The communist wager on the boundless reserves of the human will was shared by scores of Red Army soldiers fighting at Stalingrad, especially by those born after 1917 and brought up in the Soviet education system. In keeping with this voluntarist conception, they distinguished between two basic dispositions—the heroic and the cowardly—and admitted few shades of gray between them. The primacy the Bolsheviks placed on fully developed consciousness expressed itself in how soldiers dealt with the psychological stress of war. In an interview filling twenty-eight pages, army commander Chuikov devoted only one sentence to this matter: “Just understand this one thing: all of this [the months of defensive battles in Stalingrad] has made an impression on our psyches.” Then he abruptly changed subjects. Sniper Vasily Zaytsev described his suffering in physiological terms—a common tendency in Soviet psychology at the time—while underscoring the ever present will to fulfill his mission:
We didn’t know fatigue. Now I get tired just walking around town, but then we had breakfast from 4:00 to 5:00 A.M. and dinner from 9:00 to 10:00 P.M., going without food all day without getting tired. We’d go three or four days without sleeping, without even feeling sleepy. How can I explain this? [ . . . ] Every soldier, including myself, was thinking only of how he could make them pay more dearly for his life, how he could slaughter even more Germans. [ . . . ] I was wounded three times in Stalingrad. Now I have a nervous system disorder and shake constantly.220
Vasiliev mentioned Mikhail Mamekov, who was also a sniper: “In a short period of time he had already killed 138 Fritzes. If he spends a day without killing a Fritz, he can’t eat and really starts fretting. He is a typical Tatar and speaks poor Russian, but he is always studying it, even in battle.”
Dozens of Red Army soldiers from different ethnic backgrounds told how they attempted to meet the demands placed on them: defending their “home” and the “socialist fatherland,” keeping their “self-preservation instinct” in check, surmounting their fear of death, seeing loss of life in battle as a meaningful act or even as life’s fulfillment, and constantly fanning their hate of Germans. As the soldiers’ stories about their families showed, these attitudes surfaced far away from the front as well. Senior Lieutenant Molchanov, sidelined by a stomach ulcer, taught at a military academy when war broke out. “I have a daughter, Nina, who is seven. She kept asking, ‘Papa, why are you not at the front? Everybody is fighting and you are not.’ That had a powerful effect on me. What can I answer the child? Tell her I am sick? But that was not the time for sickness! After that I went to the head of the political department of the district and told him about my wish to go to the front.”
Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Molchanov
Characteristically, talk of resignation or fortune surface nowhere in the interviews, even though fatalism, in the positive sense of the word, once counted as a virtue among soldiers in the Russian empire, lending them their legendary tenacity and endurance.
The question remains how to assess the language of the Stalingrad transcripts in relation to how Soviet soldiers talked or wrote in an unofficial setting. Many historians believe they can best uncover the reality of war in the words of those who speak freely about it. They mistrust official sources, regarding them as outlets of propaganda that yield little for understanding actual individual experience.221 Indeed, some Soviet wartime letters speak a very different language. We know of their existence because they were recorded by NKVD agents in search of “anti-Soviet” subjects—soldiers who despaired over their fate or voiced defeatist positions. In October 1942, Special Section officers at the Stalingrad Front presented a report containing these excerpts (the agents were not concerned with the letters as a whole, only with passages in them that fit the categories they were searching for):
“The majority no longer believes in victory. The masses are no longer sympathetic to us. And now the allies are delaying the opening of a second front.222 Seeing all this, I have reached an impasse with my convictions.”
“I am in the south where it is very hot, but in a day I’ll have to ship out and join the fight with the Germans at Stalingrad. That means waving good-bye to my life. I am writing this letter on a steamship, and these are certainly the last minutes of my life. I have information about the front: when an echelon reaches the front, out of the four thousand men, only fifteen or twenty will make it, and those are the ranking commanders. Only fifteen minutes are needed to destroy a division.”
The report also flagged as anti-Soviet several letter writers with anti-Semitic views who claimed the Soviet government was Jewish.223
Voices like these are important for understanding the soldiers’ experience of war, but they can only be fruitfully studied within their political context. For the NKVD operatives who collected them, these statements represented a pole of hostility they were bent on eradicating. They did so by confiscating the letters and sometimes arresting the authors and addressees as well. Letter writers who voiced despair but did not expound a political platform were left untouched, but their letters confiscated, so as not to contaminate Soviet society. On an aggregate level the work of the NKVD looked like this: “after checking the letters, texts were detected that voiced complaints about exhaustion from the war and the hardship of military service. A number of letters reflected defeatist sentiments. During the period from June to August 1942, out of 30,237,000 examined letters, 15,469 contain such statements.”224 Reports always concluded that the overwhelming majority of letters sent from the Soviet front lines “reflected the healthy morale and political reliability of the personnel.”225 Critics might contend that in making this assertion the NKVD agents did not account for the fact that Red Army soldiers knew their letters were being censored and hence did not confide their true thoughts to them. But such criticism misses the bigger point: that a huge, costly censorship apparatus was at work, scanning every single letter that passed from the front to the rear—a unique feature among all warfaring nations in World War II—in an effort to transform Red Army soldiers’ thinking and behavior in wartime.
This work was performed with equal zeal by NKVD censors and by the political officers at the Stalingrad Front who kept explaining to soldiers why they were fighting until minutes before battle. They resumed their task as soon as fighting was over, summarizing and interpreting the day’s events. The political officers trained soldiers to speak about themselves in a way that, they believed, would decisively influence thought and action in war. An account of subjective experience in wartime remains incomplete if it fails to take into account the pervasive monitoring and conditioning performed by the Soviet ideological state apparatus and its structuring effects.
And so, when the Moscow historians arrived at the Stalingrad front in late December 1942 they encountered soldiers who had fully incorporated Soviet notions of heroism and cowardice and were conversant about the battle’s political and historical significance.