KRYMOV’S life had not been going well when the war began. Zhenya had left him the previous winter and had been living since then with her mother, her elder sister Ludmila or a friend in Leningrad. She wrote letters telling him about her plans, about her work, about her meetings with people they knew. Her tone was calm and friendly, as if she were simply visiting friends or family and would soon be back home.
One day she asked him to send her 2,000 roubles, and he did this gladly. It upset him when she returned the money to him a month later by wire transfer.
Krymov would have found it easier if Zhenya had stopped writing to him altogether. Her letters, which came every seven or eight weeks, were a torment; he waited for them eagerly, but Zhenya’s friendly tone only made these letters all the more painful. When she wrote that she had been to the theatre, he was not interested in what she had to say about the play, the stage design or the actors; what he wanted to know was who she had gone with, who had sat next to her, or seen her back home. Zhenya, however, did not tell him this.
Krymov’s work brought him no satisfaction, though he was diligent and always stayed in the office until late at night. He was a department head in a publishing house that specialized in economics and the social sciences; there were many meetings, and there was a lot to read and edit.
Krymov’s move to the publishing house meant that his former Comintern colleagues had less reason to visit, or even telephone him; they no longer needed to ask for advice or share their news and concerns. And since Zhenya’s departure, still fewer people had been coming to his now rather bleak apartment, with its strong smell of cigarette smoke. On Sundays he would keep looking at the phone—but sometimes the whole day would pass by without it ringing at all. Or if it finally did ring, and he joyfully picked up the receiver, it would turn out to be someone from the office wanting to talk about work, or the translator of some book or other wanting to discuss his manuscript in exhausting detail.
Krymov wrote to his younger brother, Semyon, in the Urals, suggesting that he should move to Moscow with his wife and daughter; he could give them one of his rooms. Semyon was a metals engineer. For several years after his graduation, he had worked in Moscow but been unable to find a room anywhere. He had lived first in Pokrovskоyе-Streshnevo, then in Veshnyaki and then in Losinka; to get to work on time he had to get up at half past five in the morning.
In the summer, when many Muscovites left for their dachas, Semyon had rented a room in the city and his wife, Lusya, had enjoyed the delights of a comfortable apartment—gas, electricity and a bathroom. For three months they would have a break from smoking stoves, snowdrifts, wells that froze over in January, and having to walk to the station every morning in the dark.
“Semyon’s an unusual kind of aristocrat,” Krymov had joked. “He winters in the country and spends his summers in the city.”
Semyon and Lusya would sometimes come round. Krymov could see that they imagined he led a life of extraordinary interest and importance. He would ask them to tell him about themselves—and Lusya would smile in embarrassment, look down at the floor and say, “But we’ve got nothing to tell you. Our lives are very dull.” And Semyon would add, “Yes, I just do ordinary engineering work, on the shop floor. But I hear you’ve been on a long journey, to a congress of Pacific Ocean trade unions.”
In 1936, when Lusya was pregnant, Semyon decided that they should move to Chelyabinsk.98 From there he wrote regularly to Krymov. He said barely a word about his own work and it was clear that his love and admiration for his elder brother were as strong as ever. Nevertheless, when Krymov suggested he return to Moscow, Semyon replied that this was impossible, and anyway he didn’t want to—he was now deputy chief engineer of a huge factory. He invited Krymov to come and stay for a few days, to see his new niece. “You’ll be well looked after,” he wrote. “We have a house of our own in a pine forest, and Lusya has created a splendid garden.”
Krymov was glad to hear that Semyon was doing so well, but he realized that he and his family were now unlikely ever to return to Moscow. This made him sad. He had dreamed of a kind of family commune, picturing himself, in a few years’ time, taking his niece to the zoo every Sunday morning and carrying her about on his shoulders when he got home from work.
A few days after the beginning of the war Krymov wrote to the Party Central Committee, volunteering to join up. He was enlisted as a commissar and posted to the Southwestern Front.
On the day he locked his apartment and, with a green kitbag on his shoulder and a small case in his hand, caught a tram to the Kiev station, he felt a new confidence and peace of mind. His loneliness, he felt, was now locked away in his apartment. He was, at last, liberated from it; the nearer the train got to the front, the calmer he felt. “This rebel, alas, seeks storms, as if in storm lies peace,” he said to himself. Day and night, the lines written by the young Lermontov kept coming back to him.99
Through the carriage window he saw Bryansk freight station, all crumpled metal, splintered stone and lacerated earth—the work of German bombers. Still standing there on the tracks were the fragile black and red skeletons of freight wagons. From loudspeakers over empty platforms he could hear Moscow radio resonantly denying the latest lies put out by the Transozean German news agency.
The train passed through stations Krymov remembered from the Civil War—Tereschenko, Mikhailovsky Hamlet, Krolevets, Konotop . . .
The meadows, the oak groves, the pine forests, the fields of wheat and buckwheat, the tall poplars and the white huts that seemed in the twilight like pale, deathly faces—everything both on the earth and in the sky looked sad and anxious.
In Bakhmach the train was bombed; two carriages were destroyed. Locomotives whistled and hooted, their iron voices full of living despair.
On one stretch of track the train stopped twice; flying low overhead was a twin-engine Messerschmitt 110, with a cannon and a heavy machine gun. The passengers ran out into the fields, looked around in confusion, and then returned to their carriages.
They crossed the Dnieper shortly before dawn. The train seemed fearful of the echo sent back by the dark river with its white sandbanks.
In Moscow, Krymov had assumed that the main fighting was taking place around Zhitomir, where in 1920 he had been wounded in a battle with the Poles. At Southwestern Front HQ he learned that the situation was a great deal worse than the newspapers made out or than he or any of his fellow passengers had imagined: the Germans had already almost reached Kiev. They were close to Svyatoshino; in an attempt to break through to Demievka, they had engaged with Rodimtsev’s Airborne Brigade. The Soviet rear was threatened by Guderian’s tanks, which were moving down from the north-east, towards Gomel—while Kleist’s Army Group was moving up from the south, along the east bank of the Dnieper. Huge pincers looked set to close, isolating the Soviet troops still in Kiev and on the west bank.
The most senior political officer, a divisional commissar, was calm and methodical, with a slow, quiet manner of speech. Krymov was impressed by the straightforwardness with which he emphasized the gravity of the situation, while still showing the confidence expected of a leader. He could, it seemed, have continued calmly signing orders and listening to reports even if his Political Administration had been located in the mouth of an active volcano.
Krymov was ordered to one of the armies on the right flank, to give political information talks to the soldiers. The army’s most distant division was, at the time, positioned in the forests and swamps of Belorussia.
First, though, Krymov went to the Front operations section. There he found a group of senior commanders standing around a map. A middle-aged general, with a wrinkled face and glasses, was running his hand over his greying hair and saying languidly, with a slight smile, “It’s only too clear that the German High Command has begun a colossal encirclement, on a historically unprecedented scale.” Pointing to the German positions on the map, he added, “You can see the horseshoe—and it’s a horseshoe that wants to crush us. In the last war, they encircled Samsonov’s corps. This time they intend to encircle an entire Front.”
Someone said a few words Krymov was unable to make out. The general shrugged and said. “The German High Command has a strategy. Russian-style hoping for the best will get us nowhere. We need to do more than that if we’re to outmanouevre them.”
Krymov made his way into the next room. An out-of-breath major collided with him in the doorway. “Is General Vlasov in there?” he asked—and rushed past without waiting for an answer.100
•
On the sector of the front Krymov was posted to, there was a general sense of calm. Many of the political-section strategists seemed strangely serene. “The Germans have exhausted themselves. They’ve got no more aircraft, no fuel, no tanks, no shells. It’s two whole weeks since we last saw one of their planes.”
This was neither the first nor the last of Krymov’s encounters with such optimists. He knew very well how quickly they panicked in any difficult situation, wandering about in bewilderment and muttering, “Who’d have thought it!”
Many of the soldiers in one of the infantry divisions were from Chernigov and happened to have been deployed very close to their own villages, which were now occupied by the Germans. The Germans evidently knew this, no doubt from interrogating prisoners. Looking at the stars as they lay at night in their trenches—in quiet oak groves or amid tall hemp or maize—these soldiers would suddenly hear an amplified woman’s voice. Treacherously authoritative, this voice would repeat, in Ukrainian, “Iva-an! Come ho-o-ome! Iva-an! Come ho-o-ome!” This iron woman’s voice, which seemed to come from the sky itself, was followed by a brief businesslike speech pronounced with a foreign accent. The “brothers from Chernigov” should return at once to their homes—or else, within a day or two, they would be burned to death by flamethrowers, or crushed under the treads of tanks.
Once again, the loud voice: “Iva-an! Iva-an! Come ho-o-ome!” Then the sullen roar of motors—the soldiers thought that the Germans possessed a special wooden rattle that mimicked the sound of a tank engine.
There were mornings when men turned out to have gone missing. Only their rifles remained, lying on the bottom of trenches.101
Two weeks later, Krymov was on his way back from this quiet army to Front HQ.
The driver who had given him a lift stopped just outside Kiev. Krymov continued on foot. He walked past a long, deep ravine with clay sides and then stood still for a moment, taking involuntary delight in the peace and charm of the early morning. The ground was covered by yellow leaves, and the leaves still left on the trees shone in the low sun. The air felt unusually light. Bird calls were only the faintest of ripples on the clear surface of a deep, transparent silence. Then the sun reached the upper slopes of the ravine. The light and the half-light, the silence and the bird calls, the sun’s warmth and the still-cool air created a sense of something extraordinary: any moment now, perhaps, some kind-hearted old men from a fairy tale would appear, quietly climbing the slope.
Krymov left the road and walked through the trees. Then he saw an elderly woman in a dark blue coat, a white canvas sack over her shoulders.
Catching sight of Krymov, she screamed.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
She ran her hand across her eyes, smiled wearily and said, “Oh, my God, I took you for a German.”
Krymov asked the way to Kreshchatik,102 and the woman replied, “You’re going the wrong way. From the ravine, from Babi Yar, you should have gone left—but the way you’re going now will take you to Podol. You must go back to Babi Yar, then past the Jewish cemetery, then along Melnik Street, then Lvov Street.”103
As he made his way down towards Kreshchatik, he thought he had stumbled into hell.
Soviet troops were leaving the Ukrainian capital. Taking up the whole width of the street, infantry, cavalry, guns and transport carts were moving slowly along Kreshchatik.
The entire army seemed to have been struck dumb. Heads were bowed. Everyone was looking down at the ground.
Vehicles and guns were camouflaged with branches of birch, maple, aspen and hazel, and millions of autumn leaves fluttered in the air, recalling the fields and forests now being abandoned.
And all the variety of colours, of weapons, insignia and uniforms, every distinction of face and age was erased by a single common expression of sorrow; this sorrow could be seen in the eyes of the soldiers, in the commanders’ bowed heads, in the banners now rolled up in their green cases, in the horses’ slow steps, in the muted rumble of engines, in the knocking of wheels that sounded like a funereal drumbeat.
Krymov saw a stout young woman with a baby in her arms, forcing her way through the crowd. She wanted to throw herself under the wheels of one of the guns, to halt this fateful retreat. People still only half-clothed were rushing after her, weeping, shouting, begging the soldiers to stop her.
Hundreds of women and children in autumn and winter coats, carrying bundles and suitcases, were trying to make their way to the Dnieper, exhausted and out of breath before they had even left the city.104 Detachments of policemen, firemen and apprentices were marching in the same direction. Old men stared at them glassily, as if hoping for some miracle. Nothing in the world, it seemed, could be more terrible than the wrinkled, yet childishly helpless faces of these old men, each alone in the crowd.
The Red Army soldiers were all gripped by a tight silence.
They knew, with an absolute, physical clarity, that every step they took to the east brought the still unseen Germans closer. Every step they took towards the Dnieper drew Hitler’s divisions closer to Kiev.
And—as if summoned by the approaching dark forces—shifty-eyed, hostile-looking people began to appear in the yards and alleys. Their whispering grew ever louder. Keeping a sly eye on the retreating soldiers, they were preparing to meet those now approaching. It was here, in a narrow alley, that Krymov first heard words of Ukrainian he would all too soon hear again: “What’s been, we have seen. What’s to be, we shall see.”105
Later, whenever he remembered this last day in Kiev—the cloudless blue sky, the gleaming windows, the streets carpeted with gold leaves—Krymov felt as if an axe were cleaving his heart; the pain was as sharp as his ever-present sense of personal loss.
In the following months there were many other times when he was among the last to leave as the Red Army abandoned a city or town to the Germans. Rather than lessening, the pain only grew still harder to bear. These towns and cities were like helpless people—people near and dear to him being taken away to some other life that was terrible, beyond understanding and infinitely distant.
Krymov had barely crossed to the east bank before the Germans, after knocking out the Soviet anti-aircraft defences, carried out a massive air raid on Brovary. Ninety bombers took part. This brought home to Krymov the full, awful meaning of the words “air supremacy.”
Guderian’s panzer divisions, moving down from the north, towards Gomel and Chernigov, were now securely positioned on the east bank of the Dnieper, to the rear of the Soviet forces in and around Kiev. It was clear that Guderian’s aim was to link up with Kleist’s Army Group South, which had broken through the Soviet front near Dnepropetrovsk.
A week later the pincers closed. Krymov was now behind the front line, in territory occupied by the Germans.
•
On one occasion Krymov saw dozens of enemy tanks move onto a plain crowded with families from Kiev fleeing east on foot. On the lead tank sat a German officer, waving a branch of orange autumn leaves in the air. Some of the tanks tore, at speed, into the midst of the women and children.
On another occasion a German tank passed slowly by only ten metres away from Krymov. It looked like some ferocious beast with bloodstained jaws. Now, Krymov felt that he had fully taken in the meaning of the words “ground supremacy.”
Day and night Krymov walked east. He heard about the death of Colonel General Kirponos.106 He read German propaganda leaflets making out that Moscow and Leningrad had already fallen and that the Soviet government had fled by plane to the Urals. He saw men who had buried their medals and Party membership cards; he saw betrayal and steely loyalty, despair and unwavering faith.
With him, under his leadership, were 200 soldiers and commanders whom he had met on his way. It was a motley squad, made up of Red Army soldiers, sailors from the Dnieper flotilla, village policemen, district Party committee workers, a few elderly Kiev factory workers, cavalrymen without horses and pilots who had lost their planes.
There were moments afterwards when Krymov felt he must have dreamed this entire journey—it was so full of extraordinary events and experiences. He remembered night-time bonfires in the forest, swimming across swollen autumn rivers under icy rain, long days of hunger, brief feasts in villages where they had eliminated detachments of Germans. Sometimes he had to judge village elders and polizei;107 this did not take him long. He remembered the look in the eyes of these traitors just before they were shot. He remembered a peasant woman who, with tears in her eyes, had begged him to give her a rifle and allow her and her two children to join his men on their journey east. He remembered the cruel execution of the mistress of the commander of a German punitive detachment. He remembered an old woman who, one night, had burned down her own house and the drunken polizei—one of them her son-in-law—who were asleep inside. And he remembered giving a lecture in a forest, immediately after a brief battle with a detachment of polizei, about the principles of the construction of a Communist society.
More than anything, he remembered the sense of togetherness that came into being between his men.108 Everyone had spoken openly about their whole lives, from their earliest childhood, and everyone’s path through life had seemed clearly marked out; people’s characters, their strengths and weaknesses—everything about them became manifest, in word and deed.
Sometimes Krymov had felt bewildered, unable to understand where he and his comrades were finding the strength to endure these long weeks of hunger and deprivation.
And the earth was so heavy, so difficult. To pull one boot out of the mud, to lift one foot and take one step, to lift the other foot—this alone was an immense labour. There was nothing during those autumn days that wasn’t difficult. Day and night it went on drizzling—and the cold drizzle was as heavy as mercury. Impregnated with this drizzle, a cloth side cap seemed heavier than a metal helmet; greatcoats became so sodden that they dragged you towards the ground; tunics and torn shirts were like clamps, clinging so tight to your chest that it was hard to breathe. Everything was a struggle.
The branches they gathered for the fire could have been made of stone. The dense, damp smoke merged with the equally dense grey mist and lay heavily on the ground.
Day and night the men’s aching shoulders felt like great weights; day and night the cold and dirt penetrated their torn boots. They would fall asleep on wet ground, under rough rain-heavy branches of hazel. At dawn, they awoke in the rain, feeling as if they had not slept at all.
In areas of German troop concentration there was ceaseless activity on the roads: columns of trucks, artillery and motor infantry. German soldiers were quartered in almost every village, and there were always sentries. In these areas Krymov and his men could move only at night.
It was their own land they were walking across, but they had to take cover in woods, to hurry across railways, to avoid asphalt roads where the sound of their footsteps might give them away. Black German cars swept past in the rain; self-propelled artillery drove past more slowly; tanks exchanged signals in metallic voices. Sometimes Krymov’s men heard strange, jarring sounds, carried by the wind from tarpaulin-covered trucks: snatches of German songs and the strains of an accordion. They saw bright headlights and heard the laboured, submissive breathing of locomotives at the head of trains carrying German troops further east. They saw peaceful lights in the windows of houses and friendly smoke rising up from chimneys—yet they had to hide away in deserted forest ravines.
Nothing during this difficult time was more precious than faith in the justice of the people’s cause, faith in the future. This made the rumours spread by the enemy—vague, grey, penetrating as the autumn mist—still harder to bear.
In some strange way, alongside his exhaustion, Krymov felt something very different—a sense of confidence and ardent strength. A sense of passion, of revolutionary faith; a sense of his own responsibility for the men trudging along beside him, for their lives and spiritual strength, for all that was happening on this cold autumn earth.
There was probably no heavier responsibility in the world, yet this sense of responsibility was the source of Krymov’s strength.
Dozens, hundreds of times every day men turned to him with the words “Comrade Commissar!”
In these two words Krymov sensed a particular warmth, a warmth that came from the heart. The men walking beside him knew of Hitler’s decree about the summary execution of all commissars and political instructors. These two words contained much that was good and pure.
It felt entirely natural and inevitable that Krymov should be leading this ad hoc detachment.
“Comrade Commissar,” Svetilnikov, his chief of staff, would ask, “what route will we be taking tomorrow?”
“Comrade Commissar, where should we send our scouts?”
Krymov would unfold the map, now wind-damaged, yellow and faded from the sun and rain, half-erased by the touch of many hands. Krymov understood that the route he chose might determine the fate of 200 men. And Air Force Major Svetilnikov knew this too; his yellow-brown eyes, usually bright and mischievous, would turn serious and his ginger eyebrows would meet in a frown.
Their choice of route depended not only on the map and the reports of their scouts. Everything was important: car and cart tracks at a fork in the road, a chance word from an old man they happened upon in the forest, the height of the bushes on a particular hillside, and the state of the unharvested wheat: Had it been beaten to the ground or was it standing up like a wall?
“Comrade Commissar—Germans!” Sizov, their chief scout—a man with a long face who seemed to know no fear of death—was a little out of breath. “On foot, not more than a company, behind that little wood over there, heading north-west.”
And Sizov, who had been close to death more often than any of them, looked into Krymov’s eyes, hoping to read there the order “Attack immediately!” He knew that Krymov was always eager to attack, whenever an opportunity arose.
These short fierce clashes brought about sudden transformations. Rather than exhausting the men, combat lent them more strength, enabled them to stand straighter.
“Comrade Commissar, what will we be eating tomorrow?” Skoropad, their provisions manager, would ask. He knew that Krymov had to take many different factors into account. One day they would have only burnt, half-cooked wheat that smelled of kerosene; another day, foreseeing a particularly difficult march, he would say, “Goose and tinned meat—one tin for every four men.”
“Comrade Commissar, what are we to do with the severely wounded? Today we’ve got eight of them,” Petrov would ask in his hoarse voice. A military doctor, Petrov suffered from asthmatic bronchitis and his lips always looked pale and anaemic. He would wait intently for Krymov’s reply, staring at him through bloodshot eyes. He knew that Krymov would never agree to leave the wounded behind, even in the care of the most loyal and dependable of villagers, but Krymov’s reply always brought joy to his heart. A little colour would return to his cheeks.
It was not that Krymov could read a map better than his chief of staff, or that he understood more about military operations than the regular soldiers. Nor did he know more about provisioning than the wise Skoropad or have a clearer idea than Petrov about how best to treat the wounded. The men who asked him these questions had a sense of their own worth; they knew the value of their own expertise, combat experience and knowledge of life. They knew that Krymov was sometimes wrong, that he might not be able to answer their questions. But they all understood that Krymov made no mistakes when it came to the single most important struggle of all—the struggle to preserve what was most essential and precious in a human being, to protect this central core at a time when it was all too easy to lose not only your life but also all sense of conscience and honour.
During this period Krymov grew accustomed to answering the most unexpected questions. During a night march through the forest, a former tractor driver, now a tank driver with no tank, would suddenly ask, “What do you think, comrade Commissar? Do the stars have Black Earth regions too?”109 Or a fierce argument would flare up around the fire: When Communism was established, would both bread and boots be distributed to everyone free of charge? A little out of breath, the soldier delegated by the debaters would go up to Krymov and say, “Comrade Commissar, are you still awake? The lads have got in rather a muddle. They need you to sort things out for them.” Or a sullen, taciturn old greybeard would pour out his soul to Krymov, telling him about his wife and children, about what he had done right in his dealings with others—everyone from close family to distant acquaintances—and where he had gone wrong.
Once, two of his men decided to go to ground. One pretended to be ill and the second shot himself in the calf; both intended to stay behind in a village, making out to the Germans that they had married into peasant families. Krymov had to judge them. And there were also moments of comedy, moments that everyone—even the sick and wounded—could laugh about together. In one village a soldier, without saying a word to the elderly mistress of the house, took five eggs and hid them inside his hat; a little later, he went and sat on this hat. The old woman shrieked abuse at him, then brought him some hot water and a cloth and helped him to regain his military dignity.
Krymov noticed that people liked telling him funny stories—as if they wanted even their commissar to be able to enjoy a little fun and laughter. During this autumn he seemed to be reliving all the hardest days of his life as a revolutionary and a Bolshevik. He was being tested—just as he had been tested during his time in the political underground, and during the Civil War. Krymov could feel on his cheeks the fresh breeze of his youth—and this was something so splendid that no difficulties, no ordeals could make him lose heart. There was no one who did not sense his strength.
Just as progressive workers had followed revolutionary fighters in the days of the tsars, in spite of prison sentences and forced labour, in spite of the whips of the Cossack soldiers, so now men brought up and educated by the Revolution were following their commissar through field and forest, regardless of hunger, suffering of all kinds and the ever-present danger of death.
Most of these men were young. They had learned to read and write from Soviet textbooks and had been taught by Soviet teachers. Before the war they had worked in Soviet factories and kolkhozes; they had read Soviet books and spent their holidays in Soviet houses of recreation. They had never seen a private landowner or factory owner; they could not even conceive of buying bread in a private bakery, being treated in a private hospital, or working on some landowner’s estate or in factories that belonged to some businessman.
Krymov could see that the pre-revolutionary order was simply incomprehensible to these young men. And now they found themselves on land occupied by German invaders, and these invaders were preparing to bring back those strange ways, to reintroduce the old order on Soviet soil.
Krymov had understood from the first days of the war that the German fascists were not only behaving with extraordinary cruelty, they also, in their blind arrogance, looked down on the Soviet people. Their attitude was one of mockery and contempt.
Old men and women, schoolgirls, young boys—everyone in the Soviet villages had been shocked by this colonialist arrogance. People brought up to believe in internationalism, in the equality of all workers, were not used to feeling themselves to be an object of scorn.
What Krymov’s men needed more than anything was certainty. So strong was their desire to overcome all doubt that they often chose to devote their short, precious hours of rest to serious discussion rather than to sleep.
There was one day when their position seemed hopeless; they were caught in a forest, encircled by a German infantry regiment. Even the bravest men were saying to Krymov that there was nothing for it but to scatter; each would have to try to make his own escape.
Krymov gathered his men in a forest clearing, stood on the trunk of a fallen pine and said, “Our strength comes from being together. The aim of the Germans is to separate us. We’re not an isolated particle, forgotten in a forest far behind German lines. Two hundred million hearts beat with us—the hearts of our two hundred million brothers and sisters. We will fight our way through, comrades!” Holding his Party membership card high above his head, he shouted, “Comrades, I swear to you that we will get through!”
And so they did—and continued on their way east.
And so they marched on—ragged, with swollen feet, suffering from bloody dysentery, but still carrying rifles and grenades, dragging along their four machine guns.
One starry autumn night, they fought their way across the German front line. When Krymov looked around at his troops, staggering from weakness yet still a force to be reckoned with, he felt both pride and joy. These men had walked hundreds of miles with him; he loved them with a tenderness beyond words.