Captain Nikolai Aksyonov and the sniper Vasily Zaytsev, the respondents in the following two interviews, both belonged to the Siberian 284th Rifle Division. (After showing exemplary valor in the battle of Stalingrad, it was renamed the 79th Red Banner Guards Division.) The division was formed in December 1941 from soldiers in the military districts of Tomsk, Novosibirsk, and Kemerovo.104 Following heavy losses in eastern Ukraine and outside Voronezh, the division was recalled to the Urals in early August 1942, where it replenished its ranks with new local recruits and several thousand sailors from the Pacific Fleet. On September 6, while the division was still conducting training exercises, its commander, Colonel Nikolai Batyuk, received the order to deploy immediately to the Stalingrad Front.105 The division reached Stalingrad on September 18; the Germans had already taken Mamayev Kurgan.106 The battle had also spread to the central ferry slip on the west bank of the Volga, forcing the division to cross at a spot to the north, near the Red October factory. On September 20 Batyuk’s soldiers were loaded onto barges and conveyed across the river. “Right off the bank” recalled Batyuk in his interview, “we received our combat objective and started fighting, not even knowing our bearings.”
Some of Batyuk’s men had the mission of retaking Mamayev Kurgan; others were to help the 13th Guards Division, which had been forced to move northward after the Germans captured the central ferry slip on September 22. The Soviets recaptured Mamayev Kurgan, but on September 28 it passed back into German hands. Batyuk’s soldiers nevertheless clung to the southern and eastern slopes of the hill, blocking the path to the industrial district and the Volga.107 The Red Army did not gain complete control of the hill until January 16, 1943.108
Divisional commander Nikolai Batyuk
Captain Aksyonov, a deputy regimental commander in the 284th Rifle Division, led a resupply unit into the burning city on September 30. He portrays the battles his regiment faced in minute detail: the defense of Mamayev Kurgan, the January offensive, and the defeat of the Germans. Before the war Aksyonov taught history at the Tomsk Pedagogical Institute, and he employed his historical knowledge to mobilize his soldiers. In the midst of the battle he recalled his lectures on the Civil War and the battle of Tsaritsyn. He told his troops how Joseph Stalin led the defense of the city from Mamayev Kurgan. Given in the regiment’s shelter at the foot of the hill, his talk was so rousing that some soldiers jumped up, eager to examine the trenches from 1918. From that point on the soldiers spoke of Mamayev Kurgan as a “sacred place, the place where Stalin had been.”109
This story shows how the cult of Stalin had morphed into a cult of military genius by the time the war began. Stalin was no longer just the best and most loyal student of Lenin; he single-handedly led Russia’s defense against the foreign invaders.110 Aksyonov was one of many eyewitnesses to promote Stalin’s military legend. In his interview he expresses delight that Stalin was promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union in March 1943. Among the photographs he submitted to the Historical Commission (some of which he took himself) were several pictures of the building that housed the 10th Soviet Army during the battle of Tsaritsyn. One photo is a close-up of a bullet hole–riddled commemorative plaque informing visitors that comrades Stalin and Voroshilov worked in there in 1918.
Aksyonov’s testimony is vivid and detailed, and his account of the storming of Mamayev Kurgan has a cinematic quality. No less dramatic are his memories of September 30, 1942, the day he first entered the burning city, and of February 25, 1943, when after 149 uninterrupted days of fighting he crossed the Volga and was astonished to see an undamaged wooden house.
COMMISSION ON THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR
May 5, 1943
Interview conducted by comrade Belkin
Stenography: comrade Laputina
Nikolai Nikitich AKSYONOV
Guards captain, 1047th Regiment, 79th Guards Red Banner Division
Deputy chief of staff for operations111
I was born in 1908 in the village of Podoynikova, in the Pankrushikhinsky district of the Altai region. I joined the army on September 8, 1941. I was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for my part in the defense of Stalingrad. Before the war I was a teacher at the Tomsk Pedagogical Institute.
We got to Stalingrad on September 30, 1942. About ten kilometers out I could already see a massive wall of smoke, and the glow from the city was getting brighter as we approached. The entire city seemed to be on fire. The fires looked especially intense at the Red October factory and the oil refinery, which was right where our division was located. I got to the riverbank just as it was getting dark. Stalingrad looked particularly terrifying then. Everything was burning. Oil was flowing out of broken tanks at the refinery and coming down to the banks, and this wall of fire was reflected in the water, making flames appear still taller than they really were. It was a very difficult situation.
We crossed the river at night. The barge we were crossing on got shelled by the Germans. As it happened, the rope connecting us to the tug boat broke, and while the tug went to shore for another rope, we were anchored in the middle of the river with the Germans still shelling us. The whole crossing took us about two hours. We had wounded men on the barge. Mortar shells were exploding close by. The Germans were launching flares that completely lit up the river, but there was nothing we could do—that was particularly unpleasant.
On the night of October 1 we got to our regiment. The next morning I went out to the front line to get to know all the combat units in our sector. I saw all kinds of terrible things there. At the very end of September the Germans bombed our division’s positions, especially the refinery, which we were defending. Many of our men were killed: they lay out in the open all over the place, lots of dead bodies in craters, and there were a lot of dead civilians—women and children by the boats, by the buildings, all over the place.
I headed straight for the Metiz factory.112 It was on fire. There was a smell of burning and of dead bodies; it was hot, dusty, smoky—that’s what it was like there. There was fighting going on in 1st Battalion’s sector.
I was with Petersky, the chief of staff, and Benesh, the commander of the 1st Battalion, and we surveyed the regiment’s entire sector, relocated our machine-gun emplacements in a way that made better sense and returned to our command post by the end of the day. The command post was located on the west bank about three or four hundred meters from the front line.
Starting from September 30, I was in Stalingrad for 152 days on end, never leaving. Very few people went back to the west bank for any reason. You could say that those five months I spent in Stalingrad were the equivalent of five years of normal life.
I learned that we had around five hundred casualties on the first day of fighting, and on October 5 we had 1,300 men. There were companies with only twenty to twenty-five men left.
In early October we were always having to repel counterattacks in two areas of our sector: the Metiz factory and the infamous Mamayev Kurgan, Hill 102.
Our forward line was around fifty to sixty meters away from the Germans, in some places up to one hundred meters. That kind of close distance was rare. It happened most often when we were fighting in the streets, which quickly led to the rise of the hand grenade. Attacks were usually repelled with grenades, along with other kinds of weapons. In our sector the Germans outnumbered us by a factor of five or six. We were basing that on our reconnaissance, observations, and information from other sources, and also the Germans were sending out wave after wave of squads. It wasn’t unusual for them to come at us four or five times a day.
[ . . . ] The toughest fighting in our sector broke out in mid-October. As a historian, I tried to draw comparisons to battles I know from history: Borodino, Verdun during the Imperialist War,113 but none of that was right because the scale of the conflict in Stalingrad makes it hard to compare it to anything. It seemed as if Stalingrad was breathing fire for days on end. Our Ilyushins114 did show up, but they took a lot of losses. The Messerschmitts shot them down quickly. The Germans suffered great losses from our U-2s at night, but that wasn’t until November. We called them the “gardeners,” and they did us a lot of good. They crossed the Volga from east to west, and before they got to enemy lines they cut their engines. Then they dropped their bombs. Once they were back on our side they started their engines again. That’s why the U-2 was so hard to catch. But the Germans bombed us at night too.
I remember once having to go to from the meatpacking plant115 to our command post. We’d just left when the Germans launched flares and started bombing us so much the buildings shook. The night raids really get to you. During the day you can see where they’re coming from and work out where the bombs are going, so you don’t get too worked up over it. You get used to it eventually.
By the way, it was here that I first saw our bombers attacking with Katyushas, though they didn’t come very often at all. On the whole, we had a very slight air presence in Stalingrad, and what we did have was weak. I couldn’t say why.
I don’t know why, but almost everyone in the division had diarrhea. We were drinking unboiled water, and the Volga was polluted with oil, dead bodies, bits of wood, and so on. The diarrhea was wearing everyone out. I had it myself. General Chuikov, the army commander, had this cook called Boris who joked that he could cure us with his general’s dry rusks. General Chuikov had made his command post in the same place as ours, and his kitchen and ours had amalgamated, which is why he was saying that.
In mid-October we reinforced our front line. The Germans weren’t pressing us on Mamayev Kurgan. Actually it was us who was pressing them. Mamayev Kurgan was divided into two areas. The eastern [slope] was ours, and they held on to the western slopes, and on top of that the Germans had the water tanks, or the “devil’s domes,” as they were known. They had their main observation posts in those tanks, and all their artillery observers were safe inside, even though they were right on our front line. So the Germans were in control of the dominant position on the hill. And that’s why the subsequent battle for Mamayev Kurgan was really a battle for these tanks. Whoever controlled the water tanks controlled Mamayev Kurgan.
[ . . . ]
We were never short of ammunition. The ammunition supply weakened only when the Volga started icing over, but until then we always felt that we had enough. Our supply of ammunition was brought across from the east bank on rickety little boats. Our divisional relay point was on the east bank. Each regiment had to transport its own food and supplies across the river. The army had a forward supply unit on the west bank, but it did little to keep us supplied with ammunition.
We had orders from Chuikov and the divisional commander saying that we needed to have our own way of getting across the river. All the barges were broken up, burned, and sunk. There were even large cutters sticking nose-up on the riverbank. The only means of transport we had was these tiny boats. At first our regiment had seven boats, but then this went up to ten, and then we got two pontoons—actually, one part of a pontoon. We jokingly called these boats Korobkov’s flotilla. Korobkov was the deputy chief of staff for logistics, the one who created this “flotilla.” He’s a former teacher and school principal, a great organizer and administrator. He’s alive and well, and was given the Medal for Battle Merit. Those rickety boats were the best way we had of crossing the Volga.
I remembered how, back in 1918, comrade Stalin issued an order to remove all the vessels from the river near Stalingrad and send them to the north. That was at the most critical period when the Germans were approaching the city, and we could not fall back.116When I was in Stalingrad we didn’t have any way of crossing the river, and we never had such an order. Sometimes the cutters would come at night to evacuate the wounded. That was only up until the ice came. After that, all of our clothing, ammunition, equipment, the wounded—everything was taken on those small boats. We couldn’t use any other form of transport to supply the regiment because even these rickety boats were getting shot at by mortars and machine guns, and a barge definitely would have been shot up. So the most durable transport turned out to be these tiny boats.
The Volga started icing over on November 9 and was frozen solid by December 17. We were completely fed up with it. This was the hardest time for our army. It was really difficult for the boats to make their way there and back through the ice floes. They’d get stuck, people would be having to move from one little block of ice to the next. There were times when the current took the boats downriver toward the German shore, and then they’d have to either ditch the boat or dump the cargo and try to steer the boat out of danger. One of our boats was taken about three kilometers past Stalingrad, and we were looking for our men for five days. On the whole, the “beautiful Volga” tried our patience and got on our nerves. We did not love the Volga back then. In the morning everyone would ask: Has it frozen over yet? And the Germans, as we learned from prisoners, were also anxiously hoping that the Volga would ice over soon. They knew we were having difficulties, and their plan was to make use of the ice for an offensive.
On November 11 the Germans launched an attack on the sector of the Metiz factory, but nothing came of it.
[ . . . ] We took a second German prisoner and brought him to regimental HQ. This was the first one we got to talk in Stalingrad. He was a private. He was wounded, and so the men brought him in on a stretcher, but since it was November and the men still hadn’t gotten gloves, they kept dropping the stretcher to warm their hands. He had internal injuries, but since this was our first captured German, they started to revive him. The doctor, Krasnov, tried hard to bring him back so he could be questioned. And he did get better, even managed to say that he was a private 1st class in the 216th Regiment, but we didn’t get anything else out of him. He died. The second prisoner had more to say. We learned that our division was up against the Germans’ 295th Division. That prisoner was very disrespectful and defiant. He came right out and said he was a member of the Nazi party. We sent him to our army HQ, after which he was sent to front HQ. He still considered himself a winner and didn’t let on that he was anything other than happy. Though he did tell us how difficult things were for them with clothing at this time. By the end of November we’d already gotten our winter uniforms, but the Germans still hadn’t gotten theirs by the end of the battle, though they did keep hoping that they would. [ . . . ]
The snipers in our regiment played an important role in our active defense of Stalingrad. The snipers appeared in Colonel Metelyov’s regiment during the heaviest fighting for Stalingrad, in October. The pioneers of the sniper movement in the regiment were Alexander Kalentyev—a Siberian from the Urals—and the sailor Vasily Zaytsev, who is now a Hero of Soviet Union. Altogether there were forty-eight snipers in the regiment. During the fighting in Stalingrad, in the streets and on Mamayev Kurgan, they eliminated 1,278 Germans. The role of leader for these forty or so best snipers in the regiment belonged, of course, to Vasily Zaytsev. He was an excellent shot, and he quickly perfected the art of sniping and of being a lone warrior. He actually did the job of a regimental instructor, and he went around to all the units in the regiment. Soon he had a lot of students. The most successful sniper movement was developed in Captain Kotov’s 2nd Battalion. That battalion was defending the Metiz factory on the southern slope of Mamayev Kurgan. There was this sense that every soldier and officer in Stalingrad was itching to kill as many Germans as possible. In Stalingrad people felt a particularly intense hatred for the Germans. That was one of the reasons for the sniper movement in our regiment. There were a lot of soldiers who wanted to become snipers, which is why we had snipers using ordinary rifles rather than sniper rifles. Zaytsev would take the best of them, and his main selection criteria were courage, resourcefulness, and composure. Zaytsev went around to the units in the regiment and questioned their commanders, observed the men on the front line, and selected his snipers. Then he trained them. After showing them the scope and doing some target practice, Zaytsev would take his marksmen out to the firing positions. Zaytsev developed the surest and most reliable way to train snipers: he demonstrated what a sniper does right on the front line.
A lot of people went to the front line on their own initiative. Krasnov, the doctor, would sneak out there—he had a count of eight dead Germans.
Izvekov, a medic, would be dressing the wounded in a bunker on the front line, and then he’d run over to the firing positions and shoot at the Germans with his rifle. His count was twenty-one dead Germans.
Zekov, a medic from the 2nd Battalion, became a sniper, so then he had two qualifications: he was a medic and a sniper. His count was forty-five dead Germans. He was given the Order of the Red Star. He had one unfortunate incident—he killed one of our own pilots. One of our fighter planes rammed a German bomber. Two men came down in parachutes. The first one came down on our side. He was on fire, and there was a trail of smoke coming up from his parachute. We didn’t know whether he was one of us or one of them, and as he got closer to the ground they could hear him screaming. Zekov had a deadly hatred of the Germans, and he decided that this was the German pilot. He shot at him and killed the man in the parachute, who turned out to be our own pilot, twice decorated. Zekov was absolutely crushed, and it affected the regiment deeply. We buried the dead pilot. Zekov was tried and given a ten-year sentence, which was to be served out on the front line. Zekov was brave and energetic, a real fighter. Being a medic didn’t really suit him. While serving out his sentence on the front line, he started eliminating Germans together with Zaytsev, and by the end of the battle he’d killed forty-five Germans. His criminal record was wiped clean, and they gave him the Order of the Red Star.
Even the commander’s adjutants would sneak out to try their hand at sniping.
As soon as the chief of staff got to the front line, he would shoot every one of the machine guns. This was also something I did myself. We’d often have to inspect the machine-gun nests. You’d go to the front line for inspections, to check the battalion’s combat readiness and, above all, the automatic weapons. I loved shooting the machine guns.
Zaytsev taught his men individually, in groups, and also at meetings of the sniper detachment. The sniper detachment raised the level of our defenses even more, strengthening our resistance. In a very short span of time our snipers brought heavy losses to the enemy, forced them to keep low, and kept them from moving about in the open. Another reason the snipers did so well was that they spent extended periods of time covering literally every approach, every bunker and trench. The second a German tried to take a look around, he’d get a bullet from one of our men. Colonel Metelyov’s regiment was famous in Stalingrad and on the entire Stalingrad Front for being a sniper regiment. The exploits of our regiment’s snipers were constantly being written about in the papers. That encouraged and inspired the snipers, and also got word of their experiences to soldiers in other units. Zaytsev was a skilled agitator: he was a strong and persuasive speaker. Since he was a member of the Komsomol bureau, he would tour the subunits on Komsomol business, and at the same time he promoted the sniper movement.
The daily reinforcement of our forward defensive line played a major role in the active defense of Stalingrad. I, for example, was moved from regimental headquarters and specially assigned to the 1st Battalion at Mamayev Kurgan. The battalion commander was Lieutenant Georgy Benesh. I was there at Mamayev Kurgan every two or three days, and the two of us were always busy strengthening the front line. [ . . . ]
Commander Benesh was a truly brave man: a scout, a sniper, and an excellent tactician. He never thought about death, he laughed at death. When he was asked whether he was afraid of dying, he said that he carried death around with him up until the fighting at Kiev, and after Kiev he banished it from his heart. This one time, the two of us were on our way to the front line. We climbed up Mamayev Kurgan and came under German machine-gun fire. We had to lie down. I yelled at him: “Get down!” He was always cracking jokes and he said to me with a laugh: “If Benesh is going to die fighting for Stalingrad, then he’s going to die on his feet.” He liked messing with people. When we made it to the front line, I couldn’t see anyone around, but Benesh was all ready to shoot his sniper rifle. I put up the periscope and started looking. They started shooting my periscope right away, the Germans were following us that closely. I moved to another location. But Benesh popped out and started shooting. I saw that he’d taken off his cap and was looking over the top of the periscope. A German jumped out from behind a tank and started running for the water tank. Benesh got him. He said that made eleven Germans he’d killed.
I was out with him several times, both during the day and at night, and he never had any regard for his safety. You could say it was criminal, how little he took care of himself. And he died for nothing, he died stupidly. He was moving from one building to another, and he was killed by a random mortar shell. He’d been with the medic Rada Zavadskaya. He told her: “You and me, Rada, defending Stalingrad.” Benesh was a poet. He was Vasily Grossman’s step-nephew. He’d recently asked me to look for Grossman, but I never managed to do it. Benesh was nominated for a medal, and the order for his promotion and decoration came three days after he died. He was decorated for the fighting at Kastornaya.117 On the subject of Grossman I should say that when he spoke with our regimental commander, he didn’t so much as ask about Benesh, and he showed no interest in his diary.118 His diary was burned. There were a lot of complaints in it about cowardly commanders, and a lot of poetry and outspoken words. Benesh was buried in a cemetery on the riverbank. Since then that cemetery has been known as the burial place for the commanders of the 1047th Regiment.119
[Interview continues, May 8, 1943]
No one wanted to take Mamayev Kurgan as much as Benesh, and no one talked about it as often. I remember how you could go up to him at night, “Let’s go to the front,” and he’d say: “Let’s go.” He was always going there.
The men in Batyuk’s division were the only ones at Mamayev Kurgan from September 21 to January 12. We took heavy losses there. The Germans wanted to push us off the hill completely. We wanted to take those water tanks at any cost because Mamayev Kurgan was the dominant height in the city. On a clear day you could see it about ten kilometers away. It rose about eighty meters above Stalingrad. At the beginning we were having to shoot upward. That’s the most hazardous and awkward combat situation: the reverse slope defense. It’s impossible to set up a successful fire plan. We were constantly having to try to get up to that ridge, and we considered it a victory if we managed to push the Germans back to gain five to seven meters in a night. [ . . . ]
An interesting thing happened on October 18. I was in good spirits. As I was looking out over the city I could sense the whole of Stalingrad, and I started thinking about Tsaritsyn, the defense of Tsaritsyn, which I’d only recently given a lecture on at the pedagogical institute. And now here I was defending Stalingrad myself. I told my comrades about these recollections, and I told them how in 1918 Mamayev Kurgan was comrade Stalin’s command and observation post. Not many of them knew that. They knew that Stalin had been in Tsaritsyn, that he defended Tsaritsyn, but they didn’t know any details. Benesh wanted to know more. He dragged me into the bunker of Lieutenant Litvenenko, where about fifteen people had gathered, and I began telling them about the defense of Tsaritsyn. I delivered an ad hoc lecture for an hour. The story was still fresh in my mind and well suited to the occasion. When they were leaving the bunker, they all wanted to see the trenches from 1918. Benesh used this story, and he asked me to tell other companies about the defense of Tsaritsyn. Afterward the men better understood the symbolic meaning of the defense of Stalingrad. The fact that Stalin had been here went deep into the hearts of these men, and it inspired them. Benesh wanted to take Mamayev Kurgan all the more after hearing that story. We jokingly referred to Mamayev Kurgan as the sacred place, the place where Stalin had been.
On November 20 our division and the entire 62nd Army got the order to attack. The men and officers received that order with great enthusiasm. [ . . . ] Our regiment was the unit from the division that was slated to attack Mamayev Kurgan and the water tanks. Benesh was gone by then. Zhidkikh was now the commander of 1st Battalion. 2nd Battalion was in the Metiz factory, and 3rd Battalion was advancing with us on the south slope of the hill. But the most important task was to be completed by the 1st Battalion of the 1047th Regiment. By then we’d already developed some new offensive tactics. We understood by then that small assault groups were much more successful. All the battalions and regiments attacked in small assault groups, and that was the only way we could attack, even though Mamayev Kurgan was like being out in the country more than in a city or even a village.
The first attacks were unsuccessful, and we were taking a lot of casualties. The men threw themselves into the assault. Officers broke every rule and ran out in front, but they were still unsuccessful. Out of twenty men in the battalion only four or five would be left. The rest were either killed or wounded. We attacked three or four times that day, at different times of the day: early morning and sunset, during the day and at night. We tried everything and had nothing to show for it. In those early days we attacked with tanks. Two tanks went behind the water tanks—one was destroyed, the other went missing. Our three remaining tanks were immobilized. One broke down, and the other two were on fire.
Incidentally, not much was accomplished during our heaviest stage of artillery preparation. Our artillery support was often inaccurate, and there was some friendly fire. On the 20th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th, and 25th we were fighting constantly for the water tanks. I spent the first few days at our headquarters. The commander and chief of staff were there the whole time. On the 26, 27th, and 28th, I was on the front line at an observation post with the battalion commander, Lieutenant Ustyuzhanin. Three battalions attacked the water tanks over the course of five or six days. We hit them from the sides. On the sixth day we managed to move about two hundred meters north of the water tanks and pose a real threat. That weakened the Germans’ position. Now we could strike them on their flanks. 3rd Battalion moved to the south where they could hit them from the side, and 2nd Battalion was to the west of the water tanks, where they could hit them straight-on. That way we were able to hit them from three sides, but even with that we still weren’t able to take the water tanks. Then, on January 10, 1943, we took them, and Mamayev Kurgan was ours. We wanted to know what these things were like in terms of their layout. I also climbed into these tanks. The walls were made of reinforced concrete, about a meter thick, and they were buried in dirt on the outside so that they looked less like tanks than hills. There were two of these, with partitions on the inside, where the water had been. They’d cut a lot of embrasures in the tanks, and these were hard to get at. The whole thing was a pillbox the Germans had set up for artillery. They had at least twenty machine guns there. There were great positions for the German snipers, who killed a lot of our officers. [ . . . ]
The first snow came to Stalingrad on the 28th. The day before there’d been wind and rain. Our overcoats were frozen solid. Everyone was cold and miserable. Lieutenant Salnikov, 1st Battalion’s deputy commander for operations, was sent to the front line to make sure everything was in order. He ended up crawling from one trench to another trying to encourage the men. They got ten men as reinforcements. They brought them breakfast at dawn. Salnikov promised that they’d be getting their winter gear that day, and he ordered company commander Shevelyov to prepare for the attack. We were supposed to attack together with the division’s training battalion, which was attached to us, and with the 1st Battalion of the 1043rd Regiment. When everything was nearly ready, Salnikov went out to the front line. He wanted to take another look to see that all the men were where they needed to be. It was already light out. A German sniper took aim and shot Salnikov in the head. And that’s how Salnikov, one of our most loyal Old Bolsheviks, was killed.
We attacked again at ten o’clock on the 28th, but we didn’t take the tanks that time either. The training battalion was almost completely destroyed—there were only a few men left. You could say that after that attack our division’s training battalion ceased to exist. Some of the commanders were sent to our regiment, some to divisional HQ. [ . . . ]
The offensives in December were also pretty rough. We had very few gains, but our operations in the city did finally contain the enemy, and that was important for the units attacking from the west: to prevent the enemy from maneuvering now that they were encircled.
Our regiment was sent over to the northern slopes of Mamayev Kurgan. We were defending the area between the railway line, which lay on the east side of the hill, and the water tanks. In November our regiment’s path to Mamayev Kurgan was obstructed by those water tanks we weren’t able to take. Now what was in our way was the Unnamed Height, which was one of the heights on the north side of Mamayev Kurgan. We had to take this height, and anyway it was keeping us from taking the tanks. It was a bit taller than the other heights, and the Germans were very solidly entrenched there, with no fewer than thirty machine guns and a whole system of communication trenches and bunkers. What’s more, they had a nice approach to the hill where they had clean lines of sight from their many bunkers. At night they would slip out and improve their defenses, and, when necessary, send in reinforcements.
On January 12–13 the 1043rd and 1045th regiments finally took the water tanks and began moving toward the western slopes of Mamayev Kurgan. The Germans dominated Mamayev Kurgan from that Unnamed Height, so we had to take that height.
1st Battalion’s commander at the time was Captain Zhidkikh, and his deputy was Lieutenant Bolvachyov.
For one whole day we got ready to storm the height. Small assault teams were formed. At 1:00 P.M. on January 14, these assault teams attacked the pillboxes and bunkers in waves from the front and a little from the right flank.
I was at 2nd Battalion’s command post, about seventy meters from the forward edge, on the railway line. Small groups went into the attack, forty men in total. The Germans obviously outnumbered us, both in men and machine guns. We had more mortars. Until 1:00 P.M. it was just the usual shooting from both sides. It was a cold, frosty day. We didn’t have any artillery preparation. It was quiet all around. You could tell that the Germans were holed up in their bunkers, not expecting an attack, since it was an unusual time for an attack. We had five cannons set out in the open. They started shooting at the bunkers where there was smoke. The attack was delayed by half an hour. One group of submachine gunners in white camouflage ran the hundred meters and rushed the German trenches, splitting up and attacking the bunkers from both ends. The Germans jumped out of the bunkers, and our men found themselves right up next to them. One assault group was led by Private Antonov, another group was led by Sergeant Kudryavtsev, the third by Lieutenant Babayev, and the fourth group by Lieutenant Maksimov. All of them distinguished themselves that day and in the coming battles.
I felt like this wasn’t real fighting, that this was all just for practice. After four months in Stalingrad we had become so used to danger, so numbed by danger, that it often seemed as if these were just exercises rather than combat. This time was like that: it felt like a training mission. Our men were wearing white camouflage, but the Germans didn’t have any, and you could easily pick out their dark figures. You could see people’s breaths in the cold air.
Antonov burst into the trench, grabbed a rifle by the barrel, and started hitting Germans in the head left and right. By the way, we didn’t use bayonets in Stalingrad, all of them got tossed aside. I ordered our big guns to shoot just above the Germans’ heads to cut off any approaching groups. Then men took Antonov’s gun-swinging as a sign to cease fire. A sniper yelled at me, telling me to stop shooting.
Through my binoculars I could see Antonov beating the Germans, and Kudryavtsev’s group coming from the opposite direction and throwing grenades at the Germans in their trenches. That’s when the intense grenade fight began. Then Maksimov’s group threw themselves into the fight. The whole thing took about fifteen to twenty minutes. The Germans still hadn’t had time to recover and hadn’t really started shooting. It seemed strange that there was all this hand-to-hand combat, that the Germans weren’t shooting. There wasn’t any fire from our side, either, nothing from the machine guns or mortars. But that was because we didn’t want hit our own men. All the fighting took place in the German trenches.
When our men went up the hill in their camouflage, the Germans threw reinforcements at them from above. Then our machine guns, mortars, and artillery opened fire, and that kept the Germans from holding them back. That day we took most of the height, but not all of it.
[ . . . ] We took possession of the entire hill on January 16. We knocked the Germans back down the western slopes. The fighting lasted two days. Afterward we raised a red flag with the words: “For the Motherland, for Stalin!” The slogan was written by the regiment’s propagandist, Captain Rakityansky. [ . . . ]
“The Red Flag Flies on Mamayev Kurgan,” 1943. Photographer: Georgy Zelma
We said it was a historic day: January 26, the day we met up with the Don Front. An unforgettable day, an unforgettable meeting. I was at regimental HQ. It wasn’t easy staying at headquarters when both the commander and chief of staff had left for the front line. I couldn’t leave because I was on the phone with the observation post.
At 10:00 A.M. I heard from 1st Battalion’s observation post that Shavrin, a scout, had seen nine tanks approaching Mamayev Kurgan from the northwest. We had the idea that these ought to be ours, but we were worried that maybe the Germans might be trying their luck, disguising themselves in our uniforms. It was impossible to know right away whose tanks they were. After a few minutes the scout said now it was fourteen tanks. Then he saw a red flag on the lead vehicle, and we knew right away that those tanks were Russian, not German.’ We’d put up red flags on the Unnamed Height, on the water tanks, and on the boxcars. That way approaching units would be able to identify us. Everyone was on their guard then. We were nearing the historic moment when the two fronts came together.
At 11:00 A.M. Captain Kotov, commander of 2nd Battalion, reported that his men had gone up to the lead vehicle. The men greeted one another and exchanged kisses, and for a moment they forgot about the war. It seemed as if we weren’t at war. I asked whose unit it was. Captain Kotov said that it was the lead vehicle of a Colonel Nezhinsky. Then he sent his major to meet our regimental commanders. The meeting took place at the flag pole on the Unnamed Height. There was also a meeting on the western slopes of Mamayev Kurgan. A brief rally was organized, and they were officially received by our division’s political chief, Colonel Tkachenko. They wrote about this in Pravda.
When this meeting took place between the two fronts—the 62nd Army and the Don Front—the encircled enemy forces were split in half. From then on there were two encircled groups: a southern group in the center of the city and a northern group, centered on the Barricades factory. The commander of the Don Front had apparently decided to destroy these groups in turn. First it was to be the southern group in the center of the city, which was much stronger and was rumored to be where Paulus was, which turned out to be the case. [ . . . ]
On January 28 we finished the operation, and by order of the divisional commanders our regiment was sent to the northern slopes of the Long Ravine near Ryazhskaya and Artillery streets. Our mission was to break the enemy defenses in the Long Ravine and move toward the center of the city along the railway line.
We fought all day on the 28th and took a lot of casualties, but we didn’t take a single meter from the Germans. We’d come up against some of their long-standing defensive positions. The Long Ravine was fortified with many firing points and emplacements, the slopes were mined and covered in barbed wire, and we weren’t able to take it. [ . . . ] The divisional commander ordered us to do anything necessary to complete our mission, but we had only a few men.120 [ . . . ] The men were worn out. Some slept while the others manned the machine guns and other weapons. The battalion commanders also slept. [ . . . ] I looked after the men, made sure they were well fed and were getting enough to drink. We prepared all night. Ustyuzhanin and I had a clear idea how strong the German’s defenses were. We couldn’t overpower them by brute force, but we were betting that their morale was hanging by a thread. We needed to organize everything and prepare a coordinated attack so we could make a quick strike on the Germans, demoralize them, and take them prisoner. Other regiments were betting on the same thing.
The regimental commander sent me to our command post, where I acted on his behalf and explained our upcoming mission in detail, not as an order but as a decision for each battalion commander to make for himself. [ . . . ] Some of our scouts managed to get far behind enemy lines and chanced upon the German battalion commander’s command post, where he was with his adjutant. The other Germans were in bunkers on the front line. As soon as the adjutant jumped out and started shooting, our men started throwing grenades. Then the battalion commander came out with his hands in the air. He was a neat, robust officer in a greatcoat that didn’t fit well. And I’ve got to say, he was the only German wearing a greatcoat.
That was when the assault groups crossed the defensive lines, flanking the Germans and throwing grenades. That caught them off guard. They started running away one by one. When we found out we had the German commander, we took him to a high place, gave him a sheet, and ordered him to signal his men to surrender. It was getting light out. The German commander waved the sheet, telling his men to surrender. German soldiers started putting up their hands and giving themselves up by the dozen. Scouts and officers disarmed them and stacked their weapons in a pile. At first there were sixty men, and after some time more than a hundred had surrendered.
The 1043rd and 1045th Regiments came just in time to share the prisoners. That morning our regiment took 172 prisoners. At the time that was the most prisoners ever taken by a regiment. Afterward, though, there were still more. I took prisoners, took their weapons. Our guys had a bit of fun with them. The Germans were wrapped up in all kinds of things. One of them had a blanket on each foot. Others wore sheets and looked like scarecrows. We got them in formation and took them to our regimental command post. I gave a report to our divisional commander, and they congratulated us on our successes. I also reported this to army commander Chuikov when I passed by his command post.
Then a cameraman came and told us to climb up the steep bank. He chose the best place for filming, with Stalingrad in the background, and up front there were prisoners on the slope along with the battalion commander in the bad coat. I was walking behind swinging a whip. That was one of the more interesting days in the history of our regiment.
We crossed the Long Ravine, and since there weren’t any strong enemy defenses we were able to move into the center of the city.
Our successes continued on January 30 as our division moved to the Ninth of January Square. The Germans were still holding out. There hadn’t been any instances of entire German regiments surrendering. They were broken, but still they weren’t surrendering entire units. The northern group even pushed back part of our encirclement, and there was a certain amount of danger. [ . . . ]
The Germans set up a perimeter defense around the Central Hotel. German officers were standing at all the entrances. They were incidents when they’d stick out a flag of surrender from the second floor, and when you went to get your prisoners they’d shoot from the other floors. After that we took a Polish prisoner who we were able to use as a truce envoy. He went about a dozen times and brought out groups of fifteen to twenty Germans. He was a good propagandist, and only too willing to pick out German officers and snipers to be shot.
On the 30th, at the end of the day, the divisional commander asked what should be done with that officers’ house: destroy it or leave it. The radio message was something like this: “Ask the commander what is to be done with their garrison at the Central Hotel: leave it or destroy it.” The army commander ordered us to destroy the garrison. What ended up happening was that we left some of our men, and the rest of the division moved in to occupy the central areas of the city and the train station. At 2:00 P.M. on the 31st the division reached the Stalingrad train station. We took the station and met the 64th Army, which was coming up to the center from the south. You could say that by 2:00 P.M. on the 31st, the southern group of encircled Germans was done for, but the officers in the Central Hotel were still holding out.
The commander again heard reports about the difficulties of storming the Central Hotel. His orders were to take it immediately, and he gave us five tanks for the job. We had four or five assault groups in our regiment. Maksimov, Babayev, and Kudryavtsev proved themselves again, and they were later given awards. When the tanks rolled up and started firing point-blank at the building, our assault groups broke inside, but even there the Germans continued to resist. About one hundred of them were killed, and sixty surrendered. We captured their hospital. I couldn’t believe it was a hospital. The orderlies were wearing new overcoats, absolutely spotless. I guessed that they were officers in disguise, though they did everything they could to show they weren’t officers and had nothing to do with defending the building.
Prisoners of war in Stalingrad, 1943. Photographer: Natalya Bode
This last remaining German stronghold in the center of the city fell at 4:00 P.M. on the 31st. Our artist did a sketch of the building.
Our regiment’s single greatest loss came on the 31st. A mine killed Captain Vasily Ivanovich Rakityansky,121 the regiment’s propagandist, a fearless soldier who had been wounded twice on the front line. He was a Siberian too. He’d been a second secretary in the Narymsk City Party Committee. He was a writer and a political worker. What he wanted most that day was to go with the men to the front line, and once they had taken the stronghold, he had a red flag ready to go. He’d set things up with the cameraman: Rakityansky was going to take the red flag and place it on the hotel. The cameraman was already getting ready to film when Rakityansky stepped on that mine. A pointless way to die.122 [ . . . ]
On February 1 the whole division moved from the center of the city to go fight against the northern group. [ . . . ] On the night of the 2nd we got orders to advance toward the airport and the parachute tower and then turn right toward the Barricades factory. It’s interesting to note that the soldiers started attacking even before they got the order. They could see things were going pretty well, that the Germans weren’t shooting much, that they were surrendering, and so they started attacking about half an hour before the order. By the time the regimental commander arrived, the fighting had already begun. The Germans were putting up a good fight, especially at the Barricades factory, but we attacked swiftly and in full strength. That day we took more than eight hundred prisoners. Throughout the fighting in Stalingrad we took 1,554 prisoners. At that point we were trying to take out isolated centers of German resistance. The Barricades factory was well defended. We captured regimental commanders, chiefs of staff. At the end we were interrogating the officers. I remember being in a bunker when they brought me this deputy chief of staff for their 113th Division, a major. We’d captured their deputy chief of staff for logistics and the commandant. These prisoners answered deviously, trying to be loyal. During the interrogations they didn’t remember everything right away, they’d get things wrong. But others would jump in to correct them, and they seemed sincere, as if they were trying to demonstrate their sincerity. One major was wearing a Red Army cap with a swastika. One soldier from our headquarters platoon pulled the cap from his head, ripped off the swastika, threw it at him, and tossed the cap to the side.
We also took the Barricades factory. That was the last stronghold of the northern group. The Barricades factory fell at 1:30 P.M. on February 2. Just after 3:00 P.M. all our operations had ended, and our division went to the banks of the Volga.
You can consider 2:30 P.M. a historic moment, the time when the guns stopped firing in the battle of Stalingrad. When I heard that on the telephone, I wrote this in my diary: “Glory to the victors! Today, at 2:30 P.M. on February 2, 1943, the last of the fighting in Stalingrad ended at the Barricades factory. The final shot of this great battle rang out at that historic moment. Today the guns are quiet. Stalingrad has been successfully defended, and thousands of Germans are plodding their way across the Volga. They have witnesses firsthand our ability to fight and win. I know that our descendants will remember this battle far into the future. Only now, as the pressure begins to subside, can I begin think of just how much we’ve done in Stalingrad.”
A few words on the prisoners. They were demoralized. At first we were looking them over one by one, but then we lost all interest. They were already saying “Hitler kaput,” to which one of our men remarked: “It’s not November [1942] for you anymore, now the whole bunch of you is kaput.”
One time we did a search of some prisoners. There were about seventy of them. I started talking to them through an interpreter. The regimental commander came and asked what I was talking to them about. I said I was asking them whether they’d seen the Volga. It turned out that most of them hadn’t. Then the regimental commander turned to them and said, via the interpreter, that today they would finally be crossing the river. And within half an hour there was a line of prisoners stretching across the Volga. [ . . . ]
We were in Stalingrad until March 6. We took a short break after the fighting, and then we started studying. Our task was to examine the German systems of defense. We gathered our intel from the field. The commanders climbed around all the enemy bunkers, trenches, and firing points to identify our own shortcomings and to arrive at some conclusions based on our combat experiences and to get something we could make use of down the line.
Red Army soldiers in the ruins of Stalingrad, February 1943.
All this intel was collected and summarized by the headquarters staffs. The staffs were working especially hard. I reported my information to the regimental commander, and the regimental commanders gave their reports to the divisional commander, and the divisional commander invited the division’s entire command staff—down to the battalion commanders—to come hear his detailed analysis of the information. The walls of the club were covered in maps and the organizational charts of regiments and divisions. The divisional commander himself gave a very interesting report on his own division’s combat ability. [ . . . ]
On February 25 I crossed the Volga for the first time in 156 days. I was up in front with the officers. When we reached the village of Krasnaya Sloboda, the first thing we were struck by was a house that was entirely intact. Smoke was coming from the chimney. We were so used to bombed-out buildings that seeing an entire house was a rare thing, it really stood out. We even stopped to take a look. [ . . . ]
Many of us received orders and medals for Stalingrad. Some were decorated posthumously. Three battalion commanders in our regiment were the first in the division to receive the Order of Alexander Nevsky for their struggle against superior enemy forces, for their experience and resourcefulness in tactical matters. The Order of Alexander Nevsky was awarded to Captain Kotov, Captain Nikiteyev, and Captain Ponomaryov.
February 10 was a momentous day for the division. That was the day the government issued a decree that awarded the 284th Division the Order of the Red Banner. We celebrated to mark the occasion.
March 2 was also significant. That’s when we learned that Colonel Batyuk was being promoted to major general.
But the most important day in the history of our division was March 5, the day we heard on the radio that we were being renamed: from now we were the 79th Guards Division. [ . . . ]
On February 24, the day I got the Order of the Red Star, I managed to get a car and go take pictures of Stalingrad, anything I thought worth photographing. At that time they were collecting the bodies of dead Germans. In the center of the city I met this civilian and I asked who he was. He said he ran the military department of the Stalingrad City Committee and that he was in charge of collecting the bodies. I asked how many they’d collected. That day they’d collected 8,700 German corpses in the city. I started taking pictures. There were piles of German corpses, two or three hundred, even six hundred piled on top of one another. Nothing in Stalingrad stood out as much as those mountains of bodies, those thousands of truckloads of bodies. I also photographed the bombed-out buildings, the field hospitals where wounded Germans still lay. I went into on German hospital in the City Theater. They were all mixed together: the sick, the wounded, and the dead. There was an awful stench. I found it hard to keep myself from finishing off the wounded.
When we left Stalingrad on March 6, we passed through what used to be the lines of the encirclement. Scattered over dozens of kilometers there were cars, tanks, guns of every caliber, mortars, and lots and lots of bodies. The battlefield was a vast cemetery with no graves. Again we were assured of just how great this battle of Stalingrad was.
Sometimes you’d see a village in an open field, and you’d think maybe you could make a stop. But as you get closer it turns out that it’s just a heap of vehicles that looks like a village. So there were cemeteries for equipment too.
We had a rally in the field on March 7, when we found out that comrade Stalin was being given the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. That made us all very happy. We’d said it before, that it would be nice to see him in uniform.
All of comrade Stalin’s documents and orders made a great impression on us. When things were at their worst, we knew that we weren’t alone. I remember in October—our worst month—I was walking at night with my orderly, Korostylyov, and we had to wait in a crater for the shooting to stop. I asked him, jokingly, whether he thought Stalingrad could hold out. He said: “I don’t think Stalin’s got it wrong.” He said this straightforwardly but with a strong belief that Stalin was thinking a lot about those of us who were in Stalingrad.
After the battle. Photographer: Sergei Strunnikov
We felt this especially strongly when we heard they were bringing out the new Medal for the Defense of Stalingrad and giving three cities the honorary title of Hero City.123
Our regiment’s clerk responded to one of Stalin’s decrees (from November, I think) like this: “Nothing brings order to my thoughts like this decree.” In that way comrade Stalin’s decrees brought order to both the activities and thoughts of our men. We always felt that he cared for us, and we could always sense his wisdom.
In Stalingrad I became a member of the party. In Stalingrad I became a captain and received the Order of the Red Banner.
[Signature:] N. Aksyonov, May 20, 1943
[Handwritten] Transcript read. Major Aksyonov, March 5, 1946