Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  “Well, it’s clear enough he’s never seen war,” the soldier said with a sigh. Putting his boot on the bench, the first soldier sat down on the grass beside him and said, in a teacherly voice, “That’s just the way it is. None of them have a clue—not till they’ve had a few bombs smash up their lives for them.”

  In a very different voice, he then called out to Mostovskoy, “Come and join us, Grandad. Have a bite to eat with us, and a drop to drink.”

  Mostovskoy sat down on the bench, beside the boot, and the soldier gave him a glass of vodka, and some bread and fatback. “There, Grandad—you’ll have been getting thin back here in the rear.”

  Mostovskoy asked how long it was since they’d been at the front.

  “We were there this time yesterday, and we’ll be back there tomorrow. We’ve been to the support-services dump, to collect a consignment of tyres.”

  “And how are things going there?” asked Mostovskoy.

  The soldier who’d taken off his boot said, “War’s a grim business out in the steppe. The Fritzes are giving us a hard time.”

  “It’s a joy being back here,” said his mate. “It’s so quiet. Everyone’s so calm. No weeping and wailing.”

  “It’ll be another story when the war’s moved a bit closer,” said the soldier wearing only one boot. Two boys in bare feet had appeared and were gazing in thoughtful silence at the bread and the fatback. The soldier looked at them. “What’s up, lads? Looking for something to get your teeth into? Here you are! In heat like this a man doesn’t much feel like eating,” he said, as if ashamed of his generosity.

  Mostovskoy said goodbye to the two soldiers and set off to the Shaposhnikovs.

  It was Tamara Berozkina who opened the door to him. She asked him to come in and wait—the family were all out, and she had come round to use Alexandra Vladimirovna’s sewing machine. Mostovskoy handed her the package for Professor Shtrum and said it would be best if he just went on his way. Everyone would be tired when they got back, and they wouldn’t be wanting visitors.

  Tamara said he couldn’t have come at a better time. The post was no longer reliable, but Colonel Novikov was flying to Moscow first thing tomorrow. Mostovskoy had never heard of this Colonel Novikov, but Tamara spoke as if he’d known him for years. And most likely, she added, Novikov would be staying in the Shtrums’ apartment.

  She took the envelope between her thumb and finger and said in horror, “Heavens, what filthy paper—anyone would think it’s been lying in a cellar for the last two years.”

  There and then, standing in the corridor, she wrapped the envelope in a sheet of the thick pink paper people use to make decorations for Christmas trees.

  58

  VIKTOR went to see Postoev in the hotel.

  In the room with him was a group of engineers. Amid the tobacco smoke, in green overalls with large protruding pockets, Postoev looked like a huge construction superintendent surrounded by technicians, foremen and brigade leaders. Only his fur-lined slippers were out of keeping.

  He was clearly excited and he was arguing a great deal. Viktor was impressed—he had never seen Postoev so animated.

  There was one very important figure present—a member of the board of the People’s Commissariat, or maybe even a deputy people’s commissar. A short man, with curly blond hair and a pale face with high cheekbones, he was sitting at the table in an armchair. The others addressed him by name and patronymic: Andrey Trofimovich.

  Sitting close to Andrey Trofimovich were two rather thin men—one with a short straight nose, the other with a slender face and greying temples. The man with the short nose was Chepchenko, director of a metals factory recently evacuated from the south of the country to the Urals. He spoke with a soft, melodious Ukrainian accent, but this did not diminish the impression he gave of extraordinary obstinacy; on the contrary, it only intensified this impression. When people argued with him, a guilty smile would appear on his lips, as if to say, “I’d be only too glad to agree with you, but I’m afraid this is just the way I am. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  The man with the slender face and grey hair was Sverchkov; he had a Urals accent and had clearly been born and bred there. He was the director of a well-known factory. Newspapers often carried accounts of receptions held there for delegations of gunners and tank commanders.

  Sverchkov was a Urals patriot. A sentence he liked to repeat was “Yes, that’s how we do things in the Urals.” He appeared to dislike Chepchenko. Whenever the latter spoke, Sverchkov’s bright blue eyes narrowed and his fine upper lip lifted a little, revealing his yellow tobacco-stained teeth.

  Next to Postoev sat a short stocky man in a general’s tunic, with yellow-grey eyes that moved slowly from person to person. Everyone referred to him simply as “the general,” often addressing him indirectly: “Well, what does the general think?”

  Near the window, sitting the wrong way round on his chair, his chin on its back, was a completely bald, pink-faced, independent-looking young man. Viktor never got to hear his name; everyone addressed him, for some reason, simply as Smezhnik (“Partner Factory”). On his chest, Smezhnik wore three medals.

  The engineers all sat in a row on a long sofa: factory chief engineers, power engineers, heads of experimental workshops—all frowning with concentration, all bearing the mark of long months of hard labour and little sleep.

  There was one elderly man, probably a former worker who had been promoted; he had pale blue eyes, a cheerful, inquisitive smile and—shining brightly against his dark jacket—two Orders of Lenin. Sitting next to him was a young man in glasses who reminded Viktor of one of his postgraduates, worn out by too many late nights of study.

  These men were the big shots, the leading lights in the field of Soviet quality-steel production.

  •

  As Viktor entered the room, Andrey Trofimovich had been saying in a loud voice, “Who says your factory can’t produce armour plating? You’ve received more from us than anybody. Why can’t your factory deliver what you promised to the State Defence Committee?”

  The man being criticized replied, “But Andrey Trofimovich, don’t you remember—”

  “That’s enough of your buts,” Andrey Trofimovich interrupted angrily. “Buts don’t kill Germans and you can’t fire shells from them. We’ve given you all the metal and coke you need. We’ve given you meat, tobacco and sunflower oil—and all we get in return is buts.”

  Seeing all these strangers engaged in serious discussion, Viktor took a step back. He would have left, but Postoev asked him to stay, saying their business was nearly finished.

  Viktor was surprised to discover that everyone present knew who he was. He had thought that his name was known only to professors, postgraduates and the more senior Moscow students.

  Postoev quietly explained to Viktor that he had been expected at a meeting that morning in the People’s Commissariat but had been feeling poorly. His heart had been giving him trouble. And so Andrey Trofimovich, who didn’t like to waste time, had decided to hold the meeting in the hotel. They had already reached the last item on the agenda: the use of high-frequency electric currents in the processing of quality steel.

  Now addressing the meeting as a whole, Postoev said, “Viktor Pavlovich has elaborated a number of hypotheses of considerable import for contemporary electrical engineering. Chance has brought him to us just as we prepare to address questions closely related to his work.”

  “Sit down, Viktor Pavlovich,” said Andrey Trofimovich. “We will certainly trouble you for a free consultation.”

  The young man in glasses who reminded Viktor of one of his postgraduates said, “Professor Shtrum can have no idea what a struggle it was for me to obtain a copy of his latest work—in the end I had to get someone to make a special trip by plane to deliver it to me in Sverdlovsk.”

  “And did you find it useful?” said Viktor.

  “How can you ask?” the young man replied. It did not, for even a moment, occur to him that Vikto
r honestly did doubt the usefulness of his work to scientists and engineers struggling with real, practical difficulties. “Needless to say, I didn’t find it easy reading. I had to sweat over it.” At this point he looked more than ever like Viktor’s postgraduate student. “But I’m glad I did. I’d made several mistakes, and you showed me how and where I’d gone wrong.”

  “You also made a mistake just now, when we were discussing the programme,” said the general, without the least humour or irony. He was looking at the young man intently, his eyes now appearing entirely yellow. “But I’ve no idea which academy will rescue you this time.”

  Then everyone forgot about Viktor and carried on as if he weren’t there.

  Sometimes they used a factory jargon all of their own and Viktor was unable to understand what they were saying.

  The young man in glasses got so carried away and began to talk about his research in such detail that Andrey Trofimovich had to ask him to stop, saying pleadingly, “Have a heart! You’re giving us a year’s worth of lectures, but we’ve only got forty minutes to cover everything else on the agenda.”

  Soon after this they moved on to more practical matters—the overall programme, the workforce, the relationship of individual factories to the association as a whole and to the People’s Commissariat. Viktor found all this fascinating.

  Andrey Trofimovich did not mince his words. Viktor was struck by how often he came out with phrases like “All right, that’s enough of you and your so-called objective conditions . . . Every one of your requests was granted . . . You received everything in person . . . The State Defence Committee gave you everything . . . No other factory was allocated more coke . . . You were awarded the Order of the Badge of Honour—but there’s no honour that can’t be revoked.”

  At first it seemed strange that the common cause, the cause that bound these men so closely together, should give rise to so much ill will and mockery.

  What lay behind their arguments, however, was shared passion—their love for a cause that mattered more to them than anything else in the world.

  These men were very different from one another; some were wary of innovation, others loved nothing more. The general was proud that he had overfulfilled the Defence Committee’s plan using only ancient furnaces built by self-taught craftsmen in the days of the tsars. Sverchkov, on the other hand, read out a telegram he had received a month earlier: official approval from Moscow of his innovations—the outstanding success he had achieved with new installations he had constructed with startling boldness.

  The general cited the opinions of old workers and craftsmen; Chepchenko relied on personal experience; Smezhnik preferred to rely on decisions taken by his superiors. Some of those present were naturally cautious; others, more audacious, said things like “What do I care how they do things abroad? My design office has followed its own path, and the results have been excellent in all respects.”

  Some were almost plodding, others quick and brusque. The young man in glasses teased Andrey Trofimovich and seemed not to care about his approval. Smezhnik glanced up at him after every word and asked, “What does Andrey Trofimovich think?”

  When Smezhnik boasted that he had overfulfilled the plan, Sverchkov, the Urals patriot, said, “I had a visit from your Party organizer. I know that your workers have been freezing in tents and shoddily built barracks. You’ve had men swell up from hunger and you’ve had one member of a national minority drop dead on the shop floor from scurvy. Yes, you’re certainly not a man for half-measures—though you don’t look undernourished yourself!” And Sverchkov pointed a long bony finger towards Smezhnik’s rosy face.

  “And I know,” Smezhnik retorted, “that you had a children’s canteen built at your factory, with white tiles on the walls and marble tabletops—and then in February you were criticized for failing to supply metal to the front.”

  “You’re lying,” Sverchkov shouted back. “It’s true I got it in the neck in February, but that was before the canteen even had walls. In June, I received an expression of gratitude from the State Defence Committee. By then the kitchen was fully functioning. We’ve achieved 118 per cent of the norm. Do you really think that the only way to do that is to give the workers’ children so little food that they all get rickets?”

  But it was Andrey Trofimovich whom Viktor found most interesting of all. “Go on, take risks, we’re all in this together—and we’ll answer for it together!” he said more than once. “Yes, go on! Have a go!” he said to one director. “Being scared gets you nowhere. There’s no ignoring a Party directive, but life’s a directive too. Today’s directive will be out of date tomorrow—it’s you who must give the signal. Steel production—that’s your only true directive!” He looked round at Viktor, smiled and asked, “What do you think, comrade Shtrum? Am I talking sense?”

  “You most certainly are!” Viktor replied.

  Andrey Trofimovich looked at his watch, shook his head sadly and turned to Postoev. “Leonid Sergeyevich, please summarize the technical issues.”

  Listening to Postoev’s response, Viktor was filled with admiration. The clarity with which he summarized complex ideas made his habitual self-assurance seem right and legitimate. He emphasized the value of true understanding and the danger of chasing after spectacular short-term results that would, in the end, bring no real benefits. He clearly had a natural ability to focus on what really mattered.

  Then it was Andrey Trofimovich’s turn to speak: “There can be no doubt now of the importance of our quarterly plan. Remember last November, when the Germans were just outside Moscow and the factories to the west had all ceased production? Every factory was either on a train or else lying in the Siberian snow, waiting to be reassembled. There were many of us, back then, who thought we could afford to invest energy and resources only into what would yield immediate results—into what would bring us high-quality steel if not within twenty-four hours, at least within the next week. It was during those grim months that Stalin resolved to construct an entirely new iron and steel industry. But now that we have thousands of new machine tools at work in Siberia, Kazakhstan and the Urals, now that we have tripled our production of quality steel, where would we be without all those newly constructed blast furnaces and open-hearth furnaces? What would we be doing with all our fine lathes, hammers, rolling mills and blooming mills? That kind of thinking is what I call leadership—true leadership! It’s not enough to think about what your factory will be doing tomorrow—you need to be thinking about what your factory will be doing a year from tomorrow.”

  And then, evidently wanting, at least for a moment, to give these hard-working men an overview, to remind them how much they had already achieved, Andrey Trofimovich said, “Remember October, November and December last year? During those three months our output of non-ferrous metals was less than three per cent of our prewar output. And our output of ball bearings was only slightly higher—about five per cent.”

  He got to his feet and held up one hand. His face was glowing. He was no longer chairing a technical discussion—he looked more like a seasoned orator addressing a workers’ demonstration. “Think for a moment, comrades, about what we have built in the snows of the Volga basin, Siberia and the Urals. Whole divisions have sprung up—divisions of machine tools, hammers and furnaces! Whole armies! Machine tools, furnaces of every kind, blooming mills turning out more and more armour plating—these are the battleships of our industry! In the Urals alone there are now 400 new factories. It’s like the year’s first flowers, coming back to life, fighting their way through the snow. Understand?”

  Viktor was listening intently.

  All the documentary films, all the poems, books and articles he had read about Soviet industry—all these images now merged. It was as if they were a single living memory, something he had witnessed himself.

  In his mind he could see a clear picture: smoky shop floors; open furnaces, white-hot as the flame of an electric arc; grey armour plating, as if stiff and congealed; worker
s in clouds of smoke, amid beating hammers, amid the whistle and crackle of long electric sparks. The vast power of iron and steel seemed to fuse with the vastness of the Soviet Union itself. And Viktor could sense this power in the words of these men who talked about millions of tons of steel and cast iron, about billions of kilowatt-hours, about tens of thousands of tons of high-quality rolled steel.

  But for all his lyrical talk of flowers pushing through the snow, Andrey Trofimovich was clearly no dreamer. Nor was he in the least easy-going. When one of the chief engineers asked him to explain a directive sent to his factory, Andrey Trofimovich interrupted, saying sternly, “I’ve done enough explaining. Now I’m giving orders!” And he thumped his palm down on the table, as if stamping some document with a huge state seal.

  When the meeting was over and everyone was saying goodbye to Postoev, the young engineer in glasses came up to Viktor and asked, “Do you have any news of Nikolay Grigorievich Krymov?”

  “Krymov?” Viktor repeated in surprise. Realizing why the engineer’s long thin face seemed oddly familiar, he asked, “Are you a relative?”

  “I’m Semyon, his younger brother.”

  The two men shook hands.

  “I often think about Nikolay Grigorievich. I love him,” said Viktor. With feeling, he added, “As for that Zhenya, I’m still furious with her.”

  “But how is she? Is she in good health?”

  “Yes, of course she is,” Viktor said crossly, as if wishing she weren’t.

  They went out into the corridor together and walked up and down for a while, talking about Krymov and reminiscing about life before the war.

  “Zhenya’s told me about you,” said Viktor. “You’ve been promoted very fast since you moved to the Urals. You’re already the deputy chief engineer.”

  “Chief engineer, now.”

  Viktor began questioning him: Might he be able to carry out a trial smelt and produce a small amount of the grade of steel Viktor required for his special apparatus?