been launched to retake the Kerch peninsula from the Germans.19
Valentina continued to resist Simonov’s approaches. Her affections lay elsewhere. She had, it seems, a brief affair with Stalin’s son, Vasily, and then fell in love with the military hero General Rokossovsky, whom she had met in the spring of 1942 whilst performing at a Moscow hospital, where he was recovering from battle wounds. A veteran of the Civil War, Rokossovsky was arrested in 1937, but released from the Butyrki jail in 1940, when he and his wife and daughter settled in Kiev. On the outbreak of the war, Rokossovsky was recalled by Stalin to Moscow and given the command of the Fourth Army near Smolensk. He took part in the crucial battles for Moscow in the autumn of 1941. When Kiev was occupied by the Germans, he lost contact with his wife. Rokossovsky believed – or wanted to believe – that he was free for Serova. He did not expect to see his wife again. But two months after he met Serova, Rokossovsky’s wife appeared with their daughter in Moscow. They had been evacuated from Kiev just before the Germans occupied the Ukrainian capital. In Moscow she soon heard of the romance between her husband and the film actress, who was still pursued by Simonov. The love-triangle had become the gossip of the Soviet elite, which dubbed it the ‘USSR’ (Union of Serova, Simonov and Rokos-sovsky). Determined to break up the affair, Rokossovsky’s wife complained to Stalin, who disapproved of his leading generals being distracted by personal affairs. In July 1942, Stalin ordered Rokossovsky to take up the command of the Briansk Front, south of Moscow, and focus his attentions on the war. Throughout that summer Valentina tried to revive the romance. Hopelessly in love with the handsome general, she flew out to the front to visit him. But after Stalin’s intervention, Rokossovsky refused to receive her. As it became clear that her passion for the general would not be reciprocated, Valentina softened towards Simonov, who had continued to send her gifts and poetry. She slept with him but said she was not in love with him. Sometimes she exploited him in cruel and humiliating ways. Once she even made him deliver one of her love letters to Rokossovsky at the front.20
By this time the ‘romance’ of Simonov and Valentina had become the subject of a cycle of lyric poems known by everyone. Their love affair became an established fact in the nation’s literary imagination even before it existed in reality.
The most famous of these poems was ‘Wait For Me’, written in the summer of 1941, when Simonov was a long way from conquering Valentina’s heart:
Wait for me, and I’ll come back,
But wait with all your might,
Wait when dreariness descends
With the yellow rains,
Wait when snowdrifts sweep the ground,
Wait during the heat,
Wait when others are given up
And together with the past forgotten.
Wait when from distant places
Letters do not arrive,
Wait when all who’ve waited together
Are already tired of it.
Wait for me, and I’ll come back,
Don’t give your approval
To those who say you should forget,
Insisting they are right.
Even though my son and mother
Believe I’m already gone,
Though my friends get tired of waiting,
Settle by the fire and drink
A bitter cup,
So my soul should rest in peace…
Wait. Do not make haste to join them
In their toast to me.
Wait for me, and I’ll come back,
Just to spite all deaths.
Let the ones who did not wait
Say: ‘It was his luck.’
It’s hard for them to understand,
For those who did not wait,
That in the very heat of fire,
By waiting here for me,
It was you who saved me.
Only you and I will know
How I survived –
It’s just that you know how to wait
As no other person.21
Simonov had written these love poems for Valentina and himself. He did not think that they were suitable for publication, because they lacked the mandatory ‘civic content’ of Socialist Realist poetry. ‘I thought these verses were my private business,’ Simonov said in 1942. But living in the dug-outs at the front, he had recited them to the soldiers, who wrote them down and learned them by heart. The men found an echo of their own emotions in these poems and encouraged Simonov to publish them in
The main reason for the poem’s huge success was its ability to voice the private thoughts and emotions of millions of soldiers and civilians, who linked their hopes of survival to the idea of reunion with somebody they loved. One group of soldiers wrote to Simonov in May 1942:
Whenever your poems appear in the newspapers, there is huge excitement in our regiment. We cut the poems out and copy them and pass these copies round by hand, because there are not enough copies of the newspapers, and we all want to read the poems and discuss them. We all know ‘Wait For Me’ by heart. It says exactly what we feel. For all of us have wives, fiancees or girlfriends back home, and we all hope that they will wait for us, until we return with victory.23
Everybody was involved in his own private version of the universal romance encapsulated by the poem – a tale of ‘You’ and ‘I’ against the background of the war. But romantic yearning was only half of it. The poem also voiced the soldiers’ deep anxiety about the fidelity of wives and girlfriends left behind. Many soldiers’ songs expressed that worry. One of the most popular had its origins in a song sung by women after the departure of their menfolk, but it had a resonance among the troops, who sang it as they went into battle:
I wanted to say so much to you,
But did not say a word.
Quietly but firmly you whispered in my ear:
