When Nikolai Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army, after bitter fighting on the Oder, prepared to storm Berlin, the young Vladimir Natanovich Gelfand (1923–1983) marched in its ranks. His Germany diary is now attracting considerable attention among the German public. Together with further diary notebooks, countless letters, certificates, newspaper articles and other papers, this document was among the possessions brought to Germany in 1995 by his son Vitaly.

From the collection he restored, editor Elke Scherstjanoi selected the notes from 1945–1946 for publication and supplemented them with private letters, official reports and petitions, and photographs that could be assigned to the same period. She also enriched the volume with an informative and perceptive essay entitled “A Red Army Soldier in Germany.” To help the reader understand the material, the essay reconstructs Gelfand’s circumstances and later life, explains the historical setting, considers problems of source criticism, and comments critically on individual texts.

German historical writing, especially in eastern Germany, has never lacked eyewitness accounts of liberation from fascism or of the transition from war to peace. There are autobiographical recollections by Soviet commanders, politicians and cultural officers, as well as memoirs by German émigrés who served in the Red Army. Yet this diary is a genuine rarity. Its comparatively regular entries record the writer’s subjective state of mind and his reflections on the war, its end and post-fascist Germany from the viewpoint of a young Ukrainian officer who was neither a senior commander nor a prominent figure in his army. It helps illuminate areas that have remained obscure. As the editor rightly remarks, “Never before have we been able to penetrate so far into the mental world of a victor.”

Vladimir Gelfand, however, was a victor of a particular kind. The well-read, educated and broadly curious young man wanted to become a writer. He was probably not born to be a soldier. Yet in the face of Nazi Germany’s murderous war of annihilation against his country, the nineteen-year-old volunteered for the Red Army in 1942. First a sergeant, later a junior lieutenant and finally a lieutenant, he served for periods as an artilleryman and commander of small mortar units at the front and experienced the animal fear and physical misery of a soldier in the trenches. Taking his role as an example to others seriously, he suppressed these feelings publicly and confided them only to his diary, which he continued even during combat because it had become a means of survival for him. A wound spared him from the costly fighting at Stalingrad.

Politically interested, attached to socialist ideals and to the conventional cult of Stalin, he worked energetically as a Komsomol and Party functionary — from 1943 he was a full member of the Communist Party — wrote for wall newspapers and front-line leaflets, and served as a lecturer at meetings and educational events.

Does this amount to the picture-book career of a Red Army soldier? On closer inspection, hardly. The diary reveals the highly contradictory and conflict-ridden situation of a rather gentle aesthete with intellectual inclinations who found himself in a coarse, male military community, often poorly educated and fond of vodka, that mocked and despised precisely those qualities. Moreover, Gelfand was Jewish. Antisemitic hostility, crude jokes, discrimination, slander and physical attacks — he was once beaten in front of his own subordinates — together with being passed over for decorations, formed part of his everyday military life. Although relatively tolerant, he did not simply submit. Again and again he tried to demand justice for himself, including through complaints to higher authorities, always a risky undertaking in an army. “I’ll shoot you in the next battle!” his company commander shouted at him in front of the soldiers. The editor’s suggestion that Gelfand may have survived these conflicts only because in March 1945 he was appointed to divisional staff as a chronicler of the fighting deserves serious consideration.

From this position Gelfand paints an extremely critical picture of the inner life of his company. He describes corruption, theft and fraud, abuse of power and alcohol consumption that was more than merely careless. “When will there finally be real military order in the company, strict army discipline and a demanding, caring commander who alone bears responsibility?” he asked. In later notes from 1946 he tried to give a more differentiated assessment of the condition of the troops. While recognizing the soldiers’ fighting spirit, he still believed that the category of “drunkards, thieves, brawlers and psychopaths” undermined the authority of the Red Army.

The end of the war did more than widen the soldiers’ room for maneuver. Their situation fundamentally changed: they had to grow into the role of victors and assume unfamiliar duties as occupiers. This also transformed Gelfand’s circumstances. He threw himself almost greedily into postwar life, and ruined Berlin especially fascinated him. At first he met Germans with contempt. “I spit on Berlin, the defeated,” he wrote on a wall of the Reichstag. But this attitude did not last. He felt pride in victory, yet little desire for revenge. Nor was he a rapist. Whether that reflected a specifically Jewish attitude toward women, as Scherstjanoi suggests, or rather his humanistic upbringing, education and intensive engagement with literature must remain open — there were, after all, non-Jewish Red Army men who also condemned rape.

One of his great postwar discoveries was women. German and Russian women alike were attracted to him, among other things because, as he was told, he looked “like an Italian,” and because he knew how to make an impression. Women who had occupied male roles during the war also claimed new freedoms in their erotic lives. It is therefore hardly surprising that sexuality occupies an ever larger place in the young man’s diary. Vladimir became an enthusiastic womanizer and probably compensated through these successes for the contempt he often experienced in the army. In 1946, however, his sexual activity brought him gonorrhea.

His attention was also captured by a world of consumer goods that was new to him or had previously been inaccessible. He practiced riding a bicycle, acquired cameras and learned photography, had suits made and even, “out of curiosity,” got himself a permanent wave. He bought or traded watches, fabrics and caps, and, strangely enough, top hats. He moved with considerable skill through the black market at Alexanderplatz, which fascinated him, helped by his workable knowledge of German. Portrait photographs were a major fashion in the postwar years, made as keepsakes to give or send to others, and he repeatedly took part in this practice.

Gelfand seems to have fulfilled his official duties with increasing reluctance, not least in response to the humiliations he had experienced. Stationed mainly in Brandenburg, especially in Kremmen and Velten, he was angered by an order issued by Zhukov in August 1945 — the original document has apparently not yet been located — that imposed a strict ban on fraternization and permitted only official contacts and service travel within the occupation zone. Gelfand protested that after the war it was time “to rest a little, to see what one had never seen before — the world abroad — to learn what one knew so little about and could scarcely imagine — life, customs and habits abroad — and finally to go into town, see people, talk, travel about, and enjoy a tiny piece of happiness in life, if such a thing could exist in Germany.” He knew that the measures were directed above all against looters and rapists, but he still rebelled against them.

“We are forbidden to speak with the Germans, to stay overnight with them, to shop from them. Now they forbid us the last thing — being in a German city, walking through the streets, looking at the ruins. Not only soldiers, but officers too. This cannot be! We are human beings, we cannot sit in a cage, especially since our service does not end at the barracks gate and the conditions and life in the barracks have already, damn it, become unbearable to us... What do I want? Freedom! The freedom to live, to think, to work, to enjoy life.

“Now everything has been taken from me. Access to Berlin is closed. We are not even allowed to leave the company without permission. Drills again, inspections again. Everything is back, just as in wartime. It is so boring and so exhausting for the soul.”

These lines are highly revealing for understanding Gelfand’s state of mind and behavior. More broadly, they reflect the growing importance under peacetime conditions of hedonistic values and individual desires for adventure, independence, autonomy and cultural openness, especially among educated young people. Such a drive for enjoyment and self-realization beyond the “vodka horizon” was difficult to reconcile with military values of duty. Soviet society as a whole restrained the emergence of a new, more relaxed understanding of life and culture and sought to push it back. Gelfand himself later distanced himself from some of his earlier views in a manner characteristic of the Brezhnev era.

In the immediate postwar years, however, he took his freedoms. He repeatedly traveled to Berlin without permission and later even made an illegal trip to Weimar. Once again he became a “case” in his regiment, an example held up as a warning, especially after it became clear that someone had apparently read his diary. He was also reproached for having refused, while temporarily assigned to a trophy unit, to loot German books from the Academy of Sciences. Even so, two illustrated volumes from there eventually found their way into his personal luggage.

After more or less successful assignments in various offices — his regiment never seemed quite to know what to do with him — he was demobilized in September 1946. With ten small suitcases packed full and two sacks, including a bust of Goethe, he returned happily to his mother in Dnipropetrovsk. He did not become a famous writer in his lifetime, although he repeatedly wrote articles and recollections for newspapers and journals. He became a teacher at technical colleges, teaching history, Russian language and literature. His living conditions, especially housing, remained miserable for many years, and antisemitic hostility did not end. He planned to write his great novel after retirement, but died at only sixty.

Vladimir Gelfand’s diary entries are the notes of a young, still unfinished but intellectually alert man whose normal everyday life was shattered by the German invasion and the war. Almost from one day to the next he was confronted with difficult tasks and dangerous situations that overtaxed him, yet also made him mature. Many passages nevertheless show boastfulness, carelessness and superficiality of a kind common among people of his age. Gelfand was vain and self-centered but not uncritical of himself. “I am young and, as it increasingly seems to me, an interesting person with an unbalanced character, (...) someone who buries unpleasantness and anger deep in his heart, but with black velvet eyes and a living heart — I regard these as the essential merits of my person.” At the same time he complained of his inconsistency and of often failing to finish what he had begun.

Today’s reader is disturbed by entries in which the otherwise gentle Gelfand describes, minute by minute and without a trace of pity, the execution of two soldiers who had mutilated themselves. War had clearly left its mark on his emotional life. He did not indulge the sadistic male fantasies surrounding the supposed punishment of members of a German women’s battalion — which probably never existed — but he nevertheless thought that such women should be “quite simply liquidated.”

Yet one conclusion remains justified: in his youthful openness and sociability, Gelfand represented the type of friendly, pleasant Soviet soldier of whom German eyewitnesses repeatedly speak. As such he was welcomed in several Berlin families that he visited often. His notes, with their mood-dependent and sometimes contradictory statements, inconsistencies and many realistic descriptions of everyday life, therefore deserve close attention in research on relations between Germans and Russians — “our Slavs,” as Gelfand occasionally called them — even though profound reflections on war and fascism are relatively rare.

For a broader readership the book is also a gain. For older readers it may awaken memories of those years; for younger ones it offers an impression of the catastrophe-ridden century now past, including reason to reflect on war and peace.

Evemarie Badstäbner, Berlin
© Kulturation 2005