He went back to the bunker. Gurov was waiting for him so they could have supper.
'What silence, Nikolay Ivanovich!' said Gurov. 'I can't believe it.'
Chuykov sniffed and didn't answer.
They sat down at table. Gurov said:
'Well, comrade, you must have had a hard time if a happy song makes you cry.'
Chuykov looked at him in astonishment.
18
In a dug-out on the slope leading down to the Volga, a few soldiers were sitting around a table fashioned from a few planks. The sergeant-major was pouring out mugs of vodka by the light of an oil-lamp; the soldiers watched as the precious liquid slowly mounted to the level indicated by his horny fingernail.
They drank and then reached out for some bread.
One of the soldiers finished chewing his piece of bread and said:
'Yes, he gave us a hard time. But we were too much for him in the end.'
'He's certainly quietened down now. You can't hear a sound.'
'He's had enough.'
'The epic of Stalingrad is over.'
'He's done a lot of damage, though. He's set half of Russia on fire. '
They chewed their bread very slowly. It was as though they were breaking off for a meal, after a long and difficult job of work.
Their heads grew hazy, but somehow this haziness left them clear-headed. The taste of bread, the crunch of onion, the weapons piled beside the mud wall, the Volga, this victory over a powerful enemy, a victory won by the same hands that had stroked the hair of their children, fondled their women, broken bread and rolled tobacco in scraps of newspaper – they experienced all this with extraordinary clarity.
19
The Muscovites who were now preparing to return home were probably rejoicing more at the thought of escaping their life as evacuees than at the thought of seeing Moscow again. Everything in Sverdlovsk, Omsk, Tashkent and Krasnoyarsk had become unbearable: the streets and houses, the stars in the autumn sky, even the taste of bread.
If there was a hopeful Soviet Information Bureau bulletin, they said: 'Well, it won't be much longer now.'
If the news was bad, they said: 'Oh, that means they'll interrupt the re-evacuation of families.'
Countless stories sprang up about people who'd managed to get back to Moscow without a pass – you had to change trains several times, using local and suburban trains where there were no inspectors.
People had forgotten that only a year before, in October 1941, every extra day spent in Moscow had seemed a torment. How enviously they had looked at their fellow citizens who were about to exchange the dangerous skies of their birthplace for the peace and safety of Tartary and Uzbekhistan…
They had forgotten how some of the men and women not included on the lists of evacuees had abandoned their bundles and suitcases and walked to Zagorsk on foot – anything to get out of Moscow. Now people were ready to abandon their work and belongings, abandon their ordered lives, and walk back to Moscow.
In the second half of November the Soviet Information Bureau announced first that a blow had been struck against the German Fascist forces in the region of Vladikavkaz, and then that a successful offensive had been launched in the Stalingrad area. There were nine announcements in the course of two weeks: 'The offensive continues… A new blow struck against the enemy… Our forces near Stalingrad, overcoming enemy resistance, have broken through his new line of defence on the east bank of the Don… Our forces, continuing their offensive, have advanced another twenty kilometres… Our troops in the Central Don region have now taken the offensive against the German Fascist forces… The offensive launched by our forces in the Central Don region continues… The offensive launched by our forces in the Northern Caucasus… A new blow struck by our forces to the south-west of Stalingrad… The offensive launched by our forces to the south of Stalingrad…'
On New Year's eve, the Soviet Information Bureau published a report entitled 'A Summary of the Past Six Weeks of the Stalingrad Offensive'. This finally announced the encirclement of the German armies in Stalingrad.
A change in popular consciousness was about to become manifest; the first stirrings of this had taken place subconsciously; as secretly as the preparations for the offensive itself. For all the apparent similarities, this change in consciousness was to prove very different indeed from that which had followed the earlier victories near Moscow.
The Moscow victory had served chiefly to change people's attitudes towards the Germans. After December 1941, the mystical fear aroused by the German Army disappeared.
The Stalingrad victory, on the other hand, served mainly to change people's attitudes towards themselves, to develop a new form of self-consciousness in the army and in the population as a whole. Soviet Russians began to think of themselves differently, to adopt a different manner towards other nationalities. The history of Russia was no longer the history of the sufferings and humiliations undergone by the workers and peasantry; it was the history of Russian national glory.
People's way of thinking at the time of the Moscow victory was still fundamentally the same as it had been before the war. The reinterpretation of the events of the war, the new consciousness of the power of the Russian armed forces, of the power of the Russian State, was part of a long and complex process. This process had begun long before the war, but only on an unconscious level.
Three major events formed the basis for this new vision of human relationships and of life itself: collectivization, industrialization and the year 1937. These events, like the October Revolution itself, involved the displacement of vast sections of the population, displacements accompanied by the physical extermination of numbers of people far greater than had accompanied the liquidation of the Russian aristocracy and the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie.
These events, presided over by Stalin himself, marked the economic triumph of the builders of the new Soviet State, the builders of 'Socialism in One Country'. At the same time, these events were the logical result of the October Revolution itself.
This new social order – this order which had triumphed during the period of collectivization, industrialization and the year 1937 with its almost complete change of leading cadres – had preferred not to renounce the old ideological concepts and formulae. The fundamental characteristic of the new order was State nationalism, but it still made use of a phraseology that went back to the beginning of the twentieth century and the formation of the Bolshevik wing of the Social Democratic Party.
The war accelerated a previously unconscious process, allowing the birth of an overtly national consciousness. The word 'Russian' once again had meaning.
To begin with, during the retreat, the connotations of this word were mainly negative: the hopelessness of Russian roads, Russian backwardness, Russian confusion, Russian fatalism… But a national self-consciousness had been born; it was waiting only for a military victory.
National consciousness is a powerful and splendid force at a time of disaster. It is splendid not because it is nationalist, but because it is human. It is a manifestation of human dignity, human love of freedom, human faith in what is good. But this consciousness can develop in a variety of ways.
No one can deny that the head of a personnel department protecting his Institute from 'cosmopolitans' and 'bourgeois nationalists' is expressing his national consciousness in a different manner to a Red Army soldier defending Stalingrad.
This awakening of national consciousness can be related to the tasks facing the State during the war and the years after the war: the struggle for national sovereignty and the affirmation of what is truly Russian, truly Soviet, in every area of life. These tasks, however, were not suddenly imposed on the State; they appeared when the events in the countryside, the creation of a national heavy industry and the complete change in the ruling cadres marked the triumph of a social order defined by Stalin as 'Socialism in One Country'.