And how was that possible? The answer is probably contained in the code, but perhaps it was also because this generation had not had an easy life. It was weighed down with the ballast of blunders and hopes, darkness and insights; it was seduced, persecuted and, who can say, perhaps redeemed.
Even before the war you were conscious of the spirit of the times. Misha Molochko spoke about the mission of your generation and the coming war against fascism. What effect did the USSR’s pact with Hitler have on you?
Immediately after the signing of the pact we were very disturbed and upset by it. Perhaps we even felt humiliated. The IPLH students from then on invariably referred to the Germans as ‘our implacable friends’.
That year I met a girl in the street who had been a fellow student of my elder brother and now worked as a translator in the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. She told me in confidence that translators who were Jewish were no longer being sent abroad on assignments and were beginning to be fired from the Commissariat. I thought to myself that seemed to be taking fraternization with the Germans too far, and in any case, why were we choosing to lose face and trying to curry favour with the Nazis?
A few years ago, when a journalist asked when I thought the Stalinist state had adopted a policy of anti-semitism, and persecution and repression of other peoples of the USSR, I suddenly remembered that conversation in the street so many years before, and I replied, ‘Since the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. They had only to start…’
At the institute, the board with its name in Russian and French was taken down and replaced with one in Russian and German. I remember an episode when the general discontent in the institute did surface. As part of the cultural events accompanying the pact and the exchanging of art, an old German film was dug out and delivered to IPLH. Word went round that the reel was very interesting and had been banned until recently. Lecture Theatre 15 was full to the rafters. A white screen had been erected over the stage. The reel had no sound so an accompanist was needed and a student, Lev Bezymensky, was identified as suitable and dragged up to the stage. To start with, he dutifully accompanied the images on the screen with neutral melodies, but suddenly took off, and when Siegfried mounted his horse, the piano belted out the Cossack, ‘Lads, Saddle up the Horses!’ After that there was no holding Lev, scene after scene! Brünnhilde’s appearance on a cliff high above the Rhine was accompanied by ‘To the Cliff Came Loveliest Katyusha.’ How the audience responded! They fell about laughing, guffawing, giving vent to their pent-up emotions.
On one occasion, after the fall of France, I saw seven or eight portly, respectable, self-satisfied Germans at the circus talking loudly and animatedly among themselves during the interval. I remember the wave of animosity that swept over me.
But the German language I loved. I was drawn to it, and was fortunate enough to have lessons for a year with a wonderful teacher, formerly the governess of Pyotr Stolypin’s children. From her I heard: ‘Sie haben eine Gabe für die deutsche Sprache.’ You have a gift for German. That was unforgettable. Alas, she died in the spring of that year, but I did not drop German. I enrolled in parallel with my school lessons on an extramural course at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages. I joined a circle conducted by the widow of Karl Liebknecht.
And earlier than that, before I was even at school, my grandfather would recite Heine to me by heart.
You wrote about your grandfather and this German teacher in Punctuation Marks, a novella about the 1930s. Today, talking to you about the book you are finishing, I am getting ever deeper insight into all you have written, into your memory, learning something about my own ancestors and the spirit of those times. So, for you young people destined to fight this war, the threat of hostilities did not seem to have receded after the pact was signed?
Perhaps to some extent it receded in time, but we were well aware war was inevitable. It was obvious. Already in Mein Kampf Hitler had written that he was not just interested in restoring Germany to its 1914 borders, but in conquering lands to the east. Russia must cease to exist and be repopulated by Germans. The fate of its population would depend on the extent to which slaves were required to cultivate these lands. After Russia, if his plan was successful, there would be no holding him. All of Europe was to be under the heel of Germany.
Why did the war start so catastrophically for us?
If we are going to talk about the beginning of the war, we have to go back to 1937–8 and Stalin’s terror. It is difficult to believe the extent to which the Red Army was vandalized. Of five marshals, three were liquidated. Almost without exception the commanders of armies, divisions, and even regiments were shot. When the trials began in Moscow, Hitler and Goebbels, who were constantly listening to radio reports, at first decided Stalin was murdering Jews, and were only puzzled that Litvinov had not yet been done away with.
‘Crisis in Russia and constant arrests. Now Stalin is going after the Red Army,’ Goebbels wrote on 3 February 1937. ‘The killings in Russia have the whole world agog. There is talk of an extremely serious crisis of Bolshevism. Voroshilov has issued an order to the army, singing the same old song about Trotskyites. Does anybody still believe all that? Russia is very longsuffering’ (5 June 1937). Finally Goebbels – Goebbels of all people! – comes to a conclusion he will repeat many times: ‘Stalin is mentally ill’ (10 July), he is destroying his own army!
How could Goebbels not rejoice at the news? ‘Since Stalin is himself shooting his generals, we will not have to.’ (This is in the entry for 15 March 1940, when Goebbels already had his eye on war.)
Shortly before the war, the newsreels showed footage of the last manoeuvres conducted by Tukhachevsky. They showed a tank–air assault for the first time. It makes an impressive spectacle, and was observed by military attachés and other foreign experts, among whom was General Guderian. After Tukhachevsky’s arrest, his theory, introducing new methods of warfare, was labelled as ‘wrecking’ and banned. Tank corps were disbanded and the tanks dispersed to army groupings. As the war developed, mechanized and tank corps and tank armies had to be reconstituted. The generals of the Wehrmacht, meanwhile, were assiduously adopting new methods, not a few of which had been demonstrated during Tukhachevsky’s exercises.
Stalin’s support enabled Germany to ratchet up its aggression in the West, but boomeranged back on the USSR. Hitler exploited the neutrality of the USSR to assault the Western countries with all his military might. He did not, however, place much reliance on the long-term stability of that neutrality and, just three months after concluding the non-aggression pact with Russia, announced to his generals on 23 November 1939, ‘We shall be able to attack Russia only after we are free in the West.’ With Russia obsessively on his mind, he was eager to achieve his goals in the West.
On 10 May 1940 Hitler moved against France. 136 German divisions were opposed to 135 French, British and Belgian divisions. Although the latter had the same number of tanks as the Germans, together with the powerful defences of the Maginot Line and the Belgian forts, the German Army with its dive bombers, massed introduction of tanks into battles, with its parachuting of troops, brought an entirely new dimension to its offensive which stunned and crushed the enemy. After six weeks, France surrendered.