kept going as a German counterattack closed off the neck of the salient they formed.
A similar, albeit smaller-scale, armored debacle took place in the Crimea, where a single understrength panzer division took the measure of superior forces employed piecemeal. As Russian survivors fought delaying actions on the long retreat to the Don River, Russian staffs emphasized surprise, exploitation, and improved logistic support for future offensives. All of these appeared in the Stalingrad offensive. The rally and the counterattack orchestrated by Manstein showed that the Germans still mastered the armored battlefield. Mastered—but no longer dominated. Beginning with the new year, frontline commanders were reporting unpleasant tactical surprises. Red armor was no longer following its familiar pattern of engaging German strongpoints and exposing itself to paralyzing local ripostes by the panzers. Instead the tankers were bypassing the “hedgehogs,” driving past them deep into the German rear. Lower-unit leadership was becoming more flexible, more situationally oriented.
Four hundred thousand tankers were trained during the war. More than three hundred thousand died in battle—a ratio matching the often-cited losses of the Nazi U-boat service, but in numbers ten times greater. The execution squads of the security police, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD, were seldom to be found riding with the tankers. And the fatalism characteristic of the Red Army for almost a decade was beginning to develop among the tank crews into a determination, still unfocused but increasingly powerful, to take as many Hitlerites as possible along with them.
The armored force attracted quality recruits—country boys who had dreamed of driving tractors for the machinery collective, factory workers attracted by the technical and mechanical aspects: socialist modernization on treads. Russia’s military heritage included elements other than brute force. It had a raiding culture as well, a concept of freewheeling mobility dating back to the Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Sich, the flying columns that devastated Napoleon’s army during its retreat from Moscow, the mounted buccaneers of Semyon Budenny’s Konarmia (Cavalry Army) during the Russian Civil War. Given the right catalyst, a Red Army tank corps was a potentially lethal compound.
The Red Army was also developing a supporting infrastructure—most significantly in its artillery. Guns had been important in the Russian army since the eighteenth century. Stalin would call artillery “the Red god of war.” And here if anywhere, mass was dominant. Western armies emphasized fire mobility. The Soviets emphasized tubes. The Red Army lacked the electronics and the technicians to implement a Western-style approach. Decentralization was in any case not a part of Soviet principle or practice. Guns, on the other hand, were easier to manufacture than tanks, and heavy mortars were even simpler than conventional artillery pieces. By October 1943, there were enough of them that Stavka authorized twenty-six artillery divisions, each with over 200 guns and howitzers plus 108 heavy (120 mm) mortars. At the same time, four rocket-launcher divisions were created. By the end of 1943, there were seven, each able to fire a salvo of over 3,400 rockets.
The effect was an ability to saturate a battle zone in the fashion attempted by the Allies on the Western Front in 1916–17. It was as sophisticated as a baseball bat to the kidneys, and just as effective. Even when the guns were deployed in forward, exposed positions, German counter-battery fire and air strikes (when these were available) were simply absorbed by the sheer number of targets. Artillery commanders were responsible to artillery superiors, creating a chain of command and control that enabled artillery to be used independently, without particular and changeable commitments to the infantry and armor. The potential of the adjusted system was only marginally apparent during the Stalingrad campaign. At best it had its limits. Against stationary targets or massed formations, it could have effects prefiguring those later projected for a tactical nuclear bomb. The best counters were dispersion, mobility, flexibility. At Kursk the Germans would deny themselves all three, and Soviet gunners would make them pay.
For the men in the Red Army’s ranks, the war’s second summer seemed to offer “neither victory nor hope.” Another third of a million men, another two thousand tanks, had been lost. The survivors were caught up in what seemed an endless retreat across the steppes, broken by last stands on temporary stop lines. Sergey Bondarchuk, himself a veteran of four years’ wartime service, presented a sanitized dramatization in his 1975 epic film,
The film’s tone of determined optimism interspersed with bits of comedy and nostalgia parallels that of its Western counterparts of the 1940s and 1950s in that it reflects an official policy that endured virtually until the Soviet Union’s final implosion. Russia’s soldiers and Russia’s people behaved heroically. Should they not in fact live up to the trope—that was why the police system existed, and from privates to generals, all went in fear of the NKVD. Its presence was ubiquitous, but its behavior remained random until July 28, when Stalin issued Order No. 227, which called for an end to retreat and demanded that every foot of Soviet soil be defended. Penalties ranged from service in a penal battalion to summary execution: more than 150,000 Red Army soldiers were formally sentenced to death. The number of summary executions will never be known.
High morale was a soldier’s duty, not his right. But Stavka did not base morale on executions alone. Part of the mythology of Soviet recovery from Barbarossa involves Stalin’s willingness to call on religion and nationalism. Orthodox prelates met with Stalin himself. Churches were opened, seminaries authorized. Accompanying this was a near cultic emphasis on the “motherland,” its heroes and its symbols. Motherland became a form of “sacred space,” combining emotional abstraction with geographic reality. Films and lectures celebrated legendary generals such as Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Aleksandr Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov—and Stalin, revolutionary defender of the city that now bore his name. Uniforms were smartened up with shoulder boards and standing collars. Military bling returned to fashion: a structure of medals, orders, and decorations that could literally cover the entire chest of senior officers such as Zhukov and his counterpart and rival, Ivan Konev. Enlisted men from cooks to snipers had their own badges recognizing “distinguished” service.
As early as September 1941, the title of “Guards” was reintroduced. Not Red Guards, as might have been expected—just Guards, referring both to the revolutionary formations and to the elite troops of the czarist empire. Units from independent battalions to entire armies that distinguished themselves in combat were rechristened and renumbered. Members of the units were titled Guardsmen—and the honorific accompanied them if they were transferred.
The new spectrum of recognitions was welcome enough. But for the surviving veterans of 1941, for the wartime conscripts, and for the recovered wounded returning in increasing numbers, the sting of defeat was beginning to mask the cultures of buck passing and scapegoating developed under two decades of postrevolutionary terror. The material and human devastation left in the Nazis’ wake had become general knowledge. For some in the ranks, it generated anger at losing the results of generations of sacrifice and deprivation. The impulse to spiral into nihilism was counterbalanced by a growing conviction, even among the cynical and the disaffected, that nothing was wrong with the Soviet Union that the Germans could fix—or wanted to.
A comprehensive and enduring propaganda campaign worked tirelessly to encourage and systematize hate—to make killing Germans a pleasure and a habit. Training, never exactly a humanitarian enterprise in the Red Army, inculcated toughness by such exercises as having tanks drive over recruits in slit trenches—sometimes trenches they had dug themselves. An “accident” or two was a sovereign cure for reluctance to dig in and dig deep.
A common Red Army type never developed even in the homogenizing context of total war and despite an official Soviet policy of stressing the collective nature of its sacrifice and victory. Age and ethnicity, background and culture, sustained individual identities. Confidence and comradeship, hope of recognition and fear of punishment, ideology and tradition—all played roles in renewing and refocusing combat motivation. Underpinning them all, even at the war’s middle stage, was the frontline soldiers’ increasing hope that their sacrifices would bring about postwar reform—“communism with a human face,” purged of prewar hatreds and misunderstandings, productive capacities adjusted to civilian needs and wants, leaders and people committed to the same goals.
Boris Gorbachevsky, by then a captain, recalls a postwar discussion with half a dozen of his men around the kind of campfire that inspired swapping confidences even with an officer present: “If only the authorities would give us freedom, spare us from Kolkhoz troubles and think up something like the NEP. If only they’d set us free, we could rebuild all of Russia within five years.” Illusion and delusion were not Third Reich monopolies.
