Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  It was at this time that attitudes to the Germans began to change. Instead of feeling only hatred for the invaders, people also began to feel contempt and scorn.

  In bunkers and trenches, in tanks and gun emplacements, they stopped referring to the enemy simply as “he” and began mockingly using the names Fritz, Hans or Karlusha (little Karl).

  Countless little stories and jokes about Hitler’s stupidity and the cowardly arrogance of his generals began to do the rounds. These stories arose spontaneously and soon became common property, throughout the whole of the front and even far back into the rear.

  Even the German planes acquired nicknames: the Humpback, the Camel, the Guitar, the Crutch, the Squeaker.

  And people began repeating, “Fritz’s gun is a goon.”

  The sudden appearance of these jokes, stories and nicknames was a sign of the final crystallization of a sense of moral superiority over the enemy.

  In May, Krymov was appointed commissar of an anti-tank brigade.

  The German army went on the offensive again. They destroyed the Soviet forces defending the Kerch Peninsula. Manstein trapped Gorodnyansky as he tried to advance on Kharkov; he encircled the 6th and 57th Armies.

  These terrible days saw the deaths of both General Gorodnyansky and General Kostenko. Kuzma Gurov, the member of the Front military soviet, whom Krymov remembered from Moscow, managed to break out of the encirclement in a tank. Once again, the air was filled with the buzz of German bombers. Once again villages were burning, unharvested grain stood in the fields, and grain silos and rail bridges were being destroyed.

  But this time the Soviet forces were not retreating towards the Bug or the Dnieper. What lay behind them now was the Don, the Volga, and the steppes of Kazakhstan.

  53

  WHAT BROUGHT about the disasters of the first months of the war? First, the Germans were fully mobilized; the 170 divisions Hitler had brought to the Soviet frontier were ready to strike, waiting only for the order. The Soviet troops, on the other hand, were poorly equipped, only partially mobilized and generally unprepared—even though the imminence of the German attack had been obvious enough. Also, there was no second front; considering their rear secure, the Germans were free to throw all their troops and those of their allies against the Soviet Union.

  While Muscovites told one another stories about Soviet troops reaching Königsberg, Soviet paratroopers seizing Warsaw, and brigades of Soviet railwaymen being despatched to convert the track to broad gauge as far as Bucharest—while Muscovites entertained one another with fairy tales, hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine started a long journey east, on foot, in carts and on tractors, in trucks and freight cars. People came to understand the reality of war; that it differed from the reality of the novels they had read and the films they had seen.

  What very few understood, however, was that the swiftness of the German advance disguised the true nature of what was now a people’s war. The Germans’ apparent strength disguised a deeper weakness, while the weakness shown by the retreating Red Army was gradually being transformed into strength.

  The battles of 1941, the battles fought during this long retreat, were the grimmest and most difficult of the war. Nevertheless, the balance of strength was shifting.135 In these tragic, hard-fought battles the future victory was slowly germinating.

  A nation’s character has many facets. Military valour is no less complex; it can declare itself in many ways. There were men ready to march forward to their death even when vast spaces lay free and empty behind them; and there were men who, recognizing they were hopelessly outnumbered, fought only the more fiercely. These are the heroes of the first period of the war. Many are nameless and received no burial. It is to them, in large part, that Russia owes her salvation.

  The war’s first year showed how many such men there were in Soviet Russia. That year saw countless small battles, some swift, some long and obstinate, on unnamed heights, outside villages, in forests, on grassy cart-tracks, in swamps, on unharvested fields, on the slopes of gullies and ravines, by the landing stages of river ferries.

  It was these battles that destroyed the foundations of Hitler’s blitzkrieg strategy, a strategy based on the assumption that it would take the German army eight weeks to cross European Russia. Hitler arrived at this length of time by the simplest of calculations: he divided the distance from the western frontier to the Urals by the average distance that German tanks, self-propelled artillery and motor infantry could cover in one day. This calculation, however, proved mistaken—and this undermined Hitler’s other central assumptions: that Soviet heavy industry could be entirely destroyed and that the Red Army command would be unable to mobilize reserves.

  In the course of this year, Russia retreated a thousand kilometres. Train after train went east carrying not only people but also machine tools, cars, boilers, motors, ballet scenery, libraries, collections of rare manuscripts, paintings by Repin and Raphael, microscopes, mirrors from astronomical observatories, millions of pillows and blankets, household items of all kinds, and millions of photographs of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents long sleeping their eternal sleep in Ukraine, Belorussia, Crimea and Moldavia.

  But, however it may have seemed at the time, this was not only a period of retreat and disaster. The state’s centralized power—the State Defence Committee—successfully organized the movement of millions of people and vast amounts of industrial equipment to the Urals and Siberia, where a powerful coal and steel industry was quickly established.

  Members of the Party Central Committee and Party leaders and members at all levels directed the construction of new mines, factories and workers’ barracks; they enabled labour battalions to achieve remarkable feats in the darkness of the Siberian nights, in blizzards and deep snow.

  During this year, in these hundreds of new factories, workers and engineers multiplied the military might of the Soviet state. At the same time, the energy of millions of people previously working in china, cardboard, pencil, furniture, footwear, hosiery and confectionery factories, in workshops and collectives of every kind, was redirected to the defence industry; tens of thousands of small enterprises became, in effect, army units, just as countless thousands of farmers, agronomists, teachers and accountants—people who had never dreamed of doing military service—became soldiers. If this vast amount of work has, to many, seemed insignificant, it is because it is the vastest things that most often escape our notice. The people’s rage, the people’s pain and suffering, was transformed into steel, into gun barrels, into explosives and armour, into the engines of bombers.

  In December 1941, America entered the war, with all its colossal industrial might. England, no longer under immediate threat, went on rapidly increasing its production of armaments. And thousands of kilometres behind the front line, Soviet workers and engineers were winning the battle over both the quantity and quality of military engines of every kind.

  •

  The balance of military and industrial might was shifting.

  Nevertheless, in 1942 Hitler was able to deploy 179 German divisions on the Soviet–German front. Also deployed against the Soviet Union were sixty-one divisions from the various countries then allied to Germany. All in all, 240 divisions, more than 3 million men, were sent against the Red Army. This was twice the total number of troops that Germany, Turkey and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had deployed against Russia in 1914.

  Hitler concentrated the greatest number of these troops on a 500-kilometre sector of the front between Oryol and Lozovaya. In late May 1942, the Germans began to advance on the Kharkov sector. In late June, they began to advance on Kursk. On 2 July, German tanks and infantry went on the offensive on the Belgorod and Volchansky axes. Sevastopol fell on 3 July.

  Once again the Germans breached the Soviet front. They captured Rostov and broke through to the Caucasus. Not only to Hitler, but also to many of those caught in the whirlwind, this seemed like another chapter in their victorious blitzkrieg.

>   But these German victories only paved the way for their eventual defeat. The reality of the war—everything except Hitler’s strategy—had changed.

  54

  AFTER SERYOZHA’S departure, the Shaposhnikovs’ home became sad and silent. Alexandra Vladimirovna worked long hours, inspecting the factories and workshops preparing the mixture for Molotov cocktails. She came home only late in the evening. Her workplace was far from the city centre and there were no buses; she often had to wait a long time for a lift from a passing vehicle, and more than once she ended up walking all the way home.

  One evening Alexandra was so exhausted that she telephoned Sofya Osipovna. Sofya sent a truck from the hospital to take her back home. On the way she asked the driver to stop at Beketovka, at Seryozha’s barracks.

  The barracks turned out to be empty; everyone had been taken off to the steppe. When she got back home and passed this news on, her daughters looked at her anxiously, but she seemed entirely calm. She even smiled as she repeated the truck driver’s reply when she asked him about Sofya Osipovna: “Comrade Levinton,” he had said, “is a famous surgeon, and she is always fair and just. But her character is sometimes a little difficult.”

  Sofya had indeed become more edgy and difficult over the last few months. She came to the Shaposhnikovs less often—she had ever more wounded to treat. Day and night an enormous battle was being fought on the western approaches to the Don, and the wounded were being taken to Stalingrad.

  Once Sofya had said, “It isn’t easy for me. For some reason everyone thinks I’m made of iron.” And another time, after coming to the Shaposhnikovs straight from work, she had burst into tears and said, “That poor boy who died an hour ago on the operating table . . . Such eyes, such a sweet, touching smile.”

  The last few weeks had seen more and more air-raid alerts.

  In daytime the German planes flew high, leaving long fluffy spirals behind them, and everyone knew that these were reconnaissance planes photographing factories and port facilities. And then, almost every night there would be the sound of solitary bombers—and loud explosions over the still city.

  Spiridonov now hardly saw anything of his family; the power station was on a war footing. He would telephone after an air raid and ask, “Is everyone all right?”

  Vera was often sullen and irritable when she got back from hospital. Bewildered by her anger and rudeness, Marusya would sometimes look around in search of sympathy. One day she complained to Sofya, “It’s stupid. She refuses point-blank to help me—her own mother—with ordinary housework. And then she’s extraordinarily kind and helpful to people she doesn’t know at all.”

  Sofya replied crossly, “If someone as bad-tempered as Vera came to work for me, I assure you I’d throw them out within twenty-four hours.”

  But Marusya reserved for herself the right to complain about her daughter. Not even her husband was allowed to usurp this prerogative—and so she immediately took Vera’s side: “Well, partly it’s a matter of heredity. Stepan’s father was uncouth and ill-mannered. Anyway, all I ever think or talk about at home is my work. It’s not surprising if Vera’s offhand, if she has to look for friendship elsewhere. Really she couldn’t be more hard-working and pure. If she’s in a bad mood, I admit, you can’t even get her to go and buy some bread—but another day she’ll scrub all the floors without being asked and then stay up all night washing piles of laundry.”

  Sofya burst out laughing: “Oh, you mothers, you’re all the same!”

  In late July and early August all-too-familiar names began to appear in Sovinform Bureau bulletins: Tsimlyanskaya, Kletskaya, Kotelnikovo—towns and villages on the outskirts of Stalingrad that were almost a part of the city.

  But refugees from Kotelnikovo, Kletskaya and Zimovniki had, in fact, begun to appear in Stalingrad some time before this; they had heard the roar of the approaching avalanche. And new wounded were being brought to Vera and Sofya Osipovna every day. Only a few days before, these men had been fighting on the west bank of the Don, and their stories filled everyone with alarm. The war knew no rest; day and night, it was drawing nearer the Volga.

  It was impossible to get away from the war. If the Shaposhnikovs tried to talk about Viktor’s work, this at once led them to think of his mother; if they mentioned Ludmila, the conversation would soon turn to Tolya—was he, or wasn’t he, still alive? Grief was lurking outside, ready to fling open every door of the house.

  And it seemed that the only pretext for jokes and laughter was Colonel Novikov’s unexpected visit.

  “All he could talk about,” said Alexandra Vladimirovna, “was the ‘Russian soul’ or the ‘spirit of Russia.’ To me it felt as if we were back in 1914.”

  “No, Mama, you don’t understand,” said Marusya. “Thanks to the Revolution these concepts have assumed an entirely new meaning.”

  Over supper one evening, at Sofya Osipovna’s instigation, they embarked on a “critical examination” of Novikov.

  “Somehow he’s very tense,” said Alexandra. “He makes me feel awkward. I keep thinking he’s about to take offence for some reason—or else say something offensive. I’m not sure I’d want our Seryozha to be under the command of a man like him.”

  “Women, women,” said Sofya with a sigh—as if she weren’t one herself and the failings of her sex had nothing to do with her. “What, do you think, is the secret of Novikov’s success? He’s a hero of his time—and women love heroes of their time. There are fashions in marriages, just like in dresses. In the decade before the First World War, smart young ladies fell in love with poets and dreamers, with Symbolists of all kinds. Next, they were all marrying engineers—the mystics and Symbolists vanished into thin air. The hero of the 1930s was the director of a major construction site and today’s hero’s a colonel. But that said, it’s a whole week since the man last put in an appearance. What’s he playing at?”

  “You’ve got nothing to worry about, Auntie Zhenya,” said Vera. “You’ve bewitched him—he’ll be back soon enough.”

  “Yes, of course,” added Sofya, to general laughter. “And he’s even left his suitcase with us.”

  At first, Zhenya would feel annoyed; then she would join in the laughter. “You know, Sofya Osipovna,” she said, “I think you talk about Novikov more than anyone—and certainly more than I do.” But Zhenya could not quite admit, even to herself, that she had not merely learned to put up with this banter—she truly enjoyed it.

  Zhenya lacked the arrogance and calm rationality usually to be found in very beautiful women who can always be certain of their success. She took little care of her appearance; she often failed to do her hair properly and she was capable of putting on an old baggy coat and shoes with worn heels. Her sisters blamed all this on Krymov’s bad influence. “The steed and the quivering doe,” Ludmila had once laughed. “With me as the steed,” Zhenya had replied. When men fell in love with her, which happened only too often, she would feel upset and say, “Now I’ve gone and lost another good comrade.”

  She used to feel a strange sense of guilt before her “suitors,” and Novikov was no exception. A strong, severe man, entirely taken up by his demanding and important work—and suddenly she would see in his eyes a look of bewilderment.

  She had been thinking recently about her life with Krymov. She felt sorry for him, and this confused her. She did not realize that what evoked her pity was her feeling—now stronger than ever—that their separation was irrevocable.

  When Krymov had stayed at Viktor and Ludmila’s dacha and gone for a walk in the garden, Ludmila had always taken care to walk beside him, knowing from experience that he would be sure to trample her phlox and other treasures “with his great hooves.”

  Ordinary Russian cigarettes were too weak for him. He preferred to roll his own, which were huge and very strong. When he waved his arms about, sparks flew through the air. As they drank tea together, he sometimes got carried away by his own eloquence. Everyone would laugh as Ludmila removed her favourite Chekhoni
n cups and spread a small towel over the embroidered tablecloth.136

  Krymov did not like music and was entirely indifferent to objets d’art, but he felt nature deeply and could speak about it well. He had no time, however, for the splendid resorts of Crimea and the Black Sea coast. Once, on holiday in Miskhor, he barely left his room for an entire month; lowering the blinds against the sun, he simply lay on the couch and read, showering grey ash over the parquet floor. But one day when the wind picked up and the sea turned rough, he went down to the shore. Returning late in the evening, he said to Zhenya, “It’s splendid out there—like the Revolution!”

  He also had strange tastes in food. One day, when a comrade from Vienna was coming to eat with them, Krymov said to Zhenya, “It would be good to have something tasty.”

  “What are you thinking of?” Zhenya replied. “Just say what you want.”

  “Well, I’m not sure, but pea soup would certainly be good—and then liver and onion.”

  There was no doubting Krymov’s moral strength. Once she had heard him give a talk, in a large Moscow factory, on the anniversary of the Revolution. When he raised his calm, quiet voice and at the same time hammered his fist down on the table, a breath of excitement passed through the hall and Zhenya felt a tingle down to her fingertips.

  Now, though, her feeling of pity for him was overwhelming. In the evening, after yet more banter initiated by Sofya Osipovna, Zhenya went into the bathroom and locked the door, saying she was going to wash her hair.

  But the hot water in the saucepan turned gradually cold, and Zhenya was still sitting on the edge of the bath, thinking, “Why is it that people close to me can seem so distant? Why do none of them—even Mama—understand anything?”