Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

My address: PPC 591, Officer Training, 2 Company.

This letter seems particular and strange, at a slant to the rest. The other letters always begin with a fountain of questions and end with a symmetrical collection of answers (the Aunts, baby, etc., etc., the order is pretty much the same always: from close family outward). The questions would seem formal if they weren’t underpinned by melancholy. This melancholy is not in the words themselves but in the space behind them, and in the number of letters — have they reached their destination? — and in the insistence of the repeated phrasing. It’s as if a person wanted desperately to send news, but was instead obliged to simply cover the whole surface of a piece of paper with one and the same question. The correspondence is the only way to reach out and touch his beloved family, but at the same time he can’t let them know what is actually happening to him. Only very occasionally the seams come apart and you can see the padding inside. The summer before, Lyodik wrote to his aunt, my great-grandmother: “I am glad you’ve settled so well and you have your own smallholding and even chickens. You made me laugh when you said you’d be very glad to leave it all and go home. However good it is, home is better always. We don’t need to hide this fact, right?”

The excerpt about training is one of the only places where the anxiety eating away at him is visible. The whole matter is squeezed into a few unsure sentences, and the “choice” made (“I had no say in the matter”) seems not entirely fixed — it could possibly be undone. He wants to hear what his mother makes of it: “Will you write to me and tell me?”

There was a desperate shortage of officers of all ranks on the frontline. By January 1, the commanding officers on the Volkhovsky Front had been almost entirely replaced. On October 4, 1941, Order 85 was implemented to deal with this shortage, “On the Creation of Training Courses for Junior and Mid-ranking Officers in Every HQ and Division.” Stalin himself amended the order, decreasing training times to match the situation: a month for those on frontline duties, two months for those stationed at bases. The latter applied directly to Lyodik, with his recently acquired military experience:

2. To create training courses for Junior Lieutenants to prepare them for the command of a platoon. Courses for up to 200 men. The combined courses to be attended by sergeants and the best lance corporals who have distinguished themselves in combat, including the lightly wounded after their rehabilitation. Course length: two months.

3. Trainers to be picked for the courses from the ranks of educated officers from unit HQs and other parts of the army.

There was an amendment in the third paragraph as well: Stalin changed the phrase “best officers” to the more realistic “educated” officers. There were extremely low demands placed on trainers, and the training itself was incredibly short. Officers were supposed to lead their soldiers into attack and so they fell first, dying in their thousands. The country needed ever more officers — it was hungry for them. They stood out more than the men they led, and could be blamed when the platoon retreated under heavy fire, or when a sentry left his post to warm up.

Daily food allowances for hungry frontline soldiers were far more generous than they were for recruits in the besieged city. Rations were constantly being reassessed and reduced in 1941, but all the same rations for soldiers on the frontline were unbelievably luxurious compared to allowances in the city just ten kilometers north. There was tobacco and 900 grams of bread, meat and cereal, onion and potato. Anyone with scurvy was given vitamin C tablets. The rations for the wounded in hospital were fairly generous, too. They got 600 grams of bread a day, meat, fish, but also milk and butter, juice or fruit extract. For those in recovery the bread ration rose to 800 grams. In comparison with this the life of a recruit was pared back to the minimum, and rumors about how bad life was reached the frontline.

Even if Lyodik hadn’t been afraid of facing hunger on his training course, or if he hadn’t seen with his own eyes what was going on in Leningrad, he still would’ve had grounds for anxiety. The conscription act had included those of “doubtful lineage” but only up to a limit: the children and grandchildren of priests, aristocrats, and merchants were fine for basic military service but they were not eligible for officer ranking. Lyodik (Leonid Gimmelfarb) had a complicated backstory: relatives abroad, whose new colored photographs were in the old albums, and grandfathers whose lineage and position were best left unmentioned on forms. Rising through the ranks made all that a little more visible as the forms were more scrutinized, one’s position less secure. And perhaps there was also his shame at leaving his comrades on the frontline. Besides, Lyodik, with his dislike of melodrama, must have found the position of an officer repellent: controlling the circumstances of others, always in the wrong, dragged into the limelight against his will.

The frontline soldier Ivan Zykov describes officer training in Leningrad, though at a higher level: commanding officer of a battalion. The training took place in a former school on the outskirts of Leningrad, where they slept as well, with their revolvers under their pillows and their loaded rifles stacked in pyramids. They didn’t once go into the city, because there was nothing to do in town but remember its prewar glory. There was no heating in the school — the water pipes had frozen back in November. They say that some theaters were still open, that the actors shuffled onstage with sunken faces to act.

Organizing food was tricky. The cooks were civilians and some of the men on duty were responsible for the chopping of wood and fetching buckets of water. We fetched water from the Neva several times a day in a big container on a sledge. About 400 meters from the school was an old wooden house and we demolished it for the wood. We’d heave a few logs back on our shoulders, saw them, chop them and take them to the kitchen so the cook could make porridge or soup. When food was ready, we weren’t allowed into the dining room. We’d line up first for a mug of pine-needle infusion which we had to drink it to avoid getting scurvy, and only then were we allowed to eat.

The freezing weather lasted a very long time. “The snow fell, and fell, and fell. The square, the banks of the Neva, the peeling facade of the Winter Palace, the broken windows of the Hermitage — it all seems somehow distant and fantastical, a fairy tale of a dying city, where Chinese shadow puppets still move, hurrying about until they breathe their last.” By February the constant talk was of cannibalism; dark rumors filled the pages of diaries. “Professor D, a pathologist, says that the liver of a person who has died of starvation has a bad taste, but when mixed with brains, is delicious. How on earth does he know???” These stories are relayed with the repeated refrain: “True or false?” The extreme naturalism of the description returns both the storyteller and the reader to their senses. Around this time Shaporina, who remained an objective and sober narrator, almost to the point of removing herself from the narrative, writes: “I have become a cave dweller.” She received her ration of 450 grams of meat and “I didn’t have the patience to cut it with a knife and fork, I picked it up in my hands and ate it.”

May 17, 1942

My dear family,

I don’t know where to begin. I’m alive and in good health and doing well. I wrote many times from the training camp but didn’t receive a reply. I don’t know why that is.