…
If you have not forgotten your father,
Who rocked you in his arms,
Who was a good soldier
And fell in the Carpathian snows,*
Who died for the Volga and the Don,
For the future of your native land;
If you cannot bear the thought
That he will turn in his grave,
That his soldier’s portrait on the cross
Should be smashed on to the ground
And stamped on by a German
Before your mother’s eyes…
…
Then kill a German – make sure to kill one!
Kill him as soon as you can!
Every time you see him,
Make sure that you kill him every time!
Simonov’s play
There was complete silence for at least ten seconds after the curtain had fallen at the end of the third act; for the last words had been: ‘See how Russian people are going to their death.’ Many women in the audience were weeping.45
Coercion, patriotism, hatred of the enemy all played a part, but perhaps the most important element in the soldiers’ determination to fight was the cult of sacrifice. The Soviet people went to war with the psychology of the 1930s. Having lived in a state of constant revolutionary struggle, where they were always being called upon to sacrifice themselves for the greater cause, they were ready for war. As Simonov remarked, the people were prepared for the privations of the war – the sharp decline in living standards, the breaking up of families, the disruption of ordinary life – because they had already been through much the same in the name of the Five Year Plans.46
This readiness for personal sacrifice was the Soviet Union’s greatest weapon. In the first year of the war, especially, it was essential to the Soviet Union’s survival, as it struggled to recover from the catastrophic summer of 1941. The actions of ordinary soldiers and civilians, who sacrificed themselves in huge numbers, made up for the failures of the military command and the paralysis of nearly all authority. The ethos of sacrifice was particularly intense in the ‘generation of 1941’ (people born in the 1910s and early 1920s), which had been raised on the legendary tales of Soviet heroes who consecrated themselves to the interests of the state: record-breaking pilots and Stakhanovites, Arctic explorers, soldiers of the Civil War, Communists who went to fight in Spain. It was in emulation of their feats that so many youthful volunteers rushed into war. The call to arms in 1941 connected them to the heroic tradition of the Russian Civil War and the Five Year Plan of 1928–32 – the two great romantic episodes in Soviet history when great things were supposedly achieved by collective enterprise and sacrifice. In the words of the poet David Samoilov (who was twenty-one when he joined the army in 1941): ‘The Civil War – that was our fathers. The Five Year Plan – that was our older brothers. But the Patriotic War of ’41 – that is us.’ Many soldiers derived the strength to fight from a sense of being part of this continuum: ‘I am following in the footsteps of our father, who died fighting in the Civil War in 1919,’ wrote Leonid Kurin, a junior lieutenant, to his sister in 1943.
He fought for my life. Now I am fighting for the lives of your children… Sonia, I have thought a lot about dying – is it frightening or not? It is not frightening when you know that you will die for a better future, for the happiness of our children. But you have to kill a dozen Germans before you die.47
The generation of 1941 fought with selfless dedication and heroic bravery, even recklessness, from the first day of the war. It bore the greatest human cost. Only 3 per cent of the male cohort of soldiers born in 1923 survived until 1945.* Older men fought more cautiously – and were the ones who tended to survive. Viacheslav Kondratiev, born in 1920 and injured several times during the war, recalls that the older soldiers tried to help the younger ones:
They fought more skilfully, more soberly, they did not charge ahead, but held us young ones back, because they understood the value of life more than we did. I had one such protector, a forty-year-old man, who often told me that I had to respect my own life, even in a war.48
Rita Kogan was just eighteen when she joined the army in 1941. She was one of the million Soviet women who served in the Red Army and its partisan units – a number representing about 8 per cent of all Soviet combatants (though many more women were active in supporting roles, such as transport, supplies and medical assistance).49 Rita was born in 1923 to a Jewish family in Rechitsa, a small industrial town in Belorussia. It was, she says, a ‘modern family of the Soviet type’. Her father was a factory manager, her mother an accountant, and Rita and her sister were brought up in the ‘Soviet spirit of those times’, without Jewish customs or beliefs or the influence of grandparents. Rita’s world-view was shaped by her school, the Pioneers and the Komsomol. ‘I saw the Pioneers and the Komsomol as a type of children’s army that fought against injustice wherever it appeared,’ she recalls. ‘If at school I saw a boy who was bullying a girl or a smaller boy, I would deal with him so harshly that he would run to the teachers to complain.’ The ethos that inspired her was enshrined in the widely read children’s book by Arkadii Gaidar,
Rita was finishing her last year at school when the war broke out. Evacuated with her family to Stalingrad, she found work as an accountant in a school, but desperate to do something more directly for the war effort, she pleaded with the local Komsomol to enrol her in their military school. The Komsomol refused (at eighteen she was too young, they said) but sent her to work in a munitions plant, where she assembled parts for aeroplanes. In the summer of 1942, the Soviet press publicized the heroic feats of young Red Army women volunteers who were fighting as snipers and anti-aircraft gunners during the defence of Stalingrad; barely out of school, few of them had fired guns before. Rita was determined to follow their example and once again appealed to the Komsomol. Again she was refused and told to continue working in the factory. ‘I was furious,’ she recalls. ‘I had volunteered to fight, I said that I was ready to sacrifice my life, and they treated me like a little girl. I went straight home and cried.’ Rita formed her own group of young Komsomol women; together they ran away from the factory and applied to a military school that was training telegraph and radio operators in preparation for the launching of Operation Uranus, the Soviet counteroffensive against the German forces around Stalingrad, in November 1942. Rita joined the class for Morse-code signallers. She was sent with a group of girls to the headquarters of the South-west Front, between Stalingrad and Voronezh. During late December, she took part in Operation Little Saturn, when the combined forces of the South-west and Voronezh Fronts broke through to the rear of the German armies on the Don. ‘The senior communications officer to whom we reported at the front headquarters was an elderly gentleman, who had served in the tsarist army in the First World War,’ recalls Rita. ‘He had no idea how to deal with us girls, and spoke to us in a kindly manner, instead of giving us firm orders. But he was a first-rate specialist and protected us from the other
