Every time I hear a discussion about the Battle of Stalingrad (which ended on February 2, 1943), I recall two stories, or rather the slips of my grandfather’s tongue. The first time I provoked him by my audacity. When I got another A at the lesson of history in the fourth grade, I decided to “educate” my grandpa regarding the Stalingrad battle. He replied: “Heroic pioneers, you say? I don’t know anything about them but we had nothing to eat for weeks. We did not have enough strength even to shoot a horse. One day one horse got behind the wagon train and we were so cold and hungry that we couldn’t even hit the hatrack, but only frightened it away and the poor thing fled to the Germans…”
At that time my “unconscientious” grandfather did not ruin the heroic image of Stalingrad in my mind. And on one occasion, being well-tanked, he let slip something that was beyond my understanding: “We had a covenant with those Germans…When everything was bombed out and the Volga was frozen, one could drink only from an ice-hole. We took turns with Nazis – they would scoop water into their canteens before lunch and we showed up after 2 p.m. Not a single shot: Germans occasionally left tea or canned meat for us at the watering site.” I remember slurring over that steam let off by my grandpa, as this was absolutely incongruous with a young pioneer’s idea of the WWII.
Now as it is impossible to query my grandpa about the actual state of things, I increasingly often recall the phrases he casually dropped. And how would he respond to American historians who are now consistently reanimating old Nazi propaganda that “Russians at Stalingrad got the upper hand thanks to harsh frosts”? And also thanks to the American “technologies and equipment provided on the basis of the land lease agreement!” What would my grandfather say to that?
Two “crucial” battles of WWII – at El Alamein (1942) and in Tunisia (1943) – took place in parallel to the Battle of Stalingrad and, according to some American and British historians, the success on the African front helped the Stalingrad defenders to rebuff the German Army and the international coalition to switch to the offensive against Hitler. It’s good that Hitler himself refuted their point. In late 1942, he admitted at his headquarters: “After Stalingrad we’ve lost an opportunity to put an end to the war in the East by launching an offensive…”
However, the battle over the WWII and in particular for the historical significance of Stalingrad continues. The attempt to align the importance of the Stalingrad Battle with two African ones as the turning point in the World War II, when an offensive against Nazism commenced, left its mark. It is in the USSR and Russia we’ve always been teaching that the 200 days of Stalingrad’s defense went down in history as a most cruel and sad period, when our nation lost more than 700,000 of its citizens. Nevertheless a number of European and American annalists prefer to talk about the Russian quality “to overpower with numbers rather than skill,” when human life was nothing but dust. And they consistently try to suggest that it was retreat blocking detachments and penal squads that actually ensured a victory at Stalingrad.
The success of the Red Army at Stalingrad was above all else a result on the scale of punitive measures taken ‘to coerce to resistance’, writes one the British encyclopedia with reference to several historians. In other words, both in the years of the Cold War and nowadays some of the European and American historians and columnists explain the resistance to the foe not by people’s desire to defend the land of their fathers, even when they were enfeebled by cold and hunger, but by their fear of the GULAG and execution squads. Even in the Hollywood blockbuster Enemy at the Gate that seems to extol the prowess of Stalingrad defenders, the main character, sniper Zaitsev (the prototype of famous lieutenant Pavlov), is confronted with the dilemma: either he kills Nazis or a retreat-blocking detachment will reduce him to the dust of GULAG. Any artist certainly has the right to a subjective view on history, but his or her duty is to mirror reality at least tentatively instead of modeling it after their molds.
Otherwise what’s the difference between this “journalist version” and the propaganda of Goebbels? It is this propaganda that invented and widely used the image of inhuman “Jewish commissars” and “SMERSH inquisitors” who presumably forced the Russian soldiers to fight “for Stalin!” and “his friends – Anglo-American capitalists.” Now this lie about the massive scale of penal squads and retreat-blocking detachments, retouched and modified, serves the task to debunk that war as patriotic and to represent it as a clash of two totalitarian regimes, with German and Russian people being victimized. Once this is established, how then is the USSR different from Nazi Germany? Is it not the right moment for the “victims” to claim a multibillion retribution from the historic successor of the USSR?
I don’t know what my grandfather thought about penal battalions and retreat-blocking detachments. I did not know anything about them because of my childish folly and Soviet propaganda and did not ask about them for this very reason. A question is why had they hush-hushed any information about them prior to 1995? Even today is it impossible to get it in the archives without a special permission. It remains only to refer to the data of the Institute of Russian History of RAS: from October 1, 1942 to February 1, 1943, 203 “alarmists and cowards” were arrested in the corps of the Donskoi Front, of which 49 men were “gunned down before the unit formation at the decree of the secret police.” It’s up to the reader to decide whether this is a big or small figure: overall 307,500 soldiers and officers had been concentrated on the Donskoi Front by the beginning of the Stalingrad Battle.
Is there any need to prove that the victory in the Stalingrad Battle cannot be explained by “massive” Stalin’s repressions and certainly not by the “decisive” role of penal squads? Of course, there is – if not for other reasons, then at least to let the slime written about the role of penal squads and retreat-blocking detachments settle down. If we know our national history well enough then hopefully the number of its revisionists will decrease and the demand for blockbusters vulgarizing the history will subside.
Vladimir Emelyanenko
