by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
At the beginning of July regional officials made plans to evacuate the city and other areas near the front. Representatives from ministries in Moscow, charged with relocating key industries farther east, visited the Stalingrad Tractor factory (refitted for tank production), the Red October steelworks, and the Barricades munitions plant. In mid-July the commanders of the Stalingrad military district, better informed than everyone else about what was happening, decamped with their families. Their actions did not go unnoticed by the city’s population, and NKVD officers observed a growing panic, fueled by rumors that the Germans had reached the city limits.7
In the early morning hours of July 20 regional party secretary Alexei Chuyanov received a call from Stalin. He ordered military district commanders to be called back immediately, the anxiety quelled, and the city kept out of enemy hands. Chuyanov passed on these orders to his party colleagues the next evening, stressing their responsibility for the city’s defense.8 Coming a week before the fall of Rostov and the issuing of Order no. 227, the call evinced the hard line that Stalin had pursued from the outset. All able-bodied persons not already involved in military production had to help dig trenches. Accompanied by a contingent of activists—in one sector ninety-six politruks supervised the work of four thousand residents—they built three defensive rings around the city. Persons were permitted to leave the city only if it served the war effort: fifty thousand injured soldiers, attending medical personnel, and children from city orphanages.9 An order evacuating all nonworking women and their children saved the families of local officials, the only ones who could afford to keep their wives at home. Working women could leave the city only if their factory was evacuated. By mid-August almost eight thousand families from the city elite had been sent away. These precautions were not announced publicly but could not be concealed from city residents. Communist agitators in the factories were hard-pressed to explain matters to irate workers and had difficulty convincing people to hold out. Still, until August 22 life in Stalingrad carried on more or less normally: parents prepared their kids for the new school year, audiences packed movie houses and theaters, and communist leaders assured the population that the Germans would never take the city.10
The number of people killed in the devastating air raid of August 23 and the ones that followed daily until September 12 is contested. Most researchers put the figure at forty thousand—the number cited in documents presented at the Nuremburg trials.11 The city commandant, Vladimir Demchenko, told the historians in 1943 that two thousand air strikes took place in the afternoon and evening of August 23, killing ten thousand people.12 Many injured on the first day of bombing could not be treated because most of the available medical personnel had been sent to the northernmost part of the city, which German panzers had infiltrated the same afternoon. The 8th Soviet Air Fleet focused its attacks on the encroaching panzer troops, leaving the rest of the city exposed.13
In the late evening of August 23, military leaders met at General Yeryomenko’s headquarters with local party bosses, NKVD officers, and industry representatives. Also present was the head of the Soviet general staff, Alexander Vasilevsky. Two items were on the agenda: the immediate evacuation of the Stalingrad workforce and the mining of industrial facilities. After midnight Chuyanov called Stalin and informed him about their discussion. As Yeryomenko later reported, Stalin continued to rule out large-scale evacuation and banned all further discussion of the matter on the grounds that it would encourage defeatism.14
Fires in Stalingrad, August 1942. Photographer: Emmanuil Yevzerikhin
Many people who fled the city in panic were detained at the ferry stations by the NKVD. Others were able to cross the river, either with approval from local officials or not. On August 24 the City Defense Committee ordered the evacuation of women and children to the countryside. The decision was motivated not by humanitarian concerns but by a need to save the scarce food resources in the beleaguered city.15 The next day party leadership declared a state of siege and started ruthlessly rounding up looters in the burning city. The agitators also stepped up their efforts. The local party committee printed a million leaflets in the final days of August and blanketed the city with rousing slogans: “We will hold our native city!” “Not a step back!”16
When a citywide evacuation effort finally started on August 25, specialists and workers whose factories had burned to the ground went first. The mass departure did not commence until August 29, but even then workers took precedence, and in some instances they had to leave their families behind because of the lack of space on the boats. On August 27 three steamers conveying civilians upriver to Saratov—Mikhail Kalinin, In Memory of the Paris Commune, and Joseph Stalin—came under enemy fire. The Joseph Stalin ran aground, heavily damaged. Of the 1,200 passengers, only 186 were saved.17 By September 14—the day German troops pushed forward through the city to the central ferry slip—315,000 people had been evacuated. According to one estimate, just as many were still in the city.18 At this point Chuyanov and most of the other local party heads and NKVD commanders fled the city.
The city’s largest industries continued to operate much longer. In the summer of 1942, the Red October steelworks produced 10 percent of Soviet steel, mostly for aeronautics and tank manufacture, and built rocket launchers on the side. After a state of siege was declared, it switched to the manufacture of machine-gun clusters, tank traps, and shovels, and to the repair of tanks and rocket launchers. The works stayed in operation until October 2; several days later it was gutted.19 From October 1942 to early January 1943 Germans were mostly in control of the plant, though fighting was severe throughout this period. The Barricades munitions factory had produced large numbers of antitank canons since the Great Patriotic War began. The director left the factory on September 25; the last technicians departed on October 5, one day after the Germans attacked the factory.20
The massive Stalingrad Tractor factory—employing some twenty thousand workers—had been refitted for tank production in the late 1930s, and by the time war broke out it was the largest producer of T-34 tanks in the Soviet Union. On August 23, the 16th Panzer Division moved to within striking distance of the plant, but it kept churning out tanks until September 13, when the Germans began the siege. In the following days the vast majority of workers were evacuated; the 62nd Army retained a small contingent to carry out repairs for the tank regiments. The large German offensive on October 14 (described in detail by General Chuikov in his interview) concentrated on the Tractor factory. From there, German divisions planned to head south and take the last stretches of the Volga still held by the Soviets. After what Soviet and German eyewitnesses alike described as the heaviest fighting in the entire battle—the 62nd Army lost 13,000 soldiers and the Wehrmacht, 1,500—the Germans gained complete control of the plant on October 17. The Red Army did not retake the factory until February 2, 1943.21
Stalingrad’s power plant, StalGRES, was located south of the city, near Beketovka. Situated a few miles from the front line, Beketovka was protected from the brunt of the fighting. It was the site of the main headquarters of the 64th Army, and in October Chuyanov moved the party headquarters there. Once the Germans reached Stalingrad, StalGRES came under daily artillery and mortar fire but remained in operation. A major attack on November 5 forced the power plant to close.
On October 12, Chuyanov noted in his diary that the plant’s chief engineer, Konstantin Zubanov, married Dr. Maria Terentyeva in the basement of the plant while artillery fire thundered above.22 In Zubanov’s interview with the historians he described his ties to the plant and likened the factory’s electrically generated pulses to the pulse of the city. The pulse metaphor recalls futuristic currents of the early twentieth century that had deep roots in the Russian workforce.23 Zubanov might also have been referring to the well-known metronome beat that was broadcast over Leningrad radio. Engineers had originally introduced the sound in the 1930s for broadcasting pauses. After the war began, it was used as an early warning system, the sp
eed of the beat quickening whenever enemy planes approached. During the Leningrad blockade radio stations had to restrict their programming and used the metronome to assure the people of Leningrad that the city was still alive.24
The interviews with Zubanov and the two dozen other eyewitnesses begin with descriptions of the city’s industrialization in the 1930s and its transition to war production. They focus on the efforts to defend the city, the devastating air raids, and the dramatic evacuation of civilians. Worth noting is the severe criticism that General Chuikov and Commissar Vasiliev directed at party officials in Stalingrad for their failings during the city’s defense and evacuation. In part, it was unjustified; Stalin bore some of the blame as well. Moreover, it was not about the military’s dissatisfaction with the communists. Rather, it reflected the belief of those who fought on the front (which included communists such as Vasiliev) that those who did not only wanted to save their own hides.
The earliest recorded interviews were with Chuikov, Vasiliev, and the engineers Venyamin Zhukov and Pavel Matevosyan; they took place on January 8, 1943, at the destroyed Red October steelworks. Party officials were not interviewed until the historians visited again in March 1943. Woven into the interviews are excerpts from Alexei Chuyanov’s war diary, published in 1968. These passages are set in italics. Chuyanov, a local party head, did not take part in the interviews.
THE SPEAKERS
City and Regional Administrators
Pigalyov, Dmitri Matveyevich—Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Stalingrad Soviet of Workers Deputies
Polyakov, Alexei Mikhailovich—Deputy chairman of the Executive Committee of the Stalingrad Regional Soviet of Workers Deputies
Romanenko, Grigory Dmitrievich—First secretary of the Barricades District of Stalingrad
Zimenkov, Ivan Fyodorovich—Chairman of the Stalingrad Regional Soviet of Workers Deputies
Party Officials
Babkin, Sergei Dmitrievich—First secretary of the Kirov District Party Committee
Chuyanov, Alexei Semyonovich—First secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Party Committee (excerpts from his published diary)
Denisova, Claudia Stepanovna—Secretary of the Yermansky District Party Committee
Kashintsev, Semyon Yefimovich—Secretary of the Red October District Party Committee
Petrukhin, Nikolai Romanovich—Chief of the war department of the Stalingrad Regional Party Committee
Piksin, Ivan Alexeyevich—Secretary of the Stalingrad City Party Committee
Prokhvatilov, Vasily Petrovich—Secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Party Committee
Odinokov, Mikhail Afanasievich—Secretary of the Voroshilov District Party Committee
Vodolagin, Mikhail Alexandrovich—Secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Party Committee
Specialists, Workers, Residents
Ioffe, Ezri Izrailevich—Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute
Matevosyan, Pavel Petrovich—Chief engineer of the Red October steelworks
Zhukov, Veniamin Yakovlevich—Foreman of Workshop no. 7 at the Red October steelworks
Zubanov, Konstantin Vasilievich—Chief engineer of the Stalingrad Power Station (StalGRES)
Military Personnel
Burin, Ilya Fyodorovich—Former mechanic at the Barricades factory, scout in the 38th Motor Rifle Brigade
Burmakov, Ivan Dmitrievich—Major general, commander of the 38th Motor Rifle Brigade
Chuikov, Vasily Ivanovich—Lieutenant general, commander of the 62nd Army
Demchenko, Vladimir Kharitonovich—Major, commandant of Stalingrad
Gurov, Kuzma Akimovich—Lieutenant general, member of the Military Council of the 62nd Army
Vasilev, Ivan Vasilevich—Brigade commissar, chief of the political section of the 62nd Army
Zimin, Alexei Yakovlevich—Lieutenant, former worker at the Barricades factory, headquarters commandant of the 38th Motor Rifle Brigade, 64th Army25
Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Stalingrad Soviet of Workers Deputies): There were about 25,000 people living in Stalingrad in 1930—400,000 during the war, 550–560 thousand if you count evacuees. The city grew quite rapidly after 1930. As soon as the Tractor factory was completed, the population immediately grew by seventy to eighty thousand. We had a beautiful city center. There were two train stations, one down by the Volga and another in the city center. The recent growth was because of the factories.
From 1934 to 1935, the city was greatly improved. Those years saw the construction of the Great Stalingrad Hotel (370 rooms), the Intourist Hotel on the Square of the Fallen Heroes, the grand Univermag department store, which opened in 1938 or 1939, and the first and second House of Soviets, on the square across from the Intourist Hotel, the Regional Executive Committee building (an extension). The House of Books was built, and the five- or six-story Lesprom building next to Intourist. These new buildings really livened up the whole square. [ . . . ] In the center we had the big new Gorky Drama Theater, a musical theater, and a youth theater. These were theaters with a permanent acting staff. Lovely buildings—the Palace of Pioneers, the printing institute. There was a good Palace of Sport that looked out over the Volga. In the Yermansky district26 alone there was a whole bunch of cultural institutes. The art and music schools, the physical education training college—they were in that district, and the Komsomolets cinema, and also the excellent Spartak cinema, and the Red Star. The Tractor factory was home to a mechanical institute. There were 1,500 to 2,000 students. There they trained workers for the Tractor factory. Later they began sharing them with other factories. There was a large medical institute, with around 1,500 students.
The center of Stalingrad, summer 1942. Photographer: Emmanuil Yevzerikhin
Ezri Izrailevich Ioffe (Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute): The Stalingrad Medical Institute was established in 1935. Its first class numbered 160 students. A young but very energetic faculty came together in a very short time. By the beginning of the war we had in our midst twenty-two doctors of medical science and upward of ten docents and candidates of medicine. The institute was located in a large, newly built four-story building, which contained three large auditoriums, ten classrooms, a library with thirty thousand volumes and a reading room, anatomy and pathology museums, and well equipped laboratories. We had more than three hundred microscopes, about a dozen kymographs,27 radiological equipment, and so on. [ . . . ] Our first class of doctors graduated in 1940, some 150 of them. The second class, around three hundred doctors, graduated in the early days of the war, and after that there were four more classes that graduated before the city was destroyed.
Konstantin Vasilievich Zubanov (Chief engineer of the Stalingrad Power Station, StalGRES): I was born in 1911. I’ve been working at StalGRES for more than five years. Graduated from the institute in 1934. From Ordzhonikidze I was sent to Moscow, to a design firm. The three years I spent working there was the low point of my life. Being a designer isn’t what I’m cut out for. I always wanted to be in a power station. They sent me here, to Stalingrad. I’ve worked here at every level: in December 1937 I was one of the station’s shift engineers, then the lead supervisor, and from 1939 I was chief engineer of the complex. I trained as an electrical engineer, but now I’m more of a thermal engineer, or, rather, a specialist in power engineering.
Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Stalingrad Soviet of Workers Deputies): What cultural institutions did we have? In the factory settlements there were clubs and palaces of culture. At the Tractor factory there was the Gorky Club, the Shock Worker cinema, and a lot of smaller clubs. And several schools, all of them beautiful. The Derzhinsky School no. 3 was really nice, a small four-story building. There were eight or nine schools altogether, not counting the small ones. At the Barricades factory there was a house of culture, and the club for engineering and technical workers in the Lower Settlement. It wasn’t that big, but it was nice. They’d l
aid out their own park, had a summer theater. They also had a club at Red October and a good technology center.
Konstantin Vasilievich Zubanov (Chief engineer of the Stalingrad Power Station, StalGRES): Basically, the power station is the center of a city’s industry—I’d even say it’s the center of its culture. A city that is electrified—a city where electricity has become an integral part of its daily life and infrastructure—sees more cultural and economic development than cities where there isn’t enough electricity. The power station is to industry what a heart is to a man. The heart beats with a steady pulse, and so the power station maintains a pulse, a pulse of fifty cycles per second. One faint or missing beat is enough to bring all the city’s activity to a halt—lights go out, factories stop working, and theaters and cinemas close. In today’s world, however, this is extremely unusual. The Stalingrad Power Station was just such a heart to the city of Stalingrad.
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): Stalingrad is an industrial city, and it has around ten enterprises of national significance, such as the Tractor factory, the 221st (Barricades), Red October, the 264th, and a number of others. During the war, these and all the other factories were refitted to produce ammunition and military equipment.