by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
In addition to emphasizing the historical importance of the battle of Stalingrad, political officers provided information about combat operations in the surrounding region to give all soldiers a sense of active participation. “I have to say,” Major Serov observed, “that even when it was reported that, say, Gorshechnaya railway station or Urazovo railway junction was taken, even such minor victories made people happy. [ . . . ] When they hear or read in a bulletin that our guys have advanced even a little bit there was this feeling: ‘we are gaining ground.’ And when rapid advances like in the North Caucasus began, that’s when folks really cheered up. Enthusiasm was plainly visible: ‘so it’s like that—they are pummeling them there, aren’t we just as good? Let’s get started!’”
Soldiers of the 284th Rifle Division receive letters and newspapers in Stalingrad, 1942.
THE HERO STRATEGY
In Soviet Marxist ideology, human beings were inherently malleable, shaped by their surroundings; through social conditioning anyone could become a hero. The political advisers were entrusted with this task. Brigade Commissar Vasiliev recounted the story of a soldier in the 45th Division who fought well but showed so little discipline that his politruk wrote the parents a letter to complain. Before posting it, he read the offending soldier its contents: “He felt really bad about it, and by then he’d won a medal, but his parents sent him a terrible dressing down from home. So we had to write another letter telling them how he’d put things right and distinguished himself, that he’d received a decoration from the government. Now he was a completely new man. Serov, chief of the political department, had taken him under his wing. The soldier was constantly getting better and never acted up again. It was like he’d been that way his whole life.” Major Serov described the incident in greater detail from his vantage point:
There was one Kiselyov in our 157th Regiment’s 1st Company—a real madcap. We talked to him, we arrested him, locked him up—nothing helped. He was an exceptional discipline-breaker. Just wouldn’t listen. So then Narovishnik, deputy political officer of the company, decided to write to his parents: “That’s how outrageously your son behaves; perhaps you can help.” That letter was read to the company. The company knew that the letter had been sent to his parents, and so did he. The very fact of sending the letter to the parents got him thinking. He got their reply when he got to the front: “Why are you bringing shame upon our gray heads? We can’t look our neighbors in the eye. Have you forgotten what we were saying when we were seeing you off—be worthy!” Then his sister writes that it’s embarrassing to receive such a report about him: “If you want to consider me your sister, fight like our older brother who died.” This is when the guy wised up. He killed nine Fritzes and wounded seven more, or the other way around. He was wounded and sent off for treatment.
Heroic deeds—usually defined as actions in which soldiers held their own against a force with superior troops and weapons—were often documented and propagated via leaflets distributed in the sectors where they occurred, on the assumption that readers would know the “heroes of the day” personally and strive to emulate them.156 The 13th Guards Rifle Division handed out leaflets with photos of the honored soldiers and brief descriptions of their deeds. “This creates an extraordinary impression,” observed Brigade Commissar Vasiliev. As a political officer in the division explained, the leaflets were read out loud to the units and then sent to parents and family members.157 In this way the political administration exploited the influence of soldiers’ families and hometowns to reinforce punishments and commendations.
Red Army soldiers read a wall newspaper in Stalingrad, 1942. Photographer: Natalya Bode
Brigade Commissar Vasiliev credited a Komsomol from his unit with embodying the Bolshevik ideal of the war hero. The soldier consciously emulated the feats of celebrated predecessors and wanted his example of self-sacrifice to inspire others to follow the heroic tradition:
Voronov, for example, a Komsomol member, had read Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered and lived only by the idea of Ostrovsky’s machine gunner. He received twenty-five wounds on the battlefield and it was only when his arms, shot through in several places, would no longer obey him that he left the battlefield. He was commanding a machine-gun detail. He was literally bleeding out and they offered to take him to the medical unit. He said, “No, you keep on fighting. I’ll go there myself.” He crawled three hundred meters bleeding out. When they got him to the medical battalion he was completely torn to shreds and he said: “Now I am that machine gunner from Ostrovsky.” Here’s this man living by an idea, and you realize that we were doing work without always seeing what we had accomplished.
Vasiliev implied that the work of the political officers was what put the novel How the Steel Was Tempered into Voronov’s hands.
While some soldiers modeled their behavior on idealized notions of the hero, others drew motivation from more basic sources. “People were fed and informed about the significance of those heights,” explained Regimental Commissar Dimitri Petrakov of the 308th Rifle Division. “They were promised a reward: for a captured German soldier an Order of the Red Star, for an officer—an Order of the Red Banner, and to the first one on the height the Order of Lenin.”158 Many of the interviewees corroborated that countless heroic feats did indeed occur on the Stalingrad Front. “Without any exaggeration,” relayed Major Pyotr Zayonchkovsky, of the 66th Army, “one can justifiably say that throughout the fighting at Stalingrad all but a handful of commanders and soldiers displayed enormous heroism.”159 General Chuikov reported that “we know about so many heroes produced by the battle of Stalingrad that you’ve got to marvel at the capabilities of our Russian people, our Soviet people. And to think how many heroes we haven’t heard of,” he wondered. “There must be ten times more of those.” According to an internal memo, by June 1943 the military had bestowed 9,601 medals on soldiers of the 62nd Army for distinction in battle.160 Army newspapers regularly paid tribute to honored soldiers, and many editions of Red Star consisted mostly of the names and ranks of those recently decorated and the medals awarded to them. This echoed the practice used for shock workers in the 1930s, whose achievements Soviet newspapers cited individually.
In promoting heroism in battle, military commanders and political officers conditioned their soldiers to be fearless. Captain Andrei Afanassyev of the 36th Rifle Division summarized the task in a few words: “After the first baptism [of fire] I decided to foster a contempt for death among the personnel.”161 Two terrors received repeated mention: fear of enemy panzers and fear of air raids. Commanders taught soldiers how to protect themselves from tanks by burrowing into the ground and demonstrated how to use bazookas and other antitank weapons.162 They preached that fear was an animal instinct that could be overcome through mindful thought and action. Alexander Sikorsky, a military hydrographer in the 62nd Army, described how the Soviet soldier “has shown that fear is no longer a part of him, that he is fearless. Each man is born with fear, fear is a quality that every human being possesses, but fear will abandon heroes and remain with cowards.”163
This emphasis on human willpower received constant mention in the Stalingrad interviews.164 When soldiers talked about fear, it was usually as something conditional, something felt initially or intermittently that they could actively tune out and overcome. Captain Afanassyev, despite resolving to teach his men fearlessness, confessed the panic he felt during a strong German attack on August 20, 1942:
In fact, it was terrifying. When I stepped outside for a look I was overcome by doubt: the advancing German army was enormous. You’d look into the binoculars or periscope and think to yourself: there’s no way we can hold out against this. That was how I felt then. One look in the periscope would send me into a panic. It wasn’t exactly cowardice but the feeling that destroying everything that was moving at us was impossible. Endless black dots. Four to five hundred tanks and other vehicles. And they weren’t moving one after another—they were moving in echelon formation.
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The scene described here resembles what communist soldiers understood by a “psychic attack.” Afanassyev later stressed that he had passed the test.
Lev Okhitovich, an infantryman in the 308th Rifle Division, described his first open-field battle and the paralyzing fear he felt when German fire forced him to the ground. But he also noted that the fear evaporated the moment he realized that he had to stand up if he wanted to avoid a senseless death: “I realized that we might die for nothing. It wasn’t bravery or courage (which I had none of). I simply realized that I was going to die unless I did something. And the only chance I had to save myself and others was to advance.” Okhitovich picked himself off the ground and was surprised by the galvanizing effect of the battle cry that reflexively crossed his lips: “I couldn’t say anything other than what anyone would have said in my place. ‘For the motherland! For Stalin!’”165
GOOD AND BAD SOLDIERS
Those unable to keep their fear in check were deemed craven and often subjected to harsh punishment. For soldiers on the Stalingrad front the leadership introduced severe disciplinary measures. The most prominent were the sanctions against “cowards” and “traitors” spelled out in Order no. 227. Drafted by Stalin personally, the order commanded soldiers to “tenaciously, to the last drop of blood, defend each position, each meter of Soviet territory, to clutch at each patch of Soviet land and hold it to the very end.”166 Anyone who abandoned a position without explicit orders to do so was to be executed or sent to a penal unit.167 Inherent in these brutal measures was a strong didactic element. Soldiers deported to penal companies, the order explained, were to be given an “opportunity to redeem their crimes against the motherland with blood.” This gave banished soldiers the hope of being rehabilitated and returning to their unit.
Many of those interviewed spoke at length about what was widely known as the “not one step back” policy. Their statements reveal how differently Order no. 227 was interpreted and implemented. General Chuikov took extreme steps for restoring discipline:
Honestly, most of the divisional commanders didn’t have the stomach to die here. The second something happens, they start saying: Permit me to cross the Volga. I yelled “I’m still here” and sent a telegram: “If you take one step I’ll shoot you.” [ . . . ] We immediately began to take the harshest possible actions against cowardice. On September 14 I shot the commander and commissar of one regiment, and a short while later I shot two brigade commanders and their commissars. This caught everyone off guard. We made sure news of this got to the men, especially the officers.
The executions, Chuikov added, produced immediate effects.
Major Serov described breaches of discipline in his unit, which forced him to take similarly drastic action. Particularly egregious was the behavior of company commanders, the very people who were supposed to set an example:
It wasn’t all clear sailing, of course. I should note that party members, commanders, and political workers were too bold, reckless even. They were always getting into things they shouldn’t. That’s why the commanders and political officers, especially at the company level, were getting knocked out so early on. So here’s the situation: the enemy is pressing, behind us is the Volga, there is nowhere to retreat. But the leadership of our company commanders and their political deputies isn’t felt because they’re all gone, dead or wounded. And the others, the less resilient ones, who knows where they’ve gone. [ . . . ] They’re off looking for a hole somewhere to sit this one out. They know this is not the time to sit it out, but they do. Some go for self-inflicted wounds, hoping to preserve their honor by pretending to be wounded and get across to the east bank. This was happening in the beginning. We started exposing these ones publicly and had them shot in front of their units. The number of similar cases started dropping rapidly. That was the only type of desertion. You couldn’t do anything else: the Volga behind us let no one get by.
The effort necessary to carry out the order—in extreme cases it required executing one’s own soldiers—was expressed by Sergeant Mikhail Gurov of the 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade: “They issued us this order: let no one pass, those who disobey should be simply [sic] We read the order of comrade Stalin: ‘Our land is vast, but there is nowhere else to go. We must hold it.’ And that’s what we decided. The order had to be carried out—we didn’t let them, hard as it was.”168 The commander of the 36th Rifle Division, Colonel Mikhail Denisenko, devised a Solomonic solution that neither violated the order nor required enforcing it with the utmost rigor. During the large-scale German attack on September 14, many soldiers of the 64th Army fled the front lines, crossing the division’s positions “disorderly, moving in a mass.” As Denisenko recalls, “I issued an order: stop them, do not allow disorderly movement, and so on. Then they tell me: comrade Colonel, it’s our people. It doesn’t feel right to shoot! I gave orders to allow them to pass while maintaining the defensive.”169
While the above accounts tell of troops being disciplined with violence or the threat of it, others emphasize the didactic effect of Order no. 227. Vasiliev reported that his efforts to “inculcate the order into the people’s consciousness” yielded results on the very first day of battle. Senior Lieutenant Nikolai Voronin, a crew member on the gunboat Chapayev, explained how the political department circulated official news from the front with the proviso that “we mustn’t make a single step back even if we have to die.”170 Divisional Commissar Kuzma Gurov (62nd Army) stated for the record that after educating his soldiers about the order they “realized their role as people of the state. Soldiers held their position even though the Germans overran them.”171
According to Lieutenant Ivan Kuznetsov, a gunboat commander in the Volga flotilla, disciplinary measures and education went hand in hand: “We were feeling the mood. Certainly there were moments when individual soldiers became pale as death during a bombing raid. I warned them, I told them straight up: ‘Comrades, this is war. I’m warning you that if anyone abandons ship or shows cowardice—I’ll shoot them!’” Kuznetsov recalled a doctor named Petrov who, on all sorts of pretexts, kept jumping off a gunship docked on the riverbank. “I summoned him again and told him that if this happens again he’ll be the first one to die and I also asked the Osobist to have a talk with him on that subject.” Exhortations peppered with threats of violence achieved a measure of success: “Of course he continued to be afraid—that could be felt—but he was already in a psychological state of knowing that he’ll be worse off if he abandons ship. Not only was he saved from cowardice, but the other troops too, who were saying that the medic was about to run off. After that no one would deliberately abandon ship or neglect his duties.”172
Commanders and political officers demanded discipline not for its own sake but to teach self-control. Their conception of military order also shone through their appraisals of the enemy. Several intelligence officers in Stalingrad spoke about the Wehrmacht’s unusually strong discipline, which forged a special bond between soldiers and commanders. One officer observed that during the Soviet barrages in the final days of January 1943 not a single German emerged from a bunker to surrender as long as the commanding officers remained.173 His approving remark contained an admission: discipline in the Red Army was far from ideal.174 Yet the intelligence officers also mentioned the “blind” and “mechanical” quality of German discipline.175 In their eyes, it seemed like slavish obedience, an attribute of the prerevolutionary era in contrast to the discipline born of conscious self-control. Unimaginable in the Wehrmacht, they thought, was the case of a Red Army soldier named Kurvantyev who killed his platoon leader for surrendering. Battalion Commissar Molchanov tells the story: “This is how it was. During the German advance the platoon commander raised his hands when the Germans ran up to him. Seeing that the platoon commander has his hands in the air, Kurvantyev with a machine gun burst mowed down both the Germans and the commander. He assumed command of the platoon, repelled the German attack that had broken through our lines in that place, a
nd retook the position. We admitted him to the party [ . . . ] and spread his example in talks, lectures, and in the division press.”176
Even penal units in the Red Army were created for the express purpose of reforming soldier offenders. Deployed in areas along the front line with high casualty rates, these units consisted of “cowards,” deserters, and self-mutilators picked up by the blocking squads, together with captured Red Army soldiers liberated after the Soviet counteroffensive and a large contingent of gulag prisoners. The historians in Stalingrad did not interview a single penal unit serviceman. Indeed, as the words of one staff officer reveal, commanders and soldiers in the other units were reluctant to speak about these formations: the officer reported that the troops of Guards divisions bristled when they heard that their ranks were to be replenished with former strafniki from the penal companies. Their biographies were “stained,” said one agitator as he admonished the former penal servicemen in his regiment at dawn before a combat operation, “but you must now prove that in one fight you can not only remove this stain but also enter the ranks of the decorated.” He reminded them of Ilya Ehrenburg’s dictum, “The blood spilled in battle is sacred. Each drop of it is a precious sacrifice on the altar of the motherland. If a man has guilt before the people, he removes it with blood in combat. I said that they were to wash away the guilt with blood. Shouting ‘Hurrah!,’ several people stepped forward and said, ‘You’ll see, we will prove it.’”177