The decimations had given our armed forces the strength and discipline to do anything we asked of them, anything but that. To ask, or even order, one soldier to kill another was crossing a line that might have sparked another mutiny.
For a while the responsibility rested with the leadership, the officers and senior sergeants. We couldn’t have made a more damaging decision. To have to look into the faces of these men, these boys whom you were responsible for, whom you fought with side by side, shared bread and blankets, saved his lite or have htm save yours. Who can focus on the monumental burden of leadership after having to commit such an act?
We began to see a noticeable degradation among our field commanders. Dereliction of duty, alcoholism, suicide-suicide became almost epidemic among the officer corps. Our division lost four experienced leaders, three junior lieutenants, and a major, all during the first week of our first campaign. Two of the lieutenants shot themselves, one right after committing the deed, and the other later that night. The third platoon leader chose a more passive method, what we began to call “suicide by combat.” He volunteered for increasingly dangerous missions, acting more like a reckless enlisted man than a responsible leader. He died trying to take on a dozen ghouls with nothing but a bayonet.
Major Kovpak just vanished. No one knows exactly when. We knew he couldn’t have been taken. The area was thoroughly swept and no one, absolutely no one left the perimeter without an escort. We all knew what probably happened. Colonel Savichev put out an official statement that the major had been sent on a long-range recon mission and had never returned. He even went so far as to recommend him for a first-class Order of the Rodina. You can’t stop the rumors, and nothing is worse for a unit’s morale than to know that one of their officers had deserted. I could not blame the man, I still cannot. Kovpak was a good man, a strong leader. Before the crisis he had done three tours in Chechnya and one in Dagestan. When the dead began to rise, he not only prevented his company from revolting, but led them all, on foot, carrying both supplies and wounded from Curta in the Salib Mountains all the way to Manaskent on the Caspian Sea. Sixty-five days, thirty-seven major engagements. Thirty-seven! He could have become an instructor-he’d more than earned the right-and had even been asked by STAVKA because of his extensive combat experience. But no, he volunteered for an immediate return to action. And now he was a deserter. They used to call this “the Second Decimation,” the fact that almost one in every ten officers killed themselves in those days, a decimation that almost brought our war effort to a crushing halt.
The logical alternative, the only one, was to therefore let the boys commit the act themselves. I can still remember their faces, dirty and pimply, their red-rimmed eyes wide as they closed their mouths around their rifles. What else could be done? It wasn’t long before they began to kill themselves in groups, all those who’d been bitten in a battle gathering at the field hospital to synchronize the moment when they would all pull the trigger. I guess it was comforting, knowing that they weren’t dying alone. It was probably the only comfort they could expect. They certainly didn’t get it from me.
I was a religious man in a country that had long since lost its faith. Decades of communism followed by materialistic democracy had left this generation of Russians with little knowledge of, or need for, “the opium of the masses.” As a chaplain, my duties were mainly to collect letters from the condemned boys to their families, and to distribute any vodka I managed to find. It was a next-to-useless existence, I knew, and the way our country was headed, I doubted anything would occur to change that.
It was right after the battle for Kostroma, just a few weeks before the official assault on Moscow. I had come to the field hospital to give last rights to the infected. They had been set apart, some badly mauled, some still healthy and lucid. The first boy couldn’t have been older than seventeen. He wasn’t bitten, that would have been merciful. The zombie had had its forearms ripped off by the treads of an SU-152 self-propelled gun. All that remained was hanging flesh and broken humerus bones, jagged at the edges, sharp like spears. They stabbed right through the boy’s tunic where whole hands would have just grabbed him. He was lying on a cot, bleeding from his belly, ashen-faced, rifle quivering in his hand. Next to him was a row of five other infected soldiers. I went through the motions of telling them I would pray for their souls. They either shrugged or nodded politely. I took their letters, as I’d always done, gave them a drink, and even passed out a couple cigarettes from their commanding officer. Even though I’d done this many times, somehow I felt strangely different. Something was stirring within me, a tense, tingling sensation that began to work its way up through my heart and lungs. I began to feel my whole body tremble as the soldiers all placed the muzzles of their weapons underneath their chins. “On three,” the oldest of them said. “One… two…” That was as far as they got. The seventeen-year-old flew backward and hit the ground. The others stared dumbfounded at the bullet hole in his forehead, then up to the smoking pistol in my hand, in God’s hand.
God was speaking to me, I could feel his words ringing in my head. “No more sinning,” he told me, “no more souls resigned to hell.” It was so clear, so simple. Officers killing soldiers had cost us too many good officers, and soldiers killing themselves had cost the Lord too many good souls. Suicide was a sin, and we, his servants-those who had chosen to be his shepherds upon the earth-were the only ones who should bear the cross of releasing trapped souls from infected bodies! That is what I told division commander after he discovered what I’d done, and that is the message that spread first to every chaplain in the field and then to every civilian priest throughout Mother Russia.
What later became known as the act of “Final Purification” was only the first step of a religious fervor that would surpass even the Iranian revolution of the 1980s. God knew his children had been denied his love for too long. They needed direction, courage, hope! You could say that it is the reason we emerged from that war as a nation of faith, and have continued to rebuild our state, on the basis of that faith.
Is there any truth to the stories of that philosophy being perverted for political reasons?
[Pause.] I don’t understand.
The president declared himself head of the Church…
Can’t a national leader feel God’s love?
But what about organizing priests into “death squads,” and assassinating people under the premise of “purifying infected victims”?
[Pause.] I don’t know what you’re Talking about.
Isn’t that why you eventually fell out with Moscow? Isn’t that why you’re here?
[There is a long pause. We hear the sounds of footsteps approaching. Someone knocks at the door. Father Sergei opens it to find a small, ragged child. Mud stains his pale, frightened face. He speaks in a frantic, local dialect, shouting and pointing up the road. The old priest nods solemnly, pats the boy on the shoulder, then turns to me.]
Thank you for coming. Will you excuse me, please?
[As I rise to leave, he opens a large wooden chest at the foot of his bed, removing both a bible and a World War II-era pistol.]