by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
Almost every mention of the penal companies included an assertion that their men had proven themselves in battle. Senior Lieutenant Alexei Kolesnik, of the 204th Rifle Division, recalled: “We received reinforcements comprised of those sentenced to ten years for self-inflicted wounds and for retreating without orders; there were even commanders among them. We’ve expunged the records of sixty people for exemplary conduct in combat. Take this one junior lieutenant. He has personally killed thirteen Fritzes and has been put in charge of the regimental engineering service. He was court-martialed for neglecting his duties, got himself blown up by mines.”178 Battalion Commissar Alexander Stepanov (308th Rifle Division) expressed similar sentiments: “About 25 percent of people in our regiment had a conviction in the past. All of them, with a few exceptions, had that conviction removed for courageous conduct and action in combat. We considered that one of the ways to stimulate people toward excellent work.”179 Senior Lieutenant Ayzenberg, the agitator who drove home the image of the blood sacrifice on the altar of the motherland, recounted, “Toward the end of the day, when we checked the casualties, we noticed that Vasiliev was still there, also a former prisoner of war. Not only had Vasiliev washed away his shameful stain, but he was there till the end. He had remembered my words so well he passed them on to his comrades. That evening he approached me and said: ‘The battalion commander has just told me that I’m being nominated for a decoration.’”180
The enormous losses of the penal companies at the front figured in the depictions of the men’s heroic deeds only in passing, if at all.181 Lieutenant Alexei Zimin (38th Motorized Rifle Brigade) alluded to the death toll when he said that after one battle “pursuant to Order no. 227 the rest of the offenders had their stain of shame removed.”182 Brigade Commissar Vasiliev was more explicit: “Guryev’s division has some convicts. The majority of them have been killed in battle; there are some wounded. [ . . . ] About six of them are left and their convictions have been removed. Now we’re working on the issue of posthumously removing the convictions of those who were killed because they fought and died heroically.”
Nowhere else was the idea of reeducation—perekovka, literally “reforging”—more present than in the descriptions of soldiers who arrived at the front from the gulag. (Perekovka was a common notion in the Soviet penal system in the early 1930s.)183 Battalion Commissar Stepanov remembered well the ninety prisoners assigned to him when forming his regiment: “people in rags, hungry, covered in lice,” the sight of whom initially frightened him. “These were real ‘cons,’ to use their own slang.” How would he break up this close-knit community and “educate” the men? Stepanov showed the results of his efforts by citing some of the paths taken by the men after serving time: “Shafranov is now a party member in the regiment, a decorated field officer, one of our finest commanders. Gavronsky deserted while the regiment was being formed. He was rounded up near Stalingrad and shot. Of all the ninety convicts who came to our regiment, only two of them were unable to reform themselves and ended up being shot. All the rest were reeducated and turned into good honest soldiers.”
Some of the offenders sent to the front earned the admiration of their commanders for their determination in battle. Major Andrei Kruglyakov, of the 45th Rifle Division, spoke about a former pickpocket named Chuvakhin. “The day after he arrived at the front in Stalingrad his friend, comrade Ivanov, was killed. He promised that for his friend he would kill no fewer than thirty-five Fritzes. And in a short period of time he killed thirty-three or thirty-two Fritzes. Later he was wounded.”184 “Madcap fellows, real daredevils,” said Major Soldatov, referring to the offenders assigned to the 38th Rifle Brigade. “On their first day at the front line they burst into some dugout, captured a German, dragged him here.”
The Soviet command also regarded non-Russian recruits, non-Slavs in particular, with suspicion, believing them to hold nationalist aspirations.185 At the same time, the Main Political Administration also thought about strategies for winning over these unpredictable “cantonists.” An October 1942 report to GlavPURKKA head Shcherbakov listed all the non-Russian soldiers fighting at Stalingrad: 5,688 Ukrainians, 1,787 Byelorussians, 2,146 Uzbeks, 3,152 Kazakhs,186 187 Turkmen, 181 Kyrgyz, 2,047 Jews, and 3,354 Tatars. The author of the report suggested publishing special newspapers for these soldiers, printed centrally in Moscow since there were no facilities for doing this in the field.
This suggestion implicitly called attention to the communication difficulties in ethnically mixed divisions.187 Many non-Russian soldiers did not understand the orders issued by their (mostly Russian) superiors, and sometimes had to rely on hand gestures when coordinating battle movements. The 62nd Army tried to surmount the problem by recruiting the best-educated non-Russians and training them as commanders. Those from urban areas with a good command of Russian were used as interpreters and instructors. Lieutenant Nikolai Karpov of the 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade talked about the services of non-Russians when the Square of the Fallen Heroes was stormed in the early hours of January 31, 1943:
Komsomol members played a leading role in the attack. We had a lot of minorities, and they were generally hard to mobilize. That Ivanov was a Chuvash, but he understood Uzbek and Russian well, in addition to Chuvash. When we were attacking and there were some twenty meters to the building, we hit the ground, as the Germans were laying down heavy fire that night. Ivanov shouts to me: “How about it, comrade Lieutenant, we will keep going?” I immediately got up and shouted: “Forward! For the motherland!” And he shouted to the minorities. We took that building by storm. We got there on January 27 and fought for four days until January 31.188
Several of the commanders interviewed attested to the “fighting spirit” of the non-Russians. For instance, Colonel Matvei Smolyanov (64th Army) noted that “there were times when Uzbeks displayed no less courage than that of Russians, Ukrainians, and others.”189 But the depictions also betrayed how little commanders expected from non-Russians. “We had pretty good folks,” recalled Captain Ivan Bukharov, of the 38th Rifle Brigade, “including some non-Russians, but the majority were Russians—professionals who had been under fire before.”190 Others bluntly asserted that the non-Russian soldiers fought poorly and were fearful, justifying the brutal punishment they sometimes received. “They’d gotten reinforcements, but they wouldn’t move—they were Uzbeks, extremely bad soldiers. The ones who didn’t go were shot.”191 General Rodimtsev, the one who delivered this assessment, went on to underscore the outstanding fighting spirit of the Russians in his division, especially those who came from Siberia. Divisional Commander Stepan Guryev (39th Guards Rifle Division) also criticized the non-Russians, though not across the board. “Among the minorities there were Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and others, but they fought poorly. There are of course those who were able to handle it—good, decorated guys—but that’s a small percentage.”192
These “nationalities”—to Russian commanders and political officers at Stalingrad—were what the Russian peasantry had been to Soviet activists of the first hour: an uneducated, backward throng who could be fashioned into effective soldiers only by dint of enormous effort. Curiously, none of the commanders in Stalingrad spoke critically of Russian soldiers with peasant backgrounds; such a category never occurred to them. The line of division no longer ran between classes, as during the Civil War, but between nationalities, and everyone took it as self-evident that Russians best embodied the communist ideal of the battle-conscious soldier. It was also clear that more than any other Soviet ethnic group they were led by hate for the German invaders.193
Political and moral education played an important role in the Red Army units fighting at Stalingrad. Most of the political officers and commanders who spoke with the Moscow historians confirmed that these mobilizing measures began to take effect there. The early phases of the battle critically tested the army’s effectiveness, but most of the interviewees affirmed that by October 1942 the city’s defenders were standing firm and fighting with conviction. (Sen
ior Lieutenant Alexei Smirnov of the 308th Rifle Division stated that “during the retreat to Stalingrad we would catch individual cowards, but in Stalingrad itself that wasn’t the case. Our army blocking units did not have a single case of that.”)194 By that time, the mythology surrounding the pivotal battle on the Volga had taken shape. A slogan like “There is no land beyond the Volga!” imbued Order no. 227 with a tangible, vivid significance for local troops. Combined with the threat of fierce punishment, such rallying cries proved effective, especially after the series of military victories beginning on November 19. Many of those interviewed corroborated the description provided by Major Georgy Spitsky of the Volga flotilla: “By the way, I’ve been in the service for a long time. It’s my fourth war, but I’ve never seen such a display as that of the ship rallies. It was an exceptional display of enthusiasm. Even the most backward—and we had a few of those—were transformed. They would speak at gatherings, rallies.”195
These reports of soldiers’ behavior at Stalingrad tally with information that has emerged from Soviet secret archives. By August 1, 1942, the military had formed forty-one blocking squads on the Stalingrad and Don Fronts. Over the course of September and August they detained 45,465 soldiers who had left the front lines without authorization: 699 were arrested, and of them, 664 “cowards, panickers, and self-mutilators” were executed on the spot. Another 1,292 were sent to penal companies and battalions. The overwhelming bulk of the deserters—41,472 soldiers—was returned into their units.196 The figures make clear that the Red Army had a huge problem with internal discipline especially during the early, defensive phase of the Stalingrad campaign. The sources also suggest that the NKVD troops operating behind the front lines with the goal of stemming desertion had two specific tasks. The first was to detain the soldiers who fled from the battlefield and to ensure that their behavior did not spread to other troops: “Today during the enemy’s offensive breakthrough two companies of the 13th Guards division froze and began to withdraw,” an internal NKVD report of September 23, 1942, stated. “The commander of one of these companies, Lieutenant Mirolyubov, also fled the battlefield in panic, abandoning the company. The blocking unit of the 62nd Army contained the retreat of these units and restored the position.” Another report states that a blocking unit opened fire on the fleeing troops, while a third specifies that the NKVD agents aimed over their heads.197
The second task was to establish who among the detained was a trustworthy soldier and who wasn’t. NKVD officers performed interrogations to “filter out” the “obvious enemies”—incorrigible cowards or “anti-Soviet elements.” These needed to be “finished off with an iron hand.” But the interrogation could also reveal that an individual had succumbed to a “momentary weakness that most often was the result of not being accustomed to combat conditions—and that in the future he will act with courage, energy, and dignity.”198 This political reading of the personality of individual Red Army soldiers fully conformed with how the NKVD had persecuted purported “enemies of the people” during the prewar Stalinist terror, with the only exception that before the war the sanctions were harsher: few people who ended up in the hands of the secret police got away without a gulag term.199 In wartime, however, and especially as the war progressed, the regime urgently required soldiers at the front. It even opened the gulag to increase the ranks of the military.
Many of the executions meted out as a consequence of Order no. 227 were conducted in front of all the assembled soldiers of a division. Such exemplary violence was to function as a deterrent, and it was widely publicized.200 The executions disproportionately affected Red Army commanders and commissars. Multiple sources describe how commanders of troops that buckled under their leadership were later shot in front of their troops.201 This lot also fell to Lieutenant Mirolyubov, the company commander in General Rodimtsev’s division. He had failed to lead by example and to transform ordinary recruits into fearless fighters. The vulnerability of Soviet commanders contrasted starkly with the German armed forces, where officers were practically immune from physical violence. Soviet rank-and-file soldiers, on the other hand, stood a smaller chance of suffering from Order no. 227.202 As military leaders realized by summer 1942, the supply of Soviet recruits was not endless. By June of that year army orders were issued that called on commanders to “spare their soldiers.”203 Back in August 1941 Stalin’s Order no. 270 had decreed indiscriminate violence. Enacted nearly a year later, Order no. 227 had evolved: the bulk of those soldiers who would have been summarily shot under Order no. 270 were now sent to penal units instead. There they were considered probationary fighters, under orders to redeem themselves within a short time frame by fighting in the most dangerous sectors of the front.204 Even with these qualifications, the penal culture in the Red Army was extremely—and by many accounts, excessively—violent.205 Over the course of the war, tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers were sentenced to death and executed—the exact number remains a matter of debate.206
The brutal measures that were taken at the Stalingrad Front in late summer and fall 1942 seemed to be effective, as later internal documents suggest. In February 1943 the NKVD reported that between October 1942 and the following January, a total of 203 “cowards and panic mongers” were arrested from the six armies that made up the Don Front; 169 of them were shot and the rest were sent to penal companies. The report mentions only “sporadic cases of mass flight from the battlefield.”207
FORMS OF COMBAT
For all the mobilizing force of political education, the army’s initiatives were often inconsistent and contradictory, less products of a single unified theory than of conflicting temperaments and viewpoints. For instance, military leaders differed greatly on whether soldiers should receive vodka to steel themselves for battle. On August 22, 1941, Stalin decreed that every soldier should receive one hundred grams of vodka a day. The directive was repealed on May 11, 1942, and then reintroduced on November 12, 1942. From May 1943 until the end of the war, unit commanders made their own decisions about alcohol allowances for troops.208 Senior Lieutenant Vasily Leshchinin of the 39th Guards Rifle Division spoke openly about giving alcohol to his men when preparing them and some recently arrived reserve units for an assault on Stalingrad’s industrial district. “We got to know the new reinforcements, talked to every one of them, organized assault teams. We spread our seasoned soldiers among them, cooked them a hot supper, gave them their hundred grams and said ‘All right guys, go and get it.’ We didn’t tell them how, but they went ahead and took that plant.”209 Other officers warned of the dangers of intoxication in battle. Here is Major Spitsky’s account:
Some say the one hundred grams handed out by order of the People’s Commissar was a necessity. I would say it was just the opposite. The more complicated the situation, the more we would choose to do without. For example, we commanders simply didn’t want to drink. Conducting an operation with a clear head is better.[ . . . ] There were indeed some small individuals who would credit the alcohol with actions that went beyond what was humanly possible, that were heroic, saying that nothing was impossible for someone who has had a few. But that of course wasn’t typical of the general opinion on that subject—just a minor aberration.
The admonition to avoid inebriation appears in an early 1943 report from Stalingrad: “[Enemy intelligence] can meet its objectives successfully only when [ . . . ] both the commander and soldiers are brave and resourceful, if their mind is clear and sober.” The wording of the report suggests that alcohol was widely used to prepare soldiers for their combat missions.210
There were also differences in combat style. Political officers urged soldiers to stand tall and proud as they marched into battle in the belief that the heroic posture would encourage others to follow suit. The agitator Izer Ayzenberg remembered how he assumed control of his battalion after the commander sustained an injury while preparing the unit to storm a hill. He called over a soldier named Polukhin, pressed the regiment flag into his hands, and told him to pl
ant it on top of a water tower held by the enemy, in the hope that the waving flag would rally the troops. “When the enemy began retreating, covering us with fire, that Polukhin rose to full height and went across the battle line, carrying the flag. Infantry, not waiting for the flag to be placed, also rose up tall and threw themselves into the offensive. Our divisional commander watched that scene and said that it was exceedingly beautiful how the infantry, standing tall and crying hurrah, followed the flag. Polukhin did place the flag.” Ayzenberg does not specify the number of soldiers who lost their lives during this assault.
The sight of his soldiers falling in a shower of enemy bullets exhilarated Brigade Commissar Alexander Yegorov, of the 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade. He was thrilled by his men’s willingness to put themselves in harm’s way. Earlier, a Soviet attack had stalled when the infantry refused to leave the trenches after an initial artillery barrage. At that point Yegorov’s reserve brigade received the order to step in: “As soon as the enemy noticed movement on our line they opened fire. But the joyful thing—my heart rejoiced at it—was that our people were resilient. Shrapnel was ripping our men out of line, there were huge bloodstains on the snow (the first snow had just fallen), but still they didn’t get down, they kept advancing.”211
Writer Vasily Grossman displayed similar enthusiasm when describing a battle in which an entire regiment of the 308th Rifle Division perished: “An iron wind struck them in the face, yet they kept moving forward. The enemy was likely possessed by a superstitious fear: Are these people who are attacking us? Are they mortal? [ . . . ] [They] were indeed mortal, and while few of them made it out alive, they had all done their duty.”212 Both Grossman and Yegorov were in thrall to the hero cult, convinced of every man’s ability to transform himself into a self-sacrificing warrior. Soviet ideas of heroism permeated all levels of warfare, from the upright bearing of the troops as they entered battle to infantrymen pitting themselves against German panzers to pilots crashing into enemy airplanes in midflight. These ideas came at a price: many of the Red Army’s enormous losses were a direct result. Yet as cultural norms they also had a great motivating power. Fighter pilot Ivan Sapryagayev summed it up in conversation with Grossman: “I always get into a fight. I don’t want distinction. I want to defeat the Germans, sacrificing my life. The battering ram—that is the character of a Russian; that is Soviet upbringing.”213