114 On the deportations from the Caucasus, see Polyan, pp. 116–27.
115 Williams, p. 333.
116 For a discussion of Tatar ‘guilt’, see Alan Fisher, The Crimean Tatars (Stanford, CA, 1978), pp. 153–64.
117 Ibid., p. 166.
8 Exulting, Grieving and Sweating Blood
1 Accounts of the precise starting point vary because of the scale of the operation. In some places, the first shots were fired on 21 June. Elsewhere the starting date is taken as 22 or 23 June.
2 The front itself was about 450 miles long. Werth, pp. 860–1.
3 Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, RH2-2338, 1 (January 1944).
4 Belov, p. 468 (21 March 1944).
5 Ibid., p. 462 (28 November 1943).
6 Ibid., p. 465 (12 January 1944).
7 Ibid., p. 468 (13 March 1944).
8 Ibid., p. 470 (7 April 1944).
9 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, monthly report, March 1944, pp. 1–2.
10 Belov, p. 464 (12 December 1943); p. 465 (17 January 1944).
11 Ermolenko, p. 39.
12 See Catherine Merridale, ‘The Collective Mind’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35:1, January 2000, p. 41.
13 Generally, they were lumped together with other ‘amoral’ or ‘extraordinary’ incidents. If they were explained at all, it was with reference to any suicide note or final remark that existed. Since the soldiers themselves did not know the word ‘trauma’, they naturally attributed their agony to more immediate causes, often unrequited love or political disappointment. For examples from Belarus in 1944, see RGVA, 32925/1/516, 177.
14 For a parallel discussion of the death penalty in the British army at this time, see David French, ‘Discipline and the Death Penalty in the British Army in the War against Germany during the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 33:4, October 1998, pp. 531–45.
15 I am grateful to Professor Simon Wessely for drawing my attention to the correlation between the statistics for Soviet mental casualties and the average incidence of adult-onset schizophrenia.
16 Richard A. Gabriel, Soviet Military Psychiatry (Westport, CT, 1986), p. 47. This estimate is based on interviews with survivors and their psychologists, as a result of which Gabriel produced a rough figure of 6 per thousand mental casualties for the Red Army as a whole. However crude, this figure compares strikingly with the equivalent 36–39 per thousand in the US army in the Second World War.
17 See Night of Stone, p. 304. The consensus among psychiatrists in Russia had shifted by 2002, when I asked these questions again. Contact with European and American medicine had clearly changed the prevailing wisdom, at least among doctors currently in practice. But retired wartime medical staff, including nurses and psychiatrists interviewed in Kursk, Smolensk and Tbilisi, had not changed their position.
18 The point is made in Amnon Sella’s optimistic book. The Value of Human Life, p. 49.
19 Gabriel, p. 56.
20 I am grateful to Dr V. A. Koltsova, of the Moscow Institute for Military Psychology, for sharing this unpublished material with me in 2002. See also Albert R. Gilgen et al., Soviet and American Psychology during World War II (Westport, CT, 1997).
21 Gabriel, p. 63.
22 Some were released, although they carried the stigma of mental illness for ever. Many of these ended up in prison camps later in life. Others joined the colonies of the crippled in the White Sea and lived out their lives in isolation. The worst fate, probably, was to remain in a Soviet psychiatric hospital of this era.
23 Gabriel, pp. 42–8.
24 Vyacheslav Kondrat’ev, cited by George Gibian, ‘World War 2 in Russian National Consciousness,’ in Garrard and Garrard, World War II and the Soviet People (London, 1993), p. 153.
25 Order of the deputy defence commissar, no. 004/073/006/23 ss; 26 January 1944, Velikaya otechestvennaya, 2 (3), p. 241.
26 On the use of convicts for this work, see the captured report of the 4th tank army, Bundesarchiv RH-2471, p. 16, 4 August 1944. See also RH-2471, 33 (prisoner of war reports). Temkin (p. 124) also recalled that a convicted murderer was used for reconnaissance work in his own unit.
27 Viktor Astaf’ev, Tam, v okopakh (Vospominaniya soldata) (Moscow, 1986), p. 24.
28 Examples are to be found in GARF 7523/16/388, which contains the records of the commission that dealt with the reinstatement of medals to soldiers who had been convicted of crimes at the front.
29 Drobyshev, p. 94.
30 For a parallel from the British army in the First World War, see Frank Richards, Old Soldiers Never Die (London, 1933), p. 194.
31 Drobyshev, p. 94.
32 Vasily Chuikov, The End of the Third Reich, trans. Ruth Kisch (London, 1976), p. 40.
33 Drobyshev, p. 94.
34 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 14, p. 619; report dated 1 October 1944.
35 Lev Kopelev, No Jail for Thought, trans. Anthony Austin (London, 1977), p. 38.
36 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 2 (3), pp. 265–6.
37 Ibid., p. 295.
38 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 6, p. 247, on the sorry state of the kitchens in the reserve political units of the 2nd Baltic Front.
39 TsAMO, 523/41119s/1, 17; see also similar reports from German intelligence, RH2-2338, 10 (1944).
40 RGVA, 32925/1/516, 177 (April 1944).
41 RGVA, 32925/1/515, 139–40.
42 RGVA 32925/1/516, 4 and 178.
43 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 14, 590.
44 TsAMO, 523/41119s/1, 169.
45 Ermolenko, p. 52.
46 See Overy, pp. 238–9; Erickson, Berlin, pp. 198–200.
47 Chuikov, Third Reich, p. 27.
48 Belov, p. 469 (31 March 1944).
49 Ibid., pp. 473–4 (18 June 1944).
50 Glanz and House, p. 209.
51 Cited in Garthoff, p. 237.
52 Erickson, Berlin, p. 225.
53 RH2-2338, 44-07, 1‒2.
54 GASO, R1500/1/1, 63.
55 Chuikov, Reich, p. 28.
56 RH2-2467, 118, for the leave. Cash incentives for planes and ‘tongues, see RH2-2338.
57 Sidorov, pp. 99 and 108.
58 Pravda, 19 July 1944; Werth, p. 862.
59 Ermolenko, p. 46.
60 Ibid., p. 50.
61 Pis’ma s fronta i na front, p. 92.
62 Stalin, O velikoi otechestvennoi voine, pp. 145–6.
63 RH2-2338, March and April 1944.
64 See, for example, Pravda, 26 August 1944.
65 German intelligence reports consistently stressed this. See, for example, RH2-2338; 4408 (monthly intelligence report for August 1944).
66 On ethnically based Ukrainian nationalism, see Amir Weiner, Making Sense, pp. 240–1.
67 See Leo J. Docherty III, ‘The Reluctant Warriors: The Non-Russian Nationalities in Service of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945,’ JSMS, 6:3 (September 1993), pp. 432–3.
68 RH2-2468, 35.
69 Ibid., 80.
70 Ibid., 35 and 38.
71 Details from RGASPI, 17/125/241, 93–4.