by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
In German popular memory, Stalingrad also connotes anti-Nazi resistance from within. Some historical evidence for this indeed exists. In February 1943 Hans and Sophie Scholl, members of the White Rose resistance group, distributed copies of what would be the group’s final leaflet to students and faculty at the University of Munich. “The dead of Stalingrad implore us to take action,” it read, calling for Germans to free themselves from the tyranny of National Socialism.40 (This appeal fell on deaf ears, as did the antifascist manifestos later written by German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union.) Another possible source of resistance came from the Stalingrad veterans who claimed to have renounced Hitler and National Socialism amid battle.41 But are their assertions credible? Did their disavowal really take place at the point they describe, or was it a view they first expressed in their memoirs?42 One thing is certain: after Stalingrad, countless Germans followed the regime in a redoubled effort to prevent the tide of war from turning against them.43
The focus on the German drama at Stalingrad has left the Soviet side without well defined contours. Part of the problem was that the Germans who fought in Stalingrad didn’t really know their adversary. For them, the Soviets were a tawny-colored horde that rushed its opponent while crying out “Hurrah!” driven by pistol-waving political officers. These ideas carried over into official military studies of the postwar era. This should come as no surprise. The misconceptions were fed by propagandists of the Third Reich, and people like Franz Halder, Hitler’s chief of general staff, later drew on racially fueled anticommunism to teach Americans about “the Russian soldier.”44
Consequently we still lack a clear picture of how Red Army soldiers fought, of the cultural impressions they brought to bear on the war, what drove them as they fought against forces they believed were superior to their own, and what Stalingrad meant to them. Though Soviet historians cite the actions of many heroes, they fail to shed light on the specifics and the context. One exception is the Stalingrad veteran Alexander Samsonov. His study of the military strategy employed in the battle not only provides such details but is the only major work from a Soviet author to consider the German side as well.45
Many archives have opened since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, dramatically expanding our understanding of what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, and the place of the battle of Stalingrad within it. This is largely owing to the efforts of Russian archivists and scholars, including those working in the Russian Security Service (FSB), who have presented a wealth of previously classified materials. These include detailed data on desertion, arrests, and executions inside the Red Army as well as secret reports by NKVD Special Section officers with analyses of the political moods among Soviet rank-and-file soldiers.46 Moreover, a good number of uncensored memoirs, letters, and diaries from the war have been published, including the revealing diaries of Vasily Grossman and Konstantin Simonov, two writers who worked as war correspondents on the Stalingrad Front.47 And yet, when it comes to the thoughts and attitudes Soviet citizens held during the war, the overall picture remains sketchy. The problem lies in part with the strictures of Soviet censorship, which ensured that with few exceptions Soviet wartime letters lacked exact place-names or detailed portrayals of events and beliefs. The other and larger part of the problem is that scores of human documents from the war—personnel files, secret surveillance materials, interrogation protocols, confiscated letters—continue to remain off-limits in the massive archival collections of Russia’s Ministry of Defense.48
Historians continue to debate the motivations of Soviet soldiers. To what extent did they fight of their own free will, impelled by love of country, loyalty to the Soviet system, or to Stalin personally? To what extent was their engagement coerced? Antony Beevor argues for the latter. In his best-selling account of the battle he sharply criticizes the Soviet system for its “barely believable ruthlessness.”49 Beevor portrays the fighting in Stalingrad as not only a clash between Germans and Russians, but also a battle that Soviet leaders waged against their own population. From his perspective, one number in particular illustrates the inhuman character of the regime: General Chuikov’s decision to execute around 13,500 Red Army soldiers unwilling to fight in the 62nd Army. Beevor refers to these killings in his preface and concludes his book by noting that “the thousands of Soviet soldiers executed at Stalingrad on his [Chuikov’s] orders never received a marked grave.”50 But he does not provide convincing proof. He merely cites the military historian John Erickson, who speaks of 13,500 “reportedly” executed by firing squad.51 Recently declassified materials, however, show that in the period from August 1 to October 15, 1942—one of the most critical phases of battle for the Red Army—278 Soviet soldiers were executed by the Soviet security police (NKVD) on the Stalingrad Front, of which the 62nd Army was only one part.52
The interviews published in this book make clear that violence, and especially the threat of violence, were widely applied in the Red Army, but they also suggest that western notions of mass executions on the Stalingrad Front need to be revised. Such notions are fully on view in the film Enemy at the Gates (2001). In the opening scene soldiers of the 284th Siberian Rifle Division are thrown into battle with insufficient weapons and munitions. Not surprisingly, the attack stalls and the soldiers retreat. They are immediately gunned down by an NKVD blocking detachment firing away with automatic weapons. The Stalingrad transcripts, which include conversations with two soldiers from the 284th Siberian Rifle Division, Major Nikolai Aksyonov and the celebrated sniper Vasily Zaytsev, the protagonist in Enemy at the Gates, show how far from reality this scene is.
In addition to presenting the battle predominantly from a German perspective, Beevor’s book transports a number of clichés that originated in Nazi-era propaganda. For instance, he describes the will of soldiers to defend the Soviet Union to the point of self-sacrifice as “almost atavistic,” an expression that recalls the “primitive” eastern enemy described by Goebbels and others.53 Beevor is also convinced, without providing solid evidence, that Soviet troops in Stalingrad lived in permanent fear of political officers, the so-called commissars. By contrast, he praises Wehrmacht officers for their cultivation and gallantry, and revels in the image of “German gunners in shorts, with their bronzed torsos muscled from the lifting of shells” who “looked like athletes from a Nazi propaganda film.”54 Had Beevor taken more time to study the other side, he would have read how Soviet citizens saw the shirtless German invaders as disrespectful and uncivilized.55 As concepts, “primitive” and “civilized” are nothing more than free-floating, culturally dependent attributes.
If Beevor describes the Soviet soldiers as terrorized subjects, the British historian Catherine Merridale portrays them as betrayed victims. While the soldiers believed they were part of a struggle to liberate the Soviet Union from Nazi invaders, Stalin’s regime kept them permanently oppressed in conditions tantamount to enslavement.56 Merridale’s social history of the Red Army offers vivid descriptions of the privation and hardship in soldiers’ everyday lives, but she is less convincing when writing about their experiences of war. She argues that Soviet troops lived two different wars: “The first, the one that they alone could know, was the war of the battlefield, the scream war of shells and smoke, the shameful one of terror and retreat. But the other war, whose shape was crafted by writers, was the one that propaganda created.”57 The ideology that appealed to morality and promised a just war had, in Merridale’s view, nothing to do with the soldiers’ primary experience of war; it was something imposed externally. Yet as a method of analysis, the attempt to separate experience from ideology is dubious, for it assumes that individuals conceive experience outside values and linguistic expression. More to the point, the soldiers who speak in her book strongly identify with the public language and ideals of the time.58
In seeking to uncover the Soviet soldier’s “real” experience, freed of state ideology, Merridale interviewed dozens of World War II veterans. Ironically, she d
iscarded most of their testimony on the grounds that it parroted official views—as if the veterans had all succumbed to false consciousness.59 Their association of moral ideals and patriotism with the war did not fit into Merridale’s preconceived notion of war as nothing but suffering and disturbing violence. There was no place in her understanding for Red Army troops who identified with the state, the homeland, or socialist values.
Anyone who, like Merridale or Beevor, depicts the Soviet population as enslaved by the system cannot persuasively explain why millions of people fought against the Germans until they literally collapsed. More recent studies such as those by Yelena Senyavskaya, Amir Weiner, Lisa Kirschenbaum, and Anna Krylova address the central undying questions: how did the state convince large segments of the population to join the war effort, and what intellectual and psychological reserves did it unleash in the process? They describe how journalists, writers, and artists helped draft and distribute inspiring slogans; they investigate how the civil population wrested meaning from the hardship of war thanks to heroic appeals from the state; and they show how frontline soldiers began to understand themselves as actors in the Soviet regime.60
The Stalingrad transcripts make it possible for the first time to hear the voices of Red Army soldiers, hitherto virtually unknown, across a varied, nuanced spectrum. They give three-dimensional shape to the emotions, motives, and actions of individual soldiers—soldiers who saw themselves as active participants and embraced their combat roles, and thus provide support for the recent trend among scholars to see the Great Patriotic War as a people’s war. But the interviews also reveal an element at odds with most western depictions: the Communist party’s enormous effort to condition the troops.61 The party was an ever-present institutional force in the form of political officers and ideological messages. It permeated all military levels and sent its emissaries—political officers, agitators, party and youth league secretaries—into the trenches, where they sermonized, provided counsel, encouraged and rallied the troops, explained the current state of affairs, and created meaning. The interviews show how this apparatus functioned, how it mobilized the soldiers, and how it responded to crises. The political officers denounced every trace of weakness as cowardice and counterrevolutionary treason while preaching self-discipline and heroism. Together with the secret police, the party placed the army in an iron yoke. But even when party officials doled out punishment, the intentions were corrective, seeking to instruct, motivate, and remake the troops.
Historians in the west have overlooked the Communist party’s mobilizing function. This is partly because their access has been limited to official documents from political headquarters, which offer little insight into the everyday working of the political apparatus. But it is also because they tend to understand the party as solely repressive in nature, regarding its ideological work as a mere demonstration of political power. Also contributing to this oversight is the view of many military historians that the Communist party hampered the military, and that the Red Army did not become an effective combat force until the political officers were removed.62 But in reality the party never left; indeed, its presence in the armed forces increased as the war continued.
The American historian Stephen Kotkin understands power and ideology in the early Soviet era in a way that helps illuminate conditions in the Red Army during World War II. Kotkin’s local study on building socialism in a Soviet industrial city illustrates how the communist state, through targeted forms of speech and behavior, recast millions of rural immigrants and refugees in a socialist mold. Party agitators saw to it that workers not only met quotas but understood the political significance of the international class struggle. The regime grouped individuals into “shock brigades” and pitted them against each other in socialist competitions. Those who learned how to “speak Bolshevik” went on to have careers and felt part of the communist society and the grand future advertised by the regime.63 But as many diaries and letters from the 1930s record, the internalization of socialist values did not take place by party directive alone; many Soviet citizens, especially the younger and better educated, saw the 1930s as a world-historical battle between an emergent communism and a crisis-shaken capitalism (of which fascism was part), and tried to shape their own lives in keeping with these high standards.64 Many believed that they needed to prepare themselves for an inevitable conflict.65
These ideals, like indoctrinated forms of behavior and speech, did not vanish when war broke out; on the contrary. The Stalingrad transcripts document the further evolution of classic Soviet character traits from the 1930s: willful, optimistic, collectively minded, and accepting of violence.66 After war erupted, the party brought its ideological conditioning to the factories and the work floors, pushing workers (by then mostly women) to meet the needs of the war industry. It put more of its agitators in battlefield trenches and shelters and sponsored new socialist competitions to see who could kill the most Germans. Judging by the medals and other distinctions awarded during the war, this renewed wave of subjectivation in Soviet society encompassed thousands of civilian workers and Red Army soldiers.
Kotkin’s perspective emphasizes the interlocking nature of a party and society that reinforced each other. This characterization is at odds with the conviction of many researchers that Soviet society opposed the party and during the war years temporarily freed itself from the chains of Stalin’s regime. The Russian literary scholar Lazar Lazarev, himself a veteran of the war, speaks of “spontaneous destalinization.” He and others point out how, after the war began, the regime opened up greater freedoms in intellectual life; even the party newspaper Pravda became more honest in its reporting.67 The chief proponent of this view was Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent in Stalingrad in the fall of 1942 who stayed longer than any other observer. His epic novel Life and Fate (1950–1959) is a monument to the Red Army soldiers who fought there.68 Paradoxically, the novel describes the ruined city as a place of freedom. Party officers, stationed at the general staff command post at a safe distance from the fighting, have lost control of the city. As the old hierarchy breaks down, a commissar is sent to the city to inspect the situation. The open political conversations he hears horrify him, but he is fascinated by how the soldiers vouch for each other and by the sense of community that unites them. This spirit of fraternity and democracy reminds him of his youth and the early stages of the Russian Revolution. Grossman describes the flame of human freedom that burned for a short time in Stalingrad but went out again after the Germans were defeated and Stalin’s state regained control over society.
Such thoughts are absent from Grossman’s wartime writing. Even in his more candid and critical war diary he writes admiringly of communists who used their moral authority to raise the spirits of despondent Red Army soldiers. One diary entry describes a meeting with brigade commissar Nikolai Shlyapin. During a combat operation in Belorussia in July 1941 Shlyapin galvanized the surviving soldiers from his division and broke through the German lines. He was a man Grossmann described as “intelligent, strong, calm, big, and slow. People sense his inner power over them.”69 In the English translation of the diary, edited by Antony Beevor, Grossman’s interview with Shlyapin is not included. Beevor removed the interview on the grounds that it was drenched in “contemporary Soviet clichés” and thus unimportant for modern readers. Grossman’s interview with Shlyapin’s adjutant, the political commissar Klenovkin, is also missing in Beevor’s editions. The adjutant describes Shlyapin as a savior: “In combat the commissar walks calmly and slowly. ‘Get over here, like this!’ He acts as if there were no fighting at all. Everyone looks at him expectantly. ‘The commissar is with us.’”70 Klenovkin served as the inspiration for a key figure in Grossman’s novel The People Immortal (1942).71
The spirit of Stalingrad, as Grossman understood it, consisted in the moral strength of ordinary soldiers who attained heroic status when they risked their lives to fulfill their civic duty. Some, though not all, of the commissars set a glowing e
xample. For Grossmann, the war contained the promise of a moral renewal of the party and its relationship with Soviet society. Only years later did he realize that his hopes had been illusory, forcing him to rethink his experiences.72 In Life and Fate Grossman’s original enthusiasm for Soviet war heroes faded into a declared belief in individual freedom, as opposed to Stalin’s regime.
Grossman, however, was not wrong about the political atmosphere during the war years: it had indeed become more liberal, as the party began to open itself to the outside (as the Stalingrad transcripts show). In particular, the party changed its criteria for admission. Earlier the litmus test had been knowledge of Marxist theory and a working-class background, but now it was military achievement. The party opened its doors to anyone who could demonstrate having killed Germans in battle. This is how many of the best soldiers were admitted to the party. Between 1941 and 1944, the number of party members in the army rose continuously, and by the end of the war the vast majority of commanders carried a membership book. In the process, not only did the composition of the party change but also the meaning of involvement. The party assumed more of a military quality and became closer to the people.73 As the end of the war neared, however, the party leadership reversed course, tightening admission requirements and increasing vigilance within the ranks.74
Relying on incessant training and supervision, party officers generated a unified worldview among Red Army troops. The pervasiveness and effectiveness of political involvement in military units set the Red Army apart from other modern armies. Recent historical studies that discuss the question of why and how soldiers fight often point to loyalties and relationships built up within the most basic, “primary” fighting groups—the platoon or the company. They deem comradeship, or the “band of brothers” concept, of utmost importance and sometimes believe it to have universal value.75 And yet these notions played a subordinate role in the Red Army. For one, the terrible casualty rate on the Soviet side consumed whole units in a matter of days and made it impossible for soldiers to develop personal cohesion. Moreover, communist authorities actively sought to suppress such ties: they feared that soldiers’ particularist visions and desires might undermine their larger Soviet identity. Unlike the German army that filled its units with soldiers from the same region so as to buttress their regional identity (Landsmannschaft), the Soviet military mixed recruits from different nationalities, lest they turn nationalistic.76 The cement that the Red Army command used to bind together diverse soldiers and motivate them to fight was ideology. Preached incessantly and targeting every recruit, it was made up of accessible concepts with an enormous emotional charge: love for the homeland and hatred of the enemy.