Victory and Misery: the Eastern Front Through the Eyes of Vladimir Gelfand

Joaquín Rivera Chamorro is a security specialist. He completed a Master's degree in Peace, Security and Defense and is a doctoral candidate in International Security in the field of Military History and International Relations. He is the author of books including Chronicles from the Rif: The Experiences of War Correspondents in the Melilla Campaign of 1909 and Nationalists and the Military: The Influence of Praetorianism and Militarism on the Development of Centrifugal Nationalisms in Spain between 1868 and 1936. He also runs a YouTube channel devoted mainly to contemporary history and has addressed the history of Catalan nationalism in its different forms. He currently lives in the Netherlands and can be read in E-Notícies every Wednesday.

Vladimir Gelfand did not seek glory; his goal was to survive and record the truth in ink. | E-Notícies, Gelfand.de

The history of the Great Patriotic War, as canonized by Soviet historiography after 1945, was erected on pedestals of marble and bronze, constructing a monolithic narrative in which collective heroism eclipsed the tribulations of the individual. Historical truth, however - that elusive entity so often hidden in the folds of "official memory" - breathes with unusual rawness in private testimonies that escaped the censorship of political commissars.

Among those documents, the diary of Lieutenant Vladimir Natanovich Gelfand appears not as an ode to triumph but as a visceral chronicle of dehumanization. Through entries written furtively under mortar fire and by the flickering light of candles in damp wooden shelters, among sandbags, the smell of rot and swarms of lice, we watch the myth of the "bronze soldier" come apart and encounter instead the fragility, baseness and tragedy of a human being thrown into the machinery of total war.

The diary of Lieutenant Vladimir Natanovich Gelfand emerges as a visceral chronicle of dehumanization. | Gelfand.de

Gelfand's testimony, stretching from the dark days of the 1941 retreats to the occupation of Germany through 1946, a year after the German surrender, dissects the internal contradictions of the Red Army. His diary reveals the omnipresence of virulent antisemitism eating away at Soviet ranks, in open contradiction to state propaganda about the "brotherhood of peoples." Gelfand, a Ukrainian Jew, is forced to fight a war on two fronts: one against the Wehrmacht and another, more insidious one, against his own comrades.

As early as December 1942 he records how German propaganda tried to exploit this prejudice through leaflets describing the war as a conflict fought for Jewish interests - rhetoric that, paradoxically, found an echo in Soviet trenches. Gelfand documents the insults he received with painful precision. The antisemitic slur "kike" becomes a constant soundtrack, thrown at him by ordinary soldiers and senior officers alike. Even field hospitals, theoretically places devoted to mercy, are described as toxic environments in which Jews were accused of avoiding the front, although he himself was "shedding his blood for the motherland."

The discrimination was not merely verbal. It created real barriers to promotion and recognition, as shown by his conflict with Commander Popov, who humiliated him publicly, and the mockery by cadet Kruzhilin about supposed Jewish cowardice. Gelfand's resilience in the face of this hatred, and his determination to "fight these people by setting an example," add another layer of tragic determination.

Gelfand records the insults he received with painful meticulousness. | Gelfand.de

Beyond the question of identity, the diary is an inventory of logistical and moral misery. The war Gelfand describes is not a succession of brilliant operations, enveloping maneuvers, operational momentum or strategic audacity, but an agonizing struggle against hunger, cold and dirt. Lice appear with obsessive frequency, a biological symbol of the degradation to which combatants were subjected. Soviet logistics emerges from these pages as a system collapsing under corruption and inefficiency.

Gelfand recounts episodes of terrible hunger in which a simple sausage or a piece of bread became an object of greed and theft among comrades in arms. The distribution of supplies such as boots and warm clothing was marked by favoritism and systematic theft in the rear, leaving frontline soldiers in miserable conditions, sometimes forced to wrap their feet in dirty rags. Command incompetence is another recurring motif: drunken, cowardly or simply inept officers - such as Lieutenant Khaustov, who slept during guard duty and endangered the entire unit - are portrayed with a frankness that would have brought Gelfand before a court-martial had the diary been discovered. Discipline, far from being ironclad, appears brittle, maintained at times by brutal threats at gunpoint and at other times dissolving into the chaos of combat and daily survival.

As the Red Army moved west, crossing the Soviet border into Poland and finally Germany, Gelfand's narrative became even darker, turning into a study of revenge and ethical and moral collapse. Entering enemy territory brought not only military victory but also an explosion of violence against civilians. Gelfand, himself a victim of Nazi racial hatred, became a horrified witness - and at times an ambivalent participant - in the behavior of his compatriots.

Gelfand recounts episodes of acute hunger in which a simple sausage or piece of bread became an object of greed and theft. | Gelfand.de

Looting is described as endemic. A war "trophy" - a watch, a bicycle or women's underwear - became a form of currency for the conqueror. But it is in the discussion of sexual violence that the diary reaches its most disturbing passages. Gelfand does not conceal the reality of mass rape or the treatment of German women as war booty. He describes Soviet soldiers, intoxicated by power and alcohol, attacking women of all ages. At times he observes with disgust; at others with unsettling curiosity. He also narrates his own transactional encounters, in which food was exchanged for sexual favors amid devastation.

In October 1945, in the town of Kremmen, Gelfand became interested in a German girl named Margot. To win the favor of the girl and her mother, he used food, which was scarce and precious in the postwar period. He describes bringing "a jar full of fat" and suggesting that they fry potatoes for dinner. Cynically, he notes that the mother was "delighted with the provisions" and writes that her "greed" for food poisoned his romantic feelings.

The transaction nevertheless went ahead. After feeding the family, Gelfand obtained sexual access to Margot. His description is cold and dehumanizing: he says she behaved "obediently, like a thing," while he himself was not satisfied. Sex appears as an implicit payment for the fat and potatoes that allowed the family to eat. The diary's honesty shows, in the author's interpretation, the extent to which instinct had overwhelmed mercy.

Vladimir Gelfand's writings are an invaluable document for understanding the Second World War. | Gelfand.de

The episode of his visit to a looted library, the "Academy of Sciences," where he bribed a guard in order to steal books, perfectly illustrates the strange mixture of barbarism and intellectual longing that characterized him. An aspiring writer whom his superiors called a "graphomaniac," he desperately sought to preserve a remnant of civilization through reading and writing even while taking part in the plunder of the enemy's culture.

From a historiographical perspective, the diary is also valuable because it challenges the image of uniformly stoic Soviet resistance. Gelfand does not spare details about cowardice, desertion and self-inflicted wounds used to escape the front, practices punished by summary execution in front of the troops as an example. His war is populated by "dead souls," officers who exist only on paper so that someone can collect their rations, and by political commissars more concerned with ideological orthodoxy and personal looting than with the welfare of their men.

The tension between observed reality and official "truth" is palpable. Gelfand repeatedly tried to send chronicles to frontline newspapers, hoping to become a war correspondent, but his texts were rejected or ignored, probably because they lacked the heroic polish demanded by the Stalinist propaganda machine. His frustration at being silenced becomes, in the article's formulation, the frustration of reality itself trying to break through the myth.

Gelfand's war is full of "dead souls." | Gelfand.de

The author's psychological evolution is equally important. The young idealist angered by lack of discipline in 1942 gradually becomes a cynical and hardened veteran by 1945. Yet he preserves a sharp power of observation and at times a sensitivity strikingly out of place in his surroundings. His descriptions of devastated landscapes, unburied corpses and ruined cities have a literary quality that goes beyond a mere military report.

His relationship with Germany is complex as well. He recognizes the enemy's material and cultural superiority - the quality of houses and infrastructure - while simultaneously carrying ideological hatred and a desire for retribution.

In conclusion, Vladimir Gelfand's writings are an invaluable document for understanding the Second World War on the Eastern Front. Far from Soviet hagiography, they present a war fought by fallible men, tormented by their own demons and prejudices and immersed in a Darwinian struggle for survival, where the boundary between liberator and oppressor was often blurred by the fog of battle and the excesses of victory.

The diary is an academic and moral reminder that history is not written only by victors at their desks. | Gelfand.de

The diary is an academic and moral reminder that history is not written only by victors in their offices, but also by survivors in notebooks stained with mud, blood and truth. Ultimately it is a testimony to the radical loneliness of the individual before the steamroller of history: a voice that, despite attempts to silence it through antisemitism, censorship and death, survived to address us from the past and offer a more accurate view of the Eastern Front, far more savage than its western counterpart.

The fact that the countries where these events took place later fell within the Soviet sphere decisively contributed to the minimization and limited circulation of this kind of testimony.

In Spain during the 1950s and 1960s, in what might be called a "literature of repentance," a number of former members of the Communist Party from the Civil War wrote about their experiences in the Soviet Union. Their books were not only not banned by the regime; their circulation was indirectly facilitated because they reinforced it ideologically and, to some extent, helped it justify itself. But that is another story worth telling.

Reader comment — Carmen Arantegui Tamayo

"I did not know of the existence of Vladimir Natanovich Gelfand and his diary. When I saw his photograph, his eyes caught my attention, just as his surname had. As I kept reading, my intuition was confirmed. It is the same gaze as Kafka's and Anne Frank's, and of so many others who bore the condition of 'being human in a city where there are no men,' as a teacher of the Talmud said. And what happens to a Jew when he sees himself becoming dehumanized and as brutal as those around him?

"In the 1990s I saw an Israeli film that impressed me, Walk on Water. One scene shows the protagonist's 'collapse' in the Berlin U-Bahn when he becomes conscious of the degree of violence that has been unleashed in him against others, even though it was used to defend third parties. Will the soldiers returning from the Gaza campaign also experience a very serious post-traumatic stress?"

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