The Impact of Stalingrad on the Key Soviet Institutions

Tom Borel Page | 1

The actions of the soldiers and officers who found themselves entrenched deepest in the Battle of Stalingrad had a profound and lasting effect on the Soviet government. These people came from a mindset where death seemed certain. The desperate and heroic defense of Stalingrad led by General Chuikov and others was profound enough to shake even Stalin out of his policy of distrust towards the men below him. Failure to keep Stalingrad might mean the death of the Russian people, perhaps the death of Stalin himself. At every echelon of Soviet order these bonds of blood were giving birth to a collective cooperation which seemed uncharacteristic of the USSR. Few of the men and women inside Stalingrad survived long enough to witness most of the lessons in leadership and personal courage that were taught here. Those who did learn them became indispensable to Stalin and his Stavka. Meanwhile, the Soviet press at Stalingrad was disseminated a crucial message to the Russian people. Survival of the Slavic race was at stake. Sacrifices had to be made at any cost. The situation at Stalingrad coalesced with a revising of Red Army tactics and organization, the dogged determination of the Soviet people to win World War II, as well as a rise in power of Soviet military officers, thanks in large part to their old enemies, the political commissars who they shared rank with. Looking at the big picture, it is clear that the war along the Eastern front created a period of turmoil that has never been matched in scale. Nearly 80% of the fighting during WWII occurred along this front1. Soviet casualties from just this on battle and the encirclement movements that followed it numbered in the range of 2.5 million2. Before Operation Barbarossa was brought to a halt outside the gates of Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad, casualties had been disproportionately in favor against Russia. Within just three weeks of the invasion, the
1

Garrard, John and Carol Garrard, ed., World War II and the Soviet People (Houndmills: MacMillan, 1993), 2. 2 Geoffrey Roberts, Victory at Stalingrad (London: Pearson, 2002), 9.

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Soviets had lost 750,000 men dead, 10,000 tanks, and 4,000 aircraft. Around this time one of the generals leading the invasion, General Franz Halder, wrote in his diary that it was probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks. It would seem that Hitlers prophecy that You only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come down had some truth to it3. By the summer of 1942, Germany had wrested control of more than one million square miles of territory from the Russians. This stretch of territory contained 40 percent of Russias people and half of its cultivated land4. In the wake of the German invasion in June 1941 up through November 1942, an overwhelming 8 million Soviet soldiers lay dead1. Observers assumed that Soviet Russia stood on the knife-edge of economic and civil collapse. By the summer of 1942, Hitler had taken a new approach to the Eastern front. He would fight a war of attrition5. Directly in the teeth of this strategy, on the west bank of the Volga river stood a long and narrow city named Stalingrad which protected the supply route that delivered 90 percent of the USSRs wartime oil resources6. If the Soviet Union was a living body, then Stalingrad might very well be considered to be the thin yet crucial layer of skin protecting its carotid artery. Hitlers decision to devote the 6th Army and its many supporting elements entirely to the capture of Stalingrad instead of the regions around it placed the Germans and their Axis allies at a key disadvantage. Infantry soldiers had to enter and seize the city street by street in order to occupy it. This was a task that the Germans had feared to do at Leningrad for the exact same reason, here they would have to fight in close quarters with the enemy and relinquish the

3 4

Roberts, Victory at Stalingrad, 17-18. Roberts, Victory at Stalingrad, 115. 5 Roberts, Victory at Stalingrad, 5. 6 Geoffrey Jukes, Stalingrad the Turning Point (New York: Ballantine, 1968), 49.

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advantage of their superior armor and air power. Use of artillery and warplanes would put the front lines in danger of friendly fire. Although the Luftwaffes 8th Air Corps had turned 90 percent of the city to ruins, these ruins still offered cover to defending forces7. The 6th Army had to take the city block by block, street by street, house by house, and cellar by cellar. It was in this type of battle that General Chuikov and the officers of the defending 62nd Army began implementing the only tactics that could stop the German onslaught. One tactic that evolved by collective experience was bringing the fight into close quarters. The Luftwaffe had total control of the skies and had used this to wreaked havoc on countless other armies before his. To counter this deadly advantage, Chuikov forced his front line right up against the Germans. As long as his troops were close enough to the enemy, German pilots and artillerymen would be reluctant to risk hitting their own men8. Chuikov in his memoirs he recounts how reluctant German troops were to engage the Russians in close-quarter combat, especially after dark. Thus one of his standing orders was every German must be made to feel that he was living under the muzzle of a Russian gun. The Soviets, on the other hand, were able to use the entire eastern side of the Volga as a relatively safe ground to deploy artillery. They did so en masse, cluttering the area with over 100 guns per square kilometer9. They made timely artillery strikes against concentrated German forces that saved the Soviets many times and forced the Germans to spread themselves thin10. Another organizational tactic that the 62nd Army used to great effect was the implementation of makeshift strong point fortifications consisting of small 5 to 6 man

Roberts, Victory at Stalingrad, 93. Wieder, Joachim, and Heinrich Graf. Stalingrad: Memories and Reassessments (London: Cassell, 2003), 20.
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9

10

Roberts, Victory at Stalingrad, 92. Vassili Zaitsev, Notes of a Russian Sniper (London: Frontline, 2009), 43.

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garrisons11. As soon as a strong point was taken (often at great cost to the Germans) small storm groups would immediately attempt to recapture it12. Thus every yard that the 6th Army infantrymen gained in the city had to be paid for over and over again. The initiative was constantly snatched away and they were put back on the defensive. Small unit tactics became so preferable to large operations that on September 26th Chuikov issued another standing order to his commanders, I again warn the commanders of all units and formations not to carry out operations by whole units like companies and battalions. The offensive should be organized chiefly on the basis of small groups, with tommy-guns, hand-grenades, bottles of incendiary mixture and anti-tank rifles11. With this type of warfare came the increased recognition of individual actions and personal bravery. Adulations in the press were given to these individuals. Every firefight was up close. Each soldier had the potential to have a noticeable impact on the course of the battle. The heroes of the Red Army were holding its own against what was perhaps the best army in the world, and the commissars of the Communist Party were watching them do it. No other group of men realized the need for motivating the Russian soldiers to fight and die more than the political commissars who found themselves attached to military units. Charged with seeding the men with the will to fight, they had to be ruthless and creative. Although the barbaric treatment of Soviet POWs had become common knowledge by this point, mutinies and desertions remained commonplace13. Cowardice of any kind was grounds for immediate execution. In one example, a tanker sergeant in the 6th Guard Tank Brigade shot and killed his company commander, forced the driver and radio operator out of their tank at

11 12

Roberts, Victory at Stalingrad, 87-89. Zaitsev, Notes of a Russian Sniper, 32. 13 Garrard, World War II and the Soviet People, 2.

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gunpoint, stuck a white flag out of the tank turret and drove it toward the lines of the German 76th Infantry Division. The driver and radio operator both faced a military tribunal for allowing this treachery to occur and were most likely shot. NKVD troops were stationed at every landing stage and jetty, executing any deserters regardless of rank14. Over 13,500 Soviet soldiers were executed for cowardice and desertion during this battle15. This figure would undoubtedly have been much higher had Stalin chose to evacuate all civilians from the city at the start of the conflict. After the air raids, several hundred thousands of civilians had evacuated. Many stayed though, using badly-damaged facilities like the Barrikady factory and the Dzerzhinskiy Tractor Works to repair tanks and anti-tank guns throughout the battle even as these buildings came under direct assault16. The support of civilians greatly improved morale. Nevertheless, neither their presence nor the threat of execution could entirely sustain their fighting spirit. The opportunity for propagandists to publish hope presented itself in the personal nature of the fighting that developed in this battle. All it took at times to keep the Germans at bay was a tenacious storm group, a single well-placed sniper, or one fanatically-guarded building. This was the perfect chance to publicize personal acts of valor and in turn make every fighter feel recognized for their inevitable sacrifice17. Legendary men like Sergeant Yakov Pavlov, the defender of the four-story apartment building which now bears his namesake, and Vasily Zaytsev the sniper were brought to the publics attention18. Stories like this captured the minds of new recruits who were constantly trickled in to join these men both at Stalingrad. It was here in this razed city that a sweeping national pride took flame, one that would ignite the hearts and minds

14
15 16

Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 (New York: Penguin, 1998), 128.

Roberts, Victory at Stalingrad, 12. Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943, 192. 17 Roberts, Victory at Stalingrad, 95-100. 18 Zaitsev, Notes of a Russian Sniper, 84.

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of the Russian people and carry them to victory. There is no land east of the Volga became their slogan. The loyalty and heroic acts of enlisted soldiers also seemed be in many ways credited to the very commanders that led them to their deaths. Considering that many company and field grade officers at Stalingrad shared their fate, perhaps this is not entirely without merit. As winter approached, German offensive operations came to a close. By October 14 Hitler had ordered that offensive operations be postponed everywhere along the Eastern front except in Stalingrad19. On November 11th, the commanding officer of the 6th Army, Friedrich Paulus, made his last push against the defending 62nd Army. Within five hours this attack was rebuffed, and this defeat marked the end of German offensive operations in Stalingrad for that year. Hitlers standing order of No retreat! meant that Paulus had to take up defensive positions within the city for that winter. Meanwhile, Axis flanks north and south of Stalingrad were protected by ill-equipped and ill-trained Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian divisions20. On November 19th, Soviet generals Zhukov and Vasilevsky implemented what was known as Operation Uranus, a massive encirclement maneuver which struck a deathblow to the poorly defended flanks and resulted in a complete surrounding of the elite 6th Army inside Stalingrad21. By November 23rd Paulus was completely cut off from the rear22. The very next day, Hitler radioed Friedrich Paulus, forbidding him from attempting a break-out23. Operation Little Saturn, a larger offensive that followed Operation Uranus would push the rest of Army Group B 160 miles away from the city24. The diseased and starved 6th Army was eventually lost25. Subsequent

19 20

Jukes, Stalingrad the Turning Point, 108-109. Wieder, Stalingrad: Memories and Reassessments, 20. 21 Louis Rotundo ed., Battle for Stalingrad: The 1943 Soviet General Staff Study (Washington: Pergamon-Brassey, 1989), 96-113. 22 Dana Sadarananda, Beyond Stalingrad (New York: Praeger, 1990), 13.
23 24

Wieder, Stalingrad: Memories and Reassessments, 32. Rotundo, Battle for Stalingrad: The 1943 Soviet General Staff Study, 96-113.

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actions by German commander Erich von Manstein would allow Army Group South A to barely escape the new Soviet line26. This reversal of the Blitzkrieg encirclement strategy was a testament to how far the Red Army had come in combat effectiveness now that Stalin had given his tentative trust to the officers who led it. This sentiment had been brewing for some time. At the height of the Battle of Stalingrad, Stalin chose to abolish the many of the privileges of commissars. Military officers would make command decisions alone while political commissars were reduced to an advisory role and repurposed to do what they had done best at Stalingrad: motivate the hearts and minds of the people. This sudden shift in policy was far out of the ordinary. The Communist Party had always held a deeply entrenched suspicion of its own military. This distrust had its roots in the very origin of the Bolshevik regime. Former tsarist officers who served in the Red Army in the 1920s grew so infamous for their desertions that seeding political commissars into every level of military command had become a necessary insurance policy against betrayal27. At the start of the invasion, Stalin at first moved to strengthen Party control of the military. Now that he had changed his mind and decided that this policy had been counterproductive, the Red Army was partially unshackled from the restraints and suspicions that the Communist Party imposed upon it. As war raged on, the propaganda mills started printing articles about the importance of professionalism and technical ability rather than ideological dogma. By July of 1942 officers had been given better uniforms, replete with epaulettes and gold braids. While Hitler increasingly dominated his commanders, Stalin increasingly listened to his generals Vasilevskii and Zhukov28. Although company-level

25 26

Roberts, Victory at Stalingrad, 7. Sadarananda, Beyond Stalingrad, 13. 27 Garrard, World War II and the Soviet People, 180. 28 Roberts, Victory at Stalingrad, 72.

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commissars were reintroduced after World War II, command authority rested firmly in the hands of military officers29. Military leaders had earned their place next to party officials. After Stalingrad, Stalin would continue to subvert and curtail his peers in the Red Army and rain famine and disasters down on the his own people, but not on the same scale as he had been accustomed to doing before the war. In the body of the Soviet Union, a triumvirate of mutual dependence had come to form between the mind (the Communist Party), the fist (the military and the NKVD), and the muscles (the people). The tides of power would ebb and flow, but for nearly half a century none of these factions would be able to assert complete dominance over the others in the way that the Stalins Party had done prior to Stalingrad.

Bibliography: Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943. New York: Penguin, 1998. Garrard, John, and Carol Garrard. World War II and the Soviet People. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1993. Jukes, Geoffrey. Stalingrad the Turning Point. New York: Ballantine, 1968. Roberts, Geoffrey. Victory at Stalingrad. London: Pearson, 2002. Rotundo, Louis, ed. Battle for Stalingrad: The 1943 Soviet General Staff Study. Washington: Pergamon-Brassey, 1989. Sadarananda, Dana V. Beyond Stalingrad. New York: Praeger, 1990. Wieder, Joachim, and Heinrich Graf. Stalingrad: Memories and Reassessments. London: Cassell, 2003. Zaitsev, Vassili. Notes of a Russian Sniper. London: Frontline, 2009.

29

Garrard, World War II and the Soviet People, 181.