Armageddon - Max Hastings [85]
The draconian retribution that fell upon those who flinched or failed was an important force in sustaining Russian will. Russians have always prided themselves upon the extravagance of their own emotions and behaviour. Nikolai Lvov, the nineteenth-century poet–engineer, applauded his people’s spontaneity:
In foreign lands all goes to a plan
Words are weighed, steps measured.
But among us Russians there is fiery life,
Our speech is thunder and sparks fly.
The Red Army often displayed courage and determination far beyond anything that could have been asked of American or British troops. Yet its achievements on the battlefield seem all the more remarkable given its manic indiscipline. Even the relentless efforts of firing squads proved unable to deter excesses that often became suicidal. Huge injections of alcohol alone rendered service in the eastern war endurable to many of those who took part. Yet institutionalized alcoholism could be deadly to men in possession of weapons. Lieutenant Vasily Kudryashov’s orderly started a drunken fight following an argument about—of all things—which tank possessed the thickest armour. A pilot shot him dead. In a cellar in the Hungarian town of Tokay, Kudryashov saw the bodies of three soldiers who had drowned. After piercing a vast vat of wine with tommy-gun fire, they drank themselves insensible, then lay collapsed upon the floor until a torrent submerged them. Recklessness with vehicles was a source of many Russian casualties. “Brake or die,” proclaimed a Red Army sign posted on many roads in Yugoslavia, but scores of Russian truck drivers cheerfully ignored it—and died. Vladimir Gormin once saw three successive Dodges in a column surge over the same precipice. Such behaviour seems of a piece with Orlando Figes’s description of the historic Russian experience: “long periods of humility and patience interspersed with bouts of joyous freedom and violent release.”
A German doctor, Hans von Lehndorff, painted a vivid word portrait of the more primitive soldiers of the Red Army, when he observed them as a prisoner. “They are utterly insensitive to noise,” he wrote.
Some of them stand the whole day in the garages, working all the available motor-horns. The radio blares without a stop in their quarters, until far into the night. Lighting circuits are installed at top speed, and where there is glass left in the windows, holes are shot in the panes so that the wires can be led through. One is repeatedly astonished at the rapidity with which they hit on the simplest way of attaining their purpose; the immediate moment is all that exists for them; everything must serve it, no matter whether what they ruin in the process is something they will be in dire need of the next minute. One is perpetually dumbfounded by their total lack of any relationship to things which, to us, are a part of life itself. One ends by giving up thinking of them as creatures of one’s own kind, and gradually assumes the attitude of lion-tamer . . . To show fear is to fare worst of all with them, it provokes them visibly to attack. Audacity, on the other hand, can get one a surprisingly long way. The most hopeless pol-icy of all is to try and make them like you . . . The Russians have no use for such arts; they use people of that sort for their own purposes and openly despise them . . . It never occurs to them to look upon us as anything resembling themselves, and our claims on their humanity find hardly any echo in them. The fact that they drive cars, fire rifles, listen to the radio, and are trained to many other of our tricks, still creates no living bridge from man to man.
Some writers have sought to argue that by 1944 the Red soldier was man for man a match for his counterpart