But, all the same, victory must have felt sweet.
It did. Our victory was a tremendous achievement. But Stalin’s toast on the occasion of the victory, which we heard over the radio, left a permanently bitter taste. He failed to acknowledge, fulsomely, the courage, self-sacrifice and valour shown by our citizens: he praised only the endurance they had shown in the war. And even that mealy-mouthed praise he gave exclusively to the Russian people, isolating it and raising it up above the other nationalities of the USSR. People hung on every word uttered by The Leader, and that was how this toast was interpreted: Hosannah to the Russian People! The consequences were only too predictable in a country like ours. That precious sense of unity, of solidarity in a war to defend our Motherland without thinking twice about our race or nationality, was destroyed. Something mendacious was imposed: Big Brother Russia, relative to whom all the other nationalities and republics were junior. And that was as much as we got in place of that all-important sense and belief that we were all compatriots. It was bad news for everyone, including the Russians. What built up from that time has expressed itself in our days as an undisguised, sometimes highly aggressive, urge towards separatism, which is a threat to Russia.
You write that the situation was already changing in the postwar months while you were still in Germany, but nevertheless there was still some hope, an expectation of certain freedoms. Were those hopes completely dashed when you got back home?
After demobilization I returned home to Moscow in October 1945. I wrote a story not that long ago, Hearth and Home, about how difficult it was going back to this new old life I had lost touch with. Here I will only say that I so wanted, so much needed to hear a human voice addressing the living and the dead, addressing everything we had been through in the war. Instead the newspapers and radio only went back to banging on about targets Stalin had set for the output of pig iron and steel, the new five-year plan, and how people were no more than the cogs to fulfil it.
The very next Victory Day holiday, 9 May, Stalin turned into an ordinary working day, which is what it remained until the twentieth anniversary of victory when, with Stalin no longer around, it again became a day of major celebration.
Even the little signs of special respect for those who had been awarded medals were revoked, like free travel on public transport and other minor privileges. In short, in the minds of all those who had contributed to victory, what they had brought to the tragic battle for the country’s survival was belittled. The victory belonged to the state, not to the peoples of the USSR.
The big question was, where is Hitler? He was the personification of Nazism and if, after all the horrors of the war he had caused, he was alive and kicking, as Soviet propaganda claimed, what kind of victory was it anyway? It spread apathy among the population.
It is unquestionable that the discovery of Hitler’s body was an important historical fact, knowledge owed to our people and to history. Stalin, who had first set up our country for defeat by the enemy at the beginning of the war, Stalin, who concealed the truth about Hitler and turned his death into a state secret, cheated our people of their victory.
You mention in Berlin, May 1945 that Major Bystrov very much wanted the discovery of Hitler’s body made public and charged you with writing about it. Did he try to share the secret with anyone else?
When Bystrov and I were interrogating Käthe Heusermann once more before leaving Buch, Bystrov allowed the Pravda correspondent to sit in on the questioning. Martyn Merzhanov and the writer Boris Gorbatov had been reporting from Berlin on the storming of the Reichstag. Merzhanov sat there, and although Bystrov warned me not to translate, he did, of course, realize what was being discussed. Later, back in Moscow, he invited me to his home and introduced me to Klimenko, who was also visiting him. Merzhanov told me he had written to the Central Committee asking for authorization to publish a story about the identification of Hitler in Pravda, based on what he had gathered while present at our interrogation. Georgiy Alexandrov, Secretary of the Central Committee for Propaganda, told him, ‘The Politburo were agog reading your report,’ but Stalin noted on it, ‘Is this making him out to be a hero?’, meaning Hitler and the fact that he had stayed in Berlin to the end.
Many years later, Martyn Merzhanov, with whom I had maintained friendly relations, phoned and asked, ‘Yelena, can you help me? I’m going through my Berlin notebooks and I’ve got a note, “Tell Boris! Hitler’s teeth are with Kagan.” Who was Kagan?’
Well, yes, who was Kagan? After all this time nobody else would be likely to know.
Lyuba, Kagan was me! And all the reports and documents, of course, are signed with my name. When I began to get into print, Rzhev was the memory closest to my heart. My first stories were about that, and as there has been a conspiracy of silence about it in the history of the Patriotic War and it had been left without a voice, I took ‘Rzhevskaya’ as my pen name, and that has been my name for the past forty-five years.
The first stories I wrote were about the war around Rzhev. Quick verbal sketches in my notebook, scraps of dialogue, reflections while we were on the move, later proved, to a greater or lesser degree, to be the raw material, or the prompt, for stories. It happened that the tone of the writing in a notebook somehow evolved of its own accord. I still sometimes glance in one, something jumps out, opens up to me. Even a soldier’s naughty word, caught and written down in a notebook, is terribly affecting.
The person conducting my seminar at the Gorky Literary Institute approved of my writing and advised me to get it published. I worked up a cycle of stories, ‘At Rzhev’, and took it to a magazine. They gave it back to me: ‘Your stories are sad. They are about everyday details of war which are probably not really worth describing. People are tired of the war.’ And that was the end for me of writing about the war for a long time. I was not aware of how deeply this topic was embedded in me. I felt I had written as well as I could.
You returned to Moscow bearing the burden of feeling you had a duty to history and already knowing you had the vocation of a writer, but you were really very young by today’s standards – just twenty-five. You had yet to graduate from the Literary Institute, to find your own voice, and on top of all that to resolve some difficult issues of where to live and how to earn a living.
Lyuba, I won’t go into all the ups and downs of the twenty years that passed before the first publication of Berlin, when I managed to tell the whole truth about the death of Hitler and the discovery of his body, and to back up my eyewitness account with documents. That is for another book, which I intend to write. I want to write about it with all the details of life at that time in reminiscences that will be a continuation of Hearth and Home. It was a long, difficult journey.
Yes, I had a mission to make public the secret of the century, that we had found Hitler’s body. The way it turned out, none of the people caught up in those historic events was present at every stage of them except me, because you cannot get by without an interpreter. And none of the other participants had ever taken up the pen, or had any intention of doing so. People pinned their hopes on me to write about it because after I was demobilized I would be going to study at the Literary Institute. I myself had no intention of leaving these things hidden away, and my silence weighed heavily on me, but these facts had been classified a state secret and the price for disclosing them would have been seven to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Quite a long time. I had to watch history being distorted without saying anything, confiding only in close friends.