Stalingrad: The Unbreakable City

In August 1942 Maria Chuprina had just turned 13. A native of Stalingrad, Maria had spent the first year of war on the Eastern Front going about her business much as normal. While she worried about her father, who was fighting the Wehrmacht in Ukraine, Maria continued to attend school and her mother kept going to work as a nurse. On the morning of 23 August Maria awoke in the apartment she shared with her mother and uncle. Drinking tea and relaxing at home after enjoying another day of the summer holidays, she had little idea of the horror that was about to unfold: ‘The sky grew dark. We just assumed clouds were covering the sun. And then the bombing started.’ 

By 23 August, Hitler’s forces in the East were two months into a furious summer advance. After the previous year’s Operation Barbarossa had ended in the failure to capture Moscow, the Führer tried a new tactic to break his Soviet opponents on the Eastern Front. The Wehrmacht was to drive hard and fast from its positions in the east of today’s Ukraine to take the Caucasus, seize the Soviet Union’s oilfields and smash the enemy’s ability to wage war. The Soviet defences would crumble and Axis forces would be able to take Leningrad and Moscow. The war in the East would be over.

By late summer, only one city stood between the Axis armies and their goal: Stalingrad, a name that has become synonymous with the hell of mechanised warfare, senseless death and the brutal clash of two totalitarian regimes. By the time the German armies finally surrendered at Stalingrad in February 1943, close to a million people lay dead in the city and on the steppe around it. Victory at Stalingrad proved the turning point in the war. The Axis powers would be beaten back through Eastern Europe and, ultimately, to Berlin.

But first, Stalingraders had to live through five and a half months of terror as fighting enveloped their city. Klavdiya Galkova, a nurse who had just celebrated her 20th birthday, remembered the events of 23 August: 

I had a day off. I was on the streetcar to my mother’s when we heard the roar of incoming planes. We were ordered out of the streetcar. We lay on the sidewalk and didn’t budge. The sky was thick black with planes … I tried to bury myself in some grass, thinking it would protect me somehow. Then whole buildings began to collapse. The noise was relentless. People were screaming, moaning and crying. I went and helped the doctors at the hospital all night. The first chance I got I went home. But there was nothing there except a pile of rubble.

A catastrophe of unthinkable proportions had begun to unfold in Stalingrad. A thousand Luftwaffe bombers flew in for hours on end. The poorly equipped Soviet air defence units were taken by surprise. Given contradictory orders – or no orders at all – they were helpless to respond. Fires tore through the remnants of the city. Residents fleeing across the Volga in  a flotilla of steamers, rowing boats and ferries were sitting ducks for the German attack aircraft. By the fall of darkness on that, the first day of the Battle of Stalingrad, some 40,000 Russians – almost twice the number of Germans who would die in the Dresden air raids of February 1945 – had been killed.

Becoming Stalingrad

Joseph Stalin and the Soviet high command understood the trajectory of Hitler’s offensive weeks before 23 August. In July the troops were read the now famous Order No. 227, which beseeched them to take ‘not one step backwards’ in their defence of the Volga. Yet little was done to help Stalingrad’s civilians. Cattle, materiel and supplies were moved out of the city weeks before the Germans arrived, but the stubborn Stalin would not countenance an evacuation of the city’s civilians. Just 25,000 women and children had been allowed to leave before 23 August; only on the following day was a full evacuation order signed. 

In spite of the leadership’s obvious lack of concern for their fate, Stalingraders would not give up their city. The German invaders swept into the city centre days after 23 August. Holding positions just metres from the Volga, the Soviet defenders would not be budged. Thousands of locals rushed to enlist as formal and informal medical workers, orderlies and civilian defence brigade members. Maria Chuprina was among these volunteers. By the evening of 23 August she was assisting her mother in a makeshift hospital in the city centre where the main post office is located today. Chuprina would stay at her post through the following months, even as Stalingrad was engulfed by a total war that saw every nook and cranny of the city riddled with fighting.

What was it that drove citizens like Maria Chuprina to keep fighting, even as defeat seemed inevitable? Popular culture and histories have spread the myth that Red Army commissars gunned down fleeing troops en masse, instilling a climate of sheer terror at the front. However, scholarship from the past 20 years has discounted this theory in favour of exploring individual Soviets’ motivations for a war effort that was widely embraced. Military discipline was certainly severe and troops at the front were always wary of discussing their true feelings about their leaders, but Stalingrad represented something worth fighting for. 

To understand why, we must look two decades further back to when the tiny city of Tsaritsyn, as Stalingrad was then named, had entered into Soviet legend. It was here during the Russian Civil War that Joseph Stalin had supposedly led Bolshevik forces to a triumphant victory over the White opposition. In 1925 Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad, literally ‘Stalin’s City’. Soviet books, plays and films regaled citizens with stories of Stalingrad’s glorious past and of the triumph of ‘the Boss’ at its walls.

Locals took great delight in their connection to the Bolshevik state’s foundational story. Aleksandr Eremin, aged 15 and working on a steamer transporting military goods at the time of the German attack in 1942, would describe in a 2021 interview his immense pride at his father’s service as a Red partisan in the civil war and his family’s multigenerational roots in Tsaritsyn. He remembers having no sympathy for ‘cowards and deserters’ and was willing to work without pay and proper equipment to defend his hometown against the Nazi invaders: ‘I was right at the front, right in the cauldron!’ Symbolic connections to Stalingrad were not the sole reasons behind the enthusiasm for defending the city. Thanks to its location on the Volga, which connected the Russian heartland to the Black Sea, the backwater of Tsaritsyn had been totally transformed by the time war broke out. From the mid-1920s on it had been the site of massive investment, intended to become a manifestation of all the working and recreational opportunities that Soviet life could offer.

While pre-revolutionary Tsaritsyn had been a small but bustling regional centre, its residents lived in abject poverty without hope of social improvement. The 1920s plans for Stalingrad offered something that had been unimaginable. There would be vast industrial projects. The most important of these was the plan to build the Stalingrad tractor factory – the largest in the USSR. National newspapers published breathless updates on the construction’s progress and on the factory’s output when the first assembly lines started work in 1930.

Soviet citizens flocked to Stalingrad to join the construction effort. Some 7,000 Komsomol’tsy – Young Communists – arrived in the city in 1929 alone. Fuelled by a zeal to participate in what was termed ‘socialist competition’ – municipal, regional and national contests for speed and quantity of output – these young men and women took immense pride in their city. Stalingrad continued to grow; by August 1942 the population stood at 850,000, ten times what it had been at the turn of the century and roughly equivalent to that of Liverpool or Manchester.

With industrial progress came improvements in living standards. Modern residences replaced the traditional Russian izbas – wooden peasant huts – so that by the outbreak of war, the city had two million square metres of quality housing stock, while 25 times more homes had access to running water than in 1917. Sewerage, electricity and a telephone service were widespread throughout the new districts that surrounded Stalingrad’s factories. Transport was cheap and accessible thanks to a 67 km tram network that crossed the city. Educational opportunities were abundant. The Stalingrad of 1941 had 125 schools – half of which were constructed in the 1930s alone – three polytechnic institutes and  a university. Some 65,000 pupils and 5,000 students were studying in the city. Stalingraders could enjoy one of six cinemas, a drama theatre and puppet theatre, several museums and an extensive library system. Passenger steamers ferried residents along the Volga; the banks were dotted with kiosks, parks and benches for public use. The smells of the Stalingrad Bazaar, where traders sold apples, melons, dried fish and cucumbers, mingled with the freshness of the Volga’s waters.

Of course, the reality of life in the city was not so blissful. Not all Stalingraders had access to this plethora of luxuries, which were afforded first to the state’s industrial workers. Those workers completed often mortally dangerous tasks and had little leisure time. Political violence roiled away in the background. When the state’s repressions reached a climax in 1937-38, some 1,000 local members of the Communist Party were jailed in prisons and camps across the USSR. Many thousands of Stalingraders were accused of every manner of imagined plot against the state. Those untouched by these repressions were constantly aware of the state’s watchful eye: the tractor factory bore the name of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the notorious secret police chief of the 1920s. A statue of the man himself stood outside its gates.

Ready to fight

The Stalingrad that faced obliteration at the hands of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe in late summer 1942, then, was by no means a workers’ paradise. However, the notion that the city was at the vanguard of national history and the revolution’s achievements gripped young Stalingraders like Maria Chuprina, Klavdiya Galkova and Aleksandr Eremin. Thus, when the Germans were poised to take the city there was little doubt that this jewel in the Soviet crown had to be saved.

Those who had raced to enlist in the first days of the war, or when their age made them eligible, had long been preparing for this moment. Boris Panchenko was one of many locals who volunteered to join civil defence brigades, a sort of Home Guard formed around workplaces. Panchenko, a worker at the tractor factory, was joined by local members of the Komsomol, teachers, homemakers and others deemed unfit for regular frontline service. In his 1943 memoir – the first about the Battle of Stalingrad to be published – Panchenko remembered his military training as a formative period that offered not just a sense of belonging, but the chance to become an ideal Soviet citizen: ‘The troops and the commanders mastered military skills. They became men. Their characters were tempered.’ The word ‘tempered’ was often used to denote Soviet heroes’ transformation from humans to the superhumans of popular literature and films.

Much of the defence brigades’ work until summer 1942 was rather superfluous. They spent most of their time seeking out spies and chasing phantom German parachutists. Nonetheless, Panchenko would recall that the combination of party work, Soviet transformation and military preparation made his comrades ready to ‘sacrifice themselves to carry out their duty to the end, just like any other soldiers and party members sent to defend the motherland’. In early August 1942, when they first caught wind of the German advance, Panchenko’s brigade began digging trenches and erecting barricades.

The preparation work in Stalingrad in summer 1942 drew from every stratum of society. Aleksandrova Martynova was a native Stalingrader who had just turned 18 when war broke out in 1941. Though she had long dreamed of obtaining a job in the city’s central department store, she raced to enlist in the Red Army on the first day of the war. The young woman soon found herself enrolled in a training course to become a radio operator. She was ordered to return home and, should Stalingrad be seized, pass messages from behind the lines. When Stalingrad was almost entirely occupied by the German forces, Martynova continued to send messages by Morse code to and from command centres located in bunkers, basements and caves around the city.

The state may have all but abandoned their families and comrades, but local Stalingraders were determined to fight for their city. Doing so meant defending fellow workers and the workplaces they had built, defending dreams of future lives and defending the progress that at least some of the city’s inhabitants had benefited from in the previous 20 years. 

The price of victory

Sacrifice at Stalingrad, however, was not just limited to the personal. What the Germans did not destroy on 23 August the Russians were willing to destroy themselves for the greater effort. An extreme scorched earth defence strategy was prepared. On the evening of 23 August itself, the writer Viktor Nekrasov, then a young sapper, was surprised to be sent to the tractor factory. There he discovered each of the factory’s eight enormous generators mined with ammonite. A cable led to a detonator switch in a tiny foxhole disguised with railway sleepers. Nekrasov spent a nervous night in the hole awaiting the Germans’ arrival. He did not have to ignite the explosives, but the message was clear: if the Soviets could not hold Stalingrad’s industrial bounties, they would not fall into enemy hands.

More than five months of brutal war followed the events of that day. Time and again through September and October, Stalingrad appeared close to falling. Both the German and Russian commands sent vast numbers of troops into the crucible, where the death rate sometimes exceeded 10,000 troops on each side per day. Yet the Soviet defenders clung to a tiny strip of land along the Volga’s banks. Finally, the deadlock was broken on 19 November, when a rapid counterattack encircled the Axis forces. Within days, the Soviets had advanced dozens of kilometres and the German 6th Army was left to freeze, starve and fight disease as the Russian winter set in. The remnants of the invading force finally surrendered on 2 February 1943.

Victory had come at enormous cost. Stalingrad lay in ruins. Practically none of the city’s amenities remained; what little housing stock was left was uninhabitable. The civilian population was decimated. The 15,000 remaining civilians had been reduced to eking out a miserable existence hiding in sewers, caves and basements. 

Yet Stalingrad was about to resume its place at the centre of the nation’s construction efforts. The government launched a massive campaign to rebuild the ‘Hero-City’ Stalingrad, the city that had saved the nation from the Nazi threat. Hundreds of thousands of Russians answered the call to arms. Plans were made for a vast new ‘House of the Soviets’ and ‘Palace of Culture’; amenities and streets would be restored on an even greater scale than what had been before. Even the landscape around the city was to be transformed with the construction of a canal to link the mighty Volga and Don rivers, the opening of the world’s largest hydroelectric station and the planting of millions of trees to green the arid steppe. The reconstruction of Stalingrad once again placed the city at the centre of the nation’s sense of identity. 

But beneath the veneer of progress, for months corpses, disease, homelessness and hunger dominated the battered city. Once again, while some benefited from modern conveniences, most civilians scraped out existences in whatever shelter they could. Even many years later, the traces of war still remained: Viktor Nekrasov, returning to the city in the 1950s, unearthed mountains of skulls covered by thin layers of scattered soil.

Proud memory 

All of the Soviet citizens mentioned here would survive Stalingrad and fight through the following two and a half years of the war at the front. Maria Chuprina, the schoolgirl who ran to help her mother on 23 August, did not leave her post until Stalingrad was safe some three months later; after the Germans surrendered, she spent the rest of the war as a medical assistant. Nonetheless, even among the horrors she witnessed, that first day at Stalingrad stood out: ‘The bombing of Stalingrad on 23 August 1942 was for sure [the most terrifying thing]. It was truly terrible. I can’t believe that anybody could survive that hell.’

On each 23 August, today’s Volgograders – the city’s name was changed in 1961 – commemorate that ‘hell’ with a minute’s silence at 4.18pm, when the first bombers struck. While the Battle of Stalingrad is widely associated with death and destruction on an unimaginable scale, for these Russians the battle still summons memories of immense sacrifice and renewed belief in utopian potential. 

Ian Garner is the author of Stalingrad Lives: Stories of Combat and Survival (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).