Red Army

The Red Army enters the novel through two sharply different perspectives: Boris Ansky’s youthful determination to join it and Hans Reiter’s experience of retreating before it as a German soldier. For Ansky, it is the army of a revolution whose victories have already made his desired battles unreachable; for Reiter, its offensives are an advancing force that drives his division westward through mounting losses. The contrast makes the Red Army both a historical institution and a pressure on individual lives, encountered through belated news, personal memory, and the changing geography of war.

Ansky and the Army of the Revolution

At fourteen, Boris Ansky left his home in Kostekino and enlisted in the Red Army. His departure was painful for his parents as well as for him: his father wept first, his mother followed, and Ansky finally threw himself into their arms and wept too. The journey to Moscow was his first departure from the village beyond two earlier trips with his father to sell shirts. The people, conversations, speeches, and proclamations he encountered along the way made a lasting impression on him.

Ansky arrived hoping to fight in the Russian Civil War, but the sequence of defeats had already overtaken his knowledge. At the recruitment office, he offered one opponent after another—Wrangel, the Poles, Krasnov, Denikin, the White Cossacks, the Czechs, Kolchak, Yudenich, and the Allied troops—and was told each had already been defeated. The soldiers explained that news arrived late in his village. His eagerness to enlist is thus joined to a gap between the revolutionary events that have occurred and the version of the present available to a boy far from Moscow.

When an old soldier asked where he came from, Ansky answered that he was from Kostekino, near the Dnieper, and confirmed that he was Jewish. The soldier replied that he had had a Jewish comrade in the campaign against the Poles. The brief exchange links Ansky’s entry into military life to the army’s multinational and geographically expansive history, while leaving the comrade’s identity unresolved. The scene presents the Red Army not as an abstract emblem alone but as an institution encountered through recruitment, veterans’ recollections, and the uneven circulation of news.

Ansky’s Story and the Revolution’s Afterlife

The Red Army also lives on in the fictional story that Efraim Ivanov writes about a future Russia. Ivanov had struggled to sustain his literary career and earned money through assorted jobs, while continuing his party work, which included writing and editing pamphlets, obtaining paper, and acting as a liaison with writers and fellow travelers. After the revolution, his political workload increased rather than easing. Asked for a story about life in Russia in 1940, he wrote The Train Through the Urals in three hours.

Ivanov’s tale follows a boy travelling by train at an average speed of 125 miles an hour through a landscape of factories, cultivated fields, and new model villages. The boy is on his way to visit his grandfather, a former Red Army soldier who has earned a university degree and directs a secretive research laboratory. The grandfather would rather talk about his work, but the boy asks him to tell stories about the revolution, the war against the Whites, and foreign intervention. The story’s enthusiastic reception surprises both Ivanov and the editor, and readers identify with the grandfather. In this embedded narrative, the Red Army is preserved as family memory and made part of an optimistic imagined future; its past is something the next generation actively asks to hear.

Reiter on the Eastern Front

The Red Army’s role changes when the narrative follows Reiter, who serves in the German army. After a long spell in Kostekino, he returns to his division in Crimea and moves through Kerch, the Kuban, Krasnodar, the Caucasus, Budennovsk, and the Kalmyk Steppe. The campaigns bring little sense of forward movement: he sees no enemy troops during part of this march, but he notices how his fellow soldiers have changed. When the Russians counterattack, the division retreats.

The account traces that retreat across several stages rather than reducing it to a single defeat. Reiter’s division, now part of the 17th Army rather than the 11th, withdraws from Elista to Proletarskaya, follows the Manych River toward Rostov, and continues west to the Mius River, where a new front line is established. In the summer of 1943, the Russians attack again and the division retreats again. Each withdrawal leaves fewer men: Kruse and Sergeant Bublitz are killed, while Voss is promoted first to sergeant and then lieutenant. Under Voss, the number of casualties doubles in less than a week. The Red Army is therefore registered through the accumulating consequences of its advances—lost ground, disrupted command, and an increasingly depleted German unit.

The retreat continues beyond the Mius. Reiter’s division is later destroyed by Soviet forces at the Bug, west of Pervomaysk, and the remnants of the 79th are incorporated into the 303rd Division. In 1944, as the reorganized troops head toward Jassy with a Russian motorized brigade close behind, Reiter and his comrades witness the aftermath of a Romanian military upheaval. The sequence situates Soviet pressure within a wider disintegration of the Axis forces in the east, without making the Red Army responsible for every violence or conflict the German soldiers encounter along the way.

Memory, Perspective, and Significance

The novel does not give the Red Army a single, stable narrative meaning. Ansky’s recollection begins with a boy’s wish to join and the belated discovery that the wars he hopes to fight have already been decided. Ivanov’s story transforms a former soldier into a grandfather whose memories connect revolutionary history with a future imagined in hopeful terms. Reiter’s wartime experience, by contrast, records the Red Army from the position of an enemy whose formations retreat under repeated attack.

These accounts remain distinct rather than resolving into one judgment. The army is encountered through a young recruit’s confusion, a political writer’s idealized fiction, and the attrition and displacement of an opposing soldier’s campaign. That shifting perspective gives the Red Army significance beyond its battlefield role: it is also a subject of contested remembrance, a presence in stories transmitted across generations, and a force whose approach is felt in the altered routes and shrinking numbers of those who flee before it.