Described like this, the city might have seemed to be the same nightmare for everyone, but from November there was a crucial difference between the experience of Soviet and German troops. For the invaders, suddenly besieged, Stalingrad was a terrible shock, a catastrophe after the victories of 1941. ‘We have not received any Christmas parcels yet,’ a soldier in Paulus’s 6th Army wrote home on 10 January. ‘They’ve promised us that they’re keeping them behind the lines, and that when we come back they’ll give them to us… We have absolutely nothing to eat, our strength is ebbing away in front of our eyes, we’ve turned into wrecks… I’ve reached the point where I no longer thank the Lord that he has spared my life thus far. I see death every hour.’109 The expectations of Soviet troops had always been less high. They were not dreaming of their Christmas trees, nor of the sweets and cakes that they had never known. If they thought about home, it was about the life their enemy had destroyed. But now, backed up by their spectacular Katyushas and by the first friendly aircraft they had seen since 1941, they seized a chance to take revenge. The Germans, in other words, were facing a kind of anti-progress, losing one by one the things that made them feel human. Red Army men, by contrast, were getting their first scent of real success. Exhausted, filthy, battle-hardened troops prepared to celebrate. ‘The prestige value of having fought at Stalingrad,’ Werth wrote, ‘was enormous.’110
The party took the credit for the spirit that emerged at Stalingrad. The brotherhood and selflessness to which that battlefield gave birth were rapidly adopted as the offspring of its ideology, its wise guidance. ‘Thousands of patriots are proving themselves to be models of fearlessness, courage and selfless dedication to the motherland,’ the soldiers’ front-line paper crowed. ‘After the war, our people will not forget the ones who honourably served their homeland. The hero’s children will be proud of their father. But the names of the coward, the panic-monger and the traitor will be pronounced with hatred.’111 On the anniversary of the revolution that November, a Stalingrad oath appeared in the press, allegedly from the city’s defenders. ‘In sending you this letter from the trenches,’ the men declared, ‘we swear to you, dear Joseph Vissarionovich, that to the last drop of blood, to the last breath, to the last heart-beat, we shall defend Stalingrad.’112
The message was drummed home at mass rallies. It was repeated in the printed orders of the day. Newly arrived men, anxiously waiting to know if fate would send them across the Volga with the rest, were made to sit through lectures on the epic heroes of the past. Courage was a topic that soldiers were forced to discuss in small groups led by their politruks, although no one among them might ever have seen a German, let alone a corpse.113 Films also worked on the men’s consciousness. That autumn, soldiers in camps along the Volga might have seen The Defence of Tsaritsyn, The Great Citizen and – especially for the Ukrainians – a recreation of the life of the Cossack Bohdan Khmelnitsky.114 Epics like these could roll out every few weeks now that the film industry had been mobilized entirely for the service of the front.115 Soldiers were also shown newsreel of Soviet successes, while documentaries, such as the famous Defeat of the German Armies near Moscow, reminded them how bedraggled and beaten the invader had looked only months before.116 ‘You look at our own captured fascist beasts,’ a man remarked, ‘and you know there just aren’t enough ways to punish them for all the atrocities, betrayals and crimes that they’ve committed.’117
It also helped that some of the reserves were well-trained, well-prepared and fit. The army had begun to look the part. Siberians were valued most of all. They seemed to be professional, not least because many had learned to shoot. They also knew how to take cover and to dig the deep, narrow trenches that provided shelter from tank tracks and airborne shells alike. ‘The most important thing,’ Ageev wrote home at this time, ‘is that there is no more of the “tank-fright” that we saw so much of at the beginning of the war. Every soldier… knowingly digs deeper into the earth.’118 Those who still panicked at the sight of eyeless, sinister machines were trained out of their fear by an exercise (called ‘ironing’) that forced them to lie in a trench while Soviet tanks were driven over their heads. ‘After this,’ a German intelligence report noted of Red Army troops, ‘they all fought with exceptional courage.’119 The men, meanwhile, dismissed their terrors with black humour. ‘The deeper you dig,’ they would mutter, ‘the longer you’ll lie.’120
For all the froth, the real culture of the front could not be hidden from the men. Whatever the party might do, stories of cruelty, deceit and wasted life flooded back. Military hospitals were not sealed off from the civilian world. Local people could smell the blood and gangrene; they often helped to dig mass graves near battle sites. As ever, they also participated in the parallel economy that flourished when the NKVD’s grip was weak. Wounded soldiers traded in guns, watches, pens and even Zeiss cameras;121 the German trenches were full of attractive loot. Meanwhile, a new class of outlaws, deserters, dealt in every trade from cash and weapons to the trafficking of human lives. The NKVD detained more than 11,000 military personnel near the Stalingrad Front between October and December 1942, more than 1,000 of whom turned out to be deserters or former Red Army men now working for the enemy.122 A favourite ruse had been to dress in women’s clothes, though one man, who had been hiding for eleven months, was found buried at the bottom of a grain bin.123
The police could not keep up with the crime wave. Instead, they tried to make examples out of any men they caught. Desertion was the infraction that most offended them. ‘Comrade commissar,’ an NKVD man told his boss as he escorted ten new miscreants, ‘we should fulfil comrade Stalin’s order 227 with these deserters and shoot them on the spot. They’re not saving the motherland, but their own skins.’124 It was a natural response to lawlessness, but overall, the number of deserters, as opposed to criminals, was falling. The weather must have played a part. As the thermometer dropped to thirty degrees below freezing, there was not much chance in Stalingrad for anyone who chose to strike out on their own. However, there were other reasons for compliance in the ranks.
Some reserves on the Volga steppe did not revolt because their lives, paradoxically, were improving. Ilya Nemanov explained how the process worked in his own case. As the son of a so-called enemy of the people, he had not been allowed, at first, to hold a gun. Instead, he had been assigned, back in 1941, to a labour battalion. It was a version of conscription, since he had no choice, but it involved back-breaking work, not battlefields. The government sent him to work on a construction site for evacuated industry in the Siberian town of Zlatoust. The men, a mixture of convicts, conscripts and supposed political misfits like himself, felt that they had been exiled to the middle of nowhere. ‘We worked in Asia,’ Nemanov joked, ‘and came back to shit in Europe.’ Like front-line soldiers, they lived in dugouts, and like the soldiers, too, they worked until they collapsed. Nemanov himself relied on help from a couple of Kazakh herdsmen, who finished his work for him every day so that the group’s norms would be met. The foreman could be rough, the criminals were violent. ‘It is not at the front that war is frightening,’ Nemanov told me. ‘It’s when you’re destroyed, when you have exhausting work to do, when people are dropping around you for no reason, when there’s hunger, when there’s no way you can help yourself – except by risking your life – when they give you frozen potatoes to eat, when you’ll even eat carrion, when you’ll take the rations off a dead comrade. That’s what’s frightening, not bullets!’