All the Western peoples behaved the same in our war: parcels, letters, all kinds of assistance flowed freely through the neutral countries. The Western POW’s did not have to lower themselves to accept ladlefuls from German soup kettles. They talked back to the German guards. Western governments gave their captured soldiers their seniority rights, their regular promotions, even their pay.
The only soldier in the world who cannot surrender is the soldier of the world’s one and only Red Army. That’s what it says in our military statutes. (The Germans would shout at us from their trenches: “Ivan plen nicht!”—“Ivan no prisoner!”) Who can picture all that means? There is war; there is death—but there is no surrender! What a discovery! What it means is: Go and die; we will go on living. And if you lose your legs, yet manage to return from captivity on crutches, we will convict you. (The Leningrader Ivanov, commander of a machine-gun platoon in the Finnish War, was subsequently thus imprisoned in Ustvym-lag, for example.)
Our soldiers alone, renounced by their Motherland and degraded to nothing in the eyes of enemies and allies, had to push their way to the swine swill being doled out in the backyards of the Third Reich. Our soldiers alone had the doors shut tight to keep them from returning to their homes, although their young souls tried hard not to believe this. There was something called Article 58-1b—and, in wartime, it provided only for execution by shooting! For not wanting to die from a German bullet, the prisoner had to die from a Soviet bullet for having been a prisoner of war! Some get theirs from the enemy; we get it from our own!
Incidentally, it is very naive to say What for? At no time have governments been moralists. They never imprisoned people and executed them for having done something. They imprisoned and executed them to keep them from doing something. They imprisoned all those POW’s, of course, not for treason to the Motherland, because it was absolutely clear even to a fool that only the Vlasov men could be accused of treason. They imprisoned all of them to keep them from telling their fellow villagers about Europe. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve for.
What, then, were the courses of action open to Russian war prisoners? There was only one legally acceptable course: to lie down and let oneself be trampled to death. Every blade of grass pushes its fragile length upward in order to live. As for you—lie down and be trampled on. Even though you’ve been slow about it, even though you couldn’t do it on the battlefield, at least die now; then you will not be prosecuted.
The soldiers sleep. They spoke their word And they are right for eternity.
And every other path which, in desperation, your mind may invent is going to lead you into conflict with the Law.
Escape and return to the Motherland—past the guards ringing the camp, across half Germany, then through Poland or the Balkans—led straight to SMERSH and prison. They were asked: How did you manage to escape when others couldn’t? This stinks! Come on, you rat, what assignment did they give you? (Mikhail Burnatsev, Pavel Bondarenko, and many, many others.)[130]
Escaping to the Western partisans, to the Resistance forces, only postponed your full reckoning with the military tribunal; also, it made you still more dangerous. You could have acquired a very harmful spirit through living freely among Europeans. And if you had not been afraid to escape and continue to fight, it meant you were a determined person and thus doubly dangerous in the Motherland.
Did you survive POW camp at the expense of your compatriots and comrades? Did you become a member of the camp Polizei, or a commandant, a helper of the Germans and of death? Stalinist law did not punish you any more severely than if you had operated with the Resistance forces. It was the same article of the Code and the same term—and one could guess why too. Such a person was less dangerous. But the inert law that is inexplicably implanted in us forbade this path to all except the dregs.
In addition to those four possibilities—either impossible or unacceptable—there was a fifth: to wait for German recruiters, to see what they would summon you to.
Sometimes, fortunately, representatives came from German rural districts to select hired men for their farmers. Sometimes they came from corporations and picked out engineers and mechanics. According to the supreme Stalinist imperative you should have rejected that too. You should have concealed the fact that you were an engineer. You should have concealed the fact that you were a skilled worker. As an industrial designer or electrician, you could have preserved your patriotic purity only if you had stayed in the POW camp to dig in the earth, to rot, to pick through the garbage heap. In that case, for pure treason to the Motherland, you could count on getting, your head raised high in pride, ten years in prison and five more “muzzled.” Whereas for treason to the Motherland aggravated by working for the enemy, especially in one’s own profession, you got, with bowed head, the same ten years in prison and five more muzzled.
And that was the jeweler’s precision of a behemoth—Stalin’s trademark.
Now and then recruiters turned up who were of quite a different stripe—Russians, usually recent Communist political commissars. White Guards didn’t accept that type of employment. These recruiters scheduled a meeting in the camp, condemned the Soviet regime, and appealed to prisoners to enlist in spy schools or in Vlasov units.
People who have never starved as our war prisoners did, who have never gnawed on bats that happened to fly into the barracks, who have never had to boil the soles of old shoes, will never understand the irresistible material force exerted by any kind of appeal, any kind of argument whatever, if behind it, on the other side of the camp gates, smoke rises from a field kitchen, and if everyone who signs up is fed a bellyful of kasha right then and there—if only once! Just once more before I die!
And hovering over the steaming kasha and the inducements of the recruiter was the apparition of freedom and a real life—wherever it might call! To the Vlasov battalions. To the Cossack regiments of Krasnov. To the labor battalions—pouring cement in the future Atlantic Wall. To the fjords of Norway. To the sands of Libya. To the “Hiwi” units (“Hilfswillige”—volunteers in the German Wehrmacht—there being twelve “Hiwi” men in each German company). And then, finally, to the village Polizei, who pursued and caught partisans—many of whom the Motherland would also renounce. Wherever it might call, any place at all, at least anything so as not to stay there and die like abandoned cattle.
We ourselves released from every obligation, not merely to his Motherland but to all humanity, the human being whom we drove to gnawing on bats.
And those of our boys who agreed to become half-baked spies still had not drawn any drastic conclusions from their abandoned state; they were still, in fact, acting very patriotically. They saw this course as the least difficult means of getting out of POW “camp. Almost to a man, they decided that as soon as the Germans sent them across to the Soviet side, they would turn themselves in to the authorities, turn in their equipment and instructions, and join their own benign command in laughing at the stupid Germans. They would then put on their Red Army uniforms and return to fight bravely in their units. And tell me, who, speaking in human terms, could have expected anything else? How could it have been any other way? These were straightforward, sincere men. I saw many of them. They had honest round faces and spoke with an attractive Vyatka or Vladimir accent. They boldly joined up as spies, even though they’d had only four or five grades of rural school and were not even competent to cope with map and compass.
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