On 18 September 1942, in the factory district of Stalingrad, a regimental commissar named Dmitri Petrakov was knocked unconscious by a blast. When he came round in a medical tent he wrote to his daughter:
My little black-eyed Mila, I'm sending you a cornflower.... Just imagine—the battle's on, enemy shells bursting all around, craters around us and a flower growing here.... And suddenly an explosion ... the cornflower is torn off. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.... The flower had grown, reached for the sun but had been torn off by an explosion, and if I hadn't picked it up it would have been trampled upon.
He was killed the following summer on the way into Orel. There are ninety-odd documents in this book and most of them are like that one: written on a knee, on a scrap, on the back of a Party card, by people who knew they had hours left and used them to say something to one person. A nineteen-year-old in Slutsk, whose name is not known, wrote to a boy called Borya: "Yesterday, when they walloped me very hard, I whispered to myself 'Borya, dear' and told them nothing—I don't want them to hear your name." Vera Porshneva, twenty-four, who had had needles driven under her fingernails in a barn cellar near Borisovka, wrote to her mother: "I've been without food now for two days and nights, but it's easier to die on an empty stomach. You know, Mum, it's such a pity to die." Bina Lurje of the 1st Latvian Volunteer Regiment, dying in the street fighting for Tallinn in August 1941: "It's hard to die at 24, but for such a worthy cause, when millions of lives are held in the balance of history, I, too, give my life."
The three lines scratched on the walls of the Brest Fortress between 22 June and 20 July 1941 are among the shortest texts in the history of the war and among the hardest to read without stopping:
There were five of us: Sedov, I. Grutov, Bogolyub, Mikhailov, V. Selivanov. We fought the first attack on 22.VI.1941 at 3.15. We shall die but not retreat! We'll die but won't desert the fortress. I am dying but won't surrender! Farewell, my country. 20/VII-41.
This is primary testimony of the largest and most destructive campaign ever fought. Between June 1941 and May 1945 the Soviet Union lost something in the region of twenty-seven million people, soldiers and civilians together—the overwhelming majority of all Allied deaths in Europe, and a share of the whole war's dead that no other belligerent approaches. The great majority of German military deaths in the war—by most estimates three-quarters or more—were inflicted on the Eastern Front. Every serious account of the war rests on that arithmetic, and the people in this book are the arithmetic: the border guards on the Zhitomir–Kiev highway who fought sixteen tanks for an hour and a half with rifles and were buried, 136 of them, by peasants from the neighbouring villages; the sailors on the Takhkun horn of Dago Island who put their farewell in a bottle and threw it into the sea, where a Soviet patrol vessel found it that winter; Katya Susanina in Liozno, a slave to a German landowner, who wrote to her father on her fifteenth birthday and hanged herself, having sewn the envelope into the brickwork of an oven where it was found after the liberation. Whatever one concludes about the state that published this collection, those things happened and these are the words of the people they happened to. That is the book's first and permanent value, and it does not depend on the frame around it.
It is worth saying plainly what the frame is, because the frame is where an introduction's business lies.
The book appeared in 1965, and 1965 is not an accidental year. Khrushchev, who had reasons of his own for keeping the war at arm's length, had allowed the anniversary to pass quietly through the late fifties. Within months of his removal in October 1964 the new leadership restored 9 May as a public holiday and staged the first Victory parade on Red Square since 1945. The twentieth anniversary became a state occasion, and remained one; the cult of the war that would define Brezhnev's Soviet Union for the next eighteen years dates from that spring. Letters From the Dead is an export edition timed to it, put out in English by Progress for readers abroad. That does not make the documents in it false. It does explain the apparatus.
The apparatus consists of an unsigned introduction, "To Those Who Survived", and a headnote after each document giving the writer's biography and the circumstances. The headnotes are, on the whole, good—researched, specific, and often restrained, telling you where a letter was found and in whose pocket. The introduction is another matter. It reads the letters as evidence for a thesis: "Through the innumerable acts of heroism we can feel the unbroken spirit, the intrepid faith in victory over fascism, the supremacy of communist over fascist ideas." Many of these people were indeed Communists and Komsomol members and say so; the state that mobilised them, armed them and evacuated its industry beyond the Urals was a real state and its capacity was real. But a book that has just quoted a girl saying it is easier to die on an empty stomach does not need to be told what her death proves.
Four things about the frame are worth reporting.
The first is what the introduction does with the catastrophe of 1941. It says: "At first losses were many and defeats common. In defence Soviet troops stood firm, then switched to the offensive." Nothing more. The destruction of the Soviet air force on the ground in the opening days, the encirclements at Minsk, Smolensk and Kiev, the millions taken prisoner in the first six months—none of it is explained, and no one is responsible for it. The reason is not in the book because it could not be. Stalin had beheaded his own officer corps in 1937–38; he had refused to credit the intelligence that reached him about the concentration facing the frontier; and he had treated the pact of August 1939 as a settled orientation rather than a manoeuvre. The Fourth International said so at the time. In June 1942, in an assessment of the war's first year, James Cadman wrote that while "lack of fighting spirit was certainly not one of the causes of the Red Army defeats," it was "on the shoulders of the Stalinist bureaucracy that the responsibility for the defeats lie"—the Soviet press having, days before the attack, been "vehemently denying all reports of the impending clash" (Fourth International, vol. III no. 6, June 1942). Ernest Mandel put the same judgement in its longer form forty years later: the purges "decapitated the Red Army, disorganised the defences of the country, delivered Poland and Europe to Hitler, and facilitated the Nazi attack on the USSR," while the industrial base built by the Five Year Plans "enabled the Soviet Union to survive in the end" (The Meaning of the Second World War, ch. 2, "The Immediate Causes", p. 33). Both halves of that sentence matter. (Mandel's own text misdates the signature of the Secret Additional Protocol by four days; it was signed on the night of 23 August 1939.)
The second is a name that is not here. Stalin does not appear in this book. Not once—not in the introduction, not in a headnote, not in a letter. "Stalingrad" appears; the man does not. In 1965 he had been out of the Mausoleum for four years and was not yet back in the war's official story, and the compilers evidently found it safest to write a book about the Soviet war in which the Soviet commander-in-chief has no existence at all. It is a strange silence and readers should notice it, because it is the clearest single indication of how much of this volume is a document of 1965 rather than of 1941.
The third is the one place where the book prints something that is not true. The introduction invokes "the famous 28 Panfilov men who fought to the last man" at Dubosekovo. The episode was a newspaper invention: the Soviet Chief Military Prosecutor's office investigated it in 1948, established that the Krasnaya Zvezda correspondents had constructed the story, found that several of the twenty-eight were alive, and filed a report that was suppressed and only published in the 1990s. The compilers of this book cannot be blamed for believing it—every Soviet schoolchild was taught it, and it is still defended in Russia today. But the contrast is instructive, and it is the strongest argument for reading this collection: Vinogradov's note counting off his dead comrades one by one is a real piece of paper and it did not need improving.
The fourth concerns who is counted. Jews are mentioned twice in this book, both times in a single headnote, as one of the categories—"Soviet officers, Communists, Jews or Russians"—that the Germans picked out for killing at the hospital Leonid Silin ran under false pretences at Kremenchug. Something on the order of two and a half million Jews were murdered on Soviet soil, most of them shot in pits within walking distance of their homes in the first eighteen months of the occupation. They appear here, when they appear, as Soviet citizens, and the specific machinery that hunted them is not described. The introduction mentions the "Death Fortress" the Germans set up outside Kaunas, and mentions it as a place where anti-fascists of many nations were held together—which is true, and which is also the site where tens of thousands of Lithuanian Jews and Jews deported from western Europe were shot. That erasure was Soviet policy, not the compilers' private choice, and it deserves to be named without being turned into a stick.
Prisoners of war are the one place where the book is braver than one expects. Soviet POWs are here in numbers and they are here honourably—the note from the Chistyakov camp, Boris Nozdrin's diary from Vesprem, written weeks before he was shot with thousands of others as the front approached, dreaming of Siberia and a woman called Masha. This matters because for years after the war captivity was itself treated as a stain in the Soviet Union, and returning prisoners were filtered, and many were sent on to camps of their own. That story is nowhere in the volume. Its shadow, however, falls across the book's most famous inclusion. Musa Jalil, the Tatar poet, was taken wounded near Myasnoi Bor in 1942 and worked inside the Idel-Ural legion the Germans raised from Soviet Muslim prisoners—the headnote says so, calling it the "'Ideal Urals' committee," and says he was there "on instructions from the underground." He was arrested in August 1943, condemned, and executed in Berlin in 1944, having copied out sixty of his prison poems and left them with a request:
If this little book comes into your hands, write out a fair copy carefully and accurately, keep it in a safe place and after the war get it to Kazan, have it published as the poems of the Tatar people's dead poet. That is my dying wish.
The book records, without dates, that he was "posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union" and the Lenin Prize. What it does not record is the interval. For years after the war Jalil was carried on Soviet lists as a suspected traitor because of the legion, and his family lived under that; the notebooks—one handed to the Tatar Union of Writers in 1946, one delivered to the Soviet consulate in Brussels in 1947 by André Timmermans, the Belgian who had shared his cell—had to argue his case for him before the honours came in the mid-1950s. A man wrote poems in Moabit prison asking that they be got to Kazan, and it was the poems that eventually cleared his name. The book prints the request and passes over the reason it was necessary.
None of that is a charge against anyone in these pages. It is a description of what a 1965 anniversary volume could and could not say, and it should be held apart from the documents, which owe the frame nothing. Mandel, who was unsparing about Stalin, was equally clear about who won the war: "No amount of exhortation by the state, party or military leadership would have succeeded without this determination of the Soviet masses to fight and win the war" (The Meaning of the Second World War, ch. 3, "The Social Forces", pp. 37–38). That is the right way round, and it is what this book, read against its own introduction, actually shows. The Soviet people were not the instruments of the victory. They were the victory, and they paid for it at a rate no other people paid, partly because of what their own government had done to them beforehand.
Read the letters. They are short, and there is nothing in them that needs an editor's help.