Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  6. There were three categories of disability pension. Those with the most serious disabilities were registered as category one.

  7. A town not far from Stalingrad.

  8. Saratov and Samara (called Kuibyshev from 1935 to 1991) are two of the oldest and most important cities on the Volga.

  9. These three factories, located parallel to the Volga and connected by underground tunnels with secure telephone lines, played a crucial role throughout the Battle of Stalingrad. Even when largely destroyed and unable to function as factories, they proved to be ideal ground for fighting a defensive battle. Each factory was about a kilometre long and from 500 to 1,000 metres wide.

  10. The Red Putilovite factory was the largest factory in Leningrad, producing mainly artillery and tanks. Though most of the equipment and personnel were evacuated to Chelyabinsk, the Leningrad site continued to repair tanks throughout the Blockade. The Obukhov factory also produced artillery and tanks.

  11. Triangles were worn by corporals and sergeants.

  12. The Society for the Promotion of Defence, Aviation and Chemistry. The declared aim of this “voluntary” civil-defence organization, founded in 1927, was to promote patriotism, marksmanship and aviation skills. Stalin described it as vital to “keeping the entire population in a state of mobilized readiness against the danger of military attack, so that no ‘accident’ and no tricks of our external enemies can catch us unawares.” The society sponsored clubs and organized contests throughout the Soviet Union; within a few years it had around 12 million members.

  13. Ethnic Germans who lived along the Volga, mainly in what is now the Saratov region to the north of Volgograd/Stalingrad. Encouraged by Catherine the Great (a German herself), they settled there in the eighteenth century. A Volga German Autonomous Republic was established in 1924, but this was abolished after the Nazi invasion. Seeing the Volga Germans as potential collaborators, the Soviet authorities deported approximately 500,000 of them to Siberia and Kazakhstan, where many died.

  14. Alexey Stakhanov was a miner whose improbably vast output of coal—twelve tons a day—led to his being held up as a model for Soviet workers. The word “Stakhanovite” was part of the official vocabulary of the era; there were, for example, regular congresses of “Stakhanovite” workers.

  15. Kliment Voroshilov (1881–1969) was a prominent political and military figure, one of the first five generals to be given the title Marshal of the Soviet Union.

  16. See Part I, note 54.

  17. The Don, the Volga and several other rivers flowing south into the Black and the Caspian Seas have high, steep west banks and low, flat east banks.

  18. Spiridonov exaggerates, but not absurdly. By June 1940 the Stalingrad Tractor Factory had produced over 230,000 tractors—more than half the tractors in the Soviet Union.

  19. Prince of Moscow from 1359 to 1389, Dmitry Donskoy was the first Muscovite ruler to openly challenge Moscow’s Mongol overlords.

  20. A cardiac medicine, used more in Russia and Germany than in the English-speaking world.

  21. The 10th NKVD Rifle Division, under Colonel A. A. Sarayev.

  22. Gradusov alludes to “Thoughts by the Grand Entrance,” a poem by Nikolay Nekrasov (see Part I, note 17). A group of exhausted pilgrims and beggars, “burnt by the sun,” knocks at the door of a grand house, hoping for alms. They are turned away.

  23. Vladimir Korolenko (1853–1921) was best known for his short novel The Blind Musician (1886), based on his experience of exile in Siberia.

  24. Arkady Gaidar (1904–41) was a popular children’s writer, best known for Timur and His Squad, a story about an altruistic young Pioneer.

  25. Penal battalions were formed from Gulag detainees and men sentenced by military tribunals. Most commanders looked on the lives of these men as entirely expendable, thinking nothing—for example—of sending them straight across minefields.

  26. “What has the Führer said?”

  27. “The Führer has said, Stalingrad must fall.”

  28. Richthofen’s Air Corps played an important part in the Battle of Yugoslavia (April 1941) and in the subsequent Battles of Greece and Crete. Richthofen did not, in fact, take part in the North Africa campaigns.

  29. Another of Grossman’s few mistakes with regard to German history: for much of the First World War Paulus and Rommel were company commanders in the same regiment.

  30. Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) was an Indian nationalist. In 1943, when Singapore was under Japanese rule, he formed a government of “Free India” there. He died in a plane crash.

  31. Goebbels was born with a deformed right foot, and he walked with a limp. A would-be writer as a young man, he obtained a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg in 1921.

  32. David Low was a famous British cartoonist. The Kukryniksy was the collective name of three Soviet cartoonists who began to work together in 1924 and went on to win international recognition for their caricatures of fascist leaders.

  33. The accuracy of Grossman’s portrayal of Himmler is confirmed by recent historians. Christopher Clark, for example, reviewing a biography of Himmler by Peter Longerich, writes: “Though he never became close to the dictator, he acquired a reputation as Hitler’s most dedicated and ruthless servant. Himmler fashioned the SS (originally a small offshoot of the much larger SA) into an instrument of the Führer’s will alone.” (“Theorist of Cosmic Ice,” London Review of Books, 11 October 2012, pp. 11–12.)

  34. Christopher Clark writes, “Between 23 April and 2 May 1942, a series of meetings, some very protracted, took place between Himmler and his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, and between Himmler and Hitler [. . .] Longerich concludes from the timing and intensity of these summit discussions that they ratified the transition from local and regional mass killings to a Europe-wide extermination programme” (ibid., p. 12). Grossman may have misdated the meeting he describes, but in other respects he was accurate. Clark refers to Himmler having “forsaken Catholicism to embrace a raft of esoteric post-Christian fads.” Hitler, on the other hand, was dismissive of occultism. In a major speech in September 1938, he claimed, “National Socialism is a cool, reality-based doctrine, based upon the sharpest scientific knowledge and its mental expression . . . The National Socialist movement is not a cult movement . . . Its meaning is not that of a mystic cult.” (Quoted by Richard J. Evans in “Nuts about the Occult,” London Review of Books, 2 August 2018, p. 38.)

  35. Hitler’s first speech as Reich Chancellor, on 10 February 1933.

  36. Nitroglycerine was used to treat chest pain and high blood pressure. It dilates the blood vessels and helps more blood reach the heart.

  37. Tobruk, in Cyrenaica (part of Libya), and the Egyptian town of Mersa Matrouh were important in the North Africa campaigns of 1941–42. There was an Axis airfield at Derna.

  38. Franz Halder (1884–1972) was chief of staff of the Army High Command from 1938 until September 1942. After receiving intelligence reports that Stalin could muster as many as 1.5 million men north of Stalingrad, Halder told Hitler that Paulus’s 6th Army was in a potentially catastrophic position. In response, Hitler threatened to replace Halder. Halder resigned—to be replaced that same day, 24 September, by Kurt Zeitzler.

  39. See Part I, note 24.

  40. Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912, chose to remain in Germany after the Nazis came to power. Some of his plays were banned but others went on being performed. His eightieth birthday in 1942 was celebrated on a grand scale. Bernhard Kellermann (1879–1951) was a novelist and poet; he welcomed the Russian Revolution in 1917 but remained in Germany throughout the Nazi era, publishing little.

  41. Albert Einstein (1879–1955) emigrated to the United States in 1933. Max Planck (1858–1947), in fact, remained in Germany throughout the Nazi era.

  42. “You are nothing, your people is everything.”

  43. The Nazi Party’s official newspaper, published daily from February 1923.


  44. Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, was the illegitimate son of Maria Schicklgruber, an Austrian peasant woman. When Alois was five years old, Maria married Johann Hiedler—or Hitler—and Alois assumed this surname.

  45. The industrialist Emil Kirdorf (1847–1938) helped promote Hitler’s rise to power, though not, in fact, until 1927.

  46. See Part II, note 1.

  47. “Fats” (zhiry), one of the food categories on ration cards, could mean anything from good quality pork fatback to all kinds of surrogates and “combined fats” (kombizhiry).

  48. There are many accounts of the terrifying whistle made by high-explosive bombs as they fell. The small incendiary units, however, were still more devastating in their effects. A He-111 bomber could carry up to thirty-two containers, each holding thirty-six units. The container was designed to fall apart soon after being dropped from the plane, thus releasing the individual units.

  49. Grossman arrived in Stalingrad soon after the air raid. A notebook entry reads, “Dead. People in cellars. Everything burned down. Hot walls of buildings, like the bodies of people who have died in the terrible heat and not yet cooled down . . . Still miraculously standing—amid thousands of vast stone buildings now burnt down or half destroyed—a small wooden soft-drinks kiosk. Like Pompeii, caught by destruction in the fullness of life.” (Gody voiny, p. 545.)

  50. Decorating houses or churches with birch branches at Whitsun was a common practice in much of northern Europe.

  51. During festivities following the coronation of Nicholas II, a mass panic on Khodynka Field in north-west Moscow led to the death of 1,389 people.

  52. See Part I, note 143. Remarkably, Kholzunov survived the Battle of Stalingrad. At the end of January 1943, when the embankment was cleared of rubble, this statue was found to be still intact.

  53. The Humiliated and Insulted is the title of one of Dostoevsky’s earlier novels, published in 1861.

  54. See Part I, note 74.

  55. An estimated 40,000 people died during the first day and night of air raids on Stalingrad (Merridale, Ivan’s War, p. 150).

  56. Three important Soviet tank army commanders.

  57. Vitya and Vitenka are both affectionate forms of Viktor. See Note on Russian Names.

  58. The second-largest town on this archipelago to the north of Norway is the Russian coal-mining settlement of Barentsburg.

  59. Labour battalions were usually formed from categories of people under suspicion, e.g. nationalities that had been deported. They were assigned to particularly hard physical labour.

  60. “Hero of Socialist Labour” was one of the highest Soviet honours, of equal status to “Hero of the Soviet Union.”

  61. See Part I, note 20.

  62. See Part I, note 37.

  63. Yemelyan Pugachov (c. 1742–75), a Cossack leader and pretender to the Russian throne, led a major popular rebellion during the reign of Catherine II.

  64. Similar to an Italian bread stick, but in the shape of a ring.

  PART THREE

  1. Vy and Ty are equivalent to the French vous and tu.

  2. See Part I, note 25.

  3. Evidently noted by Darensky shortly before the Germans encircled half a million Soviet troops during the Battle of Kiev.

  4. Three great Russian military heroes, from the thirteenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  5. A port on the Volga, in what is now the Mari El Republic. There was a labour camp nearby.

  6. The paper used for Soviet newspapers was coarse and poor quality—far from ideal for roll-ups.

  7. Around 5,000 American Bell Airacobra P-39s were delivered into Soviet service, half of them flying via Alaska and Siberia, half of them transported in crates via Iran.

  8. Part of the 62nd Army had been encircled on the west bank of the Don.

  9. See Part I, note 54.

  10. The first lines of an untitled poem well known to Russians. According to Grossman’s daughter, Tyutchev was one of his favourite Russian poets, along with Pushkin, Lermontov and Nekrasov (Korotkova-Grossman, Vospominaniya, p. 214).

  11. See Part I, note 30.

  12. Between 1 and 6 August, Stalin made several changes both to the naming of the various Fronts and to the chain of command. For a summary of this confusing period, see Glantz and House, Stalingrad, p. 99.

  13. The Volga at this point is about one-and-a-half-kilometres wide. One of Grossman’s notebook entries reads, “An awful crossing. Terror. The ferry was packed with vehicles, carts, hundreds of people all crowded together—and it hit a sandbank. A Junkers 108 dropped a bomb. A huge column of water, vertical, pale blue. Terror. Not a single machine gun or anti-aircraft gun at the crossing. The quiet, bright Volga—awful as a scaffold.” (Gody voiny, p. 345.)

  14. This reintroduction of the most ideologically charged part of tsarist military uniform was a significant moment in Stalin’s abandonment of revolutionary internationalism and assertion, in its place, of traditional Russian patriotism. See Schechter, Stuff of Soldiers, chapter 2.

  15. On 13 September Chuikov was on Mamaev Kurgan. On the 14th, he was in this tunnel by the River Tsaritsa. During the night of the 16th he moved to the cliff behind the Red October steelworks. My thanks to Michael Jones for clarifying these details (private email).

  16. In September 1943 Kuzma Gurov died from a heart attack.

  17. The move from the formal Vy to the informal Ty is a serious matter and was often marked by a threefold kiss, either on the cheeks or on the lips. It was not, in the mid-twentieth century, unusual for two Russian men to kiss on the lips.

  18. Red Army soldiers and commanders were expected to sew a narrow strip of white cloth to the inside of their jacket collar, leaving just two to three millimetres showing above it. This both created the illusion of a shirt and helped preserve the collar.

  19. The Kliment Voroshilov heavy tank, named after the Soviet minister of defence, was generally referred to by its initials.

  20. According to Michael K. Jones, Grossman’s account of the 13th Guards Division crossing the Volga is slightly inaccurate. Jones writes, “The crossing began on the early evening of 14 September, and the majority crossed during the night of the 14th, which was when the railway station was regained” (private email).

  21. See Part II, note 12.

  22. See Part I, note 31.

  23. In winter people often slept on top of the stove. See Part I, note 6.

  24. Lines from a song best known in a recording by the popular Lydia Ruslanova (1900–73). Ruslanova was arrested on trumped-up charges in 1948, and from January 1949 until her official “rehabilitation” in July 1953 her recordings were banned. It may be for this reason that Grossman leaves her nameless and sounding “sad and surprised.”

  25. “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  26. “Fire! Fire! Good! Very good!”

  27. “The Führer has said, ‘Stalingrad must fall.’”

  28. Grossman—though not Bach!—alludes to a famous sentence from Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, “God spare us from Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.” Both syntactically and rhythmically, the echo is precise. Bach may be coming to realize, if only half-consciously, that the Germans are about to encounter unshakable, merciless resistance.

  29. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil was first published in 1886. Like Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, it was well known in Russia and the Soviet Union. The Nazis made selective use of the philosophy of both Nietzsche and Spengler, and also of the work of the philosopher Johann Fichte (1762–1814).

  30. “Dear Ivan, come to me!”

  31. A Spanish company, founded in 1904, that produced luxury cars.

  32. Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919), a co-founder of the German Communist Party, is best known for his opposition to the First World War and his role in the Spartacist uprising of 1919. The idea of him being an agent of the Jewish Sanhedrin was, of course, Nazi propaganda.

  33. Furs.

  34. Stumpfe’s bro
ther evidently took part in the massacre at Babi Yar, outside Kiev. See Part I, note 103. There were two cemeteries nearby: a Russian Orthodox cemetery and a Jewish cemetery. The latter was closed in 1937.

  35. A reference to the Bible, to the Book of Esther. Haman, vizier to the Persian king Ahasuerus, was plotting to destroy the Jewish people. Queen Esther, herself a Jew, manages to foil this plot. The festival of Purim commemorates her success.

  36. See Part I, note 45.

  37. The “factory” in question is Treblinka. In “The Hell of Treblinka” (an article first published in 1944), Grossman writes, “We know about a huge young man named Stumpfe who broke out into uncontrollable laughter every time he murdered a prisoner or when one was executed in his presence. He was known as ‘Laughing Death.’”

  38. “Hey you, Puss, Puss!”

  39. A Blockleiter (block leader) was a junior Nazi official responsible for the political supervision of a neighbourhood. Blockleiters were supposed to act as a link between the Nazi authorities and the people as a whole.

  40. Filyashkin is being ironic and facetious; as a professional soldier, he has suffered from the interference of commissars. At the same time, he clearly feels the need for some kind of ritual to mark the imminent end of his and his comrades’ lives. Unconsciously, he turns to the only ritual with which he has any familiarity—that of the Orthodox church. Shvedkov, naturally, is irritated by Filyashkin’s facetiousness. He may also sense Filyashkin’s deeper feelings—which would be still more irritating for him.

  41. See Part I, note 31.

  42. A standard formula, pronounced in acknowledgement of the receipt of any official award.

  43. This report is based on a report by a real figure, Company Commander Kolaganov. Grossman carried this report about in his map case throughout the war. He reproduced it first in his article “Tsaritsyn—Stalingrad” and then in Stalingrad. For a discussion of the battle for the railway station, see Jones, Stalingrad, pp. 121–7. Grossman’s account telescopes three separate events into one: the defence of the railway station, which in reality lasted only twenty-four hours, and the subsequent defence first of the Univermag department store and then of the nail factory, which is where Kolaganov wrote his report. It seems likely that Grossman knew the true sequence of events and chose to employ dramatic licence.