2
Soldiers of the 308th Rifle Division
The German advance on Stalingrad had the stated aim of annihilating the city and forcing the surviving population into slave labor. Yet Stalin forbade the evacuation of residents, ordering that the city be held whatever the cost. The following interviews—carried out between January 1943 and January 1944 with city and regional administrators, party officials, factory managers, engineers, and a professor at the city’s medical institute—explain how the city armed for its defense before being reduced to rubble and how, to cite one respondent, the “pulse” of Stalingrad changed over the course of the battle.
The Wehrmacht’s basic strategy in Stalingrad was the same one it used to attack Moscow and Leningrad the previous year: use aerial bombardment and artillery fire to destroy the city before occupying it in order to protect the lives of German soldiers on the ground.1 Luftflotte 4—a fleet of 780 bombers and 490 fighter planes—flew endless sorties over Stalingrad between August 23 and September 13, 1942.2 The fleet was under the command of General Wolfram von Richthofen, who had been the chief of staff for the Condor Legion when it introduced carpet bombing, a tactic that destroyed Guernica in the Spanish Civil War.3 Richthofen also commanded the bombing of Belgrade in April 1941 that killed an estimated seventeen thousand residents4 and was responsible for the attack on Sevastopol in the summer of 1942. The air campaign in Stalingrad, the most violent on the Eastern Front, marked what Beevor described as the “natural culmination of Richthofen’s career.”5 German planes dropped the first bombs on Stalingrad in October 1941 and carried out isolated strikes in early 1942. In the second half of July the full-blown campaign began; from that point on air raid sirens in the city sounded almost daily.6
At the beginning of July regional officials made plans to evacuate the city and other areas near the front. Representatives from ministries in Moscow, charged with relocating key industries farther east, visited the Stalingrad Tractor factory (refitted for tank production), the Red October steelworks, and the Barricades munitions plant. In mid-July the commanders of the Stalingrad military district, better informed than everyone else about what was happening, decamped with their families. Their actions did not go unnoticed by the city’s population, and NKVD officers observed a growing panic, fueled by rumors that the Germans had reached the city limits.7
In the early morning hours of July 20 regional party secretary Alexei Chuyanov received a call from Stalin. He ordered military district commanders to be called back immediately, the anxiety quelled, and the city kept out of enemy hands. Chuyanov passed on these orders to his party colleagues the next evening, stressing their responsibility for the city’s defense.8 Coming a week before the fall of Rostov and the issuing of Order no. 227, the call evinced the hard line that Stalin had pursued from the outset. All able-bodied persons not already involved in military production had to help dig trenches. Accompanied by a contingent of activists—in one sector ninety-six politruks supervised the work of four thousand residents—they built three defensive rings around the city. Persons were permitted to leave the city only if it served the war effort: fifty thousand injured soldiers, attending medical personnel, and children from city orphanages.9 An order evacuating all nonworking women and their children saved the families of local officials, the only ones who could afford to keep their wives at home. Working women could leave the city only if their factory was evacuated. By mid-August almost eight thousand families from the city elite had been sent away. These precautions were not announced publicly but could not be concealed from city residents. Communist agitators in the factories were hard-pressed to explain matters to irate workers and had difficulty convincing people to hold out. Still, until August 22 life in Stalingrad carried on more or less normally: parents prepared their kids for the new school year, audiences packed movie houses and theaters, and communist leaders assured the population that the Germans would never take the city.10
The number of people killed in the devastating air raid of August 23 and the ones that followed daily until September 12 is contested. Most researchers put the figure at forty thousand—the number cited in documents presented at the Nuremburg trials.11 The city commandant, Vladimir Demchenko, told the historians in 1943 that two thousand air strikes took place in the afternoon and evening of August 23, killing ten thousand people.12 Many injured on the first day of bombing could not be treated because most of the available medical personnel had been sent to the northernmost part of the city, which German panzers had infiltrated the same afternoon. The 8th Soviet Air Fleet focused its attacks on the encroaching panzer troops, leaving the rest of the city exposed.13
In the late evening of August 23, military leaders met at General Yeryomenko’s headquarters with local party bosses, NKVD officers, and industry representatives. Also present was the head of the Soviet general staff, Alexander Vasilevsky. Two items were on the agenda: the immediate evacuation of the Stalingrad workforce and the mining of industrial facilities. After midnight Chuyanov called Stalin and informed him about their discussion. As Yeryomenko later reported, Stalin continued to rule out large-scale evacuation and banned all further discussion of the matter on the grounds that it would encourage defeatism.14
Fires in Stalingrad, August 1942. Photographer: Emmanuil Yevzerikhin
Many people who fled the city in panic were detained at the ferry stations by the NKVD. Others were able to cross the river, either with approval from local officials or not. On August 24 the City Defense Committee ordered the evacuation of women and children to the countryside. The decision was motivated not by humanitarian concerns but by a need to save the scarce food resources in the beleaguered city.15 The next day party leadership declared a state of siege and started ruthlessly rounding up looters in the burning city. The agitators also stepped up their efforts. The local party committee printed a million leaflets in the final days of August and blanketed the city with rousing slogans: “We will hold our native city!” “Not a step back!”16
When a citywide evacuation effort finally started on August 25, specialists and workers whose factories had burned to the ground went first. The mass departure did not commence until August 29, but even then workers took precedence, and in some instances they had to leave their families behind because of the lack of space on the boats. On August 27 three steamers conveying civilians upriver to Saratov—Mikhail Kalinin, In Memory of the Paris Commune, and Joseph Stalin—came under enemy fire. The Joseph Stalin ran aground, heavily damaged. Of the 1,200 passengers, only 186 were saved.17 By September 14—the day German troops pushed forward through the city to the central ferry slip—315,000 people had been evacuated. According to one estimate, just as many were still in the city.18 At this point Chuyanov and most of the other local party heads and NKVD commanders fled the city.
The city’s largest industries continued to operate much longer. In the summer of 1942, the Red October steelworks produced 10 percent of Soviet steel, mostly for aeronautics and tank manufacture, and built rocket launchers on the side. After a state of siege was declared, it switched to the manufacture of machine-gun clusters, tank traps, and shovels, and to the repair of tanks and rocket launchers. The works stayed in operation until October 2; several days later it was gutted.19 From October 1942 to early January 1943 Germans were mostly in control of the plant, though fighting was severe throughout this period. The Barricades munitions factory had produced large numbers of antitank canons since the Great Patriotic War began. The director left the factory on September 25; the last technicians departed on October 5, one day after the Germans attacked the factory.20
The massive Stalingrad Tractor factory—employing some twenty thousand workers—had been refitted for tank production in the late 1930s, and by the time war broke out it was the largest producer of T-34 tanks in the Soviet Union. On August 23, the 16th Panzer Division moved to within striking distance of the plant, but it kept churning out tanks until September 13, when the Germans began the siege. In the following days the vast majority of workers were evacuated; the 62nd Army retained a small contingent to carry out repairs for the tank regiments. The large German offensive on October 14 (described in detail by General Chuikov in his interview) concentrated on the Tractor factory. From there, German divisions planned to head south and take the last stretches of the Volga still held by the Soviets. After what Soviet and German eyewitnesses alike described as the heaviest fighting in the entire battle—the 62nd Army lost 13,000 soldiers and the Wehrmacht, 1,500—the Germans gained complete control of the plant on October 17. The Red Army did not retake the factory until February 2, 1943.21
Stalingrad’s power plant, StalGRES, was located south of the city, near Beketovka. Situated a few miles from the front line, Beketovka was protected from the brunt of the fighting. It was the site of the main headquarters of the 64th Army, and in October Chuyanov moved the party headquarters there. Once the Germans reached Stalingrad, StalGRES came under daily artillery and mortar fire but remained in operation. A major attack on November 5 forced the power plant to close.
On October 12, Chuyanov noted in his diary that the plant’s chief engineer, Konstantin Zubanov, married Dr. Maria Terentyeva in the basement of the plant while artillery fire thundered above.22 In Zubanov’s interview with the historians he described his ties to the plant and likened the factory’s electrically generated pulses to the pulse of the city. The pulse metaphor recalls futuristic currents of the early twentieth century that had deep roots in the Russian workforce.23 Zubanov might also have been referring to the well-known metronome beat that was broadcast over Leningrad radio. Engineers had originally introduced the sound in the 1930s for broadcasting pauses. After the war began, it was used as an early warning system, the speed of the beat quickening whenever enemy planes approached. During the Leningrad blockade radio stations had to restrict their programming and used the metronome to assure the people of Leningrad that the city was still alive.24
The interviews with Zubanov and the two dozen other eyewitnesses begin with descriptions of the city’s industrialization in the 1930s and its transition to war production. They focus on the efforts to defend the city, the devastating air raids, and the dramatic evacuation of civilians. Worth noting is the severe criticism that General Chuikov and Commissar Vasiliev directed at party officials in Stalingrad for their failings during the city’s defense and evacuation. In part, it was unjustified; Stalin bore some of the blame as well. Moreover, it was not about the military’s dissatisfaction with the communists. Rather, it reflected the belief of those who fought on the front (which included communists such as Vasiliev) that those who did not only wanted to save their own hides.
The earliest recorded interviews were with Chuikov, Vasiliev, and the engineers Venyamin Zhukov and Pavel Matevosyan; they took place on January 8, 1943, at the destroyed Red October steelworks. Party officials were not interviewed until the historians visited again in March 1943. Woven into the interviews are excerpts from Alexei Chuyanov’s war diary, published in 1968. These passages are set in italics. Chuyanov, a local party head, did not take part in the interviews.
THE SPEAKERS
City and Regional Administrators
Pigalyov, Dmitri Matveyevich—Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Stalingrad Soviet of Workers Deputies
Polyakov, Alexei Mikhailovich—Deputy chairman of the Executive Committee of the Stalingrad Regional Soviet of Workers Deputies
Romanenko, Grigory Dmitrievich—First secretary of the Barricades District of Stalingrad
Zimenkov, Ivan Fyodorovich—Chairman of the Stalingrad Regional Soviet of Workers Deputies
Party Officials
Babkin, Sergei Dmitrievich—First secretary of the Kirov District Party Committee
Chuyanov, Alexei Semyonovich—First secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Party Committee (excerpts from his published diary)
Denisova, Claudia Stepanovna—Secretary of the Yermansky District Party Committee
Kashintsev, Semyon Yefimovich—Secretary of the Red October District Party Committee
Petrukhin, Nikolai Romanovich—Chief of the war department of the Stalingrad Regional Party Committee
Piksin, Ivan Alexeyevich—Secretary of the Stalingrad City Party Committee
Prokhvatilov, Vasily Petrovich—Secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Party Committee
Odinokov, Mikhail Afanasievich—Secretary of the Voroshilov District Party Committee
Vodolagin, Mikhail Alexandrovich—Secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Party Committee
Specialists, Workers, Residents
Ioffe, Ezri Izrailevich—Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute
Matevosyan, Pavel Petrovich—Chief engineer of the Red October steelworks
Zhukov, Veniamin Yakovlevich—Foreman of Workshop no. 7 at the Red October steelworks
Zubanov, Konstantin Vasilievich—Chief engineer of the Stalingrad Power Station (StalGRES)
Military Personnel
Burin, Ilya Fyodorovich—Former mechanic at the Barricades factory, scout in the 38th Motor Rifle Brigade
Burmakov, Ivan Dmitrievich—Major general, commander of the 38th Motor Rifle Brigade
Chuikov, Vasily Ivanovich—Lieutenant general, commander of the 62nd Army
Demchenko, Vladimir Kharitonovich—Major, commandant of Stalingrad
Gurov, Kuzma Akimovich—Lieutenant general, member of the Military Council of the 62nd Army
Vasilev, Ivan Vasilevich—Brigade commissar, chief of the political section of the 62nd Army
Zimin, Alexei Yakovlevich—Lieutenant, former worker at the Barricades factory, headquarters commandant of the 38th Motor Rifle Brigade, 64th Army25
Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Stalingrad Soviet of Workers Deputies): There were about 25,000 people living in Stalingrad in 1930—400,000 during the war, 550–560 thousand if you count evacuees. The city grew quite rapidly after 1930. As soon as the Tractor factory was completed, the population immediately grew by seventy to eighty thousand. We had a beautiful city center. There were two train stations, one down by the Volga and another in the city center. The recent growth was because of the factories.
From 1934 to 1935, the city was greatly improved. Those years saw the construction of the Great Stalingrad Hotel (370 rooms), the Intourist Hotel on the Square of the Fallen Heroes, the grand Univermag department store, which opened in 1938 or 1939, and the first and second House of Soviets, on the square across from the Intourist Hotel, the Regional Executive Committee building (an extension). The House of Books was built, and the five- or six-story Lesprom building next to Intourist. These new buildings really livened up the whole square. [ . . . ] In the center we had the big new Gorky Drama Theater, a musical theater, and a youth theater. These were theaters with a permanent acting staff. Lovely buildings—the Palace of Pioneers, the printing institute. There was a good Palace of Sport that looked out over the Volga. In the Yermansky district26 alone there was a whole bunch of cultural institutes. The art and music schools, the physical education training college—they were in that district, and the Komsomolets cinema, and also the excellent Spartak cinema, and the Red Star. The Tractor factory was home to a mechanical institute. There were 1,500 to 2,000 students. There they trained workers for the Tractor factory. Later they began sharing them with other factories. There was a large medical institute, with around 1,500 students.
The center of Stalingrad, summer 1942. Photographer: Emmanuil Yevzerikhin
Ezri Izrailevich Ioffe (Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute): The Stalingrad Medical Institute was established in 1935. Its first class numbered 160 students. A young but very energetic faculty came together in a very short time. By the beginning of the war we had in our midst twenty-two doctors of medical science and upward of ten docents and candidates of medicine. The institute was located in a large, newly built four-story building, which contained three large auditoriums, ten classrooms, a library with thirty thousand volumes and a reading room, anatomy and pathology museums, and well equipped laboratories. We had more than three hundred microscopes, about a dozen kymographs,27 radiological equipment, and so on. [ . . . ] Our first class of doctors graduated in 1940, some 150 of them. The second class, around three hundred doctors, graduated in the early days of the war, and after that there were four more classes that graduated before the city was destroyed.
Konstantin Vasilievich Zubanov (Chief engineer of the Stalingrad Power Station, StalGRES): I was born in 1911. I’ve been working at StalGRES for more than five years. Graduated from the institute in 1934. From Ordzhonikidze I was sent to Moscow, to a design firm. The three years I spent working there was the low point of my life. Being a designer isn’t what I’m cut out for. I always wanted to be in a power station. They sent me here, to Stalingrad. I’ve worked here at every level: in December 1937 I was one of the station’s shift engineers, then the lead supervisor, and from 1939 I was chief engineer of the complex. I trained as an electrical engineer, but now I’m more of a thermal engineer, or, rather, a specialist in power engineering.
Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Stalingrad Soviet of Workers Deputies): What cultural institutions did we have? In the factory settlements there were clubs and palaces of culture. At the Tractor factory there was the Gorky Club, the Shock Worker cinema, and a lot of smaller clubs. And several schools, all of them beautiful. The Derzhinsky School no. 3 was really nice, a small four-story building. There were eight or nine schools altogether, not counting the small ones. At the Barricades factory there was a house of culture, and the club for engineering and technical workers in the Lower Settlement. It wasn’t that big, but it was nice. They’d laid out their own park, had a summer theater. They also had a club at Red October and a good technology center.
Konstantin Vasilievich Zubanov (Chief engineer of the Stalingrad Power Station, StalGRES): Basically, the power station is the center of a city’s industry—I’d even say it’s the center of its culture. A city that is electrified—a city where electricity has become an integral part of its daily life and infrastructure—sees more cultural and economic development than cities where there isn’t enough electricity. The power station is to industry what a heart is to a man. The heart beats with a steady pulse, and so the power station maintains a pulse, a pulse of fifty cycles per second. One faint or missing beat is enough to bring all the city’s activity to a halt—lights go out, factories stop working, and theaters and cinemas close. In today’s world, however, this is extremely unusual. The Stalingrad Power Station was just such a heart to the city of Stalingrad.
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): Stalingrad is an industrial city, and it has around ten enterprises of national significance, such as the Tractor factory, the 221st (Barricades), Red October, the 264th, and a number of others. During the war, these and all the other factories were refitted to produce ammunition and military equipment.
Veniamin Yakovlevich Zhukov (Foreman of Workshop no. 7 at the Red October steelworks): I made my way up at the factory beginning in 1932. I grew up here, started out as a driver and advanced to workshop foreman. This place has grown before my eyes. [ . . . ] The plant worked, and I worked. The factory grew, and I grew with it. The party organization raised me. Lately there’s been interesting work mastering the Katyusha rocket.28 [ . . . ] On the first day of the war we gave the army about forty vehicles, which were given a rating of excellent by the regional military organization, despite the fact that they’d been used in extremely difficult conditions.
The sixty people in the workshop crew put everything they had into mastering the rocket system. So when the decision was made to take the vehicle off the line, we felt awful. Weren’t we good enough to keep producing this weapon? It was nice to have a part to play in the war.
Konstantin Vasilievich Zubanov (Chief engineer of the Stalingrad Power Station, StalGRES): For the phase of combat operations, the first stage was the period of time from the outbreak of war until the siege of our city. During this time we tried to do all we could to provide our city—and especially factories of particular military importance—with a sufficient supply of high-quality electricity. [ . . . ] We tried to breathe as one with our country, to match its rhythm as it repelled the assaults of the fascist horde. The war drastically changed the way we did things. When the Germans took the Donbass region, we found ourselves without coal. We had to find something else to burn: fuel oil. But this didn’t faze us. There were no power restrictions at all, meaning that we didn’t even notice the switch. We made the move from coal to fuel oil in a very short time frame. Fitters such as master Sergei Vasilievich Ivlev and Mudrenko, the supervisor of the boiler shop—they made it so they city didn’t notice the switchover. And our power station safely used the new fuel to provide electricity to its customers without restrictions.
Alexei Yakovlevich Zimin (Lieutenant, former worker at the Barricades factory, headquarters commandant of the 38th Motor Rifle Brigade, 64th Army): The factories were working at full capacity. All kinds of weaponry were set up right there in the compounds, lifted up to the rooftops by crane. Tanks rolled in. People in the workers settlements were feeling lively and cheerful. They constructed bunkers and bomb shelters, made water reservoirs. Apart from that liveliness, there was nothing unusual about them.
Ezri Izrailevich Ioffe (Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute): The institute played an active role in the city’s defensive preparations. In the autumn of 1941 and from July to August 1942 the institute built lines of defense. Under the direction of professors and instructors, hundreds of students erected fortifications outside the city and within the city itself.
Alexei Semyonovich Chuyanov (First secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Committee): July 12 [ . . . ] It’s becoming clearer and clearer that combat operations are soon to begin on the immediate approaches to Stalingrad. [ . . . ]
July 19. As usual, the regional committee sat until dawn, which comes early during the summer. It was past two in the morning when we got a call on the hard line: “Please hold the line for comrade Stalin.”
“Has the city decided to surrender to the enemy?” said Stalin angrily. “Why have you moved the military district HQ to Astrakhan? Who gave the order? Answer me!” J. V. Stalin inquired about conditions in the city. He wanted to know about the output of the factories producing military goods. Then he issued directives from the Central Committee regarding the difficult military situation. In conclusion he said: “Stalingrad will not be given to the enemy. You let everyone know that.”
Long after I hung up the receiver I stayed under the spell of the conversation. I didn’t feel like going home, though it was late. I stood by an open window, breathed in the fresh morning air, and felt a great surge of strength. The main thing was clear: the city was not going to surrender to the Nazis.
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): Long before the enemy was nearing the city, each factory had formed destruction battalions.29 The destruction battalions were composed of all the factories’ best people—the party and Komsomol members, and the best non-party workers.
All of these military activities took place after exhausting manufacturing work. It must be said that these skills were useful during the war when things became difficult for our city.
Alexei Semyonovich Chuyanov (First secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Committee): August 11. This morning Ivan Fyodorovich Zimenkov dropped by and asked: “How much longer will we keep burdening our families?”
I understood what he meant: “What do you suggest we do?”
“Today we should send the families of all managerial staff in the city and region across the Volga, to a state farm. Or to the koumiss production facility in the Palassovsky district.
This wasn’t a simple matter. It’s true that many families had already been evacuated, but if our own families were sent away, the enemy might exploit this in their propaganda. But there seemed to be no other choice. When it comes down to it, Valery, who’s only a year and a half old, shouldn’t have to pay for the fact that his father is a regional committee secretary. He’d already developed a nervous stutter. I approved Zimenkov’s proposal. That night our families departed for Srednyaya Akhtuba by boat and later went by car to the Palassovsky district.
Claudia Stepanovna Denisova (Secretary of the Yermansky District Committee): Most of the party activists’ families were taken across the river in advance.
Ivan Fyodorovich Zimenkov (Chairman of the Stalingrad Regional Soviet of Workers Deputies): Some rural districts and their livestock were evacuated to the east side of the Volga. We evacuated the collective farms’ entire stock apart from parts of the Voroshilov and Kotelnikov district, where we had to leave everything behind. Horses, oxen, sheep, pigs from all the districts later occupied by the Germans were taken across the Volga. We didn’t evacuate animals that were for the personal use of the farmers and other workers. From the thirty-eight machine and tractor stations later occupied by the Germans all but 750 tractors were evacuated (from a total of 3,080).30 We sent tractors across the Volga, some to the Olkhovsky, Molotov, and Nizhne-Dobrinsky districts.
This was at the beginning of the grain harvest. All fourteen districts were effectively occupied by the peak of harvest season. All the grain was left behind. We got all of the government milled grain from Kalach. We got everything from the grain-collection stations on the railway running from Kalach and Nizhny Chir to Stalingrad, and from the warehouses as well.
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): The enemy caught us unawares, and just about no one—certainly none of the workers—were evacuated from the city.
Ivan Fyodorovich Zimenkov (Chairman of the Stalingrad Regional Soviet of Workers Deputies): We immediately set up four defensive lines. Those who couldn’t go far from home because of children worked on the lines inside the city. This was women for the most part. The rest of the city’s population—nearly 28,000—worked on the second line, on the third and fourth Don lines. All the 1,500 kilometers of defensive lines were completed by the beginning of August. The whole region was full of lines, all the way to Astrakhan. Along the Don, the Volga, the Medveditsa—defensive lines were everywhere. [ . . . ]
Stalingrad civilians dig antitank ditches, August 1942. The only man in the picture (bottom right) is probably a communist agitator. Photographer: L. I. Konov
When I was in Moscow I met the executive committee chairman for the Tula Regional Soviet. He said that they were digging defensive lines, bringing in scrap metal to place in specific locations to keep enemy tanks from getting through. I told this to comrade Chuyanov, the chairman of our city defense committee, and we started to think about lines in the city and elsewhere, and then we set about doing it.
Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of Stalingrad Soviet Committee): On the recommendation of the City Party Committee, we built the so-called internal city line along the perimeter. This was a line the Stavka didn’t manage to sign off on. All the others had all been established out of strategic considerations.
This line played an important role during the battle. Our forces couldn’t get to the intermediary line, but they held this one. We asked all the women to come build this line, even those with two- to eight-year-old children and women over fifty-five, though it went against every labor law. We were basically asking for anyone who could to come and work. The remainder of the population was mobilized and sent to work on the perimeter.
Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov (Lieutenant general, commander of the 62nd Army): The fortifications surrounding Stalingrad were under construction. We had great plans, but only 10 percent of them were completed.
Kuzma Akimovich Gurov (Lieutenant general, member of the Military Council of the 62nd Army): There was a lack of combat preparations in Stalingrad. We really felt this when we found ourselves fighting to defend the city.
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): Certain Red Army commanders took offense at not being told about our defensive lines. The commander of the 64th Army [Shumilov] remarked on this several times. What can I say? The people who worked there, on the line, did an excellent job keeping it a secret. Lieutenant General Shumilov said: “If I’d known that line was there, I’d have deployed my troops differently.”
Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of Stalingrad Soviet Committee): In those first days, before all of the bombing, we constructed barricades in the city. We didn’t have any before then. We’d built lines, but no barricades. We didn’t think they would get here from the Don in a single day.
Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov (Lieutenant general, commander of the 62nd Army): And those barricades—all you had to do was nick one with your fender, and it’d fall apart. Some construction.
Ivan Vasilevich Vasilev (Brigade commissar, chief of the political section of the 62nd Army): We had nothing to fall back on. The city was not protected. They’d built these “hedgehogs” that would collapse if only grazed by a light vehicle. There were no fortifications. By the station they’d put up camouflage that the Germans later used, so we ended up having to fight against it. And then the workers were complaining, saying how much they’d done for the soldiers, digging bunkers, earth-and-timber emplacements, concrete pillboxes. All of it was lost.
Vladimir Kharitonovich Demchenko (Major, commandant of Stalingrad): Our headquarters had a lot more work because of the large troop movements. A number of units had to be detained. Tens of thousands of men were detained within a few weeks. In the first ten days of August, 17,360 people were detained. That’s within the city itself; 85,000 were arrested outside the city—a whole army’s worth.31 I reported this to the front commander. We immediately set up a transfer station to the front line. These people—both officers and soldiers—were dispatched to the transfer station, where they were sent straight to the front line. Our task was to make sure these people did not manage to get across to the east bank of the Volga. We set up outposts along the major roads. Blocking detachments stood on the edge of the city. Nearly every street was covered with checkpoints. We checked civilians’ documents too. We checked everyone.
Alexei Semyonovich Chuyanov (First secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Committee): I spent the night of August 22–23 at the offices of the regional committee. I’d been waiting for a call from the Central Committee, so I was late getting back from HQ. [ . . . ] I left the regional committee building and headed toward the Volga. Even though the front was so close, life went on as usual. Caretakers were still watering the plants. Housewives, having grown used to frequent enemy air raids, hurried to get to the shops and the market. Women would take their children with them. It broke my heart to see this: What would become of them? The enemy is already at the gate.
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): It was August 23 at around four in the afternoon. I was with the city defense committee when I got a call from the regional committee. The enemy had broken through to Rynka. I say, “That’s just talk.” “No—Gorgelyad, the deputy people’s commissar for tank production, was there. Give him a call.” So I call him. “What’s going on, comrade Gorgelyad?”32 “What’s going on is that I’ve seen enemy tanks with my own eyes.” Well, what was there to do? Right then we handed over command to the destruction battalions.
Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of Stalingrad Soviet Committee): As this formidable threat hung over the city, no military units were in place before it. Our closest forces were seventy or eighty kilometers away from the Tractor factory. Considering the growing threat of the enemy’s assault on Stalingrad, on the factory, and beyond, it was basically: “Come on in, the door’s open.” But when the tanks attacked, the antiaircraft units showed them more than enough resistance, and a significant number of the tanks were taken out. The Germans seemed to get the idea that if we continued to engage them on their approach, then we would resist all the more fiercely when they attacked the city itself. It was evening, so they didn’t risk entering the city. If they’d wanted to, they could have done so. We had antiaircraft artillery outside the city, but here we had none. There were some placed on rooftops, but you couldn’t hit a tank in the street from there. The Germans didn’t come into the city, they stopped there for the night. They’d come as far as Rynka and Spartakovka. At a distance measured not in kilometers but in meters.
During the night [of August 23–24] the City Defense Committee and the City Party Committee brought out whatever forces they could muster. All the destruction battalions and whatever forces could be found in the workers settlements were issued arms and sent in as support, as the armed forces set up to defend the city. We were lucky to have the Tractor factory there producing tanks and artillery. Workers at the factory pulled out all the stops and had sixty tanks ready to go by morning. They took everything that hadn’t been entirely completed: some were on stands awaiting repairs, some were ready to go. Tank crews were somehow assembled. Many of them were made up of the Tractor factory workers who had conducted tests, inspections, and so on. They also included people who received the tanks. In any case, the crews were assembled. And then there was the tank school, which also had several tanks. The Barricades workers brought their cannons and brought out their artillery to set up the line of defense. They took anyone and everyone to man the guns. Military representatives, workers who were present during the testing—everyone was sent there, everyone we had at our disposal. By morning some NKVD units had been brought in.
This is how we cobbled together a defense of the city by morning. But you couldn’t call it a defense in the full sense of the word.
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): These destruction battalions held the enemy back until the morning of August 24, at which point the regular Red Army units had arrived. Because of this, the bulk of these destruction battalions were absorbed into the Red Army.
Semyon Yefimovich Kashintsev (Secretary of the Red October District Committee): This destruction battalion lost party member Olga Kovalyova,33 the only woman in the unit. She hadn’t been part of the battalion, but when they were sent to the front line, she left her work and her factory to go to the regional party committee office, where she declared that she wanted to go with the destruction battalion to the front line. At first she helped out as a nurse. Later, when everyone around her was dead, she set off with a rifle to the front line. She died there too.
Olga Kovalyova was a senior party member (from 1925 to 1926) and a senior worker at the Red October factory. When she first came to the factory she was a laborer, worked at the stone crusher. She came to the factory between 1921 and 1923—we’re not entirely sure when—then joined the party and started to display a particular zeal for social and party work. She was sent to one of the political departments as either a women’s organizer or the deputy for women’s affairs. When she returned to the factory, she expressed a desire to learn how to cast steel. She was the only woman in the works who did this, and one of four, I discovered, in the Soviet Union. Three were in Magnitogorsk,34 and she was the fourth. This is what she did for the last three years, did a good job at this incredibly difficult physical labor.
Before the siege she was temporarily appointed the workshop’s deputy chief for leisure activities, and she was a member of the Stalingrad Party Committee Plenum. She was so easy to work with, so kind-hearted. On top of all that, she adopted a boy and proved to be exceptionally caring with him. She didn’t hold anything back—she gave everything to her work and her party life.
Olga Kovalyova
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): She was supporting this boy and her own mother, but still she left to defend her native city. Olga Kovalyova died a hero’s death while fighting the enemy. [ . . . ] The destruction battalion pushed the enemy back to Mechyotka. The enemy certainly lost a lot of men. How did Olga Kovalyova die? She was lying there waiting and waiting, and then she said: “Come on, guys, let’s go!” But there were also Germans lying and waiting ahead of her who she couldn’t see. She was cut down the moment she got up.
[ . . . ] Some of the workers took up arms and set off to defend their city, while the others remained at the factories and literally performed miracles. In a single day, from the evening of August 23 through 24, workers at the Tractor factory sent out more than sixty tanks, forty-five trucks, and a great quantity of spare parts for tanks and other vehicles. Some of the tanks were brand-new, while the rest were undergoing major or medium overhauls. Through their intensive work, the factory collective managed to get these tanks to the front line. After they left the factory gates, these tanks were engaging the enemy in only five to ten minutes.
Vladimir Kharitonovich Demchenko (Major, commandant of Stalingrad): On August 23 I received word that the enemy had come as far as the Tractor factory. This was at 2:00 P.M. [ . . . ] I watched the German advance through my binoculars. The factory workers were the first to be hit.
Nikolai Romanovich Petrukhin (Chief of the war department of the Stalingrad Regional Committee): The sustained bombardment of the city began on August 23 at 6:00 P.M. and continued intensively until August 27, 1942.
Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of Stalingrad Soviet Committee): The first raid took place in October 1941 at Beketovka, in the Kirov district. Three Stukas came and dropped a dozen bombs. The bombs struck near the rail station. People had been feeling relatively safe—the enemy was far away. Many people were gathered at the station, so we suffered several dozen casualties. These were our first casualties of the war. Later in the winter, there were only occasional air raids. There was quite a heavy raid in April 1942. Around fifty aircraft took part. We had very few casualties. We’d set up rather strong anti–air installations, and the AA artillery had been brought in. The raid didn’t cause much damage, the buildings were unscathed. A few small houses were destroyed, and we lost a few men. Until July there were no mass air raids, though there were small isolated attacks on Krasnoarmeysk. For the most part, the air raid sirens were rarely followed by bombing. Most of the bombing occurred when the sirens were silent. Because of the frequency of the enemy raids, we decided not to raise the alarm for one airplane attacking on its own. Otherwise, the whole city would have panicked. The factories, the plants—it would’ve caused untold damage. We’d have had to close the factories! So people said you could rest easy whenever you couldn’t hear the sirens. It’s an odd thing, but life’s like that.
That’s how it was until August 23, when the siege of the city began. It was a sunny day. Everything was in its place, the city was full of life, and the factories were producing at full speed. Actually, I should mention that we hadn’t evacuated the city, even though the front had come as close as the Don, even past Abganerovo from the south. Just two weeks before the siege of the city proper we sent tens of thousands of people out of the city—women with children, who weren’t working at the factories. None of the workers were released, with few exceptions. The city was ready. Every company and organization was working at full speed.
Then came August 23. It was a Sunday. Everyone was at work—we didn’t have a weekend. It was a fine day. All day the enemy was bombing the stations northwest of the city, starting with Panshino, then Don, Ilovla, the Konny junction, Gorodishche, and then back again. They started bombing the stations in the morning. We didn’t think much of it, didn’t pay it much attention.
At about noon I left with my deputy, Lebedev, to observe the construction of the ring roads. [ . . . ] We drove for three hours. During that time the air raid sirens started up. Enemy aircraft had come as far as the city, but hadn’t bombed it. They started bombing Orlovka on the other side of the Tractor factory. The general feeling was that so long as the alarm was sounded, there wouldn’t be any bombs.
We had come to share this feeling. We decided not to get back to our command post immediately, but to see how the city was doing under the alert. You can’t see everything from your command post; you can only gauge the situation from the reports of others. We decided to take a look ourselves. We drove around the city for about an hour during the alert. Then we went to our post. As the head of the local anti–air defense, I took my seat, as did my deputy. These were proven men here. We took our seats and stayed put. Everything was more or less quiet in the city. The city was not being bombed. I established communication with our air defense stations. Communications weren’t very good, so I decided to go out to them. The sirens had been going for two hours. By then it was about 5:00 P.M. on August 23.
Claudia Stepanovna Denisova (Secretary of the Yermansky District Committee): There had never been an air raid like that before. It actually looked like the sky was covered with airplanes. There didn’t seem to be anywhere that didn’t get hit. They started bombing at around five or six. Factory no. 687, a solid-tire factory, was the first place to catch fire. It had just been rebuilt but hadn’t started production yet. That same night a lot of places went up in flames: most of the apartment buildings and institutes, the construction trust, the railway depot, and buildings all the way down to the Volga. I stayed at the phone because I wasn’t permitted to leave. I couldn’t even go to the headquarters of the anti–air defense. I was told to inform the City Party Committee of what damages we had sustained.
Residents flee from the bombing, August 1942. Photographer: Emmanuil Yevzerikhin
I remember that like it was only yesterday. It was a bit frightening. They would announce: “Still under alert. Still under alert.” The alert was not removed, so it kept going.
Ezri Izrailevich Ioffe (Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute): The evacuation [of the medical institute] had been set for August 23. It was a Sunday. It had taken us two days to prepare. That evening we were supposed to take a steamer. We were to evacuate the first-year students, the library, and the whole of the theory department. It was beautiful and sunny. All day we loaded the trucks and took everything to the riverbank. The heavy bombing started at around 2:00 P.M., and the air raid sirens kept going and going. Our steamer was meant to disembark at 7:00 P.M., but by around 6:00 P.M. we were being hit unrelentingly by a hundred bombers. Everyone was running for it. My family had already left, and I returned hungry to the institute at 6:00 P.M. It was empty: windows were open, doors and walls were missing, everywhere was covered with shrapnel. There was a dreadful whirlwind. It was terrifying. I stayed at the institute with four Komsomol orderlies. Professor Tsyganov’s orderly, who had come from Odessa as an evacuee, was very frightened, so I let him go. The bombs came in waves: they would drop bombs for twenty minutes, then fly away. I stayed there until ten o’clock, when I received a call from the regional committee telling me to send them these Komsomol members because some tanks had been parachuted down north of the Tractor factory. I heard this from the committee secretaries, who had seen planes dropping tanks.35 I had four students at my disposal whom I sent around the city to gather party and Komsomol members. We ended up with about fifteen people. We were looking until 2:00 A.M. Some we managed to get on the phone, and the others were reached at home.
Claudia Stepanovna Denisova (Secretary of the Yermansky District Committee): They bombed us mercilessly, and there was fire all around. It was like this: one of them flies in, bombs a street, and then the next one’s right behind. This goes on and on like a conveyor belt, and all the while with the wailing sirens. The bombing went on through the night. The wounded were taken to the party offices, which were located downstairs. There didn’t seem to be much point in taking them there. [ . . . ] Then we got hold of a car. We loaded the wounded and drove them to the river crossing. All of this was done by our political staff. Afterward, once we’d gotten the wounded to the ferry, I went to the district committee offices. I’d just arrived when it was hit by a bomb. [ . . . ] It was terrifying. [ . . . ] The shock wave knocked me through the building and pinned me to a wall, and I was covered in white plaster. One wall of the building was missing. Thankfully, no one was hurt.
When I got to the basement, the State Bank—the building next door—burst into flames. That was a direct hit. [ . . . ]
The State Bank and the city committee building were on fire. I saw that all the party members had returned. “Where can we go? There’s fire everywhere, everything’s burning.” Our district was a sea of flame. It was hot. We couldn’t go outside, but we couldn’t stay in this building. There was a wall of smoke—the walls of the city committee building were already on fire.
Ivan Fyodorovich Zimenkov (Chairman of the Stalingrad Regional Soviet of Workers Deputies): On [August] 24 there was heavy bombing in the morning, and the workers gathered at a park in the city center. We held a meeting with the workers to discuss how to defend the city. The park was a good place to distribute arms. It was the rallying point where we armed the worker battalions, which took place on August 24 and 25. The workers would come to get their weapons and assignments, then they’d be handed over to a junior lieutenant, and they’d all go to the front line to defend the city. There were workers from the Tractor factory, from Factory no. 221. This wasn’t the only rallying point—it only held four to five hundred men. You couldn’t imagine what we were feeling then.
This one steelworker who’d been at the works for thirty or forty years, he picks up a submachine gun, but he’d never picked up one before, so we showed him what to do. We taught men how to load the drum magazines, how to set them to single-fire, and so on. On August 23, 24, and 25, enemy aircraft conducted an especially brutal bombardment of the city. It was during this brutal bombardment that the people came together, took their weapons, and were immediately sent to the front line. We delivered these workers battalions to Front HQ.
Semyon Yefimovich Kashintsev (Secretary of the Red October District Committee): The 1st Destruction Battalion returned from the front at the end of August with only twenty-two men. [ . . . ] Why so many losses? One survivor, Commissar Sazykov, explained it like this: In those early days it was only our unit and the guys from the Tractor factory bearing the brunt of the main strike, before the regular army units arrived, and the destruction battalion was poorly equipped. The only weapons they had were rifles.
Vladimir Kharitonovich Demchenko (Major, commandant of Stalingrad): At that time there was a great shortage of weapons. We didn’t even have rifles. I went all over the place to get rifles for these men. [ . . . ] Wherever we came across captured enemy weapons, we used them to arm our detachments.
Ezri Izrailevich Ioffe (Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute): In those first two days there was great confusion among the regional organizations, it was the 26th before they put themselves back together. [ . . . ] On the 24th and 25th we had no newspapers, electricity, or water, and, because of the lack of water, the fire crews could do nothing about the burning buildings. On the night of the 25th I could see an enormous column of smoke on the wooded banks of the Volga—the oil tanks were on fire.
Claudia Stepanovna Denisova (Secretary of the Yermansky District Committee): Putting out the fires was impossible because the Germans had taken out the water supply system. They’d cut off the main pump at Mechyotka—it was destroyed, there was no water. We fought the fires with whatever we had. The self-defense groups and others were not working at all badly and within half an hour they’d manage to extinguish a fire—but then it would flare up again. A lost cause [ . . . ] I sent all our command staff across the Volga. I did this on my own initiative because otherwise we might have had casualties. Not one person in the district committee died. The people were still alive, and they could be of use. The chairman and three secretaries from the district committee were still there. One secretary was a man, the others women. They called us the “women’s district committee.” [ . . . ]
Within three or four days everything was turned into the ruins you’re looking at right now.
Vladimir Kharitonovich Demchenko (Major, commandant of Stalingrad): About ten thousand people were dead after the first bombardment. That figure also includes military personnel sent here. Cellars were packed with hundreds of people. There were some I know that held two or three hundred. [ . . . ] On the first day, thirty-seven aircraft bombed us until evening.36 Can you imagine? Twenty to thirty dive-bombers trying to take out the AA batteries.
Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of Stalingrad Soviet Committee): My opinion—as a nonmilitary man—is that the enemy hoped to demoralize the people. They knew that we hadn’t evacuated anyone. There were bombs everywhere, fires everywhere. People were stunned. There was a mass panic, no leadership. It was up to me to take control of the city until the military forces got here.
Because we’d built defensive lines and the enemy hadn’t broken through from the north or south, we had a chance to get organized.
Three days after the bombing started in this area, we dragged people out from their trenches and shelters and began making repairs. We decided to repair the water system and the bread factory, to reestablish electricity production, and even to get the trams running. An extraordinary city commission was formed.
Vladimir Kharitonovich Demchenko (Major, commandant of Stalingrad): A commission was established during the bombardment to take decisive measures to reestablish the city’s economy. [ . . . ] Sure, there were bombs, but we still had to feed the people. We still had to organize the economy. Chuyanov chaired this commission, which also included Zimenkov, Voronin, and me, the commandant of the city.
Mikhail Alexandrovich Vodolagin (Secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Committee): In the very first minutes of the raid, bombs severed our main artery, the power line that supplied the factories in the north and center of the city, and in many sectors the 110-kV line was cut off. The city was left without light, water, bread. We were ordered by the city defense committee to do everything we could to restore the city’s water supply. The fires that raged throughout the city were stifling. Sometimes it was difficult to get to the river for a quick drink of water. We understood our mission. It was technically difficult but of great importance. Under constant attack from the air—later from artillery and mortar fire—our people threw themselves into their work. At any time day or night—for days on end, actually—they worked to fix the power line. There were times when they’d just finish resupplying a sector only to have it destroyed, the blast sending people ten or twelve meters into the air. But after the initial shock they’d go right back to repairing the line.
Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of Stalingrad Soviet Committee): Once we’d restored the water system, the bread factory, and the mills, we started to provide supplies for the population. We opened trade stalls, two or three canteens in the center and outlying areas. We started feeding children at the canteens. Life went on, in a way. Trade resumed, stalls were set up in basements to sell groceries and bread. We set a new goal of rebuilding the bathhouses so people could wash themselves. From August 23 to 28 they’d been staying in shelters, basements, trenches—they needed to wash. We worked for two and a half days to repair a few bathhouses and get them up and running. On the first day about two thousand people used one of the bathhouses. A day after that we launched a radio station and played music from tapes. But amid all the fires and the bombs the music sounded like a funeral march. After a day of this we decided to quit broadcasting the music—we just played the latest news bulletins. Whenever it started playing, the radio lifted people’s spirits. If the radio is saying that the bread factory is operating and so on, then the city is alive. People felt better, and that meant that all was not lost. That’s the reason for the radio, so the people could listen. [ . . . ]
In the Yermansky district, in the basement of block 7, two women were trapped for four or five days. Nobody knew they were there. Someone heard moaning and crying as they were passing by. They dug them out, got them out alive. I was there too. Turns out they recognized me, the chairman of the Executive Committee, and showered me with kisses of joy. [ . . . ]
Children in Stalingrad during an air raid. Photographer: L. I. Konov
A mother and daughter had been buried in this one basement. The mother had managed to dig herself out, but the daughter was buried in such a way that she had no hope of escaping. She was alive, but her legs were stuck in the rubble and she couldn’t get up. Several engineers arrived, and they all agreed that they wouldn’t be able to dig her out. I found out about this a few days later. I thought, there’s got to be some way to save her. So I go there with an engineer. He said he would give it a try. And, sure enough, he did it. When they started digging, she began to sing. Meanwhile, the mother, in complete calm, said to the daughter: “When they’ve got you dug out, don’t forget your things.”
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): There were some terribly gruesome scenes. City committee secretary Khlynin tells of one example. He goes into a cellar just in case, because there were times when there’d be a collapse, but the beams and walls would hold, and the people inside were still alive. He enters the dark cellar and yells, “Is anyone there?” And then there’s this humanlike scream of wild profanity. He says it made his hair stand on end. He lights a match and he sees this man, burned all over, no eyes even, nothing at all. Can you imagine a man in such a state? They called for a medic right away. [ . . . ]
Some people cracked up. It didn’t matter how much they tried to restrain themselves or keep it under wraps—they lost it all the same. There is, in the end, only so much one can get used to.
Showing up at the factory never used to be a big deal because you were there all the time. But now when you arrive it’s a great event. People greet you warmly, as if it’s been ages. When I went to Red October, I went straight into the courtyard, and what a reception! A sturdy-looking man is brought to me, along with some armed workers.
“What’s going on here, comrades?”
“What’s going on, comrade Piksin, is that the enemy is bombing the city. We’re losing the city to them, we’re losing the factory, and this bastard here is taking advantage of the situation by looting.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“He worked in the auto shop. There were work clothes there, overalls. See for yourself how many he’s put on.”
He was in fact wearing six sets of overalls. He had hidden underneath his shirt 115 packs of tea and wrapped around himself some eight meters of good drive belt, the kind that can be used as shoe soles. One worker asked: “Why’d you do it? This is government property.”
“That’s my business.”
“Who’d you get it from?”
“Some guy.”
“Were you selling them?
“No.”
“He’s a thief, a looter.”
“What are we going to do with him? Send him to the front?”
“You can’t send his kind to the front. He’d just do the same thing there. He must be shot!”
I said: “Even so, couldn’t we still send him to the front?”
“No—he’s got to be shot.”
There was a meeting: a district committee secretary, the NKVD chief, a party organizer, and me—at that time I was also a deputy people’s commissar.
But then all the workers came out. They took everything from him. He had boots, good box calf boots. They wanted to take them, but other workers said: “Don’t bother. We don’t need anything of his. Let him die with all his stuff.”
They were put in formation, spaced three paces apart. By order of the workers, the man was shot. [ . . . ] They said: He was well provided for, a good master vulcanizer, childless, had a wife who worked in Factory no. 221. What else did he need? He couldn’t be trusted. He couldn’t be sent to the front.
[ . . . ] Some looting occurred, beginning on the second or third day of the bombing. Flour was being taken, basements were being broken into. This necessitated extraordinary measures. In some districts people were shot on sight. Several people were shot. Afterward, the problem more or less stopped, though incidents of illegal looting still cropped up. We took extreme measures and were rid of our looting problem.
Alexei Yakovlevich Zimin (Lieutenant, former worker at the Barricades factory, headquarters commandant of the 38th Motor Rifle Brigade, 64th Army): [ . . . ] The factories withstood most of the bombing. This was when two of the Barricades workshops were destroyed. None of the other workshops were hit directly, but they had windows broken and roofs torn off. The Barricades Factory Training School took a direct hit. From August 23–24, three workshops at the Tractor factory were destroyed. When that happened, everyone ran for it. The managers led the way. Workshop foremen loaded their vehicles and headed out, but then after a short break in the bombing the NKVD forces made them turn around, and the factories started up again.
Mikhail Afanasievich Odinokov (Secretary of the Voroshilov District Committee): There was a dark stain on the work of the district party organizations—certain cases in which individual factory directors and party secretaries lost their heads during the bombardment, got scared, and fled the district and the city, leaving their enterprises without leadership. By doing this they helped not the motherland but the enemy.
These directors and party secretaries were Alexei Ivanovich Brilevsky, director of the Stalingrad Cannery, party secretary Sevryugin; Moskalyov, acting director of the confectionary plant; Martynov, director of Factory no. 490; party bureau secretary Maksimov; and Mezentsev, director of Bread Factory no. 5. All of these men left without the permission of the district committee. The coward Samarin, who was in charge of district food provisioning, transformed himself into a cattle driver on the east bank of the Volga and set off for a destination unknown to the regional committee.
Claudia Stepanovna Denisova (Secretary of the Yermansky District Committee): Factories were being destroyed, people were fleeing. Some of the enterprises got some things out, but many were unable to save anything because the bombing raid had been so unexpected. The Krupskaya 8th of March Textile Factory burned down on the 23rd. It had caught fire twice. The first was put out, but the second fire destroyed the whole factory. They’d removed equipment and raw materials. There was still one workshop where they worked on transmission mechanisms. About seventy-five sewing machines were still there. Once they’d gotten out the raw materials, neither the director nor the party secretary came back. They abandoned the workshop, leaving the transmissions and machines to the Germans. This is why the factory’s director and party organization secretary were expelled from the party for desertion and cowardice.
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): From August 23—at the onset of the bombardment—we began evacuating the population. It was an orderly evacuation. Mostly it was the workers’ families and the workers themselves who were leaving. We organized ferries across the Volga. [ . . . ]
The conditions for the evacuation were extremely difficult. Evacuating across the Volga was hard because the boats were being bombed. Many people died. When we sent them out on the Saratov rail line, many of the trains were bombed out. A train carrying workers from the Red October factory sustained very heavy bombing at Leninsk, and again on the way back at the Elton and Pollasovka stations. [ . . . ]
The evacuation took place under exceptionally difficult conditions, especially since the only way out was the Volga. We had to cross it. Arms and food supplies had to cross the river continuously, at the same time as the population was being evacuated. Hundreds of thousands of people had to get out, mostly women and children. Approximately 60 to 70 percent were women, children, and the elderly. And there were the wounded, who complicated the evacuation.
Ezri Izrailevich Ioffe (Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute): The crossing was made with small ferries and twin-engine military boats. For two or three days everything was done haphazardly, but by the 27th the crossing was organized. Everything the institute had intended to evacuate had burned on the banks of the Volga. The institute itself had burned down on August 25. Nothing was saved. Professor Kolosov carried a lone imported microscope with him to Saratov. We all set off on foot toward Cheborksar, our gathering point. Everyone met again in Saratov.
Alexei Mikhailovich Polyakov (Deputy chairman of the Executive Committee of the Stalingrad Regional Soviet of Workers Deputies): There were two active crossings near the statue of Kolzunov.37 Quite a large number of people crossed by the ferry near the central waterworks, which was being bombed constantly. In addition to the municipal ferries, there were two large motor boats that had been linked together—this fast, powerful vessel could cross the Volga in eight to ten minutes. They could take ten or twelve vehicles with 200–250 people in the spaces between them. A deck of planks was laid over the two joined boats. The vehicles would go on these planks.
There were some really long days, such as August 27, 28, and 30, when we transported thirty to forty thousand people within a twenty-four-hour period. About one thousand rowboats had been given to us, but they were too disorganized. They were eager to go to the east bank, but once they got there it was difficult to get them to return to the west bank. [ . . . ]
I was there day and night. [ . . . ] Having some leadership on the riverbank brought a certain amount of calm. [ . . . ] I was in command of a militia platoon, the entire force of militiamen on the river. We maintained order and assisted the people as needed. I was there until September 5. Then I was in Krasnaya Sloboda. Though I would go to the right bank several times a day—specifically, to the central command post in the park—most of my time was spent on the east bank because of the enormous crowds of evacuated people who needed to be transported farther.
Ivan Dmitrievich Burmakov (Major general, commander of the 38th [7th Guards] Motor Rifle Brigade): Our arrival at the west bank—that was an interesting moment. The masses of people there! So many kids, so many women! Men seeing off their wives and children. Piles of belongings everywhere. We were crossing at night. Everyone wanted to get across quickly, to hurry. We started to establish order. We wanted to send them as fast as possible. We’d put five women and children on a boat and send them on. Then they had to cross the islands, about a kilometer and a half. I carried two children myself. Everyone was on foot. Soldiers carried people’s belongings and children to lighten the load. You’d see a woman with a bunch of stuff and two or three kids. It’s heartbreaking to see that. Tons of people at the riverbank, tons of children. I couldn’t bear it—the next day I sent ten trucks. I gave orders for the children to be brought to the river first. With these small children running around, you think about your own children in Siberia. Over in Siberia things were all right, but the suffering in Stalingrad was terrible.
Ivan Vasilevich Vasilev (Brigade commissar, chief of the political section of the 62nd Army): We were getting them out, across the Volga, but this evacuation, as we called it, was just as deadly. It was a dreadful sight, especially the children. They’re let out onto the sand without water or any kind of food provisions. How could a worker bring anything, what with the explosions all around, the bombs from above, and children going in the boats? You’d often come across some terrible scene on the island. If only some government representative had been present—there were plenty of vehicles coming through that could have taken them. This was well within our capabilities, but once the permission had been given—literally an hour later—they couldn’t be found, and at the same time we had to take care of the local population. [ . . . ]
As a communist, I cannot look at children with indifference. They were going around collecting scraps of bread. I telegrammed Chuyanov, telling him to send Soviet authorities to bring this matter to rest. Things couldn’t be so bad that we couldn’t feed these children. We got them fed. A private’s family—the father’s at the front, mother’s dead, leaving an infant, a four-year-old, an eight-year-old, and the sick old grandfather. How could you not help a family like that?
Mikhail Alexander Vodolagin (Secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Committee): There were children turning up with no parents, children of all ages, from infants to teenagers. It was decided that the Komsomol would be responsible for gathering these children and transporting them to the east bank of the Volga. Comrade Bykov, secretary of the Yermansky District Komsomol, played a very active role in this work. Komsomol members began searching for unaccompanied children in courtyards, apartments, trenches, and basements. We brought these homeless children to the shelter in the basement of the City Theater. Then at three or four in the morning, or some other suitable time, we’d send them across the Volga. Supplies were being sent at the same time, so we gave them everything they needed.
Konstantin Vasilievich Zubanov (Chief engineer of the Stalingrad Power Station, StalGRES): It was only September 13 when the Germans broke through to the Volga at Kuporosnoye, definitively breaking the link between Stalingrad’s heart and brain. The artery was severed. We had a job to do: provide electricity to the southern part of the city, specifically to the industrial and residential areas in the Kirov district. [ . . . ] The Germans were entrenched in the hills of Yelshanka and Kuporosnoye38 Evidently they had heard about our work at the station, and they placed us under fierce artillery fire. After a few test shots, the Germans concentrated fire on us with exceptional force.
Refugees from Stalingrad, September 1942.
Claudia Stepanovna Denisova (Secretary of the Yermansky District Committee): On September 14 we held a meeting of the bureau of the district committee. This meeting took place in a trench. We listened to reports on barricade construction and the evacuation of minors.
We stopped the meeting because everything went quiet. Those attending were the chief of the militia, the chief of staff of the local anti–air defense, and the director of the Krasnaya Zastava factory. Someone took minutes in a notebook, everything was preserved. The chief of staff said: “I’ll go see what the trouble is.” The day before, the 13th, they enemy bombed us heavily, maniacally. [ . . . ] While he was out seeing what was going on, why there was this strange, ominous silence, some militiamen in black clothing walked by. Submachine guns, satchels, and all of them dressed the same. They walked on. We thought they were our own militiamen and said: “Didn’t we see them earlier going toward the House of Specialists?” It turned out that they were German soldiers who later took over the House of Specialists, and here we were about fifty meters away. This was around three o’clock. The chief of staff came back and said: “I suggest we leave immediately. There are German tanks on First of May Street.” The tanks were coming from a bridge in the Dzerzhinsky district, and the submachine gunners were already in the House of Specialists.
Vladimir Kharitonovich Demchenko (Major, commandant of Stalingrad): On September 14 German soldiers entered the city and occupied the NKVD building. At that time I received a message from the garrison commander saying that groups of submachine gunners were moving from the central airfield onto the southern slopes of Mamayev Kurgan. My orders were to verify this. I set out on reconnaissance with three men. I decided to stop at my HQ at the Red October factory to get a dozen or so more men, because I had heard all kinds of rumors. [ . . . ] I went along the riverbank, thinking I’d soon be getting some more men. We reached the north docks, and it turned out that the Germans were firing at the crossing. We spent two hours exchanging fire with them. I gathered my men. At the crossing there were about a hundred vehicles that couldn’t be ferried across because of all the German machine guns and submachine guns. I gathered about fifteen men at the House of Specialists. The shooting began—them firing from over there, us from over here. A junior political officer got wounded. I could tell we weren’t getting anywhere. I went back with my men to the command post on the Tsaritsa. We got as far as Kholzunov Square. There were antiaircraft guns on the square and right on the riverbank. Five enemy dive-bombers were attacking them. One gun was fifteen meters from the bank. Five planes were coming right for it. The gun started firing. We saw the bombs fall. Two of my men were lying in the water, and I jumped into a ditch. A bomb fell about ten meters away from me. I was thrown into the air, hit the ground, took quite a beating. Put me out of action for a week. I got up but fell down again. I felt like something had snapped inside me. My two comrades grabbed me and got me to our command post. The bombing started up again. A bomb struck the back wall of the building and started a fire. A high-explosive bomb. When I saw that I figured that everyone was probably dead. I got up. I could see that the building was burning.
Alexei Semyonovich Chuyanov (First secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Committee): September 1439 [ . . . ] The city defense committee’s command post is a few meters back from the front line. Telephone and telegraphic communication with the northern and southern sections of the city has been cut off. In several places the fascists have reached the Volga, dividing the city into isolated defense sectors. It was decided that the command post should be removed to the east bank of the Volga. I. V. Sidorov, the regional committee secretary for transportation, was charged with organizing the crossing. [ . . . ] Late at night two boats came to the command post from Krasnaya Sloboda, and we started crossing. I left on the last ferry with my assistants and comrades Voronin and Zimenkov. It was relatively calm until we reached the middle of the river. We’d just gotten there when we saw flares overhead. That was when the machine-gun fire began.
We hit the deck. The engineer decided to muffle the engine, but in his haste he went too far and killed it. The current was taking us straight toward the statue of Kholzunov, where the German machine-gun fire was coming from. [ . . . ] Sidorov left the helm to go down to the engineer.
“Come on!” he said, sighing heavily. “Look what you’ve done! Do you see where we’re headed?”
“To visit the fascists!” joked Zimenkov, deadpan.
But this was no laughing matter. The boat taking fire from machine guns. There was only one way out: to swim for it. And it was just at that moment that the engine started up. Ivan Vasilievich ran back to the helm and turned the vessel sharply toward Krasnaya Sloboda.
Vladimir Kharitonovich Demchenko (Major, commandant of Stalingrad): The [Extraordinary City] Commission existed until September 14. After September 14 the Regional Committee and the Executive Committee moved to the east bank. The Commandant’s Office stayed on the west bank, but all other city and regional authorities moved to the east bank. [ . . . ] After our building on Communist Street was bombed, the Commandant’s Office worked and received people at several different locations. For a few days we were at the hospital, then we moved to October Street, then to the Tsaritsa, and from September 18 we were at General Rodimtsev’s command post. We stayed there until September 25. On September 25 we left with the 62nd Army and went to the Barricades district. From there we moved to the Red October district under the direction of the commander of 62nd Army. We built bunkers and stayed in them all the time. [ . . . ]
I should mention that I was the only one with a map, which was on tracing cloth. Front headquarters had ordered us to show them where certain streets were, where they were located, because the city was not like other cities. We directed people. Someone would come to us at one in the morning, say, some army subunit, and they’d need help with a street or heading. Or there would be ammunition or guns that had to be picked up from the station. We’d go and show them the way. Because of all the ravines here, streets and roads aren’t that easy to find.
Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov (Lieutenant general, commander of the 62nd Army): The army’s commander and military council defended Stalingrad while based at Mamayev Kurgan. Sometimes when we were surrounded by submachine gunners we’d run down to the riverbank. There were times when we were 150 meters from the enemy’s forward positions. Were there any local party organizations there? [ . . . ] Yes, indeed! I remember comrade Chuyanov, secretary of the regional committee, who was made chairman of the defense committee, I saw him myself—Would you like to know when? It was on February 5, 1943, at the victory rally. And as for Secretary Piksin—I saw him, if I’m not mistaken, in mid- to late January 1943. Until then I had seen no one at all.
[ . . . ] Then, when things had more or less calmed down, the commandant of Stalingrad showed up on the riverbank.
“How can I help you?”
“Who are you?”
“Commandant of the city.”
“Where are you based?”
“Across the river—Leninsk, Akhtuba, Krasnaya Sloboda—everyone’s there [ . . . ].”
I think that with the right leadership, the situation here would have been different.
An army is made up of men, and the Bolshevik leadership ought to be located where the greatest danger is.
[ . . . ] The enemy had forced his way into Stalingrad. At the Tractor factory there were hundreds of tons of fuel. Transporting fuel across the Volga is not at all easy to do. It is extremely dangerous. I said: get that fuel! I met the director of the factory, who informed me that their regulations prohibited taking anything from the factory. I ordered armed soldiers to take the fuel. These men encountered armed security, who pointed machine guns at them. What was I to do? I gave up and let it go. The fuel stayed there for the enemy.
Alexei Yakovlevich Zimin (Lieutenant, former worker at the Barricades factory, headquarters commandant of the 38th Motor Rifle Brigade, 64th Army): When we arrived to hold the line at the Barricades factory, when we took up positions at the Upper Settlement, I got a chance to visit the offices of the factory [party] committee and the district committee. The only one there from the factory committee was Skorikov, but I did see Secretary Kotov from the district committee. The district soviet was gone—they’d already gone across. The factory management was gone. The factory’s director had come back on September 25. Actually, he was brought back and told to stay put until told otherwise.
They did assembly work at the factory. The assembly workshop was undamaged apart from its glass roof, which had fallen in, and this is where the assembly work was done. When they started returning, the managers and foremen had to be forced to organize the work. They organized the assembly of finished parts and weaponry. After that they started making repairs. The Tractor factory had also been blown up, but then their people organized the assembly work and repaired tanks returning from the field.
Ivan Vasilevich Vasilev (Brigade commissar, chief of the political section of the 62nd Army): Party activists could have been left here, so that every apartment and building would return fire, and when the Germans entered the city we’d have been right on top of them. We had no other support. The city was undefended. [ . . . ] If you’ve got 400,000 workers, what if you just took 100,000—that’s a whole army! We’d have even been able to arm them. We’d have posted them on high ground, and the Germans never would have entered Stalingrad. We would have stopped them on the approach, just like we did in the city. We’d have an easier task now if we’d stayed there, but in the city, even with all our skill, it was a difficult and complex job that took a lot of blood. This much is clear: the city was abandoned, not defended.
Pavel Petrovich Matevosyan (Chief engineer of the Red October steelworks): On September 15 we were with General Chuikov and Gurov, a member of the military council. They demanded that we get our people out, saying that people were dying—they’re shooting us, we’re shooting them. That’s when we started moving out.
Ilya Fyodorovich Burin (Former mechanic at the Barricades factory, scout in the 38th [7th Guards] Motor Rifle Brigade): All the workers began evacuating across the Volga. Then the order came for us to drive to Leninsk with all the machinery. They took everyone. We went across to Leninsk. From there we were to evacuate to Novosibirsk. Some of us were late, and they didn’t let us go. Later we got the order: any worker with evacuation papers who stays behind will be detained and sent into combat. We were detained and sent there.
Our unit was formed in Solyanka. I was the only one from my workshop. Later I met a comrade from the same factory, but from Workshop no. 16, Neznamov was his name. Since then we’ve always been together. [ . . . ] At first we were the Factory Emergency Rifle Regiment. We were trained there. When our training was completed, we were asked what we wanted to do. I volunteered to be a submachine gunner, and later I was transferred to reconnaissance.
Vladimir Kharitonovich Demchenko (Major, commandant of Stalingrad): Lately we’ve had to force people to leave. Some of them think: I’ve been living here twenty years, where will I go? We’ll defend our city to the very end; the city will not surrender. There were some, of course, who were waiting for the Germans. [ . . . ]
From September 23 to October 15 we evacuated 149,000 families [from the population in the factory districts]. We did have to send in the militia to do this. They went into every trench and bomb shelter to take people out and send them to the east bank. Not much of the population remained in the city. Most of those who remained were in the Dzerzhinsky and Voroshilov districts, which had been occupied suddenly. Very few remained elsewhere—frail old people, sick people. In the area where 62nd Army was, they stayed until the very end. There were quite a few children left. The mothers died, the kids remained. Some children were found in bunkers.
This one time we kicked the Germans out of a bunker and destroyed the firing position, but didn’t go inside that day. The next evening we entered the bunker. There was a girl, eight or nine years old, lying there among the bodies. As soon as we came in she cried: Take me with you, it’s cold in here with them. Her mother had been killed. General Sokolov, commander of the 39th Division,40 took the girl.
Pavel Petrovich Matevosyan (Chief engineer of the Red October steelworks): We planted mines throughout the factory three times, and each time we removed them. We were in direct communication with army HQ and with the division that was protecting us. At first we had an NKVD division. They’d warned us how difficult things were. The last time we went to General Chuikov he said there was no order from Moscow. He doubted that we were going to blow up the factory: we were going to fight it out to the end. Hopefully we wouldn’t lose the city, but if it came down to it, we’d have to abandon Stalingrad. So we removed the mines. Afterward we put them back—after all, that was just his personal opinion. No one had ordered us not to. [ . . . ] Then we got the order from Moscow to clear the mines. It had apparently come from Beria41 himself. [ . . . ] We left there on October 4, and we were the last to leave.
Konstantin Vasilievich Zubanov (Chief engineer of the Stalingrad Power Station, StalGRES): The artillery fire was at its heaviest on September 23, when about four hundred shells hit our power station. That was an intense day, and a difficult period for the workers. It turned out to be a fatal moment for the station.
At first there were isolated shots, then a barrage (which military personnel usually call a fire assault). Our station was rendered completely useless. [ . . . ] Even without counting the shrapnel, the shells that stuck the station brought destruction to the building assemblies and the units, and there was this entire mass of shrapnel, components, glass, wood, brick, metal—all of this came down on top of people at their work stations. It was especially bad at the boiler shop. [ . . . ] That day a dud landed at the feet of the boiler technician Dubonosov. He didn’t know the shell wouldn’t go off right away. He risked his life but never left his station. I saw myself what he went through. He calmed down only once the shell had been carefully removed from his spot and made safe.
In any case, the station was shut down. We had to figure out what to do. The Germans had zeroed in on us well, and their shooting was precise. Working under such conditions was dangerous. [ . . . ] I met the workshop foreman to discuss the work before us. Later we jokingly called this meeting the Council of Fili.42 We asked ourselves: What can we do? If we stop, then the factories nearby won’t be repairing tanks or making shells, it will mean that the entire area will go without water and that the army will go without bread. Getting the place running again, on the other hand, would expose our workers and all of the managerial staff to considerable danger. It came as no surprise when not a single one of the foreman said no. Very modestly and calmly, and under the unrelenting music of artillery, each of them reached their verdict: the station must continue operating. The station was up and running that very day, September 23.
The onset of darkness at first reduced, then completely eliminated the artillery fire. It appeared that the Germans had been aiming at the cloud of smoke coming from the station. Artillery fire continued straight through to November 10. After the lesson of September 23, our regional authorities decided that the station should operate only at night.
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): There was this one incident that sounds like a joke. The artillery fire was unbelievable. Zemlyansky, the director of the power station, makes a written address to the army commander: “I request that you immediately neutralize the enemy artillery, as it is making it impossible for Stalingrad Power Station to operate. Should this request be denied, I will appeal to your superiors.” Shumilov recalled this recently: “When I got that request, I wrote to the artillery commander: ‘Comrade so-and-so, you are to immediately neutralize the artillery so the station can operate.’”
Konstantin Vasilievich Zubanov (Chief engineer of the Stalingrad Power Station, StalGRES): Something surprising: people we had ordered to places less exposed to falling debris and exploding shells often found these heavy barrages very difficult. But if you went along to the main panel, you would see, or rather hear, something extraordinary: against the background of the artillery music you could hear classical music. This was comrade Karochansky playing records on a gramophone.
Sergei Dmitrievich Babkin (First secretary of the Kirov District Committee): When the planes first came and flew over the settlement, people ran and hid in trenches. Now everyone’s used to it. They see a group of planes in the air, and people can already tell what they’re going to attack. In Staraya Beketovka there were about thirty or forty Katyushas. When they fired, the windmill would immediately start turning. In October, when we were at the collective farm, we watched the Katyushas get hit. A Messerschmitt showed up, turned around, and flew away. I said that more German planes would come in ten minutes. After fifteen minutes, the German planes appeared and started their bombing runs. We were about 250 meters away, and we saw one plane drop eight bombs, then the others made their drops and flew away. We could hear cries and moans. We saw that the planes were coming for us and we took cover behind a building. Two bombs landed three meters away, another at five meters. The driver and I were covered in dirt. We saw a third group. They attacked like that all day long, but everyone held up just fine, no panicking. There was some long-range artillery there, and children would wait on skis and sleds, and when they fired, the shock waves from the guns would push them down the slope.
Konstantin Vasilievich Zubanov (Chief engineer of the Stalingrad Power Station, StalGRES): November 4, 1942. At the end of the night shift at the station, after we shut down, all personnel (incidentally, no one had been allowed to leave since the first days of the siege), went to bed. People were so used to this new way of life that no amount of artillery fire kept them from undressing and going to bed as usual. But on November 4 at 8:30 A.M., fascist vultures unexpectedly spread their wings over the station. Forty-nine Stukas—or, as we called them, “musicians”—started a methodical bombardment. The intention was to destroy our station once and for all. Every one of the forty-nine dive-bombers made multiple runs. The wail of their sirens was particularly unpleasant. I never believe people who say they get used to artillery fire or bombs. I just can’t find any truth in it. For me every bomb or shell is hard to take, it’s painful. What’s important is how you conduct yourself, how much you can contain your feelings. I have never since experienced anything like what I experienced then. You often hear it said that Red Army soldiers were less afraid of the bombs than of the sirens. I’m certain that’s the truth. The Stukas’ sirens really were incapacitating. So you can imagine what things were like at the station. Half-naked men jumping out of bed and running to the shelters, some running toward the power assemblies to make sure they were “prepared” for such an attack.
The bombing didn’t last long—maybe twenty or twenty-five minutes—but for us this seemed like an eternity. When the planes had left we recognized the unusually devastating effects of the bombing. Before then we hadn’t had any serious casualties, but that day there were two dozen. Many of the units were lost. In operational terms, the station was put out of action for quite some time.
Secretary Ilin from the regional party committee arrived. The committee finally had us evacuate to the east bank so that these last few brave men might be saved.
Nikolai Romanovich Petrukhin (Chief of the war department of the Stalingrad Regional Party Committee): Regarding the partisans [ . . . ] By the time of the German invasion we had created thirty-four partisan reconnaissance detachments comprising a total of 839 men. About sixty caches with provisions had been placed to supply these units with food. They were also issued equipment, and the caches also contained weapons and ammunition. Most of the partisans had been trained in units of the destruction battalions or in units created by the regional council of OSOAVIAKhIM,43 in so-called training groups. We trained some of them in a special school. [ . . . ]
All the partisan detachments were located on the open steppe. No good cover, no water. That is why the detachments tended to be small, no more than seven, ten, or fifteen men. The fascist hordes conducted harsh inspections and committed atrocities against the civilian population in the occupied districts (fourteen of the regional districts were occupied), which also made it difficult for these detachments to conduct their operations.
In early September 1942 a group of partisans went to Ulyana Vasilievna Sochkova in the village of Kamyshki and asked for water. While citizen Sochkova was fetching the water, two German patrols approached the partisans, who then killed the Germans and disappeared. The next day, German soldiers took the sixty-year-old Sochkova and her thirty-year-old daughter. They conducted a manhunt in the area near the village with a large number of riders, and they found some regular Red Army soldiers who happened to be there after breaking through the encirclement. The Germans gathered all of the men from the village and made them dig a grave. Then they brought over the Russian soldiers and the two women and shot them in front of everyone. A German officer warned the villagers, saying that this would happen to them, that for each murdered German soldier one hundred of them would be shot. [ . . . ] In the village of Averino in the Kalachevsky district they arrested seventeen children ranging from eight to fifteen years old. They were taken into the road and publicly whipped. For seven days they were given no food or water. On November 7 the fascists shot ten of these defenseless boys as part of a bloody and malicious reprisal. The bodies were taken to the pit silo of the collective farm. It was said that the boys had been shot because an officer was missing a pack of cigarettes, and suspicion had fallen on one of the boys. In the village of Plodovitoye, the wife of a former collective farm manager who had been expelled from the party in 1938 and sentenced to five years for anti-Soviet agitation denounced Natalya Nikolayevna Ignatievna, a party member, who was then executed by the German occupiers. Her body was left there for a week.
Ezri Izrailevich Ioffe (Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute): Already by December 1942, while Stalingrad was still under occupation, steps were being taken to return a core group of professors. Faculty from the Stalingrad Medical Institute started moving there by the end of January. Four faculty members were in place by February 25.
Veniamin Yakovlevich Zhukov (Foreman of Workshop no. 7 at the Red October steelworks): I’d watched the plant grow up, so it’s not easy for me now [This interview was conducted on January 8, 1943, at the site.] to see it destroyed. It’s like leaving your parents at home, alive and well, and coming back later to find them dead—that’s what it feels like. [ . . . ] Now all I see are ruins. You can’t even walk through them, let alone drive. I just can’t take it in. A team from my shop, twenty-two of us, have come to work. We’re waiting to get in there so we can help put things back in shape.
Major General Stepan Guryev hands over the Red October factory to its director, Pavel Matevosyan, in January 1943. Photographer: G. B. Kapustyansky
Alexei Semyonovich Chuyanov (First secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Committee): February 4. Today we’re celebrating our victory on the Volga. The austere and majestic Square of the Fallen Heroes is covered in red bunting. [ . . . ] Twelve o’clock noon. Front and army military council members appeared on an improvised rostrum, including V. I. Chuikov, M. S. Shumilov, A. I. Rodimtsev, and the leaders of regional and city organizations. [ . . . ] By request of the regional committee, the regional soviet of workers deputies, and the city defense committee, I gave an address to the rally: “As we fought against this vicious enemy, the fascist German occupiers decimated our city. But today, in the name of the motherland, of the party, and of our government, let us vow that we will restore our beloved city.” [ . . . ] I said good-bye to my comrades at arms. Their path takes them westward, while I will remain in the city. I was an ordinary civilian once again. The front has moved hundreds of kilometers away. The army is moving out. It wasn’t easy to see them go, these comrades I had shared so much with.
Clearing the Volga embankment. Photographer: L. I. Konov
Vasily Petrovich Prokhvatilov (Secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Committee of the AUCP[b]): There was a public rally on February 4.44 Other rallies took place throughout the region. We’d heard from the Sovinformburo that Chuyanov had eliminated the surrounding forces, and I received many congratulatory telegrams from within the region, then from everywhere in the Soviet Union. Not long ago I got one from a certain Pletnev, naming his unit and congratulating us on our victory. This meant something to Stalingrad. Not just Stalingrad, but the entire country. There were a lot of messages like that.
Ivan Alexeyevich Piksin (Secretary of the Stalingrad City Committee): Right after we had completely eliminated the German forces in Stalingrad, we focused our efforts on clearing the bodies. Every district had several thousand corpses.
Alexei Mikhailovich Polyakov (Deputy chairman of the Executive Committee of the Stalingrad Regional Soviet of Workers Deputies): Our main task now is to clear the streets as fast as we can. We’ve been at it for a month and have barely made a dent. It’s not that we aren’t working. Thousands of people are helping with the work.
Laborers from the Srednaya Akhtuba and Praleyksky collective farms have been providing a lot of assistance. They each sent around fifty carts, along with workers on camels and oxen. These men and women have removed tens of thousands of bodies.
Vasily Petrovich Prokhvatilov (Secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Committee of the AUCP[b]): [ . . . ] The collective farmers tried to aid every district that had been occupied by the Germans. I was in Kotelnikovo45 three days after its liberation. The Poperechensky collective farm is in that area. The workers there had saved nearly the entire herd by concealing them in a hollow, where the Germans didn’t find them. The workers there hid their grain in a pit silo and informed the Red Army when they arrived. Now this farm has seed for this year’s planting. They held on to twelve tractors. How did they do it? When the Germans were closing in it was impossible to get the tractors out, so the workers removed certain parts from their tractors to render them inoperable. Once the Germans had left, the operators returned with the parts and were able to get them running again in ten days. Now the tractors are all working again. The tractor fleet at this collective farm will be just fine because the people here are Cossacks. The Germans tried to win over the Cossacks, but nothing came of it. We learned this from the farm workers. [ . . . ]
In the Perelazovsky district I drove out to Lipovsky and spoke with the farm workers there. They told me of atrocities committed by the Germans and Romanians there. A few cows were still in the village. All the rest had been taken by the Germans, and this was a settlement of 170–180 households—not a small place. The villagers were particularly outraged by the POW camp. In Lipovsky there is a pig farm that borders a small river. Nearly all the farms had been burned down. The goat, sheep, and pig farms were all that remained, and these had been fenced in with barbed wire and used to keep prisoners of war. They fed them rye chaff. The day before I arrived there was a burial. Twenty-three Russian officers with frostbitten feet. The Germans couldn’t take them away, so they covered them with straw in a pigpen and set them on fire. Six Russian prisoners were being kept in a small hut, another five in a dugout in the yard. The locals helped them, and when the district committee secretary arrived they were brought to the hospital, most of them frostbitten, emaciated from the lack of food.
Grigory Dmitrievich Romanenko (First secretary of the Barricades district of Stalingrad): Of the many thousands of people who had been living in our district before August 23, we came across only 130—they were gaunt, frostbitten, stomachs bloated from starvation. Many of them said that if we’d taken another two or three weeks, they’d have starved to death or died from mistreatment by the Germans.
Ilya Fyodorovich Burin (Former mechanic at the Barricades factory, scout in the 38th [7th Guards] Motor Rifle Brigade): My family stayed in Stalingrad. I had no father, but my mother was killed there. When I got there I went home and found out that she died on September 8. She was in the kitchen cooking at four in the morning when the bomb hit. The building burned down, my mother was killed.
Public kitchen in Stalingrad, March 1943. Photographer: Georgy Zelma
Claudia Stepanovna Denisova (Secretary of the Yermansky District Committee): Right now the district has a population of sixty-two. Some people were kicked out by the Germans, some stayed behind. The ones that stayed were close to the Germans, they worked for them. They were allowed to stay here. It was a restricted area.
Now we’re going around block by block. We’ve counted the population three times, determining who’s who and what’s what. When appropriate, we report them to the relevant authorities.46
Ezri Izrailevich Ioffe (Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute): Anyone who couldn’t hide was driven westward by the Germans. Only those who could hole up in the nooks and crannies remained. It was easy to identify the people who worked with the Germans—they were the ones who had lost all self-respect. I met a great number of people while seeing patients, and I could recognize these unsoviet people at a glance.
They didn’t speak openly, they weren’t determined or direct, perhaps because they felt anxious and demoralized. One doesn’t get over this easily. These people are psychologically different from the rest.
Konstantin Vasilievich Zubanov (Chief engineer of the Stalingrad Power Station, StalGRES): When I was evacuated to the east bank they asked me to relocate to Moscow. It seemed like the thing to do—work in Moscow, get an apartment. For a certain sort of person this would have been great, but I had to turn it down. They need me here more than they do in Moscow. I couldn’t leave the station at such a difficult time. This station raised me when things were good, so I’ve got to do what I can for it during this difficult time. This is where I came up the ranks, starting as nothing and working my way up to chief engineer. My conscience tells me I have to repair the station and see that it returns to its prewar capacity.
Ezri Izrailevich Ioffe (Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute): [The interview was conducted on February 1, 1944.] Our main difficulty is housing. The students are still sleeping two to a bed. Even though we have plenty of sheets, mattresses, and beds, we have nowhere to put them. [ . . . ]
There’s been a great influx of people in Stalingrad. The population has already reached 250,000, and about ten thousand more are coming every month, according to the “Rebuilding Stalingrad” section of Stalingradskaya Pravda. This influx of people causes serious problems for housing, food distribution, schooling, and medical care.
Residents returning to Stalingrad find shelter in the abandoned dugouts of the 62nd Army, 1943. Photographer: Georgy Zelma
Population growth is not being factored in when it comes to public services. The schools have begun running several shifts, with lessons running from 8:00 A.M. to midnight. The earlier grades are going only every second day. Though I must say that this influx of people is a sign of the city’s recovery. Many still live in varying conditions—in basements, trenches, bunkers, with dozens staying in a single room. But they are still coming, despite the obstacles. Very few are leaving, mostly those who are not from here originally. People come to fight for Stalingrad’s recovery. [ . . . ] The mood here is a cheerful one—we want to live truly and do good work. The victories of the Red Army have given us the elixir of life.
Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of Stalingrad Soviet Committee): There was this one telephone operator. Her switchboard wasn’t hidden. It was on the second floor. If a bomb comes, they’re all finished. Our command post was made of concrete. Sometimes you’d just sit there rocking, like on a boat, while these poor girls were up there sitting at the switchboard. They couldn’t leave, they had to connect people. When you called you could hear their voices trembling:
“Get me so-and-so!”
“Putting you through now.”
Red Army telephone operators at work in Stalingrad, December 1942. Photographer: Georgy Zelma
Her voice trembles, but she connects you. You hear her crying into the receiver, but she doesn’t leave her post without an order, she stays put. At the time this seemed an ordinary occurrence. Now that things have calmed down, you think back and it seems different. But at the time you’re saying: “What the hell’s wrong with you, sitting there crying?” Now you think about it and it’s just plain awful. Everything’s rumbling, and you’re safe under concrete, miserable. But what about her up there on the second floor? She’s a woman, after all, not some seasoned fighter. An ordinary woman, an ordinary telephone operator—what did you expect?