New Sources on the History of the Second World War: Diaries

November 29, 2021
Jewish Museum
Lecturer: Oleg Budnitsky

Dear colleagues, hello! Thank you for joining us today. We are beginning a new section of our laboratory. This section will be devoted to wartime diaries and, in particular, to one diary that has never previously been published.

It is kept in the archive of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, and we will be able to read and discuss it at our next meeting. Today we will hear a lecture about the particular characteristics of the wartime diary as a genre and about the specific practice of keeping a diary in the 1940s, under Soviet conditions and in wartime.

I do not think our lecturer today needs any special introduction. This is Oleg Vitalyevich Budnitsky, historian, professor at the Higher School of Economics and director of the Institute of Soviet and Post-Soviet History at the Higher School of Economics. He has published a large number of ego-documents, including documents from the war years. Oleg Vitalyevich, the floor is yours.

Yes, thank you, Georgy. What format do we have, exactly? How long is the lecture supposed to be?

About an hour.

Won't the listeners wilt by then? I would simply like this not to be a one-way monologue, especially with me speaking into a black square. There are some reviews written there. Sometimes it is pleasant to see the listeners' faces. I would like this to take place not simply in the form of me broadcasting, but with listening and some kind of feedback.

That is, if questions arise as we go along... I think, Georgy, you will moderate, right? If someone wants to ask a question in English, they can ask it aloud so everyone can hear, or write it in the chat and then you can voice it. If questions arise in the course of the talk, I think that is a fairly productive form, especially when we are working online. That is the first point.

The second point, naturally, is wartime diaries. Who kept them, under what circumstances, who these people were, why they kept diaries, and so on. In essence, these questions are no different from the questions asked by diary researchers or by historians who use diaries as historical sources and try to extract information from them.

The only difference is that this is war, and war is an extremely inconvenient time for keeping a diary. If only because everyone is shooting. There is shooting, bombing, and a great deal else.

And technically, how can one keep a diary at all? The question arises of who could keep such diaries, how many wartime diaries there were in all, and one could continue listing such questions indefinitely.

I want immediately to dispose of one question that I am always asked. People always say that keeping a diary during the war was prohibited. This comes up in every audience. In fact, no special order specifically prohibiting people from keeping diaries was ever issued. At least, historians have not discovered one to this day. There were general rules and assumptions concerning secrecy. Given those circumstances, keeping a diary was of course an undesirable thing if it might fall into enemy hands—and such cases did occur. An enemy could learn something from a diary about the condition of the opposing side, in this case the Red Army. Even if it contained no concrete information about unit locations, plans, or similar matters—things diarists normally did not write about, or wrote about only very rarely—it could still reveal morale, the state of supplies, and relationships inside the Red Army. That was already valuable information for the enemy. Therefore people who kept diaries were often told not to continue.

Zinovy Chernilovsky, a lawyer who served during the war as the political officer of a machine-gun company, recalled that when his commander noticed that he was keeping a diary, the commander simply took it and threw it into the stove of the hut where they were quartered. He said that Comrade Stalin had ordered that people who kept diaries be shot. Comrade Stalin had ordered nothing of the kind, of course, but the commander's belief that this constituted a terrible crime is revealing.

There were also entirely opposite cases, in which people kept diaries quite openly and sometimes even read them aloud to their comrades. There was no uniform practice. For the most part it was apparently not encouraged, but at the same time in many cases people openly kept diaries and no one said a bad word to them. People who made notes were sometimes questioned by officers of the special departments.

Military interpreter Irina Dunaevskaya, for example, recalled that on several occasions different security officers spoke to her for various reasons and asked what she was writing down. Since her notes contained neither unit numbers nor surnames—in other words, nothing that constituted a military secret—they told her, all right, you may continue making notes, just make sure there is nothing secret in them.

Another case, known or perhaps rather less known, is that of Elena Kagan, an interpreter in a special SMERSH group whose task was to find Hitler or his remains. She kept notes throughout the war.

Elena Kagan is better known by the literary surname she later used, Elena Rzhevskaya. It is understandable that she kept records: before the war she had been a student at the Literary Institute, wanted to become a writer, and later did indeed become one. At the front she tried to make notes and in fact did so. Later, when I became acquainted with her wartime notebooks, it was clear that a great many of her works simply grew out of those records. They are, essentially, wartime diaries that were subsequently given literary form.

When they actually found Hitler's corpse and an autopsy was performed, incidentally, the pathologist was a woman, Anna Marants, the chief pathologist—or acting chief pathologist—of the First Belorussian Front, a major in the medical service. The remains were terribly burned, so identifying the person was extremely difficult. But the jaws and teeth were in excellent condition, and teeth are a one-hundred-percent identifier of a person. Lieutenant Elena Kagan recorded what was happening and so forth.

Then they were told that all of this was a terrible secret. One of the paradoxes of general Soviet policy was that the discovery of Hitler's body was not announced. It became something of an open secret.

In the West, people generally knew quite well what had happened to Hitler. With a certain number of witnesses, including people who had managed to escape from Berlin, the information could not really be concealed. Apparently it was announced that Hitler had committed suicide, but the discovery of the body itself was not reported.

Perhaps this served as a kind of scare story: look, Hitler might still be hiding somewhere, so everyone must remain alert, and so on. That is my speculation; I do not know how else to explain it. In any case, Elena Kagan carefully blacked out in her diaries everything concerning Hitler's teeth.

She did not destroy the notebook, but all of that material had been blacked out. She had signed a nondisclosure pledge, and so the notebooks were kept—not exactly under seven seals, but at home—and she told no one until twenty years after the events, when she published a book entitled Berlin, May 1945: Notes of a Military Interpreter. There she told the world for the first time about the circumstances of the whole affair. Although the work is called Notes, it is of course not simply a set of notes; it is a text written on the basis of a diary.

Let us return to the people who kept diaries and why they did so. First, they were educated people, at the very least people who had finished secondary school. In the prewar Soviet Union that already meant a very educated person.

And one must understand, incidentally, that the idea of the Cultural Revolution and so on is a major Soviet myth. In what sense a myth? In the sense that on the eve of the war the population was still not particularly well educated. If my memory does not fail me, for every thousand adults there were about seventy-something—I am giving approximate figures—roughly seventy-seven people with secondary education and six or seven with higher education.

There were very few of them, and as a rule they were urban residents. We know extremely little about what the overwhelming majority of the country's population thought or how it experienced the war. The overwhelming majority were peasants and rural residents. On the eve of the war they still made up two-thirds of the population according to the 1939 census. So the people who kept diaries represented a minority: a small, educated, urban minority that also happened to have the habit of writing things down. And they did so under conditions in which, in many cases and perhaps most cases, making such notes was not recommended or was forbidden.

Under those circumstances, until perhaps twenty years ago it was assumed that wartime diaries were an entirely exceptional phenomenon and that very few existed.

There are indeed very few if one compares their number with the total size of the Red Army. What was the total number of people who passed through the Red Army during the war? Who can say offhand? Suppose someone guesses.

Thirty million.

You see, excellent. You know better than I do. But not quite. A little more: 34.5 million. There was the prewar army of more than five million, and 29.5 million people were mobilized or drafted during the war. So, of course, the fraction represented by diarists is tiny.

At first we spoke of dozens of diaries. It later turned out that there are hundreds that we know about at a minimum, most of them published. And there were most likely thousands.

Thousands that... One hopes they may have survived somewhere, above all in family archives. In addition, some may not have been destroyed by security-service personnel at the time of arrest, because in a number of cases keeping a diary was itself grounds for arrest if a person wrote something considered suspicious or someone informed on him.

Sometimes, though rather rarely, such diaries were deposited in state archives. For the most part, however, they are discovered in private family archives.

I sometimes host broadcasts on Echo of Moscow radio in the program The Price of Victory, and several times I ended my broadcasts with an appeal: if anyone has diaries or wartime documents in family archives—not interviews or reminiscences recorded fifty or sixty years later, but diaries written then, here and now, when a person did not know not only what would happen tomorrow but sometimes whether he would still be alive that evening—please let us know. To my surprise, people responded and sent scans, and sometimes handed over original diaries, from all sorts of places.

They came from Novosibirsk, Moscow, Stuttgart—the most unexpected places. Diaries or diary notes even arrived from New York. Sometimes, unfortunately, they had later been recopied by the authors. There were also cases in which relatives had recopied them, and in such cases the diaries bore obvious signs of editing.

If the original does not exist, then of course one has to treat the text with extreme caution and verify it. For example, I was sent a very interesting “Nurse's Diary.” It is remarkable, and one can see that some passages really were written here and now, but suddenly it contains a reference to the film Cossacks of the Kuban, which, as everyone knows, was made after the war.

Clearly, in 1942 the diarist could not have recalled the happy life shown in Cossacks of the Kuban. Yet all my attempts... The diary was recopied by the author herself, by the way. Her daughter stubbornly refused to provide the original.

“Mother wanted it this way; this is the form it must have.” Such cases do occur. That does not mean that every recopied diary was in fact edited in some way.

Sometimes the original consisted of sheets that were literally falling apart, and people simply recopied or retyped them to preserve the text.

What else can we say about diary authors? Why did they write, and who wrote? Keeping a diary at the front line was practically impossible, although there were cases. They were not frequent, but there were people who wrote diaries even during combat operations. I will discuss one such diary in more detail.

Most often the authors were officers—or commanders, as they were called until the end of 1942, when officer ranks were restored. They were frequently interpreters, staff personnel, or political workers. Naturally, a considerable body of material survives from journalists, who were permitted to make notes—military journalists. And people who had no direct connection with literature also wrote, including people who dreamed of becoming writers afterward.

This was not an isolated phenomenon. Boris Suris from Odessa, for example, wrote somewhat ironically that “I want to write a n-n-novel.” He wrote the word “novel” with three n's in Russian for comic effect.

Jokes aside, while working as an interpreter he copied down the surnames of Germans he interrogated so that he could use them in a future novel. He never did write the novel. Instead he produced a remarkable diary. The original diary of Boris Suris has been published. He became an artist. His children and grandchildren moved to Israel, and somewhere here they have the original diary. The diary was published in Moscow; it is extraordinarily interesting, although one has the impression that certain fragments were omitted.

Oleg Vitalyevich, excuse me for interrupting, but some people cannot see the screen share. Could you turn it off and on again?

It is simply paused.

Yes, it is paused. It is simply paused; I will continue it later. For now there is only the title, nothing else.

As I said, Elena Kagan intended to become a writer and did become one. Irina Dunaevskaya kept diary notes of this kind and said, “Perhaps I, an ordinary girl like this, will someday write a book about the war?” Of course, this “ordinary girl” was studying at the Oriental Faculty of Leningrad University. For better or worse, she knew German, and so on.

After the war she became a relatively well-known historian and Orientalist. She worked on the Ancient Near East and on religious sects. There are curious details there. I think she first entered the Russian department, then moved to the foreign-language department, and later into Oriental studies. In one of her entries she complains that she has to read the early al-Tabari in translation because it is impossible to obtain the original. That was our “ordinary girl.”

The person who really was, in quotation marks of course—because there are no truly “simple” people—and who also dreamed of becoming a writer was Vladimir Gelfand. I will now discuss his diary in detail, because I can see that people are already longing for pictures; a talking head becomes a little tiring. My colleagues Tatiana Lvovna Voronina and Irina Makhalova and I published this diary with extensive notes, illustrations, and so on.

The story is as follows—the story of this diary, or more precisely of this publication. I had come across amateur-style versions of the diary on the Internet.

But it was difficult to call them a publication, because different kinds of documents had clearly been joined together: the diary, various applications, character references, letters. There were obvious confusions in wording and so forth.

In one radio program devoted to wartime diaries I mentioned this astonishing diary, which is astonishing for two reasons. First, its sheer scale. It begins in the summer of 1941 and ends in the autumn of 1946, when the diarist, who was serving in Germany with the Soviet occupation forces, had already been demobilized and was traveling home to Dnipropetrovsk.

Second, there is its extraordinary, almost boundless candor. After that radio program the diarist's son telephoned. The author was no longer alive; unfortunately, he did not live a very long life and died at the age of sixty.

His son, Vitaly Vladimirovich Gelfand, lives in Berlin. He called the radio station, they gave him my telephone number, and he said that he wanted to publish the diary in Russia. By that time part of the diary had already appeared in German and had even been translated into Swedish.

But that edition covered only the part devoted to his time in Germany, first as a conqueror and then as an officer of the occupation forces. At some point I started saying that we needed scans of everything, because clearly some material had to be deciphered, systematized, and so on.

Then one day I found myself in Vitaly Vladimirovich's apartment in Berlin. I was also interested in one question: given the gigantic volume of the diary, how had all of this been physically possible?

There was a box standing there. It contained notebooks, separate sheets, and generally anything on which it had been possible to write. Paper, of course, was in desperately short supply during the war. And here, look, is a fragment of the diary.

This is what it looks like, and here is the transcription made for our edition. Here is another fragment.

Do you see how it is written? This part was written in 1941, and this one in 1942. The second sheet is Tsereteli, with the diary entry written around it. Apparently a page was torn out of a book containing Tsereteli's works. If there was a surface one could write on, he wrote on it.

What makes this diary remarkable? Several things. First, its author is very naïve. He had practically just left school. There was only a short interval before he turned eighteen and was drafted into the army. He had worked as an electrician in Yessentuki. He was a half-formed person, half teenager, half young man.

And he kept this diary. I do not know whether he had kept some form of diary earlier, but the surviving text begins in 1941. His first reaction to the beginning of the war was essentially: “So, the war has started; now I will have to change my vacation plans.”

Indeed, his vacation plans did have to change. Usually people keep diaries with some future reader in mind. Even if you declare that it is all only for yourself and so on, a person normally does not go all the way to complete candor.

This is a different case. It is extraordinarily frank, almost maximally frank. He writes extremely unflattering things about himself that, I do not know, a more mature person probably would not have written down, including unpleasant things that he himself did.

What else is striking about this diary besides its size, duration, and candor? It was written by someone who served in genuine combat units. He was a mortar man; only the infantry was closer to death. And he continued making entries during shelling and during battles.

After a shell hit one end of the trench near Lidnoye and killed the people who were there, he once again survived almost miraculously. During the whole war he was wounded only once, in a finger. It was a very unpleasant injury because it became infected, a whitlow developed, and he ended up in hospital and took a long time to recover. But in that respect he was of course very lucky, because he took part in very fierce fighting, especially in the autumn of 1943 during the battles for Ukraine—terrible, simply monstrous battles. At times he lost track of the days and did not know the date, yet he continued writing.

Some entries are simply horrifying. He began talking with a young woman who was a medical orderly; clearly he liked her. He notes that he was constantly passed over and deprived of decorations, which upset him greatly, while this girl already had a medal. They talked, and she apparently had some kind of bad premonition. He reassured her that everything would be all right. Shelling began, and gallantly he gave her his individual trench, which he had dug himself and which was deeper than the others, while he lay down somewhere else. A shell hit precisely the trench he had given to the girl. He describes what remained of her: a leg and other pieces of the body. He made the soldiers gather the remains and bury them and wrote on a board who she was, and so on.

What matters in this case, besides such astonishing and terrifying details, is that this is real war and that much of it can be checked. Fortunately, the Ministry of Defense has public electronic databases such as Memorial. One can search the Memorial database for the surname and first name of that dead young woman and verify that Gelfand really made the entry on the day she was killed. One can also find information about her decoration in the Podvig Naroda database, which contains award citations for participants in the war.

Another characteristic of this diary is that Gelfand embellished nothing. He entered the front-line army as a private and became a sergeant during the Kharkiv catastrophe of May 1942, when the Red Army attempted an offensive to liberate Kharkiv. The plan failed, the enemy's strength had been misjudged, and the Germans were themselves preparing an offensive. A powerful counterattack followed, then the Kharkiv encirclement and colossal losses. After that the Red Army began retreating toward the Don and later toward Stalingrad. He describes this extremely difficult period. Some diarists, even if they do not beautify events, at least avoid dwelling on negative moments. Gelfand writes everything without embellishment.

Perhaps the most interesting part of his diary, however, concerns his stay in Germany.

You know that the subject of the Red Army in Germany, relations with the local population, and, shall we say, treatment of German women that was not always gentlemanly, is much discussed. Gelfand wrote about it in his diary, and there is controversy around these passages. He records in considerable detail both episodes he witnessed and his own relations with German women. Here, for example, is an entry from May 15, 1945.

“A few days ago I met two pretty German girls near the mess hall. We talked; they compared me to an Italian and said that my hair was very black. They paid me compliments, which I did not fail to notice. For some reason the word ‘compliment’ delighted them, and they clapped their hands and expressed their joy with gestures,” and so on.

What is interesting about the story? The girls were not alone. Their mother was with them, and they wanted food. He brought out some pies, and they were delighted. The mother had clearly come to bargain with her daughters, and the daughters apparently did not object, but Gelfand did not quite understand what was going on.

One of the central themes of his diary is that he was a virgin and kept wanting to lose his virginity but never managed to. In many cases women practically put him into bed, but he somehow withdrew and did not know how to behave. He finally lost his innocence in Germany with a German woman.

This too is a curious story, a good illustration of a well-read boy. He was sorting through a German library so that the books could be sent to Moscow, to the USSR, as compensation for the damage done by Germany, and he felt terribly guilty about it. Why? Because socialism was going to be built there as well; he was a convinced Soviet person and believed socialism would soon be built in Germany, and how could people manage without these important books? It would be difficult for them.

In one of the books—a medical book—he read something in German that he understood as meaning that if “it” did not happen to him now, then later nothing would ever work. He went outside, called over the first German woman he encountered, and suggested that she sleep with him.

She agreed, and the reason she agreed is fairly obvious. When a Soviet officer said, “Come here,” refusal was not customary; among other things he had a pistol at his side. He describes his “fall from innocence” in minute detail.

After that he began to live much more freely, and the naïve boy stopped looking naïve at all. He became a regular at the black market and got to know more than one German woman. In the end it finished as such things often do: he contracted gonorrhea and again described in extraordinary detail how he was treated. The treatment was completely barbaric. These passages should be given to adolescents at puberty so that they understand how certain adventures can end. In the end, however, everything turned out well.

From what I have retold, I think it is already clear why diaries are an absolutely unique source for the history of the war. A certain canon of war history has formed. What many veterans—the overwhelming majority—say and write about the war is what they consider proper to say, and it is often not easy to reach their actual memories. For many people their memories have become substantially mixed with what they later saw and heard. In addition to the understandable distortions of memory, there is this changing norm of what one is “supposed” to say. When people wrote diaries, they did not know what they were supposed to write. They wrote as they felt—though not everyone did; some people even then wrote as they thought they ought to. Not everyone recorded exactly what they saw, felt, and experienced.

There is frequent public discussion, especially among people interested in the history of the war, historians, and politicians, to the effect that one day the archives will open. They are already open to a significant extent, although far from completely, and then, people say, we will learn everything about what really happened.

Nothing of the kind, I assure you. We will learn a great deal, but by no means everything, because archives contain documents written by people for particular purposes. They contain a great deal that is fascinating and that has still not become common knowledge. But one should not imagine that archives alone can give us a picture of genuine history. Without the human viewpoint, without personal experience, that enterprise is meaningless. In this respect diaries are a completely unique and irreplaceable source.

Wartime letters, for example, passed through censorship, and soldiers generally knew they were being censored. Accordingly, letters are not a source with the same degree of frankness as diaries.

Returning to Gelfand's diary, another extraordinarily interesting point is that the family archive survived. In Germany he acquired a camera and photographed very actively. We therefore have an absolutely unique set of photographs. Some of them are reproduced in our edition of Gelfand's wartime diaries.

Here is his family: Gelfand with his mother and father, Gelfand as a teenager, and his relatives on his father's side, who were murdered by the Germans in Yessentuki in 1942. What later came to be called the Holocaust was something he knew about firsthand, long before the Red Army liberated Poland and discovered the Nazi extermination camps.

For many people, especially in the West, the Holocaust means above all Poland and the extermination camps. Indeed, a very large proportion of the Jews murdered during the Second World War were killed in those camps. In the Soviet Union the Nazis used a different strategy. Jews were shot near the places where they lived, sometimes without any great effort to conceal what was happening. Gelfand learned about this fairly early and wrote about it.

Here, then, is Vladimir Gelfand. He completed junior-lieutenant courses in April 1943. And after that there is an entire series of photographs...

Here he is in Poland. His German girlfriend said that he looked Italian. And in fact, he does look a little like an Italian actor from the films.

And here is a series of photographs taken by him and his comrades in Germany, in Berlin. Look at this one. And then, here, you can easily recognize the Brandenburg Gate.

This is the memorial to Soviet soldiers killed in the assault on Berlin, erected very soon after the battle. It still stands in the same place. Here he is again with his comrades.

Look at how a Soviet officer could appear at that time. Notice the hairstyle.

You see, at the end of the war Gelfand was awarded the Order of the Red Star for the fighting of 1945. And here he is fooling around, trying things on, attaching a fake mustache, and so forth.

In short, a young man of his time. These are his German female friends. One of them even wrote to him after the war ended.

Here is another series of these jokes and antics. You see him dressed up in a top hat. And here are views of postwar Berlin.

The Stettin railway station. Stettin is now Polish Szczecin. The station no longer exists; it was destroyed.

The black market. Here is Gelfand with his camera. Again, as you see, he is fooling around. His hair is natural, but he created this particular look.

This is the cover of the book, with Vladimir Gelfand against the background of the Brandenburg Gate. You can see him with a small beard. The book turned out to be a very thick one—750 pages—with extremely detailed commentary.

There are many other diaries as well. I have mentioned several. Some are very short little diaries, but that does not mean they are less valuable.

I was deeply impressed by the diary of Pavel Elkinson, an artillery sergeant who fought through almost the entire war from 1942 onward, took part in the Battle of Stalingrad, was wounded, and so forth. He began keeping a diary in 1944. Why then? Because they had reached the Prut, the border of the Soviet Union. He wrote: “Now we are going abroad. I will probably never be abroad again, so I must write all of this down.”

And he really did visit Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria. A kind of tourism, as it were. Tourism in quotation marks, of course. He writes with delight about how in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia they were welcomed as they had never been welcomed in Russia or Ukraine. People threw food to them; there was wine everywhere; everyone was constantly drunk. He describes it all with great enthusiasm, and so on. Bulgaria, of course, had been at war with the Soviet Union's allies, but it immediately underwent a coup and declared war on Germany. In Yugoslavia the Soviet troops were naturally welcomed as liberators.

Then in Hungary there was extremely heavy fighting while crossing the Danube and during the assault on Budapest. One day he writes that four of his comrades were killed that day. Involuntarily he wonders, and writes, “When will my turn come?” The feeling that you can die at any moment does not become dulled over time. His enormous combat experience meant nothing in that respect. Eventually they reached Austria as well.

One can find the most unexpected subjects in diaries: love stories, humor sometimes, and a great many other curious things. Sometimes they really read almost like a tourist's notes—again, of course, in quotation marks.

Major Safonov's diary is in St. Petersburg, in the manuscript department. He was a cartographer. His task was to put reliable military maps together for territory that the Red Army was liberating or occupying, depending on whether the country in question was a victim of Nazism or a member of the Nazi bloc. He too traveled through several countries, and Austria, which he had dreamed of visiting, made a particularly strong impression on him. He had dreamed of seeing Vienna and the Vienna Woods.

It is easy to understand why: Strauss, Tales from the Vienna Woods, and so forth. He really did reach Vienna, and he visited the Vienna Opera, which had been partly destroyed. Soldiers were sleeping there in heaps on the floor. He sat down and played something briefly on a piano and thought that perhaps, who knows, Strauss himself might once have played that very piano. He describes sleighs and various other things in detail. Texts like that exist too, although more often, of course, the diary is about the hard everyday life of war.

I can give one last example from the diaries I have read most recently. This is the diary of Nikolai Genzlin, a political worker. Later the number of political workers was sharply reduced, and he ended the war not as a political worker but as an artillery officer. He had already been in artillery before that, serving as a political deputy or commissar, and later became a reconnaissance officer in an artillery battalion.

He describes extremely heavy fighting on the southern section of the front, first around Taganrog and Rostov in 1942 during the difficult period of retreat, and later in the North Caucasus. He too reached Germany and finished the war there, although his entries from Germany are already rather fragmentary.

So there are not as few diaries as one might think, and they are very diverse. The people who wrote them were very different, yet something unites them. What unites them is a tendency toward reflection, I would say, and to some extent a sense of History, even if they themselves did not consciously formulate it that way: a desire to record what was happening. In some of them one can clearly see the wish to leave a memory, a trace of oneself. Again, these people did not know what awaited them the next day. One sometimes encounters diaries like that of Sergeant Boris Komsky, an absolutely remarkable diary kept in the Bakhmeteff Archive in New York. He began fighting at the Kursk salient. Literally on the eve of examinations at an officer-training school, all of the cadets were simply loaded up and sent to Kursk because there was an acute shortage of men. The Battle of Kursk was the largest battle not only of the Second World War but, in terms of scale, one of the largest in world history.

They were thrown into combat before completing their training. Komsky too was a mortar man and was given the rank of sergeant rather than junior lieutenant. Within a few days his mortar company first turned into an infantry company because enemy fire destroyed its mortars, and then the company simply ceased to exist: it was annihilated. He was lucky because he had been wounded a day or two earlier and was already in hospital. The others were not so lucky. That is the story. It too is a very interesting diary.

Komsky was also a young man—seventeen when the war began—but psychologically he was quite different from Vladimir Gelfand, much more self-confident. He ended the war in Germany as a lieutenant. Unfortunately, as he later said, his wife destroyed the German part of his diary. Apparently she did not like what he had written there.

So that is a rapid survey of wartime diaries. I would call them an unprecedented source, and it is difficult to overstate their importance for understanding what we sometimes call the human dimension of war. Read them. They are, in general, extraordinarily absorbing texts. And almost always, I would say, they are a Bildungsroman, a novel of formation.

A Bildungsroman is a literary genre in which we see how a person changes. This is especially clear when a diary was kept for a long time: by the end of the war, or by the end of the author's participation in combat, the diarist is a different person. Sometimes the author leaves the war because he is wounded and never returns to the front, and so on.

Now I am ready to answer your questions, if there are any.

There is one more important thing I did not mention, given that this is a joint seminar of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, as I understand it, with the Prozhito project. You may have noticed that almost everyone I spoke about was Jewish: Boris Suris, Vladimir Gelfand, Boris Komsky, Pavel Elkinson, Ginzburg, Irina Dunaevskaya, Elena Kagan.

That is not accidental. It is not because I deliberately selected Jews. Nikolai Genzlin, whom I mentioned today, was Russian, for example, and so was Nikolai Yakovlev, whose diary I read recently.

Why, then, are there so many Jewish diarists? Because Jews were the most highly educated nationality in the Soviet Union. The proportion of people with higher and secondary education among Soviet Jews was several times, even tens of times, higher than among many peoples of the USSR, and they were almost all urban residents. The overwhelming majority lived in towns and especially in large cities. Many were university students or university graduates.

This is what one might call a precondition. To give you an idea: in absolute numbers there were more Jews with higher education than Ukrainians, and seven and a half times as many as in Belarus. There were specific historical reasons for this, but I will not go into them here. I will simply say that the probability of finding Soviet Jews among diary authors was very high.

And indeed, many Soviet Jews appear among the diarists. Some never use the word “Jew” in their diaries at all. For others it is a very important subject. Some suffer from antisemitism, as Gelfand did. He even wrote: “Why am I a Jew? Why did I have to be born a Jew?”

Boris Suris, by contrast, hardly felt such hostility at all. He wrote: “For some reason everybody likes me. I have good relations with people; everyone likes me.” And judging by the diary, this man from Odessa, with a splendid sense of humor and artistic gifts, really was popular. He served as an interpreter at headquarters in his unit.

So experiences differed greatly, and the people themselves were very different. I think the Jewish Museum made an excellent decision in choosing diaries as the theme of the seminar. Wartime and peacetime diaries give us a picture of the history of Soviet Jewry that, once again, turns out not to be quite the same as the version later commonly accepted or imagined.

Questions, please.

Yes, I have a question. Perhaps you mentioned this, but I am interested in the circumstances in which this particular diary was found and in how wartime diaries are usually discovered. Are they handed over by descendants, or do they somehow reach you by chance?

As I said, Gelfand's diary remained in the family. Its author preserved it and tried to publish after the war. He had articles in newspapers and some local publications, and his reminiscences appeared in a collection. But publishing the diary itself was of course impossible. It fit none of the accepted canons, even though Gelfand was an entirely Soviet person. At the end of the war, for example, he wrote about Stalin: “Stalin is my sun!” He describes all kinds of horrors, indecencies, and other things he encountered but does not connect them in any way with the central authorities. Moreover, he wrote for wartime divisional and army newspapers, and there he wrote in precisely the language one was supposed to use. The diary says one thing; the text for a wall newspaper says something entirely different. He knows that one must write in that way. It is a characteristic example of doublethink, although he himself does not reflect on it. He simply understands that this is how things are supposed to be done.

His attempts to publish after the war failed. Everything remained in the family. Vladimir Gelfand died in 1983. He was born in 1923. His son Vitaly Vladimirovich took the material with him when the family emigrated to Germany. There he devoted himself to deciphering and publishing his father's legacy.

The German historian Elke Scherstjanoi later learned about it. She published the German section of the diary in German translation. The book became a bestseller in Germany, selling about 80,000 copies—an enormous figure for a wartime diary, especially one written by a foreigner rather than a German. Later, as I have said, Vitaly Vladimirovich contacted me. In the end he scanned everything. The original diary was transferred to the Jewish Museum in Moscow, where it is now kept, along with unpublished wartime correspondence. That is how it happened.

Other diaries, as I have said, in my experience are mostly preserved in families. Unfortunately, many people throw away these “unnecessary scraps of paper.” But in general they remain in family archives.

Yes, please. We cannot hear you. Turn on your microphone.

Hello. Sorry. Thank you very much for the lecture; it was very interesting. I have a question. My colleague has a family diary kept by her grandfather, Popov. She has already published one fragment in a book in the Tula region and tried to analyze it. I too became acquainted with the diary—or rather with the family. My brother and the grandchildren deciphered the diary. Unfortunately, the grandfather died in 1945 while returning home—not exactly ingloriously, but he fell ill and died after the war. He kept notes through practically the whole war. They were then preserved in the family. What interested me was that he did not seem embarrassed or afraid to keep the diary, and it contains rather sharp comments about the actions of the leadership, including the highest-level leadership, regarding the organization of military operations. How typical is that? Such things were dangerous, as you rightly explained, and one might expect self-silencing. You have read a large number of wartime diaries. How common is this kind of criticism and bold condemnation of command decisions? Or is it very rare?

You know, it occurs fairly often. People were not afraid because they were Soviet people and believed they were trying to correct shortcomings. That was the way they saw it.

Incidentally, I have written about wartime diaries in detail. A book of mine came out this year, called People at War, published by New Literary Observer. I recommend it if you want to learn more, including about wartime diaries. It covers a range of material, but a substantial part is based precisely on diaries, and there is a special chapter devoted to them. It analyzes the diary of Olga Berggolts, including its previously unpublished early part. The third, postwar part of her diary has only just been published. A great deal of attention is devoted to precisely this kind of document.

The book also deals with what we can read in diaries and in certain other personal sources. In simple terms, this includes relations between men and women during the war, which were very varied and far from always romantic. I have a chapter called “Man and Woman in the Red Army.”

As for the story of Elena Kagan-Rzhevskaya and the discovery of Hitler's body, she carried his teeth in a box under her arm for some time. This was of course an extraordinarily secret matter. It turned out that the special group had not yet brought the necessary photographic equipment. She was handed a burgundy-colored box that had originally contained cheap costume jewelry and carried it under her arm for at least a day or two. She was ordered not to take her eyes off it. Imagine the responsibility: Hitler's teeth. She was terribly annoyed. It was May 9, Victory Day, everyone was celebrating, and she was stuck with this box. She could not even have a drink. The final chapter of my book is called “Hitler's Teeth” and is devoted to this story.

Elena Rzhevskaya's granddaughter, the excellent translator Lyubov Sum, showed me these notebooks and allowed me to publish several photographs from the family archive. They are extraordinarily interesting. The archive even preserves a diagram of Hitler's teeth drawn by Lieutenant Colonel Shkaravsky, head of the commission that examined the bodies found at the Reich Chancellery, together with corrections and an alternative diagram drawn by Käthe Heusermann, an assistant to Hitler's dentist. All this survived in Elena Rzhevskaya's personal archive. It is extraordinarily interesting.

But there are many other cases. So it was not unusual for diary keeping to occur, although the consequences varied. Sometimes everything was fine; sometimes people were arrested. Take Danil Fibikh, a journalist and writer. Apparently one of his fellow servicemen studied his diary and found a sentence to the effect that there were no speakers like in the old days—Trotsky, for example. That was enough: ten years. Simply for mentioning Trotsky. This was in 1943; Trotsky was already dead. The sentence itself was completely neutral. But the report did not go to just anyone; it went to Lev Mekhlis, who was a member of the military council of the front where Fibikh worked for an army newspaper. Fibikh was arrested at the front, sent away, and served the full ten-year sentence.

And he was an entirely Soviet person, even more than that. When he recorded stories about peasants who did not help Red Army men escaping from encirclement, he added something like: “Damned kulaks; they were not finished off during collectivization.” I am quoting from memory, not word for word, but that was the essence. Someone asked for bread, and a peasant said: you have a watch, then we can trade. A loaf of bread was exchanged for a watch, which at the time was of enormous value, and so on.

In other words, if Fibikh makes negative remarks, they are critical in the sense that “these are shortcomings we need to correct.” But the sentence about Trotsky destroyed him.

I work not only with diaries but with many kinds of sources, including judicial records. Among wartime military-tribunal documents one sometimes encounters formulations such as “kept a counterrevolutionary diary” or “kept a diary of counterrevolutionary content.” It is not common, but it occurs.

That is a wonderful project, what you are describing about the diary. Is she planning to publish the whole diary somewhere?

Yes, she is preparing it and intends to analyze it as a sociologist. I will definitely recommend your book to her. I think there will be publications. She is also considering eventually transferring the diary somewhere, although for now she wants to work with it herself.

Of course. If she needs help or consultation...

I will tell her. Thank you.

You can find the Institute of Soviet and Post-Soviet History on the Higher School of Economics website, or simply find me directly.

The diary is very interesting. It contains unique things. I read it with great interest. Reconstructing it was difficult: the handwriting is difficult, and as you said, people wrote on anything and under any conditions. The family spent several years reconstructing everything and then began the analysis.

Well, deciphering it... that is the smallest problem.

Of course, of course.

At least for professional historians who work with such materials.

No, they are not historians, not professionals—just family members, the grandchildren.

If they need any consultation or help, please contact me.

All right, I will tell her. Thank you.

Any more questions?

You mentioned “counterrevolutionary diaries.” Could you name any authors whose diaries one could read?

Wait a moment. I was not the one calling them counterrevolutionary diaries. That is how tribunals classified them. It does not mean there was anything genuinely counterrevolutionary in them. For example, the fact that Trotsky was an excellent orator was common knowledge both inside and outside the Soviet Union. The entry itself was not counterrevolutionary at all. It reflects the customs of Stalin's time and, in that particular case, the mentality of Lev Mekhlis, formerly head of the Main Political Directorate—in other words, the Red Army's chief political commissar.

Gelfand's diary itself could quite easily have been classified as counterrevolutionary. “Counterrevolutionary” was a legal formula. Article 58 dealt with counterrevolutionary and state crimes and contained many clauses, including the notorious Article 58-10—“anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.”

The overwhelming majority of the wartime cases I have seen involved people being imprisoned for words. Forget about an entire diary: saying the wrong thing could be enough. “Slandered the Soviet press”—grounds for arrest. “Slandered a Sovinformburo communiqué.” “Slandered the collective-farm system.” Put into ordinary language, people did not believe what the newspapers printed or what Soviet official reports said. And they had good reason not to, because the reports constantly announced how many enemy soldiers and officers and how much enemy equipment had been destroyed, while somehow more and more territory kept being surrendered to the enemy.

There are splendid diaries by Mikhail Prishvin. I am no longer speaking only about diaries by servicemen; there are also excellent wartime diaries by Prishvin and by the writer Vsevolod Ivanov. In one of them—I think Prishvin's—the author says that nobody can listen to the radio because it is so irritating and depressing. And so on.

Similar entries occur in soldiers' diaries too. Georgy Slavgorodsky, for example: I also took part in publishing his diary, which appeared posthumously many years after his death. Sadly, he survived almost the entire war only to be killed in Poland in 1945. He records a fellow serviceman's reaction to an item in the Soviet press: “It's all lies. All of it is lies.” That sentence alone could have led to Article 58. Slavgorodsky himself wrote other things in his diary that could also have been labeled counterrevolutionary.

So it is a question of structure. The overwhelming majority—almost all—of these diarists were Soviet people. There are some diaries that are genuinely critical of the authorities as such. They are very few, but they do exist. Mostly, however, Soviet people wrote because they were dissatisfied with the way the war was being conducted, in their opinion.

Take Boris Komsky, an absolutely Soviet patriot, a Komsomol organizer and so forth. He recorded what he had been told about the destruction of his company, or what remained of it: a drunken Captain Fronel led the company into a frontal attack. He could easily have been accused of slandering the Red Army. Yet there is little reason to doubt that what he recorded was true. It was told to him by one of the very few men who survived that terrible attack, when this drunken minor commander led the company straight onto the battlefield.

And that is exactly what I mean: such things are preserved precisely and almost only in diaries. People did not write them home in letters. If someone did, his relatives at home would probably never have received a next letter from him.

Any more questions?

Oleg Vitalyevich, thank you very much for the lecture and for the new book. I apologize for my screen; I am having camera problems. I actually have many questions, but I will try to be concise. Have there been studies comparing diaries of the Second World War—the Great Patriotic War—with Russian diaries of the First World War, 1914–1918? And were there comparative studies of Soviet diaries and diaries kept, say, in the German army, German society, or the Allied armies?

And, if I may, another question, more philosophical perhaps. As someone who has read a great many diaries, I am interested in your opinion about war and reflection—not only reflection on oneself and one's own experiences, but on the people around one. Do you more often encounter the thought that war corrupts people? Or, conversely, that war somehow allows something else to emerge...

That it brings out the best in a person.

Yes, exactly. I understand that both kinds of observation will occur, but which is more common?

I have almost never encountered the idea in these diaries that war brings out something better in people. I want to say that this is a mythologeme. In my view it is an absolute myth. War is a terrible thing. It makes nobody better. Whether the war is just or unjust, people kill in war and sacrifice other people's lives.

I apologize, Oleg Vitalyevich. I probably formulated the question poorly. I mean something slightly different. I understand that the heroic idea is a mythologeme.

You mean: is that discussed in the diaries?

No, not exactly. I mean moments when the diarist records surprise because he expected people to behave one way but they behaved another. In Gelfand's diary, for example, he is a Soviet patriot and encounters a reality that does not match his ideas about war and the army. Naturally he is shocked that people steal in the army, beat one another, and that there is no real internationalism. He records the collision between what he expected and behavior that is worse. But surely there were also cases when people already knew from experience that war was horrible and nevertheless encountered unexpected displays of humanity. How often does that occur in the diaries? That is what I mean.

Not very often. There are entries about particular military achievements by particular servicemen. There are entries showing that people found friends in war and became very attached to them. Friendship at war, however, is a difficult matter: there was enormous turnover, very high casualty rates, and much else. Entries saying, “Look how humane these people turned out to be,” are extremely rare. Extremely rare.

As for your other questions, the answer can be given in one word: no. As far as I know, there are no comparative studies of First and Second World War diaries. Someone compared Soviet and German letters from Stalingrad—there was an article by, I believe, Helbert. But I honestly do not recall comparative studies of diaries.

In general, I do not remember any major specialized study devoted specifically to wartime diaries—a monograph, for example. There are discussions of the subject in articles that often introduce editions of particular diaries, but I cannot recall a dedicated book-length study.

I cannot recommend a specific book or article on the subject, except perhaps my own chapter in People at War.

Thank you very much.

Colleagues, any more questions?

Oleg Vitalyevich, if I may, I have two questions. First: there are known cases in which diaries of Soviet servicemen fell into German hands and were translated into German. Why was this done, how were the translations used, and was it widely known in the Soviet army that this could happen? Could that awareness have affected diary keeping?

Why they did it is clear: to extract useful information. Remember that a translator translated the diary, while the actual user was a military commander of some rank. The material had to be presented to him in a usable form.

One must also remember that the Germans had a propaganda machine and it functioned quite effectively. They had Vineta, a special propaganda service, and other structures. They wanted to understand what Soviet soldiers were like and what language should be used when speaking to them.

They had masses of prisoners with whom they could talk, of course. But diaries were also very interesting material for forming a picture of Soviet servicemen. Sometimes they were used for propaganda purposes and fragments were published.

There was also the reverse situation. Many Germans kept diaries; diary keeping was common, encouraged, and not prohibited. Soviet soldiers sometimes captured these diaries, usually from the bodies of dead soldiers, and used them in propaganda. German soldiers' diaries were repeatedly quoted for that purpose.

Thank you. And my second question: if we speak about the “proper” way of writing in Soviet soldiers' diaries, did models exist? Were diary-form texts widely published in the wartime press or literature?

No, I have not encountered that. Diary keeping was not encouraged at all. People generally believed it was prohibited. In practice it probably was prohibited in the overwhelming majority of cases. Boris Komsky, for example, explained after the war why he had kept a diary even though it was forbidden: “I didn't know. If I had known, I would not have kept it.”

Gelfand sometimes read his entries to his comrades, but usually this produced nothing except mockery.

At one point in his diary the style suddenly changes sharply. He writes enthusiastically about a political officer who is now explaining to him what he should do and how he should keep a diary: he should write about the combat achievements of their unit, about how the political officer conducts political work, and so forth.

The resulting text is strange to the point of absurdity. A few days later an entry appears: “At last I have got rid of the political officer!” The man had been living with him in the same dugout. “Now I can write whatever I want,” or words to that effect.

So those were the kinds of instructions that existed. The political officer did not forbid him to keep a diary but explained what and how he should write. With the political officer right beside him, Gelfand wrote things intended, if not to please him, at least not to provoke a negative reaction. Once the officer was gone, he went back to writing freely and later remarked: “What nonsense I wrote in my diary before,” or something of that sort.

Then that phase passed too, and he returned to those same “foolish” entries—in quotation marks, of course—which for us are the most interesting material of all.

© Gorskie 
© Oleg Budnitsky 
© Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center