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GermanTitle: Germany Diary 1945–1946. Notes of a Red Army Soldier
Authors/Editors: Vladimir Gelfand; Elke Scherstjanoi
Place: Berlin
Publisher: Aufbau Verlag
Year: 2005
ISBN: 3-351-02596-3
Length: 357 pp.
Reviewed for H-Soz-u-Kult by: Andrea Moll, German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Germany Diary 1945–1946: Notes of a Red Army Soldier
On the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war, Aufbau-Verlag published the diary entries of Vladimir Gelfand, a Red Army lieutenant, written during his stay in Germany in 1945 and 1946. The publisher promises a “deep insight into the thoughts and feelings of a victor from Stalin’s army.” [1] Publishers today address a broad readership with the promise of an “authentic” historical testimony. Gelfand’s diary is undoubtedly an unusual contribution to contemporary history and opens a rare body of evidence.
Elke Scherstjanoi, the historian who edited the Deutschland-Tagebuch, has spent many years researching the wartime and post-war periods, with particular attention to private writings and personal testimony. [2] The edition meets the scholarly requirements of source publication: the editor selected the texts, supplied extensive commentary for a German-speaking readership, and combined consecutive diary entries with notes, official documents, letters and photographs from the period.
Vladimir Natanovich Gelfand (1923–1983) began keeping a diary in 1942, when he entered military service, and continued writing after the war. The future teacher, a Ukrainian of Jewish origin, remained throughout his life an avid collector and an ambitious chronicler of his own experience. As a young man he dreamed of becoming a writer but never achieved that goal. He left a substantial collection of notes, photographs and memorabilia. His son, like many descendants of the Soviet wartime generation, assumed responsibility for preserving his father’s memory and made this unusual historical document available to the public.
It was long assumed that strict censorship in the Red Army prevented ordinary soldiers from keeping personal diaries, or caused such diaries to be destroyed. Gelfand’s surviving notebooks suggest that the ban was either not enforced in every unit or was sometimes ignored. Political officers themselves made exceptions when notes could be used for propaganda or interrogation. Lev Kopelev’s diary, for example, was confiscated when he was arrested. Other chance survivals include the diary of navigator Galina Dokutovich, killed in 1943, and that of political officer Georgy Solus, who fought in East Prussia in 1945. Such examples raise the possibility that further wartime diaries remain undiscovered in Russian archives or private collections.
Gelfand’s diary is particularly valuable because the text was not retrospectively rewritten. It illuminates two important aspects of everyday history. First, it records direct encounters between Red Army soldiers and Germans. Second, it describes daily routines inside the army: material hardship, poor supplies, lack of sleep, sharp conflicts between soldiers and officers, and the uncertain discipline of troops advancing on Berlin. Such subjects rarely appear in Soviet and post-Soviet historiography, which traditionally concentrated on military heroism and victory.
The entries also shed light on perceptions of Germany at the end of the war and in the first post-war months. Gelfand records violent crimes committed by Soviet soldiers against German civilians, but also voluntary contacts with Germans despite the official ban on fraternisation. His notebooks reveal erotic and material interests on both sides. He witnessed the gulf between victors and defeated, yet his perspective cannot be reduced to a single position: he records brutality alongside sympathy, violence alongside attempts at peaceful coexistence.
For all his artistic and romantic inclinations, Gelfand also remained a product of Soviet society. His worldview had been formed in the 1930s under Stalinism; after the German attack in 1941, like many of his generation, he was mobilised by ideas of defending the motherland. This generation bore much of the burden of war and reconstruction.
Gelfand entered military service in March 1942 at the age of nineteen. From the beginning he was active in political work and in 1943 became a full member of the Communist Party. He served on several sectors of the front, at times in the forward line, commanding first a mortar and later a rifle unit. After a serious wound he spent eight months in the rear, completed officer training and hoped for promotion, which did not come. He entered Berlin as a staff officer in a division of the 3rd Shock Army of the 1st Belorussian Front. By then he was deeply disappointed in comrades and superiors, felt increasingly alienated, and may also have encountered antisemitism.
From the end of the war until demobilisation Gelfand served in a trophy brigade involved in removing property in Germany. The assignment gave him mobility and an opportunity to explore Berlin and its surroundings. The young officer used his time to discover a new world and, very visibly, to meet women. His relationships with German women, described in detail in the diary, came to the attention of his superiors and resulted in disciplinary proceedings. Despite hardship and conflict, he retained a strong consciousness of himself as one of the victors. Photographs in the book show a proud officer at the Reichstag and other landmarks, recording his personal triumph for memory and family.
Gelfand’s style is eloquent, at times naive and theatrical. His letters and diary entries use long constructions, occasionally awkward or imprecise. Despite his education and love of reading, his prose is impulsive and emotional. Propaganda can be heard in his understanding of the war, but so can private doubts, fears and desires. The diary captures a young man oscillating between lyrical romanticism and the brutal reality of the front, between the pride of victory and profound personal disappointment.
Of particular interest is his view of the enemy and of women. In one episode he reports rumours about a German women’s battalion supposedly fighting at the front, a story that becomes a focus for fantasies of violence and revenge. Such myths circulated among soldiers on both sides and demonstrate the mutual demonisation of the enemy. Gelfand’s descriptions of women in the military also reflect gender stereotypes common in wartime environments, where violence and sexuality became entangled in contradictory ways.
The diary is therefore a singular testimony to the war and the post-war occupation through the eyes of a young officer. It records a life without the retrospective discipline of official memoir. Unlike most Soviet officers’ memoirs published in the Soviet period, these notes expose an unofficial and intimate side of military experience. [7]
Gelfand may also be read as a representative of the Soviet wartime generation. His diaries convey a psychological ambivalence familiar to many veterans: pride in participation in victory, silent suffering from traumatic wartime experience, and disappointment at a lack of recognition in later life. Against this background, his wartime notebooks are especially valuable for the history of everyday life. They show how an individual lived and thought inside the hierarchical Red Army, under military discipline, severe demands and permanent danger. The entries are not only eyewitness testimony but something like “photographs” of an era, in which people appear not merely as victims or heroes but as actors in history.
A future publication of Gelfand’s diary in Russia would therefore be important, especially for the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who fought. It could help later generations approach their relatives’ wartime experience from a more personal perspective and reconsider familiar images of the “victors of Stalin’s army.”
Notes:
[1] Gelfand, dust-jacket text.
[2] Elke Scherstjanoi (ed.), Red Army Soldiers Write from Germany, Munich 2004.
[3] Vitaly Gelfand placed his father’s writings online at zhurnal.lib.ru.
[4] Lev Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever, Hamburg 1976, pp. 13–14.
[5] Unpublished, Museum of the Great Patriotic War, Minsk.
[6] Unpublished, Berlin-Karlshorst Museum.
[7] No closed women’s combat formations were recorded on either the German or Soviet side.
Editorial supervision of the review: Susanne Schattenberg
Type: Source material
Country: Germany
Language: German
Regional focus: USSR / Russia
Period: 20th century
Thematic focus: Cultural history
