VICTOR NEKRASOV
59
story completely, joining the ranks of the party of Lenin and Stalin with
the purest of motives. This I believed wholeheartedly, that the Red Army
had brought peace and freedom to the world, when on the hillside next
to the Red stadium I penned with half-paralyzed fingers in a school
notebook, "The order to retreat always comes unexpectedly."
Thirty-six years ago, that was the way I really thought. I longed for
my fellow soldiers, those young "birch boys," and my officer friends
(although I missed the big brass less) . And I wanted everyone to love my
Red Army, the liberator. It had earned their love by dint of blood,
sweat, wounds, and graves. . . . And what of Stalin, the great
Commander-in-Chief?
In early 1947, when
In the Trenches
had been submitted to
Soviet
Writer,
before it was awarded the Stalin Prize, I was called in by a cen–
sor, a unique event. She looked at me reproachfully and said, "You've
written a good book. But how can you have discussed Stalingrad with–
out mentioning Comrade Stalin? It's unsettling. The inspirer and orga–
nizer of all our victors, and you leave him out? Can't you add a scene in
Stalin's office? Just one or two pages?"
I played dumb: "I'm not a writer; I just wrote about what I saw
and lived through. I can't just make things up. Believe me, it wouldn't
be any good."
We parted on that note. Ten years later, in the wake of the Twen–
tieth Party Congress, the director of Voenizdat, the military publishing
house, called me into his office and asked me, almost in tears, to delete
the three lines in my book where the officers talk about Stalin. I refused.
But not out of any love for Stalin. Yet this is what I hear from the
West: "You fought for Stalin. You charged into battle, your voice
straining as you shouted 'for the Motherland and for Stalin.' You
defended the most horrible system on earth, one which was arguably
worse than Hitler's, and to what end?"
Well, I would reply, we fought at the time not so much for some–
one as against an intruder. An enemy had invaded our country, and we
had to repulse him, to destroy him. Or rather, anyone who wore that
despicable uniform and "God is with us" on his epaulets. I am not in a
position to judge the Vlasovites who joined the German army following
their Russian general; I never came across them and know little about
them. But I can assure you that had we run into them, we would have
killed them. As for what would come out of all this, we didn't know.
None of us could begin to imagine.
My arm in a sling, I wandered about newly-liberated Lublin and
found only smiling people everywhere. People invited me to their houses,
