Self-inflicted wounds were regarded as desertion by dishonesty. A soldier from Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Rifle Division, who was suspected of having shot himself in the hand, was escorted to the dressing station. He tried to escape in the dark when German artillery opened up, but was dragged back. A committee of doctors examined him and declared that the wound had been self-inflicted. The prisoner was then executed in front of an audience of soldiers drawn from his battalion. Even officers were charged with self-inflicted wounds. A nineteen-year-old lieutenant in 196th Rifle Division, having been accused of shooting himself through the left palm with a sub-machine-gun, was executed in front of an audience of officers from his formation. The report implies, with unconvincing logic, that his guilt was self-evident because he had ‘tried to hide his crime by applying a bandage’.
Malingerers were seen to belong in the same category. ‘Eleven soldiers in a field hospital pretended to be deaf and dumb,’ Dobronin recorded, then added with grim satisfaction: ‘but as soon as the medical commission decided that they were fit for military duty, and their papers were passed to the military tribunal, they started talking.’
The ultimate self-inflicted wound was suicide. Like the Wehrmacht, the Soviet authorities defined it as ‘a sign of cowardice’ or the product of ‘unhealthy moods’. Even the definition of cowardice could take many forms. One pilot, who baled out of his burning plane, tore up his Communist Party candidate’s card immediately after landing, because he thought he had come down behind German lines. On his return to base, the commissar accused him of cowardice under Stalin’s Order No. 270, even though Soviet propaganda emphasized that the Germans executed Communists on the spot.
The NKVD and the political department of Stalingrad Front worked extremely closely on any hint of ‘anti-Soviet’ activity. For example, ‘men found with German leaflets were handed over to the NKVD’. It was dangerous to pick one up, even for rolling a cigarette of makhorka tobacco. A soldier who lost his temper and told a superior officer what he thought of him and the Red Army, could face an accusation of ‘counter-revolutionary propaganda’ or ‘non-belief in our victory’. Corporal K. in the 204th Rifle Division was executed for having ‘discredited the leaders of the Red Army and uttered terroristic threats against his commanding officer’. Those who criticized the regime, like two soldiers in the 51st Army, were also handed over to the NKVD. One had ‘spread fascist statements that collective farm workers were like slaves’, and the other had said that ‘Soviet propaganda lies to raise morale in the army’.
Cases of ‘anti-Soviet activities’, which were often treated as synonymous with the crime of ‘treason to the Motherland’, seem to have been comparatively rare in the front line. Officers generally followed the informal advice of the Russian Army in 1812: ‘When soldiers mutter, officers should not listen.’ Most recognized that in war, when men faced death, they needed to say what they thought. Among front-line comrades, soldiers did not shrink from criticizing the incompetence, corruption and bullying of Communist Party officials. The constant risk of being killed at any moment made them careless of commissars and Special Department informers. With their trenches so close to the Germans, there seemed little difference between an enemy bullet and that final ration from the Soviet state, the NKVD’s ‘nine grams of lead’.
Most of the reported cases of anti-Soviet activities took place behind the lines. Newly arrived recruits who grumbled were more likely to be denounced by fellow conscripts. A Stalingrad civilian in Training Battalion 178 who ventured to say that they would freeze and starve when winter came, was quickly arrested ‘thanks to the political consciousness of Trainees K. and I.’. NKVD paranoia stretched back among the transport and engineer detachments of the Stalingrad Front on the east bank of the Volga. Twelve soldiers and five officers, including two senior officers, were arrested in October for ‘anti-Soviet activities of a defeatist nature’. ‘A majority of those arrested are from the occupied territories’, the report added, claiming for good measure that they had a plan ‘to betray the Motherland and join the enemy’.
The newspaper reports which claimed that frontoviki eagerly discussed the heroic leadership of Comrade Stalin in their trenches, and went into the attack with the battle-cry ‘Za Stalina!’(‘For Stalin’), were pure propaganda. Yury Belash, a soldier poet, once wrote a verse:
However much the Soviet press played up stories of personal heroism, the authorities’ total lack of respect for the individual was clearly confirmed by the propaganda at Stalingrad. Newspapers took up the slogan, apparently coined by Chuikov at a meeting of the military counciclass="underline" ‘Every man must become one of the stones of the city.’ One of Chuikov’s officers added admiringly that the 62nd Army ‘cemented the stones of the Stalin-inspired city like living concrete’. This theme reached its ultimate expression in the monstrous post-war memorial constructed on the Mamaev Kurgan, where the figures of soldiers among the ruins are deliberately portrayed in a bas-relief of brickwork. This monument to the Soviet Union, not to the soldiers themselves, virtually turns them into a terracotta army, like those of Chinese emperors.
Even day-to-day administrative policy confirmed the impression of soldiers as discardable items. New boots, uniforms and equipment were reserved for new armies being formed in the rear. For front-line soldiers at Stalingrad, replacement items did not come from the quartermaster’s store, they came off the bodies of dead comrades. Nothing was wasted when it came to burial. Men were even sent forward at night into no man’s land to strip corpses to their underclothes. The sight of fallen comrades, left semi-naked in the open, revolted many. When winter came in its full force, snow-camouflage suits became especially precious. A wounded soldier would try to take off the white coverall before it became bloodstained. It was a well-known occurrence for a soldier, too badly wounded to remove his snow-camouflage suit, to apologize for any marks to those taking it from him.
Grossman, a close observer of his fellow countrymen at Stalingrad, rejected the idea that they had been completely brutalized into indifference. ‘Life is not easy for a Russian,’ he wrote, ‘but in his heart he does not feel that this is unavoidable. During the war at the front, I observed just two feelings towards events: either an incredible optimism or a complete gloom. No one can bear the thought that the war is going to last a long time, and anyone who says that only months and months of hard work will lead to victory is not believed.’ The truth was that in such a terrible battle you could think only about surviving for the rest of that day or even hour. To look forward to any point beyond was dangerous dreaming.
Soldiers at least had some sort of purpose and fairly regular rations to keep them going. The civilians trapped in Stalingrad had virtually nothing. How over 10,000 of them, including 1,000 children, were still alive in the city’s ruins after over five months of battle, remains the most astonishing part of the whole Stalingrad story.
Soviet sources claim that between 24 August, the day after the first air raids, when Stalingrad inhabitants were finally allowed to cross the Volga, and 10 September, 300,000 civilians were evacuated to the east bank. It was totally inadequate, considering the swollen population of the city. What was not admitted at the time was that well over 50,000 civilians were trapped on the west bank, partly due to the NKVD’s control of river crossing.