I’ll Never Go Back: A Red Army Officer Talks

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Text originally published in 1948 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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I’LL NEVER GO BACK

A RED ARMY OFFICER TALKS

BY

MIKHAIL KORIAKOV

Translated from the Russian by

NICHOLAS WREDEN

Stand fast therefore in the liberty

wherewith Christ hath made us

free, and be not entangled again

with the yoke of bondage.

GALATIANS V, I

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

PREFACE 4

Chapter One—REQUIEM 5

Chapter Two—OUR LADY OF LUBLIN 20

Chapter Three—BRIGHT HILL 29

Chapter Four—LENCHEN 35

Chapter Five—APRIL 22, 1945 45

Chapter Six—AND HE LAID HIS RIGHT HAND UPON ME 54

Chapter Seven—RUSSIAN LIBERATION CORPS 66

Chapter Eight—PRISONER OF THE AMERICANS 84

Chapter Nine—ESCAPE 89

Chapter Ten—IN THE SOVIET EMBASSY 95

Chapter Eleven—WHITE ÉMIGRÉS 106

Chapter Twelve—OUTLAW 124

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 139

PREFACE

For six years a storm had raged over the world. It lifted millions of people of all countries and scattered them over the different continents. As soon as the storm subsided and the skies cleared, the people who had forgotten light began to study one another under the low-hanging, blinding sun of the first days of peace.

Who are you? Where did the storm carry you during those years? Why are you here? Why are you on this side of the front with your enemies, instead of being over there with your people? Why are you in a foreign country, instead of being at home?

These are fair questions. Suspicious attitudes so soon after a war are to be expected. When people read in the newspapers about the hundreds of thousands of Russian non-repatriates who are hiding in the stony caves of Germany, in the mountains of Switzerland, or with the French Underground, their impulse is to say: These men are traitors who fought on the German side! These men have a bad conscience and they should be turned over to the Red Army! Such accusations cannot be easily dismissed; unfortunately they are founded on bitter truth. But people who make them should be aware of the tragedy as well as of the guilt of the Russian soldier; they should investigate the causes of such wholesale treason.

I am a non-repatriate, and I am ready to defend my stand. Beginning with the spring of 1941, and until the spring of 1945, I fought in the ranks of the Red Army. With the Red Army I travelled the long road from the walls of Moscow to the ruins of Dresden. I started out as a private and ended as a captain. For almost a year after the surrender, from May 1945 until April 1946, I worked in the Russian Embassy in Paris. Whenever I probe my conscience, I feel no reason to be ashamed; I fought the Germans until the bitter end; that is the reason why, without holding anything back, I can tell how I found myself on this side of the front at the close of the War.

This book is a document; none of the facts is distorted, and only some of the names are changed. If the reader will understand the tragedy of the Russian soldier, if he will sense the deep underlying motives of the Russian non-repatriate, I shall consider that the writing of this book has been justified.

Chapter One—REQUIEM

In the spring of 1944 the 6th Air Force was being shifted from the North-west Front to the First White Russian Front, from round Novgorod to Volhynia, into the Lutsk-Kovel sector. The morale of the troops was extremely good; the Ukraine was clear of the Germans, the siege of Leningrad lifted; every one realized that one more blow would carry us across the borders into Rumania, Poland, and the Baltic States. My personal fortunes were also at their peak. As an Air Force military correspondent I was visiting many of the regiments and divisions by ‘plane, I was dropping in on the different sectors of the front, I was learning a great deal, and, since there were things that could not be mentioned in my dispatches, I was trying to remember everything. My notebooks were bulging. I wanted to understand the fine points of air combat in which our flyers used new tactical formations and the enemy even more unexpected and tricky manœuvres. The tactics of air combat were no longer new to me; I had learned something about this complex and exact science. The pilots in the various air regiments knew me and considered me one of them. Lieutenant-General Polynin, commanding the 6th Air Force, decorated me with the Order of the Red Star and gave me a week’s leave in Moscow, while the troops under his command were being moved to Volhynia.

Moscow meant everything to me. There, in a narrow, winding lane, lived my family; there, on dust-covered shelves in a tiny room, were my books, which I had not touched since the beginning of the War, since the spring of 1941; there, across the Moscow River in a two-storey wooden house standing in a quiet street, lived my girl....Moscow was an essential part of all my hopes, my dreams, my plans for the future, my literary aspirations. In my kitbag was a fat, two-hundred-and-fifty-page manuscript—my first book, which I hoped to publish in Moscow.

It was an unpretentious, factual book called A Day in the Belfry, and it described the events of a single day in a quiet sector of the North-west Front. That particular front had remained stationary for two years and all fighting had been confined to static warfare. An empty, snowy desert extended for about fifteen miles on both sides of the front line. The villages had disappeared without a trace; the houses had been burned by two years of bombing and artillery fire, or else torn down and used for reinforcing dugouts and trenches, and for building plank roads across the never-freezing swamps. In some miraculous fashion, far from the front line, a lone belfry had withstood destruction—it was the only landmark on the spot where once there had been a village, Bolshaya Ivanovshchina. For two years the German artillerymen had fired at this target to no avail! Direct hits had left the altar in ruins, the walls of the church had collapsed, but the belfry, which was so valuable to us, continued to stand, its walls covered with smoke, scarred with shell fragments, and reinforced with iron bands. In the belfry our men maintained an Air Force observation point from which the German lines and their approaches could be seen with revealing clarity. The Air Force staff officers in the belfry were in constant touch by wireless with the infantry, the artillery, and the ‘planes in the air; they directed the dive-bombers to their targets, gave orders during dog-fights that were fought as often as ten times a day over the lines, and, most important of all, co-ordinated the action of all the different branches of the service. The contents of my book dealt with what could be seen from the belfry in the course of a single day. A single day on a small, relatively unimportant and quiet sector of the front, but what an amazingly long chain of varied, colourful, and, at times, strikingly contrasting events! In order to absorb and understand the events of a single day, I had spent two long months in the belfry. The tiny, frozen sector of the stationary front was placed under a microscope and the war was revealed as a tightly constructed network in which it was extremely difficult to segregate the commonplace from the tragic or the ridiculous. A Day in the Belfry was a study in the physiology of war.

The manuscript had been read by the Air Force men at the front; they liked the way in which I had handled the facts—my understanding of air tactics, and the calm, sober way in which I described the events. In Moscow it was read by my literary friends, who appreciated the device I had used—a single day in a belfry—as well as the novel approach to the physiology of war. But in the Goslitizdat{1} I was confronted with an unexpected objection:

"A Day in the Belfry....Why in the belfry?"

Professor Minna Yunovich, editor of the magazine October, published by the Goslitizdat, was asking the question. It had never occurred to me, or for that matter to anyone else who had read the manuscript, to question the title which expressed the nature of the book so well.

By the belfry I meant the observation point, I said with embarrassment. But ‘on the observation point’ sounds so awkward....

But you will have to admit that ‘in the belfry’ does not sound much better. A belfry seems completely out of place here. We can get on without it.

How can we get on without it? All through the book...

We can take the belfry out of the book altogether. Let it collapse with the church. You can put the observation point in a tree or in a tower. I don’t need to explain these things to you—you know how to do them. But it still is a fine book. Congratulations! I will give your manuscript to Gutman; he will clean it up, edit it, and then everything will be in order.

I was not too elated by Minna Yunovich’s congratulations, because I had heard that among the Moscow writers she was known as delayed-action Minna. My doubts were fully borne out when I met the impulsive, explosive Alexander Gutman to whom she had assigned my book and whom nothing could reconcile to belfries.

What kind of stuff are you writing? Gutman exclaimed when a couple of days later I dropped in to see him. As soon as I began to read your manuscript, I knew you were on the wrong tack!

What’s the matter with it?

Just take a look at this! He handed me a page which he had marked with red pencil.

The remnants of the old paintings could still be seen on the ruined church wall that looked as though it had been sliced diagonally from top to bottom. The saints and martyrs towered above the icy desert that showed no other trace of human life, because the people who had been there had escaped, or else had buried themselves underground in the camouflaged trenches and dugouts; these figures towered above the earth torn by shells. Their blue robes were stained with the smoke of gunpowder and rent by shell fragments. Two Christian warriors, resting on their swords, held a scroll that read. On earth peace, good will toward men....

What’s the matter with that? I asked, bristling for a fight; I was determined to save this page because it pictured so well what I had seen.

Do you expect me to explain to you what you have written? Gutman answered. "I hope that you are not under the impression that merely because the Goslitizdat is for the time being producing The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate you can fill the pages of October with saints, martyrs, and the devil only knows what else! I haven’t finished reading your manuscript, but I can tell you now that this particular page is out!"

No, it isn’t!

Gutman looked at me with a puzzled expression. Silenced for the moment by surprise, he collected the scattered pages. In that case you had better take back the manuscript!

I will.

From the Goslitizdat I went to the Union of Writers, which had a military section. All frontline correspondents were under its direction. Jointly with the central political bureau of the Red Army it assigned writers to the frontline newspapers and watched their work and their literary output. A. Leytes was head of the military section. He was not a writer; his official designation was guiding comrade, and he was one of the men whose duty it was to provide guidance within the writers’ organization.

I have no way of knowing whether the guiding comrade actually read A Day in the Belfry. My impression is that he accepted a report by another reader, but without hesitation he passed final judgment on my ill-fated book:

This book deserves attention because of its quality and because of the manner in which the subject is presented. Certain changes are imperative. (1) The day described should be the day of attack, the end of stationary, stabilized warfare. The subject of the book should be the day of the breakthrough (a recommendation to use this title should be passed on to the author). (2) The theme requires a more dynamic handling, a factor that must be borne in mind in rewriting the book. The author displays a certain pacifistic, or perhaps religious, turn of mind which must be eradicated in the book and inwardly rejected by the author in the interests of his future literary career.

The note from the guiding comrade which was attached to the title-page of the manuscript when it was returned to me made me wonder. During the thirty years of my life, until the outbreak of the War, I never had evinced any religious feelings. But in the autumn of 1941, as a result of my war experiences, I had experienced a spiritual landslide. I was aware that this was not the time to write about it, and I deliberately restrained my religious inclinations from colouring my book. Had they asserted themselves in spite of that and against my will?

Russian autobiographical literature, the numerous recollections of childhood and youth, invariably has chapters that describe family pilgrimages to the holy shrines, and the deep impression made on the tender, receptive soul of the child by the pageantry of the Church and the harmonious religious chants. Nothing of the sort ever happened in my childhood. I was born in a small village that had no church and was lost in the dark Siberian wilds, in the foothills of the Sayan Mountains. In thinking about my early years I remember a wild, primitive life that was close to nature. The Kan River, alive with those amazing graylings, bubbled through the green woods; a mountain with the Tartar name of Yanda towered above the village against a line of snow-covered peaks of the Byeli Mountains, beyond which, according to the hunters, spread a desert, a foreign land, Mongolia. The people round me—my father, my mother, my relatives—knew God, but in their stern, primitive life they were not accustomed to display their inner feelings, whether they were moved by affection or religion; without thinking about it they instinctively knew that the best way in which they could serve God was through work, through bringing up their children, and through leading a useful and upright life. My mother could not read or write, and I don’t think that she tried to teach me any prayers—probably she did not know any. But her very life was like a prayer; she dedicated it to her neighbours and especially to her children. Oddly enough, my father and my mother approached our education with idealism. They had grown up in the same little village, but they were determined to expand our experience beyond the dark life of the forests. An exiled Pole had taught my father how to read, and for many years Father perused a book called The World of God. It described the various animals, the different peoples, and the faraway countries. As soon as I was old enough my mother made for me a new suit of hemp cloth, and Father drove me across sixty miles of Siberian wilds to the nearest town, where I could learn about the world of God.

That was in 1923. The rumble of the Revolution had not yet had time to die down in distant Siberia. Meetings and demonstrations were daily occurrences. They all began and ended with the singing of The Internationale, which praised the destruction of the old and the building of the new world.

The world of God was being torn down. On Sundays the school-children gathered in the Pioneer Club, where we picked up huge placards reading Down with the priests and the imperialists! From there we marched to the church in Bazaar Square, where in those days services were still being held. My boyish heart knew pleasures very different from those described in most autobiographies. It was fun to build a large cardboard model of a church, to paint its cupolas blue and the crosses above them gold, and then with a noisy throng carry it to the square, and set it on fire in front of the real church. With torches in our hands we jumped and danced for a long time round the bonfire and shouted the song:

Sergei the priest,

Sergei the deacon....

This was the extent of our religious education. Did we grow up to be atheists? Not at all, despite the energetic efforts of our teachers, the Pioneer leaders, and the executive secretaries of the Komsomol{2} groups. As a textbook we were given The Bible for Believers and Non-believers, a book by Emelian Yaroslavski that contained all the incredible legends of Christianity. Yaroslavski’s book made no impression on me or on my school-mates; we were not familiar with the real Bible and so the attacks on it meant nothing to us. For the same reason, not knowing God, we could not turn against Him. As an ideological objective, not as a form of repression, the fight on God was a complete failure. We were not religious and we were not atheists. We were something in between. Our attitude towards God was one of complete indifference.

I continued in this state of religious indifference for many years, until the outbreak of war. While I was studying at the Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History I began to realize that the Church was an important factor in Russian national life. Within my consciousness arose the figures of Sergei Radonejski, Alexander Nevski, and later Joseph Volotski, whom I saw as statesmen who had left an imprint on Russian history. But this was a superficial and completely irreligious approach; I was discovering only the historical significance of the Church, while its mystic meaning remained closed to me. I accepted the Church as a part of Russian civilization, of the Russian State, and nothing more. The Church as a religious faith or as a spiritual experience remained incomprehensible and obscure to me.

The storm that broke in the summer of 1941 penetrated the darkness like a ray of light. But all this happened after summer was over, during that autumn, when an officer named Klochkov, with a handful of soldiers, held the Volokolamski road against the attacking German tanks, calling to his men, We cannot retreat any further! Moscow is at our backs! Moscow meant everything to us, and, like one man, we braced ourselves for the last stand. In the face of death all material values that nourished and conditioned our religious indifference ceased to exist. The sense of heaven became the only vital, life-giving sense; the sense of a great, boundless responsibility, not to oneself and not to one’s country, but to something that suddenly became very close and real—God!

This is not the place to recount how, during that year of 1941, the religious light penetrated the darkness that engulfed my consciousness. In the war years that followed, while I commanded a company and came to know the insecurity of frontline life, I had the opportunity to observe in the soldiers certain spiritual peculiarities of the Russian national character which served as evidence of their unquestionable, at times involuntary, cosmic religious spirit. Patriotism and the love of their homeland asserted themselves as ageless, immutable, spiritual traits that had been planted in the souls of the people by the Church and its martyrs. Outwardly all of us were separated from the Church, but in the very essence of our beings we belonged to it, we were its children.

During the spring of 1944 I thought a great deal about this. The War had taken a final victorious turn; the analysis of wartime experience became of paramount importance, and, as an Air Force correspondent, I devoted my time to it. At once it became obvious that wartime experience had to be studied not only as a tactical and strategical problem, but also as a spiritual one. What inner change had occurred in the people during the War? What had weakened and what had strengthened the soldier’s morale? Because of existing conditions these questions could not be brought into the open. My thoughts on this subject were