culture ideology and combat in the russian army 1939-1945

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2006 41: 305Journal of Contemporary HistoryCatherine Merridale

Culture, Ideology and Combat in the Red Army, 1939-45

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Catherine Merridale

Culture, Ideology and Combat in the Red Army, 1939–45

Russian soldiers have always impressed foreigners. ‘They are very patient ofhunger, thirst, and cold’, an English traveller remarked in 1698, ‘obedient to their officers, and ready to charge the enemy on all occasions.’1 Broadlyspeaking, this is the view that has persisted ever since. ‘They probably providethe best material in the world from which to form an army’, the BritishLieutenant-General Martel concluded after watching Soviet manoeuvres.‘Their bravery on the battlefield is beyond dispute, but the most outstandingfeature is their astonishing strength and toughness.’2 Even Hitler’s Germans,who were keen to amass any evidence that they could find of Slavic dissipa-tion, conceded that Ivan, the Russian soldier, was special. According to theVölkischer Beobachter of 1941, the Russian ‘surpasses our adversary in theWest in his contempt for death’. It was a view that direct engagement withSoviet troops would soon confirm. By the winter of 1941, with the Battle ofMoscow behind them, German observers were describing the Red Army as‘the craftiest and most stubborn enemy that we have ever faced’. If you wantto resist a Russian-style attack, a captured German report observed that winter, ‘you will need strong nerves’.3

Its formidable reputation — and more formidable suffering — has drawnhistorians to write about the Red Army for decades. The topic, which com-bines the appeal of the grittiest war stories with the chill of a spy thriller, continues to fascinate. Strangely, however, while strategy and leadership arewell-researched, very little is known about the lives, background and motiva-tion of the troops themselves.4 Perversely, indeed, most of what is knownabout soldiers on the Eastern Front currently relies on evidence from Hitler’s

This article draws on research generously funded by the Economic and Social Research Councilbetween 2002 and 2005, and also on writing completed during research leave made possible bythe Arts and Humanities Research Board and the University of Bristol. I am grateful to each ofthese for their support and encouragement, and also to Queen Mary, University of London, forfurther sabbatical leave in which to complete both manuscripts. Finally, my thanks to the Centrefor History and Economics for its unfailing support over many years, and also to each of the participants at the Culture and Combat Motivation workshop for their comments.

1 Baldwin, ‘A New and Exact Description of Muscovy’, cited in Raymond L. Garthoff, HowRussia Makes War (London 1954), 225.2 Ibid.3 Cited in P.N. Knyshevskii, Skrytaya pravda voiny (Moscow 1992), 227.4 Among the works dealing with strategy, David Glantz’s numerous volumes are outstanding, asare the older, but still classic, works of John Erickson.

Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA andNew Delhi, Vol 41(2), 305–324. ISSN 0022–0094.DOI: 10.1177/0022009406062072

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army.5 Red Army soldiers, the victors, remain shadowy. This article, whichdraws on research for a larger social history of the Red Army in the secondworld war,6 will explore two specific aspects of culture and combat motivationin the Red Army. First, it will investigate the reasons for our relative ignoranceabout Red Army troops. Having established these boundaries, many of whichsuggest problems common to all writing about combat motivation, the articlewill then ask the specific question: why did Ivan fight?

When it comes to research, one problem, historically, has been the weight ofprejudice. As long as Stalin was an ally against Hitler, Red Army troops wereheroes to the English-speaking world, albeit heroes little understood. From the1950s, however, as the Cold War encouraged stereotyping and suspicion, anew Ivan, the slant-eyed, stone-faced military automaton, took over in imagi-nation. This Ivan was inhuman, even emotionless, but he remained a formid-able soldier. The victory at Stalingrad — and the triumph that followed inBerlin — sustained an image of invincible troops that only the most recentwars, and notably Chechnya, have managed to tarnish.

Whatever damage the disasters in Afghanistan and Chechnya may havecaused to Soviet military reputations, however, the image of second world warSoviet riflemen remains so powerful that the question of human motivationseems almost superfluous in their case. These men were forced to fight, theargument can run; in the few cases where coercion was not needed it wasbecause the victims of dictatorship had never exercised much choice. At thesame time, a similarly two-dimensional image, albeit a positive one, is offeredby Soviet and even post-Soviet writing about the war. In these versions, Ivan isnothing less than a hero, a patriot. ‘The people were extraordinary’, a group ofMoscow-based survivors assured me. ‘There is nothing else to say.’ Instead oflooking at the minds and culture of Red Army soldiers, most histories fromany source have focused on the heavy price that they were forced to pay.

That price, even expressed in numerical terms, was overwhelming. No fewerthan eight million men and women in the Soviet armed forces lost their livesduring the Great Patriotic War. This figure represents just over a quarter of thetotal number mobilized between 1941 and 1945.7 Very few of the remainderescaped injury, and many were wounded several times. It was not unusual fora single battle to claim thousands of lives in a matter of hours. Survivors couldbe taken prisoner; the Germans seized three million Red Army soldiers in the first six months alone. Capture itself could amount to a death sentence,especially for Communist Party members, political officers and ethnic Jews. In all, the scale and cruelty of the war almost defy imagination. It is certainly

306 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 41 No 2

5 See Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army. Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich (New York1992).6 Ivan’s War. The Red Army, 1939–45 (London 2005).7 For a discussion of figures, see John Erickson’s essay, ‘The System and the Soldier’ in P.Addison and A. Calder (eds), Time to Kill. The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West (London1997), 235.



difficult to create a space in which to think about the soldiers’ motivation,about their lives, their culture and ideas.

I have always doubted the crude, cold, faceless image of the Russian soldier,and ten years’ worth of interviews have reinforced my view. The youngrecruits that I have met, today’s soldiers, hungry and frightened, bear noresemblance to Martel’s Ivan, while the veterans, even veterans of the secondworld war, are endlessly diverse, to say nothing of including thousands ofwomen. To write about an army 30 million strong, after all, is to take on an entire society, albeit one that faced extreme crisis. And this army, like thesociety from which it sprang, did not remain the same over four years. Wherepanic and despair had reigned in 1941, a dogged stoicism would emerge by thetime of Stalingrad, and this in turn gave way to something like professionalconfidence. One reason was that the bulk of the army died (or was captured)and was replaced several times — at least twice — in the course of the war.Another was the changing mood of people — soldiers — as the army’s ownculture and fortunes changed. Generalizations about Ivan, in other words, areeither crude shorthand or cruder racism.

One starting point for the discussion of Ivan, always a fruitful source ofthemes and questions, is comparison with other armies and societies at war.The articles in this collection have sparked ideas in just this way, but nonethe-less there is a special quality about the Soviet Union’s war, and that is its con-tinuing political and symbolic importance. All wars cast shadows and createheroes, but in this case the memory is like a cult. The museums that guard warrelics in Russia are reminiscent of shrines, while many of the most importantwar archives are closed, preserving the secrets and myths. Russia’s pride, and agood part of its identity, remains invested in the memories of war and victory.The Soviet Union has collapsed, its rulers have been exposed as corrupt andcruel, and yet Russians take pride in having saved the world from fascism. Thecostly feat, moreover, is almost the only source of self-congratulation remain-ing to the Russian army in its dismal post-Soviet incarnation.

Researchers have been chipping at the patriotic edifice for years. Becauseofficial myth remains so strong, historians seem almost bound to dig for dirt,to write of panic and betrayal, punishment battalions, police surveillance,crime, atrocities in East Prussia. This search for an alternative is probably assterile as the golden fable that it seeks to overturn, but until the DefenceMinistry archives are open — even on a partial basis — the temptation toimagine the worst will remain strong. In particular, since statistics are largelysecret, historians must speculate about such matters as front-line executionsfor cowardice, the proportion of officers arrested for drunkenness, and eventhe educational level of peasants among the new recruits.

The people who might remember the truth, the veterans themselves, havegood reasons for reticence. Many have spent so long warming their hands atthe official version of the Patriotic War that they cannot face the cold blasts ofscepticism that blow in when the archive door is forced. The myth of the waris as important to some elderly survivors as the enhanced pensions that they

Merridale: Culture, Ideology and Combat in the Red Army 307



used to receive. The communism they believed in has been discredited, the collectivism that provided for their health and welfare has crumbled away.Inflation has slashed the value of their fixed incomes, while advertising,pornography and the electronic media have destroyed the prim and enclosedworld that sheltered them in middle age. The war, with its romance of heroicstruggle, is all the treasure that some old people have left. To question how itwas is to threaten the last thing that allows them to make sense of their longlives.

That said, there is no substitute, while those who fought are still alive, fortalking to the veterans themselves. For the purposes of this project, about 200of them shared their war stories with me, and most were co-operative, engagedand forthcoming.8 These characteristics may make them unrepresentative, formany self-styled patriots still refuse to speak to foreigners, and the majority ofveterans, especially the invalids, are dead. I was speaking to a volunteer groupof the youngest and most fortunate, some of whom would become friends. Werummaged through old photographs and letters and we walked around thebattlesites to talk.9 It was a privilege to hear their stories, but it was also frus-trating for us all. For one thing, the veterans were struggling to reassembletheir own stories as we talked. Memory is selective, and heavily influenced bythe fables that groups of people tell in subsequent years. Old age also plays itspart, as does the passage of time. But the difficulty that veterans experience inrecollecting combat is also specific to war. Battle is a moment of extremeemergency and stress. It is also an episode of fractured, collapsed time, whenthe seconds drag slowly and entire hours speed by. To step back from old age— or any age — into that world may be almost impossible.

Most veterans are happy to talk about events for which the war providedbackground, including love affairs, letters from home, and the close friend-ships that they formed. The emotions attaching to these remain strong, butneither the narrative nor the emotional impact of combat seems readily avail-able in memory. As I walked round the cornfields at Prokhorovka, the scene ofthe largest tank battle in history, my guides remembered pictures from thepast. They told me that the very dust caught fire, that the horizon vanished ina wall of smoke. Most had a tale about a friend, the last words that he said tothem, the way he always used to drink his tea. But though these imagesendure, the scenes and feelings that relate to combat turn out to be evanescenttraces, quickly lost. They are also overlaid with other feelings — multiple layers, all of them powerful — including the wrenching loneliness of the demobilized man, the guilt of the survivor, the grief of the bereaved, the dour


8 I conducted most of the interviews myself, alone or with assistants, but I also asked a Russianman, an ex-soldier, to conduct some in my absence. We were struck afterwards by the lack of vari-ation in the content of the veterans’ answers.9 Two of these new friends, Ilya Natanovich Nemanov of Smolensk and Lev Lvovich Lyakhovfrom Moscow, respectively veterans of Stalingrad and Kursk, have died this year. Their storieshave inspired me as I write.



pleasure of the veteran. All these reasons together are probably necessary toexplain the silence about combat after 60 years.

There may, moreover, have been no adequate words for battle at the time.Its memory is repressed almost at once. ‘I got back from operations onlytonight’, a soldier called Ageev wrote to his wife in 1943.

In these situations the same well-known reaction always sets in. The strain of effort isreplaced by inertia. When you’re under stress, you don’t think about anything, and all yourefforts are directed towards a single goal. But when the stress is replaced by inertia, which is explained by tiredness, then you really need a bit of a shaking, because for a moment nothing seems to matter.10

Nothing, that is, except the temporary calm. The poet David Samoilov, whofought in the front line for two years, explained that he could never writeabout this war. His poems at the time were pure escapism, sweet little songs orfolk stories composed to dodge the turmoil in his head. Later, when the warwas over, he could no longer recollect how it had been.11

Amnesia of this variety is not a purely Russian problem. John Steinbeck,who visited Russia just after the war, also found memory a doubtful tool aftercombat. ‘When you wake up and think back to the things that happened theyare already becoming dreamlike’, he explained.

You try to remember what it was like, and you can’t quite manage it. The outlines in yourmemory are vague. The next day the memory slips further, until very little is left at all . . .Men in prolonged battle are not normal men. And when afterwards they seem to be reticent,perhaps they don’t remember very well.12

It did not need a revolution, or even the work of the Sovinformburo, thewartime propaganda department, to drive men’s memories into shadow. Thesecretive designs of the Soviet state were realized in part because they workedin harmony with genuine human desires.

These observations carry into every written kind of source, although a greatdeal remains to be learned from wartime documents. The censor could grasphis blue pencil and the policeman his gun, but with six million troops to con-trol, and unnumbered refugees, deserters, spies and hangers-on to consider,authority was over-stretched. It was always possible to make examples of indi-vidual soldiers who broke the rules, but there were too many infringements —and too many corrupt or exhausted officials — for control to be absolute.‘Letters from the front reveal that military secrets are being disclosed on amass scale’, the political administration complained on 3 February 1942.13 Itwould be saying much the same a year later, not least because the letters in


10 Russian Centre for Social and Political History, Archive of the Komsomol (hereafterRGASPI-M), 33/1/1454, 107.11 David Samoilov, ‘Lyudi odnogo varianta’, part II, Avrora, no. 3 (1990), 56.12 Cited in John Ellis, The Sharp End (London 1980), 109.13 Russkii arkhiv. Velikaya otechestvennaya, vol. 6 (Moscow 1996), 111–12.



question were often the last that soldiers would write. The men had little tolose, but even so few wrote about fighting itself. Indeed, they even used thecensor as an excuse for their silences. ‘I can’t write much to you’, a tankmechanic told his mother. ‘It’s not allowed.’ As another frankly told his wife:‘I cannot describe all my feelings or all my experiences.’14

For all that, letters do describe the changing contours of the soldiers’ war.The most moving, and least numerous, date from the first few months of hostilities. This was the time when the hubristic bubble of the 1930s burst,when an entire generation struggled with its shock. The Soviet people hadbeen promised easy victory — ‘the enemy will be defeated on his own soil’15 —and now they faced near-certain death. ‘We’re living in dugouts in the woods’,a young man wrote to his mother in 1941. ‘We sleep on straw, like cattle. Theyfeed us very badly — twice a day, and even then, not what we need. We getfive spoonfuls of soup in the morning . . . we’re hungry all day.’ The myth ofthe Red Army as its country’s glorious defender had collapsed in full view ofthe world. Thousands of people knew they were about to die for it. ‘Don’tbelieve the newspapers’, another soldier wrote. ‘The things they say are lies. . . . We’ve been through it all and seen it all’, he continued. ‘We’ve got nothingto fight with, and when the Germans catch up with us, our men have nothingto escape in.’ Another bleakly added a remark that his own words belied:‘They make us keep our mouths shut.’16

Two years later, no one would write with that frankness, but not becauseconditions themselves were much better. The men were still living in dugouts— ‘like moles’ — they still fought to exhaustion, lived on soup, and dreamedof soap, toothbrushes and a Russian bath. ‘When the war is over’, one manwrote, ‘I am going to take a bath every two weeks.’ But the defeatist, enragedlanguage of the early months had gone, and with it the sense that authoritywas always wrong. Wartime recruits found a new sense of purpose, especiallyafter Stalingrad. Most were trained, like factory workers on a production line,to understand one process and one kind of job precisely.17 Meanwhile, the fogof ideological rhetoric that had blurred military thinking for so long was sweptaway. Political officers were subordinated to their military comrades. A newprofessionalism lifted spirits in the army. War became the new norm, warbecame a job.

In the last phase of the war, the problem with the letters is that they becomebombastic, coloured with triumphant propaganda. ‘There has not been a dayat the front yet like today’, an engineer wrote home on 16 April 1945. ‘At 4


14 A.D. Shindel’ (ed.), Po obe storony fronta (Moscow 1995), 99; E.M. Snetkova, Pis’ma very,nadezhdy, lyubvy. Pis’ma s fronta (Moscow 1999), 38.15 This slogan was repeated endlessly in the 1930s, and was the guiding theme of Efim Dzigan’s1938 film, ‘If There is War Tomorrow’.16 All excerpts cited from M.M. Gorinov et al. (eds), Moskva voennaya (Moscow 1995),167–8.17 On the psychology of training, see A.R. Gilgen, C.K. Gilgen, V.A. Koltsova and Y.N.Oleinik, Soviet and American Psychology during World War Two (Westport, CT 1997).



o’clock in the morning thousands of katyushas and machine guns opened fire,and the sky was as bright as day from horizon to horizon.’18 Tactfully, he didnot add that this bright day had ended with one of the few disasters for whichZhukov himself was responsible. Like all letters, too, those from this time aresilent about crime, which in 1945 meant rape and wanton destruction.Aronov’s unit was in East Prussia, in a city then called Insterburg,19 when hesent a polite postcard to his sister. ‘I am alive and well and send you this withbest wishes’, he wrote.20 This was a time when thousands of German womenand girls were being raped near the front line, but the only hints — not inAronov’s card — are borrowed from the stilted language of the press.

The letters of 1944 and 1945 are also interesting for the values they reflect,the things that seem to cause no shame. Looting was one thing that becameroutine. One man, a relatively modest character, took a radio (‘for this, ofcourse, we will need electricity’) as well as a bolt of black silk, yellow leatherto make boots, parcels of food, an overcoat, a feather eiderdown with a silkcover, several sets of sheets, woollen cloth, and a pair of padded trousers forthose hunting expeditions of the future.21 Stalin’s regime was making good itsclaim to reparations. The soldier’s portion, as they understood, was no morethan their recompense. Quotas of loot were set — so many kilos for each manper month — and looting was transformed into a duty. Murder and raperemained taboo, but the pattern on a Meissen cup was a legitimate topic formen’s letters home. The whole business was so open that stationmasters inRussia and Ukraine had to construct special depots to store the parcels whilethey waited for a horse and cart to take them to the soldiers’ home villages.22

The letters that the soldiers of a totalitarian state could write, then, are morepromising, as a source about their lives, than we might expect. But not everyletter was spontaneous, and those of the least literate — perhaps the largestgroup among infantrymen — were especially stilted. Most men could write alittle, but many were unused to the written word, which meant that theyreached for stock phrases — the state’s stock phrases — when the time came tosend a card back to the village: ‘I am alive and well. Our cause is just. Victorywill be ours. Love to Vanya and Masha.’ In general, the main effect of blanketmedia censorship and saturating political education was not so much that they forbade some kinds of talk but rather that they shaped an outlook andvocabulary. Men with limited education, and especially the young, were vulnerable to this kind of pressure. Older men, especially officers, could bemore critical, but this was a war in which, by 1943, most officers had beenrecruits themselves, mere children, only months before.

Whatever the advantages of letters, however, when it comes to the question


18 Shindel’ (ed.), Po obe storony fronta, op. cit., 160.19 Today it is called Chernyakovsk, after the general who died in the Battle of Königsberg.20 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 27.21 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 152.22 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii Kurskoi oblasti (GAOPIKO),1/1/3754, 5–9.



of motivation, real problems start. Combat and soldiering do not depend on asingle emotional impulse. As specialists have long observed, there is a differ-ence between the motive that impels someone to volunteer, and even to remainin a collapsing army, and the specific drive to run towards near-certain injuryor death.23 The first two can be described in letters. But the third, like combatitself, is dark, violent and quickly repressed when the emergency is over.Perhaps there are no easy words for something as instinctive as an adrenalinrush, perhaps the complex set of impulses that get a person through are matters for a confused kind of shame. Either way, the best that letters ever dois mutter about the inexpressible. As a veteran officer assured me, if wartimeletters talk of glorious battle, it is almost certain that the writer is a new recruitor non-combatant.

The other problem with letters is that they were addressed to a specific audi-ence. Many were written in a sort of dream, often at night, when the writerfound a moment to escape his comrades and summon the image of his wife,parents or friends. What a soldier wrote then, often through his exhaustion,bore scant resemblance to the things he might have said (or even thought)during the working day. ‘It is hard to know how long I will remain alive’, aman wrote to his wife in January 1942. She was expecting their first child, buthe knew he would never see it. ‘Simochka’, he wrote, ‘whether it is a boy or agirl, please bring it up according to your own beliefs. Tell it about me, aboutyour husband and its father.’ There was nothing here about the war; it wasbeyond easy description, out of place. ‘You couldn’t say that I’m alive — no’,another man wrote to his wife and daughter. ‘A dead person is a blind one,and for that reason the only thing that interests me is your life, my only con-cern is to remember you.’24

Judging from letters of this kind, some men fought only for their families.But letters are written with little other purpose in mind. They are unlikely todiscuss less noble or attractive feelings. And there is another strand to catch,even in writing this intimate. For while they signed up, frequently, to defendtheir families and homes, the men found that war distanced them from every-one they loved, making it difficult to imagine reunion. Some felt that they hadaged, and claimed to fear rejection. ‘I’ve had four letters from you’, Ageevwrote to his wife in the early spring of 1944. ‘At least I have some basis for believing that my family has been preserved intact. Nina! It’s the biggestquestion for all of us frontoviki. What’s going to happen when the war ends?’25

Life at the front had set the troops apart from non-combatants for ever. As oneconfided to his wife in 1943: ‘The question of our meeting after the victory —that is what is worrying a lot of us right now.’26 Like thousands of others, he


23 John Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic. Motivation and Tactics in the Army ofRevolutionary France, 1791–94 (Urbana, IL 1984).24 RGASPI-M, 33/1/276, 4; Stroki, opalennye voiny (Belgorod 1998), 115–16.25 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 78.26 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Smolenskoi oblasti (GASO), 2482/1/1, 35.



was wondering if the old world was worth recovering, if he could ever face hisformer self.

Diaries, in general, are no more helpful about fighting. It was illegal to keepthem during the war, but there were always compulsive writers whose desireto make notes was stronger than the fear of punishment. As a result, thereexist diaries of battle, of capture, and of the long months of waiting betweenoperations. Like the letters, they chart changes in morale, the rise of profes-sionalism, the impact of propaganda, friendships, boredom, loss and hope. Butdiaries do not say much about the writers’ thoughts in combat. There are two basic kinds of journal. The first is little more than an account of action,intended for posterity, and often breaking off suddenly, signalling that theauthor was captured or killed. This type records the number of miles marched,or curt details about the ‘Fritz’, but the people who kept them had no time forsentiment.

The second kind of diary, which includes the most revealing texts, was written by the introspective types, the men who insulated themselves from warby keeping wads of secret scribbled notes. As a rule, these do not deal withcombat. They are about the writer’s mood. ‘Time is going slowly again’, anofficer complains on the eve of Operation Bagration in 1944. ‘The days dragendlessly . . . . In the last while I have been feeling an acute tiredness from the war.’27 For men like him, combat itself would come as a relief, lifting thepreoccupations that impelled him to write in the first place. ‘There are no letters from home, the devil take them’, the same officer wrote a few weekslater. He had been worrying about his wife, and muttering that they wereheading for a row. But things were changing in his world. ‘In that regard’, hecontinued, ‘I can be very tolerant, because we’ll soon be in battle, and then I’llforget everything.’28

The testimonies of witnesses, too, are seldom very helpful about soldiers inthe field. These include the writings of political officers — the communistswho combined in a single man the roles of priest, confessor, agitator, stoolpigeon and conveyor of news — and also the NKVD troops who watched overthe men at the front line. Both wrote daily reports, but neither was trying toconvey truth, to analyse the men. Instead, they were filling in the blanks on notional lists, reporting that morale was ‘healthy’, finding and exposingideological foes, keeping the red banner in view. They had neither the incen-tive nor the training to discuss what was really going on in their men’s heads.29


27 ‘Frontovoi dnevnik N.F. Belova, 1941–1944’ (hereafter ‘Belov’) in Vologda, vyp 2 (Vologda1997), 470 and 464–5.28 ‘Belov’, op. cit., 473–4 (15 June 1944).29 Regular reports on morale were filed by NKVD troops at the front line. My comments arebased on a continuous run of these, beginning on the Don Front just before Stalingrad and endingwith the occupying forces in Berlin. They are available at the Russian State Military Archive(RGVA) in Moscow. I have also consulted a selection of similar reports from the regular army onthe Don and Belorussian Fronts in 1942 and 1944, available (with effort) at the Central Archiveof the Ministry of Defence (TsAMO) in Podolsk.



The instances of defeatist or anti-communist talk that they ‘exposed’ in theirreports were often false, too, cooked up on fabricated evidence to make arrestssecure. The last few years have unearthed a stream of such cases from thearchives of the KGB.30 Official reports, albeit witnessed, stamped and signed,are scarcely more reliable than the soldiers’ own tall tales.

Soviet war correspondents were even less able to write the truth. TheSovinformburo controlled each word, each comma, that they wrote. Its editingwas so meticulous that even patriots like Simonov eventually complained.Ehrenburg reported that he spent entire days on corrections, so that there wasno time to write new pieces, let alone to think. The whole enterprise was sosecretive that on one occasion Sovinformburo staff were banned from theirown building on the grounds that they did not have high enough levels ofclearance.31 In practice, references to cowardice, panic, doubt or even boredomwere completely banned. Olga Berggolts, the poet of the Leningrad blockade,discovered on a visit to Moscow that she was not allowed to refer to starvationwhen she talked of her ordeal on national radio. She could speak of hardship,and certainly of heroism, but hunger, even in 1943, was taboo.32

It is difficult to find out just why Ivan fought, but the question of motivation isstill worthwhile. For one thing, it opens valuable windows upon Stalin’sregime, on the levels of support and belief, and on the possibilities for popularpatriotism. The war marked a watershed in the short history of the SovietUnion, and nowhere were the changes more acute than among the people whofought. Just as seriously, the story of Red Army troops represents land-basedcombat at the extreme. The question of motivation in this case must surelyhelp to understand the problem in more general terms.

The first explanation that veterans themselves would cite for Ivan’s valour isthe least fashionable among English-speaking historians of this war. Patriot-ism is the central myth for the survivors themselves, and it has been burnishedfirst by victory and then by years of Soviet stagnation and decline, leavingthose who fought for Stalin’s state with little but its myths to cherish. It wouldbe arrogant to dismiss the idea — it is so powerful that it shines like a faith,even today — but nonetheless it does bear closer scrutiny.

Love of the motherland, in 1941, was clearly something that drove millionsto sign up for the front.33 The state’s own use of words like patriot, however,need not have coincided with its people’s view of their homeland, nor need the veterans’ recollection of the word’s meaning today. The Communist Party


30 I am grateful to Memorial in Moscow for making manuscript reports of these available.31 Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI), 17/125/47, 23.32 O.V. Druzhba, Velikaya otechestvennaya voina v soznanii i podsoznanii sovetskogo ipostsovetskogo obshchestvo (Rostov on Don 2000), 33–4.33 The evidence includes hundreds of soldiers’ letters, some of the most lucid of which, fromMoscow university students, are reprinted in M.Ya. Gefter (ed.), Golosa iz mira, kotorogo uzhenet (Moscow 1995).



portrayed the patriot as a good proletarian, a progressive, but the soldiers’own version of the patriotic was likely to embrace love for home village, family, language and even — for some — an informal nostalgia for peasantreligion. In fact, the term may well have meant no more than loyalty to whatwas ‘ours’ at a time of great collective danger. This war had ways of ignitingcollective emotion. ‘It was a war of extermination’, a former private soldierrecalled. ‘It stirred up hatred, the thirst for revenge, finally ripening into acause, which would inspire the Red Army into furious battles over a four-yearperiod. The name of that cause was patriotism.’34

Patriotism, then, was shorthand for a range of sentiments that ideologicalleaders might not have recognized (although they tried to harness them byreviving the notion of a Russian, as opposed to Soviet, people). It stood for thefrenzy of volunteering in the summer of 1941, for example, but it also coveredthe doomed persistence at Stalingrad, the relief of sharing favourite songs, andthe community of longing for one’s home. ‘Our people’ and ‘our country’ didnot have to mean Stalin’s empire, or even, for millions, Russia itself.Thousands of letters make it clear that what each man was thinking of was hisown home, whether that were Kiev or Ashkhabad. And homesickness was notmerely nostalgia. Many of the men were thinking of invasion, of tanks pound-ing familiar streets, of their mothers, wives and children, of schoolfriends (andschool buildings) that they might never see again.

This love of home, of village, even of the smell of Russian earth, was not justa matter for the articulate, for officers.35 Rank and file soldiers were as deeplyattached to their homes — as patriotic — as any communist. Their passionwas reflected in their tastes — the songs they favoured and the verse they loved(the fable of private Tyorkin, full of sentimental references to birch trees andopen skies, was universally popular). It was also reflected in the doggerel versethey wrote themselves — screeds of it, incorporating the stock images of village, motherland, home, comradeship and struggle. The patriotism of thefront was not the dour stuff of later ceremonial. It was maudlin, desperate, away of clinging to the pre-war world that had been lost, a way of honouringthe friends who died. It was also enraged, bitter, driven by real images of out-rage, cruelty and pain. As the men travelled west, it combined with a newawareness of the size and beauty of the country for which they had been fight-ing. ‘In the past’, a tank man wrote, ‘I knew Ukraine only from books; now Ican see it with my own eyes, the picturesque nature, lots of gardens.’36 Thestate made use of all of this, but that was only possible because reality wasvivid.

If love of country and a sense of outrage drove soldiers to volunteer and


34 Gabriel Temkin, My Just War. The Memoir of a Jewish Red Army Soldier in World War II(Novato, CA 1998), 34.35 A woman veteran told Alexiyevich that her comrades would crowd around anyone whocame from ‘home’ to smell their clothes. It was that smell, the smell of Russia, that brought backthe sharpest memories.36 Snetkova, Pis’ma s fronta, op. cit., p. 91.



warmed them as they rested after battle, what sustained them throughepisodes of shock is another question. The moment of volunteering, and eventhe last farewells at home, were followed by just such an interval. ‘You put ona uniform’, a veteran told me, ‘and it is like a second skin. It is your new per-sonality.’ The process was like losing an old self. Almost within a single day, anew recruit lost not just his civilian clothes and lank civilian hair but also free-dom, individuality, home comforts, home cooking and an entire landscape, tosay nothing of family and friends (and, for men, almost all contact, for a time,with members of the female sex). Ideals alone were unlikely to have sustainedmany people through so profound a psychological and physical upheaval.New kinds of motivation soon took over, some of which reflected the coarsersocial milieu to which each man had to adapt. A recruit’s letters home wereunlikely to mention these, for letters were a lifeline back to vanished worlds.But other evidence, including reports on crime, suggests that what got recruitsthrough the first weeks was a combination of drink, comradeship and thecomfort to be gained by stealing tiny marches on the system, carving out aniche, whether that meant pilfering food, stealing a few hours of illicit sleep orarranging to wear more comfortable, non-regulation, boots.

These small pleasures and little triumphs would continue to keep the men’sspirits up throughout the war. So, too, did front-line humour, though little isknown of it.37 Crude, often racist, and subversive in that it punctured thesolemnity of patriotic war, the men’s humour is absent from Soviet collectionsof front-line folklore. Lev Pushkarev, ethnographer and front-line veteran,explained to me that the secret police banned him from writing down men’sjokes. Ironically, the richest collections are often to be found in Germanarchives, where screeds of the antisemitic remarks and jibes reported by captured Red Army men were catalogued for later use.38 Censored, approvedhumour featured in the Russian press, but the jokes that helped troops withtheir daily lives went unrecorded. To some extent, the taboo arose from the language of the jokes itself, the patois of obscenity that Russians call mat,or mother. Jokes were also intimate, things of the moment and the group ofmates that could not be shared with outsiders. Above all, however, theyreflected the men’s real world, the one that everyone has been turning to epicor romantic fable ever since.

Songs were a different matter, and the texts of many favourites survive. Again,the written versions are innocent of obscenity, a fact that Krupyanskaya, thewartime ethnographer, later explained when she revealed that she had been forbidden to publish the words to any song that lacked a patriotic theme.39 As a


37 One respondent, the veteran ethnographer Lev Pushkarev, informed me that his own attemptto collect his comrades’ jokes at the front line had been quashed by the Special Section, the mili-tary police, who permitted songs to be recorded but not humour. On these aspects of soldiers’ cul-ture, see my Ivan’s War. The Red Army, 1939–45 (London 2005), chap. 6.38 For examples, see Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, RH2–2468, 6–7, 27.39 Ya. I. Gudoshnikov, Russkie narodnye pesny i chastushki velikoi otechestevnnoi voiny(Tambov 1997), 5.



result, large numbers of lyrics have disappeared, although the ones that survivesuggest that the propagandists remained hard at work. Catchphrases, songs and slogans, even when they seemed to belong to the soldiers themselves, couldinteract with ideology, and sometimes it was ideology that won. Propagandistssupplied words to the jolliest tunes, they wrote slogans, and they also encour-aged the use of a famous battle cry. The veterans I met were all amused bytoday’s confusion over that roar: ‘For the Motherland! For Stalin!’ Someclaimed that they had never used the phrase. ‘We may have shouted something’,a member of a punishment battalion commented, ‘but I doubt if it was thatpolite.’ The writer Vasil Bykov pointed out that officers and police spies wereusually too far behind the front line to hear what words the men shouted.40 Byfar the most common, as even the Germans attested, was the drawn-out andblood-curdling ‘Urrah!’. Nonetheless, frightened riflemen needed encourage-ment, and a collective battle cry was potent, making them feel part of a mass,more powerful (and less vulnerable) than any group of individuals. When theyused the Stalinist battle cry, the men probably did so in much the same way asthey moved their limbs in unison rather than dragging behind. The sound, andnot the meaning, gave the words their power. But it was also through repetitionlike this (and through hundreds of songs) that Stalin acquired the almost sacredaura with which some soldiers later imbued him.

Official language and official images became important, then, partly becausethey served a purpose when people sought things to say and believe in col-lectively. This observation ought to modify van Creveld’s claim, based onAmerican soldiers, that ideology must be an irrelevance in soldiers’ lives, slipping away like water off a duck’s back.41 The ideology of patriotic war,informally, became a part of daily life, explaining and even hallowing theprogress that Red Army soldiers made. Thousands of troops joined theCommunist Party as their faith in victory grew stronger. In other societies,religion might have played a comparable role, but, with the exception of someMuslims from Central Asia and some of the recruits from Poland, WesternUkraine and Western Belorussia, there was little formal religious belief amongSoviet troops. The Komsomol had seen to that, as had the widespread anti-clericalism of the 1920s. Totems and protective rituals deriving from religionwere another matter. Soviet troops were as likely to carry a dog-eared photo-graph or a copy of Simonov’s poem ‘Wait for Me’ as a tin cross.

Though beliefs varied, all soldiers shared some measure of fear. The NKVDsoldier with his pistol, shooting stragglers in the back, is an abiding image ofthis war.42 Fear began well before a man’s first battle. Many soldiers joined upbecause the alternative — a labour battalion — was so much worse than armyservice.43 You could be worked to death on a construction site, and all the time


40 Vasil Bykov, ‘Za Rodinu! Za Stalina!’, Rodina, 5 (1995), 30–7.41 M. van Creveld, Fighting Power (London 1983), 83.42 It is the opening sequence, for example, in the recent film of Stalingrad, starring Jude Law,Enemy at the Gates.43 A testimonial to this — another diary — was reprinted in Rodina, 6–7 (1991) (‘My — obuza,



you risked the knives and fists of the professional criminals who really ran thecamps. ‘At least when we got to the front’, a former convict told me, ‘we knewwhich direction the bullets would be coming from.’ Most, they expected,would issue from the guns ahead. Their own police would only shoot the hindmost. But ‘blocking units’, the special battalions whose guns were trainedon their own fellow-Soviets, were used along the front from 1941. The penalty for cowardice was death, and brutal methods were employed to makemen fight and keep them in the field. Stalin’s famous order no. 227, ‘Not aStep Back’, merely reiterated regulations that were already in force.

The point was that they needed repetition. Fear of their officers was notenough to make Red Army soldiers fight. At least until the end of 1942, fear ofthe NKVD was balanced by the fear of certain death at the front line. Poortraining and scant faith in possible success allowed for panic, and sometimesthe officers themselves could be the first to turn and run. More decently, manywithdrew and watched proceedings from the safety of a moving — andretreating — vehicle.44 The men had so little faith in such commanders thatmost feared German bullets more. They also feared for their homes, knowingthat their own families were in danger while they sat rotting in the woods. Thiskind of fear drove thousands to pick up their packs and walk. Desertions continued well into 1943. It was only after Kursk, when the Red Army wasadvancing rapidly to victory, that the numbers would drop to a few hundred amonth and ‘1943 partisans’, the stragglers who had held out in the woods formonths, emerged to offer their support to the side that seemed set to win.

Fear was only partially effective, then, and it was also double-edged becausesoldiers themselves were armed. The hated agents of their state were often the first to catch the bullets in the field. ‘Oh yes’, a former officer told me. ‘Ithappened quite often. You had to win the friendship of the men, or else youwould not know which way they would shoot.’ An army in this mood, as evenStalin realized, would scarcely win a war. In 1941, the leader ordered that‘persuasion, not fear’ was needed to keep soldiers in the field.45 Frederick theGreat’s maxim — cited by Hew Strachan in this issue — that a soldier shouldbe ‘more afraid of his officers than of the dangers to which he was exposed’was an irrelevance in the battlefield conditions of Stalin’s war.46 Later in thewar, too, officers (many of whom had been promoted from the ranks) andmen, by now much better-trained and seasoned in the field, formed close com-radeships based on shared experience and a sense that they were now set apartfrom the civilian world.

Outrage comes closer to explaining the men’s endurance and their victory.In the first months, after all, despair was common. Some muttered that one


my — vragi’), 66–9. See also V. Astaf’ev, Proklyaty i ubyti (reprinted Moscow 2002), whose earlychapters recreate the labour battalion in literary form.44 Tsentr dokumentatsii noveishei istorii Smolenskoi oblasti (TsDNISO), 8/1/212, 4.45 Velikaya otechestvennaya, vol. 2, part 2, 108–9.46 Hew Strachan cited in E. Colby, Masters of Mobile Warfare (Princeton, NJ 1943), 83.



dictatorship was very like another.47 Surrender was better, it was felt, thandeath. But the Wehrmacht itself destroyed this mood. ‘However much theywrite in the papers about atrocities’, a Ukrainian officer wrote to his wife, ‘thereality is much worse. I’ve seen the burned-out towns and villages, the corpsesof women and children. The spirit of those places has affected me, and it hasgrown in all our soldiers.’48 The Soviet authorities nurtured the mood, andEhrenburg would become the apostle of hatred, enjoining men to kill and killagain. Most armies use hatred in one way or another, but in this case therewere abundant reserves upon which to draw. The German army took so manyprisoners that many — tens of thousands — would escape. The makeshiftcamps were simply too crude to contain thousands of men. Those whoescaped told stories that would chill the blood. One refugee reported that thepopulation of his prison camp had fallen from about 80,000 in the summer of1941 to 3000 the following spring. The rest had died of hunger, cold, diseaseor from the torture and baiting of their captors. Twelve had been shot for cannibalism in a single week.49 ‘If the Germans treated our prisoners well’, aSoviet colonel told Alexander Werth in 1942, ‘it would soon be known. It’s ahorrible thing to say, but by ill-treating and starving our prisoners to death,the Germans are helping us.’50

The balance between patriotism and vengeance tipped in 1944. As the RedArmy drew close to its own border, many soldiers began to mutter that theirjob was done. The spur that Stalin used to force them on was hatred, the need ‘to destroy the beast in his own lair’.51 Vengeance, they were told, wastheirs, and the word echoes in the letters of 1945, letters written as the armycrossed onto Prussian soil. ‘Happy is the heart as you drive through a burningGerman town’, one man wrote to his parents. ‘We are taking revenge foreverything, and our revenge is just. Fire for fire, blood for blood, death fordeath.’52

Violence, indeed, would soon become an end in itself. There was no short-age of men in the Red Army whose lives had been marked by state violence,whose consciousness was formed in the brutality of civil war. German atroci-ties on Soviet soil compounded images that had been part of life for 20 years.A kind of wild amorality prevailed along the front, especially among the hugenumbers conscripted in the last year of the war. Most of these came fromregions that had survived not just German occupation but also the horrors ofSoviet invasion back in 1939. These recruits had learned how to survive in ananarchic, brutal world. Many had little reason to love Stalin, let alone hisparty. But vengeance, and personal survival, were high on their list of private


47 Knyshevskii, op.cit., 184.48 RGASPI-M, 33/1/360, 3–8.49 RGASPI, 17/125/169, 5–8.50 A. Werth, Russia at War (New York 1964; reprinted 2002), 422.51 This theme became the leitmotiv of Stalin’s speeches from 1 May 1944.52 Captured field post, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, RH2–2688, 12.



goals. Even the Sovinformburo was shocked by the stories from Romania in1944,53 and these were just a prelude to the rampage in the north.54

Fastidious patriots began to express misgivings. ‘The soldier of 1941 foughtfor his land, he was defending his own soil’, Samoilov wrote. ‘It was enough forhim to know just this, and that knowledge itself made him strong.’ Unfortu-nately, as Samoilov also observed, ‘there cannot be a humane war.’ The rot setin, he added, when the war of self-defence became a war of aggression.55 Likemany others, he was nostalgic for Stalingrad. Back then, Soviet troops had beenfighting a true, just war. Now they seemed capable of outrages that lookeduncannily like those that their enemy had perpetrated in 1941. They alsoseemed far too keen to amass personal wealth. The wristwatches and bicyclesand schnapps that brightened the road towards Berlin are well-documented,but in fact looting, and private gain in general, had featured while the army wason Soviet soil. Hundreds of tons of goods went missing every year, from armyfood supplies to livestock, home-brewed alcohol, black market guns and evenboots.56 After two decades of Soviet poverty, after the enforced collectivizationof agriculture, the chance to amass real wealth, and also to make sense of miserable army life by turning it to advantage, was too attractive to resist.

When it came to the heat of battle, however, the prospect of booty was morelikely to divert a man’s attention than to keep him in the field, just as somearmy transports meant for stocks of shells were hijacked to take food andfeather duvets home. The secret of Ivan’s resilience in the field surely lies some-where else. Adrenalin apart, three things — training, friendship and pride —seem to have helped the men to get through real fire. A fourth, the fatalismthat comes from having no alternative, was bolstered by reserves of blackhumour. Meanwhile, appalling mortality rates disguised the number of psy-chological casualties, making it difficult to assess how many reached theirbreaking point despite all this, and for what reasons.

The effects of training were clear from the autumn of 1942. First came areshuffle among the military leadership that saw the removal of incompetentslike Kliment Voroshilov and the poisonous Lev Mekhlis. Thenceforth, leaderswhose background was in war, not politics, began to analyse the men’s conduct. They noted the weak liaison between the infantry, artillery and tanks.They noted the poor state of military intelligence. They noted, above all, thelack of discipline that led to random fire, wastage of shells, and panic on thebattlefield.57 Habits that dated from the civil war were quietly abandoned.More emphasis would now be placed on drill and less on comic-strip heroics.Where a man’s class or social origin had defined him before, the army startedemphasizing skill. Orders to improve training, and especially the tactical


53 RGASPI, 17/125/241, 91–5.54 For an eyewitness account, see Lev Kopelev, No Jail for Thought (London 1977).55 Samoilov, op. cit., part II, Avrora, no. 3 (1990), 81.56 These issues are explored in my Ivan’s War, op. cit. The main sources include the army’s ownreports in Velikaya otechestvennaya, 2 (2).57 TsAMO, 1128/1/4, 61.



preparation of infantrymen, streamed from the General Staff.58 As the corre-spondent of the soldiers’ paper Red Star put it that autumn: ‘Nothing in theSoviet land will sustain an ignorant or unskilled leader — not personalcourage, not honours from the past.’ The time for ‘conservatism’ was over.59

Hard economic fact would underscore the change of mood. In the summerof 1942, the Soviets’ capacity to turn out weapons, shells and tanks recoveredafter months of dislocation. So many factories had been destroyed in the firstweeks of war that the revival of manufacturing seemed like a miracle. Tanksand aeroplanes soon came to symbolize the Soviet recovery, with Chelyabinsk,the new manufacturing centre in the Urals, earning the nickname Tankograd.Mass-production accelerated everything. Manufacture of the world-beating T-34 medium tank, for instance, was adapted so that the turrets could bestamped, not cast. Troops soon dubbed it the ‘matchbox’, partly because itcaught fire all too readily, but also because T-34s poured off production linesin such prolific numbers after 1942.60 Meanwhile, lend-lease military aid, principally from the USA, began to make a crucial difference to the supply ofweapons, aeroplanes and food.61

Better training and supply were backed up by a new emphasis on hierarchyand appearance. On 30 August 1942, a campaign began to get the soldiers’boots mended and polished, to inspect officers’ uniforms, eliminate dirt, anddrill the ranks in self-respect.62 The men themselves were set to cobblingleather soles and sewing seams. Armies of women scrubbed and laundered inmakeshift wash-houses near the front. ‘Nina, don’t worry about our uni-forms’, an officer wrote to his wife just before Stalingrad. ‘We dress betterthese days than any commander from the capitalist countries.’63 They alsoboasted new orders to distinguish the brave. Eleven million decorations wereawarded to members of the Soviet military between 1941 and 1945. By con-trast, the USA awarded only 1,400,409.64 The US army often took as long assix months to process individual awards. In Stalin’s army the equivalent wasfrequently three days.65 Most medals entitled their bearers to additional privi-leges, and some, in theory, allowed men’s families to receive extra food.

Front-line friendships were even more vital than pride or recognition. Theliterature on wartime ‘buddies’ in armies across the world is voluminous. Inother wars, men seem to fight out of a kind of love.66 Whatever got them to the


58 For examples, see Velikaya otechestvennaya, 2 (2), 281–3 and 318–20.59 TsAMO, 206/298/4, 6. For more on the play, see also Werth, op. cit., 423–6.60 Temkin, op. cit., 137; Werth, op. cit., 622.61 See Richard Overy, Russia’s War (London 1999), 195.62 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 2 (2), 287.63 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 36.64 Garthoff, op. cit., 249.65 Van Creveld, op. cit., 112; RGASPI, 17/125/78, 123.66 Among the earliest offerings are Samuel Stouffer et al., The American Soldier. Combat andits Aftermath (Princeton, NJ 1949); S.L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire. The Problem of BattleCommand in Future War (New York 1947); and Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, ‘Cohesionand Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 12, 2 (1948).



front in the first place, fear of disgracing themselves or of betraying their front-line companions becomes the primary motive for some soldiers’ efforts. In theSoviet case, the argument is problematical. True, Red Army policy on replace-ments was more thoughtful than its American equivalent at this time, for units were withdrawn for retraining and replenishment, not filled piecemealwith individual recruits, but the rate of turnover was so rapid that many soldiers scarcely had the time to make close friends. At Stalingrad, average lifeexpectancy would drop to a mere 24 hours in the winter of 1942. Relation-ships were hardly sure before they shattered for ever. Some that survived wereovershadowed by the attentions of spies and informers, the dreaded ears andeyes of SMERSh. ‘The fear of SMERSh truly cemented relations at the frontfor a time’, Samoilov wrote. ‘But in the end it corrupted our strong sense ofbeing a people facing invasion together.’ As he added, ‘We almost never knewwho the SMERSh informers were among us.’67

The veterans discount each of these points. ‘It does not take long’, they say.They would seek out and learn the qualities of their mates in hours, not days,especially under pressure. Technology also dictated certain kinds of trust; for atank or air crew, jammed together in a confined space and destined, if onefailed, to die together, learned mutual dependence rapidly. Aside from these,the strongest friendships were often between people from the same locality,and the arrival of a ‘countryman’, someone from a man’s own region, wasoften the occasion for long conversations, the exchange of news. Meanwhile,the power of front-line loyalties endured and even strengthened in the midst ofdeath. Blood cried for vengeance, and rendered each man’s cause more sacred.The love that soldiers felt for their fallen friends was often the strongest of all,and some even returned after the war to marry fallen comrades’ sisters orbecome honorary sons in their lost buddies’ homes.68

Pride, finally, grew with successive victories. In the 1930s, Soviet citizenshad learned to avoid responsibility, to follow crowds. By 1943, combatantsknew their lives depended on their training and personal skill. Those who survived would discover a different sense of self. ‘We looked in our hearts’,one writer remembered, ‘and did not find slaves there.’ Lads from the villageswere no longer peasants. To the people they would liberate, indeed, at least onRussian soil, they were heroes. By 1945, such combatants would feel that theyhad earned the right to comment on government policy and even to advisetheir leaders. The fires of Stalingrad gave birth to a sense of citizenship thateven postwar levels of repression took several years to kill.

The new sense of self-worth came at a price. Quite apart from the millionswho died, few soldiers escaped physical injury, and many also carried psycho-logical wounds. Far from growing confident about their manly strength, RedArmy men noted the toll that war had taken — grey hair, disfigurement, aches


67 Samoilov, Avrora, vol. 2, 1990, 67.68 Examples of each of these are to be found in soldiers’ letters and memoirs. See, for example,RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 33–8.



and pains. ‘Perhaps you will not recognize me’, was a common anxiety as theywrote to their wives, although in general women at home had aged no lessduring the war. Apathy, which diarists recorded but could not explain,69 wasfrequently a sign of exhaustion and battle stress. Those who fell ill without aclearly physical cause, however, were likely to find little help. Red Army doctors gave trauma and battle stress short shrift throughout the war, andpatients who did not recover from disabling symptoms often underwent puni-tive tests, including simulated drowning, before they were sent for treatment.It is estimated that about 100,000 of the Red Army’s active service troopseventually became permanent casualities of the mind, a figure so low that itsuggests that only acute mental illnesses like schizophrenia were recognized asdisabling.70

The general exhaustion of most veterans played into the hands of a regimestaffed by people who had stayed at home. ‘The most painful thing’, com-mented the nationalist writer Victor Astafev, ‘was the realization that, becausewe were exhausted by the war, because of the strain of the postwar years, wewere not going to be able to maintain the high level of moral development thatwe had achieved during the war, and which we had created for ourselves.’71 Hemight have added that this high moral development was anyway a sham, sincecrime, alcoholism and domestic violence would all reach record levels in theshadow of the war. Ivan was not a superman. Some soldiers were heroes, mostmade the best of war, but large numbers were wracked by memories of violence and many never shed their brutal sense of the life and death.

In other words, Ivan was human. The Germans could not believe it, shiver-ing in their own dugouts, but Soviet soldiers felt the cold like everyone else,suffered when they were hungry and grieved for their dead friends. Theyalways had done, even when that seventeenth-century Englishman had firstobserved them. The cold he noticed, that made the Germans swear and longfor Paris and Berlin, was no easier for Russians, but it was at least the cold of home. The crucial element in almost every war in which Ivan showed thequalities that outsiders would admire was self-defence. On his own soil, hefought with a tenacity that invaders, so far from all that was familiar, couldonly fear. It was not some exceptional national characteristic that turned Ivaninto a fighter. Eventually, again despite German beliefs, the quality of histraining played a part. But through it all, the main impulse that kept him in thefield was the emergency itself. He may explain it in more epic ways, drawnfrom his culture and times, but in the end, he simply had no choice.

It takes an effort to get beyond the enduring legend of Ivan, but there ismuch to find. It is not present in the ceremonial and banqueting of today’s


69 ‘Belov’, 12 December 1943, 464.70 The figure is cited in Richard A. Gabriel, Soviet Military Psychiatry (Westport, CT 1986),47, and compares with 36–9 per thousand in the US army at the same time. As Simon Wesselypointed out to me, the likelihood is that Soviet doctors were recognizing adult-onset schizophreniain youths recruited before the symptoms appeared.71 Cited in C. Merridale, Night of Stone (London 2000), 316.



dignitaries and town councillors. It is more likely to be found in the silence ofthe old men as they gather at their battle sites each year. ‘They don’t talkmuch’, the woman who looks after the monument at Prokhorovka told me.‘Sometimes they just stand and weep.’ For that, for their very ordinariness,these old people command respect. If their bloodcurdling stories seem incon-gruous on elderly lips, if they have lived a series of more peaceful lives, raisedchildren, chosen new careers; if they have now retired to sit and chatter overcups of tea, that, too, is a kind of triumph.

Catherine Merridale is Professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary College,

University of London. She specializes in Russian social and culturalhistory and has a particular interest in the history of violence, trauma

and memory. Her most recent publication is Ivan’s War. The RedArmy, 1939–45 (London 2005).




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