A Writer at War

by Vasily Grossman

  A welder at the west bank crossing point soon found himself mending more than battered boats.

  Welder Kosenko was so good people came to him from the front and asked him to mend their Katyushas. ‘You do it better than at the front.’ Two tanks rushed back from the front. ‘Quick, we’ve got to go back and fight.’ He fixed them and they went back into the battle.

  Everyday life. The [transport troops] have their own bakery, banya and delousing facility. The banya is dug out of the earth. The soldiers like to go there with birch twigs. They would stay there all the time if they could. Its chimney has been knocked down by an explosion. The bakery is a Russian stove, dug into the earth. They bake a wonderful, light hearth bread. They are excellent bakers, but the whole bakery was smashed by the latest bombing! The 2nd Company’s kitchen [suffered] a direct hit too. ‘May I report? The kitchen has been blown up, together with the shchi!’

  ‘Well, go and cook more dinner, then.’

  Grossman, although only a correspondent, evidently pitched in when the situation demanded.

  [A supply of] Katyusha rockets caught fire. There was one truckload of them and dozens of vehicles around it. We dragged them away.

  But above all, he was pleased that his articles meant so much to the men.

  They all liked my piece very much about the soldiers from Yaroslavl. They were as proud as peacocks: ‘This is written about us!’

  1 The 284th Rifle Division became the 79th Guards Rifle Division on 1 March 1943 in honour of its role at Stalingrad.

  2 There were no German servicewomen in the front line, so one assumes that these were Russian civilians recruited or forced to act as auxiliaries. Under Stalin’s personal order, they were to be treated as traitors even if they had been compelled to work for the Germans at gunpoint.

  3 In his Krasnaya Zvezda article, Grossman added extra detail. ‘Sometimes it is very quiet, and then one can hear small pieces of plaster fall in the house opposite where Germans are sitting. Sometimes one hears German speech and the creaking of German boots. And sometimes the bombing and shooting gets so strong that one has to lean to the comrade’s ear and shout as loudly as one can, but the comrade answers with gestures: “I can’t hear.”’

  4 It is impossible to judge the claimed kill scores of snipers in Stalingrad, especially Zaitsev’s, since according to his own account, he did not become a sniper until 21 October, when he shot three men, one after another. Colonel Batyuk is said to have seen this feat and ordered that he be made a sniper. So how Zaitsev achieved such a stupendous score when the most intense phase of the battle was over is hard to tell.

  5 ‘Zaitsev’ in Russian means hare, so Zaitsev’s apprentice snipers were known as zaichata, or leverets.

  6 Uzbeks had the reputation of being the least reliable members of the Red Army while the Germans were openly contemptuous of their Romanian allies of the Romanian First and Third Armies which were supposed to secure the north-western and the southern flanks of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad.

  7 ‘Khren’ in Russian means horseradish, but it is also a euphemism for an insult similar to ‘motherfucker’. So when the pilot shouted: ‘Hey, motherfucker!’ Khrennikov was astonished at hearing what he thought was his own name.

  8 KS was an industrial mixture containing unpurified spirit.

  9 Acipenser ruthenus, or freshwater sturgeon, and Leuciscus idus, sometimes known as the orfe.

  SIXTEEN

  The October Battles

  General Chuikov’s headquarters had been less than a week in the Tsaritsa tunnel when another German offensive crushed the centre of Stalingrad. Chuikov and his staff moved some four kilometres north to the Red October works. The factory district of northern Stalingrad soon proved to be the focus of German attacks, with the first major offensive starting on 27 September. These attacks were heralded by squadrons of Stukas, which Red Army soldiers dubbed ‘screechers’ or ‘musicians’ because of their screaming sirens as they dropped towards their target.

  The fighting was equally desperate on the northern flank where the 16th Panzer Division had captured Rynok and Spartakovka and advanced towards the tractor works from the north.

  Bolvinov’s 149th Brigade – probably, one of the best units . . . was sent to fight under Gorokhov [commanding the 124th Brigade], and Gorokhov pushed Bolvinov into the backgound. But Bolvinov was doing what he had to. He crawled, armed to the teeth with grenades, from one fire point to another, and Red Army soldiers loved him.

  For all headquarters on the west bank, the major problem was communications. Signal cables were forever being broken by shellfire and runners were cut down. Chuikov described to Grossman the feeling of frustration and fear.

  ‘[It was] the most oppressive sensation. There’s firing and thunder all around. You send off a liaison officer to find out what’s happening, and he gets killed. That’s when you shake all over with tension . . . The most terrible times were when you sat there like an idiot, and the battle was boiling around you, but there was nothing you could do.’

  The most direct threat to Chuikov’s headquarters came on 2 October. The headquarters of 62nd Army had been sited on the steep bank of the Volga just below some fuel storage tanks which everyone had assumed to be empty. This was a dangerous mistake. The Germans targeted the tanks successfully and suddenly the headquarters was engulfed in burning oil, as Chuikov later described to Grossman.

  ‘Oil was flowing in streams to the Volga through the command post. The Volga was in flames. We were only some fifteen metres from the river’s edge . . . The only way out was to move towards the enemy . . . The fuel tanks were on fire. A fountain of smoke eight hundred metres high. And the Volga. All this stuff was flowing with roaring flames down to the river. They dragged me out of the river of fire and we stood on the water’s edge until morning. Some men who had been asleep burned to death . . . Up to forty men were killed at the headquarters.’

  Chuikov’s chief of staff gave his own version.

  Then [headquarters] moved into a tunnel by the Barrikady plant and was there from 7 to 15 October. There we were being forced away from the main forces, [so] from there, we moved to the Banny gully, into the tunnel headquarters of the 284th Rifle Division which had left there and moved towards the bank. Here one often hears of the Banny gully.

  ‘“The Army Command Post has disappeared!”’

  ‘“Where to?”’

  ‘“It’s not gone to the left bank, it’s moved closer to the front line.”’

  On 6 October, General Paulus sent two divisions against the huge Stalingrad tractor plant on the northern edge of the city. Paulus was under heavy pressure from Hitler to finish off the pocket of Soviet resistance on the west bank. Meanwhile, Yeremenko was being urged by Stalin to counter-attack and throw the Germans back. Chuikov ignored this unrealistic order. He could barely hold on as it was, and then only thanks to the Soviet heavy artillery positioned on the east bank, firing over their heads into German forming-up areas to disrupt their preparations for an attack.

  The Stalingrad Tractor Plant was the scene of nightmare fighting as the tanks of the 14th Panzer Division smashed like prehistoric monsters into workshops, their tracks crunching the shards of glass from the shattered skylights above. The remains of the 112th Rifle Division and Colonel Zholudev’s 37th Guards Rifle Division could not withstand the force, but although their defence lines were broken, they fought on in isolated pockets.1

  Zholudev’s division. Commissar Shcherbina. Tractor plant. The command post was buried by an explosion. It became quiet at once. They were sitting there for a long time, then they began to sing: ‘Lyubo, bratsy, lyubo.’ [‘Life is great.’] A sergeant dug them out under fire. He worked like a madman, frenziedly, with bubbles on his lips. An hour later, he was killed by a shell. A German ‘sneezed’ with his sub-machine gun. He had crept into the ‘tube’ [tunnel] and opened fire when there was noise from mortars and guns. They dragged him out. He was all black, and they tore him to pieces.


  When the Germans captured one workshop, they even managed to raise a disabled tank up to a certain height and fire from the window.

  Grossman crossed once more to the west bank just as the battle erupted again with a renewed German offensive. He wrote to the editor of Krasnaya Zvezda to inform him of his movements.

  Comrade Ortenberg, I arrived on the 11th with Vysokoostrovsky [another Krasnaya Zvezda correspondent], and crossed the river to Stalingrad during the night. I’ve done thorough interviews with soldiers, officers, and with General Rodimtsev.

  Grossman overheard two Red Army soldiers talking on the way to the Volga crossing point:

  ‘It’s been a long time since I last had hot food.’

  ‘Well, we’ll soon be drinking our own hot blood over there,’ the other one answered.

  Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Rifle Division had almost been destroyed in a surprise attack. On 1 October, groups from the the German 295th Infantry Division had infiltrated gullies on Rodimtsev’s right flank and nearly managed to cut off the division from the rest of the 62nd Army. Rodimtsev’s guardsmen had reacted with furious counter-attacks and only just managed to force the Germans back. Grossman spent the 12 and 13 October with the division.

  Funeral by the Volga. Speeches, salute. A memorial was put on the grave, stating when they were killed and under what circumstances. Funerals are done at night, always with a salute.

  The salute in Stalingrad consisted not of a volley fired in the air, but towards the Germans.

  Charming and sad. Mamaev Kurgan – here is the command post of the battalion. Men from the mortar company are playing a record all the time with the song ‘No, friends, please not now, don’t put me yet on this bed of frost.’

  There was never another place with so much music. This ploughed-up clay, stained with shit and blood, was ringing with music from radios, gramophone records and from the voices of company and platoon singers.

  ‘We also had two concerts here,’ [Rodimtsev told him]. ‘Hairdresser Rubinchik played the violin in our tunnel. And everyone began to smile remembering the concert.’

  Rodimtsev also recounted an anecdote rather more representative of soldiers’ priorities.

  ‘Today, for example, two soldiers came to me. It turned out that they had been fighting for fourteen days in a house surrounded by German houses. And these two, so quietly, you know, demanded rusks, ammunition, sugar, tobacco, loaded it all in their rucksacks, and went off. They said: “There are two more of our men there, guarding the house, and they need a smoke.” Actually, it is such a peculiar affair, this war in houses,’ he smiled. ‘I don’t know whether I should tell this to you, but a funny incident happened yesterday. The Germans captured a house, and there was a barrel of spirits in its basement. And our guards soldiers became angry about [the idea of] the Germans drinking this barrel, so twenty men attacked the house, seized it back and rolled the barrel away, while almost the whole street was held by the Germans. All this caused a great sense of triumph . . .

  ‘I’m not afraid,’ he said. ‘It’s the only way. I think I’ve seen everything. Once, a German tank was ironing flat my command post, and then a sub-machine-gunner threw a grenade, just to be sure, and I threw the grenade back . . .’

  Grossman also went on another occasion with Efim Gekhman to see Rodimtsev on the west bank. The Guards general said that he was getting uneasy about interviews. ‘You know, I am a superstitious man. I remember how [Krasnaya Zvezda] published a leader about Dovator. He was killed on the very same day.’2

  Grossman, with typical generosity, always praised the courage of others. ‘Gekhman is extremely brave,’ Ortenberg remembers him saying. ‘Once, on a dark October night, we had to leave Rodimtsev’s tunnel in Stalingrad and cross the Volga in a boat. Rodimtsev was listening anxiously to the thunder [of fire] outside. He shook his head and said to us: “Comrades, have a glass before you go, it is too hot out there, crossing the water.” Gekhman shrugged his shoulders and answered: “No, thanks. I would rather have another piece of sausage.” He said this so calmly and ate the sausage with such good appetite that everyone couldn’t help laughing.’

  At dawn on Monday, 14 October, the German Sixth Army began what General Paulus hoped was the last offensive to push the 62nd Army from the west bank. Every available Stuka in General Wolfram von Richthofen’s Fourth Air Fleet was used to soften up Soviet positions. It was the most intensive bombardment yet. Chuikov had sensed that the climax of the battle was approaching.

  ‘The press3 was teasing Hitler [about his failure to take Stalingrad], and we were terrified. We were sitting here, knowing, feeling, realising that Hitler has sent his main forces here.

  ‘After the 14th, I decided to send all the women back to the opposite bank. There were many tears. Courage is infectious here, just like cowardice is infectious in other places. Take my word for it, we were living by the hour, by the minute. One waited for the dawn. Well, it all started again then. And in the evening, one thought: “Well, thank God, another day is gone, how surprising.” Yes, if someone had told me that I would [live to] celebrate the new year, I would have laughed.’

  Levkin (left), Koroteev (centre right), and Grossman (right) talk to civilians, October 1942.

  On the night of 15 October, 3,500 wounded men were evacuated across the river. Many had to crawl to the river bank because there were not enough medical orderlies. In the early hours of 16 October, General Yeremenko himself crossed the river to see Chuikov. He needed to know for certain whether they could hold on. ‘Yeremenko arrived during the night4 . . . Gurov and I went out to meet him.

  ‘There was a hellish fire, an air raid.’ Chuikov did not explain that he and Gurov could not find Yeremenko on the river bank, but Yeremenko stumbled across their headquarters and waited for them there. Yeremenko told Grossman how he encountered a soldier on the river bank: ‘“I recognise you, Comrade Commander-in-Chief’.” He told me where he had been, where he had fought, how many Germans he had killed.’

  After the battle was over, Chuikov’s version of events tended to make light of the reality, but this obscured the fact that during the crisis of mid-October, the 62nd Army’s bridgehead was down to less than a thousand metres deep, and would soon be squeezed even further.

  ‘German attacks: they smash everything into the earth, send in their tanks, and after this mad chaos our infantry come out of their trenches and cut their infantry off from the tanks . . . There are shouts: “Tanks at the command post!”

  ‘And infantry?’

  ‘We’ve cut ’em off.’

  ‘Everything’s all right, then.’

  Grossman asked Chuikov what he thought of the Germans’ performance. ‘Not particularly brilliant. But we must do them justice concerning their discipline. An order is the law for them.’

  His chief of staff, Krylov, who had suffered the terrible siege of Sebastopol, compared the battle there with Stalingrad. ‘There, our force was melting away, while here it was replenished. There was a lot in common. It seemed to us sometimes as if we were still continuing the same battle. But we did not feel doomed, like we did in Sebastopol.’

  The loss of the tractor works had meant that Gorokhov’s 124th Brigade was cut off in Spartakovka.

  On the day of glory, I remembered the battalion which crossed the river and reached Gorokhov in order to divert the main blow on to themselves.5 They all died. Not a single man survived. But has anyone remembered this battalion? No one has thought of those who crossed the river on that rainy night in the latter part of October. (Two days later, I saw a captured Georgian from this battalion. He had deserted and surrendered. He said that there were many who surrendered.)

  A man from Ossetia, Alborov, was killed at his post (a bomb). He was still holding in his hand the butt of his rifle, the barrel had been torn off by the explosion, his pulse was still throbbing. His friend was sobbing, and he cried: ‘My comrade is killed.’

  Grossman spent time with Colonel Gurtiev’s 308th Rifle Division of Siberi
ans who had been defending the silicate works just north of the Barrikady factory complex.6 They had crossed the Volga on 30 September, and went straight into action. This is his compilation of what had happened to them since the last day of September, when they crossed to the west bank.

  The first line went in, the second, and the third. Thirteen attacks were thrown back on that day. [The Germans] were struggling to reach the crossing point. Our artillery played a major role.

  On 1 [October], four artillery regiments and Katyusha batteries fired for half an hour. Everything froze. Germans were rooted to the spot. Everyone was watching and listening.

  Germans were on the edge of the plant. That was in the afternoon of the 2nd. Some of them took cover, others ran away. A Kazakh was escorting three prisoners. He was wounded. He took out a knife and stabbed the three prisoners to death. A tankist, a big red-haired man, jumped out of his tank in front of Changov’s command post when he ran out of shells. He grabbed some bricks and [started throwing them at] the Germans, effing and blinding. The Germans turned on their heels and ran.

  The men’s spirits were high, they had had some experience of fighting. Their ages ranged from twenty-three to forty-six. Most of them were Siberians, from Omsk, Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk. Siberians are more stocky, more reserved, more stern. They are hunters, they are more disciplined, more used to cold and hardship. There wasn’t a single case of desertion [en route to Stalingrad]. When one of them dropped his rifle, he ran three kilometres after the train and caught up. They aren’t talkative, but are witty, and have sharp tongues.

  ‘We’re used to “whistlers” [Stukas]. We even get bored when the Germans aren’t whistling. When they are whistling, this means they aren’t throwing anything at us. They started attacking the silicate plant on the night of 2 October. The whole of Markelov’s regiment was killed or wounded. There were only eleven men left. The Germans had taken the whole plant by the evening of the 3rd. Our instruction was: not one step back. The commander was wounded heavily, the commissar was killed.