The Ego of a War Long Past

Ogonyok, No. 24, June 19, 2017

Historian Oleg Budnitsky spoke with Olga Filina about the truths hidden in the private archives of participants in the Great Patriotic War.

One feature of war that history textbooks rarely convey is that its participants spend most of their time not fighting. Much of wartime consists of everyday military life—life that is not recorded in operational documents or reports and is therefore almost unknown to later generations. Despite the enormous number of books about the Great Patriotic War, the time between the battles remains largely “missing in action”: we know for certain only that it existed.

An ambitious goal of modern historians is to recover these lost wartime minutes. This is the task of the “social history” of war, which is studied largely through “ego-documents”: diaries, memoirs and personal archives. Ogonyok asked why these understudied sources can today be more important and more candid than official records, and what truths about the war they contain.

For Russia, the social history of the war is especially important because the war affected the “Soviet person” in a particular way. On the one hand, it completed the formation of Soviet society: in the trenches the city met the countryside in a direct and unprecedented way, and the two later mixed into a single “people.” On the other hand, the war also predetermined a future crisis by bringing Soviet citizens into contact with Western life, another world and the challenge of individual freedom.

At the Higher School of Economics conference “The Revolution of Memory: Soviet History in Sources of Personal Origin,” devoted to the “social-anthropological turn” in recent-history studies, Vladimir Buldakov, chief researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, observed that despite hundreds of works we still do not know exactly when the “Soviet person with a communist soul” emerged or how that person lived.

“History was once perceived as the history of gods and heroes, later as the history of rulers and politicians, and today we are finally interested in the history of the human being,” Buldakov explained. “But individual agency has always been difficult in Russia, so the Russian individual is an exceptionally difficult subject of study. Looking back at some of my own works, I notice that they too preserved an ideological and political subtext that pushed the ordinary person’s history into the background.”

The paradox is that the “ordinary person” in Russia often knew how to push himself into the background too, withholding even in private documents. Wartime is an exception, and that is another reason for its importance. If the characteristic “human source” of the 1920s is the letter to authority, and the 1930s produced denunciations, interrogations and private correspondence, the 1940s are remarkable for diaries.

According to Mikhail Melnichenko, founder and head of the online diary project Prozhito, 1942 ranks first among the dates represented in new diary submissions. A comparable spike in diary-writing occurred only immediately after the Revolution, in 1918. And of the two poles of memory of the Great Patriotic War—June 22 as a day of grief and May 9 as Victory Day—personal documents unmistakably gravitate toward the first. Ego-texts present the war as a history of unprecedented human suffering.

Ogonyok discussed how much remains to be learned with Oleg Budnitsky, director of the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences at the Higher School of Economics.

— As the number of surviving witnesses diminishes while interest in the “person at war” grows, where can researchers find the information they need? Can diaries be trusted without reservation?

Oleg Budnitsky: For a long time, personal notes and wartime diaries were treated as second-rate sources. The argument was that a person knew only one tiny fragment of the war—what could he see or understand from his trench? But now that we are interested in the human dimension of war, these sources are regarded as particularly important. They have been studied far less than they deserve.

We have no single archive that contains the memoirs and diaries of participants in the Great Patriotic War. Konstantin Simonov once proposed creating such a repository of soldiers’ memoirs within the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense. His proposal was considered at the highest level, by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The General Staff and the Main Political Directorate opposed it. Their reasoning was simple: there was no need to multiply disagreements in views of the war.

In veterans’ memoirs published during Soviet times, the personal element was deliberately removed. Texts were standardized and adjusted to fit the official canon of war history. Memoirs by senior commanders were often written by ghostwriters. For a social historian, the value of many such texts is therefore scarcely greater than that of the paper they were printed on.

Diaries usually survived in family archives and only rarely reached manuscript departments of libraries or state archives. Over the last quarter century many diaries and memoirs written “for the desk”—works that had no chance of publication in the Soviet era—have appeared. There is reason to hope that many more uncensored memoirs and diaries still remain in private homes.

I have appealed through the media to families of veterans, asking them to send handwritten notes and diaries. As a result I received copies of about fifteen diaries, which are now being prepared for publication. I make the same appeal to Ogonyok readers. Among the publications already produced by our Center I would mention the extensive 1941–1946 diary of mortar officer Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand, miraculously preserved by his son and published with detailed scholarly commentary.

— How openly could Red Army soldiers keep diaries?

Budnitsky: Apparently there was no specific general order forbidding diaries. Of course there were secrecy rules: a soldier should not commit to paper anything that could be useful to the enemy. In some units these rules were interpreted strictly; in others they were not. Many diarists wrote quite openly and nobody interfered. Sometimes their diaries even contain genuinely sensitive information—unit numbers, commanders’ names. If somebody had inspected such records closely, the authors could have been in serious trouble.

More often, though, soldiers wrote about personal matters: fears, emotions and incidents. They censored themselves much less than they did in letters home because everyone understood that letters were read by military censors and sensitive passages were blacked out. Besides, soldiers did not want to frighten their families.

— Can a full history of the war really be built from such private sources?

Budnitsky: The history of war can, somewhat conventionally, be divided into military history proper—the history of operations—the history of wartime diplomacy, military economics and social history. Military history has been studied reasonably well. We have a general understanding of how the General Staff functioned and how operations were planned and carried out. In the early 1990s we finally learned the casualty figures for individual battles. It is difficult to believe, but in a country that attached such significance to victory and its cost, this information remained classified until 1993.

We still know far too little about the “history of people” at war and during wartime. Official sources say little, and some important collections remain closed. The archive of the Main Political Directorate, which monitored the army’s moral and psychological condition, is still inaccessible to researchers. Military prosecutor files are closed too. Obviously they contain information far removed from heroic examples: according to official statistics alone, more than 994,000 servicemen were convicted by military tribunals during the war.

Much of the Military Medical Archive is also restricted because it contains personal data. As a result we know surprisingly little about the physical condition of Red Army soldiers and continue to repeat myths that wartime “mobilized” people and made them forget illness. That is very far from the truth.

We know somewhat more about the health of women who volunteered or were recruited because many were mobilized through the Komsomol, whose archives are accessible. Medical rejection rates were very high, sometimes up to 20 percent, because of illness or insufficient height and weight. That tells us a great deal about the condition of the country and its armed forces.

But even if all those archives opened tomorrow, they could not replace personal sources. The real prose—and poetry—of life appears most clearly in them. First and foremost I mean diaries, but also letters and memoirs. Among memoirs, the most valuable are often those written in Soviet times “for the desk,” with no hope of publication, because they did not conform to the official canon. I am more cautious about memoirs written in the post-Soviet era: the people writing them may be the same individuals biologically, but after fifty or sixty years they are in many respects different people, and the critical reassessment of the Soviet past has influenced their judgments.

— What does war look like in personal documents?

Budnitsky: Nikolai Nikulin, a veteran who later became a well-known art historian and Hermitage employee, wrote in his uncensored memoirs that the main subjects occupying soldiers at war were, to quote him, “death, food and sex.” Those subjects really do take up a large place in wartime diaries.

Death is obvious: it was always close. Some writers anticipate imminent death; others write that they have no fear of it. “Fate protects me,” we read in the diary of Hero of the Soviet Union Georgy Slavgorodsky, knowing that he had only five months left to live. The reader almost feels a mystical desire to send a telegram into the past: do not write that; do not tempt fate.

Leonid Andreyev, a front-line soldier who wrote memoirs from 1942 to 1944 while hospitalized, described how the ski battalion in which he served was sent into a frontal attack on a village and virtually mowed down by German machine guns. Andreyev survived by a miracle after lying in the snow for a day and suffering frostbite in both legs. Later, as a famous philologist and dean of the Moscow State University Faculty of Philology, he asked the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense what had become of his battalion and received the reply: “No information available.” As if the battalion had never existed.

Food is the second recurring theme because there was never enough. The USSR had food shortages even before the war; then Germany occupied Ukraine and peasants went to the front, making the situation critical. Any shortage produces theft, and soldiers’ diaries mention it repeatedly. Evidence that these were not isolated cases can also be found in the former Central Party Archive, which contains the results of large-scale inspections. The subject is unpleasant and has never been studied properly.

Sergei Golitsyn’s memoirs, written between 1946 and 1948 on the basis of his diaries, contain vivid examples. Golitsyn was not accepted into the army proper but only into construction units, apparently because of his aristocratic origin—he was a prince and the grandson of a Moscow governor. He describes falsified reports, theft and speculation in the immediate rear and admits participating in some of it with his comrades. His notes read almost like a picaresque novel. Golitsyn wrote that he saw only the “wrong side” of the war. In my view, the so-called wrong side is an inseparable part of war and must be studied if we want to know the war in all its reality and completeness. War was not a heroic Western.

— Was sex discussed in the diaries too?

Budnitsky: Of course. During the war 29.5 million people were called into the armed forces and were practically never given leave except because of wounds or exceptional merit. About half a million women served at the front. Some people had brief affairs; others found lasting love there.

The result was a huge demographic imbalance: millions of men were without women, while millions of women in the rear were without men. That produced thousands of family dramas, not only because husbands were killed or wounded. Konstantin Simonov, author of the famous poem “Wait for Me,” also wrote a kind of counter-poem, “Remembering Names for an Hour,” praising the woman who briefly and hurriedly replaced for a soldier—who might not live long enough to see love again—the beloved woman far away.

I do not think there is a single “correct” answer to the question of what is moral or immoral in relations between men and women in the face of death. Soldiers’ diaries contain many parodies or rewritten versions of popular songs—part of wartime urban folklore. Private Vasily Tsymbal recorded an alternative text to the romantic song “Dark Night”: “You are waiting for me, while living with the quartermaster, / And secretly slipping away from the child’s bed to the cinema.” During the war Soviet sexual behavior changed on a scale comparable only to the sexual revolution in the West. That too is an important page in social history.

— Doesn’t this kind of “human history” look too human? Doesn’t it diminish the sacred image of the war for many of our compatriots?

Budnitsky: You will find nothing “sacred” in soldiers’ diaries. And the people who kept them were not anti-Soviet dissidents. They were perfectly Soviet people, often convinced Stalinists, as Vladimir Gelfand and Georgy Slavgorodsky were.

I am more inclined to trust the notes of submachine-gunner Lev Razumovsky, who lost an arm in the war; Private Leonid Andreyev, who suffered frostbite in both legs; Major Boris Slutsky, who underwent two trepanations of the skull after the war because of an untreated concussion; and many other texts written by Red Army soldiers and commanders during the war or shortly afterward without regard to censorship and without expecting publication, than I am to trust the “sacred” texts of professional propagandists.

There is nothing romantic about war. War reveals not only the best in human beings, as we like to think, but also the worst—and, predictably, there is more of the worst. In my view, the more valuable human life becomes to us today, the more important this human history of the Great Patriotic War should become.

• 9.3% — the prerogative of the state;
• 48.5% — everyone’s responsibility;
• 42.2% — memory cannot be imposed: either it exists or it does not.