Stalingrad

by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)

  It remains unclear whether executions on the spot performed by commanders on the battlefield in response to soldierly infractions entered the statistics of the NKVD or not. Various authorities—military courts, SMERSH, and “Special commissions” (Osobye soveshchaniia)—were authorized to order executions, and the grand total may not be known to the present day. Military procuracy records and other hitherto classified documents will certainly shed more light on the matter.

  207. Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 380.

  208. Stimulants such as alcohol and psychotropic drugs were used in many armies in World War II, but only the Red Army administered them by decree. A. S. Seniavskii and E. S. Seniavskaia, “Ideologiia voiny i psikhologiia naroda,” in Narod i voina: 1941–1945 gg. Izdanie podgotovleno k 65-letiiu Pobedy v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine (Moscow, 2010), p. 160; Sonja Margolina, Wodka: Trinken und Macht in Russland (Berlin, 2004), pp. 68–70.

  209. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 8, l. 15–28.

  210. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 5, l. 18.

  211. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 14, l. 43–63.

  212. These sentences are carved into the walls of the Stalingrad battle memorial at Mamayev Kurgan. Compare Jochen Hellbeck, “War and Peace for the Twentieth Century,” Raritan, Spring 2007, pp. 24–48.

  213. Grossman, Gody voiny, p. 321.

  214. On Shumilov, see pp. 226–254. The fifty-five minutes mentioned by Shumilov cover the entire operation that he describes, with the mock attack in the middle.

  215. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 111, d. 1.

  216. Svirin, interview, p. 149. The Panfilov men inspired one of the earliest myths of the Great Patriotic War. Twenty-eight soldiers were alleged to have destroyed eighteen enemy tanks in the defense of Moscow; all of the men were killed. Later investigations revealed that at least six of the Panfilov men had survived and one of them worked as an auxiliary police officer for the German occupiers as the war progressed. It was also found that a war correspondent for Red Star invented the number twenty-eight as well as some of the last words of these Soviet “heroes.” N. Petrov and O. Edel’man, “Novoe o sovetskikh geroiakh,” Novyi Mir 6 (1997): 140–151.

  217. See pp. 316–317.

  218. See pp. 209–213, 222.

  219. Gordov was arrested in 1947. The Soviet secret service had bugged his apartment and recorded a conversation between Gordov, his wife, and his deputy, Major General Filipp Rybalchenko, in which Gordov held Stalin responsible for postwar economic and social problems in the Soviet Union. He also talked about a need for more democracy. Gordov and Rybalchenko were charged with treason and the “restoration of capitalism” and executed in 1950. They were rehabilitated in 1954, one year after Stalin’s death. R. G. Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz: Istoriia vlasti. 1945–1991, 2nd rev. ed. (Novosibirsk, 2000), pp. 39–41.

  220. In the language of German military psychologists in World War II, Zaytsev would have been considered a “war trembler”; the western Allies spoke of shell shock. Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (Ithaca, NY, 2003). The Soviet psychological discourse in World War II interpreted war injuries in a physiological manner. The treatment aimed to develop psychological resources such as the will and the moral consciousness. S. Rubenstein, “Soviet Psychology in Wartime,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, December 1944:181–198. See the already noted case of the Komsomol Ilya Voronov.

  221. Merridale, Ivan’s War, pp. 56–58, 199, 262; Oleg Budnitskii, “Evrei na voine: Soldatskie dnevniki,” Lekhaim, May 2010, http://www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/217/budnitskiy.htm; Mark Edele, “Toward a Sociocultural History of the Second World War,” Kritika 15 (2014), no. 4: 829–835.

  222. Ever since the signing of the Anglo-Soviet alliance on May 22, 1942, Soviet officials vocally pushed Great Britain and the United States to open a “second front” in western Europe before year’s end, to ease the burden on the Red Army, which was practically fighting the Axis forces alone. This second front would not materialize until June 1944. See Allies at War: The Soviet, American, and British Experience, 1939–1945, ed. David Reynolds, Warren F. Kimball, A. O. Chubarian (New York, 1994).

  223. Stalingradskaia popeia, pp. 233–234, report of October 21, 1942. Soviet wartime diaries are a rare but interesting source because they show individual thoughts in evolution. Stepan Kalinin, commander of the Volga military district, kept a diary in which he harshly criticized leadership deficiencies and supply problems in the Red Army in 1941 and early 1942. When he heard of Order no. 227, he read it as a long overdue moral call to order and was relieved. (Kalinin was accused of conducting “anti-Soviet propaganda” and arrested in 1944.) Khristoforov, “Voina trebuet vse novykh zhertv,” pp. 178–190. In similar ways, Vasily Grossman used his diary to expose party and military officials who drank and partied instead of leading. He also criticized ordinary civilians who put their personal needs over those of society. All along he retained a moral, Soviet perspective on the war. See also the diaries mentioned in note 47, and the confiscated diary discussed in Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 207.

  224. Khristoforov, “Voina trebuet vse novykh zhertv,” p. 197. The report was dated September 30, 1942.

  225. Ibid.

  226. Elizabeth Astrid Papazian, Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture (DeKalb, IL, 2009).

  227. The words of Sergey Tretyakov are cited in Maria Gough, “Paris: Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde,” October, Summer 2002: 73; see also Literatura Fakta, ed. N. F. Chuzhak (1929; Munich, 1972), pp. 31–33; Tretyakov’s notion of the “operative” strongly influenced Walter Benjamin; see especially his essay, “The Author as Producer” (1934), in Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Peter Demetz, ed. (New York, 1986), pp. 220–238

  228. Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2004), pp. 112–113, 126.

  229. Katerina Clark, “The History of the Factories as a Factory of History,” in Autobiographical Practices in Russia, ed. Jochen Hellbeck and Klaus Heller (Göttingen, 2004), pp. 251–254; Hans Günther, Der sozialistische Übermensch: Maksim Gor’kij und der sowjetische Heldenmythos (Stuttgart, 1983), p. 92; Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, p. 137.

  230. On the political background of the editorial work in the Gorky Project, see Sergei Zhuravlev, Fenomen “Istorii fabrik i zavodov”: Gor’kovskoe nachinanie v kontekste epokhi 1930-kh godov (Moscow, 1997); Josette Bouvard, Le métro de Moscou: La construction d’un mythe soviétique (Paris, 2005).

  231. Zhuravlev, Fenomen, p. 176. Gorky floated other documentary projects: the history of Soviet cities, the history of the village, the history of culture and everyday life, and other subjects. Zhuravlev, Fenomen, p. 175.

  232. Elaine MacKinnon, “Writing History for Stalin: Isaak Izrailevich Mints and the Istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6 (2005), no. 1: 20–21.

  233. MacKinnon, “Writing History for Stalin.”

  234. Papazian locates the end of the documentary movement in the early Stalin period with the promulgation of socialist realism as a compulsory aesthetic. The spirit was continued, however; it showed itself not only in the work of the Mints commission during the war, but also in the documentary project A Day in the World, which was first launched in 1935 and revisited twenty-five years later. M. Gor’kii and M. Kol’tsov, eds., Den’ mira (Moscow, 1937); Den’ mira: 27 sentiabria 1960 goda (Moscow, 1960). The 1960 project in turn inspired the East German writer Christa Wolf to start a similarly conceived documentary diary. Christa Wolf, Ein Tag im Jahr: 1960–2000 (Munich, 2003).

  235. In 1930, the commander of the Cossack Corps, Vitaly Primakov, married Liliya Brik, formerly the lover of the poet Vladimir Maiakovsky and a well-known muse of the artistic avant-garde. A few years later, Primakov was hit by the purges in the Red Army and confessed under torture to participating in an anti-Soviet f
ascist conspiracy. He was executed in June 1937. We learn nothing about these circumstances in the recently published diary of Isaak Mints, which excludes the years of Stalin’s terror and is generally patchy. I. I. Mints, “Iz pamiati vyplyli vospominaniia”: Dnevnikovye zapisi, putevye zametki, memuary akademika AN SSSR I. I. Mintsa (Moscow, 2007); see also K istorii russkikh revoliutsii: Sobytiia, mneniia, otsenki. Pamiati Isaaka Izrailevicha Mintsa (Moscow, 2007).

  236. Vividly portrayed in the diary and in the short stories of Isaak Babel, another Jew who fought in the Red Cossacks. Babel, Konarmeiskii dnevnik 1920 g.; Isaak Babel, Red Cavalry (New York, 2003); MacKinnon, “Writing History for Stalin,” pp. 11–13.

  237. A. P. Shelyubsky, “Bol’shevik, voin, uchënyi. (K 70-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia akademika I. I. Mintsa),” Voprosy istorii 1966, no. 3: 167–170; see also Mints’s autobiography in K istorii russkikh revoliutsii, pp. 221–222.

  238. A laudatory review of the second volume appeared in Pravda, January 13, 1943, p. 4.

  239. MacKinnon, “Writing History for Stalin,” p. 29.

  240. Ibid., p. 6, n. 2.

  241. In the style of Istpart, the surviving members of the commission came together in 1984 for an evening of remembering the Great Patriotic War and reminisced about the founding and work of the now virtually forgotten commission. Naturally, a stenographer was present to transcribe the oral memories. “Vstrecha sotrudnikov Komissii po istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny AN SSSR,” Arkheograficheskii Ezhegodnik za 1984 g. (Moscow, 1986): 316–319. A tape recording of the meeting is preserved in the Russian State Archive of sound recordings. RGAFD, f. 439, op. 4m, no. 1–2. All citations refer to this recording.

  242. Jochen Hellbeck, “Krieg und Frieden im 20. Jahrhundert,” afterword in Wassili Grossman, Leben und Schicksal (Berlin, 2007), pp. 1069–1085.

  243. The letter to the Central Committee that Mints remembered writing in July 1941 could not be found in the archives. But there is evidence of other documentary projects pursued by other institutions at the same time. On July 15, 1941, the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Education called on all museum staff to collect materials on the Great Patriotic War. The call was followed by Order 170 of November 15, 1941, “On the Collection of Documents and Objects of the Great Patriotic War.” T. Timofeeva, “Istoricheskaia pamiat’ i ee pamiatniki,” in Rossiiane i nemtsy v epokhu katastrof, pp. 122–134, at pp. 127–128. Regardless of the Red Army’s disastrous losses over the first months of the war, Soviet scholars appeared to believe that historical certainty was on their side and that the war would end victoriously for them.

  244. Rodric Braithwaite, Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War (New York, 2006); Moskovskaia bitva v khronike faktov i sobytii (Moscow, 2004).

  245. E. N. Gorodetskii and L. M. Zak, “Akademik I. I. Mints kak arkheograf (K 90–letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia),” Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1986 god (Moscow, 1987): 136.

  246. Mints, Iz pamiati, pp. 41–42.

  247. Moskovskaia bitva v khronike faktov i sobytii, p. 246. Mints, Iz pamiati, p. 42 (diary entry for December 11, 1941). On the history and activities of the commision: D. D. Lotareva, “Komissiia po istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny i ee arkhiv: rekonstruktsiia deiatel’nosti i metodov raboty,” Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 2011 g. (Moscow, 2014): 123–166; A. A. Kurnosov, “Vospominaniia-interv’iu v fonde Komissii po istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny AN SSSR (Organizatsiia i metodika sobiraniia),” in Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1973 g. (Moscow, 1974): 118–132; B. V. Levshin, “Deiatel’nost’ Komissii po istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945 gg.,” in Istoriia i istoriki: Istoriograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1974 g. (Moscow, 1976); E. P. Michailova, “O deiatel’nosti Komissii po istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny sovetskogo naroda protiv fashistskikh zakhvatchikov v period 1941–1945 gg.,” in Voprosy istoriografii v Vysshei shkole (Smolensk, 1975), pp. 352–359; I. S. Archangorodskaia and A. A. Kurnosov, “O sozdanii Komissii po istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny AN SSSR i eë arkhiva. (K 40-letiiu so dnia obrazovaniia),” in Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1981 g. (Moscow, 1982): 219–229; A. M. Samsonov, “Vklad istorikov AN SSSR v izuchenie problemy Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” Vestnik AN SSSR 9 (1981): 84–93; E. V. Vasnevskaia, “Vospominaniia-interv’iu o bitve pod Moskvoi,” in Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1983 g. (Moscow, 1985): 272–277; I. S. Arkhangorodskaia and A. A. Kurnosov, “Istorii voinskikh chastei v fonde Komissii po istorii Otechestvennoi voiny AN SSSR,” in Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1985 g. (Moscow, 1986): 174–181; A. A. Kurnosov, “Memuary uchastnikov partizanskogo dvizheniia v period Velikoi Otechesvennoi voiny kak istoricheskii istochnik. (Opyt analiza memuarov po istorii Pervoi Bobruiskoi partizanskoi brigady),” in Trudy MGIAI, t. 16 (Moscow, 1961): 29–55; A. A. Kurnosov, “Priemy vnutrennei kritiki memuarov. (Vospominaniia uchastnikov partizanskogo dvizheniia v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny kak istoricheskii istochnik),” in Istochnikovedenie. Teoreticheskie i metodicheskie problemy (Moscow, 1969), pp. 478–505.

  248. Mints, Iz pamiati, p. 42.

  249. Arkady Lavrovich Sidorov (1900–1966). Historian at the Institute of Red Professorship (1928). On Sidorov’s later life, see Chapter 5.

  250. Mints, Iz pamiati, p. 46f.

  251. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, r. 14, d. 23, l. 16, 213

  252. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, r. 14, d. 7, l. 23–24; see also A. A. Kurnosov, Vospominaniia-interv’iu, p. 122.

  253. Mints, Iz pamiati, p. 49.

  254. In February 1943 the Academy of Sciences registered the commission’s new status, but the Communist party withheld approval in spite of Alexandrov’s petitioning to Shcherbakov for support. RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, ed. chr. 204, l. 2.

  255. Clark, “History of the Factories,” p. 251, n. 1.

  256. Mints, Iz pamiati, pp. 52–53.

  257. Shelyubsky, “Bol’shevik, voin, uchënyj.”

  258. I. I. Mints, “Dokumenty Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, ikh sobiranie i khranenie,” in 80 let na sluzhbe nauki i kul’tury nashei Rodiny (Moscow, 1943), pp. 134–150. Many of these sources cited by Mints are kept in the archives of the Institute of Russian History of the Academy of Sciences (NA IRI RAN, f. 2).

  259. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, r. 14, d. 22, l. 45.

  260. A. A. Kurnosov, “Vospominaniia-Interv’iu,” p. 121.

  261. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. XIV, d. 7, l. 34–41 (no date given).

  262. Kurnosov, “Vospominaniia-Interv’iu,” p. 125, 132.

  263. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. XIV, d. 7, l. 34–41.

  264. Ibid.

  265. The figures refer only to the interviews done in Stalingrad in January-March 1943. Numerous other Stalingrad witnesses were interviewed in later months and at other venues.

  266. Kurnosov, “Vospominaniia-Interv’iu,” p. 126.

  267. E. V. Vasnevskaia, “Vospominaniia-interv’iu o bitve pod Moskvoi,” in Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1983 g. (Moscow, 1985): 272.

  268. NA IRI RAN, f 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 4, l. 1–2 (Batyuk); razd. I, op. 71, d. 11 (Pavlov); on Fugenfirov, Koshkaryov, Rivkin, Smirnov, Stepanov, and Svirin, see pp. 145–146.

  269. Ensign Arnold Krastynsh, interview. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, op. 80, d. 3.

  270. The 4,930 transcribed interviews counted by Kurnosov were conducted from 1942 to 1944 and do not include the transcripts produced by the commission in 1945. Kurnosov, “Vospominaniia-Interv’iu,” p. 131; also see 200 let AN SSSR: Spravochnaia kniga (Moscow, 1945), p. 252.

  271. Two large-scale interview projects launched in the United States and Great Britain during the 1930s suggest that the documentary impulse of the Mints commission may have been part of a larger cultural phenomenon: The Federal Writers Project in the United States, enacted by the Works Progress Administration in 1935, employed several thousand writers who collected information—much of it by way of oral histories—about American history, folklore, and everyday life. David A. Taylor, Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America (Hoboken, NJ, 2009). Britain
saw the founding of Mass-Observation in 1937, a nongovernmental project that sought to gauge and activate the political pulse of ordinary Britons in response to the rise of fascism. See James Hinton, The Mass Observers: A History, 1937–1949 (Oxford, 2013).

  272. S. L. A. Marshall, Island Victory (New York, 1944).

  273. S. L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Washington, 1947).

  274. Roger J. Spiller, “S. L. A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire,” RUSI Journal: Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, August 1988: 63–71; Richard Halloran, “Historian’s Pivotal Assertion on Warfare Assailed as False,” New York Times, February 19, 1989. An official commissioned by the US Army Center of Military History describes Marshall’s interview technique as groundbreaking. Stephen E. Everett, Oral History Techniques and Procedures (Washington, DC, 1992).

  275. Notes and Statement by the Soviet Government on the German Atrocities (Moscow, 1943), p. 19.

  276. Molotov’s “outrageous note” was a “typical Jewish” attempt to blame Bolshevik atrocities against their own people on the Germans, Goebbels recorded on January 8, 1942. A day later, he noted that “when it comes to atrocities, the Bolsheviks have so much to answer for that their own atrocity reports can’t elicit a dog from behind the stove.” Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Part 2: Diktate 1941–1945, vol. 3: Januar-März 1942, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich, 1995), pp. 70–71, 79.

  277. Mints, Iz pamiati, pp. 52, 54.

  278. Shchegoleva was an astute observer. Her diary commented on the corrosive anti-Semitism and the bigotry of the occupiers who made disparaging comments about all things Russian and Soviet. When the Germans left Yasnaya Polyana after six weeks, they had turned the holy place for Shchegoleva into a stable, and human excrement covered the balconies of Tolstoy’s apartment building. Only by a hair did the museum workers succeed in extinguishing the fire started by the Germans during their retreat. The diary was serialized in Komsomol’skaia Pravda: December 18–24, 1941. A copy is in NA IRI RAN, f. 2, r. VI, op. 4, d. 2.