Sasha Orlov is the son of one of the volunteer movement’s founders. Wearing rubber waders and an army-issue jacket, he stands next to a decommissioned half-track in wilderness a few kilometres to the south-east of Myasnoi Bor. Snow and sky are a flat, dull grey; the oranges and golds of new willow and dead reeds muted. Just out of sight, where the ground dips, lies the Volkhov. Save for the twittering of finches in a nearby bush, it is completely silent. Here, Sasha explains, was a German bunker. Scraping at the snow with his foot, he rapidly uncovers a leather boot, a rusty saw, two earth-filled green wine bottles, a length of ammunition belt, a stovepipe, the spiral skeleton of a hose and dozens of pointy nosed 7.92mm rifle rounds, packed in neat rows inside a rotten wooden box. Ignoring nervous health and safety pleas, he breaks open one of the rounds against a stone and tips out a little heap of shiny slate-grey flakes. A lighter rasps and they flare and crackle, throwing off a miniature fountain of bright white sparks.

The group’s finds are displayed in the gymnasium of a local school. There are hand-painted wall maps — the front lines carefully delineated in interlocking red and grey — a variety of guns (the police periodically take them away, Sasha says, but his group just goes out and gets more), and a litter of helmets, water bottles and tin spoons with Cyrillic initials scratched into the handles. Three fat ring binders are filled with the Red Army equivalent of dog tags: narrow paper forms, filled in by hand, which were rolled up and put inside small screw-top Bakelite cylinders. When found they are now almost always illegible, with the result that of the 29,000 bodies recovered from the Myasnoi Bor area to date, only 1,800 have been identified. Sasha’s prize exhibit, unearthed at the site of Vlasov’s last headquarters, hangs on the wall. It is a print matrix, lead type still gripped within a corroded metal frame, for the Second Shock Army’s one-page ‘newspaper’. The headlines read ‘Death to the German occupiers’, ‘The enemy will not break our resistance’ and ‘Our victory is near’. The issue, almost certainly never produced, is dated Wednesday 24 June — the day on which what was left of the Second Shock Army rushed the Myasnoi Bor corridor for the last time.

Overall, the winter offensive of January to April 1942 lost the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts 308,000 out of a total 326,000 troops committed to combat. Of these 213,303 were ‘medical losses’ — i.e. the wounded and those who died in hospital — and 95,000 ‘irrecoverable losses’ — i.e. the dead in battle, captured and missing. The operations of May and June lost the northern fronts another 94,000 men, of whom at least 48,000, according to German records, were taken prisoner at Myasnoi Bor.26

Ilya Frenklakh, survivor of the doomed People’s Levy, had been transferred to a reconnaissance unit within the Volkhov Front’s 52nd Army. His job was to lie motionless for hours at a time in no-man’s-land, watching the enemy lines through binoculars. All around lay corpses, their relative states of decomposition indicating whether they had formed part of the autumn or spring ‘call-ups to heaven’. ‘As you lay there’, he remembered,

you couldn’t help thinking and comparing: why are the Germans so well-trained, while all we do is try to overwhelm them with numbers? Why do they use technology and brains, while all we’ve got is bayonets? Why is it that every time we attack, our blood flows in rivers and our dead pile up in mountains? Where are our tanks? Who needs this wretched village of Dubrovka? And lots more unanswered questions.

A feeling of nausea would descend — only people who fought at Leningrad or on the Volkhov in the first two years of the war will understand what I mean. If our generals and colonels had done their jobs properly we would have won with a quarter of the losses. . Butchers and undertakers — we had plenty of those.27

19. The Gentle Joy of Living and Breathing