The transcripts from the 215 interviews conducted by the Mints commission in Stalingrad fill thousands of typed pages. This book presents only a selection. A unique feature of these transcripts is the historians’ decision to interview numerous members of the same cohort, be it a division, regiment, or factory. Viewed in their entirety, the transcripts offer a detailed illumination of local events from multiple perspectives. But their three-dimensionality does not materialize when individual interviews are read in succession. To recreate it here, I have arranged the interviews in a way that brings out the common experiences of each cohort while exposing the rifts between them. Specifically, I have woven strands of conversation out of the individual responses and grouped them chronologically and by location.
For instance, I present the combat operations of the 308th Rifle Division as described by both commanders and infantry, providing a single picture from several vantage points within the unit. For some operations, such as a September 18, 1942, attempt to take an important hill that resulted in heavy losses, the storytelling becomes more concentrated, with each eyewitness recalling the intense fighting of that day. Another set of individual accounts—a chorus of voices across diverse parts of Soviet society—provides rich descriptions of the fate of Stalingrad and its people from July 1942, when frantic work began to fortify the frontline city, until the spring of 1943, when engineers returned to plan the reconstruction of its ruined factories.
This type of narrative montage recalls Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. The film is about a criminal trial, recalled in flashback, in which four witnesses take the stand and submit different versions of what happened. The film employs this technique to shed light on the unreliability of subjective statements.282 But unlike the testimony in Rashomon, the interviews from Stalingrad are strikingly consistent down to the smallest detail, from their ideas of heroism, fear, and self-actualization to their accounts of combat and the conduct of fellow soldiers. The extensive agreement among respondents indicates that the events they described were not after-the-fact inventions of Soviet propaganda. A reading of the Stalingrad transcripts invalidates any claim that the public statements of Red Army infantry consisted of Soviet clichés, isolated from the reality of war. Rather, one finds a language shared by foot soldiers and officers alike, informed by the same ideas and horizons of experience. At the same time, it is apparent that political officers emphasized specific modes of speech for talking about both oneself and the enemy. The language of the interviews was thus twofold: a description of the battle and a mark of ideological conditioning.
Following the group conversations are nine individual interviews printed in their original form and for the most part in full.283 The selection comprises soldiers of different ranks and forms of expression. It begins with the self-serving and confident accounts of Generals Chuikov and Rodimtsev. It also includes the minutely detailed report of staff officer Nikolai Aksyonov, the chatty narrative of the sniper and Hero of the Soviet Union Vasily Zaytsev (by then already a legend), and the artlessly delivered testimony of Private Alexander Parkhomenko. The only woman in the group (the commission interviewed few women in Stalingrad) is Vera Gurova, a medic in General Rodimtsev’s division. The last interview is with Captain Pyotr Zayonchkovsky, who, drawing on his work in enemy propaganda, provides interesting insights into Soviet perceptions of Germans at Stalingrad.
The book then switches sides, shedding light on the German perspective. The first part of this chapter contains transcripts from interrogations of imprisoned Germans officers that Captain Zayonchkovsky carried out in February 1943. The second part consists of excerpts from a diary kept by a German soldier in the Kessel. The materials for both parts stem from the Historical Commission archive. As with all the previous sections, short introductions provide background and context. Additional information can be found in the endnotes. I conclude with a chapter on the fate of the Mints’s commission after the end of the war and discuss why the documents remained under lock and key for decades.
The transcripts are presented with all their stylistic idiosyncrasies intact; only obvious typos have been corrected. The parentheses in the documentary text contain remarks from commission staff; brackets indicate comments and abbreviations by the editors. Except when Latin letters were handwritten in the transcripts, German names in the documents have been reverse translated from the Russian and could not always be reconstructed with certainty. For instance, the soldier referred to in Cyrillic as “Geynts Khyunel” (Гейнц Хюнелъ) is rendered as “Heinz Hühnel” but could also be spelled “Heinz Hünel.”
Interspersed among the transcripts are Soviet photographs, leaflets, and posters that illuminate the battle of Stalingrad and document the mind-set of their creators. Just as the interviews ideologically shaped the respondents while describing the war, the photographs are interventions, conscious attempts by the photographers to attune themselves and their beholders to the exigencies of war. With certain restrictions this also applies to the small-format portraits made by Red Army soldiers and frontline photographers. Alongside a physical impression of the eyewitnesses, they convey an expression of the pride felt by soldiers conscious of doing their part in a people’s war.