Елена Ржевская - Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter - From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker

On 20 June 1974, I opened the newspaper in the morning and saw Zhukov’s portrait framed in black. An unspoken, half-clandestine invitation to bid him farewell.

I decided to go with my friend, Lyalya Hanelli. At the front she too had been an army interpreter. During the disastrous retreat of our troops in the south in the summer of 1942, intelligence she obtained in the mountains at a critical moment saved a division from catastrophe. From her house on Kalyaevskaya Street we set off through quiet, uncelebrated backstreets, across old, grassy Moscow courtyards as touchingly homely and unpretentious as their grass. They were in an improbably good state of preservation and there was a little functioning church tucked away in one of them. Overshadowed by soulless new buildings, they were still unexpectedly alive and perfectly adapted to drinking tea together, having a good gossip, a doze, or reading quietly on your own; to everything that makes life good and natural and unforced.

You walk through one courtyard, then another, each with its own character, and you gaze around enchanted by some places you have never seen before despite having lived in Moscow for so much of your life. At the same time, you are sadly saying goodbye to them, because in the blinking of an eye they will vanish without trace and be replaced by some new development.

And perhaps you are so acutely, so painfully drawn to them and cling to them because you are on your way to say farewell to someone who has gone now to a very different place, and you are chilled by a sense of the unfathomable, of desolation, of a misery not of this world.

We finally emerge from an archway on to the street somewhere near Commune Square and the National Soviet Army Club. The streets, however, have been cordoned off by ranks of police to stop us going any further. ‘The public will be admitted from 10.00 to 18.00’, but that was only in the newspaper, and admitted the public are in the sense that ‘representatives of the workers’ are being bussed in, unloaded, formed up in columns, and the columns are marching with orders not to allow unauthorized mourners into their carefully selected ranks. The unauthorized mourners, however, intend to work their way in. The column is instructed to form up in threes. We are not wanted. They attempt to elbow us out: ‘Stop trying to worm your way in.’ This column has been brought in all the way from Tushino. ‘And who are you with, then?’ We are not with anyone, but they are not going to get rid of us that easily. We make our way along the column, all the way to the front.

‘Where have you turned up from?’ the vanguard of the Tushino marchers demand as they turn us away. ‘From the 1st Byelorussian Front,’ I reply. Only the 1st Byelorussian Front which, under the command of renowned military commander Georgiy Zhukov, stormed and captured Berlin. My answer means little to these recently sprouted officials of district-level activism.

I appeal to the young police officer to let through two women who fought, it is fair to say, under the command of Zhukov. That gets us nowhere. We take up position to one side of the column, and are promptly removed by the police cordon that is here to ensure that nothing happens spontaneously, on personal initiative, uncontrolled, anarchic; nothing at the dictate of a human heart, only at the dictate of the Soviet authorities, officially, in accordance with instructions.

That quiet, consoling, melancholy mood that had been building up on our way here through the courtyards fades and dies, to be replaced by a growing sense of protest and outrage. What sort of way is this Russia has of bidding farewell to its greatest generals! Tsar Paul I failed to honour the dying Suvorov, and sought to quash, by his neglect, the passionate impulse of the people to show their respect. He failed. Great crowds of sorrowing people saw Suvorov to his grave.

This time the government has taken a firmer grip on the amount of honour to be allowed Marshal Zhukov, who had fallen into its disfavour, and the carefully composed columns have been arranged to file past his coffin between 10.00 and 18.00 hours on the same day as the announcement of his death and the funeral arrangements. Not everyone will have had time to open their newspaper that morning, to decide what to do, to get time off work. And to make sure this is exactly what happens, the pettyminded ‘competent authorities’ get busy, to ensure there is no outpouring of emotion. ‘Zhukov? Great was he? Don’t ask me.’

For all that, what has been decided buckles under the pressure of the ‘unorganized’ like Lyalya and me, who flood here to pay our last respects and augment the ranks of the officially approved. War veterans with medal ribbon bars on their chests, free-thinking young and not-so-young people. Bypassing our column, the stewards let through some other endless one. Thousands and thousands of people stand waiting patiently, only worried that we may not fit into the brief period allotted for the lying in state. It is a pity there are no pictures of these people, no pictures of their faces. There is no filming.

The sun is hot. Slowly, step by a step, we move past the newsstands, where the deliberately downbeat tone of today’s newspapers on the subject of Zhukov is suddenly rudely disrupted by a headline in Komsomolskaya Pravda that shouts: ‘Suvorov, Kutuzov, Zhukov!’ We go past a photo in the newspaper of Zhukov with his youngest daughter, Masha, long plaits, a frank, marvellous face.

We are shuffling about in the shade of trees by the tuberculosis hospital on Bozhedomka, and in the depths, between the cast-iron bars of the railing, we can see a sorrowful-looking Dostoevsky. Next to me is a young man who is travelling with his family and only passing through Moscow. He has left his wife and child at the station to rush here, and with every passing half hour becomes sadder as he loses hope of reaching the coffin before his train leaves.

In over three hours we have come about one kilometre and finally emerged on to Commune Square. The Museum of the Armed Forces is not far away now. I came to the museum once before, shortly after Zhukov and his wife had visited it. Neither in the Hall of Victory nor in the other halls of the museum was there a single photograph of Marshal Zhukov. Forget him! There never was a great military leader called Zhukov, the embodiment of Russia’s victory! Banished for years from all state or public office, he lived in isolation behind a high wooden fence in an official dacha .

We were nearly there when the column was diverted to move slowly round Yekaterininsky Boulevard, extending our route. Having circled round the boulevard, we set foot on to the pavement, finally almost at the National Soviet Army Club where the coffin lay. Out of the open doors of a new army hotel adjoining the club, brisk, energetic bearers appeared carrying trays of rissoles and mountains of sliced bread, crates of bottled water and basins of hot sausages. Exhausted people stampeded to drink and sate themselves with the raging gluttony that besets them at wakes and in war. In an instant all was chaos, as if some theatre director had given the signal to sweep away the solemn mood called for by the moment. Coins clattered, empty cardboard cups were thrown to the ground. Those left behind with the hawkers ran back to the column, with their mouths full and excitedly clutching their rissoles.

And then, from above, peals of thunder roared and the skies opened. The rain poured down with such unbelievable force that the money-changing in the temple was instantly washed out. Coloured umbrellas unfurled above the heads of the crowd in their bright summer clothes. Lyalya and I had not thought to bring any, so, unprotected against the wrath of heaven, with an élan born of desperation, we rushed forward to one side of the column, jumping the queue. We were so soaked from head to foot it seemed unlikely we would survive the day. Nobody stopped us. We ran a hundred metres and no one prevented us from squeezing into the soggy mass of people and with them getting inside the National Soviet Army Club.