Stalingrad
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279. Sovetskaia propaganda v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, pp. 204–205.
280. E. Genkina, Geroicheskii Stalingrad (Moscow, 1943); V. G. Zaitsev, Rasskaz snaipera (Moscow, 1943).
281. Genkina, Geroicheskii Stalingrad, p. 76.
282. Cultural anthropologists and philosophers refer to this incompatibility as the Rashomon effect. Karl G. Heider, “The Rashomon Effect: When Ethnographers Disagree,” American Anthropologist, n.s., March 1988: 73–81; Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture (New York, 1979), pp. 315–324.
283. The interviews with Chuikov, Rodimtsev, and Aksyonov each run up to 10,000 words; they are presented with cuts.
CHAPTER 2: A CHORUS OF SOLDIERS
1. Leningrad was to be strangled and starved.
2. Figures from the files of the archive of the Russian Defense Ministry (Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 166). Based on German sources, Beevor counts 1,200 and 1,600 aircraft sorties on August 23. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 103.
3. Hubert Brieden, Heidi Dettinger, and Marion Hirschfeld, Ein voller Erfolg der Luftwaffe: Die Vernichtung Guernicas und deutsche Traditionspflege (Nördlingen, 1997), p. 72.
4. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 69; Janusz Piekalkiewicz, Luftkrieg 1939–1945 (Munich, 1978), p. 138. A smaller number (1,500 dead) is cited in Rolf-Dieter Müller and Florian Huber, Der Bombenkrieg 1939–1945 (Berlin, 2004), p. 248.
5. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 167; Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 106.
6. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 154–160; interview with D. Pigalyov.
7. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 137f.
8. Ibid., p. 139.
9. Ibid., pp. 143–148.
10. Ibid., pp. 140–141, 159f., 166.
11. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 106; Overy, Russia’s War, pp. 166, 351 (n. 22) with further references. Volgograd historian Tatiana Pavlova considers these figures understated (Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 186).
12. See p. 108.
13. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 202.
14. Ibid., p. 211. None of those assembled on the evening of August 23 admits to being the “defeatist” who proposed mining the plants. Yeryomenko in his memoirs makes Chuyanov responsible for it; he in turn writes that the representatives of the ministries had made the proposal, and that he had spoken out against it. See A. I. Erëmenko, Stalingrad: Zapiski komanduiushchego frontom (Moscow, 1961), p. 139; A. S. Chuianov, Stalingradskii dnevnik (1941–1943), 2nd rev. ed. (Volgograd, 1979), p. 157.
15. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 221–222.
16. Ibid., pp. 226–229.
17. Ibid, p. 225.
18. Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 214.
19. Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. l48. The Red October factory produced steel again starting in July 1943; the Barricades munitions plant took up production again in the autumn of 1944.
20. For an account of the fighting, see Grossman’s story “In the Line of the Main Drive,” pp. 192–203.
21. Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, pp. 374–376; Hans Wijers, Der Kampf um Stalingrad. Die Kämpfe im Industriegelände, 14. Oktober bis 19. November 1942 (Brummen, 2001), p. 26.
22. Chuianov, Stalingradskii dnevnik, p. 254.
23. René Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia (New York, 1965); Mark Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca, NY, 2002).
24. Kirschenbaum, Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, pp. 64–65.
25. Source: NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 14, 21, 22; Chuianov, Stalingradskii dnevnik, S. 90, 100f., 150, 212f., 380f. For Chuikov, see p. 266. Mikhail Vodolagin was interviewed in Stalingrad in June 1943.
26. Since 1936 Stalingrad had consisted of seven districts. The Yermansky district was located in the city center.
27. A kymograph is a device that produces graphical representations of physical processes (e.g., heartbeat, breathing, muscle contractions, etc.).
28. This is a reference to the M-13, or BM-13, multiple rocket launcher built by the Soviet Union during World War II. Soviet soldiers affectionately called the rockets “Katyusha”; German troops referred to them as “Stalin’s organ” or “Joseph’s organ,” prompted by the resemblance of the launch array to a church organ and the sound of the rocket motors. Zaloga and Ness, Red Army Handbook, pp. 211–215; “Katiusha,” Voennyi ntsiklopedicheskii slovar’, S. F. Akhromeev and S. G. Shapkin, eds. (Moscow, 1986), p. 323.
29. The Soviet government decreed the creation of destruction battalions on June 24, 1941. Formed on a volunteer basis and staffed by trusted Soviet activists, their task was to guard lines of communication and industrial objects against saboteurs and enemy agents. The battalions received military training and worked under the oversight of the NKVD or local party officials. Many units formally joined the Red Army over the course of the war. S. V. Bilenko, Na okhrane tyla strany. Istrebitel’nye batal’ony i polki v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine 1941–45 gg. (Moscow, 1988).
30. A machine and tractor station (MTS) was a state enterprise for ownership and maintenance of agricultural machinery for use on collective farms. Agricultural equipment and technical personnel were scarce and thus shared by collective farms in a given region.
31. Demchenko is alluding to the disintegration within the Red Army.
32. Alexei Adamovich Goreglyad (1905–1985) served as representative of the People’s Commissar of the Tank Industry at the Stalingrad Tractor factory (July-September 1941) and was later promoted to people’s commissar. K. A. Zalessky, Stalin’s Empire. A Biographical Encyclopedic Dictionary (Moscow, 2000).
33. Olga Kuzminichna Kovalyova (1900–1942) began working at the Red October factory in 1927. Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 193.
34. In 1940 Pravda reported on four women who toiled in one of the blast furnaces of the Magnitogorsk Metal Works: Tatiana Mikhailovna Ippolitova, and her subordinates S. S. Vasilieva, L. Spartakova, and P. Tkachenko, Pravda, January 7, 1940.
35. German military sources mention nothing about this.
36. Pigalyov in his interview mentions 57 aircraft.
37. Viktor Stepanovich Kholsunov (1905–1939), a native of Tsaritsyn, commanded a squadron of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union in 1937. He was killed in a flying accident. The monument in his honor was built in 1940. Restored after the war, it still stands at its original location in the city center. Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 432.
38. Settlements south of Stalingrad. On September 13, the German attack through Yelshanka to the Volga River split the 62nd Army from the 64th Army, which was stationed farther south. Samsonov, Stalingradskaia bitva, pp. 175–183.
39. Pavlova writes that Chuyanov and his staff had left the city on the evening of September 13. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 230.
40. Probably an error. Major General Stepan Guryev commanded the 39th Motor Rifle Division. Major General Vasily Sokolov commanded the 45th (74th Guards) Rifle Division in the 62nd Army.
41. Lavrentiy Beria (1899–1953) headed the Soviet security and secret police apparatus (NKVD) during World War II.
42. On their retreat from Napoleon, Russian military commanders gathered in the village of Fili near Moscow in September 1812 and debated whether they should confront the invader or cede Moscow to him. Leo Tolstoy describes the gathering in War and Peace. Asserting that losing Moscow did not mean losing Russia, commander Mikhail Kutuzov decided to leave the capital to Napoleon. In regard to Stalingrad the Soviet regime argued conversely.
43. Society for the Assistance to Defense, Aviation, and Chemical Construction: a popular volunteer organization in the Soviet Union that existed from 1927 to 1948. See also p. 30.
44. The “Rally of the Victors” took place on February 4, 1943, on the Square of Fallen Heroes. In attendance were thousands o
f Red Army soldiers as well as party and city officials.
45. Kotelnikovo: a village 190 kilometers southwest of Volgograd. Kotelnikovo was captured by the Wehrmacht on August 2, 1942. It was from here that General Hoth’s panzer group sought to break through to the encircled German troops at Stalingrad in December 1942. Hoth’s attempt failed, and Soviet forces took Kotelnikovo on December 29, 1942.
46. In the first weeks after the liberation of the city, the NKVD arrested 502 “traitors, agents, and accomplices” of the Germans, including 46 agents, 45 espionage suspects, 68 police employees, and 172 individuals who had voluntarily assisted the German armed forces (Stalingradskaia popeia, pp. 406–407). In the surrounding villages, 732 arrests had been made by July 1, 1943. Pavlova believes that many more collaborators were not punished by the Soviet authorities. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 412, 547.
47. These numbers are given, respectively, by Gerlach, Militärische “Versorgungszwänge,” Besatzungspolitik und Massenverbrechen, p. 199; and Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 460.
48. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 291.
49. Ibid., p. 460.
50. Ibid., p. 461; Pravda and Izvestiia from October 17, 1942, citing German attacks in the area of the Barricades munitions plant on October 4, 1942.
51. The Germans, Speidel claimed under further interrogation, also tried “at all costs to get the Cossacks on their side” (Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 307, 468). While Stalingrad itself was largely populated by Russians, many Cossacks lived in the villages and on the farms in the area. German occupation officials emphasized the “consanguinity” of the Cossacks to the Aryan peoples and styled Pyotr Krasnov—the commander who had directed the attack against Red Tsaritsyn in 1918 and who was living in German exile—as a liberator of the Cossacks from the Bolshevik yoke. In the summer of 1942 this propaganda fell on open ears. Later, the picture changed when the Germans failed to abolish the collective farms, as they had promised they would, and when the villagers witnessed the mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war. The Soviet leadership had evacuated able-bodied men from the Cossack settlements in the Volga-Don region to prevent a possible collaboration between Cossacks and Germans. That was one of the few instances of the timely evacuation of the civilian population. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 321–331, 359; R. Krikunov, Kazaki.
52. Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 396.
53. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 316–319, 363–364.
54. Communists could survive if they were willing to denounce fellow party members. Speidel probably died in late 1943 in the Beketovka prison. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 314, 467, 469, 478–479.
55. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 304–305; Gert C. Lübbers, “Die 6. Armee und die Zivilbevölkerung von Stalingrad,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 54 (2006), no. 1: 115.
56. Gert Lübbers refutes Christian Gerlach’s claim that the evacuation ordered by the quartermaster general of the army was aimed to extinguish Stalingrad’s civilian population. But his attempt to humanize the policies of the military government seems anachronistic: the sources Lübbers cites speak in a language of bureaucratic calculus. Relying on Russian archival sources, Tatiana Pavlova describes in detail the inhumane conditions of the evacuation. Gerlach, “Militärische ‘Versorgungszwänge,’ Besatzungspolitik, und Massenverbrechen,” pp. 200–202; Lübbers, “Die 6. Armee und die Zivilbevölkerung von Stalingrad,” pp. 110–119; Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 485–508.
57. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 496 (G. Scheffer, Feldpost 45955).
58. Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 394. Pavlova estimates the remaining population in the city as 30,000. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 527.
59. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 347, 527, 530–531.
60. Ibid., p. 533; Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 394.
61. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 539.
62. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 22, l. 66–71.
63. The grain elevator on the southern outskirts of Stalingrad was built in 1940. It was at the time the tallest building in the city. It fell to the Germans after heavy fighting on September 22, 1942, and was recaptured on January 25, 1943. Made from concrete, the elevator is one of few surviving prewar buildings in Volgograd today. Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 456.
64. The Ninth of January Square, today’s Lenin Square, was located in the northern center of Stalingrad near the Volga River and was fiercely fought over during the battle. Both the L-shaped house and Pavlov’s House bordered on the square. See Rodimtsev, interview, pp. 305–309; Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 305.
65. On Kotluban: Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, pp. 37–58, 168–183.
66. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, p. 701; Chuikov, Srazhenie veka, p. 247.
67. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, p. 980.
68. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, p. 174. On September 30, 1942, General Rokossovsky became commander of the army group fighting in the north, which was now called the Don Front. In his memoirs, he comments on the uninspired operations of his predecessor, Yeryomenko, who kept throwing rifle divisions into frontal attacks for twelve consecutive days. Konstantin K. Rokossovsky, Velikaia pobeda na Volge (Moscow, 1965), p. 157.
69. Georgy K. Zhukov, Vospominaniia i razmyshleniia (Moscow, 2002), 2:78.
70. Wegner, Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion, p. 981.
71. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, pp. 44, 50–51., 55, 177.
72. Ibid., pp. 322, 327–329.
73. Ibid., p. 359.
74. Fighter pilot Herbert Pabst, cited in Wegner, Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion, p. 995.
75. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, p. 542.
76. Ibid., pp. 542, 670.
77. Ibid., p. 636; see also the interview with divisional commander Ivan Lyudnikov.
78. Führer command of November 17, 1942, concerning continuation of the conquest of Stalingrad by the 6th Army; cited in Wegner, Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion, p. 997.
79. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, d. 1–3, 5–8, 11, 14. The Moscow interviews were conducted by E. B. Genkina and transcribed by O. A. Roslyakova; the interviewer in Laptyevo was P. M. Fedosov and the stenographer M. P. Laputina. Major Pyotr Mikhailovich Fedosov (1897–1974) was a battalion commissar during the Great Patriotic War. He served on the Historical Commission since its creation in December 1941. Fedosov’s daughter, herself a former staff member of the Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has researched his wartime work for the commission: E. P. Fedosova, “‘Privezennyi material mozhet sluzhit’ dlia napisaniia istorii . . .’,” Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 2011 g. (Moscow, 2014): 167–176.
80. Leonty Nikolayevich Gurtyev (1891–1943) was appointed major general on December 7, 1942. He died on August 3, 1943, during the fighting for Oryol and was posthumously awarded a Hero of the Soviet Union.
81. The State Fishing Trust.
82. The Russian Red Cross Society was established in 1854. In 1923 it was renamed the Union of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies of the USSR (the Soviet Red Cross). Its activities included teaching first aid skills to the general population and providing medical training to nurses.
83. Nina Kokorina ended the war in Berlin. After the war she lived in Sverdlovsk, where she led the female veterans association. She died in January 2010. N. Kriukova, “Chizhik: Medsestra iz soldatskoi pesni,” Tiumenskie izvestiia, January 27, 2010.
84. Cheka (1917–1922) and GPU (1922–1934): predecessor organizations of the NKVD (and later, KGB), the Soviet state security police.
85. From 1917 to 1932, the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy was the central authority for managing industry. It was dissolved in 1932, and its functions were transferred to branches of the People’s Commissariat.
86. Kumylga—a railway station on the Uryupinsk–Volgograd line.
87. Samofalovka—a village near Kotluban.
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88. From these heights Tsaritsyn was defended in the summer and autumn of 1918.
89. Arnold Meri (1919–2009) was an Estonian soldier who volunteered to serve in the Red Army after the Soviet invasion of Estonia. In July 1941 he was wounded in the defense of Pskov and awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union. From 1945 to 1949 he chaired the Estonian Komsomol organization. In 2003 the Estonian prosecutor indicted Meri for genocide. He was accused of deporting 251 Estonian civilians to Siberia after the war. Meri denied the allegations. Russian president Medvedev awarded him the Medal of Honor posthumously in 2009.
90. In all likelihood, Ilya Nikolayevich Kuzin (1919–1960) was the leader of a group of demolitionists in a Volokolamsk partisan detachment that spent six months behind enemy lines near Moscow. Kuzin personally conducted about 150 acts of sabotage. He was declared a Hero of the Soviet Union on February 16, 1942.
91. Zoya Anatolyevna Kosmodemyanskaya (1923–1941) was a Komsomol from Moscow who voluntarily joined the guerrilla movement after the outbreak of war. Their task was to burn down German accommodations behind the front lines. Kosmodemyanskaya was discovered by a Russian guard and handed over to the Germans. She was tortured and then hanged publicly. Petrischchevo, the village where she died, was liberated on January 22, 1942. The journalist Pyotr Lidov reported the partisan’s story a few days later in Pravda, and the article became famous. Kosmodemyanskaya was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union on February 16, 1942.
92. Weapons are camouflaged behind the defense line. Two to three guns with armor-piercing munitions wait until the enemy completes his assault only to experience massive fire from two sides. The fire starts a counterattack by troops emerging from the trenches. See “Kinzhal’nyi ogon’,” Bol’shaia sovetskaia ntsiklopediiantsiklopediia, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1953), 21:11.
93. Spartak was a popular Soviet sports society of industrial cooperatives (established in 1935).