Guest Blog: Stalingrad Lives by Ian Garner

Ian Garner’s new book, Stalingrad Lives: Stories of Combat and Survival, tells the hidden story of how Russia’s greatest wartime epic was created at the front.  Garner brings together a selection of short stories written at and after the battle. They reveal, for the first time in English, the real Russian narrative of Stalingrad – an epic story of death, martyrdom, resurrection, and utopian beginnings. Following the authors into the hellish world of Stalingrad, Garner traces how tragedy was written as triumph. He uncovers how, dealing with loss and destruction on an unimaginable scale, Soviet readers and writers embraced the story of martyred Stalingrad, embedding it into the Russian psyche for decades to come.

In his Guest Blog below, Ian Garner looks at the importance of the story of Stalingrad for Russians, giving some backstory to his interest in this topic.

Soviet troops on the attack in Stalingrad, October 1942. Photo by Natalya Bode, used with permission of her family.

Back in spring 2014, director Fyodor Bondarchuk’s Russian-language World War II epic Stalingrad hit movie screens across North America. The film—a state-sponsored blockbuster starring a raft of big-name Russian actors—had already smashed box office records back home. Now Vladimir Putin’s government was funding the movie’s distribution abroad. That was how I ended up in a screening of Stalingrad at a cinema in glitzy downtown Toronto.

The film was a cliched piece bursting with scenes and tropes well known to anyone with the slightest familiarity with the story of Stalingrad. A small group of soldiers crosses the fiery Volga into the besieged Stalingrad in fall 1942. They occupy a bombed-out apartment block in the city, which they defend against marauding Germans, who brutalize and murder Soviet women and children. In the movie’s climax, the surviving Soviet soldiers call an artillery strike on their own position, killing themselves to halt the German onslaught for good. The battle is won. Framed by a narrative of Russian EMS workers rescuing civilians in the present, and mixing big budget fighting sequences, video game-like camera tracking, and a stirring action movie score, Stalingrad was a two-hour cliche. The film was just a modern update on the same Soviet Stalingrad movies that I’d seen a dozen times before.

Yet looking around the movie theatre, I was surprised to see the audience—all of whom appeared to be Russian speakers—were enthralled. Many were in floods of tears. Audiences had been unmoved by the Putin regime’s movies about other World War II legends like those of Sevastopol, Brest, and the Podolsk Cadets. What was it about the Stalingrad story that produced such a visceral emotional response in a group of Russian emigres hardly known for their love of state propaganda pieces?

Troops celebrate victory at Stalingrad in February 1943. Photo by Natalya Bode, used with permission of her family.

In Stalingrad Lives, I set out to find out why. What I discovered was an extraordinary trove of literature and language produced, at the front and under fire, by a group of the Soviet Union’s very finest prose writers. Hired by the regime to write literature for the newspapers, these writers were let loose and given free rein to go where they pleased, speak to whom they liked, and write whatever they wanted at the front. The results are one of the most extraordinary bodies of war correspondence ever produced.

Vasily Grossman—later the author of the epic anti-totalitarian novels Life and Fate and Stalingrad—spent four months living with the troops at the Stalingrad front. His peer, Konstantin Simonov, spent a brief few weeks risking his neck, rattling off machine gun rounds in pitched battles by day and pumping out minor literary masterpieces by night. Aided by luminaries such as Ilya Ehrenburg, Vasily Koroteev, Evgeny Kriger, and others, these men produced almost every phrase, image, and motif associated with Stalingrad in a flurry of intense literary activity. In Stalingrad Lives, I translate lost and forgotten work by these men, presenting their Stalingrad stories for the first time in English—alongside the tale of how these writers worked, relied on each other, and battled the authorities after the fighting drew to a close and Stalin attempted to seize the laurels of victory for himself.

With millions dead, swathes of the country occupied, and the USSR seemingly on the brink, Soviet readers embraced the stories from the front right away. But the stories didn’t just boost morale. In the total chaos of World War II, when the advancing Germans threatened not just occupation but to eliminate or enslave the Soviet peoples, the literature of Stalingrad gave people a means to make sense of their own trauma. The key motif was that of Stalingrad as a necessary, messianic martyrdom—not a moment of tragic loss to be avoided at all costs, but a time when troops were sent into what was described as a literal hell to die. Through death, Soviet soldiers could resurrect the nation and save the entire world from the Nazi threat.

Readers and writers alike, as I show in Stalingrad Lives, clung onto this thread of hope. Daughters, mothers, sons, and brothers may have been dying in their millions, but their sacrifices, embodied in the notion of Stalingrad, had saved the world. Soon, Soviets began treating the battle—as much spontaneously as at the government’s behest—as an article of quasi-religious faith. The battle’s story would be rewritten hundreds of times in books, plays, poems, movies, and letters in the coming decades, using the language from the frontline authors whose stories feature in Stalingrad Lives to reaffirm the significance of the sacrifice.

The story of Stalingrad is more relevant than ever for understanding the Russian mindset around war today, when Vladimir Putin has sent his armies into Ukraine. Western commentators and readers look on at the vast Russian losses and wonder: how long will the Russian public tolerate this level of sacrifice? Stalingrad Lives helps us to understand that the answer may not be the one we in the West, appalled at the destruction and aggression of 2022, will want to hear.

As the Russian government and ordinary Russians alike refer to strategic battles in Ukraine as “the new Stalingrad,” they use the language of utopia, turning points, and martyrdom to describe action at the front. By doing so, they frame their own sacrifices as moments not of human waste but greater triumph. Stalingrad is for them not a byword for tragic loss but for brilliant rebirth. Vasily Grossman, who later bitterly regretted his complicit in propagandizing for the Stalin regime, would be appalled—but his and his peers’ words have created a story that is still playing an enormous role for Russian national and military identity in 2022.

A Stalingrad resident collects water, early 1943. Photo by Natalya Bode, used with permission of her family.

Ian Garner is a cultural historian and translator in Kingston, Ontario.