With the advent ofperestroika in the mid-1980s, there were still many people alive who remembered the war vividly. As the archives opened and the fear of taking the wrong' line dissipated, it was no longer possible to silence alternative voices. Difficult questions about Stalin's unpreparedness and the huge casualty count resurfaced, together with some new ones. Why were returning Soviet soldiers who had been captured by the Germans sent to labour camps? Why were whole ethnic groups deported from their homelands to other parts of the Soviet Union during the war? And what exactly was it that motivated the Soviet people?
Secret NKVD reports into the private moods of writers and intellectuals during the war came to light that showed just how much resistance there was to Soviet power during the first months of the conflict. A Moscow journalist claimed he was ready for another three years of war and a million deaths, if by the end of it the 'despotic, awful order in our country was defeated along with the Nazis.6 Other intellectuals, including those considered loyal to the regime, apparently had similar thoughts.7
There remained no doubt that millions of Soviet citizens did fight, heroically and to the death, but it was clear that the picture was not as simple and clear-cut as the previous historiography had made out. The Soviet order, after all, had existed for less than a quarter of a century and had embarked on a series of bloody attacks on huge swathes of its own population. Some people fought for the Soviet Union or for Stalin, while others fought in spite of them, for a deeper sense of Russianness and homeland.8
It turned out that prior to the Nazi invasion, Stalin had received more than a hundred warnings of the impending attack, coming from sources as diverse as moles inside the German air force, Winston Churchill, and an intelligence agent in Japan who had seduced the German ambassador's wife. He ignored them all, convinced that Hitler was not planning an attack, and failed to make elementary preparations to repulse the initial advance,9 a blow to the idea of Stalin as the wise and brilliant military tactician who had steered the Soviets to victory. When it came to the fighting itself, the sanitized, glorious portrayal of the war also began to crumble. Soviet tactics paid scant concern to human lives; it was often a case of victory by sheer numbers. In one Crimean operation, Red Army soldiers were ordered not to dig trenches because they spoiled the 'spirit of aggression'. In under a fortnight, 176,000 soldiers died.10 Historians dug up many such examples.
There were also many examples of tactical brilliance, and the Western image of terrified Soviet soldiers who lived in fear of execution and fought only through coercion is equally problematic.11 But the reality of war is never pretty, and the Eastern Front was perhaps the most savage theatre of the most awful war in human history. There were indeed many cases of extreme bravery and extraordinary feats, but this did not lessen the horror. Many who fought heroically were persecuted after the war, especially those who had succumbed to the shame' of being captured rather than fighting to the death.
In 1985, the director Elem Klimov's Come and See, one of the most disturbing war films ever made, hit Soviet cinemas. Released as the first hints of perestroika were in the air, the film had been planned since the mid 1970s but was deemed inappropriate by the censor. Nobody who has seen it can forget the expression of horror on the face of the main protagonist, Flyora, a young boy from a village in Belarus who leaves his mother to fight with the pro-Soviet partisans against the Nazi occupants. With the exception of very brief moments of graphic violence, the film's power is channeled through the reflection of events on Flyora's face, a masterly and disturbing piece of acting. It certainly does not besmirch the memory of the Soviet war dead or show the Nazis as anything other than monstrous killers. But it does not glorify the war either; it shows events in all their appalling misery. When it was released, there were reports of people fainting inside the cinema. Nevertheless, nearly thirty million Soviet citizens went to see the film and were subjected to this shockingly realistic portrayal of the conflict.
The official, Brezhnev-era historiography was coming apart at the seams. In 1989, Moscow admitted the existence of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, by which it had carved up Eastern Europe together with Nazi Germany, moved into the Baltic States and eastern Poland, and deported tens of thousands of people in 1940 and 1941.12 There was finally an admittance that the mass execution of 21,857 Poles at Katyn and two other sites, which the Soviet government had for decades blamed on the Nazis, was indeed Moscow's doing. In the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, historians and activists who had always balked at the Soviet insistence that 1945 should be seen as a liberation, rather than a new occupation, began writing their own, new histories.
In this atmosphere of soul-searching, the Soviet ministry of defence commissioned a new history of the war from the director of the army's main history institute, General Dmitry Volkogonov. By 1990, Volkogonov had prepared a draft in which he criticized the terror and slaughter in the years leading up to 1941, suggested that the Red Army had won the war in spite of Stalin's tactics rather than because of them, and intimated that the death count was far higher than it had needed to be. With access to more archives than anyone previously (and more than any historian would have today), Volkogonov was able to piece together a disturbing portrait of the war, which even in the atmosphere ofperestroika was extremely controversial. When attacked by other generals over the tone of his work, he said, 'We don't need blind patriotism. We need the truth!'13
Gradually, attitudes were changing, and during the first years of Yeltsin's rule there was a flourishing of interest in a new historiography of the war, one that would take in the more problematic sides of the victory as well as the glory. In parts of the periphery, there was also a flourishing of interest in one of the least publicized crimes of the Soviet war effort: the deportations.
11
Kalmykia, a chunk of arid steppe on the Caspian Sea, is only a two- hour internal flight from Moscow, but when my plane landed in the region's capital, Elista, I felt as though I had made a civilizational shift. The ethnic Kalmyk population is of Mongol origin, and the city's skyline is dominated by a splendid Buddhist temple.
Kalmykia's story during the war was one of many reminders that the black-and-white version of the Soviet war narrative was deeply problematic. In 1943, the Kalmyks, along with many other Soviet nationalities, were accused of supporting the Nazis. Every man, woman, and child of Kalmyk ethnicity was rounded up, expelled from the ancestral homeland, and resettled in scattered settlements deep in the heart of Siberia, thousands of miles away. It was extraordinary, when one stopped to think about it: like deporting the whole of Wales to Australia.
Vladimir Ubushayev, the head of the history faculty at Kalmykia's main university, had written the only proper book on the subject, published locally in pamphlet form in 1991, amid the new atmosphere of intellectual permissiveness. By the time I visited him in his Elista home
in 2007, he was a pensioner with a swept-back shock of grey hair and chunky glasses of the type favoured by Soviet-era intellectuals.