The People Immortal Page 2
It is particularly striking how often two of his most positive figures – Captain Babadjanian and Battalion Commissar Bogariov – act and speak in defiance of the important Order no. 270, issued by the Stavka (the Soviet Supreme Command) on 16 August 1941. Not only do Babadjanian and Bogariov act far too independently, risking accusations of insubordination, but they also show unacceptable leniency, merely reprimanding subordinates who – according to this order – should be shot on the spot.
The text of the last part of this shockingly brutal order follows this introduction. It serves not only to bring out the boldness of Grossman’s thinking but also to illustrate the desperation of Stalin’s attempt to check the Red Army’s headlong flight.
Robert Chandler and Julia Volohova, September 2021
ORDER NO. 270, ISSUED BY THE STAVKA (THE SOVIET SUPREME COMMAND) ON 16 AUGUST 1941
This concludes as follows:
In the ranks of the Red Army, can we tolerate cowards who desert to the enemy and surrender, or commanders so cowardly that, at the slightest hitch, they tear off their badges of rank and desert to the rear? No! If we give free rein to such cowards and deserters, they will promptly bring about the disintegration of our army and the destruction of our Motherland. Cowards and deserters must be destroyed.
Can a commander be called a commander if he hides in a slit trench during a battle, if he does not keep his eyes on the battlefield, if he does not observe the course of the battle from the front line – yet still sees himself as a battalion or regimental commander? No! Such a man is not a battalion or regimental commander but an impostor. Should we give free rein to such impostors, they will soon make the army into nothing more than a massive bureaucracy. […]
I ORDER:
1. That commanders and political officers who, during combat, tear off their badges of rank and desert to the rear or surrender to the enemy are to be considered malicious deserters, their families also subject to arrest as relatives of a man who has violated his oath and betrayed his Motherland.
All higher commanders and commissars are required to shoot on the spot any such deserters from among command personnel.
2. Units and sub-units encircled by the enemy are to fight selflessly to the last, to take care of their equipment like the apple of their eye and to break through to our main forces from behind the enemy front line, defeating the Fascist dogs.
Should his unit be surrounded, every Red Army man, regardless of rank or position, is required to demand from a higher commander that he fight to the last in order to break through to our main forces, and should such a commander or Red Army unit prefer to surrender rather than strike a blow against the enemy, all possible means, both ground and air, should be used to destroy them. The families of Red Army men who allow themselves to be taken prisoner are to be deprived of all state benefits and assistance.
3. Divisional commanders and commissars are required to immediately remove from their posts any battalion or regimental commander who hides in a slit trench during a battle and is afraid to direct the course of the fighting from the battlefield. Such men should be demoted as impostors, transferred to the ranks, and, if necessary, shot on the spot. They should be replaced by brave and courageous men from the junior command staff or from the ranks of Red Army soldiers who have distinguished themselves.
This Order to be read aloud in all infantry companies, cavalry troops, artillery batteries, aircraft squadrons, command posts and HQs.
Stavka of the Red Army Supreme Command
Chairman of the State Defence Committee I. STALIN
Deputy Chairman of the State Defence Committee V. MOLOTOV
Marshal S. BUDYONNY
Marshal S. TIMOSHENKO
Marshal B. SHAPOSHNIKOV
Army General G. ZHUKOV
TIMELINE
12 December 1905: Birth of Vasily Grossman in Berdichev, Ukraine.
8–16 March 1917: “The February Revolution” – a spontaneous revolution that topples the Romanov monarchy.
7 November 1917: “The October Revolution” – the Bolshevik Party seizes power in a coup.
November 1917–October 1922: Russian Civil War. Grossman and his mother spend most of these years in Kiev, which changes hands many times.
1923: Grossman moves to Moscow to study chemistry. He becomes increasingly interested in literature, politics and the arts.
1928: Grossman’s first publications as a journalist.
Winter 1929–30: “Total Collectivization” of Soviet agriculture.
1934: Grossman’s first publications as a novelist and writer of short stories.
1937: Height of the “Great Terror”. Hundreds of thousands of members of the Soviet elite – Party members, politicians, NKVD and military officers – are arrested and executed or sent to labour camps.
1 September 1939: Germany invades Poland. This is generally accepted as marking the beginning of the Second World War.
22 June 1941: Launch of Operation Barbarossa. German forces invade the Soviet Union. This is the date that most Russians see as marking the beginning of the war, which they usually refer to not as “the Second World War” but as “the Great Patriotic War”.
28 June 1941: German forces capture Minsk, the capital of Belorussia.
7 July 1941: German forces occupy Berdichev, where Grossman was born and where his mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, is still living.
9 July 1941: German forces capture 290,000 Soviet troops near Minsk.
27 July 1941: German forces complete the encirclement of Smolensk.
28 July 1941: David Ortenberg, the editor of Red Star, appoints Grossman as a special correspondent.
5 August 1941: Grossman leaves Moscow by train. Two days later, he arrives in Gomel, 560 kilometres south-west of Moscow, the location of General Yeromenko’s Western Front HQ. A few days later, Gomel falls to the Germans.
16 August 1941: Order no. 270 published by the Stavka. This is almost as draconian as the better-known “Not a Step Back Order” of July 1942. Anyone considered to be a deserter is to be shot. Their families, too, will be subjected to draconian penalties.
30 August–8 September 1941: The historical Lieutenant Colonel Babadjanian takes part in the Yelnya offensive, the first Soviet victory during the war. Though it fails to prevent the fall of Smolensk, it provides a boost to Soviet morale.
15 September 1941: Yekaterina Savelievna is murdered, along with approximately 18,000 other Jews from the Berdichev ghetto.
16 September 1941: The Soviet Southern Front is encircled near Kiev and more than half a million soldiers are taken prisoner.
2–21 October 1941: Battle of Briansk. The 50th Army and two other Soviet armies are encircled. General Mikhail Petrov and Regimental Commissar Nikolay Shliapin, the commander and senior commissar of the 50th Army, either take their own lives or are killed in action.
10 April 1942: David Ortenberg, the editor of Red Star, gives Grossman two months’ leave to work on a novel.
11 June 1942: Grossman delivers a complete manuscript of The People Immortal, which Ortenberg promises to publish without cuts.
19 July–12 August 1942: First publication of The People Immortal, serialized over 18 issues of Red Star.
28 July 1942: Stalin issues his Order no. 227, generally known as Ni shagu nazad! (Not a Step Back!). This order, which became the main slogan of the Soviet press during the following months, is often confused with Stavka Order no. 270 of 16 August 1941 (Stalin’s personal orders are numbered separately from orders issued by the Stavka as a whole).
14 September 1942: The Germans reach the centre of Stalingrad.
31 January 1943: Friedrich Paulus, Commander of the German Sixth Army, surrenders to the Red Army at Stalingrad.
5 July–23 August 1943: Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history. The real Hamazasp Babadjanian took part in this battle, as a lieutenant colonel in command of a light armoured brigade.
1943: First English-language publication of The People Immortal
(Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), tr. Elizabeth Donnelly and Rose Prokofiev.
8–9 May 1945: Last German forces surrender. End of World War Two.
August 1952: First Russian publication of For a Just Cause, the first of Grossman’s two Stalingrad novels.
14 September 1964: Death of Vasily Grossman.
1980: First publication, in Switzerland, of a Russian-language edition of Life and Fate, the second of Grossman’s Stalingrad novels.
2019: First publication in any language, under the title Stalingrad, of an expanded version of For a Just Cause. Unlike any previous edition, this English translation incorporates passages from Grossman’s manuscripts and typescripts that he was unable to publish during his lifetime.
THE PEOPLE IMMORTAL
1
AUGUST
One summer evening in 1941, heavy artillery was moving towards Gomel. The guns were so huge that even the blasé cart drivers, who thought there was nothing they hadn’t already seen, kept glancing with curiosity at the colossal steel barrels. Dust hung in the air, the gunners’ eyes were inflamed, and their faces and uniforms were grey. Most of the men were riding on their guns; only a few were walking. One man was drinking water from his steel helmet; drops were dripping down his chin and his wet teeth glistened. For a moment, you might have thought he was laughing – but his face was tired and preoccupied.
Then came a long shout from the lieutenant walking at the head of the column:
“A-a-a-i-r-cr-a-a-a-ft!”
Above the small oak wood were two planes, flying swiftly towards the road. The men watched anxiously.
“Donkeys!”4
“No, they’re German. Junkers or Heinkels.”5
And, as always at such moments, someone came out with the standard front-line witticism, “They’re ours all right. Where’s my helmet?”
The planes were flying at right angles to the road – which meant they were ours. German planes usually banked when they spotted a column, so that they could fly in line with the road and drop small bombs or strafe the column with machine-gun fire.
Powerful road tractors were hauling the guns down the main street of a village. Cows were lowing and dogs were barking in a variety of voices. Women and old greybeards were sitting on the earth banks around whitewashed huts. Small front gardens were filled with curly golden coneflowers and red peonies that flamed in the sunset. Amid all this, the huge guns moving through the quiet of the evening seemed strange and out of place.
A small bridge, not used to such burdens, was letting out groans. Beside it, a car was waiting for the guns to pass. The driver, accustomed to delays like this, was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, smiling as he watched the gunner drink from his helmet. The battalion commissar6 sitting beside him kept looking ahead, hoping that the tail of the column might now be in sight.
“Comrade Bogariov,” the driver said with a strong Ukrainian accent, “perhaps we should stop here for the night. It’ll be dark soon.”
The commissar shook his head.
“We must hurry,” he said. “I have to get to HQ.”
“Like it or not, we can’t drive down roads like this in the dark. We’ll be spending the night in the forest.”
The commissar laughed. “Wanting a drink of milk, are you?”
“I wouldn’t say no – and some fried potatoes would be good too!”
“Or even some goose,” said the commissar.
“That too!” the driver replied cheerily.
“Three hours from now we must be at HQ – no matter how dark it gets or how bad the roads.”
Soon they were able to drive onto the bridge. Flaxen-haired village children ran tirelessly after the jeep, their bare feet almost soundless in the dust, as if they were running through water.
“Here!” they shouted. “For you! Cucumbers, tomatoes, pears!” And they tossed cucumbers and hard, unripe pears through a half-open window.
Bogariov waved at the children and felt a chill pass through his heart. For him, there was always something bitter-sweet about the sight of village children saying farewell to the Red Army as it retreated.
Before the war, Sergey Alexandrovich Bogariov had been a professor in the Faculty of Marxism in one of the main Moscow higher education institutes. Research work was important to him and he tried to devote as few hours as possible to giving lectures. His main concern was a study he had begun about two years before. The directors of the Marx–Engels Institute 7 were very interested in his work and he had twice been called to the Communist Party’s Central Committee to discuss some of his preliminary conclusions. His topic was the theoretical foundations of the collective principles of industrial and agricultural labour in Russia. His wife, Yelizaveta Vlasievna, had often been angry with him for not giving enough time to his family: he had usually left home at nine in the morning and seldom returned before eleven o’clock in the evening. And when he finally sat down to dinner, he would take a manuscript from his briefcase and start reading. His wife would ask if he was enjoying his food and whether she’d put enough salt on the fried eggs – and he would reply at random. This would both anger her and make her laugh. Then he would say, “You know, Liza, I had a wonderful day. I read several amazing letters from Marx to Lafargue.8 They were in some old archive and they’ve only recently been discovered.” He would go on to tell her all about these letters, and she would listen, involuntarily carried away by his excitement. She loved him and was proud of him. She knew how respected and valued he was by his colleagues and with what admiration they spoke of his purity and integrity.
She also found something touching about his lack of practical competence, his inability to manage small everyday matters. In summer, when the school year came to an end and they went for a month to Teberda, in the Northern Caucasus, it was she who was responsible for everything from taxis and porters to train tickets and vouchers for the house of recreation. Sergey Alexandrovich, though well able to display iron strength and determination in his work and in arguments over some matter of principle, was utterly helpless when it came to these simpler matters.9
And now Sergey Alexandrovich Bogariov was deputy head of the Front Political Administration department responsible for work among the enemy troops.10 Now and then he would remember the cool vaults of the institute’s manuscript repository, a desk heaped with papers, a shaded lamp, the creak of the stepladder a librarian was moving from one bookshelf to another. Sometimes odd sentences from his unfinished study would come to mind and he would return to the questions that had so passionately engaged him throughout his life.
•
The car speeds along the road. There is dust everywhere: dark brick dust, yellow dust, fine grey dust. Men’s faces look like the faces of corpses. These clouds of dust hanging over every road near the front line have been raised by hundreds of thousands of Red Army boots, by truck wheels and tank tracks, by road tractors and artillery, by the small hooves of pigs and sheep, by collective-farm horses and huge herds of cows, by collective-farm tractors, by the creaking carts of refugees, by the bast sandals of collective-farm foremen and the little shoes of girls leaving Bobruisk, Mozyr, Zhlobin, Shepetovka and Berdichev.11 Dust hangs over Ukraine and Belorussia; it swirls over the Soviet earth. At night, the dark August sky reddens from the sinister glow of burning villages. The heavy rumble of exploding bombs rolls through birch groves, over quivering aspens and through dark forests of oak and pine. Green and red tracer bullets riddle the sky’s heavy velvet. Anti-aircraft shells burst like small white sparks. Heinkels loaded with high-explosive bombs drone through the dark, their engines seeming to say, B-b-bomber, b-b-bomber. Old men, women and children in villages and hamlets wave the retreating soldiers on their way, offering them curd cheese, pies, cucumbers and glasses of milk. The old women weep and weep, searching amid thousands of grim, dusty, exhausted faces for the face of a son. And they hold out the little white bundles with their gifts of food, “Take this, love. You are all my own sons. Every one of you has a
place in my heart.”
Sergey Alexandrovich Bogariov has been on these roads for fifty days now. Now and then he asks himself, “Do I still need my old life – my thoughts, my joys and disappointments, all those pages I wrote, all my hard work that seemed as precious as gold?”12
Hordes of Germans are advancing from the west. Their tanks are daubed with antlered deer heads, with green and red dragons, with wolf maws and fox tails, with skulls and crossbones. Every German soldier has in his pocket photographs of conquered Paris, devastated Warsaw, shameful Verdun, burned-down Belgrade and occupied Brussels, Amsterdam, Oslo, Narvik, Athens and Gdynia. In every officer’s wallet are photographs of German women and girls with fringes and curls, lounging at home in striped pyjamas. Every officer wears some kind of amulet: a gold trinket, a string of coral, a tiny stuffed animal with yellow bead eyes. Every officer carries in his pocket a German–Russian military phrasebook full of such clear, straightforward phrases as “Hands up!”, “Halt, don’t move!”, “Where’s your gun?”, “Surrender!” Every German soldier has learned a few words of Russian or Ukrainian: mleko (milk); kleb (bread); yaiki (eggs); koko (Cluck-cluck!); and the curt Davay, davay! (Come on – hand it over!). All these officers and soldiers are confident of Nazi Germany’s greatness and invincibility. They defeated Denmark in half a day, Poland in seventeen days, France in thirty-five days, Greece in eight days and Holland in five – and they have no doubt that within seventy days they can reduce Ukraine, Belorussia and Russia to slavery.13