NOTES

CHAPTER 1: THE FATEFUL BATTLE

1. Evgenii Kriger, “Eto—Stalingrad!” Izvestiia, October 25, 1942; see also M. Galaktionov, “Stalingrad i Verden,” Krasnaia Zvezda, October 3, 1942, p. 4.

2. Jens Wehner, “Stalingrad,” in Stalingrad, ed. Gorch Pieken et al. (Dresden, 2012), pp. 19–20.

3. Richard Overy, “Stalingrad und seine Wahrnehmung bei den Westalliierten,” in Stalingrad, ed. Gorch Pieken, pp. 106–117, at p. 113.

4. In fall 1942 British postal censors reported that virtually every letter checked by them lauded the Russians. Philip M. H. Bell, “Großbritannien und die Schlacht von Stalingrad,” in Stalingrad. Ereignis-Wirkung-Symbol, ed. Jürgen Förster (Munich, 1992), pp. 350–372, at p. 354.

5. Meldungen aus dem Reich. Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1938–1945, 17 vols., ed. Heinz Boberach, (Herrsching, 1984), 12:4720; January 28, 1943.

6. Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington, IN, 1999), pp. 173–177.

7. Soviet writer Vasily Grossman was the first to link Himmler’s visit to the death camp to the Soviet victory at Stalingrad. Grossman was with the Red Army when it entered Treblinka in August 1944. Based on interviews with eyewitnesses and former camp workers he produced a harrowing account of the Nazi death camp. Vasily Grossman, “The Hell of Treblinka,” in The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays (New York, 2010).

8. Alexander Werth, The Year of Stalingrad: An Historical Record and a Study of Russian Mentality, Methods, and Policies (1947; Safety Harbor, FL, 2001), p. 438. A British correspondent reported from Stalingrad for the Daily Telegraph as early as January 18, 1943. Bell, “Großbritannien und die Schlacht von Stalingrad,” p. 350.

9. See https://archive.org/details/WartimeRadio1943.

10. Alexander Werth, “Won’t Survive Two Stalingrads,” Winnipeg Tribune, February 12, 1943, p. 1; Henry Shapiro, “All of Stalingrad Ruined by Battles,” New York Times, February 9, 1943, p. 3.

11. Werth, Year of Stalingrad, pp. 443–446. In spite of these constraints, Alexander Werth was able to conduct and reproduce verbatim in-depth conversations with Generals Vasily Chuikov and Alexander Rodimtsev, two famous figures at Stalingrad whose much more detailed testimony figures in the present book. Werth, The Year of Stalingrad, pp. 456–460, 468–470.

12. Nauchnyi arkhiv Instituta Rossiiskoi istorii Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk (NA IRI RAN).

13. To illustrate the breadth of the interview corpus, Chapter 1 features many excerpts of voices from soldiers whose full transcripts did not enter the volume. A comprehensive online publication of the Stalingrad transcripts is planned.

14. The best military histories of the battle are, from the Axis side, Manfred Kehrig, Stalingrad: Analyse und Dokumentation einer Schlacht (Stuttgart, 1979); from the Soviet side, A. M. Samsonov, Stalingradskaia bitva, 4th ed. (Moscow, 1989); and from the two sides in interaction, David M. Glantz, To the Gates of Stalingrad: Soviet-German Combat Operations, April–August 1942 (Lawrence, KS, 2009); Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad: September–November 1942 (Lawrence, KS, 2009); Glantz, Endgame at Stalingrad: Book Two: December 1942–February 1943(Lawrence, KS, 2014).

15. See the diary entries and letters of Ursula von Kardoff und Rudolf Tjaden in Walter Kempowski, Das Echolot: Ein kollektives Tagebuch, Januar und Februar 1943, 4 vols. (Munich, 1993); Friedrich Kellner, Vernebelt, verdunkelt sind alle Hirne: Tagebücher 1939–1945, ed. Sascha Feuchert et al. (Göttingen, 2011).

16. Vasily S. Grossman, Gody voiny [The War Years] (Moscow, 1989), p. 5. A Soviet writer and journalist, Grossman (1905–1964) reported to the front voluntarily in summer 1941. As a war correspondent he reported for the newspaper Red Star (Krasnaya zvezda), including the battle of Stalingrad and the battle of Berlin.

17. Printed verbatim in Prikazy narodnogo komissara oborony SSSR. 22 iiuniia 1941 g.–1942 g. (=Velikaia Otechestvennaia, vol. 13) (Moscow, 1997), pp. 276–279.

18. Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Im Auftrag des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte und mit Unterstützung des Staatlichen Archivdienstes Russlands, ed. Elke Fröhlich, pt. 2: Diktate 1941–1945, vol. 5: Juli–September 1942 (Munich, 1995), p. 353; see also Bernd Wegner, Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1942/43, in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 6: Horst Boog et al., Der globale Krieg, vol. 6; Die Ausweitung zum Weltkrieg und der Wechsel der Initiative, ed. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Stuttgart, 1990), p. 993.

19. Lazar Brontman, Voennyi dnevnik korrespondenta “Pravdy”: Vstrechi, sobytiia, sud’by, 1942–1945 (Moscow, 2007), p. 57. Diary entry for August 30, 1942. See also Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, NY, 2012), pp. 74–75, 132–133.

20. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, p. 119.

21. For the Soviet military, “front” designated what Germans referred to as an army group.

22. Colonel general Andrei Ivanovich Yeryomenko (1892–1970) was appointed commander of the Southeastern Front and the Stalingrad Front on August 12, 1942. On September 28, 1942, the Southeastern Front became part of the Stalingrad Front.

23. Lieutenant General Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky (1896–1968) commanded the Don Front between September 1942 and January 1943.

24. For more, see Kehrig, Stalingrad, pp. 86–119.

25. “Das ist der Unterschied,” Das Schwarze Korps, October 29, 1942, pp. 1–2.

26. Johannes Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer: Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42 (Munich, 2007), pp. 326–340.

27. Facsimile of the order at http://www.historisches-tonarchiv.de/stalingrad/stalingrad-kampf175a.jpg.

28. General field marshal Erich von Manstein (1887–1973) was commander in chief of the Army Group Don between November 1942 and February 1943. The 6th Army formed part of this army group.

29. The Turkic term “Kurgan” means burial mound. Mamayev Kurgan is named after the Tatar military commander Mamai, who is buried there. On military maps the elevation was labeled “Hill 102.0.”

30. Werth, The Year of Stalingrad, p. 465.

31. Between August 21 and October 17, 1942, the 6th Army recorded 40,000 deaths, as well as an estimated 100,000 deaths up until November 19. In addition, there were an estimated 30,000 deaths in the 4th Panzer Army. Glantz, Armaggedon in Stalingrad, p. 716; Rüdiger Overmans, “Das andere Gesicht des Krieges: Leben und Sterben der 6. Armee,” in Förster, ed., Stalingrad: Ereignis—Wirkung—Symbol, p. 446. 113,000 survivors: Manfred Kehrig, “Die 6. Armee im Kessel von Stalingrad, in Stalingrad,” in Förster, ed., Stalingrad, p. 109. Overmans estimated the number of Romanian allies in the Kessel as only 5,000 (Overmans, “Das andere Gesicht,” pp. 441–442). Soviet loss figures in G. F. Krivosheev, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (London, 1997), pp. 125, 127; S. N. Michalev, Liudskie poteri v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine 1941–1945 gg. Statisticheskoe issledovanie (Krasnoiarsk, 2000), p. 17–41; for higher estimates, see B. V. Sokolov, “The Cost of War: Human Losses for the USSR and Germany, 1939–1945,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9 (March 1996): 152–193. Sokolov contends that the precise numbers given in divisional and army staff reports, which Krivosheev uses for his analysis, embellish the horrendous actual casualty rates in the Red Army. These, he writes, can be established only indirectly.

32. Stalingradskaia popeia: Vpervye publikuemye dokumenty, rassekrechennye FSB RF: Vospominaniia fel’dmarshala Pauliusa; Dnevniki i pis’ma soldat RKKA i vermakhta: Agenturnye doneseniia; Protokoly doprosov; Dokladnye zapiski osobykh otdelov frontov i armii (Moscow, 2000), p. 404.

33. Christian Gerlach, “Militärische ‘Versorgungszwänge,’ Besatzungspolitik, und Massenverbrechen: Die Rolle des Generalquartiermeisters des Heeres und seiner Dienststellen im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion,” in Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, Öffentlichkeit: Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Lagerpolitik, ed. Norbert Frei et al. (Munich, 2000), p. 199; T. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia: Grazhdanskoe naselenie v Stalingradskoi bitve (Volgograd, 2005), p. 521; S. Sidorov, “Voennoplennye v Stalingrade. 1943–1954 gg.,” in Rossiiane i nemtsy v epokhu katastrof. Pamiat’ o voine i preodolenie proshlogo, ed. Jochen Hellbeck, Lars-Peter Schmidt, Alexander Vatlin (Moscow, 2012), pp. 75–87.

34. For critical reflections on this, see Michael Kumpfmüller, Die Schlacht von Stalingrad: Metamorphosen eines deutschen Mythos (Munich, 1995); Wolfram Wette and Gerd R. Ueberschär, eds., Stalingrad: Mythos und Wirklichkeit einer Schlacht (Frankfurt, 2012); Wegner, Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1942/43, pp. 962–1063.

35. See Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad (Gütersloh, 1954); Kempowski, Das Echolot; Feldpostbriefe aus Stalingrad: November 1942 bis Februar 1943, ed. Jens Ebert (Göttingen, 2006).

36. Enlightening in this regard is Bernd Boll and Hans Safrian, “On the Way to Stalingrad: The 6th Army in 1941–1942,” in War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941–1944, Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds., (New York, 2000), pp. 237–271.

37. Stalingrad: Eine Trilogie, directed by Sebastian Dehnhardt and Manfred Oldenburg.

38. Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories, trans. Anthony G. Powell (Chicago, 1958), p. 289.

39. Feldpostbriefe aus Stalingrad; Es grüsst Euch alle; Bertold. Von Koblenz nach Stalingrad: Die Feldpostbriefe des Pioniers Bertold Paulus aus Kastel (Nonnweiler-Otzenhausen, 1993); Stalingrad (1993), directed by Joseph Vilsmaier. Recent publications accentuate the ideological conditioning of everyday life at the front: Mark Edele and Michael Geyer, “States of Exception: The Nazi-Soviet War as a System of Violence, 1939–1945,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer (Cambridge, MA, 2008), pp. 345–395; Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA, 2008), pp. 143–154.

40. Inge Scholl, The White Rose: Munich 1942–1943, trans. Arthur R. Schultz (Middletown, CT, 1983), p. 93.

41. Manstein, Verlorene Siege, pp. 303–318; Heinrich Gerlach, Die verratene Armee (Munich, 1957).

42. Jochen Hellbeck, “Breakthrough at Stalingrad: The Repressed Soviet Origins of a Bestselling West German War Tale,” Contemporary European History 1 (2013): 1–31.

43. Susanne zur Nieden, “Umsonst geopfert? Zur Verarbeitung der Ereignisse in Stalingrad in biographischen Zeugnissen,” Krieg und Literatur/War and Literature 5, no. 10 (1993): 33–46; Diaries and letters by Martin Fiebig, Paulheinz Quack, Martin Rahlenbeck, Wilhelm Saak, Hildegard Wagener and others in Kempowski, Das Echolot. Ian Kershaw asserts that the Führer cult in the German population had faded before Stalingrad, and for this reason he believes that the defeat in Stalingrad accelerated the loss of popular support for the regime. Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (New York, 1987), pp. 188–190. Michael Geyer und Peter Fritzsche, however, reference other connections between the Nazi regime and the population, which were created during Stalingrad and intensified in the further course of the war: Germans increasingly began to see themselves as victims of a massive disaster. This national and European victim perspective was orchestrated by the Nazi leadership. See Michael Geyer, “Endkampf 1918 and 1945: German Nationalism, Annihilation, and Self-Destruction,” in No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars in the 20th Century, Alf Lüdtke and Bernd Weisbrod, eds. (Göttingen, 2006), pp. 52–53; Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA, 2008), pp. 279–280.

44. Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies III, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture (New York, 2008), p. 69; David M. Glantz, “The Red Army at War, 1941–1945: Sources and Interpretations,” Journal of Military History, July 1998, pp. 595–617.

45. Horst Giertz, “Die Schlacht von Stalingrad in der sowjetischen Historiographie,” in Stalingrad: Mythos und Wirklichkeit, p. 214; Samsonov, Stalingradskaia bitva.

46. See especially the multivolume series Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia, ed. V. A. Zolotarev (Moscow, 1993–2002), with numerous documents from the Central Archives of the Russian Ministry of Defense. A planned volume on the battle of Stalingrad (vol. 4, pt. 2) has not appeared in the series. Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine. Sbornik dokumentov, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1995–2007), draws on documents from the FSB archives. Stalingradskaia popeia, also prepared by archivists in the FSB, features abundant new material and is indispensable reading for any student of the battle. The same applies to the documents presented in Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina. 1942 god, ed. T. V. Volokitina and V. S. Khristoforov (Moscow, 2012). See in addition numerous documents published in the periodicals Rodina(since 1988) and Istochnik (1993–2003).

47. Konstantin M. Simonov, Raznye dni voiny: Dnevnik pisatelia, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2005); Grossman, Gody voiny. See also Vasily Chkalov, Voennii dnevnik: 1941. 1942. 1943 (Moscow, 2004); Nikolai N. Inozemtsev, Frontovoi dnevnik (Moscow, 2005); Boris Suris, Frontovoi dnevnik: Dnevnik, rasskazy (Moscow, 2010); Poslednie pis’ma s fronta, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1990–1995); Alexsandr D. Shindel’, ed., Po obe storony fronta: Pis’ma sovetskikh i nemetskikh soldat 1941–1945 gg. (Moscow, 1995). See the rather mundane letters from General Rokossovsky to his family: “‘Posylaiu miaso, muku, kartofel’, maslo, sakhar i t. p.’ O chëm pisal s fronta Konstantin Rokossovskii” [“‘I am sending you meat, flour, potatoes, butter, sugar, etc.’ Konstantin Rokossovsky reporting from the front”], Diletant 2012, no. 2: 58–62. With a few exceptions, chains of letters written by a single author, a crucial source for the study of individual experience, have not been published. Exceptions include: Iz istorii zemli Tomskoi 1941–1945: Ia pishu tebe s voiny . . . Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Tomsk, 2001); Pis’ma s fronta riazantsev-uchastnikov Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945 gg. (Riazan’, 1998).

48. In 2007 the Defense Ministry launched a website devoted to all Soviet personnel who were killed or went missing in action during the Great Patriotic War and its aftermath. The searchable site includes scans of documents from various archives that shed light on the fate and place of burial of a given soldier. To date, more than 16 million scans of documents have been made available, though the site does not state how many service men and women have been registered. It continues to be expanded. www.obd-memorial.ru.

49. Antony Beevor, Stalingrad (London, 1999), p. xiv.

50. Ibid., p. 431.

51. John Erickson, “Red Army Battlefield Performance, 1941–1945: The System and the Soldier,” in Time to Kill: The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West, 1939–1945, ed. Paul Addison and Angus Calder (Pimlico, 1997), p. 244; Frank Ellis, “A Review of Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova (ed. and trans.), “‘A Writer at War’: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941–1945,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 20, no. 1 (2007): 137–146.

52. Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 222.

53. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 200.

54. Ibid., pp. 87–88.

55. Speaking in October 1942, in the immediate wake of being liberated by Soviet troops, a Russian woman from a village near Rzhevsk had this to say about the Germans (she was talking to other villagers and was not aware that a Soviet newspaper correspondent was listening): “Well, we once thought that these Germans were cultured people. [ . . . ] But how shamelessly they undress in front of women, how they splash about in the trough, how they pollute the air when they are seated at the table, and how they urinate inside the hut! Is this what they call culture? Then they chase after girls and young women like wild stallions. Fall over them. [ . . . ] This is the culture of convicts. Shameless. [ . . . ] Are they like this in their own country as well?” Aleksei Surkov, “Zemlia pod peplem,” in Publitsistika perioda Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny i pervykh poslevoennykh let (Moscow, 1985), pp. 135–141. Interviewed by the historians in Stalingrad, Lt. Col. Pyotr Molchanov of the 36th Rifle Division said: “The Germans prepared, obviously, to attack us. They pulled together their soldiers and attacked. To attack they did the following: they laid aside their uniforms, rolled up their shirt sleeves, many in their underwear, like bandits. So they attacked us.”

56. Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1939–45 (London, 2005), p. 320.

57. Merridale, Ivan’s War, p. 94.

58. Even Merridale concedes that “most [Soviet soldiers] were more deeply saturated in their regime’s ideology than soldiers in the Wehrmacht, for Soviet propaganda had been working on its nation’s consciousness for fifteen years by the time that Hitler came to power in Berlin” (Ivan’s War, p. 12).

59. Catherine Merridale, lecture to the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/191531–1.

60. The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union, ed. Bernd Bonwetsch and Robert W. Thurston (Urbana, IL, 2000); Elena S. Seniavskaia, Frontovoe pokolenie: Istoriko-psikhologicheskoe issledovanie, 1941–1945 (Moscow, 1995); Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001); Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (New York, 2006).

61. Roger Reese’s recent study, for instance, lists a range of individual motivations to fight while deemphasizing the mobilizing reach of the Soviet regime. Roger R. Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought: The Red Army’s Military Effectiveness in World War II(Lawrence, KS, 2011).

62. Overy, Russia’s War, pp. 187–189; Merridale, Ivan’s War, p. 160; Timothy Colton, Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority: The Structure of Soviet Military Politics (Cambridge, MA, 1979), pp. 4–5, 60, 68; Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945(London, 2005), p. 213. Colton and Mawdsley emphasize the pervasive presence of the party in the army. Roger Reese is ambivalent: Roger R. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991 (New York, 2000), pp. 78, 126.

63. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA, 1995), pp. 198–225.

64. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Hellbeck, “Everyday Ideology” Eurozine, February 22, 2010; Hellbeck, ed., Tagebuch aus Moskau, 1931–1939 (Munich, 1996); Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937(Cambridge, MA, 2012).

65. Anna Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (New York, 2010).

66. Regarding these character ideals, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981).

67. Lazar Lazarev, “Russian Literature on the War and Historical Truth,” in World War 2 and the Soviet People, ed. John Garrard and Carol Garrard (New York, 1993), p. 29; Bernd Bonwetsch, “War as a Breathing Space,” in The People’s War, pp. 137–153. Elena Iu. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, 1945–1964 (Moscow, 1993), p. 19; Merridale, Ivan’s War, pp. 338–340. Most of these studies cite post–Stalin era memoirs as evidence for Soviet society’s emancipation from the party during the years of the war.

68. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, Robert Chandler, trans., (New York, 2006).

69. A Writer at War: Vasily Grossmann with the Red Army, 1941–1945, Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, ed. and trans. (London, 2006), p. 34.

70. Vasily S. Grossman, Gody voiny (Moscow, 1989), p. 263.

71. Grossman again used Commissar Shlyapin as a template for Life and Fate. Captain Grekov, the defender of House 6/1 and a commander who preaches “democracy and toughness,” bears recognizable traits of the commissar.

72. On Grossman’s horizons during the war and their development in the postwar period, see Jochen Hellbeck, “The Maximalist: On Vasily Grossman,” The Nation, December 20, 2010.

73. The proportion of military in the Communist party had grown to 55 percent in January 1944. Colton, Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority, p. 16.

74. Ideologicheskaia rabota KPSS na fronte, 1941–1945 gg. (1960), pp. 253–254. On October 14, 1944, the Central Committee criticized the lack of “political resilience” among many Red Army soldiers who were new to the party, and it ordered the Main Political Administration to intensify its “ideological and political education.” The decree was issued on the eve of the Red Army’s offensive into East Prussia; Soviet leaders must have been concerned over the political reliability of their own soldiers after entering enemy lands. A prominent victim of the new hard line was the later dissident Lev Kopelev, who served as a specialist for enemy propaganda in the Red Army. In April 1945 in Germany he was accused of “bourgeois humanism” and served almost ten years.

75. Robert MacCoun et al., “Does Social Cohesion Determine Motivation in Combat? An Old Question with an Old Answer,” Armed Forces and Society 32 (2006); Thomas Kühne, Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2011). The thesis was first advanced by Edmund Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Summer 1948, pp. 280–315, based on their interviews with German POWs. Samuel Stouffer et al., The American Soldier(Princeton, NJ, 1949) seemed to support this with American GIs. For a skeptical perspective, see Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York, 1991), especially pp. 29–33.

76. Morris Janowitz and Stephen D. Westbrook, The Political Education of Soldiers (Beverly Hills, CA, 1983), pp. 196–198. For the same reason, the Red Army did not follow the German model of a reserve army (Ersatzheer), which ensured that recovering soldiers would rotate back into their regionally identified units (see p. 385 for a Soviet officer suggesting that the Red Army adopt the German model). At a meeting with western correspondents in early 1943, Alexander Shcherbakov, the head of the Red Army’s Main Political Administration, became irritated when one of the journalists talked about a Russian tradition of military bravery: “Don’t talk to me about the Russian soul,” Shcherbakov retorted, “Let me recommend you to study the Soviet man.” Karel Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA, 2012), p. 206. Nazi leaders upheld the notion of Landsmannschaft in part because of its racial essence: their common soil would help forge the German recruits into Aryan fighters.

77. Jürgen Förster, “Geistige Kriegführung in Deutschland 1919–1945,” in Die deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft 1939–1945, vol. 1, Politisierung, Vernichtung, Überleben (Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg,vol. 9/1), ed. Jörg Echternkamp (Munich, 2004), p. 567.

78. Toward the end of the war Wehrmacht units fighting in the east had casualty rates approximating those the Red Army had suffered all along. According to Omer Bartov, the decimation of the primary groups prompted military commanders to increasingly rely on ideological indoctrination to mold troupe cohesion, which in turn explained the “barbarization” of German warfare in the east. Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare, 2nd ed. (New York, 2001). Critics contend that Bartov’s thesis explains little, as fighting on the Eastern Front had been exceptionally violent from the start. Mark Edele and Michael Geyer, “States of Exception: The Nazi-Soviet War as a System of Violence, 1939–1945,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, pp. 345–395, at p. 357. The ideological work conducted in the Wehrmacht paled against the comprehensive political conditioning that prevailed in the Red Army and other communist armies. For the latter, see Alexander L. George, The Chinese Communist Army in Action: The Korean War and Its Aftermath (New York, 1967); Shu Guang Zhang, Mao’s Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950–1953 (Lawrence, KS, 1995), pp. 14–18; William Darryl Henderson, Why the Vietcong Fought: A Study of Motivation and Control in a Modern Army in Combat (Westport, CT, 1979).

79. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience, p. 4.

80. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York, 1998), p. 601.

81. Figes, People’s Tragedy, p. 597.

82. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience, p. 4; Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca, NY, 1993).

83. Peter Holquist, “What’s So Revolutionary About the Russian Revolution?” in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (New York, 2000), pp. 87–111; Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship; Reese, The Soviet Military Experience.

84. Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp. 232–240; Holquist, “Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Modern History,September 1997, pp. 415–460. Military censors read only a portion of the letters sent to Red Army soldiers from the “rear.”

85. Ortwin Buchbender und Reinhold Sterz, eds., Das andere Gesicht des Krieges: Deutsche Feldpostbriefe, 1939–1945 (Munich, 1983).

86. Dietrich Beyrau, “Avant-garde in Uniform,” manuscript (Tübingen, 2011); Colton, Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority, p. 42.

87. A. G. Kavtaradze, Voennye spetsialisty na sluzhbe Respubliki Sovetov, 1917–1920 gg. (Moscow, 1988), pp. 170, 177.

88. Kremlevskii kinoteatr 1928–1953. Dokumenty (Moscow, 2005), pp. 951–981.

89. Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat, pp. 67–68.

90. Compare the interview with Captain Mikhail Ingor of the 308th Rifle Division: “It was October 4. The situation was scary. The Hitlerites used their tanks to mount a ‘psychic attack’ against the command post of the 339th Rifle Regiment” (NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, op. 71, d. 3). See also interview with Alexander Parkhomenko, pp. 374–375. An interview with a given soldier is archivally referenced only after its first mention.

91. Isaak Babel, 1920 Diary, ed. Carol J. Avins (New Haven, 1995), entries for July 14 and August 28, 1920. In Red Cavalry, Babel’s collection of short stories from the Civil War, Timoshenko is immortalized as divisional commander Savitsky.

92. Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (London, 1987), pp. 88–92.

93. Iu. F. Boldyrev u. V. P. Vyrelkin, “V ogne grazhdanskoi voiny. Tsaritsyn i bor’ba na iugovostoke Rossii. 1918 g.,” in Aktual’nye problemy istorii Tsaritsyna nachala XX veka i perioda grazhdanskoi voiny (Volgograd, 2001), p. 42.

94. A. L. Nosovich (A. Chernomorchev), Krasnyi Tsaritsyn. Vzgliad iznutri. Zapiski belogo razvedchika (Moscow, 2010), pp. 28–29. The author was introduced to the Red movement already in the spring of 1918 and served as chief of staff in the Northern Military District. In October 1918 he fled, to forestall detection. He published his notes in the journal Rostov on Don.

95. See the announcement in Pravda, March 28, 1942.

96. Quoted in Samsonov, Stalingradskaia bitva, p. 153.

97. Pravda, November 11, 1942, p. 1. Krasnaia Zvezda, November 11, 1942, p. 1.

98. Dokumenty o geroicheskoi oborone Tsaritsyna v 1918 godu (Moscow, 1942).

99. Pravda, May 2, 1931, p. 1.

100. Cited in Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (New York, 2004), p. 465.

101. Overy, Dictators, p. 464.

102. V. A. Somov, “Dukhovnyi oblik trudiashchikhsia perioda Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” in Narod i voina (Moscow, 2010), pp. 333–335; David L. Hoffmann, “Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in Its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 1 (2000): 35–54; Hoffman, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY, 2011).

103. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, pp. 92–93; Schlögel, Moscow, 1937 pp. 136–152. Oleg Khlevnyuk sees fear of war as the main trigger of the great terror in the 1930s: Oleg Khlevnyuk, “The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937–1938,” in Stalinism: The Essential Readings, ed. David Hoffmann (Oxford, 2003), pp. 81–104.

104. Vsevolod Vishnevskii, Poslednii reshitel’nyi (Moscow, 1931), cited in Overy, The Dictators, p. 462.

105. Overy, Dictators, pp. 469f., 474–476; Reese, Soviet Military Experience, pp. 85–92.

106. Reese, Soviet Military Experience, pp. 86–88; Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, p. 20f.

107. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 37a, 37b.

108. Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, p. 43.

109. Ibid., p. 29.

110. Ibid., pp. 58–59.

111. The T-34 is a medium Soviet tank that was built from 1940. Steve Zaloga/Leland S. Ness, Red Army Handbook: 1939–1945 (Stroud, 1998), pp. 162–169. The Pe-2 is a Soviet bomber developed by Vladimir Petliakov that went into production in 1941. Soldiers gave it the nickname “Peschka.” Valerii Bargatinov, Kryl’ia Rossii: polnaia illiustrirovannaia ntsiklopediia (Moscow, 2005), pp. 493–494.

112. Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, p. 85.

113. Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London, 1991), pp. 127–132.

114. Figures from Mawdsley, who doubts the German information about 3.35 million prisoners of war (Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, p. 86).

115. Glantz, Colossus Reborn, p. 549f.

116. On November 30, 1939, the Red Army attacked Finland after it rejected Soviet territorial claims. The war ended on March 13, 1940, with Finland ceding 11 percent of its land area. During the Winter War the Red Army showed great strategic and tactical weakness. It purchased a victory, however, with enormous loss of life.

117. Compare A. A. Cherkasov, “O formirovanii i primenenii v Krasnoi armii zagradotriadov,” Voprosy istorii 2 (2003): 174–175.

118. Sovetskaia propaganda v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, ed. A. Ia. Livshin and I. B. Orlov (Moscow, 2007), p. 306.

119. Colton, Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority, pp. 16–17, 21.

120. Istoriia kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, vol. 5, bk. 1, 1938–1945 (Moscow, 1970), p. 284.

121. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 8, l. 50–58.

122. Nikolai Glamazda, interview (NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 9, ll. 24–34); see also Lieutenant Colonel Afanasy Svirin, interview, pp. 148–192.

123. Vasily Zaytsev, interview, pp. 360–373.

124. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 9, ll. 24–34.

125. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 11.

126. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 2a, l. 42–70. On hate as a motivation in the Red Army and its effects, see Amir Weiner, “Something to Die For, a Lot to Kill For: The Soviet System and the Brutalization of Warfare,” in The Barbarisation of Warfare, ed. George Kassimeris (London, 2006).

127. See Grossman, Gody voiny, p. 355; Chuikov, interview, pp. 266–290.

128. Partiino-politicheskaia rabota v Sovetskikh Vooruzhennykh silakh v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny 1941–1945 gg. Kratkii istoricheskii obzor, ed. K. V. Krainiukova, S. E. Zakharova, and G. E. Shabaeva (Moscow, 1968), p. 215.

129. A. M. Vasil’evskii, Delo vsei zhizni (Moscow, 1973), p. 233.

130. Fritz, Fritzes: slang for German soldier.

131. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 9, l. 35–55.

132. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 14, l. 117–126.

133. On Duka, see p. 227–231.

134. Glantz, Colossus Reborn, p. 380; Istoriia kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, vol. 5, bk. 1, 1938–1945 (Moscow, 1970), p. 318.

135. Reese, Soviet Military Experience, p. 70; Stalingradskaia popeia; V. Khristoforov, Stalingrad: Organy NKVD nakanune i v dni srazheniia (Moscow, 2008).

136. Overy, Dictators, p. 473; Glantz, Colossus Reborn, pp. 383–385.

137. The anonymous letter writer built on Stalin’s support, because he portrayed the behavior of the NKVD men as undermining the spirit of Stalin’s single command in October 1942. Of his fate nothing more is known. Sovetskaia povsednevnost’ i massovoe soznanie, 1939–1945, A. Ia. Livzhin and I. B. Orlov, eds. (Moscow, 2003), pp. 109–110. By the time of this letter, the NKVD Special Departments had become incorporated into a new counterintelligence organization called SMERSH (Russian acronym for “Death to Spies”), founded in April 1943. Vadim J. Birstein, Smersh: Stalin’s Secret Weapon. Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WW II (London 2011),

138. See pp. 233–238.

139. See note 62.

140. Sbornik zakonov SSSR i ukazov Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR. 1938 g.–iiun’ 1956 g. (Moscow, 1956), pp. 200–201.

141. The order is printed in Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 423. See also Colton, Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority, pp. 14, 60; Glantz, Colossus Reborn, pp. 381–382.

142. Lieutenant Colonel Dubrovsky and battalion commissar Stepanov, interviews.

143. See the interview with Major General Burmakov, commander of the 38th Rifle Brigade, regarding the collaboration with his political deputy Leonid Vinokur. See also the photo that shows Burmakov und Vinokur side by side (p. 240).

144. Divisional commander Levykin und brigade commissar Ivan Vasiliev, interviews.

145. Colton, Commissars, Commanders and Civilian Authority, p. 59.

146. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 16, l. 14–52.

147. Amnon Sella explains the price of such operations. Among the fallen Soviet soldiers in the first six months of the war were 500,000 members and candidates of the Communist party. In total, 3 million Soviet communists perished in the Great Patriotic War. Amnon Sella, The Value of Human Life in Soviet Warfare (London, 1992), pp. 157–158.

148. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 8, l. 29–49. In his discussion of the Soviet assault troops in Stalingrad, Beevor overlooks this political aspect (A Writer at War, pp. 154–169). During the Civil War units of the Red Army considered unreliable were filled with communists to strengthen the combat force. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience, p. 72.

149. During the Civil War, party comrades were celebrated as the “ferment” of the Red Army. Beyrau, “Avantgarde in Uniform.”

150. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 4, l. 29–31.

151. “Geroicheskii Stalingrad,” Pravda, Oktober 5, 1942, p. 1.

152. Agitators were party activists who specifically trained poorly educated soldiers, using simple and graphic means. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger, p. 3.

153. The battle for Tunisia, which began in November 1942, was part of the North African Campaign waged by British, American, and French troops. It would end in May 1943 with the rout of the Axis forces. More than 230,000 German and Italian soldiers were taken as prisoners of war. The Western Allies referred to their victory as “Tunisgrad.”

154. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 16, l. 62–74.

155. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 8, l. 85–93.

156. Captain Ivan Maksin, 308th Rifle Division, interview, pp. 145–182.

157. “Comrade Koren,” interview, p. 310.

158. Petrakov, interview, pp. 145–162.

159. Zayonchkovsky, interview, pp. 381–398.

160. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 3a, l. 1–3.

161. Afanassyev described the first combat action of his artillery battery at defensive battles in the Crimea in September 1941. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 15, l. 37–46.

162. See p. 149.

163. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, op. 80, d. 14. In 1941 Soviet psychologist M. P. Feofanov wrote: “In a person without self-control fear escapes the control of his will. It takes the place of reason [ . . . ] lowers the will to the lowest level, the level of impulsive will.” M. P. Feofanov, “Vospitanie smelosti i muzhestva,” Sovetskaia pedagogika 1941, no. 10: 62. See also V. A. Kol’tsova, Iu. N. Oleinik, Sovetskaia psikhologicheskaia nauka v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (1941–1945) (Moscow, 2006), p. 108.

164. This emphasis, and along with it the education of fearlessness, had a prerevolutionary pedigree. General Mikhail Dragomirov (1830–1905) sought to inculcate a theory of morale among Tsarist troops that was built on similar principles. Dragomirov believed that the essence of victory was to impose one’s own will on the enemy. He also regarded the bayonet attack as the decisive action in battle. The parallels with Bolshevik ideas of a “psychic attack” and the Soviet preference for the Hoorah battle call in infantry attacks are obvious. Bruce Manning, Bayonets Before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861–1914 (Bloomington, IN, 1992), p. 41; Jan Plamper, “Fear: Soldiers and Emotion in Early Twentieth-Century Russian Military Psychology,” Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (2009): 259–283. For fear conditioning among American and British soldiers in the two world wars, see Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (Emeryville, CA, 2006), pp. 197–221.

165. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, op. 71, d. 15. See also Lt. Col. Alexei Kolesnik (204th Rifle Division), interview: NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d.12, l. 22–25.

166. The penalties threatened in Order no. 227 were nothing new. Blocking units and penal companies had been with the Red Army since its creation in 1918. Abolished after the Civil War, they were revived in military campaigns in the Far East in 1938 and 1939, and then in the Winter War with Finland. They appeared again in various sectors of the German-Soviet front starting in late June 1941. V. O. Daines, Shtrafbaty i zagradotriady Krasnoi Armii (Moscow, 2008); Cherkasov, “O formirovanii i primenenii v Krasnoi armii zagradotriadov.” What was new about Order no. 227 was its reach: it was to be read to all soldiers of the Red Army. Stalin referred to Order no. 227 as a copy of disciplinary measures that the German army applied to its own soldiers in the fighting around Moscow. For this reason historian Mikhail Miagkov claims that in December 1941 the German side formed blocking detachments. M. Iu. Miagkov, Vermakht u vorot Moskvy 1941–1942 (Moscow, 1999), pp. 218–219. The relevant literature contains no mention of such measures: Christian Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg: Front und militärisches Hinterland, 1941/42(Munich, 2009); Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer. The blocking units in the Red Army were abolished in October 1944.

167. Ordinary soldier offenders were dispatched to penal companies; officers charged with cowardice or desertion were sent to separate penal battalions.

168. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 14, l. 112–116; see also below, pp. 57–59.

169. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, op. 57, d. 1, l. 1–11.

170. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, op. 80, d. 3.

171. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 2a, l. 29–41.

172. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, op. 80, d. 32.

173. Alexander Shelyubsky, interview, NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 2a, l. 101–133.

174. Order no. 227 addressed this problem squarely: “There is a lack of order and discipline in the companies, regiments, and divisions, with the armored force, the flying squadrons. This is currently our biggest deficiency. We need to introduce in our army the strictest order and an iron discipline, if we want to save the situation and defend our homeland successfully.” Prikazy narodnogo komissara oborony SSSR, p. 277.

175. See interviews with Pyotr Zayonchkovsky und Alexander Shelyubsky.

176. Acting in this manner, Kurvantyev meticulously implemented Stalin’s Order no. 270 of August 1941, which called on Red Army soldiers, regardless of their rank, to shoot their commanders if they abandoned their positions.

177. Ayzenberg, interview.

178. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 12, l. 22–25.

179. Alexander Stepanov, interview, pp. 146–188.

180. Soldiers and officers from the criminal units who “atoned for their guilt in the struggle against the German aggressors” received a certificate of rehabilitation: http://rkka.ru/idocs.htm, see under: dokumenty/lichnye/Spravka ob iskuplenii viny. Beevor claims that the promise of forgiveness extended to punished soldiers was a fiction because those in the criminal units were allowed to bleed to death. The case he cites, of officers of the 51th Army who were accidentally sent to a penal battalion, makes clear, however, that the Main Political Administration monitored the situation. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 85.

181. On loss estimates, see John Erickson, “Soviet War Losses,” in Barbarossa: The Axis and the Allies, ed. J. Erickson and D. Dilks (Edinburgh, 1994), p. 262; see also Alex Statiev, “Penal Units in the Red Army,” Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 62, no. 5 (July 2010): 721–747, at p. 740.

182. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 14, l. 160–170.

183. More than one million criminals were conscripted into the Red Army over the course of the war. Most of them were drafted before Order no. 227 was issued and sent to regular units. Beginning in October 1942, most gulag prisoners were sent to penal companies. Statiev, “Penal Units in the Red Army,” p. 731; see also Steven A. Barnes, “All for the Front, All for Victory! The Mobilization of Forced Labor in the Soviet Union During World War II,” International Labor and Working-Class History, Fall 2000, pp. 239–260.

184. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 9, l. 56–61.

185. Glantz, Colossus Reborn, pp. 547–551.

186. The author wrote “Cossacks” but almost certainly meant Kazakhs. First, this addresses the confusion of this nationality with other Central Asian ethnic groups (Uzbeks and Turkmen) and, second, the questionable loyalty of Cossacks, especially the Don Cossacks, who supported the White Army in the Civil War. In World War II Cossacks fought in the Red Army as well as on the side of the Wehrmacht. For this reason, they were grouped into separate statistics by the NKVD. RGAMO, f. 220, op. 445, d. 30a, l. 483. R. Krikunov, Kazaki: Mezhdu Gitlerom i Stalinym. Krestovyi pokhod protiv bol’shevizma (Moscow, 2005); Rolf-Dieter Müller, An der Seite der Wehrmacht: Hitlers ausländische Helfer beim “Kreuzzug gegen den Bolschewismus” 1941–1945 (Berlin, 2007), pp. 207–212.

187. The 45th Division, a unit comprising 10,000 soldiers in spring 1942, consisted of 6,000 Russians, 850 Ukrainians, 650 Uzbeks, 258 Kazakhs, and smaller numbers of Belarussians, Chuvash, and Tatars. Overall, it was made up of twenty-eight nationalities. Serov, interview.

188. Karpov, interview, pp. 225, 232; see also Captain Lukyan Morozov, interview, pp. 225–246.

189. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 11.

190. Bukharov, interview, pp. 225–246.

191. Rodimtsev, interview, pp. 294–310.

192. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, op. 53, d. 1b. German divisional staff officers at Stalingrad kept track of the numbers of Soviet deserters crossing the lines. Their records showed a disproportionate number of non-Slavic deserters, Central Asian and Caucasian soldiers in particular. Ellis, Stalingrad Cauldron, pp. 315–319.

193. On Russian nationalism in war and its relationship to Soviet patriotism, see Weiner, Making Sense of War; David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA, 2002).

194. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 29, l. 29–35.

195. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, raz. I, op. 80, d. 29.

196. V. S. Khristoforov, “Voina trebuet vse novykh zhertv: Chrezvychainye mery 1942 g.,” in Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina. 1942 god (Moscow, 2012), pp. 173–222, at p. 192; Stalingradskaia popeia, pp. 222–224. The latter source has figures that extend to mid-October 1942.

197. “Dokumenty organov NKVD SSSR perioda oborony Stalingrada,” Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina. 1942 god, p. 456; V. S. Khristoforov, “Zagraditel’nye otriady,” in Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina. 1942 god, pp. 473–494, at p. 486; Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 223.

198. These words are from an appeal in the Red Army newspaper that detailed how Order no. 227 was to be implemented without mentioning the secret order by name. “Za nepreryvnuiu boevuiu politicheskuiu rabotu!” Krasnaia zvezda, August 9, 1942, p. 1; see also Khristoforov, “Zagraditel’nye otriady,” p. 477.

199. Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Halfin, Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University (Pittsburgh, PA, 2009).

200. Already in November 1941 General Zhukov ordered the commander and the commissar of a division that had shrunk from the Germans to be shot in front of their unit. Zhukov also ordered that all commanders and political officers of the Red Army be informed of his action. Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, pp. 114–115.

201. See, for example, Daines, Shtrafbaty, pp. 131–135.

202. Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941–1991 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 115–117.

203. Khristoforov, “Voina trebuet vse novykh zhertv,” p. 183.

204. Statiev, “Penal Units in the Red Army,” p. 744. This approach, Statiev writes, once more referenced the revolutionary political culture inside the Red Army. Most other modern armies sentenced penal soldiers to long prison terms.

205. The latest publications by General Valentin Khristoforov, head of the Archives of the FSB, document many abusive practices within the wartime Red Army. The author comments on them with outrage. This is a notable departure from his earlier works, which celebrate the “Chekists” for their “patriotic” work. Khristoforov, “Voina trebuet vse novykh zhertv,” pp. 204–210; Khristoforov, Stalingrad. Organy NKVD nakanune i v dni srazheniia (Moscow, 2008).

206. Krivosheev gives a precise number: 157,593 people; a similar number (“more than 157,000 death sentences”) is cited by Vladimir Naumov and Leonid Reshin and has been widely accepted by scholars as the number of executions actually carried out inside the Red Army. Vladimir Naumow and Leonid Reschin, “Repressionen gegen sowjetische Kriegsgefangene und zivile Repatrianten in der USSR 1941 bis 1956,” in Die Tragödie der Gefangenschaft in Deutschland und der Sowjetunion, 1941–1956, ed. Klaus-Dieter Müller et al. (Cologne, 1998), pp. 335–364, at p. 339; Merridale, Ivan’s War, p. 136. But Krivosheev adds that a special court order suspended more than 40 percent of all death sentences and had the convicts join penal units instead (Krivosheev, Rossiia i SSSR v voinakh XX veka, p. 302). Elsewhere in the same publication, Krivosheev writes of “135,000 executed soldiers” (ibid., p. 43). Of the death sentences, Naumov and Reschin believe that most were given in the early phase of the war and affected soldiers who had been temporarily encircled by the Germans or taken captive.

It remains unclear whether executions on the spot performed by commanders on the battlefield in response to soldierly infractions entered the statistics of the NKVD or not. Various authorities—military courts, SMERSH, and “Special commissions” (Osobye soveshchaniia)—were authorized to order executions, and the grand total may not be known to the present day. Military procuracy records and other hitherto classified documents will certainly shed more light on the matter.

207. Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 380.

208. Stimulants such as alcohol and psychotropic drugs were used in many armies in World War II, but only the Red Army administered them by decree. A. S. Seniavskii and E. S. Seniavskaia, “Ideologiia voiny i psikhologiia naroda,” in Narod i voina: 1941–1945 gg. Izdanie podgotovleno k 65-letiiu Pobedy v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine (Moscow, 2010), p. 160; Sonja Margolina, Wodka: Trinken und Macht in Russland (Berlin, 2004), pp. 68–70.

209. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 8, l. 15–28.

210. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 5, l. 18.

211. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 14, l. 43–63.

212. These sentences are carved into the walls of the Stalingrad battle memorial at Mamayev Kurgan. Compare Jochen Hellbeck, “War and Peace for the Twentieth Century,” Raritan, Spring 2007, pp. 24–48.

213. Grossman, Gody voiny, p. 321.

214. On Shumilov, see pp. 226–254. The fifty-five minutes mentioned by Shumilov cover the entire operation that he describes, with the mock attack in the middle.

215. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 111, d. 1.

216. Svirin, interview, p. 149. The Panfilov men inspired one of the earliest myths of the Great Patriotic War. Twenty-eight soldiers were alleged to have destroyed eighteen enemy tanks in the defense of Moscow; all of the men were killed. Later investigations revealed that at least six of the Panfilov men had survived and one of them worked as an auxiliary police officer for the German occupiers as the war progressed. It was also found that a war correspondent for Red Star invented the number twenty-eight as well as some of the last words of these Soviet “heroes.” N. Petrov and O. Edel’man, “Novoe o sovetskikh geroiakh,” Novyi Mir 6 (1997): 140–151.

217. See pp. 316–317.

218. See pp. 209–213, 222.

219. Gordov was arrested in 1947. The Soviet secret service had bugged his apartment and recorded a conversation between Gordov, his wife, and his deputy, Major General Filipp Rybalchenko, in which Gordov held Stalin responsible for postwar economic and social problems in the Soviet Union. He also talked about a need for more democracy. Gordov and Rybalchenko were charged with treason and the “restoration of capitalism” and executed in 1950. They were rehabilitated in 1954, one year after Stalin’s death. R. G. Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz: Istoriia vlasti. 1945–1991, 2nd rev. ed. (Novosibirsk, 2000), pp. 39–41.

220. In the language of German military psychologists in World War II, Zaytsev would have been considered a “war trembler”; the western Allies spoke of shell shock. Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (Ithaca, NY, 2003). The Soviet psychological discourse in World War II interpreted war injuries in a physiological manner. The treatment aimed to develop psychological resources such as the will and the moral consciousness. S. Rubenstein, “Soviet Psychology in Wartime,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, December 1944:181–198. See the already noted case of the Komsomol Ilya Voronov.

221. Merridale, Ivan’s War, pp. 56–58, 199, 262; Oleg Budnitskii, “Evrei na voine: Soldatskie dnevniki,” Lekhaim, May 2010, http://www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/217/budnitskiy.htm; Mark Edele, “Toward a Sociocultural History of the Second World War,” Kritika15 (2014), no. 4: 829–835.

222. Ever since the signing of the Anglo-Soviet alliance on May 22, 1942, Soviet officials vocally pushed Great Britain and the United States to open a “second front” in western Europe before year’s end, to ease the burden on the Red Army, which was practically fighting the Axis forces alone. This second front would not materialize until June 1944. See Allies at War: The Soviet, American, and British Experience, 1939–1945, ed. David Reynolds, Warren F. Kimball, A. O. Chubarian (New York, 1994).

223. Stalingradskaia popeia, pp. 233–234, report of October 21, 1942. Soviet wartime diaries are a rare but interesting source because they show individual thoughts in evolution. Stepan Kalinin, commander of the Volga military district, kept a diary in which he harshly criticized leadership deficiencies and supply problems in the Red Army in 1941 and early 1942. When he heard of Order no. 227, he read it as a long overdue moral call to order and was relieved. (Kalinin was accused of conducting “anti-Soviet propaganda” and arrested in 1944.) Khristoforov, “Voina trebuet vse novykh zhertv,” pp. 178–190. In similar ways, Vasily Grossman used his diary to expose party and military officials who drank and partied instead of leading. He also criticized ordinary civilians who put their personal needs over those of society. All along he retained a moral, Soviet perspective on the war. See also the diaries mentioned in note 47, and the confiscated diary discussed in Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 207.

224. Khristoforov, “Voina trebuet vse novykh zhertv,” p. 197. The report was dated September 30, 1942.

225. Ibid.

226. Elizabeth Astrid Papazian, Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture (DeKalb, IL, 2009).

227. The words of Sergey Tretyakov are cited in Maria Gough, “Paris: Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde,” October, Summer 2002: 73; see also Literatura Fakta, ed. N. F. Chuzhak (1929; Munich, 1972), pp. 31–33; Tretyakov’s notion of the “operative” strongly influenced Walter Benjamin; see especially his essay, “The Author as Producer” (1934), in Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Peter Demetz, ed. (New York, 1986), pp. 220–238

228. Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2004), pp. 112–113, 126.

229. Katerina Clark, “The History of the Factories as a Factory of History,” in Autobiographical Practices in Russia, ed. Jochen Hellbeck and Klaus Heller (Göttingen, 2004), pp. 251–254; Hans Günther, Der sozialistische Übermensch: Maksim Gor’kij und der sowjetische Heldenmythos(Stuttgart, 1983), p. 92; Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, p. 137.

230. On the political background of the editorial work in the Gorky Project, see Sergei Zhuravlev, Fenomen “Istorii fabrik i zavodov”: Gor’kovskoe nachinanie v kontekste epokhi 1930-kh godov (Moscow, 1997); Josette Bouvard, Le métro de Moscou: La construction d’un mythe soviétique (Paris, 2005).

231. Zhuravlev, Fenomen, p. 176. Gorky floated other documentary projects: the history of Soviet cities, the history of the village, the history of culture and everyday life, and other subjects. Zhuravlev, Fenomen, p. 175.

232. Elaine MacKinnon, “Writing History for Stalin: Isaak Izrailevich Mints and the Istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6 (2005), no. 1: 20–21.

233. MacKinnon, “Writing History for Stalin.”

234. Papazian locates the end of the documentary movement in the early Stalin period with the promulgation of socialist realism as a compulsory aesthetic. The spirit was continued, however; it showed itself not only in the work of the Mints commission during the war, but also in the documentary project A Day in the World, which was first launched in 1935 and revisited twenty-five years later. M. Gor’kii and M. Kol’tsov, eds., Den’ mira (Moscow, 1937); Den’ mira: 27 sentiabria 1960 goda (Moscow, 1960). The 1960 project in turn inspired the East German writer Christa Wolf to start a similarly conceived documentary diary. Christa Wolf, Ein Tag im Jahr: 1960–2000 (Munich, 2003).

235. In 1930, the commander of the Cossack Corps, Vitaly Primakov, married Liliya Brik, formerly the lover of the poet Vladimir Maiakovsky and a well-known muse of the artistic avant-garde. A few years later, Primakov was hit by the purges in the Red Army and confessed under torture to participating in an anti-Soviet fascist conspiracy. He was executed in June 1937. We learn nothing about these circumstances in the recently published diary of Isaak Mints, which excludes the years of Stalin’s terror and is generally patchy. I. I. Mints, “Iz pamiati vyplyli vospominaniia”: Dnevnikovye zapisi, putevye zametki, memuary akademika AN SSSR I. I. Mintsa (Moscow, 2007); see also K istorii russkikh revoliutsii: Sobytiia, mneniia, otsenki. Pamiati Isaaka Izrailevicha Mintsa (Moscow, 2007).

236. Vividly portrayed in the diary and in the short stories of Isaak Babel, another Jew who fought in the Red Cossacks. Babel, Konarmeiskii dnevnik 1920 g.; Isaak Babel, Red Cavalry (New York, 2003); MacKinnon, “Writing History for Stalin,” pp. 11–13.

237. A. P. Shelyubsky, “Bol’shevik, voin, uchënyi. (K 70-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia akademika I. I. Mintsa),” Voprosy istorii 1966, no. 3: 167–170; see also Mints’s autobiography in K istorii russkikh revoliutsii, pp. 221–222.

238. A laudatory review of the second volume appeared in Pravda, January 13, 1943, p. 4.

239. MacKinnon, “Writing History for Stalin,” p. 29.

240. Ibid., p. 6, n. 2.

241. In the style of Istpart, the surviving members of the commission came together in 1984 for an evening of remembering the Great Patriotic War and reminisced about the founding and work of the now virtually forgotten commission. Naturally, a stenographer was present to transcribe the oral memories. “Vstrecha sotrudnikov Komissii po istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny AN SSSR,” Arkheograficheskii Ezhegodnik za 1984 g. (Moscow, 1986): 316–319. A tape recording of the meeting is preserved in the Russian State Archive of sound recordings. RGAFD, f. 439, op. 4m, no. 1–2. All citations refer to this recording.

242. Jochen Hellbeck, “Krieg und Frieden im 20. Jahrhundert,” afterword in Wassili Grossman, Leben und Schicksal (Berlin, 2007), pp. 1069–1085.

243. The letter to the Central Committee that Mints remembered writing in July 1941 could not be found in the archives. But there is evidence of other documentary projects pursued by other institutions at the same time. On July 15, 1941, the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Education called on all museum staff to collect materials on the Great Patriotic War. The call was followed by Order 170 of November 15, 1941, “On the Collection of Documents and Objects of the Great Patriotic War.” T. Timofeeva, “Istoricheskaia pamiat’ i ee pamiatniki,” in Rossiiane i nemtsy v epokhu katastrof, pp. 122–134, at pp. 127–128. Regardless of the Red Army’s disastrous losses over the first months of the war, Soviet scholars appeared to believe that historical certainty was on their side and that the war would end victoriously for them.

244. Rodric Braithwaite, Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War (New York, 2006); Moskovskaia bitva v khronike faktov i sobytii (Moscow, 2004).

245. E. N. Gorodetskii and L. M. Zak, “Akademik I. I. Mints kak arkheograf (K 90–letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia),” Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1986 god (Moscow, 1987): 136.

246. Mints, Iz pamiati, pp. 41–42.

247. Moskovskaia bitva v khronike faktov i sobytii, p. 246. Mints, Iz pamiati, p. 42 (diary entry for December 11, 1941). On the history and activities of the commision: D. D. Lotareva, “Komissiia po istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny i ee arkhiv: rekonstruktsiia deiatel’nosti i metodov raboty,” Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 2011 g. (Moscow, 2014): 123–166; A. A. Kurnosov, “Vospominaniia-interv’iu v fonde Komissii po istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny AN SSSR (Organizatsiia i metodika sobiraniia),” in Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1973 g. (Moscow, 1974): 118–132; B. V. Levshin, “Deiatel’nost’ Komissii po istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945 gg.,” in Istoriia i istoriki: Istoriograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1974 g. (Moscow, 1976); E. P. Michailova, “O deiatel’nosti Komissii po istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny sovetskogo naroda protiv fashistskikh zakhvatchikov v period 1941–1945 gg.,” in Voprosy istoriografii v Vysshei shkole (Smolensk, 1975), pp. 352–359; I. S. Archangorodskaia and A. A. Kurnosov, “O sozdanii Komissii po istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny AN SSSR i eë arkhiva. (K 40-letiiu so dnia obrazovaniia),” in Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1981 g. (Moscow, 1982): 219–229; A. M. Samsonov, “Vklad istorikov AN SSSR v izuchenie problemy Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” Vestnik AN SSSR 9 (1981): 84–93; E. V. Vasnevskaia, “Vospominaniia-interv’iu o bitve pod Moskvoi,” in Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1983 g. (Moscow, 1985): 272–277; I. S. Arkhangorodskaia and A. A. Kurnosov, “Istorii voinskikh chastei v fonde Komissii po istorii Otechestvennoi voiny AN SSSR,” in Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1985 g. (Moscow, 1986): 174–181; A. A. Kurnosov, “Memuary uchastnikov partizanskogo dvizheniia v period Velikoi Otechesvennoi voiny kak istoricheskii istochnik. (Opyt analiza memuarov po istorii Pervoi Bobruiskoi partizanskoi brigady),” in Trudy MGIAI, t. 16 (Moscow, 1961): 29–55; A. A. Kurnosov, “Priemy vnutrennei kritiki memuarov. (Vospominaniia uchastnikov partizanskogo dvizheniia v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny kak istoricheskii istochnik),” in Istochnikovedenie. Teoreticheskie i metodicheskie problemy (Moscow, 1969), pp. 478–505.

248. Mints, Iz pamiati, p. 42.

249. Arkady Lavrovich Sidorov (1900–1966). Historian at the Institute of Red Professorship (1928). On Sidorov’s later life, see Chapter 5.

250. Mints, Iz pamiati, p. 46f.

251. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, r. 14, d. 23, l. 16, 213

252. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, r. 14, d. 7, l. 23–24; see also A. A. Kurnosov, Vospominaniia-interv’iu, p. 122.

253. Mints, Iz pamiati, p. 49.

254. In February 1943 the Academy of Sciences registered the commission’s new status, but the Communist party withheld approval in spite of Alexandrov’s petitioning to Shcherbakov for support. RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, ed. chr. 204, l. 2.

255. Clark, “History of the Factories,” p. 251, n. 1.

256. Mints, Iz pamiati, pp. 52–53.

257. Shelyubsky, “Bol’shevik, voin, uchënyj.”

258. I. I. Mints, “Dokumenty Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, ikh sobiranie i khranenie,” in 80 let na sluzhbe nauki i kul’tury nashei Rodiny (Moscow, 1943), pp. 134–150. Many of these sources cited by Mints are kept in the archives of the Institute of Russian History of the Academy of Sciences (NA IRI RAN, f. 2).

259. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, r. 14, d. 22, l. 45.

260. A. A. Kurnosov, “Vospominaniia-Interv’iu,” p. 121.

261. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. XIV, d. 7, l. 34–41 (no date given).

262. Kurnosov, “Vospominaniia-Interv’iu,” p. 125, 132.

263. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. XIV, d. 7, l. 34–41.

264. Ibid.

265. The figures refer only to the interviews done in Stalingrad in January-March 1943. Numerous other Stalingrad witnesses were interviewed in later months and at other venues.

266. Kurnosov, “Vospominaniia-Interv’iu,” p. 126.

267. E. V. Vasnevskaia, “Vospominaniia-interv’iu o bitve pod Moskvoi,” in Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1983 g. (Moscow, 1985): 272.

268. NA IRI RAN, f 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 4, l. 1–2 (Batyuk); razd. I, op. 71, d. 11 (Pavlov); on Fugenfirov, Koshkaryov, Rivkin, Smirnov, Stepanov, and Svirin, see pp. 145–146.

269. Ensign Arnold Krastynsh, interview. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, op. 80, d. 3.

270. The 4,930 transcribed interviews counted by Kurnosov were conducted from 1942 to 1944 and do not include the transcripts produced by the commission in 1945. Kurnosov, “Vospominaniia-Interv’iu,” p. 131; also see 200 let AN SSSR: Spravochnaia kniga(Moscow, 1945), p. 252.

271. Two large-scale interview projects launched in the United States and Great Britain during the 1930s suggest that the documentary impulse of the Mints commission may have been part of a larger cultural phenomenon: The Federal Writers Project in the United States, enacted by the Works Progress Administration in 1935, employed several thousand writers who collected information—much of it by way of oral histories—about American history, folklore, and everyday life. David A. Taylor, Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America(Hoboken, NJ, 2009). Britain saw the founding of Mass-Observation in 1937, a nongovernmental project that sought to gauge and activate the political pulse of ordinary Britons in response to the rise of fascism. See James Hinton, The Mass Observers: A History, 1937–1949 (Oxford, 2013).

272. S. L. A. Marshall, Island Victory (New York, 1944).

273. S. L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Washington, 1947).

274. Roger J. Spiller, “S. L. A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire,” RUSI Journal: Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, August 1988: 63–71; Richard Halloran, “Historian’s Pivotal Assertion on Warfare Assailed as False,” New York Times, February 19, 1989. An official commissioned by the US Army Center of Military History describes Marshall’s interview technique as groundbreaking. Stephen E. Everett, Oral History Techniques and Procedures (Washington, DC, 1992).

275. Notes and Statement by the Soviet Government on the German Atrocities (Moscow, 1943), p. 19.

276. Molotov’s “outrageous note” was a “typical Jewish” attempt to blame Bolshevik atrocities against their own people on the Germans, Goebbels recorded on January 8, 1942. A day later, he noted that “when it comes to atrocities, the Bolsheviks have so much to answer for that their own atrocity reports can’t elicit a dog from behind the stove.” Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Part 2: Diktate 1941–1945, vol. 3: Januar-März 1942, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich, 1995), pp. 70–71, 79.

277. Mints, Iz pamiati, pp. 52, 54.

278. Shchegoleva was an astute observer. Her diary commented on the corrosive anti-Semitism and the bigotry of the occupiers who made disparaging comments about all things Russian and Soviet. When the Germans left Yasnaya Polyana after six weeks, they had turned the holy place for Shchegoleva into a stable, and human excrement covered the balconies of Tolstoy’s apartment building. Only by a hair did the museum workers succeed in extinguishing the fire started by the Germans during their retreat. The diary was serialized in Komsomol’skaia Pravda: December 18–24, 1941. A copy is in NA IRI RAN, f. 2, r. VI, op. 4, d. 2.

279. Sovetskaia propaganda v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, pp. 204–205.

280. E. Genkina, Geroicheskii Stalingrad (Moscow, 1943); V. G. Zaitsev, Rasskaz snaipera (Moscow, 1943).

281. Genkina, Geroicheskii Stalingrad, p. 76.

282. Cultural anthropologists and philosophers refer to this incompatibility as the Rashomon effect. Karl G. Heider, “The Rashomon Effect: When Ethnographers Disagree,” American Anthropologist, n.s., March 1988: 73–81; Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture (New York, 1979), pp. 315–324.

283. The interviews with Chuikov, Rodimtsev, and Aksyonov each run up to 10,000 words; they are presented with cuts.

CHAPTER 2: A CHORUS OF SOLDIERS

1. Leningrad was to be strangled and starved.

2. Figures from the files of the archive of the Russian Defense Ministry (Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 166). Based on German sources, Beevor counts 1,200 and 1,600 aircraft sorties on August 23. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 103.

3. Hubert Brieden, Heidi Dettinger, and Marion Hirschfeld, Ein voller Erfolg der Luftwaffe: Die Vernichtung Guernicas und deutsche Traditionspflege (Nördlingen, 1997), p. 72.

4. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 69; Janusz Piekalkiewicz, Luftkrieg 1939–1945 (Munich, 1978), p. 138. A smaller number (1,500 dead) is cited in Rolf-Dieter Müller and Florian Huber, Der Bombenkrieg 1939–1945 (Berlin, 2004), p. 248.

5. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 167; Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 106.

6. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 154–160; interview with D. Pigalyov.

7. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 137f.

8. Ibid., p. 139.

9. Ibid., pp. 143–148.

10. Ibid., pp. 140–141, 159f., 166.

11. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 106; Overy, Russia’s War, pp. 166, 351 (n. 22) with further references. Volgograd historian Tatiana Pavlova considers these figures understated (Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 186).

12. See p. 108.

13. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 202.

14. Ibid., p. 211. None of those assembled on the evening of August 23 admits to being the “defeatist” who proposed mining the plants. Yeryomenko in his memoirs makes Chuyanov responsible for it; he in turn writes that the representatives of the ministries had made the proposal, and that he had spoken out against it. See A. I. Erëmenko, Stalingrad: Zapiski komanduiushchego frontom (Moscow, 1961), p. 139; A. S. Chuianov, Stalingradskii dnevnik (1941–1943), 2nd rev. ed. (Volgograd, 1979), p. 157.

15. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 221–222.

16. Ibid., pp. 226–229.

17. Ibid, p. 225.

18. Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 214.

19. Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. l48. The Red October factory produced steel again starting in July 1943; the Barricades munitions plant took up production again in the autumn of 1944.

20. For an account of the fighting, see Grossman’s story “In the Line of the Main Drive,” pp. 192–203.

21. Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, pp. 374–376; Hans Wijers, Der Kampf um Stalingrad. Die Kämpfe im Industriegelände, 14. Oktober bis 19. November 1942 (Brummen, 2001), p. 26.

22. Chuianov, Stalingradskii dnevnik, p. 254.

23. René Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia (New York, 1965); Mark Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca, NY, 2002).

24. Kirschenbaum, Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, pp. 64–65.

25. Source: NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 14, 21, 22; Chuianov, Stalingradskii dnevnik, S. 90, 100f., 150, 212f., 380f. For Chuikov, see p. 266. Mikhail Vodolagin was interviewed in Stalingrad in June 1943.

26. Since 1936 Stalingrad had consisted of seven districts. The Yermansky district was located in the city center.

27. A kymograph is a device that produces graphical representations of physical processes (e.g., heartbeat, breathing, muscle contractions, etc.).

28. This is a reference to the M-13, or BM-13, multiple rocket launcher built by the Soviet Union during World War II. Soviet soldiers affectionately called the rockets “Katyusha”; German troops referred to them as “Stalin’s organ” or “Joseph’s organ,” prompted by the resemblance of the launch array to a church organ and the sound of the rocket motors. Zaloga and Ness, Red Army Handbook, pp. 211–215; “Katiusha,” Voennyi ntsiklopedicheskii slovar’, S. F. Akhromeev and S. G. Shapkin, eds. (Moscow, 1986), p. 323.

29. The Soviet government decreed the creation of destruction battalions on June 24, 1941. Formed on a volunteer basis and staffed by trusted Soviet activists, their task was to guard lines of communication and industrial objects against saboteurs and enemy agents. The battalions received military training and worked under the oversight of the NKVD or local party officials. Many units formally joined the Red Army over the course of the war. S. V. Bilenko, Na okhrane tyla strany. Istrebitel’nye batal’ony i polki v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine 1941–45 gg. (Moscow, 1988).

30. A machine and tractor station (MTS) was a state enterprise for ownership and maintenance of agricultural machinery for use on collective farms. Agricultural equipment and technical personnel were scarce and thus shared by collective farms in a given region.

31. Demchenko is alluding to the disintegration within the Red Army.

32. Alexei Adamovich Goreglyad (1905–1985) served as representative of the People’s Commissar of the Tank Industry at the Stalingrad Tractor factory (July-September 1941) and was later promoted to people’s commissar. K. A. Zalessky, Stalin’s Empire. A Biographical Encyclopedic Dictionary (Moscow, 2000).

33. Olga Kuzminichna Kovalyova (1900–1942) began working at the Red October factory in 1927. Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 193.

34. In 1940 Pravda reported on four women who toiled in one of the blast furnaces of the Magnitogorsk Metal Works: Tatiana Mikhailovna Ippolitova, and her subordinates S. S. Vasilieva, L. Spartakova, and P. Tkachenko, Pravda, January 7, 1940.

35. German military sources mention nothing about this.

36. Pigalyov in his interview mentions 57 aircraft.

37. Viktor Stepanovich Kholsunov (1905–1939), a native of Tsaritsyn, commanded a squadron of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union in 1937. He was killed in a flying accident. The monument in his honor was built in 1940. Restored after the war, it still stands at its original location in the city center. Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 432.

38. Settlements south of Stalingrad. On September 13, the German attack through Yelshanka to the Volga River split the 62nd Army from the 64th Army, which was stationed farther south. Samsonov, Stalingradskaia bitva, pp. 175–183.

39. Pavlova writes that Chuyanov and his staff had left the city on the evening of September 13. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 230.

40. Probably an error. Major General Stepan Guryev commanded the 39th Motor Rifle Division. Major General Vasily Sokolov commanded the 45th (74th Guards) Rifle Division in the 62nd Army.

41. Lavrentiy Beria (1899–1953) headed the Soviet security and secret police apparatus (NKVD) during World War II.

42. On their retreat from Napoleon, Russian military commanders gathered in the village of Fili near Moscow in September 1812 and debated whether they should confront the invader or cede Moscow to him. Leo Tolstoy describes the gathering in War and Peace. Asserting that losing Moscow did not mean losing Russia, commander Mikhail Kutuzov decided to leave the capital to Napoleon. In regard to Stalingrad the Soviet regime argued conversely.

43. Society for the Assistance to Defense, Aviation, and Chemical Construction: a popular volunteer organization in the Soviet Union that existed from 1927 to 1948. See also p. 30.

44. The “Rally of the Victors” took place on February 4, 1943, on the Square of Fallen Heroes. In attendance were thousands of Red Army soldiers as well as party and city officials.

45. Kotelnikovo: a village 190 kilometers southwest of Volgograd. Kotelnikovo was captured by the Wehrmacht on August 2, 1942. It was from here that General Hoth’s panzer group sought to break through to the encircled German troops at Stalingrad in December 1942. Hoth’s attempt failed, and Soviet forces took Kotelnikovo on December 29, 1942.

46. In the first weeks after the liberation of the city, the NKVD arrested 502 “traitors, agents, and accomplices” of the Germans, including 46 agents, 45 espionage suspects, 68 police employees, and 172 individuals who had voluntarily assisted the German armed forces (Stalingradskaia popeia, pp. 406–407). In the surrounding villages, 732 arrests had been made by July 1, 1943. Pavlova believes that many more collaborators were not punished by the Soviet authorities. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 412, 547.

47. These numbers are given, respectively, by Gerlach, Militärische “Versorgungszwänge,” Besatzungspolitik und Massenverbrechen, p. 199; and Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 460.

48. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 291.

49. Ibid., p. 460.

50. Ibid., p. 461; Pravda and Izvestiia from October 17, 1942, citing German attacks in the area of the Barricades munitions plant on October 4, 1942.

51. The Germans, Speidel claimed under further interrogation, also tried “at all costs to get the Cossacks on their side” (Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 307, 468). While Stalingrad itself was largely populated by Russians, many Cossacks lived in the villages and on the farms in the area. German occupation officials emphasized the “consanguinity” of the Cossacks to the Aryan peoples and styled Pyotr Krasnov—the commander who had directed the attack against Red Tsaritsyn in 1918 and who was living in German exile—as a liberator of the Cossacks from the Bolshevik yoke. In the summer of 1942 this propaganda fell on open ears. Later, the picture changed when the Germans failed to abolish the collective farms, as they had promised they would, and when the villagers witnessed the mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war. The Soviet leadership had evacuated able-bodied men from the Cossack settlements in the Volga-Don region to prevent a possible collaboration between Cossacks and Germans. That was one of the few instances of the timely evacuation of the civilian population. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 321–331, 359; R. Krikunov, Kazaki.

52. Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 396.

53. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 316–319, 363–364.

54. Communists could survive if they were willing to denounce fellow party members. Speidel probably died in late 1943 in the Beketovka prison. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 314, 467, 469, 478–479.

55. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 304–305; Gert C. Lübbers, “Die 6. Armee und die Zivilbevölkerung von Stalingrad,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 54 (2006), no. 1: 115.

56. Gert Lübbers refutes Christian Gerlach’s claim that the evacuation ordered by the quartermaster general of the army was aimed to extinguish Stalingrad’s civilian population. But his attempt to humanize the policies of the military government seems anachronistic: the sources Lübbers cites speak in a language of bureaucratic calculus. Relying on Russian archival sources, Tatiana Pavlova describes in detail the inhumane conditions of the evacuation. Gerlach, “Militärische ‘Versorgungszwänge,’ Besatzungspolitik, und Massenverbrechen,” pp. 200–202; Lübbers, “Die 6. Armee und die Zivilbevölkerung von Stalingrad,” pp. 110–119; Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 485–508.

57. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 496 (G. Scheffer, Feldpost 45955).

58. Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 394. Pavlova estimates the remaining population in the city as 30,000. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 527.

59. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, pp. 347, 527, 530–531.

60. Ibid., p. 533; Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 394.

61. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia, p. 539.

62. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 22, l. 66–71.

63. The grain elevator on the southern outskirts of Stalingrad was built in 1940. It was at the time the tallest building in the city. It fell to the Germans after heavy fighting on September 22, 1942, and was recaptured on January 25, 1943. Made from concrete, the elevator is one of few surviving prewar buildings in Volgograd today. Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 456.

64. The Ninth of January Square, today’s Lenin Square, was located in the northern center of Stalingrad near the Volga River and was fiercely fought over during the battle. Both the L-shaped house and Pavlov’s House bordered on the square. See Rodimtsev, interview, pp. 305–309; Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 305.

65. On Kotluban: Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, pp. 37–58, 168–183.

66. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, p. 701; Chuikov, Srazhenie veka, p. 247.

67. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, p. 980.

68. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, p. 174. On September 30, 1942, General Rokossovsky became commander of the army group fighting in the north, which was now called the Don Front. In his memoirs, he comments on the uninspired operations of his predecessor, Yeryomenko, who kept throwing rifle divisions into frontal attacks for twelve consecutive days. Konstantin K. Rokossovsky, Velikaia pobeda na Volge (Moscow, 1965), p. 157.

69. Georgy K. Zhukov, Vospominaniia i razmyshleniia (Moscow, 2002), 2:78.

70. Wegner, Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion, p. 981.

71. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, pp. 44, 50–51., 55, 177.

72. Ibid., pp. 322, 327–329.

73. Ibid., p. 359.

74. Fighter pilot Herbert Pabst, cited in Wegner, Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion, p. 995.

75. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, p. 542.

76. Ibid., pp. 542, 670.

77. Ibid., p. 636; see also the interview with divisional commander Ivan Lyudnikov.

78. Führer command of November 17, 1942, concerning continuation of the conquest of Stalingrad by the 6th Army; cited in Wegner, Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion, p. 997.

79. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, d. 1–3, 5–8, 11, 14. The Moscow interviews were conducted by E. B. Genkina and transcribed by O. A. Roslyakova; the interviewer in Laptyevo was P. M. Fedosov and the stenographer M. P. Laputina. Major Pyotr Mikhailovich Fedosov (1897–1974) was a battalion commissar during the Great Patriotic War. He served on the Historical Commission since its creation in December 1941. Fedosov’s daughter, herself a former staff member of the Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has researched his wartime work for the commission: E. P. Fedosova, “‘Privezennyi material mozhet sluzhit’ dlia napisaniia istorii . . .’,” Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 2011 g. (Moscow, 2014): 167–176.

80. Leonty Nikolayevich Gurtyev (1891–1943) was appointed major general on December 7, 1942. He died on August 3, 1943, during the fighting for Oryol and was posthumously awarded a Hero of the Soviet Union.

81. The State Fishing Trust.

82. The Russian Red Cross Society was established in 1854. In 1923 it was renamed the Union of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies of the USSR (the Soviet Red Cross). Its activities included teaching first aid skills to the general population and providing medical training to nurses.

83. Nina Kokorina ended the war in Berlin. After the war she lived in Sverdlovsk, where she led the female veterans association. She died in January 2010. N. Kriukova, “Chizhik: Medsestra iz soldatskoi pesni,” Tiumenskie izvestiia, January 27, 2010.

84. Cheka (1917–1922) and GPU (1922–1934): predecessor organizations of the NKVD (and later, KGB), the Soviet state security police.

85. From 1917 to 1932, the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy was the central authority for managing industry. It was dissolved in 1932, and its functions were transferred to branches of the People’s Commissariat.

86. Kumylga—a railway station on the Uryupinsk–Volgograd line.

87. Samofalovka—a village near Kotluban.

88. From these heights Tsaritsyn was defended in the summer and autumn of 1918.

89. Arnold Meri (1919–2009) was an Estonian soldier who volunteered to serve in the Red Army after the Soviet invasion of Estonia. In July 1941 he was wounded in the defense of Pskov and awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union. From 1945 to 1949 he chaired the Estonian Komsomol organization. In 2003 the Estonian prosecutor indicted Meri for genocide. He was accused of deporting 251 Estonian civilians to Siberia after the war. Meri denied the allegations. Russian president Medvedev awarded him the Medal of Honor posthumously in 2009.

90. In all likelihood, Ilya Nikolayevich Kuzin (1919–1960) was the leader of a group of demolitionists in a Volokolamsk partisan detachment that spent six months behind enemy lines near Moscow. Kuzin personally conducted about 150 acts of sabotage. He was declared a Hero of the Soviet Union on February 16, 1942.

91. Zoya Anatolyevna Kosmodemyanskaya (1923–1941) was a Komsomol from Moscow who voluntarily joined the guerrilla movement after the outbreak of war. Their task was to burn down German accommodations behind the front lines. Kosmodemyanskaya was discovered by a Russian guard and handed over to the Germans. She was tortured and then hanged publicly. Petrischchevo, the village where she died, was liberated on January 22, 1942. The journalist Pyotr Lidov reported the partisan’s story a few days later in Pravda, and the article became famous. Kosmodemyanskaya was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union on February 16, 1942.

92. Weapons are camouflaged behind the defense line. Two to three guns with armor-piercing munitions wait until the enemy completes his assault only to experience massive fire from two sides. The fire starts a counterattack by troops emerging from the trenches. See “Kinzhal’nyi ogon’,” Bol’shaia sovetskaia ntsiklopediiantsiklopediia, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1953), 21:11.

93. Spartak was a popular Soviet sports society of industrial cooperatives (established in 1935).

94. For more on Nikolai Kosykh, see Sibiriaki na zashchite Stalingrada (Novosibirsk, 1943).

95. On September 18, 1942, Commissar Petrakov wrote his daughter a letter: “My black-eyed Mila! With this letter I am sending you a cornflower [ . . . ] Imagine: here the battle rages, enemy projectiles explode, everything is destroyed and yet here grows a flower [ . . . ] And then the next explosion, and it has torn the cornflower. I have removed the flower and put it in my shirt pocket. The flower grew and wanted the sun, but the force of the explosion has destroyed the flowers, and if I had not picked them up, they would have been trampled. Just what the fascists do with the children in the occupied villages around; they kill and crush the children [ . . . ] Mila! Your Papa Dima will fight to the last drop of blood against the fascists, to the last breath, so the fascists will not treat you like this flower. What you do not understand, your mom will explain.” The letter was first published in 1957 in Rabotnitsa. That same year saw the inauguration of the Soldiers Field memorial west of Volgograd. Among the mass graves stands a bronze statue of a girl holding a cornflower in her hands. At her feet is a triangular stone in the shape of a Red Army letter. On it are carved Commissar Petrakov’s words to his daughter. Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 355.

96. Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov (1901–1988), one of Stalin’s closest aides, was a member of the State Defense Committee during the war. In this capacity Malenkov traveled to Stalingrad in August 1942 to inspect the city’s defenses.

97. Kirill Semenovich Moskalenko (1902–1985). Commander of the 1st Guards Army.

98. Boris Petrovich Shonin (1918–1942), assistant chief of staff of the 339th Rifle Regiment of the 308th Rifle Division, recipient of the Red Star and the Lenin orders. Shonin’s deeds were documented by Captain Ingor, the interviewee: M. Ingor, Sibiriaki: Stalingradtsy (Moscow, 1950), pp. 22–26.

99. Vasily Anufriyevich Zhigalin (1910–1942). Senior lieutenant, assistant to the regimental chief of staff. Fell on October 27, 1942, in Stalingrad (details at www.obd-memorial.ru).

100. Semyon Grigoryevich Fugenfirov (1917–1942). Assistant to the regimental chief of staff. Died of his wounds on October 29, 1942, in Stalingrad (details at www.obd-memorial.ru).

101. A reference to an open letter to Stalin sent by hundreds of Red Army soldiers fighting at Stalingrad on the eve of the revolutionary holiday in November 1942. The soldiers swore to defend Stalingrad to the last drop of their blood. The letter was published in Pravda, November 6, 1942, p. 1.

102. Probably Prokhor Vasilievich Kayukov (1914–1942), who died in Stalingrad in October 1942, according to www.obd-memorial.ru.

103. Captain Ingor writes that before the war Zoya Rokovanova taught Russian literature at a school. At the front she hosted readings under the motto “Life Is Magnificent!” The readings featured the life of revolutionary writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889), whose writings supplied the motto. Rokovanova had books shipped from Omsk to prepare for the readings. After the readings, she distributed written summaries among the soldiers. M. Ingor, Sibiriaki—gurt’evtsy—gvardeitsy (Omsk, 194?), pp. 44–46. The publication date on the volume, 1941, is a misprint.

104. That is, German aircraft, probably a Focke-Wulf fighter bomber.

105. The “Call by the participants in the defense of Tsaritsyn to the defenders of Stalingrad” was published in the army newspaper For Our Victory. Za nashu pobedu, October 2, 1942.

106. The book was published in 1943 under the title Sibiriaki na zashchite Stalingrada (OGIZ, 1943). It included the stories: A. Svirin, “Sibiriaki v boiakh za Stalingrad”; V. Grossman, “Napravlenie glavnogo udara”; V. Belov, “Bogatyri Sibiri”; M. Ingor, “Leitenant Boris Shonin”; M. Ingor, “Artillerist Vasily Boltenko”; V. Belov, “Vasily Kalinin,” and others.

107. Grossman, Gody voiny, pp. 388–399.

108. Krasnaia zvezda, November 25, 1942, p. 3. Grossman talked with the soldiers of the 308th Rifle Division before the beginning of the November 19, 1942, counteroffensive. In later editions the essay was slightly altered to foreshadow the Soviet victory. Grossman, Gody voiny, pp. 49–61.

109. Grossman, Gody voiny, p. 365.

110. Most of the interviews were conducted on the ships of the Volga flotilla, which were scattered after the battle of Stalingrad: to conduct the interviews, the historians had to travel to Kuibyshev (now Samara), Saratov, Sarepta (near Stalingrad), and Chorny Yar (near Astrakhan).

111. The division was refurbished after it lost 80 percent of its personnel fighting in eastern Ukraine in summer 1942. Isaac Kobylyansky, “Memories of War, Part 2,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies, December 2003,:147. In April 1943, the division was renamed 87th Guards Rifle Division.

112. Stalingrad 1942–1943. Stalingradskaia bitva v dokumentakh (Moscow, 1995), p. 192. Latoshinka today borders on the northern outskirts of Volgograd. During the war, the village was often called Latashanka. The spelling has been standardized here.

113. Tsentral’ny arkhiv Ministerstva oborony Rossiiskoi Federatsii, f. 1247. op.1. d.10. l. 105.

114. Samsonov, Stalingradskaia bitva, p. 240.

115. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, p. 522.

116. Apparently the maneuver was postponed for twenty-four hours. See also Oleynik, interview.

117. The Soviet general staff and German Wehrmacht reports are cited from Stalingradskaia bitva. Khronika, fakty, liudi (Moscow, 2002), 1:827–842.

118. Stalingrad 1942–1943, pp. 187–188. The document bears the signatures of Yeryomenko, Khrushchev, and Varennikov.

119. Stalingradskaia bitva. Khronika, fakty, liudi, 1:842.

120. Wolfgang Werthen, Geschichte der 16. Panzer-Division, 1939–1945 (Bad Nauheim, 1958), pp. 106–108, 110.

121. Werthen, Geschichte der 16. Panzer-Division, p. 116; Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, pp. 521–524.

122. Stalingrad 1942–1943, pp. 183–184, 187; see also Zaginaylo, interview.

123. Stalingrad 1942–1943, p. 192.

124. Erëmenko, Stalingrad, p. 248. A recent Russian publication identifies the losses of the landing operation but also points out that the Soviet battalion “had destroyed 10 to 15 enemy tanks and up to an infantry battalion of the enemy.” In addition, it notes that the action successfully concealed Soviet preparations for Operation Uranus. (Stalingradskaia bitva, pp. 224–225). That, however, had not been the stated goal of the landing maneuver.

125. Isaak Kobylianskii, Priamoi navodkoi po vragu (Moscow, 2005), chap. 5.

126. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, op. 80, d. 3, 7–8, 12, 16, 28, 32, 80. Those interviews that bear dates were recorded between July 18 and 28, 1943. The Interviewers were Vasily A. Divin, Filipp St. Krinitsyn, and Nikolai P. Mazunin, and the stenographers Ye. S. Dassayeva and V. Shinder. The latter, the record notes, was a sailor of the Red Fleet.

127. Colonel (and as of December 1942, Major General) Sergey Fyodorovich Gorokhov (1901–1974) commanded the 124th Independent Rifle Brigade and the Northern group of the 62nd Army.

128. Shadrinsky Bay is on the eastern bank of the Volga, opposite the settlement, located on the river’s western bank.

129. Today the village is located near the Volga cargo port.

130. Sredne-Pogromnoye is a village on the left bank of the Akhtuba.

131. At another point in the interview, Zaginaylo said about him, “Fyodorov is an amazingly quiet commander; he does not shout, is not nervous, but explains the order clearly.”

132. Oleynik possibly confused Kazakhs and Bashkirs. Before the landing maneuver the division was resupplied in Bashkiria, probably with local recruits.

133. Nikolai Nikitich Zhuravkov (1916–1998).

134. This refers to the six-tube 15cm Nebelwerfer 41, which Soviet soldiers called Vanyusha, in contrast to their Katyusha.

135. Anton Grigoryevich Lemeshko. Lieutenant of the Guards, Commissar of the Northern Group of the Volga Flotilla.

136. Probably Ivan Mikhailovich Pyoryshkin.

137. The brigade fought since September 1942 at Stalingrad, first as part of the 64th Army, later in the 62nd, 57th, and 51st Armies before being restored to the 64th Army in January 1943. See Burmakov, interview; Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 401.

138. Friedrich Roske (1897–1956). Previously regimental commander in the 71st Infantry Division. Succeeded General Alexander von Hartmann as divisional commander on January 26, 1943, after his death. According to several witnesses, Hartmann had sought a “hero’s death”: he walked up to the battle line, standing tall, and was shot in the head. Kehrig, Stalingrad, p. 533; Torsten Diedrich, Paulus: Das Trauma von Stalingrad (Paderborn, 2008), p. 289.

139. Akte Dobberkau (p. 2), in RMA Hirst Collection, Hoover Institution Archives (Stanford University), Box 10.

140. Diedrich, Paulus, p. 285.

141. Ibid., pp. 289–291.

142. Kehrig, Stalingrad, p. 542f.

143. In 1860, 65 percent of the officers of the Prussian army came from the nobility. Until 1913, the share of aristocratic officers in the Imperial Army stood at 30 percent. In 1918, 21.7 percent of generals were aristocrats. After the Nazis took power, the percentage declined again. In 1944, 19 percent of all generals were of noble origin. Bartov, Hitler’s Army, p. 43.

144. The scene in Beketovka was captured in the documentary film Stalingrad (dir. Leonid Varlamov, 1943). The speaker dubbed the German commander correctly as “Friedrich Paulus.” Yet in his 1972 memoir Leonid Vinokur repeated the title “Von Paulus.” L. Vinokur, “Plenenie fel’dmarshala Paulyusa,” Raduga: Organ Pravleniia Soiuza pisatelei Ukrainy 1972, no. 2: 145–148.

145. Army General Shumilov came from a poor peasant family, as did Captains Ivan Morozov and Lukyan Bukharov. Both negotiated with Generals Schmidt and Roske in the department store basement. See interviews with Shumilov, Morozov, and Bukharov.

146. Fritz Roske, “Stalingrad,” manuscript, 1956. From the private archive of Bodo Roske, Krefeld. Presented in abbreviated form in Die 71. Infanterie-Division im Zweiten Weltkrieg 1939–1945, ed. Arbeitsgemeinschaft “Das Kleeblatt” (Hildesheim, 1973), pp. 299–300.

147. Cited from the television documentary Stalingrad: Eine Trilogie (2003). The commandant of Stalingrad reported that a group of Germans was seized in a shelter on March 11, 1943 (Demchenko, interview).

148. On the role of European volunteers who joined the Wehrmacht, see Hans Werner Neulen, An deutscher Seite: Internationale Freiwillige von Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS (Munich, 1985); Müller, An der Seite der Wehrmacht.

149. Burmakov was a colonel during the battle and was only promoted to major general on March 1, 1943.

150. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 11, 14–15.

151. A reference to Operation Ring, which was initiated on January 10, 1943. See pp. 11–12.

152. Duka wanted to say, “Hand over your weapons!” (“Geben Sie Ihre Waffen!”), but he mistakenly said: “Hand the guards!”

153. This is confirmed by Kehrig in Stalingrad, pp. 542–543.

154. Red Square was adjacent to the Square of Fallen Heroes. Several German wartime maps show only Red Square in the city center, omitting the larger Square of Fallen Heroes. Red Square was abolished in the course of the postwar reconstruction of Stalingrad.

155. This could have been Boris V. Neihardt, translator with the 51st Army Corps. In view of a possible surrender to the Soviets, Neihardt was ordered to serve Paulus and the Army Command on January 22, 1943. Kehrig, Stalingrad, p. 539.

156. Ivan Andreyevich Laskin (1901–1988) was the 64th Army’s chief of staff between September 1942 and March 1943. In 1941, Laskin had commanded a rifle division at the Southwestern front and successfully broken through a German encirclement. In December 1943, the NKVD learned that the Germans had in fact captured and interrogated Laskin, before he managed to escape again. (After his escape he had remained silent about this fact.) The major general, who had received Soviet and American decorations for his role in the capture of Field Marshal Paulus, was arrested, accused of treason and espionage, and—after prolonged interrogations that stretched over years—sentenced to a fifteen-year prison term. The basis for this harsh treatment was Stalin’s Order no. 270 of August 1941. Laskin was freed as part of an amnesty in 1952 and rehabilitated in 1953. Naumow and Reschin, “Repressionen gegen sowjetische Kriegsgefangene und zivile Repatrianten in der USSR 1941 bis 1956,” p. 339.

157. In his 1972 memoir Vinokur describes his arrival at the department store consistent with the facts described here, but he gives a different slant to the encounter with the hundreds of armed German soldiers in the courtyard of the store: “The Germans huddled in a corner together talking to each other. You could only understand single word fragments: “Kamrad, Kamrad, Hitler kaput! Paulus kaput, kaput.” Our officers and soldiers were talking boldly, courageously, with dignity. It seemed as if the capture of fascist generals was an everyday thing” (L. Vinokur, “Plenenie fel’dmarshala Pauliusa,” p. 146). Vinokur’s 1943 interview conveys how threatened he felt surrounded by armed Germans. The memoir hides this feeling and gives an anachronistic image of the defeated Germans trying to ingratiate their superior Soviet opponents.

158. Paulus was in a different room. Gurov confuses the exceedingly tall field marshal with Roske, who was shorter: “Roske was tall and thin. Paulus was shorter, but had a fuller build.”

159. In the final part of the interview Vinokur again refers to the scene: “I was speaking through the interpreter. I went into Roske’s room. I said: [sic]. He said the same thing. He liked that. He asked if I would sit down.” It would be nice to know what word or words Vinokur used when he greeted the German officer. The stenographer did not say, perhaps wisely?

160. Emka: Soviet M-1 limousine, colloquially referred to as “M-type.”

161. During the Seven Years War, Russian and Austrian troops occupied Berlin for a few days in October 1760.

162. Probably Shumilov was asked if he had asked Paulus why he had not committed suicide.

163. To establish a spatial and moral “new order” in Europe and the world was the explicit goal of the Axis powers: Germany, Italy, and Japan. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1998), pp. 143–146.

164. The reference is probably to Major Demchenko, the city commandant of Stalingrad. See p. 92.

CHAPTER 3: NINE ACCOUNTS OF THE WAR

1. W. I. Chuikov, Legendarnaia shestdesiat vtoraia (Moscow, 1958); Chuikov, Nachalo puti, ed. I. G. Paderina (Moscow, 1959); Chuikov, Vystoiav, my pobedili. Zapiski komandarma 62-i (Moscow, 1960); Chuikov, 180 dnei v ogne srazhenii. Iz zapisok komandarma 62-i (Moscow, 1962); Chuikov, Besprimernyi podvig. O geroizme sovetskikh voinov v bitve na Volge (Moscow, 1965); Chuikov, Srazhenie veka (Moscow, 1975); Stalingrad. Uroki istorii. Vospominaniia uchastnikov bitvy, ed. W. I. Chuikov (Moscow, 1976).

2. Chuikov, Srazhenie veka, pp. 108–109.

3. Walter Kerr, The Russian Army: Its Men, Its Leaders, and Its Battles (New York, 1944), p. 144; Werth, The Year of Stalingrad, p. 456.

4. Richard Woff, “Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov,” in Stalin’s Generals, ed. Harold Shukman (London, 1993), pp. 67–74.

5. Grossman, Life and Fate, p. 660.

6. Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 390; see also Chuikov, Srazhenie veka, pp. 257–258.

7. Initials of the stenographer, Alexandra Shamshina.

8. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 2a, l. 1–28.

9. Serebryanye Prudy, in Moscow province, is Chuikov’s birthplace. Today it features a Chuikov Museum as well as a memorial bust (by artist Yevgeny Vuchetich) and another monument (by artist Alexander Chuikov, Vasily Chuikov’s son).

10. Romania and Germany declared war on August 15, 1916.

11. The party of the Left Social Revolutionaries existed from 1917 to 1923 and had formed an oppositional circle in the Socialist-Revolutionary party. Its members wanted to withdraw from World War I, transfer land to the peasants, and terminate cooperation with the Provisional Government.

12. The October Revolution, 1917.

13. The names Ilya and Ivan are written in the margin in pencil.

14. The decree, signed by Lenin, was published on January 15, 1918.

15. The village soviet occupies the lowest rung of the soviet system; at its upper end is the Council of People’s Deputies.

16. Lefortovo: a district in Moscow’s east, home to barracks and military academies.

17. The insurrection of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries began on July 6, 1918, with the assassination of the German ambassador in Moscow, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach-Harff.

18. The Alexeyevskaya Military Academy was founded in 1864 and located in Lefortovo.

19. A river that rises in the western foothills of the Urals and flows into the Kama, the largest tributary of the Volga.

20. For Gordov, see pp. 63–64.

21. Kotelnikovo: a settlement located 190 kilometers southwest of Volgograd.

22. Tsimlyanskaya: a village in the Volgograd region.

23. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.

24. That is, Hill 102.0, or Mamayev Kurgan.

25. Orlovka and Rynok were villages north of Stalingrad and formed part of the city’s outer defense perimeter.

26. Gumrak: village northwest of Stalingrad.

27. Correct: Yelshanka.

28. Mikhail Naumovich Krichman (1908–1969). From June 1942 to April 1943 he commanded the 6th Guards Tank Brigade.

29. Interview with Alexander V. Chuikov, Moscow, November 11, 2009.

30. Kuzma Akimovich Gurov (1901–1943). Lieutenant general. Member of the Military Council of the Stalingrad Front.

31. Nikolai Ivanovich Krylov (1903–1972) was appointed chief of staff of the 62nd Army in August 1942. Until the arrival of the new army commander, Chuikov, he commanded the army for more than a month. He received the Hero of the Soviet Union award twice in 1945. See N. I. Krylov, Stalingradskii rubezh (Moscow, 1969).

32. Nikolai Mitrofanovich Pozharsky (Pozharnov) (1899–1945). From September 1942 artillery commander of the 62nd Army.

33. See p. 280, note 43.

34. See pp. 292–293, and Rodimtsev, interview, pp. 298–301.

35. Tumak: bend of the Volga below the settlement of Krasnaya Sloboda, which served as an important crossing point for the 62nd Army.

36. Verkhnyaya Akhtuba: a village east of Stalingrad.

37. Among them was sniper Vasily Zaytsev. See Zaytsev, interview.

38. Stalin’s Falcons: slang for Soviet fighter pilots.

39. Polikarpov U-2 biplane. Built in 1927, it was used as a trainer aircraft and crop duster and in war as a reconnaissance aircraft. The aircraft flew slowly, had no technical equipment, and offered its two-man crew, who flew in an open cockpit without helmets, weapons, or parachutes, no protection. Losses were consequently high. Among Germans the nightly raids were feared. They referred to the bombers as “nuisances” or “sewing machines.” Kempowski, Das Echolot, p. 556.

40. Korney Mikhailovich Andrusenko (1899–1976), who fought in the Red Army since 1918, commanded the 115th Independent Rifle Brigade during the battle of Stalingrad. Chuikov reprimanded Andrusenko for retreating without authorization on November 3, 1942, following a devastating German attack. Andrusenko was demoted in rank and made regimental commander. For more details on Andrusenko’s complex war biography, see: http://www.warheroes.ru/hero/hero.asp?Hero_id=4530.

41. Stepan Savelyevich Guryev (1902–1945). Commander of the 39th Guards Rifle Division.

42. Ivan Efimovich Yermolkin (1907–1943). Commander of the 112th Rifle Division.

43. Lieutenant Colonel P. I. Tarasov, commander of the Independent 92nd Rifle Brigade, had moved his command post without authorization from the center of Stalingrad to an island in the Volga on September 26 in the course of a German attack. A military tribunal accused him of cowardice, pointing out that his irresponsible behavior (as well as that of the brigade commissar, G. I. Andreyev) had prompted the troops to leave their defense positions. Both the commander and the commissar were executed on October 9, 1942 (Daines, Shtrafbaty, p. 133). Tarasov and Andreyev must have been one of the two brigade command teams that Chuikov personally executed in front of the brigade’s assembled soldiers (see pp. 273, 288). Chuikov’s memoirs make no mention of their names.

44. Guards Lieutenant General Vasily Akimovich Gorishny (1903–1962). Commander of the NKVD’s 13th Motor Rifle Division. Hero of the Soviet Union (1943).

45. Colonel General Ivan Ilyich Lyudnikov (1902–1976). Commander of the 138th Rifle Division, which led the fight for the Barricades munitions plant. Hero of the Soviet Union (1943).

46. Possibly Afrikan Fyodorovich Sokolov (1917–1977). Captain chief of staff of the 397th Antitank Regiment of the 62nd Army. Hero of the Soviet Union (1945).

47. Major General Viktor Grigoryevich Zholudyev (1905–1944). Commander of the 37th Guards Division, which fought for the Stalingrad Tractor factory. Hero of the Soviet Union (posthumously, 1944).

48. The division was formed in August 1942 near Moscow on the basis of the 8th Airborne Corps. See the interviews with A. P. Averbukh und A. A. Gerasimov.

49. The text comes from the French song “Everything Good, Beautiful Marquise,” which Russian entertainer Leonid Utyosov used in his repertoire. In the song the Marquise asks what happened to her estate after her absence. Everything is good, they say, and so on, to the small matter of the death of her gray mare.

50. The KV is a heavy Soviet tank named after Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. German soldiers called the tank “Dicker Bello” due to its strong armor.

51. The German fighter Messerschmitt Bf 109 (Me-109).

52. Vasily Grossman interviewed Chuikov in December 1942. His brief notes are concordant with Chuikov’s present statements; for example, “Final conversation [with Chuikov] about cruelty and callousness as principles. A dispute. His last, surprising sentence: ‘Well, what the heck, I cried, but alone. What do you say when four Red Army soldiers directs fire onto themselves! You cry, but alone, alone. Nobody. Has. Ever. Seen me cry.’” Grossman, Gody voiny, p. 357.

53. While in Stalingrad, Grossman also spoke with front commander Yeryomenko and asked him about his opinion of Chuikov: “Chuikov I suggested. I knew him; he cannot be swayed by panic. ‘I know your bravery, but it comes from drinking, this bravery I do not need. Don’t make any rash decisions, you like to make them.’ I helped him when he panicked.” The writer’s notebook portrays the front commander in unflattering ways: Yeryomenko claims that he had been the first to come up with the idea of encircling the Germans in a pincer operation, and he repeatedly underlines his closeness to Stalin (Grossman, Gody voiny, pp. 350–353). A chapter in Grossman’s Stalingrad novel describes the front commander’s visit with Chuikov: Yeryomenko felt like a “guest” who had come to see the “master of Stalingrad.” Grossman, Life and Fate, p. 56.

54. Boris Mikhailovich Shaposhnikov (1882–1945). Deputy people’s commissar of defense of the USSR (1942–1943).

55. Alexander I. Rodimtsev, Gvardeitsy stoiali nasmert’ (Moscow, 1969), pp. 7–10.

56. Vasily Grossman, “Stalingradskaia bitva,” September 20, 1942, in Grossman, Gody voiny, p. 29.

57. On October 18, 1942, Izvestiya reported on the house but did not mention Pavlov. Speaking to historians, Rodimtsev described the hostilities he conducted as a commander. The defense of the Pavlov house may have been controlled below his command level.

58. The destroyed Pavlov house was rebuilt in July 1943, to great propaganda fanfare. Located on 61 Penzenskaya Street, the building appears as “House 6/1” in Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate. See Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, pp. 136–137, as well as the television documentary Iskateli: Legendarnyi redut (dir. Lev Nikolaev, 2007).

59. The “house of the soldiers’ sacrifice,” in A. I. Rodimtsev, Gvardeitsy stoiali nasmert’, pp. 85–105, 133–134, 138.

60. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 6, l. 1–7.

61. Sharlyk is a village in the Orenburg region and birthplace of Alexander Rodimtsev. A street and a school are named after him and a bust of him exists there. In 1967, a school museum of military glory was opened, and Rodimtsev loaned it his uniform jacket, cap, and binoculars.

62. The great famine in Russia (1921–1922), brought about by the Civil War and a drought, cost about 10 million lives. It particularly affected the agricultural region between the Volga and the Urals, including Orenburg.

63. Kulaks: pejorative Soviet-era reference to wealthier peasants who were considered “class enemies” of poorer peasants.

64. Today, the Moscow Military Academy.

65. The Khodynka field, located northwest of Moscow, was used for military instruction and target practice.

66. Students of the Federal Military Academy had the exclusive right to stand guard at the Lenin mausoleum.

67. The article could not be found in Red Star.

68. The International Exposition dedicated to Art and Technology in Modern Life, held from May through November 1937. Set up at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, the exposition was noted for the visual confrontation between the German and Soviet pavilions, which faced each other.

69. The M. V. Frunze Academy of the Staff of the Red Army. Since 1998 known as the General Military Academy of the Russian Armed Forces.

70. A city in southern Ukraine.

71. Stalinka (today Chernozavodskoye): town in the Poltava region, Ukraine.

72. Filipp Ivanovich Golikov (1900–1980). Commander of the 1st Guards Army on the Southeast and Stalingrad Fronts. From September 1942 deputy supreme commander of the Stalingrad Front; from October 1942 commander of the front.

73. The division was reinforced and newly equipped after suffering heavy losses in the battle of Kharkov. Many of the reinforcements were officer trainees without combat experience. During the reorganization, the division was ordered to Stalingrad. Krylov, Stalingradskii rubezh, pp. 128–129.

74. Rodimtsev’s memoir contains nothing about the shooting.

75. According to Samsonov, the L-shaped house (in Russian: “G-obrazny dom”) and the Railway Workers house, which stood seventy meters from each other on Penzenskaya Street, were multistory buildings with massive cellars. After taking the two houses, the Germans converted them into veritable fortresses. The buildings had great tactical value because they controlled the area. Samsonov, Stalingradskaia bitva, pp. 265–266.

76. For a detailed description of the storming of the L-shaped house and the Railway Workers house, see W. I. Chuikov, “Taktika shturmovykh grupp v gorodskom boiu” (Assault group tactics in city fighting), Voennyi vestnik 1943, no. 7: 10–15. The storming of the L-shaped house was filmed by Valentin Orlyankin and is shown in the documentary Stalingrad (dir. Leonid Varlamov, 1943).

77. Tim is a town in the Kursk region.

78. The conversation, like the one with Rodimtsev, took place on January 7, 1943, in Stalingrad. The interviewer was A. A. Belkin, and the stenographer was A. I. Shamshina. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 6, l. 8–8 ob.

79. Olkhovatka: probably a village in the Voronezh region.

80. Chuikov, Srazhenie veka, p. 350; Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 196.

81. PPSh stands for Pistolet Pulemyot Shpagina and is a Soviet submachine gun. It was developed by Georgy S. Shpagin.

82. This renders all the more valuable the interviews that Svetlana Aleksievich conducted with female veterans of the Great Patriotic War during the 1980s: Svetlana Aleksievich, War’s Unwomanly Face (Moscow, 1988).

83. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 6, l. 9–10.

84. Burkovka: a settlement on the eastern side of the Volga and location of a 62nd Army field hospital.

85. Maybe Gurova answered the question of her marital status. Since the interviewers’ questions are not included in the transcript, the degree of their intervention in the conversation is difficult to gauge.

86. Stalingradskaia bitva. Khronika, fakty, liudi, 1:417, 427; Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 402. Today Rossoshka is home to a German war cemetery which was set up by the German War Graves Commission in 1999. An estimated 50,000 German soldiers are buried there. A Russian war cemetery is located on the other side of the street.

87. On Makarenko, see James Bowen, Soviet Education: Anton Makarenko and the Years of Experiment (Madison, 1965).

88. Innokenti Petrovich Gerasimov (1918–). Details at Geroi Sovetskogo Soiuza: Kratkii biograficheskii slovar’ (Moscow, 1987), 1:319; Stalingradskaia bitva. Khronika, fakty, liudi 1:74–75.

89. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 38, l. 36–37.

90. Rzhishchev: a town southeast of Kiev.

91. A settlement on the southwestern edge of Kiev.

92. Political officer Innokenti Gerasimov, who conducted the interview with Averbukh.

93. Regimental commander Alexander Akimovich Gerasimov, not to be confused with the eponymous political officer (see note 88).

94. This refers to the six-tube 15cm multiple rocket launcher Nebelwerfer 41, which Red Army Soviet soldiers called the “Vanyusha” (little Vanya), in contrast to their own “Katyusha” (little Katya) rocket launcher.

95. Verkhnyaya Yelshanka: a settlement south of Stalingrad.

96. The blood-stained uniform of Major General Vasily Glazkov (1901–1942), shot through in 168 places, is now displayed in the Volgograd Panoramic Museum.

97. Chuikov, Srazhenie veka. Glantz writes that on September 11 the division still counted 454 soldiers. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, p. 85.

98. Initials of Alexandra Shamshina, the stenographer.

99. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 38, l. 25–32. The transcript does not indicate who conducted the interview.

100. After Glazkov’s death, Colonel Vasily Pavlovich Dubyansky (1891–?) assumed command of the 35th Guards Rifle Division.

101. The 35th Guards Division fought against the German 14th and 24th Panzer Divisions, as well as the Romanian 20th Infantry Division. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, pp. 64, 93.

102. Gerasimov’s regiment was located south of the German forces that had reached the Volga on the southern edge of Stalingrad. The only open way to reach the division command was by boat.

103. The sailors of the Volga Military Flotilla who controlled the river crossing.

104. Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 127; see also the interview with divisional commander Batyuk.

105. Interview with Alexander Levykin, commissar of the 284th Rifle Division.

106. “Donesenie OO NKVD Stalingradskogo fronta v NKVD SSSR o khode boev v Stalingrade, 16. 9. 1942,” in Stalingradskaia popeia, p. 196.

107. William Craig, Enemy at the Gates (New York, 1973), p. 120.

108. This date is given by Aksyonov in his interview. According to another source, the hill was not fully under Soviet control until January 26: Kratkie svedeniia ob osnovnykh tapakh boev 62. Armii po oborone gor. Stalingrada, NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 3, l. 5.

109. As a history teacher, Aksyonov felt an affinity to Isaak Mints’s historical commission. The State Historical Museum in Moscow has an oil lamp made from a grenade shell with the inscription: “To the history professor Dr. Mints in memory of the defense of Stalingrad from Captain N. N. Aksyonov.” 1943 god. Voina glazami ochevidtsev. Vystavka iz sobraniia Gosudarstvennogo Istoricheskogo muzeia pri uchastii Tsentral’nogo muzeia Vooruzhennykh Sil (Moscow, 2003), p. 8.

110. On the Stalin cult in the Soviet Union, see Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (New Haven, CT, 2012).

111. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 4, l. 3–16 ob. The long interview began on May 5 and was continued on May 8.

112. Metiz: acronym for “Metal Products.” Established in 1932 as the Stalingrad steel mill, the factory was located at the foot of Mamayev Kurgan.

113. Imperialist War: this is how Lenin and other Soviet Marxists referred to World War I.

114. This refers to the Il-2, a Soviet fighter plane, which was built under the direction of Sergey Ilyushin and came into use during the war.

115. The plant was situated on the slope of Mamayev Kurgan.

116. In accordance with Soviet wartime propaganda Aksyonov represents the defense of Tsaritsyn as a struggle against the Germans. Yet German occupation troops in the Ukraine did not participate in the attack on the city in 1918.

117. Kastornaya: railway junction on the Kursk-Voronezh route. In July 1942, heavy fighting took place there.

118. Letters written at the time by Grossman indicate that he was, in fact, very concerned about Benesh. See A Writer at War, pp. 203–204.

119. Signed: “Viewed on May 12, 1943, N. Aksyonov.”

120. Corrected by hand to “none.”

121. Rakityansky was born in 1913. This is confirmed at: http://www.obd-memorial.ru/html/info.htm?id=9413438.

122. The following was deleted: “and we felt very sorry about him.”

123. A Stalin order of May 1, 1945 formally declared four Soviet cities “Hero Cities”: Leningrad, Stalingrad, Sevastopol, and Odessa. The number later rose to twelve.

124. See also Frank Ellis, The Stalingrad Cauldron: Inside the Encirclement and Destruction of 6th Army (Lawrence, KS, 2013), pp. 270–284.

125. Na zashchitu rodiny, October 5, 1942, p. 2.

126. Kapitan N. N. Aksënov, “Rol’ snaiperov v oborone Stalingrada” (manuscript), NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 26, l. 2.

127. Words from an article by writer and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967). Il’ia Erenburg, “Ubei!” [“Kill!”] Krasnaia zvezda, July 24, 1942.

128. Chuikov, Srazhenie veka, pp. 174–175.

129. Na zashchitu rodiny, October 21, 1942, p. 1; October 26, 1942, p. 1; October 30, 1942, p. 1.

130. Ibid., October 26, 1942, p. 1.

131. “Znatnyi snaiper,” Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 203, with a reference to the archive of the Russian Defense Ministry.

132. Grossman, Gody voiny, p. 387.

133. “Snaiper Vasilii Zaitsev,” Na zashchitu rodiny, November 2, 1942, p. 1.

134. Na zashchitu rodiny, November 6, 1942, p. 1.

135. Ibid., November 14, 1942, p. 1.

136. Zaytsev, interview, p. 367; NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 27, l. 44; Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 151. A Moscow archive has Zaytsev’s Stalingrad “combat account” for the period from October 5 to December 5, 1942. The booklet countersigned by Captain Kotov lists 184 killed “Hitler soldiers” (RGASPI-M, f. 7, op. 2, ed. 468).

137. Zaitsev, Za Volgoi zemli dlia nas ne bylo, pp. 105–106.

138. Captain Aksyonov may have played a role in facilitating the interview with Zaytsev. On March 9, 1943, he wrote an essay on the role of snipers in the defense of Stalingrad (NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 26, l. 1–20). Presumably this text was in front of the historians who talked with Zaytsev in April; that would explain the concordance of the narrated episodes. Aksyonov’s essay, or parts of it, appeared in the newspaper Red Fleet on March 15, 1943 (see p. 367).

139. Vasilii G. Zaitsev, Geroi Sovetskogo Soiuza. Rasskaz snaipera (Moscow, 1943).

140. Zaytsev’s 1981 memoir also departs from the 1943 interview on multiple counts. Zaitsev, Za Volgoi zemli dlia nas ne bylo.

141. Stalingradskaia bitva. ntsiklopediia, p. 151; Geroi Sovetskogo Soiuza: Kratkii biograficheskii slovar’, 1:524.

142. Raisa Ivanovna Krol’ worked for the commission beginning in 1942.

143. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 4, l. 17–26.

144. Zaytsev describes the sniper modification of his automatic rifle, the Tokarev SVT-40.

145. Probably the TOZ 8 sports and hunting rifle that was produced by the Tula Weapons Factory.

146. In the published interview: “In October, something very important happened in my life. The Komsomol handed me over to the ranks of the Communist Party.” Zaitsev, Rasskaz snaipera, p. 8.

147. The political officer in question must be Colonel Vedyukov.

148. On Furmanov and Chapayev, see pp. 25–28.

149. Alexander Yakovlevich Parkhomenko (1886–1921) was a Civil War hero. Vsevolod Ivanov published his biography in 1939.

150. Grigori Ivanovich Kotovsky (1881–1925) was a Soviet commander during the Civil War. Zaytsev probably read V. Shmerling’s book Kotovsky (Moscow, 1937).

151. Alexander Vasilievich Suvorov (1730–1800), the last Generalissimo of the Russian army and one of the most distinguished commanders in Russian military history.

152. Brusilov offensive: a vast and successful Russian offensive against Austria and Germany during World War I, under the command of General Alexei Brusilov. Zaytsev probably read the book by L. V. Vetoshnikov, Brusilovskii proryv: Operativno-strategicheskii ocherk (Moscow, 1940).

153. Vladimir Yakovlevich Zazubrin (1895–1937) was a Soviet writer whose novel about the destruction of Admiral Kolchak, Two Worlds, was published in 1921.

154. Pyotr Ivanovich Bagration (1765–1812) was a general in the Patriotic War of 1812. Zaytsev probably refers to S. B. Borisov, Bagration. Zhizn’ i deiatel’nost’ russkogo polkovodtsa (Moscow, 1938).

155. Denis Vasilievich Davydov (1784–1839) was a Russian poet and military commander who led a guerrilla movement during the Patriotic War of 1812.

156. Sergey Georgyevich Lazo (1894–1920) was a Soviet commander in the Civil War. See Sergei Lazo. Vospominaniia i dokumenty (Moscow, 1938).

157. K. M. Staniukovich (1843–1903), Morskie rasskazy (1934).

158. Alexei Novikov-Priboi Sikych (1877–1944) was a Russian-Soviet writer and student of Maxim Gorky. In 1932 he published his most famous novel, Tsusima, followed by part 2 in 1941.

159. The supplementary interview with Zaytsev begins after this passage. It was recorded on August 23, 1943. The interviewer was Raisa Krol’; Alexandra Shamshina transcribed.

160. On that day Chuikov presented Zaytsev with the Medal for Valor.

161. Epaulets were denounced as a sign of counterrevolution and abolished in the Russian army in December 1917. In January 1943 they were reintroduced by the Red Army.

162. See pp. 62–64.

163. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 14, l. 154–159. The interviewing historian and the stenographer are not identified.

164. Until December 1941 the Soviet government readied itself for a Japanese attack in the Far East. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the US declaration of war against Japan, the specter of a two-front war became less likely, and by early 1942, twenty-three divisions and nineteen brigades of the Red Army were deployed from the Soviet Far East to the European theater. Glantz, Colossus Reborn, p. 154.

165. Rozengartovka: train station in the Khabarovsk region.

166. Vertyachy: a hamlet in the Don bend, west of Stalingrad.

167. Regarding the concept of the psychic attack, see pp. 25–26.

168. Tinguta and Peskovatka: settlements in the Stalingrad region. The distance between them is more than one hundred kilometers.

169. For the activities of the 7th Section, see Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA, 1995), pp. 17–20.

170. See A. Epifanov, “Sovetskaia propaganda i obrashchenie s voennoplennymi vermakhta v khode Stalingradskoi bitvy (1942–1943 gg.),” in Rossiiane i nemtsy v epokhu katastrof, pp. 67–74

171. For the appropriation of imperial Russian traditions in Soviet prewar and wartime culture, see Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger, eds., Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Madison, WI, 2006).

172. This and the following biographical details are taken from L. G. Zakharova, “Pëtr Andreevich Zaionchkovskii: Uchënyi i uchitel’,” Voprosy istorii 1994, no. 5: 171–179; Terence Emmons, “Zaionchkovsky, Petr Andreevich,” in The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, ed. George N. Rhyne, vol. 55 (Gulf Breeze, FL, 1993), pp. 185–186.

173. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind; Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (London, 2008), pp. 64, 196–199.

174. Istoriia dorevoliutsionnoi istorii Rossii v dnevnikakh i vospominaniiakh. Annotirovannyi ukazatel’ knig i publikatsii v zhurnalakh. Nauchnoe rukovodstvo, redaktsiia i vvedenie professora P. A. Zaionchkovskogo, 5 vols. in 13 pts. (Moscow, 1976–1989). Several of Zayonchkovsky’s monographs have appeared in American translation, including The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia (Gulf Breeze, FL, 1978).

175. Grigori Nikolayevich Anpilogov (1902–1987) was a Soviet historian. He served on the Historical Commission from 1942 to 1945.

176. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 54, l. 1–7.

177. This refers to Andrei Cheslavovich Zayonchkovsky (1862–1926). His brother was Nikolai Cheslavovich Zayonchkovsky (1859–1918), a senator, and later deputy Procurator of the Holy Synod.

178. The Zayonchkovskys, a noble family of Polish origin, owned the estate Mikhailovsky in the government of Smolensk. The farm was located near the village Volochek, today Nakhimovsky.

179. Pavel Stepanovich Nakhimov (1802–1855). Admiral. Commander of the Black Sea Fleet squadron during the Crimean War, 1853–1856.

180. The George Cross is a Russian order of merit, which was founded in 1769 by Catherine II.

181. The battle of Borodino (August 29, 1812) took place near Moscow and was one of the key moments in the Patriotic War of 1812.

182. Today it is the Russian State Military Historical Archive, or RGVIA.

183. The Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) were a bourgeois-liberal party in prerevolutionary Russia. The Octobrists formed a party farther to the right that supported the reformed Tsarist state after the Revolution of 1905.

184. See p. 363, note 161, and pp. 431–432.

185. Gustav Wietersheim (1884–1974). Lieutenant general of the infantry and commander of the 14th Panzer corps at Stalingrad. After the corps incurred heavy casualties in September 1942, Wietersheim suggested a partial withdrawal to the Don. Army commander Paulus accused him of defeatism and Wietersheim was demoted.

186. Hitler Youth: the youth organization of the Nazi party in Germany.

187. Kletskaya: a train station located 230 kilometers northwest of Stalingrad on the banks of the Don.

188. See p. 22, note 76.

189. Soviet enemy propagandists produced the “Daddy Is Dead” leaflet in a variety of forms because it proved extremely effective. In a June 1942 meeting with Red Army propaganda specialists, GlavPURKKA head Alexander Shcherbakov discussed the leaflet at length. He had been told, Shcherbakov said, that there was not a single German POW who did not know about the leaflet, and that many enemy soldiers were clutching it in their hands as they surrendered to the Red Army. Shcherbakov’s reasoning was interesting: German soldiers were brutal, fully conforming to Hitler’s ambition to produce a beastly and cruel new generation, but they were also sentimental. Shcherbakov urged the assembled specialists to work on the enemy’s soft spot and produce more “sentimental” propaganda. M. I. Burtsev, Prozrenie (Moscow, 1981), pp. 100–102. An exact image of the leaflet as described by Zayonchkovsky could not be found.

190. Zayonchkovsky is referring to propaganda that appealed to German soldiers, as sons of workers and peasants, to turn against a Nazi regime controlled by capitalists.

191. For the full wording of the order, see p. 10, note 27.

192. Hitler’s address to the soldiers of the 6th Army was dated November 26, 1942, and is referenced in Kehrig, Stalingrad, pp. 264–265.

193. See “The Landing at Latoshinka,” pp. 203–222.

194. Elsewhere in Stalingrad, too, cats were used to deliver Soviet propaganda. The intelligence department of the 62nd Army reported on two soldiers of the 149th Independent Rifle Battalion who noticed “that a cat living in their shelter from time to time visited the shelters of the Germans. They decided to use the cat to transport fliers to the adversary. They wrapped the cat with leaflets and shooed it forcibly to the Germans. In this way the cat took about one hundred leaflets to the Germans. The fact that it returned without leaflets suggests that the German soldiers read our leaflets and care about them.” Unlike Zayonchkovsky’s story, this report ends without the heroic death of the cat. It is interesting to note that the animal had to be shooed to the Germans; by itself it would not go there. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 3a, l. 27 ob. Report of January 5, 1943.

195. A Sovinformburo broadcast.

196. Maria Petrovna Kukharskaya (Smirnova) (1921–2010) was a medical educator who joined the front as a volunteer in 1941. She held the rank of lieutenant at the end of the war. See Iu. A. Naumenko, Shagai, pekhota! (Moscow, 1989); Akmolinskaia Pravda,September 28, 2010.

197. Captain Nikolai Dmitriyevich Abukhov (1922–1943) commanded the 1st Rifle Battalion, 1151st Rifle Regiment, 343rd Rifle Division. See Iu. A. Naumenko, Shagai, pekhota!

198. Ehrenburg produced hundreds of columns during the war, filled with scathing observations on Nazi German “culture.” To make his point, Ehrenburg often quoted from captured German letters and diaries. See Jochen Hellbeck, “‘The Diaries of Fritzes and the Letters of Gretchens’: Personal Writings from the German–Soviet War and Their Readers,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10 (2009), no. 3: 571–606; Peter Jahn, ed., Ilya Ehrenburg und die Deutschen (Berlin, 1997).

199. Mokraya Mechetka is a river that flows through the area of the Tractor factory. The riverbed is transformed seasonally into a ravine.

200. Soviet observers frequently commented on the pornographic images that they found in the pockets of German POWs or in abandoned trenches. “You want to wash your hands after touching any of these Germans’ things,” Vassily Grossman subtly remarked in his war diary. Grossman, Gody voiny, pp. 261–262. Talking with the Moscow historians, Major Anatoly Soldatov was more explicit: “There were a lot of obscene magazines that they left behind—such obscenities that you rarely see on photographs. An official edition, mind you.” Soldatov might have had in mind Ostfront-Illustrierte, a magazine that was produced for soldiers of the 6th Army. Its issues were replete with erotic pictures of young German women, in tune with the Nazis’ aggressive reproductive aims. A partial run is at Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (Freiburg), RWD 9/32. Compare also Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 67–94.

CHAPTER 4: THE GERMANS SPEAK

1. General Karl Strecker (1884–1973) commanded the German 11th Corps at Stalingrad. He surrendered on February 2, 1943, as commander of the Stalingrad north Kessel.

2. 2 NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, op. 258, d. 2, l. 8–11.

3. Colonel Arno Ernst Max von Lenski (1893–1986) commanded the 24th Panzer Division at Stalingrad. In January 1943 he was promoted to lieutenant general.

4. Presented here is only a selection of the interrogation transcripts preserved in the archive of the Historical Commission: NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I, op. 258, d. 5.

5. Handwritten insertions in the typewritten transcripts are italicized.

6. Turkey, which had maintained its neutrality, declared war on Germany and Japan on February 23, 1945.

7. See Zayonchkovsky’s information about the desecrated corpses of Soviet soldiers, which he found in November 1942 near Latoshinka (pp. 207, 391).

8. During the first days of the encirclement German commanders in the Kessel readied themselves for a breakthrough to the west, and they ordered food and military supplies to be destroyed.

9. Kalmyk steppe: desert-like area southeast of Stalingrad.

10. The Red Army liberated Rostov on February 14 and Kharkov on February 16, 1943. On March 15 Kharkov again fell into German hands and was finally liberated on August 23.

11. Böse Waffe (German): evil weapon.

12. General Walther von Brauchitsch (1881–1948, promoted to general field marshal in 1940) was the commander-in-chief of the German Army from 1938–1941. He was sacked by Hitler after the failed Moscow offensive and spent the remainder of the war in enforced retirement.

13. Erwin Jaenecke (1890–1960), Lieutenant general and commander of the 389th Infantry Division. He was flown out of Stalingrad as one of the last higher officers.

14. See Jens Ebert, “Organisation eines Mythos,” in Feldpostbriefe aus Stalingrad, pp. 333–402.

15. Shelyubsky crossed paths with Isaak Mints during the war and appears to have joined the Historical Commission shortly after the war ended. See Sheliubskii, “Bol’shevik, voin, uchënyi”; A. P. Sheliubskii, “Bol’shevistskaia propaganda i revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie na severnom fronte nakanune 1917 goda,” Voprosy istorii 1947, no. 2: 67–80.

16. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 3a, l. 1–48.

17. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 2a, l. 101–133.

18. Schelyubsky: “Among our [sic] German divisions, who fought against us, there were also several small Austrian units. The Austrians came in first after the Germans.”

19. These are words from a poem by Gavriil Derzhavin (1743–1816), which became the unofficial Russian national anthem of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

20. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 3a, l. 14–15.

21. “Vechernee soobshchenie 25 ianvaria,” Pravda, January 26, 1943, p. 3; see also “Pis’ma okruzhennykh nemtsev,” Pravda, January 10, 1943, p. 4.

CHAPTER 5: WAR AND PEACE

1. Quoted from Kempowski, Das Echolot, 3:173.

2. Pravda, February 4, 1943, p. 1.

3. Krasnaia Zvezda, February 4, 1943, p. 1.

4. The list with the 9,602 decorated soldiers is signed by the head of the cadre department in the political administration of the 62nd Army. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. III, op. 5, d. 3, l. 1.

5. The documentary Stalingrad (dir. Varlamov). Grossman collaborated on the screenplay. See also p. 224, n. 144.

6. Grossman, Gody voiny, p. 369 (entry for May 1, 1943).

7. Pravda, June 27, 1945, p. 2. Stalin’s use of the screw metaphor is often viewed as an expression of his cynical views toward the Soviet people. That may be, but there is evidence that Soviet citizens readily described themselves in the very same terms. In September 1943 an engineer at Moscow’s ZIL factory noted in his diary: “The news gets better every day. There is growing confidence that we will end the war this year. What magnificent events we are witnessing! And what a joy to think that you are a tiny little screw in these events.” V. A. Lapshin, entry for September 7, 1943, in Somov, “Dukhovnii oblik trudiashchikhsia perioda Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” p. 342. For the cynical interpretation see, among others, Seniavskaia, Frontovoe pokolenie, p. 4.

8. I. S. Konev, Zapiski komanduiushchego frontom (Moscow, 1991), pp. 594–599; Laurence Rees, World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis, and the West (New York, 2010), pp. 395–398.

9. Lidiya Ginzburg, Blockade Diary, trans. Alan Myers (London, 1995), p. 3.

10. N. N. Gusev, “Voina i mir” L. N. Tolstogo: Geroicheskaia popeia Otechestvennoi voiny 1812 goda, Bloknot lektora (Moscow, 1943); A. Rashkovskaia, “‘Voina i mir’, prochtennaia zanovo,” Smena (Leningrad), February 3, 1943; James von Geldern, “Radio Moscow: The Voice from the Center,” in Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, ed. Richard Stites (Bloomington, 1995), p. 53.

11. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, 2007), p. 1137.

12. Ilya Ehrenburg, Letopis’ muzhestva: Publitsisticheskie stat’i voennykh let (Moscow, 1974), p. 355; L. Lazarev, “Dukh svobody,” Znamia 9 (1988): 128.

13. Benedikt Sarnov, “‘Voina i mir dvadtsatogo veka,” Lechaim, January 2007, http://www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/177/sarnov.htm. War and Peace was, as Grossman acknowledged, the only book that he read during the war years. A Writer at War, pp. 54–55; see also Grossman, Gody voiny,p. 287.

14. Grossman was fortunate that the Central Committee of the party called on General Rodimtsev as a military expert. He remembered Grossman’s war reports from Stalingrad and had a favorable view of the writer (RGALI, f. 1710, op. 2, ed. chr. 1, entry from May 31, 1950). Twelve versions of the novel are preserved in Grossman’s estate. Grossman compiled a diary to document the twisted road that his manuscript traveled.

15. RGALI, f. 1710, op. 1, ed. khr. 106, l. 26; see also f. 1710, op. 1, ed. khr. 152.

16. RGALI, f. 1710, op. 1, ed. khr. 37, title page.

17. John Garrard and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (New York, 1996), pp. 355, 358.

18. The book is forthcoming under its original title, Stalingrad, in the New York Review of Books Classics series (trans. Robert Chandler).

19. Grossman’s daughter remembers how committed her father was to the mythology of the Soviet people’s war. The family often sang war songs at evening gatherings. Inevitably the evening reached its high point: with his unmusical voice, her father intoned the famous song of the “holy war” (1941). The song moved him so powerfully that he had to stand up. “Father stands hunched over, his hands on his hips, as if he were in a parade. His face is solemn and serious. ‘Rise up, rise up great country / to the last battle [ . . . ] This is a war of the people / a holy war.’” A Writer at War, p. 348.

20. Sabine R. Arnold, Stalingrad im sowjetischen Gedächtnis: Kriegserinnerung und Geschichtsbild im totalitären Staat (Bochum, 1998), p. 293.

21. How Grossman’s words came to be included in the war memorial is unclear. Surviving witnesses supply conflicting information. Compare Arnold, Stalingrad im sowjetischen Gedächtnis, p. 294.

22. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. XIV, d. 22, l. 210.

23. K istorii russkikh revoliutsii, p. 224. According to a different source, the decision to dissolve the commission and its transformation in the sector was made on September 15 or November 15, 1945. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, “Prikazy po Institutu istorii za 1945 g.,” no call number, l. 119; Levshin, “Deiatel’nost’ Komissii po istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” p. 317. The sector worked in the same place as the commission before it, in the house on Comintern Street.

24. Many documents were kept secret even after the war due to their detailed descriptions of military operations and fighting. Gorodetskii and Zak, “Akademik I. I. Minc kak arkheograf,” p. 142.

25. NA IRI RAN, f. 2, unsigned folder on the activity of the sector in the year 1946, l. 71–72 (July 25, 1946).

26. Stalingradskaia bitva (dir. N. Petrov, 1949).

27. Kratkaia evreiskaia ntsiklopediia, vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 1976), pp. 682–691; Dopolnenie 2 (Jerusalem, 1995), pp. 286–291.

28. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ, 2004), pp. 297–313; Gennadi Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia (Amherst, MA, 1995).

29. I. Mints, Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow, 1947).

30. It was the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow, led by historian Mikhail Pokrovsky (1868–1932).

31. A. L. Sidorov, “Institut krasnoi professury,” in Mir istorika: Istoriograficheskii sbornik, vol. 1 (2005), p. 399; see also K. N. Tarnovskii, “Put’ uchënogo,” Istoricheskie zapiski 80 (1967): 207–251, at p. 223.

32. His doctoral thesis examined the war economy of the Russian empire during the First World War. Sidorov submitted the work in December 1942; it appeared in full only after his death. A. L. Sidorov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii v gody Pervoi Mirovoi voiny (Moscow, 1973). Compare Tarnovskii, “Put’ uchënogo,” pp. 226–228, at p. 244.

33. Tarnovskii, “Put’ uchënogo,” p. 225; NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. XIV, d. 22, l. 18–19; d. 23, l. 14, 23, 56; Mints, Iz pamiati vyplyli vospominaniia, p. 50. Sidorov conducted many interviews for the commission. In fall 1943 he talked with dozens of residents of Kharkov shortly after the liberation of the city; in 1945 he interviewed Red Army soldiers who had taken part in the assault on Königsberg and the liberation of Czechoslovakia. For his service in the Red Army, Sidorov was awarded the Order of the Red Star. Tarnovskii, “Put’ uchënogo,” pp. 225–227.

34. Prof. A. Sidorov, “O knige akademika I. Mintsa ‘Istoriia SSSR’,” Kul’tura i zhizn’ 33 (1947): 4; compare V. V. Tikhonov, “Bor’ba za vlast’ v sovetskoi istoricheskoi nauke: A. L. Sidorov i I. I. Mints (1949 g.),” Vestnik Lipetskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta. Nauchnyi zhurnal. Seriia Gumanitarnye nauki 2011, no. 2: 76–80. That Sidorov’s review appeared in Kul’tura i zhizn’, a highly political magazine, suggests that the campaign against Mints was supported or controlled from above. Mints seems to have fallen out of favor because, among other reasons, in the book discussed by Sidorov he had claimed that some of his editorial staff on the history of the Civil War had laid the “foundations” of the history of Soviet society. Yet only one publication could claim such a role: the 1938 The Short Course of the History of the Communist Party that was ascribed to Stalin. Mints was also accused of neglecting the work on the history of the Civil War. Indeed, only two volumes had been published so far. Since 1942 Mints had incorporated the entire staff into the Commission on the History of the Great Patriotic War. K istorii russkikh revoliutsii, pp. 224, 251.

35. Detailed in Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, pp. 179–221.

36. In this connection Mints also wrote to Stalin and Malenkov, confessing various errors and offenses in his scientific work. K istorii russkikh revoliutsii, p. 251.

37. Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, pp. 198–199. Sidorov’s obituaries are silent about the campaign against “cosmopolitanism,” and Sidorov’s participation in it. Tarnovskii, “Put’ uchënogo”; P. V. Volobuev, “Arkadii Lavrovich Sidorov,” Istoriya SSSR 3 (1966): 234–238. In 1959 Sidorov relinquished his position as director for health reasons. His works are listed in Tarnovskii, “Put’ uchënogo,” pp. 245–251.

38. Edele, Soviet Veterans of World War II, pp. 61, 129–136; A. M. Nekrich, “Pokhod protiv ‘kosmopolitov’ v MGU,” Kontinent 28 (1981): 304–305; Tarnovskii, “Put’ uchënogo,” p. 229.

39. Sidorov, “Institut krasnoj professury,” pp. 397, 399–400.

40. On his seventieth birthday Mints was awarded the Order of Lenin, the highest award of the Soviet Union. The leading Soviet historical journal published a tribute to his life’s work. It was written by the Stalingrad veteran Alexander Sheliubskii, the former head of the intelligence department of the 62nd Army. Sheliubskii mentioned the Historical Commission, founded by Mints during the war, and expressed his regret that its documentary record remained virtually unexplored. Sheliubskii, “Bol’shevik, voin, uchënyi,” p. 168; see also K istorii russkikh revoliutsii, p. 277. For his work on the history of the battle of Stalingrad, Samsonov (himself a veteran of the battle) had access to the documents from the Mints commission, but he made virtually no use of them.

41. His posthumously published diaries are anything but instructive. Mints, Iz pamiati vyplyli vospominaniia. Mints’s estate in the archives of the Academy of Sciences is currently not available.

42. The main outcome of this work was the History of Great October, volume 1 of which appeared on the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution (I. I. Mints, Istoriia Velikogo Oktiabria, 3 vols., Moscow, 1967–1973). In 1968 Mints drew a straight line from his work in the 1930s as a responsible editor of the history of the Civil War to his research on the history of the Revolution after the war. He passed over his activity during the war. “Nashi interv’iu: Akademik I. I. Mints otvechaet na voprosy zhurnala ‘Voprosy istorii,’” Voprosy istorii 1968, no. 8: 182–189, at p. 187. Mints’s collected writings are listed in K istorii russkikh revoliutsii, pp. 280–330.

43. In 1957 the third volume of the History of the Civil War in the Soviet Union appeared, but without Mints’s involvement. The volume devotes eight pages to a description of the battle of Tsaritsyn in the summer and fall of 1918. Stalin is mentioned just three times. The main actors in this account are the workers of Tsaritsyn, the “Tsaritsyn Central Committee” (to which Stalin belonged), and Stalin’s colleague Voroshilov. Istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny v SSSR, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1957), pp. 250–257.

44. Robert Chandler, “Introduction,” in Grossman, Life and Fate, pp. xv–xvi.

45. RGAFD, f. 439, op. 4m, N. 1–2 (Memories of Nadezhda Trusova); see also p. 73, n. 247.