Russian
Radio Liberty “The Red Army. Encounter with Europe”
22 February 2009, 16:00
Ivan Tolstoy: Historian Oleg Budnitskii chose this subject on the eve of Defender of the Fatherland Day. In recent years, the library of wartime memoirs has been supplemented by new memoirs—or reprints of forgotten old ones—by those who liberated Europe from fascism. Among the new books are not only memoirs; for understandable reasons, the number of memoirists themselves is diminishing, but there are also historical studies. Many of these books are received quite painfully not only by war veterans but also by readers who never fought. How does the myth of the war change when we read these pages? What is the new face of the liberating soldier? How are we to live with the contradictory reputation of our fathers and grandfathers? These themes formed the basis of our conversation with Oleg Budnitskii.
Oleg Vitalyevich, if you had to put things in order of importance, what strikes you most when you read all kinds of memoirs about the Red Army’s encounter with Europe?
Oleg Budnitskii: What do you mean by “all kinds”? They are very different. If we are talking about memoirs published in enormous quantities during the Soviet period, then what strikes one first of all is the facelessness of the texts and the correctness of their formulas. Actually, that is not surprising; it is understandable and entirely in the spirit of the era. Europe itself is almost absent from them. There are only military operations and certain correct phrases. The people in them are almost illustrations of correct theses. The feeling of people who, by force of circumstance, broke out and rode a tank behind the Iron Curtain is of course absent, except in memoirs published abroad. I mean the very few memoirs by people who did not return—Koryakov, Olshansky—and memoirs by dissidents. The best known, and perhaps the only ones frequently cited, are Lev Kopelev’s memoirs.
Over the last twenty years an enormous number of texts have appeared that I would call new war memoirs. They are new not only because they were recorded or published in recent times but because they are new in their subject matter, freedom of expression, and range of authors. One such “new” memoirist, Zinovy Chernilovsky, a law professor who had commanded a rifle company during the war and later became a military lawyer, wrote that he was “tired of reading posthumous notes by Chateaubriand generals”; there were no memoirs by company commanders. “Company commanders,” of course, is a shorthand. He meant the broad mass of junior and middle-ranking officers and ordinary soldiers and NCOs. There were no real memoirs—uncensored, free, written without looking over one’s shoulder at censorship or at public opinion, which can itself be a powerful restraint. If certain stereotypes exist in society, it is very difficult to write something that contradicts them.
Hundreds of such memoirs have now appeared, very often in electronic form on various websites. Some are texts people wrote themselves, sometimes for their desk drawer in the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes in the late 1980s and 1990s. More often they are interviews in memoir form, looking back on past experience. There we see a very varied picture. Those who had been in Europe naturally speak about completely different things from what had been written before: their impressions, daily life, encounters with foreigners, with foreign culture, with another civilization, I would say.
And, very importantly, a fair number of diaries have been published, although in absolute terms the number is small. Why do I say that several diaries is a lot? Because keeping diaries was prohibited. It was absolutely forbidden to rank-and-file soldiers, and officers were advised not to keep them, which in practice amounted to a prohibition as well. Therefore a front-line diary is a unique phenomenon.
For example, David Samoilov’s diary appeared. People usually look there not for the history of the war but for things connected with literary history. Yet he fought, he was in Germany, and he left extraordinarily interesting notes.
There are other astonishing texts. There was a man named Nikolai Belov, who was killed literally in the final days of the war, and unfortunately the last notebook of his diary, dealing with Germany, disappeared. It is an astonishingly candid diary written for himself, not for anyone else to read. He was from the Vologda region and had nothing to do with literature. There are other texts of this kind as well.
The most astonishing, of course, is Boris Slutsky’s Notes on the War. It is not a diary in the literal sense, but he wrote the text in 1945. That same year he read it to some comrades, and I am amazed that he was not arrested then. Although the Notes were written by a convinced communist, they are so anti-regime, reveal so much of the ugliness of the regime of the time, and contradict the official legend so sharply that it is simply astonishing. And, I repeat, the author was writing from the standpoint of a convinced communist.
Ivan Tolstoy: Let us now discuss the details. What did Red Army soldiers notice in Europe? And let us combine this with the next question that follows from it: what myths existed about the encounter with Europe, what had existed before, and what appeared now on the basis of the new memoirs? Let us talk about these impressions against the background of those myths.
Oleg Budnitskii: I have already spoken about Soviet myths. It was not exactly a myth; certain things were simply passed over in complete silence. Those memoirs about the war, including time spent in Germany, were reduced to descriptions of military operations. Questions of everyday life or relations with the local population, with German civilians, were either ignored or had to conform to certain ideological norms.
When you read generals’ memoirs, you get the impression that the Red Army entered Germany in order to feed German women and children and that this was its main task. Yet apart from purely military objectives—to defeat the Wehrmacht and finish off the fascist beast, as people said then—there was also the aim of revenge. This was not merely in people’s hearts and minds; it was official ideology, expressed in slogans: take revenge and finish off the fascist beast in its lair.
Unfortunately, this revenge, understandable as it was, took forms that now force us to sort through the matter and try to understand what is true, what is not, and why what happened happened.
Before speaking about such unpleasant things, let us say a little about the cultural shock experienced by Red Army soldiers when they came to Europe, especially Germany. I will speak mainly about Germany because it was the most developed country in which Red Army soldiers and commanders found themselves.
Imagine people who for a decade had been told about the advantages of collective-farm life and who had experienced those “advantages” to the full. Then they enter East Prussia and see something indescribable from their point of view. Peasant houses are simply palaces. They see paved roads, tidy farms, herds of fat cows, pigs, and so on—nothing like the skinny animals called cows in Soviet collective farms. They see an entirely different life, something fairytale-like and incomprehensible.
It is entirely understandable that many Red Army soldiers thought those farmhouses and the life of ordinary German farmers must be the life of landowners or kulaks; to them these were manor houses. And that is without even speaking of real Prussian castles. Those were beyond all imagination.
The same applied to urban life. It is difficult for many people today to imagine that in the Soviet Union at that time the overwhelming majority of the population did not own watches; some had never even seen bicycles. Not merely did they not own them; they had not seen them. People had never had and could not have a valve radio receiver. If there was anything, it was the wired loudspeaker “plate.” Then they found themselves in a place where all of these were ordinary household objects.
You can imagine the impression made on people from the provinces, on peasants—the peasantry made up the overwhelming majority of the Red Army—but also on urban people from the capitals, by what they saw in provincial German towns. The effect was stunning.
Let me quote a letter to his wife by Boris Itenberg, a well-known historian who was once my mentor in graduate school. He wrote from Gumbinnen: “I saw destroyed houses, abandoned furniture, streets carefully lined with trees, libraries with new, unread books, and many other small things that spoke of the unimaginably good life these parasites had lived. Everything was left in the houses; the furnishings are especially striking: the armchairs, sofas, wardrobes—how they lived! What more did they need? They wanted war; they got it.”
This was the reaction of a Muscovite, a university-educated historian simply astonished by the quality of material life. It aroused not only surprise but fury. What did those parasites need if they lived so well? Why did they come to fight us, and what did they want from us?
This led to things that could not be taken and sent home being destroyed—both as an element of revenge and as an outlet for rage and incomprehension. Why had people with such a good life gone to war against our poor country and done to it what they did?
Many memoirists whose books were published abroad in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and especially those published today, describe monstrous episodes in which people burned things that would actually have been useful to Red Army soldiers themselves, who were supposed to be quartered there and somehow feed themselves.
Koryakov, the well-known émigré writer and former Red Army captain, describes such a scene. A herd of cows intended as food for Red Army troops is being driven along. Communications are stretched, the army is advancing, and the rear services cannot keep supplies moving fast enough. One officer pulls out a Finnish knife and strikes a cow in the back of the head like an experienced torero, saying: “They killed a cow back home. This is revenge.” A senseless act. It is an emotional release and a response to what Germans, Nazis, and ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers had done in Russia.
These acts—arson, fires, shooting up furniture and everything else that could not be taken—were described repeatedly in diaries and memoirs, even in Solzhenitsyn’s verse, Prussian Nights; very vividly in Kopelev; and in the diary of Nikolai Nikolaevich Inozemtsev, published in the mid-1990s. Incidentally, Inozemtsev later became an academician, economist, and one of Brezhnev’s speechwriters. He kept diaries, and his wartime diary was published in 1995. Among other things, he described what happened in Germany and how people took revenge on Germans for what they had done in Russia.
Ivan Tolstoy: You have described the myth of the superiority of Soviet life over European life. That myth was shattered by the arrival in Europe. What other myth would you point to?
Oleg Budnitskii: Unfortunately, I am now going to speak not about a myth but about a problem that has been actively discussed abroad in scholarly literature, popular literature, and film—a subject that was an absolute taboo for us but has recently begun to be discussed here as well. Books that in the past would never in their lives have been translated into Russian, books in which this very painful subject is discussed, now exist in Russian and are read and debated.
I am speaking about the rape of German women. The subject appeared in Western scholarly literature, but it became a major public debate after the release in Germany of Helke Sander’s documentary Liberators Take Liberties, which came out in 1991. It consisted of interviews with women who had suffered sexual violence and, among other things, cited a figure for the number raped. According to Helke Sander and her co-authors, it was about two million women. After that this figure began to be quoted frequently in scholarly and quasi-scholarly literature.
Where did the figure of two million come from, where did the whole claim come from, and is it true? The study was based on records of Berlin’s Charité, the city’s largest hospital. Women went to the hospital to obtain abortions after unwanted pregnancies or to be treated for venereal diseases acquired as a result of rape. The number of such cases was extrapolated to Berlin’s female population and then to the population of Germany, producing the figure.
Helke Sander estimated that 110,000 women were raped in Berlin and that 10,000 of them were killed. The figures are approximate, but extrapolated to Germany they yielded a total of about 1.9 million. Rounded to two million, the figure appeared in Antony Beevor’s book The Fall of Berlin, published at the very beginning of the twenty-first century. Beevor is a well-known military historian, also the author of Stalingrad and other books. Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin are probably his best-known works.
Beevor’s book caused a genuine scandal. Even the Russian ambassador to Britain at the time, Grigory Karasin, wrote an indignant letter to the Daily Telegraph about what he called slander and insinuations in the book. Who could have imagined that a couple of years later the book would be translated into Russian and published here?
As we can see, these figures, repeated by Beevor, are based on—well, I cannot find the exact mathematical term—on extrapolation. They are not precise figures but estimates. Yet even so, the number is monstrous. One can debate whether the exact figure is reliable, but the fact of mass rape can hardly be doubted. Perhaps it was not two million; perhaps it was several hundred thousand. The numbers would still be monstrous.
Catherine Merridale, in what I consider an excellent book about the war, Ivan’s War, also writes about this. It is one of the first attempts at a social history of the war, a war seen from the point of view of the ordinary Ivan, the Red Army soldier, an attempt to show his daily life, ideas, existence, and heroism together and inseparably. Strangely enough, it was written by an Englishwoman. I have not encountered a similar book in our literature.
She writes that, with the exception of Lev Kopelev’s memoirs and the recollections of the artist Leonid Rabichev published in the journal Znamya at the beginning of the twenty-first century, no one in Russia raises this subject or writes about it. Rabichev, like Kopelev, was a war veteran and wrote about dreadful scenes, group rapes, and so on.
Merridale writes that Russia has a culture of total denial of violence against civilians, especially women. In fact that is not entirely so. It was discussed in émigré literature; Koryakov in particular devoted considerable attention to it, and Solzhenitsyn wrote about it. In the new diaries and memoirs—many of them in fact old texts simply published in the 1990s and 2000s—there is a great deal of testimony. I would mention the memoirs of Yevgeny Plimak, a well-known philosopher and historian, Samoilov, Slutsky, Grigory Pomerants, and many other people whose names are not famous but who wrote about it.
Following Boris Slutsky, who fought not in Germany but in Austria—though Austria was part of the Third Reich and was perceived as part of Germany, and Red Army soldiers behaved toward Austrian civilians as they did toward Germans—let me quote what Slutsky wrote in 1945: “Our anger and our cruelty need no justification. This is no time to speak of law and truth. The Germans were the first to cross beyond good and evil. Let them be repaid threefold.”
Yet, contradicting himself, Slutsky wrote elsewhere that “our cruelty was too great to be justified. It can and must be explained.” So how can it be explained?
Various explanations have been attempted; some are simply anecdotal. I will give one offered by Antony Beevor. Let me quote his work: “Stalin succeeded in making Soviet people believe that they lived in a society in which sex could not be mentioned. The regime unequivocally demanded that every form of desire be transformed into love for the Party and, above all, for the great leader.”
Beevor points to the dehumanizing influence of propaganda, which supposedly suppressed all sexual impulses. As a result, most Soviet soldiers did not have the necessary sexual education and simply did not know how to deal properly with women. Therefore, since they did not know how to behave toward a woman, they simply raped her.
I think this is complete nonsense. Stalin and the other leaders understood that children are not born from love for the Party, and somehow, without special sexual education, Soviet people knew how to court women, marry, have children, and so on.
Another explanation, given in Norman Naimark’s The Russians in Germany and in some other specialized works, is that rape represented, as it were, the highest form of revenge. Since ancient times there has existed at a subconscious level an idea of how one can take revenge on an enemy: possess his women. This is the highest form of humiliation. The peak of that humiliation is to possess his women before his eyes. Memoirists and documents show that such cases were not rare: women were raped in front of husbands, children, parents, and so on.
Another, perhaps the most important, element is what happened to our women during the Nazi occupation. Strangely enough, there are quite a few studies of what happened to German women and how Red Army soldiers behaved toward them. As for the fate of women in the occupied territories of the USSR, I have not encountered a single study.
Yet the Red Army was on German territory from mid-January 1945 until early May while active fighting continued, whereas German troops occupied Soviet territory for much longer. Under their rule were enormous numbers of women who had been unable to evacuate, had no physical possibility of doing so, or did not intend to. What happened to them, we simply do not know; we can only suppose.
The subject did arise in our society, but not in scholarly literature. I recall, for example, the once very popular film The Chairman. Yegor Trubnikov returns from the war, a positive character and future collective-farm chairman, while his brother—the negative character—had remained under occupation, as if sitting behind the stove throughout the war. Yegor enters his house, sees a crowd of children, and asks a question that shocked me when I was a schoolboy: “Any Germans among them?” “There he is—the blue-eyed one,” or perhaps “the fair-haired one.” Something like that—what a child fathered by a German was supposed to look like. The brother says: “What, was I supposed to die when a German came and started pestering my wife?”
There were probably very many such cases. I think we can safely speak of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions.
I will mention one more passage from the diary of Vasily Tsymbal. Recently an astonishing text came into my hands. Vasily Tsymbal was the father of the well-known documentary filmmaker Yevgeny Tsymbal, a friend of mine. He once happened to mention that his father had kept diaries throughout the war, from 1942 to 1945, up to the war with Japan, and that they had survived. Twelve notebooks written in a tiny hand.
In the Kuban, where he began fighting, they liberated a stanitsa, and he recorded: “All girls over fifteen and all young women are pregnant by Germans or Romanians.” That was one particular stanitsa. How many such villages were there?
I think it is clear why this subject was not discussed. It was always regarded as shameful. The women did not want it made public. Our medical services were significantly less developed than those in Germany, and I think the kind of medical statistics preserved there simply did not survive here. If they did survive, no one worked on or studied them.
The second point is that it was shameful not only for women but for men. They—that is, we; I will not separate myself from the Soviet people—had left them to the enemy. And now the Red Army was taking revenge in this respect as well.
In Grigory Pomerants’s remarkable memoir Notes of an Ugly Duckling there is a vivid episode. The Party organizer of the unit in which he fought near Stalingrad had a wife who remained in occupied territory. He says: “What is happening to my wife now?” Then suddenly he remarks: “Well, we’ll get to Germany; we’ll show the German women.” I think this is one of the fundamentally important motives.
Ivan Tolstoy: Oleg Vitalyevich, you began your answer by saying that this would not be about a myth. But it turns out that you have shown precisely the myth of the peace-loving soldier Ivan, how it arose, and what actually happened. May I ask you the next question? I am interested in the myth—or however you would present it—of enrichment. To what extent did the Soviet army enrich itself in Europe? I do not mean generals and the senior officer corps, who, as is well known, brought trainloads of all kinds of German goods back to the Soviet Union, but ordinary soldiers. What was known about the enrichment of the Soviet army?
Oleg Budnitskii: I will say a few words about that, but first I would like to add something. I could speak for a long time about the sad subject I began discussing, but I do not want to create the impression that I am justifying it. I am trying to explain why it happened.
There is one more element that cannot be overlooked: Red Army soldiers were men who had lived for months and years without women. That too must not be forgotten. As Grigory Pomerants wrote, from the point of view of Red Army soldiers all German women from fifteen to sixty years old were their lawful trophy. No Stalin could stop the army, although orders were issued, there were trials, and even executions. This is a separate and very painful subject that unfortunately has to be studied, and we have to do what Slutsky wrote about: explain what happened and show all the complexity and cruelty of war.
As for enrichment, that is too strong a word. The point is that on the eve of entering German territory, on 26 December, Stavka issued an order under which Red Army soldiers and commanders could send home parcels containing trophies. Privates could send up to five kilograms once a month, officers up to ten kilograms, generals up to sixteen kilograms per month. As you understand, one cannot become very rich on a five-kilogram parcel a month.
But the order certainly had a bad smell about it. In fact it amounted to authorization of looting. Soldiers were not going to send cartridges and shells home. Obviously they would send things useful in the household and in everyday life. Where would they get them? Pick them up on the road? Sometimes they took things from abandoned houses; very often they simply took them off Germans.
Some soldiers and officers understood it exactly this way. Vasily Churkin, from Leningrad, wrote in his diary that this was looting. David Kaufman, later famous under the name Samoilov, wrote that one cannot take revenge on a scoundrel by becoming like him.
The practice led to quite frightening consequences. Many people became so absorbed in collecting trophies that it interfered with their direct duties—military operations. This resulted in fairly harsh measures and strict orders by Rokossovsky on 6 February 1945 and especially by Konev on 27 January 1945, about which, of course, you will not read a word in their memoirs. Konev’s order used extremely harsh language. Among other things, in paraphrase, he said that tank crews could not quickly prepare their tanks for battle because the tanks were stuffed with all kinds of loot.
Unfortunately, the collection of trophies involved violence against civilians, including killings. There were very many such cases. Measures were taken and not taken. Military tribunals issued more than four thousand sentences in various cases of looting and violence, including public executions. But if one compares that with the size of the Red Army and the number of acts that remained outside the judicial process, it was of course a drop in the ocean. Generally speaking, higher authorities did not pursue soldiers too aggressively when the trophy campaign went beyond every conceivable limit.
I will cite Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. There is a statement of his in conversations with Milovan Djilas, the well-known Yugoslav communist who later published Conversations with Stalin, which is also available in Russian. When Djilas said that violence against civilians was undermining the prestige of the Red Army, Stalin replied that “we give our soldier too many instructions; let us give him a little initiative.”
Ilya Ehrenburg formulated this attitude and this policy toward the German civilian population in a popular form when he wrote in one of his articles: “Let us leave everything to the soldier’s conscience.” Soldiers had different consciences, and soldiers were different; therefore the manifestations of the trophy campaign were different.
But the trophy campaign had another side. The Germans had totally plundered our country. How could the state somehow compensate for these monstrous losses and reward soldiers for the blood they had shed, and their families who had gone hungry in the rear? How could that be done? Everyone understood that the country had been devastated to an extraordinary degree and that there were no shining prospects ahead.
Perhaps the only way to reward people was at the enemy’s expense. After all, it was not we who came to them; they came to us. They had plundered the Soviet Union in an organized fashion, and now the reckoning had come.
So one can moralize, on the one hand, that it was wrong in substance to issue an order authorizing looting. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the texts I read show that people received the order with satisfaction, sometimes with delight, regarding it as a perfectly just measure: the Germans had to pay for what they had done in the Soviet Union.
Ivan Tolstoy: Oleg Vitalyevich, all this time we have been talking, so to speak, about the bodily lower depths. It is indeed a darkness of low truths, but it is truth, and we have to understand and comprehend it and learn to live with it. One very much does not want to live with it, but most likely one has to if we bear responsibility for our own actions and understand that we must also answer for the actions of our ancestors—at least morally live through what happened.
So let us move to the spiritual heights, especially since in life these things always coexist, sometimes directly in the same person. It is well known that Kutuzov’s army returned from Europe with a number of progressive ideas. From Kutuzov’s army and the European campaign came the future Decembrists, who brought new ideas of liberation. Did Soviet Decembrists emerge from the Red Army?
Oleg Budnitskii: I think everyone knows the answer. No, they did not, and they could not. That is quite obvious.
First, the people who became Decembrists were the elite, educated people, and people much freer than Soviet people in the Stalin era. The overwhelming majority of Soviet people, unfortunately in my view, had not yet matured as citizens. They were still subjects. The tsar changed: instead of someone from the Romanov dynasty there was Joseph Vissarionovich, but the psychology of loyal subjects remained. The capacity for critical thought and, especially, for action as a result was of course weak among the overwhelming majority of people who took part in this liberating campaign in Europe.
Nevertheless, some people, above all educated urban people, drew conclusions, and from some of them, as we know, later emerged these new Decembrists: Solzhenitsyn, for example, or Lev Kopelev, who received a prison sentence precisely because he defended Germans against violence. This idealistic communist did not fit in at the time and, for “bourgeois humanism,” was sent to a camp.
One can name other people who did not directly take part in political activity or struggle against the existing regime but who, through their works, poetry, way of thinking, and way of life, were, conditionally speaking, Decembrists without a December: David Samoilov, the cult poet of the Soviet intelligentsia; Boris Slutsky, despite the twists and turns of his political views at different times; Grigory Pomerants.
In Pomerants’s remarkable memoirs there is an interesting episode: his conversations with clever German ladies. The editorial office of the newspaper in which he served was quartered in the villa of a woman who was anti-Nazi, a certain Frau Ruth Bogerts, the widow of a businessman. Unlike many others, she had not fled from the Red Army because she regarded the propaganda and stories about what Red Army soldiers did to Germans, especially German women, as exaggeration.
Unfortunately, the encounter was not a pleasant one. Frau Ruth herself teased Pomerants about the Russian soldier: “Ring, Uhr, Rad, Wein”—ring, watch, bicycle, wine—the blue chips of the exchange and black market of the time.
They talked about many things. She and several of her friends were free-thinking women who even read Heine, forbidden in Germany, and they were anti-Nazi. In one conversation she said: “You know, we did not listen to our propaganda radio; we preferred the BBC, although that was dangerous.” Pomerants blurted out, as he himself writes: “We did not have such an opportunity, because our radio receivers had been confiscated.” The woman looked at him and observed acidly: “Then you are even less free than we are.”
Encounters with such realities caused something to happen in people’s minds. He remembered that conversation. The liberators had arrived, yet in Nazi Germany people had valve radios, listened to forbidden stations, and received at least a little truth. People in the Soviet Union had been deprived of the ability to compare different opinions simply because their radio receivers had been confiscated.
Among this small number of people there emerged an awareness that they were not free, that they by no means lived in the freest and most just society on earth. From this grew the movement that later gradually undermined communist power and which, together with other factors, ultimately contributed to the collapse of that power. So some “Decembrists” did appear, but there were very few of them and there could of course be no talk of a mass movement.
The history of war is not only the history of military operations. It is the history of society at war. And we know the history of that society very poorly. We know very little about the people who crushed Nazism. They were very different.
There is a formula, “the front-line generation.” But, like any such formula, it is no more than an intellectual construct. During the war twenty-seven age cohorts were called into the army—people of very different ages, with different life experiences and ideas, different levels of education, different notions of good and evil, and so on. This has to be studied. Without studying this society at war, we are unlikely to understand what really happened afterward, and unlikely to understand who we ourselves are. We are the heirs of everyone, the heirs of the good and the bad, and all of it is mixed within us.
I would like to add one more point. I said that Soviet people were struck by this material way of life, that they felt a certain inferiority because we, the liberators, lived much worse than those scoundrels who had done what they did in our country. Yet, interestingly, they all felt intellectually and spiritually superior.
You said, let us move from the low to the high. When David Kaufman, the future Samoilov, analyzes what he sees in Germany, this abundance of things, he writes: “Perhaps it was easier to make a revolution in Russia because the object was never master there. Never, I think, was everyday life in Russia so detailed, nor did things ever exercise such domination.” To him, at the time a passionate revolutionary, this was evil.
Another Moscow intellectual, Boris Itenberg, spoke with a prisoner of war, a thirty-six-year-old gardener. He writes to his parents that he asked the Fritz whether he knew the writer Feuchtwanger. It turned out that Feuchtwanger’s works had been banned in Germany and that this “thick-headed Fritz had never heard of such a writer. Yet he completed eight classes,” Itenberg exclaims indignantly.
There is a sense of superiority here. These thick-headed Germans do not know their own culture and literature.
Or take another Soviet officer, mortar-platoon commander Vladimir Gelfand, who also kept a front-line diary, remarkable for its candor and detail. This is just after the war. He writes: “Berliners read a great deal, especially on trams. But what do they read? I took an interest in the content of the books they were reading. Not a single world-famous author; even Goethe is rare. All sorts of tinsel.”
These are wonderful little details: our Soviet intellectuals, who themselves read Goethe and Feuchtwanger, are indignant that Germans on the tram are not reading Goethe but all sorts of nonsense. This too is a brushstroke in the portrait of that remarkable generation that won the war. Perhaps they won partly because among that generation were people spiritually higher—higher first of all than the enemy, higher than the era itself, I would say—people who constitute the glory and pride of that generation and, more broadly, of twentieth-century Russia.
Ivan Tolstoy: Oleg Vitalyevich, I would like to object. This thesis does not seem indisputable to me. You are comparing incomparable groups: Soviet intellectuals, educated people, with some German gardeners. One could just as easily find cultured Nazi officers who could sight-read Tchaikovsky or knew Chekhov perfectly, and Soviet soldiers who had never heard, say, of Tyutchev.
Oleg Budnitskii: I will give one more amusing detail. In Gelfand’s diary there are wonderful entries showing how contradictory things could coexist in one person and among the same people.
He was a fairly successful looter, to call things by their names. He records how many watches he took somewhere, notebooks, a fountain pen. True, the commander of a neighboring company took his watch away, then he acquired more watches, traded them for something—there is a whole story.
In one house, while they were engaged in this, to Gelfand’s horror an officer, his comrade-in-arms, smashed a bust of Goethe. Gelfand said: “What are you doing? This is the common culture of humanity!” Before his comrade could reach the bust of Schiller, Gelfand wrapped the Schiller bust and buried it so that it would not be smashed.
It is astonishing. He had collected four pairs of watches, but he wrapped up and hid the bust of Schiller. That may be the quintessence of what was happening both in people’s heads and in reality.
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