Russian

THE PRICE OF VICTORY

Lieutenant Gelfand’s Diaries

91.2 FM Moscow. Broadcast: 7 NOVEMBER 2015, 20:04

Guest: Oleg Budnitsky, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor at HSE University

Host: Vitaly Dymarsky, Editor-in-Chief of Diletant magazine

V. Dymarsky― This is The Price of Victory, and we are its hosts, Vladimir Ryzhkov…

V. Ryzhkov― …and Vitaly Dymarsky.

V. Dymarsky― Today we have another edition of the program. In a sense it continues an earlier program that you may already have heard or read on the Echo of Moscow website. If you have not heard or read it, you can still do so by going to the website and the section devoted to The Price of Victory.

Some time ago we spoke with today’s guest, whom I am pleased to introduce: Oleg Budnitsky, historian and professor at the Higher School of Economics. You are also described as the head of the center for the study of the Second World War.

O. Budnitsky― Yes, the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences.

V. Dymarsky― Yes. I do not know whether the book lying in front of me can itself be considered one of those “consequences,” but in a sense, of course. What we discussed then, and what we will continue discussing today, was Vladimir Gelfand’s diary. Some listeners may know, others may not, that wartime diaries are in general quite rare.

O. Budnitsky― Yes, that is true.

V. Dymarsky― If only because people were forbidden to keep them.

O. Budnitsky― That is not entirely true.

V. Dymarsky― I remember, Oleg Vitalyevich, that we discussed that last time. But in any event they are rare. This diary was discovered; as I have said, we spoke about it at length in the previous program. Today we have a kind of continuation—first of all in the form of a beautifully produced book, Vladimir Gelfand. Diary 1941–1946.

V. Ryzhkov― Yes, I am looking at it now. It is designed with great taste.

V. Dymarsky― As far as I know, the book is among the sales leaders.

O. Budnitsky― It is number one.

V. Dymarsky― Number one among memoir literature.

O. Budnitsky― Yes, at the Moskva bookstore.

V. Ryzhkov― So hurry up.

V. Dymarsky― Ryzhkov drew attention to the illustrations. It should be understood that these are original illustrations.

O. Budnitsky― They are photographs taken by the author.

V. Ryzhkov― Yes, it is astonishing!

V. Dymarsky― And I take it, Oleg Vitalyevich, that you will now tell us how the story continued—how the book was made, including your trip to Germany.

O. Budnitsky― The trip to Germany was very recent, and its main purpose was to take our HSE students, who study the history of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and other forms of Nazi genocide. They visited various sites of that kind, including Sachsenhausen—not the most cheerful of places—and held a joint seminar there with colleagues from the Free University of Berlin. But that is a separate story.

I also met Vitaly Gelfand there, of course. I should say that this whole story actually began with Echo of Moscow. We spoke about it in our previous program several years ago, when fragments of the diary were appearing on the internet. They were being posted by the author’s son, Vitaly, who has lived in Berlin, Germany, for many years.

I mentioned his father’s diary. He called Echo, was given my home telephone number, and we established some contact. He complained bitterly that only part of his father’s diary had been published—the 1945–46 German section. Gelfand entered Germany in January 1945 and was very glad to see Germany burning; the sight gave him pleasure. He served there, reached the heart of Germany, and remained there on duty—although naturally he wanted to go home. He did not leave until October 1946. He served in the occupation administration and handled various economic matters…

V. Dymarsky― And that is the end of the diary.

O. Budnitsky― Yes. The diary ends there, although in fact he kept a diary afterward too, less systematically, and the later material is quite substantial. But this diary ends with him traveling by train: soon his native Dnepropetrovsk will appear. He is riding in a postwar train, looking at the devastation around him, waiting for the native city from which he once had to flee when the Germans advanced and Dnepropetrovsk suddenly faced occupation. For everyone that had been a complete shock—only a little more than two months after the war began.

That is the story. Vitaly Vladimirovich was frustrated that only the German section of the diary had appeared, although it became a bestseller in Germany.

V. Ryzhkov― How long was that section? After all, January to May is a fairly short period. More precisely, it becomes a year and a half if you include his later work in the administration.

O. Budnitsky― Yes, but it is a substantial part of the diary. He could keep a diary more calmly there.

V. Ryzhkov― Even that final section is really a full book in itself.

O. Budnitsky― Even the final section is a full book. But, you know, starting from 1941 it is fuller still.

V. Ryzhkov― Of course!

O. Budnitsky― …751 pages.

V. Ryzhkov― Yes, so our listeners understand that it is quite a weighty volume.

O. Budnitsky― Yes. And a very important part of the volume consists of photographs the author took in Germany. Vitaly has now transferred to the Jewish Museum in Maryina Roshcha the original diary, correspondence, and a whole series of documents, including the cameras with which those pictures were taken—an Agfa and a Kodak. I do not know whether they still work.

V. Ryzhkov― Agfa and Kodak. If you lubricate them and adjust them a little, it is quite possible they still work.

O. Budnitsky― Quite possibly. At any rate, you press the button and the camera opens and unfolds. It is an astonishing sight and sensation to hold it in your hands. It is still in the branded packaging of the time and so on. He describes how he acquired those cameras, and now you hold them in your hands—it is an extraordinary feeling. In Germany, to give you a sense of the scale, 83,000 copies of the diary were sold.

V. Ryzhkov― Fantastic!

O. Budnitsky― Simply fantastic. By comparison, the Russian edition had a print run of 1,200 copies.

V. Ryzhkov― For now. We shall see; perhaps it will have a happy fate and many additional printings.

O. Budnitsky― We shall see. Judging by the sales we have just seen at least in the Moskva bookstore, perhaps such a fate awaits it in its homeland as well. Especially because this edition is special. In what sense? First, we restored the full text of the diary. Vitaly Gelfand did enormous work—he deciphered it, scanned it, and so on. But he made a rough transcription and, not being a historian, simply placed the papers one after another even though they were in chaotic order. We restored…

V. Dymarsky― …the chronology.

O. Budnitsky― By “we” I mean my colleagues at the center: Tatyana Lvovna Voronina and our trainee researcher, my former student Irina Makhalova, who is now a master’s student at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her knowledge of German was very helpful in preparing the commentary.

The genuine diary in its authentic, complete form begins literally in the middle of a sentence, before the war started—in the prewar months of 1941—and ends in October 1946.

V. Ryzhkov― I see you also prepared a scholarly reference apparatus.

O. Budnitsky― Almost 200 pages…

V. Ryzhkov― A very serious scholarly apparatus.

O. Budnitsky― Yes, thank you. We tried. First, we placed in the apparatus various accompanying documents—documents mentioned in or confirming the diary: reports, personnel evaluations, letters, fragments of letters. This is very important for understanding the context of the time. There is real commentary there. We reconstructed his entire combat and non-combat route and identified all the little places he mentions. There are countless villages called Kamenka, for example; one has to establish which one he meant and where exactly he was. He himself does not understand what is happening around him, you see?

Sometimes he even gets things wrong simply because he is a soldier who has just reached the front. He was born in 1923. He was first a sergeant and later a lieutenant. He did not complete secondary school; he finished nine grades, or roughly the equivalent, just before the war. Because he was born in 1923 he was not called up in 1941; he was conscripted in 1942. And he reached what he calls the “Kharkov Front,” although there was no front by that name. What he was witnessing was the Kharkov catastrophe. His very first impressions of the war are what happened near Kharkov, the subsequent encirclement, retreat, and so on. And he somehow manages to write all of it down constantly. It is an astonishing chronicle of the whole thing—of how they retreated toward Stalingrad.

V. Dymarsky― May I interrupt? I think we discussed this last time too, but it is impossible not to ask again. To what extent can a historian, or historians, trust such subjective notes by people who might embellish something or leave something unsaid?

V. Ryzhkov― Figuratively speaking, he saw the war over the parapet of a trench.

V. Dymarsky― …he saw it through his own mind.

V. Ryzhkov― If Zhukov saw the war through General Staff maps, Gelfand saw it over the parapet of a trench—with nine grades of education and so on. To what extent can his account serve as a source for broader generalizations? Or did he see only pieces, fragments of a mosaic?

O. Budnitsky― Naturally, any junior officer or private, anyone at all, sees only a fragment, a part. If we write the history of the war based only on one person’s vision, of course we will get a distorted picture. But when there are dozens or hundreds of such sources, then we can begin to speak more broadly.

V. Dymarsky― A three-dimensional picture emerges.

O. Budnitsky― I repeat this again and again, but repetition does not make the thought less true: what people actually saw during the war, what they experienced then and recorded then, has very little—or nothing—in common with the canonical history of the war that we learned from childhood in the Soviet period and that continues to exist in modified form.

A genuine people’s history of the war has still not really been written in our country. How the people who participated in the war—servicemen, civilians who found themselves in combat zones, in the Soviet rear, or in occupied territories—saw and experienced it all differs greatly from the standard view of the war to which we are accustomed. Everything was much more complicated, more dramatic, and, I would say, more terrible.

V. Ryzhkov― To what extent did Vladimir Gelfand, the author of these diaries, censor himself? You understand perfectly what I mean. Counterintelligence officers were nearby; SMERSH personnel were nearby. He understood that the diary could be read and confiscated. Is there an element of embellishment or omission, gaps in the description of what he encountered?

O. Budnitsky― Thank you for the question. This text is extraordinarily frank and extraordinarily naïve. People who keep diaries normally have some feeling that someone might see or read them, some restraining instinct…

V. Ryzhkov― That is exactly the point.

O. Budnitsky― He does not have it. He simply does not. It is phenomenal.

V. Ryzhkov― He wrote what he saw.

O. Budnitsky― More than that, he writes things about himself that people usually prefer to hide. He records very unflattering things. Every person wants to appear stronger, smarter, and so on, but he writes about the humiliations he has to endure. It is not even that he is unashamed of them; he is simply like that. He really records everything he sees. Though in a sense it is graphomania, perhaps.

V. Ryzhkov― I would call it a movie camera: what the camera sees, with no cuts or editing afterward.

O. Budnitsky― Of course he wanted to be a writer, as many young people do. He attended literary circles…

V. Ryzhkov― So his ambition was not simply to keep a diary but to gather material.

O. Budnitsky― That is true of many people who kept diaries. He also writes poetry and articles for newspapers. They are not always printed, but sometimes they are. He writes an enormous number of letters to relatives.

V. Dymarsky― Did the son preserve the letters, by the way?

O. Budnitsky― Five hundred and three. But they are not only letters by Gelfand; it is correspondence—not only with relatives, but with girls he met along the way, including the girls’ letters. Those letters deserve a separate publication. There are two folders of them and they are extraordinarily interesting. The language is inimitable: not always very literate, with fascinating notions of how a letter is supposed to be written. They are remarkable texts. I hardly know what to compare them to—the language of characters in Andrei Platonov.

V. Ryzhkov― I would say they are a kind of modern Novgorod birch-bark letter, preserving the everyday language of an earlier era.

O. Budnitsky― Something like that. It is not the Middle Ages, of course, but real people of that time did not speak the language one hears in, say, the film Volga-Volga. It was a different language and a different understanding of what was good and bad, and of many other things. He writes extraordinarily frankly about his relations with German women. Before the German women, so to speak, his relations with women had not really existed. They were complicated.

V. Dymarsky― Wasn’t that what the scandal was about?

O. Budnitsky― The scandal was not over Gelfand’s diary itself. The publication of the diary became the occasion for an article by a British journalist, and above all there was, to put it mildly, a politically incorrect tweet from which the whole affair began. But it gave the book tremendous publicity. Every cloud has a silver lining, as they say.

Incidentally, when I mentioned relations with German women, these were mainly consensual. There is a theme of rape: at one point he meets a group of German women. Apparently it was clear from him that he was not one of those who might behave improperly toward women, so they asked him for protection. One young woman tells him she had been raped repeatedly, and so forth. But mostly the diary concerns his romances with German women. He discusses and records them, sometimes in such detail that the book is definitely 18+.

V. Ryzhkov― You did not censor it?

O. Budnitsky― No. It is a historical source.

V. Ryzhkov― Of course.

O. Budnitsky― We published it as it was written. Moreover, there are letters from those German women, both the originals and translations.

V. Dymarsky― He corresponded with them too?

O. Budnitsky― They wrote to him, at least; the letters are there. But that is another story.

V. Dymarsky― Did they write to him after he had already returned to the Soviet Union?

O. Budnitsky― No, while he was still there in Germany. He had many such adventures. He describes the black market on Alexanderplatz in Berlin. There are masses of details of that kind. For Germans this was extraordinarily interesting reading. There are many German diaries and memoirs, whereas material from the Soviet side was practically inaccessible to them.

V. Ryzhkov― We know the heroic history of the war, but we know very little about everyday life. This book is in fact a story of wartime everyday life.

O. Budnitsky― Everyday life, yes, although…

V. Dymarsky― There is a military side too.

O. Budnitsky― Very much so!

V. Ryzhkov― Both everyday life and the military side.

O. Budnitsky― You know what else makes this diary unique? Diaries are usually written by people who are not on the front line. I have encountered quite a few diaries by military interpreters or political workers, for example. That makes sense. But he was a mortar man. Probably only infantry was worse, right?

V. Ryzhkov― So by day he fired the mortar and before bed he wrote his diary.

O. Budnitsky― The mortar work varied, but he wrote all the time. There are situations where shells are falling and he is sitting there writing.

V. Ryzhkov― Astonishing!

O. Budnitsky― It is hard to imagine. Perhaps it was some kind of reflex. And you know, he had another remarkable trait: it seems he was not afraid of death at all, in the sense that he simply did not believe it could happen to him.

V. Ryzhkov― And he turned out to be right.

O. Budnitsky― Yes. He was wounded only once, and comparatively lightly—in a finger. Then he developed a felon, because there were no antibiotics then, and that can become…

V. Dymarsky― He ended up in hospital?

O. Budnitsky― Yes, he did, because if nothing is done about it a person can develop gangrene and die. That was what happened to him.

Otherwise he generally escaped harm. There is an astonishing scene in the diary: he is chatting and flirting with a young woman, a medical orderly. Shelling begins. Gallantly he gives her his own trench, which is deeper; she had dug only a shallow slit trench. A shell hits precisely his trench, the one he gave her. Of the girl there remained—he writes about it quite calmly—a kidney, a leg, details like that. They buried her somehow, and he made the soldiers put up a memorial marker and wrote who she was, a girl from Astrakhan, and so on. And here is something interesting regarding reliability. My poor colleagues had to deal with masses of people he mentions—ordinary soldiers, junior officers, people unknown to anyone. But we have the OBD Memorial database.

V. Ryzhkov― The Defense Ministry database.

O. Budnitsky― Yes, and there is also Feat of the People.

V. Ryzhkov― Yes.

O. Budnitsky― Here and there the names match, and we were able to identify most of the people mentioned in the diary.

V. Ryzhkov― So the text is reliable to that extent.

O. Budnitsky― Yes. As for reliability, it is completely obvious that the diary is authentic—we have the originals.

V. Ryzhkov― Reliable even in its people and place names; even the weather he describes matches what actually happened.

O. Budnitsky― Naturally. He wrote while he was there. It was not written afterward. That is the fundamental distinction. Not everyone understands or feels the difference between memoirs and diaries.

V. Ryzhkov― Of course.

O. Budnitsky― A diary is written here and now.

V. Ryzhkov― A snapshot.

O. Budnitsky― Sometimes it was not written the same day—perhaps the next day. There are interesting moments when he loses track of the date. Continuous fighting is going on and he writes approximately, “I think today is such-and-such a date.” Things like that happen. It is fascinating. The diary is full of such details.

Another unusual impression is this: we think of an army as order and organization, but a kind of constant anarchy often reigns there. And this is not only 1942. Reading it, one thinks Leo Tolstoy was right when he wrote that everything happens somehow by itself while commanders imagine they are directing something…

V. Ryzhkov― Tolstoy also knew war firsthand.

O. Budnitsky― Yes. He was a staff captain, after all. An artilleryman.

V. Ryzhkov― He knew the subject, as people say. He knew what he was writing about.

O. Budnitsky― The diary shows very plainly how such things happen. From time to time some order is established. Gelfand constantly regrets that Comrade Stalin does not know what is going on—which brings us back to the question of…

V. Ryzhkov― A typical psychological state too.

O. Budnitsky― He is constantly thinking: how can it be that they write one thing there while here things are different? But most interestingly, when he himself goes to short-term commanders’ courses, receives the rank of lieutenant, and produces a wall newspaper there, he writes in the language one is supposed to use. He does not even experience it as a contradiction. Here, in the diary, he writes what he sees and feels; in the newspaper, he writes what one is supposed to write. And nobody else wants to write at all.

V. Ryzhkov― It is like the old joke: “What is your attitude toward the decisions of the Party and government?” “The same as the whole Soviet people: I fully approve and support them.” “But that is the Soviet people. Do you have a personal opinion?” “I do, but I neither approve nor support it.” It is the same here.

O. Budnitsky― And this is curious too: he cannot be the only person writing, but nobody else either wants to or can. So he simply writes texts on behalf of different cadets, signs their names, and all the texts are ideologically correct.

V. Ryzhkov― And later in his diary he tells how he manufactured the newspaper?

O. Budnitsky― Yes. You ask whether he was afraid. First, he was not afraid because he was absolutely a Soviet person. He thinks: I write this because this is how things are; I want things to be better. He is not writing in order to criticize the system.

V. Ryzhkov― Right.

O. Budnitsky― There was one curious episode, though. A political officer was once quartered with him, and suddenly I noticed the tone of the diary changing. It became more like newspaper editorials, the language of leading articles.

V. Ryzhkov― Why?

V. Dymarsky― He was afraid.

O. Budnitsky― Because the political officer was living with him.

V. Ryzhkov― And?

O. Budnitsky― He writes: “How happy I am that the political officer is living with me; he explained how one should keep a diary.”

(laughter)

O. Budnitsky― A diary should describe successes.

V. Ryzhkov― Victories.

O. Budnitsky― The role of the political officer in preparations, and so on.

V. Ryzhkov― And when the political officer moved out?

O. Budnitsky― “Now I no longer write that nonsense—I write properly.” As soon as the political officer leaves, he writes: “What happiness, at last I have got rid of the political officer.”

(laughter)

O. Budnitsky― Normal language begins again.

V. Ryzhkov― A question about your center. Its name is very interesting: the Center for History and Sociology.

O. Budnitsky― Yes.

V. Ryzhkov― Sociology, among other things, studies the dynamics of public opinion.

O. Budnitsky― Exactly.

V. Ryzhkov― You have already said a little about how exceptionally important the diary is as a historical source, showing how things actually were.

O. Budnitsky― “How things actually were” is, you know, an unattainable dream.

V. Ryzhkov― As he saw them, yes. But from the sociological point of view, does Vladimir Gelfand’s diary help us…

V. Dymarsky― …to project outward, yes.

V. Ryzhkov― …to establish, see, and feel the dynamics of how attitudes changed in the Soviet army and in society from year to year, from one year of the war to the next? Can one see changes in the diary?

O. Budnitsky― From the diary, both yes and no. An army is a special organism in general.

V. Ryzhkov― Does he record conversations, perhaps, discussions among the men?

O. Budnitsky― First of all, he is a rather solitary person in the sense that…

V. Ryzhkov― An introvert, as people say now?

O. Budnitsky― No, not exactly. He is not an introvert. But he is unusual.

V. Dymarsky― A foreign body.

O. Budnitsky― A foreign body. From the viewpoint of those around him he is not of this world. Always writing something…

V. Ryzhkov― An eccentric.

O. Budnitsky― Then there is this: he is basically a boy who came into the army and is supposed to command somebody, while the men under him are older and, at least in life, far more experienced. “We are not going to listen to you.” That question of discipline is there too: “I simply won’t obey you.”

V. Ryzhkov― Right—a green kid.

O. Budnitsky― “Who are you anyway?” When you read it, he describes scenes like that. Then there are the ordinary people, and you ask about attitudes. How can I put it? There is not much patriotic rhetoric there. It is more…

V. Dymarsky― They do not shout, “For the Motherland, for Stalin!” Or at least we do not hear it.

V. Ryzhkov― You do not hear that in the diary?

O. Budnitsky― You do not. But he himself is a convinced Stalinist. After the war, when [inaudible] Stalin before voters, he writes: “Stalin is my sun.” Texts like that. In other words, he is an absolutely Soviet person, and that is why he is unafraid, you see? Someone else might get into trouble, but he cannot imagine that happening to himself because he knows he is Soviet. Still, I think that if his diary had fallen into the wrong hands and been read seriously, he would have had a very hard time indeed.

V. Dymarsky― How interesting is the first year of the diaries, when he is not yet at war? I mean the civilian’s view of the war—what he sees and what he knows.

O. Budnitsky― First, he works on a collective farm. You cannot say he is simply observing and living an ordinary life—nothing of the sort.

V. Dymarsky― Is this Dnepropetrovsk?

O. Budnitsky― They leave Dnepropetrovsk; they are literally forced to flee. They go to relatives in Essentuki. There he gets work as a line technician, if I am not mistaken.

V. Ryzhkov― He was not drafted immediately because of his age?

O. Budnitsky― Apparently both because of his age and because he worked in a system that gave exemptions. One version is that he later simply volunteered.

V. Ryzhkov― He had a reserved-occupation exemption?

O. Budnitsky― Yes, because the work was somehow connected with communications.

V. Ryzhkov― I see.

V. Dymarsky― Was he a signalman?

O. Budnitsky― No, that was while he was a civilian. There is a photograph of him climbing the kinds of poles he worked on. According to one version he volunteered because he was tired of that life and wanted to be a hero. He writes that at last life will begin—he is still a boy, imagining a life full of adventures and exploits, in which he will prove everything to everyone. When he actually reaches the front there are plenty of adventures, of course, but they look very different from what he imagined in his dreams.

V. Ryzhkov― Different from Walter Scott.

O. Budnitsky― Yes. And if you want sociology, in sociological terms this is the first Soviet generation. He was born under Soviet power, grew up under Soviet power, knows no other system, believes in it sacredly, and is an ideal Soviet person. Whatever happens, he still thinks the newspaper will ultimately tell the truth. Yet because of his sincerity and naïveté—I do not know what else to call it—he writes down what he actually sees.

There is much of interest about the mood of the civilian population. Here is another curious thing: people leaving hospital had to make their own way back to their units or to their assembly point; there was no transport. They walked. This appears not only in this diary but in many others. There might be a group or…

V. Ryzhkov― You were discharged, and from there you moved on by yourself.

O. Budnitsky― Exactly. You were discharged, given instructions: you must arrive at such-and-such a place within a given number of days—thirty days, for example. On foot. And you had to find food along the way, because either there were no feeding points or, if there were, they had already run out of food. All kinds of difficulties. He literally begs from the population. The civilians are already tired of these soldiers because they themselves have nothing to eat, while soldiers are constantly asking them for things. To a modern person, reading this looks monstrous.

V. Ryzhkov― Savage, yes.

O. Budnitsky― But those were the realities of the time. We poorly understand how poor a country the USSR was. Those enormous losses and many other things occurred because it was a poor country fighting an industrial power.

V. Dymarsky― In that connection, a question. There is an opinion that Stalin did not much like the wartime generation because they had passed through Europe.

V. Ryzhkov― They had seen things.

V. Dymarsky― Yes, they had seen a different life, and he feared that generation. Does Gelfand show his attitude—if not admiration, then at least surprise—at what he saw outside the USSR, in Europe?

V. Ryzhkov― Did his consciousness change when he found himself there—in Poland, in Germany?

O. Budnitsky― Both yes and no.

V. Dymarsky― He saw more than German women, after all?

O. Budnitsky― Yes, he saw different things. But one has to understand this: they were the victors. Their roads might be better, this or that might be better—but we won the war.

V. Ryzhkov― So who is better? We are.

V. Dymarsky― That attitude is there?

O. Budnitsky― Yes, there is such an element.

V. Dymarsky― Their everyday material life did not shock him?

O. Budnitsky― And besides, Germany was…

V. Ryzhkov― Smashed to pieces.

O. Budnitsky― Exactly. I was trying to find a more literary word. It was ruins.

V. Ryzhkov― Berlin had almost been wiped off the face of the earth by area bombing.

O. Budnitsky― Not quite wiped out, but the destruction was enormous. We know very little about what our Allies did.

V. Dymarsky― We will take a break now and continue The Price of Victory.

NEWS

V. Dymarsky― This is The Price of Victory. Vladimir Ryzhkov and Vitaly Dymarsky are your hosts. I remind you that our guest is Oleg Budnitsky, head of the International Center for the History and Sociology of the Second World War…

O. Budnitsky― And Its Consequences.

V. Dymarsky― And Its Consequences. I keep forgetting the consequences, though they certainly need to be studied as well. Today we are discussing a diary that has been found and reconstructed—and reconstructed beautifully, in the form of a splendidly produced book, Vladimir Gelfand. Diaries 1941–1946. These are the diaries of a Red Army serviceman who went through the war. Well, not all of it—from 1942, when he was conscripted, correct?

O. Budnitsky― Yes.

V. Ryzhkov― There are remarkable photographs, recently seen online, including aerial photographs of Berlin in the summer of 1945.

O. Budnitsky― Yes.

V. Ryzhkov― Perhaps you saw them too. What Berlin looked like was terrifying. Ruins.

V. Dymarsky― And Dresden?

O. Budnitsky― Dresden was simply wiped off the face of the earth, and quite deliberately.

V. Ryzhkov― Danzig was also…

O. Budnitsky― That was the Germany he encountered. On the one hand, German material culture naturally could not fail to impress him. By the end of the war, especially after living in Germany, he had become rather worldly. He knew what things cost and how things worked; he bought and bartered things…

V. Ryzhkov― He hustled.

O. Budnitsky― At first he sees, with surprise, a woman and her daughters hanging around the unit and showing photographs. He wonders what they are doing there. He brings them some leftover pies, and they jump for joy. He does not understand that the mother has come to sell her daughters. It is perfectly clear to the reader, while he still does not quite grasp it: they were so happy… Nothing follows from that particular episode.

Elsewhere he writes about visiting a German girl named Margo, whom he likes and with whom he has a romance. Her mother is supervising them. He has brought butter and other things, but the mother will not let them be alone. And he writes, in effect: for this packet of butter and the other things one could get anything now, yet she is still here behaving like this. By then he already understands the exchange value of things; he is no longer so naïve.

And, putting aside those romantic and sometimes not very romantic affairs, on the one hand he sees the material culture; on the other, he considers the Germans rather primitive and their culture low. He writes that in a tram one never sees anyone with a serious book—Goethe or Schiller, for example.

V. Ryzhkov― What did he expect?

O. Budnitsky― They read all kinds of rubbish!

V. Ryzhkov― Did he expect everyone to ride the tram with Schiller in hand?

O. Budnitsky― There are entries like that. He sort of…

V. Ryzhkov― Apparently in his native Dnepropetrovsk everyone rode around with volumes of Pushkin and Tolstoy.

O. Budnitsky― Of course: where is this famous German culture? Or he watches little stage sketches and finds them vulgar. One sketch he greatly disliked was called “A Woman Washes Herself.” An actor imitates how a woman washes and so on. He writes: this is vulgar, this is terrible, and the crowd laughs. What is this? These are the Germans! Where is their culture? He has that attitude. And of course, after the war the Germans were not in the best condition, to put it mildly. I did not notice any desire on his part to remain there. He wants to go home because home is his homeland. There are no passages saying, “I wish I could stay here.”

V. Ryzhkov― Nor “Why is it not like this in our country?” There is practically none of that?

O. Budnitsky― It is not really noticeable.

V. Dymarsky― Does he write about what he took home with him?

O. Budnitsky― In what sense?

V. Ryzhkov― Trophies.

O. Budnitsky― Home?

V. Dymarsky― Yes.

O. Budnitsky― He does.

V. Ryzhkov― Watches, for example, like everyone carried back?

O. Budnitsky― Some of it has now actually been brought back to Moscow again—for example, the cameras. He writes about clothing too. Open the book and look at the photographs. He loved to have his photograph taken in different outfits.

V. Dymarsky― Yes, there are many photographs of him himself.

O. Budnitsky― Yes, that was his nature. He was a rather good-looking young man and women liked him; he noticed that. In one photograph he is in a suit and hat—where did the suit come from?

V. Dymarsky― Yes.

O. Budnitsky― A suit and hat, or a tie with a short-sleeved shirt, or something else. He liked that sort of thing. He acquired some paintings in Germany too. These were not “trophies” in the sense of looting; such things could be bought. Soviet soldiers, especially officers, were rich compared with the local Germans. They received pay. Most importantly, they had food.

V. Ryzhkov― Like the butter.

O. Budnitsky― He was a regular at the black market, where all sorts of things could be bartered.

V. Ryzhkov― For food?

O. Budnitsky― In different ways. Once he bartered for a coat, then discovered it was full of holes and that he had been tricked. The diary is full of such everyday details.

We were interrupted while talking about attitudes, weren’t we? It is very interesting when he travels on foot and finds himself in different situations, especially his observations about the population. He passes through Cossack regions.

V. Ryzhkov― Rostov?

O. Budnitsky― Among others, yes. The Rostov region and parts of what is now the Volgograd region. When he reached Zernograd, that giant grain state farm, he says it was the first time he heard the word “ours” used by local people to refer to Red Army men. “Ours”—before that it had been “Russians” or “Reds.” That is curious; it is reflected in language.

There was a fairly large stratum of people who—especially in the Kuban, as we know both from statistics and modern research, and in some Don districts—had suffered greatly under Soviet rule and collaborated with the Nazis.

Incidentally, the relatives to whom the Gelfands fled from Dnepropetrovsk—the mother and son actually lost each other during the flight, because everything happened unexpectedly and nobody thought the Germans would arrive so quickly—remained there when the Germans later occupied part of the North Caucasus. All those relatives were killed. The Germans murdered them all. His father and mother survived, but all the relatives who lived in Essentuki perished, and he writes about them with anxiety…

V. Ryzhkov― They were killed as Jews?

O. Budnitsky― As Jews. The Germans killed them all.

V. Dymarsky― Does he merely describe day by day what is happening, or does he trace certain themes and draw conclusions?

V. Ryzhkov― Story lines.

V. Dymarsky― Yes. He enters the army in 1942. Does service in the army make the reasons for the defeats of 1941 clearer to him, for example? Does he go back to that question?

O. Budnitsky― As far as I remember, he does not reflect much specifically on 1941. But when he enters the army in the midst of defeat and retreat, he keeps trying to understand why it is happening. He sees the reason in disorganization and in the behavior of commanders—one moment they are there, the next they have all got into cars and driven away, abandoning the men. The commander was there and suddenly he is gone; he ran away. He describes things like that. And when Order No. 227 comes out, he is pleased—extremely pleased.

V. Dymarsky― The blocking detachments.

O. Budnitsky― Yes.

V. Ryzhkov― “Not one step back.”

O. Budnitsky― Yes. Though on the other hand he himself gets caught in what one might call a roundup. He is at an assembly point and has no idea how it will end or where they will send him. He decides it is better to run away. Somehow he later reaches his formation and continues serving. There are chronological gaps in the diary—about three months in one period, with no surviving entries. Perhaps they were lost…

V. Ryzhkov― Maybe simply lost.

O. Budnitsky― Most likely. And on some days he clearly had no possibility of writing. Sometimes he writes several days retrospectively.

V. Dymarsky― Judging by the illustrations, I take it he wrote the diary on whatever paper he could find—here, for example, over a portrait of Tolstoy?

O. Budnitsky― Yes.

V. Dymarsky― So he wrote on anything, whatever was at hand.

O. Budnitsky― Paper was in terribly short supply.

V. Ryzhkov― And he carried all of it with him constantly?

O. Budnitsky― Yes.

V. Ryzhkov― Hundreds of sheets, hundreds of pages?

O. Budnitsky― Yes. He carried them. Apparently at some point he managed to send some away for safekeeping, but he carried most of it with him.

V. Ryzhkov― Returning to the sociology of that generation, the generation of victors: he was one of the victors and knew it. He was in the Berlin area, where there were Allied commissions, British and Americans. Does he record anything about that? How did a victorious Soviet soldier view the Allies in May, June, July 1945 and into 1946? Or was he hardly interested and rarely encountered them?

O. Budnitsky― First, he was not actually based in Berlin; he visited Berlin. He was stationed not far away and later in various German towns. He served in Berlin for a short time. Incidentally, one of his duties there was selecting books from a German library to be sent to the Soviet Union. He was terribly indignant about it.

V. Ryzhkov― Why?

O. Budnitsky― “But what about the German working class? What books will they study from?” He meant it completely seriously. I think that may even have been why he was eventually transferred to some motor-transport unit.

V. Ryzhkov― A Soviet mind worrying about German workers.

O. Budnitsky― Yes. And despite everything, he had this feeling for culture. There is an interesting scene. When they entered Germany—and I do not know whether listeners realize this—at first people simply began destroying everything.

V. Ryzhkov― Smashing things.

O. Budnitsky― Smashing, burning…

V. Ryzhkov― The hatred was incredible.

O. Budnitsky― There is hardly a document from the period that does not mention it. Reports to the Main Political Directorate ask what to do and how to combat arson and fires. Everything was being wrecked. Who knew what would happen? We are here now, but perhaps they will drive us back later. So the impulse was: do to them now what they did to us. There was such a moment. Later, of course, looting began. I almost said that was “normal,” though of course it is not really normal…

V. Dymarsky― It usually accompanies war.

O. Budnitsky― In essence it was sanctioned from above. There was an order allowing soldiers to send home five kilograms of trophies, officers ten kilograms…

V. Ryzhkov― The victors’ trophies.

O. Budnitsky― …senior officers fifteen kilograms. Obviously they were not mailing ammunition home; they sent things. Where were those things to come from? Sometimes there were abandoned houses with no owners, but situations varied. Often the owners had simply fled. In one episode a commander in the company where Gelfand served tries to smash busts of Goethe and Schiller. Gelfand writes that he could not bear to watch such barbarism. He took the busts of Goethe and Schiller away from the man, wrapped them in cloth, hid them somewhere, and would not allow them to be destroyed.

V. Ryzhkov― Reverence for culture.

O. Budnitsky― Yes. That is…

V. Dymarsky― But he recognized Goethe and Schiller?

O. Budnitsky― Well, he…

V. Dymarsky― He did not have higher education, did he?

O. Budnitsky― He did not even complete secondary education—roughly nine grades—but he was a great reader. Again, before the war he attended a literary circle. He describes the poet Iosif Utkin coming to speak to them—not at school, it was somewhere in the city, at some…

V. Dymarsky― Palace of Pioneers?

O. Budnitsky― Something like that; I do not remember the exact detail. He describes meeting Iosif Utkin and is very critical of him—how self-important he was, always “I, I, I,” and so on. Gelfand carried books with him, including a biography of Lermontov and other books. He was constantly reading. He was well-read, a person with rather elevated aspirations.

V. Dymarsky― Literate?

O. Budnitsky― Literate, of course.

V. Dymarsky― I mean his Russian.

O. Budnitsky― Yes, yes.

V. Dymarsky― The published text may have been corrected.

V. Ryzhkov― The prose is quite deft, well written.

V. Dymarsky― The commas were probably put in by editors.

O. Budnitsky― I did not compare every comma, but he was quite literate. He intended to become a man of letters, a writer. These diaries were his raw material. When his comrades told him—he would sometimes read them fragments of his diary or his poems—reactions differed. Once they mocked him and said, “What kind of writer are you? Nothing will come of you.” He became very upset, as though he sensed there might be some truth in it. This was already after the war, and he took it hard. Incidentally, he continued writing after the war ended.

V. Ryzhkov― Did he ever try—I see a photograph here from the early 1970s—to use this enormous factual material recorded in the diaries to make something documentary or literary: a novel, novella, book, and so on? Did he want to, did he try?

O. Budnitsky― I do not know of such an attempt. Apparently not. At least among the enormous quantity of papers left after his very early death—he died at sixty—there was no finished literary work. He published some sketches, memoir pieces, and fragments in the local newspaper. The most he achieved was publication in the republican press: a collection in Kyiv printed a short memoir fragment of his, but the editors rewrote it completely. Most astonishingly, that fragment was not about what he had seen himself, but about something another soldier had told him, something that did not correspond to reality: a supposed German women’s battalion that had been captured, and so on. It was exotic. He wrote down what the other soldier had told him, including what they did with those German women and what was proposed. The editors remade it in a humanitarian spirit, and an entirely different text resulted.

V. Dymarsky― Oleg, when the 1945–46 part of the diary was published in Germany, what was the German reaction? In particular, were the pages we have discussed today—relations with German women, rape, looting, and so on—received with condemnation?

O. Budnitsky― What was the reaction? First, enormous interest. Second, none of this was news to Germans. There is a vast German-language literature, including diaries, memoirs, and so on. Why did this diary become a bestseller? Because a contemporary Soviet person recorded it through his own eyes. That aroused tremendous interest there.

V. Dymarsky― But in some sense, not that it justifies them—it certainly does not—but does it not shift some portion of blame onto the victors as well?

O. Budnitsky― I would not say so.

V. Dymarsky― No? There was no such German reaction?

O. Budnitsky― I simply do not know those reactions in enough detail. I do not think Gelfand’s diary fundamentally changed anything. There was already an enormous German literature unknown to us, including official documents on population transfers, refugees, and so on. Germans, incidentally, were the largest group of refugees in twentieth-century Europe. Few people know that.

V. Dymarsky― Fleeing Hitler?

O. Budnitsky― No, they were not fleeing Hitler. First they fled the Red Army; second, they were expelled from Czechoslovakia and Poland. There were three million Sudeten Germans alone. Altogether there were something like fifteen million refugees.

V. Ryzhkov― An enormous number, yes.

O. Budnitsky― And while today we sympathize with the suffering of civilians, many of whom personally had done nothing, it was nevertheless the retribution that, broadly speaking, Germany had brought upon itself. One cannot get away from that context.

I simply want to add one thing so that listeners do not get the impression that this is the main leitmotif of the book. In the German section, everyday life is extraordinarily interesting, as are these forms of interaction. The war ends, and suddenly everything somehow…

V. Dymarsky― And the diary ended.

O. Budnitsky― No, that is not what I mean. The diary continues. I mean that the hatred somehow dissolves and disappears. When they enter Germany he writes joyfully that Germany is burning—and then quite soon he is interacting normally with Germans. Everything normalizes very quickly. That is one of the surprising things.

V. Dymarsky― Our time is up, so we thank our guest Oleg Budnitsky.

V. Ryzhkov― Thank you very much.

V. Dymarsky― I remind you that this was The Price of Victory. See you again in a week.