Stalingrad
Page 13
Veniamin Yakovlevich Zhukov (Foreman of Workshop no. 7 at the Red October steelworks): I made my way up at the factory beginning in 1932. I grew up here, started out as a driver and advanced to workshop foreman. This place has grown before my eyes. [ . . . ] The plant worked, and I worked. The factory grew, and I grew with it. The party organization raised me. Lately there’s been interesting work mastering the Katyusha rocket.28 [ . . . ] On the first day of the war we gave the army about forty vehicles, which were given a rating of excellent by the regional military organization, despite the fact that they’d been used in extremely difficult conditions.
The sixty people in the workshop crew put everything they had into mastering the rocket system. So when the decision was made to take the vehicle off the line, we felt awful. Weren’t we good enough to keep producing this weapon? It was nice to have a part to play in the war.
Konstantin Vasilievich Zubanov (Chief engineer of the Stalingrad Power Station, StalGRES): For the phase of combat operations, the first stage was the period of time from the outbreak of war until the siege of our city. During this time we tried to do all we could to provide our city—and especially factories of particular military importance—with a sufficient supply of high-quality electricity. [ . . . ] We tried to breathe as one with our country, to match its rhythm as it repelled the assaults of the fascist horde. The war drastically changed the way we did things. When the Germans took the Donbass region, we found ourselves without coal. We had to find something else to burn: fuel oil. But this didn’t faze us. There were no power restrictions at all, meaning that we didn’t even notice the switch. We made the move from coal to fuel oil in a very short time frame. Fitters such as master Sergei Vasilievich Ivlev and Mudrenko, the supervisor of the boiler shop—they made it so they city didn’t notice the switchover. And our power station safely used the new fuel to provide electricity to its customers without restrictions.
Alexei Yakovlevich Zimin (Lieutenant, former worker at the Barricades factory, headquarters commandant of the 38th Motor Rifle Brigade, 64th Army): The factories were working at full capacity. All kinds of weaponry were set up right there in the compounds, lifted up to the rooftops by crane. Tanks rolled in. People in the workers settlements were feeling lively and cheerful. They constructed bunkers and bomb shelters, made water reservoirs. Apart from that liveliness, there was nothing unusual about them.
Ezri Izrailevich Ioffe (Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute): The institute played an active role in the city’s defensive preparations. In the autumn of 1941 and from July to August 1942 the institute built lines of defense. Under the direction of professors and instructors, hundreds of students erected fortifications outside the city and within the city itself.
Alexei Semyonovich Chuyanov (First secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Committee): July 12 [ . . . ] It’s becoming clearer and clearer that combat operations are soon to begin on the immediate approaches to Stalingrad. [ . . . ]
July 19. As usual, the regional committee sat until dawn, which comes early during the summer. It was past two in the morning when we got a call on the hard line: “Please hold the line for comrade Stalin.”
“Has the city decided to surrender to the enemy?” said Stalin angrily. “Why have you moved the military district HQ to Astrakhan? Who gave the order? Answer me!” J. V. Stalin inquired about conditions in the city. He wanted to know about the output of the factories producing military goods. Then he issued directives from the Central Committee regarding the difficult military situation. In conclusion he said: “Stalingrad will not be given to the enemy. You let everyone know that.”
Long after I hung up the receiver I stayed under the spell of the conversation. I didn’t feel like going home, though it was late. I stood by an open window, breathed in the fresh morning air, and felt a great surge of strength. The main thing was clear: the city was not going to surrender to the Nazis.
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): Long before the enemy was nearing the city, each factory had formed destruction battalions.29 The destruction battalions were composed of all the factories’ best people—the party and Komsomol members, and the best non-party workers.
All of these military activities took place after exhausting manufacturing work. It must be said that these skills were useful during the war when things became difficult for our city.
Alexei Semyonovich Chuyanov (First secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Committee): August 11. This morning Ivan Fyodorovich Zimenkov dropped by and asked: “How much longer will we keep burdening our families?”
I understood what he meant: “What do you suggest we do?”
“Today we should send the families of all managerial staff in the city and region across the Volga, to a state farm. Or to the koumiss production facility in the Palassovsky district.
This wasn’t a simple matter. It’s true that many families had already been evacuated, but if our own families were sent away, the enemy might exploit this in their propaganda. But there seemed to be no other choice. When it comes down to it, Valery, who’s only a year and a half old, shouldn’t have to pay for the fact that his father is a regional committee secretary. He’d already developed a nervous stutter. I approved Zimenkov’s proposal. That night our families departed for Srednyaya Akhtuba by boat and later went by car to the Palassovsky district.
Claudia Stepanovna Denisova (Secretary of the Yermansky District Committee): Most of the party activists’ families were taken across the river in advance.
Ivan Fyodorovich Zimenkov (Chairman of the Stalingrad Regional Soviet of Workers Deputies): Some rural districts and their livestock were evacuated to the east side of the Volga. We evacuated the collective farms’ entire stock apart from parts of the Voroshilov and Kotelnikov district, where we had to leave everything behind. Horses, oxen, sheep, pigs from all the districts later occupied by the Germans were taken across the Volga. We didn’t evacuate animals that were for the personal use of the farmers and other workers. From the thirty-eight machine and tractor stations later occupied by the Germans all but 750 tractors were evacuated (from a total of 3,080).30 We sent tractors across the Volga, some to the Olkhovsky, Molotov, and Nizhne-Dobrinsky districts.
This was at the beginning of the grain harvest. All fourteen districts were effectively occupied by the peak of harvest season. All the grain was left behind. We got all of the government milled grain from Kalach. We got everything from the grain-collection stations on the railway running from Kalach and Nizhny Chir to Stalingrad, and from the warehouses as well.
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): The enemy caught us unawares, and just about no one—certainly none of the workers—were evacuated from the city.
Ivan Fyodorovich Zimenkov (Chairman of the Stalingrad Regional Soviet of Workers Deputies): We immediately set up four defensive lines. Those who couldn’t go far from home because of children worked on the lines inside the city. This was women for the most part. The rest of the city’s population—nearly 28,000—worked on the second line, on the third and fourth Don lines. All the 1,500 kilometers of defensive lines were completed by the beginning of August. The whole region was full of lines, all the way to Astrakhan. Along the Don, the Volga, the Medveditsa—defensive lines were everywhere. [ . . . ]
Stalingrad civilians dig antitank ditches, August 1942. The only man in the picture (bottom right) is probably a communist agitator. Photographer: L. I. Konov
When I was in Moscow I met the executive committee chairman for the Tula Regional Soviet. He said that they were digging defensive lines, bringing in scrap metal to place in specific locations to keep enemy tanks from getting through. I told this to comrade Chuyanov, the chairman of our city defense committee, and we started to think about lines in the city and elsewhere, and then we set about doing it.
Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of Stalingrad Soviet Committee): On the recommendation of the City Party Committee, we built the so
-called internal city line along the perimeter. This was a line the Stavka didn’t manage to sign off on. All the others had all been established out of strategic considerations.
This line played an important role during the battle. Our forces couldn’t get to the intermediary line, but they held this one. We asked all the women to come build this line, even those with two- to eight-year-old children and women over fifty-five, though it went against every labor law. We were basically asking for anyone who could to come and work. The remainder of the population was mobilized and sent to work on the perimeter.
Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov (Lieutenant general, commander of the 62nd Army): The fortifications surrounding Stalingrad were under construction. We had great plans, but only 10 percent of them were completed.
Kuzma Akimovich Gurov (Lieutenant general, member of the Military Council of the 62nd Army): There was a lack of combat preparations in Stalingrad. We really felt this when we found ourselves fighting to defend the city.
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): Certain Red Army commanders took offense at not being told about our defensive lines. The commander of the 64th Army [Shumilov] remarked on this several times. What can I say? The people who worked there, on the line, did an excellent job keeping it a secret. Lieutenant General Shumilov said: “If I’d known that line was there, I’d have deployed my troops differently.”
Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of Stalingrad Soviet Committee): In those first days, before all of the bombing, we constructed barricades in the city. We didn’t have any before then. We’d built lines, but no barricades. We didn’t think they would get here from the Don in a single day.
Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov (Lieutenant general, commander of the 62nd Army): And those barricades—all you had to do was nick one with your fender, and it’d fall apart. Some construction.
Ivan Vasilevich Vasilev (Brigade commissar, chief of the political section of the 62nd Army): We had nothing to fall back on. The city was not protected. They’d built these “hedgehogs” that would collapse if only grazed by a light vehicle. There were no fortifications. By the station they’d put up camouflage that the Germans later used, so we ended up having to fight against it. And then the workers were complaining, saying how much they’d done for the soldiers, digging bunkers, earth-and-timber emplacements, concrete pillboxes. All of it was lost.
Vladimir Kharitonovich Demchenko (Major, commandant of Stalingrad): Our headquarters had a lot more work because of the large troop movements. A number of units had to be detained. Tens of thousands of men were detained within a few weeks. In the first ten days of August, 17,360 people were detained. That’s within the city itself; 85,000 were arrested outside the city—a whole army’s worth.31 I reported this to the front commander. We immediately set up a transfer station to the front line. These people—both officers and soldiers—were dispatched to the transfer station, where they were sent straight to the front line. Our task was to make sure these people did not manage to get across to the east bank of the Volga. We set up outposts along the major roads. Blocking detachments stood on the edge of the city. Nearly every street was covered with checkpoints. We checked civilians’ documents too. We checked everyone.
Alexei Semyonovich Chuyanov (First secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Committee): I spent the night of August 22–23 at the offices of the regional committee. I’d been waiting for a call from the Central Committee, so I was late getting back from HQ. [ . . . ] I left the regional committee building and headed toward the Volga. Even though the front was so close, life went on as usual. Caretakers were still watering the plants. Housewives, having grown used to frequent enemy air raids, hurried to get to the shops and the market. Women would take their children with them. It broke my heart to see this: What would become of them? The enemy is already at the gate.
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): It was August 23 at around four in the afternoon. I was with the city defense committee when I got a call from the regional committee. The enemy had broken through to Rynka. I say, “That’s just talk.” “No—Gorgelyad, the deputy people’s commissar for tank production, was there. Give him a call.” So I call him. “What’s going on, comrade Gorgelyad?”32 “What’s going on is that I’ve seen enemy tanks with my own eyes.” Well, what was there to do? Right then we handed over command to the destruction battalions.
Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of Stalingrad Soviet Committee): As this formidable threat hung over the city, no military units were in place before it. Our closest forces were seventy or eighty kilometers away from the Tractor factory. Considering the growing threat of the enemy’s assault on Stalingrad, on the factory, and beyond, it was basically: “Come on in, the door’s open.” But when the tanks attacked, the antiaircraft units showed them more than enough resistance, and a significant number of the tanks were taken out. The Germans seemed to get the idea that if we continued to engage them on their approach, then we would resist all the more fiercely when they attacked the city itself. It was evening, so they didn’t risk entering the city. If they’d wanted to, they could have done so. We had antiaircraft artillery outside the city, but here we had none. There were some placed on rooftops, but you couldn’t hit a tank in the street from there. The Germans didn’t come into the city, they stopped there for the night. They’d come as far as Rynka and Spartakovka. At a distance measured not in kilometers but in meters.
During the night [of August 23–24] the City Defense Committee and the City Party Committee brought out whatever forces they could muster. All the destruction battalions and whatever forces could be found in the workers settlements were issued arms and sent in as support, as the armed forces set up to defend the city. We were lucky to have the Tractor factory there producing tanks and artillery. Workers at the factory pulled out all the stops and had sixty tanks ready to go by morning. They took everything that hadn’t been entirely completed: some were on stands awaiting repairs, some were ready to go. Tank crews were somehow assembled. Many of them were made up of the Tractor factory workers who had conducted tests, inspections, and so on. They also included people who received the tanks. In any case, the crews were assembled. And then there was the tank school, which also had several tanks. The Barricades workers brought their cannons and brought out their artillery to set up the line of defense. They took anyone and everyone to man the guns. Military representatives, workers who were present during the testing—everyone was sent there, everyone we had at our disposal. By morning some NKVD units had been brought in.
This is how we cobbled together a defense of the city by morning. But you couldn’t call it a defense in the full sense of the word.
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): These destruction battalions held the enemy back until the morning of August 24, at which point the regular Red Army units had arrived. Because of this, the bulk of these destruction battalions were absorbed into the Red Army.
Semyon Yefimovich Kashintsev (Secretary of the Red October District Committee): This destruction battalion lost party member Olga Kovalyova,33 the only woman in the unit. She hadn’t been part of the battalion, but when they were sent to the front line, she left her work and her factory to go to the regional party committee office, where she declared that she wanted to go with the destruction battalion to the front line. At first she helped out as a nurse. Later, when everyone around her was dead, she set off with a rifle to the front line. She died there too.
Olga Kovalyova was a senior party member (from 1925 to 1926) and a senior worker at the Red October factory. When she first came to the factory she was a laborer, worked at the stone crusher. She came to the factory between 1921 and 1923—we’re not entirely sure when—then joined the party and started to display a particular zeal for social and party work. She was sent to one of the political departments as either a women’s organizer or the deputy for women’s affairs. When she returned to the factory, she expressed
a desire to learn how to cast steel. She was the only woman in the works who did this, and one of four, I discovered, in the Soviet Union. Three were in Magnitogorsk,34 and she was the fourth. This is what she did for the last three years, did a good job at this incredibly difficult physical labor.
Before the siege she was temporarily appointed the workshop’s deputy chief for leisure activities, and she was a member of the Stalingrad Party Committee Plenum. She was so easy to work with, so kind-hearted. On top of all that, she adopted a boy and proved to be exceptionally caring with him. She didn’t hold anything back—she gave everything to her work and her party life.
Olga Kovalyova
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): She was supporting this boy and her own mother, but still she left to defend her native city. Olga Kovalyova died a hero’s death while fighting the enemy. [ . . . ] The destruction battalion pushed the enemy back to Mechyotka. The enemy certainly lost a lot of men. How did Olga Kovalyova die? She was lying there waiting and waiting, and then she said: “Come on, guys, let’s go!” But there were also Germans lying and waiting ahead of her who she couldn’t see. She was cut down the moment she got up.
[ . . . ] Some of the workers took up arms and set off to defend their city, while the others remained at the factories and literally performed miracles. In a single day, from the evening of August 23 through 24, workers at the Tractor factory sent out more than sixty tanks, forty-five trucks, and a great quantity of spare parts for tanks and other vehicles. Some of the tanks were brand-new, while the rest were undergoing major or medium overhauls. Through their intensive work, the factory collective managed to get these tanks to the front line. After they left the factory gates, these tanks were engaging the enemy in only five to ten minutes.
Vladimir Kharitonovich Demchenko (Major, commandant of Stalingrad): On August 23 I received word that the enemy had come as far as the Tractor factory. This was at 2:00 P.M. [ . . . ] I watched the German advance through my binoculars. The factory workers were the first to be hit.