by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
Major Zayonchkovsky shared this heroic disposition, but he also pointed out its dark side: the “rash, senseless courage, and the sometimes unnecessary risks. Here’s the kind of thing that happens during a day on the front lines: ‘Vanka, give me a smoke,’ and he gets up and runs over to him. Or people are walking normally in places where they need to crawl, and the next second they’re dead.” The flamboyant display of heroism that Zayonchkovsky criticized was, for General Chuikov, an indispensible linchpin in his authority as commander:
Attack. Stalingrad, 1943. Photographer: Natalya Bode
We don’t have heroes who aren’t afraid of anything. No one sees or knows what Chuikov does when he’s by himself, when there’s no witnesses, nobody to see him, to see what’s going on in his head. The idea that a commander would go to his subordinates and bare his poor little soul—you could find them, but they are the rejects. We’re in a bunker, and shell fragments are flying at us. But what, you just sit there, and that doesn’t get to you? I don’t believe it. The survival instinct is still there, but a man’s pride—an officer’s especially—is of vital importance in combat.
By contrast, General Mikhail Shumilov of the 64th Army repeatedly stressed that the first job of a good commander was to protect his troops. He recounted a successful attack that began with a fifty-five-minute artillery bombardment: “First there was a five-minute fire raid on the front line that was then taken deeper for ten minutes. At that time the infantry started firing heavily from all weapons, stuck out mannequins, and cried ‘Hurrah!,’ imitating a mass infantry attack. That disoriented the enemy, who decided that we were already attacking and started leaving the dugouts to go into the trenches. Just then, all of our artillery again concentrated on the enemy’s front line.”214 Other experienced commanders also noted the effectiveness of subterfuge. The fighter pilot Stepan Prutkov defended this furtive, ignoble form of warfare by arguing that the Germans did it too: “That is how we began tricking the Germans. [ . . . ] You shouldn’t fight them head-on. They’re crafty and sly, so you’ve got to be clever about it.”215 Since these maneuvers lacked the expressive and electrifying power of heroic, straight-backed soldiers striding into battle, they received little attention from political officers and war correspondents.
Shumilov acknowledged an important fact corroborated by other interviewees: for most of 1942 his soldiers lacked weapons and equipment. By January 4, 1943, when Shumilov gave his interview, the situation had changed. “Now that the army is saturated with machinery,” he said, the ability to operate them was paramount. The hero cult, filled with tales of soldiers who threw themselves into the path of oncoming German panzers, grew in part out of this scarcity. Consider Lieutenant Colonel Svirin’s depiction of the bloody battle on the northwest outskirts of Stalingrad in September 1942: “We educated the soldiers using the example of the brave defenders of Sevastopol, five of whom threw themselves under the tanks, and the example of the twenty-eight Panfilov soldiers who managed to hold back an avalanche of armor.”216
But the officers interviewed also noted a growing divide within the military. General Shumilov cited Front, a play by Alexander Korneychuk that premiered in the summer of 1942. It portrayed the conflict between the obstinate veterans of the Civil War and the younger generation of officers who had graduated from military academies in the 1930s. After the battle of Stalingrad, the soldiers’ confidence had become palpable. The defeat of an opponent previously considered invincible testified to their own military prowess. Many officers criticized superiors who relied on brute force alone, without military expertise. Regimental commander Alexander Gerasimov took an indirect swipe at his division head, Vasily Glazkov.217 When talking about divisional commander Ivan Afonin, the sailors of the Volga flotilla did not mince words.218 An especially severe rebuke was reserved for General Vasily Gordov, who commanded the Stalingrad Front in July and August 1942. Divisional commander Stepan Guryev of the 39th Guards Division, who had served under Gordov, believed that he was “chiefly responsible” for the heavy losses in the 62nd and 64th Armies on the Don steppes: “History will never forgive him. [ . . . ] Gordov completely lacks talent.” Senior Lieutenant Dubrovsky also pinned the blame on Gordov. “To be honest,” he said, “what happened on the Don in August could only be described as a catastrophe.” He too pinned the blame on General Gordov. General Chuikov noted that he saved the 64th Army from annihilation by disobeying Gordov’s commands and ordering a rapid retreat; the 62nd Army held its position and was nearly destroyed by German panzers and aircraft. “The front command,” Chuikov summed up, “did not take the direction into consideration, even though Comrade Stalin had warned Gordov and the rest that Tsymlyanskaya was the foremost and most important direction for the enemy.” Gordov was relieved of command and demoted in August 1942, allowing the eyewitnesses interviewed in 1943 to criticize him without fear of reprisals. Yet Stalin, who time and again goaded commanders on the front to initiate bloody offensives and threatened them with severe punishment if they failed, escaped criticism of any kind. (It is not known how many Red Army soldiers in Stalingrad knew of Stalin’s leadership style or mistrusted it.)
General Mikhail Shumilov (center) and members of his military council (S. T. Serdyuk, front; Konstantin Abramov, rear) in Stalingrad, January 1943.
Despite the emphasis on military expertise and strategy after 1942, many of the command forms from the Civil War survived. Stalin valued commanders like Gordov, who did not hesitate to sacrifice entire divisions for a spectacular offensive. The vilified ex-commander made a comeback in 1943, rising to colonel general and later taking part in the attacks on Berlin and Prague. In April 1945 he was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.219
PEOPLE IN WAR
The communist wager on the boundless reserves of the human will was shared by scores of Red Army soldiers fighting at Stalingrad, especially by those born after 1917 and brought up in the Soviet education system. In keeping with this voluntarist conception, they distinguished between two basic dispositions—the heroic and the cowardly—and admitted few shades of gray between them. The primacy the Bolsheviks placed on fully developed consciousness expressed itself in how soldiers dealt with the psychological stress of war. In an interview filling twenty-eight pages, army commander Chuikov devoted only one sentence to this matter: “Just understand this one thing: all of this [the months of defensive battles in Stalingrad] has made an impression on our psyches.” Then he abruptly changed subjects. Sniper Vasily Zaytsev described his suffering in physiological terms—a common tendency in Soviet psychology at the time—while underscoring the ever present will to fulfill his mission:
We didn’t know fatigue. Now I get tired just walking around town, but then we had breakfast from 4:00 to 5:00 A.M. and dinner from 9:00 to 10:00 P.M., going without food all day without getting tired. We’d go three or four days without sleeping, without even feeling sleepy. How can I explain this? [ . . . ] Every soldier, including myself, was thinking only of how he could make them pay more dearly for his life, how he could slaughter even more Germans. [ . . . ] I was wounded three times in Stalingrad. Now I have a nervous system disorder and shake constantly.220
Vasiliev mentioned Mikhail Mamekov, who was also a sniper: “In a short period of time he had already killed 138 Fritzes. If he spends a day without killing a Fritz, he can’t eat and really starts fretting. He is a typical Tatar and speaks poor Russian, but he is always studying it, even in battle.”
Dozens of Red Army soldiers from different ethnic backgrounds told how they attempted to meet the demands placed on them: defending their “home” and the “socialist fatherland,” keeping their “self-preservation instinct” in check, surmounting their fear of death, seeing loss of life in battle as a meaningful act or even as life’s fulfillment, and constantly fanning their hate of Germans. As the soldiers’ stories about their families showed, these attitudes surfaced far away from the front as well. Senior Lieutenant Molchanov, sidelined by a stomach ulcer, taught at a m
ilitary academy when war broke out. “I have a daughter, Nina, who is seven. She kept asking, ‘Papa, why are you not at the front? Everybody is fighting and you are not.’ That had a powerful effect on me. What can I answer the child? Tell her I am sick? But that was not the time for sickness! After that I went to the head of the political department of the district and told him about my wish to go to the front.”
Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Molchanov
Characteristically, talk of resignation or fortune surface nowhere in the interviews, even though fatalism, in the positive sense of the word, once counted as a virtue among soldiers in the Russian empire, lending them their legendary tenacity and endurance.
The question remains how to assess the language of the Stalingrad transcripts in relation to how Soviet soldiers talked or wrote in an unofficial setting. Many historians believe they can best uncover the reality of war in the words of those who speak freely about it. They mistrust official sources, regarding them as outlets of propaganda that yield little for understanding actual individual experience.221 Indeed, some Soviet wartime letters speak a very different language. We know of their existence because they were recorded by NKVD agents in search of “anti-Soviet” subjects—soldiers who despaired over their fate or voiced defeatist positions. In October 1942, Special Section officers at the Stalingrad Front presented a report containing these excerpts (the agents were not concerned with the letters as a whole, only with passages in them that fit the categories they were searching for):
“The majority no longer believes in victory. The masses are no longer sympathetic to us. And now the allies are delaying the opening of a second front.222 Seeing all this, I have reached an impasse with my convictions.”
“I am in the south where it is very hot, but in a day I’ll have to ship out and join the fight with the Germans at Stalingrad. That means waving good-bye to my life. I am writing this letter on a steamship, and these are certainly the last minutes of my life. I have information about the front: when an echelon reaches the front, out of the four thousand men, only fifteen or twenty will make it, and those are the ranking commanders. Only fifteen minutes are needed to destroy a division.”
The report also flagged as anti-Soviet several letter writers with anti-Semitic views who claimed the Soviet government was Jewish.223
Voices like these are important for understanding the soldiers’ experience of war, but they can only be fruitfully studied within their political context. For the NKVD operatives who collected them, these statements represented a pole of hostility they were bent on eradicating. They did so by confiscating the letters and sometimes arresting the authors and addressees as well. Letter writers who voiced despair but did not expound a political platform were left untouched, but their letters confiscated, so as not to contaminate Soviet society. On an aggregate level the work of the NKVD looked like this: “after checking the letters, texts were detected that voiced complaints about exhaustion from the war and the hardship of military service. A number of letters reflected defeatist sentiments. During the period from June to August 1942, out of 30,237,000 examined letters, 15,469 contain such statements.”224 Reports always concluded that the overwhelming majority of letters sent from the Soviet front lines “reflected the healthy morale and political reliability of the personnel.”225 Critics might contend that in making this assertion the NKVD agents did not account for the fact that Red Army soldiers knew their letters were being censored and hence did not confide their true thoughts to them. But such criticism misses the bigger point: that a huge, costly censorship apparatus was at work, scanning every single letter that passed from the front to the rear—a unique feature among all warfaring nations in World War II—in an effort to transform Red Army soldiers’ thinking and behavior in wartime.
This work was performed with equal zeal by NKVD censors and by the political officers at the Stalingrad Front who kept explaining to soldiers why they were fighting until minutes before battle. They resumed their task as soon as fighting was over, summarizing and interpreting the day’s events. The political officers trained soldiers to speak about themselves in a way that, they believed, would decisively influence thought and action in war. An account of subjective experience in wartime remains incomplete if it fails to take into account the pervasive monitoring and conditioning performed by the Soviet ideological state apparatus and its structuring effects.
And so, when the Moscow historians arrived at the Stalingrad front in late December 1942 they encountered soldiers who had fully incorporated Soviet notions of heroism and cowardice and were conversant about the battle’s political and historical significance.
HISTORIANS OF THE AVANT-GARDE
The historians who conducted the interviews in Stalingrad not only documented the work and impact of the ideological apparatus but participated in it. As Soviet citizens they felt called on to help the Red Army defeat Hitler’s Germany. They understood their project as an important contribution to the education and mobilization of Soviet society in time of war. Like the writers and artists who volunteered as war correspondents and photographers in the Red Army, the historians wanted to make themselves useful. They did this by reviving the avant-garde documentary style that Russian critics, writers, and filmmakers had developed after the 1917 revolution.226 The participants in this avant-garde movement took as their subject the Soviet world, where, from their vantage point, a drama of monumental importance was unfolding. They believed it was misguided and senseless to retain traditional art forms such as the novel, whose invented world turned its back on the real one. The critic Sergei Tretyakov argued that writing a work like War and Peace in the Soviet era would be anachronistic. The preferred medium was the newspaper, which day after day and page after page reported news of Soviet industrialization and fostered it in the process. News coverage and eyewitness interviews not only represented reality; they also ordered raw facts into a meaningful framework. As documentarians, artists, and intellectuals were “operatives” participating in the “life of the material” and engineering a new world.227
Historians and Communist party representatives alike embraced the documentary aesthetic at the beginning of the 1920s, and together initiated a series of large-scale historical projects. The first was the Commission for the Study of the October Revolution and of the Russian Communist Party (Istpart). Founded in 1920, it recorded the history of the Bolshevik uprising for future generations. In Moscow, Petrograd, and numerous other Russian cities, “commemorative evenings” were held in which people relayed their experiences of the 1917 upheaval. The directors of the commission served as mediators in a system of history workshops run through local party bureaus, municipal administrations, and newspaper offices. The directors wanted to gather as many eyewitnesses as possible; they believed that bearing witness to the founding moment of Soviet history would make them active participants in the revolution as well as inspire readers.228 Despite these high expectations, however, the commission’s publication output was meager. As the history of the revolution became entangled in the battle for Lenin’s legacy, party leaders began to censor the eyewitness accounts. By the time The Short Course of the History of the All-Union Communist Party appeared in 1938, most Istpart documents had been expunged from the official record and confined to state archives.
In 1931, in the midst of the first five year plan, the writer Maxim Gorky conceived of a grand literary project: every large factory in the Soviet Union—he had over three hundred in mind—would write its own history and include as many workers as possible as coauthors. A staff of almost one hundred writers and journalists working full-time supervised the mammoth project. Their job was to teach factory workers documentary techniques and expand their historical consciousness by encouraging them to record their own experiences. Gorky asked the editors to collect memories primarily from “shock workers,” working-class heroes who far surpassed their work quotas. Gorky embraced the ideas of Nietzsche but interpreted them in a socialist vein. He believed that every pers
on came into the world a hero, but that heroic essence would unfold only if it received proper support. In Gorky’s eyes the hero had an important function as a teacher, “a HUMAN BEING in capital letters” who showed others how to become more human than they already were. The project’s staff members were to foster a society-wide emergence of socialist heroes while learning from the stories they collected and reforging themselves in a collectivist spirit.229 By the time war broke out in 1941, twenty volumes had been published in the series History of the Factories and Plants. Among them was the well-received volume People of the Stalingrad Tractor Factory (1934). It presented a variety of literary sketches and photographic portraits of factory workers, and included an introduction by Gorky and a closing essay by the writer Leopold Averbakh. The work showcased the many functions of the project’s authors: observers, creators, participants, and literary engineers of mass transformation.230