“Diary, Dear Friend!” Vladimir Gelfand’s Wartime Diary

Wartime diaries: strategies of historical research

Editors’ note: We publish excerpts from the newly released book Vladimir Gelfand. Diary 1941-1946, prepared by the HSE International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences.

To write the history of Soviet society on the basis of official documents alone - even documents never intended for publication and kept under lock and key in archives - is to mislead the reader. More precisely, relying on texts and other materials produced by the authorities and their agents distorts the historical perspective. The state has generally viewed, and still views, history in terms of its “usefulness.” History is treated as an instrument of education and as proof of historical rights; in short, as part of politics. The state attempts to pursue a particular “politics of memory,” managing the memory of certain events. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it does not.

War is no exception. In our country, when one simply says or writes “the war,” everyone understands the Second World War, which we call the Great Patriotic War. It is part of Soviet history, although in both public memory and historical research it often seems to stand apart from the general course of that history.

Private memory is pushed to the margins and deprived of legitimacy. At first glance, war might seem least affected by this, since an enormous number of military memoirs were published in the Soviet period. Yet a substantial, perhaps the greater, part of them were issued by military commanders of various ranks, notably in the famous “Military Memoirs” series. The texts were carefully edited and coordinated and, as a rule, were not even written by the generals and marshals themselves but by ghostwriters, most of whom were not especially gifted writers. Memory of the war was carefully standardized.

“Military memoirs became something like notes from beyond the grave, composed by Chateaubriand-like generals,” wrote former machine-gun company commander Zinovy Chernilovsky, “while soldiers such as Nekrasov or Bykov concentrated on the artistic vision of war. Where is the company commander who will dare to show this greatest of wars as a participant saw it? Simply and routinely - not as a ‘man with a gun,’ but much more plainly and ordinarily, in the spirit of the familiar French saying: war is war...” [1]

The situation began to change during perestroika, and in post-Soviet Russia there was a genuine “memory revolution.” The number of texts about the war grew exponentially, and so did their frankness. Hundreds of memoir volumes appeared. Military-history enthusiasts recorded thousands of veterans’ stories. It turned out that some ordinary participants in the great war had written accounts of their wartime experience without expecting publication: for their children and grandchildren, “for the drawer,” for history. Sometimes the impulse to write came from official lies about the war and from the participation of officially appointed “veterans” in those lies.

“No country has such remarkable veterans as our own beloved USSR,” Vasyl Bykov wrote. They “not only fail to help reveal the truth and justice of the war, but on the contrary are now more concerned than anyone else with hiding the truth and replacing it with propagandistic mythmaking in which they are heroes and nothing else. They have settled into this inflated image and will not allow it to be destroyed.” [2]

It is telling that Bykov’s letter to N. N. Nikulin, author of Memoirs of the War, written in the mid-1970s and published in 2008, was dated 1996. For Bykov the USSR, at least in its attitude toward the war, continued to exist. Nikulin, who began the war near Leningrad and ended it in Germany, was prompted to write his memoirs by the official celebrations of the thirtieth anniversary of Victory. His preface to the manuscript, which was not intended for publication, is dated 1975. “This is only an attempt,” Nikulin wrote, “to free myself from the past: just as in Western countries people go to a psychoanalyst and lay out their anxieties, worries and secrets in the hope of being healed and finding peace, I turned to paper in order to scrape from the corners of memory the filth, murk and swinishness lodged there, and to free myself from the memories that oppressed me.” In an afterword written in 2007, Nikulin remarked about his still unpublished and extremely harsh manuscript that he was struck by “the mildness with which [it] depicts the events of the war”: “The horrors of war are softened in it; the most monstrous episodes are simply not mentioned.” [3]

Of course, memoirs written forty or even fifty years after the events they describe, like oral history interviews, must be treated with great caution. The problem is not merely the weakness of human memory. The people writing and speaking are already different people from those they were during the war. Life experience, surroundings, books read and films seen, and decades of propaganda inevitably affect what is written or recalled. Sometimes veterans, without noticing it, insert plots from films into their own stories; sometimes they argue with what they have read or watched. Without going into the details of source criticism, one can say that these “new memoirs” are usable, but cannot simply be taken on trust.

Where, then, can we find reliable information about the war - let us not invoke the lofty word “truth” unnecessarily - not only about heroes and exploits, which dominate wartime literature, but about the everyday life of soldiers and officers? In war people do not only kill and die. They play cards, drink, sing, envy, love and steal. In short, they live. Despite the vast literature about the war, least of all has been written about this: life in war, and especially the life of the “ordinary Ivan” (or Abram).

The answer seems obvious: we should turn to personal sources from the war years - diaries and letters. But this is precisely where the problem begins. Letters were censored, and servicemen knew it well. Thus letters passed through a “double censorship,” internal and external. War is not the best time for keeping a diary, and it was widely believed that diaries were forbidden.

When the political commissar of Zinovy Chernilovsky’s company saw his notebook, he seized it and threw it into the stove: “Remember, company commander, Comrade Stalin has ordered that anyone who keeps a diary is to be shot.” “I do not know whether such an order existed,” Chernilovsky wrote more than half a century later, “but I never kept a diary again. Like everyone else.” [4]

As it turned out, not everyone stopped. Nor has any special order prohibiting diaries yet been found. Evidently diary-keeping was forbidden on general grounds of secrecy. Some people kept diaries despite any prohibition; others simply did not know that such a prohibition was supposed to exist, as in the case of Sergeant Boris Komsky. [5]

And there was hardly an order in the USSR that was never violated - in this case, fortunately for historians. Engineer and private soldier Mark Shumelishsky made notes on separate sheets, sometimes without dates. He understood that recording his impressions, and especially his opinions, was dangerous. “There is so much one would like to record and later think through using concrete examples, but one cannot... one cannot write everything down. A note that falls into the hands of some bastard can do harm.” Shumelishsky was not afraid of being denounced. He feared that the enemy might use his critical notes for its own purposes. Criticism, he believed, belonged to the future. “It is, as it were, potential criticism.” [6]

SMERSH officers held preventive conversations with Irina Dunaevskaya, but after finding nothing secret in her notes - unit numbers or names - they did not forbid her to continue keeping a diary.

Some diarists had kept journals before the war and did not abandon the habit at the front; for others, the war itself became the reason to record the greatest event of their lives, in which they happened to participate. Front-line diaries, until recently regarded as a unique phenomenon, can probably be reclassified as a very rare one. [7] A characteristic of such sources is that they were seldom deposited in state archives. “Private memory” generally remained private, among family papers. Sometimes, however, diaries turn up in state repositories too, including the archives of an institution with which the overwhelming majority of Soviet people preferred to have no dealings. There they survive as physical evidence in case files. [8]

Why did Red Army soldiers keep diaries? Most of these “writers” had at least some literary ambitions and may have intended to use their diaries in future books. High-school graduate Sergeant Boris Komsky wrote poetry and dreamed of a literary career. Private David Kaufman had been a student at Moscow’s Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History (IFLI), was preparing to become a professional writer, and had already published his first poem in a serious literary journal. Kaufman would later write one of the best-known poems about the war, “The Forties, Fateful...” There is probably no need to remind the reader of the literary pseudonym under which its author became famous.

Engineer Mark Shumelishsky asked himself “again and again”: “Why the devil do I keep trying to make notes all the time?” He was constantly pursued by the idea of collecting material and, eventually, writing a good truthful book that would reflect the real moods of certain groups of people in the rear during that great time. Such a book, he thought, could of course be written many years later, when everything had been lived through, reconsidered and assessed. But at the moment it was essential to record many small details. [9]

Sergeant Pavel Elkinson began keeping a diary for a very specific reason. On 28 August 1944 he wrote:

“At last the long-awaited day of the complete expulsion of the Germans from our land on our sector of the front has arrived. Here is the Prut, here is the border. Only six days have passed since we began the offensive, and how much has been accomplished. Bessarabia has been completely cleared. Peace has been concluded with Romania. Tomorrow we shall cross the border. Did I ever think that I would have to go abroad? It turns out that I will. How I want to remember everything I see and write it down briefly. After all, something like this happens only once in a lifetime...” [10]

Elkinson, who served as an artillery reconnaissance soldier, did a fair amount of “travelling” through Europe: from August 1944 to May 1945 he was in Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Austria.

* * *

At first glance Vladimir Gelfand’s diary seems to fit among other wartime diaries. Yet this text, although similar to some others in the motives that guided its author — “I will not stop my literary work and study under any circumstances; it is my life,” Gelfand wrote on 6 June 1942 — and in some of the subjects it touches on, stands apart from the rest.

The diary is unique for several reasons. First, because of its chronological range and the sheer volume of the entries: it begins in the final prewar months of 1941 and ends with Gelfand’s return in the autumn of 1946 from Germany, where he served with the occupation forces. Vladimir Gelfand continued keeping a diary after the war, but less systematically; the events described there are of interest mainly for the history of the everyday life of a Soviet person from the second half of the 1940s to the early 1980s. That is another story. Diaries covering a similarly long period do exist, though they are uncommon: those of Nikolai Inozemtsev and Boris Suris [11], for example, and among unpublished sources the diary of Vasily Tsymbal. [12] Inozemtsev, however, served in heavy artillery, which was used mainly in offensive operations and was positioned fairly far from the front line. As a result he spent much of the war in the rear waiting for offensives. Suris was a military interpreter at divisional headquarters and, by the nature of his work, was seldom at the front. Gelfand, by contrast — the second feature that makes his diary unique — was a mortar man and during combat was practically at the very front; only the infantry was ahead of him. Service in heavy artillery presupposed a certain level of education, let alone staff work, so Gelfand’s surroundings differed substantially from those of Inozemtsev or Suris. His comrades were the most ordinary people; many were poorly literate or simply illiterate, and he sometimes wrote letters for them. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the diary is unprecedented in its frankness. In many diaries one can sense an internal restraint: the writers seem to imagine an outside reader and sometimes consciously write with that reader in mind. Gelfand’s case is fundamentally different. At times the diary is difficult to read: he records his own humiliations and sometimes unattractive actions. He writes about his sexual problems and “victories,” down to physiological detail, with a degree of candour that is hard to match.

In several respects it differs from other diaries known to us. Gelfand served for long periods close to the front line and encountered an environment very different from that of technically trained artillerymen or headquarters officers. Many of his comrades were poorly educated or even illiterate, and he sometimes wrote letters for them. Most important, however, is the diary’s unprecedented frankness. Many diaries reveal an internal censor: the author seems to imagine an outside reader and writes with that possible reader in mind. Gelfand’s case is fundamentally different. At times the diary is painful to read. He records his own humiliations and sometimes his unattractive behaviour. He writes about his sexual problems and “victories” with an openness, down to physiological detail, that is hard to match elsewhere.

The diary is also unique in another respect: it is perhaps the only text currently known that describes in detail the daily life of a Red Army officer in occupied Germany in 1945-1946 and his relations with Germans, especially German women, without omissions or backward glances.

The author undoubtedly belonged to the category of compulsive writers. He could not refrain from writing and did so constantly, under any conditions. He wrote letters to relatives and girlfriends - mostly school acquaintances, although any girl he happened to meet might join his list of correspondents - as well as poems and articles for newspapers, both regular and wall newspapers. He wrote letters for comrades who were not comfortable with literacy or who wanted something written “beautifully.”

“For several days in a row I have been writing letters for other people. I wrote two letters to his girl Nina for Pyotr Sokolov, our company commander. Then Kalinin asked me to answer his little daughter, who wants him to send an article to the local wall newspaper, and he does not know how best to answer without hurting her feelings. Earlier I wrote to Rudneva’s girl. Two letters to Glyantsev’s wife, one letter home for Chipak, and so on.” (15 January 1944)

Above all, however, Gelfand kept a diary, which he called his “friend” (7 November 1941). A little more than a year later he addressed it directly:

“Diary, dear friend! Today I drank tea made from roots! Sweet as if it had sugar! A pity I did not leave any for you! Never mind - it is enough for you to smell the roots; here they are in my hands, so that you may be convinced my words are true. And why should you need any sweets other than mine? You experience everything together with me - the same joys and the same sorrows.” (3 September 1942)

The diary may in fact have been the only true friend of Private, then Sergeant and Lieutenant, Vladimir Gelfand. He found it extremely difficult to become close to people and made no lasting friends during the war. Sometimes compulsive writers become actual writers - something Gelfand dreamed of and hoped for. In the overwhelming majority of cases they do not. Gelfand belonged to that majority. Yet the book he wrote, though not in the form he intended, did eventually appear in print, unfortunately only after his death. That book was the diary, which Gelfand probably regarded merely as raw material for future literature.

Before discussing the diary’s contents, a few words about its author. Vladimir Natanovich Gelfand was born on 1 March 1923 in Novo-Arkhangelsk, Kirovograd Region, into the family of a glass worker. His father, Natan Solomonovich Gelfand (born 1896), worked at various times as a foreman at a cement plant, a school supply manager, and a storekeeper for a metalworking cooperative in Dneprodzerzhinsk and Dnepropetrovsk. His mother, Nadezhda Vladimirovna Gorodynskaya (born 1902), had given private Russian lessons before the Revolution to wealthy families in the village of Pokotilovo. During the Civil War she served for a time in the Red Army and joined the Bolshevik Party. According to her own stories, this fact, together with her typing skills, helped her obtain work as a typist in the Kremlin. She later returned to Ukraine, married and had a son. She appears to have taken no further part in public activity and was expelled from the Party “for passivity.” She worked as an educator in an orphanage and various kindergartens, and until the beginning of the war as secretary in the personnel department of the Lenin Plant in Dnepropetrovsk. The family moved several times in search of a better life before settling in Dnepropetrovsk in 1933, the city Vladimir Gelfand regarded as his home. His parents divorced three years before the war. Natan Gelfand was drafted into the Red Army, but because of his health was soon sent to the “labour front,” then to coal mines in Shakhty, where he worked as a guard. Gelfand’s mother was evacuated to Central Asia and worked on a collective farm.

Vladimir Gelfand completed eight grades of secondary school and three years at the Dnepropetrovsk industrial workers’ faculty, roughly equivalent to nine years of schooling. At the beginning of the war he went with the Komsomol organization of the workers’ faculty to the Apostolovo district of Dnepropetrovsk Region for the harvest. On 18 August 1941 - as it turned out, one week before the Germans captured the city - he was evacuated from Dnepropetrovsk to Yessentuki. There the Komsomol sent him to a repair and restoration communications column, where he worked as a line worker until he was drafted.

Gelfand was called up on 6 May 1942. After three weeks of training as a mortar man, he was sent to the active army. He joined the 427th Separate Artillery and Machine-Gun Battalion of the 52nd Fortified Region just as Soviet forces were retreating after the Kharkov catastrophe. Gelfand was promoted to sergeant and made commander of a mortar crew. His first month and a half at the front contained a great deal: his unit was encircled and destroyed. With the remnants he escaped the encirclement near Stalingrad; after a short stay at a transit point he was assigned to the 50th Guards Rifle Regiment of the 15th Guards Rifle Division, where he commanded a mortar crew and also served as acting deputy political officer and deputy company commander for political affairs.

On 13 December 1942 he was wounded in a finger and sent to Hospital No. 4519 for the lightly wounded, where he remained from December 1942 until March 1943. A wound that at first seemed minor could have had serious consequences: it caused a felon, an acute purulent infection that could lead to gangrene. Modern medical literature says such a condition requires a highly qualified surgeon in a surgical department. Since Red Army medical institutions did not yet have antibiotics, treatment was slow and painful. After leaving the hospital on 28 February 1943, Gelfand was sent to a transit point, then to the 197th Reserve Rifle Regiment and, on 30 April 1943, to the 28th Army’s junior-lieutenant courses.

After completing the courses, on 28 August 1943 Gelfand, now a junior lieutenant, was sent to the army reserve at Kryukovo. On 7 September he joined the 248th Division; the next day he was placed in the reserve of the 899th Rifle Regiment. On 23 September he was transferred from the regimental reserve to the 2nd Battalion, and on 1 October was appointed commander of a mortar platoon in the 3rd Mortar Company of the 3rd Battalion. On 27 January 1944 he was promoted to lieutenant. At the end of 1944 he was transferred to the 301st Rifle Division on the 1st Belorussian Front, again as a mortar-platoon commander; from late March 1945 he served at divisional headquarters and kept the combat journal.

He took part in the liberation of Ukraine and later in combat in Poland and Germany. After the war he served in a number of positions in occupied Germany, in Berlin and its surroundings, spending most of the time as assistant head of the transport department of the 2nd Tank Army. He was demobilized in September 1946. He received the Order of the Red Star and the medals “For the Liberation of Warsaw,” “For the Capture of Berlin,” and “For Victory over Germany”; the medal “For the Defence of Stalingrad” finally “caught up with him” in 1966. [13]

Throughout all this time Vladimir Gelfand kept his diary. He wrote continuously, regardless of time or circumstances - for example under shellfire or bombing. On 22 June 1942 he wrote:

“Today marks one year of the war between our country and the German-Fascist vermin. This important date has coincided with the first fierce air raid, at least since I have been here, on this place.

I am writing in a dugout-trench. The raids are continuing even now. Khaustov, one of my men, completely lost his nerve and was even sick with fear. He vomited. His hands are shaking and his face is twisted. At first he tried to hide his fear of the enemy bombing, but now he no longer conceals it and openly admits to me that his nerves cannot take it. This is the way yesterday’s hero behaves, the man who last night swore at me and said that I was a ‘shitter’ who would soil my trousers at the first battle and leave him alone to die.” (22 June 1942)

“The shells are raging - Gorelenko, Ivashchenko, the mortar men Solovyov, the company sergeant-major and others have been wounded. The dugout is useless. It is cold. Conditions are appalling. I feel miserable. But I cannot stop writing, even though it is dark and I am writing by touch. Rudnev and Zasypko are with me. The shells land on both sides, and in my thoughts I ask them to burst farther away.” (4 February 1944)

Sergeant, later Lieutenant, Vladimir Gelfand kept his diary quite openly and sometimes read passages from it to his comrades. His immediate superior even advised him to use an ordinary pencil rather than an indelible one, because it would preserve better (entry of 28 June 1942). On another occasion Gelfand received instructions from the political officer:

“The political officer told me how to keep a diary. After that incident when he accidentally saw various foolish things written in it, I now write the way he advised me. He says that in a diary one should write only about the work of the company, the course of the fighting, the skilful leadership of the company command, the talks the political officer holds with the soldiers, the soldiers’ responses to his talks, and so on. That is exactly how I shall write from now on.” (10 September 1942)

Two days later an even more remarkable entry appears:

“The political officer slept at my place last night. Today during the day too. I have now moved out of my trench onto the mortar platform. Perhaps that is even more convenient for me. I am delighted! After all, if it were not for the political officer, who would direct my actions?” (12 September 1942)

One might think that something had happened to Gelfand’s mind, but an entry made two weeks later explains the sudden change in the content and tone of the diary:

“For the first time here I have written openly, because I have got rid of the political officer who once instructed me how to keep a diary and what to write in it!” (27 September 1942)

Needless to say, Gelfand once again began recording “foolish things” - sometimes without quotation marks - and those things are in fact the principal value of this extensive text.

The diary is a kind of Bildungsroman. It begins with someone scarcely out of adolescence, a young man with an almost childlike psychology and childlike ideas about the world - and about war. One of his first wartime entries reads: “The war has changed all my plans for the summer holidays” (2 July 1941). That is all. Having taken a job that exempted him from military mobilization, Gelfand complains: “I was frightened by my mother’s tears, yielded to her pleas and decided to evade military service. What is the point of a deferment? Wouldn’t cheerful trench life for the good of my Motherland be better? Ardent military service, connected with danger and filled with bloody episodes of battle” (7 November 1941). He still had to discover what “cheerful trench life” actually meant.

He ends the war in some respects a completely different person and in others the same one. He is far more experienced and adept in practical matters, has overcome his shyness with women and has more than succeeded in the field of “romantic victories” in Germany - for which, however, it was enough to possess a certain amount of food. At the same time he remains just as lonely, still finds it difficult to get along with people, and often manages to land himself in awkward situations for no apparent reason. He still dreams of becoming a writer, though increasingly he is troubled by doubts on that score.

Gelfand belonged to the generation born and raised under Soviet rule, sincerely devoted to it and taking Party-Soviet rhetoric seriously. More than merely accepting it, they thought and spoke in stereotypes and phrases drawn from newspaper editorials and speeches by Party leaders:

“I am going to apply for membership in the Party. I want to go into battle as a Communist. I will conduct political work, with which I am somewhat familiar and which is close to me. In battle I swear to be among the foremost and to win the rank of lieutenant, which chance prevented me from obtaining at the school. Much is still unfamiliar and unclear to me, but I shall study in order to know more. Under no circumstances will I stop my literary work and study, for it is my bread, my food, my dear life.

I am not going there to die, but to live and win, to strike the enemies of my Motherland! I shall beat them with a mortar, with a rifle, and also with literature and politics - such are my thoughts and aspirations at this moment. I do not think about death, because I believe in my fate, which I pray will preserve me from enemy bullets. Relying on this faith, I will be fearless in battle, I will be in the front ranks of the defenders of the Motherland.” (6 June 1942)

“I must distinguish myself. My slogan is courage or death. Death rather than captivity. Fate must preserve my life; it watches over me, and my task is to win immortality for myself.

I lose consciousness from a cut finger when even a fairly noticeable stream of blood appears. The sight of the dead has always been unpleasant to me. In fights I was always beaten. And now I dream of a heroic feat - I wait for one and, more than that, strive toward it! I, who...

So far neither bursting shells nor bombing have frightened me - perhaps because it was all far away from me, I do not know. But I think and hope I will not fail, that I will distinguish myself, become a commissar and send military correspondence from the front to newspapers. I shall achieve my goal, even at the price of my life; otherwise I am not a man but a coward and a braggart. I swear to you, my diary, not to be a grey, ordinary warrior indistinguishable from the mass of Red Army men, but to become a famous, celebrated, or at least known hero of the Patriotic War.” (28 June 1942)

The striking contrast between the realities Gelfand encountered from his first days in the active army - cowardly commanders capable of abandoning their men at a difficult moment, looting, theft, antisemitism, and the open dissatisfaction of some rural inhabitants with Soviet rule - had little effect on his attitude toward that rule and its leaders, or on his perception of the language they used. Gelfand accepted as self-evident the contradiction between life and the words in which that life was described in newspapers. More precisely, he did not regard it as a contradiction at all. For him it was normal, simply part of the accepted “rules of the game.” He possessed the double consciousness characteristic of people of the Stalin era, and indeed of the Soviet era as a whole. The diary and the articles he wrote for the army press are a vivid example of different languages being used to describe the same events. Gelfand knew what could and could not be written “for everyone,” regarded that as normal, and did not reflect on the contradiction.

Perhaps only once, during the panicked retreat toward Stalingrad after the Kharkov catastrophe, did he explicitly write about the mismatch between life and its reflection in the newspapers:

“Belenky Farmstead. That is what this settlement is called. Today is already our second day here. Troops keep coming and coming: individuals, small groups and large units. All look exhausted and tormented. Many have changed into civilian clothes, most have thrown away their weapons, and some commanders have torn off their insignia. What a disgrace! What an unexpected and painful contradiction with the newspaper reports. Woe to me - a soldier, commander, Komsomol member and patriot of my country. My heart contracts with shame and with helplessness at being unable to stop this disgraceful flight. Every day I become more convinced that we are strong and that we will inevitably win, yet with sorrow I must admit to myself that we are disorganized, that we lack proper discipline, and that because of this the war drags on and we temporarily suffer setbacks.

The senior command fled in cars, betraying the masses of Red Army soldiers even though the front is far from here. Things have reached the point where German aircraft allow themselves to fly just above the ground as though at home, not letting us freely raise our heads along the entire route of retreat.

All crossings and bridges are destroyed; wrecked and mutilated property and livestock lie on the road. Looting flourishes everywhere and cowardice reigns. The military oath and Stalin’s order are trampled at every step.” (20 July 1942)

It is therefore unsurprising that Gelfand greeted Stalin’s Order No. 227 of 28 July 1942 - “Not One Step Back!” - with enthusiasm. In early August he wrote:

“I recall my thoughts during the exhausting and shameful wanderings of our armies. Oh, if only Comrade Stalin knew all this! He would take measures, I thought. It seemed to me that he was unaware of everything that was happening, or had been incorrectly informed by the command of the retreating armies. How great my joy is now that I have heard the order of our leader. Stalin knows everything. It is as if he were standing beside the soldiers; my thoughts resemble his brilliant thoughts. How comforting it is to realize this.” (2 August 1942)

Stalin was his idol. “I madly love it when Comrade Stalin speaks. Every event in the course of the war becomes so clear and logically justified,” he wrote in early November 1943. Three years later Gelfand remained an equally enthusiastic admirer of the leader:

“Once again I reread Comrade Stalin’s speech on the eve of the election of candidates for deputies of the Supreme Soviet and am once again amazed at the clarity of mind and simplicity with which Stalin’s thought is expressed. There has never been a statement by Comrade Stalin in which the wisdom, truth and persuasiveness of the facts and figures presented to his listeners did not emerge. So it is this time. Who dares to dispute or express doubt about the truthfulness of the brilliant account by the leader of our Party and our people of the causes and conditions of our victory, the roots of imperialist wars, and the essential difference between the war just ended and all those that preceded it, because of the participation of the Soviet Union?” (14 February 1946)

In that speech Stalin said, among other things, that collectivization had “helped the development of agriculture and made it possible to put an end to centuries-old backwardness.”

“‘It is for you to judge how correctly the Party has worked and continues to work (applause), and whether it could have worked better (laughter, applause),’” Gelfand notes. “‘Comrade Stalin says this to the voters at the end. And everyone rewards him with such warm applause and love that it is simply touching to watch. Yes, he has earned it, my Stalin, immortal and simple, modest and great, my leader, my teacher, my glory, my genius, my great sun.’” (14 February 1946)

Neither his own experience of peasants nor his personal acquaintance with the results of collectivization planted even a shadow of doubt in him about the truth of the leader’s words. Because of his age Gelfand could not compare the Soviet countryside before and after collectivization. Yet his involuntary acquaintance with the level of agricultural development in Germany, and more generally with the living standard of the defeated, did not prompt him to reflect on the matter either.

A. Y. Vyshinsky, the prosecutor at the show trials of the Great Terror who later reinvented himself as a diplomat, inspired Gelfand with enthusiasm:

“Vyshinsky is brilliant. I have read all his speeches at the International Assembly and could not help developing an unrestrained affection for him. His success, both before and now, is understandable. I do not remember Litvinov, but Vyshinsky now seems to me stronger as a diplomat and cleverer as a theorist.

How familiar he is, how handsome, what a damnedly proper man he is! No, he is even more formidable than Litvinov!” (21 February 1946)

On the same date as this diary entry, Gelfand wrote to his mother about Vyshinsky:

“I love Vyshinsky for his intelligence and courage as though he were one of my own, even more strongly - just think what he is doing there in the General Assembly, how powerfully and virtuously he moves minds - what minds! - and his arguments remain unanswerable! No, he is even more formidable than Litvinov!” (Vladimir Gelfand’s letter to his mother, 21 February 1946)

In short, Vladimir Gelfand both began and ended the war as an entirely Soviet man. He joined the Party at the front out of conviction, wanted to become a political worker, and produced a wall newspaper at his training school, writing all the articles himself but signing them with the names of different cadets. He sincerely tried to convey newspaper information and Party directives to his comrades, generally provoking little more than irritation with his persistence.

In Gelfand’s diary the Red Army often appears poorly organized and undisciplined. Looting was far from rare even on Soviet territory; in Germany it became universal, and the diarist himself took a very active part in the hunt for “trophies.” The attitude of Soviet civilians toward Red Army men was also far from uniform: sometimes soldiers were welcomed warmly and people shared their last possessions with them; sometimes they were received coolly or even with hostility. In many cases the population could be called “Soviet” only in the formal sense that it lived on the territory of the USSR; by no means everyone regarded Soviet power as their own. People were absorbed in their own concerns and in survival, and it was not always evident that the fate of the country occupied them very much.

On 1 April 1943 Gelfand wrote in Zernograd:

“The inhabitants are all workers on state farms. In their stories you no longer hear ‘Russians’ [illegible word] when they speak of Soviet and German-Fascist troops, as I heard everywhere from people in all the previous towns and villages from Kotelnikovo to Mechetka; here they say ‘ours’ and ‘the Germans.’ In these expressions one does not see the sharp separation of themselves, also Russians, from their own people, society and army.”

The region between Kotelnikovo and the stanitsa of Mechetinskaya was not the only place where inhabitants seemed to separate themselves from Soviet power and the Red Army. A man very different from Gelfand, Captain and future General Illarion Tolkonyuk, escaping from the Vyazma encirclement in October 1941, was unpleasantly surprised that peasants referred to Red Army soldiers as “yours” and to Germans as “they.” In general, the rural population of the Smolensk region and the Moscow outskirts proved unfriendly and quite unlike the proverbial “hospitable Soviet people.” [14]

Much outraged Gelfand, but life taught the naive idealist in many situations to conceal his thoughts and feelings. He did not always succeed; when he failed, trouble followed with almost guaranteed regularity.

One recurring theme of the diary is antisemitism, which Gelfand constantly encountered in both society and the army and from which he suffered. It would be more accurate to speak not of isolated manifestations of antisemitism but of its mass character. On 23 October 1941 in Yessentuki, to which he had been evacuated from Dnepropetrovsk, Gelfand wrote:

“In the streets and in the park, in the bread shop and in the queue for kerosene - everywhere one hears whispering, quiet, terrible, cheerful, but hateful. They are talking about Jews. For the moment they speak timidly, looking around. Jews are thieves. One Jewish woman stole this and that. Jews have money. One woman turned out to have fifty thousand, but she complained about her fate and said she had nothing to wear. One Jew has even more money, yet considers himself unfortunate. Jews do not like to work. Jews do not want to serve in the Red Army. Jews live without registration. Jews have climbed onto everyone’s neck. In short, Jews are the cause of every misfortune. I have to hear all this more than once - my appearance and speech do not reveal that I am a Jew.”

Gelfand’s entries, like the diaries and memoirs of other contemporaries, Jewish and non-Jewish, show that antisemitism had by no means disappeared in the country of internationalists. Soviet power had fought antisemitism vigorously, especially in the late 1920s and early 1930s. During the war an open campaign was almost unthinkable: it would in effect have seemed to confirm one of the central themes of Nazi propaganda, that Soviet power was Jewish power. Given the broad spread of antisemitic attitudes, the authorities could scarcely afford such a campaign, even if they had wanted one. [15]

Already in the army, in June 1942 Gelfand found two German leaflets urging Red Army men to surrender:

“What stupid and illiterate authors worked on them! What shallow ideas are expressed in these so-called ‘leaflets.’ It is hard to believe they were produced for the purpose of persuading our people to go over to the German rogues. Who will believe their unconvincing arguments and trust them? The one correctly chosen argument is the Jewish question. Antisemitism is very strong here, and the words ‘we are fighting only against the Yids who have climbed onto your necks and are responsible for the war’ may influence some people.” (12 June 1942)

When Gelfand found himself among people who did not know him, whether from cowardice or common sense, he sometimes concealed his Jewish identity. Once, for example, he introduced himself as a “Russian-Georgian”: “My father, I said, is Russian, my mother Georgian” (28 July 1942). Things became especially hard in the hospital, where the wounded were kept in appalling conditions: breakfast was served at six or seven in the evening, “but” lunch came at five in the morning, while dinner never appeared at all. The quality of the food - water with semolina, a spoonful of potatoes, 600 grams of bread a day, and so on - competed with its irregularity:

“There are many other horrifying defects here, but people - not all of them, it is true - blame Jews for everything and openly call all of us Yids. I get more of it than anyone, although of course none of this is my fault. They take out their anger on me and insultingly shout ‘Yid’ at me, swear at me and never let me say a word or rebuke anyone when they litter and foul my bed.” (29 December 1942)

“Why am I a Jew?” Gelfand once wrote in despair. “Why do nations exist in the world at all? Belonging to the Jewish nation is my unchanging scourge, a constant torment from which no escape can be found. Why are Jews disliked? Why do I, like many others, sometimes have to conceal my origins?” (9 April 1943)

In the spring of 1943 Gelfand constantly heard accounts from inhabitants of liberated districts about the Nazi extermination of Jews. He worried about relatives who had failed to leave Yessentuki and had remained under occupation. His anxiety was justified: all his relatives in Yessentuki were murdered by the Nazis.

“As for the Germans, I have decided once and for all,” he wrote in the diary, “there are no enemies more evil or deadly to me than Germans. Until the grave, until my last breath, in the rear and at the front, I will serve my Motherland and my government, which guaranteed me equal rights as a Jew. I will never become like those Ukrainians who betrayed the Motherland, went over to the enemy camp and now serve them. They clean their boots and serve them, while the Germans beat their Judas-like dog faces.” (13 March 1943)

It is said that character is destiny. There is no doubt that the formation of the adolescent’s character - we meet the author precisely at the transition from adolescence to youth - was affected by his despotic mother, who tolerated no objections. Judging from Gelfand’s entries, Nadezhda Gorodynskaya was a loving mother, but one who did not stop short of the harshest methods of “education” for her only son, including banging his head against a wall.

Gelfand’s parents divorced three years before the war, when he was at a very vulnerable age. He tried to reconcile them and hoped they might come together again; he mentions this from time to time in his wartime letters.

Gelfand became separated from his mother in September 1941 during the evacuation from Dnepropetrovsk, losing sight of her during a bombing raid. [16] Two months later his mother unexpectedly came to Yessentuki, where Vladimir was living with relatives, and stayed for only a day. Approaching his aunt’s apartment, Gelfand “heard someone’s familiar, dear, habitual voice. Who could it be? a thought flashed through my head. Could it really be ‘her’? ... I pressed my poor mother to my heart and comforted her for a long time until she stopped crying. They were tears of joy, tears of grief, tears of longing for the past and despair in the face of the future. Then the first minutes of that unforgettable meeting with Mama passed, and our conversation [took] its ordinary form. Mama returned to her former state, the state she had been in before I appeared...” (31 October 1941)

What followed was a conversation full of reproaches, perhaps in part justified, but the son’s attempts to explain himself only caused his mother’s face to become “distorted, to take on an animal expression. Before me stood the former mother, the old scenes and pictures of our life together. I became feverish at the memory of them. My mother’s face became alien and unpleasant, as it had been during our quarrels, when she used against me chairs, the poker, a hammer and whatever else came to hand.” (31 October 1941)

In family quarrels there is seldom a single “right” side, but that is not the point. The methods Vladimir’s mother used in raising him were certainly unusual and were hardly conducive to producing a self-confident child. The psychological injuries inflicted in childhood apparently never entirely healed. Almost five years after the painful scene in Yessentuki, after the war had already ended, Gelfand wrote:

“Mama is nervous and difficult. Rarely could she caress me as I once loved, but almost always she scolded me and was cold. In my heart I felt that she loved me deeply and tenderly, but in my mind such love did not fit with the way she treated me. Even in childhood I was not spoiled by true emotional warmth, but then I had not yet encountered such cruel coldness from my mother; feelings of love outweighed everything else, and so I quickly forgot the savage beatings - sometimes my head against the wall - the angry reproaches, and every kind of boycott.” (1 July 1946)

In any event, Vladimir Gelfand did not possess a strong character. His comrades quickly recognized this and, as in any closed male community where the weakest often becomes a target of ridicule and abuse, he almost always became the “victim.” Soldiers disobeyed him both when, still a private, he was placed in charge and later when, as a lieutenant, he commanded them legally. This was partly explained by his youth and inexperience: men who were less educated but older and more experienced did not want to obey him. It was also partly due to the “strangeness” of his behaviour: a commander who was constantly writing something evidently seemed eccentric. Add Gelfand’s idealism and his struggle for justice, expressed among other things in reports to his superiors, and it is not surprising that he often found himself an outsider.

The soldiers sensed weakness and took advantage of it. Gelfand describes one episode in which a communications sergeant from a neighbouring unit simply threw him out of a trench Gelfand himself had dug. The sergeant argued, among other things, that Gelfand might be a commander but belonged to a different unit and therefore had no authority over him (11 October 1943). Many officers would simply have shot the sergeant on the spot, probably without punishment; the diarist preferred to leave. The sergeant, like other soldiers who allowed themselves to violate regulations in their treatment of an officer, was surely confident that he was not going to receive a bullet. [17]

Gelfand was quite aware of these features of his character. Once he recorded a comrade’s story that the man had been expelled from school seven times, and commented:

“How I now regret that I was expelled from school only once, and even then only for a few days. It would have been better if I had been a street boy and a hooligan in childhood and youth than such an indecisive man in love and life as I am now.” (17 July 1944)

Gelfand’s truth-seeking and his desire to bring life into conformity with newspaper articles and Party directives did nothing to improve other people’s attitude toward him. He understood this perfectly well:

“The regimental Party organizer gave me the questionnaire for joining the Party. All I have left is to write an application and an autobiography - I filled in the questionnaire; the rest is not my business. I have been a candidate member for about ten months. It is time to become a full member. I want to hurry while they do not yet know me here, because later I will quarrel or argue with someone in command and then I will have as much chance of seeing Party membership as of seeing my own ears without a mirror.” (11 October 1943)

Shortly before the end of the war he stated:

“Yes, fate did not offend me in giving me appearance and intelligence. But my character spoils the first impression and repels the people around me. That is why life is so difficult for me, why my comrades so often hurt me for no reason and unfairly.” (22 March 1945)

Gelfand seems to have felt relatively comfortable, morally speaking, when circumstances left him alone - for example, on the road from a hospital to a unit. Or at the front line, especially during combat. The latter claim sounds strange, to say the least, yet that is the conclusion suggested by his battle entries, many written under shellfire or during short pauses in fighting. One reads:

“Yesterday I fired all day. I sent off about 700 mines, not to exaggerate. No one asked us how many ‘cucumbers,’ as they call them on the telephone here, we fired, but they asked every minute how many mines remained...

Both the logistical work - delivery of mines, vodka and food - and the combat work - preparing mines, wiping them down, cleaning the mortars, digging slit trenches, positioning the men, keeping order at the battery and the firing itself - fell on me, as did the political work, distributing and reading newspapers. I commanded at the top of my voice with pleasure - the wind carried my commands away and I had to shout loudly - feeling the eyes of the soldiers and commanders who passed us and admired the simultaneity of our shots and the beauty of the firing.” (11 October 1943)

Gelfand appears to have lacked fear of death and to have been convinced that nothing would happen to him.

“The German has begun pounding us with his ‘Vanyusha’ [a German rocket mortar]. There it is! The ground is trembling. Explosions all around, but they have not reached here yet. To hell with it! What is destined to happen will happen! I am not going to put down my pen just because the German has become sick of living and is nervous, firing and carrying out bombardments now here, now there.” (18 or 19 November 1943)

Death was often very close. If that aroused emotion in him, it was more surprise than horror. Here is one such episode, apparently on 18 October 1943. Gelfand, who had lost count of the days during continuous fighting, marked it simply as “the nth day”:

“When I lay down in the trench to rest, shells began exploding. I had taken a cabbage stump into the trench and started cleaning it. Suddenly a shell burst. So close that it deafened me. The trench collapsed, earth covered me, and then something struck my hand, chin, lip and eyebrow painfully. I immediately decided I was badly wounded, because I could not move my arm and three streams of blood ran down my face. For several minutes I could not get up. My head roared and I could not shake the impression of what had happened. At last I decided to go and have myself bandaged. When I came out, everyone cried: ‘Alive?!’ and then, ‘Wounded!’ I looked at the crater and was astonished: the shell had landed right on the edge of the trench at my feet. The wall was blown apart, yet not a single fragment touched my legs; the fragments hit my face. I escaped concussion precisely because the shell overshot and all its force was directed away from me. My face was separated from the blast by the length of my body plus the trench wall. I looked back at the ammunition boxes lying in front of the trench - from our side, the rear - and all of them were torn to pieces by fragments. By a miracle - again a miracle - I survived. When I examined myself in a mirror, to my great joy I saw that I had only been scratched by a small fragment. Apparently a single fragment flew past, touching my face in three places and, I think, remaining in the last one - my eyebrow. But it does not trouble me. A larger fragment merely struck my arm flat-on and painfully; there was not even a wound opening, although blood still appeared. So I got off lightly again this time.”

At least twice enemy shells “went to” someone else instead. On one occasion a shell struck the trench from which the communications sergeant had thrown Gelfand out, to his own misfortune. On another, when shelling intensified, Gelfand gallantly yielded a deeper trench to a young female medical instructor and moved into the neighbouring one:

“The trench was a little shallower than the one Maria occupied and stood one metre to her right. I had only just moved into it when another shell growled, hissed furiously and struck the ground with savage force. I fell flat on my back in the trench and suddenly felt a terrible blow to my ears and head. For a minute I could not come to my senses. When I did, I understood that the shell had caused it all. My side cap was no longer on my head, blood spurted from my nose, and my temples hurt unbearably. Shaking off the earth that covered me, I got up and began calling Maria. But she did not answer. It was already dark and I thought she had been buried in her trench. When the orderlies came at my call, they found only a mangled mass where Maria and her trench had been. The shell had travelled about six metres along the surface of the ground, carving a long furrow, then landed and exploded in Marusya’s trench. It was clear that only a memory remained of her...

I never found my side cap that night. Only the next morning did I find it about three metres from the trench that had saved me. In the morning they dug Maria out. They found one leg, her kidneys and nothing else... Maria was buried and left in the earth without any sign or memorial. I ordered my men to make a T-shaped marker; I wrote a short obituary in memory of Maria on it and placed it over her grave. Thus ended the life of Maria Fedorova, born in 1919, from Astrakhan, a medal holder and candidate member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), senior sergeant of the medical service.” (entry written in mid-November 1943)

According to Ministry of Defence records, twenty-one-year-old Maria Arkhipovna Fedorova, senior sergeant of the medical service, died on 26 October 1943. Vladimir Gelfand was the last person to speak with Maria, and his diary entry is apparently the only eyewitness testimony to her death. Whatever one thinks of Gelfand’s interpretation of particular events, his diary entries are marked by precision, detail and frankness. We repeat: in this respect they are an exceptionally valuable source for the history of everyday life in wartime.

More precisely, of life and death.

* * *

Vladimir Gelfand returned to his native Dnepropetrovsk in early October 1946. His parents were already there. His mother had returned in 1944 and gone back to her former workplace, the Lenin Plant, as secretary of the labour-organization department. His father worked as superintendent of a vocational school. The parents never reunited but were forced - a not uncommon postwar situation, and not uncommon in Soviet life generally - to live in the same apartment. Gelfand’s father died in 1974 and his mother in 1982. Vladimir entered the preparatory department of the Transport Institute in Dnepropetrovsk, where he obtained his secondary-school certificate. In 1947 he was admitted to the Faculty of Philology at Dnepropetrovsk State University. In 1949 he married his school friend Berta Koifman, the same Beba whose mention opens the diary. The newlyweds moved to Molotov (Perm), where Berta’s parents lived. Berta studied at the medical institute; Vladimir transferred into the second year of the History and Philology Faculty at Molotov State University, from which he graduated in 1952. According to his diploma, the graduate was qualified to work as a researcher or as a university or secondary-school teacher.

Gelfand’s first marriage was unsuccessful. In 1955 he left Berta and their five-year-old son Alexander and returned to Dnepropetrovsk. The divorce was finalized three years later. In 1959 Vladimir married twenty-six-year-old Bella Shulman, a teacher of Russian language and literature by training. They had two sons, Gennady (born 1959) and Vitaly (born 1963). Vladimir Gelfand spent his entire professional life teaching: in Molotov he taught history, Russian language and literature at a railway school; in Dnepropetrovsk he taught social studies, history and political economy at a vocational school. His wife first taught Russian language and literature at a school and later worked as a kindergarten educator.

These were neither prestigious nor well-paid occupations. Life was generally difficult: four people lived in a room of ten square metres. Only in the late 1960s did the Gelfands obtain a separate apartment in a new building, and in the early 1970s they moved to a three-room flat, where Vladimir’s mother also lived with them.

Vladimir Gelfand remained as restless as ever. He organized a small museum of the history of the Great Patriotic War at his school and a history circle. He published in local Party and Komsomol newspapers and in a trade newspaper for construction workers in Russian and Ukrainian: notes about school life and wartime recollections. Twenty of his articles and notes appeared in 1976 and thirty in 1978. Naturally, writings about the war could not go beyond what was permitted. A revealing example of self-censorship is a short memoir published in a collection of Great Patriotic War veterans’ recollections based on letters sent to the main newspaper of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Pravda Ukrainy. Apparently this was the only time Gelfand reached the pages of the republican press. It is unclear why he chose to tell not about something in which he himself had participated or which he had witnessed, but a story heard second-hand about a German women’s battalion captured by Red Army soldiers. [18] The story was undoubtedly invented by the soldier who told it to Gelfand: the Wehrmacht had no women’s battalions, and women did not serve in German combat units. It is nevertheless instructive to see how internal and external restraint operated. In the diary, according to a soldier who allegedly took part in the capture, the story includes the rape of German female prisoners. As Elke Scherstjanoi has rightly observed, the account reflects the sexual fantasies of Red Army men rather than reality. In the text submitted to the newspaper, however, the ugly details disappeared, and after further editorial work the episode became yet another proof of the Red Army soldier’s humaneness.

Vladimir Gelfand died on 25 November 1983 at the age of sixty. He missed by only a short time the period when the “curtain of censorship” over the Soviet past was first lifted and then torn away altogether. And even in his boldest dreams, although he had longed for literary fame since childhood, he could probably not have imagined that his wartime diary - more precisely, the German part of it - would be translated into foreign languages, become a bestseller in Germany, and be cited in dozens of studies of the Second World War.

This is unquestionably due above all to Vladimir Gelfand’s younger son Vitaly, who, like his mother and elder brother, has lived in Germany since 1995, and in Berlin since 1996. Vitaly Gelfand devoted a substantial part of his life to organizing, publishing and publicizing his father’s literary legacy. He put the scattered sheets into chronological order - no easy task, since it was far from always clear to which date or diary entry a particular sheet belonged - deciphered them and converted them into electronic form. He did the same with his father’s wartime letters, various certificates, reports and other documents relating to V. N. Gelfand’s service in the Red Army.

In Vitaly Gelfand’s words, he “did not discover the Boyle-Mariotte law and still has not invented perpetual motion. But I did a great deal: Papa’s diaries. No one will erase them, no one will forget them or pass them by. They have already appeared in German. Now they are being published in full in Russian: seventy years after the end of the Second World War and twenty-eight years after I began working on them, in 1987. I have struck this one point for so long and so hard...

Diaries like this one, written day by day, event by event, can be counted on one’s fingers. The history of the past war is different - not the one in war films made after the war and still being made today; not the one in Marshal Zhukov’s memoirs and Marshal Brezhnev’s books; and not the one in the recollections of many other participants. It is not the history people are accustomed to knowing, edited, ironed smooth and rinsed clean over seven decades.

That you can read this diary today is the achievement of my father, who wrote it throughout the war, day after day; and in part mine, because I found it after his death and deciphered it... I thank my wife Olga Gelfand and the curator of the German edition, Dr Elke Scherstjanoi, for their help in working with the diaries.” [19]

V. N. Gelfand’s diary for 1945-1946 was published in German translation in 2005 and became a genuine sensation. German readers were perhaps able for the first time to see the defeat of the Third Reich, the occupation of Germany, and relations between Soviet servicemen and Germans - especially German women, perhaps the most painful and discussed subject in Germany at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century - through the eyes of a Soviet officer. Lev Kopelev’s memoirs had, of course, already been written and published. [20] But they covered a relatively short period, were written retrospectively, as memoirs normally are, by the same person who had by then become somewhat different, and were to some extent literary works. Gelfand’s diary covered almost two years and was extraordinarily detailed and frank. The German historian Elke Scherstjanoi prepared the text for publication and supplied commentary. The book appeared under the title German Diary 1945-1946 and went through two editions, hardback and paperback. [21] German Diary was also published in Swedish translation. [22]

Our cooperation with Vitaly Vladimirovich began rather unexpectedly. He telephoned Echo of Moscow radio from Berlin after a broadcast in which I had taken part and which discussed soldiers’ diaries, including his father’s. Through telephone conversations and personal meetings the idea arose of a complete scholarly publication of V. N. Gelfand’s wartime diary. Tatiana Voronina carried out an enormous amount of work in preparing the diary for print: the printouts prepared by V. V. Gelfand were checked against the originals and corrected; passages that had previously been illegible were deciphered; dates were established or clarified in some cases. The actual diary text was separated from accompanying materials. The most important of those are reproduced in full or in extracts in the notes. The notes also reproduce, in full or in extracts, letters from V. N. Gelfand and his correspondents that help clarify or refine particular diary entries.

The publication is accompanied by detailed commentary. The notes to the diaries for 1941-1943 were prepared by Tatiana Voronina; those for 1944-1946 by Tatiana Voronina and Irina Makhalova.

The diary is printed in full, without omissions or cuts.

Notes

1. Chernilovsky, Z. M. Notes of a Company Commander. Moscow, 2002, p. 83.
2. Vasil Bykov to N. N. Nikulin, 25 March 1996, in N. N. Nikulin, Memoirs of the War. St Petersburg, 2008, p. 236.
3. Nikulin, N. N. Memoirs of the War, pp. 9, 236.
4. Chernilovsky, Z. M. Notes of a Company Commander, p. 16.
5. Interview with B. G. Komsky conducted by Leonid Reynes, 27 July 2009, Lviv (Blavatnik Archive, New York).
6. Shumelishsky, M. G. A Soldier's Diary. Moscow, 2000, p. 37.
7. Inozemtsev, N. N. Frontline Diary, second revised and expanded edition. Moscow: Nauka, 2005 (first published 1995); Kovalevsky, A. A., “We Have a Breathing Space Today…” (Frontline Diary), published by E. Kovalevskaya and O. Mikhailova in Neva, 1995, no. 5; Yermolenko, V. I. The War Diary of a Senior Sergeant. Belgorod: Otchiy Krai, 2000; Lyadsky, T. S. Notes from a Pilot's Map Case: War Diaries. Minsk: Asobny Dakh, 2001; Samoilov, D. Daily Notes. Moscow: Vremya, 2002, vol. 1; Tartakovsky, B. G. From the Diaries of the War Years. Moscow: AIRO-XX, 2005; Suris, B. Frontline Diary. Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2010; Komsky, B. G. “Diary, 1943–1945,” introduction, publication and notes by O. V. Budnitsky, Archive of Jewish History, 2011, vol. 6, pp. 11–70; Dunayevskaya, I. From Leningrad to Königsberg: A Military Interpreter's Diary (1942–1945). Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010; Fialkovsky, L. I. The Stalingrad Apocalypse: A Tank Brigade in Hell. Moscow: Yauza/Eksmo, 2011 (although neither the author nor the publisher says so, this diary, in my opinion, shows signs of subsequent literary editing).
8. See, for example, Fibikh, D. Resilient Russia: Diaries and Memoirs. Moscow: Pervoye Sentyabrya, 2010.
9. Shumelishsky, M. G. A Soldier's Diary, p. 19. The entry dates from March 1942.
10. Elkinson, P. Diary (copy held in the Blavatnik Archive, New York).
11. See note 7.
12. V. Tsymbal's detailed diary comprises twelve closely written notebooks and covers 1942–1945. It was made available to us by his son, film director Yevgeny Tsymbal.
13. Autobiographies of V. N. Gelfand dated 5 November 1943, 28 August 1948 and 26 November 1952 (personal archive of V. V. Gelfand, Berlin).
14. Quoted in Smirnov, A., “An Offensive for the Sake of an Offensive: On the Notes of General Illarion Tolkonyuk,” Rodina, 2008, no. 5, p. 31.
15. On the “Jewish syndrome” of Soviet propaganda, see Kostyrchenko, G. V. Stalin's Secret Policy: Power and Antisemitism. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya, 2001, pp. 222–229. On antisemitism in the USSR during the war, including in the army, see Budnitskii, O., “Jews at War: Diaries from the Front,” in Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering, ed. H. Murav and G. Estraikh. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014, pp. 76–79; idem, “The Great Patriotic War and Soviet Society: Defeatism, 1941–42,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2014, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 782–783.
16. See also his letter to his mother of 2 March 1942: “...we became confused when our troop train was bombed...” (V. V. Gelfand Archive, Berlin).
17. See also the entries dated 16 June 1942, 22 June 1942, 4 March 1945, and others.
18. Gelfand, V., “That Spring,” in We Must Never Forget Those Roads: Memoirs of Veterans of the Great Patriotic War. Kyiv: Politizdat Ukrainy, 1980, pp. 365–366.
19. Letter from V. V. Gelfand to the author, 23 June 2014.
20. Kopelev, L. To Be Preserved Forever. Ann Arbor, 1975 (the book has been republished several times).
21. Gelfand, W. Deutschland-Tagebuch 1945–1946: Aufzeichnungen eines Rotarmisten. Hardcover. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2005; paperback, Aufbau Taschenbuch, 2008.
22. Gelfand, V. Tysk dagbok 1945–46: en sovjetisk officers anteckningar. Stockholm: Erzatz, 2006. An electronic edition of the Swedish publication appeared in 2012.

Source: Vladimir Gelfand, Diary 1941-1946. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2015, pp. 4-28.