War and Peace

April 20, 1945. Just a few days remain before the war with Germany will end. Japan will hold out for a few months longer. The war is ending, ending, ending... You can feel it in the air, thick with thoughts and feelings of hope.

Yet military actions continue as before, with horrific exasperation. On April 16, the Soviet Army began its Berlin operation,

attacking on three fronts. The three marshals: Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky all understand that the Germans cannot hold out for long, but they also understand very well that, if the allies enter Berlin before they do, then they, the marshals, will have to answer to Stalin. And so, onward they press. No amount of casualties will slow them down. Death always weighs heavily, yet to die in the last weeks of the war, knowing that the guns will soon fall silent, is twice as heavy a weight to bear. But soldiers are a dependent sort; they follow orders. And of course they too want to crush Berlin as quickly as possible. So the troops tear forward.

After Zhukov’s famous predawn attack, in which tanks and infantry surged forward, lit by 143 searchlights and supported by the rolling thunder of thousands of Soviet artillery guns, the German defenses were broken. Watering every centimeter of the Seelow Heights with their and German blood, Soviet troops quickly began to advance on Berlin. And the allies moved on the German capital from the west. They had crossed the Rhine in March and then, day-by-day, had methodically taken Germany’s western lands. German troops clearly preferred to surrender to the allies, rationally concluding that it was better to end up in an American jail than in a camp in Kolyma. The allies could have arrived in Berlin rather quickly, but, to the satisfaction of the Soviet marshals, the allied commanders held back their troops, seeking to advance with minimal losses.

But of course there was too the war in the Pacific, which also continued to claim thousands of lives on both sides. The Americans had not even managed to consolidate their victory on Iwo Jima after the most difficult of battles, when, on April 1, they began their attack on Okinawa. The battle would rage there for several months, and thousands of American soldiers would perish. Hundreds of Japanese kamikazes would carry out their pointless, suicidal flights...

And, on top of all this, in the first months of 1945, humankind began to find out about things more horrific than any war. In February, the world learned about the ovens at Auschwitz – the camp had been liberated on January 26; in April it saw photographs of the starving inmates at Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dachau... The outlines of a massive, worldwide catastrophe became clear, forcing humankind to have doubts about its humanity...

And yet, amongst the horrors, blood and dirt of the Second World War, people were still people. They loved and wanted to be loved, smiled at the spring sun, which lit both the blood-soaked fields of battle and the peaceful streets of neutral countries. They worked, wrote books and breathed. “As long as I breathe, there is hope,” someone once said. And that is how it was in the spring of 1945. People hoped: in the Soviet Union and in America, in Germany and in Japan, hope in the future was alive everywhere.

When one thinks about wartime, it seems as if nothing happened but battles. But it is not so. Life always goes on, no matter what, and all the more so when it is spring and the war is nearing its end. In the pages of newspapers from April 1945, alongside reports from Sovinformburo, there are film listings and announcements about dissertation defenses and sporting events. In Moscow, the theaters were open and an exhibition was featuring sketches by theatrical artists. The Oriental Museum was preparing a new exposition.

The choice of films on the capital’s screens was not very great – just some ten titles, the majority of which, of course, were of a patriotic nature, like the film Ivan Nikulin – Russian Sailor. There were just two foreign films: the comedy Let George Do It, where the famous British comic George Formby elegantly and happily rounds up a nest of Nazi spies. In another theater, they are playing Sun Valley Serenade, which features the great Glenn Miller Orchestra. Another American film is promised soon: Edison, with Spencer Tracy in the leading role. There are also some documentary films: The Liberation of France and Comrade Tito’s Visit to the USSR.

In a few years, Tito will no longer be a comrade, but a feared enemy, and not the leader of Fraternal Yugoslavia, but the head of the “bloody Tito-Rankovich clique.” But, for now, his visit is a huge success for Soviet foreign policy and a major discomfort for the allies, who are not happy about the appearance of a new communist state in the Balkans.

But the simple folk don’t know anything about this – the allies are our allies and we should be friendly with them. And so, in April, Clementine Churchill, the Prime Minister’s wife, travels around the USSR (where she is awarded the Order of the Red Banner), and on movie screens Soviet troops visit liberated France. Everything will be wonderful; everything will be simply excellent.

It so happens that an institution with the strange name Mosrestorantrest, which oversees all Moscow restaurants, needs jazz ensembles. People want to dance and be happy. Jazz will not be forbidden until a few years later. For now, young jazz artists are teaching themselves the songs from Sun Valley Serenade. Gostsirk – which oversees the circuses – needs arena workers and watchmen. Despite everything, the circus orchestra is playing its flourishes and, every evening, circus hands enter the arena, followed by clowns, acrobats and trainers.

Academics are also not sitting idly by. Every paper has announcements of dissertation defenses. On May 8, philologists will hear a defense of, “Enlightened Realism and Satire in Smollett’s Novels.” Did anyone listen to the discussion of 18th century novels on that day, or was everyone thinking about what had happened in Berlin? Who can know? And in the Planetarium there are, as far as we can tell, fascinating daily lectures on the themes, “Was there a beginning and will there be an end to the world?” and “Is there life on the planets?”

One wonders whether the lecturers, enlightening the public at the Planetarium, knew that they were living at a time when one world was fading and another rising to take its place. The war years were ending and an entirely new and different world was beginning.

On April 30, nighttime blackouts had ended and the newspapers happily wrote about new streetlights on the city’s squares. Fifth grade student Volodya Savushkin made a bird house and hung it on a tree, which got him in the paper. Spring is here and the birds are returning!

In the cities and villages, everyone prepared to celebrate May Day. In Moscow, public festivals were announced for all the city’s parks, to include rowing and cycling contests, and even games like gorodki and lapty (which had yet to be forgotten). Groups of self-appointed artists at various factories feverishly rehearsed in preparation for the holiday. The club at the Moscow Tryokhgorny Textile Mill announced it would host a ball. Did Moscow weavers even know what a real ball was? Actually, at that time, the Mossoviet Theater had begun buying up old ball dresses. Women from “days gone by” sighed as they gathered up useless, mothball-infused gowns from their hiding places on back shelves in their tiny kommunalkas, and hauled them off to the theater.

Orchestras are playing everywhere. And everywhere there is dancing, dancing, dancing. Of course, there are not enough men – most of them are at the front. So women dance with women, twirling on the dance floor to the sound of a trumpet.

On May 2, the summer season of the Moscow Hippodrome racetrack is to open. Here, of course, there will also be an orchestra. A buffet is also promised. In a word, a new, happier, wonderful life is beginning.

In point of fact, no one had any doubt that life would get better. Or that they would be not just better off  than during the wartime years, but even better off than in the pre-war years.

The time had passed when yesterday’s heroes, be they marshals or members of the Central Committee, were suddenly announced to be spies, accused of grave crimes which demanded a swift and fatal punishment.

The time had passed when nights were filled with terror, with the sound of car brakes under the window, when you would rush to the door, hold your breath and listen, wondering in horror, “Are those footsteps really stopping on our floor?” And then you breathe again, “No, they are going to the neighbor’s.”

The time had passed when even a wonderful, close friend could suddenly be revealed as a foreign spy, who had poisoned the well or sabotaged machinery at a factory.

All of this ought to disappear along with the war – at least that is what everyone hoped. After all, what kind of spies could there be? We have destroyed the Fascists, and the Americans and British are now our friends and allies.

We so wanted to believe that it would always be this way, that we would forever defend goodness and justice and enjoy life, while listening to the music of Glenn Miller. In those April days in distant San Francisco, a conference was begun on the creation of the future United Nations. It was to be an organization that would not allow any aggressor to attack another country.

If we had ever offended anyone, then surely it was so long ago, and they would no longer hold a grudge. In the newspaper Pravda, First Secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party Anastas Snechkus happily described “the first spring in a liberated Lithuania.” There, apparently, all the workers were banding together to reinvigorate the economy and carry out a socialist transformation. Comrade Snechkus, does not mention the echelons of Baltic intelligentsia and businesspeople being shuttled off to Siberia – this would spoil the happy picture. And he would know better, having himself been arrested and imprisoned by Stalin prior to the war.

With Poland, apparently, all the former unpleasantries were also behind us. They now had a new government, which had signed a friendship pact with the Soviet Union, which had been approved by the peoples of both countries and which, in the words of Comrade Stalin, “drove the last nail in the coffin of our disagreements with Poland.” Did the citizens of Poland concur? Probably. The Polish newspapers, at least, welcomed the pact. Simple folk preferred to hold their tongues.

All this time, the troops closed tighter on Berlin. And finally, there happened that which should have happened long ago: not far from the German town of Torgau, which stands on the banks of the Elbe, Soviet and allied troops finally met one another.

American and Soviet commanders, fearing friendly-fire incidents, had long ago agreed that, upon meeting, Soviet troops would fire off red flares and the Americans would answer with green ones. That way it would be clear that it was in fact one’s allies that faced you, and not Germans wearing fake uniforms. Yet, when and where this meeting of the allies would happen was not clear. In any event, on April 25th, 1945, on the banks of the Elbe, neither Soviet nor American soldiers expected that their allies were as close as they were.

First contact was made between First Lieutenant Albert “Buck” Kotzebue, of the 69th Infantry Division and Russian soldiers of the 175th Rifle Regiment, near the village of Strehla, where he was greeted by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Gardiyev. Later in the day, 2nd Lieutenant William Robertson, leading a four-man reconnaissance patrol to survey nearby roads, moved toward Torgau. They knew that the Russians were near and attempted to make contact, waving a makeshift American flag from the top of Torgau’s Hartenfels Castle. Robertson and two men then met Sergeant Nikolai Andreyev halfway across the river Elbe. The next day, a photo-op meeting was arranged, between Robertson and a more equal counterpart, Soviet Lieutenant Alexander Silvashko – their joyful photo would later be immortalized on postage stamps.

Robertson, who went on to become a famous neurosurgeon, never forgot, even many years later, how everyone was on the verge of tears when they saw the red flares, finally set off by the Russians. He did not have the required green rocket, since they truly did not expect that the Russians were so close.

The inability to understand one another’s languages was overcome with hugs, slaps on the shoulders and gleeful exclamations. Soviet commanders awarded Robertson the Order of Alexander Nevsky. True enough, the Soviet officers who hugged the Americans without approval from their commanders faired less well. They were given over to military courts... but this happened only several days later.

For now, following their captains and lieutenants, Generals Reinhardt and Rusakov prepared for a ceremonial meeting, at which they would pronounce speeches fit for the occasion about friendship in battle and solidarity of allies, exchanging flags and gifts of remembrance.

This is how the two worlds collided – two worlds that knew practically nothing about one another. What did Russian soldiers know about America? That it was located somewhere very, very far away. Back in the 19th century, one of Dostoyevsky’s heroes, planning to take his own life, said that he was “departing for America.” But of course America is in this world, not the next. I don’t know if Gardiyev, Andreyev or Silvashko had read Dostoyevsky – his novels were not in great favor with the Soviet Powers That Be at the time, and it was difficult to find them. But the fact that America was a distant, foreign and incomprehensible country, this they of course knew.

For Soviets in the 1940s, America was a place of skyscrapers, inhabited by paunchy capitalists lighting up cigars with hundred dollar bills. There had been a terrible crisis there, where the unemployed died of hunger right on the streets. In the South, plantation owners related to blacks as described in the book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Fortunately, when the war began, the Americans supported us. True enough, they did not want to open the second front that Comrade Stalin had insisted upon. But they later opened it somehow or other. They had a president named Roosevelt, who met several times with Comrade Stalin. This president had died just a few days ago. In Moscow, they had even hung flags of mourning in his honor. Now America had a new president, Harry Truman. He, perhaps, will also try to help the Soviet Union, just as Roosevelt before him. But that is not the main thing. Anyone who had been on the roads during the war knew that the main thing in Soviet-American relations at that time was the Studebaker – a word that became synonymous with “truck” in Russia, as some 100,000 Studebaker-made trucks were sent to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease.

And what did Albert Kotzebue and William Robertson know about Russia? Perhaps the fact that it was cold there, that they had overthrown the tsar, and that Stalin had at first signed a pact with Hitler, and then for some reason quarreled with him.

Yet no amount of misunderstanding kept either side from happily slapping their new friends on the shoulder, exchanging medals and showing off photos of relatives. No matter what came before, now they were friends. They looked one another over with wonder. The Russians were surprised to see how the American officers’ and common soldiers’ uniforms differed so little from one another.  One could inadvertently mix them up. One side brought out flasks with vodka; the other supplied whiskey. And they began to raise toasts to victory, friendship, peace and happiness – in languages unknown to either but known to all.

The generals, meanwhile, continued to lead their troops into Berlin. Hitler was in his bunker, preparing for his suicide, and politicians were trying to figure out how to manage the fate of a post-war Europe. At the conference in San Francisco, they gave speeches about the need to guarantee peace and security. Stalin, in the Kremlin, puffed on his pipe and considered how best to suppress the budding insurgency in Poland. Churchill was preparing for parliamentary elections, which would happen in Great Britain right after the end of the war. He realized that he had been unable to stop the movement of the communists westward and was now thinking about what kind of concessions would need to be made to Stalin. Truman received information from Los Alamos about the successful testing of a new weapon, an unseen bomb that would be ready in just a few months. Kamikazes sat in their planes, ready to bear down on American aircraft carriers. The citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki guessed that the war was near its end and took heart that their cities had at least been bombed less than Tokyo. The corpse of the executed Fascist Italian leader, Benito Mussolini, had already been hung by its feet for all to see. Germans hastily left their homes in Poland. Concentration camp prisoners began moving homeward, unsure if their homes even remained. NKVD officers began to question everyone who had been imprisoned by the Germans, the mere fact of which made them suspect. Alexander Silvashko and William Robertson exchanged addresses, unaware that they would not see one another for another 40 years, when, even then, organizers would do everything they could to make sure that the two only spoke in official situations and not, heaven forbid, outside the control of responsible organs.

And on the screens of Western Europe, Russia and America, Glen Miller played over and over again, as if he had not disappeared over the English Channel in 1944... as if the sounds of Sun Valley Serenade would be heard forever... as if the Iron Curtain would not descend... as if the atomic mushroom cloud would not rise up... as if everything would be as those soldiers might have hoped, standing on the banks of the Elbe, slapping each other on the back, giving the thumbs-up and proudly showing off their photos from home.  RL