In view of the commission’s enormous efforts, it published astonishingly little. To this day, virtually none of the thousands of interviews transcribed by stenographers have gone to press. The few publications the commission produced appeared during the war and portrayed events mostly from a bird’s-eye view, largely omitting the individual voices. The sparse output was due in part to Mints’s own conviction that as long as the Soviet Union remained at war, interviewing eyewitnesses and collecting other documentary materials ought to take precedence. Another difficulty lay in bringing the views expressed by the respondents into line with the ideals of the historians. Gorky’s earlier projects generated relatively few publications on similar grounds: few of the interviewed factory workers spoke in the heroic categories attributed to them; most accounts were either edited or hidden away in archives. So too in the case of the Mints commission. Internal discussions reveal that the staff argued about whether to show persons with all their frailties or disclose only their heroic deeds. But the outcome of the debate was a foregone conclusion, for it was not the commission staff that ultimately decided the contents but the Communist party, specifically the powerful censorship office known as Glavlit.
The extent of Glavlit’s influence is illustrated by the first large project of the Mints commission—the study of the German occupation of Tolstoy’s estate. Germans controlled the Tolstoy museum at Yasnaya Polyana for six weeks, from October 30 to December 14, 1941. As already noted, Mints traveled there at the end of December with historians from the Academy of the Sciences to assess the damage. The delegation’s report informed the note on German atrocities in occupied Soviet territory issued by foreign affairs minister Vyacheslav Molotov on January 6, 1942. In it Molotov specifically mentions Tolstoy’s estate, a “glorious memorial of Russian culture, wrecked, befouled, and finally set on fire by the Nazi vandals.”275 Joseph Goebbels categorically denied Molotov’s public accusations,276 and Alexandrov gave Mints the task of preparing a response. Mints suggested a book documenting the crimes at Yasnaya Polyana. Though his idea met with Stalin’s approval,277 when the finished book was later submitted to Glavlit for review, it set off alarm bells. The censor took particular offense at diary entries by museum employee Maria Shchegoleva that filled a large portion of the book. Citing Molotov’s description of pillaging vandals, the censor complained that Shchegoleva’s diary did not do justice to the defilement that occurred at Yasnaya Polyana. The author’s “quiet” tone came across as “pedantic” and lacked the outrage befitting a Soviet citizen.278 In the same breath the censor criticized the book’s editors for their “totally irresponsible” work: “They didn’t even bother to separate everything that was valuable in Shchegoleva’s diary from the obviously useless material which as a result not only fails to increase hatred for the fascist enslavers but actually weakens it.”279 The censor believed that the editors were politically obligated to intervene in the accounts of eyewitnesses, preserving the ideologically compliant views and suppressing everything else. Not surprisingly, the book was rejected. When a revised form later appeared, it did not include Shchegoleva’s diary.
In 1943 the commission published two pieces on the battle for Stalingrad, a short study and a separate brochure containing an interview with sniper Vasily Zaytsev.280 In “Heroic Stalingrad” historian Esfira Genkina portrays Stalingrad as the most important battle of the war, where the heroic spirit of the city’s defenders forced Hitler’s elite forces to their knees. In Genkina’s telling, the valor displayed by Red Army soldiers did not spring from a political education in heroism and cowardice nor from fear of coercive measures—she makes no mention of Order no. 227—but from their very being. Genkina cherry-picks passages from the transcripts that paint the defenders as one-dimensional heroes with deeply held communist convictions, soldiers who without batting an eyelash took on a superior German army. Her narrative sings the unity of Red Army soldiers and ends with an ode to Stalin: “The glory of Stalingrad is the glory of our chief, the leader of the Red Army. To Stalin, to victory!”281 Like “Heroic Stalingrad,” the interview with Zaytsev was also heavily edited, as comparing the stenographic transcripts and the published version shows. The editors omitted from the interview all statements that made Zaytsev seem less than heroic, rewriting his story into an unconditional affirmation of the Communist party.
The editors may well have undertaken these interventions without Glavlit’s insistence. It should not be forgotten that Mints and his colleagues understood their project as aiding Soviet victory. Indeed, one finds in their work the revolutionary sweep of the documentary movement. They wanted to become “operative” by engaging with the raw material and extracting from it the fighting spirit needed to excite their readers. In the same breath, however, they strove toward meticulous scholarship. They handled historical documents with the utmost respect, and the clarity of their methodology impresses scholars to this day. Their rigor suffuses each and every interview as well as the enormous archive the commission assembled during its four-year existence (historians continued to maintain the archive after the commission was dissolved). The raw material for the Stalingrad transcripts, presented seventy years later, ultimately owes its existence to this scholarly ethos.