Hitler's war

Even without dumplings or mushrooms, Sergei raised his tumbler. “Za Stalina!”

“To Stalin!” Anastas echoed. They both drank. The vodka was no better than it had to be. It went down as if Sergei were swallowing the lighted kerosene lamp. The really good stuff slid down your throat smooth as a kiss, then exploded in your stomach like a 500kg bomb. But this got you there, smooth or not.

Sergei sighed. If it was harsh now, he’d feel it worse in the morning. The good stuff didn’t make you think elephants in hobnailed boots were marching on top of your skull.

“We have aspirins?” he asked.

“Somewhere,” Mouradian said vaguely. Then he brightened. “We’ll have more vodka.”

“Da.” That cheered Sergei up, too: at least a little. Another dose of what made you feel bad could make you feel better. He reached for the bottle again. If he drank it now, he’d feel better right away.

“Leave me some,” Anastas said.

“Leave me some, sir,” Sergei said. The drunker you got, the more important military discipline seemed…unless, of course, it didn’t. He passed Mouradian the bottle. They drank till there was very little left to drink. They would have drunk till nothing was left to drink, but they both fell asleep first.

Getting up in the morning was as bad as Yaroslavsky had known it would be, or maybe a little worse. The first thing he did was drink half the remaining vodka. He would have drunk all of it, but Anastas snatched the bottle out of his hands. “To each according to his needs,” the Armenian croaked, and no one in the USSR, no matter how hung over, dared quarrel with unadulterated Marx.

Fortunately, the aspirins turned up. Sergei dry-swallowed three of them. Mouradian took four. As sour as Sergei’s stomach already was, the aspirins felt like a flamethrower in there. If he belched, he figured he could incinerate the whole airstrip.

Mouradian didn’t look or sound much happier. “Breakfast,” he said. The mere thought made Sergei groan. Then Anastas added, “They’ll have tea-coffee, too, maybe.”

“Well, maybe.” Sergei peeled back the tent flap and looked out. The sun shone brilliantly off snow. He squinted at the alarming landscape. “Don’t want to bleed to death through my eyeballs,” he muttered.

“Tell me about it!” Mouradian said fervently.

Both being brave men, they made it to the field kitchen. Shchi -cabbage soup-seemed safe enough to Sergei. Anastas stuck to plain brown bread. The cooks had one battered samovar full of tea, another full of coffee. After getting outside of some of that-and after the aspirins took hold-Sergei decided he’d live. Eventually, he would decide he wanted to.

The radio blared out music. Mouradian turned it down. Sergei would have loved to turn it off, but he didn’t dare. People might think you didn’t want to listen to the news. If you didn’t want to listen to the splendid achievements of the glorious Soviet state, people would wonder why not. Some of the people who wondered would have NKVD connections, too. And you’d be heading for a camp faster than you could blink.

Nobody complained about turning down the radio, though. Several other men eating breakfast had red-tracked eyes, sallow skin, and a hangdog expression. When it was snowing at an isolated airstrip, what were you going to do besides drink?

The song ended. An announcer gabbled about the overfulfillment of production norms at factories in Smolensk, Magnitogorsk, and Vladivostok. Not easy to imagine three more widely separated places. “Thus, despite the efforts of Fascists and other reactionaries, prosperity spreads throughout this great bulwark of the proletariat!” the announcer said.

Sergei had nothing against the bulwark of the proletariat. In his present fragile state, though, he didn’t much want to hear about it. He made himself seem attentive even so, as he would have during a dull lecture in school. The penalty for obvious boredom then would have been a rap on the knuckles, or maybe a swat on the backside. He might pay more now.

Music returned. He didn’t have to seem to be listening to that so closely. He couldn’t ignore it altogether, however, or show he didn’t like it. It wouldn’t have gone out without some commissar’s approvaclass="underline" without the state’s approval, in other words. And if the state approved, citizens who knew what was good for them needed to do the same.

At the top of the hour, a different announcer came on the air. This fellow sounded better educated than the joker who’d been bragging about production norms. “And now the news!” the man said.

Several people with Red Air Force light blue on their collar tabs perked up. News from around the world mattered. “Soviet forces continue to punish the Polish reactionaries and the Nazi bandits who support them,” the announcer crowed. “Over the past several days, Soviet infantrymen have driven another twenty kilometers deeper into Poland. Knowledgeable officers report that enemy resistance is beginning to crumble.”

Nobody said anything. Nobody even raised an eyebrow. Sergei didn’t think anyone actually fighting the Poles and Germans believed their resistance was crumbling. He knew damn well he didn’t. That particular item had to be aimed at bucking up civilian morale hundreds if not thousands of kilometers from the front.