War veterans in US and USSR

The Second World War ended 81 years ago – true or false? If you are anywhere but in Russia, definitely and verifiably true. However, if you have the misfortune of living in Russia, false on all counts.

First, you ignoramus you, what’s that with the Second World War? Russia fought the Great Patriotic War, and don’t you ever forget it.

This is an important distinction: the Second World War started on 1 September, 1939; the Great Patriotic War on 22 June, 1941. Until then the Soviet Union had been faithfully pursuing a policy of peace.

Admittedly, it pursued peace in rather eccentric ways. First, following the 1939 (Non)-Aggression Pact with Hitler, the Soviets annexed Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bessarabia and Bukovina, along with the eastern half of Poland. But fair enough, since those invasions succeeded without a shot fired, perhaps you can’t say Russia was at war.

But then things got more interesting. After the Nazis attacked Poland on 1 September, 1939, the Second World War officially started. But the Soviets took no part in it, and if you say anything different, you could go to prison in Russia.

What about the Soviet attack on rump Poland from the east on 17 September, 1939? I hear you ask. Yes, I’ll grant you that 3,000 Red Army soldiers were killed then, and some 10,000 went missing.

But unlike the German and Polish casualties, these had nothing to do with the Second World War. Stalin was merely helping out his ally Hitler, that’s all. A fallen German or Polish soldier was killed in that war. A Russian soldier was, well, just killed.

Then there was that conflict with Finland in the winter of 1939-1940. Considering that the Red Army lost some 500,000 men there, one has to agree begrudgingly that it was indeed a war. But it had nothing to do with the Second World War in which capitalist countries were fighting one another. Stalin’s Winter War was just a pursuit of peace by other means.

If all those little conflicts (what’s a few hundred thousand casualties here or there?) were less than wars, the Great Patriotic War was much more than just a war. As far as Putin’s Russia is concerned, it’s the most significant event in the history of Russia, possibly the world.

And that’s another reason the opening sentence above is false. As far as the Russians are concerned, that war never ended. It lives on in the heart of every Russian – or is supposed to on pain of lengthy imprisonment.

The whole ideology of post-Soviet Russia is based on that 1945 victory over Nazi Germany. All over the country, one can see placards, bumper stickers and ensigns screaming “We can do it again!” They mean it too. The war on the Ukraine isn’t just a war on the Ukraine.  

With a characteristic Russian disdain for detail, they adorn those rousing words with the imperial St George’s ribbons, which during the Great Patriotic War were only used by Gen. Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army. This raises the question of what exactly they can do again.

Over a million Soviet soldiers joined Vlasov to fight Stalin on Hitler’s side. One can infer that a repeat performance would involve over a million Russian soldiers deserting (or being taken prisoner) and then joining, say, the Ukrainians fighting against Russia. But no, let’s not make too much of that little design error. We’ve all made mistakes, haven’t we?

Anyway, my subject today isn’t Putin’s turning that great tragedy of 26 million Soviets perishing in Stalin’s war into a ghoulish state ideology. It’s not even about Soviet complicity in the Second World War, which Stalin entered as Hitler’s ally.

It’s the way the Soviets treated their veterans, which was so different from the way the Americans treated theirs. Here one has to make an important distinction between any old Soviet veterans and returning POWs. In every civilised country, such lucky survivors are treated as heroes. Not in Russia though.

Historically, the Russians took a dim view of their soldiers who had fallen into enemy hands and then came back. Most of the time, returning POWs were officially seen as deserters, and unofficially as people contaminated by the West and therefore in need of fumigation.

To that end, when the 16^th century Polish king Stefan Batory released 2,300 Russian POWs, they were all summarily slaughtered on return. This fine tradition had survived until modern times when Stalin declared, “There are no Soviet POWs, only traitors”.

He practised what he preached: most of the returning POWs during the Russo-Finnish and Russo-German wars were shot, imprisoned or exiled (my father was fortunate to have fallen into the last category). It’s useful to remember we’re talking millions of people here.

To cite one example, as a tribute to the tradition going back to Ivan the Terrible, when, after the Winter War, the Finns returned to Russia 5,700 Red Army POWs, they were all taken to an Arctic island never to be seen again.

But what about those brave soldiers who hadn’t ‘betrayed’ their country by being taken prisoner? Surely they were treated with the same care and respect as American veterans were treated in their country?

Not quite. At this point, I stop being a writer and become a translator. This is what an article I read this morning says:

“On 1 January, 1948, following ‘numerous requests from USSR citizens’, pensions for military decorations were cancelled. So was free travel on public transport for decorated veterans. So was any priority in receiving residences.

“Education became very expensive – back in 1940 Stalin introduced tuition fees for secondary schools and universities. Secondary schools charged 200 roubles a year, universities cost 400 roubles in Moscow, Leningrad and republican centres, and 300 in other cities (tuition fees were abolished only in 1956, after Stalin’s death).

“In addition, destitute people were robbed by the confiscatory money reform of 1947. [Redenomination swapped all cash into new roubles at 10 to 1. That wiped out whatever meagre savings people had.]

“About 10 million soldiers came back from the front as invalids to one extent or another. Some 775,000 had debilitating head wounds, 155,000 lost an eye, 54,000 were blind, 3,000,000 lost one arm, 1,100,000 both arms, hundreds of thousands lost one leg or both. Many invalids were physically incapable of working and had to beg.

“To combat those decorated invalids, in 1948 the government issued a directive ‘On the relocation to remote regions of persons malevolently shirking work in agriculture and living in an anti-social parasitic manner’. Invalids, war heroes, began to be deported from major cities.

“In 1951 Stalin ordered that the problem be solved radically, by ‘voluntarily-forcibly’ [whatever that means] shipping all invalids caught begging to guarded facilities [aka prisons].

“By contrast, in the USA:

“FDR signed the 1944 G.I. Bill establishing benefits for returning veterans of the Second World War. Among the benefits were university and college scholarships.

“As a result, by 1947 veterans made up 47 per cent of all college students. Within the framework of that law, 7.8 million veterans took advantage of scholarships, with 2.2 million going to colleges and universities and another 5.6 million to other institutions. Historians and economists regard the G.I. Bill as a major political and economic success. It made a significant contribution to the preservation of America’s human capital and boosted the country’s long-term economic growth.

“Veterans were also given an unemployment benefit of $20 a week [about $400 today]. Four billion dollars were allocated for that and also to help veterans find employment. Special hospitals for veterans were built. Discounted mortgages and credits were introduced. An inexpensive suburban house in the US cost about $8,000. A war veteran could buy it for $400, and millions of veterans’ families began to live in their own houses.”

Those bygones weren’t allowed to remain bygones. Throughout the 1990s, Moscow (the only Russian city I visited then) was overrun with ‘Afghan’ beggars. They weren’t actual Afghans but impeccably Russian veterans of the Soviet 1979-1989 war on Afghanistan.

However, many of them did find gainful employment as Mafia enforcers and hitmen during the gang wars that put Al Capone’s Chicago to shame. This means Russia has something to look forward to.

While there were only about 650,000 trained ‘Afghan’ killers let loose on Russian cities, some 2,000,000 veterans will come back when Putin’s excursion into the Ukraine finally ends. Some 200,000 of them will be career criminals who won a commuted sentence in exchange for killing Ukrainians.

Those Russians who still remember the orgy of violence in the 90s do some mental arithmetic, multiplying those incidents by at least three. They know that crime and begging will be the only career options available to the veterans. Guess which they’ll choose, those who still have a full complement of limbs, that is.