Stalingrad

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 levée 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196th Rifle Division, which was mostly Kazakh, Uzbek and Tartar, ‘received such severe losses that it had to be withdrawn from the front to be reconstituted’.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 asoldier 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