The Whisperers

exaggeration’ of his true opinion.40

Some of his war correspondence served the regime’s campaign to get the troops to fight. In August 1941, after the collapse of the Soviet front, Stalin had issued his merciless Order Number 270, condemning all those who surrendered or were captured as ‘traitors to the motherland’. Several senior commanders were arrested and shot, including the commander of the Western Army Group, General Dmitry Pavlov, who had made a desperate effort to hold the front together in the first weeks of the war. The wives of captured officers were also subject to arrest (even the wife of Stalin’s son, Iakov, who was captured by the Germans in July, was arrested and sent to a labour camp). Simonov accepted – and argued in his reports of 1941 – that the collapse of the Soviet front had been caused by the ‘criminal behaviour of certain generals, at best cowards and at worst German agents’, who ‘were shot deservedly’. He also peddled the idea that the bravest soldiers were the ones least likely to be killed – a propaganda myth that encouraged many troops to fight in situations where they were almost bound to die.41

Alongside this service to the Stalinist regime, Simonov pursued yet another objective in his war writings, especially in the unpublished notes and observations which he later used for his great war novel The Living and the Dead. A Soviet patriot and firm believer in the Soviet Union’s victory, he attempted to discern the signs of that victory in the actions, ideas and emotions of the people. He had spotted the first sign amidst the chaos of the Soviet retreat in June 1941, when he had seen the two junior officers walking west towards the front at Minsk to locate their military command.42 Simonov could not forget this scene – it symbolized for him the patriotic spirit of the ordinary people – and he would return to it in his later writings as he struggled to develop a populist conception of the Soviet victory. But at the time he had only a vague sense of the forces that moved the people to fight.

3

Simonov arrived in Stalingrad in September 1942, at the height of the battle for the streets. The last Soviet defenders were confined to the factory districts of the north, the area around the railway station and the small hill in the centre, while all around them the city had collapsed under the bombardment of the German tanks, artillery and planes. Simonov was astonished by the extraordinary determination of the Soviet soldiers to fight for every street, and every ruined building, against the superior German forces. Even as the Germans pushed them back towards the river bank, the Soviet soldiers would not give up the city and evacuate to the eastern shore of the Volga, where the main Soviet army was massed. It was this determination – a spirit that cannot be explained by military discipline or ideology – that tipped the scales in this decisive battle of the war.

In his diary on 16 September, A. S. Chuianov, the head of the Stalingrad Defence Committee, recorded a conversation he had overheard between a group of newly arrived troops and a wounded soldier who had been evacuated from the burning city:

‘What is going on in the city?’ [the men asked the wounded soldier].

‘There’s no making head or tail of it. Look,’ he pointed with his good arm towards the Volga – ‘the whole town is on fire.’

‘But why is it burning for so long?’ the troops asked in astonishment.

‘Everything is on fire: the houses, the factories, the land, all the metal is melting…’

‘And the people?’

‘The people? They are standing! Standing, and fighting!…’

The courageous determination of the Soviet forces was indeed decisive in the war and cannot be dismissed as a propaganda myth. Yet its origin has never been satisfactorily explained. Why did so many Soviet soldiers fight with such fierce disregard for their own lives in the battles for Moscow, Kiev, Stalingrad and a dozen other Soviet cities?

Terror and coercion provide part of the explanation. The practices of the pre- war terror system were reimposed to keep the soldiers fighting in the war. At the height of the Soviet collapse, on 28 July 1942, as the Germans threatened Stalingrad, Stalin issued the notorious Order Number 227 (‘Not One Step Backwards!’), calling on the troops to defend every metre of Soviet territory ‘to the last drop of blood’ and threatening the severest punishments for ‘panickers’ and ‘cowards’ who shirked their duty.* Special ‘blocking units’ (zagradotriady) were set up to bolster the existing NKVD units: their orders were to sweep behind the Soviet front and shoot any soldiers who lagged behind or tried to run from the fighting. During the course of the war approximately 158,000 soldiers were sentenced to be shot (many more were shot without any formal sentencing or record of their deaths); 436,000 were imprisoned; while 422,000 were made to ‘atone with their blood’ for the crimes they had ‘committed before the motherland’ by serving in the special penal battalions (shtrafroty) used for the most dangerous tasks, such as clearing minefields or storming German fortifications. The impact of Order Number 227, like the terror system in the army as a whole, should not be exaggerated, however. The Order was enforced at desperate moments, like the battle for Stalingrad, when an estimated 13,500 Soviet troops were shot in the space of a few weeks. But otherwise the Order was frequently ignored by the commanders and their political officers, who learned from experience that military unity and effectiveness were not served by such wholesale drastic punishments. Indeed, despite the introduction of the Order, desertion from the army continued to increase, prompting even Stalin to acknowledge that terror was becoming ineffective as a way to make the soldiers fight, and that other means of persuasion should be developed.43

Appeals to the patriotism of the Soviet people were more successful. The vast majority of Soviet soldiers were peasant sons: their loyalty was not to Stalin or the Party, which had brought ruin to the countryside, but to their homes and families, to their own vision of the ‘motherland’. As Stalin put it to Averell Harriman in September 1941, the Russian people were fighting ‘for their homeland, not for us’. To appeal to them, Soviet propaganda increasingly jettisoned Soviet symbols in favour of older images of Mother Russia that carried greater weight among the troops. Thus Stalin’s picture became less conspicuous in 1941–2, the period of military catastrophe (although he reappeared as the national figurehead and inspiration of the Soviet victories in 1943–5); the ‘Internationale’ was replaced by a new national anthem; new Soviet medals were produced featuring military heroes from Russian history; and the Church was granted a new lease on life, as the state lifted many of its pre-war political controls on religious activities in exchange for Church leaders’ moral support in the war. The result of this communion between Church and state was a curious blend of religious faith and Soviet belief. The journalist Ralph Parker saw a Siberian soldier at a Moscow railway station preparing to leave for the front. He was listening to a broadcast on the loudspeaker, and when he recognized Stalin’s voice, he crossed himself and cried out ‘Stalin!’44

Soviet propaganda also played on the emotions of hatred and revenge. By the winter of 1941, the German invasion had brought so much suffering to Soviet families that all it took to get the people fighting was to fan their rage against the enemy. According to Lev Pushkarev, a young soldier and ethnographer who made a detailed study of the culture and beliefs of the Red Army rank and file, it was hatred of the Germans, more than anything else, that made the soldiers fight. The force of this emotion was so powerful and unpredictable – containing as it did much pent-up fury over the suffering people had endured long before the war – that it needed to be carefully manipulated by propagandists to focus it against the foreign enemy. Poets played a vital part. Simonov was one of several Soviet writers, along with Ilia Ehrenburg and Aleksei Surkov, who lent their literary talents to the hate campaign. ‘Kill Him!’ was the best known poem in this call to arms. Written by Simonov in July 1942 – at a desperate moment of the war when the Germans threatened to break through to the Volga and the Caucasus – it was essentially a reiteration of the fight-to-the-death spirit of Order Number 227. Officers would read the poem to their men before they went into battle to instil in them the spirit of defiance and determination to fight to the end:

If you cherish your mother,

Who fed you at her breast

From which the milk has long since gone,

And on which your cheek may only rest;

If you cannot bear the thought,

That the Fascist standing near her,

May beat her wrinkled cheeks,

Winding her braids in his hand;