Soviet victory at Stalingrad bore a heavy cost
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/05/2015 (4106 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
The battle of Stalingrad in the Second World War was a titanic struggle between the armies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
It lasted six months, from August 1942 to early February 1943, ending with the encirclement and surrender of the German forces.
The bitter, street-by-street and building-by-building combat cost an estimated one million lives.
The Soviet victory represented a turning point in the Second World War; as Rutgers University historian Jochen Hellbeck observes, the battle “shifted the war’s momentum in favour of the Red Army; after Stalingrad, its divisions would push steadily westward, their sights set on Berlin.”
Hellbeck has selected excerpts from Soviet first-person accounts of the battle of Stalingrad in order to illuminate the motivations of the Soviet rank and file.
It is an intriguing and gripping yet off-putting collection.
The source of these first-person accounts was the work of the Commission on the History of the Great Patriotic War, a delegation of historians from Moscow who visited the Stalingrad front in January and February 1943.
Aware of the monumental significance of the battle, the historians wanted to record for posterity the experiences of participants.
Accordingly, they conducted interviews with a wide range of actors: “generals, staff officers, troop commanders, simple foot soldiers, commissars, agitators, sailors of the Volga Military Flotilla, nurses and a number of civilians.”
The commission’s historians ultimately collected 215 interviews that fill thousands of typed pages. They were unable to obtain permission to publish these documents, however; Hellbeck’s selection represents their first appearance in English.
The eyewitness accounts presented in Hellbeck’s volume reflect the brutality and futility of industrialized warfare, its carnage and destruction.
The courage, tenacity and self-sacrifice of the Soviet soldiers in defending Stalingrad against the Nazi invader can only excite the highest admiration. But there is a limit to which one can sympathize with the Soviet soldier: charging into battle, they would shout “For the socialist motherland!” and “For comrade Stalin!”
They really were indoctrinated — or perhaps the historians inserted these expressions of fidelity to communism and the Soviet state in order to make the interviews more acceptable to Soviet censors. Who knows?
The Soviets did emphasize indoctrination and constant monitoring of the “political-moral mood” of the troops. For this purpose, political officers were attached to each regiment.
As Hellbeck writes, “The cement that the Red Army command used to bind together diverse soldiers and motivate them to fight was ideology.”
Hellbeck’s selections vividly depict the battle of Stalingrad in all its horror and heroism.
Graeme Voyer is a Winnipeg writer.
History
Updated on Saturday, May 30, 2015 8:50 AM CDT: Formatting.
