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boards – symbols of privilege which some Bolshevik lynch mobs in 1917 had nailed to the bodies of their tsarist wearers – were reinstated. (Gold braid had been secretly ordered from Great Britain, to the astonishment and disapproval of officials there.) One soldier in a Guards division heard the news about shoulder boards from an old man polishing boots in a railway station: ‘They’re starting these gold shoulder boards once more,’ the man told him in angry disbelief. ‘Just like in the White Army.’ His fellow soldiers too were amazed when he told them the news on returning to the train: ‘Why in the Red Army?’ they asked. Such mutterings were ignored. The new decorations for the Great Patriotic War – the Orders of Suvorov and of Kutuzov – were also distributed to senior commanders in the campaign.

The greatest propaganda success, however, extended far beyond Soviet frontiers. The story of the Red Army’s sacrifice had a powerful effect across the world, especially within occupied Europe. Its effect on resistance movements everywhere and thus its influence on the politics of post-war Europe were considerable. The triumph of the Red Army boosted the status of the Party member and attracted fellow-travellers in droves. Even conservatives could not avoid praising the heroism of the Red Army. In Britain, King George VI commissioned a Sword of Stalingrad to be forged for presentation to the city. The morale of civilians and soldiers alike was boosted by newsreels lauding the victory, with flickering footage of Paulus and the long columns of prisoners of war, snaking across the snow-covered landscape. Everyone knew that the Russians were taking the brunt of the German onslaught, and that the Eastern Front was bleeding the Wehrmacht to death far more surely than any western theatre. The Red Army would push on, as the officer had shouted at the prisoners of war, until Berlin looked like the ruined city of Stalingrad.

24

The City of the Dead

The silence that fell on 2 February in the ruined city felt eerie for those who had become used to destruction as a natural state. Grossman described mounds of rubble and bomb craters so deep that the low-angled winter sunlight never seemed to reach the bottom, and ‘railway tracks, where tanker wagons lie belly up, like dead horses’.

Some 3,500 civilians were put to work as burial parties. They stacked frozen German corpses like piles of timber at the roadside, and although they had a few carts drawn by camels, most of the removal work was accomplished with improvised sleds and handcarts. The German dead were taken to bunkers, or the huge anti-tank ditch, dug the previous summer, and tipped in. Later, 1,200 German prisoners were put to work on the same task, using carts, with humans instead of horses pulling them. ‘Almost all members of these work parties’, reported a prisoner of war, ‘soon died of typhus.’ Others – ‘dozens each day’ according to an NKVD officer in Beketovka camp – were shot on the way to work by their escorts.

The grisly evidence of the fighting did not disappear swiftly. After the Volga thawed in spring, lumps of coagulated blackened skin were found on the river bank. General de Gaulle, when he stopped in Stalingrad on his way north to Moscow in December 1944, was struck to find that bodies were still being dug up, but this was to continue for several decades. Almost any building work in the city uncovered human remains from the battle.

More astonishing than the number of dead was the capacity for human survival. The Stalingrad Party Committee held meetings in all districts ‘liberated from fascist occupation’, and rapidly organized a census. They found that at least 9,796 civilians had lived through the fighting, surviving in the battlefield ruins. They included 994 children, of whom only nine were reunited with their parents. The vast majority were sent off to state orphanages or given work clearing the city. The report says nothing of their physical or mental state, witnessed by an American aid worker, who arrived very soon after the fighting to distribute clothes.