by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
Like other states in the interwar period, the Soviet government encouraged citizens to start families in an effort to increase the birth rate, but it also tied these pro-family policies to a comprehensive premilitary education. In 1931 the Komsomol introduced a military sports program in which millions of adolescents learned how to shoot rifles and throw grenades. By 1933, a Komsomol offshoot, the Society for the Assistance to Defense, Aviation, and Chemical Construction, had 10 million men and 3 million women members, who received flight training and practiced parachuting.101 The Soviet new person—an ideal that expressly included women—was strong of will, full of fight, fearless, and optimistic. Even the youngest Soviet citizens were sworn to military discipline and allegiance to the collective as members of the party’s pioneer organization.102 Their literary paradigm was another hero from the Civil War: Pavel Korchagin, from Nikolay Ostrovsky’s bestselling novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1934). Korchagin was a Komsomol and a soldier who strove to “work on himself” and benefit society even after being severely wounded in battle.
Ever since Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, war had been a real danger for the Soviet Union. Beginning in 1935 the Soviet press portrayed fascist Germany as the main enemy. The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)—in which Stalin supplied the Republicans with weapons and advisers—received sympathetic coverage, and even found its way into the diaries of village residents.103 The successful play The Final Battle (1931) showcased Soviet citizens’ belief that war was imminent. The final scene shows a group of twenty-seven Red Army soldiers defending the border against an imperialist enemy. In a hail of machine gun fire, all die but one. The injured survivor drags himself to a blackboard, where, just before collapsing, he writes, “162,000,000-27 = 161,999,973.” At that point a man walks out on stage and addresses the audience. Invariably the following exchange would take place. The man would ask, “Who is in the army?” and a few members of the audience would stand up. Then he would ask, “Who is a reservist?” and more would stand up. Finally he would ask, “Who will defend the Soviet Union?” and the entire audience would stand up. “Show’s over,” the man would announce. “To be continued on the front.”104 The avant-garde device—tearing down the barrier between the stage and the audience—sought to activate spectators as militarized participants. “The final battle” were words straight out of “The Internationale,” an anthem familiar to every Soviet child.
War preparations included a massive expansion of the Red Army, but the process was erratic and tense. In 1937 the deputy people’s commissar of defense, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, together with seven other generals, was accused of high treason and espionage and sentenced to death. Stalin’s distrust of Tukhachevsky, a brilliant military strategist but also the son of a noble family and a former lieutenant in the tsarist army, seems to have precipitated the purge. The confessions of the accused, extracted under torture, led to further arrests. By 1939 more than 34,000 officers had been expelled from the Red Army. In the meantime the regime had broadened the original 1925 mandate of the people’s commissar for the purposes of monitoring military commanders deemed politically unreliable.105
The scope of the Red Army purges was probably less than has long been assumed, however.106 It is certainly the case that Nikita Khrushchev exaggerated their extent in order to pin the blame for the devastating defeats in 1941 on his predecessor. In truth, most of the 34,000 officials excluded from the Communist party escaped execution: 11,000 had reentered the party by 1939 after lodging successful appeals; less than half of the remaining 23,000 became caught in the tentacles of the NKVD, but most cases were not political and resulted in minor sanctions. Many of the dismissed officers later sought to prove their loyalty. Guards General Major Nestor Kozin was among the soldiers interviewed in Stalingrad. Like most victims of Stalin’s terror, Kozin sincerely believed that the purges were meant for enemies and a mistake had been made in his case:
Why I was kicked out of the party. The formal reason for the expulsion was that divisional commander Balakiryev turned out to be an enemy of the people, and they accused me of not being vigilant enough. All I said was that the political chief, the deputy, the entire political department, along with the top commanders—all of them party members—missed that he was an enemy of the people. But here I—a platoon commander—was meant to see what kind of man he was. They called it “spreading anti-Soviet rumors.” Long story short—they kicked me out of the party.107
Further in his defense, Kozin explained that he was unable to command his troops during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland because, having been deemed politically unreliable, he had to prove himself first as an instructor (which he did with flying colors). He joined the Great Patriotic War immediately and was awarded the Order of Lenin within several months. In December 1941 he was reaccepted into the party. Most commanders interviewed in Stalingrad were young, part of a group of majors and captains who advanced after their superiors were demoted and went on to have impressive careers.
ARMY AND PARTY IN WAR
Despite—or because of—its massive expansion between 1938 and 1941, the Red Army was poorly equipped for the German attack in June 1941. The impressive number of Red Army soldiers enlisted by that time—5 million versus 1.6 million in January 1938108—obscured the fact that most of the recruits, assembled near the Polish border, were inexperienced and poorly trained. When the Hitler-Stalin pact put half of Poland in the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, the Red Army positioned its soldiers close to the new border, where they could repel an enemy attack quickly and decisively. They erected a wall immediately behind the border, mostly with materials taken from the old line of defense, known by the Germans as the Stalin line. When war broke out, the new wall was still incomplete and the old one half demolished; neither provided significant protection.
The first phase of the Soviet Union’s wartime production favored quantity over quality, especially when it came to aerial forces. When the Germans invaded, Soviet warplanes lacked radio equipment, making effective communication with ground troops and other aircraft impossible,109 and the pilots and airplane mechanics were inadequately trained. As a result, in the first year of the war Germany managed to immobilize almost the entire Soviet air force, a large part on the ground in the Blitz raids of June 1941. By the end of 1941, the Soviet Union had lost more than 10,000 aircraft. Another 10,000 machines were inoperative due to breakdowns and mechanical defects. Germany incurred fifteen times fewer losses during the same period.110 Many of the Red Army soldiers interviewed in Stalingrad noted the poor performance of the Soviet air force and Germany’s absolute air superiority in the summer and fall of 1942. The soldiers criticized the poor coordination within the armed services and the lack of experience in mechanized and mobile warfare. In 1942 the Red Army improved its coordination, as well as its military hardware, especially with the introduction of the T-34 tank and the Pe-2 dive bomber, which the Germans came to respect and fear.111
The Soviets were up against a 4 million man army that possessed superior technology, well-rehearsed tactical maneuvers, and almost two years of uninterrupted combat experience. The Wehrmacht’s arsenal comprised first-rate reconnaissance, tested coordination between tank troops, air force, and infantry, and a proven artillery that could unleash devastating barrages. Hitler and his generals believed that they could deliver a death blow to the Red Army with deep pincer movements. This strategy yielded hundreds of thousands of prisoners, but it did not break the Red Army’s will. The Wehrmacht lost 185,000 men on the Eastern Front in the first three months of battle, almost twice as many as it had since June 1941.112
The German leadership was oblivious to the strong backing the Soviet regime received from its people and its ability to mobilize a seemingly inexhaustible number of troops. Just as Nazi Germany was skilled militarily, the Soviet system was well versed politically: with a push of a button it could launch a political campaign, exhorting citizens to go above and beyond. One example was the evacuation of industr
y after the German invasion on June 22, 1941. Within six months, the Soviets completely dismantled 1,500 large plants and relocated their machinery and workers to the east. As Soviet leaders had not reckoned with the Germans advancing so far into the country, no evacuation plans had been drawn up in advance. The massive campaign worked because it was executed in the command economy style that the Soviets had employed successfully for many years.113 The regime sought to raise the fighting spirit of civilians and soldiers against the “fascist aggressors,” just as the Russian empire had in the Patriotic War of 1812. Stalin appealed to his people’s love for country, calling on his “brothers and sisters” to fight a “just war” that would end in either Soviet liberation or German enslavement. The many thousands of Soviet citizens, men and women alike, who volunteered for the front in the first weeks of the war confirmed the effectiveness of his appeal.
Owing to the enormous losses sustained by the Red Army in the initial months—by December 1941, 3 million soldiers had been killed or captured114—the military leadership kept expanding the pool of potential recruits. From late 1941 on, it began sending non-Slavic soldiers to the front, though their political loyalty and military ability were considered suspect. By 1945, 8 million people besides the Slavs—Uzbeks, Kazaks, Tatars, Latvians, and others—had joined the Red Army, close to one-fourth of the 34 million who enlisted during the war.115 The high number of casualties compelled Stalin to conscript women into the Red Army, in particular female Komsomols who had volunteered in the summer of 1941 but had yet to be cleared for armed combat. Over the course of several recruitment waves beginning in 1942, a total of 1 million women entered the armed forces.
The inexperience of the recruits led to panicked retreats, especially in the first months of war, prompting Soviet commanders to take drastic measures. Following a method implemented in the Civil War and then again in the Winter War,116 they deployed blocking squads ordered to shoot soldiers who were unwilling to fight and could not be persuaded in any other way. Order no. 270, issued by Stalin in August 1941, branded any Red soldier captured alive a traitor to his country.117 The family members of imprisoned troops saw their benefits cut; wives of captive officers were often sent to labor camps. At the same time, the regime appealed to the soldiers’ sense of honor and sought to raise the morale of the commanders. As in the tsarist army, units that distinguished themselves through bravery and perseverance were granted Guards status. Leading the way in September 1941 were four divisions, “divisions of heroes,” as the army newspaper Red Star put it, their ranks “welded together like steel, firm and unshakable.”118
General Chuikov (pictured on the far left) presents the commander and the commissar of the 39th Rifle Division (both kneeling) with the Guards title in Stalingrad, January 3, 1943. The ceremony took place on the steep banks of the Volga. The division soldiers (outside the picture) kneel before the commanding officers. Photographer: Georgy Samsonov
Soviet leaders put most of their stock in the political mobilization of Red Army soldiers. They banked on the influence of the Communist party and sought to increase it at every turn. As the war progressed, the number of party members in the Red Army rose steeply, and by July 1945 there were 2,984,750 party members, more than one in four, up from 654,000 at the war’s onset. Between 1941 and 1945 membership in the Young Communist League tripled to 2,393,345 soldiers who were Komsomol members. Taken together, these figures amount to a strongly communist army by war’s end.119 This development was consistent with the party’s earlier expansions—during the Civil War, when party membership increased by 600 percent, and once again during the first five year plan. By contrast, party membership contracted in the wake of the political purges (in 1921, 1933–1939, and starting again in 1944).
To acquire as many new members as possible in a short period of time, the party simplified its admission criteria. In December 1941 the Central Committee shortened the trial period for new candidates from one year to three months. Moreover, applicants no longer needed to submit recommendations from longtime party members. Pragmatic considerations dictated some of these changes. The previous system was time-consuming and impractical in wartime, especially when the objective was to increase membership. Another obvious factor was the changing character of the party.120 Soldiers who before the war had stood no chance of membership were now achieving glory and honor as party comrades. Captain Alexander Olkhovkin, the propaganda instructor for the 39th Guards Division, spoke of one such soldier in his interview. On November 19, 1942, some men from his division met to discuss the circulation of the general attack order. Olkhovkin joined the meeting as a sniper was speaking. The sniper, Olkhovkin remarked, was “completely uneducated. This is how he talks: ‘We was about to go on the attack.’ He’d say, ‘I knowed I was gonna be a sniper today.’ Before that he was a runner for the battalion commander. This man—Afonkin was his name—started working as a sniper. Over the course of eighteen days he racked up thirty-nine Hitlerites. Now he’s been admitted to the party and decorated.”121
In the war years the idea of a good party comrade was quite simple. A successful candidate had to prove that he had killed a German soldier, shot down an enemy plane, or taken out a panzer. Soldiers received forms known as “vengeance accounts” to record the number of opponents they killed and the number of weapons they destroyed. A soldier with an empty account had no chance of being admitted to the party.122 By contrast, someone like the sniper Vasily Zaytsev rose immediately to communist status—the number of Germans he killed was recommendation enough. As Zaytsev explained, “I thought, How can I join the party when I don’t know the program? I read the program and wrote my application right there in a trench. Two days later I was summoned to a party commission. By then I’d killed sixty Germans. I’d been decorated.”123
The ideal communist in wartime was occasionally described as bloodthirsty. Consider Colonel Nikolai Glamazda’s description of the final battle of a commissar named Yudayev, who led an assault unit in the 253rd Regiment of the 45th Division. When storming a German bunker, his:
rifle was knocked out of his hands by a grenade fragment. Comrade Yudayev rushed at one of the unarmed Germans, grabbed him by the throat, and strangled him. The Germans threw in some reinforcements and again pounced on that handful of heroes. Yudayev was raised by the Germans on their bayonets but wouldn’t let go of his victim. Impaled and raised on bayonets, he was still holding on to his strangled German. So he had strangled him and died on the bayonets himself. The Germans overran that trench but after some time that company kicked them out of the dugout, took that hero Yudayev, and buried him by the third workshop of the Red October plant.124
Colonel Dobryakov, the deputy director of the political department of the 64th army, described a similarly violent scene:
The battery commander of the 154th Marine Brigade was put in charge of the defense. He had thirteen men including himself. He was ordered not to engage the Germans under any circumstances because he had so few men and the Germans were already advancing. He couldn’t bring himself to stay put, yelled “Hurrah!,” and attacked a company that was supported by machine guns. He drove them out, killing seven Germans himself. During that assault a piece of flesh was torn from his side. He went up to the brigade commander, Colonel Smirnov, and asked: “Comrade Colonel, can I have a little something to drink?”
“Yes, of course,” said the colonel.
And then the wounded battery commander held up that piece of flesh and asked: “Do you suppose this is worth seven Germans?”125
Needless to say, the missing flesh from the commander’s body guaranteed his admission to the party.
As the war raged on, the party extended its influence by tailoring its political efforts to circumstances on the battlefield. Retaliation for the suffering inflicted by the enemy and the will to victory constituted a common denominator among the soldiers. “We are communists; we will avenge our murdered soldiers, commanders, and political officers.” To the mind of Ivan Vasiliev, com
missar of the 62nd army, this expressed the overwhelming mood in the battle for Stalingrad.126 General Chuikov relayed to Vasily Grossman the hands-on quality of political education: “Political work: everything has only one purpose, and everything is done together with the soldiers. As for isms—communism, nationalism—we weren’t doing that.” Nevertheless, as Chuikov stressed when interviewed by historians, Soviet soldiers in Stalingrad demonstrated a high level of political consciousness.127 He meant that Red Army soldiers had internalized the “patriotic duty” promoted by the party to hold Stalingrad at all costs. For Chuikov, this was the essential reason for Soviet victory.
During the battle of Stalingrad the Communist party made an extra effort to deepen its influence. Between August and October 1942, the number of party members on the Stalingrad Front increased by 25,000, reaching a total of 53,500.128 By November membership surpassed 60,000.129 These numbers do not take into account battlefield losses and need an upward correction for an accurate total. Major Yakov Serov, the political department director of the 45th Division, provided some unit-level specifics. In the first months of the battle of Stalingrad, the 45th Division had 840 party members, of whom 163 died in battle and 405 were sidelined by injuries. During the same period, 659 additional soldiers joined the party. “People took joining the party very seriously and applied only when they had six, seven, ten Fritzes130 to their name. One would show up and claim: I have killed ten Fritzes. Here is my certificate. No commando would apply before opening his [vengeance] account.” Conveying what party membership meant for soldiers, Serov quoted from their applications: