Red Army

The Red Army is presented as both the military force that liberates the village from German control and a temporary refuge for The boy, whose wartime idea of Soviet life grows into a personal ideal. Its arrival changes the balance of power, but it does not end the violence or the boy’s uncertainty: discipline, exchange, political education, and care coexist with grief, revenge, and the army’s eventual duty to send him away.

Wartime Setting and Arrival

Before the Red Army reaches the village, occupation has made survival depend on competing demands. The peasants must provide much of their already meager harvest to German troops and to Partisans; refusal risks punitive raids that can leave settlements in ruins. German soldiers also search villages for information about the armed groups and shoot peasants as a warning. When they come, the blacksmith hides The boy in a potato cellar while trying to secure the village’s safety by promising food deliveries and additional grain. The army enters a countryside where military authority is already enforced through requisition, intimidation, and the threat of collective punishment.

The change becomes visible at the bridge. Helmeted soldiers dismantle German weapons and lower the German flag, while military trucks travel west and German songs fade. The peasants conclude that the Germans are retreating and losing the war. The next day, mounted Kalmyk cavalrymen arrive in German uniforms, prompting villagers to hide their women and children. Their presence brings another immediate threat rather than security. During the ensuing attack, The boy hears fighting and engines approaching; an aircraft marked with a red star passes low over the village. The Soviet advance is first registered through these sounds and signs before its soldiers appear.

Tanks emerge from the forest, followed by soldiers, and the bridge has been destroyed in the fighting. Kalmyk cavalrymen who had taken cover near the village surrender or are captured as the Red Army rounds them up. The boy, injured and struggling to walk, watches the change in control from the hill. He is disappointed to think the war may be over, an unexpected response that shows how the army’s arrival is not simply a happy resolution for a child whose sense of safety has become bound to the continuing presence of soldiers.

Occupation, Camp, and Contact with Villagers

The Red Army’s presence soon takes the form of an encampment. Its forces fill the fields around the village with machines, tents, field kitchens, and telephone wires. Soldiers speak a language The boy guesses is Russian. Some villagers approach carrying red flags painted with hammers and sickles, but their tentative welcome is marked by uncertainty: they do not know what to do with the flags and leave them outside the regimental commander’s tent before meeting him. The army has arrived as a victorious force, yet the encounter does not instantly erase the villagers’ hesitation or fear.

The regiment is a communications unit, made up mainly of very young soldiers and recently recruited officers who had been boys when the war began. Its equipment is new and well maintained, and the men train while the fighting front lies far away in enemy territory. Radio reports describe German defeats; soldiers listen proudly, write to relatives, and wonder whether they will reach battle before the war ends. Mail and newspapers arrive every few days by small biplane. In reports and photographs, the soldiers encounter a war that continues elsewhere: ruined cities and fortifications, German prisoners, and the beginning of reconstruction at home.

Daily contact with local people develops through trade and social gatherings. Peasants bring fruit and vegetables to exchange for American canned pork, shoes, and pieces of tent canvas. Songs and accordion music draw listeners, some of whom join in while others watch their neighbors suspiciously. Women come with their husbands or relatives and flirt with soldiers, while the soldiers offer canned meat, tobacco, and cigarette paper. These exchanges make the camp a place of material abundance beside the impoverished villages, but contact is neither politically neutral nor ultimately safe. After local men kill Red Army soldiers, the evening report brings orders forbidding contact with the hostile local population and any action that might further worsen relations between the villagers and the army.

Care, Political Instruction, and the Boy’s Ideal

After the Red Army arrives, The boy is admitted to a regimental hospital. When he is released in autumn 1944, the injury to his chest has healed, and he is allowed to remain with the soldiers. The arrangement is provisional: he expects that the regiment will leave him in a village when it moves toward the front. For now, however, the communications unit remains encamped by the river, and two men look after him most of the time: Gavrila, the regiment’s political officer, and Mitka the Cuckoo, a sharpshooting instructor and expert sniper.

Gavrila’s teaching gives the boy an account of happiness and usefulness grounded in collective life. He urges him to join the march of working people and keep his place in the column: moving too far ahead risks losing contact with the masses, while falling behind may impede the group and expose a straggler to being trampled. The lesson casts social solidarity as a disciplined march in which individual position matters because the whole depends on its members. The boy tries to remember every word, even as the later events of the novel complicate this orderly image of collective purpose.

The boy takes the Red Army’s political promise into his own identity. At the children’s home he refuses to learn reading and writing in his mother tongue, declaring in writing that his language is Russian and describing the land associated with it as a place without exploitation and without teachers persecuting pupils. He also clings to the regiment’s newspaper, Pravda: each day he sneaks out to buy a copy with money Gavrila gave him, reads reports of victories, and studies new pictures of Joseph Stalin. The newspaper reassures him that events are moving toward the end of the war. This attachment is not simply an abstract political conviction; it becomes a child’s practical source of hope, reinforced by the uniform and books given to him by the soldiers.

Violence, Discipline, and Private Justice

The regiment’s discipline is tested by the deaths of its men at the hands of local people. After the bodies are taken away, orders prohibit further contact with hostile villagers and forbid actions that could worsen relations. Mitka the Cuckoo, one of the boy’s protectors, is shaken by the loss. For several days he is unwell and another soldier takes over his training duties. The official instruction to restrain contact and Mitka’s grief occupy opposing claims on him: the regiment’s regulations demand control, while loyalty to his dead friends presses toward retaliation.

Mitka the Cuckoo eventually takes revenge, risking his position in the regiment and the standing he holds as a Hero of the Soviet Union. The boy understands the act through the idea that each person carries a private war and must administer a justice that is personally his to uphold. In his view, Mitka’s public honor would be of little value if he could not live with himself after failing to act for his friends. This episode does not make revenge an official Red Army policy; instead, it exposes the strain between institutional discipline and an individual’s sense of obligation. The boy’s admiration for Mitka’s solitary choice also sits uneasily beside Gavrila’s lessons about keeping pace with the collective.

Departure and the Limits of Refuge

As the war draws to a close, the Red Army’s care for The boy becomes inseparable from the rules governing lost children. Gavrila explains that the country has been liberated from the Germans and that missing children must be sent to special centers while authorities determine whether their parents are alive. The boy takes several days to accept that he must leave Gavrila, Mitka the Cuckoo, and his other friends. Gavrila promises that if no relative claims him within three months after the end of the war, he will care for him and send him to a school where he can learn to speak again. He also tells him to be brave and to keep reading Pravda.

The soldiers give The boy a bag of gifts and books, and a regimental tailor makes him a Soviet Uniform. In its pocket he finds a small wooden pistol bearing pictures of Joseph Stalin and Lenin. The details turn the farewell into a portable remnant of the camp: he leaves with the army’s clothing, political reading, and a toy weapon, accompanied by Sergeant Yury to the city where a center for lost children is located. As the train crosses a devastated landscape, it carries him away from the regiment and through a postwar world crowded with soldiers, civilians, invalids, and people returning from concentration camps. The Red Army has provided shelter and companionship, but it cannot resolve his family’s fate or allow him to remain with the men who cared for him. Its significance in his story lies in that double role: a force that defeats the occupying army and a temporary home whose protection ends when military authority hands the child over to the postwar system.