Armageddon - Max Hastings [178]
Yet, in the Soviet Union’s great advance west from the Vistula and into East Prussia, the glory was not intended for any marshal. For more than two years, to a remarkable degree Stalin had deferred to his subordinate commanders in the conduct of the war. They rewarded him with victories. Stalin’s resentment of Zhukov’s celebrity and popularity had grown, however, eating into what passed for his soul. All his life, the ruler of Russia displayed towards able comrades a blend of admiration and envy which impelled him to murder most of them sooner or later. Although his marshals would fight the great battles now impending, and Zhukov would play the decisive role on the Vistula front, Stalin was determined that in the eyes of the Russian people and of history the January offensive of the Red Army should be identified as his own achievement.
Among the men of the Red Army, attitudes towards the nation’s leader were complex and various. Many soldiers avowed less respect for him than for Zhukov. “Stalin won the war, but he was responsible for so many deaths,” said Corporal Nikolai Ponomarev of the 374th Rifle Division. Major Fyodor Romanovsky of the NKVD was, unsurprisingly, a passionate admirer of his nation’s leader: “He saved the Soviet state. He possessed a very good mind and picked good people. The leaders of England and America did not have to fight the war with a fifth column in their midst. We did. Stalin destroyed our traitors. We were real communists in those days.” Yet for every party zealot like Romanovsky there were scores of men whose families had suffered badly at the hands of Stalin. Nikolai Senkevich, a Red Army doctor, often asked himself: “Is there no one to rid us of this cannibal?” His father, an illiterate Belorussian peasant, had died in the Gulag after being convicted of hoarding flax seed. His brother had served ten years in a labour camp for “political crimes.” Yet Senkevich would never have voiced aloud a harsh thought about Stalin. Corporal Anna Nikyunas said: “We were fighting for our country, not for Stalin.” Major Yury Ryakhovsky’s father told him: “You should obey Stalin not for what he is, but because he is the leader of our nation.” Ryakhovsky himself said: “Stalin seemed like a god to us.”
To the frustration of the Party, however, Christian religion still touched the hearts of many Soviet soldiers. Men and women in imminent danger of death reached out to a deity who promised a hereafter, rather than to a national leader likely to consign them there. “I often prayed to God for deliverance,” said Nikolai Ponomarev, who wore a crucifix through his entire front-line service. Corporal Anatoly Osminov always carried an icon given to him by his mother. He knew that he would have lost his Party membership if a political officer had heard about it, “but many men crossed themselves privately, and prayed for their lives. There was a little bit of religion somewhere in most of us.” Lieutenant Alexandr Sergeev’s men liked to recall the Russian proverb: “We all stand together beneath the hand of God.” Seventeen-year-old Yulia Pozdnyakova had never been taught the words of any prayer, but when she found herself being bombed, she invented some.
HITLER HAD ALWAYS opposed the building of fixed fortifications, on the ground that they discouraged the offensive spirit which he demanded from his armies. Yet in the weeks before the Soviets struck on the Vistula some 1.5 million German civilians were belatedly struggling in the snows to drive spades and mattocks into the frozen soil of the Reich from the Rhine to Königsberg, to create anti-tank ditches and trench lines against the Allied flood. In East Prussia alone, 65,000 people of both sexes and all ages and conditions were engaged upon defensive works, almost all of them futile. Hitler fiercely rejected Guderian’s proposal to withdraw the main German