"Gimme a left turn on Petrovka Street, and easy past the you-know-what."
Turning the corner, we almost hit two cars that have apparently crashed into each other minutes before. One contains a small boy with a gory face and a woman wailing about what had possessed her to drive him home at this hour. Because the damaged cars must not be moved until the police arrive, we rush mother and son to a nearby clinic, then cruise for another hour, hardly talking.
But the boy's wounds have somehow introduced yet another element to our relationship, and Alyosha begins reminiscing about his military service, the period that has long intrigued me. The link is blood, but I press him to begin at the beginning. . . .
He was first inducted during the shock of the Finnish campaign in 1939. A foul-mouthed orphan of seventeen whose world was poker, fistfights and occasional errands for shysters on Moscow's toughest streets, he half-welcomed his induction as a break with this aimlessness and as a possible opportunity to acquire the profession he already sensed he needed. Together with the last of his innocence, this notion disappeared within a week.
Basic training was brief, penal and brutish. And insanely inadequate; although cursed by bellowing officers, whose opacity he could hardly believe after the slyness of his card-playing mentors. Private Aksyonov did not fire a single round of live ammunition during his training. Thus prepared—and similarly equipped: one of his two changes of underwear was reclaimed as the camp's shortages grew more severe—the new infantryman was shipped directly to the Karelian Front, an army group
AlyoshaXl95
assigned to cut Finland in half at its waist. He arrived in early January, 1940, the nadir of the war.
Only the enormity of Russian disasters preceding and following the Winter War can explain why its suffering has been largely forgotten. The few soldiers who survived both the northern Finnish slaughter and Stalingrad actually preferred the latter: less hunger and irreversible chaos; more hope, at least, for survival. The day after arriving, Alyosha, who still knew ludicrously little about his rifle, understood that something was horrendously wrong. Compared to the fighting army's confusion, mindlessness and paralysis (fostered by decimation of the general staff and field officer ranks in purges completed the previous year), basic training seemed almost quaint in retrospect. In the field, muzhiks with nothing but fatalism and dumb political faith—the backbone of the new Stalinist army—wore the boots of Russia's executed officers. And they were frightened rigid as well as ignorant: after the purges, guessing wrong on the simplest decision might lead to unmasking as a saboteur. Initiative was more feared than the Finns; staff and field officers cringed in mutual suspicion; on the front line, even tactical withdrawals— another quick route to a firing squad for "defeatism"—^were beyond consideration. "In a sense, muddle is endemic to this country and has a comic element, but this one was beyond description and very sad. No one knew anything; nothing worked."
The fighting took place three hundred miles below the Arctic Circle, in the coldest winter ever recorded there. Alyosha's unit was woefully undersupplied, even with winter overcoats. Their opposites in almost everything, the Finns had superb snow parkas and rifles with German telescopic sights. From steel pillboxes and skillfully camouflaged positions in the overlooking hills, they methodically picked off their targets; it was documented that one rifleman dispatched over a thousand individual Soviet troops. Khaki bull's-eyes against the snow, the Russians crouched as ordered, awaiting bullets in their stomachs. In the first five days, two thirds of Alyosha's company, including the uncomplaining lads to his left and right, got theirs. Clutching their wounds, they sank quietly to their knees as if commanded by higher will.
196^MOSCOW FAREWELL
"This was literally a massacre of the innocents; few of the boys had had enough knowledge or joy from life to feel sorry for themselves about leaving it. Their problem was limited to whether to take an overcoat from a dead body, which would help with the cold but also make them cleaner targets. Most simply waited their turn, wondering only whether a canteen might appear so there'd be some hot soup first."
Before his own turn could come, Alyosha was dispatched on a reconnaissance patrol. A pair of binoculars was found and reluctantly entrusted to his sergeant. When he was shot an hour later, the glasses passed to one of the two other privates sharing the mission. When they were both killed, Alyosha snatched them and ran. A sudden, violent snowstorm engulfed him; profoundly exhausted and hopelessly lost in the white vastness—divisional headquarters had refused to give the sergeant a proper map of the region because he was not entitled to such security information—he was grateful to the numbing cold for helping prepare a peaceful death. At dawn the following morning, he was still alive. The snowfall having eased, he was able to use the binoculars, and put them to his eyes to amuse himself in his final hours. There was no point walking, even if he had had the strength. Without a map, one mute hill was like all the others, and a small valley in the distance might as well have been on the moon.
(Hearing how the humble sergeant had entreated for a map, I suddenly understand Alyosha's fixation for always knowing his precise location. Of everything for which he mocks Soviet rule, only his grievance over the perpetual shortage of road maps crosses the line from irony into rancor. Even the few available, he curses, are deliberately falsified: roads, bridges, and railways are moved out of true position; university cartographists are among those denied the "secret information" of accurate data. The purpose is to confuse enemy rockets and bombers—futile nonsense, he says, in the age of satellite mapping, whereas the dupe's real victims, as always, are the Russian people. "A million ditch diggers tunneling a few yards off, twenty million drivers taking wrong turns—or getting run over as they get out of their cabs and stand on the asphalt scratching their heads over the puzzle of some heterotypic road. . . . Fishing boats have been lost, hikers a.ctua.\\y frozen to death because a stream meanders right instead of
AlyoshaXl97
left. That sums it up, muchacho: the Pentagon knows every hayshed's position while we all grope around, trying to dope out what belongs where in our brave new world." But despite this, Alyosha saves every map he sees; the apartment is full of them.)
The fading private played aimlessly with the binoculars. Suddenly he held his breath. Through the frosty lenses, he distinguished a large Soviet force, seemingly an armored division, straddling the road of that distant valley. Before his system could fully respond to the joy of rescue, he made out several figures. Incredulous, he dragged himself closer. Hundreds of soldiers were frozen literally stiff beside tanks and field guns. The scene's ghoulishness was doubled by his beholding it alone in the whole white world. Rifles clutched by arms frozen outstretched; mouths opened in shouts and snorts, even conversational grins, as if flesh had instantaneously turned to stone. (Like monuments too, the black faces were heavily dusted with last night's snow.) Dozens of men had been praying; one officer held his cap in his teeth. But most were on their backs with limbs stretched skyward, like horses in rigor mortis. Shrieking, seventeen-year-old Alyosha established that nothing moved.
He ran again. Instinct ordered him not to die like this. But even if it weren't starting to snow again, even if he could do no more without snowshoes than thrash about like a doomed man, he had no more idea of which direction to take than of whether last year was a good one for Burgundy. It was remarkable that his wobbly circling led anywhere at all. Somehow it did; and extracting the last calorie of his extraordinary endurance, he stumbled back to his camp.
Somehow too, he remembered that it was to reconnoiter that he had been sent out the day before, and he conjured up a few-more minutes of strength to report the spectacle of the lost division to his lieutenant—who led him to headquarters to repeat the story. A major with a beetle's face listened without comment, and told Alyosha that for one more word about his "subversive rumor" to anyone, he would be shot.