Diletant — “Wartime Diaries”

Guest — historian Oleg Budnitsky.
Host — Vladimir Ryzhkov.

V. RYZHKOV: Good evening! My guest is our wonderful long-time expert Oleg Vitalyevich Budnitsky, historian and Doctor of Historical Sciences. Today we decided to talk about wartime diaries. The source base on the Second World War is, of course, enormous: coded messages, reports, plans, maps, memoirs, statistics — millions of documents. But diaries are something special. While preparing for the program, I thought that for me diaries are associated with aristocrats, with an older way of life in imperial Russia, with a particular culture in which a person takes a notebook and records the day’s events every evening. Emperor Nicholas II, as we know, kept diaries. If I had kept diaries, they would now be a most valuable source. But I am lazy and not very cultivated, so I wrote nothing down, which of course I regret terribly.

My first question, Oleg: 1941–1945 was already the USSR, not that old imperial culture, not the traditions of grammar-school boys and girls. What kind of people managed, under shelling and bombing, in trenches and dugouts, to carry a pen and notebook in their kitbag and still keep diaries? Was this an older social formation, or a surviving Russian cultural habit? How would you characterize the category of people who managed to keep diaries during the war?

O. BUDNITSKY: Thank you for putting the question that way. I was just thinking that we have already talked so much about diaries, often at my instigation. We have had separate programs, for example, on Vasily Grossman’s notebooks, Gelfand’s diary, and the diary of the future marshal Andrei Yeremenko. But you have asked a very good question that turns the subject at a different angle.

I would not underestimate diary culture in the Soviet period. It was fairly widespread, even fashionable. There was even a novella called Diary After Ryabtsev, and other things in that vein. Keeping a diary was considered normal. Moreover, Gorky urged people to record the present — the “History of Factories and Plants.” In modern language that was more a matter of interviews, questioning people who had taken part in industrialization, but the idea was: record our great contemporary age. There was such a culture. Schoolchildren, especially schoolgirls, tended to keep notes and reflect on themselves in the world. Remember that a huge number of people who went to war left straight from school, sometimes before finishing it.

Second, you contrasted old Russia with new Russia, but many people from the former Russia had not disappeared. There is, for example, Lyubov Shaporina’s remarkable two-volume diary. Much of her theatrical career — puppet theater and so on — developed after the Revolution, but she was still a person of that old noble culture. Her diary, including the Leningrad blockade, was published in two volumes by New Literary Review. It is extraordinary: very frank and very sharp. Her reaction to Stalin’s speech of July 3, 1941 is enough to show this. Stalin drank water, his hand shook, his teeth rattled against the glass. She wrote: “A clodhopping peasant lot, a timid Georgian.” Imagine if that entry had reached the appropriate authorities. She also recorded all sorts of conversations about the Great Terror. It is often said that during the Great Terror people did nothing but burn diaries. Some did; others began keeping diaries precisely to record the horror of what was happening. There were very few of them.

Or, if we speak of people of the older culture and era, there is Mikhail Prishvin, known to many perhaps from his works for children. In reality he was a serious, philosophical writer, and the most important thing he wrote in his life was his diary. He kept it from 1905 until his death in 1954. It is a fantastic, extraordinarily detailed, multivolume diary.

V. RYZHKOV: Prishvin is considered one of the finest prose stylists. Half a century of notes! That is astonishing.

O. BUDNITSKY: The Revolution, the Civil War, anything you like is there. He was a Socialist Revolutionary for a time. The wartime section is extraordinarily interesting, with fluctuations of mood — not exactly that he was waiting for the Germans…

V. RYZHKOV: Was he in Moscow then?

O. BUDNITSKY: He was in Moscow and then went to a village in Yaroslavl Region, near Pereslavl-Zalessky. He recorded peasants’ conversations, many everyday details, and broader reflections on the course of the war. He had studied in Germany before the First World War and was, to simplify, an agronomist, although he hardly ever worked in that profession. He knew German. He wondered how he would meet the Germans, because they were supposedly about to arrive, were already close to Moscow, and there was a widespread mood that Soviet power was finished. He wrote: “I will tell them: I am not an enemy; I am a writer.” It is a curious entry.

His moods changed sharply. Sometimes he was dissatisfied with Soviet power, sometimes pleased with it. At one point he was unhappy that he had received the wrong decoration. He hated Marshak, who was very influential in children’s literature and in a sense a competitor, though they worked in completely different genres. Prishvin’s diary contains particularly venomous entries about Marshak — and, it must be said, about Jews in general. There is a striking entry there too.

V. RYZHKOV: So that little odor was present too?

O. BUDNITSKY: What do you mean by an “odor”? It is all written explicitly: Jews this, Jews that. And then he writes: “My best readers are Jews. What am I to do with that?”

V. RYZHKOV: What was Prishvin’s attitude toward Stalin? Or did he avoid the subject?

O. BUDNITSKY: He did not really avoid it, but his attitude varied. There were things he apparently did not dare to write down. Overall, it seems to have been negative. But at moments when he thought Stalin was doing something in the interests of the whole people, something for Russia as a whole, his entries were fairly positive, or at least neutral. Prishvin often looked at events from the village point of view and recorded village moods. He was deeply religious. His second wife was, one might say, a religious fanatic. I may be putting it rather crudely, but there are many reflections on religious and mystical themes.

Why did the peasants — using the language of that time, the “men and women” — dislike Soviet power? Because of persecution of religion. He records the thought: “What must a government have done if people see foreigners, occupiers, as those who will defend the faith and save them from persecution?” One woman said Moscow would not be bombed because there were many believers there. Those were the conversations in a Yaroslavl village. Moscow, as we know, was bombed. The Germans had no intention of saving the faith, but in their occupation policy they made a move that was very sensible from the occupiers’ point of view: they reopened churches. More than two thousand churches that had been closed under the Bolsheviks were reopened. That mattered. The rest of German policy, however, was such that very quickly…

V. RYZHKOV: We have been talking about the elite, about geniuses. When Vasily Grossman kept a diary at Stalingrad and elsewhere, that was clearly a professional need: he wrote brilliant reports and later a brilliant novel from this material. Prishvin, as a writer, also partly kept a diary to gather material for his work. Many academicians kept diaries while evacuated in Kazakhstan, including future atomic scientists. Many members of the elite wrote diaries because they belonged to this high culture, understood that they were witnesses to historical processes and that their testimony had weight.

But what about, forgive the word, ordinary people — sergeants, sappers, tankmen, and so on? Has anything significant survived from ordinary people from the standpoint of historical scholarship and our knowledge of the war?

O. BUDNITSKY: I have to disappoint you. Ordinary people generally did not keep diaries. One reason was limited literacy; the achievements of the Cultural Revolution are greatly exaggerated. Even the prewar Red Army, after educational reforms and after students were drafted when deferments were abolished, included many young men with little schooling. In the best-prepared army, four servicemen out of a given group had less than six years of schooling; later things only worsened. Older age groups were mobilized, and many boys who were called up had not been able to attend senior classes because they had been working.

The second point is that keeping a diary in a trench is practically impossible. I know only one exception, a diary I published and about which we have spoken in detail: the diary of Vladimir Gelfand, first a sergeant and later a mortar lieutenant. He wrote always, everywhere, under every circumstance. Shells were exploding, and he kept writing. Fortunately for us, he was graphomaniacal — a person who could not refrain from writing. He had kept a diary before the war while still a schoolboy and continued constantly. The result was an enormous diary written on scraps of paper. Apparently he somehow sent portions to relatives. When I saw the original in Berlin, at the home of Vladimir Gelfand’s son, who had emigrated to Germany, it was a large transparent box literally stuffed with different notebooks, loose sheets, and every kind of improvised writing material. Much was written in pencil. Either his political officer or his commander advised him: ink runs, write in pencil, it is more reliable. Even so, many entries had become rubbed and faint.

That is a unique story. For the most part diaries were not kept. Another example was Sergeant Boris Khomsky, who began keeping a diary when he started fighting at Kursk.

V. RYZHKOV: In Gelfand’s case, we understand that this was more an exception. What was his level of education?

O. BUDNITSKY: Nine grades. That was a high level of education. With seven grades a man could already be sent to junior-lieutenant courses at an officer school.

V. RYZHKOV: With nine, one could really be considered educated: literature, mathematics, and so on.

O. BUDNITSKY: It should also be noted that many of those who kept diaries intended to become writers. Some did; others at least hoped to become journalists. Not all succeeded. This left a certain imprint. David Kaufman, whom we all know under the pen name David Samoilov, author of “The Fateful Forties,” kept a diary. He was already a student at the Literary Institute and had published a little poetry. He kept a diary throughout the war, and it was later published. These were not yet professional writers or journalists: he was a private, later a corporal.

Those who kept diaries were generally urban and educated people who had received full or partial secondary schooling or were already students. People with higher education were usually already in command positions.

V. RYZHKOV: It seems to me there might even have been a kind of vanity among commanders: it is good to have someone who, like the famous chronicler in The Good Soldier Švejk, records the unit’s brilliant and uninterrupted victories. So commanders did not interfere — if a man writes, let him write?

O. BUDNITSKY: Not quite, and in places not at all. It is generally said that diaries were forbidden at the front. In this the Red Army differed sharply from the German army, where recording great events and great victories was encouraged — though later, as we know, they had to record very different things. In the Red Army diaries were usually forbidden for reasons of secrecy: a person might write down something and then be captured, or the diary might be found, and the enemy might learn something about the army’s condition, command locations, and so on.

Zinovy Chernilovsky, a lawyer, went to the front with a university education and a profession. He commanded a machine-gun company and was later transferred to legal service. He kept notes that were later published as Notes of a Company Commander. A superior who saw him writing told him: “Throw it into the fire; Comrade Stalin ordered that people who keep diaries be shot.” Stalin had issued no such order, of course, but such a belief existed.

Or there was Irina Dunaevskaya, one of the few female diarists. Counterintelligence officers, and later SMERSH, summoned her several times. She showed them that her notes contained no unit numbers or names; they were personal, women’s entries. But there was this kind of control.

Elsewhere nobody paid attention. Boris Khomsky buried his diary in the forest when he reached the front, remembered the place, but later could not find it. From 1943 onward he kept a diary in real time, including the Battle of Kursk. There are not many entries from the battle, but they are terrifying. He had studied at an officer school in Central Asia. Because the battle was enormous and manpower was short, the cadets were quickly certified as sergeants and thrown into the fighting. First they ceased to be mortar men because comrades and equipment were knocked out and they became infantry in practice. Then the entire company was killed. Khomsky survived because he was wounded. In the hospital another wounded comrade from his company was brought in and said that the whole company had perished because a drunken captain — Khomsky gives the surname, though I will not — led them into a frontal attack and got them all killed.

The entries are filled with grief. Close friends with whom he had studied and fought side by side were killed. They are terrible notes, written, as it were, directly in the fire. But such a case was rare. Later he was in re-formation, then in a reserve regiment, then again at the front. There is also a great deal about love. In soldiers’ diaries, women are written about almost as much as soldiers think about them. Anyone who has served in the army knows what a soldier thinks about at every hour of the day and night. Women, love, sex — these appear in all soldiers’ diaries and are an important theme.

Khomsky too had a romantic story, a relationship with a young woman. It did not end well. She became involved with the unit commander and became pregnant. He met her again in 1945. His surviving entries run to January 1945, when they entered Germany, and then stop.

I managed to speak with him. He lived in Lviv. I called because I wanted to publish part of his diary from 1943 to 1945. What interested me most was: what happened next, where were the later entries? He wrote very well; you could feel he was a sensitive person. He later became a military journalist and retired as a colonel. But he was very ill and found it difficult to speak. Three weeks after our conversation he died — not because he had spoken with me, of course; he was already in that condition. I asked him about the rest of the diary, and he said his wife had burned it because she disliked the entries about women.

V. RYZHKOV: I myself served compulsory service in the Soviet army. There is another subject that occupies a soldier’s mind practically twenty-four hours a day: food. Tell us a little about that. How does the subject of food appear in frontline diaries?

O. BUDNITSKY: As a red thread. I do not know what troops you served in, but in the unit and company where I served, what else was left to the soldiers?

V. RYZHKOV: In the signals troops we were fed, if not worse than dogs, then only slightly better. I understand what you mean.

O. BUDNITSKY: I served in Transcarpathia, where there was continuous physical labor. Exercises were constantly announced: twelve hours out on the line, and then they brought you back to the company and gave you mixed animal feed with nothing added. I mean “animal feed” literally.

V. RYZHKOV: I understand; we had the same thing.

O. BUDNITSKY: During the war, you can imagine, it was…

V. RYZHKOV: We did a program about how the front was fed with Lend-Lease supplies. There must at least have been something more or less adequate.

O. BUDNITSKY: Not at first. Food runs like a red thread through practically everything. Do you know when abundance arrived? In 1944, and especially in 1945, when the army entered Germany and suddenly the soldier was no longer tied to the field kitchen. There were abandoned cows and pigs. There are many entries about that — what they ate in Germany and how: fried pork with potatoes, washed down with milk.

V. RYZHKOV: Again I think of The Good Soldier Švejk, because you are describing soldiers’ everyday life almost word for word: they enter a rich Hungarian village, pigs are walking around, women are carrying jugs of milk. Can one trace all this in the diaries — an evolution in food?

O. BUDNITSKY: Of course. At first there is a horse carcass lying upstream, and you have to get to it and cut off a piece. There are such entries. Or sunflower seeds. It is 1943, the Kuban, and there is nothing to eat. The Kuban is an extraordinarily fertile region, but fierce fighting was taking place there.

Vasily Tsymbal — father of the well-known film director Yevgeny Tsymbal, who gave me the diary, which we are thinking of publishing — had been director of the Yeisk pedagogical school before the war. He joined a partisan detachment on our side that raided across the front. He writes quite frankly that the main task was not to meet the enemy, because then people would shoot at you. He is completely candid. They were especially afraid of Cossack detachments. Many Cossacks became collaborators and joined German units; there was a Main Directorate of Cossack Forces under Ataman Krasnov, who ultimately paid for it. Tsymbal has many detailed entries. What helped them supplement their rations? Sunflower seeds. Seeds were good. There are many such notes.

By 1944 things were much better. The most important Lend-Lease deliveries from 1944 onward were food. In principle Lend-Lease food was supposed to go only to the army, to servicemen. In reality, of course, it also spread among civilians. Soviet orders in 1944 were focused not on armaments but on food, because enormous territories with large populations had been liberated. There was simply nothing to eat; the number of mouths had suddenly grown. As the Germans retreated, they burned everything — scorched-earth tactics now operating in the opposite direction. People faced the threat of deadly famine. Soviet orders therefore concentrated first of all on food: more than one million tons of food were supplied. Lend-Lease food to a significant extent saved hundreds of thousands of people from starving to death.

One must also understand that, alongside shortages of everything, corruption and theft inevitably arise in conditions of scarcity.

V. RYZHKOV: I would even say profiteers and saboteurs.

O. BUDNITSKY: I mean embezzlers within the army, people involved in distributing supplies. David Samoilov has a wonderful diary entry. He was at an officer school; later, because manpower was short, they were sent to fight as privates anyway. They complained to an inspecting superior that food was insufficient and wondered where it all went. The officer formed a ball of snow or earth and ordered it passed down the ranks. Naturally, by the end almost nothing was left, only miserable crumbs. “Do you understand how it works?” the officer said. Theft, one might say, was a natural, original sin — so there was no point complaining; endure it. It is a striking moment and a very graphic explanation of how certain things happened.

Recalling my own army experience, exactly the same happened in our company: instead of eleven one-kilogram cans of stewed meat allotted for twenty fellows, one can ended up in the pot merely for the smell.

V. RYZHKOV: I can confirm that from my side. I will not even mention the beverage that we called tea.

O. BUDNITSKY: No, in our unit that was normal. Tea in the morning, fifty grams of butter, and a piece of bread. That was always available — if you got there in time. And sugar.

V. RYZHKOV: Oleg, we have discussed two important things for a soldier: women and food. What about understanding the aims of the war? What can be learned from these diaries? How did soldiers and officers understand the meaning and aims of the war, and how did that understanding change? You already mentioned Prishvin. Remember how peasants reasoned: the German will come and reopen the churches. There is an official narrative about the meaning and aims of the war, and there is a popular narrative. They do not always coincide. Can these mental changes be traced in diaries?

O. BUDNITSKY: Those who were in the army were, in the overwhelming majority, genuine Soviet people. For them this was not really an issue.

V. RYZHKOV: Soviet people or communists? Or was that the same thing then?

O. BUDNITSKY: Not the same thing. Communists could quite well be not very Soviet. There were recruitment quotas, and sometimes people were admitted to the Party who were, to put it mildly, not especially Soviet-minded. But people who grew up under Soviet power and knew no other government — urban young people — were the principal beneficiaries of Soviet power in Russia. They did not live very well, to put it mildly, but they received education and had prospects. Before the war there were problems: tuition fees were introduced in the upper grades and at universities. But there were clear prospects. And of course there was massive propaganda, which reached urban residents. It simply did not reach the village. Remember: there was no television, practically no radio…

V. RYZHKOV: I will say a terrible thing for young people: there was hardly any internet.

O. BUDNITSKY: Villages had no wired radio points. Radio receivers were a luxury and very rare. At the start of the war they were simply confiscated so people would not listen to things they were not supposed to hear. There were those loudspeaker “plates.” I still saw one at my grandparents’ home: a large dish on the wall carrying the all-Union program. Villages did not have that. Some people there lived, in effect, in other centuries.

There are striking memoirs by Esther Vankova, a young woman from Latvia, a Komsomol member even under the bourgeois regime. These Komsomol girls volunteered. In the Baltic region they were treated with suspicion and four of them were sent to work on a collective farm. Many things astonished them. When they began washing underwear, village women came running to see what it was. When they saw women’s panties they did not really understand what they were for. Some Baba Fenya or Baba Manya, once it was explained, said: “It’s harmful — the wind gets through.” Another thing that amazed the girls was that they knew and sang Soviet songs. The village women had never heard them: “We don’t sing such long songs.” They sang village chastushki instead.

V. RYZHKOV: In everyday life that is approximately the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

O. BUDNITSKY: Well, not the seventeenth, but clearly not the twentieth. One has to understand that the whole population had not yet been Sovietized.

V. RYZHKOV: That was precisely my question. People from cities entered the army — clearly educated people with Soviet thinking. But there were also masses of village boys and men.

O. BUDNITSKY: They were the majority.

V. RYZHKOV: Is that consciousness reflected in diaries? What did they think and say, how did they perceive the war — as subjects of the tsar, as conscripts dragged in against their will? Are such things reflected?

O. BUDNITSKY: They are reflected, though not in diaries written by villagers themselves, because they simply did not keep them. There was a terrible shortage of paper and writing materials. But urban diarists recorded conversations with peasants, and they vary greatly.

One man says: “Rather than suffer like this, I’d better kill myself.” This appears in the diary of Mark Shumelevsky, a Moscow engineer. He was over thirty and worked at a factory producing Katyusha launchers. He had a reserved occupation and was very shortsighted, but he kept trying to get to the front. He went again and again to the military commissariat until they finally took him. He recorded that even at the commissariat people looked at those who volunteered for the army as if they were idiots.

He was in a training regiment through which everyone passed and met all kinds of people. From spring 1942, when manpower was short and territories containing about forty percent of the population had been lost, the army took everyone, fit or unfit. The idea that losses were simply ignored is complete nonsense. Of course losses were counted. But there were all sorts of people. One peasant says: “I’d rather shoot myself.” They answer: “What are you saying? The Motherland must be defended.” He replies: “Hitler won’t reach us. And anyway we have nothing worth taking.” He has no concept of a Motherland, Fatherland, Russia.

V. RYZHKOV: Yes — only my private life exists.

O. BUDNITSKY: That is an extreme case. But I want to say that it was precisely through the army that the population was Sovietized. I believe a substantial part of the USSR’s population before the war was not Soviet in any deep sense. Formally they were Soviet citizens, but they lived according to their own ideas. An enormous number passed through the army: 34.5 million people — half a million women and thirty-four million men. There they underwent Sovietization.

The second force that made not-very-Soviet people Soviet, of course, was the Germans. Once people experienced occupation — confiscations, deportation to Germany, mass and individual killings, demonstrative executions and everything else, and then the burning of fields as the Germans retreated — that contributed enormously to understanding the aims of the war.

V. RYZHKOV: Another subject that constantly came up when I served was relations among nationalities. We knew that this unit had these people, that unit had those, here there were many of one group, there few, these people were considered aggressive, and so on. Given the ethnic composition of the Red Army, did this subject appear in diaries? Was it significant for participants during the war?

O. BUDNITSKY: Of course. It is an extremely important subject, worthy of a separate program and a separate conversation. The “friendship of peoples,” like comradeship in arms, did not form immediately and did so with great difficulty. It is no accident that the ethnic composition of the Red Army and its de facto nationality policy were declassified only in 2017.

I think the reason was connected, among other things, with combat effectiveness — and God forbid that I should say anything bad about any people. The authorities had already encountered the problem from 1937 onward: until 1939 residents of Central Asia were not drafted into the army. Imagine war breaking out and people being brought from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan; they had never been to Russia, did not know the language, and were told: “This is your Motherland, son; you must give your life for it.” Reactions varied.

Historian Alexei Bezugolny has very interesting work on this subject; his doctoral dissertation concerned nationality relations in the Red Army. He shows, for example, that from October 1943, when the liberation of the Slavic republics began, residents of Central Asia and Transcaucasia ceased to be drafted into the army for combat service. More precisely, they were drafted and sent to labor armies. Those already serving continued to fight, but the practice of new combat mobilization was abandoned. Ukrainians and Belarusians were drafted to a greater extent.

V. RYZHKOV: That concerns combat effectiveness. I meant relations between people.

O. BUDNITSKY: I understand. Those relations are present in diaries too: insulting nicknames, characterizations, all sorts of things. Vasily Tsymbal has such descriptions. Boris Slutsky, in his Notes on the War — not a diary, but close to one — wrote after returning from the army. I am amazed he remained at liberty. The Notes were published only after his death, in 2000. He has the phrase: “The peoples met and at first did not like one another.”

V. RYZHKOV: That is exactly what I am asking about. My own experience in the mid-1980s showed that even then, when there was already the Brezhnev Constitution and the “new historical community, the Soviet people,” sparks flew everywhere. Imagine the 1940s, when this was still a former empire and not yet integrated. Of course the Communist Party, KGB, regional committee, and party committee held it together, but it was not an integrated society. I can imagine how hard it was to form a unit, train it, and make people cooperate under those conditions. I can hardly imagine how it was done.

O. BUDNITSKY: Exactly. In my platoon there were thirty-one men and twenty-eight nationalities. Those were special railway troops, of course.

V. RYZHKOV: In a way that may even have been easier. Imagine a platoon of thirty divided fifteen and fifteen — a much harder situation. Or twenty and ten.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, regional cliques and all that. There were difficult things. I looked at documents on nationality affairs from the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the VKP(b), and the Alexander Shcherbakov collection — he headed the Main Political Directorate during the war. A huge part concerns the problem of non-Russian nationalities, or something along those lines: how to work, with whom, and in what manner. It was very complicated, relations were difficult. Diaries contain this, sometimes in very harsh form.

V. RYZHKOV: Today we have moved through key themes: women, food, the nationality question, perceptions of the war. Oleg, what other red thread can be singled out, what else enriches our understanding? Diaries describe everyday life and give us a remarkable picture of views, thoughts, ideas, and relations. In that sense diaries are certainly a unique source. What other red thread is there?

O. BUDNITSKY: If we are talking mainly about servicemen’s diaries, leaving aside civilian wartime diaries — especially the extraordinary phenomenon of blockade diaries — Nikolai Nikulin wrote in his well-known memoirs that the main subjects of soldiers’ conversations were death, grub, and sex. That is absolutely true. We have avoided the most important subject: death, which is always nearby.

What is the fundamental difference between a diary and memoirs? The person does not know whether he will be alive tomorrow, or even this evening. People become accustomed to everything. The instinct of self-preservation makes them simply not think about it, though sometimes it breaks through. I mentioned Khomsky’s diary and his sorrowful entries after all his comrades had been killed. Or the diary of Pavel Akhenson, a daring reconnaissance soldier. In Hungary four of his comrades were killed in one day; the fighting there was extremely hard. He was no philosopher — his main interests were drinking, food, women. It is a small diary. But he writes: “You wonder when your turn will come.” It still hangs over everything.

Or Gelfand’s diary. He struck up a conversation with a young female medical instructor and was deeply impressed by her; she had a medal and so on. When shelling began he gallantly gave her his trench and moved into hers, which she had not managed to dig deeply. A shell hit the trench he had given her. Soldiers were made to collect pieces of the girl: one leg separately, her kidneys were found. Horrific things. The pieces were buried separately. Gelfand recorded her full surname, first name, and patronymic. I checked later: absolutely everything matches. He describes the incident. Death was literally walking beside them. If he had not given up his trench, he himself would have been torn to pieces. He hardly even reflects on it. If one thought about such things constantly, one would go mad. Those are the realities. They are of course present in soldiers’ diaries: the deaths of comrades, one’s own wounds. It is a major theme.

There are also curious general reflections. One striking thing is that “Motherland,” Party, Stalin — these are almost absent. People record what they encounter. Perhaps such things were taken for granted. Overt politicization is rare, which is itself interesting. There are exceptions. Vasily Tsymbal was not young — he turned forty during the war — and he read newspapers and analyzed what was happening on the fronts and what the Allies thought. But that is unusual. Normally entries concern concrete circumstances of life: a person lives for today.

The most terrible thing I encountered in diaries came while I was helping prepare for publication the diary of Slavgorodsky, a Hero of the Soviet Union. His unit was already in Poland and had entered territory then regarded as Germany, though it had actually been Polish land. He made an entry and wrote down the date on which he would make the next one. He never made it: he was killed in that battle. He had been writing about how he would live afterward, and so on.

V. RYZHKOV: And that is where it ends?

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. That is where it ends.

V. RYZHKOV: Oleg, thank you for a wonderful account. Today we did not follow one diary or one hero. We tried, as scholars would say, to conceptualize the subject and identify the principal themes found in diaries of that period. I think we will have another opportunity to discuss them in greater detail. This was Oleg Budnitsky, historian and Doctor of Historical Sciences.

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