The emotional climax of this book is a piece of German police paperwork.
Nikolai Kuznetsov — the intelligence officer who spent two years in Rovno in the uniform of a Wehrmacht lieutenant named Paul Siebert, who shot the Reich Finance Adviser Funk, kidnapped General Ilgen, and killed the deputy governor of Galicia in a Lvov street in broad daylight — disappears in March 1944. Medvedev does not know what happened to him. What he has, and what he prints, is a copy of an urgent telegram to Berlin found afterwards in the papers of the Lvov Gestapo:
"This agent (the German documents give his name as Paul Siebert) has been recognised. He is a Soviet partisan—a spy and wrecker, who was active for a long time in Rovno with impunity. Among other crimes he murdered Dr. Funk and kidnapped General Ilgen."
And, at the end of it: "A communication has been received from the Pritzmann field group that Paul Siebert and his two accomplices have been shot."
That is the whole of the evidence. The only account of Kuznetsov's death in this book is the one written by the people who say they killed him, in the vocabulary of the people who killed him — spy and wrecker, crimes, murdered. Medvedev quotes it without comment and writes the next sentence himself: "Thus died Nikolai Kuznetsov, our comrade-in-arms."
Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. The half-title reads Library of Soviet Literature — which settles a question our own catalogue had left open, since the series attribution had been the Internet Archive cataloguer's and not the book's. It is the book's.
The credits leaf carries two lines:
TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY DAVID SKVIRSKY DESIGNED BY V. BELYUKIN
David Skvirsky is the editor of record on Polevoi's A Story About a Real Man elsewhere in this collection; here he is the translator. The house's English was made by a very small number of people.
And, for the third FLPH volume in a row, there is no date and no copyright line anywhere in the book. The last leaf gives the Russian title and "Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", and nothing else.
Our catalogue says 1950. Two things in the volume say otherwise.
The first is that Russian title: ДМИТРИЙ МЕДВЕДЕВ, СИЛЬНЫЕ ДУХОМ (ЭТО БЫЛО ПОД РОВНО). Medvedev published Это было под Ровно in 1948 and then rewrote and expanded it as Сильные духом in 1951. The English title Stout Hearts (This Happened Near Rovno) translates the 1951 book with the 1948 title in brackets, exactly as the Russian title page does — so the translation is of the later version and cannot precede it.
The second is the back matter, which advertises four books, among them Yuri Pilyar's account of two years in Mauthausen and S. Smirnov, _Heroes of Brest Fortress_, of which the advertisement says: "The author spent several years tirelessly looking up the Brest Fortress heroes and studying material about them." Smirnov's search for the survivors of Brest was a public campaign of the mid-1950s. A volume advertising its results is not a volume of 1950.
Record the printing as undated. This is now the third FLPH book in this strand whose catalogue date has come from a library record rather than from the object.
Now the count, and here it is very short.
NKVD: zero. Chekist: zero. State Security: zero. The letters do not appear. Neither does Stalin as a person: thirteen occurrences, all of them inside Stalingrad. Lenin appears nine times, the Party thirty-two, Communist seven, Komsomol once.
What does the work instead is a pair of words. Moscow, eighty-one times, and "our Command" — with its variants, thirty-four. Men are sent, recalled, supplied, decorated and reported to by Moscow and by the Command, and the reader is never told what either of them is.
Here is what they were.
Dmitry Nikolayevich Medvedev (1898–1954) was a colonel of the NKVD. From June 1942 to September 1944 he commanded the special-purpose partisan detachment "Победители" — the Victors — of the Fourth Directorate of the NKVD, operating in the Rovno and Lvov regions; Nikolai Kuznetsov was one of the men dropped with it. Medvedev was made Hero of the Soviet Union in 1944. None of that is in this book. The English reader is given a commander, a detachment, an airfield at Tushino, fifty volunteers, and no institution at all.
This matters less as concealment than as a category claim. Stout Hearts is published in a series called the Library of Soviet Literature, as a book about partisans. Partisans, in the Soviet account and in most others, are a popular movement: people in occupied territory who take up arms where they live. The Victors were not that. They were parachuted in, trained, equipped, directed by radio, and tasked from Moscow, and their most celebrated member was not a partisan at all but an agent working under cover in enemy uniform. The book is a good operational memoir of a special-forces and intelligence operation, presented as a story of the people in arms.
Medvedev himself is not coy about the substance — he describes the radio traffic, the forged papers, the mobile groups, the running of agents inside Rovno — only about the name. And the effect on a reader who does not know the name is real: the volume reads as though a body of local volunteers had spontaneously produced a man who could walk into the Reichskommissar's headquarters in a German uniform.
It is much better written than it needs to be, and it begins with a small, disarming scene.
Fifty selected volunteers assemble at Tushino airfield one morning in April 1942 for their first parachute jump. Medvedev notices them being noisy: "the uneasy looks these 'jovial' chaps cast about them eloquently betrayed what they really felt." Someone asks whether it is frightening. And the commander says, on the record, that it is: "There's nothing to be done. Frightening or not, we have to jump." The men are astonished to hear it, and he fills the remaining half hour with a story about his own first jump — off a shed, in 1907, aged eight, in a workers' settlement in Byelorussia, because there was nothing else to do while the grown-ups had their party.
That is a good opening for a book by a colonel of state security, and it is characteristic. Medvedev writes short chapters — there are forty of them, most between one and three thousand words — each built round one operation, one person, or one death. He is precise about logistics, about distances (a hundred and twenty kilometres from Rovno to the camp, forty-eight hours for a messenger on foot), and about the arithmetic of what his detachment did. His own balance sheet, delivered flatly from a hospital bed in Moscow:
In the battles and skirmishes with the enemy we had destroyed nearly twelve thousand officers and men. Compared with that figure our own losses were small: a hundred and ten killed and two hundred and thirty wounded.
He is also, in the chapter "A Ghastly New Order", one of the few writers in this collection to say plainly what happened to the Jews. "In every town and village the nazis forced all the Jews to register." The Jewish population of Rovno and the surrounding districts, he writes, "was exterminated at the close of August in strict conformity to a plan": taken out of the town in large groups, made to dig their own graves, shot, and pushed into the holes without anyone stopping to see who was dead. "The vandals spared nobody, neither old folks nor babes in arms." And then the detail that does the work of a page of argument: the Germans warned the population on pain of death against assisting Jews, and offered a reward for informers — "a kilogram of salt for every Jew betrayed."
Medvedev saw the 1946 documentary of the Nuremberg trial and records that it "showed me nothing I did not see in 1942" in the districts of West Ukraine. Readers of Polevoi's volume in this series will recognise the courtroom; Polevoi was in it, and built a novel out of what Goering said there. Medvedev's version is blunter and, on this subject, more reliable.
The centre of the book is a chapter called "Received by Koch", and it is worth setting out because it is the most extraordinary thing in the collection.
In May 1943 Valya Dovger, a young woman working in Rovno as Kuznetsov's cover, receives word that Erich Koch, Reichskommissar of the Ukraine, will see her at four that afternoon about her application not to be deported to Germany — and that she should bring Senior Lieutenant Siebert, since the Gauleiter will want to see that a German officer is interceding for her. Kuznetsov has no time to ask Moscow for instructions; Valya asks whether they can go without permission, and he answers that he will take his decision on the spot. (Both scans mangle the contraction that opens his reply, so it is given here without quotation marks.)
They drive down Rovno's main street, renamed Friedrichstrasse. Kuznetsov is in new parade uniform with a Nazi party badge, two wound ribbons and two Iron Crosses, a pistol in the holster on his left side and a second in his pocket with the safety catch released. Valya wears a crêpe mourning band and carries a police certificate, supplied by the detachment, stating that her father was killed by partisans — which the reader knows to be a forgery, because the book has already described how Konstantin Dovger was in fact seized by nationalists, beaten for information, tied with barbed wire and drowned in the river.
On the steps Valya asks whether he will shoot. Kuznetsov's answer, as the volume sets it: "I'm sure I can kill him."
He is not allowed in. Valya goes first, alone, into a study where the desk stands at an angle in the corner, where two guards sit between her and Koch and a third stands at the window, and where an Alsatian lies at his feet — "Good lord, how the man's guarded!" she thinks. Koch, "a big, corpulent man with a Hitler moustache and long reddish eyelashes", tells her she has German blood and "To beat the Bolsheviks, everybody must do his bit."
Then Siebert is called in. What follows is an interview between the Reichskommissar of the Ukraine and a Soviet agent, and it runs on small talk. Where were the crosses won — France, and the Eastern Front. What is he doing now — supply, in his sector. Which sector: "The Kursk Front." Where was he born — East Prussia, forty kilometres from Königsberg. "Ah, we come from the same place." Have the recent events frightened many — "You mean Stalingrad? No, they have only fortified our spirits."
And then Koch, pleased with himself, tells him to bear in mind that the Führer is preparing a surprise for the Russians in his Kursk sector.
Kuznetsov did not shoot, and explains why afterwards in terms that are entirely professional: the curtains, the guards, "that damned dog at your feet. They would have seized me before I could move." Koch's "fate is sealed, but he will be destroyed without risk to the detachment, to you or to me." And then the line that is the whole point of the chapter:
"All in all, this meeting has been useful. Koch told me that Hitler is planning an offensive in the Kursk sector, and we mustn't forget that Koch has only just come back from Berlin. The news therefore is fresh. We must report it quickly."
Whatever one concludes about the book's silences, that is what the detachment was for, and Medvedev tells it without a word of self-congratulation. He also lets Kuznetsov have the joke: "To think that an East Prussian like Koch never dreamed he was talking to a Soviet partisan who has never been to Germany in his life."
The best sustained writing is the Kuznetsov material — the invention of Paul Siebert, the forged papers "better than genuine", the long nerve-shredding business of a Soviet officer going to dinner parties in Rovno with the men he intends to kill. And the best single paragraph in the book is the one about the radio bulletin from Stockholm. Medvedev, in hospital, hears at ten to midnight that two German officials have been shot in a Lvov street by an unidentified man in German uniform, and that the killer escaped. He knows instantly who it was. He tries to sit up, the pain forces him back, he rings the bell — and then stops himself:
This was all unnecessary: I should not have called anyone. A nurse entered. "Please bring me a headache pill," I said. She went out. There was nobody here who would be interested to hear my news.
A man in a secret service learning, in a public ward, that his friend is alive, and asking for an aspirin.
Three of them, and they should be read with the same attention as the good pages.
The first is the treatment of the Ukrainian nationalist insurgency, which the detachment fought alongside the Germans as a matter of daily routine and which the book handles entirely through the vocabulary of criminality. Nationalists appear as "spies and traitors" who "organised gangs of kulaks and criminals"; German operations against the partisans are reinforced with "nationalist gangs of bandits". That the OUN and UPA collaborated with the occupation at various points, fought the Soviets, and carried out massacres of their own is not in dispute. But a reader is given no political account of them whatever — no programme, no social base, no history, not even a name. "Bandera" does not occur in the book. The largest armed movement in the territory Medvedev operated in is present only as banditry.
The second is a silence in the epilogue. Valya Dovger, the young woman who worked as Kuznetsov's cover and who was arrested after he left, is tortured by the Gestapo, tells them nothing, is taken out to be shot, is moved to Lvov and then to Germany. "V-Day found Valya in a concentration camp in Germany: from there she returned home." That is the whole of it. What returning home from a German camp meant for Soviet citizens in 1945 — the filtration, the suspicion, the careers foreclosed — is not a subject this book can approach, and the sentence walks straight past it.
The third is more general. The epilogue is a roll-call of former partisans settled into peaceful work: factories, collective farms, institutes, a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Ukraine, a boy who is now a car mechanic and wears his Partisan Medal First Class with pride. It is warm and, so far as it goes, true. It is also written in 1951 by an officer of the organisation that spent those same years filling camps, and it contains not one shadow of that. The men come home and the country receives them. Nobody in this book is ever afraid of Moscow.
Stout Hearts is the first title in this strand that is not fiction and was not written by a writer, and that makes it the sharpest test of what the series is for.
The book's virtues are real and belong to its author: courage, competence, an eye, a refusal to inflate his own part, and a plain statement about the murder of the Jews of Rovno at a date when plain statements on that subject were becoming rarer in Soviet print, not commoner. Twelve thousand German casualties against a hundred and ten of his own dead is, if the figure is anywhere near right, an extraordinary return, and he does not boast about it.
The book's limits are institutional, and they are not the author's private failings. A memoir by a serving officer of state security, published by a state publisher, in a series of literature, for export, cannot say what organisation it is about, cannot describe its enemies politically, and cannot notice what its own service was doing at home. The result is a document that is simultaneously honest and structurally incapable of telling the truth about itself — which is a fair description of a great deal of Soviet publishing, and the reason for reading these volumes with the apparatus in view.
The ebook was built, until now, with thirty of the book's forty chapters.
The printed contents runs over two leaves. The build's chapter list had been taken from the first leaf and stopped at "Retribution", so everything from "In a New Camp" to the "Epilogue" — printed pages 182 to 234, nine chapters including Kuznetsov's disappearance and the whole of the ending — was swallowed into a single division of nearly nineteen thousand words. A tenth chapter, "Marfa Strucinska", had been written off as unproved because the contents page OCR'd her surname as Strucitiska; the heading is set perfectly cleanly in the body. All eleven have been restored, and the volume now divides exactly as the printed contents does, with the text accounted for to within one part in two thousand.
It is worth saying where the error came from, because it is the same error twice: both times a contents page was trusted over the body of the book. The contents page is the worse witness. It is set in smaller type, it is full of leader dots, and it is the first thing a scanner gets wrong.
Read it for the Rovno chapters, which are the best account in English by a participant of what running an agent inside an occupied city actually involved.
Read "A Ghastly New Order" as testimony, and remember that the man writing it had been there in 1942 and was comparing it, in his own mind, to the film of the Nuremberg trial.
And read the last chapter with the Gestapo telegram in front of you. Medvedev's finest friend vanishes, and the only paper that survives to tell him what became of him is the enemy's. He prints it whole, in the enemy's words, because it is all there is. That is an act of documentary honesty, and it sits in a book that cannot print the three letters that would explain who Medvedev was.