First published by Viking 1998
First published in Penguin Books 1999
This edition published 2007
Copyright © Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, 1998
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192610-0
Notes
1
Hitler had his revenge in the end. Schulenburg, chosen in 1944 by the July plotters as their Foreign Minister after the planned assassination at Rastenburg, was hanged by the Nazis on 10 November of that year.
2
‘I do not understand,’ a Red Army intelligence officer has written at the bottom of the translation. ‘Where does this come from?’
3
There were other echoes of the Spanish Civil War. Ruben Ruiz Ibarruri, the son of La Pasionaria, was killed commanding a machine-gun company of 35th Guards Rifle Division south of Kotluban. Four subsequent Marshals of the Soviet Union closely linked to the battle of Stalingrad — Voronov, Malinovsky, Rokossovsky and Rodimtsev — had been Soviet advisers in Spain, as had General Shumilov, the commander of 64th Army. Voronov had directed the Republican artillery during the siege of Madrid against Franco’s Army of Africa.
4
Few members of the Sixth Army seem to have heard about the Sarmatae of the lower Volga — an interbreed of Scythians and Amazons, according to Herodotus — who allowed their women to take part in war.
5
There can be little doubt that the ‘violation’ propaganda in the late summer of 1942 contributed significantly to the mass rape committed by the Red Army on its advance into German territory in late 1944 and 1945.
6
Two other sons of Soviet leaders, Vladimir Mikoyan and Leonid Khrushchev, served in Red Army aviation at Stalingrad. Vasily Stalin, who was much more of a playboy, soon escaped combat duties to make a propaganda film about the air force.
7
The list of nicknames and slang is almost endless. Bullets were ‘sunflower seeds’ and mines were ‘gherkins’. A ‘tongue’ was an enemy sentry captured for interrogation purposes.
8
Apart from one well-known member of a tank crew, Yekaterina Petlyuk, very few women served as combat soldiers in the city. In the air armies supporting Stalingrad Front, however, there was a women’s bomber regiment led by the famous aviator, Marina Raskova. ‘I had never seen her close to,’ Simonov wrote in his diary after meeting her at the Kamyshin aerodrome, ‘and I did not realize that she was so young and so beautiful. Maybe I remember it so well because soon afterwards I heard that she was killed.’
9
Some 270,000 Ukrainians had already been recruited from prison camps by 31 January 1942. Others were civilian volunteers. The
10
Grossman seems to have been going through a period of spiritual idealization, seeing the Red Army soldier in quasi-Tolstoyan terms. ‘In war,’ he wrote in another notebook, ‘the Russian man puts a white shirt on his soul. He lives sinfully, but he dies like a saint. At the front, the thoughts and souls of many men are pure and there is even a monk-like modesty.’
