreed and rehearsed in advance. The parade was blatant with gold braid. This was an army with a sharp hierarchy and strong leaders, not a people’s militia or even the sword of the world’s proletariat. Zhukov himself reviewed the troops, perching on that tetchy grey and soaking in the endless rain. The themes that day were triumph and authority. The victory, it was made clear, was about Germany’s defeat, not Russia’s liberty. In a grand gesture of conquest, the captured German colours, each topped with a silver eagle, were hurled down in a pile before the Lenin mausoleum. They might have gleamed in the June light. Instead they made a sodden pile of red and black in the grey damp.
Stalin watched from the safety of his stand. He was, by all accounts, exhausted, and he had visibly aged. But he had lost none of his anxious jealousy. That night, at a banquet for 2,500 Red Army officers and men, the leader would propose a toast to the Soviet people. It should have been the supreme moment of glory and gratitude. Instead, the words he used might well have made an entire nation shudder. For though Stalin acknowledged that this had been a real people’s war, he was in no mood to elevate rivals. The time for homespun pride was past. While they might have been hailed as heroes, the people who had struggled, the millions whose efforts had kept the soldiers fed and bullets in their guns, became ‘the little screws and bolts’ in the great engine of his state.22 They were to be no more significant in the next decade than the replaceable parts of a machine. A peace on terms like this would be a disappointment to many civilians, but for frontoviki, with all their hopes and new-found strengths, it would turn out to be a kind of death, a loss of self. In many ways, it was also a betrayal.
‘We’ve been living in peacetime conditions for about a week already,’ Taranichev wrote to Natalya on 15 May. ‘The cannons and machine guns aren’t firing any more, and the planes aren’t flying; we don’t have to observe a blackout any more – we work at night with the windows open and breathe the fresh air. But… there is still plenty of work to do. We will probably be here for a couple of months at least.’ It was no real hardship, as he went on to explain. He and a comrade had been billeted with a family near their base in Czechoslovakia. Their hosts were deferential, generous. ‘They offered us every convenience: we had a bath as soon as we arrived and we have been given a room of our own with wonderful beds and snow-white linen.’23 There was even a radio in the room – another excellent German one – that Taranichev (notwithstanding the kind hosts) already planned to take home when he left. Indeed, a good part of his letter was about the parcels that were on their way to Ashkhabad. His other main preoccupation was the future. Like his comrades, he yearned to know the date he would go home.
The bulk of front-line troops were stationed in central and eastern Europe. Their demobilization was not just desirable in human terms, for the Soviet state could not afford to keep an army several million strong in uniform. But what the older men dreamed of – a swift, joyful reunion with their families – would not be possible for most. No army simply dissolves overnight. And while it finalized its plans to debrief and transport over a million men, the Soviet state was content to use soldiers as cheap labour for some of the tougher jobs in construction and transport. As Taranichev hinted, these ranged from rebuilding the roads to securing the ruins of Berlin and dealing with the human columns of former prisoners and refugees. If soldiers in the European theatre were bored, it was only because the peace would always be dull – thankfully – after the extreme world of the war. But some Red Army men still had some fighting left to do.