Oleg Sdvizhkov — “The Red Army in Europe: Through the Pages of Zakhar Agranenko’s Diary”

Oleg Vladimirovich Sdvizhkov is a historian and a member of the Russian Military Historical Society. The “Echo of Our Victories” lecture series is an educational project of the Russian Military Historical Society, supported by the Moscow Department of Culture. The series was scheduled to continue until the end of 2019. The lectures take place at the Literator Book Club; admission is free. Schedule: https://www.museumrvio.ru/lectures. Information: +7 (495) 648-18-13. Venue: Literator bookshop, 1 Vozdvizhenka Street, second floor, Moscow. August 13, 2019.

1:02:45

— Yes, by the way, there is an interesting point I wanted to add about diaries. When Vladimir Gelfand’s diary came out, I had occasion to work with it. How did it begin? The diary was published, and an article appeared on the BBC website: “Here is another piece of evidence of Soviet atrocities in Germany.” It was presented as yet another witness to Soviet atrocities. The article first appeared in English, sometime in the spring, around Victory Day, and then in Russian in the autumn, if I remember correctly. It also said that this was a taboo subject in the Soviet Union, something all Western historians complain about: that veterans do not want to recall these horrors, that the subject was forbidden, that they are unwilling to remember, and so on.

So I went and bought the diary. It was published in 2015; I found it in the bookshop of the Institute of Russian History, bought it, and began reading. It is a very thick book. I concentrated on 1944 and 1945, the time when Vladimir Gelfand was already in Poland and Germany. What, I wondered, had he written that was so terrible?

It turned out that in the diary I found—how many episodes?—two episodes concerning, shall we say, sexual violence committed by Soviet soldiers. In the first, he was riding a bicycle somewhere on the outskirts of Berlin. A group of women came towards him, rushed up to him and said: “Yesterday your soldiers came, about twenty of them, and raped my daughter. Stay and live with us.” That is one episode. What can we say about it? First, could it have happened? Probably. Second, can we be absolutely certain that they were Soviet soldiers? Could they have been Polish soldiers, for example? The Poles also took part in the capture of Berlin. Or could they have been liberated prisoners of war, displaced persons, or God knows who? In fact it is a rather difficult incident to assess. But it is one episode in Gelfand’s diary.

The second episode is really something. It concerns a sergeant who got lost, wandered about, ended up in the Special Department and was then sent from there into the infantry. Gelfand himself served in a mortar platoon, whereas the Special Department, as a punishment, sent this sergeant into the infantry, where he took part in fighting. A German women’s battalion supposedly advanced against them, with SS men driving it forward from behind. Somehow they drove off the SS men, captured the women, and then indulged in all sorts of pleasures with them. The sergeant chose the youngest and prettiest woman for himself, and so on. That is the story, the second episode in Gelfand’s diary.

The story is told second-hand, and it is not even clear who this sergeant was or where he had been. It is a historical fact, as I see it, that there were no women’s battalions in the Wehrmacht. Moreover, it was possible to trace this episode back to an account by Gelfand from before his children first published the book in Germany. The part about a German women’s battalion advancing against them—without the subsequent story of the pleasures with the German women—had already appeared in Soviet times, sometime in the 1980s. There is a discrepancy: in the diary it happened on the Oder, while in the Soviet publication it supposedly happened somewhere around Treptow Park. It appeared, I think, in a collection of front-line veterans’ recollections published in Kyiv in about 1986.

In other words, it seems to me to be pure front-line folklore, some kind of legend. But I did not stop there. I began looking further. Just as with Comrade Agranenko, surely Gelfand encountered women? Surely women must have told him things? One woman, or rather one girl, told him that some of “your soldiers” had accosted her the previous night, and so forth. Was it true? Was it not? Who knows? All kinds of things happened. There were rapes, of course. There were many soldiers, and soldiers were different; naturally there were excesses. It could hardly have been otherwise.

I then carefully counted every episode in which Gelfand describes his relationships with women. You see, he had a personal problem: he had no success with women. He was already twenty-three by the end of the war, but things just did not work out for him. He was always searching for some kind of lofty, pure love. He met Polish, Russian and German women; there was quite a range of acquaintances. Later, once his relationships with women began to work out—he was terribly preoccupied with the subject—there was even a time, after the fighting had ended, when he had a German mistress in one town and a Russian one in another. So there was even a situation like that.

Altogether I counted sixty young women whom Gelfand knew. He chose pretty girls; he was rather particular. Of those sixty, only one—I counted the girl he met on the banks of the Spree among them—said that Soviet soldiers had subjected her to violence. One could of course object: what if Gelfand did not write it down? What if women complained to him and he simply did not record their complaints?

Most likely, they did not complain. He made the entry about the German woman by the Spree sometime in May 1945, and a year later, in 1946, he returned to that place and wrote that he remembered the unhappy German woman there, and so on. The incident had made such an impression on him that he apparently heard nothing more striking from any of the other women he met between the spring of 1945 and the spring of 1946. And Gelfand has a great many amusing little episodes of this kind. For example: “I looked out of the window and saw a pretty girl. I called her over. She asked what we would do, and I said, ‘Read books.’ She said that sounded boring: she had come for sex, not love.” I am paraphrasing, but there are many such entertaining passages.

So it turned out that the entire diary contains one account of something that may have happened to that girl on the banks of the Spree. The second story is pure front-line folklore, and that is all. He knew sixty girls, and fifty-nine of them made no complaint to him. On the contrary, he tells how, wherever he went, women called out and waved from windows. He worked at some factory where there were lots of girls; they invited him over, and he joked that he was tired and could not keep up with them all, and so on. These were mostly German women, not Russian women. Russian women were few, in short supply and much in demand; in general he did not have much success with Russian women. That is the picture.

And in that BBC article, you see, the author begins by citing those couple of episodes from Gelfand. But there are no further episodes with which to build that dreadful picture. The author announces a new witness testifying to the horrors, retells those two stories, and then turns to quoting the diary A Woman in Berlin. And that is it. Come on, where are your sources? We have a source here: Gelfand’s diary. Nobody disputes that it is an authentic diary, kept by him at the front. It is accessible to everyone and has been published in German and Russian. But what the article suggests does not follow from the diary. There are, of course, accounts of looting, bad conduct and damage to property. Interestingly, Gelfand himself describes taking someone’s bicycle because he thought its owners had fled. It turned out that they had not fled after all, and when they came back he was too embarrassed, or afraid, to return the bicycle: he would have had to admit that he had stolen it. So that is another story.

There certainly are incidents like that. But, in general, I do not find the particular horrors the BBC author claims to see. As far as sexual violence is concerned, there are two episodes in the whole diary, alongside sixty women Gelfand knew, fifty-nine of whom, broadly speaking, complained of nothing. It is an interesting picture. You see, the problem with this subject arises when people try to create an image of dreadful eastern hordes arriving and perpetrating unspeakable horrors. This does not mean there were no excesses or cruel acts—of course there were. But, in my view, Western writers do not have enough reliable sources for the picture they are trying to construct. Whatever source you take, either it is not clear who its author was, or the author greatly distorts events, or, as with Agranenko’s diary, there is nothing extraordinarily horrific in it—even though the facts that it contains are quite serious. Or take Gelfand’s diary: yes, there are some things in it.

For example, he describes a trial of a group of deserters. Twenty men, Soviet soldiers, had deserted somewhere in Poland and started robbing people. The Special Department eventually caught them, and they were brought to trial. In court they said they had strayed from the righteous path and that nobody had been there to direct them back onto the right one. He records phrases like that. So here is another interesting diary. Such diaries are fascinating to read because they show ordinary daily life and how things were organised at the front. Reading nothing but descriptions of battles can become rather tedious; the relationships between people and all those other details are much more interesting. Well, that is everything I wanted to tell you. Probably everything.

— But Agranovsky’s diary does not arouse doubts, does it? Why has it not been published?

— Agranenko, not Agranovsky. No, it is a handwritten text. Why has it not been published? Probably nobody has got around to it. And it is a short text, you understand. To publish it you would need to put it in a collection; the diary alone would make a very thin booklet, like those little children’s books, remember?

— And Gelfand’s diary, I think, was translated from German, wasn’t it?

— Yes, it was first published in Germany. His son moved to Germany, and there is even a website devoted to it. They published it there first in German and then in Russian in 2015.

— Was it reissued several times?

— Yes, yes, it appeared in Russian.

— But I think they translated it from the German, not from the original. Could that be the reason for the discrepancies?

— I do not know exactly how the Russian edition was prepared, whether from the original or not.

— There was a broadcast about the publication of the Russian edition. I cannot remember for certain, but I think it was not translated from the original.

— I do not know. I would have to check. I have a copy at home; I will take a look. It is interesting.

— I have come across people who decipher diaries from, say, the revolutionary period and the 1920s. It is difficult work, and they check one another’s transcriptions. They use an interesting method: they take portions of a diary, decipher and transcribe them, and then try to put everything together. It is a fascinating process. I understand how difficult it is, because usually you cannot make out half the text, especially if you do not know the context.

— Well, the point is, I think, why...

— I think—excuse me—I do not think anyone here will be able to decipher Gelfand’s handwriting.

— Yes, that is quite possible. What matters here is why Agranenko’s text is so clear and intelligible. He was carrying out official duties. He probably had to bring the diary back to the theatre and show them: look, this is what I recorded. He wrote in clear handwriting, marked all the dates, and so on. Naturally, it is very easy to work with that diary. That brings Grossman’s diary to mind: if you look at the handwritten original, it will drive you mad. It is practically impossible to read.

— Might there have been a draft? You say he was in Eldingen for only a few hours—six hours on the road, one night, and then he left the next morning. To scribble all that in just a couple of hours...

— I cannot rule that out at all. But unfortunately what is preserved in the archive is all we have. Perhaps he really made rough notes as he went along and later copied them out neatly to present to the theatre and account for his assignment. That is possible. On the other hand, practically all Agranenko’s diary entries are very short, literally one or two sentences. There are no long entries. I recall the diary of Hans von Lehndorff. When he describes the horror supposedly caused by Soviet troops in his hospital on, I think, April 9, the account runs to at least eight handwritten pages, if you convert the typescript into handwriting. So Mr Lehndorff expects us to believe that these horrors were taking place around him, while he sat there writing. Forgive me, but how is that possible? Who would believe it? That is another reason to suspect that Lehndorff’s diary is some kind of literary composition. Perhaps it is based on real incidents and notes, but written after the war. Imagine the scene he describes: soldiers walking around, raping people, taking things and carrying off hospital property, while the chief physician sits there writing an eight-page account of what is happening. I cannot believe that. Most likely it is essentially a literary work, although some elements may indeed be real.

As for Agranenko, I do not know. He could perfectly well have written rough notes while travelling and later made a fair copy, because he had to report back. He had been sent on a business trip to collect material for a play. The diary was therefore a natural form of reporting, and no Special Department could have punished him for keeping it. I think it was preserved for the same reason: it was effectively an official document, part of the theatre’s paperwork.

— Does it contain dates?

— Yes, every entry has a clear date and location. You can trace his journey quite well. Take Kolberg, for instance: the place is clearly named, you can find it and see where it was. Everything can be traced. The details follow one another with great precision, so there is no problem. That is precisely what makes the diary informative. There is always a date and a place where the entry was made—or at least, if the precise place is missing, you have two known points. You can work out that the note was probably made somewhere on the road between them. It is quite easy to reconstruct approximately where he was. With Grossman, you cannot work that out. Grossman writes: “Fires everywhere, everything burning and collapsing!” But where were the fires? Give me a date and the name of a town or village, and I can check. With Agranenko it is precise: “Kolberg. Corpses, fire damage, Polish administration”—a short phrase. The town was taken twice, first by the Poles, whom a German naval landing force drove out, and later by our troops together with the Poles. But we know where the entry was written. When Grossman writes that everything around him is burning, I want to ask: Where? On what day? In what town? What exactly does he mean?

Grossman is interesting in another way, too. Beevor quotes him frequently, including many extracts from his diary. But Beevor’s quotations are rather strange. On the one hand, he picks some passages that say virtually nothing. Grossman writes, for example, “Our troops are advancing very quickly.” Well, quickly or slowly—what does that establish?

On the other hand, people say Grossman provides evidence that Soviet soldiers raped not only German women but also Soviet women freed from captivity. So I went back to Grossman’s diary. I think it had even been published, but I also went to the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, RGALI, and read it on microfilm. And what did I find? Where is the alleged confirmation of such terrible behaviour by Soviet soldiers? There is one complaint from a girl. She says of a man, rather strangely, “He was as old as my dad”—perhaps that is how people spoke in 1945; I do not know—and “He kept pestering me, he was so disgusting,” and so on. But it is unclear where this happened, on what date, or even whether the girl was Russian. Someone probably did accost her, but we do not know how it ended. That is one episode in Grossman.

The second episode concerns young women liberated from a Focke-Wulf factory where they had been working. According to the head of the political department, they were dirty, lice-ridden and hungry, and so on. According to men from the divisional newspaper, however, the women were clean and well fed, and our soldiers had allegedly robbed them, taking their watches and other possessions. That is Grossman’s second piece of testimony. What are we to make of it? The journalists said that our soldiers robbed the women, while the division’s political officer said that the women were filthy and infested with lice. Which account was true? At the very least, the episode shows that Grossman did not see the women himself. Had he seen them, he could have said what they were like. Instead he merely recorded that one person said one thing and another person something else. What really happened is unclear.

And Grossman’s third episode concerns Soviet soldiers pestering unfortunate young women who had been freed. Grossman and the other correspondents were staying in a house somewhere, and a group of young women came to stay with them. It was understandable: there was chaos everywhere, it was wartime, all kinds of people were wandering around, and the women wanted to spend the night somewhere safe. Then one of the journalists—not some frightening Uzbek or Kazakh, as people might stereotypically imagine, but one of their own educated journalists—began pestering one of the women. There was a commotion during the night; everyone woke up and led the man away. That ended the incident. That is what Grossman saw. Again, there was the one girl who complained to him. Perhaps something happened; who knows?

So there is the incident involving the journalist, and then there are those two contradictory accounts from the divisional political officer and the newspaper men. Which one told the truth? What actually happened? I tried to find information about that Focke-Wulf factory. It was somewhere in Poland, perhaps in Łódź. I thought I might find something about its liberation, but nothing turned up where I looked. Perhaps some document or report will come to light: “Factory captured; such-and-such a number of workers liberated,” and so on. But I have not found it. There was something else, though—not a document, actually. I came across an interview on Drabkin’s website, which also mentioned a factory, possibly Focke-Wulf. Unfortunately the interviewee did not give precise details, so I could not establish whether it was the same factory or another one. The man described a factory being liberated where many of our young women had worked. According to him, the barracks where they lived were immediately placed under guard by the Special Department, to make sure nobody did anything to the women. That was the recollection of one of our front-line veterans. But when did it happen, and at which factory?

— But these are relatively recent recollections. When did that project end—in 2008 or 2010? It ran for four years, if I remember correctly. I have spoken personally with Drabkin many times. He says that eyewitnesses forget a great deal, and that people can develop something called “false memory”: if you read enough accounts of something, you begin to take them for your own experience. People describe the same events as though they themselves had lived through them.

— That can very easily happen after many years. Something you heard second-hand—something that was never part of your own experience—settles into your memory and becomes, as it were, your personal recollection. And when so many years have passed... Take Rabichev’s memoirs, for instance. He wrote a whole heap of horrors. It is a kind of “total recall.” Rabichev published his book in 2006, I think. He must have been about eighty-six when it came out, if I remember correctly.

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