Joseph Stalin and the city named after him had their own Civil War experiences. Until 1925 Stalingrad bore the name Tsaritsyn, a Tatar word meaning “city on the yellow river” in reference to the Tsaritsa, which flows into the Volga at Stalingrad. The city’s location on the Volga and on a railway line stretching from Moscow to the Caucasus made it into a transportation and trade hub for southern Russian and had promoted industrial development there since the nineteenth century. The weapons factory in Tsaritsyn, founded in 1914 and renamed the Red Barricades after the revolution, was the largest munitions manufacturer in Europe. The area around Tsaritsyn was one of the first burning points in the Civil War. After the Bolsheviks seized power, many tsarist officers fled to the Cossack settlements in the Don and Kuban regions where they formed a volunteer army in the spring of 1918 to mobilize against the new rulers. They received logistical support from the German occupying powers in the Ukraine. In May 1918 Stalin, as people’s commissar of nationalities, was tasked with boosting the food supply from the northern Caucasus. Due to fighting, the train carrying Stalin and his Red Army troops got stuck in Tsaritsyn, where they joined forces with the 10th Army, which had been cobbled together from partisans under the command of Voroshilov. Meanwhile, the White Army, together with an allied Cossack army under the direction of Ataman Pyotr Krasnov, had pushed forward from the south and the west toward the city. Although Stalin’s assignment was civilian in nature and he had no military experience, he seized the reins. In a letter to Lenin, he demanded that General Andrei Snesarev, the commander of the Red Army in the northern Caucasus military district who still wore his tsarist epaulets, be fired. Lenin gave in to Stalin’s pressure. In the middle of August 1918 Stalin declared the city under siege and ordered the city’s bourgeoisie to dig trenches. The Soviet defenders spoke of Tsaritsyn as a “Red Verdun” that would never surrender to the Whites and the foreign meddlers who backed them. A counterattack pushed the enemy troops behind the Don, but by September Krasnov’s troops had recovered their ground. Once again, there was a conflict between Stalin and a former tsarist commander in the service of the Red Army, and once again it ended with the commander’s dismissal. Trotsky, furious, ordered Stalin back to Moscow immediately. Yet by the middle of October the Red Army had ended the White assault on Tsaritsyn.92
Stalin’s role in saving the city is contested. First after his death, and again after the Soviet Union fell apart, critics have raised doubts about Stalin’s military acumen in view of the heavy losses.93 But at the time, some admired Stalin for his brutal approach. Writing in 1919, an officer in the White Army who had infiltrated the Red Army as a spy during the siege of Tsaritsyn stressed the effectiveness of Stalin’s ruthless measures. He cites one example where Stalin, convinced that the city’s bourgeoisie harbored counterrevolutionary sentiments, had several dozen officers and civilians placed on a barge, which he threatened to blow up if city residents did not side with the Red Army. The officer also attested to Stalin’s great skills as an agitator:
He would often say in his arguments about military skill: “It’s fine if everyone is talking about the need for military skill, but if the most talented general in the world does not have a conscientious soldier educated by the right kind of agitation, believe me, he won’t be able to do anything with a bunch of motivated revolutionaries, however few in number.” And Stalin, in accordance with his conviction, spared no means on propaganda, on the publication and distribution of newspapers, on dispatching agitators.94
Thanks to Stalin, the White spy continued sadly, the city bore the name “Red Tsaritsyn.” The officer also explained the many casualties on the Soviet side: they had resulted from his successful disinformation.
By the end of the Civil War, Tsaritsyn had been besieged multiple times, yet in Soviet memory the defense of the city was associated with Stalin even before it was renamed in 1925. In the 1930s the Stalingrad cult began to bloom. After the success of Chapayev, the Vasiliev brothers began work on a movie about the defense of Tsaritsyn. The filming encountered delays, and the first part was not released in theaters until April 1942.95 The film follows the same template as Chapayev, with Voroshilov behind a Maxim gun, single-handedly fending off an attack designed to intimidate the Reds. But here it was not the Whites but the Germans (equipped anachronistically with Wehrmacht helmets) on the opposing side. The tsarist general serving under the Bolsheviks wants to give up Tsaritsyn, but Stalin resists. “In order to be victorious, one has to fight.” The film culminates with Stalin delivering an address to the workers of Tsaritsyn: “An honest death is better than mean, slavish life. [ . . . ] Onward for the motherland!”
The striking parallels between the Defense of Tsaritsyn and the defense of Stalingrad may be coincidental, but they also suggest that the Civil War era and its legends acted as a template for World War II. As in the battle of Tsaritsyn, Stalin prohibited the evacuation of his namesake city, declared a state of siege, and demanded self-sacrifice from residents. Civil War veterans gave rousing speeches in the city and on the front, and one of the City Defense Committee’s first appeals to city residents after the German assault began with the following call to arms:
Like 24 years ago, our city is again experiencing hard times. [ . . . ] In the momentous 1918 our fathers held Red Tsaritsyn against the onslaught of the gangs of German hirelings. And we ourselves shall hold Red Stalingrad in 1942. We shall hold it so that then we may drive back and destroy the bloodthirsty gang of German occupiers [ . . . ] Everybody to the construction of barricades! Everybody capable of bearing arms to the barricades, to the defense of the native city, the native home!96
On November 6, 1942, one day before the public holiday commemorating the October Revolution, Soviet newspapers printed an open letter to Stalin signed by commanders and soldiers from the 62nd Army. The signatories swore to Stalin and their “fathers, the gray-haired defenders of Tsaritsyn,” that they would defend Stalingrad “till the last drop of blood, till the last breath.”97 The Moscow historians who visited Stalingrad in December 1942 were not immune to the spell of the Civil War. Several were recognized specialists in the field; one had published a documentary history on the defense of Tsaritsyn several months earlier.98 In the historical memory of many Soviet participants to the battle, the Civil War figured very prominently, shrouded in a mystique of heroic magnitude and revolutionary zeal.