PART ONE
1. The Battle of Berezina (26–29 November 1812) took place during Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. Though they suffered heavy losses, the French succeeded in crossing the River Berezina and so escaped being trapped. Nevertheless, some nations continue to use the word “Berezina” as a synonym for “disaster.”
2. Reinhard Heydrich (1904–42) was a high-ranking Nazi official and one of the main architects of the Shoah. On 27 May 1942, he was critically wounded in Prague by a British-trained team of Czech and Slovak soldiers. He died a week later. The Nazis carried out massive reprisals against the civilian population.
3. In late 1940 and early 1941 the British had routed the Italian Army Group in North Africa. In February 1941 Hitler had sent Rommel’s Afrika Korps to support the Italians. Since then he had reinforced the Afrika Korps several times.
4. War, peace, world history, religion, politics, philosophy, the German soul (Grossman’s own note).
5. Between the outer door or porch and the habitable room or rooms of a peasant hut was an unheated entrance room. This provided insulation from the cold and could be used for storing tools and firewood, or for housing animals.
6. A Russian stove was a large brick or clay structure taking up between one-fifth and one-quarter of the room it stood in. Its functions included baking and cooking, boiling water, heating the building, and drying linen and foodstuffs. A sleeping bench might be attached to one side of the stove; a wide shelf above it could also be slept on; and people often slept directly on the stove’s warm surface.
7. Foot cloths were lengths of material wound around the foot and ankle. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries these were far more common in Russia than socks or stockings. By the 1950s, however, they were used only in the army and in labour camps.
8. A portmanteau word, meaning “collective farm.” In 1929–30 Stalin forcibly collectivized nearly all Soviet agriculture, against massive peasant resistance.
9. A common refreshing drink, lightly alcoholic, usually made from stale bread.
10. The word “soviet” means both “council” and “counsel.” The workers’ soviets in Petrograd and other cities became the Bolsheviks’ main power base during 1917, and so the word became associated with the Communist Party. In the Soviet Union, governmental bodies at all levels—from that of a small village to that of the entire country—were known as soviets: village soviet, town soviet, province soviet, etc.
11. His surname is derived from the word kozyol, which means “goat.”
12. Russian peasants—even those who were not believers—continued unofficially following the Christian calendar for many decades after the Revolution.
13. The Comintern (Communist International), an international communist organization, held seven World Congresses in Moscow between 1919 and 1935. It gradually lost its importance as Stalin abandoned the earlier Soviet goal of world revolution in favour of establishing socialism in one country. In 1943 it was dissolved.
14. Among the staples of the Red Army diet, especially when it came to field rations, were a dehydrated wheat or millet porridge and a dehydrated pea soup. Both needed only the addition of hot water.
15. Every unit of the Red Army, from company to Front (equivalent to a German Army Group), had both a military leader and a political leader. The military leaders were called commanders until 1943, when the word “officer” was officially reintroduced. The political leaders were called commissars, except for the most junior rank, which was political instructor (politruk). Catherine Merridale writes: “An individual politruk was likely to combine the functions of a propagandist with those of an army chaplain, military psychiatrist, school prefect and spy.” Ivan’s War (Faber, 2006), p. 56.
16. This song featured in Eduard Pentslin’s popular film Fighters, which premiered in 1940.
17. Nikolay Nekrasov (1821–77), the most popular poet of his time, was fiercely critical of serfdom and the autocracy. Nikolay Dobrolyubov (1836–61) was a literary critic and political revolutionary.
18. A Soviet rocket launcher, generally known by its nickname Katyusha. Mostovskoy jokingly uses the word to refer to his rudimentary cigarette lighter.
19. The Academy of Sciences was—and remains—immensely important. There are two levels of membership: corresponding membership (the more junior level), and full membership. Even to be a corresponding member is a great honour.
20. Nikolay Chernyshevsky (1828–89) was a philosopher, revolutionary and literary critic, best known for his utopian socialist novel What Is to Be Done? This greatly influenced Vladimir Lenin, one of whose political tracts bears the same title. Leo Tolstoy also used this title, for a pamphlet about personal moral responsibility. The writer and journalist Alexander Herzen (1812–70) is sometimes called the father of Russian socialism.
21. The title of a miniature play by Alexander Pushkin, one of his Little Tragedies.
22. The Irtysh flows through Kazakhstan and western Siberia. The Amu-Darya (once known as the Oxus) is the biggest river in Central Asia.
23. Most Soviet institutions were linked to at least one “house of recreation.” Usually in an attractive spot in the country or by the sea, these were like holiday hotels for particular sections of society. Universities and factories, unions such as the Union of Soviet Writers—all provided their members with subsidized holidays in their house or houses of recreation.
24. A standard term for former members of the clergy, bourgeoisie or aristocracy.
25. Nikolay Gastello (1908–41) was a pilot whose plane was hit by flak and set on fire. He reputedly flew it into a column of German vehicles, destroying a large number of them, including tanks. He was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, posthumously.
26. Grossman evidently knew the Sherlock Holmes stories well. His daughter, Yekaterina Korotkova, remembers him recounting The Hound of the Baskervilles to her when she was a child: “The sense of horror was both agonizing and splendid [. . .] My father evoked the atmosphere of the story with such inspiration that I can sense its horror and beauty to this day. [. . .] I remember reading the book several years later and feeling slightly disappointed. In my father’s retelling it was more interesting, more powerful and more frightening.” Korotkova-Grossman, Vospominaniya, p. 204. Korotkova—one of Grossman’s most perceptive readers—has put her finger on a central feature of her father’s greatness. Grossman’s psychological understanding is acute. His work is important to historians, and to political and moral philosophers. But he is also a superb storyteller. Many chapters of his dilogy are imbued with a sense of horror that could be described as “both agonizing and splendid.”
27. A phrase from the Communist Manifesto (1848), by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
28. The Smolny Institute was Russia’s first educational establishment for women, constructed in 1806–8. During the October Revolution it was the Bolshevik HQ.
29. The words “Everything flows” (Πάντα ῥέι—panta rhei), later chosen by Grossman as the title of his last major work, are often, though probably wrongly, attributed to Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher. One of Heraclitus’s best-known aphorisms is “You cannot step twice into the same river.” In the third version of the novel Heraclitus is one of the philosophers Mostovskoy has written about for a dictionary of philosophy.
30. Shooting oneself in the left hand was a common way of trying to escape the fighting, so wounds of this kind aroused suspicion. For more about soldiers shooting themselves in the left hand, see Schechter, The Stuff of Soldiers, chapter 1.
31. The standard measure for a serving of vodka in a café or restaurant was a hundred grams. This was so common that the word “vodka” was usually omitted. “He drank a glass of vodka” can best be translated as “He drank a hundred grams” (On vypil sto grammov).
32. The Union of Communist Youth.
33. The Yak (named after its designer, Alexander Yakovlev) was produced from early 1940. A single-seat fighter, it was fast, manoeuvrable, well armed and reliable.
34. Chekhov’s “A Man in a Case” is a story about an obtuse and rigid-minded civil servant.
35. The constituent republics of the Soviet Union were divided into oblasti (provinces), which were in turn divided into raiony (districts). An obkom is the Party committee for an oblast and a raikom is the Party committee for a raion.
36. I.e. an internal passport, a document of crucial importance in the Soviet Union.
37. The Soviet Union was a highly militarized society and military terminology infiltrated most areas of life. Such terms as artists’ (or writers’) brigade and shock-workers (by analogy with shock-troops) were standard.
38. Sofya quotes Apollon Maikov (1821–97), a popular poet, many of whose short poems have been set to music.
39. The GAZ-M1 car was produced from 1936 until 1942. The M referred to Vyacheslav Molotov, later to become People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and the car was usually known by its nickname—the Emka. The larger ZIS-101 was produced from 1936 until 1941.
40. A “Front” was equivalent to a German “Army Group.” According to Rodric Braithwaite, “A Front contained up to nine mixed armies, up to three tank armies, one or two air armies and various supporting formations. A mixed army contained five or six rifle divisions and supporting arms.” (Braithwaite, Moscow 1941, p. 268, note 6.) The word “Front” was used only after the German invasion; the earlier equivalent was “Military District.” Throughout this translation we distinguish between “Front,” as above, and “front” or “front line” in a more general sense.
41. Here and elsewhere Novikov addresses Zhenya rather formally, by her first name and patronymic. Zhenya is the most common affectionate form of Yevgenia. See Note on Russian Names.
42. From 1869, this town was called Yuzovka. In 1932 it was renamed Stalino, and in 1961, Donetsk. As a young man, Grossman had worked in the Smolyanka mine, as a safety engineer and chemical analyst.
43. Russians have always seen the war as beginning with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. See Chronology.
44. A Finnish defensive fortification line across the Karelian Isthmus. During the Winter War (1939–40) between Finland and the Soviet Union, it halted the Soviet advance for two months. Both Finnish and Soviet propaganda exaggerated the extent of the fortifications: the Finns wanting to improve national morale, the Soviets needing to explain the slowness of their advance.
45. After Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in summer 1939, they split the country into three parts: a western part annexed by Germany; a central part, also under German control, that was officially called the General Government; and an eastern part annexed by the Soviet Union. The River Bug was the border between the General Government and the Soviet area.
46. It may now seem surprising that Grossman was able to publish this passage about the Nazi officer (which appears in all the published editions), but it is in accord with the official Soviet doctrine of the time. “Falsifiers of History,” an important document edited and in part rewritten by Stalin in 1948, claims that “No forgers will ever succeed in wiping from history [. . .] the decisive fact that under these conditions, the Soviet Union faced the alternative: either to accept, for purposes of self-defence, Germany’s proposal to conclude a non-aggression pact and thereby to ensure to the Soviet Union the prolongation of peace for a certain period of time, which might be used by the Soviet State better to prepare its forces for resistance to a possible attack on the part of an aggressor; or to reject Germany’s proposal for a non-aggression pact and thereby to permit war provocateurs from the camp of the Western Powers immediately to involve the Soviet Union in armed conflict with Germany at a time when the situation was utterly unfavourable to the Soviet Union and when it was completely isolated. In this situation, the Soviet government found itself compelled to make its choice and conclude a non-aggression pact with Germany.” (See “Falsifiers of History” entry in Wikipedia and http://collections.mun.ca/PDFs/radical/FalsificatorsOfHistory.pdf.) “Falsifiers of History,” needless to say, does not mention the secret protocol to the non-aggression pact according to which Stalin and Hitler divided up the whole of central Europe, from Finland to Romania, with Stalin annexing the Baltic states and eastern Poland. One of Hitler’s conditions was the transfer to German-held areas of all ethnic Germans living in Poland or the Baltic states. Most of these Germans were “resettled” in 1939 or 1940, but a final resettlement was organized in spring 1941. (See “Baltic Germans” entry in Wikipedia.)
47. Boris Dralyuk writes (private email, 2017), “I see the self-correction as indicative of cognitive dissonance. Like any serious trauma, it upends Novikov’s sense of reality to such a degree that he can neither process it at the time nor forget it later. It is the Nazi officer, of course, whom Novikov has in mind; his haughty face and bizarre uniform makes him look like a sinister fool. But Novikov may also be thinking of Hitler. And Grossman himself may—possibly—also be thinking of Stalin. All three are murderous, self-serious clowns.”
48. The 1940 German–Soviet Commercial Agreement stipulated that, in exchange for technical and military equipment, the Soviet Union should deliver large quantities of raw materials to Germany. The German war effort against the Soviet Union was partially supported by raw materials—above all, supplies of rubber and grain—obtained through this agreement.
49. A well-known play by Oleksandr Korniychuk (1905–72), a Soviet Ukrainian playwright, literary critic and politician.
50. A Red Corner was a special room in a Soviet hostel, factory or other institution, stocked with educational literature and reserved for reading. Before the Revolution the term referred to the corner of a room in a private house or peasant hut where the icons were kept (the word krasny originally meant both “red” and “beautiful”—a connection independent of Communism).
51. This marked the catastrophic end to the Soviet offensive first mentioned in chapter 4 of Part I, when Shepunov reads to Vavilov from a district newspaper.
52. Three of the main Soviet fighters of the time. The Yak was designed by Yakovlev (see Part I, note 33). The LaGG-3 was named from the first letters of the names of its three designers: Lavochkin, Gorbunov and Gudkov.
53. In March 1940, at the end of the Winter War with Finland, the Soviet Union won the right to lease this southernmost point of Finland for thirty years and to set up a naval base there. In the event, this base existed only until December 1941.
54. Later known as the Po-2, this simple, versatile biplane was produced in large numbers between 1929 and 1953.
55. The Supreme Command in Moscow, established on 23 June 1941, was known as the Stavka. Its members were Stalin, Semyon Timoshenko (the defence commissar), Georgy Zhukov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Semyon Budyonny and Nikolay Kuznetsov.
56. The Southwestern Front—then under the command of Marshal Timoshenko—was formally disbanded on 12 July 1942.
57. A traditional token of hospitality.
58. From 8 April 1942 Bagramyan was the Southwestern Front chief of staff, but on 28 June he was dismissed from this post—unfairly blamed for the catastrophic encirclement following the Soviet recapture of Kharkov.
59. The phrase “Memory eternal!” is pronounced at the end of an Orthodox funeral or memorial service. It refers to remembrance by God, rather than by the living; it is a prayer that the soul of the departed may enter heaven and enjoy eternal life.
60. The Douglas C-47 Skytrain, generally considered the best transport plane of the Second World War, was supplied to the Soviet Union through lend-lease. It was also produced locally, under licence, as the Lisunov Li-2.
61. After the catastrophic Battle of Kiev (August and September 1941) the Southwestern Front was re-established with new forces. From September to December 1941 and from April to July 1942 it was under the command of Marshal Timoshenko. On 12 July 1942 it was disbanded and its forces transferred to the Stalingrad Front and the Southern Front.
62. Ivan Michurin (1855–1935) was an agronomist and plant breeder, a founding father of scientific agricultural selection. His belief that environmental influences could bring about changes to the genotype was the starting point for the pseudo-scientific theories of Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976).
63. In the Soviet Union, maids and servants were known as “domestic workers.”
64. For the Orthodox Church, St. Tatyana is the patron saint of students. Students traditionally celebrated her day by getting drunk.
65. This was founded in 1922. It collected funds to publicize the plight of political prisoners in capitalist countries and to provide material assistance to their families.
66. Someone who profited, or was thought to have profited, from a business venture during the period (1921–28) of relative economic liberalization known as the New Economic Policy (NEP).
67. During the first decade after the Revolution, fervent Communists often gave their children politicized names like this. October, Vladlen (Vladimir Lenin), and Marlen (Marx–Lenin) are among the more common examples.
69. One of the stores for privileged sections of the population—in this case, families of members of the Academy of Sciences—where it was possible to obtain goods and products not generally available.
70. Having no envelopes or postcards, Red Army soldiers used to fold a letter in such a way as to make it into its own envelope. All mail had to be checked by censors and these letters were folded rather than sealed. They were delivered free of charge; there was no need for stamps.
71. Two of the greatest Russian landscape painters, from the second half of the nineteenth century.
72. For Nekrasov, see Part I, note 17. For Herzen, see Part I, note 20. Nikolay Ogaryov (1813–77) was Herzen’s collaborator and closest friend. In 1840, on the Sparrow Hills above Moscow, the two men famously swore not to rest until their country was free.
73. Pyrethrum is a natural insecticide, made from chrysanthemum flowers. Sulfonamide, the only effective antibiotic available before penicillin, was used to treat coughs and allergies.
74. From a song about Stenka Razin, the Cossack brigand who in 1670–71 led a major peasant rebellion. In the song he casts his young Persian bride into the Volga—as a sacrifice to the river—and to placate his comrades, who are jealous of her.
75. The first line of a famous quatrain by Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–73): “Russia is baffling to the mind, / not subject to the common measure; / her ways—of a peculiar kind . . . / One only can have faith in Russia.” Translated by Avril Pyman, The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin, 2015), p. 111.
76. Between the signing of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact (23 August 1939) and the German invasion of the Soviet Union (22 June 1941) all criticism of Hitler and Nazi Germany was suppressed. By speaking so openly, Maximov is endangering himself.
78. This paragraph is based on an actual dream of Grossman’s. His mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, was killed in the first and largest of the mass executions of Berdichev Jews, on 14 September 1941. See Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, chapter 6.
79. The Moscow metro had been designed from the start to provide shelter in time of war. At night, when metro services were suspended, and during air-raid alerts in daytime, civil-defence troops “put wooden duckboards on the rails and closed off all apertures through which a bomb blast might penetrate [. . .] Invalids, children, and the elderly were accommodated in the trains and in the stations [. . .] The remainder went into the tunnels themselves for shelter. The stations were comparatively well lit. Water was available from drinking fountains on the platforms and from taps in the tunnels.” (Braithwaite, Moscow 1941, p. 189.)
80. Balloons sent high into the sky and trailing fine steel wires designed to wreck any aeroplane that flew into them.
81. Perfectum and futurum—Latin for “past” and “future.”
82. For more about the biologist and plant breeder Nikolay Vavilov, see Introduction, pp. xvii–xix, and Afterword, p. 990.
83. The first Russian translations of Sherlock Holmes appeared in 1903 and were followed by a wave of cheap imitations. Holmes remained popular after the Revolution, without encouragement from the Soviet authorities. For some time, the stories were passed around only unofficially. In 1945, however, “The Man with the Twisted Lip” was published in a series titled “The Little Library of the Journal of the Red Army Soldier” and it seems likely that close to 11 million copies of the complete works were published in the late 1950s.
84. The Razguliay district is named after a famous local tavern. Cheryomushki was the home of wealthy merchants and Sadovniki was a peasant district. Grossman evokes different aspects of Moscow life.
85. Kliment Timiryazev (1843–1920) was a famous Russian botanist and physiologist.
86. A well-known Russian children’s song.
87. Madeira Massandra, a quality wine made since 1892 in Crimea.
88. In the 1940s some Armenian scientists claimed to have discovered the “varitron,” a new particle with a variable mass. “Carl Anderson speculated that they may have been under such great political pressure to produce a ‘breakthrough’ that they invented one that would satisfy the administrators but not damage physics, since no physicists would believe it.” D. A. Glaser, “Invention of the Bubble Chamber and Subsequent Events,” Nuclear Physics B Proc. Suppl. 36 (1994), pp. 3–18, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0920563294907625/part/first-page-pdf.
89. In 1854, the poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) republished some of his earlier newspaper articles under the title Lutezia, the Latin name for Paris.
90. Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932), one of the founders of physical chemistry, wrote on many subjects, including philosophy. Soon after the beginning of the First World War he was one of ninety-three prominent German scientists and cultural figures who signed a chauvinistic “Appeal to the Civilized World.”
91. Also known as gas vans or gas wagons, these had an air-tight compartment into which exhaust fumes were piped while the vehicle’s engine was running. Those held inside died of carbon monoxide poisoning. This method of execution was thought up and first put into practice by the NKVD in the late 1930s. It was then used in Nazi Germany, before being superseded by the far larger gas chambers of the death camps.
92. Bruno was a Dominican poet, mathematician and philosopher. Found guilty of heresy, he was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600. For Chernyshevsky, see Part I, note 20.
93. From “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’” (1843–44), published in The German–French Annals (1844).
94. August Bebel (1840–1913) was one of the founders, in 1869, of the Social Democratic Workers Party of Germany. Lenin referred to him as “a model workers’ leader.”
95. Grossman expresses similar thoughts in a passage in his Red Star article “Through Chekhov’s Eyes”: “Every brave man is brave in his own way. The mighty tree of courage has thousands of branches [. . .] but selfish cowardice takes only one form: slavish submission to the instinct to save one’s own life. The man who runs from the battlefield today will run tomorrow from a burning house, leaving his old mother, his wife and his little children to the flames.” (Grossman, Gody voiny, p. 43.)
96. “Mankind—the word has a proud ring”; in Soviet days these words of Maxim Gorky’s were very well known indeed.
97. Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), a German philosopher of history, published his influential The Decline of the West in 1918.
98. After the war began, this new industrial centre in the Urals grew increasingly important. It was nicknamed Tankograd.
99. Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41), the celebrated Russian Romantic poet. See The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, pp. 116–17.
100. The middle-aged general in glasses is General Andrey Vlasov. At the time of the Battle of Kiev, Vlasov was an up-and-coming lieutenant general in command of the 37th Army; along with part of this army, he managed to escape encirclement. In July 1942, however, he was captured by the Germans. He agreed to collaborate and, in autumn 1944, founded the anti-Communist ROA (the Russian Liberation Army). After the war, he was found guilty of treason and was executed in August 1946. As a traitor, Vlasov was held in contempt. It was bold of Grossman even to mention his name; the three paragraphs from “First, though, Krymov. . .” were not included in any of the published editions.
101. In a notebook entry, Grossman puts this more strongly, writing that “Men from Chernigov were deserting in thousands.” This entry was omitted from the 1989 publication of the wartime notebooks. Oleg Budnitsky, who is preparing a more complete edition of the notebooks, quoted it in a talk at Pushkin House, London, in April 2018.
102. The main street of central Kiev.
103. Babi Yar (“Woman’s Ravine”) is the name of the ravine on the outskirts of Kiev where 100,000 people, mostly Jews, were shot in the course of six months, over 33,000 of them during the first two days of the massacre, 29 and 30 September 1941. The route the old woman advises Krymov to take is, in reverse, the route along which the Jews were taken to Babi Yar from central Kiev.
104. Yelena Lvovna Shtrum, the daughter of the physicist Lev Shtrum, has spoken about how she herself escaped from Kiev at this time. All entrances to the main railway station had been closed, but there was a vast crowd of women and children in the square outside. Among them were Yelena (aged eighteen) and her two aunts (aged about thirty). Unlike many of the others, who were weighed down with luggage, they were carrying only a very few bags. One of the fences collapsed and Yelena and her aunts and other women at the front of the crowd occupied an empty goods train. Officials realized it would have been impossible to remove the women; they simply did not have the manpower. In Yelena’s words, “it would have taken two men to remove each woman.” The doors were then bolted, with about twenty women being shut up in each wagon. For twenty-four hours nothing much happened. The women defecated and urinated through a hole they had made by removing a plank from the floor. Eventually, the train crossed the Dnieper. After that, it travelled slowly east, taking two weeks to reach the Volga. Bread or swill was brought to the women at some of the stations. It was also sometimes possible to buy food being sold privately (private conversation, Cologne, 30 August 2018).
105. Grossman provides these words only in Ukrainian; he does not translate them.
106. Mikhail Kirponos, commander of the Southwestern Front, was killed during the defence of Kiev.
107. Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis and acted as local police.
108. The historian Michael Jones quotes at length from a diary kept by Ivan Shabalin, the courageous and clear-minded head of the political section of the 50th Army. Shabalin was killed in October 1941, while trying to break out of encirclement. Jones summarizes one passage as follows: “Shabalin, an ambitious NKVD officer responsible for army education, realized that he no longer needed to give political lectures or issue instructions to the men around him. The comradeship binding his group of fighters together was enough in itself. And as Shabalin realized that, he felt a remarkable sense of peace.” (Jones, The Retreat, p. 67.) Shabalin’s diaries were first published only in 1974, ten years after Grossman’s death; this makes the similarity between them and Grossman’s account of Krymov all the more striking.
109. The Black Earth region is a belt of exceptionally rich, fertile soil in Ukraine and southern Russia.
110. Grossman met Shlyapin in September 1941, when he was sent as a Red Star journalist to the Bryansk Front. Grossman’s first war novel, The People Is Immortal (1942), is based on Shlyapin’s account of his escape from encirclement.
111. Shlyapin quotes from Pushkin’s verse fairy tale Ruslan and Ludmila.
112. Alexander Suvorov (1729/30–1800) is considered the greatest of all Russian generals. The Order of Suvorov, one of the highest of Soviet military decorations, was established on 29 July 1942; its first recipient was Georgy Zhukov.
113. A lieutenant general wears three stars, a colonel general wears four.
114. Heinz Guderian (1888–1954) was one of the most successful German tank commanders both in France in 1940 and on the Eastern front in 1941.
115. See Grossman, A Writer at War, p. 47.
116. In July 1941 Yakov Kreizer (1905–69) became the first Red Army general to outfight the Wehrmacht in a large-scale engagement, stalling Guderian’s superior forces and thus holding up German Army Group Centre in its drive towards Moscow.
117. Lines from what is usually seen as a children’s poem, by Alexey Nikolaevich Pleshcheyev (1825–93), a political radical.
118. The old woman quotes from the beginning of Psalm 68: “Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered: let them also that hate him flee before him. As smoke is driven away, so drive them away: as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.”
119. Vasil Kolarov (1877–1950), a Bulgarian, was a key functionary in the Communist International. Maurice Thorez (1900–64) led the French Communist Party from 1930 until his death. Ernst Thälmann (1886– 1944) led the German Communist Party throughout most of the duration of the Weimar Republic. Sen Katayama (1859–1933) co-founded the Japanese Communist Party.
120. The Hotel Lux housed many leading exiled Communists—from Germany and elsewhere. The hotel’s international character aroused Stalin’s suspicions. Between 1936 and 1938 a great many of its occupants were arrested.
121. Titled “14 December 1825,” this poem by Tyutchev is about a failed revolt against the autocracy. The translation, by Robert Chandler, is from The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, p. 104.
122. From Lenin’s “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism” (1913): https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm
123. The estate, seven miles from Tula, where Tolstoy was born and where he wrote both War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Since 1921, it has been a museum.
124. Krymov is, of course, remembering War and Peace. The “old, sick prince” is Prince Bolkonsky, father of Prince Andrey and Princess Maria. His estate—Bald Hills—is modelled on Yasnaya Polyana.
125. Grossman has given Krymov many of his own experiences from these weeks. He himself made a similar journey in early October 1941, visiting Yasnaya Polyana and speaking to Tolstoy’s granddaughter. A few days later General Guderian took over the estate, making it his HQ for his planned assault on Moscow. (See Grossman, A Writer at War, p. 54.) In early September 1942, on his way from Moscow to Stalingrad, Grossman stopped a second time at Yasnaya Polyana, which the Russians had recaptured the previous winter.
126. This was one of the first engagements in which the Red Army deployed their new T-34 tank, generally recognized as the best all-round tank in the Second World War. Soon to be produced in vast numbers, this tank made a crucial contribution to the Soviet victory.
127. Two towns very close to Moscow.
128. The location of three major railway termini.
129. Probably: “Follow me . . . straight ahead . . . Fire . . . Direct hit.” But the German does not entirely make sense. This may be a mistake on Grossman’s part, or it may be his way of conveying that this is how the Russian listeners hear the words.
130. Russia moved from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar only in 1918. Thus the anniversary of the October 1917 Revolution has always been celebrated on 7 November.
131. Lobnoye Mesto is a thirteen-metre-long stone platform, often mistakenly thought to have been a place of execution. A nearby bronze statue commemorates Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, who, in 1611–12, gathered a volunteer army and expelled the forces of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. This put an end to the period known as the Time of Troubles.
132. Kirza is a type of artificial leather—multiple layers of textile impregnated with latex and other substances—that was widely used in the Soviet Union, mainly for army boots.
133. Until 1 August 1941, the bars on their collar tabs would have been red. They were changed to green in the interests of camouflage.
134. Semyon Budyonny (1883–1973) was a cavalry commander during the Russian Civil War and a close ally of Joseph Stalin. He was a popular figure but an opponent of mechanization. He declared that the tank could never replace the horse.
135. Some German officers thought much the same surprisingly early in the war. In July 1941, General Walther Nehring, commander of the 18th Panzer Division, wrote, “The further our armoured spearheads advance into the depths of this country, the more our difficulties mount, while the forces of the enemy seem to gain in strength and cohesion” (Jones, The Retreat, p. 19).
136. Sergey Chekhonin (1878–1936) was a graphic artist, ceramicist and book designer. After leaving Soviet Russia in 1928, he lived in France and Germany.
137. The novelist Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) was a member of the French Communist Party. His sycophantic biography of Stalin was published posthumously, in 1936.
138. Ernst Busch (1900–1980) was a German singer and actor who collaborated several times with Bertolt Brecht. After fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, he settled in the Soviet Union. “The Peat Bog Soldiers” (“Die Moorsoldaten”) was written, composed and first performed by political prisoners in 1933, in a Nazi concentration camp in the moors of Lower Saxony. The song became a Republican anthem during the Spanish Civil War and a symbol of resistance during the Second World War.
139. This was established in 1933. The zoo was struggling to look after a large number of orphaned baby animals—some born in captivity and rejected by their mothers, others brought to the zoo by hunters who had shot their mothers. It was thought that the keepers would be able to care more easily for these cubs if they were all kept together. Each species had its own cage, and there was also a large shared space, which included a pool. The “cubs’ pen” soon became one of the zoo’s most popular attractions. But in 1950 and in the early 1970s the shared space was twice reduced in size and the pen was finally closed in the late 1970s. Since then, the pen has been criticized as reflecting “a Stalinist concept of education” (http://radiomayak.ru/shows/episode/id/1122701).
140. From a poem by Heinrich Heine: “This is an old story, yet it remains always new.”
141. From Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin IV, 14, as translated by Stanley Mitchell (Penguin, 2008)—though slightly amended.
142. Clothes produced by this factory were of notoriously poor quality.
143. Viktor Kholzunov (1905–39), born in Stalingrad, commanded a bomber squadron during the Spanish Civil War. Grossman saw this statue in August 1942, during his first days in Stalingrad. It evidently made an impression both on him and on his companion Vasily Koroteyev. Both writers mention the statue several times in their writings (with thanks to Ian Garner for help with this note).
144. A chapter from Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1839–40).
145. Lvov is now a part of Ukraine and is known as L’viv. Schechter, in Stuff of Soldiers, chapter 7, refers to Lvov and Riga as “centres of fashion” during the two years between the signing of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact in August 1939 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
146. In an apartment block like Mostovskoy’s, there would have been one central radio receiver. This would have received broadcasts from All-Union Radio, based in Moscow. The individual apartments had only speakers, connected by wire to the central receiver. There was no choice of channels or stations.
147. Pyotr Chaadaev (1794–1856) is best known for his eight “Philosophical Letters” about Russia, only the first of which was published during his life. These are highly critical of nearly all aspects of Russian culture and society. The government’s response was to declare Chaadaev insane.
148. A pre-revolutionary measure of distance, a little more than a kilometre.
149. This last short paragraph, like many of the novel’s more humorous moments, first appeared in the 1956 edition.
150. A popular historical melodrama, made in England in 1941. Its central theme, the adulterous liaison between Admiral Nelson and Emma Hamilton, links it to the affair between Viktor and Nina.
152. Four poods is about sixty-five kilograms.
153. It was in Dno railway station that Tsar Nicholas II signed his abdication decree on 15 March 1917.
154. Stalin’s still-controversial order, with its slogan “Not One Step Back,” forbade any further retreat, under any circumstances, and decreed the death penalty for “laggards, cowards, defeatists and other miscreants.” See note to this chapter in the Afterword.
156. Administrative officials—some of them German, others Ukrainian collaborators.
157. It is startling to read of vodka being measured by such a large measure as a kilo, but it was entirely normal to measure spirits by weight rather than by volume. See Part I, note 31.
158. The earlier name for Stalingrad. The city was renamed in 1925 in recognition of Stalin’s role, probably somewhat exaggerated during the Stalin era, in defending the city during the Russian Civil War. In 1961, the city was renamed Volgograd.
PART TWO
1. A popular musical comedy released in 1940.
2. Alexander Blok (1880–1921) and Innokenty Annensky (1855–1909) were the two most important Russian Symbolists. Annensky’s poetry is subtle and delicate. Blok’s is less subtle, but deeply mystical. Both are a far cry from socialist realism.
3. Nikolay Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered is a classic of socialist realism. Alexander Sheller-Mikhailov was a progressive novelist of the 1860s, lauded during the early Soviet era because of an essay in which he quoted large chunks of Marx’s Das Kapital, effectively introducing the book to Russian readers. Andreyev dutifully reads a certain amount of the correct literature of the era—e.g. Stalin and Ostrovsky—but what he really loves is more imaginative and entertaining literature.
4. See Part I, note 94. The book is primarily an attack on the institution of marriage.
5. Founded by Volga Germans in 1765, Sarepta was renamed Krasnoarmeisk in 1920. In 1931 it became a district of Stalingrad.
6. There were three categories of disability pension. Those with the most serious disabilities were registered as category one.
7. A town not far from Stalingrad.
8. Saratov and Samara (called Kuibyshev from 1935 to 1991) are two of the oldest and most important cities on the Volga.
9. These three factories, located parallel to the Volga and connected by underground tunnels with secure telephone lines, played a crucial role throughout the Battle of Stalingrad. Even when largely destroyed and unable to function as factories, they proved to be ideal ground for fighting a defensive battle. Each factory was about a kilometre long and from 500 to 1,000 metres wide.
10. The Red Putilovite factory was the largest factory in Leningrad, producing mainly artillery and tanks. Though most of the equipment and personnel were evacuated to Chelyabinsk, the Leningrad site continued to repair tanks throughout the Blockade. The Obukhov factory also produced artillery and tanks.
11. Triangles were worn by corporals and sergeants.
12. The Society for the Promotion of Defence, Aviation and Chemistry. The declared aim of this “voluntary” civil-defence organization, founded in 1927, was to promote patriotism, marksmanship and aviation skills. Stalin described it as vital to “keeping the entire population in a state of mobilized readiness against the danger of military attack, so that no ‘accident’ and no tricks of our external enemies can catch us unawares.” The society sponsored clubs and organized contests throughout the Soviet Union; within a few years it had around 12 million members.
13. Ethnic Germans who lived along the Volga, mainly in what is now the Saratov region to the north of Volgograd/Stalingrad. Encouraged by Catherine the Great (a German herself), they settled there in the eighteenth century. A Volga German Autonomous Republic was established in 1924, but this was abolished after the Nazi invasion. Seeing the Volga Germans as potential collaborators, the Soviet authorities deported approximately 500,000 of them to Siberia and Kazakhstan, where many died.
14. Alexey Stakhanov was a miner whose improbably vast output of coal—twelve tons a day—led to his being held up as a model for Soviet workers. The word “Stakhanovite” was part of the official vocabulary of the era; there were, for example, regular congresses of “Stakhanovite” workers.
15. Kliment Voroshilov (1881–1969) was a prominent political and military figure, one of the first five generals to be given the title Marshal of the Soviet Union.
17. The Don, the Volga and several other rivers flowing south into the Black and the Caspian Seas have high, steep west banks and low, flat east banks.
18. Spiridonov exaggerates, but not absurdly. By June 1940 the Stalingrad Tractor Factory had produced over 230,000 tractors—more than half the tractors in the Soviet Union.
19. Prince of Moscow from 1359 to 1389, Dmitry Donskoy was the first Muscovite ruler to openly challenge Moscow’s Mongol overlords.
20. A cardiac medicine, used more in Russia and Germany than in the English-speaking world.
21. The 10th NKVD Rifle Division, under Colonel A. A. Sarayev.
22. Gradusov alludes to “Thoughts by the Grand Entrance,” a poem by Nikolay Nekrasov (see Part I, note 17). A group of exhausted pilgrims and beggars, “burnt by the sun,” knocks at the door of a grand house, hoping for alms. They are turned away.
23. Vladimir Korolenko (1853–1921) was best known for his short novel The Blind Musician (1886), based on his experience of exile in Siberia.
24. Arkady Gaidar (1904–41) was a popular children’s writer, best known for Timur and His Squad, a story about an altruistic young Pioneer.
25. Penal battalions were formed from Gulag detainees and men sentenced by military tribunals. Most commanders looked on the lives of these men as entirely expendable, thinking nothing—for example—of sending them straight across minefields.
26. “What has the Führer said?”
27. “The Führer has said, Stalingrad must fall.”
28. Richthofen’s Air Corps played an important part in the Battle of Yugoslavia (April 1941) and in the subsequent Battles of Greece and Crete. Richthofen did not, in fact, take part in the North Africa campaigns.
29. Another of Grossman’s few mistakes with regard to German history: for much of the First World War Paulus and Rommel were company commanders in the same regiment.
30. Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) was an Indian nationalist. In 1943, when Singapore was under Japanese rule, he formed a government of “Free India” there. He died in a plane crash.
31. Goebbels was born with a deformed right foot, and he walked with a limp. A would-be writer as a young man, he obtained a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg in 1921.
32. David Low was a famous British cartoonist. The Kukryniksy was the collective name of three Soviet cartoonists who began to work together in 1924 and went on to win international recognition for their caricatures of fascist leaders.
33. The accuracy of Grossman’s portrayal of Himmler is confirmed by recent historians. Christopher Clark, for example, reviewing a biography of Himmler by Peter Longerich, writes: “Though he never became close to the dictator, he acquired a reputation as Hitler’s most dedicated and ruthless servant. Himmler fashioned the SS (originally a small offshoot of the much larger SA) into an instrument of the Führer’s will alone.” (“Theorist of Cosmic Ice,” London Review of Books, 11 October 2012, pp. 11–12.)
34. Christopher Clark writes, “Between 23 April and 2 May 1942, a series of meetings, some very protracted, took place between Himmler and his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, and between Himmler and Hitler [. . .] Longerich concludes from the timing and intensity of these summit discussions that they ratified the transition from local and regional mass killings to a Europe-wide extermination programme” (ibid., p. 12). Grossman may have misdated the meeting he describes, but in other respects he was accurate. Clark refers to Himmler having “forsaken Catholicism to embrace a raft of esoteric post-Christian fads.” Hitler, on the other hand, was dismissive of occultism. In a major speech in September 1938, he claimed, “National Socialism is a cool, reality-based doctrine, based upon the sharpest scientific knowledge and its mental expression . . . The National Socialist movement is not a cult movement . . . Its meaning is not that of a mystic cult.” (Quoted by Richard J. Evans in “Nuts about the Occult,” London Review of Books, 2 August 2018, p. 38.)
35. Hitler’s first speech as Reich Chancellor, on 10 February 1933.
36. Nitroglycerine was used to treat chest pain and high blood pressure. It dilates the blood vessels and helps more blood reach the heart.
37. Tobruk, in Cyrenaica (part of Libya), and the Egyptian town of Mersa Matrouh were important in the North Africa campaigns of 1941–42. There was an Axis airfield at Derna.
38. Franz Halder (1884–1972) was chief of staff of the Army High Command from 1938 until September 1942. After receiving intelligence reports that Stalin could muster as many as 1.5 million men north of Stalingrad, Halder told Hitler that Paulus’s 6th Army was in a potentially catastrophic position. In response, Hitler threatened to replace Halder. Halder resigned—to be replaced that same day, 24 September, by Kurt Zeitzler.
40. Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912, chose to remain in Germany after the Nazis came to power. Some of his plays were banned but others went on being performed. His eightieth birthday in 1942 was celebrated on a grand scale. Bernhard Kellermann (1879–1951) was a novelist and poet; he welcomed the Russian Revolution in 1917 but remained in Germany throughout the Nazi era, publishing little.
41. Albert Einstein (1879–1955) emigrated to the United States in 1933. Max Planck (1858–1947), in fact, remained in Germany throughout the Nazi era.
42. “You are nothing, your people is everything.”
43. The Nazi Party’s official newspaper, published daily from February 1923.
44. Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, was the illegitimate son of Maria Schicklgruber, an Austrian peasant woman. When Alois was five years old, Maria married Johann Hiedler—or Hitler—and Alois assumed this surname.
45. The industrialist Emil Kirdorf (1847–1938) helped promote Hitler’s rise to power, though not, in fact, until 1927.
47. “Fats” (zhiry), one of the food categories on ration cards, could mean anything from good quality pork fatback to all kinds of surrogates and “combined fats” (kombizhiry).
48. There are many accounts of the terrifying whistle made by high-explosive bombs as they fell. The small incendiary units, however, were still more devastating in their effects. A He-111 bomber could carry up to thirty-two containers, each holding thirty-six units. The container was designed to fall apart soon after being dropped from the plane, thus releasing the individual units.
49. Grossman arrived in Stalingrad soon after the air raid. A notebook entry reads, “Dead. People in cellars. Everything burned down. Hot walls of buildings, like the bodies of people who have died in the terrible heat and not yet cooled down . . . Still miraculously standing—amid thousands of vast stone buildings now burnt down or half destroyed—a small wooden soft-drinks kiosk. Like Pompeii, caught by destruction in the fullness of life.” (Gody voiny, p. 545.)
50. Decorating houses or churches with birch branches at Whitsun was a common practice in much of northern Europe.
51. During festivities following the coronation of Nicholas II, a mass panic on Khodynka Field in north-west Moscow led to the death of 1,389 people.
52. See Part I, note 143. Remarkably, Kholzunov survived the Battle of Stalingrad. At the end of January 1943, when the embankment was cleared of rubble, this statue was found to be still intact.
53. The Humiliated and Insulted is the title of one of Dostoevsky’s earlier novels, published in 1861.
55. An estimated 40,000 people died during the first day and night of air raids on Stalingrad (Merridale, Ivan’s War, p. 150).
56. Three important Soviet tank army commanders.
57. Vitya and Vitenka are both affectionate forms of Viktor. See Note on Russian Names.
58. The second-largest town on this archipelago to the north of Norway is the Russian coal-mining settlement of Barentsburg.
59. Labour battalions were usually formed from categories of people under suspicion, e.g. nationalities that had been deported. They were assigned to particularly hard physical labour.
60. “Hero of Socialist Labour” was one of the highest Soviet honours, of equal status to “Hero of the Soviet Union.”
63. Yemelyan Pugachov (c. 1742–75), a Cossack leader and pretender to the Russian throne, led a major popular rebellion during the reign of Catherine II.
64. Similar to an Italian bread stick, but in the shape of a ring.
PART THREE
1. Vy and Ty are equivalent to the French vous and tu.
3. Evidently noted by Darensky shortly before the Germans encircled half a million Soviet troops during the Battle of Kiev.
4. Three great Russian military heroes, from the thirteenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
5. A port on the Volga, in what is now the Mari El Republic. There was a labour camp nearby.
6. The paper used for Soviet newspapers was coarse and poor quality—far from ideal for roll-ups.
7. Around 5,000 American Bell Airacobra P-39s were delivered into Soviet service, half of them flying via Alaska and Siberia, half of them transported in crates via Iran.
8. Part of the 62nd Army had been encircled on the west bank of the Don.
10. The first lines of an untitled poem well known to Russians. According to Grossman’s daughter, Tyutchev was one of his favourite Russian poets, along with Pushkin, Lermontov and Nekrasov (Korotkova-Grossman, Vospominaniya, p. 214).
12. Between 1 and 6 August, Stalin made several changes both to the naming of the various Fronts and to the chain of command. For a summary of this confusing period, see Glantz and House, Stalingrad, p. 99.
13. The Volga at this point is about one-and-a-half-kilometres wide. One of Grossman’s notebook entries reads, “An awful crossing. Terror. The ferry was packed with vehicles, carts, hundreds of people all crowded together—and it hit a sandbank. A Junkers 108 dropped a bomb. A huge column of water, vertical, pale blue. Terror. Not a single machine gun or anti-aircraft gun at the crossing. The quiet, bright Volga—awful as a scaffold.” (Gody voiny, p. 345.)
14. This reintroduction of the most ideologically charged part of tsarist military uniform was a significant moment in Stalin’s abandonment of revolutionary internationalism and assertion, in its place, of traditional Russian patriotism. See Schechter, Stuff of Soldiers, chapter 2.
15. On 13 September Chuikov was on Mamaev Kurgan. On the 14th, he was in this tunnel by the River Tsaritsa. During the night of the 16th he moved to the cliff behind the Red October steelworks. My thanks to Michael Jones for clarifying these details (private email).
16. In September 1943 Kuzma Gurov died from a heart attack.
17. The move from the formal Vy to the informal Ty is a serious matter and was often marked by a threefold kiss, either on the cheeks or on the lips. It was not, in the mid-twentieth century, unusual for two Russian men to kiss on the lips.
18. Red Army soldiers and commanders were expected to sew a narrow strip of white cloth to the inside of their jacket collar, leaving just two to three millimetres showing above it. This both created the illusion of a shirt and helped preserve the collar.
19. The Kliment Voroshilov heavy tank, named after the Soviet minister of defence, was generally referred to by its initials.
20. According to Michael K. Jones, Grossman’s account of the 13th Guards Division crossing the Volga is slightly inaccurate. Jones writes, “The crossing began on the early evening of 14 September, and the majority crossed during the night of the 14th, which was when the railway station was regained” (private email).
23. In winter people often slept on top of the stove. See Part I, note 6.
24. Lines from a song best known in a recording by the popular Lydia Ruslanova (1900–73). Ruslanova was arrested on trumped-up charges in 1948, and from January 1949 until her official “rehabilitation” in July 1953 her recordings were banned. It may be for this reason that Grossman leaves her nameless and sounding “sad and surprised.”
25. “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
26. “Fire! Fire! Good! Very good!”
27. “The Führer has said, ‘Stalingrad must fall.’”
28. Grossman—though not Bach!—alludes to a famous sentence from Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, “God spare us from Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.” Both syntactically and rhythmically, the echo is precise. Bach may be coming to realize, if only half-consciously, that the Germans are about to encounter unshakable, merciless resistance.
29. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil was first published in 1886. Like Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, it was well known in Russia and the Soviet Union. The Nazis made selective use of the philosophy of both Nietzsche and Spengler, and also of the work of the philosopher Johann Fichte (1762–1814).
30. “Dear Ivan, come to me!”
31. A Spanish company, founded in 1904, that produced luxury cars.
32. Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919), a co-founder of the German Communist Party, is best known for his opposition to the First World War and his role in the Spartacist uprising of 1919. The idea of him being an agent of the Jewish Sanhedrin was, of course, Nazi propaganda.
33. Furs.
34. Stumpfe’s brother evidently took part in the massacre at Babi Yar, outside Kiev. See Part I, note 103. There were two cemeteries nearby: a Russian Orthodox cemetery and a Jewish cemetery. The latter was closed in 1937.
35. A reference to the Bible, to the Book of Esther. Haman, vizier to the Persian king Ahasuerus, was plotting to destroy the Jewish people. Queen Esther, herself a Jew, manages to foil this plot. The festival of Purim commemorates her success.
37. The “factory” in question is Treblinka. In “The Hell of Treblinka” (an article first published in 1944), Grossman writes, “We know about a huge young man named Stumpfe who broke out into uncontrollable laughter every time he murdered a prisoner or when one was executed in his presence. He was known as ‘Laughing Death.’”
38. “Hey you, Puss, Puss!”
39. A Blockleiter (block leader) was a junior Nazi official responsible for the political supervision of a neighbourhood. Blockleiters were supposed to act as a link between the Nazi authorities and the people as a whole.
40. Filyashkin is being ironic and facetious; as a professional soldier, he has suffered from the interference of commissars. At the same time, he clearly feels the need for some kind of ritual to mark the imminent end of his and his comrades’ lives. Unconsciously, he turns to the only ritual with which he has any familiarity—that of the Orthodox church. Shvedkov, naturally, is irritated by Filyashkin’s facetiousness. He may also sense Filyashkin’s deeper feelings—which would be still more irritating for him.
42. A standard formula, pronounced in acknowledgement of the receipt of any official award.
43. This report is based on a report by a real figure, Company Commander Kolaganov. Grossman carried this report about in his map case throughout the war. He reproduced it first in his article “Tsaritsyn—Stalingrad” and then in Stalingrad. For a discussion of the battle for the railway station, see Jones, Stalingrad, pp. 121–7. Grossman’s account telescopes three separate events into one: the defence of the railway station, which in reality lasted only twenty-four hours, and the subsequent defence first of the Univermag department store and then of the nail factory, which is where Kolaganov wrote his report. It seems likely that Grossman knew the true sequence of events and chose to employ dramatic licence.
46. From Book VIII of the Odyssey.
47. The 210 was the heaviest German artillery piece—the 210 mm Morser 18 howitzer. The 103 was a medium artillery piece, firing 103 mm shells.