Special Department officers on the Stalingrad Front saw reprisals against close relatives as absolutely essential to deter others who might be tempted to run away.
NKVD Special Departments, when investigating cases of desertion, undoubtedly put heavy pressure on a suspect to denounce others. A newly arrived soldier in 302nd Rifle Division (51st Army) was accused by a comrade of having said: ‘If I am sent to the front line, I will be the first to cross to the Germans.’ ‘Under interrogation’, he is claimed to have confessed to persuading five others to go with him and ‘revealed’ their names, but he may have been pushed by the NKVD into inventing a conspiracy which had never existed.
Commissars blamed ‘the carelessness and good-heartedness of officers’ for desertion in a unit. But there were also countless cases of officers using their accepted right to shoot to kill as ‘an extreme measure to be used only on active service when a Red Army man refuses to fulfil a military order or retreats from the field of battle’. On a rare occasion, however, the authorities considered that officers had been overharsh. ‘During the night of 17/18 October, two soldiers disappeared from [204th Rifle Division in 64th Army]. The regimental commander and the commissar ordered the company commander to execute the platoon commander of the men who had deserted.’ This nineteen-year-old junior lieutenant had joined the regiment only five days before, and scarcely knew the two deserters from his platoon. ‘The company commander obeyed the order. He went to his trench and, in the presence of the commissar, shot him dead.’
Commissars, wanting to vaunt the all-embracing nature of the Soviet Union, could have pointed to the fact that nearly half the soldiers of the 62nd Army were not Russian. Propaganda sections, however, had good reasons to remain silent on the subject. Far too much was expected of the levee en masse from Central Asia. ‘It is hard for them to understand things,’ reported a Russian lieutenant sent in to command a machine-gun platoon, ‘and it is very difficult to work with them.’ The lack of familiarity with modern technology also meant that they were more likely to be confused and terrorized by air attack. Language difficulties and consequent misunderstandings naturally made things worse. One formation, 196th Rifle Division, which was mostly Kazakh, Uzbek and Tartar, ‘received such severe losses that it had to be withdrawn from the front to be reconstituted’.
The commissars realized that things were badly wrong, but their only prescription was predictable: ‘To indoctrinate soldiers and officers of non-Russian nationality in the highest noble aims of the peoples of the USSR, in the explanation of their military oath and the law for punishing any betrayal of the Motherland.’ Their indoctrination cannot have been very successful, because many clearly had little idea what the war was about. A Tartar in 284th Rifle Division, unable to stand the fighting any more, decided to desert. He crawled forward in the dark from his position without being seen, but then lost his bearings in no man’s land. Without realizing, he crossed back into the sector occupied by 685th Rifle Regiment. He found a command bunker and entered. Convinced that he had reached his destination, he presumed that the officers staring at him must be German officers wearing Russian uniform as a sort of disguise. ‘He announced that he had come to surrender,’ the report recorded. ‘The traitor was executed.’
Commissars also faced a bureaucratic problem. ‘It is very difficult to classify extraordinary events’, the front political department explained to Shcherbakov in Moscow, ‘because we cannot tell in many cases whether a soldier deserted or crossed over to the enemy.’ ‘In battle conditions’, the department reported on another occasion, ‘it is not always possible to determine for sure what happened to particular soldiers or groups of men. In 38th Rifle Division, a sergeant and a soldier who went off to collect their company’s rations were never seen again. Nobody knew what had happened to them. They might have been buried by a large shell, or they might have deserted. Unless there are eyewitnesses, we can only suspect.’
The fact that officers often failed to count their soldiers properly did not help. Some absentees were listed as traitors, and then found to have been evacuated to a field hospital with serious wounds. Even a soldier who discharged himself from hospital to return to his unit to fight could find himself listed as a deserter and condemned. On occasions, the carelessness of officers was deliberate. The deaths of soldiers were sometimes not reported in order to obtain more rations, a practice as old as organized armies, but now defined as ‘criminal disorder on the military roll’.
Dobronin’s acknowledgement of the statistical difficulties should certainly be remembered when looking at the total of 446 desertions during September. No mention is made of the other category, ‘crossing over to the enemy’. Yet even Stalingrad Front’s own reports of group desertions indicate a serious problem. For example, after twenty-three men from a single battalion deserted over three nights, ‘a protective zone’ was ‘set up in front of the front line’, and officers formed ‘a twenty-four-hour guard’.
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
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
