257 “Film is the most important art form…”—Very loosely after Shostakovich and Volkov, Testimony, p. 149.
258 Footnote: The New York Times’s opinion of Karmen’s documentary on the Nuremberg Trials (“Judgment of the Peoples”), The New York Times Film Reviews 1913-1968, vol. 3 (of 6): 1939-1948, p. 2184 (Bosley Crowther, “The Nuremberg Trials,” May 26, 1947; 24:2), full sentence substantially abridged by WTV. As for his film on Albania, the Times considered that less effective than I. Kopalin and P. Atasheva’s documentary about the liberation of Czechoslovakia (p. 2128, “At the Stanley,” July 15. 1946, 21:1).
258 Burt Lancaster: Karmen’s “passionate love for life and people…”—Roman Karmen: Retrospektive, p. 78 (Sergej Drobaschenko, “Roman Karmen”), trans. WTV.
259 Great Soviet Encyclopedia on “Far and Wide My Country Stretches”—Vol. 19, p. 214. The New York Times ridicules this movie for its excess of high-speed automobile driving and the stiffness of the alternating male and female narrators (the former is Karmen himself; the latter is E. Dolmatovsky). All the same, the Times enjoys the steel mills of Magnitogorsk, the oil fields of the Caspian and the log raft in the Carpathians. “Far and Wide” seems to be almost all travelogue (The New York Times Film Reviews 1913-1968, vol. 5 [1970], p. 3134 [Bosley Crowther, “Great Is My Country,” July 1, 1959; 26:1]).
259 Castro: “In the name of our people we thank you…”—Roman Karmen: Retrospektive, p. 69, trans. WTV.
259 Allende: “My friend Roman Karmen”—Ibid., p. 70, trans. WTV.
259 Moscow Kinoslovar on the character of Karmen’s films—After S. I. Yutkevich et al., p. 674, trans. WTV. I have somewhat reordered and abridged the items on the original eye-glazing list. In spite of my italics, this is not a direct quote at all, but a second-generation paraphrase.
260 Epigraph: “With few, but courageous allies…”—Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 287 (entry for 8 January 1944).
262 Footnote: Vlasov’s wife: “Andrei, can you really live like that?”—Catherine Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Émigré Theories (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 39. Vlasov’s wife was actually not the allegorical Moscow figurine of my conception, but a doctor from a tiny village in the province of Nizhni Novgorod. She was indeed arrested and executed after his defection. They had a small son, whose fate I don’t know.
261 Vlasov’s recommendations to Stalin—Not much is known about them, although the two men did have some such conference. Given that Vlasov was in good odor after the Battle of Moscow, I decided to put into his mouth the strategy which actually got followed.
261 Stalin: “Anybody can defend Moscow with reserves”—Harold Shukman, ed., Stalin’s Generals (New York: Grove Press, 1993), p. 304 (Catherine Andreyev, “Vlasov”).
261 Number of Twentieth Army’s tanks during the Battle of Moscow—Erickson, p. 534.
265 “What the enemy called Kesselschlacht, cauldron-slaughter.” Mr. Thomas Melle notes (letter to author, September 2003): “A little semantic confusion crept in here: ‘to slaughter’ means ‘schlachten’ (animals, Slaughterhouse-Five, etc.); ‘Schlacht’ means ‘battle’ or ‘fight’ and the plural of ‘Schlacht’ is “Schlachten’—‘to slaughter’ and ‘battles’ being the same word in German. I think ‘cauldron battle’ would be more appropriate. In a dictionary it says ‘battle of encirclement and annhilation.’” I myself rest my artistic and semantic case.
265 General K. A. Meretskov: “If nothing is done then a catastrophe is inevitable.” —Shukman, p. 305.
266 Guderian: “These men remain essentially unable to break free…”—Heinz Guderian, Achtung-Panzer! The Development of Tank Warfare, trans. Christopher Duffy (Reading, Berkshire, U.K.: Cassell Military Paperbacks; orig. German ed. 1937), p. 24 (“retranslated”).
266 Vlasov’s commissar: “Everything you say may be correct from the military viewpoint…”—Roughly after Sewern Bialer, ed., Stalin and His Generals: Soviet Military Memoirs of World War II (New York: Pegasus, 1969), p. 252 (memoir of Marshal I. Kh. Bagramian).
271 Vlasov’s capture—Accurately told, except that he was captured with a woman named Maria Voronova, who was the family servant in Nizhni Novgorod and whom Vlasov’s wife actually dispatched to him to take care of him. Since her presence raises several issues not relevant to the parable, I decided to leave her out.
272 Vlasov to General Lindemann and Lindemann’s reply: “Would a German officer in my place have shot himself?”—“Capture’s no disgrace for someone like you, who’s fought with his unit up to the very last instant…”—Loosely after an exchange between Vlasov and the German intelligence officer who captured him, Captain von Schwerdtner, indirectly quoted in Sven Steenberg, Vlasov, trans. Abe Farbstein (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970 trans. of 1968 German ed.), p. 28.
275 The German policeman-poet: Vinnitsa, where “we saw two worlds, and will permit only one to rule”—Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess, “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, trans. Deborah Burnstone (Old Saybrook, Connecticut: Konecky and Konecky, 1991, repr. of 1988 German ed.), p. 123 (my trans.; the English given on the following page differs slightly).
277 Jewish casualties at Babi Yar—Most Western sources estimate that about thirty-three thousand people were murdered. Soviet sources sometimes say seventy thousand. The eyewitness A. Anatoli Kuzentsov gives the figure of one hundred thousand in his “documentary novel” Babi Yar.
277 Boyarsky: “When the Jews saw how easy it was to be executed, they ran to the pits of their own free will.”—Slightly rephrased from the statement of a German customs official who saw the Jews being machine-gunned in Vinnitsa. The eyewitness estimated that “some thousands” were shot “over the total period” (Klee et al, p. 119).
279 Tukhachevsky: “It is necessary to observe the promise of privileged treatment to those who surrender voluntarily with their arms.”—Chaliand, p. 916 (“Counterinsurgency”).
281 Strik-Strikfeldt: “Vlasov spoke openly, and I did also, insofar as my oath of service permitted me”—Op. cit., p. 73 (slightly reworded).
281 Vlasov: “Only if I put human values before nationalist values…”—Ibid., p. 75 (a little altered).
281 Vlasov: “The Soviet regime has brought me no personal disadvantages,” “At Przemysl… my proposals were rejected,” “Two factors must entail… interference from the commissars.”—Ibid., pp. 253-54 (Appendix II: “General Vlasov’s Open Letter: Why I Took Up Arms Against Bolshevism”; somewhat abridged and altered).
283 Strik-Strikfeldt: “It’s an admirable document, but, as drafted, too Russian”—Ibid., p. 76 (slightly altered).
285 Strik-Strikfeldt: “I grant that thousands of Russian prisoners have died…” —Loosely after the argument advanced by General Jodl at his war crimes trial in Nuremberg; see Gilbert, p. 253 (10 April 1946).