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White nights, so we had German planes overhead twenty-four hours a day, strafing and dropping bombs. The noise of shellfire was continuous and deafening, as was the sound of breaking and burning trees. . We weren’t an army any more — we were a market crowd. A complete mess — no communication between units, and lines of command had ceased to exist. No information on our own situation, but limitless amounts of German propaganda — flyers, newspapers, coloured proclamations — covering the ground and urging us to surrender. . The forest burns, the peat smoulders. There are bomb craters everywhere and twisted, broken trees — piles of useless rifles, wrecked gun carriages. And corpses — corpses everywhere you looked. Thousands of them, stinking and covered in flies, decomposing under the June sun. You pass one and the flies rise off it into your face — you can’t see anything, they’re in your eyes, your nose, everywhere. Big fat buzzing flies — disgusting to remember. On every bit of dry ground there are wounded soldiers, screaming, moaning, pleading — some for water, some for somebody to finish them off. But nobody cares. People wander about the woods, indifferent, sullen, half-mad; in hats with the ear flaps tied under the chin so as to keep off the mosquitoes; eyes red and swollen from lack of sleep. . Nobody has a watch, we lose track of time. What date is it? Is it day or night?22

The end came on the relentlessly sunlit nights of 21–24 June, in a series of suicidal breakouts through a gap in the German lines four kilometres long and only a few hundred metres wide. Those with enough strength carried rifles, and the emaciated and wounded nothing at all. The German fire, in the words of a survivor, was ‘so fierce that everything was flung into the air — people, earth, trees. You couldn’t see anything for smoke.’ Stumbling over corpses old and new, he took shelter in a bomb crater, then slid down a bank past a German tank towards a stream. ‘An astonishing silence fell, then suddenly, a voice: “Stop! Who goes there!” It was our soldiers; we had got through to the other side.’23

One soldier who did not get through to the other side was General Vlasov, who had dropped all radio communication with front headquarters a few days previously. How exactly he spent the next three weeks is unclear, but on 12 July he was picked up by the Germans in a village on the western edge of the ‘pocket’ and flown to Vinnitsa in central Ukraine, site of Hitler’s new forward headquarters and of a special camp for high-ranking Soviet prisoners. Here — perhaps in rush of anger at the Myasnoi Bor disaster, perhaps as the cumulation of years of suppressed doubt and frustration — Vlasov turned against Stalin, writing a letter to the Nazi authorities in which he argued that since many Soviet citizens were strongly anti-Bolshevik, civilians in occupied territory should be better treated and Soviet POWs recruited into a Russian Liberation Army. He had misjudged his audience: ‘We will never build a Russian Army’, Hitler sneered. ‘It is a phantom of the first order.’ Though the Nazis made good use of Vlasov for propaganda purposes, touring him round the occupied territories and putting his name to leaflets inciting the Red Army to surrender, he never met Hitler and was only given command of two POW-based divisions late in January 1945. Four months later he was captured by the Soviets amidst the confusion of the Prague Rising, and in July 1946 tried in a closed court and hanged.24

Vlasov’s treason was also fatal to the reputation of the Second Shock Army, its demise transformed from heroic last stand into deliberate mass defection to the enemy. A Major General Afanasyev, Vlasov’s chief of communications, was flown out from behind enemy lines in August, having spent the intervening weeks living off hedgehogs with partisans. His interrogation report, in which he describes Vlasov as lapsing into dumb indifference before wandering off into the woods alone, reeks of fear of accusation of treachery. On flying back over the Soviet lines, he claims, he could not help shouting, ‘Hurrah! Long live our Great and Beloved Friend and Teacher Comrade Stalin!’, although he was ‘the only passenger, and the pilot could not hear’.25

Post-war, all mention of the Second Shock Army was taboo. No histories were written, ceremonies enacted or memorials erected, and the widows of its fallen were denied military pensions. Veterans were forced to treat their service as a shameful secret, on a par with having been the son of a kulak or priest. Rehabilitation did not begin until the late 1970s, when local volunteer groups began mounting expeditions into the backwoods to recover and decently inter tens of thousands of still unburied bodies.