The Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945

                 October 25, 2017

           

Class Materials

 

I. A City Before the War[1].

 

            It had been a cold spring in Leningrad in 1941. There had been snow as late as May Day. As Harrison Salisbury wrote, “The cold persisted in June, and it seemed that the Baltic fogs would never lift….The weather began to change with thunderstorms on Thursday, June 19, and again on [Friday]. Finally on the summer solstice, [Saturday] June 21, the sun broke through and sudden bright blue skies blessed the city.”

            The solstice was a special day, the year’s longest day, a day with no end, the whitest of the “white nights”, when midnight is like dusk and it never really gets dark. Trees began to blossom. Examinations were finished in the university on Saturday, June 21, and classes were dismissed for part of the summer. Young people took to the streets to celebrate. They flowed across the Palace Bridge for the promenade of the White Nights, singing, playing guitars, meeting at cafes along the Nevsky Prospekt, Leningrad’s main thoroughfare. All evening there were long lines waiting to get in the Astoria Hotel, where inside young people danced to the current hit, “We’ll Meet Again in Lvov, My Love and I”, a song made popular by Eddie Rozner and his Metropole Hotel Jazz Band.

            Yet it was an uncertain spring, fading into summer in the white light. World War II was well into its second year. Could peace in Russia last forever?  The government assured Leningraders and all of Russia that the Nazi/Soviet Peace Pact of August 1939 would assure continued peace. Any suggestion to the contrary was almost tantamount to treason. Recent territorial acquisitions had made the nation seem more secure. The portions of Finland close to Leningrad had been taken in the winter war of 1939-1940. In a secret protocol with Hitler, the Soviet Union in 1940 had annexed the Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—ending their 20-year experience of being free from the yoke of the Russian Empire.

            On Saturday afternoon, the editorial staff of Leningrad Pravda put the Sunday edition to bed and then went outside the city to a rented villa on the Gulf of Finland to enjoy part of a weekend by the sea. In the rehearsal rooms of the State Ballet School, the strict taskmistress, Agrippina Vaganova, rehearsed the ballet corps for a program on Sunday at the Mariinsky Theater. That same Saturday, June 21, 1941, the composer Dmitri Shostakovich was planning something not very musical. An avid sports fan, he purchased tickets for the soccer game on Sunday at Dynamo Stadium.

            In the great Hermitage Museum that June Saturday, the director, Joseph Orbeli, whose long beard made him resemble an Old Testament prophet, worked late. He was concerned but not about the risk of war. That day’s Pravda had announced the Sunday opening of an exhibition about Tamerlane and the Mongol era, and Orbeli knew the crowds—always large on Sunday, the only non-work day of a Soviet week—would be larger than usual.

            In the suburb of Pushkin, the old imperial village of Tsarkoye Selo, young couples strolled the parks and the Catherine Palace, one of the great architect Rastrelli’s masterpiece designs. Mostly recent university and technical school graduates, they celebrated the longest day of the year. From the open windows of the palace, they could hear the composer Gavril Popov playing a Scriabin piano sonata.

            It was such a beautiful day and night that one could almost forget, at least temporarily, the terror of 1937.

            In the local party headquarters at Smolny Institute, a former girls’ school turned into party and government headquarters by Lenin, regular Saturday meetings were being held. Just before the top Communist Party officials left Smolny for the day, the word was quietly passed to them—but not to the others: “Don’t get too far away. There may be something coming up tonight.”

            There was something coming up that night. At 3:30 am, on Sunday morning, June 22, 1941, 3,200,000 German soldiers invaded Russia all along a 1,500-mile front. The Nazis went into Russia with 148 divisions, including 19 Panzer divisions; 3,350 tanks; 7,184 artillery pieces; 600,000 trucks and cars; 600,000 horses; and 2,000 aircraft[2].

 

II.  Overview.

 

            In a speech at American University, President Kennedy said, referring to the United States and the Soviet Union:

            “Among the many traits that the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than the mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Russians suffered in the course of the Second World War.”

Not unnaturally, Britons have been interested chiefly in the British war effort, and Americans in the American war effort. This emphasis in our country and in Great Britain has tended to obscure the important fact, in Winston Churchill’s words, “It was the Russians who tore the guts out of the German Army.” Gratitude now perhaps forgotten was commonplace, particularly in the dark days of 1942. Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in the British wartime government and later Foreign Minister, said in June 1942:

            “All the aid we have been able to give has been small compared with the tremendous efforts of the Soviet people. Our children’s children will look back, through their history books, with admiration and thanks for the heroism of the great Russian people.”

Without in any way belittling the American war effort or sacrifices but instead to show graphically the scale of the sacrifices of the Russians, here are some numbers. In World War II, United States military deaths in the war with Japan and Germany combined were 416,800. Great Britain military deaths totaled 383,600; dominions added more military deaths: 45,400 Canadians and 39,800 Australians died in World War II.

            German military deaths totaled 4.5 million. Austrians, Ethnic Germans from other countries and Soviet citizens who fought for Germany add about 1 million to the total. (The Soviet citizen/German soldier total deaths number is 215,000—many were from the territories incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1940.) 3.3 million German soldiers were taken prisoners by the Soviets, and 374,000 died in captivity. German civilian war deaths are somewhere between 900,000 and 1.7 million. German citizens who perished in the holocaust totaled 160,000.

            The numbers for the Soviet Union are staggering, even when compared to German losses. Soviet statistics are not reliable, but Soviet military deaths were about 8.7 million. The Germans took about 4 million Soviet soldiers prisoners, and only 1.68 million of these Soviet POWs were alive at war’s end. Russian civilian deaths were at least 18 million. The Soviet total is around 27 million, based on most recent estimates.

            Over 25 million Russians were left homeless—no Americans were. Two-thirds of the factories of European Russia were destroyed by the Nazis. Virtually no American factories were destroyed.

            For 25 years after the war, the Russians were reluctant to mention a specific figure for their deaths during World War II. The appalling losses left a deep mark on the Russian character; and, whether we like it or not, were a contributing cause of Soviet conduct in Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1985. These memories are still fresh in every older Russian mind, and the younger generations cannot miss the monuments, memorials and anniversary celebrations that remind them of how Russia suffered, how she had to fight—first for survival and then for victory.

            Memories of World War II were in many Russian minds when the George W. Bush administration proposed to base cruise missiles in Poland, and the Obama and Trump administrations proposed to sell them to the Poles. Only those weak in the history of Eastern Europe’s service as a highway for invading Russia could have thought that Russia would accept those missile placements.

            It is strange today to think that this immense war in Russian was successfully fought under the barbarous Stalin regime. But the people fought, and fought above all for themselves, that is for Russia—not for communism or the Soviet state. Stalin had the good sense to realize this almost at once. In the dark days of 1941, Stalin explicitly proclaimed that the people were fighting this war for Russia and “for the Russian heritage,” thus stimulating Russian national pride. Later in the war, Stalin deliberately singled out the Great Russians for special praise, at the expense of other nationalities of the Soviet Union, for having shown the greatest endurance, the greatest patience and for not having lost faith in the Soviet regime. That last claim is of doubtful validity.

            The regime did have a major share in the credit for Russia’s ultimate victory: but for the vast industrialization effort that had gone on since 1928, and the tremendous organizational feat of evacuating a large part of industry to the east at the height of the German invasion, Russia might well have been destroyed. As for Stalin himself, Marshal  Georgy Zhukov—a man who did not like Stalin—nevertheless paid Stalin this tribute: “You can say what you like, but that man has got nerves of iron.”

 

III. The Prelude.

            The road to war began in May 1939, when, without fanfare, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was named People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs in place of Maxim Litvinov. Litvinov had been the Soviet foreign minister for years, was a westernized intellectual, and (importantly for the significance of the change) was a Jew.

            Molotov was an Old Bolshevik, born in 1890 in the Russian village of Kukarka, the son of a shop clerk. His birth surname was Skriabin but contrary to rumor he was not related to the composer Aleksandr Scriabin. He took the name “Molotov” during his time as a revolutionary; the word “molot” means “hammer.” Molotov attended a secondary school in Kazan, on the Volga well east of Moscow, and joined the Bolshevik party in 1906. His life then followed the usual pattern for a communist under the Tsar: he was arrested in 1909 and spent two years in exile in Vologda. He next enrolled in technical school in St. Petersburg and worked under Stalin on Pravda, then an outlawed underground newspaper. He was arrested again in and exiled to Irkutsk in Siberia, but he escaped after two years and returned to St. Petersburg to await the revolution. He climbed the ranks of administration and was nominal prime minister of the Soviet Union during the 1930’s. Molotov, rare among Old Bolsheviks, survived some pressures on him and died in 1986 at the age of 96. His public career ended when Khrushchev removed the old Stalinist from his posts in 1956.

            Molotov likely survived to old age only because Stalin died suddenly in March 1953. Stalin and his secret police head, Lavrenti Beria, had planned a purge of older party leaders (Molotov included) for 1953. Molotov’s political survival powers are best shown by his conduct in 1948 when Stalin had Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, arrested for treason. She was Jewish, Stalin had long distrusted her, and he had in 1948 started a major purge of Jews. She was freed from prison after Stalin died and reunited with her husband. Molotov, still foreign minister of Russian at the time of Polina Zhemchuzhina’s arrest, continued to work with Stalin without mentioning his wife’s situation. Never in political history has a foreign minister worked beside a dictator or head of state without comment or complaint after the dictator arrested the minister’s wife.

            To Hitler the removal of a Jewish foreign minister who was known to be pro-Western, was a signal that Moscow was no longer oriented toward the western powers and might consider a deal with Hitler. As Hitler said to his generals on August 22, 1939, the day before a pact was signed between Hitler and Stalin, “Litvinov’s dismissal was decisive. It came to me like a cannon shot, like a sign that the attitude of Moscow had changed.”

            The Stalin who had liquidated his own army leadership was desperate to avoid war with Germany. Stalin was right to be concerned about Germany, because Hitler’s rantings and writings had long been directed more at the Soviet Union than at France, Britain and the west.

            When Germany marched into Prague in March of 1939, in violation of the Munich Pact agreed to in late September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain summarily issued a British guarantee of the sanctity of Poland. The appeaser of Munich had become six months later the guarantor of a distant country. As one historian wrote in reference to the hastily made British guarantee of Poland, “Having been bamboozled by Hitler [at Munich], Chamberlain was now going to be bamboozled by the Poles.”

Shortly after the issuance of the guarantee to Poland, Great Britain and France began negotiations with the Soviet Union concerning a mutual defense treaty. Britain and France had guaranteed Polish security, but figured correctly the guarantee was near meaningless without Soviet help due to its proximity to Poland. The Soviet Union was interested but demanded that it have the right to enter Poland to meet a German attack. The Poles would not stand for that. Poland had been partitioned by Catherine the Great, had been briefly occupied by the Bolsheviks in 1920, and had been independent only since 1920, so its vehement objections to giving the Soviets a treaty right to enter Poland for any reason had a sound historical basis. The Poles wanted British and French guarantees of Polish integrity; the last thing the Poles wanted was a Russian guarantee.

            In the event, Britain and France did not insist. Stalin’s talks with Britain and France fell apart by early August.

            On August 3, the Germans sent a signal to the Russians that an agreement could be reached between the two previously hostile countries. Stalin threw Molotov into negotiations, and on August 23, Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop arrived in Moscow to sign the hastily negotiated German-Russian treaty. The treaty provided for trade and peace between the two countries. In a secret protocol, it provided that, if Germany were to invade Poland, The Soviets could take the Western Ukraine. The Western Ukraine had been part of the Russian Empire, and was an ethnically mixed area in which the cities were largely populated by Poles and the countryside by Ukrainians.

            The treaty also provided that Germany would not much care if the Russians decided to take over Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on the Baltic Coast. The three countries had been part of the Russian Empire until the end of World War I and became independent countries after the Russian Revolution.

            The Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and on September 17, the Red Army crossed the Polish frontier and incorporated the Western Ukraine, comprising eastern one-third of Poland, into the Soviet Union. One can imagine how the Poles actually greeted their Russian liberators. But, according to Pravda, the Red Army was greeted with joy. As one headline in Pravda read, “Happy days in liberated villages”; another Pravda headline read, “Polish population says to Red Army, ‘you have saved our lives.’”

            In 1940, Stalin deported to Siberia thousands of allegedly “disloyal” or “hostile” Poles. A substantial number of Polish soldiers captured by the Russians were sent east to labor camps. Last, in 1940 Stalin, at the suggestion of Beria, head of the NKVD, assassinated about 22,000 Polish officers, priests, lawyers, and intelligentsia in the Katyn Forest and elsewhere. When the Germans discovered the bodies in 1943, it caused a major foreign policy headache for the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States, with the Russians claiming the Nazis had killed the Poles—a claim very few believed. Over four decades later, Russia admitted responsibility for the massacre.

            Territorial expansion tends to go the heads of dictators. Having effortlessly picked up a third of Poland, Stalin in late 1939 made some modest territorial demands on Finland. Leningrad was twenty miles from the Finnish border, and Stalin asked the Finns to give him another twenty miles plus a naval base on the north side of the Gulf of Finland to guard the approaches to Leningrad. In return, Stalin was prepared to cede some largely frozen Russian territory north of Lake Ladoga to the Finns. The Finns were not much interested in a forced concession of their lands.

            On November 30, 1939, in the Winter War, the Red Army proceeded north of Leningrad into Finnish territory. The Finns, on skis and in white winter dress, fought fiercely. By March 1940 it was all over, and Stalin had gotten the land he wanted. However, The Red Army lost 48,000 killed and 158,000 additional soldiers wounded. Soviet casualties were not reported in Pravda. How could they be? To Pravda, the war was one of, to quote the paper, “the Red Army helping the Finnish people to struggle against their capitalist oppressors.”

            In response to the disaster that befell the Red Army in the snows of Finland, Stalin transformed the Red Army in 1940, greatly increasing the defense budget. In the last part of 1940 and the first months of 1941, the Soviet press was filled with Army nominations and promotions, always with pictures of the new generals, sometimes taking up four pages of Pravda at a time. Pravda never mentioned why there was so much room for promotions in the Red Army: Stalin had destroyed most of its senior officers in the terror of 1937 and 1938.

            As agreed with the Germans, in June 1940 the Red Army occupied the allegedly oppressed peoples of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and incorporated them into the Soviet Union, thus increasing the size of Stalin’s buffer zone.

            On December 18, 1940, having conquered Holland, Belgium and France and isolated Great Britain, Hitler signed the order to invade Russia in Operation Barbarossa in the spring of 1941. The jumping off date, June 22, 1941, was on the 129^th anniversary of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812.

            During the months prior to June 22, the Kremlin received specific and grave warnings from reliable sources that Germany was going to invade Russia. Perhaps most startling, in February 1941, a German print shop worker brought to the Soviet Embassy in Berlin a German-Russian phrase book being printed in large numbers at his print shop. It included such phrases as “Are you a communist?”; “Hands up or I’ll shoot”; and “Surrender!” As Harrison Salisbury noted, “The implications were obvious”. The printer was ignored. In the spring a Russian diplomat in Berlin heard about an incident at a reception at the Bulgarian embassy. The chief of a German press department, got drunk and shouted out, “We will demolish the Russians quicker than we did the French.”

            The NKVD had a remarkable source, the master spy Richard Sorge. He was a German communist who had for years ostensibly been a German newspaper correspondent in Tokyo but was actually Soviet spy. He had become a confidant of the German Ambassador in Tokyo, one Hermann Ott. By means of a secret wireless station and using couriers, Sorge was able to send to Moscow a stream of accurate information. In March he sent to Moscow a copy of a telegram from Ribbentrop to Ambassador Ott that gave a mid-June date for a German attack on the Soviet Union. In early May 1941, Sorge informed Moscow that Hitler would invade as soon as his spring campaign against Yugoslavia was complete—which turned out to be the case. On May 19, Sorge he reported that Germany would send 150 divisions against Russia. He was two divisions off; the actual number was 148 divisions.

            In April 1941, United States Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles warned the Soviet Ambassador in Washington that Germany was preparing to invade Russia. That same month, British Prime Minister Churchill sent a similar warning to the Soviets. Last on June 10, Lord Cadogan of the British Foreign Office called in Russian Ambassador Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky and said, “Take a piece of paper and write down what I am going to dictate.” Lord Cadogan then proceeded to list the identity and location of German army units concentrated on the Russian frontier. Maisky sent an urgent telegram to Moscow. Three days later the Soviet press called rumors of a war with Germany a British provocation.

            In the midst of these warnings, Stalin signed an order in early June to put Soviet industry on a wartime footing by the end of 1942—seemingly proof he did not believe the warnings of war in June 1941. Why? Here is what Harrison Salisbury wrote:

            “Stalin could not have had more specific, more detailed…information. Probably no nation ever had been so well informed of an impending enemy attack. The encyclopedic mass of Soviet intelligence makes even the imposing data which the United States possessed concerning Japan’s intention to attack Pearl Harbor look quite skimpy.”[3]

           

 

IV. The Great Patriotic War.

 

A. A Brief Look at the Campaigns

            These materials first give a brief overview of the four years of war on the Russian Front and will then attempt to provide a feeling for the war by looking at four major events: the collapse of the Red Army in 1941, leading up to the defense of Moscow in December; the 900-day siege of Leningrad; the battle of Stalingrad; and the battle of Kursk in July 1943.

            In June 1941, the Germans launched a three-pronged attack. The first prong went northeast out of Poland towards Leningrad; the second prong went straight towards Moscow; and the third prong went southeast into the Ukraine. The advance was extraordinary; hundreds of miles of territory were taken in a few weeks; by early fall, the northeastern prong was at the gates of Leningrad where it would remain for the next 2 ½ years. By November, the middle prong was nearing the outskirts of Moscow; by the late fall, the southeastern prong had taken most of the Ukraine and almost all the Crimean peninsula.

            There the line stayed frozen during the winter of 1942. In the spring of 1942, the Germans struck again, primarily in the south. The Germans were unable to move the Leningrad front forward in 1942, and retreated a few miles further away from Moscow in the summer. In the south, the Germans struck with great ferocity in an effort to reach the  oil fields of Georgia and Azerbaijan. The German advance moved well into the Caucasus, almost to the oil fields of Georgia, before it was halted—not by fighting in the Caucasus, but instead by a Red Army thrust south from Stalingrad after the victory at Stalingrad in February, 1943. And that thrust threatened to close off hundreds of thousands of German troops from their supply lines.

            In summer 1943, after another winter of relatively little movement, the Russians launched their great western offensive, pushing the Germans out of the Caucasus and out of the southern steppes back into the Ukraine and, in the center, 300 miles west of Moscow. The highlight of the 1943 campaign was the battle of Kursk, the largest single battle fought in the war, dwarfing by a factor of 3 or 4 anything that happened on the Western Front. On one battlefield, Russians and Germans threw almost two million soldiers into a battle won by the Russians.

            The Russian summer offensive in 1944 reclaimed the Ukraine and parts of Poland. Warsaw fell in late 1944, after a much-debated pause by the Red Army either to rest and refit after a 300-mile advance without stopping or to let the Polish underground rise up and be crushed by the Germans. The reason for the pause was probably a mixture of the two: the Red Army was exhausted and had outrun its supply lines. At the same time, Stalin was only too pleased to let the Germans get rid of a considerable number of anti-communist Poles.

The Russians stormed into Berlin in late April 1945, having met the American army at the River Elbe on April 12. While we mark victory in Europe on May 8, the Russians mark it as May 9 because it was May 9 in Moscow when the fighting stopped.

A word about American aid to Russia during the war: American lend-lease shipments to Russia were modest in 1942 but picked up dramatically from 1943 to 1945. Deliveries were very difficult, using the northern ports of Murmansk and Archangel in 1942. A route up through Iran opened in 1943, and this helped to increase the volume of aid. For the entire war, American aid to Russia included 427,000 trucks, 13,000 jeeps, 35,000 motorcycles, 380,000 field telephones,23 million yards of cloth for uniforms, 5 ½ million pairs of combat boots, 2 million tires, raw materials and 4,400,000 tons of food. Of this, Max Hastings writes: “Few Russians were ever allowed to know that they marched to Berlin in boots manufactured by the U.S…or that much of the Soviet Union’s aircraft production was made possible by American aluminum supplies.”[4]

From 1943 on, the Red Army particularly appreciated the trucks, combat boots, medicines and Spam. And the Dodge and Ford trucks were seen on Russian streets for many years after the war. The aid program was not without tensions. Alexander Werth, who spent the war in Russia, wrote: “ This [the aid] still does not dispose of the profound emotional problem created by the simple fact that the Russians were losing millions of men, while the British and American were losing much fewer people.” For its part, the west thought there was a lack of Russian gratitude. It flared up in March 1943, when the American ambassador, Admiral Standley, complained at a press conference about the “ungracious” Soviet attitude toward American help. The Russians were annoyed. One said to Alexander Werth at the time, “We’ve lost millions of people, and they want us to crawl on our knees because they send us Spam.”[5]

 

B. The Collapse of 1941 and the Battle of Moscow.

            Alexander Werth, who died in 1969, was a naturalized British citizen born in St. Petersburg. His family had fled Russia at the time of the revolution. He spent the war in Russia as a BBC correspondent with extraordinary access to officials and the battlefield because he was an ally and fluent in Russian. Here is a true story: Werth was allowed to visit Majdenek concentration camp, one of the first liberated by the Red Army and before any had been liberated by Western Front troops. He filed a story, but the BBC initially refused to broadcast it because it thought the story about a death camp for Jews was a Soviet propaganda stunt.

            In his book, Russia at War, Werth describes the summer of 1941 this way:

            “The first weeks of the war and, indeed, the first three and a half months were, to the Russians, an almost mitigated disaster. The greater part of the Russian Air Force was wiped out in the first few days; the Russians lost thousands of tanks; hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as a million Russian soldiers were taken prisoner in a series of spectacular encirclements during the first two weeks of the war, and by the second week of July, some German generals thought the war was as good as won.”[6]

            In the Ukraine in particular, a significant portion of the population greeted the invading Germans with open arms—not surprising after collectivization of agriculture, the famine of 1933 and the terror of 1937. A year or so of German repression solved that problem: by 1943, the Ukraine was a hotbed of Soviet partisan activity in the German rear.

            Stalin surely panicked for nearly two weeks. The announcement of the war on the afternoon of June 22 was made by Molotov, not Stalin. At last on July 3 Stalin spoke on the radio to the people of the Soviet Union, calling the people his “brothers and sisters” and “my friends.” He whipped up enthusiasm against the Germans:

            “The enemy is cruel and merciless. He aims at grabbing our land, our wheat and oil. He wants to restore the power of the landowners, reestablish tsarism and turn us into the slave of the German princes and barons.”

            Stalin also made it clear that the war in Russia would be prosecuted with ruthless dedication to the task: “There should be no room in our ranks for whimperers and cowards, for deserters and panic mongers.”

            But nothing stopped the German advance. By mid-October, the German army was 50 miles from Moscow. On October 16, there was total panic in Moscow, and the majority of the government fled east to Kuibyshev, a dreary Volga river town. Stalin stayed in Moscow, and the British and American ambassadors vowed to stay with him, but Molotov ordered them east to Kuibyshev, which they took as an admission Moscow was going to be captured by the Germans. In Russia, people quietly referred to the events of October 16 as the “big skedaddle.” A factory worker, Dmitri Safonov, wrote, “All of Moscow seemed to be streaming out somewhere. [People rushing about the street] didn’t seem to know where to go or what to do.”  At a railroad station, Safonov saw suitcases, clothes, lamps, even a piano, all abandoned by those who had managed to board anything that was leaving Moscow[7]. Those who stayed in Moscow spent late October dumping their apartments’ obligatory pictures of Stalin and Lenin in the trash for fear the Germans would kill them for being communists.

            Vasily Grossman, the battlefront journalist, wrote in his journal (this could never have been printed in a newspaper) about a Red Army retreat near Moscow: “I thought I’d seen retreat, but I’ve never seen anything like what I am seeing now....Exodus! Biblical exodus! Vehicles are moving in eight lanes…There are crowds of pedestrians with sacks, bundles, suitcases…There are moments when I feel…as if we have been transported back in time to the era of biblical catastrophes.”[8]

Despite the panic, five hundred thousand civilians, mainly women and children, were mobilized to dig anti-tank ditches around Moscow as the Germans approached. On the ride from Moscow’s Sheremetevo Airport to the center of the city one can still see the remains of the anti-tank defenses.

            On November 7, Stalin delivered a speech to a large group of troops who were heading to the very nearby front. Stalin invoked the name of Lenin: ‘Under the banner of Lenin, onward to victory.” He also invoked the heroes of Tsarist Russia: “May you be inspired in this war by the heroic figures of our great ancestors, Aleksandr Nevsky, Aleksandr Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov.”[9] Nevsky defeated the Teutonic Knights in the Battle of the Ice in the 13^th century. General Suvorov won all battles he led against the Ottoman Empire in the 18^th century. And Mikhail Kutuzov led Russia to victory over Napoleon in 1812. Stalin was appealing to Russian patriotism, not Soviet patriotism or communist loyalty.

            There was irony in the reference to Aleksandr Nevsky. In 1938, the director, Sergeii Eisenstein had made a popular movie about Nevsky’s defeat of the Teutonic Knights in 1242. When the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed in August 1939, the movie was pulled from Russian theaters. Then when the Germans invaded in 1941, the movie was put back in theaters; and the director, Eisenstein went from having a movie that had been banned to being awarded the Stalin Prize for the movie.

            The first sign that things might change came on October 6 when the first snow fell. It melted, and the streets turned to mud, slowing the Nazi onslaught. The old saying is that the best Russian generals are General January and General February; and there is a grain of truth in that. The lead panzer general, Heinz Guderian, took the early snow as warning of the looming Russian winter. He and his officers pleaded for warm boots, shirts, socks, which were in very short supply.  Guderian was told not to pester the high command with such requests, but he continued to do so without success. Guderian noted that many of his soldiers were still wearing cotton denim when the temperature was 8 degrees below zero. The only way of dealing with the cold was to seize overcoats and fur hats from captured or dead Russians. Guderian wrote that winter clothing provided by his own army was “a mere drop in the ocean.” 

Even Nazi propaganda chief Dr. Joseph Gobbels grew concerned. He approached Colonel General Alfred Jodl, the second-ranking Nazi officer, in October about collecting winter clothes for the front. Jodl brushed him off, saying, “Winter? By then we will be sitting in warm quarters in Leningrad and Moscow.”[10]

            The weather, long supply lines and some Red Army stubbornness, led General Guderian, creator of the blitzkrieg, to write in late November,

            “We are suffering severe frostbite; the troops are suffering from an appalling supply situation; without fuel, our trucks can’t move; without food, our troops cannot fight. I am thankful that our men are such good soldiers.”

            By now, Stalin had recalled his best general, Marshal Georgy Zhukov from Leningrad, where he had been sent in September to stabilize that front. Zhukov was born in poverty in 1896 in the village of Strelkovka. The village name comes from the word, streltsy, or archers, because this was where Ivan the Terrible’s archers set up camp. Zhukov was apprenticed to a furrier and then drafted into the Russian army in World War I, where he was twice awarded the Cross of St. George, the Tsarist Empire’s highest honor for valor. After the revolution, he joined the Bolshevik Party, contracted typhus but recovered and then served in the Red Army during the civil war. Zhukov came to Stalin’s attention when he defeated a short-lived Japanese invasion in the Far East in 1939.

            He was not an easy man to like. He was famous for angry tirades laced with obscenities; for example, “You are not a general but a bag of dung”—except he did not say “dung”. He did not flinch when it came to sacrificing his men on a battlefield. After the war, he told General Eisenhower, “If we came to a minefield, our infantry attacked exactly as if it were not there.” No American commander would ever order a frontal attack over a known minefield without any effort to clear it first.

            Zhukov knew he was lucky to have survived the purge of army officers in 1937. His daughter Ella said that he kept a small suitcase packed with underwear and a toilet kit in case the next knock on the door was for him. Ella also said they never talked openly at home about why daddy kept a suitcase packed and ready to go.

            In late October, Stalin called in Zhukov and his second in command, General Ivan Konev, listened to their plans to defend Moscow, and said, “If Moscow falls, both your heads will roll.”[11] They got the message.

            When Zhukov died in 1974, he was one of only two men who had been named a Hero of the Soviet Union four times. The other was the longtime leader, Leonid Brezhnev; and all of Brezhnev’s were self-awarded.

            The weather worsened in late November, and Hitler allowed his freezing troops in front of Moscow to go over to the defensive on December 4, in some places only 15 miles from Moscow. They could not dig in, because the ground was too frozen to dig a foxhole. In addition to weather, the Germans had been stopped by four things. First, the new Russian T-34 tank appeared—superior to any German, American or British tank in World War II. Second, the new Katyushas, rocket propelled artillery fired from trucks, came onto the battlefield. Known as Stalin’s Organs, they were terrifying.

Third, the Russian soldier toughened. General Ewald von Kleist, commander of the First Panzer Army, was astounded by some Red Army units’ refusal to surrender. He recalled later, “The Russians are so primitive that they won’t give up even when they are surrounded by a dozen machine guns.” A backhanded compliment, to be sure, but a compliment. One German soldier in the battle for Moscow wrote, “the…duration and fury of [Red Army] attacks had exhausted and numbed us completely. Not to hide the truth, [but] they had frightened us.”[12] Last, for all their victories, the German losses were appalling. In the first five months, the Germans had 743,000 casualties on the Russian Front, including 200,000 dead. That’s 40,000 deaths a month; 1,333 a day, every day.

            Zhukov struck on December 6 with a large number of Siberian troops, well prepared for winter fighting—heavy boots, overcoats and white camouflage on top. The sight of fresh soldiers, dressed the same color as the ever-present snow caused some German units to panic. In the end, the Germans were pushed back about 100 miles from Moscow; but only after Stalin ordered a continuation of the offensive over Zhukov’s objections. The costly continuation got nowhere.

            The Nazis would not threaten Moscow again. Letters sent home to Germany reflect the change in German fortunes in the week leading up to the Russian attack on December 6.

             On December 1, SS officer Kurt Simann wrote this to his wife in Munich:

“We are now at a distance of [16 miles] from Moscow and can see some of its spires. Soon we will have surrounded Moscow and then we’ll be billeted in sumptuous winter quarters and I will send you presents which will make Aunt Minna green with envy.”

            On December 3, SS soldier Christian Hoelzer wrote this to his brother:

“When you receive this letter, the Russians will be defeated and we will be in Moscow parading in Red square. I never dreamed I’d see so many countries. I also hope to be on hand when our troops parade in England….”

            On December 6, Adlof Fortheimer wrote this to his wife:

“My dear wife,

            This is Hell. The Russian don’t want to leave Moscow. They’ve launched an offensive. Every hour brings news of terrifying developments. It’s so cold my very soul is freezing. It’s death to venture out in the evening. I beg of you—stop writing about the silks and rubber boots I’m supposed to bring you from Moscow. Can’t you understand I’m dying? I’ll die for sure. I feel it.”

 

C. The Siege of Leningrad[13].

            The military battle is a small part of the story. The Germans closed a ring around Leningrad in early September 1941, except for Lake Ladoga. The ring was loosened slightly in late 1943 and opened in 1944. The result was that 3 million Leningraders were trapped inside Leningrad when the siege began. And one million Leningraders died from disease and starvation during the siege, but the city never fell to the Germans. (The city in a sense fell to Stalin after the war. In 1949-1950, most of the communist party leaders in Leningrad during the war were shot. They were shot apparently because Stalin knew they thought he did not do enough for Leningrad during the starvation winter of 1941-1942.)

            Compare the one million civilian deaths in Leningrad with other famous tragedies of World War II. Apart from the Holocaust, nothing approaches the siege of Leningrad. At most, 200,000 died at Hiroshima; 135,000 civilians died in the fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945; Coventry became famous in Great Britain where 700 people were killed in one night.

            The first Western historian of the siege, Harrison Salisbury, wrote this:

            “This was the…longest siege ever endured by a modern city, a time of trial, suffering and heroism that reached peaks of tragedy and bravery almost beyond our power to comprehend. But in the west, not one person in fifty who thrilled to the courage of the Londoners in the Battle of Britain is cognizant of that of the Leningraders.”

            There is no more moving sight than to visit Piskarevsky (Piskaryovskoye)[14] Cemetery in St. Petersburg where the civilians and some soldiers who died in the siege are buried. The names are not known; there are no individual grave markers. There are simply large green plots of grass with a marker at the foot of each: 1941, 1942 or 1943. 500,000 civilians and 50,000 soldiers are buried in that cemetery. At the back is a monument with a stanza written by Olga Berggolts, a Leningrad poet who lived through the siege:

“We cannot number the noble ones

Who lie beneath the eternal granite

But of those honored by this stone

Let no one forget; let nothing be forgotten.”

When I visited this cemetery for the first time in 1976, the other tourists went ahead, but I looked at our Intourist guide, a middle-aged woman, standing by the bus with a few tears on her face. I said, “You had family?” She responded, “Da” (yes).

            Two months before the ring closed around Leningrad, a 31-car train pulled by two engines moved out of the railroad station one dawn. Its cargo was over 500,000 objects from the Hermitage Museum, and the train included two flatcars with antiaircraft guns on them. Never in history had there been such a train: Rembrandt’s Holy Family, Titians, El Grecos, Rubenses, Van Dycks, Velazquezes, two DaVinci Madonnas, two Raphael Madonnas, Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal, plus diamonds, gold, and the crown jewels of the Tsars. Musem Director Orbeli stood on the platform, tears running down his cheeks and then turned back to the museum. A million more objects awaited evacuation. By the time two more trains had been packed, workers had used 50 tons of shavings and three tons of cotton wadding to pack the treasures.

            Later in the summer, as the Germans neared Leningrad, the public library shipped off 360,000 of its most priceless items, including Voltaire’s Library and the Pushkin archives. Fifty-two boxes of treasures from the Catherine and Alexander Palaces were shipped to the East. The leading artistic groups were required by the government to leave: the Philharmonic was sent to Novosibirsk; the Mariinsky Opera and Ballet to Perm; and the Maly Opera to Orenburg.

            The composer Dmitri Shostakovich was a native Leningrader who spent the summer and early fall completing his 7^th symphony in honor of Leningrad. The government repeatedly asked him to leave. He refused. Finally, in early October, after the ring had closed, he was commanded to fly with his family east to Kuibyshev. The poet Anna Akhmatova was urged to leave; she responded, “All my life is connected with Leningrad.” In late September, she was ordered to go to Tashkent in the Asian desert. Why did such a barbarous regime (remember, Akhmatova’s son was in a labor camp and would remain there until 1953) act quickly to protect its cultural assets, both human and inanimate? I can only guess: at bottom, the people were much more Russian than they were Soviet, and the government knew it.

            In the summer of 1941, about 400,000 women and children were evacuated, and more were scheduled to leave when the ring around the city closed in September. This did not reduce the population because easily the same number came to the city from the west—fleeing the German army.  The population left behind was put to work. Over 400,000 were engaged in building defensive works both in and around Leningrad. Nearly 50,000 were hastily formed into army divisions, given little or no training and few weapons and sent to the front. The children were not left idle. They were handed pails of paint and began to paint over all street signs and house numbers: if the Germans did break into the city, they were on their own geographically.

            One couple actually decided to go to Leningrad and share its fate. In mid-August, the Moscow poet Vera Inber arrived with her physician husband, he to treat the wounded and sick. As for her, she said, “I believe Leningrad will not give up….And for the middle-aged to sit in the rear is somehow very shameful.” So, she left the rear and came to the front. Another group also planned on arriving soon. By late July the Germans had printed guidebooks to the sights of Leningrad and had distributed them to German soldiers. The Nazis also printed special permits for officers to drive automobiles in Leningrad.

            Most of Leningrad’s food supplies were housed in the Badayev warehouses, a group of wooden buildings built by a rich merchant before World War I. On the night of September 8, German planes bombed them and set them on fire. All Leningrad watched as their 35-day food supply went up in smoke. The air was filled with the smell of burning meat, the stench of carbonized sugar and the scent of burning vegetable oil and flour. Dmitri Pavlov, a 36-year-old supply official was quickly sent from Moscow. He halted the sale of food without ration coupons and closed all restaurants, ice cream stands, and pastry shops. People were shot for stealing or forging ration cards. A female employee of the print shop where ration cards were printed was found in possession of ten cards. She was shot to death.

            By October, Pavlov had cut the ration for non-workers and children to 1/3 of a loaf of bread a day. For a month, they also got one pound of meat, 1½ pounds of cereal or macaroni, ¾ of a pound of sunflower-seed oil or butter and 3 pounds of pastry or confectionary. That is, in addition to the 1/3 of a loaf of bread each day, they were supposed to live on 5 ¼ pounds of food a month. And that ration was cut again before the Ice Road across Lake Ladoga opened: two slices of bread a day for children, four slices for workers. By late October, flax, cellulose, moldy flour and flour swept up from bakery floors were being mixed with regular flour to make bread. Someone found 2,000 tons of sheep guts in the port; it was turned into a horrible jelly, the smell of which was neutralized with an admixture of cloves. This sheep-gut jelly was then substituted for the monthly meat ration.

            By November, people turned to substitutes. They tore wallpaper of the walls and ate the paste. Some ate the wallpaper. Leather was grilled and chewed. No pet dog or cat survived the hunger of its owners or their neighbors. Here is how one witness described the search for food that winter:

            “To fill their empty stomachs…people would look for incredible substitutes: they would catch crows…or any cat or dog that still had somehow survived; they would go through medicine chests in search of castor oil, hair oil, vaseline or glycerine; they would make soup or jelly out of carpenter’s glue….”

            By early November, there was no electricity: streetcars stopped running; there was no heat or light in apartments, except for candles and a small ration of kerosene.

            Here is how Yevgeniya Vasyutina, a typical Leningrader, passed a day that first winter:

            “[She] sat at home like a troglodyte. There was no heat. She wore her greatcoat and felt boots, removing the boots only when she slept. But not the coat…She heated her tea and food on a tiny grill set between two bricks. Shavings provided the fuel. There was no electricity….She divided her ration of bread into three pieces, each the size of a chocolate bar. She ate one for breakfast, one for lunch, and the third she hid in her lamp shade [until supper]….No one would think, she devoutly believed, of looking there for food.”

            In that first winter of the siege, supplies could only come over Lake Ladoga—by water in the fall and then over the ice. On the opposite side of the lake a 220-mile road to the nearest rail line was built in 15 days. By November 22, the lake had turned to ice and reached the required 3-foot thickness; and the first convoy of 60 trucks brought 33 tons of flour to Leningrad. Each convoy to Leningrad left with evacuees. By the time the Ice Road closed on April 12, 1942, 519,000 persons had been evacuated from Leningrad. The evacuations plus deaths, mainly from starvation and disease, made it possible to raise the daily ration to something more normal by May 1942. The last shipment, over squishy, melting ice, was 65 tons of onions.

            Disease swept the city: dystrophy, diarrhea, typhus and, to a lesser extent, scurvy. A Professor Bezzubov had invented a process for extracting vitamin C from pine needles. Factories were put to work, and millions of doses were produced in 1942, to help hold down scurvy. Because of lack of running water, everything—lunchrooms, restrooms—was filthy. The people were filthy. There were no bath facilities available from December to March 1942.

            An order of starvation appeared:  the young died first, particularly teenagers who lived on the same ration as small children got. Men died before women: they had more active jobs, needed more nourishment and starved first. Officially, 11 thousand starved to death in November 1941, 53 thousand in December, and even more in the first 3 months of 1942. But most think the actual numbers were much greater. Smaller numbers died in the last two years of the siege.

In the absence of public transportation, brightly colored children’s sleds began to appear on the streets. It was the easiest way to pull a body to the cemetery. The ground was frozen—no graves could be dug—so the bodies piled up until spring. By February or March 1942, most lacked the strength to use these sled hearses. Instead, they took the body from a warmer room in an apartment to the coldest room and put it on the floor. As one historian wrote, “Little by little the houses of Leningrad filled up with dead.”

On January 27, 1944, after 880 days the Red Army broke the siege of Leningrad. Two stories, both true, will end this look at the siege. By January 1942, rats had disappeared from Leningrad. They came up out of cellars and sewers and made their way by the thousands to the German lines. Food was much more plentiful there.

In late spring 1942, after that first winter, the poet Vera Inber heard a mother and child talking. Child: “Mama, what’s ham?” The mother explained. The child asked: “Has anyone ever tasted it?”

 

D. The Battle for Stalingrad[15].

            In the summer of 1942, Hitler’s summer offensive roared south and east out of the Ukraine towards the Caucasus and the oil of Georgia and Azerbaijan. There was no strategic reason to capture Stalingrad. Thus, the eastward detour toward Stalingrad by Hitler was an act of ego—to capture the city of Stalin. Given the numbers of Russians and Germans previously killed and yet to be killed, the losses by the Germans at Stalingrad are not that appalling: more than ¼ million but less than ½ million. But the Soviet victory at Stalingrad had a tremendous effect on the morale of the Red Army and the German army.

            From mid-July until early August, the German Sixth Army under General Friedrich von Paulus advanced inside the Don Bend. In early August, the Germans forded the Don and raced, in early September, across the country between the Don and the Volga. By September 4, the Germans had moved to the outskirts of Stalingrad. At this point, from early September until mid-November, the battle of Stalingrad was a house-to-house, floor-to-floor, basement-to-basement war of attrition. By November 18, the Russian bridgehead inside Stalingrad consisted of two small pockets, accounting for a mile or two of riverfront and poking out into the German line to a depth of no more than one mile. The Germans held most of Stalingrad.

            The Soviet battlefield correspondent, Vasily Grossman, described the Red Army retreat into Stalingrad:

            “Men’s faces were gloomy. Dust covered their clothes and weapons, dust fell on the barrels of guns, on the canvas covering the boxes full of headquarters documents…and on the…sacks and rifles piled chaotically on the carts. The dry, grey dust got into people’s nostrils and throats. It made one’s lips dry and cracked.

            This was terrible dust, the dust of retreat. It ate up the men’s faith, it extinguished the warmth of people’s hearts….The first units of the retreating army entered Stalingrad. Trucks with grey-faced wounded men, front vehicles with crumpled wings, with holes from bullets and shells….And the war’s breath entered the city and scorched it.”[16]

            On November 19 and 20, the Russians, using slightly over one million troops, struck across the Volga and across the Don, from the south and the north, into the rear of the German Sixth Army. The strike in the north was made primarily against Italian and Romanian soldiers who guarded the flanks of the German bulge into Stalingrad and were not regarded by the Germans or the Russians as first-class soldiers. On November 22, the northern and southern prongs of the attack met up at Kalach, 50 miles to the rear of Paulus’s army in Stalingrad. Despite several German attempts to break through the ring around Paulus, the Sixty Army was trapped. The famous Stalingrad “cauldron” (called “Der Kessel” by the Germans) was formed. In the early stages of the Russian encirclement, Paulus probably could have withdrawn from Stalingrad and broken out of the encirclement. However, Hitler refused to authorize a breakout, even though his generals in the cauldron and back in Germany urged the retreat. And General von Paulus, a Nazi sympathizer, would not cross Hitler’s orders. From January 10 to February 2, 1943, the Russians liquidated the German, Romanian and Italian forces inside the cauldron.

            Those are the movements in the battle, and now for the story.

            In the summer of 1942, greatly disorganized, demoralized and thirsty Red Army troops reeled eastward across the dusty Don Steppe toward Stalingrad. In late summer, a significant command change was made when General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov was appointed Commander of the 62^nd Army, charged with the job of defending Stalingrad until help came. With its back to the Volga River, the 62^nd Army could only retreat so far.

            Vasily Chuikov came from a peasant family in Tula province, south of Moscow, and he had worked as a bellhop and a shop apprentice before the Bolshevik Revolution. He joined the party in 1919 and led a regiment in the Civil War. He then went to the Frunze Military Academy. He commanded an army in the invasions of Poland and Finland. When the Germans invaded Russia, Chuikov was in China serving as an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek. He was recalled from China only six weeks before being given command of the 62^nd Army.

            Chuikov had an abrasive personality, was argumentative to a fault and chastised anyone who disagreed with his military ideas. He had a pugnacious appearance: broad-shouldered, stocky, a jowly face, tousled hair. When he smiled, one saw a row of gleaming gold teeth. His dress was so ordinary and unkempt that he was often mistaken for the average infantryman.

            Chuikov died in 1982 after a long military career and having been named Hero of the Soviet Union two times. Fitting for the man known as the Savior of Stalingrad, he is buried at the memorial to the battle of Stalingrad.

            Chuikov’s opponent, General Friedrich von Paulus, could not have been more different. Tall, darkly handsome, Paulus was a classic German General Staff officer. Apolitical, trained only to do his army job, he nonetheless thought Hitler an excellent leader for Germany. After watching him lead the conquest of much of Europe, Paulus regarded Hitler as a military genius.  Paulus was quiet, moody, introspective and disdained public emotion. He relaxed by listening to Beethoven on the phonograph.

            Paulus’s wife, the former Elena Constance Rosetti-Solescu (known as Coca), was a descendant of Romanian aristocracy. She detested the Nazis and told her husband he war far too good for the lackeys around Hitler. She condemned as unjust the attack on Poland that started World War II.

            In the field, the contrast with the scruffy Chuikov could not have been greater. Paulus was impeccably groomed at all times. He wore gloves in the field because he disliked dirt. He bathed and changed his uniform twice a day. After the surrender, Paulus was a POW for a few years and then lived in Russia. In 1952, he moved to Dresden in East Germany and died in 1957. He did not see his wife after Stalingrad. In prison camp, Paulus had spoken out against the Nazis. In retaliation, the Gestapo arrested Coca. She was freed by American soldiers and died in West Germany in 1949.

            Some previous Red Army commanders in the Stalingrad area had worked from the safe east bank (or left bank) of the Volga; Chuikov stayed with his troops on the west (right) bank. He later described what it was like to cross the Volga and land in Stalingrad in late summer as the Germans closed in:

“[T]he pier was crowded with people….many wounded were being carried out of trenches, bomb-craters….There were also many people with bundles…who had been hiding from German bombs and shells….they rushed to the pier, with the one desire of getting away to the other side of the river…away from a city that had become a hell. Their eyes were grim and there were trickles of tears running through the dust and soot on their grimy aces. The children, suffering from thirst and hunger, were not crying, but simply whining, and stretching out their little arms to the water of the Volga.”

Chuikov looked around and noticed something else: though it was still summer, every leaf had fallen from the trees.

            General Chuikov’s headquarters was never above ground after September 5. It was constantly shelled; five of his cooks and many of his staff officers were killed by German bombs while working at his headquarters. With the aid of a well-known party figure, Nikita Khrushchev, the chief political officer of the front, Chuikov spent much time delivering propaganda speeches to the 62^nd Army, urging them to hold the city named after Stalin. Despite his efforts, the Germans made it to the Volga on August 23, north and south of Stalingrad. On the same day, 600 planes attacked the city, killing 40,000 civilians.

            To hold on, the Russians fed divisions from across the Volga into their shrinking bridgehead at Stalingrad, at an enormous cost. General Zholudev’s and General Gorishnyi’s divisions crossed the river in October. In two days, 75% of their troops were wounded, missing or killed. In a Colonel Yelin’s regiment, one battalion of over 600 men fought to defend the railway station. It was lost, so they retreated to a nearby stone building. Within a few days, only six soldiers were left, and they were all wounded. They made their way to the Volga only after they ran out of ammunition, improvised a raft, and were picked up by medics on the other side. They had eaten nothing for three days.

            On the night of September 14, General Aleksandr Rodimtsev crossed with his 13^th Guards Rife Division, 10,000 strong, a force that would share with Chuikov the title of Savior of Stalingrad. Within less than a month, the division had been bled. Forty-one of Rodimtsev’s soldiers were killed by German artillery on the trip across the Volga. Another seven soldiers, all from Uzbekistan, were guilty of self-inflicted wounds upon landing and were executed.

            Senior Lt. Ivan Bezditko, known as “Ivan the Terrible” by his men, led a mortar battalion inside the shrinking bridgehead. Each Russian soldier received a daily ration of 100 grams of vodka (about 9 ounces, 6 shots)[17]. Bezditko had an incredible appetite for vodka, so when a soldier died, he reported the soldier as present. He then pirated their daily vodka ration and in a short time he had many gallons of vodka in his dugout. In a warehouse at the Volga shore, the supply officer noted the battalion had held up very well in the fighting. He pursued the matter and found out the battalion had actually suffered heavy casualties. The supply officer, Major Malygin, called Bezditko and told him the scheme had been figured out and his vodka ration was being canceled.

            Bezditko screamed, “If I don’t get it, you’ll get it.” Major Malygin reported the matter to headquarters. A while later the meaning of Bezditko’s threat (“you’ll get it”) became clear. His unit dropped three mortar rounds on the warehouse, and the shaken supply officer staggered out. Hundreds of bottles of vodka had been broken. Malygin called headquarters and reported that Bezditko had fired on the Red Army’s warehouse. The voice on the other end of the line was unsympathetic, saying: “Next time, give him his vodka. He just won the Order of the Red Star, so give it to him.” Ivan the Terrible’s vodka ration promptly resumed.

            All supplies and reinforcements to the small Red Army bridgehead left at Stalingrad had to come by boat across the Volga; and the wounded had to cross the Volga for any significant treatment. The Germans so forcefully shelled the river that thirty-percent of the reinforcements who attempted to cross the Volga were killed in the process. By November 20, the Volga was so covered with floating pack ice that it was no longer navigable; no steady supply of reinforcements or supplies until it froze solid.  Chuikov became frustrated. “Pack ice drifted by in enormous chunks, grating against each other like knives scraping glass”, one historian wrote.

            In the twilight of December 16, a tremendous crash brought Chuikov and his officers out of their cave to witness a glorious sight: an enormous wave of ice came down the river, smashing everything in its path. The general held his breath as the monstrous ice pack slowed and shuddered to a halt. Behind it thousands more chunks of ice slammed into the ice jam. It held. By 9pm, planks were being laid for an ice highway across the Volga. The bridgehead in Stalingrad was saved.

            Air Marshall Herman Goering promised to fly 500 tons of food, fuel and ammunition a day to the 6^th Army trapped in the cauldron. By late November, the Luftwaffe was bringing in only 100 tons per day, and by the end of December considerably less than that. Manstein’s army group, retreating from the Caucasus, was ordered to try to break through to the Germans from the south; but the Red Army had strengthened the noose too much and the effort did not come close to succeeding.

            Within Der Kessel German soldiers contracted frostbite by December at an alarming rate. When the Russians encircled the Sixth Army on November 22, there were one hundred forty four railcars of winter clothing near the cauldron that would never make it to the Sixth Army. The German High Command had been in no hurry to send the winter clothing because they did not want to give the Stalingrad troops the idea they would not win the battle before winter set in.

            If a Nazi soldier did not freeze, he likely starved. By January 1943, the ration was 2 ounces of bread a day plus some scraps of horseflesh. Alexander Werth, the only Western journalist to visit Stalingrad a few days after the battle ended, walked into a courtyard of a building that had been one of the last German strongholds. On the porch was a horse skeleton with a few scraps of meat still clinging to its ribs. Frozen yellow corpses of emaciated Nazi soldiers and completely picked over horse skeletons filled the courtyard.

            As the cauldron was liquidated, the Germans were down to one small airfield for supplies and to evacuate the severely wounded—but only those who had a reasonable chance of living. One other group got out: specialists and particularly gifted officers who would be needed to form new fighting units in Germany. In the days before the last airfield was captured by the Red Army on January 24, the walking wounded thronged the runways and charged each plane as it rolled to a stop. Many were trampled to death by the half-crazed mob. Armed guards pushed them aside to board the departing specialists and the wounded who had been designated for evacuation. The left-behind wounded glared at the departing specialists with open hostility.

            German Army Captain Gerhard Meunch was ordered to fly out. As a specialist in infantry attacks, he was needed elsewhere. The wounded mobbed his plane when it landed on January 22. Meunch showed his pass to the pilot through the cockpit window, and the pilot had him crawl in through the cockpit window—there was no hope of getting through the mob back at the door. The pilot gunned the motors of the Junkers-52 and tried to lift off. He could not get the plane off the ground. Meunch looked out the co-pilot’s window and saw why. Nearly 50 men were lying on the wings, holding onto anything they could grab. On the second try the pilot gunned the plane at top speed down the runway, and Captain Meunch watched as one-by-one the soldiers tumbled off the wing as the plane finally rose into the sky.

            The end took more than four weeks after Christmas, but the coming result was now obvious. The starving Germans, surrounded, lived in the ruins of Stalingrad. On January 9, Paulus, under orders from Hitler, rejected a Russian ultimatum to surrender. The next day the Russians attacked the remaining cauldron with 7,000 artillery pieces and hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Twenty-five thousand German soldiers were killed in the first week.

            In the end on February 2, 1943, Field Marshal Paulus was captured by a young Russian lieutenant, Fyodor Yelchenko. As the lieutenant later described it:

            “I crossed a street and went up to a German officer who was waving at me. The German officer said, through an interpreter, ‘Our big chief wants to talk to your big chief.’ So I said to him, ‘look here, our big chief has other things to do. He isn’t available. You’ll just have to deal with me.’ And so I was led into the basement of a department store and into a room with an iron bed where von Paulus was lying down, not looking very jolly. ‘Well, that finishes it’, I said to him. And I captured a Field Marshal.”

            330,000 German troops had been encircled by the Red Army in November. 240,000 of these troops died before the surrender. The Russians took 91,000 prisoners, including 24 generals. The prisoners were marched east of the Volga across the winter snow to prison camps. They were used to rebuild cities for years after the end of the war. They were sent home starting in 1947, but the last returned home only in 1955. Of the 91,000 prisoners,  about 5,000 lived to return to Germany.

            Stalingrad was the great Russian victory; clearly the psychological turning point of the war. No Russian doubted after February 2, 1943, that the war would be won.

It is odd how others, with different perspectives can view Stalingrad. In 1944, General Charles DeGaulle, head of the Free French forces, was taken to Stalingrad to see what the Red Army had accomplished. Stalingrad is over 1,000 miles from Russian border with Poland.  Later, at a reception in Moscow, a reporter asked DeGaulle for his impressions of the battle scene. DeGaulle said, “Ah, Stalingrad. All the same, they are a tremendous people, a very great people.” The reporter nodded in apparent agreement, “Ah, yes, the Russians…” DeGaulle responded, “No, I am not talking about the Russians; I mean the Germans. That they could have come so far.”

 

E. Kursk[18].

            If you ask an American or an Englishman to name the largest battle in World War II, you usually hear in response D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, El Alamein, or Stalingrad. But the correct answer by a large margin is the July 1943 battle of the Kursk Salient, near the border of Russia and the eastern Ukraine. The Kursk Salient was a bulge that stuck out for 100 miles into the German front; and Hitler intended in Operation Citadel to eliminate the salient and encircle four Russian armies at its western end.

            The war in the east could scarcely be won after Stalingrad, but Hitler badly wanted a spectacular victory. The Kursk Salient, which the Russians had taken in the aftermath of Stalingrad, seemed the most obvious place. From the Russian viewpoint, nothing suited General Zhukov better than for the Germans to attack where the Red Army was the strongest. The Soviets viewed the Kursk Salient as the jumping off point for their 1943 summer offensive and had poured 500,000 railcars of equipment and supplies into the salient.

            For Operation Citadel, the Germans assembled 3,000 tanks, 1,800 planes, and more than fifty divisions, including 17 Panzer divisions, with 780,000 soldiers. For the battle, the Russians had 4,900 tanks, 2,000 planes and 1.4 million soldiers. It was the Armageddon of the pre-atomic age. Hitler delayed the start of the battle for two months while German factories turned out new Tiger and Panther tanks that were rushed to the German positions around the salient.

From the north under General Model and the south under General Hoth, the Germans launched a pincers movement at 4:30 am on July 5, 1943. Both sides poured men and tanks into the narrow avenues of the two pincers. A leading historian described the first day this way:

“Within twelve hours both sides were furiously stoking the great glowing furnace of the battle for Kursk. The armour continued to mass and move on a scale unlike anything seen anywhere else in the war. Both commands watched this fiery escalation with grim, numbed fascination: German officers had never seen so many Soviet aircraft, while Soviet commanders—who had seen a lot—had never before seen such formidable massing of German tanks…coming in great squadrons of 100 and 200 or more….”

            “German tanks and assault guns were being steadily drawn into this gigantic battle, which roared on hour after hour, leaving even greater heaps of the dead and dying, clumps of blazing or disabled armor, shattered personnel carriers and lorries, and thickening columns of smoke over the steppe. With each hour…the traffic in mangled, twisted men brought to steaming, blood-soaked forward dressing stations continued to swell.”[19]

            The Wehrmacht bit into the most formidable Soviet defenses it had seen to date in the war. By July 13, the German offensive was spent, having penetrated ten useless miles in the north, thirty in the south and stalling while still over fifty miles apart. In the first eight days, the Russians claimed the Germans lost 70,000 killed, 2,000 missing, and 54,000 wounded. Russian losses were only slightly less. The Russians then went over to the offensive and moved west into the Ukraine.

            Alexander Werth described what he saw when he visited the battlefield two weeks after the Russian victory:

            “[The salient] had been turned into a hideous desert, in which every tree and bush had been smashed by shellfire. Hundreds of burned out tanks and wrecked planes were still littering the battlefield, and even several miles away from it the air was filled with the stench of thousands of only half-buried Russian and German corpses.”

            General Guderian, father of the Panzers, called the failure a decisive defeat that made 15 Panzer divisions unemployable for a year. German historian Walter Goerlitz wrote after the war that Stalingrad was the psychological turning point in the war but Kursk was the military turning point. And a British historian wrote, “The legend that in the summer the Germans always advanced had been dispelled once and for all.”

            Vasily Grossman described a 3-day battle in the Kursk Salient:

            “Black smoke was hanging in the air, people’s faces were completely black. Everyone’s voice became hoarse, because in this rattling and clatter one could hear words only if they were shouted. People snatched moments to eat, and pieces of white pork fat immediately became black from dust and smoke. No one thought of sleep, but if someone did snatch a minute to rest, that was usually during the day, when the thunder of battle was particularly loud, and the ground trembled as if during an earthquake. At night, the quietness was frightening the nerves were strained and quietness scared away the sleep.”[20]

 

F. The Red Army[21].

            In Armageddon, the British writer Max Hastings praises Stalin’s performance after a ghastly start:

“The Soviet Union’s defeats in 1941-1942 were chiefly attributable to Stalin’s own blunders. In the years that followed, however, in striking contrast to Hitler, the master of Russia learned lessons. Without surrendering any fraction of his power over the state, he delegated the conduct of battles to able commanders, and reaped the rewards. He displayed an intellect and mastery of detail which impressed even foreign visitors who were repelled by his insane cruelty. He showed himself the most successful warlord of the Second World War, contriving means and pursuing ends with a single-mindedness unimaginable in the democracies.”

 

            Hastings also gives high marks to Stalin’s generals:

“At the highest level, Soviet generalship was much more imaginative than that of the Western armies. Zhukov was the outstanding Allied commander of the Second World War, more effective than his Anglo-American counterparts, master of the grand envelopment. Several other Soviet marshals—Vasilevsky, Konev, Chrenyakhovsky, Rokossovsky—displayed the highest gifts,”

 

            He admires their fighting but realizes no Western Allied general could have used some of the tactics:

“The Red Army often displayed courage and determination far beyond anything that could have been asked of American or British troops. Yet its achievements on the battlefield seem all the more remarkable given its manic indiscipline….Huge injections of alcohol alone rendered service in the eastern war endurable to many of those who took part.”

The Russians’ command of artillery was superb, though it relied for effect upon weight rather than accuracy of fire. Their principal weapons, including the T-34 and Stalin tanks, together with their 1944-1945 aircraft, were as good or better than anything the Western allies possessed.”

Yet, if the Red Army …possessed hitting power and command skills as great as those of any combatant, its infantry and armoured assaults relied upon the sacrifice of lives rather than upon tactical ingenuity or even common prudence.”

 

            The rank and file soldiers were drawn from a society in which extreme harshness, the capacity both to endure and to inflict pain, had been inbred for centuries, and refined to the highest degree under Stalin. On the ground, the Russians excelled at night fighting and patrolling. German soldiers who moved from the Eastern Front to the west remarked upon the dramatic change he experienced, that they could move freely during the hours of darkness, when the Americans especially, were content to leave the front in peace. The Russians harassed the enemy relentlessly. Night patrols sometimes slit the throats of German sentries and left the mutilated bodies to provide food for thought among their surviving comrades.

            When they were not in foxholes, men slept under trucks, in the open under blankets, or in ruined houses. They lived chiefly off bread, cabbage soup, canned meat milk powder and the 100 gram daily issue of vodka. They rolled their own cigarettes using scraps of newspaper.

            Hastings notes one German officer’s description of the Red Army in attack:

“You couldn’t believe the way they kept coming—their infantry simply charging our tanks, running and shouting, even when the bodies were piled up in front of our positions. Sometimes our infantry seemed paralyzed by the spectacle. One thought: ‘How can we ever stop such people?’”.

            Criminals freed from labor camps and soldiers convicted of cowardice were put in penal battalions, where one possessed about a one-in-thirty chance of avoiding death. Penal battalions were used to clear mine fields, lead charges and the like.

            About one million women served in the Soviet armed forces during the war, as antiaircraft gunners, snipers, truck drivers, medics and nurses. In an oral history, one medical assistant describes going out on the field after an attack:

“The battle ended during the night. In the morning, fresh snow fell. Under it the dead. Many had their arms raised up…toward the sky. You ask me: what is happiness? I answer to suddenly find a living man among the dead.”[22]

 

           

G. End of the War.

            In 1837, the French were making substantial noises about invading Russia; it seemed an interesting possibility. The French, of course, had tried it in 1812 and had been beaten. The poet Aleksandr Pushkin wrote a poem warning the French of what would happen if they were to invade Russia in 1837. In the last line, there is a clear reference to the French deaths at the hands of the Russians in 1812. Adolf Hitler, before he invaded Russia in 1941, should have read his Pushkin:

            “Send on then sacred mischief makers,

            Send your embittered sons and braves,

            There is room for them in Russian acres

            Amid not unfamiliar graves.”

 

The Russians have not forgotten the four years they call The Great Patriotic War.

 

 

V. Literature of the War: Vasily Grossman and Life and Fate

 

            A. Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman lived from 1905 to 1964—a child during the Russian Revolutions, an adult writer through the terror of the 1930’s, Russia’s leading frontline war correspondent during World War II, and a dissident writer from the late 1940’s until his death in 1964.

            Vasily Grossman is relatively unknown in the West. Yet he led an extraordinary life and became a great Russian novelist, in addition to being a famous battlefield correspondent. His 870-page epic novel centered on the Battle of Stalingrad, Life and Fate, provided him a reputation in Russia today some believe exceeds that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Boris Pasternak and most other Western favorites, such as Vladimir Voinovich. I do not know why Russian writers are prone to sweeping titles—War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and Life and Fate.

            His biographers write that Grossman was a man of deep contradictions:

            “One of the Soviet regime’s early beneficiaries…he moved from acceptance of the October Revolution to a gradual but total rejection of Marxism-Leninism’s fundamental premises and values….A lover of Russian literature and European culture, he was obliged to function in a literary environment dominated by socialist realism….He kept silent while relatives and friends were swept away in the Great Terror of the 1930’s, and then went on to display fabled courage as the leading frontline combat correspondent on the Eastern Front.”[23]

            The Garrards mention one last contradiction in the life of Vasily Grossman and it will remind you of Boris Pasternak. “He [Grossman] preached fidelity and friendship but twice had affairs with the wives of close colleagues.”

            Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was born on December 12, 1905, or thereabouts . Virtually all vital records—births, deaths and marriages—were lost or destroyed by the combination of World War I, the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. Grossman was born in Berdichev, a town of about 50,000 people in the Ukraine around 100 miles southwest of Kiev. Berdichev was around 80% Jewish, and at one time had almost 80 synagogues. Berdichev was also a major center of the ultra religious Hassidic movement.  It had been a major banking center earlier in the 19^th century, but the banks later moved to the port city of Odessa on the Black Sea.

            Grossman was initially named “Iosif”, but that was shortly changed to the more Russian, Vasily or Vasya. His parents, Semyon Osipovich Grossman and Yekaterina Savelievna, were from upper class merchant families. Semyon was a chemical engineer, and Yekaterina taught French. The parents met while each was studying in Switzerland. Semyon spoke German, Yekaterina spoke French; they both spoke Russian; neither could speak Yiddish. Grossman himself knew Russian and French, but not Yiddish, and could not communicate with most of the citizens of Berdichev. The Grossmans, in common with many upper class Jews in the Russian Empire, were completely Russified and secular.

            Grossman’s father was a socialist and joined the Menshevik party, but he was never anything more than a member and was not persecuted when the Bolsheviks took power. Two of his father’s brothers emigrated to the United States, one, Vladimir, started a successful agricultural business in southern New Jersey. Arnold, the other brother, unwisely left America to move to Germany to practice law just a few years before the Nazis seized power. He then fled the Nazis by moving to Moscow, where he died of pneumonia in 1940.

            Grossman’s parents separated early, though they remained on reasonably good terms. Right after the separation, his mother took him to live in Geneva for two years from 1910 to 1912, and Grossman attended elementary school and learned French there. When they returned to Berdichev, they moved into an apartment owned by Yekaterina’s rich uncle, David, and were supported largely by the uncle. This was not your typical poor Eastern European Jew. As Grossman once said to his daughter, Katya:

            “We were not like the poor shtetl Jews…the type that lived in hovels and slept side by side on the floor, packed like sardines. No, our family comes from quite a different Jewish background. They had their own carriages….Their women wore diamonds, and they sent their children abroad to study.”[24]

            Grossman arrived at Moscow University to study chemistry in 1923, and was such a diligent chemistry student that the other students called him Vasya-khimik, Vasya the Chemist. He soon lost interest, and it ended up taking him six years to complete his degree in chemical engineering. 

The university then had no student dormitories; Grossman had little money, and he ended up living in a one-room hut on a state farm (Sovkhoz) outside of Moscow. The hut had only a few sticks of furniture, was not near a bus or train line, and was either unheated or poorly heated. For food, Grossman lived on the few rubles his father sent him each month and ate mainly at the university cafeteria. That cafeteria featured mainly “bread soup, cabbage soup, potato soup and mysterious meatballs floating in suspicious broths.”

In 1928,  his cousin Nadya arranged for Grossman to go with a group of students to Uzbekistan. Upon his return he wrote an article about the Uzbeks that Nadya arranged to have published in a newspaper. This was followed by an article about a collective farm that was published in Pravda—quite a feat for a 23-year-old.

In 1928 Grossman married his Kiev high school girlfriend, Anna Petrovna Matsuk, called Galya (from Ganna, the Ukrainian version of Anna). She was from a Cossack family—some in Grossman’s family were horrified that he would marry one from the band that had most tormented Russia’s Jews. Just after Grossman finally finished university, Galya gave birth in January 1930 to Grossman’s only child, Yekaterina, called Katya. But it was otherwise a brief and ill-suited marriage. Galya was unwilling to leave her job in Kiev. She could not get a residence permit to live in Moscow—and Grossman did not have a suitable apartment in any event. And they had little in common and shared no intellectual interests.

After graduating, and with a child to support, Grossman took a job running chemical tests at a coal mining concern in Stalino, a grim mining town in the Donbass Region. Galya certainly had no interest in leaving Kiev to live in Stalino, particularly because she was now having numerous affairs. As it happened, she also had little interest in mothering Katya. So Katya, by agreement, spent most of her childhood with Vasily Grossman’s mother in Berdichev. The pair divorced in 1933.

 Grossman was unattached from 1933 to 1935, a time in which he leaves Stalino, and returns to Moscow as a writer of some note. Boris Guber, a colleague and fellow writer of Grossman’s, had aided the career of the somewhat younger Grossman. His reward was that in 1935 Grossman started an affair with Guber’s wife, Olga Mikhailovna Guber. By late 1935, Olga had moved in with Grossman, and she and Guber had worked out an arrangement for sharing custody of their two sons. They formally divorced in 1936, and she and Grossman registered their marriage three days later.

Olga Grossman was five years older than Grossman and was, his biographer swrote, “ an attractive woman, if rather plump by current standards…..Olga Mikhailovna also resembled Galya in having few intellectual or cultural interests, but unlike the vivacious and mercurial Galya, Olga Mikhailovna was totally devoted to Grossman and his physical well-being.”[25] The similarity to Pasternak’s second wife, Zinaida, cannot be ignored.

Boris Guber, largely because of his bourgeois origin and his German ethnicity, was scooped up in the 1937 terror as an “enemy of the people.” He was quickly sentenced to ten years “without the right of correspondence.” Neither Olga nor Vasily knew this was an NKVD code that meant “shot immediately.” Things got worse. Olga Grossman was arrested in February for failing to denounce “an enemy of the people.” Grossman promptly did two courageous things. First, he moved to adopt Olga’s two boys so that they would not be sent to an orphanage or special camp for children of “enemies of the people.” Second, Grossman wrote to Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD. Short of stature, Yezhov was known behind his back as “the bloody dwarf.” Grossman explained that Olga was now his wife and had not been Guber’s wife since before Guber was arrested.  A friend later commented, “In 1938, only a very brave man would have dared to write a letter like this to the State’s chief executioner.”[26]

Grossman was called to the notorious Lubyanka Prison for an interrogation about the matter. Grossman had his interrogation in mind when he wrote in Life and Fate about Krymov, a Communist International official, being called to the Lubyanka for an interrogation. Miraculously, Olga Grossman was released from prison after six months—almost unheard of in Stalin’s Russia in 1938.

In 1955, almost 20 years after he had started an affair with a colleague’s wife, Grossman did it again. Housing was always a problem in Moscow, and in the mid 1950’s, Olga’s son Fyodor moved in with his wife and a screaming baby. Grossman’s study, his workroom, became a nursery. In his view, he was almost driven out of his own home. So he went and fell in love with a lady who lived around the corner, Yekaterina Vasilievna Zabolotskaya. She was the wife of a friend, neighbor and fellow writer of Grossman’s, Nikolai Zabolotsky. Zabolotsky had spent the war years in a labor camp, was released in 1946 and resumed his writing career. The romance is described by one writer this way: “This was a late romance between a couple around fifty years old, conducted in the courtly manner of a forgotten age….When the romance was in full bloom, Yekaterina Vasilievna told [a] friend…that both she and Grossman were behaving like teenagers.” Grossman’s daughter remembers it like this: “Two people who had been denied a carefree youth and were forced to endure the terrors of Stalinism and the German invasion enjoyed a personal springtime.”[27]

Grossman somehow finagled a second apartment, and he and Yekaterina moved in together for about two years, but he also regularly visited Olga. The two apartments were around the corner from each other on different streets. Because of his shuttling back and forth between the two homes, his friends began to call him “the man on two streets.” After two years, they each moved back in with their spouses. There were no divorces involved.

Then in 1958, Yekaterina’s husband died; and the affair started back up again. All critics agree that Yekaterina is the model for Marya Ivanova in Life and Fate, the woman who so attracted Shtrum and that Olga is the model for Shtrum’s wife, Lyudmila.

As Grossman was lying in a hospital bed in 1964 dying of stomach cancer, Olga Mikhailovna spent the morning with him and then went out to cook him a good meal and bring it to the hospital in the evening. After she would leave,  his mistress, Yekaterina,would arrive and sit with him for the afternoon. The two women alternated their visits, never seeing each other and never being in the same room with the dying man at the same time.

After two years in Stalino, Grossman came back to Moscow, took a chemical job at the Sacco and Vanzetti Pencil Factory, and worked on his first novel. In 1934 the novel was published under the title, Glyukauf, a story about life among the coal miners in the Donbass Region. No doubt a real page turner, written in the required socialist realism form.  This made him a candidate member of the Soviet Writers’ Union. The publication of 3 volumes of his short stories led to Grossman’s election to the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1937, a position that carried numerous entitlements. It also brought with it certain obligations. In 1937, he and other writers were required to sign a letter protesting some alleged Trotskyite conspiracy at a magazine. He and virtually every other writer signed without complaint. Grossman rekindled this event when his main character Viktor Shtrum in Life and Fate is made to sign a protest letter.

One Writers’ Union entitlement was an exemption from armed service in the event of war. When war broke out on June 22, 1941, Grossman was alarmed at the speed of the Nazi advance; and he wanted to go and retrieve his mother from Berdichev, which was in the path of the southern prong of the German invading force. But his second wife, Olga, loudly complained that she did not want another occupant in their small apartment. Grossman relented. He later learned that his mother was thrown into a pit by the Nazis near an airport on September 15, when they slaughtered en mass the Jews of Berdichev. Grossman blamed Olga for his mother’s death, and this (as one might suspect) cast quite a pall over the marriage.

When he heard Berdichev had fallen to the Nazis, Grossman—although exempt from service—volunteered for the Red Army. His eyesight alone would have disqualified him; and the army recruiters asked the editor of the Red Army’s newspaper, Red Star, if he would be interested in having Grossman as a reporter. He responded that he wanted Grossman because “he has a profound knowledge of the human heart.” Red Star was published six days per week, was distributed to frontline soldiers, sold in cities and read aloud on the radio. During the war years, Red Star, featuring Grossman as its star battlefront correspondent, outsold Pravda, even though some of his articles were reprinted in Pravda.  Grossman spent over 1,000 days on the frontlines, more than any reporter anywhere during World War II. He acquired a reputation for bravery as he insisted on being on the frontlines—not behind the lines. From his vantage point on the front, he wrote vivid stories about common soldiers and frontline officers.

By the second year of the war, Grossman had his own Jeep, and he rose to the rank of Lt. Colonel by the end of the war. Grossman was present at the battle for Moscow, the battle of Stalingrad, the Kursk tank battle and the fall of Berlin.

In Stalingrad in the late summer and early fall of 1942, many high ranking army officers, journalists and political officers stayed on the left (east) bank of the Volga—a fairly dangerous place itself given constant German artillery barrages across the river. Only Grossman crossed the river under fire and observed first hand the months of street and building-by-building fighting in the city. Once a German grenade rolled between his legs in a trench. Another time a German sniper missed his head by only a few inches. With the political types who could tell him what to write about staying on the safe side of the Volga, Grossman was free to find his own stories among the troops, and he produced some of the war’s finest writing in that battle.

While on the safe bank of the Volga, he met Nikita Khrushchev, the chief political officer for the Stalingrad battle. Most commentators believe that one of the reasons the government would not approve Life and Fate for publication in the early 1960’s was that the dastardly and underhanded political commissar in Life and Fate, Getmanov, was Khrushchev in disguise. Allegedly there was a second reason: Khrushchev held a grudge against Grossman because Grossman did not write a story about him during the battle for Stalingrad. Grossman did not write stories about officials who stayed on the safe side of the Volga.

During the war, Grossman was largely freed from having to write in the socialist realism style. His work after the war for the most part eschewed the dreadful socialist realism. As a result, he started getting rejection slips; his first three short stories submitted for publication after the war were rejected.  He then wrote his first novel about Stalingrad, entitled For a Just Cause.

Grossman had great difficulty in getting For a Just Cause published. Several Stalingrad generals lobbied for the publication of For a Just Cause, and it was published in 1952. It was nominated for the Stalin Prize as the best book of the year and received glowing reviews. But, when the Writers’ Union held a meeting to discuss the Stalin Prize, voices were raised against the book—after all, it glorified the soldiers in the blown out buildings of Stalingrad, without mentioning the military genius of Stalin. It seemed clear the objectors had high-level political backing, and the Stalin Prize went elsewhere. Thereafter, He was subjected to periodic attacks as a “Jewish nationalist.”

For ten years, from 1950 to 1960, Vasily Grossman wrote Life and Fate in secret.

His timing in trying to get Life and Fate published could not have been worse. The Nobel Prize awarded to Pasternak in 1958 and the publication of Doctor Zhivago abroad had been a public relations nightmare for the Soviets. Officials resolved not to let that happen again. They were aided in their mission because Grossman lacked Pasternak’s international contacts, so there was little chance he could send the Life and Fate manuscript abroad for publication.  Grossman nonetheless obtained a contract for publication from a Russian journal that would serialize the novel. A few excerpts were published to general praise, and Grossman felt encouraged. He should not have.

Just before noon on February 14, 1961, the KGB arrived at Grossman’s apartment to arrest all manuscripts of Life and Fate and the typewriter ribbons used to type the manuscript. They questioned Grossman about where other copies of the manuscript might be, and he spent the afternoon leading the KGB to other copies: one from a cousin and two from volunteer typists. He did not tell the KGB about two additional copies that were being held by friends. Grossman wrote Nikita Khrushchev pointing out it made no sense for him, Grossman, to be free and his book to be under arrest: “There is no sense…in my present position, in my physical freedom while the book to which I dedicated my life is in prison….I ask for freedom for my book.”[28]

By 1962 Grossman had reason to believe the Soviets would relent and allow his book to be published, the KGB seizure of the book notwithstanding. After all, Khrushchev had just approved One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, indicating a real thaw in what could be published in Russia. But there were differences. Grossman was not aware of the grudge Khrushchev held against him for not writing a story about Khrushchev during the Stalingrad battle. Grossman was also not aware that Khrushchev’s minions were pointing out that Getmanov seemed to be modeled on Khrushchev. Last, Khrushchev was from a common worker background; and Ivan Denisovich, a farm worker and brick layer, appealed to Khrushchev.

Grossman’s hopes were dashed when the head of ideology for the Communist Party, Mikhail Suslov, granted him an audience in 1962 and told Grossman that Life and Fate could not be published for 250 years. As Suslov mused in his meeting with Grossman, why should the party permit publication of the book and, in Suslov’s words, “begin a public discussion as to whether anyone needs the Soviet Union or not?”

That same year, Grossman contracted stomach cancer, and he died on September 14, 1964. Just before he died, he told a friend he still wanted Life and Fate published, even if published abroad. On September 18, 1964, The New York Times had a brief unsigned obituary about the famous war correspondent. The obituary claimed that after the war Grossman “did little subsequent writing.”

In the mid-1970’s, a friend of Grossman’s asked the writer and dissident, Vladimir Voinovich, for help[29]. The manuscript for an 870-page novel was too large and heavy for someone to smuggle out of Russia; it would have to be microfilmed. Voinovich enlisted the help of the dissident atomic scientist Andrei Sakharov. Sakharov had access to high quality microfilming equipment; it was moved to an apartment near where Yeraterina and Olga lived (apart, of course). This was not easily done in Russia at that time: one risked a two-year jail sentence simply for being in possession of microfilming equipment.  The manuscript was microfilmed over a long period of time, then was passed on to a trusted friend, who took two incomplete copies out to the West. (You cannot make this stuff up.)

It turned out that Western publishers were not interested in a long novel about war on the Eastern Front by a long-deceased author unknown to them. People in the West knew little about the Eastern Front, and the publishers figured the book would not arouse much interest. Finally, a small publisher in Switzerland published Life and Fate in Russian and quickly followed that with French and German versions. The book became a sensation. Life and Fate was also a sensation when it was finally published in Mikhail Gorbachev’s Russia in 1988.

The gigantic memorial to the victors of the battle of Stalingrad, Mamayev Hill, was built between 1959 and 1967. It contains in 6-foot high letters engraved on the wall leading to the mausoleum a tribute to the Red Army soldiers: “An iron wind lashed their faces, but still they marched forward. And once more a feeling of superstitious terror gripped their [Nazi] foe: They are attacking us again, can they be mortal?” And inside the mausoleum, on the wall these words are engraved in large letters, “Yes, we were mortal indeed, and few of us survived, but we all carried out our patriotic duty before holy Mother Russia.” The author of both sets of words is nowhere mentioned. The author was the outcast Vasily Grossman.

 

 

B. Life and Fate.

            What is the point of Life and Fate How does the title, both bombastic and sweeping, relate to the story in the book? Of humans and destiny, Grossman’s lesson to us in Life and Fate is, “we may not be masters of our own fate, but each of us must master our own soul.”[30] You can apply this to most of the main characters in the book: the Stalinist state is master of their fates and the question is whether they will, in the face of that, master their own souls.

            Grossman knew that in retelling the national myth associated with the German invasion and the Battle of Stalingrad in particular, he was following in the footsteps of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He wrote his daughter, Katya, that the only book he could read during the Stalingrad battle was War and Peace. There are numerous similarities between the two epic novels. War and Peace and Life and Fate are each long, deal with an immense country under foreign invasion and comment on ethical issues. Each novel has an array of characters. The list of what are called the “chief” characters in Life and Fate takes up seven pages at the back of the book. The stories of each novel are told by “an omniscient narrator whose godlike powers are exercised in making ex cathedra pronouncements…on characters and events” in the books[31].

            But the similarities end. Grossman witnessed personally what he writes about; Tolstoy did not, and it shows in Grossman’s more graphic description of fighting and life at the front. The 19^th century admiration for the bravery of an opposing officer that is prevalent in War and Peace is completely absent from the minds of Grossman’s Red Army soldiers. As the Garrards write, “One cannot imagine Grossman having Hitler ever pause to speak graciously of a Russian officer’s brave, if vain, effort to stem the German advance, as Tolstoy has the French emperor acknowledge the courage of Prince Andrei’s doomed charge at the battle of Austerlitz.”[32]

            Two more differences: Tolstoy was writing a hymn of praise to Russia and compared noble Russians to the wicked French. Grossman, on the other hand, showed that Red Army soldiers were not only the victims of the Germans but also of the “callous indifference and criminal incompetence of their own military and government leaders.”[33]  Second, Tolstoy is more accomplished at describing characters than is Grossman.

            The defects in Life and Fate are grounded in the author’s years of writing in the required socialist realism style. He tried to get away from it but at times did not succeed. One critic says the book suffers from “an occasional tendency toward philosophizing, a certain long-windedness and a lack of sparkle.” That is a fair comment, but some of that is due to the incomplete microfilms of the manuscript and some due to Grossman’s inability to edit a book published 16 years after his death.

            One other comment about the novel—Grossman tellingly describes Soviet characters and their fates that are typical of their generation because he was an insider. He knew well these types, and each is vividly drawn. Krymov, the Old Bolshevik who is a commissar at Stalingrad before his arrest as a traitor; Mostovskoy, the Old Bolshevik held and killed in a German concentration camp; Getmanov, the Stalinist functionary who may be modeled on Nikita Khrushchev; Viktor Shtrum, the Russianized Jewish physicist who is attacked for admiring Western physics until Stalin realizes the importance of his research. No Soviet period writer has so successfully created non-prisoner characters like these.

            The structure of Life and Fate is also reminiscent of War and Peace in that it evokes the life of a society by means of a number of subplots centered around one family. Grossman then binds the subplots not only by family relationships but also by having them relate in various ways to the battle of Stalingrad. Some of the subplots take place at or near Stalingrad. Some take place elsewhere—a German concentration camp, a physics institute in Kazan (a city on the middle Volga) and in Moscow, Krymov’s interrogation in Lubyanka prison in Moscow—but are linked to Stalingrad in some way.

            Grossman wrote for a Russian audience, and he correctly assumed a Russian reader would be familiar with the historical and military framework in which the Stalingrad battle and the novel take place. Much like Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago, Grossman writes nothing about how the Germans got to Stalingrad or what happened in the war before or after Stalingrad. He just starts right in as the Germans are pushing Russian soldiers back against the Volga River in the fall of 1942, and he ends the novel two months after the Russian victory.

            The family that forms the glue (to the extent there is glue) of the plot is the Shaposhnikovs, the matriarch Alexandra; her daughter Lyudmila Nikolaevna and Lyudmila’s son Anatoli (Tolya) by her first husband. Lyudmila’s first husband, Abarchuk, is in a Soviet forced labor camp, having been arrested in the Great Terror.

Next, we have Lyudmila’s second husband, Viktor Shtrum, a physicist, and their daughter, Nadya. The matriarch’s second daughter is Yevgenia Nikolaevna (Zhenya). Zhenya’s first husband was Nikolai Grigorevich Krymov, a political commissar at the Stalingrad front. Zhenya’s current lover is the dashing Colonel Pyotr Pavlovich Novikov, commander of a newly formed tank corps being readied to help surround the Germans at Stalingrad. The matriarch, Alexandra Shaposhnikov’s third daughter, Marusya, drowns in the Volga River while escaping the advancing Nazis before the novel opens. Marusya’s husband is (was) Stepan Fyodorovich Spiridinov. Stepan and his and Marusya’s daughter, Vera, remain in Stalingrad throughout the fighting, while he directs the only power station still functioning.

The matriarch Alexandra’s only son, Dmitry, was arrested in 1937 and dies during the battle of Stalingrad in a forced labor camp.

Plots and comings and goings wind around and through all these people in Life and Fate. It is a sweeping and grand story, best read with a post-it note sticking out of the back where the seven-page list of chief characters is located.

            Here are some pieces of Life and Fate.

 

            1. Viktor Shtrum and his Mother. The physicist Viktor Shtrum, a scientist like Grossman, receives a last letter from his mother, Anna, before she is killed in a massacre by the Nazis of all the Jews in her Ukranian town. As previously noted, Grossman’s mother was so killed, and he imagines what his mother’s last letter might have said. His vivid death scene is based on his research in 1944 and after the war of what happened to the Jews in his hometown of Berdichev. In her last letter, smuggled out through the fence around the town ghetto, Viktor’s mother (she calls him Vitya in the letter) knows that all the Jews will be killed in pits being dug by Ukranian collaborators outside the town. Incidentally, a reference to Ukranian collaborators with the Nazis was alone enough to ensure the novel would not be published in Soviet Russia. Officially, none of the happy peoples of the Soviet Union collaborated with the Nazis. The truth is quite different.

            She observes that, in the ghetto, the poorest people are superior to those who have something:

            “The poorest people, the tailors and tinsmiths, the ones without hope, are so much nobler, more generous and more intelligent than the people who’ve somehow managed to lay by a few provisions. The young schoolmistress;…the eccentric old teacher…; the timid women who work in the library; Reyvich, the engineer who’s more helpless than a child, yet dreams of arming the ghetto with handmade grenades—what wonderful, impractical, dear, sad, good people they all are.”

            “I’ve realized now that hope almost never goes together with reason. It’s something quite irrational and instinctive. People carry on, Vitya, as though their whole life lies ahead of them. It’s impossible to say whether that’s wise or foolish—it’s just the way people are.” (p. 88)

         Victor’s mother then writes about the children of the ghetto:

            “They say that children are our own future, but how can one say that of these children? They aren’t going to become musicians, cobblers or tailors. Last night [in a dream] I saw very clearly how this whole noisy world of bearded, anxious fathers and querulous grandmothers…this whole world of marriage customs, proverbial sayings, and Sabbaths will disappear for ever under the earth. After the war life will begin to stir once again, but we won’t be here, we will have vanished—just as the Aztecs once vanished.” (p. 92)

 

            2. Colonel Novikov and Commissar Getmanov. One of the finer subplots in Life and Fate is the conflict between the accomplished tank commander Novikov and the tank corps’s political commissar, Getmanov. Prior to the Soviet counterattack in November that surrounded the German 6^th Army at Stalingrad, Dementiy Trifonovich Getmanov is appointed Commissar for Colonel Pyotr Pavlovich Novikov’s tank corps, then being organized in the Ural Mountains. Col. Novikov is the lover of Zhenya Shaposhnikov. As previously noted, in the Red Army up until late 1943, because of the perceived political unreliability of the military commanders, each unit had a political commissar. The commissars watched the military commanders, reported on them, had to approve orders, and gave political speeches to the troops. The Red Army officers almost to a man hated the political commissars.

            Getmanov, the new commissar for the tank corps had no military experience. He had been a regional Communist Party official in an area now held by the Germans. But he was a Communist Party man through and through. Grossman writes about Getmanov:

            “His whole life—which contained no great books, famous discoveries or military victories—was one sustained, intense, unsleeping labor. The supreme meaning of this labour lay in the fact that it was done at the demand and for the sake of the Party.

            “The attitude of a Party leader to any matter, to any film, to any book, had to be infused with the Spirit of the Party; however difficult it might be, he had to immediately renounce a favourite book or a customary way of behavior if the interests of the Party should conflict with his personal sympathies.” (p. 102)

            Before taking up his new post, Getmanov naturally took a look at the state’s files on this Col. Novikov. A friend says to Getmanov, “You probably know more about… [Novikov] than he does himself.” Getmanov screwed up his narrow, shrewd eyes and ominously said, “A lot more.” (p. 105)

            In his mind, the regional party official had little problem in switching over to the military, about which he knew nothing. Grossman writes about Getmanov:

            “Before the war…he had given speeches about the production of fire-bricks…about the quality of bread from the municipal bakery…about an epidemic of fowl-pest in the collective farm.

            “Now he spoke with the same authority about the quality of fuel, about tactics in battle… about the psychology of the soldier in battle….” (p. 223)

            Getmanov is described by the narrator: “Getmanov was short and broad-shouldered. He had a large stomach and a large head with tousled hair. He was very active, quick to laugh, and he had a loud voice. He appeared inexhaustible…..He walked with a slight waddle and often made use of a stick….He was quick-tempered and resented it if someone answered him back….” “Novikov couldn’t deny that he was afraid of him”—this though Novikov was nominally his superior.

            Novikov soon runs up against Getmanov. Getmanov will not approve promotions for soldiers who are not Great Russians or for soldiers from the wrong background: such as a soldier from a kulak family, the former aristocracy, or one whose father had been a priest.

            Novikov, it turns out, was far more protective of his men than Getmanov or his ilk wanted. As the narrator says of Novikov, “[A]s a soldier he had been afraid of having to account for lost ammunition…lost fuel….Not once had he known a superior officer show real anger because an operation had been wasteful in terms of human lives.” (p. 501) At dawn on November 20, just before Novikov sends his tank corps forward south of Stalingrad as part of the encirclement of the Nazis, he thinks one last thought that will later get him in trouble:

            “There is one right even more important that the right to send men to their death without thinking: the right to think twice before you send men to their death. Novikov carried out this responsibility to the full.” (p. 644)

            At the hour set for the attack, Novikov delays sending his tanks forward for eight minutes so that one last German artillery battery can be knocked out. Getmanov, the military ignoramus, urges him own: “Pyotr Pavlovich!” said Getmanov anxiously, “It’s time! You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”(p. 643) Stalin himself, on the phone, orders the front commander Yeremenko to get the tanks moving. Yeremenko so orders Novikov. Novikov waits three more minutes. Once unleashed, Novikov’s tanks roar through the German lines to close the circle around Paulus’s 6^th Army with the loss of one man and one tank. Getmanov kisses him with joy over the triumph. And that night he writes the political authorities about the eight-minute delay.

            Novikov’s tank corps then turns west toward the Ukraine. Getmanov badly wants his unit to be the first Red Army unit to reach the Ukraine. After five days of nonstop advances, Novikov’s soldiers are falling asleep while they drive. Novikov orders a 10-hour halt for a rest. The military ignoramus, Getmanov explodes: “To hell with them all! So what if they haven’t had enough sleep….And you want to call a halt just because of that! You’re dithering, Pyotr Pavlovich, and I protest!...[Y]ou want to put your men to bed. It’s becoming a habit….Do you think you are in charge of a kindergarten?” (p. 812)

            Getmanov calls Moscow and gets the 10-hour rest order reversed. Novikov, a hero of Stalingrad, then receives a summons to report to Moscow, almost surely not a good sign. The narrator of the novel notes the reactions to the summons:

            “Novikov’s summons provoked considerable discussion….Some people made out it was of no great import, that Novikov would soon resume his command. Others argued that it had to do with Novikov’s delay at the beginning of the offensive and his unfortunate decision, at the very climax of the offensive, to call a 10-hour halt in order to rest his men. Still others claimed that it was the result of his failure to establish good relations with his commissar [Getmanov]…who had an excellent record.” (p. 817)

            Novikov’s fate is not mentioned again in the novel, but the Russian reader would assume he was either shot or imprisoned. And no novel that made “bad stuff” out of a Red Army political commissar was going to be published in Russia, particularly where the commissar in the novel bore a striking resemblance to Nikita Khrushchev.

            In one subplot involving two people, Grossman destroyed the myth of Stalingrad as a battle won by the genius of Stalin and the Communist Party.

 

            3. Lyudmila and Tolya. Early in Life and Fate Lyudmila’s son by her first husband, Abarchuk, who is in a forced labor camp, is severely wounded. Abarchuk had left her when their son Anatoli (called Tolya) was a newborn and had forbidden her to give him his surname; so Tolya had her surname, Shaposhnikov. As the narrator writes of Lyudmila, “For her, the whole world was contained in Tolya; for [her husband and daughter] Tolya was just part of the world.” (p. 73)

She finds out that Tolya is in a hospital in Saratov (a city on the Volga River north of Stalingrad) and takes a riverboat to be at his side. On the trip, Lyudmila is full of a grief that always makes the journey back to a mother’s home:

“Her grief was the same grief that had always known the way from the military hospitals and graves of the front back to the huts of peasants, huts without numbers standing on patches of ground without a name.” (p. 138)

Lt. Anatoli Shaposhnikov, artillery officer in the Red Army, dies just before Lyudmila arrives at the hospital. At the hospital she finds out Tolya is dead and is taken to a cemetery by a sergeant, who feels guilty about the poor quality of wood used for coffins and headboards. The narrator:

“Even the thick-lipped sergeant-major with the fleshy ears, the man responsible for the burial of dead patients felt guilty before the woman he was driving to the cemetery: the coffins were knocked together out of poor quality boards, the dead were laid out in their underclothes and buried in communal graves—extremely close together unless they were officers…; the inscriptions over the graves were in an ugly script, on unpolished board and in paint that would not last….”

“The sergeant-major felt guilty about his poor quality timber as the lieutenant’s mother questioned him about the conduct of burials, asking how they dressed the corpses…and whether a last word was spoken over the grave….”

The narrator again:

“Everyone feels guilty before a mother who has lost her son in a war; throughout human history men have tried in vain to justify themselves.” (p. 149-150)

At Tolya’s sparse grave, the headboard was not wide enough to take the long family surname, Shaposhnikov. Grossman writes:

“Lyudmila walked up to the small mound of earth. On a plywood board she read her son’s name and rank….Lyudmila knelt down and, very gently, so as not to disturb her son, straightened the board with his name on it. He had always got angry with her when she straightened the collar of his jacket on their way to school….

“She could see some trees, the polished gravestones [of the pre-war cemetery] shining in the sun, and the board with her son’s name. SHAPOSHN was written in big letters, while IKOV was written very small, each letter clinging to the one before it. She had no thoughts and no will. She had nothing.

“With even steps and without looking around, she began to walk towards the gates.” (p. 151-156)

 

4. Commissar Krymov. Krymov, Zhenya Shaposhnikova’s first husband and a political commissar in Stalingrad who wants to be a fighting soldier, muses about time (and this could only happen in a Russian novel) after beating off a German attack in the city. Krymov’s unit had been surrounded in 1941 and then broke out back to Russian lines. He is later arrested and charged with becoming a Nazi spy during the encirclement (the same thing that happens to Ivan Denisovich). His musing about time foretells his arrest:

“ There is nothing more difficult to do than to be a stepson of the time; there is no heavier fate than to live in an age that is not your own….Time loves only those it has given birth to itself; its own children, its own heroes….Never can it come to love the children of a past age….

“Such is time: everything passes, it alone remains; everything remains, it alone passes. And how swiftly and noiselessly it passes. Only yesterday you were sure of yourself, strong and cheerful, a son of time. But now another time has come—and you don’t even know it.” (p. 51)

 After Commissar Krymov is arrested at Stalingrad he is taken to Lubyanka Prison for interrogation by an MGB (later KGB) officer who has a massive file on Krymov with everything in it. The secret police must have been following him for years:

“[the interrogator] sighed, opened a file inscribed “To be kept in perpetuity”, slowly loosened the white tapes and began leafing through pages covered in writing. Krymov caught a glimpse of different colors of ink, single- and double-spaced typescript and occasional appended notes in red and blue crayon and ordinary pencil…..

“Even if Krymov had been a very great man, whose every word was important, it would still not have been worth gathering so many trifles, so much junk into this great file….But nothing was considered trifling. Wherever he had been, he had left footprints behind him; a whole retinue had followed on his heels, committing his life to memory.

“A mocking remark he had made about one of his comrades, a word or two about a book he had read, a comic toast he had made on someone’s birthday, a three-minute telephone conversation, an angry note he had addressed to the platform at a conference—everything had been gathered together in the file.” (p. 772-774)

One of Krymov’s cellmates at the Lubyanka is Katsenelenbogen, a former Chekist (precursor of the KGB), who has been arrested for some reason or other. Krymov is fascinated by Kaatsenelenbogen’s eyes: “[H]is eyes—for all their intelligence—were tired and lazy. They were the eyes of someone who knows too much, who is tired of life and unafraid of death.” (p. 634).

Kastelenbogen, who is experienced in these matters, tells Krymov that whatever happens in his interrogation, he will get the usual sentence, probably 8 or 10 years in a labor camp. Krymov argues that he, Krymov, is innocent. Kastelenbogen answers:

“The concept of personal innocence is a hangover from the Middle Ages. Pure superstition! Tolstoy declared that no one in the world is guilty. We Chekists have put forward a more advanced thesis: ‘No one in the world is innocent.’ Everyone is subject to our jurisdiction. If a warrant has been issued for your arrest, you are guilty—and a warrant can be issued for everyone. Yes, everyone has the right to a warrant.” (p. 635)

 

 

            5. Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum. Viktor Shtrum, Lyudmila’s second husband, is a physicist, a member of the Academy of Sciences. A thoroughly Russianized, secular Jew, he never thought about being Jewish until the Nazis invaded. His physics laboratory was evacuated from Moscow, at the time of the “big skedaddle” in October 1941, to Kazan, on the Volga River. Shtrum is Vasily Grossman. It is in Kazan that he becomes enchanted with his colleague Sokolov’s wife, Marya Ivanovna Sokolova, modeled after Grossman’s mistress Yekaterina.

            Viktor is first and foremost a nuclear physicist, fascinated by how physics has been completely changed by quantum theory in the first 3 decades of the 20^th century. Grossman writes:

            “The Day of Judgment had come; thousand-year-old truths had been declared errors. Truth had been sleeping for centuries, as though in a cocoon, inside ancient prejudices, errors and inaccuracies.

            “The world was no longer Euclidian, its geometrical nature no longer composed of masses and their speeds.”….The more deeply physicists penetrated the heart of the atom, the more clearly they were able to understand the laws governing the luminescence of stars.” (p. 79)

            In Kazan, Viktor’s work is not going well. His experiments are not producing the expected results. Without directly saying so, the reader knows the work has clear implications for the atomic bomb. The combination of problems at work and Lyudmila’s seemingly endless recollections of the times he had mistreated her dead son, Tolya, lead Viktor to spend many of his evenings at Sokolov’s home. Sokolov is the lead mathematician at the laboratory. His wife, Marya, understands Sokolov: he was appalled by collectivization and the terror. But when his brother-in-law was arrested for 11 months, he would not even call his own sister to see how she was doing. The narrator notes what Marya knew: “She alone understood [Sokolov’s] spiritual purity. But then she alone knew how servile he was in the face of power.” (p. 287)

            In contrast to Sokolov, Viktor Shtrum was more prone to say what he thought and then get worried about the consequences. As the narrator writes about Viktor:

            “ What a wonderful power and clarity there is in speaking one’s mind. What a terrible price people paid for a few bold words.”

            “Viktor had…taken a vow either to remain silent and not express dangerous thoughts or else to say what he thought without funking it. He had not kept this vow. He had often flared up and thrown caution to the wind—only to suddenly take fright and attempt to snuff out the flame he himself had lit.”  (p. 288)

            Viktor could not forget one such instance: “He remembered looking at his assistant’s face after making a thoughtless joke about Stalin’s having formulated the laws of gravity long before Newton. ‘You didn’t say anything, and I didn’t hear anything”, this young assistant had said gaily.” And Viktor worried to himself: “Why, why, why all these jokes? It was mad to make such jokes—like banging a flask of nitroglycerine with a hammer.” (p. 289)

             As the Germans are pushed back the lab returns to Moscow. Soon Viktor’s work is validated, and he comes in for much praise. He is even nominated for the Stalin Prize in physics. Alas, in the eyes of the Bolshevik party he gives too much credit to western physicists, particularly Einstein. The communist party leader at the lab says Viktor is too quick to make Einstein’s idealist theory the peak of scientific achievement. To that, Viktor, his quick tongue lashing out, responds in an arrogant and didactic voice, “contemporary physics without Einstein is the physics of monkeys. It’s not for us to trifle with the names of Einstein, Galileo and Newton.” (p. 454) Party figures start complaining that his Western-oriented approach to physics contradicts what they call the Leninist view of the nature of matter.

            As communist the party group at the lab prepares to pass a resolution condemning Shtrum, his friends urge him to give a speech or write a letter admitting his error. Fearing arrest, Viktor drafts such a letter but cannot bring himself to send it. The narrator describes the pressure on Viktor Shtrum:

            “…[A]n invisible force was crushing him. He could feel its weight, its hypnotic power; it was forcing him to think as it wanted, to write as it dictated. This force was inside him; it could dissolve his will and cause his heart to stop beating….Only people who have never felt such a force themselves can be surprised that others submit to it. Those who have felt it, on the other hand, feel astonished that a man can rebel against it even for a moment—with one sudden word of anger, one timid gesture of protest.” (p. 672)

            In the end Viktor does not attend the meeting at which he is harshly reprimanded for his views; he stays at home; he stays away from the lab for days, claiming illness. Viktor correctly tells Lyudmila that one has to act in a certain way after being condemned so that others will not get in trouble for befriending an enemy of the people:

            “Lyuda, from now on our contact with people has to be one-sided. If a man’s been arrested, his wife can only visit people who’ve invited her. She doesn’t have the right to say ‘I want to come round.’ ….We can no longer write to anyone ourselves; we can only reply to letters. We can no longer phone anyone; we can only pick up the receiver when it rings. We don’t even have the right to greet acquaintances—they may prefer not to notice us….You and I are pariahs.” (p. 710-711)

            One day while Shtrum is still staying away from the lab, the phone rings. The narrator reports: “The voice on the line was…so similar to the voice Viktor had heard on the radio that it sounded almost like an impersonation. It was like his own imitation of Stalin when he was playing the fool at home.” It was Stalin, praising his work, wishing him every success and asking if his working conditions were satisfactory. Of course they were, Viktor responds.

            Overnight, Viktor is the hero of the physics laboratory—both he and Lyudmila are given cars with drivers; his every wish for new equipment is granted in a rush. And then one day, after the new cars, the praise, the new equipment, the lab director asks Shtrum, as a very prominent physicist, to sign a letter protesting an article in The New York Times. The Times article reported that a number of Russian writers had been sent to forced labor camps, which, of course, they had. The lab director tells Viktor the article has aroused indignation among the Russian intelligentsia. The thought immediately occurs to Viktor Shtrum: “How can the Soviet intelligentsia be so indignant if they’ve never once set eyes on the New York Times?” (p. 833)

            Grossman describes Shtrum’s reaction to the request: “He began to feel sick. It was just like when they’d wanted him to make a public confession; he suddenly felt miserable, base, pathetic….Once again, millions of tons of granite were about to come down on his shoulders….” (p. 835) Grossman continues: “Viktor felt overwhelmed by disgust at his own submissiveness. The great State was breathig on him tenderly; he didn’t have the strength to cast himself out into the freezing darkness…He was paralyzed, not by fear, but by…a strange, agonizing sense of his own passivity.” (p. 835)

            Viktor proceeds to rationalize the act: “He was as obedient as a well-cared for  animal…What more could he ask for? Stalin had telephoned him…..It was better to get it over and done with. He took out his pen….How docile this rebel had now become.” (p. 837)

            In a nation in which no person has outer freedom, the other kind takes on great importance. Of Viktor’s act in signing the letter, the narrator says, “He had lost his inner freedom.” (p. 839)

            Marya, Sokolev’s wife, calls to say farewell. At his request, Sokolev is being transferred to another research lab.  She tells him that someone had visited and asked Sokolev, always docile, to sign a letter. “’You know the one I mean’, she says.” Marya continues: “I’m sure it was you, your strength, that helped Pyotr Lavrentyevich stand his ground.” (p. 838) Sokolev has refused to sign the letter, following the example of Shtrum’s earlier refusal to write a letter admitting his errors to the Party.

            Grossman continues: “Viktor put down the receiver and buried his face in his hands….It wasn’t his enemies who were going to punish him, but his friends, the people who loved him. It was their very faith in him that would wound him.” (p. 838)

            Viktor thought, “How could he be so arrogant? Who had given him the right to boast of his purity and courage, to set himself up as a merciless judge of the weaknesses of others?” Viktor is crushed by his weakness in signing the letter. And Viktor has a thought that is what Life and Fate is all about: “Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed—while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.”(p. 840)

           

6. Snapshots. (a) Drinking at the Front:  The chief of staff of an artillery regiment, Colonel Bova, invites military inspector Colonel Darensky to stay the night with him near the front. Bova was stoop shouldered, bald and hard of hearing. His headquarters were in a shack made form boards smeared with clay. Also, he was drunk—a common frontline condition. Grossman knew how to be graphic in describing life at the front:

“Bova sat Derensky down on a crate that had once contained cans of food from America, poured out some vodka into a large, dirty glass whose rim was smeared with dried toothpaste, and handed [him] a green pickled tomato on a piece of damp newspaper….

Bova’s head was hanging off the edge of the camp bed and his snores were like the groans of a dying man. Darensky, with the special tenderness and patience that a Russian feels towards a drunkard, placed a pillow under his head and some sheets of newspaper under his legs.” (p. 384-385)

(b) SS Officer Lenard:  Inside Stalingrad near the end, trapped, freezing and hungry German soldiers survived by eating their horses. An SS officer named Lenard is being driven to 6^th Army headquarters inside Stalingrad. Lenard had been offered a chance to fly out of the cauldron and had refused so he could stay with his men. Grossman writes:

“The driver stopped the car near the corpse of a dead horse…. [SS officer] Lenard watched the anxious, unshaven men hewing off slabs of frozen horsemeat with hatchets. One soldier, standing between the horse’s exposed ribs, looked like a carpenter up in the rafters of an unfinished roof.  A few yards away, in the middle of a ruined building, was a fire with a black cauldron hanging down from a tripod. Round it stood a group of soldiers wrapped in shawls and blankets…The cook prodded with his bayonet at the pieces of meat that came to the surface. A soldier sitting on the roof of a dugout was gnawing at a large bone; it looked for all the world like an improbably vast harmonica.

“It was like a scene from the Stone Age. The grenadiers, the glory of the nation…were no longer travelling the road to victory. Lenard looked at these men bandaged up in rags. With a poetic intuition he understood that this twilight was the end of a dream.

“Life must indeed conceal some strangely obtuse inertial force. How was it that the dazzling energy of Hitler and the terrible power of a people moved by the most progressive of philosophies had led to the quiet banks of a frozen Volga, to these ruins, to this dirty snow…to the quiet humility of these creatures watching over a steaming cauldron of horsemeat?” (pp. 729-730)

(c) Lt. Viktorov:  Russian air force Lt. Viktorov, the father of Vera Spiridovna’s baby, is sent to attack the German infantry in mid-November. His plane was set on fire by German anti-aircraft guns, and he came down on a hill in no man’s land. Grossman describes the scene:

“The dead pilot lay there all night on a hill covered with snow; it was a cold night and the stars were quite brilliant. At dawn the hill turned pink—the pilot now lay on a pink hill. Then the wind got up and the snow covered his body.” (p.611)

(d) Lt. Bach: A German officer, Lt. Bach, more thoughtful than most, wonders what has happened to him—he had not personally taken part in any of the Nazi horrors. Indeed, he had hated Hitler for many years. Though he would not kill the Jews, he could understand why Germany might need to do it:

“[I]f he were in power himself, he would immediately put a stop to this genocide. Nevertheless, though he had several Jewish friends himself, he had to admit there was such a thing as a German soul and a German character….A state…alone has the power to express what is most precious, what is truly immortal in millions of people—a German character, a German hearth, a German will, a German spirit of sacrifice.” (p. 377)

Did agreeing with that idea make him part of the darkness?--

“He had never killed a child; he had never arrested anyone. But he had broken the fragile dyke that had protected the purity of his soul from the seething darkness around him. The blood of the camps and ghettos had gushed over him and carried him away…There was no longer any divide between him and the darkness; he himself was a part of the darkness.” (p. 737)

The relentless snow of the Russian steppe falls as the battle nears its end and Lt. Bach contemplates what was happening:

“[B]ig flakes of snow settled on the ground,…on the crosses of graves, on the turrets of abandoned tanks, in the ears of dead men waiting to be buried.

“The snow filled the air with a soft grey-blue mist, softening the wind and gunfire, bringing the earth and sky together into one swaying blur.

“The snow fell on [Lt.] Bach’s shoulders; it was as though flakes of silence were falling on the still Volga, on the dead city, on the skeletons of horses. It was snowing everywhere, on earth and on the stars; the whole universe was full of snow. Everything was disappearing beneath it: guns, the bodies of the dead, filthy dressings, rubble, scraps of twisted iron.

“This soft white snow settling over the carnage of the city was time itself; the present was turning into the past, and there was no future.” (p.743)

(e). Major Byerozkin.

Major Byerozkin is commander of a regiment under General Chuikov in Stalingrad. His wife and daughter have been evacuated to a rural area of the Ural Mountains. He has not had a letter for weeks. Quiet, brave, Byerozkin “knew it was only the peace and silence within him that enabled him to endure…[the] stress [of war].” (p. 62) As Grossman writes, “ Byerozkin knew very well that the man with no quiet at the bottom of his soul was unable to endure for long, however courageous he might be in combat.” (p. 62) The narrator describes what Byerozkin was like in battle:

“In battle, his strength imposed itself on all his subordinates. Nevertheless, there was nothing essentially military or warlike about it; it was a simple, reasonable and very human strength. Few men were able to display strength of this kind in the inferno of battle; they were the true masters of the war.” (p. 439)

Byerozkin is wounded, recovers in a hospital and, after the Stalingrad battle is won, is granted convalescent leave with his wife in the Urals. And Grossman ends the novel with Byerozkin and his wife, Tanya, walking by a lake to a nearby village:

“There they’d be able to buy some white bread with his army ration-card. They walked along hand in hand, without saying a word….

“The snow here hadn’t thawed. Its large, rough crystals were filled with the blue of the lake water. But on the sunny side of the hill the snow was just beginning to melt….The glitter of the snow, the water and the ice on the puddles was quite blinding. There was so much light, it was so intense, that they seemed almost to have to force their way through it. …The spring sun seemed to be closer to the earth than ever. The air was cool and warm at the same time.”

They returned to the house through a forest:

“Somehow you could sense spring more vividly in this cool forest than on the sunlit plain. And there was a deeper sadness in this silence than in the silence of autumn. In it you could hear both a lament for the dead and the furious joy of life itself.

“It was still cold and dark, but soon the doors and shutters would be flung open. Soon the house would be filled with the tears and laughter of children, with the hurried steps of a loved woman and the measured gait of the master of the house.

“They stood there, holding their bags, in silence.” (pp. 869-871)

 

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