History: Two new works document the lives of Red Army soldiers and an army reporter, writes Ian Thomson.
In January 1945 the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. Russian cavalry announced "Germania kaputt!" and, dismounting in the snow, pointed to the red stars on their caps. "Ruski! Ruski!" The Russians soon looked embarrassed, even revolted, by what they saw. The Jews before them were starved. However, world Jewry had reason to be grateful to the Red Army: had the Nazis won the war, all Jewish culture from the shtetls - small towns where the majority of the inhabitants were Jewish - of Lithuania to the salons of Vienna would have disappeared from Europe.
Primo Levi was one of the 800 to 900 Jews left in the Auschwitz IV Judenlager that January. His celebrated war memoir, The Truce (1963), was one of the first books to describe the post-war Soviet Union from the inside. Readers were curious to know about the chaotic Red Bear, its people and their indomitable spirit. Yet, in spite of Levi's approving portrait of the Red Army, The Truce was not well-received in the Soviet Union, and is still not translated into Russian. Levi's vignettes of Red Army life were considered reactionary; the Astrakhan-furred troops of his description were either permanently drunk or lazy. How could these vodka-swilling Ruskis have beaten Hitler's disciplined armies?
The Red Army was known to its recruits as the "meat grinder". When the German army invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the carnage as it advanced across the Stalin Line was appalling. An estimated 27 million Soviet citizens died in the conflict they called the Great Patriotic War. The majority were civilians, but Red Army casualties exceeded 8 million. Yet the day-to-day existence of the ordinary Ivan - the Russian equivalent of the British Tommy or the German Fritz - remains unexplored. Where did he come from? What did he believe in? What trauma had he endured?
In her remarkable new book, Ivan's War, Catherine Merridale rescues the Red Army from accumulated myth and propaganda. With her excellent Russian, she interviewed Red Army veterans, travelled to their battle sites and dredged documents from "sensitive" sources.
With imaginative empathy, she recreates the lives of ordinary Russian soldiers. Many were reluctant to reveal their inner selves to a foreigner (and a woman at that). Stalin had cultivated the Bolshevik virtue of tverdost - hardness - and veterans are ashamed to appear emotionally soft. Yet, as Merridale shows, Stalin was often the last thing on a Red Army conscript's mind as German shells exploded; battle stress or depression were far more likely to intrude.
At the war's end, not surprisingly, many Red Army survivors felt the grip of depression and began to fear death as they had not done before. Yet anyone guilty of threatening the unity of the socialist state by his deeds or even thoughts, Stalin decreed, would be punished. So soldiers learned to bottle up their emotions. Few of them had any awareness of the disturbance - the neurotic aftermath - that soon lay ahead after Hitler's defeat at the hands of Stalin. The effect of war on the psyche was simply not known in 1945.
With admirable patience, Merridale coaxes out stories of everyday fear, depression and desertion. In the course of her search for the "real Ivan" she finds not the cast-iron stalwart of Stalinist myth, but a human creature prone to drinking (looted schnapps, white spirit, sometimes even anti-freeze), belting out Kalinka Kala and devising anti-Stalinist burlesques. Rape, long a taboo subject among the Russian military, was carried out on a horrific scale in Berlin in 1945, and Merridale does not flinch from documenting the reality.
It is impossible not to admire her dedication to the task. Night of Stone, her previous book, was a beautifully written study of death and bereavement in Soviet Russia; if anything, Ivan's War is a greater achievement. The book painstakingly reveals the twisted nature of Stalin's propaganda, but also returns dignity to the ordinary soldiers of the Red Army.
Vasily Grossman was a special correspondent for the Soviet army newspaper Red Star. His dispatches from the front between 1941 and 1945 combined good writing with an emotional and intellectual engagement. A Ukrainian-born Jew, rather than side with the Stalinist establishment Grossman preferred to question and document truthfully what he saw and heard. A Writer at War, a fascinating collection of Grossman's notebook jottings, bristles with pungent observation and incident. Superbly edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova (his Russian-speaking assistant), the book serves as a companion to Grossman's classic novel, Life and Fate, about the glories and depredations of Stalingrad.
As the editors point out, Grossman's humanity lent his journalism a special kind of candour. His account of the vile workings of Treblinka, the Nazi extermination camp near Auschwitz, still shocks with its controlled understatement and unsparing lucidity. Reading the article, it is clear that Grossman believed there was a unique moral horror to what the Nazis did. The industrial exploitation of Jews and their ashes was a uniquely Hitlerian atrocity and different in kind from the horrors of the Gulag.
Not surprisingly, Grossman was mortified when the man who had prevented the annihiliation of Jews under Hitler was suddenly set on their extinction. On January 13th, 1953, Stalin announced via the communist organ Pravda that a plot to murder Kremlin members had been unmasked among Russian Jewish doctors. Jews were now a self-regarding, supra-national sect inimical to Mother Russia, yet they had fought courageously in the Red Army. Vasily Grossman, as a "cosmopolitan traitor" to Mother Russia, was reduced to the status of a non-person. It was a fine way to treat a Russian hero.
Ian Thomson's biography of Primo Levi (Vintage) won the Royal Society of Literature WH Heinemann Award 2003
Ivan's War: The Red Army 1939-1945. By Catherine Merridale, Faber & Faber, 396pp. £20
A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945. Edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova Harvill, 378pp. £20