The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes Read Free Book Online Page B

The wives of captured officers were also subject to arrest (even the wife of Stalin’s son, Iakov, who was captured by the Germans in July, was arrested and sent to a labour camp). Simonov accepted – and argued in his reports of 1941 – that the collapse of the Soviet front had been caused by the ‘criminal behaviour of certain generals, at best cowards and at worst German agents’, who ‘were shot deservedly’. He also peddled the idea that the bravest soldiers were the ones least likely to be killed – a propaganda myth that encouraged many troops to fight in situations where they were almost bound to die. 41
    Alongside this service to the Stalinist regime, Simonov pursued yet another objective in his war writings, especially in the unpublished notes and observations which he later used for his great war novel The Living and the Dead . A Soviet patriot and firm believer in the Soviet Union’s victory, he attempted to discern the signs of that victory in the actions, ideas and emotions of the people. He had spotted the first sign amidst the chaos of the Soviet retreat in June 1941, when he had seen the two junior officers walking west towards the front at Minsk to locate their military command. 42 Simonov could not forget this scene – it symbolized for him the patriotic spirit of the ordinary people – and he would return to it in his later writings as he struggled to develop a populist conceptionof the Soviet victory. But at the time he had only a vague sense of the forces that moved the people to fight.
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    Simonov arrived in Stalingrad in September 1942, at the height of the battle for the streets. The last Soviet defenders were confined to the factory districts of the north, the area around the railway station and the small hill in the centre, while all around them the city had collapsed under the bombardment of the German tanks, artillery and planes. Simonov was astonished by the extraordinary determination of the Soviet soldiers to fight for every street, and every ruined building, against the superior German forces. Even as the Germans pushed them back towards the river bank, the Soviet soldiers would not give up the city and evacuate to the eastern shore of the Volga, where the main Soviet army was massed. It was this determination – a spirit that cannot be explained by military discipline or ideology – that tipped the scales in this decisive battle of the war.
    In his diary on 16 September, A. S. Chuianov, the head of the Stalingrad Defence Committee, recorded a conversation he had overheard between a group of newly arrived troops and a wounded soldier who had been evacuated from the burning city:
    ‘What is going on in the city?’ [the men asked the wounded soldier].
    ‘There’s no making head or tail of it. Look,’ he pointed with his good arm towards the Volga – ‘the whole town is on fire.’
    ‘But why is it burning for so long?’ the troops asked in astonishment.
    ‘Everything is on fire: the houses, the factories, the land, all the metal is melting…’
    ‘And the people?’
    ‘The people? They are standing! Standing, and fighting!…’
    The courageous determination of the Soviet forces was indeed decisive in the war and cannot be dismissed as a propaganda myth. Yet its origin has never been satisfactorily explained. Why did so many Soviet soldiers fight with such fierce disregard for their own lives in the battles for Moscow, Kiev, Stalingrad and a dozen other Soviet cities?
    Terror and coercion provide part of the explanation. The practices ofthe pre-war terror system were reimposed to keep the soldiers fighting in the war. At the height of the Soviet collapse, on 28 July 1942, as the Germans threatened Stalingrad, Stalin issued the notorious Order Number 227 (‘Not One Step Backwards!’), calling on the troops to defend every metre of Soviet territory ‘to the last drop of blood’ and threatening the severest punishments for ‘panickers’ and ‘cowards’ who shirked