Ivan's War
Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
by Catherine Merridale
Picador, 480 pp., $15
Earlier this year, the government of Estonia took a step that sparked outrage across Russia. The Russian parliament called for severing diplomatic ties with Estonia. Members of youth groups loyal to the Kremlin threw rocks at the Estonian embassy in Moscow and blockaded the entrance. The Russian foreign minister called Estonia's action "disgusting," "blasphemous," and vowed "to take serious measures" in response.
Days later, it became clear what those measures might be when Estonia, one of the most wired nations in the world, was hit with what may have been the first act of state-sponsored cyberwarfare in history. Whether the Russian hackers were acting at the behest of the government or not--experts now appear to doubt the Kremlin's direct involvement--it was clear that Estonia had touched a nerve running throughout the Russian body politic.
What mortal sin did Estonia commit against the Russian state to provoke such a tantrum? Sink a Russian ship? Spill toxic chemicals into Russian waters? No, what the Estonian government did was utterly innocuous: They moved a Soviet World War II memorial from the center of their capital city, Tallinn, to a military cemetery across town. To understand how an action as unassailably proper as the relocation by a sovereign state of a monument within its borders could cause so many reasonable grownups to throw such an unreasonable tantrum, one can learn a lot from Ivan's War, Catherine Merridale's superb account of the Soviet experience of the Second World War.
The Red Army was unprepared for the German invasion in every respect: Soldiers were rushed to the front with minimal training and with grossly inadequate supplies of, well, everything. Worse, they were fatally undermined by an offensive military strategy totally unsuited for the defensive posture in which the invaders had placed them. The result was a breathtaking number of casualties--over three million soldiers were killed, incapacitated, or captured in the first four months of the war--with little to show for the effort.
The threat of extinction has a way of making even the most rigid ideologue grow flexible, and with German troops nearing Moscow, Stalin finally allowed pragmatism to trump socialism. Politruki, the political officers placed in every unit to enforce Leninist orthodoxy, were cut out of the military decision-making process, and promotions were awarded based on merit rather than ideology. Commanders began to discourage the sort of suicidal heroics that had led so many troops to pointless death in the early months of the war. The law forbidding former kulaks (affluent peasants) from army service was repealed. And in 1943, thanks to crucial victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, the increasingly professional Red Army turned the tide and began its march all the way to Berlin.
Ivan's War is not, however, a wonky military chronicle--though it definitely could use more maps. Instead, Merridale conducts a survey that is anthropological in nature, examining all the elements of Red Army society: food, art, sex, religion, humor, clothing, and so on. She brings a novelist's skills to the task by stressing the sensory experience of the soldiers: the ubiquitous sight of piles of corpses; the deafening roar of explosions; the disgusting taste of the cabbage soup soldiers were fed; the smell of decaying flesh; the sensation of lice on one's scalp; the stifling heat generated by burning tanks. (Merridale explains why perishing in a tank is an extremely unpleasant way to die.)
She enriches her account of life on the eastern front with recurring detours into biography. Using letters, diaries, and 200 interviews she conducted with veterans, she puts a human face on the terror, rage, and loneliness soldiers felt. Her cast of characters--a cross-section of officers and grunts, loyal Communists and doubters, peasants and city-dwellers--guide us through the war with their contemporaneous observations. Merridale has a knack for enlivening the text with vivid quotations from witnesses to the carnage.
Here, for example, is an excerpt from a letter a Red Army officer wrote to his wife during the long, savage battle for Stalingrad:
I never thought I'd be capable of the kind of ruthlessness that really borders on cruelty. I thought I was a good-hearted person, but it seems that a human being can hide within himself for a long time the qualities that surface only at a time like this.
Though Ivan's War proceeds in chronological order, its loose structure allows Merridale to explore dozens of fascinating topics: the high rates of desertion; Stalin's appalling treatment of the Tatar minority; the murder of hated officers by their own troops; the widespread graft among officers; the Kremlin's decision to ignore in its wartime propaganda Germany's treatment of the Jews. (Details of the Holocaust, Stalin feared, could undermine the Soviet Union's status as the war's number one victim.)
Foremost among these is the question of motivation: Why did so many fight so valiantly for an evil dictator and a system that oppressed them? The answer, in the main, is twofold: fear and revenge.
Red Army troops feared the German enemy, but they often lived in a more immediate fear of their own superiors. In July 1942, his army demoralized and exhausted, Stalin elevated terror to a supreme position in his war strategy by issuing Order No. 227. Henceforth, withdrawal from a firing position was punishable by death. Entire units were assigned to stand behind the front lines and shoot any comrade attempting to flee. In all, 158,000 Soviet soldiers received death sentences during the war. A 1942 German report on the enemy put it succinctly: "As a rule, they do not fight out of some ideology or for their motherland but out of fear of their officers, especially their commissars."
The second source of motivation, revenge, is something that few American readers can fully comprehend. We were attacked on our soil in 1941 and again 60 years later, but we have never experienced all the horror and humiliation that a foreign occupation entails. As the war progressed, the soldiers grew more enraged by the sadism of their German adversaries. "The Fritzes" didn't merely capture Soviet territory; they murdered the civilians they found there, and laughed as they did so. (For a harrowing cinematic look at the Soviet experience of the German invasion, watch the 1985 Belarussian film Come and See, arguably the best war movie ever made.)
In the early days of the war, many troops had privately wavered, wondering if life under fascism could really be much worse than life under communism. But as the Germans sowed misery across their homeland, a steely new resolve took root.
Soviet payback would be gruesome. When the Red Army entered Axis territory, they launched what Merridale terms "an orgy of war crimes," particularly rape. (Many Tallinn residents refer to the controversial monument as "The Unknown Rapist," and when the Soviets were crossing Estonia they were just getting started.) The details Merridale presents are shocking. One Soviet officer wrote:
Women, mothers and their children, lie to the right and left along the route and in front of each of them stands a raucous armada of men with their trousers down. The women who are bleeding or losing consciousness get shoved to one side, and our men shoot the ones who try to save their children.
According to this officer, a commander directed the whole scene "to make sure that every soldier without exception took part." In some German towns, nearly every woman was raped.
Merridale argues that these war crimes were encouraged by the Soviet government, which not only looked the other way at the mayhem but intentionally constructed among the rank-and-file an image of Germans as subhumans. The abundance of alcohol on German territory played a part, too. A soldier wrote to his family, "It is nearly impossible not to be drinking. What I am going through is indescribable; when I am drunk everything is easier." One gang left an empty wine bottle in the vagina of each woman they raped and murdered.
One of the most fascinating subplots in Ivan's War is the reaction of Soviet soldiers to seeing the West for the first time. Lest we forget, Stalin's USSR was the original hermetically sealed totalitarian state, North Korea times 10. Not only had the troops never been in the West before, but they also had been systematically denied any accurate information about it. Before they crossed into Romania in 1944 the only thing they "knew" of the West was that it was a sewer of poverty and corruption. What they found made their brainwashed heads spin.
"Such pretty houses," one veteran remarked. The prosperity of the farms in Central Europe stunned the peasants among the troops. In one of the book's many moments of poignancy, a veteran struggles to admit to Merridale the truth of what he saw that day: "The word for it is rich. The capitalist farms were richer."
Their glimpse of life outside the Soviet Union made the soldiers determined to improve conditions in their native country. Astonishingly, in 1945, Red Army officers began sending letters to Moscow demanding reforms: an end to arbitrary arrests, cultural openness, the return of farmlands to the people. But Stalin had other ideas. When the soldiers returned home, the country they had saved from fascism continued to treat them like dirt.
Woven into the story Merridale tells is a metanarrative about the obstacles historians face in trying to tell that story. From the war's inception, the Kremlin waged battle on two parallel tracks: military and optical. The Soviet propaganda machine wrapped every development into an ideologically correct package. The Kremlin drastically underreported the number of casualties. Merely mentioning the starvation in Leningrad brought imprisonment or execution. The first Soviet museum devoted to the war opened in early 1943, a time when resources surely could have been put to better use elsewhere.
Newspapers and films bombarded the populace with the same simple story of inevitable, glorious victory over the fascist beasts. Soldiers returning home were even forced to sign a sort of nondisclosure agreement, in which they promised, in perpetuity, never to reveal most of what they had experienced. As a result, even many of the veterans seem to recall only the war that they have been conditioned to remember.
This political culture of forgetting in Russia still surrounds the war, which helps explain the severity of the Russian reaction to the Estonian monument. What Stalin built, Brezhnev would embellish into what Merridale calls "a glittering and specious edifice of myth." For a brief period in the Yeltsin era, Russian pupils learned from history textbooks that chipped away at the myth, but in 2003, state officials pulled those books out of the classroom. And the Kremlin has just promulgated guidelines for new history textbooks, which describe Stalin as "the most successful leader of the USSR," virtually ignore his crimes against humanity, and offer praise for the current president in a style that can only be called Soviet: "We see that practically every significant deed is connected with the name and activity of President V.V. Putin."
To underscore the importance of this project for his government, Putin himself addressed a convention of history teachers earlier this year, admonishing them that Russia "has nothing to be ashamed of" and should "stop apologizing."
To those of us not reared on a fairy-tale version of the eastern front, it seems self-evident that the people of Estonia might have mixed feelings, to say the least, about a monument to the soldiers of a country that first colluded with Hitler to seize their homeland and then, after driving out the Germans, annexed it again and sent thousands of Estonians to die in the gulag. But for the most part, even 60 years later, the Russian people have never learned the truth about what the Soviet Union did in the Baltics. If Putin has his way, they never will.
(Benjamin Herman is an attorney at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.)