by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
40. Inge Scholl, The White Rose: Munich 1942–1943, trans. Arthur R. Schultz (Middletown, CT, 1983), p. 93.
41. Manstein, Verlorene Siege, pp. 303–318; Heinrich Gerlach, Die verratene Armee (Munich, 1957).
42. Jochen Hellbeck, “Breakthrough at Stalingrad: The Repressed Soviet Origins of a Bestselling West German War Tale,” Contemporary European History 1 (2013): 1–31.
43. Susanne zur Nieden, “Umsonst geopfert? Zur Verarbeitung der Ereignisse in Stalingrad in biographischen Zeugnissen,” Krieg und Literatur/War and Literature 5, no. 10 (1993): 33–46; Diaries and letters by Martin Fiebig, Paulheinz Quack, Martin Rahlenbeck, Wilhelm Saak, Hildegard Wagener and others in Kempowski, Das Echolot. Ian Kershaw asserts that the Führer cult in the German population had faded before Stalingrad, and for this reason he believes that the defeat in Stalingrad accelerated the loss of popular support for the regime. Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (New York, 1987), pp. 188–190. Michael Geyer und Peter Fritzsche, however, reference other connections between the Nazi regime and the population, which were created during Stalingrad and intensified in the further course of the war: Germans increasingly began to see themselves as victims of a massive disaster. This national and European victim perspective was orchestrated by the Nazi leadership. See Michael Geyer, “Endkampf 1918 and 1945: German Nationalism, Annihilation, and Self-Destruction,” in No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars in the 20th Century, Alf Lüdtke and Bernd Weisbrod, eds. (Göttingen, 2006), pp. 52–53; Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA, 2008), pp. 279–280.
44. Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies III, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture (New York, 2008), p. 69; David M. Glantz, “The Red Army at War, 1941–1945: Sources and Interpretations,” Journal of Military History, July 1998, pp. 595–617.
45. Horst Giertz, “Die Schlacht von Stalingrad in der sowjetischen Historiographie,” in Stalingrad: Mythos und Wirklichkeit, p. 214; Samsonov, Stalingradskaia bitva.
46. See especially the multivolume series Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia, ed. V. A. Zolotarev (Moscow, 1993–2002), with numerous documents from the Central Archives of the Russian Ministry of Defense. A planned volume on the battle of Stalingrad (vol. 4, pt. 2) has not appeared in the series. Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine. Sbornik dokumentov, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1995–2007), draws on documents from the FSB archives. Stalingradskaia popeia, also prepared by archivists in the FSB, features abundant new material and is indispensable reading for any student of the battle. The same applies to the documents presented in Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina. 1942 god, ed. T. V. Volokitina and V. S. Khristoforov (Moscow, 2012). See in addition numerous documents published in the periodicals Rodina (since 1988) and Istochnik (1993–2003).
47. Konstantin M. Simonov, Raznye dni voiny: Dnevnik pisatelia, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2005); Grossman, Gody voiny. See also Vasily Chkalov, Voennii dnevnik: 1941. 1942. 1943 (Moscow, 2004); Nikolai N. Inozemtsev, Frontovoi dnevnik (Moscow, 2005); Boris Suris, Frontovoi dnevnik: Dnevnik, rasskazy (Moscow, 2010); Poslednie pis’ma s fronta, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1990–1995); Alexsandr D. Shindel’, ed., Po obe storony fronta: Pis’ma sovetskikh i nemetskikh soldat 1941–1945 gg. (Moscow, 1995). See the rather mundane letters from General Rokossovsky to his family: “‘Posylaiu miaso, muku, kartofel’, maslo, sakhar i t. p.’ O chëm pisal s fronta Konstantin Rokossovskii” [“‘I am sending you meat, flour, potatoes, butter, sugar, etc.’ Konstantin Rokossovsky reporting from the front”], Diletant 2012, no. 2: 58–62. With a few exceptions, chains of letters written by a single author, a crucial source for the study of individual experience, have not been published. Exceptions include: Iz istorii zemli Tomskoi 1941–1945: Ia pishu tebe s voiny . . . Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Tomsk, 2001); Pis’ma s fronta riazantsev-uchastnikov Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945 gg. (Riazan’, 1998).
48. In 2007 the Defense Ministry launched a website devoted to all Soviet personnel who were killed or went missing in action during the Great Patriotic War and its aftermath. The searchable site includes scans of documents from various archives that shed light on the fate and place of burial of a given soldier. To date, more than 16 million scans of documents have been made available, though the site does not state how many service men and women have been registered. It continues to be expanded. www.obd-memorial.ru.
49. Antony Beevor, Stalingrad (London, 1999), p. xiv.
50. Ibid., p. 431.
51. John Erickson, “Red Army Battlefield Performance, 1941–1945: The System and the Soldier,” in Time to Kill: The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West, 1939–1945, ed. Paul Addison and Angus Calder (Pimlico, 1997), p. 244; Frank Ellis, “A Review of Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova (ed. and trans.), “‘A Writer at War’: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941–1945,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 20, no. 1 (2007): 137–146.
52. Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 222.
53. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 200.
54. Ibid., pp. 87–88.
55. Speaking in October 1942, in the immediate wake of being liberated by Soviet troops, a Russian woman from a village near Rzhevsk had this to say about the Germans (she was talking to other villagers and was not aware that a Soviet newspaper correspondent was listening): “Well, we once thought that these Germans were cultured people. [ . . . ] But how shamelessly they undress in front of women, how they splash about in the trough, how they pollute the air when they are seated at the table, and how they urinate inside the hut! Is this what they call culture? Then they chase after girls and young women like wild stallions. Fall over them. [ . . . ] This is the culture of convicts. Shameless. [ . . . ] Are they like this in their own country as well?” Aleksei Surkov, “Zemlia pod peplem,” in Publitsistika perioda Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny i pervykh poslevoennykh let (Moscow, 1985), pp. 135–141. Interviewed by the historians in Stalingrad, Lt. Col. Pyotr Molchanov of the 36th Rifle Division said: “The Germans prepared, obviously, to attack us. They pulled together their soldiers and attacked. To attack they did the following: they laid aside their uniforms, rolled up their shirt sleeves, many in their underwear, like bandits. So they attacked us.”
56. Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1939–45 (London, 2005), p. 320.
57. Merridale, Ivan’s War, p. 94.
58. Even Merridale concedes that “most [Soviet soldiers] were more deeply saturated in their regime’s ideology than soldiers in the Wehrmacht, for Soviet propaganda had been working on its nation’s consciousness for fifteen years by the time that Hitler came to power in Berlin” (Ivan’s War, p. 12).
59. Catherine Merridale, lecture to the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/191531–1.
60. The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union, ed. Bernd Bonwetsch and Robert W. Thurston (Urbana, IL, 2000); Elena S. Seniavskaia, Frontovoe pokolenie: Istoriko-psikhologicheskoe issledovanie, 1941–1945 (Moscow, 1995); Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001); Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (New York, 2006).
61. Roger Reese’s recent study, for instance, lists a range of individual motivations to fight while deemphasizing the mobilizing reach of the Soviet regime. Roger R. Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought: The Red Army’s Military Effectiveness in World War II (Lawrence, KS, 2011).
62. Overy, Russia’s War, pp. 187–189; Merridale, Ivan’s War, p. 160; Timothy Colton, Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority: The Structure of Soviet Military Politics (Cambridge, MA, 1979), pp. 4–5, 60, 68; Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945 (London, 2005), p. 213. Colton and Mawdsley emphasize the pervasive presence of the party in the army. Roger Reese is ambivalent: Roger R. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917�
��1991 (New York, 2000), pp. 78, 126.
63. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA, 1995), pp. 198–225.
64. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Hellbeck, “Everyday Ideology” Eurozine, February 22, 2010; Hellbeck, ed., Tagebuch aus Moskau, 1931–1939 (Munich, 1996); Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937 (Cambridge, MA, 2012).
65. Anna Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (New York, 2010).
66. Regarding these character ideals, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981).
67. Lazar Lazarev, “Russian Literature on the War and Historical Truth,” in World War 2 and the Soviet People, ed. John Garrard and Carol Garrard (New York, 1993), p. 29; Bernd Bonwetsch, “War as a Breathing Space,” in The People’s War, pp. 137–153. Elena Iu. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, 1945–1964 (Moscow, 1993), p. 19; Merridale, Ivan’s War, pp. 338–340. Most of these studies cite post–Stalin era memoirs as evidence for Soviet society’s emancipation from the party during the years of the war.
68. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, Robert Chandler, trans., (New York, 2006).
69. A Writer at War: Vasily Grossmann with the Red Army, 1941–1945, Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, ed. and trans. (London, 2006), p. 34.
70. Vasily S. Grossman, Gody voiny (Moscow, 1989), p. 263.
71. Grossman again used Commissar Shlyapin as a template for Life and Fate. Captain Grekov, the defender of House 6/1 and a commander who preaches “democracy and toughness,” bears recognizable traits of the commissar.
72. On Grossman’s horizons during the war and their development in the postwar period, see Jochen Hellbeck, “The Maximalist: On Vasily Grossman,” The Nation, December 20, 2010.
73. The proportion of military in the Communist party had grown to 55 percent in January 1944. Colton, Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority, p. 16.
74. Ideologicheskaia rabota KPSS na fronte, 1941–1945 gg. (1960), pp. 253–254. On October 14, 1944, the Central Committee criticized the lack of “political resilience” among many Red Army soldiers who were new to the party, and it ordered the Main Political Administration to intensify its “ideological and political education.” The decree was issued on the eve of the Red Army’s offensive into East Prussia; Soviet leaders must have been concerned over the political reliability of their own soldiers after entering enemy lands. A prominent victim of the new hard line was the later dissident Lev Kopelev, who served as a specialist for enemy propaganda in the Red Army. In April 1945 in Germany he was accused of “bourgeois humanism” and served almost ten years.
75. Robert MacCoun et al., “Does Social Cohesion Determine Motivation in Combat? An Old Question with an Old Answer,” Armed Forces and Society 32 (2006); Thomas Kühne, Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2011). The thesis was first advanced by Edmund Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Summer 1948, pp. 280–315, based on their interviews with German POWs. Samuel Stouffer et al., The American Soldier (Princeton, NJ, 1949) seemed to support this with American GIs. For a skeptical perspective, see Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York, 1991), especially pp. 29–33.
76. Morris Janowitz and Stephen D. Westbrook, The Political Education of Soldiers (Beverly Hills, CA, 1983), pp. 196–198. For the same reason, the Red Army did not follow the German model of a reserve army (Ersatzheer), which ensured that recovering soldiers would rotate back into their regionally identified units (see p. 385 for a Soviet officer suggesting that the Red Army adopt the German model). At a meeting with western correspondents in early 1943, Alexander Shcherbakov, the head of the Red Army’s Main Political Administration, became irritated when one of the journalists talked about a Russian tradition of military bravery: “Don’t talk to me about the Russian soul,” Shcherbakov retorted, “Let me recommend you to study the Soviet man.” Karel Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA, 2012), p. 206. Nazi leaders upheld the notion of Landsmannschaft in part because of its racial essence: their common soil would help forge the German recruits into Aryan fighters.
77. Jürgen Förster, “Geistige Kriegführung in Deutschland 1919–1945,” in Die deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft 1939–1945, vol. 1, Politisierung, Vernichtung, Überleben (Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg,vol. 9/1), ed. Jörg Echternkamp (Munich, 2004), p. 567.
78. Toward the end of the war Wehrmacht units fighting in the east had casualty rates approximating those the Red Army had suffered all along. According to Omer Bartov, the decimation of the primary groups prompted military commanders to increasingly rely on ideological indoctrination to mold troupe cohesion, which in turn explained the “barbarization” of German warfare in the east. Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare, 2nd ed. (New York, 2001). Critics contend that Bartov’s thesis explains little, as fighting on the Eastern Front had been exceptionally violent from the start. Mark Edele and Michael Geyer, “States of Exception: The Nazi-Soviet War as a System of Violence, 1939–1945,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, pp. 345–395, at p. 357. The ideological work conducted in the Wehrmacht paled against the comprehensive political conditioning that prevailed in the Red Army and other communist armies. For the latter, see Alexander L. George, The Chinese Communist Army in Action: The Korean War and Its Aftermath (New York, 1967); Shu Guang Zhang, Mao’s Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950–1953 (Lawrence, KS, 1995), pp. 14–18; William Darryl Henderson, Why the Vietcong Fought: A Study of Motivation and Control in a Modern Army in Combat (Westport, CT, 1979).
79. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience, p. 4.
80. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York, 1998), p. 601.
81. Figes, People’s Tragedy, p. 597.
82. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience, p. 4; Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca, NY, 1993).
83. Peter Holquist, “What’s So Revolutionary About the Russian Revolution?” in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (New York, 2000), pp. 87–111; Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship; Reese, The Soviet Military Experience.
84. Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp. 232–240; Holquist, “Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Modern History, September 1997, pp. 415–460. Military censors read only a portion of the letters sent to Red Army soldiers from the “rear.”
85. Ortwin Buchbender und Reinhold Sterz, eds., Das andere Gesicht des Krieges: Deutsche Feldpostbriefe, 1939–1945 (Munich, 1983).
86. Dietrich Beyrau, “Avant-garde in Uniform,” manuscript (Tübingen, 2011); Colton, Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority, p. 42.
87. A. G. Kavtaradze, Voennye spetsialisty na sluzhbe Respubliki Sovetov, 1917–1920 gg. (Moscow, 1988), pp. 170, 177.
88. Kremlevskii kinoteatr 1928–1953. Dokumenty (Moscow, 2005), pp. 951–981.
89. Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat, pp. 67–68.
90. Compare the interview with Captain Mikhail Ingor of the 308th Rifle Division: “It was October 4. The situation was scary. The Hitlerites used their tanks to mount a ‘psychic attack’ against the command post of the 339th Rifle Regiment” (NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, op. 71, d. 3). See also interview with Alexander Parkhomenko, pp. 374–375. An interview with a given soldier is archivally referenced only after its first mention.
91. Isaak Babel, 1920 Diary, ed. Carol J. Avins (New Haven, 1995), entries for July 14 and August 28, 1920. In Red Cavalry, Babel’s collection of short stories from the
Civil War, Timoshenko is immortalized as divisional commander Savitsky.
92. Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (London, 1987), pp. 88–92.
93. Iu. F. Boldyrev u. V. P. Vyrelkin, “V ogne grazhdanskoi voiny. Tsaritsyn i bor’ba na iugovostoke Rossii. 1918 g.,” in Aktual’nye problemy istorii Tsaritsyna nachala XX veka i perioda grazhdanskoi voiny (Volgograd, 2001), p. 42.
94. A. L. Nosovich (A. Chernomorchev), Krasnyi Tsaritsyn. Vzgliad iznutri. Zapiski belogo razvedchika (Moscow, 2010), pp. 28–29. The author was introduced to the Red movement already in the spring of 1918 and served as chief of staff in the Northern Military District. In October 1918 he fled, to forestall detection. He published his notes in the journal Rostov on Don.
95. See the announcement in Pravda, March 28, 1942.
96. Quoted in Samsonov, Stalingradskaia bitva, p. 153.
97. Pravda, November 11, 1942, p. 1. Krasnaia Zvezda, November 11, 1942, p. 1.
98. Dokumenty o geroicheskoi oborone Tsaritsyna v 1918 godu (Moscow, 1942).
99. Pravda, May 2, 1931, p. 1.
100. Cited in Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (New York, 2004), p. 465.
101. Overy, Dictators, p. 464.
102. V. A. Somov, “Dukhovnyi oblik trudiashchikhsia perioda Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” in Narod i voina (Moscow, 2010), pp. 333–335; David L. Hoffmann, “Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in Its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 1 (2000): 35–54; Hoffman, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY, 2011).
103. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, pp. 92–93; Schlögel, Moscow, 1937 pp. 136–152. Oleg Khlevnyuk sees fear of war as the main trigger of the great terror in the 1930s: Oleg Khlevnyuk, “The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937–1938,” in Stalinism: The Essential Readings, ed. David Hoffmann (Oxford, 2003), pp. 81–104.