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By Root 823 0

rocket unit travelled by train from Prague to Moscow, exhilarated by a delusion that they were going home. They had fought through four long years at Stalingrad and on the Don, in Romania, Austria and finally Czechoslovakia. The first intimation that their rulers had other plans came as they approached the capital. Their train, instead of proceeding to Moscow’s central station, took the ring line. Chervyakov was less dismayed than most of his comrades. A career soldier, “I was twenty-two863, and I didn’t give a damn who I fought.”

By contrast, Sgt. Anatoly Fillipov, radio operator with an intelligence unit, was weary of war. He was twenty-eight, and had been the first to bring news to his commander of the June 1941 German invasion, for which he was roundly cursed and told to “cut out the bullshit.” In 1943 he was wounded and taken prisoner on a secret mission into neutral Turkey, and badly beaten by his Turkish captors before escaping. Fillipov was in Moscow in May 1945 when told that he was being posted to the Far East. He enlisted the good offices of his brother, a staff college student, to delay his departure until after Victory Day, Stalin’s equivalent of VE-Day, twenty-four hours later: “Please, Lyosha, could you ask864 your commander to get permission for me to stay? I so much want to see the Parade!” Fillipov got this wish, but his wider ambitions went unfulfilled. He was a sailor at heart, raised aboard a Volga river steamer on which his father was an engineer. All he wanted now was a chance to join the merchant fleet and travel the world. He cherished a special dream of seeing Rio de Janeiro. Instead, he went to Manchuria.

Oleg Smirnov was deeply saddened by his unit’s journey east. In East Prussia on VE-Day, he had emptied his pistol into the air, holstered it with finality, and declared: “Those were the last shots I shall ever fire.” Now he was called upon to fight again. Crossing Lithuania, his train was attacked by anti-Communist partisans, who had to be driven off. Despite the bands and welcomes from local people at every Russian station halt, “we came to realise the price865 we had paid for victory. Day after day while the train crawled slowly through European Russia we saw around us only burnt-out ruins, chimneys amid charred wastelands, fields scarred by trenches and craters…Even beyond the Volga where the villages stood intact, one saw no fit men—only women, old men and cripples. I remember looking out at women dragging ploughs and homeless kids at the stations.” A railway guard at Chita scrounged a cigarette from Smirnov and said: “What a host is moving east!866 The samurais are in for a bad time, and those rats must know it. Look at the Japanese consul here—he sits every day by the river with his fishing rod, counting trains. He can count as many as he likes, but his lot are for it!”

After travelling 6,000 miles from Europe by rail, some units, including Vladimir Spindler’s, marched the last two hundred to the Manchurian border across the treeless Mongolian desert in blazing heat. A large influx of young recruits joined them, many weak from malnutrition. These were given hasty training, and as much food as could be spared. “Frankly, most of us hated having to do this,” said anti-aircraft gunner Georgy Sergeev, a veteran of the European campaign. “I was due to turn twenty in September. I kept thinking, would I now live to be twenty?” After all that they had survived in the west, now they were back under the sun and stars, living on field rations. Once again, in Sergeev’s words, “there was that perpetual uncertainty867, not knowing what would happen tomorrow, or whether there would even be a tomorrow.”

“I’d taken part in plenty of offensives868, but I’d never seen a build-up like this one,” said one soldier. “Trains arrived one after another, off-loaded men who formed ranks and marched away across the steppe. The diesels of hundreds of brand-new tanks roared, as they were started up by crews of veterans, frontoviks, who had fought in Europe. There were tractors towing heavy artillery, katyushas, cavalry,