by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
Several German observers in the war were impressed by the Soviet example. After the battle of Stalingrad they demanded that political training in the Wehrmacht be radically expanded, arguing that such training planted the decisive seed of military morale. In December 1943 Hitler created the position of National Socialist leadership officer (NSFO), which, unlike the commissars, came from the army but had to be confirmed by party leaders.77 Because the military identity of soldiers and officers in the Wehrmacht lay outside politics, the reforms did not find acceptance. People poked fun at the leadership officer, calling him the “NSF zero.” Political questions had a very different status in the Red Army, as even its name makes clear.78
REVOLUTIONARY ARMY
On February 23, 1943, three weeks after its victory at Stalingrad, the Red Army commemorated its twenty-fifth anniversary. A young army, it still showed traces of its origins in the Russian Revolution and the Civil War that followed (1917–1921). How present the revolutionary era was for many Soviet soldiers in Stalingrad can be illustrated by the interviews with General Vasily Chuikov and General Alexander Rodimtsev, who tell how they joined up with the Red Army in the commotion of the revolution and earned their spurs in the Civil War. But other links, institutional and intellectual, also existed between the Civil War and World War II. The Red Workers and Peasants Army—renamed the Soviet Army in 1946—understood itself as a new kind of revolutionary organization. It was “the world’s first political army,” equipped with an arsenal of words as well as weapons.79 This ambition found striking expression in an early emblem of the Red Army, which depicted a gun and a book alongside the hammer and sickle.80
The Red Army began as a volunteer army fueled by the revolutionary spirit of armed workers, the so-called Red Guards. In the summer of 1918, when enemies closed around Soviet Russia, Leon Trotsky, as war commissar of the Red Army, introduced general conscription, opening the army for millions of soldiers from the countryside. Lenin was appalled as he watched the ragged recruits march across Red Square on the first anniversary of the October Revolution.81 Yet from the outset the Bolsheviks tried to mold the members of the Peasants Army. They initiated mandatory instruction in reading, writing, and math and appealed constantly to the recruits’ political consciousness in the hope they would fight for the new system from personal belief and conviction.82 Toward the end of the Civil War, the Red Army consisted of 5 million soldiers, far more than necessary to defeat the Whites. For the Soviet leadership, the crucial motivation lay elsewhere: making sure that as many people as possible acquired the rudiments of socialism.
As Marxists, the Bolsheviks brought to the recruits a broad understanding of politics. Each was an actor on the world-historical stage; every thought and action carried political significance. The Bolsheviks wanted the recruits to internalize the message and fight of their own free will because they believed this would make them better soldiers and citizens. Their idea of humanity was thoroughly voluntarist: a person with a fully developed will could achieve anything. Soviet communists understood people as products of their environment and hence saw human nature as adaptable. Peasants unskilled in war were ignorant but they could learn. Deserters who showed remorse and recognized the error of their ways got a second chance. By contrast, deserters in the White Army were summarily executed, as was common practice in tsarist Russia.83
To monitor troops in their beliefs, Soviet leaders introduced a comprehensive system of political surveillance. During World War I many governments kept tabs on troop morale, but none went as far as the Bolsheviks. In the 1920s and 1930s and throughout World War II and after, military censors under the direction of the secret police screened all letters written by Red Army soldiers.84 The letters were not sealed but folded into triangles, each bearing the censor’s stamp and signature. In contrast, Wehrmacht mail inspectors made do with spot checks.85
The Soviet practice of surveillance always included an educational mission. The Bolsheviks wanted to educate the ignorant, convert the skeptical, and root out die-hard “counterrevolutionaries.” Because the system of surveillance and education reached deeply into everyday life, Red Army soldiers were familiar with the moral categories of Soviet leaders. Faintheartedness, bourgeois values, and political indifference were anathema; open criticism of superiors in mail correspondence, inadvisable; selfless and heroic action, the ideal.
The Communist party had a strong institutional presence in the Red Army from the outset. The Bolsheviks formed party cells at all levels of the army down to the company. Commissars (politruks at the company level and voenkoms at the higher echelons) served as direct representatives of the government. Initially, their primary task was to monitor the military commander to whom they were assigned and with whom they held equal military rank. All orders issued by commanders required the express approval of their respective commissar.86 This dual system of military and political leadership grew out of Trotsky’s decision in the spring of 1918 to enlist thousands of former tsarist officers in the Red Army.87 Trotsky believed that the military expertise of these “bourgeois specialists” would benefit the Soviet regime because the Red Workers and Peasants Army had so few experienced commanders. (Trotsky and other Bolsheviks purposely avoided the terms “officer” and “soldier,” which they associated with the hierarchies and class differences of the tsarist army. Instead, they spoke of “Red Army men” or “fighters.” Any mention of “soldiers” referred to enemy troops.) Many other Bolsheviks, including Stalin and his associate Kliment Voroshilov, disagreed with Trotsky. They found former members of the tsarist army repulsive both personally and politically. The conflict between Stalin and Trotsky smoldered for several years before erupting publicly.
A portrayal of the relationship between the commissar and the commander is found in Dmitri Furmanov’s autobiographical novel Chapayev (1923). Furmanov was a provincial teacher before joining the Bolshevik party in 1918 and entering the Red Army the following year. There he served as the commissar for divisional commander Vasily Chapayev as they fought side by side against Admiral Alexander Kolchak’s White Army in the Urals. In his novel, Furmanov depicts Chapayev as a brash go-getter, brimming with a peasant’s anarchistic fervor. The unit’s commissar, a disciplined fighter and a patient teacher, must harness Chapayev’s energy if the backwoods commander is to benefit the revolution. Over the course of many conversations the commissar instills a higher political consciousness in the physically powerful but mentally malleable Chapayev.
In 1934 the novel was adapted into a film, establishing Chapayev as a heroic Soviet icon. Stalin had seen the film dozens of times within a year and a half of its release. He knew the scenes and dialogue by heart and reanalyzed the actors and plot at every screening.88 Several of the soldiers interviewed in Stalingrad mentioned Chapayev, and a gunboat in the Volga Military Flotilla bore his name.
Interestingly, the film contains a subplot not found in the novel: a budding romance between two supporting characters, Chapayev’s adjutant Petya and a machine gunner named Anka. Initially not taken seriously by Petya, Anka proves herself by valiantly repelling an attack by the Whites. In a pivotal scene, the enemy troops, dressed in regal uniforms and marching in full formation—as the film makes clear, the purpose is intimidation—close in on the outnumbered Reds. Anka’s comrades are eager to fire their guns and storm the enemy troops, but Anka waits until they are almost on top of her before opening fire, furiously cutting them down with a Maxim machine gun. Her actions inspired many young women to enlist in 194189 and symbolized the presence of mind and strength of will vaunted by the Bolsheviks. But the psychological intimidation depicted in the film was a fantasy, fed by the belief that the enemy sought to break communist will. Red Army soldiers in Stalingrad spoke repeatedly of German “psychic attacks.” In all likelihood this impression had more to do with Chapayev than with the actual intentions of the enemy.90
The culture of the Red Army during the Civil War was marked by not only political mobilization but also raw physic
al violence. Many of the commanders interviewed in Stalingrad cut their teeth as young men in the Civil War. The future army commander Vasily Chuikov learned how to cement his authority with beatings and executions. Writer Isaak Babel, working as a war correspondent, described how the commander Semyon Timoshenko, “a colossus in red half-leather trousers, red cap, well-built,” whipped his regiment officers with a riding crop and shot at them with his pistol to drive them into battle. Babel also observed Kliment Voroshilov—later a confidant of Stalin’s and part of the Soviet political and military leadership in World War II—berating a divisional commander in front of his troops while riding to and fro on horseback.91 Babel recorded brutal violence among the troops, executions of Polish prisoners of war, and assaults on Jews and other civilians. Although horrified, he continued to express his admiration for the soldiers’ heroic deeds and convictions, which he helped foster in his reports from the war zone.
STALIN’S CITY
Joseph Stalin and the city named after him had their own Civil War experiences. Until 1925 Stalingrad bore the name Tsaritsyn, a Tatar word meaning “city on the yellow river” in reference to the Tsaritsa, which flows into the Volga at Stalingrad. The city’s location on the Volga and on a railway line stretching from Moscow to the Caucasus made it into a transportation and trade hub for southern Russian and had promoted industrial development there since the nineteenth century. The weapons factory in Tsaritsyn, founded in 1914 and renamed the Red Barricades after the revolution, was the largest munitions manufacturer in Europe. The area around Tsaritsyn was one of the first burning points in the Civil War. After the Bolsheviks seized power, many tsarist officers fled to the Cossack settlements in the Don and Kuban regions where they formed a volunteer army in the spring of 1918 to mobilize against the new rulers. They received logistical support from the German occupying powers in the Ukraine. In May 1918 Stalin, as people’s commissar of nationalities, was tasked with boosting the food supply from the northern Caucasus. Due to fighting, the train carrying Stalin and his Red Army troops got stuck in Tsaritsyn, where they joined forces with the 10th Army, which had been cobbled together from partisans under the command of Voroshilov. Meanwhile, the White Army, together with an allied Cossack army under the direction of Ataman Pyotr Krasnov, had pushed forward from the south and the west toward the city. Although Stalin’s assignment was civilian in nature and he had no military experience, he seized the reins. In a letter to Lenin, he demanded that General Andrei Snesarev, the commander of the Red Army in the northern Caucasus military district who still wore his tsarist epaulets, be fired. Lenin gave in to Stalin’s pressure. In the middle of August 1918 Stalin declared the city under siege and ordered the city’s bourgeoisie to dig trenches. The Soviet defenders spoke of Tsaritsyn as a “Red Verdun” that would never surrender to the Whites and the foreign meddlers who backed them. A counterattack pushed the enemy troops behind the Don, but by September Krasnov’s troops had recovered their ground. Once again, there was a conflict between Stalin and a former tsarist commander in the service of the Red Army, and once again it ended with the commander’s dismissal. Trotsky, furious, ordered Stalin back to Moscow immediately. Yet by the middle of October the Red Army had ended the White assault on Tsaritsyn.92
Stalin’s role in saving the city is contested. First after his death, and again after the Soviet Union fell apart, critics have raised doubts about Stalin’s military acumen in view of the heavy losses.93 But at the time, some admired Stalin for his brutal approach. Writing in 1919, an officer in the White Army who had infiltrated the Red Army as a spy during the siege of Tsaritsyn stressed the effectiveness of Stalin’s ruthless measures. He cites one example where Stalin, convinced that the city’s bourgeoisie harbored counterrevolutionary sentiments, had several dozen officers and civilians placed on a barge, which he threatened to blow up if city residents did not side with the Red Army. The officer also attested to Stalin’s great skills as an agitator:
He would often say in his arguments about military skill: “It’s fine if everyone is talking about the need for military skill, but if the most talented general in the world does not have a conscientious soldier educated by the right kind of agitation, believe me, he won’t be able to do anything with a bunch of motivated revolutionaries, however few in number.” And Stalin, in accordance with his conviction, spared no means on propaganda, on the publication and distribution of newspapers, on dispatching agitators.94
Thanks to Stalin, the White spy continued sadly, the city bore the name “Red Tsaritsyn.” The officer also explained the many casualties on the Soviet side: they had resulted from his successful disinformation.
By the end of the Civil War, Tsaritsyn had been besieged multiple times, yet in Soviet memory the defense of the city was associated with Stalin even before it was renamed in 1925. In the 1930s the Stalingrad cult began to bloom. After the success of Chapayev, the Vasiliev brothers began work on a movie about the defense of Tsaritsyn. The filming encountered delays, and the first part was not released in theaters until April 1942.95 The film follows the same template as Chapayev, with Voroshilov behind a Maxim gun, single-handedly fending off an attack designed to intimidate the Reds. But here it was not the Whites but the Germans (equipped anachronistically with Wehrmacht helmets) on the opposing side. The tsarist general serving under the Bolsheviks wants to give up Tsaritsyn, but Stalin resists. “In order to be victorious, one has to fight.” The film culminates with Stalin delivering an address to the workers of Tsaritsyn: “An honest death is better than mean, slavish life. [ . . . ] Onward for the motherland!”
The striking parallels between the Defense of Tsaritsyn and the defense of Stalingrad may be coincidental, but they also suggest that the Civil War era and its legends acted as a template for World War II. As in the battle of Tsaritsyn, Stalin prohibited the evacuation of his namesake city, declared a state of siege, and demanded self-sacrifice from residents. Civil War veterans gave rousing speeches in the city and on the front, and one of the City Defense Committee’s first appeals to city residents after the German assault began with the following call to arms:
Like 24 years ago, our city is again experiencing hard times. [ . . . ] In the momentous 1918 our fathers held Red Tsaritsyn against the onslaught of the gangs of German hirelings. And we ourselves shall hold Red Stalingrad in 1942. We shall hold it so that then we may drive back and destroy the bloodthirsty gang of German occupiers [ . . . ] Everybody to the construction of barricades! Everybody capable of bearing arms to the barricades, to the defense of the native city, the native home!96
On November 6, 1942, one day before the public holiday commemorating the October Revolution, Soviet newspapers printed an open letter to Stalin signed by commanders and soldiers from the 62nd Army. The signatories swore to Stalin and their “fathers, the gray-haired defenders of Tsaritsyn,” that they would defend Stalingrad “till the last drop of blood, till the last breath.”97 The Moscow historians who visited Stalingrad in December 1942 were not immune to the spell of the Civil War. Several were recognized specialists in the field; one had published a documentary history on the defense of Tsaritsyn several months earlier.98 In the historical memory of many Soviet participants to the battle, the Civil War figured very prominently, shrouded in a mystique of heroic magnitude and revolutionary zeal.
PREWAR ERA
In the years after the Civil War the Red Army shrank from 5 million soldiers to 1.5 million. But this did not deter the Soviet government from preparing for a global showdown between capitalist and socialist camps. In Bolshevik fashion, Stalin spoke to an assembly of industrial executives in 1931, pointing out that Soviet Russia was currently lagging “fifty to one hundred years behind” developed nations and exhorting the managers to close the gap by 1941: “We must cover this distance in ten years, or we will be crushed.”99
Like other governments, the Soviet Union made three major investments that enabled it to wage war effectively in the twentieth century. It launched a national industriali
zation campaign to equip a large army; it prepared its population for impending war; and it created human reserves to feed the industrial cycle of mass production and mass killing. The nationalized economy and the one-party system enabled Soviet leaders to take measures that were more sweeping and more ruthless than those of rival states during the interwar period. Socialist planners approached industrialization like a war. They deployed superproductive “shock workers,” achieved “breakthroughs,” celebrated “triumphs” over nature, and fought against the machinations of “class enemies.” The backbone of this campaign consisted of the Communist party and its youth organization, the Komsomol. The party dispatched armed delegations from an “army of revolutionary warriors,”100 whose job was to force recalcitrant populations in rural areas onto collective farms. This violent expansion of socialism took place at the expense of much of the population, who had to learn to live with rationing and privation—while increasing productivity. In 1940 the government passed laws punishing tardiness at work as severely as desertion. Though the system demanded much from citizens, it also held out a promise. Every worker who took part could become a “builder of socialism,” a part of the system and an actor on the world-historical stage.