The title “Notes of a Red Army Soldier” sounds combative, almost like the notebook of a warrior from the other side. Yet Vladimir Gelfand’s diary of 1945–1946 is clearly not a literary celebration of battle. Born in 1923, the author left behind intensely personal recollections that his son Vitaly, who moved from Ukraine to Berlin in 1995, has now made available for publication. What we have is something like an autobiographical coming-of-age novel, at times centered on the “intimate journal” of a young Red Army lieutenant. In that sense, the discovery is genuinely remarkable.

In 1945, the twenty-one-year-old Jewish officer Vladimir Gelfand commanded a mortar platoon in the 5th Shock Army under Colonel General Nikolai Berzarin, who later became the first Soviet commandant of Berlin. After Germany’s capitulation, the young lieutenant was assigned as an occupation officer in communities near Berlin. Throughout this period he kept a diary—on notebook pages, in small pads, and sometimes even on the backs of newspaper sheets.

Correspondence with his parents, relatives and future wife, several official documents, and a number of photographs complement the archive. The material was selected and annotated by historian Elke Scherstjanoi of the Institute for Contemporary History. The published diary ends with Gelfand’s discharge from the Soviet Army and his return home at the end of September 1946.

Gelfand was not an exemplary soldier. He was often impulsive, repeatedly violated discipline, and irritated his superiors, which left him feeling marginalized. Despite the courage he showed in battle, he received no decoration, something that wounded him deeply. In a letter to his father he states openly what he believed to be the reason: discrimination against him as a Jew.

Even so, Gelfand remained an ardent communist and a devoted admirer of Stalin. He did not regard Stalin as responsible for antisemitism. Instead, he explained discrimination against Jews as the “nationalism” of ordinary people and considered it a sign of backwardness.

He saw himself as a future writer. Alongside his diary he wrote poetry and occasionally published work in army newspapers. In his own understanding he was both a communist internationalist and an intellectual.

The second major theme of his notes is his relationship with women. At the end of the war he was completely inexperienced in matters of love, and his first encounters with German women and girls are described with touching uncertainty. His own entries do not present him as using sexual violence. On the contrary, they repeatedly show a certain respect for women.

That respect is, of course, colored by his consciousness of being a victor and by the knowledge that Germans had murdered members of his family in the North Caucasus. Nevertheless, he develops sincere attachments to some of his German girlfriends and suffers deeply from disappointment. His strongest longing, however, remains directed toward a distant Soviet woman, whom he sees as the only truly desirable image of love.

Gelfand’s notes are marked by a naive honesty in their most private moments. They can be read both as an individual record of war and the postwar period and as a historical source. At the same time, they must be approached critically, especially when Gelfand accepts rumors as facts without question.

One example is the story of a “German women’s battalion” that supposedly destroyed or humiliated a neighboring unit. There is no sound factual basis for this tale. Here one can see the mechanism of male fantasy, displacing attention from Nazi crimes in the occupied countries and redirecting it toward images of German women and their suffering.

Gelfand’s willingness to accept such rumors as truth may indicate that, despite his education, he was still an immature young man. But how could anyone fully mature after experiencing millions of deaths and mass murder? His diary leaves that question unanswered.

His writings are the chronicle of the development of an exceptional young officer who was, at heart, not a soldier at all, and whose preparation for civilian life took place in a world in which ordinary peaceful life had ceased to exist. We owe him and his generation an immeasurable debt.

Harald Loch