
Echo of Moscow — June 15, 2017, 21:07
Guest: Oleg Budnitsky, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor at the Higher School of Economics
Host: Sergei Buntman
Sergei Buntman: Good evening. We are beginning our program. Perhaps we are getting a little ahead of events, but in June it seems appropriate to talk specifically about this—about the beginning of the war. Let me remind you that we will also have a lecture and meeting devoted to the beginning of the war, one of our “Amateur Readings.” We will discuss the beginning of the war, the actions of the leadership, and the general situation. Leonid Mlechin will be speaking on the 22nd at 7 p.m., as usual in the former Lenin Museum. I hope you are already buying tickets; we are closing the season. Today we decided to look at the subject from another angle—from letters, diaries, and testimony of that kind. And naturally, if that is our subject, our guest is Oleg Budnitsky. Good evening.
Oleg Budnitsky: Good evening.
Buntman: These contemporary accounts—information recorded at the same time as the events—are probably among the most important things for our understanding.
Budnitsky: Among other things, yes.
Buntman: Including for a human understanding of what happened.
Budnitsky: Of course. It depends on what we want to understand. The reaction of the leadership—what they knew and did not know—has already been written and spoken about so much that, in my view, it is not the most interesting part of the story.
Buntman: Although it never hurts to summarize and remind people.
Budnitsky: Certainly. But today we will probably talk about something else: how ordinary people perceived the beginning of the war, how the first weeks and months passed, what happened, and what changed in public consciousness and in people’s perception of events. We are devoting more and more attention to what is called the human dimension of war—the history of people at war and during wartime.
We must understand that what has reached us is only a tiny fraction. First of all, we generally deal with those who survived and therefore were able to write something and preserve it. Those who did not survive, unfortunately, usually left us little, except in rare cases. And a huge quantity of texts of every kind was lost after the war, in perfectly peaceful circumstances, simply because nobody was particularly interested in them—neither the state, nor academic scholarship, nor sometimes even relatives. Old papers remain: notebooks, loose sheets, letters. Who needs them? I would like to begin today with an appeal: if any of you still have such material, please send it to us at the Higher School of Economics, to the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II. We collect such material and prepare it for publication.
Thanks in part to Echo of Moscow, we now have copies of perhaps fifteen wartime diaries at the center—diaries are rare—and we are working with them.
Buntman: People really do write to us from time to time asking where they should take such things, and I always send them to you.
Budnitsky: Thank you. A lot is coming in now.
Buntman: So please remember: if you have something, if acquaintances have something, or if someone unfortunately dies and leaves an archive, look through it carefully. I know how painful it can be to sort through the papers of someone close to you, but it needs to be done. These materials are extremely valuable.
Budnitsky: There was a remarkable story in the late Soviet period, at the end of the 1970s. Konstantin Simonov—who, among other things, was then a member of the Central Committee’s Control and Auditing Commission—sent a letter to the Central Committee proposing the creation of a kind of data bank, a people’s archive, although he did not use that expression. He wanted it attached to the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense. Memoirs that arrived spontaneously at newspapers and journals could be deposited there. Thousands of veterans—not hundreds, but thousands—wrote and sent in accounts. Simonov said that most of them were helpless from a literary point of view and could not really be edited for publication, but they contained information. Let us create a repository, he said, and in the future historians will be able to extract something from it.
What do you think happened? The proposal was sent for review to the General Staff and the Main Political Directorate of the Soviet Army.
Buntman: Comrade Yepishev.
Budnitsky: Comrade Yepishev and Comrade Ogarkov sent a letter to the Central Committee under their signatures saying that they considered such a repository inadvisable because it might reveal differing views of the history of the war, which was of course unacceptable. So, unfortunately, we lost the possibility of creating an enormous collection. And no one was even proposing that everyone should be given access to it. The proposal was simply to collect and preserve the material.
Buntman: To collect it and save it.
Budnitsky: Exactly. But even that was rejected. It is a sad story. Nevertheless, in our own time it has become clear that quite a few people did preserve such things. “Quite a few” may sound exaggerated when we are talking about dozens or hundreds, because millions served in the armed forces during the war. Still, compared with what we knew twenty-five years ago, the change is enormous. Diaries, letters, and memoirs are being discovered, mainly in family archives, sometimes in state archives. Some memoirs were written even in Soviet times without any hope of publication, by people describing what they remembered of the war and thinking about what they had endured.
For me as a historian, however, the greatest value lies not only in later reflection, but in records made here and now. Those are the most valuable sources. A person does not know what will happen tomorrow—sometimes he does not even know whether he will live until evening. The official canon of the war has not yet been formed, so people write down what they themselves consider important and true, without adapting their words to somebody else’s view. These are priceless accounts. There are not many, but there are far more than we used to think, and we are trying to collect and analyze them.
Not surprisingly, very few testimonies survive from the very beginning of the war. Most of the people who met the war somewhere along the western frontier were killed, did not keep records, or kept records that did not survive. Still, we do have some.
For example, there is the extensive diary of Nikolai Inozemtsev, published by his widow in the mid-1990s after his death. Inozemtsev later became an academician, director of an academic institute, and a speechwriter for Brezhnev. But he began the war as a sergeant on the western border, in western Ukraine, and kept a diary all the way to the end of the war.
Among the things he records is the hostile attitude of part of the local population toward Red Army soldiers. Like many others, he was shocked by the speed of the German advance and by the Red Army’s defeat and rapid retreat. Farther east, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, he barely avoided capture when his unit found itself almost surrounded.
What strikes me about his first entries is precisely this hostility from the population—even shots fired into soldiers’ backs. His diary actually begins not in 1941 but in 1939, when he and other students lost their deferments after the new law on universal military service and were drafted. He was already an intellectual and a fairly mature person despite his youth. He had a good literary style and an analytical mind.
He and his comrades were stationed in western Ukraine and, in effect, behaved there as if they were in an occupied country, although he did not fully realize it. It was a completely different world to them: western Ukraine had only recently been incorporated into the Soviet Union; many people spoke another language; the soldiers mainly encountered peasants whom they regarded as kulaks or semi-kulaks.
One of their “amusements,” and at the same time a way of supplementing their rations and obtaining alcohol, went like this. Someone would sell state property in a village—perhaps surplus military clothing or something else scarce. A day later his comrades would come and announce: “There has been theft here. We have been told you are buying stolen property.” They would then confiscate the very goods that had been sold. It was a little scheme. When it stopped working in one village, they repeated it in another. They treated such tricks as harmless fun, without considering how behavior of that kind might affect the population’s attitude toward the army. Inozemtsev does not connect these things in his diary, and that is precisely what makes the source interesting.
If we compare such personal impressions with official documents, a broader picture emerges. On the Southwestern Front, in just one army, about five thousand locally mobilized men deserted every day. They were already Soviet citizens in legal terms, but the scale of desertion was enormous. After the first disastrous days, and once the extent of mass desertion became clear, Lev Mekhlis, head of the Main Political Directorate, issued severe orders demanding executions, including executions in front of formations, and requiring that reports about them be published in army newspapers so that servicemen would know what was happening. The intersection of personal testimony and official documents gives us a kind of stereoscopic image of the first days of the war and helps explain some of what took place.
Buntman: Can Inozemtsev’s diary tell us how far into Soviet territory this hostile attitude toward the Red Army extended?
Budnitsky: He served in one particular region—western Ukraine. I do not remember him later writing something like, “Now we crossed a line and here the attitude became positive.” His diary entries were not daily. But I can refer to another diary that I am now preparing for publication.
Alexander Borisovich Izyumsky, a historian from Rostov with whom I once worked in the same department, wrote to me after hearing one of these appeals on Echo of Moscow. In the archive of his father, the well-known writer Boris Izyumsky, a diary had survived that belonged to Georgy Slavgorodsky, a Hero of the Soviet Union. Izyumsky scanned it and then prepared it for publication. I have almost finished the introduction, and I expect the diary to appear with ROSSPEN. I also think we will do a separate program about it with Vitaly Dymarsky.
Buntman: That would be very good.
Budnitsky: It is a rare diary: from August 1941 to January 1945—practically the entire war. One notebook seems to have been lost, so several months are missing, but essentially the diary runs from early August 1941 to January 23, 1945. That date is simply written at the end. Apparently he was mortally wounded that same day while crossing the Oder and died two days later, on January 25. The records disagree: comrades said the 25th, while the Memorial database gives the 26th. On some points I think the comrades were more precise.
Slavgorodsky was an extraordinary man. In one respect his path resembled Inozemtsev’s. He had already graduated from a pedagogical institute in Molotov—present-day Perm—in 1939 and had taught for a short time before being drafted. He began the war as a sergeant and ended it as a Guards major and battalion commander. He was exceptionally brave and genuinely talented at soldiering, although he himself did not value that talent. He wanted to be a writer; by training he was a literature teacher.
People with literary inclinations or ambitions were the ones most likely to keep diaries. I do not think Slavgorodsky would have become a great writer. The text is full of spelling and grammatical errors—one wonders what they taught at the pedagogical institute in Molotov—but it has a distinctive spirit and style. He tried to write every day.
Returning to the question of where the population’s attitude changes: Slavgorodsky was also in Ukraine, but in a different area, around Kaniv. He names the towns and villages where they fought. His unit was encircled more than once. There the attitude was different—generally positive. He notes occasional conversations showing that some civilians did not care who ruled so long as their men returned home, but in general people treated Red Army soldiers well, fed them and helped them. That mattered enormously because the supply system was extremely poor and, during rapid movements, collapsed almost completely. Soldiers depended on local people for food. Sometimes there was a little looting, but in his account it was limited. Slavgorodsky’s diary lets us trace a broadly positive attitude toward Red Army soldiers in that region.
As for the literal first days—June 22, the end of June and beginning of July—the most immediate surviving reactions often come not from servicemen but from civilians. As I said, soldiers’ records from those days usually did not survive. We more often have diaries by intellectuals, writers, or even schoolchildren simply recording what was happening.
Take two intellectual extremes. Vladimir Gelfand, whose diary we have discussed many times, wrote when the war began that he would probably have to change his vacation plans.
Buntman: He certainly had to change them.
Budnitsky: Very much so—and for a long time. From 1942 to 1946 he was in the army, and even before that, in August 1941, he had to flee his native Dnipropetrovsk as the Germans advanced.
Buntman: Was that bravado? Did he really believe it would be a short affair?
Budnitsky: No. He was a schoolboy, a complete product of Soviet society who accepted Soviet propaganda as truth. He had been told that any war would be won “with little blood and a mighty blow,” so he expected exactly that. He assumed the war might interfere with his holidays, but he did not imagine the scale of the catastrophe approaching. Many people did not. Apparently many of those who rushed to military recruitment offices as volunteers were afraid they might miss the war—that it would end without them.
At the other intellectual pole is Mikhail Prishvin, the writer whose unique diary runs from 1905 to 1954, almost half a century. On June 22 he spent much of the day writing long philosophical reflections before he even knew that the war had begun. By evening he learned the news and wrote: “This is judgment for 1917.”
Buntman: Oh!
Budnitsky: What did he mean? The Bolsheviks had risen to power in large part by rejecting the First World War. In my view, they succeeded above all because people no longer wanted to fight and the Bolsheviks were the party prepared to go furthest—even to accept territorial and other losses—in order to leave the war. Russia had entered the war on the side that eventually won, but because of the revolution it ended up among the defeated. As one Russian émigré later put it, postwar Europe had two pariahs: Germany and Russia. That helped bring Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia closer in the 1920s, although that is another story.
Prishvin had been closer to the Socialist Revolutionaries and did not accept the Bolshevik Revolution. He held a particular grievance against the Bolsheviks over what they had done during the First World War. So, a quarter of a century later, Russia was again at war with Germany, and for him the question was: what would these Bolsheviks be able to do now?
Buntman: And this was despite the fact that the Soviet Union had been on very good terms with Germany until June 22.
Budnitsky: Prishvin was not a foolish man. On June 24, reacting to Churchill’s speech in support of the Soviet Union, he wrote that Hitler’s war against the USSR was the price of peace with Britain. That was basically correct in the sense that Hitler did not regard the Soviet Union as a serious opponent and believed that, once the USSR had been crushed and Germany controlled nearly all of Europe, Britain would be forced to make peace.
Buntman: Yes. Oleg Budnitsky—we will continue in five minutes.
Buntman: We continue with Oleg Budnitsky. We are talking about the beginning of the war and about diaries and personal testimony. Tanya asks the recurring question: “We have always believed that keeping diaries was categorically forbidden.”
Budnitsky: Let me answer this once again. Historians have never found a general order banning diaries, and apparently there never was one. There were broad secrecy rules, interpreted differently in different units and places. In some units diaries were categorically forbidden. Zinovy Sverdlov recalled that a political officer told him Comrade Stalin had ordered anyone keeping a diary to be shot. Stalin, of course, never issued such an order. But Sverdlov stopped keeping notes.
Georgy Slavgorodsky, on the other hand, kept his diary quite openly. In fact he wrote down exactly the sort of information that was explicitly forbidden—names of unit commanders and sometimes unit numbers. Nobody paid attention. Vasily Tsymbal, the father of film director Yevgeny Tsymbal, also kept a diary openly: twelve notebooks from 1942 to 1945. Paper was scarce, so one notebook was made from old pre-revolutionary court-proceeding forms of the Kuban Cossack Host, and another had German Gothic printing on its pages.
Gelfand kept his diary quite openly too. His commander even advised him to write in ordinary pencil rather than indelible pencil because the latter might run and blur. So practices varied enormously. Some soldiers did not even know diaries might be prohibited. Boris Komsky said after the war: “I had no idea it was forbidden. If I had known, I would not have kept a diary.” Others hid what they were doing. Mark Shumerizhsky wrote on separate sheets that were not even dated and concealed them carefully.
There were women as well. Irina Dunayevskaya, a military interpreter and the author of a remarkable—and rare—woman’s wartime diary, was questioned by SMERSH officers: “What are you writing there?” They inspected her notes, saw that she had not written surnames or unit numbers, and essentially told her to carry on. Everything depended on the concrete circumstances.
Buntman: Let us return to 1941. We have shown very different poles of reaction, including Prishvin’s attempt to see a higher historical pattern.
Budnitsky: Those are far from all the poles. On June 22, a woman living in Pushkin named Olimpiada Polyakova, better known under the pen name Lydia Osipova, wrote that at last “our liberation” was approaching and that, whatever the Germans were like, things could not be worse than they were under the Bolsheviks. Such attitudes existed. She and her husband had spent their whole lives under Soviet rule waiting for something to happen that might end it. When the bombing began, she even called the falling bombs “bombs of liberation.”
There are other fascinating entries from June 22 and the days that followed. The writer Alexander Gladkov, author of the play Long Ago, later famous through the film Hussar Ballad, learned of the war rather late. He was a young man with an active love life and was preoccupied with a girlfriend while something outside was interrupting them; only later did he discover that war had begun.
Reactions ranged from enthusiasts who immediately wanted to enlist and rush to the front to people who understood that something terrible was happening.
Olga Bergholz made the first entry in what later became known as her siege diary on July 3. The diary has recently been published by the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in a huge, beautifully annotated volume. She wrote that she had prepared an article but the censors were holding it back. She went to the censorship office and wrote in her diary: “They still do not believe me. They do not trust me.” She had been arrested shortly before the war and beaten so severely while pregnant that she lost the child and was never able to have children again. This was the future “voice of Leningrad,” and her first wartime diary entry is about censorship and distrust of an honest text.
So we have very different immediate records. We also have memoirs, although memoirs are, in my view, a second-order source.
Buntman: Because things are erased, distorted, or remembered with complete confidence even though they did not happen exactly that way.
Budnitsky: Exactly. Any of us can test this on ourselves. If someone kept notes as a child or young person and then does not look at them for years or decades, the memory that formed later can be quite different. When you finally read the old pages you think, “Yes, that really was me; I really wrote this and did that.”
I want to give one example of a memoir that breathes authenticity: Leonid Andreyev’s account. He later became a well-known philologist and specialist in French literature, head of a department and dean of the Faculty of Philology at Moscow University. He began writing his memoir in a hospital in 1942 and returned to the text from time to time until 1944. After that the manuscript remained unpublished until his widow issued it after his death under the title The Philosophy of Existence.
Andreyev himself understood the limitations of memory. He wrote that even events from only a year earlier could no longer be reconstructed in every detail. On June 22, 1941, he was in Moscow. In retrospect he remembered June 21 and 22 as a time when everything seemed wonderful: people had struggled and suffered, and now it was possible to enjoy life again. He and his brother were arguing about something—probably literature—when their sister came in and said, “War.” He answered, “Yes,” still thinking in the metaphorical sense, as if they were “at war” in their argument. She had to say: “No. War with Germany.” He had felt no premonition at all, although later memory told him that “we knew it was coming.” That is a very instructive example.
He then went home to Smolensk, where his parents lived, and his notes vividly display the psychology of a young man raised in Stalin’s Soviet Union. By June 24 he was already writing about how many enemy parachutists and agents had supposedly been detained. Someone had the wrong number of insignia bars; a policeman in uniform paid a tram fare even though policemen were supposedly entitled to ride free—every oddity became “evidence” of espionage. These were obviously rumors, but spy mania was extremely characteristic of the period.
When bombing began in Smolensk, rumors spread about tank crews signaling to enemy aircraft, secret signalmen, green rockets and “green chains.” We now know that much of this was mythology, especially stories popular in besieged Leningrad. Andreyev also describes how he and a relative attracted suspicion merely because they asked the full name of a street. A crowd began following them, and the police detained them. The locals were released quickly; the relative who was not from the area had to sit at the station until his identity was established.
Buntman: I was told a wonderful story about one of the most famous and popular Moscow Art Theatre actors. During evacuation an NKVD representative went through the entire train saying, eyes bulging, “There is a spy sitting there. He must be neutralized immediately.”
Budnitsky: Exactly. It is especially valuable that Andreyev wrote this only a little more than a year after the war began and as a young man rather than decades later.
His own wartime fate was dramatic, almost tragic. He was drafted and served in a ski battalion. His first battle was also his last. The battalion was ordered into a frontal assault on a village, straight into machine-gun fire, and was virtually destroyed. Andreyev lay in the snow for about a day and suffered severe frostbite in his hands and especially his feet. He spent nearly two years in hospitals, where he wrote these notes.
These are the earliest wartime memoirs I know that were written so close to the events themselves. At the beginning he reflects that memoir-writing is an old and banal thing, but that he should record what he remembers for himself and his relatives because even after one year memory is already changing.
Much later, in post-Soviet times, when he was already a professor and Doctor of Sciences, Andreyev sent an inquiry to the Ministry of Defense asking what had happened to his ski battalion. According to his recollection, only eighteen men survived. He received the answer: “No information available.” The battalion had simply disappeared from the record. It was there—and then, as far as the paperwork was concerned, it was not.
Buntman: Do you often encounter the belief that it would not even become a real war, that it was some incident that would somehow blow over? The leadership itself was very slow to react, and until midday there was still uncertainty about what exactly was happening.
Budnitsky: I have not encountered that very often. Most people learned that war had begun from Molotov’s radio address, and Molotov made the situation clear: this was war. The word “patriotic” was already used in that speech.
Incidentally, I once noticed something that I may or may not have mentioned on Echo of Moscow. Molotov’s famous formula “Our cause is just; the enemy will be defeated” echoes Pavel Milyukov’s speech in the State Duma on July 26, 1914. Milyukov said essentially the same thing: “Our cause is a just cause.” Where were Bolshevik leaders to find the proper vocabulary for a war with Germany? Naturally, I believe they turned to the language used when war with Germany began in 1914. The same themes reappeared: the war with Napoleon, the “Patriotic War,” the justice of Russia’s cause, and confidence that the enemy would be defeated. In the First World War that did not happen for Russia; in the Second World War, as we know, it did.
So the range of reactions to the unfolding war was extremely broad.
If we turn to the actual fighting in the summer of 1941, we of course have Konstantin Simonov’s detailed notebooks, later used in his two-volume Different Days of the War, and we have Vasily Grossman’s extensive notebooks. But I want to return to Georgy Slavgorodsky’s diary because it is one of the rare cases of a record written continuously by a man directly at the front, not a senior commander but an ordinary sergeant.
Buntman: He begins in August?
Budnitsky: The surviving diary begins in early August 1941, although he had actually been keeping one since 1939.
What do we see? A certain amount of chaos, understandably, and very weak command at lower and middle levels. He does not encounter many people capable of taking charge, organizing resistance intelligently, or leading men out of encirclement.
There is a striking scene. A group of soldiers is trying to escape an encirclement, and a senior political instructor and a junior political instructor argue over who should go forward and scout the situation. Neither wants to do it because it is frightening. The senior political instructor essentially says: “I am more valuable to the Motherland because I am senior in rank. You go.” What is remarkable is that no one takes command of the group. Slavgorodsky finally writes, using language I will not repeat: “I hope the paper can stand all this. I will take command.” He is a sergeant, yet he takes over and leads the group out.
This is the beginning of a pattern. In the diary he constantly reflects on himself and doubts himself. At one point he even writes that Russian literature has ruined him because he has read too much and has learned to see life as more complicated than it really is. Yet his behavior is completely different from his self-doubt: he is sober, capable, courageous, and able to lead.
He rises steadily. He never received a proper officer’s education—or, really, any serious command training. He spent about two months in courses for political workers because he wanted to become one, but for reasons not entirely clear from the diary that did not work out. Perhaps he was too direct; perhaps his formal political education was insufficient. But he became a successful field commander.
Inozemtsev, by contrast, remained a sergeant through the war despite being obviously more intellectual. That is partly because he served in heavy artillery, a weapon of offensive operations that spent much of the earlier war away from the front and moved forward mainly later. Slavgorodsky was at the sharp end from the beginning. He fought at Stalingrad and served in what became Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Division.
It is evident that he had a real talent for war, yet he did not value it. He would write something like, “I have become carried away by the war again; I have even grown a black beard and have not written anything.” He wanted to be a man of letters.
Buntman: There is some self-irony in that too.
Budnitsky: I would call it less self-irony than uncertainty about himself. He dreamed of becoming a great man and sometimes had almost adolescent reactions. He would think of Frunze, who had been great from a young age, and ask: “And what am I? Nobody.” At other times he wrote about reading the second volume of Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don and literally kissing the pages. He read constantly and would say, “I could write like that too.”
Buntman: But consciously or not, he also had an ethical model of how a person ought to behave—what is shameful and what is not. Cowardice, for example, is shameful.
Budnitsky: Yes, certainly. A few months before his death he wrote a remarkable line: “What am I? I am an average Russian officer. A brave Russian officer. That is all.” He was thirty. He still wanted ordinary human happiness, a family and a life beyond the army, and yet at that moment being a brave officer was perhaps the most important thing a person could be.
Buntman: Oleg Budnitsky, thank you very much. I think we will return in different programs to newly discovered and newly published memoirs, diaries, and especially notebooks. Thank you.
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