CHAPTER 4

Cities of Earth, Cities of Rubble

The Spade and Red Army Landscaping

The trenches are like an underground city, with signs pointing to platoons, companies, Lenin Rooms, etc.

—Oles’ Gonchar

Arriving at the front in 1941, Valentina Chudakova, who would later command a machine-gun platoon, was pleasantly surprised by the visible presence of order:

I had no idea what the front was like. Or rather, I thought that everyone shoots at each other day and night, comes together in hand-to-hand combat, runs and hides wherever they find a spot… I was pleasantly surprised: here there was absolute order. What can I say—a real earthen city—like that of some ancient settlers. The main trench, that’s the central street, and from there to the front and the rear are side streets and dead ends. On the side streets, leading in the direction of the enemy, there were all sorts of things—pillboxes, wood and earth fire positions and caponiers, covered foxholes… In the side streets headed toward the rear dugouts were hidden under snow-covered roofs. No commotion, no fighting—silence… I whistled: “Well, see how they’ve worked! Mama-infantry sure has dug in!”1

Her intuition that the front would be a space of chaotic violence was correct— it was the potential for destruction that led to the creation of the organized, essentially urban space that so impressed her. These cities of earth would be built everywhere along the front in response to the cities of rubble that modern weapons could create.

FIGURE 4.1 The city-like space of the trench. The caption reads “A finished trench for a squad.” Ushakov, Voenno-inzhenernoe delo, 42.

During the Great Patriotic War, survival at the front was virtually impossible without the help of an ancient hand tool: the spade. The idea of the spade as a loyal friend became a major trope of military propaganda.2 That such a humble object received so much attention is telling. The spade was the key to soldiers’ reading, shaping, and using the landscape. Soldiers in the Great Patriotic War were reported to move about twice as much earth as soldiers in the trenches of World War I.³ The soldier’s small spade was an anonymous object, standard to everyone, and manuals taught soldiers to dig trenches according to a regular plan, yet Red Army soldiers excavated highly personalized spaces.

Red Army soldiers turned a wide, open field of fire into a narrow, constricted, and sometimes even cozy system of trenches, where they could more effectively kill without being killed. Soldiers marched from trenches they had dug to spaces they would turn into trenches. Excavations were to be carefully camouflaged, even as they dramatically altered landscapes. Those at the front attempted to recreate aspects of normal life amid death in the cities they created with spades. A small, relatively primitive object and the labor it facilitated were central to the experience of millions of people in one of the most technologically advanced conflicts in world history.

This chapter examines the deadly environment soldiers inhabited and the endless work that allowed them to survive. The first section details the destructive powers soldiers faced and how exposure to massive devastation changed the way they moved, read the landscape, and understood the war. The second explores how soldiers used their spades to survive. The last two sections investigate attempts to recreate normal life in the trenches and soldiers’ reactions to the deaths of their comrades.

FIGURE 4.2 The soldier’s spade, a commonly reproduced image from manuals. Nastavlenie po inzhenernomu delu dlia pekhoty (Inzh. P-39), 8.

The cities of earth that soldiers excavated mirrored Soviet cities in significant ways. Defined in contradistinction to both the village and capitalism, Soviet cities were to serve as key sites in the forging of new Soviet people. This transformation was most often from backward, unwashed peasant to conscious, cultured worker. Institutions such as libraries, clubs, museums, and bathhouses were important vehicles of this change, but so was communally organized living and an organization of space that directly connected workers to workplace. The factories around which socialist cities were built gave them their meaning, with a green band of parks to separate residences from workplace. In practice, socialist cities were often haphazard realizations of their rationalized blueprints with a marked lack of infrastructure. The spaces of production were built before permanent housing and the new urbanites had to improvise living space, plumbing, and various comforts. The emphasis on extreme exertion in labor, communal living that created larger collectives, and improvisational practices would all be reproduced as soldiers excavated cities at the front. The transformation from civilian to soldier would be realized by the soldiers’ labor and tweaked by the state’s attempts to provide the front with the hallmarks of urban infrastructure. Massive green spaces were preserved for the sake of camouflage. Foxholes and bunkers became managed spaces of transformation just as factories and communal apartments had been before the war.4 In short, “the cities of earth” described here were a militarized iteration of general practices of Soviet urbanization—except now the sense of urgency and space had changed dramatically, as the enemy reduced Soviet cities and villages to rubble.

The cities of earth were dynamic border cities of a society fighting off a deadly foe. On this massive front, all territory—both around the globe and around a soldier’s foxhole—was divided into “friendly,” “enemy,” and the liminal “neutral.” The consequences of this division were very real for the soldier and formed the understanding of space by which tactical and strategic decisions were made. At the front being on enemy or neutral territory was to be directly in danger, while being on friendly territory provided a (very limited) degree of safety.⁵ Commanders envisioned territory in terms of maps on which they often manipulated objects or drew where they thought their troops were positioned. Reliance on telephones meant that this was often conjecture, as artillery fire cut lines or troops became cut off from their headquarters. The crisp space of the map, although enhanced by constant reports and smaller, detailed maps provided by subordinates, could reflect the landscape faced by soldiers but captured little of the experience of those occupying the real terrain that it represented. The dirt and confusion of the battlefield was not part of these abstractions. Many commanders took tours of frontline positions to understand what exactly their soldiers were up against, and top-ranking officers often made use of aerial photography and other forms of reconnaissance.⁶ On tour at the immediate front line and indeed more often than not in the bunker where he made decisions, the commander was confronted with realities that were not expressed on the two-dimensional world of the strategic map with red and blue lines dividing the real estate into “ours” and “theirs.”

Despite the massive, impersonal nature of World War II, it was experienced as something intimate. Grigorii Baklanov explained that “for a soldier, the front is whatever faces his foxhole.”⁷ Although soldiers received rumors and official information from all over the front and rear, the immediate front, which they viewed through the narrow perspective of the trenches they built, was the world that they experienced. Yet soldiers’ individual foxholes added up to an enormous front.

Cities of Rubble

In the 1940s it was much easier to envision and move through vast expanses. Aerial reconnaissance had given opposing armies the ability to see far behind the front lines. Movement that would have taken weeks even in World War I could now be a matter of days or even hours. In the interwar years technologies of the Great War became even deadlier. Tanks and planes were faster and better armored and packed heavier weapons, dramatically expanding the space of the battlefield. Hand grenades and automatic weapons had become more efficient, portable, and plentiful. Soldiers could be observed and injured more efficiently than ever before. Anything that could be seen could be destroyed.

The new potential for killing dramatically changed the way that soldiers experienced the landscape. Soldiers quickly came face to face with the capacities of new technology to kill and maim. Corpses were rendered unrecognizable, as one female soldier wrote her friend: “I lost my beloved black-eyed Sashka. I couldn’t find his head. I gathered the remaining pieces of meat and buried them with my own hands.”8 A traumatized veteran of the Leningrad Front recalled: “when a person next to you is ripped to shreds, when you are soused in his blood, his insides and brains are strewn over you—this is enough in peacetime conditions to make you lose your mind.”⁹ The terrible experience of shelling could place unbearable strain on soldiers. Viktor Astaf’ev described a bombardment as follows: “it seemed as if now, this minute, the earth was shifting or had just shifted its axis.”¹⁰ Another veteran confided in his diary that during prolonged shelling: “it doesn’t so much frighten as much as oppresses, and you think: ‘Eh, the devil take it. Wouldn’t it be better if they hit us, so that our suffering would be over!’”¹¹ Soldiers understood how vulnerable they were at the front; it was graphically demonstrated on the bodies of the fallen and carved into the landscape. The Germans dropped 148,478 bombs on the city of Leningrad alone. Numbers of this scale are abstract, but the effect of a few bombs on a small piece of real estate held by a few soldiers was made explicit by shell-pocked landscapes and dismembered bodies.¹² While this experience was universally unnerving, the ways in which people experienced this destruction changed depending on the direction in which the army was traveling.

Early in the war, soldiers underwent the shock of destruction as they retreated through towns and cities, often harassed by German aviation, which enjoyed total domination. Soldiers felt powerlessness and a sense of shame in front of civilians, whom they could not protect and left to an unknown fate. When they stopped, it was often in areas drained of inhabitants, as the Red Army frequently evacuated civilians from the “front strip” (prifrontovaia polosa), a space five or more kilometers behind its lines.13 As the fortunes of war changed, so did the ways in which Red Army soldiers witnessed the destruction of the landscape and its inhabitants. When an area became the center of a protracted battle, undamaged structures became captivating. A division commander recalled at Stalingrad that after 156 days of combat, he saw an intact house for the first time: “We were so used to ruins—that seemed so normal to us—that an intact little house was a remarkable phenomenon and attracted our attention. We even stopped, looking at this surviving house.”¹⁴ During the retreat soldiers often felt themselves helpless victims and bystanders. When the Red Army began to retake territory, as early as December 1941, soldiers became both liberators and witnesses to much more systematic destruction than shrapnel and strafing could accomplish. As the army moved westward, destroyed villages became an everyday sight. The consequences of failing to defend territory became sickeningly clear. Diaries, letters home, and memoirs noted the inconceivable destruction that the retreating Wehrmacht left in its wake, as Vasilii Chekalov, an artillery officer, recorded early in 1943: “I’ve had my fill of wandering through other people’s destroyed huts.”¹⁵ Lt. V. P. Kiselёv, also an artillerist, wrote in his diary: “I say ‘villages,’ but you see they remain only as geographical notions; they’ve all been burnt to the ground by shot and shell.”¹⁶

Soviet authorities were keen to use the ruins of former cities and villages as a pedagogical tool to convince Red Army soldiers that their cause was just. In 1942 an article in the widely circulated Propagandist Krasnoi Armii discussed how soldiers came to realize the level of destruction visited by the enemy. When confronted with ruins, they asked an agitator: “Where did all the cows and sheep go? Why were the houses and mangers burnt? Where did all the people who lived here go? The Germans ate the livestock. The Germans burned the village. Germans drove the women, children, and teenagers into backbreaking slavery.”¹⁷ In the spring of the following year, when large areas occupied by the Germans were liberated, the entire Red Army held meetings dedicated to showcasing Fascist villainy. These “Meetings of Vengeance” became a common genre of agitation where soldiers were gathered around graves or destroyed villages and told of the horrors that the Germans had visited on Soviet people. By May 1943 the main propaganda publication of the army reported that 80 percent of personnel in the active army had attended at least one of more than a thousand such meetings.¹⁸ In units far from the front visitors from afflicted regions, including children who had been mutilated and veterans who had witnessed atrocities, gave harrowing accounts of what occupation meant. Letters from recently liberated areas were read aloud. Soldiers also discussed their homes under occupation: “Each of us has his or her own score to settle with the Germans. I for the destroyed and burned city of Briansk, for the tears of my mother and sister, who have already languished seventeen months in fascist captivity, and may no longer be among the living. Starshina Pakhomov for Rzhev. Dorozhchenko—for Khar’kov, and all of us together—for our Motherland, for our wives and children, for our brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, factories and plants, for everything Russian, Soviet.”19 Hatred and rage toward the enemy and anxiety about the fate of loved ones could bring together people from all over the Soviet Union.

FIGURE 4.3 Red Army soldier reunited with his family in a destroyed village near Belgorod, 1943. RGAKFD 1-105157 (Ia. I. Riumkin).

FIGURE 4.4 Kiev, city of rubble, view of Kreshchatik (the central street), November 1943. RGAKFD 0-271941 (A.S. Shaikhet).

To appreciate how important such propaganda could be, it’s worth remembering the fact that many soldiers were hostile to the regime and/or came from remote regions that did not feel the direct threat of destruction by the invaders.20 Face-to-face meetings with survivors of destruction and witnesses of Nazi atrocities, set in the ruins of towns and villages and by the graves or exposed corpses of victims of the occupational regime, had a tremendous effect on soldiers, as the political agitator Guards Major Akai Neuspbekov recalled: “The reinforcements we received that summer from Kazakhstan saw such ruins, German villainy, that this meeting impressed in them hatred of the German barbarians.”²¹ The letter of Tatar soldiers from the First Ukrainian Front to their faraway homeland told of the horrors they had seen and the rage they felt: “We have fought our way through the lands of Ukraine and seen with our own eyes the monstrous acts carried out by the Germans in the occupied zones. Ukrainian soil was drenched in blood and tears. It freezes the heart and causes one’s blood to run cold when we see thousands of old men, children, and women torn to pieces and thrown in ditches and wells, when we see mountains of ash where wonderful Ukrainian cities and towns once stood.”²² Ritualized vows, using similar language, often followed meetings of vengeance and turned the tragedy of death and destruction into an epic event, motivating soldiers to carry the struggle forward and move all the more quickly forward. While group letters were often scripted by political officers, their sentiments were probably genuine. Even if expressed in the terms of the Communist Party, these letters were written in response to real horrors soldiers had witnessed. A resolution from the North-Caucasian Front declared: “Dear brothers and sisters on occupied territory. We hear your moans and calls for help, your prayers for liberation from German slavery. We, warriors of the Red Army, are coming to free you. No difficulties, hardships, or obstacles can stop us. We swear to the Soviet People, to great Stalin, to fight until the last German on our land is destroyed… Not one drop of blood, not one bitter tear of innocent Soviet people will go without vengeance.”23 Every day of occupation meant more women raped, towns destroyed, and fellow citizens humiliated and murdered. Quick movement westward would save lives.²⁴ A letter from children to their father read aloud at a meeting on the Southern Front put it plainly: “Papa, we were put on list No. 475 by the Germans—of people to be shot. The only thing that saved us was the quick advance of the Red Army.”²⁵

Meetings of Vengeance would continue throughout the war, and in addition to vows by those present to seek vengeance, signs narrating German atrocities to passersby were also planted. Boris Komskii recorded in his diary on October 1, 1943, that in the village of Shablykino, where he saw only graves and chimneys, the following sign was posted: “Here was a regional center. It was thoroughly looted and burned by the Germans. Fighter, remember and avenge!”²⁶ The Political Department of the army reported that soldiers were often bolder and more disciplined and worked harder after Meetings of Vengeance, and the evidence of what occupation meant became ever more abundant as soldiers marched west.²⁷

FIGURE 4.5 Meeting of Red Army troops in honor of the victory at Stalingrad. The following spring, Meetings of Vengeance, using ruined cities as a backdrop, would be held throughout the army. RGAKFD 0-347117 (Ia. I. Riumkin).

Retreating east or advancing west, soldiers’ lives in the cities of rubble and cities of earth were interspersed with nights in peasant huts. These encounters could be tense, with peasants angry at being abandoned early in the war or suspicious of soldiers as Soviet power returned. However, liberated peasants were often immensely grateful, thirsty for news, and ready to share horrendous stories of what occupation had meant. These could also be fleeting moments of romance, as men and women facing an uncertain fate comforted each other. Many mothers worried about leaving their young daughters alone with soldiers, while others offered food and shelter to soldiers who resembled their children, hoping somewhere others were doing the same for their kin. Often these were moments of coming together around a humble feast cobbled together from soldiers’ rations, the harvest of peasant’s gardens, and moonshine. These meetings are a motif of much of the fiction inspired by the war and pepper the diaries, letters, and memoirs of soldiers. They were a glimpse of what life might be like if those present survived the war and a moment of interaction with the people soldiers were defending and liberating.28 However, these were but brief pauses in a life that consisted of constant movement and excavation.

The way soldiers moved was idiosyncratic. Every move made had to be carefully concealed. A Red Army manual on marching reminded soldiers that due to aviation all movements had to take place either at night or in areas of limited visibility. Soldiers were also instructed to leave no trace of their presence.²⁹ Night became a time of increased activity for soldiers not only on the march but while in the trenches as well, and the routes soldiers traveled had many peculiarities.

While soldiers would cover long distances by trains or trucks, and certain types of troops (cavalrymen, artillerists, tankers, and motorized riflemen) rode rather than marched, most soldiers traveled on foot. Vasilii Grossman wrote in his notebook during the spring thaw: “Certainly no one has seen such filth: rain; snow; grain; a liquid, bottomless swamp; a black dough kneaded by thousands of boots, wheels, and tracks.”³⁰ In dry weather roads were plagued by dust clouds, an occurrence so common that scouts were trained to judge the size and type of enemy formations by the dust cloud a column raised.³¹ The soldier-artist Kharis Iakupov recalled how dust covered everything on the march: “Not only people but all military hardware looked as if it had been painted one color—a whitish ocher. The sandy dust covered everything with a thick coat: the clothing and face of a soldier. Only the eyes shined. The sand got into the mouth and crunched between teeth.”³² In winter thousands of soldiers trudging the same path could turn it into an icy slough. The mere presence of so many soldiers turned roads into highways, and these paths came to resemble the thoroughfares of major cities, as Nikolai Nikulin, a veteran of the Leningrad Front recalled: “I observed strange, remarkable vignettes on the road near the front. Lively like an avenue, it had moved in two directions. Toward the front reinforcements traveled, food and weapons were delivered, tanks moved. The wounded were hauled away from the front. And along either side there was hustle and bustle.”33 The “hustle and bustle” included the issuing of rations, trade among soldiers, and burials of the dead. As the war progressed, the army became more motorized and its highways increasingly organized.³⁴

However, highways were not the only means of travel for soldiers. An old saying by General Suvorov, repopularized during the war, declared, “Wherever a deer can pass, so can a soldier.”³⁵ Soldiers were expected to be able to cross any obstacle: mountains, rivers, swamps, and even minefields.³⁶ Fronts stopped wherever two armies could not dislodge each other from their positions, something that often depended on climate and terrain. This meant that if the front stopped in a swamp, among mountains, or deep in the woods, soldiers would have to travel to them. If roads did not exist, it was the job of soldiers to build them or to carry additional supplies (bullets, shells, grenades, rations) to remote positions. Yet roads could also be very dangerous, leaving soldiers exposed to fire and often sewn with booby traps.

The Wehrmacht was known to generously sow mines, particularly in retreat. Manuals warned soldiers of the tricks the Wehrmacht used and explained how to disarm mines.³⁷ Chekalov recorded in his diary: “On the paths of retreat the Germans are trying to sow death: they mine roads and paths, bunkers and surviving buildings. Machinery doesn’t enter Zaluch’e, and people move with caution. Time and again—just like some dry grass— the treacherous whiskers of mines fall underfoot.”³⁸ Mines were utilized not only in retreat but also on the battlefield; combined with barbed wire, they dramatically limited soldiers’ ability to move and avoid fire.³⁹

On the battlefield every move soldiers made was determined to avoid enemy detection and fire to stay alive. Red Army personnel mastered the arts of crawling po-plastunski (an extremely low belly crawl) so as to keep their rear ends below machine-gun fire and their weapon out of the dirt, running in short bursts and navigating rows of wire and mines. Soldiers had to avoid the natural instinct to crowd together under fire, keeping a distance of six to eight paces from their neighbors.⁴⁰ Orders to move on the battlefield gave landmarks for soldiers to use as orientation.⁴¹

Landscapes were instantly divided into sectors of fire with clear points of orientation. Trees and churches were no longer features of rural life but points for zeroing in on the enemy.⁴² The war correspondent and famed author Evgenii Petrov noted how a picturesque hill became simply “height number so-and-so… and that Russian birch, standing by the road—it’s not a birch at all but a lone tree. That’s how its marked on the map. And the creek—not a river but a front line. And the edge of the forest—not a glade but an excellent position to set up a fire base.”43 Viktor Nekrasov’s avatar Iurii explained to his sweetheart while on an idyllic stroll that all he could think about was where he could best place machine guns. When she took offense, he responded: “It’s just habit. I now look at the moon from the perspective of its expediency and usefulness.”⁴⁴

The need to use the landscape to kill turned soldiers into cartographers. “Fire maps,” “fire reference cards,” or “fire cards”—a small map using the landmarks chosen by the commander of a unit or a weapon crew—were a regular part of the duties of junior commanders, machine gunners, artillerists, antitank gunners, and mortar men.⁴⁵ These maps were a graphic representation of the soldiers’ need to make rational use of the landscape to kill with maximum efficiency, and every soldier was obliged to know the points of orientation. A particular feature of the landscape could be used as a mark to open fire.⁴⁶ These maps were arranged with a clearly marked north-south orientation, indicated landmarks from right to left with range clearly indicated, and were scaled as accurately as possible. Neighboring units, the disposition of the enemy, and the arc of fire from the flanks of the unit were all indicated. These documents were signed and dated down to the hour and served as a key for anyone to use the stretch of ground in front of them to cause maximum damage to the enemy. They represented a sort of procedural expertise where junior commanders graphically demonstrated their technical mastery, often including azimuths necessary to hit their targets. The reference card allowed anyone to exploit weapons available to great effect and were copied to be viewed by their author’s superiors. Through fire cards soldiers and commanders reduced an unmanageably complex landscape into a set of clear, rationalized vectors for killing.⁴⁷

Junior commanders, scouts, and observers also constantly recorded and often mapped changes in the enemy’s disposition, the planting of mines, and so on and copied their own fire maps to be sent to their superiors. Scouts engaged in nighttime raids to capture enemy soldiers for interrogation. The possibility of capture could make soldiers’ knowledge about their trench system a liability for their comrades. Whether they were recording maps or simply traveling through the maze of tunnels they had dug, soldiers learned quickly to orient themselves. They came to know their section of the line expertly, but lack of knowledge of their vicinity or dramatic changes brought about by weather or bombardment could have catastrophic effects, as soldiers could wander into enemy territory or be mistaken by their own soldiers for the enemy.48

FIGURE 4.6 Fire card for a squad (roughly eight soldiers) using a rock (1), stump (2), haystack (3), and yellow bush as orienteers with gun sight markers, signed “squad leader jr. sergeant Ivanov.” V. V. Glazatov, Pamiatka komandiru strelkovogo otdeleniia po vvedeniiu ognem v boiu (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1942), 14.

Every piece of real estate gave advantages to one side and hindrances to the other. Commanding heights allowed an army to use artillery and machine guns more effectively. Controlling a road kept supplies and reinforcements rolling freely. Access to a body of water could provide transport and drinking water. In battle, any hill or remnant of a building could become a strong point that would cost lives to take. Every advantage in topography or adept usage of the landscape meant better chances of survival and more chances to kill the enemy. Navigating and surviving this environment required very specific skills. Yet even proficient soldiers inevitably suffered in this habitat.

Toward the end of the war, the military translator Boris Suris reflected on the awful conditions faced by a soldier across the Oder River from his bunker, summing up the twin miseries of danger and bad weather: “He sits in a shallow foxhole, which he only just carved into the cursed dam; exploding bullets keep clicking against the parapet. To the right of the brick factory two machine guns cut ceaselessly, artillery beats with a hurricane of blasts. Cold and wet as a dog since last night. They didn’t bring up anything to eat all day—just nibble on a crouton [sukhar’]. Or doze off, if you can, crouched in a heap, switching off with your partner.”49

Survival at the front meant killing and not being killed yourself while waging a parallel struggle against the elements. In such a deadly environment soldiers of all branches of service became heavily reliant on their spades, which allowed them to craft safety in the earth.

Cities of Earth: What the Spade Built

Soldiers’ spades, often referred to as “the soldier’s loyal friend,” dangled off the belt near their right buttocks.⁵⁰ It was, after their weapons, the most important item to their survival. A thin sheet of metal 20cm long and 15cm wide, drawn over a 30cm handle, the spade could have a square or a sharp head. It was the soldier’s task to wipe condensation from, sharpen, clean, and oil it as soon as his work was done.⁵¹ Shortages of spades plagued the army, and even in the third quarter of 1944, when supply was at its height, only 80 percent of the active army had spades.⁵² Due to wartime shortages, both the spades and the covers that held them were simplified; spade covers became entirely skeletal or multipurpose carriers (e.g., with a pocket for carrying grenades), and spades themselves were redesigned to use less metal.⁵³ Despite the spade’s modest appearance, soldiers created whole cities with it.

Kliment Voroshilov, the people’s commissar of defense before the war, declared that a soldier was “not prepared, if he has not mastered the spade, has not become accustomed to use it with the same skill as a spoon at the table.”⁵⁴ Soldiers were expected to begin digging immediately if they stopped anywhere where they might have to fight. Digging was a way of making a claim to any territory, even a few meters taken from the enemy. This was of particular importance to an army that instructed its soldiers to be very aggressive and had retreated deep into its own territory. Red Army soldiers were trained to dig under fire, lying down while observing the enemy with their rifles an arm’s length away. They were instructed to find a space that provided good fields of fire and that would be easy to conceal. In less than ten minutes soldiers dug berms behind which they could lie down.55 The spades that soldiers carried were impossible to use standing until one had dug themselves into the earth. The position one had to dig in was unnatural and uncomfortable: in full kit, the soldier was to keep his body and head as close to the ground as possible and thrust his legs into the ground to give him force.⁵⁶ When soldiers were lucky, they might be issued larger implements that were carried with their unit’s headquarters, but this was largely the province of combat engineers and artillerists.⁵⁷ Under extreme circumstances, civilian labor could be mobilized to dig massive networks of anti-tank ditches, a practice that was common near major cities, but the cities of earth were overwhelmingly of the soldiers’ own construction.⁵⁸ Outside enemy observation, soldiers could dig while kneeling, but those training them assumed that they would be digging under fire.

Army manuals stated the time necessary to dig a breastwork out of everything from sand to snow and the thickness of breastwork needed to stop a bullet from a machine gun at a hundred meters. They also measured how many hours it would take for one man to dig such a barrier.⁵⁹ In an abstracted “average” soil (probably black earth), a soldier was expected to dig a camouflaged hole in which they could fire while standing within an hour.60 This structure had the advantage of providing 360 degrees of fire, while “protecting the soldier against the fire of aviation and tanks passing over the trench.” It was extraordinarily narrow, providing just enough space to stand and wield a weapon. These were the basic unit of the cities of earth—the place of work for soldiers, built to a standardized plan.

FIGURE 4.7 Red Army Soldier entrenching while observing the enemy, Central Front, 1943. RGAKFD 0-312319.

FIGURE 4.8 Soldier removing sod while digging in full kit (m.1936 knapsack). Inzh. P-39, 32.

FIGURE 4.9 The deepening of a foxhole from lying down to standing: fighting from behind a berm. Inzh. P-39, 33.

FIGURE 4.10 The deepening of a foxhole from lying down to standing: narrow one-man foxholes, 1941. RGAKFD 0-94214 (A. S. Shaikhet and Garanin).

Manuals gave detailed instructions on how to dig an ergonomically informed, user-friendly foxhole. This included a special side step for getting out of the trench and throwing grenades, as well as a niche to fire from.⁶¹ Specialized foxholes for machine guns, mortars, artillery, and so on were all part of the repertoire. All of these specific structures were given with dimensions in manuals, and soldiers were supposed to use their spades (conveniently 50cm long, with elements that measured 15 and 20cm) as a means to measure their excavations.⁶² Manuals provided a boiled-down essence of necessary survival skills that required interpretation, personal experience, and constant revision (often provided by military newspapers and journals). They were universal in their prescriptions, but flexibility was, ironically, part of this universality.

If the army couldn’t make the landscape uniform, it could hold its soldiers to a uniform standard. While specialized tips were given as to how to construct a fighting position in mountains, swamps, the steppe, and snow, these structures posited an average person and ignored differences in height, age, and gender that could be significant. Mansur Abdulin reflected: “Even I, a nineteen-year-old miner used to heavy labor from a young age, have moments when I can’t go on. What is it like for those who have just finished ninth or tenth grade? Or those who never did manual labor?”⁶³ For the tall or the short, trenches could prove too deep or too shallow. However, as one article that highlighted a short soldier’s endeavors to make a trench his own stated: “blame your parents for giving birth to one so small as you. But the trench is as it should be, dug by one measure, by regulations. You are the boss here now, make yourself at home.”⁶⁴

Soldiers’ shovels moved the sand of the Karelian Isthmus, stones of the Caucasus Mountains, black soil of Ukraine, marshes around Leningrad, permafrost near Murmansk, and shattered concrete of Stalingrad and Berlin.⁶⁵ They helped forge the fencing and log work that would take the place of a trench in swamps, which Dunaevskaia described in her diary: “The ground is swampy, and we take our places in a log framework, which neither defends nor saves from either shrapnel or the cold. Our bunks are made of the same logs.”⁶⁶ Spring mud was virtually impossible to dig into, but with enough wood a drainage system could be built to make such a situation livable.67 Manuals gave timeframes for each type of soil but failed to mention rocks, roots, and all the little things that could make digging hell. There was also no discussion of how soldiers were supposed to keep themselves from becoming utterly grimy while creating and then navigating a claustrophobic space made of soil.⁶⁸

Many soldiers had received minimal training before arriving at the front, and although most recruits came from a peasant background and were accustomed to working the earth, the specific types of labor required to build cities of earth differed dramatically from traditional peasant landscaping and building. Sod houses were sometimes built in emergency situations by peasants and workers, but the demands that everything be invisible and impervious to enemy fire made frontline structures unlike anything that most had ever built. Regardless of their background, men and women in the service came to share in the ubiquitous tasks of excavation.

Once soldiers finished their fighting positions, they were supposed to dig at least three more “reserve positions,” then lines of communication connecting foxholes. These were the streets of their frontline cities. They had to be zigzag to provide protection from shrapnel and fighting positions in case the line was overrun by the enemy. Their depth depended on the amount of time soldiers had to dig them, so soldiers might crawl on their bellies, hands and knees, or walk fully upright between positions.⁶⁹ Finally, soldiers dug false trench systems. They were also responsible for building obstacles to stop enemy infantry and tanks, including barbed wire, “hedgehogs,” anti-tank ditches, and so on.⁷⁰ Still later, they built bunkers, latrines, warehouses, wells, observation points, antitank ditches, and more advanced infrastructure.⁷¹ Tankers and drivers dug earthworks to conceal their vehicles or to rest in. Every soldier was “not just a warrior but the builder of his own fortress,”⁷² who “should transform any locality into an ally.”⁷³

A soldier was never finished digging and building. All structures had to be impervious to both bullets and bombs. This meant reinforcing trenches and dugouts with several layers of wood or other materials improvised from whatever was at hand: trees, munitions boxes, peasant huts, or destroyed apartment blocks. Manuals included detailed descriptions of which thicknesses of wood to use and how to manufacture standard components for trench construction.⁷⁴

All of this effort worked only if soldiers mastered the rhythms and rules of behavior at the front. They needed to be vigilant. By regulation, most soldiers would be relaxing in their bunkers, coming out only to fight, while a few stood watch.⁷⁵ Often snipers or groups of observers provided this cover during the day. While allowing the majority of soldiers to rest, this meant that one soldier’s drowsiness or inattention could get his or her comrades killed, wounded, or captured. Soldiers caught sleeping were often humiliated or severely punished, including by execution.76 However, those who were on guard were often poorly trained or lax in discipline. Grigorii Pomer-ants recalled that soldiers almost never acted according to regulations and seldom knew the password.77 A report from April 1944 showed that the rear area was rife with people who didn’t fulfill regulations, talking with strangers and letting civilians walk freely through the areas they guarded.⁷⁸ Calls for vigilance remained a constant aspect of military propaganda throughout the war.

FIGURE 4.11 The evolution from foxhole to trench. Inzh. P-43, 27.

FIGURE 4.12 The end result, a fully formed network of trenches. Ushakov, Voenno-inzhenernoe delo, 33.

It was assumed that the denizens of the cities of earth would wear helmets, as its streets were often exposed. Propaganda often linked the spade and the helmet as equipment that could save a soldier’s life, yet Red Army soldiers were often found at the front without helmets.⁷⁹ This was due in part to shortage, as large numbers of helmets were lost in 1941. As with everything else, the army recycled helmets, taking from the wounded and dead and from rear to front, to give to the living directly in combat. Yet a significant number of soldiers remained without helmets. One 1942 study from the Leningrad Front found that 83.7 percent of a sample of soldiers with head wounds were not wearing helmets.⁸⁰ As Anatolii Genatulin recalled, many soldiers refused to wear helmets: “Many fling their helmets into the grass as if they were useless. When it’s hot these helmets heat up as if you slapped a just-forged cauldron on your head, and if you take it off and put it on your pack its still heavy. And later it turns out, that a helmet is a most necessary thing in battle.”⁸¹ Genatulin uses this passage to introduce an autobiographical story about how almost everyone in his squad was killed by shrapnel, their brains being splattered all over him. He alone survived due to his helmet. So many helmets were thrown away that the government even offered a bounty to civilians who collected discarded helmets from the battlefield.82 Articles encouraging soldiers to wear helmets abounded in the military press, which often linked helmets and spades as objects that could be the difference between life and death. A June 1944 article described how a tiny fragment could kill a man and how a helmet could deflect a bullet.⁸³ Despite regulations and the pragmatic desire to increase one’s chances of survival in an endeavor centered on killing, many seemed to believe in talismans more than in the uncomfortable steel shell the army had provided. Nikolai Nikulin, who never wore a helmet, recalled, “We usually defecated into helmets, then threw them over the parapet of the trench, and shock waves from explosions tossed everything back, onto our heads.”⁸⁴ The desire for comfort that led soldiers to discard helmets could also lead to laziness, as soldiers avoided the manual labor so key to their survival.

Mikhail Kalinin recalled a common retort in an article for agitators: “Why dig foxholes, when in half an hour we won’t need them?”⁸⁵ Since soldiers moved often and dug in almost everywhere they stopped, digging became an endless rhythm of their lives. Despite its ubiquity, soldiers often did not appreciate just how important this work was until they had been in combat. The perils of laziness were not always clear to soldiers at the front, as we see from official reports and propaganda. Marshal Voroshilov noted in a report from May 1942, that soldiers often built fortifications only “to clear their conscience,” neglecting to dig in or creating positions that were difficult to fire from.⁸⁶ Veterans learned quickly how key digging was to survival, as the sapper A. V. Luzhbin wrote from his hospital bed: “If during peaceful training in the rear the parapet doesn’t have a tangible meaning, at the front its thickness is a question of life and death.”⁸⁷ Failure could be used as a tool to teach others, as one political officer recalled using dead soldiers and their shabby bunker as “a form of visual propaganda,” which “had a very positive result—they started digging in quite well.”⁸⁸ Soldiers without spades felt cheated, as one censored letter during the Battle of Kursk complained: “the discrepancies have chewed us to death. For example, they say ‘the spade is the soldier’s friend,’ but we went into battle without spades.”⁸⁹ It became clear to everyone that survival meant digging.

The simple soldier could survive mechanized warfare only with the help of the spade. Soldiers wrote about their landscaping in their diaries, as one chauffeur complained in the last winter of the war: “The ground had thoroughly frozen; even crowbars break. But we gnaw through it unremittingly. That is a soldier’s duty. And if you don’t bury yourself in the earth, you’ll die like a fly.”90 Krasnoarmeets, the most widely circulated journal in the army, ran a story in which Mother Earth promised to protect a brave soldier.⁹¹ But this promise was made good only through the soldier’s near-endless work of not only digging but woodworking and other crafts. Creative excavations also helped offset a lack of manpower.

FIGURE 4.13 Soldiers, including Sergeants I. F. Vas’kin and T. D. Osipov, eating in a well-appointed trench, Kalinin Front, 1943. Most carry SVT-40 Rifles. RGAKFD 0-286688 (V. P. Grebnev).

Norms were supposed to dictate the density of manpower per square kilometer of front. However, losses often meant that only the skeletal remains of a unit held territory meant for significantly more people. At the front the combat medic Tat’iana Atabek recorded: “In our trenches the squads [about eight soldiers] are 500 meters from each other, and we were taught that by regulations they should be no more than 30–40 meters.”⁹² One veteran recalled the soldiers’ ironic phrase “two Russians make a front.”⁹³ It was imperative that the enemy have no idea that such a shadow force was in front of them, and hiding their numbers was a major task that provided hours of extra work for soldiers and led to the preservation of green space throughout the cities of rubble.

The progression of trenches from unconnected dots to a massive network resembling a primitive city was supposed to happen without the enemy catching a glimpse of any of it. Camouflage was a key part of this endeavor, especially given the overwhelming air superiority enjoyed by the Germans in 1941–1942. Enemy planes and artillery could rain death on anything they could see. As was repeated in manuals, “the task of military camouflage is to conceal that which is true and show that which is false.”⁹⁴ Camouflage was often meant not to entirely conceal the presence of soldiers, as it was felt that this would attract the enemy’s suspicion, but rather to deceive the enemy as to the intentions of those in the trenches.⁹⁵ The landscape was to be filled with false clues about what the army was up to.

Being seen meant being shot at. Trenches were supposed to seamlessly blend into the landscape, preserving its profile. Soldiers were supposed to carry a personal (150 x 100cm) net to help camouflage themselves at all times.⁹⁶ Every foxhole was to disappear behind some aspect of the local flora, which meant soldiers could find themselves hidden by roses, raspberries, corn, rye, sod, or whatever sprang from the ground.⁹⁷ From the first slice of earth a soldier lifted, every effort was to be taken to maintain concealment. This meant that soldiers vigilantly cleared their fields of fire, gathered brush, and cut into sod gingerly to preserve the network of roots that kept the grass alive and gave cover. Commanders carefully chose the ground and, when possible, watched their soldiers work from the direction of the enemy. Soldiers eventually dug false positions to attract enemy fire (often using soot to give the impression of depth) and produced fake machine guns and artillery pieces from wood that needed to be both realistic enough to draw attention but also camouflaged enough to seem like the actual object—a real-looking machine gun left out in the open might seem too incredible to waste a mortar shell on.98 Nets and screens were constructed to place over communication trenches, foxholes, and vehicles. When Red Army men opened fire, it was often through a loophole invisible from the enemy’s lines, which could feature a camouflaged trapdoor.⁹⁹ As Vasilii Grossman recorded in his notebook, the Red Army soldier had “become so crafty that not even a professor could think of it. He builds such a foxhole that you can step on his head and not notice him.”¹⁰⁰

Camouflage required not just labor but changes in the way soldiers acted. Every move made was to take the landscape into account and use its features to provide cover. Soldiers were encouraged to choose paths based on which plants best matched the color of their uniform or to move in short bursts from tree to tree or rock to rock. They would also smear their helmets in mud or flour to match the clay or snow of their trenches.¹⁰¹ Noise and light discipline became key to survival. This meant concealing smoke and flashes, particularly at night. Nothing could shine or jingle in the soldier’s kit, and conversation had to be kept quiet and to a minimum.¹⁰² In the steppe soldiers were instructed to “strictly observe the regime on the battle line, don’t show yourself, sit in the ground and secretly observe the enemy. Leave the trench only with permission and only at night.”¹⁰³

Of course, the enemy was also trying to hide his every move. As an article on observation put it: “The modern battlefield often seems entirely empty. Locating a fortified and camouflaged enemy requires ceaseless and in-depth observation of the smallest signs of the life in the enemy’s order of battle.” The trenches were dotted with observation points, in which soldiers kept journals of every change in the landscape and enemies’ disposition. Observers tried to locate minefields, artillery, and machine guns, reading the landscape more fluently than other soldiers, either with the naked eye or with the help of binoculars, periscopes and stereoscopes.¹⁰⁴

The Germans noticed how rapidly and skillfully Red Army soldiers used their spades, finding a racial explanation: “instinctual use of location, exemplary construction of positions, and skillful camouflage strikingly characterize every Red Army soldier,” stemming from their “inborn, mindless submission to fate, lack of initiative, blind obedience from fear of being shot.”¹⁰⁵

Soviet propaganda declared: “You could say that every blow with a shovel on the battlefield is equal to a well aimed shot. The spade makes a soldier invulnerable, and thus terrifying to the enemy.”¹⁰⁶ The spade was a soldier’s shield; often carried tucked into the belt in combat, it could be a weapon. Spades even occasionally deflected lethal fire, and some soldiers went into attacks covering their faces with spades.107 The spade was indispensable to soldiers on the battlefield, but the world created by the soldier’s spade consisted of more than just violence. As Mikhail Loginov put it: “We don’t just wage war at the front, we also live there. The trenches are our home.”¹⁰⁸

Domesticating the Front

Once soldiers settled into a position for any period of time, they began to concentrate on comfort, starting with the soldier’s foxhole. Mansur Abdulin recalled:

Every burrow is different in shape and volume, since it is dug to the taste and complexion of the builder… A foxhole is a soldier’s place of work, his fire position. But it’s also his home… The passion for improvement is inflamed: he starts to dig out a niche for grenades, another for ammunition, a third for his submachine gun, so it will be at hand. And you want to find a place for your mess pot… A soldier has already made himself at home.¹⁰⁹

Niches for all manner of items—weapons, gasmasks, food, and water—came to mark the walls of the trench. After soldiers finished their fighting positions, they began constructing more complicated places to live with the same attention to detail. First they built a small burrow to escape the elements and enemy fire, a place large enough to lie down in, directly in the trench wall. These could be for one or two soldiers, with walls of bare earth or lined with branches or wooden boards.¹¹⁰

The first door for any structure a soldier made was the plashch-palatka, an ingeniously designed tent portion and rain cape that was both clothing and architectural element in one. (See figures 1.4 and 4.16.) A veteran of the Leningrad Front praised this humble cloth: “the indispensable accessory of the soldier. It defends him from rain and blizzard, covers him from the sun, and serves as both bedding and tent. And they’ll bury you in it, when your time comes.”¹¹¹ The plashch-palatka could be used as a very basic shelter or combined in any number of combinations from a simple one- or two-person tent to dozens put together into a yurt. When not being used as a tent, it could be worn as a rain cape, with one corner buttoning up so as not to be dragged on the ground and another being drawn into a hood via two drawstrings. It even featured an opening that soldiers could put their shooting arm through. Lightweight and multifunctional, the plashch-palatka was an all-purpose item that served as a blanket, a method of carrying wounded and supplies and makeshift door, roof, camouflage, and, finally, as a shroud for the dead.

If the plashch-palatka was a portable house, an element of both architecture and clothing, then the spade allowed soldiers to build elaborate shelter wherever they found themselves. Living space was often separated from the space of fighting by tens of meters, echoing in miniature Soviet city planning that sought to connect workers with their factories but also provide a belt of greenery that separated the spaces of labor and rest. The bunkers that soldiers built and inhabited were spaces for rest and recovery, sparsely decorated, but often with a few touches of home. As one correspondent with the Mints Commission wrote: “The present communication was written in a small bunker—the dugout of the commander of the Chemical Company and his political deputy. The décor: a window the width of two logs without glass on the level of the earth. Two board beds; a small iron oven; a log floor; the door is hung with a double sheet of chemical paper. The only decoration on the wall—two sheets of Frontovaia illiustratsiia [a popular illustrated magazine]. On the other wall—a submachine gun and a gasmask bag.”112 Structures like this became ubiquitous at the front, as soldiers adapted to their environment and built customized spaces.

This world had its own rhythms and eccentricities to which soldiers had to adapt; a process that mirrored country folks’ adaptation to city ways. Soldiers often became largely nocturnal, as Boris Marchenko wrote home to his wife in September 1942: “I try not to sleep at night, in general, and sleep during the day—it’s better that way. In general it is impossible to answer the question of when I sleep, day and night and neither day nor night. In a word, I’ve gotten used to sleeping in snatches and feel no inconvenience whatsoever.”¹¹³ Loginov recalled similar patterns, but his soldiers had more trouble adjusting: “We don’t know plates, forgot what hot tea, good books, and music are… The most simple everyday details of life are beyond our reach. We have a special schedule—there is no difference between day and night. We sleep, not knowing sheets, not getting undressed, at odd moments. And so we never get enough rest and always want to sleep.”¹¹⁴

Beyond sleep, other conditions were dramatically different. Once soldiers dug in, they could become acclimated to the technology that shaped their landscape. They learned to tell enemy and friendly planes from the sound their engines made or the direction of artillery fire by its shriek.¹¹⁵ Others learned simply to ignore these sounds, as Nikolai Chekhovich wrote home to his mother: “the constant whistle of bullet and mortar fire, and even the creak of ‘Katiusha’ and the German ‘mule’ [rocket mortars] have become normal.” He later boasted to his mother that he could drink tea under bombardment.116 Soldiers bragged of their ability to sleep through bombardments or even battle as well as to sleep fully clothed, with grenades and spades hanging from their belts.¹¹⁷

FIGURE 4.14 Soldiers in a bunker with an improvised stove. RGAKFD 0-312479 (O. B. Knorring).

While danger could become unremarkable, other conditions could prove unbearable. Lice were a frequent companion in the trenches, as were other vermin such as mice. The trenches were subject to the elements, as one female sniper recalled: “awful rain began… I arrived at a dugout, dampness; the dugout is dripping, uninviting, cold, and dirty… even though we were on high ground, the water came up to our knees, and we stood in water all the time.”¹¹⁸ A certain level of discomfort was inevitable under these conditions, but both soldiers and the government strived to create the best living conditions possible.

The environment in which soldiers lived was always of interest to the state, who frequently sent agents to investigate conditions at the front. In early 1943 interest in the everyday life (byt) of soldiers became a major campaign. A discussion among top political officers led by A. S. Shcherbakov, head of the Main Red Army Political Directorate, revealed that soldiers were living under unacceptable conditions. Food was pilfered and poorly prepared, warm clothing wasn’t finding its way to the front, and the bunkers in which soldiers lived had major shortcomings. Political officers at the front were deemed not to understand the importance of looking after soldiers’ comfort. Those present understood that “where the barest needs of the fighters are not satisfied—the number of extraordinary events [desertions, self-mutilations, etc.] grows. Enemy agents take advantage of this.”119 Keep ing cities of earth up to code was key to securing soldiers’ loyalty and health.

Just as in Soviet cities, infrastructure was sought but often found wanting. Political officers noted that in some units, bunkers were dug too shallow, forcing soldiers to constantly hunch over.¹²⁰ In others, the bare clay floors were cold and miserable, while windows remained without glass, and a thin rain cape served as the only door. Finally, lighting was cited as a major problem. Soldiers spent a lot of time in their dugouts—the space in which they were to sleep, write and read letters, clean their weapons, shave, and repair their uniforms and equipment. Some form of artificial lighting was key, and in a few bunkers, soldiers burned telephone cable to provide light. One soldier colorfully described how when burning telephone cable there was so much soot that “in the course of an evening so much crawls into your nose that you can’t pick it all out,” while a report to Moscow found that the practice could lead to death from smoke inhalation.¹²¹

Both soldiers and political officers came to the same conclusion: soldiers should simply improvise lamps from whatever could be found at hand. Most often the bodies of these makeshift creations were either the casings of artillery shells (the 45mm cannon being particularly common) or recycled ration cans. Soldiers used a variety of fuels—kerosene, animal fat, or a mix of gasoline and salt. For a wick they often cut strips from the end of their woolen overcoats.¹²²

Improvisation was key to survival and comfort at the front, just as it often was in Soviet cities. Indeed manuals officially encouraged a “do-it-yourself” ethic. In contrast to the US and German armies (both drawn from consumer-oriented societies)—which provided a wide array of field stoves, flashlights, and other appliances for their soldiers in the trenches—comforts and necessities in the Red Army had to be improvised from whatever was at hand. Materials could include artillery shell casings, cans, abandoned civilian houses, or whatever else could be salvaged.¹²³ The military surgeon Vishnevskii described one instance of ingenuity: “There’s a highly original wash-stand in the MSB [Medical Sanitary Battalion]. It is made out of a ration box of American sausages. In the bottom of the box there is a hole and a rifle cartridge is soldered in place.”¹²⁴ Other soldiers described making ovens out of whatever they could find: “Nearby a 76mm gun was positioned. We asked the troops for a can that had been used for lube and made an oven out of it. We found a piece of old iron, turned it into a tube, and put it outside, not too high—level with the ground. It got dark, we struck up the oven, it got warm, you could even heat up soup in a mess tin.”125 Everything had to be scrounged and had to function in such a way as to be invisible from enemy lines—the trail of smoke of even a cigarette could draw enemy fire.¹²⁶

The infrastructure of the cities of earth was improvised but also expansive. The political department encouraged units to organize workshops that could repair clothing, and commanders would often try to find various craftsmen—tailors, barbers, or woodworkers, for example—to make their lives easier.¹²⁷ Self-sufficiency became a priority, touching all aspects of a soldier’s life. Soldiers were expected to find their own wells. They were supposed to bathe every ten days, to have their clothing deloused in special rooms. These bathhouses took the form of either a specially constructed bunker with running water and an oven or traveling tents.¹²⁸ Being able to wash was a real joy, as it rescued soldiers from lice and the possibility of contracting typhus. However, female soldiers often found themselves in an awkward situation, being forced to bathe with men or wait last in line, when there might not be any hot water.¹²⁹

Latrines were standardized, coming in two camouflaged models, and soldiers had to travel 30–40 meters from the main trench line through a communication trench to answer the call of nature.¹³⁰ References to urination and defecation among soldiers highlight the lack of privacy in the army. Boris Suris confided to his diary that in his training camp the bathroom was the only place where one could get any privacy.¹³¹ In the field such privacy was rare. Irina Dunaevskaia recorded an entire squad, in ranks, peeing in one puddle in the middle of the road.¹³² Vera Malakhova recalled the particular suffering of women on the march: “You’d be marching along, exhausted, worn out beyond belief. Suddenly you’d have the urge to go, but how could you? And they [older soldiers] ‘saved’ us… It was dangerous to go off somewhere, because sometimes there were mines. So the three of them would stand up, turn their backs to us, open their greatcoats wide, and say: ‘Dear daughters, go ahead, don’t be bashful. We can see that you can’t march any further.’” Until then, she had to hold it in, with an aching stomach and bursting bladder.¹³³ Whatever you did in the bunkers, in trenches, or on the road, chances are you wouldn’t be doing it alone and unobserved.

Red Army units had a special section, from April 1943 on dubbed SMERSh (Smert’ shpionam—Death to Spies), dedicated to finding spies and traitors in the active army, rear, and newly liberated territories. Known colloquially as osobisty (“specials” or as the “Special Section”—osobyi otdel), these often unpopular men were part of the NKVD, their presence a continuation of prewar surveillance organically embedded in any Soviet institution. Osobisty and sometimes political officers recruited soldiers to observe and report back on their comrades, and occasionally to create provocations.134 These men listened carefully to conversations and reported back in detail any anti-Soviet sentiments, conspiracies to desert to the enemy, or cases of panic and cowardice. Commanders sent regular reports of “extraordinary occurrences” to the Political Department of the army. Griping is a norm in any army, but in the Red Army this could lead to serious results, as the veteran Boris Slutskii recorded in a poem about a machine gunner: “For three jokes, facts of three, he will never see tomorrow.”¹³⁵ However, soldiers who seemed to be on the verge of surrendering to the enemy could redeem themselves in battle, as the story of the Red Army man “Chechen” reveals: Under investigation for reportedly declaring that the food was so bad he was ready to desert, the Germans too strong to defeat, and the Allies disinterested, he was pardoned when he inspired a group of cowering soldiers to open fire with his “heroic example.” Redemption was possible but difficult to achieve, and some informants hunted those who would desert to the enemy.¹³⁶ This war was in many ways a battle for souls, and the army’s Political Department sought to reveal to soldiers what was at stake but also to feed the soul.

A variety of institutions providing spiritual sustenance that had marked Soviet cities also found their place at the front, whether in dedicated bunkers that served as libraries, clubs, or tea houses, many of which were portable. The creativity shown by some political officers in arranging the free time of soldiers and attempting to influence them could be truly impressive. For example Izer Aizenberg, a regimental agitator, devised an agitkul’tchemodan (cultural agitation suitcase) that he compared to an “illusionist’s case.” Aizenberg described the contents of and scuttlebutt around his case:

It works out like this: one group takes a map, hangs it up, and starts to trace their fingers around cities the Germans have bombed and where our pilots are bombing. They take an interest in other theaters of the war, ask what is happening in Tunisia, and so on. Another group plays checkers, a third reads brochures—riddles and songs—and laugh jollily. Serious brochures are read in the corner. In the case there is paper and envelopes; they take the paper and write a letter home or turn out a combat sheet [a short form of propaganda produced by soldiers themselves]. There is also a mirror. Sometimes a line forms when you take out this mirror: one comes up to it—“Let me have a look at myself,” another “I’m overgrown, let me have a look.” At the height of this work the agitator asks for everyone’s attention and holds a ten- to fifteen-minute discussion or reads an interesting article.¹³⁷

Captivating props allowed political officers to influence soldiers and explain events on their front and around the world. The state also sent musical instruments (particularly accordions and harmonicas), traveling theaters, and musicians and even organized talent shows among the soldiers themselves. The military press encouraged the creation of mobile libraries, and some agitators gathered collections of literature in the languages of “non-Russians” as part of a larger effort to help integrate these soldiers into the largely Slavic culture of the army.138 The Soviet project of enlightenment and shaping the individual continued even under the primitive conditions of a world constructed by the soldier’s small spade. The bunkers, no less than workers’ barracks and urban clubs, were spaces of transformation.

Even in the chaotic conditions of Stalingrad, with its near constant combat, a political officer explained that soldiers “sitting in foxholes and dugouts in constant battle, need some relaxation, they need time to relax and let it all out, to get dry, warm, write a letter somewhere, bandy a few words with their comrades… share their impressions. This was also very important: through the exchange of experiences from mouth to mouth fighters helped each other.”¹³⁹ In these tight quarters the sharing of experiences went beyond veteran soldiers instructing newly arrived reinforcements in the tricks to staying alive and becoming a hero. The space was a veritable melting pot. Many urban youths were first introduced to the peasantry that still demographically dominated the country. They might hear different versions of the Civil War,140 folk tales, or entirely different concepts of biology.¹⁴¹ Educated people from good families became friends with professional criminals, sharing stories about their prewar lives.¹⁴² Kazakhs or Uzbeks might sing their traditional songs, to the amusement or bemusement of their comrades.¹⁴³ All of the diversity of the country came together in these bunkers, and in the need to while away the sometimes interminable hours between battle and training, there was little else to do but talk, read, and write. The world built by the spade had little place for privacy—the battlefield exploits, opinions, love affairs, and hygienic practices of a soldier were all exposed to the surveil-lance and judgment of his or her comrades.¹⁴⁴

FIGURE 4.15 A frontline club, Fourth Guards Rifle Division, Volkhov Front, 1942. RGAKFD 0-144470 (Garanin).

FIGURE 4.16 Frontline post office, 1942. Note the soldier on the left wearing a plashch-palatka. RGAKFD 0-101371 (Chernov).

The particular ambience of the dugout—that intimate, relatively safe space so close to death—was recorded in songs, interviews, and memoirs. None more famous than “In a dugout” (V zemlianke), which begins with a description of a lamp flickering in a tight bunker and climaxes with the singer proclaiming that his love is far away but that “Death is only four steps away.”¹⁴⁵ As one female scout remembered: “The dugout was very dimly lit with oil wick lamps, filled to the brim with people. You can’t imagine how loud it was, and so much smoke that you could hang an axe.”146 The bunker was the space where soldiers wrote their loved ones, thought of home, and socialized. As Boris Suris recorded in his diary: “It’s always jolly and lively at our place. Sometimes the operations guys come, saving themselves from the boredom that rules their section; sometimes scouts in white camouflage suits bring a report; sometimes we suddenly get crowded with guests from the neighboring outfit.”¹⁴⁷ Boris Slutskii used the bunker as a motif in his poetry, musing on how officers imagined themselves in a Moscow restaurant while sitting in their bunker, reflecting that “No one has forbidden us to live well!” A typical line reads as follows:

And we’re alive. We wait for lunch.

And in the meantime, we argue, banter, fool around.

We are glad that we aren’t under the rain.

And are used to the fact that we are under fire.¹⁴⁸

One veteran recalled the homey smell of Red Army bunkers as opposed to the stench of captured German dugouts: “Our bunkers were filled with the tart fumes of tobacco and the aroma of bread.”¹⁴⁹ Unlike the trenches, where total concentration was needed, the bunker was a domesticated space separated, albeit by a slim margin, from the space of killing and dying.

FIGURE 4.17 A camouflaged bathhouse, 1942. RGAKFD 0-121639 (Kolesnikov).

Bunkers could be the loneliest places or replace a lost sense of family for the soldier. Viktor Kiselёv complained of an every-man-for-himself attitude in his rear-area training camp.¹⁵⁰ Irina Dunaevskaia (a Leningrad University student turned army translator) was kicked out of a bunker because her (male) roommate “didn’t want to acquire cultured habits,” which was a relief, as she was afraid of acquiring her comrade’s coarse manners.¹⁵¹ Her tendency toward quiet reflection would later draw the negative attention of other comrades sharing her bunker.¹⁵² For other soldiers, the closeness of the front was a balm to their souls. Major A. Luzhbin wrote in his diary: “Every soldier and commander of our army carries in their heart a burning love for their family, their mother and father. But their families are not at the front and they shift this onto each other… this earnest, gigantic strength of love bonds together a unit with a firm, militant friendship and works true miracles—it brought us victory.”¹⁵³ Intimacy, while not easy to come by, served as both a substitute for families left at home and as a guarantee of combat effectiveness.

However, not all intimacy at the front was welcome. As noted previously, the bodies of female soldiers were often viewed as the property of commanders. The intimate space of the bunker was where by either mutual affection, continual harassment, or force, men and women entered into relations. Many soldiers recorded in their diaries the primacy of sex in soldiers’ discussions and that many men doubted that a woman at the front could stay single or faithful to a distant partner.154 The closed quarters of men and women often led to uncomfortable moments for female soldiers, as Tat’iana Atabek confided to her diary: “At night, as if an insane dream, I hear impassioned whisperings: ‘I love you and will never leave you alone.’ Attempts to embrace and kiss and that moaning prayer to give him my lips. I felt that I had no strength to stop this person… and felt so insulted—I had never been so wronged in all my life—that I wept uncontrollably.”¹⁵⁵ Other women also reported being sexually harassed in bunkers.¹⁵⁶ Occasion ally female soldiers, particularly those with elite status, were given special, separate accommodations, in what could jokingly be called “the harem.”¹⁵⁷ Sex at the front could lead to serious indiscipline, such as soldiers who should be on watch having sex. One wry chauffeur noted: “Such a case, it seems, has not been foreseen even by our ubiquitous military regulations. It is necessary, apparently, to add to it: ‘it is forbidden to f*ck sentries.’”¹⁵⁸ “Girls” in the army were often forced to regulate their actions very strictly or risk being seen as sexually available, and some women found it necessary to set stringent boundaries immediately.¹⁵⁹

While talk about women and promiscuity was common, many soldiers noted that the presence of women was looked on fondly as a way of softening the harsh conditions of the front. One commander told the Mints Commission in 1944, “At the front, at headquarters, in the hospital, and in the trenches our girls are the only pure souls.”¹⁶⁰ Women in the army often fulfilled traditional gender roles, something that could lead to correctives from the military press: “In a number of units a wholly unnecessary ‘division of labor’ has been established. Girls do the laundry for all soldiers, wash the floors of bunkers and garrisons of men, and men-soldiers start up the stoves in the dormitories of girls. Such a relationship to girl-soldiers weakens military discipline.”¹⁶¹ Despite being a breach of discipline, it was precisely these hints of civilian life that many soldiers cherished.¹⁶² Any reminder of home could distract soldiers from the hardships and constant danger of the front. Nonetheless, those comrades who had made today bearable could be gone tomorrow without a trace or rendered into the earth.

Living with the Dead

The dead became part of the landscape, haunting the memories of friends and leaving unavoidable traces of their existence. Under combat conditions it was often impractical to remove the dead. Nikulin noted a macabre experience on the Leningrad Front in his 1942 diary:

A corpse smells intolerably. There are many of them here, old and new. Some are dried and black, like a mummy with shining teeth. Others have swelled as if they are about to burst. They lie in different poses. Some inexperienced soldiers dug themselves a niche in the sandy walls of the trench, and the earth, crumbling from a nearby explosion, buried them alive. And so they lie, all curled up, as if sleeping under a thick layer of sand. The picture looks like a grave cut down the middle. Here and there in the trench parts of bodies trampled into the clay stick out—a spine, a flattened face, a hand—all brown in color like the earth. We walk directly on them.163

Reports found that soldiers, particularly in the winter months, did not rush to bury their friends, which could lead to fears of epidemics during the spring thaw.¹⁶⁴ Bodies left on the battlefield could attest to the length of battles that traversed several seasons and bore witness to different units that had passed through, particularly if they had distinctive uniforms (such as the black pea coats of Naval Infantry).¹⁶⁵ These men and women decomposed into the landscape yet left traces of themselves everywhere.

FIGURE 4.18 Dmitrii Baltermants, Na voennoi doroge, 1941. © Dmitrii Baltermants. Courtesy of Paul Harbaugh and Tat’iana Baltermants.

Many observers found the attitude of soldiers toward the dead unconscionable. Vasilii Grossman, writing about the fate of a corpse that had lain frozen for two days in the winter of 1942, exclaimed: “No one wants to bury him—laziness. He has bad comrades!… Too often one is forced to observe the approach of reserves to the front, reinforcements passing recent battlefields among unburied dead, scattered all over. Who knows what is happening in the souls of those people going to take the place of those lying on the snow?”166 Shortly before Grossman put his rancor to paper, an army-wide order had called for the standardization and organization of burial of soldiers, noting: “The burial of the dead in battle often takes place not in mass graves, but in foxholes, fissures, and dugouts. Individual and mass graves are not registered, not marked on maps, and not properly formalized.” The order noted that by not providing a proper burial, the army missed an opportunity to “mobilize the masses of Red Army soldiers for the decisive battle with German-Fascist invaders, to engender in the soldiers hatred of the enemy and the drive to avenge the deaths of their comrades,” and that no record existed to identify the dead or where they were buried.¹⁶⁷ Despite orders to the contrary, many soldiers would come to their final rest in the foxholes and dugouts they had built, unmarked and unknown. Under these conditions, the spade became the tool that committed soldiers’ bodies to the earth.

Improper burial continued to be an issue throughout the war, with Mikhail Kalinin instructing agitators in 1943 to “cultivate respect for the dead among Red Army men, to honor them.” Soldiers were supposed to bury their comrades and turn maintenance of the graves over to members of the Young Pioneers youth organization.¹⁶⁸ An article in Krasnaia zvezda, the daily newspaper of the army, pointed out that some municipalities had allowed grave sites to become overgrown as early as 1943.¹⁶⁹ The war swallowed whole villages, and with them all knowledge of nearby graves.¹⁷⁰ Even when the desire to provide a proper burial was apparent, the logistics of burying so many soldiers so quickly could prove daunting. A report from the Karelian Front described how burial teams (pokhoronnaia komanda) during a successful offensive dug properly formatted graves with markings rather than in simple pencil, leading to these men falling 20–40 kilometers behind their units.¹⁷¹ All valuables belonging to soldiers were supposed to be sent to their families, including medals, which often took the place of remains as kin mourned. Exact locations of place of burial, often a mass grave, were to be provided to relatives.¹⁷² However, even orders from 1945 sought to correct the failures of those committing soldiers to the earth to properly fulfill their task.¹⁷³

In contrast, Red Army soldiers had seen—and later often witnessed the destruction of—neatly formatted German cemeteries.¹⁷⁴ Some claimed that this disparity inspired them to pay more attention to how they buried their own.175 On January 26, 1945, the artillerist Viktor Kiselёv noted in his diary:

to an inexperienced person, it could seem that the losses of the German were minuscule, because their corpses are much fewer than ours. The thing of it is that the Germans have a custom of taking away their dead to bury them in the Motherland. Their soldiers are severely punished if they retreat without taking the body of their commander. And what do we do? Russians have nothing like this respect for the dead, and it is not for nothing that you see so many neglected, uncared-for bodies in the fields and on the roads. Everyone who walks by wrinkles his nose and expresses indignation (“why haven’t they been buried yet?”) but himself doesn’t lift a finger, covers his nose, and walks by. And only among natsmen (Uzbeks, Kazakhs, people from the Caucasus) do we see this noble custom.¹⁷⁶

However, soldiers might be forgiven for being overwhelmed by the number of their dead comrades surrounding them and wanting to avoid such pungent reminders of their own possible fate.

The constant proximity of death and the dead could have a dramatic effect on soldiers’ sense of self. Anatolii Genatulin wrote that he couldn’t feel the same depth of feeling for dead at the front, having become used to death: “my boyish soul didn’t so much harden as learned to live with it or became numb.” He explained that it was perhaps his youth that didn’t allow him to feel for the dead or “because I was one of them, I was shell-shocked and survived by some miracle” that his joy at being alive overtook his pity for those dying around him.¹⁷⁷ Chekalov recorded a similar feeling: “Death!? I have become so close to it that its blood-freezing breath seems normal. It repeats itself every day in hundreds of variations and tiresomely reminds us of itself. And perhaps this is exactly why you appreciate not only that which is alive but even the dream of life, of the past.”¹⁷⁸ The simple ubiquity of death helps explain the indifference of soldiers to the bodies of their comrades, particularly to anonymous bodies littering roads and battlefields. Only one’s closest friends warranted attention. As Chekhovich wrote home to his mother and fiancée: “Many times I have seen a person reduced to a bloody mess… It’s hard to force myself to pull out the documents of a dead person if I didn’t know him well.”¹⁷⁹

However, many soldiers put considerable effort into the graves they provided for their friends. A do-it-yourself ethos was common here as elsewhere. Often only one’s closest comrades knew where a soldier had been buried and provided details of burial to a comrade’s family.¹⁸⁰ Vasilii Chekalov ordered his soldiers to build a monument to a close friend who had been killed.181 Tat’iana Atabek noted in her diary the substantial effort made by troops in technical branches in March 1944: “I have noticed that tankers have their own manner of burying their comrades (they use tank tracks as a fence) as opposed to artillerists, who cordon off their graves with casings from artillery shells. Not far from us two Guards tankers are buried. So that no one could step a foot on the ground near their grave, it is surrounded by the track of their once fearsome tank.”¹⁸² Graves such as this were much more conducive to the pedagogical role the dead were supposed to play in soldiers’ lives. Loginov recalled a “lesson of bravery” when his soldiers stopped for a moment of somber ceremonial contemplation in front of the graves of soldiers who had perished the year before.¹⁸³ Nikolai Inozemtsev recorded that at the burial of his close friend (the third to die in the course of a single operation), three salvos were fired at the German lines, realizing Soviet propaganda mobilizing grief as fuel for vengeance.¹⁸⁴

In this potentially indifferent milieu, many soldiers feared disappearing into nothingness, as if their lives had never existed.¹⁸⁵ Perhaps this is why reflections on the eternal nature of monuments to soldiers were common both in wartime propaganda and postwar memoir literature. The government would in many ways bind its legitimacy to a cult of the war dead and raise generations of children to venerate mass graves at battlefields that were often a short walk from their homes or schools.186 However, during the war itself, the soldier’s spade was often all that was available to commit remains to the earth. The scale of events could render both the landscape and human form unrecognizable and turn people into the landscape.

FIGURE 4.19 Soldiers of the Eighth Guards “Panfilov” Rifle Division vow vengeance over the grave of a fallen commander before going into combat, April 17, 1943. RGAKFD 0-285341 (V. S. Kinelovskii).

Cities of Soldiers

The unimaginable scale of the Great Patriotic War—the level of destruction, number of dead, and immense scope of action—is belied by the fact that it was experienced on a very local scale. Soldiers built a front that spanned a continent, but everything they did was determined by local conditions—the commanding heights, little river, or easily visible landmarks had more sway over where and how soldiers dug their foxholes than any projections in Berlin or Moscow. Soldiers using a standard, anonymous, and easily portable object created urban spaces tailored to their bodies and needs, encompassing all aspects of life, including death. People from all over the Soviet Union bore witness to very local tragedies that amounted to cities of rubble. They testified before mass graves and rushed to save their fellow citizens from extermination. Like newcomers to Soviet construction sites a decade before, they built a new environment.

The echoes of Soviet urbanity in the trenches were striking. Production had been key in determining the layout of many Soviet cities, which were often built around one factory. At the front, combat replaced production, playing an even greater role in shaping the space soldiers inhabited. In Soviet cities, projections often ran afoul of reality, forcing urbanites to improvise under often primitive conditions, a phenomenon all the more intensely replayed at the front. Ironically, the green space that was often sacrificed in Soviet cities was preserved at the front as camouflage, not as a space of leisure but as a zone devoid of signs of life. Finally, whenever possible, the transformative institutions of the bath-house, library, and club were excavated in the city of earth. If previously many had been transformed from peasants into workers in factories, barracks, communal apartments, libraries, and other hallmarks of the Soviet city, at the front civilians were transformed into Red Army soldiers. Through the specific labors of being a soldier, they created a new sense of community in a space that was by necessity practically invisible. This was backbreaking work. The main periodical for army agitators stated in 1943: “war consists mostly of labor. The spade and axe are now in as much demand as the submachine gun.”¹⁸⁷ While the spade was necessary to survive, it was also insufficient. A soldier’s job is deadly by its nature. He or she not only avoids getting killed but also kills.