Stalingrad

like a paper boat, because there were no envelopes, seemed both too large and too small for their purposes. The resultant letter stuck, as a result, to three main themes: enquiries after the family at home, reassurance (‘I’m getting along all right–still alive’), and preoccupation with the battle (‘we are constantly destroying their manpower and equipment. Day or night, we won’t leave them in peace’). Red Army soldiers in Stalingrad were well aware that the whole nation’s eyes were on them, but many must have tailored part of their letters because they knew that the Special Departments censored mail carefully.
    Even when they wanted to escape when writing to their wife or sweetheart, the battle stayed with them always, partly because a man’s worth was defined by the opinion of his comrades and commander. ‘Mariya,’ wrote a certain Kolya, ‘I think you will remember our last evening together. Because now, this minute, it is exactly a year since we were parted. And it was very difficult for me to say goodbye to you. It’s very sad, but we had to part because it was the order of the Motherland. We are carrying out this order as well as we can. The Motherland requires those of us who are defending this town to resist to the end. And we are going to carry out that order.’
    The majority of Russian soldiers seem to have subsumed their personal feelings within the cause of the Great Patriotic War. They may have been more afraid of the censor than their German counterparts; they may have been more effectively brainwashed by the Stalinist regime, and yet the concept of self-sacrifice comes across as much more than an ideological slogan. It appears almost atavistic, a moral compulsion in the face of the invader. ‘People might reproach me’, wrote a Red Army lieutenant in Stalingrad to his bride of a few weeks, ‘if they read this letter about the reason why I am fighting for you. But I can’t distinguish where you end, and where the Motherland begins. You and it are the same for me.’
    A comparative study of letters home written by officers and soldiers on both sides is most instructive. In many of the letters from Germans in Stalingrad at this time, there is often a hurt, disabused, even disbelieving note at what was happening, as if this was no longer the same war on which they had embarked. ‘I often ask myself, wrote a German lieutenant to his wife, ‘what all this suffering is for. Has mankind gone crazy? This terrible time will mark many of us for ever.’ And despite the optimistic propaganda of imminent victory at home, many wives sensed the truth: ‘I can’t stop worrying. I know that you are fighting constantly. I will always be your faithful wife. My life belongs to you and to our world.’
    There was also a surprising number of dissatisfied Russian soldiers who either forgot that their letters were censored, or were so downcast that they no longer cared. Many complained about their rations. ‘Aunt Lyuba,’ wrote one young soldier, ‘please send me some food. I am ashamed to ask you, but hunger makes me do it.’ Many admitted that they were reduced to scavenging, and others told their families that soldiers were falling ill ‘because of bad food and insanitary conditions’. One soldier suffering from dysentery wrote: ‘If it goes on like this, it won’t be possible to avoid an epidemic. We also have lice, which are the first source of disease.’ The soldier’s prediction soon proved correct. In Hospital 4169, soldiers with typhus were rapidly isolated. The doctors thought that ‘the wounded caught typhus from local people on the way to the hospital and that it spread from there’.
    As well as complaints about bad food and conditions, strong tracesof defeatism still surfaced. The commissars, always ready to jump at their own shadows in the Stalinist night, were clearly unsettled by the results of NKVD postal censorship. ‘In 62nd Army alone, in the first half of October, military secrets were divulged in 12,747 letters,’ the political department reported to Moscow. ‘Some letters contain clear anti-Soviet statements, praising the fascist army and failing to believe in the victory of the Red Army.’ A few examples were quoted. ‘Hundreds and thousands of people die every day,’ wrote a soldier to his wife. ‘Now it is all so hard that I do not see a way out. We can consider Stalingrad as good as surrendered.’ At a time when most Russian civilians had been living