Remembering Bill and Ivan

By Mike Davis, ZNet, 7 June 2004

The decisive battle for the liberation of Europe began 60 years ago this month: a Soviet guerrilla army emerged from the forests and swamps of Belorussia to launch a bold surprise attack on the mighty Wehrmacht's rear. The partisan brigades, including thousands of Jewish fighters and concentration-camp escapees, devastated the rail lines linking the German Army Group Center to its bases in Poland and Eastern Prussia.

Three days later, on 22 June—the third anniversary of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union—Marshal Zhukov gave the order for the main assault on German front lines. Twenty-six thousand heavy guns and rocket launchers pulverized German fortifications in a matter of minutes. The banshee-like screams of the Katyusha rockets were punctually followed by the roar of 4000 tanks and the battle cries (in more than 40 languages!) of 1.6 million Soviet soldiers. Thus began Operation Bagration, an assault launched over a 500 hundred mile long front.

But what American has ever heard of Operation Bagration? June 1944 signifies Omaha Beach, not the crossing of the river Dvina. Yet the Soviet summer offensive was almost an order of magnitude larger than Operation Overlord (the invasion of Normandy) in both the scale of forces engaged and the direct cost to the Germans.

By the end of summer, the Red Army (which included full divisions of Poles and Czechs) had reached the gates of Warsaw as well as the high passes of the Carpathians—which command the entrance to Slovakia as well as Hungary. Soviet tanks, in a stunning reverse blitzkrieg, had caught Army Group Center in steel pincers and destroyed it. The Germans would lose more than 300,000 men in Belorussia alone. Another huge German army had been encircled and would soon be annihilated along the Baltic coast. The road to Berlin had been opened.

Thank Ivan.

It is no disparagement of the brave men who died in the sinister hedgerows of Normandy or in the cold forests around Bastogne, to recall that 70% of the Wehrmacht is buried on the Russian steppes—not in French fields. In the struggle against Naziism, approximately 40 Ivans died for every Private Ryan.

Yet the ordinary Soviet soldier—the tractor mechanic from Samara, the actor from Orel, the miner from the Donetz, even the highschool girl from Leningrad—is invisible in the current celebration and mythologization of the Greatest Generation. It is as if the new American century cannot be fully born without exorcising the central Soviet role in the epochal victory of the last century.

Indeed, most Americans are shockingly clueless about the relative burdens of combat and death in the Second World War. And even the minority who understand something of the enormity of the Soviet sacrifice tend to visualize it in terms of crude stereotypes of the Red Army: a barbarian horde driven by feral revenge and primitive Russian nationalism. Only G.I. Joe and Tommy are envisioned as truly fighting for civilized ideals of freedom and democracy.

It is thus all the more important to recall that—despite Stalin, the NKVD, and the massacre of an entire generation of Bolshevik leaders—the Red Army still retained powerful elements of revolutionary fraternity. In its own eyes, and that of the slaves it freed from Hitler, it was the greatest army of liberation in history.

Moreover, the Red Army of 1944 was still a Soviet Army. The generals who led the brilliant breakthrough on the Dvina included a Jew (Chernyakovskii), an Armenian (Bagramyan), and a Pole (Rokossovskii). In contrast to the class-divided and racially segregated American forces, command in the Red Army was an open, if ruthless, ladder of opportunity.

Anyone who doubts the revolutionary elan and rank-and-file humanity of the Red Army should consult the extraordinary memoirs by Primo Levi (THE REAWAKENING) and K.S. Karol (BETWEEN TWO WORLDS). Both hated Stalinism but loved the ordinary Soviet soldier and saw in her/him the seeds of socialist renewal.

So, as George W. Bush demeans the memory of D-Day to solicit support for his war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, I've decided to hold my own private commemoration.

I will recall, first, my kindhearted Uncle Bill, the salesman from Columbus, although it is hard to imagine such a gentle soul as a hell-for-leather teenage GI in Normandy. Second—as I'm sure my Uncle Bill would've wished—I will remember his comrade Ivan. The Ivan who drove his tank through the gates of Auschwitz and battled his way into Hitler's bunker.

Two ordinary heroes: Bill and Ivan. Obscene to celebrate the first without also commemorating the second.