Killed Near Rzhev: The Other Side of Soviet Sacrifice

People who worship the Red Army for beating the bulk of Hitler's armies should learn the darker side of this story, at a little-known town that gives chills to any Red Army war veteran: Rzhev.

“I was killed near Rzhev
In a nameless bog,
In fifth company,
On the Left flank,
In a cruel air raid

I didn’t hear explosions
And did not see the flash
Down to an abyss from a cliff
No start, no end

And in this whole world
To the end of its days —
Neither patches, nor badges
From my tunic you’ll find

I am where the blind roots
Seek for food in the dark
I am where the rye waves
On a hill in the dust

I am where the cockerel cries
In the dew of the dawn
I am where your cars
Tear the air on highways

Where — small stalk to small stalk —
River’s weaving its grass
Where for the remembrance
Even my mother won’t come

In a bitter year’s summer
I was killed. And for me
Neither news nor bulletins
Will come after this day”

— Alexander Tvardovsky, “I was killed near Rzhev”

I don’t often tear up or cry when reading literature or watching movies. Not because I’m made of stone, but because I try to contain my emotions and ensure they come in measured doses as much as possible, the product of a lifetime of struggling with my sometimes too volatile mind.

But the above poem hit me like a punch to the gut. Bypassing all my defenses, it made me tear up the first time, and the next time, and the next time I read it. Never before have I ever read such a powerful, emotionally resonant depiction of the horror of war. If there is one better, I never want to read it; I could not bear it.

Its power lies not just in its beautiful verbal lyricism, which I am told works even better in Russian, but in the absence of any overt attempt to satirize war or to mock the cause for which the Soviets fought. There is no need for any of that; the simple telling of the anonymous soldier’s story tells you everything.

At its heart, the poem - which you can read here in full - is a primal cry for simple recognition and acknowledgement, a desperate plea to not be forgotten in the nameless bog, but to instead be recognized alongside the great struggles of the Red Army, names which are universally recognized: Stalingrad, Moscow, Berlin.

But what is Rzhev?

Rzhev is an unremarkable train junction near Moscow (pronounced Re-ZH-ev (ZH like a soft J). It would have remained unremarkable, if not for the fact that it was one of a number of key positions held by the German Army in a salient near Moscow, after Hitler failed to take the city in 1941. The fear of a renewed offensive was so great that the Red Army launched multiple large and small offensives to destroy or shrink the salient.

Without exception, the offensives failed. Not only did they fail, with one possible exception (on which more below), they achieved absolutely nothing militarily. Over two million, maybe three million Russians were killed, wounded, and missing in offensives which bordered on simple murder, full of absolutely needless and not properly planned direct attacks and suicidal offensives.

There were of course many other instances where the Red Army made suicidal mistakes, unnecessarily losing mind-boggling numbers of men. In 1941, in at least two instances, Stalin refused to allow forces of over half a million men to withdraw from encirclements that even the most bull-headed saw coming at the cities of Kyiv and Vyazma.

But those could at least have been said to have “saved” Moscow by delaying the attack on the city by critical weeks, even though simply rescuing such large forces to help in the defense would have probably done a better job.

So, too, offensives like the Battle of Berlin, where the Red Army was forced to first delay the offensive and then bashed its head against well-prepared defenses rather than show the creativity and skill it had undeniably gained after five years of fighting the bulk of Hitler’s forces.

But Rzhev achieved nothing. Yes, it’s possible one of the operations prevented an effort to relieve the German forces at Stalingrad from having more tanks. Yes, eventually Hitler agreed to withdraw from the salient to shore up the line. But compared to the absolutely massive sacrifices made here, this is piddling. Even insulting.

The Soviet Union, as callous as it was towards the lives of its soldiers, seemed to implicitly acknowledge this, too, as it did everything possible to cover up the story of the Rzhev battles, denying any of it ever happened. Millions sacrificed for some achieved goal is one thing. Millions sacrificed for nothing at all? Even admitting this would be to make a lot of people ask some very hard questions.

It is common in the west to speak of callous commanders who view their soldiers as cannon fodder or who fight needlessly costly battles. It is also common, especially with the end of the Cold War, to speak uncritically of the great sacrifice of the Red Army, with the implication that its enormous death toll of 20 million dead was simply the price to pay to beat the Nazis.

Rzhev puts the lie to all that. No western commander, certainly not in the United States or Britain or France, would have been tolerated in doing anything resembling Rzhev, in either war. Furthermore, highly skilled though the German Army was, it never came close to the killing ratio in fighting western armies that it achieved with the Red Army around that unremarkable railroad town.

The Red Army’s victory over the Nazis and the German Army was indeed a powerful testament to the ability of incredible, almost insane bravery of millions of men from many nations in fighting one of the most skilled armies in modern times.

But it is also a testament to the cruelty, callousness, brutality and horror of a regime that treated so many heroic soldiers as completely disposable cogs in a machine, in a way that would have made even the most incompetent or hard-headed WWI western general go white.

We can salute the soldiers and officers and even many of the generals who did so, while rightly damning the regime and the system which condemned so many of them to die not for the motherland, but simply because they were ordered to die. For nothing.