Equipped with these general guidelines, four members of the commission—historians Esfir Genkina, Pyotr Beletski, and Abram Belkin, as well as stenographer Alexandra Shamshina—set off for Stalingrad in late December. They stayed in the besieged city for just under two weeks. To judge from the variety and scope of the transcripts, they carried out interviews almost nonstop. They departed one day before the Soviets launched their final offensive, but returned again in February with more staff. By March they had conducted 130 interviews with soldiers from thirteen rifle divisions, an air force division, a motorized brigade, and a mechanized corps. They spoke with staff officers from different field armies, with representatives from local party offices, and with workers and engineers from two factories. Among the first persons to be interviewed were Generals Chuikov and Shumilov. Many of the interviewees were high in the chain of command (twelve field army staff officers, twelve divisional commanders, twenty-five staff officers at the division and brigade levels, and thirty-three officers at the regiment, battalion, and battery levels); only twelve were sergeants and infantrymen.265 The historians were not interested in finding as many eyewitnesses as possible but in obtaining in-depth testimony. To this end, they focused on troops from the 62nd, the 64th, and the 57th Armies who had fought in close proximity with one another since retreating from the Don steppes in the summer of 1942. The historians interviewed multiple members of the same unit (divisions, regiments, and, in a few cases, companies) to merge individual narratives into a larger story (the course of the battle in general, but also clashes and other local events) told from a variety of perspectives.266
The first few interview transcripts completed by the commission contained the questions and insertions of the historians along with the responses. These were omitted from later transcripts to give them the character of a closed narrative.267 But the questions can be reconstructed from the recurring narrative patterns in many of the interviews. Sometimes the interviewees began with a question, repeating the words of the interviewer. Interviews with renowned commanders or decorated soldiers usually started with a request to hear about their personal biography: childhood, education, profession, and how they came to join the army and the Communist party. (Most of the commanders had been members for years; the soldiers, usually much younger, did not join until the war.) Afterward came a detailed description of military assignments and responsibilities.
The historians asked them about the “most memorable period” in their lives (as with Colonel Nikolai Batyuk and Lieutenant Colonel Kolesnik). Sometimes they were disappointed by the responses. Regimental Commander Genrikh Fugenfirov said, “How can I single out a characteristic detail or the particular features of a fight if bombs kept raining on us and the regiment was under aerial bombardment for days on end?” They wanted to know when the battle for the city raged most intensely, and how it differed from combat operations elsewhere (as with Lieutenant Colonel Smirnov and Regimental Commander Fugenfirov). Many questions were about what happened before, during, and after battle: “How did we train the soldiers for combat?” (Battalion Commissar Stepanov); “How did we deal with the fear of tanks?” (Lieutenant Colonel Svirin); “How did we work with snipers?” (Captain Olkhovkin); “What was the significance of the river crossing?” (Captain Semyon Ryvkin); “What did the pioneer battalion do during combat?” (Lieutenant Kolesnik); “What did we do following the attack?” (Colonel Smolyanov); “What are we doing now?” (Junior Lieutenant Ayzenberg). Almost every interview inquired about soldiers whose acts set them apart. For instance: “I don’t exactly remember who distinguished themselves in that fighting. Some were killed, others wounded” (Sergeant Karpushin). Political officers were asked about the effectiveness of their work: “How did we conduct political and party work?” (Divisional Commissar Levykin); “How did the soldiers feel about our events? What kind of people came to join our party?” (Colonel Smolyanov), “How did communists conduct themselves [in battle]?” (division party secretary Alexander Koshkarev). They were also interested in hearing about deficiencies of the Red Army and they questioned commanders about their “own mistakes” (General Chuikov). Toward the end of conversations they often asked about promotions or medals soldiers had received. Infantryman Alexei Pavlov summed up his record: “All in all I killed eleven Germans and destroyed one machine gun.”268
Some soldiers were very communicative, others more reserved. Linguistic hurdles were partly to blame. As one Latvian soldier explained, “Perhaps I could tell more, but my command of Russian is poor. Besides, talking about oneself doesn’t feel right.”269Rural dialects colored the language of some eyewitnesses, in particular the commanders, who spoke more openly than their subordinates. Soldiers for the most part spoke quickly and to the point. The shortest of the interviews ran two to three pages typed out in long form, but most ranged between eight and fifteen pages, with some reaching twenty or thirty. Some of the soldiers interviewed stuck to the fighting in Stalingrad; others went into great length about their family background and how they came to the Red Army. This variety suited the historians; they wanted to show “living people,” not just lump together various accounts.
The Stalingrad staff worked diligently, completing many more interviews than other delegations of historians on the front. The total output of the commission during the war was nevertheless considerable: more than five thousand interview transcripts with soldiers, partisans, and civilians, covering broad areas of the war, from the front and the countryside to the occupied territories.270
This massive collection of documents is unique in military and social history research. This becomes apparent when it is compared to an ostensibly similar project undertaken by the US armed forces during World War II.271 The chief US Army combat historian, Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Marshall, and a staff of workers interviewed groups of soldiers within hours after combat in the Pacific and European theaters.272 Marshall stated that he interviewed a total of four hundred companies, each made up of 125 men. Marshall did not see himself primarily as a documentary historian, however. The project’s purpose was to strengthen the army’s combat effectiveness. From the interviews he concluded that most soldiers—he put the number between 75 and 85 percent—were so overcome by fear in battle that they wouldn’t use their weapons.273 Marshall recommended drilling the soldiers to overcome their instinctive fear of death. Indeed, it was because of Marshall’s influential studies that later generations of US soldiers underwent more live-fire training, increasing the percentage of those who used their weapons in war. But Marshall’s work has drawn much criticism from historians. Roger Spiller believes that Marshall greatly exaggerated the number he claimed to interview and contends that he invented his data on the rate of fire. Spiller and others point out that Marshall was trained as a journalist before being promoted to army historian.274 Instead of having a stenographer transcribe the interviews, he based his work on shorthand notes.
Marshall’s approach stands in contrast to the care exercised by professional Soviet historians, who used stenographers to record all the interviews and then archived the transcripts. But comparing Marshall with Mints reveals more than the difference between simple journalism and scholarly rigor. It underscores the emotion that fueled the Soviet historians as they went about their work, their trust in the universal principles governing history, and their confidence that these laws would inevitably lead to Soviet victory. For instance, the decision to record the interviews in the first person followed a Gorky-esque aim: respondents were meant to see themselves as actors on a world-historical stage. Equipped with a new subjective awareness, they would push the envelope of individual achievement and advance the objective course of history.