Tolstoy claimed that it was impossible fully to encircle an army. This claim was borne out by the experience of his time.
The years 1941–1945 proved that it is indeed possible to encircle an entire army, to nail it to the ground, to fetter it in a hoop of iron. A large number of armies, Soviet and German alike, were encircled during these years.
Tolstoy’s claim was indisputably true for his time. But, like most of the thoughts of great men about war and politics, it was by no means an eternal truth.
What made encirclements possible was the combination of the extraordinary mobility of shock troops and the vast, unwieldy rears on which they depended. The encircling forces have all the advantages of mobility on their side. The encircled forces entirely lose this mobility: it is impossible for an encircled army to organize its vast, complex and factory-like rear. The encircled forces are paralysed; the encircling forces have motors and wings.
An encircled army loses more than just mobility and technical resources. Its soldiers and officers are somehow excluded from the contemporary world, thrust back into the past. They begin to reappraise not only the strength of the enemy and the likely development of the war; they also begin to reappraise the politics of their own country, the appeal of their political leaders, their laws and constitution, their characteristics as a nation, their past and their future. The encircling forces go through a similar reappraisal – but inversely.
The victory of Stalingrad determined the outcome of the war, but the silent quarrel between the victorious people and the victorious State was not yet over. On the outcome of this quarrel depended the destiny, the freedom, of Man.
16
A gentle drizzle was falling in the forest of Görlitz, on the frontier between Eastern Prussia and Lithuania. A man of average height, wearing a grey raincoat, was walking down a path between the tall trees. As the sentries caught sight of him, they held their breath, freezing into perfect immobility, allowing the raindrops to run down their cheeks.
Hitler had wanted to be alone for a moment, to have a breath of fresh air. The fine, gentle drizzle was very pleasant. He loved the silent trees. And he enjoyed walking over the soft carpet of fallen leaves.
All day he had found the staff of his field headquarters quite unbearable . . . He had never felt any respect for Stalin. His actions before the war had always seemed crude and stupid. There was a peasant simplicity even in his cunning and treachery. His Soviet State was absurd. One day Churchill would understand the tragic role played by the Reich – with its own body it had defended Europe from Stalin’s Asiatic Bolshevism . . . He thought of the men on his staff who had insisted on the withdrawal of the 6th Army from Stalingrad; they would now be particularly reserved and respectful. He was equally irritated by those whose faith in him was unconditional; they would use eloquent words to assure him of their fidelity. He kept trying to think scornfully of Stalin. He wanted somehow to despise him, and he knew this was because he no longer had a sense of his own superiority over him . . . that cruel, vengeful little shopkeeper from the Caucasus. Anyway, this one success of his changed very little . . . Had he sensed a veiled mockery today in the eyes of that old gelding Zeitzler? He was annoyed at the thought that Goebbels would probably report the witticisms of the English prime minister about his gifts as a military leader. ‘You’ve got to admit it – he is quite witty!’ Goebbels would laugh. At the bottom of his intelligent, handsome eyes he would glimpse the envious light of a triumphant rival – something he had thought extinguished for ever.
This trouble over the 6th Army somehow prevented him from feeling fully himself. What mattered was not the loss of Stalingrad or the encirclement of the Army; what mattered was that Stalin had gained the upper hand.
Well, he would soon see to that.
Hitler had always had ordinary thoughts and ordinary, endearing weaknesses. But while he had seemed great and omnipotent, they had evoked only love and admiration. He had embodied the national élan of the German people. But if the power of the armed forces and the Reich wavered for even a moment, then his wisdom began to seem tarnished, his genius vanished.
He had never envied Napoleon. He couldn’t bear people whose greatness endured even in solitude, poverty and impotence, people who were able to remain strong even in a dark cellar or attic.
He had found it impossible during this solitary walk in the forest to rise above everyday trivia and find the true, just solution that was beyond the plodders of the General Staff and the Party leadership. He found it unbearably depressing to be reduced again to the level of ordinary men.
It had been beyond the capacities of a mere man to found the New Germany, to kindle the war and the ovens of Auschwitz, to create the Gestapo. To be the founder of the New Germany and its Führer, one had to be a superman. His thoughts and feelings, his everyday life, had to exist outside and above those of ordinary men.
The Russian tanks had brought him back to his starting-point. His thoughts, decisions and passions were no longer directed towards God and the destiny of the world. The Russian tanks had brought him back among men.
At first he had found it soothing to be alone in the forest, but now he began to feel frightened. Without his bodyguards and aides, he felt like a little boy in a fairy-tale lost in a dark, enchanted forest.
Yes, he was like Tom Thumb; he was like the goat who had wandered into the forest, unaware that the wolf had stolen up on him through a thicket. His childhood fears had re-emerged through the thick darkness of decades. He could see the picture in his old book of fairy-tales: a goat in the middle of a glade and, between the damp, dark trees, the red eyes and white teeth of the wolf.
He wanted to scream, to call for his mother, to close his eyes, to run.
This forest, however, hid only the regiment of his personal guard: thousands of strong, highly-trained men whose reflexes were instantaneous. Their sole aim in life was to stop the least breath disturbing a single hair on his head. The telephones buzzed discreetly, passing on from zone to zone, from sector to sector, each movement of the Führer who had decided to go for a walk on his own in the woods.
He turned round. Restraining his desire to run, he began to walk back towards the dark-green buildings of his field headquarters.
The guards noticed he was hurrying and thought he must have urgent matters to attend to. How could they have imagined that the gathering twilight had reminded the Führer of a wolf in a fairy-tale?
Through the trees he could see the lights of the buildings. For the first time, he felt a sense of horror, human horror, at the thought of the crematoria in the camps.
17
The men in the bunkers and command-posts of the 62nd Army felt very strange indeed; they wanted to touch their faces, feel their clothes, wiggle their toes in their boots. The Germans weren’t shooting. It was quiet.
The silence made their heads whirl. They felt as though they had grown empty, as though their hearts had gone numb, as though their arms and legs moved in a different way from usual. It felt very odd, even inconceivable, to eat kasha in silence, to write a letter in silence, to wake up at night and hear silence. This silence then gave birth to many different sounds that seemed new and strange: the clink of a knife, the rustle of a page being turned in a book, the creak of a floorboard, the sound of bare feet, the scratching of a pen, the click of a safety-catch on a pistol, the ticking of the clock on the wall of the bunker.
Krylov, the chief of staff, entered Chuykov’s bunker; Chuykov himself was sitting on a bed and Gurov was sitting opposite him at the table. He had hurried in to tell them the latest news: the Stalingrad Front had gone over to the offensive and it would be only a matter of hours before Paulus was surrounded. Instead, he looked at Chuykov and Gurov and then sat down without saying a word. What he had seen on his comrades’ faces must have been very special – his news was far from unimportant.
The three men sat there in silence. The silence had already given birth to sounds that had seemed erased for ever. Soon
it would give birth to new thoughts, new anxieties and passions that had been uncalled-for during the fighting itself.
But they were not yet aware of these new thoughts. Their anxieties, ambitions, resentments and jealousies had yet to emerge from under the crushing weight of the fighting. They were still unaware that their names would be forever linked with a glorious page of Russian military history.
These minutes of silence were the finest of their lives. During these minutes they felt only human feelings; none of them could understand afterwards why it was they had known such happiness and such sorrow, such love and such humility.
Is there any need to continue this story? Is there any need to describe the pitiful spectacle many of these generals then made of themselves? The constant drunkenness, the bitter disputes over the sharing-out of the glory? How a drunken Chuykov leapt on Rodimtsev and tried to strangle him at a victory celebration – merely because Nikita Khrushchev had thrown his arms round Rodimtsev and kissed him without so much as a glance at Chuykov?
Is there any need to say that Chuykov and his staff first left the right bank in order to attend the celebrations of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Cheka? And that the following morning, blind drunk, he and his comrades nearly drowned in the Volga and had to be fished out by soldiers from a hole in the ice? Is there any need to describe the subsequent curses, reproaches and suspicions?
There is only one truth. There cannot be two truths. It’s hard to live with no truth, with scraps of truth, with a half-truth. A partial truth is no truth at all. Let the wonderful silence of this night be the truth, the whole truth . . . Let us remember the good in these men; let us remember their great achievements.
Chuykov left the bunker and climbed slowly up to the top of the slope; the wooden steps creaked under his boots. It was dark. Both the east and the west were quiet. The silhouettes of factories, the ruined buildings, the trenches and dug-outs all merged into the calm, silent darkness of the earth, the sky and the Volga.
This was the true expression of the people’s victory. Not the ceremonial marches and orchestras, not the fireworks and artillery salutes, but this quietness – the quietness of a damp night in the country . . .
Chuykov was very moved; he could hear his heart thumping in his breast. Then he realized the silence was not total. From Banniy Ovrag and the ‘Red October’ factory came the sound of men singing. Below, on the banks of the Volga, he could hear quiet voices and the sound of a guitar.
He went back to the bunker. Gurov was waiting for him so they could have supper.
‘What silence, Nikolay Ivanovich!’ said Gurov. ‘I can’t believe it.’
Chuykov sniffed and didn’t answer.
They sat down at table. Gurov said:
‘Well, comrade, you must have had a hard time if a happy song makes you cry.’
Chuykov looked at him in astonishment.
18
In a dug-out on the slope leading down to the Volga, a few soldiers were sitting around a table fashioned from a few planks. The sergeant-major was pouring out mugs of vodka by the light of an oil-lamp; the soldiers watched as the precious liquid slowly mounted to the level indicated by his horny fingernail.
They drank and then reached out for some bread.
One of the soldiers finished chewing his piece of bread and said:
‘Yes, he gave us a hard time. But we were too much for him in the end.’
‘He’s certainly quietened down now. You can’t hear a sound.’
‘He’s had enough.’
‘The epic of Stalingrad is over.’
‘He’s done a lot of damage, though. He’s set half of Russia on fire.’
They chewed their bread very slowly. It was as though they were breaking off for a meal, after a long and difficult job of work.
Their heads grew hazy, but somehow this haziness left them clear-headed. The taste of bread, the crunch of onion, the weapons piled beside the mud wall, the Volga, this victory over a powerful enemy, a victory won by the same hands that had stroked the hair of their children, fondled their women, broken bread and rolled tobacco in scraps of newspaper – they experienced all this with extraordinary clarity.
19
The Muscovites who were now preparing to return home were probably rejoicing more at the thought of escaping their life as evacuees than at the thought of seeing Moscow again. Everything in Sverdlovsk, Omsk, Tashkent and Krasnoyarsk had become unbearable: the streets and houses, the stars in the autumn sky, even the taste of bread.
If there was a hopeful Soviet Information Bureau bulletin, they said: ‘Well, it won’t be much longer now.’
If the news was bad, they said: ‘Oh, that means they’ll interrupt the re-evacuation of families.’
Countless stories sprang up about people who’d managed to get back to Moscow without a pass – you had to change trains several times, using local and suburban trains where there were no inspectors.
People had forgotten that only a year before, in October 1941, every extra day spent in Moscow had seemed a torment. How enviously they had looked at their fellow citizens who were about to exchange the dangerous skies of their birthplace for the peace and safety of Tartary and Uzbekhistan . . .
They had forgotten how some of the men and women not included on the lists of evacuees had abandoned their bundles and suitcases and walked to Zagorsk on foot – anything to get out of Moscow. Now people were ready to abandon their work and belongings, abandon their ordered lives, and walk back to Moscow.
In the second half of November the Soviet Information Bureau announced first that a blow had been struck against the German Fascist forces in the region of Vladikavkaz, and then that a successful offensive had been launched in the Stalingrad area. There were nine announcements in the course of two weeks: ‘The offensive continues . . . A new blow struck against the enemy . . . Our forces near Stalingrad, overcoming enemy resistance, have broken through his new line of defence on the east bank of the Don . . . Our forces, continuing their offensive, have advanced another twenty kilometres . . . Our troops in the Central Don region have now taken the offensive against the German Fascist forces . . . The offensive launched by our forces in the Central Don region continues . . . The offensive launched by our forces in the Northern Caucasus . . . A new blow struck by our forces to the south-west of Stalingrad . . . The offensive launched by our forces to the south of Stalingrad . . .’
On New Year’s eve, the Soviet Information Bureau published a report entitled ‘A Summary of the Past Six Weeks of the Stalingrad Offensive’. This finally announced the encirclement of the German armies in Stalingrad.
A change in popular consciousness was about to become manifest; the first stirrings of this had taken place subconsciously; as secretly as the preparations for the offensive itself. For all the apparent similarities, this change in consciousness was to prove very different indeed from that which had followed the earlier victories near Moscow.
The Moscow victory had served chiefly to change people’s attitudes towards the Germans. After December 1941, the mystical fear aroused by the German Army disappeared.
The Stalingrad victory, on the other hand, served mainly to change people’s attitudes towards themselves, to develop a new form of self-consciousness in the army and in the population as a whole. Soviet Russians began to think of themselves differently, to adopt a different manner towards other nationalities. The history of Russia was no longer the history of the sufferings and humiliations undergone by the workers and peasantry; it was the history of Russian national glory.
People’s way of thinking at the time of the Moscow victory was still fundamentally the same as it had been before the war. The reinterpretation of the events of the war, the new consciousness of the power of the Russian armed forces, of the power of the Russian State, was part of a long and complex process. This process had begun long before the war, but only on an unconscious level.
Three major events formed the basis for this new vision of h
uman relationships and of life itself: collectivization, industrialization and the year 1937. These events, like the October Revolution itself, involved the displacement of vast sections of the population, displacements accompanied by the physical extermination of numbers of people far greater than had accompanied the liquidation of the Russian aristocracy and the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie.
These events, presided over by Stalin himself, marked the economic triumph of the builders of the new Soviet State, the builders of ‘Socialism in One Country’. At the same time, these events were the logical result of the October Revolution itself.
This new social order – this order which had triumphed during the period of collectivization, industrialization and the year 1937 with its almost complete change of leading cadres – had preferred not to renounce the old ideological concepts and formulae. The fundamental characteristic of the new order was State nationalism, but it still made use of a phraseology that went back to the beginning of the twentieth century and the formation of the Bolshevik wing of the Social Democratic Party.
The war accelerated a previously unconscious process, allowing the birth of an overtly national consciousness. The word ‘Russian’ once again had meaning.
To begin with, during the retreat, the connotations of this word were mainly negative: the hopelessness of Russian roads, Russian backwardness, Russian confusion, Russian fatalism . . . But a national self-consciousness had been born; it was waiting only for a military victory.
National consciousness is a powerful and splendid force at a time of disaster. It is splendid not because it is nationalist, but because it is human. It is a manifestation of human dignity, human love of freedom, human faith in what is good. But this consciousness can develop in a variety of ways.
No one can deny that the head of a personnel department protecting his Institute from ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘bourgeois nationalists’ is expressing his national consciousness in a different manner to a Red Army soldier defending Stalingrad.
Life and Fate Page 79