By early February 1943, the entire 6th Army of General Friedrich Paulus had been destroyed, the first major military defeat suffered by the Nazis in the course of the war. Though initially vastly outnumbered by the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces), the Red Army was able to defend Stalingrad and eventually go over to the offensive. However, throughout that year, the Soviet Union was able to mobilize immense economic resources for the war effort, thanks in large part to the planning principles in place, however limited and distorted by the bureaucracy, and the enormous sacrifices made by the Soviet population. It had been forced to retreat deeply into Soviet Russia, at the cost of millions of lives, until the autumn of 1942. The Red Army had been taken by surprise by the Nazi invasion, largely due to the criminal Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 and the beheading of the army’s leadership in Stalin’s Great Terror.

And everyone at the time, from Moscow to Berlin, London and Washington, understood this. It was the battle of Stalingrad (Augto February 2, 1943), on the western bank of the Volga in the “heart of Russia,” that effectively helped decide the outcome of the war and sealed the fate of the Nazis’ Third Reich. The last portion of the work is focused entirely on the Nazi attack on Stalingrad, a vital industrial and transportation center in southern Russia, and the Soviet defense of the city through the first two weeks of September 1942. Andrey Yeryomenko, but, above all, Soviet civilians and soldiers, drawn from the working class and peasantry in Stalingrad. He portrays sections of the technical intelligentsia miners in Siberia working in war production children orphaned by the war historical figures such as Gen. Grossman offers a panoramic view of Soviet society at war. Many of the protagonists, especially the physicist Viktor Shtrum and the Shaposhnikov family, will be familiar to readers of Life and Fate.

The plot of Stalingrad is too complex to be recounted in full. It is this same spirit that permeates Grossman’s novel. In a partial but significant manner, the spirit that animated the Red Army during its early years, after it was created by Leon Trotsky and the Bolsheviks to defend the revolution, was revived. Despite the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Great Terror of 1936-38, the Soviet masses rose up to defend the conquests of the October Revolution against the fascist invaders. By the end of the war, in 1945, at least 27 million Soviet citizens, including 1.5 million Soviet Jews, would be dead. Less than a year earlier, on June 22, 1941, the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union, launching the bloodiest conflict in the history of mankind. The novel begins with a meeting between fascist dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini on April 29, 1942, in which they discuss the progress of the war.

Stalingrad by vasily grossman