violence, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Vistula river, 1
Vitebsk, Belorussia, 1, 2
Vladikavkaz, 1
Vlasov, General Andrei, 1, 2
Vlasovites, 1, 2, 3, 4
vodka ration, 1, 2
Vodopyanov, Mikhail Vasilievich, 1
Volga Germans, 1
Volga river, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Volga steppe, 1
Volkhov Front, near Leningrad, 1, 2, 3, 4
Volkov, Misha, 1, 2, 3, 4
Voronezh, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Voronezh Front, 1, 2, 3
Voroshilov, Commissar Kliment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Voroshilovgrad, 1
Vyaz’ma, 1
wall newspapers, 1
war loans, 1
Warsaw, 1
Warsaw Uprising, 1
Wedding at Malinovka, The (a play), 1
Weidling, General, 1
Werth, Alexander, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
Western Front, 1, 2
Whites, 1
Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army (RKKA), 1, 2, 3, 4
Yakuts, 1
Yalta, 1, 2
Yegorov, Sergeant Mikhail, 1
Yeremenko, Marshal, 1
zagradotryady (troops detailed to shoot would-be deserters), 1, 2
Zaitsev, Vasili, 1
zemlyanki (earth dugouts), 1, 2, 3, 4
Zhigalov, Comrade, 1
Zhlobin, 1, 2
Zhukov, Georgy, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21
Zionism, 1
Zlatoust, Siberia, 1
‘Zemlyanka’, 1
ZVK military stores, 1
About the Author
Catherine Merridale is the author of Night of Stone, described by Misha Glenny as ‘an epic and moving history’, and Ivan’s War, which Anthony Beevor called ‘a most fascinating and important work’. She is Professor of History at Queen Mary College, London.
Notes
1 Marching with Revolutionary Step
1 The music was composed by Dmitry and Daniil Pokrass, but it was Lebedev-Kumach whose name people remembered.
2 There is an account of just such a screening in O. V. Druzhba’s Velikaya otechestvennaya voina v soznanii sovetskogo i postsovetskogo obshchestva: dinamika predstavlenii ob istoricheskom proshlom (Rostov on Don, 2000), p. 22.
3 John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad (London, 1975), pp. 27–8.
4 Druzhba, pp. 22–3.
5 In round figures, roughly 1,700,000 Russian soldiers died, compared with 1,686,000 Germans, although Germany fought for ten months longer and was waging war on two fronts for most of the time. Troops of the British Empire lost about 767,000 killed, and those of the United States about 81,000.
6 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants (Oxford, 1994), pp. 80–1.
7 The children of former kulaks were permitted to join the front line from April 1942. See Chapter 5, p. 144.
8 Lev Kopelev, No Jail for Thought (London, 1977), p. 13.
9 Cited in Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford, 1986), p. 233.
10 Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales (Harmondsworth, 1994), p. 43.
11 A. Werth, Russia at War (London, 1964), pp. 112 and 136.
12 Stephen J. Zaloga and Leland S. Ness, Red Army Handbook, 1939–1945 (Stroud, 2003), p. 157. The number of armoured vehicles in the Soviet tank pool was just over 23,000.
13 See also Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1995), p. 238.
14 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford, 1999), p. 18.
15 Ibid., pp. 90–1.
16 See Kotkin, p. 246.
17 Vyacheslav Kondrat’ev, ‘Oplacheno krov’yu,’ Rodina, 1991, nos. 6–7, p. 6.
18 The details are taken from the excellent biographical summaries in Harold Shukman (Ed.), Stalin’s Generals (London, 1993 and 1997).
19 They were, in fact, more likely to have been Dornier 17s or Heinkel 111s. Kirill’s memory suggests that ‘Messer’ was a generic term for German planes before people began to know them all too intimately.
20 Werth, p. 200.
21 In his classic history of the years leading up to Stalingrad, Antony Beevor suggests that Soviet Jews did not suspect the fascists’ genocidal plans (Stalingrad, p. 56). In reality, while there was little reference to German anti-Semitism after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, and while no one suspected the full extent of the Final Solution, Soviet citizens had been bombarded with evidence of German racism, including anti-Semitism, before 1939, and many Polish and Austrian Jews fleeing Nazi rule confirmed their Soviet cousins’ fears.
22 Detwiler (Ed.), World War II German Military Studies, vol. 19, D-036, pp. 3–4.
23 This claim involved downgrading the achievements of late tsarism. See Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, NJ, 1985).
24 Druzhba, pp. 9–10.
25 Ibid., p. 29.
26 Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 69.
27 On the quality of the training, see William E. Odom, The Soviet Volunteers: Modernization and Bureaucracy in a Public Mass Organization (Princeton, NJ, 1973). See also Reina Pennington, Wings, Women and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (Lawrence, KA, 2001).
28 Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 75.
29 Zaloga and Ness, p. 147.
30 This one was from May 1941. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), 17/125/44, 57.
31 Angelica Balabanoff, cited in Merridale, Night of Stone, p. 148. The same perception has been voiced by citizens of other ideological dictatorships, including the Iranian author Azar Nafizi.
32 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii kurskoi oblasti (GAOPIKO), 1⁄1⁄2807, 14.
33 The NKVD’s own figure for 1939 is 1,672,438. For a discussion of numbers, see Anne Applebaum, Gulag, pp. 515–22.
34 Kopelev, p. 92.
35 V. M. Sidelnikov, compiler, Krasnoarmeiskii fol’klor (Moscow, 1938), pp. 142–3.
36 On irony in war narratives, see Samuel Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (London, 1998), especially p. 151.
37 Druzhba, p. 29.
38 Ibid.
39 E. S. Senyavskaya, ‘Zhenskie sud’by skvoz’ prizmu voennoi tsenzury’, Voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, 7:22, 2001, p. 82.
2 A Fire Through All the World
1 Reports of atrocities are frequent through the war. See Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (RGVA), 9/31/292, 315 (December 1939). On the unburied dead, see RGVA 9/36/3821, 56. As the reporter comments, the sight ‘influenced the political-moral condition of soldiers on their way into attack’.
2 Krivosheev, p. 78. The figure he gives is 126,875 for ‘irrecoverable losses’, a category which includes those who died in action or of wounds and disease as well as those who were reported missing in action.
3 Ibid., p. 79.
4 Ibid., p. 78.
5 Ibid., p. 64.
6 Carl van Dyke, ‘The Timoshenko Reforms: March–July 1940’, in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies (hereafter JSMS), 9:1, March 1996, p. 71.