Armageddon - Max Hastings [94]
Mighty Russian word!
We will transmit you to our grandchildren
Free and pure and rescued from captivity
Forever!
The men of the Red Army were drawn from every corner of the millions of square miles of the Soviet Union. A T-34 commander, Anatoly Osminov, was an eighteen-year-old Muscovite. His driver, Boris, was a Tartar. Andreyev, the loader, was an Udmurt. Gospodimov, the gunner, was Ukrainian. “Nobody cared about nationalities at that time,” said Osminov, “any more than they cared whether you were an officer, NCO or soldier. We were just all in it together.” The war proved an extraordinary unifying force for a society in which Russian had supplanted French as the chosen language of its rulers barely a century earlier. For many Russians, wartime service offered fractionally greater freedom to think and to speak than they had known in the worst years of Stalin’s Purges. “When war broke out its real dangers and its menace of death were a blessing compared with the inhuman power of the lie,” says one of Pasternak’s characters in Dr. Zhivago. “It broke the spell of the dead letter.” The vitality of the war years remains for many veterans a memory which made its sufferings seem endurable. Yet the poet Akhmatova herself was a suspect person in the eyes of Moscow. Yury Ryakhovsky was shocked to find a fellow officer court-martialled for quoting poetry that was deemed “politically incorrect.”
Sometimes, all the 150 girls of Lieutenant Gennady Klimenko’s signals regiment would gather for an evening to sing folk songs. Long before they finished, tears were coursing down the cheeks of men and women alike. “It is when they sing that we realise most clearly that they come from another world. They form a community then, and include us as hearers, in some immeasurable expanse,” wrote Hans von Lehndorff, observing the Russians as a prisoner. “They are living over there, for the moment at least, and everything here is as unreal to them as some circus they have been led into. When they return home later on, all their experience here will seem to them like a mad dream.”
When they were not in foxholes, men slept under trucks, in the open under blankets, or in ruined houses. When Klimenko thought of wartime billets afterwards, his most vivid memory was of the shattered glass that crackled underfoot every yard of the road between Moscow and Berlin, in a world in which few windows survived a battle. They lived chiefly off bread, cabbage soup, canned meat, milk powder and the legendary “100 grams”—the official daily issue of vodka which fuelled the Red Army from 1941 to 1945. They rolled their own cigarettes using scraps of newspaper. Many men suffered from boils caused by the poor diet. There were frequent outbreaks of disease, especially typhoid—even an artillery general died of it. Colds and ’flu were endemic, as indeed they were in all the armies, as soldiers perforce lived a semi-animal existence for months on end, denied the shelter of heated buildings, and laying their heads each night on sodden or frozen earth. Among the Russians, poor hygiene contributed significantly to the prevalence of disease, when men could seldom bathe or change clothes. Their rations were prepared and cooked in conditions of unbridled squalor.
Despite all that has been said above about the Soviet capacity for sacrifice, it would be wrong to suppose that all Russian soldiers were fired by suicidal courage or that they never ran away. Vitold Kubashevsky remarked that his bowels and those of many of his colleagues customarily collapsed before an attack, while their officer was prone to uncontrollable attacks of hiccups. One night in Yugoslavia, German officers watching on a hill observed Soviet troops occupying a town below. They ordered their Cossack unit to mount. Then the long line of horsemen charged, shouting and firing flare pistols as they scrambled down the slope. The Russians ran, throwing away their weapons as they went. This was among the last instances in the history of warfare of modern infantry succumbing to a cavalry charge. Even