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Echo of Moscow — “Dilettantes. The Red Army in Europe”

91.2 FM Moscow — aired 14 May 2015 at 21:08

Guest: Oleg Budnitsky, Doctor of Historical Sciences
Hosts: Sergei Buntman, Sergei Shargunov

S. Buntman: Good evening, everyone! This is the program “Dilettantes,” together with the magazine Diletant and, of course, Echo of Moscow. Sergei Shargunov and Sergei Buntman.

S. Shargunov: Good evening!

S. Buntman: We congratulate Sergei Shargunov on a wonderful milestone — 35 years old.

S. Shargunov: Unbelievable!

S. Buntman: Happy birthday. And today we…

S. Shargunov: Today is no longer my birthday.

S. Buntman: No, today it is back to working days.

S. Shargunov: Working days, yes — a working evening.

S. Buntman: And today we are together with historian Oleg Budnitsky…

O. Budnitsky: Good evening!

S. Buntman: Good evening. Today we will once again turn to the Red Army — the Red Army in Europe. Today it is possible to reconstruct in considerable detail, including everyday life, how people felt when they came out of an absolutely closed country and found themselves in Europe.

O. Budnitsky: I would not say “in considerable detail”...

S. Buntman: Well, at least in some human, everyday way...

S. Shargunov: There are many memoirs, diaries...

O. Budnitsky: Yes. “Many” — if only it were so. You know, not many, but still enough to form an impression of how Europe was perceived by those people who were able to write. We should not forget that around eight million people unexpectedly found themselves in Europe. The lion’s share of those who served in the Red Army were peasants. Their level of education was, to put it mildly, below average. There were also inhabitants of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, who began to be drafted actively in the second half of the war and who often understood Russian poorly or not at all. So, relative to the enormous number of people who went abroad, the number of texts they left is, of course, very small. But compared with what we knew before, there are many — that is true.

S. Buntman: Oleg Budnitsky. We will now make the sort of prologue customary in our program. There is an amusing anecdotal scene that for some reason we always liked when we first watched the film Liberation. It takes place in Winston Churchill’s office. Let us listen.

Voice: From Marshal Stalin for you, Mr Prime Minister.

Churchill: And no letter? I noticed long ago that Uncle Joe adores his portraits. This is not so simple. There must be some hidden meaning here. Somehow he has got ahead of me. Ah! Of course — the Russians have crossed the Polish border.

S. Buntman: There you have it, a profound little anecdote. I do not know how true the story is, but for some reason I liked it very much as a child.

S. Shargunov: The one with the portrait.

S. Buntman: Yes, with the portrait. The portrait — and those pauses that made half the radio station panic: why are there pauses on the air? But it is Winston Churchill opening the envelope: “Why is there no letter?”

O. Budnitsky: He made a Moscow Art Theatre pause.

S. Shargunov: By the way, that portrait could recently be seen in central Berlin in newly released color footage from Berlin, footage that had not been available before and has now been taken out of some archive and posted online.

S. Buntman: In any case, this was an enormous, multi-million-person movement. One would just like to know: which Polish border are we talking about? And in general, what did it feel like for a person to “arrive in Europe”? Kuprin wrote that when you travel west you enter Europe before leaving Russia, and when returning east you leave Europe before crossing the border, because the western provinces of the Russian Empire in his time strongly resembled Europe. And then, in 1939–40, large western territories were annexed, including the Baltic states, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. This feeling of Europe reached even children — Riga sweets and so on. So, judging from impressions and diaries, when can we say that they truly found themselves in some unfamiliar kind of life?

S. Shargunov: In another world.

O. Budnitsky: We need not look very far. Let me simply read what Sergeant Pavel Elkinson wrote on 26 August 1944. I quote: “There it is — the pond, there is the border. Did I ever think I would have to go abroad? And now it has happened. How I want to remember everything I see and write it down briefly, because something like this happens only once in a lifetime.” That is when he begins keeping a diary. He had been fighting since at least 1942 and had already been wounded near Stalingrad. He starts writing when he finds himself abroad. This particular sergeant, Pavel Elkinson, went through Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Austria, where he ended the war. That was his route.

There were many people who began making notes once they found themselves abroad — very many about Poland, very many about Germany, and there are also records about Austria, which of course was part of the Third Reich, about Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. The authors were very different people: from Moscow intellectuals — for example David Kaufman, better known as David Samoilov, the famous poet of the wartime generation, author of “The Fatal Forties,” who kept a diary in Poland and Germany — to less famous people who left enormous diaries.

One such person was Vladimir Gelfand, first a private and later a lieutenant. He left an extremely detailed diary about Poland and especially Germany, where he remained almost until the end of 1946, serving in the occupation forces.

Another diary was kindly provided by the staff of the manuscript department of the Public Library in St Petersburg — it has another official name now, but to everyone it will always be “the Publicka.” This is the diary of Igor Safonov. He belonged to the military elite: a captain, later a major. Again, he began keeping his diary in January 1945, precisely when they moved on through Poland, Romania, Hungary, Austria, then Czechoslovakia, and then Hungary again. These are genuine tourist notes. He was a topographer at army headquarters. His first task was to collect all kinds of maps. Incidentally, he was convinced there would be a Third World War. It was 1945, and you would think: we are just about to finish this one...

S. Shargunov: You mean with the Allies?

O. Budnitsky: He does not say with whom. No. He was simply convinced there would be a Third World War. On the one hand he collected maps, and on the other he mapped the terrain where he found himself; his job was to make their own map. And he wrote things down. There is almost nothing about combat operations. He records impressions: what people look like, cities, castles, museums and so on. He pasted in postcards. Two large account books written in calligraphic handwriting, with all the postcards in color. There are wonderful notes, for example about Vienna and Austria in particular. He wonders whether the birds in the Vienna Woods really sing as they do in The Great Waltz, a film he had seen before the war.

O. Budnitsky: Germany lay beyond what Soviet people could imagine; it made a shocking impression.

S. Buntman: That was a favorite film, yes. Strauss writes down what he hears — a horn, the birds...

O. Budnitsky: Others wrote down less pleasant things: battles, death and what happened to civilians. There was a distinction between countries occupied by Germany and countries allied with Germany, and attitudes toward them naturally differed. So we can see how Europe was perceived. And of course these diaries are interesting not only for what the writers saw, but for how they perceived it. They are a mirror in which Soviet people themselves were reflected.

S. Buntman: Of course.

O. Budnitsky: The way they perceived the West tells us who they were and what kind of country they came from. Romania, for example, seemed extraordinarily rich to them.

S. Buntman: Romania...

O. Budnitsky: Romania, which was essentially on the outskirts of Europe. And there are not only diaries. In one archive there is an astonishing text written by Pravda correspondent Boris Polevoy. Correspondents were not merely correspondents; naturally they were also informants, one way or another. Alongside articles in which everything was “correct,” published in Pravda, Izvestia or elsewhere...

S. Buntman: They also wrote things closer to reality.

O. Budnitsky: Closer to reality — for example about behavior in Romania. Boris Polevoy was outraged by the obsession with buying goods among senior officers, who bought up every piece of merchandise they could find. He writes that the owner of a Romanian shop, whose entire stock was bought — including things he had never expected to sell — asked: “Do you really have nothing at home, if you are buying even this?” It was easy to buy things because the compulsory exchange rate of the ruble against the leu made everything very cheap for Soviet officers, and for soldiers too if they had money. Polevoy believed this behavior dishonored the officer corps.

S. Shargunov: The theme of buying up goods appeared as early as 1939. There was the well-known meeting on Staraya Square where Stalin called the writer Avdeenko a “bargain hunter” after he returned from Western Belarus having bought all sorts of things there.

S. Buntman: Here it becomes an everyday phenomenon.

S. Shargunov: And one of the film directors quickly took off his tie and hid it.

O. Budnitsky: The difference in material conditions was enormous. There was a joke then: “Lebedev-Kumach went to the former Poland and came back Lebedev-Koverkot,” a pun suggesting he returned dressed in better cloth. There were such episodes. In the diary of the future Marshal Yeremenko, when troops under his command entered the Baltic region, including Estonia, he complains that soldiers were wandering around, looking at things, buying things. He banned it so that they would not disgrace the Soviet person.

But if we are talking about people who entered a world of different material things, Germany of course made the most shocking impression. It was something beyond the imagination of Soviet people. They had been told that the Western world was terrible: unemployment, no collective farms supposedly saving people from starvation, dreadful private property, and so on. Suddenly they entered a world that looked completely different. Reactions varied greatly: some were indignant, some admired it, and very many were angry. They were angry that these people had lived so well — and yet had come to invade us...

S. Buntman: What did they want?

O. Budnitsky: What did they want? I want to find an entry so I can quote it precisely. Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand, whom I mentioned, wrote in Germany on 30 January 1945: “The luxury of the furnishings is indescribable. The wealth and elegance of all the property are astonishing.” But he was, after all, a man from Dnipropetrovsk...

He came from Dnipropetrovsk, a fairly developed industrial city, but not a capital. He had not even finished the full ten-year school course — nine years of education in today’s terms.

Then there is Lieutenant Boris Etinberg, a Muscovite with higher education, a historian — my own academic adviser, incidentally. Boris Samoilovich entered Germany on an armored train. He commanded a gun platoon, and his armored train was not sitting on some siding; it was on the main line.

S. Buntman: On the main line.

O. Budnitsky: On the main line. He arrived in Gumbinnen. Gumbinnen had already been taken...

S. Buntman: Today’s Gusev, right?

O. Budnitsky: Exactly. The troops had already passed through. And this is what he wrote. On 25 March 1945, describing what he saw in Gumbinnen: “Ruined houses, abandoned furniture. Streets neatly planted with trees. Libraries with new, unread books. Many other little things speaking of the unheard-of good life these parasites lived. Everything was left in the houses. The furnishings are especially striking. What armchairs, sofas, wardrobes! How did they live? What more did they need? They wanted war? They got it.” End of quote.

By the way, one might get the impression that everything had simply been left untouched. But Boris Samoilovich told me personally that when he wrote about furniture, he really meant furniture skeletons, because the leather had been cut off everything and sent home by soldiers in parcels. They did not understand that upholstery leather could not really be turned into shoes. But whatever they found, they sent. Books, of course, stayed where they were if they had not been burned. Who needed those German folios in magnificent bindings? As for everything else — the inhabitants were gone, they had fled — and under Stalin’s order of 20 December 1944 soldiers were now allowed to send parcels home: ordinary soldiers up to five kilograms per month, officers up to ten, senior officers up to fifteen. Trophies. Naturally, as we know, people did not always stop at fifteen; some generals managed to send things home by the trainload, but that is another story.

S. Buntman: Last Sunday we were just discussing one of those trials.

S. Shargunov: Ruslanova, perhaps?

S. Buntman: That too. The trophy trials.

O. Budnitsky: That was the perception. And incidentally, this luxury provoked sheer rage. My adviser Boris Samoilovich wrote that “one wants to take revenge even on this furniture, because a Fritz sat on it.”

S. Buntman: And what they were seeing was simply an orderly everyday life. Objectively speaking, for the most part it was a decent, well-organized way of life.

S. Shargunov: Yes. Under those conditions, by contrast, it was perceived as luxury.

S. Buntman: And one senses the thought that precisely because of this there is no desire to pity anyone.

O. Budnitsky: It does come through. Moreover, this well-organized domestic life — what they perceived as philistinism or bourgeois narrow-mindedness — was seen as a kind of foundation and root of fascism. David Samoilov philosophized particularly on this subject.

He writes about everyday life. Without knowing it, you have practically quoted David Samoilov’s diary from Landsberg. He wrote: “The details of well-ordered domestic life are striking; they are visible in every little detail of daily use, in a thousand little things and objects, abandoned regalia and trinkets. At the same time there are so few books” — though in some places there were few and in others many. “On my table is an old clock that keeps chiming something resembling a Krakowiak. Tasteless pictures on the walls. Portraits of people in uniform and out of uniform. Under one, an inscription: ‘Died for the Fatherland, 27 March 1918.’ And, of course, the inevitable beer mug with the inscription: ‘Man’s worst enemy was and remains his attraction to alcohol. But the Bible says you must love your enemies.’” Those sorts of jokes. Beer mugs became a symbol of Germany for many people and appear very often in frontline film footage — these beer mugs with inscriptions.

Samoilov directly linked what they understood as bourgeois philistinism — a settled, orderly domestic life — with fascism. He regarded it as the breeding ground of Nazism. Samoilov wrote: “Hitlerism is the philosophy of the brutalized petty bourgeois who has reached the point of mania in his conceit, narcissism, hatred and envy. It is a kind of pathos of vulgarity and insignificance, a monstrous exposure of instincts, an admiration of the filth of one’s own ego. It is the logical end of every form of philistinism. The respectable German burgher had inevitably to arrive at this.”

He ended his reflections with a phrase expressing a lingering longing for world revolution: “And all the burghers of the world will inevitably come to the same thing if we do not crush them and wipe them from the face of the earth.” Incidentally, he also reflected on the Russian Revolution and wrote that perhaps revolution had been easier in Russia because material possessions had never been its master: “I do not think there was ever such elaborate domestic detail in Russia, such domination by things.” In other words: if people are comfortable with their possessions, there will be no revolution. In a sense, he was right.

S. Buntman: In a sense, yes. What is striking here is probably how strongly many people wanted somehow to explain to themselves what they were seeing.

O. Budnitsky: Yes. It was a kind of vulgar Marxism, I would say: people fight wars for things.

S. Shargunov: But on the other hand there is what we know of the German way of life even today — a certain orderliness, a definite form of burgher mentality. So this was also a collision between different psychological archetypes.

O. Budnitsky: You know, perhaps I will say something terrible. The first time I saw in Berlin that a tram stop had a display saying the tram would arrive in two minutes, at first it provoked a kind of protest in me. Then you get used to it very quickly.

S. Buntman: There is something disgusting about that!

O. Budnitsky: You quickly get used to it and think: people really do live well.

S. Shargunov: Undoubtedly.

O. Budnitsky: Though things are not always so perfect in Germany now. I was there recently and ran into a railway strike...

...a railway strike, and I was horrified that I might not be able to leave Tübingen at all.

S. Buntman: Terrible. If it had been France, one could understand it — but Germany? A nightmare.

S. Shargunov: But was Romania really so much better off than the Soviet Union?

O. Budnitsky: Without question.

S. Shargunov: Was the contrast really that enormous? Those little villages had also been drained by war to a considerable degree. Yes, there were things — but what things? A chest of drawers, a clock... Why such a cultural shock?

O. Budnitsky: Here you are: Romania, 5 September 1944, a village. Sergeant Elkinson writes: “People live not badly in the villages — each on his own. Everyone has pigs, geese, chickens, horses. This individual ownership has made them so greedy they would hang themselves over a piece of property.” Interesting...

S. Buntman: Individual ownership. Sergei, this is very important. The main thing people had been deprived of, what did not exist, was any kind of separateness, any private sphere of their own. Perhaps that is why we now have eight-metre fences.

O. Budnitsky: I want to finish the quotation because it is rather vivid: “People in the villages are dressed rather poorly — or perhaps they dress that way deliberately, or have nothing else? The women and girls perhaps dress that way intentionally and smear themselves so much that it is frightening to look at them. I did not notice young women at all. They are evidently afraid of us.” The logic of “smearing themselves” is understandable. “In the towns people dress better. The towns are not bad, clean. If you have money, you can get anything.” Bulgaria, 8 September — just three days later, also a poor country: “We arrived in a village and went to the shop. They have everything. As much vodka as you want and whatever kind you want, three rubles a litre. Everyone took as much as he could.” And so on. One can go down the list. That is the difference a person simply saw with his own eyes.

S. Buntman: Because the most elementary things were astonishing.

O. Budnitsky: Exactly.

S. Buntman: Precisely the elementary things — even a separate room. Never mind a separate house. Livestock belonging to a family. Even if half the livestock had been killed and only one dead cow remained, it had still belonged to the family. Such a thing already seemed almost impossible. Oleg Budnitsky. We will continue in five minutes. We are talking about the Red Army abroad through diaries and memoirs, and above all through diaries — things written down immediately after what people saw. “Dilettantes” returns in five minutes.

NEWS

S. Buntman: The Red Army in Europe. We continue our program. Oleg Budnitsky is our guest today. Sergei Shargunov and Sergei Buntman are hosting. A question has come in: technically, how did they keep diaries? Was there censorship? Were diaries inspected? What could happen to someone for keeping one?

O. Budnitsky: You know, although there was no special order explicitly banning diaries, the practice was not encouraged and in some places was prosecuted under general censorship considerations. So diaries were usually kept secretly. Sergeant Elkinson, for instance, had a little notebook in which he wrote his diary — very dense, very vivid. Once he lost it and was utterly terrified that someone would find it. And amazingly, he himself later found it by the roadside. That was extraordinarily lucky.

Some people kept diaries in tiny notebooks in minuscule handwriting and hung them on a cord under their tunic. Some kept diaries quite openly. Quite a few diaries were kept by people serving near headquarters rather than in trenches.

S. Buntman: People who in general had to write a great deal.

S. Shargunov: Like the cartographer.

O. Budnitsky: Exactly. He was practically without supervision. He often travelled alone and mapped terrain. Some interpreters kept diaries as well, and so on. But everything depended on the specific situation. Somewhere, if notes were discovered, a person could be imprisoned — as happened to military correspondent Danila Fibikh. Someone among his fellow servicemen reported a note of his — he even basically knew who it was — saying that Trotsky had been a good orator. The matter went all the way to Mekhlis, and Fibikh was sent straight from the front to a camp. Trotsky really was a good orator; the statement itself seems hardly subversive.

S. Buntman: But you were not supposed to write that.

O. Budnitsky: That alone was enough. So circumstances varied. Still, it turns out that more diaries survived than one might have expected. And taking this opportunity, I appeal to anyone who has somehow preserved wartime diaries, letters or other personal documents to contact me. My email address can be found on the Higher School of Economics website by searching my surname. In this way our centre has already received quite a number of absolutely unique diaries from many Russian cities and even from abroad, for example Stuttgart.

S. Shargunov: Here is another question. Have a sufficient number of notes survived from Russians who fought Napoleon and later found themselves in Paris?

S. Buntman: Plenty, of course.

S. Shargunov: Is it possible to compare the two experiences? We have been talking a lot about collectivist consciousness, the Stalinist state, the shock experienced by Soviet people. But Europe also lived better in everyday material terms then and looked more attractive. What happened in 1812 and after? Was that a cultural shock too?

O. Budnitsky: First of all, I am not a specialist in the War of 1812.

S. Shargunov: But have you ever compared them? Russians did not enter Europe for the first time in the Second World War.

O. Budnitsky: At that time, however, it was mainly officers who kept notes — that is one difference. And the second is that one consequence was the Decembrist movement. So I think the conclusion is fairly clear.

S. Shargunov: One of its sources, in short.

O. Budnitsky: In fact, that is the most important point.

S. Buntman: Alexander even said in Paris: “Your head has flown very high.”

O. Budnitsky: And, incidentally, the theme of a new Decembrism runs like a red thread through the period. First of all, it appears in the instructions of the political departments. The authorities fully understood what might happen when people saw a different life and discovered that much of what they had been told for twenty years was simply not true.

There were newspaper articles, political instructions and explanatory campaigns saying, for example, that all this prosperity had been looted — that these people produced nothing themselves, and so on.

They said quite openly that one must not compare the present situation with the time of tsarism, when the Decembrist movement arose. Senior political officers said this, and lower-level political workers explained it to those who even understood what Decembrism was.

And in the notes of people who thought about such matters — the intellectual elite, let us call them that — Samoilov, Slutsky and others, one constantly finds reflections on whether a new Decembrism was possible. Boris Slutsky, however, thought that this new “Decembrism” would come from intelligent regional party secretaries — something along those lines.

S. Shargunov: That they would somehow understand and compare things, and see what could be done at home without causing harm.

O. Budnitsky: Yes. But you understand, after the war a new Decembrism could not really arise from anywhere. In 1812 the people who later became Decembrists belonged to the social elite. They were not ordinary soldiers. In 1945, strangely enough, that layer of elite was much thinner than it had been in 1812 — not in terms of literacy, but in terms of feeling that they were people entitled to shape the fate of the country.

The anti-Western campaign, the struggle against “cosmopolitanism,” “kowtowing before the West,” and so on were, of course, preventive measures against the kind of inoculation people had received — a dose of freedom, a measure of independence, and especially the ability to see things with their own eyes, compare them and tell others: look, what we were told at home was not true, or at least not entirely true.

S. Shargunov: And also a response to the creation of NATO and the deterioration of relations with the West.

S. Buntman: No. This was a year before NATO.

S. Shargunov: Churchill’s Fulton speech was around then.

S. Buntman: The Fulton speech and NATO are different things.

S. Shargunov: One flowed into the other.

S. Buntman: No. These are connections people here are very fond of making. The Fulton speech was a response to Sovietization and the spread of socialist control, to what was already happening...

S. Shargunov: Each side has its own argument about who started first.

S. Buntman: But there is a calendar.

S. Shargunov: And what was happening with Berlin — the different occupation zones...

O. Budnitsky: That is another story. But, you know, what was done in Poland contrary to the agreements — were there free elections there, for example? Or what was later arranged in Czechoslovakia? What is there to argue about? These things seem completely obvious to me, at least. But here we are talking about something else.

We are talking about the inoculation people received from a certain amount of freedom, a certain amount of independence, and above all from having seen things for themselves, being able to compare and to tell others: “Look, what we were told was not quite true.” That was a purely domestic matter, not something caused by the emerging Cold War. The aim was to crush these tendencies in the bud. Hence the resolutions against the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, and later the campaign against cosmopolitanism.

S. Buntman: They moved fairly quickly. A year passed, no more, before they began dealing with these things. It is interesting to imagine it, because memoirs have survived about people returning and telling stories. What did they tell?

O. Budnitsky: I cannot say; I do not know such recollections well enough — what exactly people told and how others perceived it. But we do have evidence of how the soldiers perceived Europe and how they perceived themselves.

For example, Private Vasily Tsymbal, father of film director Zhenya Tsymbal — who supplied me with his father’s diaries — drew a plan of a standard peasant house, showing how it was arranged, and recorded many similar details. People were struck by such things; they tried to document them and compare them with what existed in the Soviet Union at that time.

Others felt nothing but hatred and had only one desire: to destroy and burn everything. The military command had to fight against this because the idea of revenge developed into something much larger...

S. Buntman: And it fed itself and intensified itself, as every wave does once it begins...

S. Shargunov: But there was also Polish revenge against the German population, Czech revenge...

S. Buntman: Of course.

S. Shargunov: And if one compares the number of civilians killed in the Soviet Union with the figures in Europe, the numbers are incomparable.

O. Budnitsky: Certainly, but that is not what we are discussing.

S. Shargunov: That rage was therefore channelled very quickly.

O. Budnitsky: How shall I put it... No, no.

S. Shargunov: Do you think they arrived and simply began destroying the civilian population?

O. Budnitsky: It is not what I “think”; it is what the documents show. If we are speaking about Germany, situations differed from country to country. Hungary had also fought against the Soviet Union, and attitudes there were, to put it mildly, far from friendly, but it was still not quite the same as in Germany.

S. Shargunov: Der Spiegel is now conducting an investigation. In the American zone there were mass rapes of German women — much more than in the Soviet zone.

O. Budnitsky: What does an investigation have to do with it? There is an enormous literature on this subject. There is a book by an American lawyer...

S. Shargunov: No, Sergei, what is there to prove? That we were not the only ones who took revenge, that we were not uniquely like this? The main thing is to find out what actually happened. Only after that should we compare things. That is what we are doing today.

O. Budnitsky: If we are speaking about the Allies, then of course we must begin with the bombing. However much the stated aim was to destroy industry, in reality entire places were wiped from the face of the earth...

S. Shargunov: Dresden, for example.

O. Budnitsky: Dresden is the classic case. I was just in Stuttgart, which was also...

S. Buntman: And Freiburg — my favorite city?

O. Budnitsky: Yes. Civilians suffered there to a very great extent. And this brings us onto difficult ground. All right: the Germans bombed Soviet cities, they bombed British cities — Coventry, London and so on. But when German cities are bombed, civilians die there too. The idea was partly to demoralize the enemy, and that is simply true.

S. Buntman: Of course. That was one of the objectives.

O. Budnitsky: Absolutely true.

S. Shargunov: But the Dresden operation was purely punitive. There were no military targets there.

O. Budnitsky: You see, we are now far enough removed from the war to say: yes, that too was a crime against civilians. Or do we believe that after what the Germans did, anything whatsoever could be done to them? That is a serious question, in my view.

S. Buntman: I think it is long past time for us to gather our courage and begin to see the wars of the twentieth century — including the Second World War — as an immense tragedy with its own patterns, causes and consequences. With all the pain in our families and all our personal feelings, we should still write and study history as an enormous European and world tragedy in the ancient sense of the word: an inexorable sequence of events with causes and consequences, in which there are no wholly white figures, and where a terrible current carries everything along. There are criminals, there are heroes, but there are also human actors caught in the process.

O. Budnitsky: I would not agree with you in everything. There were probably no absolutely white sides because war produces no absolutely white sides.

S. Buntman: But there were absolutely black ones.

O. Budnitsky: There were absolutely black ones. Fascism is an absolutely black phenomenon...

S. Shargunov: A deliberate policy of extermination.

O. Budnitsky: Exactly. There can be no...

S. Buntman: I agree that the absolutely black existed, unfortunately.

S. Buntman: Absolutely white did not exist, unfortunately. The romantic idea that people become better in war is false — no one becomes better. And that is precisely what we can trace here.

S. Buntman: Are there certain patterns? First of all, enormous surprise and enormous curiosity about what was happening there.

O. Budnitsky: Yes, certainly. And feelings differed toward different countries and peoples. There was, for example, complete delight at the receptions in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Elkinson writes that they were not welcomed in Russia or Ukraine the way they were welcomed in Yugoslavia. He says: “We are practically never sober; they are constantly giving us food and drink...” It was a very enthusiastic reception. There are memories of very warm receptions in Czechoslovakia as well. The attitude toward Romania was much more complicated because Romania suddenly changed from an enemy into an ally.

S. Buntman: Bulgaria too...

S. Shargunov: Bulgaria was an ally of Germany but did not fight the Soviet Union. It allowed troops through. There was no fighting there.

O. Budnitsky: It did not fight us. As for Hungary, here is an entry from 17 October 1944: “The population is afraid of us and does not treat us very well, which is understandable. Our Ivans will repay a hundredfold what the Germans did to us. They take whatever they want. There are even cases of women being raped.” That is an ordinary soldier’s entry. There are quite a few such entries about Hungary.

If we speak about revenge, which we have discussed before, perhaps the most concise description was written — and later carefully crossed out, though we restored it — by Sergeant Nikolai Inozemtsev, the future Academician Nikolai Nikolaevich Inozemtsev and later Brezhnev’s speechwriter. He wrote: “Burning German towns, traces of short battles along the road. Groups of captured Germans surrendering in large numbers. Alone they are afraid — they will be shot. Corpses of men, women and children in apartments, lines of carts with refugees, raped women, devastated villages, hundreds and thousands of abandoned bicycles along the roads. Huge masses of cattle bellowing in every voice: there is no one to milk or water the cows. All these are the ‘battle scenes’ of the advance of an army of avengers. Scenes of Germany’s defeat that will make surviving Germans and their children swear never again to fight Russia.” That is what he wrote in Germany in April 1945, in this compressed form.

S. Buntman: A harsh picture.

O. Budnitsky: A harsh picture.

S. Shargunov: Comrade Ehrenburg simplifies things.

O. Budnitsky: And in every diary — I repeat, every diary...

...we see entries like this in all of them.

S. Shargunov: From all sides.

S. Buntman: It is also important to understand what changed as the army moved closer to Berlin. Are there diaries relating to central Germany, almost to the capital itself — diaries about Berlin and its surroundings?

O. Budnitsky: Of course.

S. Buntman: Berlin itself and the area around it.

O. Budnitsky: I mentioned Samoilov — that was Landsberg, practically Berlin. And Vladimir Gelfand, who was in Berlin many times both before and especially after its capture, and later while serving in Germany. There are wonderful and very interesting entries.

Then there is Elena Rzhevskaya’s Berlin, May 1945. It is not exactly a diary, but it is clearly based on diary notes. Of course the book was published in 1965, in the Soviet period, so there were certain nuances. But it contains very interesting observations, including things that astonished her about the Germans.

At the beginning of May, for almost the first time during the war, she sleeps in a real bed in the home of a German family who are, naturally, somewhat afraid of her. There are freshly cut flowers in a vase — that is simply how things are supposed to be. The owner asks whether he may go to the dentist. It is 4 May 1945. She says yes, of course, and thinks: war is war, but if a man has a toothache, he must go. Then it turns out that he had made the dental appointment two weeks earlier. War or no war, the appointment must be kept. She is astonished by this.

There is another striking observation from the town of Stendal shortly after the war ended: how suddenly everything stops. A moment before there had been war — and then, suddenly, that is it. Peaceful life seems to return as though nothing had happened. The sensation is remarkable.

S. Buntman: That really happened — on some particular sector it could simply stop, just like that.

O. Budnitsky: Yes. Gelfand and many others describe similar things. A woman appears near their camp with two daughters and shows photographs of how beautiful they are. He does not understand at first that the mother is, so to speak, offering her daughters for sale. People need food. Almost immediately certain commodity-money relations begin to develop. There are other things too. Soldiers communicate with Germans, especially German women; romances begin, and so on.

S. Shargunov: There was a situation of near-starvation there.

O. Budnitsky: Yes. Prostitution developed almost instantly and on an enormous scale.

S. Shargunov: The proverbial bar of chocolate...

S. Buntman: Different things.

S. Shargunov: And at the same time everyday life was being restored. Sergei, I recommend that you watch the newsreel footage recently posted online. You can see Berlin already in the summer of 1945: cyclists, conversations, passers-by. There is a sense that life has returned.

O. Budnitsky: On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, this was an occupation army, and soldiers basically felt they were within their rights...

S. Shargunov: The soldiers had won, yes.

O. Budnitsky: They had won, yes. But from the end of April the authorities began tightening discipline and order quite actively. There had been discipline before as well, but not in such a centralized, rigid form. It took time to cool the army down; it did not happen instantly.

Still, I would like to move away from sad subjects toward things that are perhaps more pleasant, even aesthetic. Speaking of Romania, Safonov wrote: “For the first time in three and a half years of war I drank a glass of coffee and ate real cakes.” There you have Romania.

And he writes about Hungarian women — I mean purely the aesthetic side of the question: “When we discussed the appearance of Hungarian women with the fellows, it turned out that their slim figures, with long legs and noses, make little impression on our boys, who say that our Mashas, twice as broad, are far better. One senses something fundamentally monumental. Here you could snap them like a twig, as one driver and connoisseur of women put it.”

S. Shargunov: Bulgaria is a fine country...

O. Budnitsky: Yes. The same Hungary, February 1945. And Hungary again in July 1945. Now he himself writes: “The Hungarian women here are beautiful, slender and thin. Our girls dressed in civilian clothes are immediately recognizable; their ample forms stand out against the slight local women. When some Dunyasha walks down the street, the Magyar women bounce away from her like ice floes from an icebreaker.”

And here is an earlier entry, from March: “Everywhere cheerful, slightly drunken faces. Fighting on foreign territory, it turns out, is more interesting than fighting on your own. Many people think so.” In general, it is apparently always better to fight on someone else’s territory than on your own.

And of course death is still all around. It is the end of the war, yet losses remain extremely high — Budapest, Lake Balaton and so on. When I quote these light-hearted observations, one must remember that this is the background against which everything is happening.

Still, let me quote something more cheerful. Captain Safonov reached Vienna. This is an entry from 11 April 1945 — a long quotation, but I think it is worth it:

“Beyond the Belvedere — anyone who knows Vienna will know it, up above where the Klimt and Schiele collections are now — closer to the very centre of the city runs the Ringstrasse, something like our Moscow ring. The finest buildings in Vienna stand along the Ring. The street is not especially wide and is full of greenery. Now everything is covered in broken glass, disfigured, with tram wires hanging down, rubbish on the cobbled roadway, corpses of people and horses, bandages, strips of film, jars of jam crushed under soldiers’ boots.

“There is heavy traffic on the Ring. Soldiers march in formation toward the front line, which is very close. Cars, artillery and carts go by, and there are many soldiers simply wandering about. At an intersection near the Vienna Opera stands a pretty female traffic controller, briskly waving her flags and casting glances at the Viennese men and women, who look at her with great surprise.

“I went into the famous and once magnificent Vienna Opera. Only the foyer and the splendid staircase are intact now. The auditorium and stage have been destroyed and burned. I stood where the imperial box had been and looked at the charred ruins, trying to imagine what it had been like here in Strauss’s time, during the heyday of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is difficult to imagine now. Exhausted Red Army soldiers are sleeping on the floor of the foyer. Instead of Strauss, someone on the second floor is picking out ‘Chizhik’ with one finger on a miraculously surviving piano.”

S. Buntman: And on that scene we will bring the program to a close. Oleg Budnitsky.

S. Shargunov: Wonderful!

S. Buntman: Thank you very much!

S. Buntman: Perhaps the most striking thing — and we will probably talk about this again — was the feeling with which those who were fortunate enough to return came home, and the expectations they had. Those expectations were very important and were based, among other things, on what they had seen: an expectation that life would become better. It did not happen, but the expectation itself is very important.

Thank you very much. Oleg Budnitsky. The program “Dilettantes,” Sergei Buntman and Sergei Shargunov.

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