archipelago of stories: the eastern front.

Red Army soldier near Dnieper hydroelectric dam

[Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhia . When the Red Army blew a hole in the dam it resulted in a flood-wave that killed 20,000 - 100,000 people;  soldiers from both sides as well as Ukrainian civilians.]








Stories from the Eastern Front, from that inexhaustible fount of stories, The Gulag Archipelago (1973).




We soon discovered that there really were Russians fighting against us and that they fought harder
than any SS men. In July, 1943, for example, near Orel, a platoon of Russians in German uniform
defended Sobakinskiye Vyselki. They fought with the desperation that might have been expected if
they had built the place themselves. One of them was driven into a root cellar. They threw hand
grenades in after him and he fell silent. But they had no more than stuck their heads in than he let
them have another volley from his automatic pistol. Only when they lobbed in an antitank grenade
did they find out that, within the root cellar, he had another foxhole in which he had taken shelter
from the infantry grenades. Just try to imagine the degree of shock, deafness, and hopelessness in
which he had kept on fighting.

They defended, for example, the unshakable Dnieper bridgehead south of Tursk. For two weeks we
continued to fight there for a mere few hundred yards. The battles were fierce in December, 1943,
and so was the cold. Through many long days both we and they went through the extreme trials of
winter, fighting in winter camouflage cloaks that covered our overcoats and caps. Near Malye
Kozlovichi, I was told, an interesting encounter took place. As the soldiers dashed back and forth
among the pines, things got confused, and two soldiers lay down next to one another. No longer very
accurately oriented, they kept shooting at someone, somewhere over there. Both had Soviet
automatic pistols. They shared their cartridges, praised one another, and together swore at the grease
freezing on their automatic pistols. Finally, their pistols stopped firing altogether, and they decided
to take a break and light up. They pulled back their white hoods — and at the same instant each saw
the other's cap ... the eagle and the star. They jumped up! Their automatic pistols still refused to fire!
Grabbing them by the barrel and swinging them like clubs, they began to go at each other. This, if
you will, was not politics and not the Motherland, but just sheer caveman distrust: If I take pity on
him, he is going to kill me.

In East Prussia, a trio of captured Vlasov men was being marched along the roadside a few steps
away from me. At that moment a T-34 tank thundered down the highway. Suddenly one of the
captives twisted around and dived underneath the tank. The tank veered, but the edge of its track
crushed him nevertheless. The broken man lay writhing, bloody foam coming from his mouth. And
one could certainly understand him! He preferred a soldier's death to being hanged in a dungeon.

They had no choice. There was no other way for them to fight. They had no chance to find a way
out, to safeguard their lives, by some more cautious mode of fighting. If "pure" surrender was
considered unforgivable treason to the Motherland, then what about those who had taken up enemy
arms? Our propaganda, in all its crudity, explained their conduct as: (1) treason (was it biologically
based? carried in the bloodstream?) ; or (2) cowardice — which it certainly was not! A coward tries
to find a spot where things are easy, soft, safe. And men could be induced to enter the Wehrmacht's
Vlasov detachments only in the last extremity, only at the limit of desperation, only out of
inexhaustible hatred of the Soviet regime, only with total contempt for their own safety. For they
knew they would never have the faintest glimpse of mercy! When we captured them, we shot them
as soon as the first intelligible Russian word came from their mouths. In Russian captivity, as in
German captivity, the worst lot of all was reserved for the Russians.


In general, this war revealed to us that the worst thing in the world was to be a Russian.


Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago trans Thomas P. Whitney, pp. 254-256.


Full online text:


https://archive.org/stream/AleksandrSolzhenitsynTheGulagArchipelago/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn_The_Gulag_Archipelago_djvu.txt

Vlasov detachment soldiers, with accordion accompaniment

[Image source: http://viriatosmilitaria.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/voluntarios-sovieticos-na-whermacht.html]