Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  47

  ON 10 JULY 1942 the 62nd Army—now one of the units constituting the south-eastern part of the Soviet front—was ordered to take up defensive positions in the Great Bend of the Don, to prevent any further German advance to the east.

  At the same time the Supreme Command brought forward from the reserves an additional large formation, deploying it on the left flank of the 62nd Army. This created a new line of defence against the German divisions threatening to break through to the Don.

  The first shots fired on 17 July marked the beginning of the defensive battle on the far approaches to Stalingrad.

  The next few days saw only insignificant clashes between the German vanguard and small Soviet infantry or tank-reconnaissance detachments. These minor but still fierce battles—most of them fought by individual companies and battalions—allowed the newly deployed units to test their weapons and to get a sense of the enemy’s strength. In the meantime the main forces were working twenty-four hours a day to reinforce their positions.

  On 20 July the German forces attacked. Major tank and infantry formations were ordered to advance to the Don, to force a crossing, to cover the short distance from there to the Volga, occupying the area between the two rivers that the German staff officers referred to as “the bottle’s neck” and to enter Stalingrad by 25 July.

  So Hitler ordered.

  The German High Command, however, soon grasped that there was no “vacuum” on the approaches to the Don, only in the strategic imagination of those who thought it a simple matter to capture a major city and who believed they could set a precise date by which this must be done.

  The fighting was fierce, with no let-up day or night. The Soviet anti-tank defence proved both strong and mobile. Soviet bombers and ground-attack aircraft carried out powerful strikes against the advancing Germans. Small infantry detachments armed with anti-tank rifles fought tenaciously.

  The Soviet defence was active. Their sudden counter-attacks in individual sectors made it difficult for the Germans to deploy their forces.

  These three weeks of fighting did not, in the end, halt the Germans, who had concentrated a massive strike force. Nevertheless, these battles slowed the German advance. The Germans suffered considerable losses of both men and equipment. They failed to execute their grand plan; they were unable, in a single operation, to cross the Don, continue their advance and capture Stalingrad.

  48

  KRYMOV’S life had not been going well when the war began. Zhenya had left him the previous winter and had been living since then with her mother, her elder sister Ludmila or a friend in Leningrad. She wrote letters telling him about her plans, about her work, about her meetings with people they knew. Her tone was calm and friendly, as if she were simply visiting friends or family and would soon be back home.

  One day she asked him to send her 2,000 roubles, and he did this gladly. It upset him when she returned the money to him a month later by wire transfer.

  Krymov would have found it easier if Zhenya had stopped writing to him altogether. Her letters, which came every seven or eight weeks, were a torment; he waited for them eagerly, but Zhenya’s friendly tone only made these letters all the more painful. When she wrote that she had been to the theatre, he was not interested in what she had to say about the play, the stage design or the actors; what he wanted to know was who she had gone with, who had sat next to her, or seen her back home. Zhenya, however, did not tell him this.

  Krymov’s work brought him no satisfaction, though he was diligent and always stayed in the office until late at night. He was a department head in a publishing house that specialized in economics and the social sciences; there were many meetings, and there was a lot to read and edit.

  Krymov’s move to the publishing house meant that his former Comintern colleagues had less reason to visit, or even telephone him; they no longer needed to ask for advice or share their news and concerns. And since Zhenya’s departure, still fewer people had been coming to his now rather bleak apartment, with its strong smell of cigarette smoke. On Sundays he would keep looking at the phone—but sometimes the whole day would pass by without it ringing at all. Or if it finally did ring, and he joyfully picked up the receiver, it would turn out to be someone from the office wanting to talk about work, or the translator of some book or other wanting to discuss his manuscript in exhausting detail.

  Krymov wrote to his younger brother, Semyon, in the Urals, suggesting that he should move to Moscow with his wife and daughter; he could give them one of his rooms. Semyon was a metals engineer. For several years after his graduation, he had worked in Moscow but been unable to find a room anywhere. He had lived first in Pokrovskоyе-Streshnevo, then in Veshnyaki and then in Losinka; to get to work on time he had to get up at half past five in the morning.

  In the summer, when many Muscovites left for their dachas, Semyon had rented a room in the city and his wife, Lusya, had enjoyed the delights of a comfortable apartment—gas, electricity and a bathroom. For three months they would have a break from smoking stoves, snowdrifts, wells that froze over in January, and having to walk to the station every morning in the dark.

  “Semyon’s an unusual kind of aristocrat,” Krymov had joked. “He winters in the country and spends his summers in the city.”

  Semyon and Lusya would sometimes come round. Krymov could see that they imagined he led a life of extraordinary interest and importance. He would ask them to tell him about themselves—and Lusya would smile in embarrassment, look down at the floor and say, “But we’ve got nothing to tell you. Our lives are very dull.” And Semyon would add, “Yes, I just do ordinary engineering work, on the shop floor. But I hear you’ve been on a long journey, to a congress of Pacific Ocean trade unions.”

  In 1936, when Lusya was pregnant, Semyon decided that they should move to Chelyabinsk.98 From there he wrote regularly to Krymov. He said barely a word about his own work and it was clear that his love and admiration for his elder brother were as strong as ever. Nevertheless, when Krymov suggested he return to Moscow, Semyon replied that this was impossible, and anyway he didn’t want to—he was now deputy chief engineer of a huge factory. He invited Krymov to come and stay for a few days, to see his new niece. “You’ll be well looked after,” he wrote. “We have a house of our own in a pine forest, and Lusya has created a splendid garden.”

  Krymov was glad to hear that Semyon was doing so well, but he realized that he and his family were now unlikely ever to return to Moscow. This made him sad. He had dreamed of a kind of family commune, picturing himself, in a few years’ time, taking his niece to the zoo every Sunday morning and carrying her about on his shoulders when he got home from work.

  A few days after the beginning of the war Krymov wrote to the Party Central Committee, volunteering to join up. He was enlisted as a commissar and posted to the Southwestern Front.

  On the day he locked his apartment and, with a green kitbag on his shoulder and a small case in his hand, caught a tram to the Kiev station, he felt a new confidence and peace of mind. His loneliness, he felt, was now locked away in his apartment. He was, at last, liberated from it; the nearer the train got to the front, the calmer he felt. “This rebel, alas, seeks storms, as if in storm lies peace,” he said to himself. Day and night, the lines written by the young Lermontov kept coming back to him.99

  Through the carriage window he saw Bryansk freight station, all crumpled metal, splintered stone and lacerated earth—the work of German bombers. Still standing there on the tracks were the fragile black and red skeletons of freight wagons. From loudspeakers over empty platforms he could hear Moscow radio resonantly denying the latest lies put out by the Transozean German news agency.

  The train passed through stations Krymov remembered from the Civil War—Tereschenko, Mikhailovsky Hamlet, Krolevets, Konotop . . .

  The meadows, the oak groves, the pine forests, the fields of wheat and buckwheat, the tall poplars and the white huts that seemed in the twilight like pale, deathly face
s—everything both on the earth and in the sky looked sad and anxious.

  In Bakhmach the train was bombed; two carriages were destroyed. Locomotives whistled and hooted, their iron voices full of living despair.

  On one stretch of track the train stopped twice; flying low overhead was a twin-engine Messerschmitt 110, with a cannon and a heavy machine gun. The passengers ran out into the fields, looked around in confusion, and then returned to their carriages.

  They crossed the Dnieper shortly before dawn. The train seemed fearful of the echo sent back by the dark river with its white sandbanks.

  In Moscow, Krymov had assumed that the main fighting was taking place around Zhitomir, where in 1920 he had been wounded in a battle with the Poles. At Southwestern Front HQ he learned that the situation was a great deal worse than the newspapers made out or than he or any of his fellow passengers had imagined: the Germans had already almost reached Kiev. They were close to Svyatoshino; in an attempt to break through to Demievka, they had engaged with Rodimtsev’s Airborne Brigade. The Soviet rear was threatened by Guderian’s tanks, which were moving down from the north-east, towards Gomel—while Kleist’s Army Group was moving up from the south, along the east bank of the Dnieper. Huge pincers looked set to close, isolating the Soviet troops still in Kiev and on the west bank.

  The most senior political officer, a divisional commissar, was calm and methodical, with a slow, quiet manner of speech. Krymov was impressed by the straightforwardness with which he emphasized the gravity of the situation, while still showing the confidence expected of a leader. He could, it seemed, have continued calmly signing orders and listening to reports even if his Political Administration had been located in the mouth of an active volcano.

  Krymov was ordered to one of the armies on the right flank, to give political information talks to the soldiers. The army’s most distant division was, at the time, positioned in the forests and swamps of Belorussia.

  First, though, Krymov went to the Front operations section. There he found a group of senior commanders standing around a map. A middle-aged general, with a wrinkled face and glasses, was running his hand over his greying hair and saying languidly, with a slight smile, “It’s only too clear that the German High Command has begun a colossal encirclement, on a historically unprecedented scale.” Pointing to the German positions on the map, he added, “You can see the horseshoe—and it’s a horseshoe that wants to crush us. In the last war, they encircled Samsonov’s corps. This time they intend to encircle an entire Front.”

  Someone said a few words Krymov was unable to make out. The general shrugged and said. “The German High Command has a strategy. Russian-style hoping for the best will get us nowhere. We need to do more than that if we’re to outmanouevre them.”

  Krymov made his way into the next room. An out-of-breath major collided with him in the doorway. “Is General Vlasov in there?” he asked—and rushed past without waiting for an answer.100

  •

  On the sector of the front Krymov was posted to, there was a general sense of calm. Many of the political-section strategists seemed strangely serene. “The Germans have exhausted themselves. They’ve got no more aircraft, no fuel, no tanks, no shells. It’s two whole weeks since we last saw one of their planes.”

  This was neither the first nor the last of Krymov’s encounters with such optimists. He knew very well how quickly they panicked in any difficult situation, wandering about in bewilderment and muttering, “Who’d have thought it!”

  Many of the soldiers in one of the infantry divisions were from Chernigov and happened to have been deployed very close to their own villages, which were now occupied by the Germans. The Germans evidently knew this, no doubt from interrogating prisoners. Looking at the stars as they lay at night in their trenches—in quiet oak groves or amid tall hemp or maize—these soldiers would suddenly hear an amplified woman’s voice. Treacherously authoritative, this voice would repeat, in Ukrainian, “Iva-an! Come ho-o-ome! Iva-an! Come ho-o-ome!” This iron woman’s voice, which seemed to come from the sky itself, was followed by a brief businesslike speech pronounced with a foreign accent. The “brothers from Chernigov” should return at once to their homes—or else, within a day or two, they would be burned to death by flamethrowers, or crushed under the treads of tanks.

  Once again, the loud voice: “Iva-an! Iva-an! Come ho-o-ome!” Then the sullen roar of motors—the soldiers thought that the Germans possessed a special wooden rattle that mimicked the sound of a tank engine.

  There were mornings when men turned out to have gone missing. Only their rifles remained, lying on the bottom of trenches.101

  Two weeks later, Krymov was on his way back from this quiet army to Front HQ.

  The driver who had given him a lift stopped just outside Kiev. Krymov continued on foot. He walked past a long, deep ravine with clay sides and then stood still for a moment, taking involuntary delight in the peace and charm of the early morning. The ground was covered by yellow leaves, and the leaves still left on the trees shone in the low sun. The air felt unusually light. Bird calls were only the faintest of ripples on the clear surface of a deep, transparent silence. Then the sun reached the upper slopes of the ravine. The light and the half-light, the silence and the bird calls, the sun’s warmth and the still-cool air created a sense of something extraordinary: any moment now, perhaps, some kind-hearted old men from a fairy tale would appear, quietly climbing the slope.

  Krymov left the road and walked through the trees. Then he saw an elderly woman in a dark blue coat, a white canvas sack over her shoulders.

  Catching sight of Krymov, she screamed.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  She ran her hand across her eyes, smiled wearily and said, “Oh, my God, I took you for a German.”

  Krymov asked the way to Kreshchatik,102 and the woman replied, “You’re going the wrong way. From the ravine, from Babi Yar, you should have gone left—but the way you’re going now will take you to Podol. You must go back to Babi Yar, then past the Jewish cemetery, then along Melnik Street, then Lvov Street.”103

  As he made his way down towards Kreshchatik, he thought he had stumbled into hell.

  Soviet troops were leaving the Ukrainian capital. Taking up the whole width of the street, infantry, cavalry, guns and transport carts were moving slowly along Kreshchatik.

  The entire army seemed to have been struck dumb. Heads were bowed. Everyone was looking down at the ground.

  Vehicles and guns were camouflaged with branches of birch, maple, aspen and hazel, and millions of autumn leaves fluttered in the air, recalling the fields and forests now being abandoned.

  And all the variety of colours, of weapons, insignia and uniforms, every distinction of face and age was erased by a single common expression of sorrow; this sorrow could be seen in the eyes of the soldiers, in the commanders’ bowed heads, in the banners now rolled up in their green cases, in the horses’ slow steps, in the muted rumble of engines, in the knocking of wheels that sounded like a funereal drumbeat.

  Krymov saw a stout young woman with a baby in her arms, forcing her way through the crowd. She wanted to throw herself under the wheels of one of the guns, to halt this fateful retreat. People still only half-clothed were rushing after her, weeping, shouting, begging the soldiers to stop her.

  Hundreds of women and children in autumn and winter coats, carrying bundles and suitcases, were trying to make their way to the Dnieper, exhausted and out of breath before they had even left the city.104 Detachments of policemen, firemen and apprentices were marching in the same direction. Old men stared at them glassily, as if hoping for some miracle. Nothing in the world, it seemed, could be more terrible than the wrinkled, yet childishly helpless faces of these old men, each alone in the crowd.

  The Red Army soldiers were all gripped by a tight silence.

  They knew, with an absolute, physical clarity, that every step they took to the east brought the still unseen Germans closer. Every step they t
ook towards the Dnieper drew Hitler’s divisions closer to Kiev.

  And—as if summoned by the approaching dark forces—shifty-eyed, hostile-looking people began to appear in the yards and alleys. Their whispering grew ever louder. Keeping a sly eye on the retreating soldiers, they were preparing to meet those now approaching. It was here, in a narrow alley, that Krymov first heard words of Ukrainian he would all too soon hear again: “What’s been, we have seen. What’s to be, we shall see.”105

  Later, whenever he remembered this last day in Kiev—the cloudless blue sky, the gleaming windows, the streets carpeted with gold leaves—Krymov felt as if an axe were cleaving his heart; the pain was as sharp as his ever-present sense of personal loss.

  In the following months there were many other times when he was among the last to leave as the Red Army abandoned a city or town to the Germans. Rather than lessening, the pain only grew still harder to bear. These towns and cities were like helpless people—people near and dear to him being taken away to some other life that was terrible, beyond understanding and infinitely distant.

  Krymov had barely crossed to the east bank before the Germans, after knocking out the Soviet anti-aircraft defences, carried out a massive air raid on Brovary. Ninety bombers took part. This brought home to Krymov the full, awful meaning of the words “air supremacy.”

  Guderian’s panzer divisions, moving down from the north, towards Gomel and Chernigov, were now securely positioned on the east bank of the Dnieper, to the rear of the Soviet forces in and around Kiev. It was clear that Guderian’s aim was to link up with Kleist’s Army Group South, which had broken through the Soviet front near Dnepropetrovsk.

  A week later the pincers closed. Krymov was now behind the front line, in territory occupied by the Germans.