jumping from tussock to tussock ‘like rabbits’, to derisive German shouts of ‘
We were completely helpless, since we had no ammunition, no petrol, no bread, no tobacco, not even salt. Worst of all was having no medical help. No medicine, no bandages. You want to help the wounded, but how? All our underwear has gone for bandages long ago; all we have left is moss and cotton wool. The field hospitals are overflowing, and the few medical staff in despair. Many hundreds of non-walking wounded simply lie under bushes. Around them mosquitoes and flies buzz like bees in a hive. Come near and the whole swarm comes after you, covers you all over, gets into your mouth, eyes, ears — unbearable. Mosquitoes, flies and lice — our hated enemies. . Nothing new about lice — but in
The main problem, though, was hunger. Oppressive, never-ending hunger. Wherever you went, whatever you were doing, the thought of food never left you. . Our food supply now depended on air deliveries by U2 [a type of small, one-engined biplane]. Each could carry five or six sacks of
Another reshuffle of the top brass, removing Khozin and separating the two northern commands again (the Volkhov Front was handed back to vindicated Meretskov, Leningrad to a taciturn, poker-faced artilleryman, Leonid Govorov), came far too late to make a difference.21 By mid-June the remnants of the Second Shock Army had been pushed into a small stretch of swamp to the west of Myasnoi Bor:
White nights, so we had German planes overhead twenty-four hours a day, strafing and dropping bombs. The noise of shellfire was continuous and deafening, as was the sound of breaking and burning trees. . We weren’t an army any more — we were a market crowd. A complete mess — no communication between units, and lines of command had ceased to exist. No information on our own situation, but limitless amounts of German propaganda — flyers, newspapers, coloured proclamations — covering the ground and urging us to surrender. . The forest burns, the peat smoulders. There are bomb craters everywhere and twisted, broken trees — piles of useless rifles, wrecked gun carriages. And corpses — corpses everywhere you looked. Thousands of them, stinking and covered in flies, decomposing under the June sun. You pass one and the flies rise off it into your face — you can’t see anything, they’re in your eyes, your nose, everywhere. Big fat buzzing flies — disgusting to remember. On every bit of dry ground there are wounded soldiers, screaming, moaning, pleading — some for water, some for somebody to finish them off. But nobody cares. People wander about the woods, indifferent, sullen, half-mad; in hats with the ear flaps tied under the chin so as to keep off the mosquitoes; eyes red and swollen from lack of sleep. . Nobody has a watch, we lose track of time. What date is it? Is it day or night?22
The end came on the relentlessly sunlit nights of 21–24 June, in a series of suicidal breakouts through a gap in the German lines four kilometres long and only a few hundred metres wide. Those with enough strength carried rifles, and the emaciated and wounded nothing at all. The German fire, in the words of a survivor, was ‘so fierce that everything was flung into the air — people, earth, trees. You couldn’t see anything for smoke.’ Stumbling over corpses old and new, he took shelter in a bomb crater, then slid down a bank past a German tank towards a stream. ‘An astonishing silence fell, then suddenly, a voice: “Stop! Who goes there!” It was our soldiers; we had got through to the other side.’23
One soldier who did not get through to the other side was General Vlasov, who had dropped all radio communication with front headquarters a few days previously. How exactly he spent the next three weeks is unclear, but on 12 July he was picked up by the Germans in a village on the western edge of the ‘pocket’ and flown to Vinnitsa in central Ukraine, site of Hitler’s new forward headquarters and of a special camp for high-ranking Soviet prisoners. Here — perhaps in rush of anger at the Myasnoi Bor disaster, perhaps as the cumulation of years of suppressed doubt and frustration — Vlasov turned against Stalin, writing a letter to the Nazi authorities in which he argued that since many Soviet citizens were strongly anti-Bolshevik, civilians in occupied territory should be better treated and Soviet POWs recruited into a Russian Liberation Army. He had misjudged his audience: ‘We will never build a Russian Army’, Hitler sneered. ‘It is a phantom of the first order.’ Though the Nazis made good use of Vlasov for propaganda purposes, touring him round the occupied territories and putting his name to leaflets inciting the Red Army to surrender, he never met Hitler and was only given command of two POW-based divisions late in January 1945. Four months later he was captured by the Soviets amidst the confusion of the Prague Rising, and in July 1946 tried in a closed court and hanged.24
Vlasov’s treason was also fatal to the reputation of the Second Shock Army, its demise transformed from heroic last stand into deliberate mass defection to the enemy. A Major General Afanasyev, Vlasov’s chief of communications, was flown out from behind enemy lines in August, having spent the intervening weeks living off hedgehogs with partisans. His interrogation report, in which he describes Vlasov as lapsing into dumb indifference before wandering off into the woods alone, reeks of fear of accusation of treachery. On flying back over the Soviet lines, he claims, he could not help shouting, ‘Hurrah! Long live our Great and Beloved Friend and Teacher Comrade Stalin!’, although he was ‘the only passenger, and the pilot could not hear’.25
Post-war, all mention of the Second Shock Army was taboo. No histories were written, ceremonies enacted or memorials erected, and the widows of its fallen were denied military pensions. Veterans were forced to treat their service as a shameful secret, on a par with having been the son of a kulak or priest. Rehabilitation did not begin until the late 1970s, when local volunteer groups began mounting expeditions into the backwoods to recover and decently inter tens of thousands of still unburied bodies.
Sasha Orlov is the son of one of the volunteer movement’s founders. Wearing rubber waders and an army- issue jacket, he stands next to a decommissioned half-track in wilderness a few kilometres to the south-east of Myasnoi Bor. Snow and sky are a flat, dull grey; the oranges and golds of new willow and dead reeds muted. Just out of sight, where the ground dips, lies the Volkhov. Save for the twittering of finches in a nearby bush, it is completely silent. Here, Sasha explains, was a German bunker. Scraping at the snow with his foot, he rapidly uncovers a leather boot, a rusty saw, two earth-filled green wine bottles, a length of ammunition belt, a stovepipe, the spiral skeleton of a hose and dozens of pointy nosed 7.92mm rifle rounds, packed in neat rows inside a rotten wooden box. Ignoring nervous health and safety pleas, he breaks open one of the rounds against a stone and tips out a little heap of shiny slate-grey flakes. A lighter rasps and they flare and crackle, throwing off a miniature fountain of bright white sparks.
The group’s finds are displayed in the gymnasium of a local school. There are hand-painted wall maps — the front lines carefully delineated in interlocking red and grey — a variety of guns (the police periodically take them away, Sasha says, but his group just goes out and gets more), and a litter of helmets, water bottles and tin spoons with Cyrillic initials scratched into the handles. Three fat ring binders are filled with the Red Army equivalent of dog tags: narrow paper forms, filled in by hand, which were rolled up and put inside small screw-top Bakelite cylinders. When found they are now almost always illegible, with the result that of the 29,000 bodies
