In Soviet Marxist ideology, human beings were inherently malleable, shaped by their surroundings; through social conditioning anyone could become a hero. The political advisers were entrusted with this task. Brigade Commissar Vasiliev recounted the story of a soldier in the 45th Division who fought well but showed so little discipline that his politruk wrote the parents a letter to complain. Before posting it, he read the offending soldier its contents: “He felt really bad about it, and by then he’d won a medal, but his parents sent him a terrible dressing down from home. So we had to write another letter telling them how he’d put things right and distinguished himself, that he’d received a decoration from the government. Now he was a completely new man. Serov, chief of the political department, had taken him under his wing. The soldier was constantly getting better and never acted up again. It was like he’d been that way his whole life.” Major Serov described the incident in greater detail from his vantage point:
There was one Kiselyov in our 157th Regiment’s 1st Company—a real madcap. We talked to him, we arrested him, locked him up—nothing helped. He was an exceptional discipline-breaker. Just wouldn’t listen. So then Narovishnik, deputy political officer of the company, decided to write to his parents: “That’s how outrageously your son behaves; perhaps you can help.” That letter was read to the company. The company knew that the letter had been sent to his parents, and so did he. The very fact of sending the letter to the parents got him thinking. He got their reply when he got to the front: “Why are you bringing shame upon our gray heads? We can’t look our neighbors in the eye. Have you forgotten what we were saying when we were seeing you off—be worthy!” Then his sister writes that it’s embarrassing to receive such a report about him: “If you want to consider me your sister, fight like our older brother who died.” This is when the guy wised up. He killed nine Fritzes and wounded seven more, or the other way around. He was wounded and sent off for treatment.
Heroic deeds—usually defined as actions in which soldiers held their own against a force with superior troops and weapons—were often documented and propagated via leaflets distributed in the sectors where they occurred, on the assumption that readers would know the “heroes of the day” personally and strive to emulate them.156 The 13th Guards Rifle Division handed out leaflets with photos of the honored soldiers and brief descriptions of their deeds. “This creates an extraordinary impression,” observed Brigade Commissar Vasiliev. As a political officer in the division explained, the leaflets were read out loud to the units and then sent to parents and family members.157 In this way the political administration exploited the influence of soldiers’ families and hometowns to reinforce punishments and commendations.
Red Army soldiers read a wall newspaper in Stalingrad, 1942. Photographer: Natalya Bode
Brigade Commissar Vasiliev credited a Komsomol from his unit with embodying the Bolshevik ideal of the war hero. The soldier consciously emulated the feats of celebrated predecessors and wanted his example of self-sacrifice to inspire others to follow the heroic tradition:
Voronov, for example, a Komsomol member, had read Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered and lived only by the idea of Ostrovsky’s machine gunner. He received twenty-five wounds on the battlefield and it was only when his arms, shot through in several places, would no longer obey him that he left the battlefield. He was commanding a machine-gun detail. He was literally bleeding out and they offered to take him to the medical unit. He said, “No, you keep on fighting. I’ll go there myself.” He crawled three hundred meters bleeding out. When they got him to the medical battalion he was completely torn to shreds and he said: “Now I am that machine gunner from Ostrovsky.” Here’s this man living by an idea, and you realize that we were doing work without always seeing what we had accomplished.
Vasiliev implied that the work of the political officers was what put the novel How the Steel Was Tempered into Voronov’s hands.
While some soldiers modeled their behavior on idealized notions of the hero, others drew motivation from more basic sources. “People were fed and informed about the significance of those heights,” explained Regimental Commissar Dimitri Petrakov of the 308th Rifle Division. “They were promised a reward: for a captured German soldier an Order of the Red Star, for an officer—an Order of the Red Banner, and to the first one on the height the Order of Lenin.”158 Many of the interviewees corroborated that countless heroic feats did indeed occur on the Stalingrad Front. “Without any exaggeration,” relayed Major Pyotr Zayonchkovsky, of the 66th Army, “one can justifiably say that throughout the fighting at Stalingrad all but a handful of commanders and soldiers displayed enormous heroism.”159 General Chuikov reported that “we know about so many heroes produced by the battle of Stalingrad that you’ve got to marvel at the capabilities of our Russian people, our Soviet people. And to think how many heroes we haven’t heard of,” he wondered. “There must be ten times more of those.” According to an internal memo, by June 1943 the military had bestowed 9,601 medals on soldiers of the 62nd Army for distinction in battle.160 Army newspapers regularly paid tribute to honored soldiers, and many editions of Red Star consisted mostly of the names and ranks of those recently decorated and the medals awarded to them. This echoed the practice used for shock workers in the 1930s, whose achievements Soviet newspapers cited individually.
In promoting heroism in battle, military commanders and political officers conditioned their soldiers to be fearless. Captain Andrei Afanassyev of the 36th Rifle Division summarized the task in a few words: “After the first baptism [of fire] I decided to foster a contempt for death among the personnel.”161 Two terrors received repeated mention: fear of enemy panzers and fear of air raids. Commanders taught soldiers how to protect themselves from tanks by burrowing into the ground and demonstrated how to use bazookas and other antitank weapons.162 They preached that fear was an animal instinct that could be overcome through mindful thought and action. Alexander Sikorsky, a military hydrographer in the 62nd Army, described how the Soviet soldier “has shown that fear is no longer a part of him, that he is fearless. Each man is born with fear, fear is a quality that every human being possesses, but fear will abandon heroes and remain with cowards.”163
This emphasis on human willpower received constant mention in the Stalingrad interviews.164 When soldiers talked about fear, it was usually as something conditional, something felt initially or intermittently that they could actively tune out and overcome. Captain Afanassyev, despite resolving to teach his men fearlessness, confessed the panic he felt during a strong German attack on August 20, 1942:
In fact, it was terrifying. When I stepped outside for a look I was overcome by doubt: the advancing German army was enormous. You’d look into the binoculars or periscope and think to yourself: there’s no way we can hold out against this. That was how I felt then. One look in the periscope would send me into a panic. It wasn’t exactly cowardice but the feeling that destroying everything that was moving at us was impossible. Endless black dots. Four to five hundred tanks and other vehicles. And they weren’t moving one after another—they were moving in echelon formation.
The scene described here resembles what communist soldiers understood by a “psychic attack.” Afanassyev later stressed that he had passed the test.
Lev Okhitovich, an infantryman in the 308th Rifle Division, described his first open-field battle and the paralyzing fear he felt when German fire forced him to the ground. But he also noted that the fear evaporated the moment he realized that he had to stand up if he wanted to avoid a senseless death: “I realized that we might die for nothing. It wasn’t bravery or courage (which I had none of). I simply realized that I was going to die unless I did something. And the only chance I had to save myself and others was to advance.” Okhitovich picked himself off the ground and was surprised by the galvanizing effect of the battle cry that reflexively crossed his lips: “I couldn’t say anything other than what anyone would have said in my place. ‘For the motherland! For Stalin!’”165