Through the Maelstrom

A Red Army Soldier's War on the Eastern Front, 1942-1945

Boris Gorbachevsky

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780700621071
• eBook ISBN: 9780700621842
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

The monumental battles of World War II’s Eastern Front—Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk—are etched into the historical record. But there is another, hidden history of that war that has too often been ignored in official accounts.

Boris Gorbachevsky was a junior officer in the 31st Army who first saw front-line duty as a rifleman in the 30th Army. Through the Maelstrom recounts his three harrowing years on some of the war’s grimmest but forgotten battlefields: the campaign for Rzhev, the bloody struggle to retake Belorussia, and the bitter final fighting in East Prussia. As he traces his experiences from his initial training, through the maelstrom, to final victory, he provides one of the richest and most detailed memoirs of life and warfare on the Eastern Front.

Gorbachevsky’s panoramic account takes us from infantry specialist school to the front lines to rear services areas and his whirlwind romances in wartime Moscow. He recalls the shriek of Katiusha rockets flying overhead toward the enemy and the unforgettable howl of Stukas divebombing Soviet tanks. And he conveys horrors of brutal fighting not recorded previously in English, including his own participation in a human wave assault that decimated his regiment at Rzhev, with piles of corpses growing the closer they got to the German trenches.

Gorbachevsky also records the sufferings of the starving citizens of Leningrad, the savage execution of a Russian scout who turned in false information, the killing of an innocent German trying to welcome the Soviet troops, and a chilling campfire discussion by four Russian soldiers as they compared notes about the women they’d raped. His memoir brims with rich descriptions of daily army life, the challenges of maintaining morale, and relationships between soldiers. It also includes candid exposés of the many problems the Red Army faced: the influence of political officers, the stubbornness of senior commanders, the attrition through desertions, and the initial months of occupation in postwar Germany.

Through the Maelstrom features the swiftly moving narrative and rich dialogue associated with the grand style of great Russian literature. Ultimately, it provides a fitting and final testament to soldiers who fought and died in anonymity.

Part One

My Initial Military Education

January–May 1942

1

Students and Commanders

January–March 1942

How I Became a Soldier

At the end of 1941 my family was living in the city of Kyshtym in Cheliabinsk Oblast. I was working as a lathe operator’s apprentice at the Red Metalworks factory. That November the Kyshtym City Party Committee summoned me from the factory and sent me to an outlying village in the oblast to work as its agent for a month. To my objection that I was a city fellow who wouldn’t be able to distinguish wheat from rye, the city Party secretary burst out laughing and said, “I hope you will now learn!”

So, suddenly and for the first time in my life, I found myself in a rural village. The village was called Babkino. There were no radios, no telephones, no newspapers, not even any electricity in the village. They used kerosene lamps and candles instead. There was one hand water-pump for two streets, and women with buckets dangling from yokes came to it from far around. It is true that water supply and canalization had long been in the planning stage, but they were not implemented until 1960.

When I arrived, wheat that had not been reaped was lying beneath the snow. The village had two broken-down tractors; in order to start the tractors’ engines the tractor driver had to spend half a day cranking them by hand, but, no matter how hard he tried, he didn’t always succeed in starting them. There were virtually no men of military age in the village; they had all been called up for the army. Sensing the covetous glances of the women, I would get flustered and feel uncomfortable. The weather turned cold, and the livestock lived in the huts together with the home owners. The closest medical office, with only a fel’dsher [a medical assistant] on staff, was in the district center of Shumikho, 12 kilometers away. In the village shop, it seemed there were more mice than products to buy. The residents of Babkino had one pride and joy—every hut had a steam bathhouse. I can vouch for this: it was a real miracle.

By the time of my arrival, wives and mothers had already buried loved ones, and the tears of widows and mothers had already spilled onto the earth. For every funeral, the village chairman would write out an order for 10 kilograms of meat from the village storehouses for the funeral repast, and the villagers would buy vodka on credit—in the village shop, vodka was always present, and the mice, thank God, took no interest in this potion. The villagers would drown their sorrow and grief in vodka for several days. Of course, no one would go to work during these days. This annoyed me, but considering the circumstances, I remained quiet and continued to count the days until I would be able to escape this village. I felt quite awkward at these funeral meals: I was alone, young—and not at the front. I couldn’t exactly explain to the residents that I had an exemption because our factory produced items for the military.

I soon had another reason to feel awkward. While in Babkino, I was staying in the hut of an elderly man who spent much of his time in a town several kilometers away. He was married to a much younger woman, named Serafima, who was perhaps in her late forties. She fed me well; for breakfast, I would normally get hot porridge, tea, milk, and honey. One day when the man of the house was away, I was enjoying a steam bath in their bania when his wife startled me with her sudden presence. She was wearing some sort of robe. She offered to wash my back, and then she disrobed. It was the first time I’d seen a nude woman. I was enormously embarrassed, but I could not tear my gaze away from her large breasts. I followed my instincts—blushing beet-red, I covered my private parts with both hands and bolted naked from the bath out into the frigid weather and snow. I covered the 20 meters to the hut in a flash, and then headed to the stove to warm myself. A couple of minutes later, Serafima entered the hut and hurled my clothes onto the floor. We didn’t speak for the rest of the day, and I avoided her occasional glance. The cost of my spurning became clear the next morning: at the breakfast table, I found only a small, hard lump of bread and a glass of water at my place. I quickly contacted a representative of the district administration and obtained different accommodations.

Nevertheless, this month in the village, my contact with the people of Babkino, changed my fate. Having returned to Kyshtym, I immediately dropped by the voenkomat [military registration and enlistment center]. I wanted to enroll in the Cheliabinsk Armor Specialist School, but the medics recognized that I was color-blind, so they sent me instead to the Tiumen Combat Infantry School. Everything happened quite quickly, and by the end of December 1941, I was on my way to Tiumen.

New Year’s Eve

I arrived at the infantry school on New Year’s Eve and was immediately assigned to a mortar battalion and sent to a barracks, where my company should soon be gathering.

When I reached the barracks, I found it empty, cold, and poorly lit by a single bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling. Naked metal bunks, bedside stands with open doors—and nothing else. Only the loud ticking of clocks, hanging above the entrance doors, which were wide and strong like gates, filled the empty silence of the space. An ambiguous sensation, as if I had just fallen into a cage, welled up inside me. I wanted to start crying but I controlled myself.

I counted off the bunks. On the right and left were 64 bunks each, arranged in two tiers. That meant there would be 128 students living here: my contemporaries, eighteen- and nineteen-year-old guys. They would be coming from all corners of the country to learn the art of combat. For six months, our commanders would train us; then they would send us off to the front as officers—junior lieutenants.

At the quartermaster’s station I was handed a decrepit quilted blanket and a worn-out mattress full of holes. This gave me the somewhat meager comfort of my first barracks bed and was supposed to ward off the cold. I climbed up into one of the upper bunks and wrapped myself a little more tightly in a greatcoat, which I had acquired only a couple of hours before.

Sleep didn’t come. So many thoughts were swirling in my mind! How would my first day of army life begin? How would my comrades in the barracks regard me? What would my officers be like, and how would they begin to instruct us? Would I manage to cope with army life? In my musings, I didn’t stop to notice that I had already gobbled down my mother’s last meat patty, which I loved so much, and I had started in on the shortbread. Mama had provided me with food for the road, warm socks, a sweater, a whole packet of paper and envelopes, a pen, and some pencils; soon all of this would disappear in turn without a trace. Would I make any friends? How would everything go?

The door gave a squeak. On the threshold an unfamiliar tall fellow was standing in a greatcoat like mine, but his hair was still shaggy; on his back was a strange bundle with a strap across his chest. He walked up and adroitly climbed onto the neighboring upper bunk, having first tossed upon it a bedraggled mattress just like mine, an even more ancient quilt, and a pillow without a pillowcase. He removed his strange over-the-shoulder burden and left it on the lower bunk.

“We’re going to be acquaintances. Allow me to introduce myself: Aleksandr Ryzhikov, from the city of Gorky. I grew up in a workers’ settlement, which was exquisitely described by our great proletarian writer [a reference to the city’s namesake, the writer Maxim Gorky].”

I also smiled and introduced myself. There we are, now I was no longer alone!

“Are you lamenting, guy, that your life of freedom has come to an end? Don’t rush to grieve. Just be a bit sad, friend, everything lies ahead; they’ve brought us together for war!”

Then he suddenly remembered, “Jesus, within an hour, it’s the New Year! Shall we sing? . . . A little New Year’s tree sprouted in a forest, in a forest it grew . . .”

I reluctantly took up the song, and we sang it together; then Sasha [the nickname for Aleksandr] said, “Well, then, today you are playing the role of Father Frost, and I’m Snegurochka [the Snowmaiden in a famous Russian fairy tale]. Sound right? Just don’t let slip such a memorable event—the first holiday in the barracks!”

He climbed down and set up an improvised table, covering the metallic springs of the lower bunk with his mattress. Then Sasha left, and I began laying out some holiday refreshments. I put down some homemade shortbread, two Astrakhan dried vobly [a type of freshwater fish, the Caspian roach], some fruit drops from Gorky, and some Japanese smoked sprats [herring]. Sasha returned with two mugs of water, spotted the spread I had arranged, and exclaimed, “What a table you’ve set!” He gave the box of sprats a turn in his hands, and then asked, “Where did these come from?”

“A strange story,” I replied. “I was sitting in the station at Kyshtym, waiting for a train. Several freight cars had gotten stuck there, filled with these cardboard boxes of Japanese sprats, which were being shipped from Japan to Moscow. But the capital city had no need of sprats at the time, so an order had arrived: within two days, empty and clean the freight cars, and transfer them to the Ural line. So they instantly put all the sprats up for sale on the spot, so that Kyshtym residents were able to stock up with probably enough Japanese smoked sprats to last their whole lives.”

“You were lucky!”

We raised our mugs and wished each other all the best for the New Year.

“And now I’ll indulge you, friend,” Sasha pronounced.

He carefully picked up his strange bag. It turned out to be a case, and inside it was a guitar! Delighted by my astonishment, Sashka [another diminutive form of Aleksandr] announced: “In honor of the New Year! The first arrivals in the barracks! Our acquaintanceship! Give a listen, sir, to songs of our past, our now premilitary lives. Folklore!”

He tuned the guitar, started singing, and sang one song after another without stopping. He played and sang superbly, and the songs—what songs! Before the war, the entire country had been singing them, in peasant households, around the holiday table, in moments of sorrow and joy. At his listener’s request, Sasha sang “For the Gal from the Little Tavern” twice.

That is how we greeted the 1942 New Year, falling asleep only just before dawn.

Lessons of the Barracks

Within a week the barracks was full of life and the sound of young men’s voices. We quickly got to know each other. Everyone was quickly divided up into platoons, and we were introduced to our platoon leaders. We each received an assigned bunk. Gradually, we were adjusting to army life. And of course we started our training.

Our leaders trained us according to an accelerated schedule. From the first days, we plunged into our studies and worked to the point of exhaustion. Within a half year, I was supposed to become a mortar platoon leader. We did parade drills every day. Twice a week, target practice. Our instructors crammed together lessons in the Field Service Regulations (and you couldn’t count them all!), communications, tactics, and infantry weapons, such as the pistol, the rifle, and the carbine; then machine guns, and we would almost be ready for work with mortars. They trained us in hand-to-hand fighting techniques as well. Once a week, we skied up to 20 or 30 kilometers, then rehearsed scouting the location for combat outposts and setting them up. Besides that, several times they woke us up in the middle of the night with alarms, and we would have to conduct nighttime rapid-marches of up to 10 to 15 kilometers, with full combat gear.

It was astonishing! Each leader considered his own business as the most important and tried to impart this personal understanding to his students. For example, the senior sergeant who conducted the parade drills liked to declare, “Without a love for parade order, not a single man can walk properly upon God’s green earth!”

The master sergeant, who was obsessed with how we made our bunks and the cleanliness of our boots, constantly harped: “A bed is made with an automatic motion of the hands below the belt.” Or: “Tomorrow you’ll be heading to the front—and yet you have filthy boots!!”

Our platoon leader, Lieutenant Artur, who could drive any student out of his mind who had not yet learned by heart every paragraph of the regulations, kept drumming into our heads, “Learn the regulations! You’ll be healthier for it!”

Our political leader in a most serious manner constantly maintained, “I’ll teach you to love your Motherland.”

In addition to the basic set of military sciences, we washed dishes, cleaned the soot and scum out of enormous pot-bellied cauldrons, picked up trash, scrubbed the floor of the barracks to a shine, chopped and sawed firewood, and mopped the toilet area and staircase. All of this, both the military training and the domestic chores, were harder for me than for the other cadets, but I eventually adjusted to the strict soldier’s life.

At nighttime the barracks experienced their own, different life. My friend Sashka Ryzhikov, for example, gave solo concerts—and what shows they were! Just like in the theater. After several performances, however, his guitar was taken from him. One night the sergeant major suddenly showed up, shouting, “This isn’t a bowl of cherries here!” and grabbed the guitar from Sashka. “I’ll give it back when you head for the front!”

Sashka suffered without his guitar; he missed it badly and once even started crying over its absence, but he continued to sing in order to spite the sergeant major. He said, “Even without the guitar, I can sing!” Everyone listened to him just as intently without his guitar—they rejoiced and applauded after every song. But he cherished his guitar and was plainly miserable without it.

I will jump ahead and tell you the full story of this guitarist and his guitar.

Within a month, the battalion commander summoned Ryzhikov and promised to return his guitar to him if Sas...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Editor’s Note
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: My Initial Military Education: January–May 1942
• Part Two: The Rzhev Meat Grinder: June 1942–March 1943
• Part Three: From Rzhev to the National Border: March 1943–July
• Part Four: In Poland and East Prussia: July 1944–April 1945
• Afterword: Reflections on the Fighting for Rzhev
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Gallery
• Back Cover