by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
As a Soviet victory over Germany became increasing certain, the war chroniclers came to the fore. They were already sure of the form history had to take: Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Just as the Red Army drew on prerevolutionary traditions, Soviet culture by that time found sustenance in a nineteenth-century novel. The iconoclastic spirit of the Soviet avant-garde had become passé. Large runs of Tolstoy’s magnum opus were printed from 1941 onward and inspired thousands of readers accustomed to finding answers to life’s questions in literature. As literary critic Lidiya Ginzburg observed, Soviets everywhere, even Leningraders left starving in the siege, avidly read War and Peace. They read in order to size themselves up vis-a-vis Tolstoy’s heroes, Ginzburg commented, “not the other way round—no one doubted the adequacy of Tolstoy’s response to life.” Tolstoy had said “the last word as regards courage, about people doing their bit in a people’s war”; this was the standard by which Soviet readers measured themselves. Whoever had energy enough to read, Ginzburg wrote, “would say to himself: right, I’ve got the proper feeling about this. So then, this is how it should be.”9 When interviewed by the historians, Chuikov revealed that he gauged his own performance based on Tolstoy’s generals; General Rodimtsev reported reading the novel three times.
The People’s Commissariat for Education printed brochures with instructions on how to make War and Peace—notorious for its length and complicated plot—accessible for soldiers. A 1942 study on the reading habits of Red Army soldiers concluded that Tolstoy’s novel was the most discussed in the military.10 By the close of the war, the parallels between the War of 1812 and the Great Patriotic War had become clear to every Soviet reader: enemy invaders had advanced into the heart of Russia only to be violently crushed by the Russian people. Tolstoy’s novel, which ends in 1815, presents Alexander I as “the pacifier of Europe.”11 Soviet military leaders in 1945 believed they had liberated Europe from the scourge of fascism. Now the question was, who would be the Soviet Tolstoy, who would write the War and Peace of the twentieth century?12
One of the frontrunners for the honor was Vasily Grossman. Since 1943 he had been working on a two-volume war epic.13 Modeled after War and Peace, the novel incorporated his own experiences but also aimed to be a chronicle of the war in its entirety. Like Tolstoy, Grossman tried to distill the spirit of a historical epoch. He borrowed Tolstoy’s technique of tying together individual protagonists through family connections. The first volume, completed in 1949, told the history of the war from its outset until September 1942 and concluded with a description of Commissar Krymov’s night crossing of the Volga into the burning city of Stalingrad. In August 1948 Grossmann submitted the first installment of the work to the journal Novy Mir (New World), where it was to be serialized as Stalingrad. For four years the book remained in limbo as Grossman rewrote the text at least three times in an effort to satisfy his critics—editors at Novy Mir, directors of the Soviet Union of Writers, members of the Central Committee and the Politburo, and military officers.14
Konstantin Simonov, the editor in chief at Novy Mir when Stalingrad was first submitted, complained about Grossman’s strict historical perspective: his portrayal of the war in 1942 makes no reference to its outcome. For Simonov, this was unacceptable. The book ought to propagate optimism among contemporary readers.15 Other critics objected to the title, which laid claim to a historical objectivity that the narrative’s multitude of subjective viewpoints could not fulfill. The figure of the physicist Viktor Strum—clearly identifiable as a Jew—particularly incensed the critics. The writer Mikhail Sholokhov alluded to this subject when he rang up Novy Mir’s new editor in chief, Alexander Tvardovsky (he succeeded Simonov in 1950), and barked: “Whom did you entrust writing about Stalingrad? Have you taken leave of your senses?” Sholokhov believed that Grossman, a Jew, should not be writing about a quintessentially Russian topic like Stalingrad. Sholochov’s views are just one expression of the anti-Semitic campaigns that had been erupting in the Soviet Union since the late 1940s.
Surprisingly, however, the novel did eventually appear in serial form in the summer and fall of 1952, earning Grossman a nomination for the Stalin Prize. But the January 1953 revelation that Jewish doctors in the Kremlin had been conspiring to kill Stalin triggered a backlash. On February 13, 1953, a scathing criticism of Grossman’s novel appeared in Pravda, penned by Mikhail Bubyonnov, one of his rivals in the race to become the Soviet Tolstoy. Grossman’s earlier supporters publicly turned against him.
But then Stalin died on March 5, 1953, and the tide turned once again. Not only was the doctors’ trial halted; the criticism of Grossman subsided and some of his colleagues privately apologized for their remarks. Grossman, for his part, continued work on the second part of his novel—retitled Life and Fate in 194916—but now he intended to write it as a literary reckoning with Stalin. Grossman was the first critic to emphasize the resemblances between Stalin’s regime and the totalitarian ideology of the Nazis, describing the extent of Soviet anti-Semitism and the similar ways in which both states grind individuals into dust). By the time he finished the work in 1959, it could not be published. The Central Committee secretary in charge of ideological affairs that questioned Grossman compared the novel, were it to be released, to a nuclear bomb. (The secretary claimed he hadn’t read the book.) Other political officials who were consulted believed that the book could not be published “for the next 250 years.”17 In 1964 Grossman died bitter and alone following a battle with stomach cancer. After his death, a copy of the manuscript was smuggled abroad and published. It appeared in 1988 in the Soviet Union as part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s campaign for transparency known as glasnost. Today Life and Fate is viewed internationally as a grand literary account of the twentieth century. The preceding volume, which appeared under the title For a Just Cause, has remained in the shadows since it appeared.18 Despite the ruptures that accompanied their publication, the volumes, when read side by side, reveal their underlying Tolstoyan conception. They show how strongly Grossman remained committed to the belief, despite his growing criticism of the Soviet state, that the mass heroism of Red Army soldiers decided not only the battle of Stalingrad but also the war as a whole.19
Grossman’s conviction is conveyed in the one place no one would suspect—the monumental memorial atop Mamayev Kurgan. Had Grossman lived long enough to see its 250-foot Motherland Calls sculpture with extended sword (the memorial was dedicated in 1967), he would likely have seen it as further evidence of an all-powerful state that manipulates people like pawns in a political chess game. Nevertheless, Grossman’s words can be found at the memorial. Some are engraved on a wall that visitors must pass on the way to Motherland Calls: “An iron wind struck them in the face, yet they kept moving forward. The enemy was likely possessed by a superstitious fear: Are these men coming towards us? Are these mortals?” The words are from Grossman’s essay on the regiment that perished while defending the Barricades plant against the Germans (see pages 192–203). On the other side of the wall is the Hall of Military Glory. From the center of the floor a large white marble hand reaches upward, cupping a torch with an eternal flame. The walls of the circular pantheon are lined with banners bearing the names of 7,200 Red Army fighters—officers and soldiers, men and women—who fell at Stalingrad. (The names were chosen at random from the death roll.)20 Below the domed ceiling runs an inscription responding to the question posed on the outside wall: “Yes, we were mortal and few of us survived, but we all discharged our patriotic duty to our sacred Motherland.” This is also drawn from Grossman’s essay, but the words have been modified. The original version was simpler: “They were mortal indeed, . . . and while few of them made it out alive, every one of them had done his duty.” Despite the melodramatic backdrop created by the monument’s designers, the words convey the idea of a people’s war invoked by Grossman during the battle of Stalingrad. Yet nowhere in the museum is Grossman identified as the author of these lines, and no museum guide seems aware of their origin.21
ISAAK MINTS’S HISTORICAL COMMISSION faced problems similar to the ones Grossman did. Its attempts to publish the chronicle of the Great Patriotic War encountered resistance for years; ultimately, Soviet censorship prevented the history from ever seeing the light of day, ensuring that the authors were mostly forgotten. Until 1945 the commission had worked fervently on collecting documents from the war. Mints wanted to record its entire history, including not only the main combat operations but also the partisan resistance movement, the war economy, Soviet culture, everyday life on the front, and the German occupation. When the Soviet Union declared war on Japan in August 1945, Mints sent several commission staff members to interview Red Army soldiers in the Far East.22 In December 1945 the executive committee of the Academy of the Sciences dissolved the commission and created in its place the Sector on the History of the Great Patriotic War, an eighteen-person research group led by Mints under the auspices of the society’s Institute of History. The following year Mints was inducted into the Academy of Sciences, the crowning achievement of his career.23
The documents that have been preserved indicate that the research group’s staff worked assiduously through 1947, submitting multiple book projects to the Military Publishing House. At the top of the list was a documentary account of the battle of Stalingrad on the occasion of its fifth anniversary, described as “an instructive history book written by the participants themselves.” The other projects included a book on the battle of Moscow, a study of women at the front, and an encyclopedia of three thousand Soviet war heroes. But the publisher was noncommittal and the works never appeared in print.24 Mints seemed to understand that if he ever wanted to see them published, Stalin would have to be portrayed as a leading figure in every area of the war.25 This of course went counter to the spirit of the wartime interviews, in which the respondents talked about their own thoughts and deeds and the collective was emphasized. But with the Stalin cult rampant again after 1945, the voices of individual soldiers had become anathema to the regime. An award-winning 1949 film about the battle of Stalingrad adhered perfectly to the prevailing expectations. The film shows the commanders of the 62nd army in dire straits as German fire bears down on them. Their only hope is that Stalin will come to the rescue. The film then cuts to the Kremlin, where Stalin calmly masterminds the defense, ordering up fresh troops and planning the encirclement of the Germans. The other members of the supreme command—generals, officers, soldiers—are all portrayed as cogs in the wheel who follow Stalin’s orders as he leads them to victory.26
There was another reason why the interview transcripts from the war fell out of favor. Like Grossman, Mints was a Jew and had to contend with growing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. But Mints was swept up by the tide of hate earlier than Grossman, and he paid a higher price. Anti-Jewish sentiment began to hold sway in Soviet public life already during the war. A popular expression, “The Jews are fighting the war from Tashkent,” implied that Jews used money and connections to flee far from the front, while Russians had to take the fall on the battlefield. In truth, Jewish soldiers in the Red Army fought with extraordinary dedication, as their high casualty rate and many commendations prove. Yet the party leadership suppressed this data,27 just as it did the enormous suffering Germans inflicted on Soviet Jews. (Postwar newspapers described the Holocaust as a mass murder of “innocent Soviet citizens.”) People like Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, who as members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee had been documenting German crimes against Jews, were eyed suspiciously. Any special interest in Jewish affairs was contrary to general Soviet objectives, and their proposed “black book” did not receive permission for publication. Meanwhile the party had begun praising ethnic Russians as the best and most devoted soldiers in the Soviet Union. This propaganda spread after the war as the Soviet leadership took a stand against the western allies, condemning foreign influences and stressing Russian values as the measure of all things. In the Russocentric Soviet cosmos of the late Stalin era, Jews were regarded as suspicious nomads, “rootless cosmopolitans” intent on undermining Soviet patriotism.28
In 1947 Mints published a seventy-page booklet titled The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union. It does not mention the work carried out by his Historical Commission during the war. Instead, Mints falls all over himself praising the “great Russian people” who in the course of the war revealed “the concentrated force of its talents.” It concludes with an ode to Generalissimus Stalin, the “brilliant, ever-bright star that will always shine in the history of the Soviet country.”29 Mints was obviously trying to present himself as a Russian patriot, yet the book could not offset a wave of public accusations that were being made against the author at the time of its release.
Their instigator was Arkadi Sidorov, one of Mints’s closest associates on the Historical Commission. Sidorov was several years younger than Mints. They had met in 1924 while attending an upper-level Communist party school.30 Like him, Sidorov had joined the Communist party during the Civil War. But whereas Mints rose quickly from one influential position to the next, Sidorov struggled. For a while he worked in the editorial department of Mints’s project on the history of the Civil War. In 1936 he was barred from the party but reinstated several months later. During the reinstatement hearing Mints was summoned to provide character testimony but never appeared—something that Sidorov resented.31 As the war began, Sidorov was finishing his doctoral work at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences.32 When panic broke out in Moscow on October 14, 1941, and the population began to flee the city en masse, he decided to join an armed communist militia. Soon the unit was absorbed into the Red Army. During the battle of Moscow Sidorov was wounded and put on reserve status after a hospital stay. (By then he was a battalion commissar and had attained the rank of major.) In May 1942 Mints recruited him as a permanent staff member on his commission.33 After the war Sidorov supervised a working group in Mints’s sector on the History of the Great Patriotic War.
In November 1947 the journal of the Central Committee’s Department of Propaganda and Agitation published a review by Sidorov sharply criticizing a lecture series edited by Mints on early Soviet history.34 The previous June, Mints had been relieved as director of the Civil War history project; in 1948 he was forced to resign from Moscow State University. In early 1949 the campaign against the “rootless cosmopolitans” reached its zenith. Anti-Semitism raged in many areas of Soviet theater and classical music.35 It also extended into the academy and affected Mints in particular. His research group at the Institute of History was branded a hostile Jewish gang. Higher-ranking staff assembled for several days to ascertain the group’s members and decide on sanctions. One of the group’s main detractors was Sidorov. Mints looked on as events unfolded and was subject to humiliating “self-criticism.”36 He lost his job at the institute and was relegated to a teaching position at the Moscow State Teachers Institute. Sidorov assumed Mints’s professorship in Soviet history at Moscow State University, and in 1953 he was named director of the Institute of History.37
Sidorov did not rise alone. The decommissioned Red Army major led a phalanx of doctoral candidates, mostly war veterans. All over the Soviet Union, former Red Army soldiers entered universities in droves, and with high expectations. With their experience on the front, self-confidence, and the Communist party books in their pockets, they aggressively claimed for themselves positions in the university administration.38 Mints’s fate is not without irony. During the war he invoked the heroism of simple Red Army soldiers and helped them find a voice and become conscious of their historical role. After the war, the very soldiers whose confidence he helped strengthen were outraged at the “Jewish clique” occupying the positions in the Soviet state that they now wanted for themselves. They had an aversion not only to Mints and his staff but also to the very documents they had collected. They believed these materials were permeated with a bourgeois, empirical spirit that lacked Russian patriotism. No one in those years continued Mints’s editorial work, a
nd the commission’s documents sank into obscurity.
Siderov took great pride in ousting Mints from the university. And until his death in 1966, he continued to speak pejoratively about Mints, calling him a “parasite,” a hypocrite, a shifty person “who everywhere he appeared would always surround himself only by Jews.” (He saw Mints’s English skills as further evidence of his inadequate “Russianness.”)39 Nevertheless, after Stalin’s death Mints experienced a rehabilitation.40 Unlike Grossman, who worked though his ordeals on the page, Mints remained for the most part silent.41 Starting in the 1950s, he turned his research to the October Revolution, in line with a Soviet regime intent on passing over the Stalin era and returning to its revolutionary beginnings.42 In the course of this volte-face Stalin’s name was wiped from the textbooks and his body removed from Lenin’s Tomb. In 1961 Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd.43
In 1984 surviving members of the Historical Commission got together for a night of reminiscing. At eighty-seven, Mints was the oldest one in the group. Mints admitted to his former staff a wish of his that had never been fulfilled: “When I was younger I dreamed that we would publish a gallery of the Heroes of the Soviet Union, but that never got under way.” Even more than Grossman, Mints retained a heroic and romanticized view of the war, which he himself helped form during the war years. It had originated in the matrix of his mentor Maxim Gorky and all those ordinary workers who raised themselves to HUMAN BEINGS “in capital letters.”
Before his death Grossman made several copies of his censored novel and hid them with friends. Had he not done this, Life and Fate would never have seen the light of day. The KGB seized not only the manuscript in Grossman’s apartment but also the carbon paper and the ribbon from the typewriter on which the text had been written.44 Mints used a similar strategy to safeguard his documents for posterity. After Stalin’s death Mints learned that the archive of the Soviet Ministry of Defense in Podolsk outside Moscow had requested the interview transcripts from his commission. The request was in keeping with the trend of the time: centralizing all documents pertaining to the war and monopolizing their interpretation. Mints knew that everything the military archive collected would be lost in the long run. (The dissolution of the Soviet Union did little to change things. Russia’s Ministry of Defense, the new guardian of the history of the Red Army, has released only a fragment of the estimated 5 million documents from the World War II era.) After Mints received the call from Podolsk, he had the presence of mind to hide the interviews. For several years they were stored in the basement of the Uskoye Sanatorium of the Academy of Sciences. Later they were moved to the basement at the Institute of History. Institute staff, a veteran of the Historical Commission among them, put the archive in order and prepared summaries of its contents.45 These notes ultimately laid the trail that led to the publication of the Stalingrad interviews.