Berlin: The Downfall 1945

‘Zemlyanka, the great wartime song set in a frozen bunker ‘just four steps from death’.

The hurricane lamp is driving away darkness,
Making a way for my pen.
You and I are close through this letter.
We are like a brother and a sister.
I long for you from the front
And I will find you when these days of fighting are over
Deep in the homeland
If only I survive.
And if the worst happens
If the days of my life are counted
Remember me sometimes
Remember me with a kind word.
Well, goodbye for now.
It is time for me to go to attack the Germans
And I want to carry your name forward
If only in my battle-cry ‘Ura!’

‘Wait for Me’, one of the most popular songs of the war, was based on the poem which made Konstantin Simonov famous in 1942. It evoked the Red Army’s quasi-religious superstition that if a girlfriend remained faithful, the soldier would stay alive. It was permitted by the authorities only because it strengthened military patriotism. Many soldiers kept ‘Wait for Me’ written on a piece of paper in their left breast pocket, and read it silently to themselves like a prayer in the moments before they went into the attack.

The song ‘Blue Shawl’, about a faithful girl’s farewell to her soldier lover, also produced such intense loyalty that many soldiers added it to the official battle-cry, making it ‘Za Rodinu, za Stalina, za Siny Platochek!’ — ‘For the Motherland, for Stalin, for the Blue Shawl!’ A great number of Komsomol members still carried newspaper cuttings with a photograph of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the young Komsomol partisan ‘tortured to death by Germans’. Many wrote ‘for Zoya’ on their tanks and aircraft.

Another poem of Simonov’s, on the other hand, was condemned as ‘indecent’, ‘vulgar’ and ‘bad for morale’. It was ironically entitled ‘Liricheskoe’, or ‘Lyrical’.

They remember names for an hour.
Memories here do not last for long.
Man says ‘War…’, and embraces a woman carelessly.
He is grateful to those who had so easily,
Without wanting to be called ‘darling’,
Replaced for him another one who is far away.
Here she was as compassionate as she could be to other women’s loved ones,
And warmed them in bad times with the generosity of her uncommitted body.
And for those waiting to go into the attack,
Those who may never live to see love,
They find it easier when they remember that yesterday
At least someone’s arms were around them.

However much the authorities disapproved of songs or poems about unfaithful girlfriends, iconoclasts still thought up ribald versions of officially approved songs. The tear-jerker ‘Dark Night’, about a soldier’s wife standing beside their child’s cot ‘secretly wiping her tears’, was turned into ‘secretly taking her streptocide’, the Soviet wartime medicine for venereal disease.

Official patriotic songs never really took on. The only exception was the ‘Song of the Artillerists’, which came from the film At Six o ’clock in the Evening after the End of the War. The film was screened for soldiers at the front just before the battle of Berlin. It showed an artillery officer who has survived to meet his true love in Moscow during the victory celebrations, but although this may have been good for morale in one way, it certainly did not help soldiers with the very natural fear of risking death when the fighting was almost over.

Other songs also looked beyond the end of the war. Soldiers of the 4th Guards Tank Army composed a sequel to the hit of spring 1943, Davai Zakunim:

Soon we will return home.

The girls will meet us,

And the stars of the Urals will shine for us.

Some day we will remember these days.

Kamenets-Podolsk and the blue Carpathians.

The fighting thunder of the tanks.

Lvov and the steppe behind the Vistula.

You won’t forget this year.

You’ll tell your children of it.

Some day, we will remember these days.

Red Army soldiers experienced an irresistible urge to finish the war, but the closer they were to victory, the more they hoped to survive. And yet men desperately wanted a medal to take home. It would make a great difference to their standing in the community and especially within their own family. But there was one thing that they feared even more than being killed in the last days of the war after having survived so far against all odds. That was to lose legs and arms. A limbless veteran, known as a samovar, was treated like an outcast.

After sunset on the evening of 15 April, Colonel Kalashnik, the chief of the 47th Army’s political department, sent Captain Vladimir Gall and the young Lieutenant Konrad Wolf to the front line, ready to interview the first prisoners brought back. Koni Wolf, a German, was the son of the Communist playwright Friedrich Wolf, who had become part of the ‘Moscow emigration’ in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. Koni’s elder brother, Misha, became notorious in the Cold War as Markus Wolf, the chief of East German espionage.

It was virtually dark as the two friends, armed only with pistols, made their way forward through woods to the bank of the Oder. Tanks and men were camouflaged all around them. As the two young officers walked forward between the trees, they could sense that ‘huge forces were concentrated there’ all around them, even though they could hardly see anything because of the dark. ‘It felt like a huge spring about to be released,’ remarked Gall.

Others were engaged on much more dangerous work. Sappers had slipped out at nightfall into no man’s land to clear mines. ‘We warned all infantry people of what we were doing,’ said Captain Shota Sulkhanishvili of the 3rd Shock Army, ‘but when one of my sappers was returning, an infantry man threw a grenade at him. He was asleep and panicked when he heard steps. I was furious and beat him almost to death. For me, all my men were worth gold, especially the mine-clearers.’

Those who had already acquired watches longed to look at the time — to know how many more minutes remained before the attack. But no lights were allowed. It was hard to think of anything else.

15. Zhukov on the Reitwein Spur