Inferno - Max Hastings [99]
Correspondent Vasily Grossman described an encounter with a cluster of peasants behind the front: “They are crying. Whether they are riding somewhere, or standing by their fences, they begin to cry as soon as they begin to speak, and one feels an involuntary desire to cry too. There’s so much grief! … An old woman thought she might see her son in the column that was trudging through the dust. She stood there until evening and then came to us. ‘Soldiers, take some cucumbers, eat, you are welcome.’ ‘Soldiers, drink this milk.’ ‘Soldiers, apples.’ ‘Soldiers, curds.’ ‘Soldiers, please take this.’ And they cry (these women), they cry, looking at the men marching past them.” Yevgeni Anufriev was one of a host of messengers delivering call-up orders to the homes of reservists: “We were surprised how many of the recipients tried to hide so that they wouldn’t have to accept the papers. There was no enthusiasm for the war at that stage.”
The overwhelming majority of the Red Army’s soldiers were conscripts, no more eager for martyrdom than their British or American counterparts. Some arrived drunk at mobilisation centres, after long trudges from their villages. Soviet educational standards had risen since the revolution, but many recruits were illiterate. The best human material was drafted to units of the NKVD, directed by Lavrenty Beria, which eventually grew into an elite enforcement arm 600,000 strong. Men from Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic republics were deemed too politically unreliable to serve in tank crews. As a consequence of Stalin’s purges the Red Army suffered a critical lack of competent officers and NCOs.
Infantrymen in the first months of war were taught only how to march, wearing portyanki—foot cloths—to compensate for the shortage of boots; to take cover on command; to dig; and to perform simple drills with wooden rifles. There were insufficient weapons, no barracks or transport. Each man learned to cherish a spoon as his most useful possession—veterans said they might throw away their rifles, but never the spoons tucked into their boots. Only officers had watches. In the desperate days of 1941, many recruits were herded into action within a week or two of being drafted. A regimental commissar named Nikolai Moskvin wrote despairingly in his diary on 23 July: “What am I to say to the boys? We keep retreating. How can I get their approval? How? Am I to say that comrade Stalin is with us? That Napoleon was ruined and that Hitler and his generals will find their graves with us?”
Moskvin did his best in a harangue to his unit, but next day acknowledged its failure: thirteen men had deserted during the night. A Jewish refugee, Gabriel Temkin, watched Russian troops advancing to the front near Bialystok, “some in trucks, many on foot, their outdated rifles hanging loosely over their shoulders. Their uniforms worn out, covered with dust, not a smile on their mostly despondent, emaciated faces with sunken cheeks.” Self-inflicted wounds were commonplace. When a war correspondent sought to flatter a Soviet commander by asserting that casualties looked astonishingly cheerful as they arrived at hospitals from the battlefield, the general responded cynically, “Especially those wounded in the left hand.” Self-mutilation declined sharply after suspects began to be shot. Beyond sanctions for failure, on 1 September the Stavka introduced the only comfort ever provided to its soldiers: the legendary “hundred grams” or “product 61,” a daily allowance of vodka. This proved important in sustaining men’s will to resist, but reinforced the Red Army’s pervasive, self-immolatory culture of drunkenness.
A critical strand in the Soviet Union’s response to Barbarossa was a commitment to the doctrine of total mobilisation, first articulated by Mikhail Frunze, the brilliant war minister under Lenin. Michael Howard has observed that, while the Russians suffered a stunning tactical surprise in June 1941, strategically and psychologically they had been preparing themselves since 1917 to