Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  84. The Razguliay district is named after a famous local tavern. Cheryomushki was the home of wealthy merchants and Sadovniki was a peasant district. Grossman evokes different aspects of Moscow life.

  85. Kliment Timiryazev (1843–1920) was a famous Russian botanist and physiologist.

  86. A well-known Russian children’s song.

  87. Madeira Massandra, a quality wine made since 1892 in Crimea.

  88. In the 1940s some Armenian scientists claimed to have discovered the “varitron,” a new particle with a variable mass. “Carl Anderson speculated that they may have been under such great political pressure to produce a ‘breakthrough’ that they invented one that would satisfy the administrators but not damage physics, since no physicists would believe it.” D. A. Glaser, “Invention of the Bubble Chamber and Subsequent Events,” Nuclear Physics B Proc. Suppl. 36 (1994), pp. 3–18, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0920563294907625/part/first-page-pdf.

  89. In 1854, the poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) republished some of his earlier newspaper articles under the title Lutezia, the Latin name for Paris.

  90. Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932), one of the founders of physical chemistry, wrote on many subjects, including philosophy. Soon after the beginning of the First World War he was one of ninety-three prominent German scientists and cultural figures who signed a chauvinistic “Appeal to the Civilized World.”

  91. Also known as gas vans or gas wagons, these had an air-tight compartment into which exhaust fumes were piped while the vehicle’s engine was running. Those held inside died of carbon monoxide poisoning. This method of execution was thought up and first put into practice by the NKVD in the late 1930s. It was then used in Nazi Germany, before being superseded by the far larger gas chambers of the death camps.

  92. Bruno was a Dominican poet, mathematician and philosopher. Found guilty of heresy, he was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600. For Chernyshevsky, see Part I, note 20.

  93. From “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’” (1843–44), published in The German–French Annals (1844).

  94. August Bebel (1840–1913) was one of the founders, in 1869, of the Social Democratic Workers Party of Germany. Lenin referred to him as “a model workers’ leader.”

  95. Grossman expresses similar thoughts in a passage in his Red Star article “Through Chekhov’s Eyes”: “Every brave man is brave in his own way. The mighty tree of courage has thousands of branches [. . .] but selfish cowardice takes only one form: slavish submission to the instinct to save one’s own life. The man who runs from the battlefield today will run tomorrow from a burning house, leaving his old mother, his wife and his little children to the flames.” (Grossman, Gody voiny, p. 43.)

  96. “Mankind—the word has a proud ring”; in Soviet days these words of Maxim Gorky’s were very well known indeed.

  97. Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), a German philosopher of history, published his influential The Decline of the West in 1918.

  98. After the war began, this new industrial centre in the Urals grew increasingly important. It was nicknamed Tankograd.

  99. Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41), the celebrated Russian Romantic poet. See The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, pp. 116–17.

  100. The middle-aged general in glasses is General Andrey Vlasov. At the time of the Battle of Kiev, Vlasov was an up-and-coming lieutenant general in command of the 37th Army; along with part of this army, he managed to escape encirclement. In July 1942, however, he was captured by the Germans. He agreed to collaborate and, in autumn 1944, founded the anti-Communist ROA (the Russian Liberation Army). After the war, he was found guilty of treason and was executed in August 1946. As a traitor, Vlasov was held in contempt. It was bold of Grossman even to mention his name; the three paragraphs from “First, though, Krymov. . .” were not included in any of the published editions.

  101. In a notebook entry, Grossman puts this more strongly, writing that “Men from Chernigov were deserting in thousands.” This entry was omitted from the 1989 publication of the wartime notebooks. Oleg Budnitsky, who is preparing a more complete edition of the notebooks, quoted it in a talk at Pushkin House, London, in April 2018.

  102. The main street of central Kiev.

  103. Babi Yar (“Woman’s Ravine”) is the name of the ravine on the outskirts of Kiev where 100,000 people, mostly Jews, were shot in the course of six months, over 33,000 of them during the first two days of the massacre, 29 and 30 September 1941. The route the old woman advises Krymov to take is, in reverse, the route along which the Jews were taken to Babi Yar from central Kiev.

  104. Yelena Lvovna Shtrum, the daughter of the physicist Lev Shtrum, has spoken about how she herself escaped from Kiev at this time. All entrances to the main railway station had been closed, but there was a vast crowd of women and children in the square outside. Among them were Yelena (aged eighteen) and her two aunts (aged about thirty). Unlike many of the others, who were weighed down with luggage, they were carrying only a very few bags. One of the fences collapsed and Yelena and her aunts and other women at the front of the crowd occupied an empty goods train. Officials realized it would have been impossible to remove the women; they simply did not have the manpower. In Yelena’s words, “it would have taken two men to remove each woman.” The doors were then bolted, with about twenty women being shut up in each wagon. For twenty-four hours nothing much happened. The women defecated and urinated through a hole they had made by removing a plank from the floor. Eventually, the train crossed the Dnieper. After that, it travelled slowly east, taking two weeks to reach the Volga. Bread or swill was brought to the women at some of the stations. It was also sometimes possible to buy food being sold privately (private conversation, Cologne, 30 August 2018).

  105. Grossman provides these words only in Ukrainian; he does not translate them.

  106. Mikhail Kirponos, commander of the Southwestern Front, was killed during the defence of Kiev.

  107. Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis and acted as local police.

  108. The historian Michael Jones quotes at length from a diary kept by Ivan Shabalin, the courageous and clear-minded head of the political section of the 50th Army. Shabalin was killed in October 1941, while trying to break out of encirclement. Jones summarizes one passage as follows: “Shabalin, an ambitious NKVD officer responsible for army education, realized that he no longer needed to give political lectures or issue instructions to the men around him. The comradeship binding his group of fighters together was enough in itself. And as Shabalin realized that, he felt a remarkable sense of peace.” (Jones, The Retreat, p. 67.) Shabalin’s diaries were first published only in 1974, ten years after Grossman’s death; this makes the similarity between them and Grossman’s account of Krymov all the more striking.

  109. The Black Earth region is a belt of exceptionally rich, fertile soil in Ukraine and southern Russia.

  110. Grossman met Shlyapin in September 1941, when he was sent as a Red Star journalist to the Bryansk Front. Grossman’s first war novel, The People Is Immortal (1942), is based on Shlyapin’s account of his escape from encirclement.

  111. Shlyapin quotes from Pushkin’s verse fairy tale Ruslan and Ludmila.

  112. Alexander Suvorov (1729/30–1800) is considered the greatest of all Russian generals. The Order of Suvorov, one of the highest of Soviet military decorations, was established on 29 July 1942; its first recipient was Georgy Zhukov.

  113. A lieutenant general wears three stars, a colonel general wears four.

  114. Heinz Guderian (1888–1954) was one of the most successful German tank commanders both in France in 1940 and on the Eastern front in 1941.

  115. See Grossman, A Writer at War, p. 47.

  116. In July 1941 Yakov Kreizer (1905–69) became the first Red Army general to outfight the Wehrmacht in a large-scale engagement, stalling Guderian’s superior forces and thus holding up German Army Group Centre in its drive towards Moscow.

  117. Lines
from what is usually seen as a children’s poem, by Alexey Nikolaevich Pleshcheyev (1825–93), a political radical.

  118. The old woman quotes from the beginning of Psalm 68: “Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered: let them also that hate him flee before him. As smoke is driven away, so drive them away: as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.”

  119. Vasil Kolarov (1877–1950), a Bulgarian, was a key functionary in the Communist International. Maurice Thorez (1900–64) led the French Communist Party from 1930 until his death. Ernst Thälmann (1886– 1944) led the German Communist Party throughout most of the duration of the Weimar Republic. Sen Katayama (1859–1933) co-founded the Japanese Communist Party.

  120. The Hotel Lux housed many leading exiled Communists—from Germany and elsewhere. The hotel’s international character aroused Stalin’s suspicions. Between 1936 and 1938 a great many of its occupants were arrested.

  121. Titled “14 December 1825,” this poem by Tyutchev is about a failed revolt against the autocracy. The translation, by Robert Chandler, is from The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, p. 104.

  122. From Lenin’s “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism” (1913): https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm

  123. The estate, seven miles from Tula, where Tolstoy was born and where he wrote both War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Since 1921, it has been a museum.

  124. Krymov is, of course, remembering War and Peace. The “old, sick prince” is Prince Bolkonsky, father of Prince Andrey and Princess Maria. His estate—Bald Hills—is modelled on Yasnaya Polyana.

  125. Grossman has given Krymov many of his own experiences from these weeks. He himself made a similar journey in early October 1941, visiting Yasnaya Polyana and speaking to Tolstoy’s granddaughter. A few days later General Guderian took over the estate, making it his HQ for his planned assault on Moscow. (See Grossman, A Writer at War, p. 54.) In early September 1942, on his way from Moscow to Stalingrad, Grossman stopped a second time at Yasnaya Polyana, which the Russians had recaptured the previous winter.

  126. This was one of the first engagements in which the Red Army deployed their new T-34 tank, generally recognized as the best all-round tank in the Second World War. Soon to be produced in vast numbers, this tank made a crucial contribution to the Soviet victory.

  127. Two towns very close to Moscow.

  128. The location of three major railway termini.

  129. Probably: “Follow me . . . straight ahead . . . Fire . . . Direct hit.” But the German does not entirely make sense. This may be a mistake on Grossman’s part, or it may be his way of conveying that this is how the Russian listeners hear the words.

  130. Russia moved from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar only in 1918. Thus the anniversary of the October 1917 Revolution has always been celebrated on 7 November.

  131. Lobnoye Mesto is a thirteen-metre-long stone platform, often mistakenly thought to have been a place of execution. A nearby bronze statue commemorates Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, who, in 1611–12, gathered a volunteer army and expelled the forces of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. This put an end to the period known as the Time of Troubles.

  132. Kirza is a type of artificial leather—multiple layers of textile impregnated with latex and other substances—that was widely used in the Soviet Union, mainly for army boots.

  133. Until 1 August 1941, the bars on their collar tabs would have been red. They were changed to green in the interests of camouflage.

  134. Semyon Budyonny (1883–1973) was a cavalry commander during the Russian Civil War and a close ally of Joseph Stalin. He was a popular figure but an opponent of mechanization. He declared that the tank could never replace the horse.

  135. Some German officers thought much the same surprisingly early in the war. In July 1941, General Walther Nehring, commander of the 18th Panzer Division, wrote, “The further our armoured spearheads advance into the depths of this country, the more our difficulties mount, while the forces of the enemy seem to gain in strength and cohesion” (Jones, The Retreat, p. 19).

  136. Sergey Chekhonin (1878–1936) was a graphic artist, ceramicist and book designer. After leaving Soviet Russia in 1928, he lived in France and Germany.

  137. The novelist Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) was a member of the French Communist Party. His sycophantic biography of Stalin was published posthumously, in 1936.

  138. Ernst Busch (1900–1980) was a German singer and actor who collaborated several times with Bertolt Brecht. After fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, he settled in the Soviet Union. “The Peat Bog Soldiers” (“Die Moorsoldaten”) was written, composed and first performed by political prisoners in 1933, in a Nazi concentration camp in the moors of Lower Saxony. The song became a Republican anthem during the Spanish Civil War and a symbol of resistance during the Second World War.

  139. This was established in 1933. The zoo was struggling to look after a large number of orphaned baby animals—some born in captivity and rejected by their mothers, others brought to the zoo by hunters who had shot their mothers. It was thought that the keepers would be able to care more easily for these cubs if they were all kept together. Each species had its own cage, and there was also a large shared space, which included a pool. The “cubs’ pen” soon became one of the zoo’s most popular attractions. But in 1950 and in the early 1970s the shared space was twice reduced in size and the pen was finally closed in the late 1970s. Since then, the pen has been criticized as reflecting “a Stalinist concept of education” (http://radiomayak.ru/shows/episode/id/1122701).

  140. From a poem by Heinrich Heine: “This is an old story, yet it remains always new.”

  141. From Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin IV, 14, as translated by Stanley Mitchell (Penguin, 2008)—though slightly amended.

  142. Clothes produced by this factory were of notoriously poor quality.

  143. Viktor Kholzunov (1905–39), born in Stalingrad, commanded a bomber squadron during the Spanish Civil War. Grossman saw this statue in August 1942, during his first days in Stalingrad. It evidently made an impression both on him and on his companion Vasily Koroteyev. Both writers mention the statue several times in their writings (with thanks to Ian Garner for help with this note).

  144. A chapter from Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1839–40).

  145. Lvov is now a part of Ukraine and is known as L’viv. Schechter, in Stuff of Soldiers, chapter 7, refers to Lvov and Riga as “centres of fashion” during the two years between the signing of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact in August 1939 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

  146. In an apartment block like Mostovskoy’s, there would have been one central radio receiver. This would have received broadcasts from All-Union Radio, based in Moscow. The individual apartments had only speakers, connected by wire to the central receiver. There was no choice of channels or stations.

  147. Pyotr Chaadaev (1794–1856) is best known for his eight “Philosophical Letters” about Russia, only the first of which was published during his life. These are highly critical of nearly all aspects of Russian culture and society. The government’s response was to declare Chaadaev insane.

  148. A pre-revolutionary measure of distance, a little more than a kilometre.

  149. This last short paragraph, like many of the novel’s more humorous moments, first appeared in the 1956 edition.

  150. A popular historical melodrama, made in England in 1941. Its central theme, the adulterous liaison between Admiral Nelson and Emma Hamilton, links it to the affair between Viktor and Nina.

  151. See Part I, note 70.

  152. Four poods is about sixty-five kilograms.

  153. It was in Dno railway station that Tsar Nicholas II signed his abdication decree on 15 March 1917.

  154. Stalin’s still-controversial order, with its slogan “Not One Step Back,” forbade any further retreat, under any circumstances, and decreed the death penalty for “
laggards, cowards, defeatists and other miscreants.” See note to this chapter in the Afterword.

  155. See Part I, note 62.

  156. Administrative officials—some of them German, others Ukrainian collaborators.

  157. It is startling to read of vodka being measured by such a large measure as a kilo, but it was entirely normal to measure spirits by weight rather than by volume. See Part I, note 31.

  158. The earlier name for Stalingrad. The city was renamed in 1925 in recognition of Stalin’s role, probably somewhat exaggerated during the Stalin era, in defending the city during the Russian Civil War. In 1961, the city was renamed Volgograd.

  PART TWO

  1. A popular musical comedy released in 1940.

  2. Alexander Blok (1880–1921) and Innokenty Annensky (1855–1909) were the two most important Russian Symbolists. Annensky’s poetry is subtle and delicate. Blok’s is less subtle, but deeply mystical. Both are a far cry from socialist realism.

  3. Nikolay Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered is a classic of socialist realism. Alexander Sheller-Mikhailov was a progressive novelist of the 1860s, lauded during the early Soviet era because of an essay in which he quoted large chunks of Marx’s Das Kapital, effectively introducing the book to Russian readers. Andreyev dutifully reads a certain amount of the correct literature of the era—e.g. Stalin and Ostrovsky—but what he really loves is more imaginative and entertaining literature.

  4. See Part I, note 94. The book is primarily an attack on the institution of marriage.

  5. Founded by Volga Germans in 1765, Sarepta was renamed Krasnoarmeisk in 1920. In 1931 it became a district of Stalingrad.