introduced the kolkhoz policy everything went wrong. I ask myself – what are we fighting for? What is there to defend?
SIZOV [a soldier]: It is only now that I have understood that we are slaves. There were people like [the Bolshevik leader] Rykov who tried to do something good for us, but they got rid of him. Will there ever be another person who thinks of us?
KARELIN [a carpenter]: They told us that the Germans were all ragged and louse-ridden, but when they arrived in our village near Mozhaisk, we saw how they were eating meat and drinking coffee every day…
SIZOV: We are all hungry, but the Communists say that everything is fine.82
Tongues were loosened to a remarkable degree. Roza Novoseltseva recalls an encounter with a Moscow shoemaker in 1942. She had just returned to the capital, five years after the arrest of her parents. She had never really questioned the Soviet regime about their arrests. Although she believed in her parents’ innocence, she was prepared to accept that ‘enemies of the people’ actually existed, ‘alien elements that needed to be cleared away’, as she herself described them in 1938. But her visit to the shoemaker changed her view. While he fixed her shoes, he cursed the Soviet government, blaming it for all the country’s woes and telling her the story of his own unjust arrest during the 1930s. He clearly did not think about the dangers of talking in this way to a complete stranger like Roza. The frankness with which he spoke – something she had never before encountered – made her ‘stop and think about these things’ for the first time in her life.83
The army’s ranks were also an important arena for criticismand debate. The small groups of trusted comrades formed by the soldiers at the front produced a safe environment for talk. ‘We cursed the leadership,’ recalls one veteran. ‘Why were there no planes? Why were there not enough artillery rounds? What was the reason for all the chaos?’ Another veteran recalls that soldiers had no fear of repression for speaking their minds: ‘They thought little about it… Soldiers living with the risk of death were not afraid of anything.’ In the spring of 1945, Lazar Lazarev returned from the front to spend some time in a Kuibyshev hospital:
Like all soldiers, I had a loose tongue in 1945. I said exactly what I thought. And I spoke about the things in the army that I thought were a scandal. The doctor in the hospital warned me to ‘watch my tongue’, and I was surprised, because I thought, like the rest of the soldiers, that I had a right to speak, having fought for the Soviet state… I often heard the soldiers from villages complain about the collective farms, and how it was necessary to sweep them all away when the war was won. Freedom of speech was at such a level that it was thought entirely normal to air views like these.84
From this kind of talk the outline of a new political community began to emerge. The increased trust and interaction between people gave rise to a renewed civic spirit and sense of nationhood. At the heart of this transformation was a fundamental change of values. Before the war the climate of general mistrust was such that no community was capable of forming on its own, without direction by the Party; all civic duties were performed as orders from the state. But in the war civic duties addressed something real, the defence of the country, which brought people together, independent of state control, and created a new set of public attitudes.
Many people remarked on the change. The writer Prishvin felt, as he noted in his diary in 1941, that ‘people have got kinder since the war began: everybody is united by their fear for the motherland’. He also felt that class divisions had been erased by the national spirit that had arisen in the war. ‘Only now do I begin to understand that “the people” is not something visible, but something deep within us,’ he wrote in 1942. ‘The “people” means much more than peasants and workers, even more than writers like Pushkin, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, it is something within all of us.’ Others experienced this wartime national unity as a new feeling of solidarity in their work place. Ada Levidova noted a new ‘closeness’ among the staff of her medical institute in Leningrad, which cut across the old professional hierarchies:
The institute became our home. The boundaries between the professors and the ordinary workers disappeared. There was the feeling of a common cause, of a shared responsibility for the institute, for the patients, for our colleagues, which made us very close. This spirit of democracy (for that is what it was), the feeling that we were one family, was sensed by all who survived the siege of Leningrad. It remained with us after the war.
The commander of an infantry platoon reported that the war had made him think again about human values and relationships:
At the front people soon discovered what the most important qualities in others were. The war was a test, not just of their strength but of their humanity as well. Baseness and cowardice and selfishness were immediately revealed. Instinctively, if not intellectually, human truths were understood in a very short time – truths which can take many years to learn, if they are learned at all, in times of peace.
Little wonder that the war appeared to many as a sort of spiritual purification, a violent purging of the ‘inhuman power of the lie’ that had stifled all political discussion in the years before. ‘The war forced us to rethink our values and priorities,’ remarks Lazarev, ‘it enabled us, the ordinary soldiers, to see a different kind of truth, even to imagine a new political reality.’85
This rethinking became more widespread as the war neared its end and much of the vast Soviet army entered into Europe, where the soldiers were exposed to different ways of life. By the start of 1944, the Soviets had amassed an army of 6 million men, more than twice the size of the German army on the Eastern Front. In June 1944, just as the Allies launched the invasion of northern France, the Red Army burst through the bulk of the German forces on the Belorussian Front, retaking Minsk by 3 July and pushing on through Lithuania to reach the Prussian border by the end of August. Meanwhile the Soviet troops on the Ukrainian Front swept through eastern Poland towards Warsaw. In the southern sector, where the German forces soon collapsed, the Red Army swept across Romania and Bulgaria to reach Yugoslavia by September 1944. The Soviet advance was relentless. By the end of January 1945, the troops of the Ukrainian Front had penetrated deep into Silesia, while Zhukov’s Belorussian Front had reached the Oder River and had Berlin in its sights.
Hardly any of the Soviet soldiers had ever been to Europe. Most of them were peasant sons who had come into the army with the small-world views and customs of the Soviet countryside and an image of the wider world shaped by propaganda. They were not prepared for what they discovered. ‘The contrast between the standard of living in Europe and our own in the Soviet Union was an emotional and psychological shock, and it changed the views of millions of troops,’ observed Simonov. Soldiers saw that ordinary people lived in better houses; they saw that the shops were better stocked, despite the war and looting by the Red Army; and that the private farms they passed on their way to Germany, even in their ruined state, were far superior to the Soviet collective farms. No amount of propaganda could persuade them to discount the evidence of their own eyes.
The encounter with the West shaped the soldiers’ expectations of the future in their own country. Peasant soldiers were convinced that with the end of the war the collective farms would be swept away. There were many rumours of this sort in the army, most of them involving promises by Zhukov to the troops. Retold in a million letters from the soldiers to their families, these expectations spread throughout the countryside, resulting in a series of peasant strikes on the collective farms. Other soldiers talked about the need to open the churches, about the need for more democracy, even about the dismantling of the Party system root and branch. The film director Aleksandr Dovzhenko remembered a discussion with a military driver, a ‘Siberian lad’, in January 1944. ‘Our life is bad,’ the driver had said. ‘And all of us, you know, just wait for changes and improvements in our lives. We all wait. All of us. It’s just that we don’t all say it.’ ‘I was astonished by what I heard,’ Dovzhenko noted in his diary afterwards. ‘The people have a tremendous need for some other kind of life. I hear it everywhere. The only place where I don’t hear it is among our leaders.’86
Officers were in the forefront of this army movement for reform. They openly expressed their criticisms of the Soviet system and their hopes for change. One lieutenant wrote to the Soviet president Mikhail Kalinin in 1945 with a ‘series of considerations to put to the next meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet’. Having been to Maidanek, the Nazi death camp in Poland, and having seen the consequences of a dictatorship in Germany, the officer demanded an end to arbitrary arrests and imprisonment in the Soviet Union, which, he said, had its own
