Passions around Penal Battalions: A View from Within

This review was prepared as part of the joint “Book Review” project of the Political Sphere Institute and the Center for European Studies in Minsk.

Alexander Pyltsyn (2010). Pages from the History of the 8th Penal Battalion of the First Belorussian Front. Minsk, Information and Publishing Center of the Ministry of Finance, 480 pp.

Review prepared by Aliaksandr Kazakou.

It is unlikely that one could find a period in the last century that has generated so many contradictions, concealed so many secrets, contained so many blank spots, and experienced so much historiographical tendentiousness as the Second World War. The collapse of the USSR and the disappearance of the ban on discussing numerous problems created conditions both for their scholarly study and for the emergence of works aimed at a mass audience. One of the “scandalous” wartime subjects is the history of the Red Army’s penal units, which is hardly surprising, since in Soviet times this topic did not merely pass through a dense ideological filter; it was, for well-known reasons, taboo altogether. The book itself, however, essentially offers us a kind of excursion into the worldview of a representative of Soviet society who, even while criticizing its Stalinist foundations, in fact justifies them.

As the author himself says (a war veteran and retired major general of the USSR armed forces), what compelled him to write the book was the fact that today history is “shamelessly and tendentiously distorted and perverted…” by people in the creative professions, as well as by those “so to speak, ‘historians’” (p. 8). Among the latter, however, no one is named personally. Among the names of falsifiers we find Eduard Volodarsky, author of the novel “Penal Battalion,” and director Nikolai Dostal, who made the television series of the same name from Volodarsky’s script, as well as Alexander Belov, author of the book “Penal Battalion. The Blood of the Grey One,” and Lev Danilov, author of the documentary “Penal Soldiers.” Other “experts,” “blackeners,” and the like, who are mentioned from time to time in the text, remain anonymous.

The narrative of the path of the 8th Penal Battalion of the First Belorussian Front is a supplemented and revised version of A. Pyltsyn’s earlier works “Penal Strike” and “The Truth about Penal Battalions.” The book consists of 18 chapters, in which the author describes his own combat path as a platoon commander and later company commander in a penal battalion in 1943-1945 (it should be said immediately that commanders in penal battalions were officers who served there permanently, unlike the convicted temporary fighters, the penal soldiers proper), briefly recounts his life before and after the war, and at times disrupts chronological sequence. This is the main plot line, from which A. Pyltsyn departs for certain generalizations concerning the history of penal battalions and for other reflections.

Chapter 9, devoted to Belarus and the preservation there of the memory of the Second World War, which the author calls the Great Patriotic War, deserves special attention. In addition, we find three appendices: the famous Order No. 227, which provided for the creation of penal battalions and penal companies; the regulation of the People’s Commissariat of Defense “On Penal Battalions of the Active Army”; and a short essay by another author on blocking detachments, published back in 1988.

Chapter 18, “Penal Battalion Poems,” can also be considered a kind of appendix. At the end there is a list of literature used (18 items) and documents from the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation relating to the 8th Penal Battalion (16 files). Apparently this is meant to show that objective truth about the war does not require strong documentary evidence, since for the uncritical or indoctrinated readership at which Pyltsyn is aiming, an appeal to the hard-won “trench truth” should be sufficient guarantee of the monumentality and unfalsifiability of this “truth.”

As for the author’s main goal, to tell the truth about penal battalions and refute “lies” and “myths,” this is the subject of the third chapter proper. Already from the introduction, the reader learns an important circumstance: penal battalions were formed exclusively from officers; penal companies, composed of rank-and-file soldiers and also possibly replenished by criminal elements, were another matter. One wants to ask the author a reasonable question: would it not have been worth lowering the intensity of his statements against “falsifiers,” whose main mistake was that they failed to see the difference between penal companies and battalions?

Thus A. Pyltsyn proves that wounded penal soldiers who left the battlefield were not shot by anyone. On the contrary, commanders, including the author himself, convinced subordinates that a wound was grounds for leaving combat independently. Moreover, penal soldiers by no means always made use of this right. Shedding blood was not the only condition for release from the penal battalion and rehabilitation. This was also done for combat merit or after the expiration of a three-month term. Moreover, awarding penal soldiers orders and medals was a common practice. The author tries to prove that penal battalions were not recklessly thrown into suicidal attacks, were not sent to certain death, as is commonly believed.

At the same time, he says that penal battalions were sometimes ordered to attack across minefields. But the author places responsibility for this on individual unscrupulous superior commanders. He himself once had to lead his men into such an attack. Two more myths are then refuted: that penal soldiers were driven into battle without weapons and that they were not provided with food, forcing them to rob the local population. A. Pyltsyn asserts that his penal battalion always had modern weapons, enough ammunition, and food. It should be noted that in his criticism of falsifications the author does not even raise the question of penal companies, speaking only about battalions and relying mainly on his own experience.

The whole book is permeated with the spirit of Soviet patriotism, pride in the Victory over fascism and the heroism of the Soviet people, and nostalgia for the brotherhood of the penal battalion. In order to give his opus a veneer of objectivity, the author notes, which apparently is one of its general characteristic features, negative manifestations of the Soviet system as well. But the criticism here is very mild, pushed to the margins of the narrative, and sometimes accompanied by justifications of particular flaws. In general, one gets the impression that a strong self-censorship has been at work. For example, A. Pyltsyn does not agree that everyone who had been in German captivity or in enemy-occupied territory should have been sent to penal battalions without careful verification, as was widely practiced. At the same time, he allows that among such people there could have been traitors to the motherland recruited by the Germans (37-38).

On the pages of the book one can find facts that will not leave indifferent anyone who wants the naked truth about the war: seven fighters who ended up in the penal battalion for having been in occupied territory went over to the Germans (p. 34); cases of self-inflicted wounds in order to be released from the penal battalion (151-152); the brutal massacre of a peaceful German family by unknown Red Army soldiers (331); and the attack by penal soldiers across a minefield on the order of higher command, mentioned above, after which A. Pyltsyn’s company lost 80 percent of its personnel (295).

The author is troubled by the “de-ideologization and de-heroization of our recent Soviet past” taking place in Estonia, Poland, and Ukraine (226). Belarus is presented as a completely different example, where A. Pyltsyn visits from time to time. He speaks very complimentarily of the country, which carefully preserves the memory of the Great Patriotic War and where serious work is being done on the patriotic education of the younger generation. The reader learns that Belarusian youth take military service very responsibly. According to the author, whoever “has not repaid his debt to the Motherland has branded himself.” Such people will not only not be hired by state structures; many firms will not take them on either (sic!) (217).

Overall, A. Pyltsyn’s book is valuable above all as a historical source. The memoir section can be used to reconstruct the combat operations in which the 8th Penal Battalion of the First Belorussian Front took part. In addition, this book is also a source for studying the features of the Soviet mentality through the example of one individual. A man whose father was repressed twice (the second time for criticizing the regime), who was sent to attack across a minefield, still, in the twenty-first century, does not question the role of the “Great Stalin, who defeated Hitler’s Germany” (415).