Red Army (3 page)

The estates were gone, of course. No Malinsky dared go near them. But an officer’s life remained a good one compared to the sufferings and dislocations Pyotr witnessed around him. At times, he considered an attempt to leave Russia with his family. But, he told himself, the Bolsheviks would pass, too, while the army would always remain. He looked for the good in the Revolution and in the strange new leaders it brought forth, still eager to believe in the good in men after swimming through seas of blood.

Pyotr’s son, Mikhail, entered a military academy in 1926. The tradition had almost been broken, since the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army did not want the sons of former noblemen. But even then, there had been enough survivors among the military specialists recruited from the Czarist ranks to quietly find the boy a place.

In 1938, Colonel Pyotr Mikhailovitch Malinsky was arrested, tried, and shot by the secret police. His son, a captain, was arrested and sent to the camps near Kolyma. Captain Malinsky’s wife and son remained behind with no knowledge of whether he was alive or dead until, finally, after a year, a particularly brave comrade of the captain’s revealed that Malinsky was alive in a camp in the east, and his family could write to him, so long as great care was taken in what was said.

In his well-furnished office in a bunker deep in eastern Germany, the son of the captive sat now, remembering how he had scribbled notes to a distant, half-remembered father. His mother always insisted that he add something, either a note of his own or, when there wasn’t enough paper, a few scratched words on his mother’s neat pages.

His father survived. When the Hitlerite Germans invaded on the twenty-second of June, 1941, even Stalin was soon forced to realize the extent of his folly. Imprisoned officers who were still healthy enough and whose records were not too black were returned to service. Malinsky’s father fought from Tula to Berlin. Not for Stalin. And not for the Communist Party, although he was reinstated as a member. But for Russia.

Malinsky’s father had looked sixty when he was in his late forties. The camps had ruined his health, and perhaps only his strength of will kept him going through the war and beyond. He had entered Berlin as a rifle division commander, with fewer than two thousand able soldiers on the divisional rolls. He died in a military sanatorium in the Caucasus in 1959. His son had come in his dress uniform to visit him, towing his own six-year-old boy, and in the quiet of a general’s sickroom, the old man had looked his son in the eyes and said, “I outlived that bastard. And Russia will outlive them all. Remember that. Your uniform is the uniform of Russia.”

In the year after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Malinsky had found himself on an inspectorate tour that took him through Smolensk. Hard drinking was still fashionable in the officer corps then, and the officers with whom he was traveling were a particularly hard-drinking bunch. One morning while they snored into their hangovers, he had taken the staff car out to the state farm where once his family estates had counted thousands of souls.

The great house was long gone, destroyed by the Germans during the Great Patriotic War. The Sovkhoz buildings were nondescript barns, shacks and sheds of tin and cinder block. Malinsky parked the car and walked beyond the litter of the state into the newly harvested fields. From a low rise he could see the chronicle of his blood stretching brown and yellow and green over tens of gently rolling kilometers. And he wept, taking off his hat. Not for the loss of land. Nor because he wasn’t called a count, even though in intimate moments he thought of his wife, affectionately, as his countess. Rather, he wept for Russia, without understanding himself. With blurred vision, he stared off into the distance where the fields met the vast, empty sky, caught up in its timelessness, suspecting that good men had always wept for Russia, that there was no choice, ever.

The gagging of a stalled tractor roused him, and he walked back through the characterless plot of farm buildings. Upon his approach, an old woman, an eternal peasant of a woman, called out:

“No special bargains for officers here, Comrade. You can go stand in line like all the rest.”

Major General Anseev came in cautiously. As he approached the island of light in front of the situation map Malinsky motioned for him to take a seat. A visitor’s chair had been carefully positioned so that the guest could turn slightly to his left and address the map or twist to the right and face Malinsky, but with no possibility of comfort in either position. The chair was positioned exactly so that, whenever the guest had to turn toward Malinsky, one of the small spotlights that lit the map dazzled the subordinate’s eyes. Malinsky was not a cruel man, but he firmly believed in establishing and maintaining control under all circumstances, and he believed in precision and in the importance of the smallest detail to the greatest military operations.

Malinsky knew Anseev well enough. During Malinsky’s tour of duty in Afghanistan -- easily the most frustrating assignment of his life -- Anseev had commanded a combined arms unit. Anseev had been bold, a great improviser, where others were routinely overcautious. Once, denied the use of mountain roads by the dushman, he had personally led his armored vehicles up a dry riverbed to relieve a besieged garrison. But he did not pay enough attention to little things, and his casualties were always high. Each of his commanders had his own peculiar weaknesses, Malinsky reflected. Anseev just needed to feel the bit now and then.

Anseev had been given the command of a corps structured to perform optimally as an operational maneuver group, with the mission of thrusting deeply and rapidly into the enemy’s operational rear, unhinging the enemy’s ability to reorganize his defenses, seizing key terrain or striking decisive targets, and convincing the opponent that he had been defeated before the military issue was actually settled. Anseev had been selected for the command because of his boldness and the speed with which he moved. Yet here was a situation in which one of his subunits could not even clear its staging area on time. Malinsky suspected he knew the reason, but he wanted to hear Anseev’s tale.

Holding out his cigarette case, Malinsky leaned forward into the light. Anseev was normally highly self-confident, even brash, and he was a chain-smoker like Malinsky. But now he waved away the proffered smoke with almost unintelligible thanks.

“Come, Igor Fedorovitch, you like a smoke.”

Anseev obediently took one of the short paper tubes that bled dark tobacco from both ends.

From Anseev’s behavior, Malinsky could tell that the man knew what the problem was, and that he had hoped it would slip by the front commander.

Malinsky leaned back into the shadows.

“Igor Fedorovitch,” he said in a friendly, almost paternal voice, “are you aware that your trail brigade is still in its staging area, holding up another unit?”

“Yes, Comrade Front Commander.”

“What’s the problem there?”

“The roads are just too crowded,” Anseev said anxiously. Anseev was a mongrel, with a great deal of Tartar blood and the guarded eyes of an Asian. “The supply columns from the front and army materiel support brigades are undisciplined. They act as though they are under no control whatsoever. I have tanks colliding with fuelers, and nobody can decide who has priority unless a senior officer is present. The commandant’s service has not deployed adequate traffic controllers. You should see how it is along my routes, Comrade Front Commander. The river-crossing sites are an absolute nightmare.”

“Igor Fedorovitch, do you imagine it will be easier to move in combat? Do you expect the British or the Germans to control traffic for you?” Malinsky paused for effect, carefully holding his voice down to a studied near-whisper that could be chilling and fatherly at the same time. “We’re not in Afghanistan now. This is a real war, with mechanized opponents, with enormous mechanized armies the like of which the world has never seen in battle. Moving to war on the finest road networks in the world. And you, my cavalryman, are perhaps the most important formation commander in this front. Yet you can’t move a lone brigade on time? Igor Fedorovitch, we’ve had reasonable weather, a little rain, but nothing to stop a good cavalryman. If the supply columns have no control, why didn’t you take control? If you can’t maneuver around a pack of field kitchens, how do you expect to get to the Rhine? How can I trust you even to get into combat on time?”

“Comrade Front Commander, this will
not
happen again. It’s just -- ”

“No ‘just,’“ Malinsky said, his voice lowering in pitch and suddenly as cold as winter in the far north. “Fix the problem. And never let it happen again.”

“Yes, Comrade Front Commander. By the way, I have to tell you that your son’s brigade is the best in my command. Well-disciplined, and he moves his tanks like lightning.”

It was the wrong approach to try with Malinsky, who instantly realized how shaken Anseev must have been to try anything so tactless and naive. Anseev would need watching as the pressure mounted.

“Guards Colonel Malinsky is no special concern of mine,” Malinsky said emphatically. “He’s one commander out of many. Anseev, did you personally review your march tables and routes in detail?”

“Comrade Commander, I flew the routes myself.”

“Did you personally review the march tables? Was your movement plan fully cleared with my chief of the rear and my movement control officers? Or did you bend the schedule you were allowed by the front? Did you even know all that had been done or left undone in your name?”

“Comrade Front Commander, the automated support mechanism -- ”

“Yes or no?”

“No, Comrade Front Commander.”

Malinsky drew on his cigarette, letting its glow briefly light his face. Anseev was clearly distraught. As he deserved to be. But Malinsky did not want him to return to his unit that way. And there was the final review to get through with all of the other commanders, the front staff, and the special representatives.

Anseev turned his face to the map, as though seeking a way to reach out and correct his error in front of Malinsky’s eyes.

“Igor Fedorovitch,” Malinsky began, weighting the paternal tone in his voice, “you are . . . perhaps the finest fighting commander I have. I frankly admired you in Afghanistan. You know that. It was a bad war for all of us, not really a war -- a trial we were never permitted to win. But you did so well with what you had, under the worst possible conditions ... we always counted on you in the desperate moments. And I am counting on you now. We’re all counting on you. Of all the formations in the First Western Front, it is most critical that your corps and its brigades be responsive and exactly on time. You must always be there first.” Malinsky sucked on his cigarette, blowing the smoke back out with a faint sigh. “We all have flaws, Igor Fedorovitch. And I’ll be frank. Your flaw is that you see everything in bold, broad terms. This may also be your virtue. But a commander must take the time for the details. If the artillery arrives but the ammunition doesn’t show up, the artillery is useless. Precision saves lives, Igor Fedorovitch. It is perhaps the most important aspect of discipline for an officer. The soldier of the Soviet Motherland will give you everything he has. I will not see his life wasted because a commander was too busy to attend to administrative details.”

“I understand, Comrade Front Commander. I won’t forget.”

Malinsky allowed a short silence to drain the tension.

“I’ll see you in a few minutes then, Igor Fedorovitch. At the final review.”

Anseev understood this form of dismissal. He rose sharply and presented his respects.

Malinsky nodded.

With Anseev gone, Malinsky lit a final cigarette, attempting to gather his thoughts. He wanted to keep the review short so that his commanders could get back to their formations, but he also wanted to insure that every last-minute question had been answered. There would be no time once the great machine had been set in motion. He tried to enumerate his last-minute concerns, but his mind strayed determinedly to his son, as if Anseev had cursed him. He suddenly felt as though, if he were a religious man, he would pray for the boy.

But pray to whom? To Russia? It was, Malinsky considered, the closest thing he could imagine to a god. Something so much greater than its children. Its stubborn, passionate, dreaming children, who always seemed to seek the most difficult solutions to life’s problems. The idea of Russia remained hopelessly mystical, verging on melodrama. Intellectually, he could pick it apart, yet it was emotionally irresistible to him.

Spare my boy. And I will do everything for you.

And Paulina. How they had wanted more children. But those children had never come, and Paulina had endured the dreadful lieutenant’s quarters on the edge of the world, with communal kitchens and the filthy shared latrines. And the separations, the lack of fine things that only those much closer to the Party, or those whose sense of duty was to themselves, would ever have. Paulina, his soldier’s wife. His countess. Paulina, he thought, if I could choose, if I had to choose, I would send you back your son.

Malinsky felt ashamed of himself. He knew he hadn’t a moment to squander on nostalgia and personal matters. He needed to concern himself with the movement of tens of thousands of war machines, of hundreds of thousands of men. There was no time for emotionalism.

The intercom phone rang. It was the chief of staff and first deputy commander, the newly promoted Lieutenant General Pavel Pavlovitch Chibisov. The chief was a self-contained, coldly brilliant man with an analytical bent and almost obsessive self-discipline whom Malinsky had rescued from another ineradicable aspect of the Russian character -- anti-Semitism. Chibisov was an ethnic Jew whose family had long ago renounced their religion, but he still felt compelled to struggle relentlessly against every last vestige of his Jewishness. And Chibisov was correct -- his Jewishness never would be fully laid to rest in the eyes of many of his fellow officers. Malinsky felt a close personal bond to Chibisov, a deep, if quiet, affection. They were both outsiders, in their very different ways. In any case, Chibisov was the perfect chief of staff, a born mathematician and organizer, leaving his commander free to concentrate more of his own energies on the military art. Chibisov was the first of his fellow officers whom Malinsky had ever trusted to the extent that he allowed himself to depend fully on another, and he smiled to think of Chibisov the man, a lifelong bachelor who could express everything except emotion with utter clarity.