When it was over, Alexander counted the Finnish bodies. There had only been twenty Finns in the woods. Now all twenty were dead, which was good, but to kill them they had sacrificed 155 Red Army soldiers. Twenty-four came back to Lisiy Nos with Alexander. Twenty-four plus Dimitri. Komkov did not come back.
In 1940, the Finns sent more troops into southern Karelia and took back the trees and the thirty meters the Soviets had won, and another twenty kilometers besides, and the lives of thousands more Soviet men. Alexander found himself in charge of three platoons of strangers and his orders were to push the Finns from the Karelian Isthmus, back to Vyborg. Vyborg needed to be in Soviet hands, according to the Red Army—and according to Alexander, since penetrating the border there would leave him only a few hundred kilometers from Helsinki, Finland. Him and Dimitri. Despite everything, he would honour his promise to Dimitri. Alexander felt their opportunity for escape was close.
During the last days of the so-calledcampaign , in March 1940, Alexander served under Major Mikhail Stepanov, a stoic commanding officer with impenetrable eyes. Alexander was given a mortar and thirty men, including the commander’s young son, Yuri, to clear the area in the swamps near Vyborg. Thirty rifles and three light mortars just did not do the job against a well entrenched Finnish army. Alexander’s platoon was unable to penetrate enemy lines, and neither could the five other platoons that stretched inland from the Gulf of Finland.
When Alexander finally returned to the rear at Lisiy Nos with only four of his thirty men, Major Stepanov asked about his son. Alexander told him that he didn’t know what had happened to Yuri. He knew that Yuri’s battle buddy had been killed. Alexander volunteered to go back into the swamps by himself to bring back Yuri Stepanov. The major instantly agreed and ordered Alexander to take one more man with him into the forest.
Alexander took Dimitri. He also took his ten thousand dollars, and they set off with nothing but his money and their rifles and grenades into the marshy lands near the gulf without any intention of coming back to the Soviet Union.
They found Yuri Stepanov.
“God, he’s alive, Dima,” said Alexander, turning Stepanov over. The soldier could barely breathe.
Alexander pushed Stepanov’s tongue down with his fingers to help the boy breathe better. “He’s alive,”
he repeated, looking up at Dimitri.
“Yeah. Barely.” Dimitri glanced around. “Come on, let’s go. We don’t have much time. We need to get going. It’s perfect right now. Quiet.”
Alexander cut open Stepanov’s uniform to see where he was hit. He saw blood over the young man’s torso. The blood was viscous and brown. Alexander couldn’t tell how much blood Stepanov had lost.
Judging by the pallid look of him, quite a bit.
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Mumbling, Yuri Stepanov opened his eyes and his hand reached up to touch Alexander. He tried to say something but couldn’t.
“Alexander!” Dimitri exclaimed. “Let’s go.”
“Dimitri!” Alexander exclaimed, not even looking up. “Stop your shouting and let me think for a minute.
Just for one minute, all right.”
He continued to crouch in the marsh by Stepanov’s side, listening to the boy’s labored breathing, looking at the boy’s gray face. Thirty meters away was the unprotected Finnish border. Thirty meters away were the low-lying bushes near the gulf coast. Thirty meters away was a country other than the Soviet Union. And in that country was the sea that would take Alexander to Stockholm, and in Stockholm was a building where Alexander would go to beg for his freedom. And afterward…Alexander could see the whitewashed shingles, the whitewashed clapboard of the Barrington houses in between the cinnabar sugar maples. He could smell Barrington. He breathed deeply in, his lungs hurting. He would save himself, he would save Dimitri who helped him see his father, he would breathe the air of home once more.
He had expected to fight, he expected to freeze, to fire his weapons and to suffer, to swim, to sleep knee deep in mud, to die if he had to, to kill men who stood in his way. He did not expect this—a wounded son and a waiting father.
Alexander took another breath. It was not Barrington anymore. All he smelled was the organic, slightly stale old blood, the metal of the weapons, the burnt sulfur odor of gunpowder. And all he heard was Yuri Stepanov’s lungs laboring through each breath.
Alexander would be leaving a young man to die. He would be leaving a father’s son to die. He would be buying his freedom with this boy’s death. Alexander crossed himself. This is God’s test, he thought. To show me what I’m made of.
Alexander grabbed Stepanov by his arms and legs and lifted him off the ground. “Dima, I have to bring him back.”
Dimitri paled. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind? You can’t go back. We are not going back.”
“I am.”
A silent scream came from Dimitri in the quiet woods. Drip, drip, trickle, crackle, birds gone, crickets gone, drip, crackle and Dimitri’s mute fury. “What are you talking about?” he hissed. “We didn’t come back for him. He was a ruse. We came here to continue forward.”
“I know we did,” said Alexander. “But I can’t.”
“This is war, Alexander! What? You’re suddenly going to care about each of the thousands of men you let die under your command?”
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“I didn’t let them die,” Alexander said.
“We’re going forward.” Dimitri grit his teeth.
“Fine,” said Alexander. “If you’re going, then let me give you half of my money. You will get yourself to Stockholm one way or another, and from there you will know what to do. You will get yourself to America.”
“What are you talking about? What do you mean,me? You mean us.”
“No, Dimitri, I told you. I’m going back with Yuri. But no reason for you to go back.”
“I’m not going without you!” Dimitri nearly shrieked through the woods, his voice pitched high.
“All right,” said Alexander. “Let’s go back while he is still alive.”
Dimitri didn’t move. “If you tell me you’re returning to Lisiy Nos, then bringing Stepanov back will be the last thing you will do as a Soviet soldier.”
With Stepanov flung over his shoulders, Alexander came up very close to Dimitri and said, through his own grit teeth, “Dimitri, are you threatening me?”
“Yes,” Dimitri said.
Alexander backed away a step and looked at Dimitri with grim resignation. “Well, I’ll tell you what,” he said slowly, “you go ahead and do what you like. Go ahead and inform on me. Then it’s even more important that the last thing I do is save another man’s life.”
“Oh, fucking hell!”
“We’re going to have another chance! Look at what we found in these woods. We’ll be able to come back here again. This is our first chance, not our last. We’ll come back here and we’ll escape. If you’re threatening me with the NKVD, then you will never yourself get out of the Soviet Union. You’ll rot here.
I’ll be dead, but you’ll be here for the rest of your life.” Alexander paused. “Mark my words, Europe is going to war with Hitler. We’ll have another chance, but not if I’m dead. So what will it be? If you want to run, you’ll keep your mouth shut long enough for me to get us out.” Alexander paused. “Don’t be an ass. Let’s bring the boy back to his father.”
“No!” said Dimitri.
“Then do what you fucking like.” Alexander was done speaking. Without waiting for Dimitri to catch up, he turned around and started walking. He heard Dimitri’s sullen footsteps in the distance behind him.
Dimitri was a coward, and as a coward perhaps he could shoot another man in the back, but not when the man had promised to someday carry him on it.
They returned to base after hours of slogging i
n the dismal swamp. It was nearly dark, but the first thing Alexander saw by the line of the pines was Mikhail Stepanov, standing with one of the NKVD border guards, looking for them through the trees. His legs shaking, Stepanov walked towards Alexander and was barely strong enough to ask, “Is he alive?”
“Yes,” said Alexander. “But he needs a doctor.”
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Mikhail Stepanov took his son from Alexander and carried him to the field tent where he laid him on an empty cot and sat by him quietly, as they got a transfusion into Yuri, and some morphine too, and even some sulfa drugs. Together Stepanov and Alexander washed Yuri’s body, and the doctor stitched up the three bullet wounds. Yuri had been too long in the woods with metal in his body. The wounds were infected.
Alexander went to get something to eat and to have a smoke, and then came back and sat by Stepanov’s side. Yuri had come to a bit, and was faintly talking to his father. “Papochka,” he said, “I’m going to be all right?”
“Yes, son,” said Stepanov, holding Yuri’s hand.
“I was lucky. It could have been so much worse.” Yuri glanced at Alexander. “Right, Lieutenant?”
“Right, Private,” said Alexander.
“Mama will be proud of me,” said Yuri. “Am I going to fight again?”
He saw Major Stepanov’s stricken face. Alexander said nothing for a moment. “Whereis his mother?”
he asked at last.
“Dead since 1930,” replied Stepanov.
“Papa?”
“Yes?”
“Areyou proud of me?”
“Very proud, son.”
They sat by Yuri like this, the two warriors, listening to Yuri’s labored breathing, watching his slowly blinking eyes.
And then the breathing was no longer labored, and the eyes were no longer blinking, and Major Stepanov hung his head and cried, and Alexander, unable to take it, walked out of the medic’s tent.
He was leaning against a supply truck, smoking, when Stepanov walked outside.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Alexander.
Stepanov extended his hand to Alexander. “You’re a fine soldier, Lieutenant Belov,” he said, in a tight voice. “I have been in the Red Army since 1921, and I will tell you right now—you’re a fine soldier.
Your refusal to retreat, to leave your dead behind, where does it all come from? Don’t say you’re sorry.
Because of you, I said goodbye to my only child. Because of you he will be buried. He will have rest.
And I will, too.” Stepanov did not let go of Alexander’s hand.
“It was nothing, sir,” said Alexander, lowering his head.
The Winter War ended days later on 13 March, 1940.
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The Soviets never did regain Vyborg.
In Front of Mekhlis, 1943
The question before him was who he was. His time was up. He knew. Standing up, he remembered verse of Kipling’s “If,” almost as if his own father were speaking to him.
If you can make one heap of all your winnings,
and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss,
and lose, and start again, at your beginnings,
and never breathe a word about your loss.
They called for him, and when he was led back before the tribunal, he was almost cheerful.
“Well, Major, have you thought about it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is your answer?”
“My answer is that I am Alexander Belov, from Krasnodar, a major in the Red Army.”
“Are you the American expatriate Alexander Barrington?”
“No, sir.”
And then they were all quiet. Outside was a fresh May day. Alexander wanted to be outside again. The faces on him were somber, unblinking. He became somber and unblinking himself. One of the generals was tapping a pencil against the wooden desk. Stepanov’s eyes were discreetly on Alexander and when their glances locked, Stepanov nodded lightly.
Finally General Mekhlis spoke. “I was afraid that would be your answer, Major. Had you said yes, we would be talking to the U.S. State Department. Now the question before me is what do I do with you? I have been given complete authority over the disposition of your fate. My colleagues and I have conferred while you were outside. The decision before us is a difficult one. Even if you are telling the truth, the accusations against you rest on your shoulders along with all your bars and follow you in the Red Army wherever you go. The swirl of rumor, of suspicion, of innuendo, it doesn’t end. It won’t end. And if makes your job as an officer so much harder, and our job of defending you against other false accusations, against men afraid to fight under your command, so much harder.”
“I’m used to challenges, sir.”
“Yes, but we don’t need them.” Mekhlis raised his hand. “And don’t interrupt, Major. If you’re lying, however, all the same things apply, except now we as a government and a protector of our people have made a terrible mistake and will be made to look foolish and humiliated when the truth is eventually revealed. And you know one thing about truth—it always comes out in the end. Do you see how, whether you are lying or telling the truth, you are tainted property to us?”
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“If I may, General,” interjected Stepanov. “We are fighting a frantic war in which we are losing men faster than we can conscript them, we are losing weapons faster than we can make them, and we’re losing ranking officers faster than we can replace them. Major Belov is an exemplary soldier. Surely we can find something for him to do in the name of the Red Army?” When Stepanov encountered no argument, he continued. “He can be sent to Sverdlovsk to make tanks and cannons. He can be sent to Vladivostok to mine iron ore, he can be sent to Kolyma, or to Perm-35. In any of those places he can remain a productive member of Soviet society.”
Mekhlis scoffed. “We have plenty of other men to mine iron ore. And why should we waste a Red Army major on making a cannon?”
Alexander imperceptibly shook his head with amusement. Well done, Colonel Stepanov, he thought. A moment from now you will be having them beg for me to remain in the army, whereas a moment ago they were ready to shoot me themselves.
Stepanov continued on Alexander’s behalf. “He is not a major any longer. He has been stripped of his rank upon his arrest. I see no problem with sending him to Kolyma.”
“Then why are we still calling him Major?” Mekhlis puffed.
“Because he remains what he is even if the bars have been removed from his shoulders. He has been a commanding officer for seven years. He commanded men during the Winter War, he has fought to keep the Germans on the other side of the Neva, he has manned the Road of Life, and he fought alongside his men in four Neva campaigns last summer trying to break the blockade.”
“We have been made aware numerous times of his record, Colonel Stepanov,” Mekhlis said, painfully rubbing his forehead. “Now we need to decide how to dispose of him.”
“I suggest sending him to Sverdlovsk,” said Stepanov.
“We cannot do that.”
“Then reinstate him.”
“We cannot do that either.”
Mekhlis was silent for a while, thinking. After a heavy sigh, he said, “Major Belov, near Volkhov in the valley between Lake Ladoga and the Sinyavino Heights there is a railroad that is getting bombed by the Germans from their hilltop positions several times a day. Are you familiar with it?”
“Yes, sir. My wife helped build that railroad after we broke the blockade.”
“Please don’t bring up your wife, Major, it’s a sore subject. In any case, that railroad is vital for getting food and fuel to the city of Leningrad. I’ve decided to sentence you to a penal unit in charge of rebuilding the railroad along a ten-kilometer stretch between Sinyavino and Lake Ladoga. Do you know what a pen
al battalion is?”
Alexander was silent. He knew. The army was filled with thousands of men sent to storm bridges without cover, to cross rivers without cover, to build railroads under fire, to go first into battle without artillery support, without tanks or rifles for each man. In penal battalions, the men were given alternating
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rifles. When the man next to you fell, you picked up his rifle, unless it was you who fell. Penal battalions were Soviet walls of men sent before Hitler’s firing squads.
Mekhlis was silent. “Anything to add, Major? Oh, and you are formally relieved of your rank.”
“That’s fine. I’m being asked to be part of a battalion, not to command the men, correct?”
“Incorrect. You are being ordered to command the men.”
“In that case, I have to keep my rank.”
“You cannot keep your rank.”
“Sir, with all due respect, I cannot command a squirrel, much less hardened and fearless men in a penal battalion constantly under threat of death without authority bestowed on me by the Red Army. If you want me to be in charge, you have to give me the tools required to command men. Otherwise I will be no good to the Red Army, no good to the war effort and no good to you. The men will not obey a single order from me, the railroad will remain unbuilt, and supply people and soldiers will perish. You cannot ask me to remain in the army—”
“I’m not asking you, I’m ordering you.”
“Sir, put me in a penal battalion, certainly, but do not ask me to be in charge. I will be an NCO, a sergeant, a corporal, whatever you decide is fine with me. But if you actually want to use me to the army’s advantage, I must keep my bars.” Alexander was unflinching when he said, “Certainly you as a general understand that better than anyone. Have you forgotten General Meretskov? He sat in the dungeons of Moscow waiting for his execution. The powers-that-be decided he should command the Volkhov front instead. So he was promoted to general and given an army instead of just a division. How do you think he would have fared commanding his army as the peasant he actually was? How many men do you think he would have been able to send to their deaths if he had been a non-commissioned corporal instead of a commissioned general? Do you want to get the Germans out of Sinyavino Heights?