In room 12, Captain Potapov asked his secretary, a small ugly woman in uniform, to leave them. Daria guessed that this old officer had not had an easy time of it; he seemed browbeaten, chastened, secretly discouraged despite his ramrod figure, buttoned into a relatively neat uniform made from cheap material. His epaulettes did not shine. Aged about fifty, he had spare features and excessively shiny glasses covering the opacity of his eyes. Nothing alive in this tiny office except the ferns of crystalline frost that curled over the panes of a double window. Potapov questioned her laconically, with an absent air. Then: “Quite right. Our work consists in deciphering enemy intentions, through enemies who are often themselves ignorant of them… Let me put it this way: the average prisoner is in possession of, at best, one letter of the coded alphabet. Are you with me?” The old officer was not as insignificant as he looked.
“War is a great game of psychology. The enemy calculates and so do we. Strength only enters as a function of these calculations. An error is sometimes the product of a flawless but excessively linear calculation which fails to allow for the unstable, the unknowable, the irrational, call it energetic or mindless folly… Hence reverses and defeat are the penalty of error. This enemy is conducting a technicians’ war. He is convinced of his superiority, and with good cause. His machines are better and more numerous, his special forces are better trained, more numerous and organized than ours, its officer class more highly educated. I would even grant that its winter equipment makes a mockery of ours… But winter is on our side. We are winter men…”
Daria took pleasure in listening to the veteran captain, who must have few opportunities to hold forth; strange of him to open up so on their first meeting. (Was he aware of her history as a deportee? Or perhaps he was steeling her for the task ahead?) She asked with concern, “Do you think, then, they might take Leningrad and win the war?”
“I do not. Beware of false deductions, they lie at the end of the shortest line of reasoning. The world is only logical in appearance, on the lower scale of perception; in reality, it is rather mad… I am persuaded that, for precisely the reasons I have listed — and several more besides — the Germans will never take Leningrad, and the Germans will lose the war.”
“A brilliant paradox, Captain. Perhaps you’re counting on the Allies?”
He looked bored and dull for a few seconds, before rousing himself to pick up the thread of his ideas.
“The art of war, as I understand it, excludes paradox, the better to comprehend facts that are hidden or contradictory. Although it cannot exclude what the Americans call wishful thinking, passionate thought that wills itself into truth… How can any side prevail without passionate thinking? I am not interested in the Allies. Above all they need the blood of our muzhiks, as we used to call them, for they are economical with their own; they loathe us, and would perhaps be only too pleased to postpone victory until five minutes after we were crushed. They’re mistaken on that score, and will be thwarted. I understand Russia. I know Russia’s wars, this being my fourth…”
“Your fourth? How is that?”
“Carpathian campaign in ’17; two civil wars, Comrade: a year with Denikin’s Volunteer Army, against the revolution, and that’s where I came to understand Russia, because the revolution was Russia, apparently senseless and beyond that highly reasonable, exceedingly logical in order to master and exploit her deep incoherence… Then three years with the Red Armies, Volga, Urals, Baikal, Crimea… Remember: we never wage anybody’s war but our own, which is selfish and messianic — messianic in the service of a boundless selfishness, the selfishness we need to survive. We have plenty of wombs in production — God bless the women! — plenty of men, and so much space that we can afford to lose territory and troops in the interests of gaining time; we can inflict on our foes the weariness and despair of expanses without roads, victories without solutions… Indeed that’s all we can do — at first: suffer more than they do. But before overpowering us, the Germans would have to reach Tobolsk, Novosibirsk, the Yenisey; and by then they would be falling prey to our distances and our winters, and still wondering how to reach Vladivostok, how to take the Arctic… And since we should be incapable of capitulating in good faith, their task would be interminable. You see, this old Mother Russia of ours is providentially blessed with a most rudimentary organism. Cut her into six pieces, and the six will live on… We cannot be invaded, and this is something intuited by the rudest yokel of the Irtysh, confusedly and then with sudden clarity while defending a wood with his trusty automatic rifle and nimble legs, always quick to run away, but only so as to turn and charge again. His tactics are all in his nerves, without quixotism or panache: only by killing the enemy can he lay hands on enemy boots and vitamin pills, and thus our very deprivation becomes a source of strength, a primordial strength as irrational as life, and imperfectly understood by the strategists of the old industrial empires… If the enemy high command were staffed by genuine Nazis, that is, by a gang of déclassé adventurers, it would be far more deadly, for those are people who know how to unleash instinct along with tanks, shrewd calculation, and a hefty pinch of absurdity… But it is made up of generals of my generation or older, formed in the days of bourgeois reason and the equations of profit; thrifty, sober, cautious planners for whom each operation must yield at the very least a tactical benefit, just as each commercial transaction must be seen to pay off at least in terms of publicity. It is only the primitive energies of man that are invincible, and they are indifferent to waste; material gain counts, certainly, but in a peculiar, non-mercantile way; it may be more important to capture a stockpile of potatoes than an oil field… Our Field Marshal Mikhail Illarionovich Golenischev-Kutuzov was one of the first to grasp this, precisely because he was somewhat stupid. He pitted our instinctive, sometimes blockheaded, common sense against the genius of Napoleon, and Napoleon paid dearly for the superfluity of his genius. Go back to Tolstoy, who knew nothing about war but understood the Russian land and its people…”