Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  Krymov looked around. Captivated by what he saw, he forgot his worries.

  Breathing and shimmering on the Volga lay a field of silver, gently tapering towards the south. The small waves of the boat’s wake streamed behind the stern, like magic pale blue mirrors. An immense sky, bright and weightless, dusted with stars, spread over the river and the broad lands stretching both east and west.

  Such a picture—a night sky, the solemn splendour of a great river, mighty hills and plains lit by moon and stars—is usually associated with silence, majestic calm and either stillness or slow, smooth movement. But this Russian night over the Volga was far from quiet.

  Over the hills of Stalingrad, above the white, moonlit buildings stretching along the Volga, trembled the incandescent light of artillery fire. A little to the north, like grim fortresses, loomed the black buildings of the giant factories. From the east bank came the slow rumble of the Soviet artillery, shaking the earth, the sky and the water. From high above came the constant drone of heavy night bombers. The pale blue of the autumn night was threaded by thousands of red lines of tracer shells and bullets. Some threads were isolated; others were in dense clumps. Some were like short spears, plunging into the ground or the walls of buildings; others were long enough to cover half the sky. The German bombers were trying to knock out the Soviet anti-aircraft defences. Semi-automatic weapons down on the ground hurled up cones of red and green tracer bullets, and these formed a complex pattern as they met the cones of tracer shells and bullets flung down by the bombers.

  Heavy bombs exploded on the moonlit streets like flashes of pink summer lightning. Iron screeched and whistled over the Volga. Mortar bombs burst in the swift water, and blue flames flared and faded amid suddenly seething golden-white foam.

  At first glance this vast, rumbling smithy, full of fire and movement and extending for dozens of kilometres, seemed beyond all comprehension. But that was not so. On the contrary, it was surprisingly easy to make out the main forces involved—the twin hammers and anvils of the battle. It was equally easy to follow many of the swifter, more ephemeral contests and skirmishes—between two buildings, between two windows, between an anti-aircraft battery and a circling bomber. Everything was laid out clearly—in all its dynamics. There on the dark blue tracing paper of the night sky was a living, breathing sketch of the war; dotted lines of tracer fire, bursts from machine guns and the flames of explosions marked out the strongholds and force fields of a huge battle.

  The flashes of artillery salvos were especially dense in a hilly sector a little to the north of the three giant factories. Sometimes the flashes came at regular intervals, like a precisely stamped chain; sometimes they came in bundles; sometimes the entire sector flickered and shone with modulating lights. The German artillery batteries were hard at work, evidently preparing the ground for an infantry attack on the factories.

  And then hundreds of parabolas of fire rose from the east bank, a broad red arc climbing over the forest and the Volga. The men in the boat heard a prolonged, barely describable howl; it could have been dozens, or even hundreds, of huge locomotives simultaneously letting off steam.

  After reaching their apogee over the Volga, the rockets hurtled towards the ground. Bursts of flame leaped from the German heavy-artillery positions on the hills. Iron drums drowned out all other sounds. Compressed by the explosions, then expanding convulsively, the air transmitted the crashing of iron hail. Each stone of this hail was enough to crush a reinforced concrete wall.

  When the glowing smoke cleared, Krymov could see that the German batteries were no longer firing. A well co-ordinated salvo of Katyushas had silenced them once and for all.

  With eyes, ears and joyful heart, Krymov understood all that had just happened. He saw sharp-eyed observers calling out aiming data, radio operators transmitting this data across the Volga, frowning divisional and regimental commanders waiting for the order to fire, a grey-haired artillery general in his bunker watching the second hand of his clock, and soldiers running back from their rocket launchers as the Katyushas took off.

  In the boat, everyone lit cigarettes and began to talk. Only the soldier with the milk sat there silently and motionless, holding the thermoses to his breast; he could have been a wet nurse cradling two babies.

  When the boat reached the middle of the Volga, a battle broke out between two dark factory workshops. From a distance the high walls of these bastions looked very close to each other. There was a flash from one of them, and a burst of tracer fire plunged into the wall of the opposing workshop. A German gunner appeared to have opened direct fire on a building occupied by Red Army soldiers. A quick spear then flashed from the dark wall of the Soviet bastion and pierced the wall of the German workshop. A few seconds later, the air was full of fiery spears and arrows. There were bursts of tracer fire from machine guns; rifles were firing tracer bullets that seemed like incandescent flies. The dark walls were like great thunderclouds, with forked lightning flashing between them.

  It occurred to Krymov that these workshops were indeed full of electricity, that the tension between the two opposing elements could be measured in billions of volts.

  Krymov forgot that the frail boat might sink at any moment. He forgot that he could not swim; he forgot his recent forebodings. He felt surprised that his companions were crouching, and that one of them had covered his eyes with his hand. This was, of course, a natural reaction—hundreds of invisible steel strings now stretched across the water, only a little above their heads, humming alarmingly.

  This vivid picture was not only stern and majestic; it was also strangely affecting. The thunder and flames of battle had not extinguished the colours of the moonlit autumn night. The swaying, shimmering field of silvery wheat spreading across the water was still intact. Nothing violated the sky’s thoughtful silence and the melancholy of the stars.

  The quiet and exalted world of the Volga night seemed, in some impossible way, to be one with the war. All that was most incompatible had come together; wild audacity and martial passion had merged with a sense of peace and resigned sadness.

  Krymov remembered the girls he had seen dancing in Akhtuba. He remembered how moved he had felt by them, and for some reason this evoked another, more distant memory: the day he told Zhenya that he loved her. She had looked at him for a long time without saying a word. But this memory no longer made him feel sad.

  As the boat drew nearer to the west bank, the water grew calmer. The shells and mortar bombs were now passing high overhead.

  The pilot cut the engine and the boat came to rest against some large stones. The four passengers went ashore and began to climb the path towards the Army HQ bunkers.

  After the tension of being on the water, it was a joy to feel solid earth underfoot, with its stones and its lumps of clay.

  Behind him Krymov heard the quiet knock of the engine. The boat was on its way back to the east bank, about to return to open water that was repeatedly being torn apart by explosions.

  Krymov realized that, as they jumped out, he and his companions had forgotten to say goodbye to the pilot. Maybe this was why the pilot had smiled when the lieutenant colonel asked him his age. It had been the same with the engine; at first they had all listened intently, noticing every slightest misfire, but as they approached the shore they were no longer even aware whether or not the engine was still running.

  But Krymov was now in the grip of new impressions; he was walking on the earth of Stalingrad.

  TIMELINE OF THE WAR

  1939

  1 September Germany invades Poland. This is generally accepted as marking the beginning of the Second World War.

  1941

  22 June Launch of Operation Barbarossa. German forces invade the Soviet Union. It is this date that most Russians see as marking the beginning of the war, which they almost always refer to not as the Second World War but as the Great Patriotic War.

  9 July German forces capture 300,000 Soviet troops near Minsk.

  27
July German forces complete the encirclement of Smolensk.

  8 August–19 September Battle of Kiev. Soviet Southern Front is encircled and more than half a million soldiers are taken prisoner. General Zhukov had wanted to withdraw earlier, but Stalin had refused to allow this, saying, “Kiev was, is, and will be Soviet!”

  29–30 September Beginning of Babi Yar massacre outside Kiev. Execution of 33,000 Jews on these two days alone.

  September–October Nikolay Krymov leads an ad hoc grouping of 200 men out of German-held territory and across the front line. He joins Major General Petrov’s 50th Army to the north of Bryansk.

  October Operation Typhoon begins; it will continue through January 1942. The Germans advance on Moscow.

  2–21 October Battles of Vyazma and Bryansk. Three Soviet armies are encircled—but their continued fighting delays the German advance on Moscow. Continues through January 1942.

  10 October Zhukov is named commander of all forces defending Moscow.

  20–22 November German forces take Rostov.

  5–6 December The German advance is halted and the Soviets begin a successful counter-offensive.

  1942

  12–28 May Krymov is appointed commissar of an anti-tank brigade. Second Battle of Kharkov ends in a disastrous defeat; the Germans take at least 240,000 prisoners in what is called “the Barvenkovo mousetrap.”

  7 June–4 July German forces besiege and eventually capture Sevastopol.

  28 June Launch of Operation Blue—the German summer offensive intended to capture the oil fields of the Caucasus. Initial success leads Hitler to insist on the additional goal of capturing Stalingrad.

  12 July Establishment of the Stalingrad Front, under General Timoshenko.

  17 July Forward units of General Paulus’s 6th Army engage with the 62nd Army by the River Chir, a tributary of the Don.

  23 July General Gordov takes over command of the Stalingrad Front.

  24 July Forward units of General Paulus’s 6th Army reach the Don, near Kalach.

  28 July Stalin issues Order 227—“Not One Step Back.” This included the sentence, “Panic-mongers and cowards should be exterminated on the spot.”

  5 August Establishment of the Southeastern Front, under General Yeromenko.

  7–8 August The Germans encircle much of the 62nd Army, on the west bank of the Don.

  9 August General Yeromenko also takes over command of the Stalingrad Front.

  21 August German forces cross the Don. No Soviet forces remain west of the Don, except for bridgeheads at Serafimovich and Kletskaya.

  23 August First massive air raid on Stalingrad. German forces reach the Volga at Rynok, north of Stalingrad, thus isolating the remnants of the 62nd Army from the Soviet forces to the north-west of Stalingrad. Grossman and his companions set out from Moscow. The journey to Stalingrad takes them five days. On the way, Grossman pays a second visit to Yasnaya Polyana.

  25 August Mining of main Stalingrad factories lest the Germans capture the city.

  28 August Mass flight of civilians from Stalingrad. This went unmentioned in most Soviet accounts of the battle.

  29 August General Zhukov is sent to the Stalingrad Front as representative of the Stavka (the Supreme Command).

  8 September The Germans reach the Volga at Kuporosnoye, to the south of Stalingrad, isolating the 62nd Army from the 64th Army positioned still further south. Yeromenko moves the Front HQ to the east bank of the Volga.

  12 September General Chuikov takes over command of the 62nd Army.

  14 September German forces enter central Stalingrad. Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Division begin crossing the Volga at 5 p.m.

  15 September A battalion of Rodimtsev’s division recaptures the main railway station.

  21–22 September Intense fighting in central Stalingrad. Rodimtsev is forced to withdraw to a thin strip of ground parallel to the river.

  1 October The Germans capture the Tractor Factory, reaching the Volga and splitting Chuikov’s 62nd Army in two.

  19 November Beginning of Operation Uranus, a major Soviet offensive.

  23 November Soviet forces encircle Paulus’s 6th Army.

  1943

  2 February The last German forces in Stalingrad surrender.

  The Soviet retreat during the first fifteen months of the war, also showing Krymov’s journeys.

  Stalingrad and surrounding area.

  Stalingrad.

  AFTERWORD

  THIS TEXT

  STALINGRAD is one of the great novels of the last century, but it does not exist in any definitive text. Its textual and publication history is, in fact, still more complicated than that of Life and Fate. Grossman began his first version in 1943 and completed it in 1949. A selection of eleven chapters—heavily edited—was published later that same year, under the title By the Volga (chapters from the novel Stalingrad). They are mostly about military matters and there is no mention of Viktor Shtrum or the Shaposhnikov sisters. The first ten of these chapters were included—in fuller versions—in the novel’s various published editions. The remaining chapter, however, was included not in Stalingrad but in Life and Fate—yet another testimony to the fact that Grossman, at least at this point, saw the two novels as a single work.

  In his struggles to meet his editors’ changing demands, Grossman then partially or completely rewrote Stalingrad at least four times between 1949 and the novel’s first publication, serialized in the journal Novy Mir, in late 1952. The novel was then published as a book: first by the military publishing house Voenizdat in 1954 (reprinted in 1955); and then, in 1956, by the literary publishing house Sovetsky Pisatel' (“Soviet Writer”). The 1952, 1954/55 and 1956 editions differ a great deal from one another, and they all differ still more from the various typescripts. Even the title was changed, against Grossman’s wishes, shortly before the novel’s first publication. Grossman’s original title was Stalingrad, but the novel was published under the title For a Just Cause—a phrase from the speech made on the day of the German invasion by Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet minister for foreign affairs.

  Clearly anticipating difficulties from the beginning, Grossman recorded all official conversations, letters and meetings to do with the novel in his fifteen-page “Diary of the Journey of the Manuscript of the Novel For a Just Cause Through Publishing Houses.”1 Anatoly Bocharov, the author of the first monograph on Grossman, summarizes this “journey of the novel” as follows: “Changes were made between 1949 and 1952 in the course of meetings of editorial boards, after comments from a large number of reviewers and consultants, editors and literary bosses of all kinds. Battered, exhausted, patched and repatched—it was only by some miracle that the author managed to save his text from destruction by demagogy, blinkered thinking and excessive caution.”2

  The tone of these editorial meetings was set in an exchange in December 1948 between Grossman and Boris Agapov, one of the members of the Novy Mir editorial board:

  AGAPOV: I want to render the novel safe, to make it impossible for anyone to criticize it.

  GROSSMAN: Boris Nikolaevich, I don’t want to render my novel safe.3

  Even though Konstantin Simonov (chief editor of Novy Mir until February 1950), Alexander Tvardovsky (Simonov’s replacement as chief editor) and Alexander Fadeyev (general secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers for most of the period from 1937 until 1954) seem genuinely to have admired Stalingrad, publication of the novel was repeatedly postponed. The demands made by Fadeyev and Tvardovsky range from the most trivial to the most sweeping. At one point Tvardovsky is said to have suggested that Grossman should make Shtrum the head of a military commissariat rather than a physicist; in reply, Grossman asked what post he should give Einstein.4 On another occasion Grossman was asked to remove all the “civilian” chapters. The novel was set in type three times, but on each occasion the decision to publish was countermanded and the type broken up—although it seems that, at least on two of these occasions, a very few copies were, in fact, printed. The 30 April 1951
entry in Grossman’s diary reads, “Thanks to the splendid, comradely attitude of the technical editors and printing-press workers, the new typesetting was carried out with fabulous speed. I now have in my hands a new copy: second edition; print run—6 copies.”

  The reason for the extreme caution shown by Grossman’s editors is that the Soviet victory at Stalingrad had acquired the status of a sacred myth—a myth that legitimized Stalin’s rule. There was, therefore, no room for even the slightest political error. Tvardovsky and Fadeyev felt it necessary to ask for approval from a variety of different bodies: the Writers’ Union; the Historical Section of the General Staff; the Institute of Marx, Engels and Lenin; and the Communist Party Central Committee. They were afraid of offending important generals. They were afraid of offending Khrushchev, who appears in the earlier versions in his role as the most senior political commissar at Stalingrad. They were, no doubt, still more concerned about Stalin’s own reaction.

  In December 1950 Grossman himself wrote to Stalin. His letter ends, “The number of pages of reviews, stenograms, conclusions and responses is already approaching the number of pages taken up by the novel itself, and although all are in favour of publication, there has not yet been a final decision. I passionately ask you to help me by deciding the fate of the book I consider more important than anything else I have written.”5 Stalin, it seems, did not reply. Nor did Georgy Malenkov, one of Stalin’s closest henchmen, to whom Grossman wrote in October 1951.6 Nevertheless, after a last flurry of new suggestions for the title, which included “On the Volga,” “Soviet People” and “During a People’s War,”7 the novel was finally published in the July– October 1952 issues of Novy Mir. In a letter to Fadeyev, Grossman wrote, “Dear Alexander Alexandrovich [. . .] Even after being published and republished for so many years, I felt more deeply and intensely moved, on seeing the July issue of the journal, than when I saw my very first story [‘In the Town of Berdichev’] in Literaturnaya gazeta.”8