As in peacetime, not all the farmwork that the men performed was unofficial. ‘They’ve sent us to the collective farm,’ Karp reported in October. ‘We have in fact been told to dig potatoes. The work is very hard. It was all made far worse this time by the fact that it was very cold and there was even rain with hail in it from time to time. The earth was cold and wet and it was terribly hard to dig in it, looking for spuds… We were all black and filthy, knackered. We worked without a break. They gave us half an hour for lunch. We ate it with the same dirty hands that we had been digging with. The mud poured down our hands and faces and into our mugs… but there was nothing much to eat then anyway.’ When Karp was given time off to recover from another bout of boils, he noted that he would be let off ‘the building work, my lessons, and mucking the horses out’.
It was not what they had signed up to do, but at least the digging was good practice for their real work. In November, Karp experienced ‘the toughest day of my training’. He and his mates were dumped on the cold steppe and left to make an earth dugout in which they had to spend the night. These shelters, zemlyanki, were a core part of the Red Army’s survival plan. They could be quite elaborate, with curtained-off rooms, an iron stove and even a window. But all were dug into the earth, concealed with turf or branches, stuffy, cramped and thick with the makhorka that almost everybody smoked. The description that an infantryman sent back to his wife that spring was typical. ‘We live like moles, in the earth,’ he wrote. ‘The walls are made of planks, and so is the roof, although there is no floor or ceiling. We sleep on planks as well, two-storey bunks… It’s just a bit uncomfortable when there is a lot of noise, because up to four hundred people have to live in here.’71
The digging, then, was not a trivial task, and Karp’s team had yet to learn the real knack. ‘We were saved by the fact that they gave us warm things,’ he wrote. ‘Padded clothes and valenki. But all the same we froze to our bones.’ It was particularly bad for each man as he did his sentry duty. Coming back inside ‘it became clear what a great thing a campfire is. That night, we all took it in turns to freeze.’72 The trainees grumbled, but so, unfortunately, did the inspectors who reviewed their work. That autumn, a report written with new standards of training in mind found infantry and gunner recruits wanting in almost every area. It also noted that their discipline was weak, that they were too fond of slipping away without permission and of sleeping at their posts, and that their manner to superior officers was rude.73 ‘We studied for ten years in school,’ wrote Karp sulkily. ‘And now we have to start all over again, working without a break. I’m sick of it. On the other hand, we can’t expect that what’s ahead will be any better.’74
The irony was that most, in fact, expected nothing less. Recruits climbed patiently into the trains that took them to the Volga or the north because they could see no future except through war. The humiliation of the training camp would end, the waiting finish, and they would begin to do a real job. They could also get their revenge, and not just on the invader. The prospect of combat and death loosened the hold of duty, party and the whole communist state. Samoilov remembered his own journey to the front. He and his comrades travelled with the hated senior, Serdyuk. As they put miles of track between their company and the old camp, their tormentor seemed to withdraw into his thoughts. ‘The tragedy of the tyrant,’ Samoilov noted, ‘lies in the fact that his power is never limitless.’ On that train, the balance would shift. It was a story that would be repeated elsewhere as insulted men began to weigh their own value. The hope – or fear, depending on your rank – was that the battlefield would level former differences out. A group of Uzbeks gathered round Serdyuk one evening. Their teeth flashed in the semi-dark, their bodies, muscled from years on the steppe, crowded their victim like the walls of a cell. ‘We’re going to the front, aren’t we?’ asked one of them. Serdyuk looked up into a fixed, confident smile, the ‘slant-eyed glance of Tamurlane’. As soon as he arrived at the unit’s reserve base, he asked to be transferred to another group.75
‘Without exception, we are all worried about Stalingrad,’ a junior officer called Ageev wrote to his wife in October 1942. ‘If the enemy succeeds in taking it, we will all suffer, including the people in our unit.’76 The city that bore Stalin’s name acquired a mythic significance that autumn. ‘I am writing to you from this historic place at an historic time,’ Viktor Barsov wrote to his parents in August.77 His mother guessed correctly where he was. The Moscow press was full of tales from the embattled town; the whole country waited for news. As Barsov put it in another letter that October, ‘I am defending the histor[ic]. t[own]. form[erly]. Ts[aritsyn]. now St[alingrad].’ His boots were soaked through and his fingers stiffened through his thin gloves as he wrote. He was no more a superman than young Karp, and just as preoccupied with hunger, cold and lack of sleep. Instead of steppe, the city that surrounded him for miles was no more than a wilderness of rubble, twisted steel and mud. But his letter suggests a certain pride in his position. Already everybody knew that fighting here was likely to decide the war.
Stalingrad stands on the west bank of the Volga river, the mightiest in Europe. The city, originally named for the Tsaritsa, a tributary of the Volga that cuts it in half, came to bear Stalin’s name in honour of a civil-war campaign in which the future leader had played a conspicuous part. Partly because of this, Stalingrad had been developed as a model city for the region, with open spaces, parks, and pristine-looking white apartment blocks that reflected the river and the summer glare. But even if it had not borne a famous name, the city was important. It was a major centre for engineering and manufacturing industry, it supported a university and several technical schools, and it hosted an extensive network of supply and storage facilities for the armies fighting nearby on the river Don. In 1942, Hitler regarded it as an important bridgehead on the Volga river and as a vital staging post for armies heading south towards the oilfields of the Caspian. He also savoured the prospect of capturing the city bearing Stalin’s name.
The battle to take it began in the heat of the southern Russian summer as Red Army units stationed on the river Don fought to hold off an enemy advance from both the south and west. On 4 August, the German 6th Army reached the southern bank of the Don, which bends east at this point in a great arc towards the Volga. By mid-month, they held almost the entire stretch of territory within this Don bend to the west and north-west of Stalingrad. The Soviet defence was more determined than of late, but conditions did not help to raise morale. On more than one occasion, whole armies gave way to panic, rushing headlong for the barren gullies on the far side of the Don. ‘I am taking part in a very large operation,’ Volkov wrote to his wife in August 1942. ‘For the past few days and still right now I am in the front line. I don’t have time to describe what’s going on, but I can tell you that what’s around me is a very hell. There’s wailing and roaring all around, the sky is splitting with the din, but my eardrums are already used to it. One shell burst just three metres from me, and I was spattered with mud, but I’m still in one piece. But as to what will happen, I can give you no guarantees.’78