"Sacred Hatred of the Enemy"

 

By David K. Shipler 

                As the Red Army swept westward into Germany toward the end of World War II, Russian soldiers wantonly burned villages; looted homes, committed rape, and murdered elderly women and other civilians in cold blood. Soviet Major Lev Kopelev, a German-speaking scholar of German literature assigned to the army’s Political Administration to propagandize the enemy, reported the crimes up the chain of command. He argued vehemently against the impulsive executions. He drew his pistol once and stood between a young girl and two Russian tank soldiers who were bent on raping her.

                He saved her, but not himself. Repeated calls for restraint made him a suspect, not a hero. “You engaged in propaganda of bourgeois humanism, of pity for the enemy,” said his interrogator. “You spent your time rescuing Germans and weakening the morale of our own troops; you engaged in agitation against vengeance and hatred—sacred hatred of the enemy.”

Major Kopelev was expelled from the Communist Party, arrested, tried, and sent to the GULAG for nine years. He tells the story in his 1977 memoir, To Be Preserved Forever, whose title comes from the official order stamped on secret police dossiers that are never to be destroyed.

                I have been thinking about him in these terrible days of Russian crimes in Ukraine. Russia’s troops are doing pretty much what their predecessors did back then, as we’ve learned after they’ve retreated from towns near Kyiv. I wonder if there is a Lev Kopelev among them and, if so, what will happen to him.

Lev died in 1997, so he does not have to witness his beloved nation reenacting the sins of the past. Having visited him often his Moscow apartment (on Red Army Street, coincidentally), I am sure that he would be tormented by the clash between the barbaric scenes in Ukraine and the deeper Russia that he cherished. His stubborn patriotism despite his persecution—and his unshaken belief in Stalin back in 1945—intrigued a fellow prisoner named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who cast him as the character Lev Rubin in his novel The First Circle.

                That contradiction between love of country and revulsion over its misdeeds is not unique to Russia, but it is being acted out now with epic drama. And not only around Russians’ kitchen tables, I’ll bet, but also in the ranks somewhere, perhaps just in whispers or inside soldiers’ minds.

Many competing fragments of what Russian troops were told and believed have peppered the news, based on communication intercepts and prisoners’ reports. They were told they were going on a military exercise. They were told they were liberating Ukrainians from neo-Nazis and would arrive to cheers. They were told they were heading into nests of spies and fascists. They thought they would roll through Ukraine with ease, so were unprepared for vicious combat. Which soldiers believed which tales that shaped which actions we may someday learn from someone’s memoir.

Still, the question: What has released some Russian men in uniform from the bonds of decency? Is it wartime’s “sacred hatred of the enemy” that leads soldiers to bang on the door of a Ukrainian home and demand to know where the Nazis are, then shoot dead someone who says there are none? Or is it that innocents can never be seen as innocents in light of the sacred hatred? Do those cowering women and children and elderly pose a threat simply because they get in the way of the soldiers’ story, deny the soldiers’ virtue, and so give the lie to the supposed cause of a war that has no cause?

War permits a kind of madness that can dislodge the discipline that is supposed to focus combat on actual military assets. So Russia obliterates hospitals, apartments, theaters, entire cities. That is done from a distance. Close up, one on one, something else takes place. To endure seeing your comrades blown to pieces, you might need sacred hatred. You might ride the fever of revenge by lashing out at any target of convenience, a limping old man, a tender child, a dusty car carrying civilians toward safety, a woman who steps into her front yard just to see what is going on. The veneer of civilization is thin. It is easily stripped away. And so men who might be humane back home, under that veneer, are inspired in war to herd hundreds of the helpless into a small, fetid basement for weeks, forcing them to live with the corpses of those who could not live.

                We Americans know from our own experience in Vietnam how soldiers ravaged by violence can be gripped by that fever. In 1968, a U.S Army company that had suffered multiple casualties from land mines and booby traps subjected the village of My Lai to a frenzy of rape and arson and murder, slaughtering some 300 to 500 Vietnamese civilians, including babies and the mothers who were shielding them. Not a single shot was fired at the Americans. The atrocity was an aberration but not the only case by any means, nor unique in the military’s attempts to submerge it under denial.

                Out of a misplaced patriotism, we are rarely completely candid about war. Yet truth-telling does not impugn love of country; it can be a tribute. If Russians were free to know and tell the truth, many would pay their country the tribute of doing so. That was Lev Kopelev’s tribute to his Russia in a time even more trying than today’s.

                He was a great oak of a man, over six feet tall and barrel-chested, yet disarmingly gentle, finely analytical and sensitive to the undercurrents of the Soviet Union. Here is part of what I wrote about him in Russia; Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams:

                  Kopelev’s beliefs took many years to crumble, and after they had fallen away, there remained, still, a passionate love of country. Through the 1970s, as he wrote of his wartime and prison experiences for publication in the West . . . Lev grew increasingly exposed and vulnerable. Derided in the official press as a “Judas” and a “traitor,” he was given to understand that he would probably have to choose between going east and going west, east into exile or prison, west into exile and freedom and rootlessness. He turned over and over the thought of taking a year’s sabbatical in West Germany to be with his friend Heinrich Boll, to pursue his studies of German literature. [His wife] Raya resisted, knowing that if they went, it would be not for a year, but forever. . . . But finally the pressure on Lev grew, and the barriers to departure relaxed, and they took the fateful step.

                Tony Austin of The New York Times wrote movingly of their departure on a 10:00 a.m. Aeroflot flight to Frankfurt on November 12, 1980. They arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport hours early, all they needed for a year packed into three suitcases, Lev using his walking stick, which he had ripped from a tree in the Crimea in 1957 during his years of recuperation from the camps. About fifty people had gathered near the customs counters to say good-bye, including some of the country’s finest and most independent writers. . . .

                “We go only to return,” said Lev.

                “We’ll be back, we’ll be back,” cried Raya tearfully.

                “Good luck, come back soon,” some of the friends and relatives called from behind the railing. And everyone knew.

                Six customs inspectors spent an hour examining their belongings. Selected items were put aside for confiscation: an old, slender book of Pushkin’s poems published in 1874 . . . Lev’s notes for a lecture on Goethe’s popularity in Russia . . . two address books containing names and phone numbers of friends throughout the world. An inspector took a small plastic box in his hands and opened it. Inside, Lev had placed a handful of Russian earth. It was confiscated.

                Lev Kopelev died seventeen years later in Cologne, Germany.