by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
151. Alexander Vasilievich Suvorov (1730–1800), the last Generalissimo of the Russian army and one of the most distinguished commanders in Russian military history.
152. Brusilov offensive: a vast and successful Russian offensive against Austria and Germany during World War I, under the command of General Alexei Brusilov. Zaytsev probably read the book by L. V. Vetoshnikov, Brusilovskii proryv: Operativno-strategicheskii ocherk (Moscow, 1940).
153. Vladimir Yakovlevich Zazubrin (1895–1937) was a Soviet writer whose novel about the destruction of Admiral Kolchak, Two Worlds, was published in 1921.
154. Pyotr Ivanovich Bagration (1765–1812) was a general in the Patriotic War of 1812. Zaytsev probably refers to S. B. Borisov, Bagration. Zhizn’ i deiatel’nost’ russkogo polkovodtsa (Moscow, 1938).
155. Denis Vasilievich Davydov (1784–1839) was a Russian poet and military commander who led a guerrilla movement during the Patriotic War of 1812.
156. Sergey Georgyevich Lazo (1894–1920) was a Soviet commander in the Civil War. See Sergei Lazo. Vospominaniia i dokumenty (Moscow, 1938).
157. K. M. Staniukovich (1843–1903), Morskie rasskazy (1934).
158. Alexei Novikov-Priboi Sikych (1877–1944) was a Russian-Soviet writer and student of Maxim Gorky. In 1932 he published his most famous novel, Tsusima, followed by part 2 in 1941.
159. The supplementary interview with Zaytsev begins after this passage. It was recorded on August 23, 1943. The interviewer was Raisa Krol’; Alexandra Shamshina transcribed.
160. On that day Chuikov presented Zaytsev with the Medal for Valor.
161. Epaulets were denounced as a sign of counterrevolution and abolished in the Russian army in December 1917. In January 1943 they were reintroduced by the Red Army.
162. See pp. 62–64.
163. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 14, l. 154–159. The interviewing historian and the stenographer are not identified.
164. Until December 1941 the Soviet government readied itself for a Japanese attack in the Far East. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the US declaration of war against Japan, the specter of a two-front war became less likely, and by early 1942, twenty-three divisions and nineteen brigades of the Red Army were deployed from the Soviet Far East to the European theater. Glantz, Colossus Reborn, p. 154.
165. Rozengartovka: train station in the Khabarovsk region.
166. Vertyachy: a hamlet in the Don bend, west of Stalingrad.
167. Regarding the concept of the psychic attack, see pp. 25–26.
168. Tinguta and Peskovatka: settlements in the Stalingrad region. The distance between them is more than one hundred kilometers.
169. For the activities of the 7th Section, see Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA, 1995), pp. 17–20.
170. See A. Epifanov, “Sovetskaia propaganda i obrashchenie s voennoplennymi vermakhta v khode Stalingradskoi bitvy (1942–1943 gg.),” in Rossiiane i nemtsy v epokhu katastrof, pp. 67–74
171. For the appropriation of imperial Russian traditions in Soviet prewar and wartime culture, see Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger, eds., Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Madison, WI, 2006).
172. This and the following biographical details are taken from L. G. Zakharova, “Pëtr Andreevich Zaionchkovskii: Uchënyi i uchitel’,” Voprosy istorii 1994, no. 5: 171–179; Terence Emmons, “Zaionchkovsky, Petr Andreevich,” in The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, ed. George N. Rhyne, vol. 55 (Gulf Breeze, FL, 1993), pp. 185–186.
173. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind; Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (London, 2008), pp. 64, 196–199.
174. Istoriia dorevoliutsionnoi istorii Rossii v dnevnikakh i vospominaniiakh. Annotirovannyi ukazatel’ knig i publikatsii v zhurnalakh. Nauchnoe rukovodstvo, redaktsiia i vvedenie professora P. A. Zaionchkovskogo, 5 vols. in 13 pts. (Moscow, 1976–1989). Several of Zayonchkovsky’s monographs have appeared in American translation, including The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia (Gulf Breeze, FL, 1978).
175. Grigori Nikolayevich Anpilogov (1902–1987) was a Soviet historian. He served on the Historical Commission from 1942 to 1945.
176. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 54, l. 1–7.
177. This refers to Andrei Cheslavovich Zayonchkovsky (1862–1926). His brother was Nikolai Cheslavovich Zayonchkovsky (1859–1918), a senator, and later deputy Procurator of the Holy Synod.
178. The Zayonchkovskys, a noble family of Polish origin, owned the estate Mikhailovsky in the government of Smolensk. The farm was located near the village Volochek, today Nakhimovsky.
179. Pavel Stepanovich Nakhimov (1802–1855). Admiral. Commander of the Black Sea Fleet squadron during the Crimean War, 1853–1856.
180. The George Cross is a Russian order of merit, which was founded in 1769 by Catherine II.
181. The battle of Borodino (August 29, 1812) took place near Moscow and was one of the key moments in the Patriotic War of 1812.
182. Today it is the Russian State Military Historical Archive, or RGVIA.
183. The Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) were a bourgeois-liberal party in prerevolutionary Russia. The Octobrists formed a party farther to the right that supported the reformed Tsarist state after the Revolution of 1905.
184. See p. 363, note 161, and pp. 431–432.
185. Gustav Wietersheim (1884–1974). Lieutenant general of the infantry and commander of the 14th Panzer corps at Stalingrad. After the corps incurred heavy casualties in September 1942, Wietersheim suggested a partial withdrawal to the Don. Army commander Paulus accused him of defeatism and Wietersheim was demoted.
186. Hitler Youth: the youth organization of the Nazi party in Germany.
187. Kletskaya: a train station located 230 kilometers northwest of Stalingrad on the banks of the Don.
188. See p. 22, note 76.
189. Soviet enemy propagandists produced the “Daddy Is Dead” leaflet in a variety of forms because it proved extremely effective. In a June 1942 meeting with Red Army propaganda specialists, GlavPURKKA head Alexander Shcherbakov discussed the leaflet at length. He had been told, Shcherbakov said, that there was not a single German POW who did not know about the leaflet, and that many enemy soldiers were clutching it in their hands as they surrendered to the Red Army. Shcherbakov’s reasoning was interesting: German soldiers were brutal, fully conforming to Hitler’s ambition to produce a beastly and cruel new generation, but they were also sentimental. Shcherbakov urged the assembled specialists to work on the enemy’s soft spot and produce more “sentimental” propaganda. M. I. Burtsev, Prozrenie (Moscow, 1981), pp. 100–102. An exact image of the leaflet as described by Zayonchkovsky could not be found.
190. Zayonchkovsky is referring to propaganda that appealed to German soldiers, as sons of workers and peasants, to turn against a Nazi regime controlled by capitalists.
191. For the full wording of the order, see p. 10, note 27.
192. Hitler’s address to the soldiers of the 6th Army was dated November 26, 1942, and is referenced in Kehrig, Stalingrad, pp. 264–265.
193. See “The Landing at Latoshinka,” pp. 203–222.
194. Elsewhere in Stalingrad, too, cats were used to deliver Soviet propaganda. The intelligence department of the 62nd Army reported on two soldiers of the 149th Independent Rifle Battalion who noticed “that a cat living in their shelter from time to time visited the shelters of the Germans. They decided to use the cat to transport fliers to the adversary. They wrapped the cat with leaflets and shooed it forcibly to the Germans. In this way the cat took about one hundred leaflets to the Germans. The fact that it returned without leaflets suggests that the German soldiers read our leaflets and care about them.” Unlike Zayonchkovsky’s story, this report ends without the heroic death of the cat. It is interesting to note that the animal had to be shooed to the Germans; by itself it would not go there. NA IRI RAN, f. 2,
razd. III, op. 5, d. 3a, l. 27 ob. Report of January 5, 1943.
195. A Sovinformburo broadcast.
196. Maria Petrovna Kukharskaya (Smirnova) (1921–2010) was a medical educator who joined the front as a volunteer in 1941. She held the rank of lieutenant at the end of the war. See Iu. A. Naumenko, Shagai, pekhota! (Moscow, 1989); Akmolinskaia Pravda, September 28, 2010.
197. Captain Nikolai Dmitriyevich Abukhov (1922–1943) commanded the 1st Rifle Battalion, 1151st Rifle Regiment, 343rd Rifle Division. See Iu. A. Naumenko, Shagai, pekhota!
198. Ehrenburg produced hundreds of columns during the war, filled with scathing observations on Nazi German “culture.” To make his point, Ehrenburg often quoted from captured German letters and diaries. See Jochen Hellbeck, “‘The Diaries of Fritzes and the Letters of Gretchens’: Personal Writings from the German–Soviet War and Their Readers,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10 (2009), no. 3: 571–606; Peter Jahn, ed., Ilya Ehrenburg und die Deutschen (Berlin, 1997).
199. Mokraya Mechetka is a river that flows through the area of the Tractor factory. The riverbed is transformed seasonally into a ravine.
200. Soviet observers frequently commented on the pornographic images that they found in the pockets of German POWs or in abandoned trenches. “You want to wash your hands after touching any of these Germans’ things,” Vassily Grossman subtly remarked in his war diary. Grossman, Gody voiny, pp. 261–262. Talking with the Moscow historians, Major Anatoly Soldatov was more explicit: “There were a lot of obscene magazines that they left behind—such obscenities that you rarely see on photographs. An official edition, mind you.” Soldatov might have had in mind Ostfront-Illustrierte, a magazine that was produced for soldiers of the 6th Army. Its issues were replete with erotic pictures of young German women, in tune with the Nazis’ aggressive reproductive aims. A partial run is at Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (Freiburg), RWD 9/32. Compare also Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 67–94.
CHAPTER 4: THE GERMANS SPEAK
1. General Karl Strecker (1884–1973) commanded the German 11th Corps at Stalingrad. He surrendered on February 2, 1943, as commander of the Stalingrad north Kessel.
2. 2 NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, op. 258, d. 2, l. 8–11.
3. Colonel Arno Ernst Max von Lenski (1893–1986) commanded the 24th Panzer Division at Stalingrad. In January 1943 he was promoted to lieutenant general.
4. Presented here is only a selection of the interrogation transcripts preserved in the archive of the Historical Commission: NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, op. 258, d. 5.
5. Handwritten insertions in the typewritten transcripts are italicized.
6. Turkey, which had maintained its neutrality, declared war on Germany and Japan on February 23, 1945.
7. See Zayonchkovsky’s information about the desecrated corpses of Soviet soldiers, which he found in November 1942 near Latoshinka (pp. 207, 391).
8. During the first days of the encirclement German commanders in the Kessel readied themselves for a breakthrough to the west, and they ordered food and military supplies to be destroyed.
9. Kalmyk steppe: desert-like area southeast of Stalingrad.
10. The Red Army liberated Rostov on February 14 and Kharkov on February 16, 1943. On March 15 Kharkov again fell into German hands and was finally liberated on August 23.
11. Böse Waffe (German): evil weapon.
12. General Walther von Brauchitsch (1881–1948, promoted to general field marshal in 1940) was the commander-in-chief of the German Army from 1938–1941. He was sacked by Hitler after the failed Moscow offensive and spent the remainder of the war in enforced retirement.
13. Erwin Jaenecke (1890–1960), Lieutenant general and commander of the 389th Infantry Division. He was flown out of Stalingrad as one of the last higher officers.
14. See Jens Ebert, “Organisation eines Mythos,” in Feldpostbriefe aus Stalingrad, pp. 333–402.
15. Shelyubsky crossed paths with Isaak Mints during the war and appears to have joined the Historical Commission shortly after the war ended. See Sheliubskii, “Bol’shevik, voin, uchënyi”; A. P. Sheliubskii, “Bol’shevistskaia propaganda i revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie na severnom fronte nakanune 1917 goda,” Voprosy istorii 1947, no. 2: 67–80.
16. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 3a, l. 1–48.
17. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 2a, l. 101–133.
18. Schelyubsky: “Among our [sic] German divisions, who fought against us, there were also several small Austrian units. The Austrians came in first after the Germans.”
19. These are words from a poem by Gavriil Derzhavin (1743–1816), which became the unofficial Russian national anthem of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
20. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 3a, l. 14–15.
21. “Vechernee soobshchenie 25 ianvaria,” Pravda, January 26, 1943, p. 3; see also “Pis’ma okruzhennykh nemtsev,” Pravda, January 10, 1943, p. 4.
CHAPTER 5: WAR AND PEACE
1. Quoted from Kempowski, Das Echolot, 3:173.
2. Pravda, February 4, 1943, p. 1.
3. Krasnaia Zvezda, February 4, 1943, p. 1.
4. The list with the 9,602 decorated soldiers is signed by the head of the cadre department in the political administration of the 62nd Army. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 3, l. 1.
5. The documentary Stalingrad (dir. Varlamov). Grossman collaborated on the screenplay. See also p. 224, n. 144.
6. Grossman, Gody voiny, p. 369 (entry for May 1, 1943).
7. Pravda, June 27, 1945, p. 2. Stalin’s use of the screw metaphor is often viewed as an expression of his cynical views toward the Soviet people. That may be, but there is evidence that Soviet citizens readily described themselves in the very same terms. In September 1943 an engineer at Moscow’s ZIL factory noted in his diary: “The news gets better every day. There is growing confidence that we will end the war this year. What magnificent events we are witnessing! And what a joy to think that you are a tiny little screw in these events.” V. A. Lapshin, entry for September 7, 1943, in Somov, “Dukhovnii oblik trudiashchikhsia perioda Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” p. 342. For the cynical interpretation see, among others, Seniavskaia, Frontovoe pokolenie, p. 4.
8. I. S. Konev, Zapiski komanduiushchego frontom (Moscow, 1991), pp. 594–599; Laurence Rees, World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis, and the West (New York, 2010), pp. 395–398.
9. Lidiya Ginzburg, Blockade Diary, trans. Alan Myers (London, 1995), p. 3.
10. N. N. Gusev, “Voina i mir” L. N. Tolstogo: Geroicheskaia popeia Otechestvennoi voiny 1812 goda, Bloknot lektora (Moscow, 1943); A. Rashkovskaia, “‘Voina i mir’, prochtennaia zanovo,” Smena (Leningrad), February 3, 1943; James von Geldern, “Radio Moscow: The Voice from the Center,” in Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, ed. Richard Stites (Bloomington, 1995), p. 53.
11. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, 2007), p. 1137.
12. Ilya Ehrenburg, Letopis’ muzhestva: Publitsisticheskie stat’i voennykh let (Moscow, 1974), p. 355; L. Lazarev, “Dukh svobody,” Znamia 9 (1988): 128.
13. Benedikt Sarnov, “‘Voina i mir dvadtsatogo veka,” Lechaim, January 2007, http://www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/177/sarnov.htm. War and Peace was, as Grossman acknowledged, the only book that he read during the war years. A Writer at War, pp. 54–55; see also Grossman, Gody voiny, p. 287.
14. Grossman was fortunate that the Central Committee of the party called on General Rodimtsev as a military expert. He remembered Grossman’s war reports from Stalingrad and had a favorable view of the writer (RGALI, f. 1710, op. 2, ed. chr. 1, entry from May 31, 1950). Twelve versions of the novel are preserved in Grossman’s estate. Grossman compiled a diary to document the twisted road that his manuscript traveled.
15. RGALI, f. 1710, op. 1, ed. khr. 106, l. 26; see also f. 1710, op. 1, ed. khr. 152.
16. RGALI, f. 1710, op.
1, ed. khr. 37, title page.
17. John Garrard and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (New York, 1996), pp. 355, 358.
18. The book is forthcoming under its original title, Stalingrad, in the New York Review of Books Classics series (trans. Robert Chandler).
19. Grossman’s daughter remembers how committed her father was to the mythology of the Soviet people’s war. The family often sang war songs at evening gatherings. Inevitably the evening reached its high point: with his unmusical voice, her father intoned the famous song of the “holy war” (1941). The song moved him so powerfully that he had to stand up. “Father stands hunched over, his hands on his hips, as if he were in a parade. His face is solemn and serious. ‘Rise up, rise up great country / to the last battle [ . . . ] This is a war of the people / a holy war.’” A Writer at War, p. 348.
20. Sabine R. Arnold, Stalingrad im sowjetischen Gedächtnis: Kriegserinnerung und Geschichtsbild im totalitären Staat (Bochum, 1998), p. 293.
21. How Grossman’s words came to be included in the war memorial is unclear. Surviving witnesses supply conflicting information. Compare Arnold, Stalingrad im sowjetischen Gedächtnis, p. 294.
22. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. XIV, d. 22, l. 210.
23. K istorii russkikh revoliutsii, p. 224. According to a different source, the decision to dissolve the commission and its transformation in the sector was made on September 15 or November 15, 1945. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, “Prikazy po Institutu istorii za 1945 g.,” no call number, l. 119; Levshin, “Deiatel’nost’ Komissii po istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” p. 317. The sector worked in the same place as the commission before it, in the house on Comintern Street.
24. Many documents were kept secret even after the war due to their detailed descriptions of military operations and fighting. Gorodetskii and Zak, “Akademik I. I. Minc kak arkheograf,” p. 142.
25. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, unsigned folder on the activity of the sector in the year 1946, l. 71–72 (July 25, 1946).
26. Stalingradskaia bitva (dir. N. Petrov, 1949).