On February 23, 1943, three weeks after its victory at Stalingrad, the Red Army commemorated its twenty-fifth anniversary. A young army, it still showed traces of its origins in the Russian Revolution and the Civil War that followed (1917–1921). How present the revolutionary era was for many Soviet soldiers in Stalingrad can be illustrated by the interviews with General Vasily Chuikov and General Alexander Rodimtsev, who tell how they joined up with the Red Army in the commotion of the revolution and earned their spurs in the Civil War. But other links, institutional and intellectual, also existed between the Civil War and World War II. The Red Workers and Peasants Army—renamed the Soviet Army in 1946—understood itself as a new kind of revolutionary organization. It was “the world’s first political army,” equipped with an arsenal of words as well as weapons.79 This ambition found striking expression in an early emblem of the Red Army, which depicted a gun and a book alongside the hammer and sickle.80
The Red Army began as a volunteer army fueled by the revolutionary spirit of armed workers, the so-called Red Guards. In the summer of 1918, when enemies closed around Soviet Russia, Leon Trotsky, as war commissar of the Red Army, introduced general conscription, opening the army for millions of soldiers from the countryside. Lenin was appalled as he watched the ragged recruits march across Red Square on the first anniversary of the October Revolution.81 Yet from the outset the Bolsheviks tried to mold the members of the Peasants Army. They initiated mandatory instruction in reading, writing, and math and appealed constantly to the recruits’ political consciousness in the hope they would fight for the new system from personal belief and conviction.82 Toward the end of the Civil War, the Red Army consisted of 5 million soldiers, far more than necessary to defeat the Whites. For the Soviet leadership, the crucial motivation lay elsewhere: making sure that as many people as possible acquired the rudiments of socialism.
As Marxists, the Bolsheviks brought to the recruits a broad understanding of politics. Each was an actor on the world-historical stage; every thought and action carried political significance. The Bolsheviks wanted the recruits to internalize the message and fight of their own free will because they believed this would make them better soldiers and citizens. Their idea of humanity was thoroughly voluntarist: a person with a fully developed will could achieve anything. Soviet communists understood people as products of their environment and hence saw human nature as adaptable. Peasants unskilled in war were ignorant but they could learn. Deserters who showed remorse and recognized the error of their ways got a second chance. By contrast, deserters in the White Army were summarily executed, as was common practice in tsarist Russia.83
To monitor troops in their beliefs, Soviet leaders introduced a comprehensive system of political surveillance. During World War I many governments kept tabs on troop morale, but none went as far as the Bolsheviks. In the 1920s and 1930s and throughout World War II and after, military censors under the direction of the secret police screened all letters written by Red Army soldiers.84 The letters were not sealed but folded into triangles, each bearing the censor’s stamp and signature. In contrast, Wehrmacht mail inspectors made do with spot checks.85
The Soviet practice of surveillance always included an educational mission. The Bolsheviks wanted to educate the ignorant, convert the skeptical, and root out die-hard “counterrevolutionaries.” Because the system of surveillance and education reached deeply into everyday life, Red Army soldiers were familiar with the moral categories of Soviet leaders. Faintheartedness, bourgeois values, and political indifference were anathema; open criticism of superiors in mail correspondence, inadvisable; selfless and heroic action, the ideal.
The Communist party had a strong institutional presence in the Red Army from the outset. The Bolsheviks formed party cells at all levels of the army down to the company. Commissars (politruks at the company level and voenkoms at the higher echelons) served as direct representatives of the government. Initially, their primary task was to monitor the military commander to whom they were assigned and with whom they held equal military rank. All orders issued by commanders required the express approval of their respective commissar.86 This dual system of military and political leadership grew out of Trotsky’s decision in the spring of 1918 to enlist thousands of former tsarist officers in the Red Army.87 Trotsky believed that the military expertise of these “bourgeois specialists” would benefit the Soviet regime because the Red Workers and Peasants Army had so few experienced commanders. (Trotsky and other Bolsheviks purposely avoided the terms “officer” and “soldier,” which they associated with the hierarchies and class differences of the tsarist army. Instead, they spoke of “Red Army men” or “fighters.” Any mention of “soldiers” referred to enemy troops.) Many other Bolsheviks, including Stalin and his associate Kliment Voroshilov, disagreed with Trotsky. They found former members of the tsarist army repulsive both personally and politically. The conflict between Stalin and Trotsky smoldered for several years before erupting publicly.
A portrayal of the relationship between the commissar and the commander is found in Dmitri Furmanov’s autobiographical novel Chapayev (1923). Furmanov was a provincial teacher before joining the Bolshevik party in 1918 and entering the Red Army the following year. There he served as the commissar for divisional commander Vasily Chapayev as they fought side by side against Admiral Alexander Kolchak’s White Army in the Urals. In his novel, Furmanov depicts Chapayev as a brash go-getter, brimming with a peasant’s anarchistic fervor. The unit’s commissar, a disciplined fighter and a patient teacher, must harness Chapayev’s energy if the backwoods commander is to benefit the revolution. Over the course of many conversations the commissar instills a higher political consciousness in the physically powerful but mentally malleable Chapayev.
In 1934 the novel was adapted into a film, establishing Chapayev as a heroic Soviet icon. Stalin had seen the film dozens of times within a year and a half of its release. He knew the scenes and dialogue by heart and reanalyzed the actors and plot at every screening.88 Several of the soldiers interviewed in Stalingrad mentioned Chapayev, and a gunboat in the Volga Military Flotilla bore his name.
Interestingly, the film contains a subplot not found in the novel: a budding romance between two supporting characters, Chapayev’s adjutant Petya and a machine gunner named Anka. Initially not taken seriously by Petya, Anka proves herself by valiantly repelling an attack by the Whites. In a pivotal scene, the enemy troops, dressed in regal uniforms and marching in full formation—as the film makes clear, the purpose is intimidation—close in on the outnumbered Reds. Anka’s comrades are eager to fire their guns and storm the enemy troops, but Anka waits until they are almost on top of her before opening fire, furiously cutting them down with a Maxim machine gun. Her actions inspired many young women to enlist in 194189 and symbolized the presence of mind and strength of will vaunted by the Bolsheviks. But the psychological intimidation depicted in the film was a fantasy, fed by the belief that the enemy sought to break communist will. Red Army soldiers in Stalingrad spoke repeatedly of German “psychic attacks.” In all likelihood this impression had more to do with Chapayev than with the actual intentions of the enemy.90
The culture of the Red Army during the Civil War was marked by not only political mobilization but also raw physical violence. Many of the commanders interviewed in Stalingrad cut their teeth as young men in the Civil War. The future army commander Vasily Chuikov learned how to cement his authority with beatings and executions. Writer Isaak Babel, working as a war correspondent, described how the commander Semyon Timoshenko, “a colossus in red half-leather trousers, red cap, well-built,” whipped his regiment officers with a riding crop and shot at them with his pistol to drive them into battle. Babel also observed Kliment Voroshilov—later a confidant of Stalin’s and part of the Soviet political and military leadership in World War II—berating a divisional commander in front of his troops while riding to and fro on horseback.91 Babel recorded brutal violence among the troops, executions of Polish prisoners of war, and assaults on Jews and other civilians. Although horrified, he continued to express his admiration for the soldiers’ heroic deeds and convictions, which he helped foster in his reports from the war zone.