by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
Guards Colonel Ivan Vasilievich Kudryavtsev (Deputy commander for political affairs, 36th Guards Rifle Division): The Germans didn’t believe they were surrounded, and their officers weren’t telling them about it. They found out it was true when they were left with nothing to eat. They started saying it looked like they were surrounded. Not even the officers knew about the ultimatum, and the soldiers knew absolutely nothing.
Captain Yakov Mironovich Golovchiner (Chief of the political section’s 7th Section, 64th Army): Until the very end the German officers were entranced by the confidence they had in their strength, by their confidence in victory. And they maintained control over their men. The soldier obeys his officer without question. [ . . . ] To the German soldier, anything an officer says or commands is law. They have a very strong sense of discipline.
Senior Lieutenant Fyodor Ivanovich Fyodorov (Commander of the 6th Battery, 65th Guards Artillery Regiment, 36th Guards Rifle Division): Then came the command to stop shooting altogether. All the Fritzes were giving up. The order to cease fire came between nine and eleven o’clock on February 1, 1943. By then they were surrendering by the hundred. They yelled, “Hitler kaput!” Prisoners were being brought out with frostbitten feet, bandaged heads. Most of them were wrapped up in blankets and just went like that. By February 1, I was done using my artillery. But I did use my pistol to finish off their wounded in the basements.
The Square of the Fallen Heroes, with view of department store, March 1943. The sign on the right reads: “Death to the German-fascist invaders and their state, their army, and their new ‘order.’”163 Photographer: Sergei Strunnikov
Major Anatoly Gavrilovich Soldatov (Deputy chief of the political section, secretary of the brigade party committee): Czechs, Greeks, Czechoslovakians, and of course the Romanians—they all gave up easily, but the Germans were so damned proud. You’d often hear them saying that our success at Stalingrad was all due to chance. Here they’ve gone and surrendered, and they’re still saying these things. Our commandant grabbed one of them by the sleeve, dragged him off, and shot him. He’s known for doing that sort of thing.164
Lieutenant Colonel Leonid Abovich Vinokur (Deputy commander for political affairs): There was a motorcyclist, someone from army intelligence, and he was there next to a German driver who was wearing a Red Army jacket. I said to the company commander: “Why’d you give him a jacket?”
“He was cold.”
“And when exactly did you die so he could pull it off your corpse?”
Major Alexander Georgievich Yegorov (Chief of the political section): We liberated our own POWs here in the Regional Committee building. We decided to get some use out of them right away. We held short interviews, told them that they’d committed a crime for which the legal punishment was a bullet. “The only way you can turn this around is with your own blood.” They very joyfully took up their weapons, and we warned them that the least sign of panic or cowardice or attempt to surrender, even if this was only on the part of one or two of them, would result in all of them being shot. Sometimes we got quite a lot out of them.
Colonel Matvei Petrovich Smolyanov (Chief of the political section, 64th Army): The first and most fundamental task was to bring ourselves, our units, and our party organizations back in line. An order came down from Army giving everyone five days’ leave. Our task during that leave period was to organize, in addition to the basic activities—getting a shave and a haircut, making repairs—various cultural activities. In line with our party and political work we thoroughly discussed these matters and recommended that we hold a series of meetings with separate worker collectives, at which we would discuss what the experience of the fighting at Stalingrad had taught us. This subject was the central question of all meetings and gatherings.
Major General Ivan Dmitrievich Burmakov (Commander of the 38th Motor Rifle Brigade): N. S. Khrushchev arrived the next day. He knew our brigade well. The first time we met was in Stalingrad. That happened while we were preparing to break out in November. We met on the march and shared our impressions. He kept saying: “Well, boys, don’t let us down! You’ve all done good.”
Nikita Khrushchev in front of the Stalingrad department store, February 1943.
Victory rally on the Square of the Fallen Heroes, February 4, 1943.
Shumilov and N. S. Khrushchev arrived the day after Paulus was captured. Khrushchev was hugging and kissing us. “Thank you, thanks to all of you! It’s not often you capture a field marshal. Generals you can get, but a field marshal’s a rare thing.”
It meant a lot to us to have Khrushchev’s gratitude. [ . . . ]
Then he came here, to this basement, and sat down. Chuyanov arrived. Representatives of the local authorities arrived. People began coming in droves. Khrushchev thanked everyone, and Shumilov pointed at me and said: “This is the guy who was angry with me for not ordering him into battle. I know when it’s the right time to do that!”
After the rally on February 4 we had a party.
Khrushchev came and praised us again.
I don’t mean to brag, but we got them, we did a good job, and I’m pleased that we did this job, I’m pleased that our brigade did so well. To me that’s what matters most.
I spoke and welcomed the guests on behalf of our brigade. I think we fought pretty well. Khrushchev stood up and said: “He’s just being modest. Thank you for bringing us Paulus!”
They were all there, everyone who had been competing with me for this prize.
Entrance to department store basement, 1944. Photographer: Samari Gurari
In February 1943 a cardboard sign was hung at the entrance to the room in the department store basement where the terms of surrender were negotiated. It read: “Here on January 31, 1943, at 7:00 AM the supreme commander of the Sixth German Army, General Field Marshal von Paulus, and his staff, led by Lieutenant General Schmidt, were captured by the 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade.” Below were the names of Colonel Ivan Burmakov and his political deputy, Senior Lieutenant Leonid Vinokur. In the same year another sign—identical except for omitting the aristocratic “von” from Paulus’s name—was placed at the side entrance of the department store, next to the basement stairwell. As the photograph below shows, it continued to draw visitors in the summer of 1944.
In the basement of the Stalingrad department store. Photographer: Sergei Strunnikov
In 1951 the sign was replaced by a bronze plaque that painted the events leading up to January 31, 1943 in an epic light. It described the opponent as a “Stalingrad army group [ . . . ] that was encircled and routed in the great battle of Stalingrad by the glorious Red Army.” The plaque honored the 38th Rifle Brigade under the command of Colonel Burmakov, but did not mention Vinokur, whose name had been expunged from Soviet annals in the wake of the anti-Semitic campaigns of the late Stalin era.
The plaque has since been removed, but in the 1990s a local historian dedicated a small museum to the battle in the basement. A few years ago the museum became entangled in a legal dispute with the owners of the department store, who wanted to turn the basement into a restaurant. In May 2012 a judge ruled that the basement was to become part of the state museum complex on the battle of Stalingrad. The new memorial site opened in fall 2012, on the seventieth anniversary of the battle.
3
NINE ACCOUNTS OF THE WAR
Page from the Stalingrad transcripts
GENERAL VASILY CHUIKOV
Lieutenant General Vasily Chuikov (1900–1982) is probably the best-known defender of Stalingrad. He commanded the 62nd Army as it fought from September 1942 to February 1943 against the initially far superior German forces in the city center and the industrial district to the north. At the beginning of October the 62nd held a seven-mile-wide front along the Volga. By the next month the Germans had cut through three of the narrowest sections—just over two hundred yards deep—and advanced to the river. That these dramatic events are widely known owes in good part to Chuikov’s own efforts: on the fifteenth anniversary
of the battle he published his first account of Stalingrad, which focused on the “legendary 62nd.” Despite this memoir and the others he would soon write in rapid succession, Chuikov’s interview with the Moscow historians provides a trove of new information and impressions.1
The interview took place on January 5, 1943, at the command post of the 62nd Army, near the Red October steelworks. (Chuikov was interviewed again in February or March 1943; parts of that interviews are also shown here.) More so than in later years, Chuikov speaks directly, colorfully, and forcefully. One detects in his mental leaps a nervous tension revealing how close the 62nd Army came to obliteration, and the severe measures Chuikov took to prevent it. He told the historians that on September 14, two days after being put in charge, he shot dead a regimental commander and commissar as their soldiers watched in line formation. The crime? The officers had abandoned their command post without permission. Soon after that, he shot two brigade commanders and their commissars for fleeing to the eastern bank of the Volga. These executions, Chuikov explained, had an immediate effect. In his memoir Chuikov spoke openly about enforcing Stalin’s “not one step back” order, but thirty years on he told a different story: the cowardly officers had received nothing more than “a sharp rebuke.”2
To begin, Chuikov talks about growing up poor in a large family and about his rapid rise in the wake of the 1917 revolution. Following the example of his older brothers, three of whom served in the revolutionary-minded Baltic Fleet, he felt instinctively drawn to the Bolsheviks, whose radicalism and relentlessness impressed him. In Petrograd he joined the armed workers militias of the Red Guards and enlisted in the Red Army immediately after it was formed in January 1918; one year later he became a member of the Bolshevik party. During the Civil War, Chuikov commanded his own regiment (he was only nineteen at the time) and took part in offensives against the White Army in the Urals and in Siberia. His superior and mentor was the divisional commander Vladimir Azin, whom Chuikov likened to the Civil War hero Vasily Chapayev: “A man of military culture, but also like Chapayev [ . . . ] someone who didn’t mind participating in an attack himself, kicking in the face of anyone who wasn’t fighting well, who would do what was needed for victory.” In Chuikov’s telling, the commander had a pronounced physical authority: he pulled rank by punching his inferiors in the face. Like his mentor, Chuikov had a short temper and was inclined to violence, as many of his fellow soldiers testified. But his mouthful of gold-capped teeth—which many western journalists noted on first meeting him—suggests that he had received punches in the face from his own superiors.3
After the end of the Civil War, Chuikov visited the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow. (His previous education had been limited to four years of primary school.) Stalin’s purges in the Red Army (Chuikov does not mention them in his testimony) did much to promote his ascent. By 1939 he had been named army commander. Chuikov’s biography bears the marks of a typical Soviet success story. Like many commanders in the Red Army, he grew up poor in tsarist Russia before acquiring education, respect, and authority in the Soviet system. Not surprisingly, Chuikov passes over the low points of his career, such as the ignominious end the 9th Army met under his command during the Winter War. As punishment he was transferred to China, where he served as a military attaché. In March 1942 he was recalled to serve as deputy commander of the 64th Army, a reserve unit stationed near Tula. In July 1942, the army pushed forward to the Don, where it first did battle against Germany’s 6th Army. On September 8 Chuikov was made commander of the 62nd Army.4
In providing an account of the battle in Stalingrad, Chuikov describes the emergence of the heroic spirit in the Red Army but also seeks to exemplify it. The general portrays himself as a pivotal hero of the battle and downplays the achievements of his rivals, particularly those of Alexander Rodimtsev, the commander of the 13th Guards Division, who even then was legendary. In Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman depicts the infighting among Red Army commanders, each bent on obtaining the greatest accolades. He mentions an incident at the February 4, 1943, victory rally where a “drunken Chuikov leapt on Rodimtsev and tried to strangle him—merely because Nikita Khrushchev had thrown his arms around Rodimtsev and kissed him without so much as a glance at Chuikov.”5 After this incident, the NKVD reprimanded Chuikov for his “unpleasant” behavior. An internal report from March 1943 recounts a conversation between Chuikov and his deputy for political affairs, Lieutenant General Gurov, in which they dubbed Rodimtsev a “newspaper general” who had good contacts in the press but nothing to show for himself on the battlefield. According to the NKVD informant who wrote the report, these intrigues were the reason why Rodimtsev was the only divisional commander in the 62nd Army who failed to receive a commendation for the defense of Stalingrad.6
Chuikov’s 64th Army—renamed the 8th Guards Army in April 1943—continued to fight as it moved west, reaching Berlin in 1945. Between 1949 and 1953, Chuikov served as commander in chief of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, and in 1955 he was promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union, the highest rank in the Soviet military. Chuikov later received a special form of immortality in Volgograd. In 1967, a memorial site, crowned with a monumental Motherland Calls statue, was erected on top of Mamayev Kurgan and dedicated on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle of Stalingrad. On the central axis of the memorial stands a fifty-foot sculpture of a bare-chested soldier. Though the heroic torso is that of a young man, the facial features are those of Vasily Chuikov. As stipulated in his will, Chuikov’s body was buried at the feet of Motherland Calls.
A.S.7
TRANSCRIPT
of interview with Comrade Lieutenant General Vasily Ivanovich
CHUIKOV
Stalingrad, January 5, 1943
Interview conducted by scientific secretary A. A. Belkin8
There’s a village called Serebryanye Prudy in the Tula region.9 A peasant family, eight sons, four daughters. At that time, with these big families, you worked at home for your father until ten or twelve, and then you’d leave to work in the city.
Vasily Chuikov in Stalingrad
Ours was a good family. We were quiet, as they say. There was never anything bad going on. And I did much the same as everybody else. I graduated from the village school. Then they opened a higher primary school—our village was a trading center. I studied there for a year. That was in 1912. I was born in 1900. Then I went to St. Petersburg. I had brothers there already. They were all working. They all had the lowest kind of jobs: laborers, porters, janitors. That’s how I got started in Petersburg. At the Seribeyevskiye baths on Basseynaya Street. I was the errand boy at the front staircase. For wages I got five rubles a month and my meals. I lived like that for about two years. Always getting into mischief. I worked from 7:00 A.M. to 11:00 P.M.
And then, on the eve of a feast day—it was Easter, 1914—I got into trouble. We had a strict boss who happened to notice some trash on the front stairs. He came over, saw it, and fired me right then and there. I was on my knees begging him not to, there was absolutely nowhere else for me to go. I couldn’t go back home to the village because there was already fifteen or sixteen people in the family, and I’d just be another mouth to feed. What was I going to do? I got another job through a guy I knew. He was a cab driver with the same last name as me—Pyotr Chuikov. He got me set up at the Sanremo boarding house on Nevsky Prospect doing the same thing as before. I was the boy on front stairs, the hall boy, as they say. God knows what I was doing, but one time I was on my way up to a room with a samovar and some dishes when I tripped and broke everything on the tray. The maid started yelling at me, and I got mad and stomped my feet. Everything went flying, and I ran out of the room. What a scene. So it wasn’t more than three weeks before poor little me got sent packing again.
Then I got yet another job through people I knew. They sent me to a hotel, the so-called Moscow Yar on the corner of Svechny Lane and Yamskaya Street. You could find everything there, as they say, except for anything good. I witne
ssed all the vulgar debauchery that existed at that time. To tell you the truth, I got completely sick of working there, and I decided that I’d leave no matter what. But where could I go? I was still a boy, but physically I was grown up. Unless I’m mistaken, the war had already started by then. [ . . . ] I’m my father’s fifth son. All of my older brothers were drafted into the military. Three of the four were sailors in the Baltic Fleet. That was when Romania declared war on the Germans. The autumn of 1916.10
I can also remember that I came back from somewhere soaked through and shivering, and I got sick. I was ill for about two months, but I kept on working. Then blood started coming from my mouth and nose. I’d always been strong and healthy, I don’t know what was the matter with me then. My sister was working in Petersburg as a servant. I was just wasting away. I remember waking up at night with my mouth full of blood. I would cough and spit it up for a while, then it would happen again.
Twice I went to the doctor. I couldn’t work anymore. Later I found out that my sister had written my father, saying that his boy was dying. After that I got a tearful letter from my father: Come home, there’s nobody here now, all your brothers have left, you can help me out at home. As I recall, by early 1917—January—I’d left Petersburg on my last legs. I stayed sick almost all the rest of the winter. The February Revolution found me in Serebryanye Prudy.