Posted on 02/04/2003 7:30:09 AM PST by Loyalist
Russians refighting the battle for Stalingrad
We know what city we were defending and it wasn't Volgograd, survivors say
By MARK MACKINNON
MOSCOW -- Valentin Spiridonov was 21 years old when he arrived as an infantryman on the front lines of the 20th century's bloodiest battle.
The battle for Stalingrad was a fight like none he or anyone else had ever seen. More than two million Soviet and German soldiers died in house-to-house warfare that engulfed every building and lasted 200 days and nights. Many froze to death as temperatures hit -40 as the battle stretched through the winter of 1942-43.
In the end, spurred by fear and their leader's decree of "not one step back," the Russians held the city, forcing the mass surrender of an entire army of Hitler's best troops and forever turning the tide of the Second World War back against Nazi Germany.
Many Russians refer to the Second World War as the Great Patriotic War, and it had an incalculable cost for Russia, which lost more than 1.3 million soldiers, many of them shot in the back by their own commanders to emphasize there would be no retreat.
Sixty years after the German surrender at Stalingrad, Mr. Spiridonov doesn't know how many of his friends are buried in the soil around the city. But he does know what they fought for, and he wants that memory restored.
In 1961, citing crimes against humanity committed by his predecessor Joseph Stalin, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev renamed the city Volgograd after the river that splits the city in two. To Mr. Spiridonov and other veterans, that was an insult to what so many fought and died for.
"It was a big mistake of Khrushchev's to rename it," he said on the weekend as the city made preparations to remember the anniversary of the frozen day Field Marshall Friedrich Paulus surrendered his trapped army to General Georgy Zhukov.
"It was real hell there. We were fighting for each house, for each street, and it was for Stalin we did it, and it was he who helped us keep fighting on," Mr. Spiridonov said. "We never forgot what city we were defending. We were all ready to die there to stop the enemy."
It's a sentiment shared by many who fought in the battle, and a large number of the city's residents as well. Late last year, the city's regional assembly sent a formal request to the both the federal Duma (parliament) and President Vladimir Putin, asking that the Stalin be put back in Stalingrad.
"It's not renaming, its about restoring historical fact," said Fedor Slipchenko, another veteran who now teaches history in Volgograd. "Waterloo, Borodino, Pearl Harbour -- nobody could ever think of renaming those historical places. Can you imagine Pearl Harbour renamed?"
To date, the Kremlin has been handling the request with kid gloves, not wanting to give Volgograd residents an outright No, but very conscious of how it would look to the rest of the world if the country took a step that some would see as a partial rehabilitation of one of history's worst mass murderers.
"The very fact that we are marking the anniversary of one of the most crucial battles of the Great Patriotic War does not mean we are giving the green light to renaming the city," Sergei Yastrzhembsky, a top aide to Mr. Putin, said recently.
For many veterans -- as for many others around Russia -- Stalin's role as a wartime leader who later made the Soviet Union into a feared superpower eclipses the later revelations that surfaced about the millions who died in mass executions and organized famines he ordered.
"We were raised under Stalin, studied under Stalin, lived with Stalin, fought for his name and for the Motherland," said Anatoli Kozlov, another Stalingrad veteran who now leads the campaign to have the city's old name brought back.
"We didn't know any bad things about him. So for us veterans he stayed the great man, the leader of the nation."
Now that's what I call a WAR
A pity those times have passed. The world no longer has men such as these.
10-12 million at least.
Hey, why quibble. So the guy had a few character flaws. </Sarcasm off>
Wow, denial is a powerful thing.
Stalin was a military idiot. His style of military leadership resulted in the deaths of 16 MILLION Russians. His "help" consisted of threatening death to anyone who retreated. When retreat is impossible, death and surrender are the only alernatives. As a result, many thousands of Russians surrendered/defected to Germany and aided the German war effort. This no doubt caused the deaths of tens of thousands if not more people.
Zhukov saved his a** and he was almost arrested during the purges. Stalin's main strategy error was how the red army was deployed along the border. There were only about 3 roads suitable for tanks along the whole thing but the antitank forces were spread. The Germans surrounded the whole border force. After that Hitler altered the original Barbarossa plan and detached units from Army Group center to encircle Leningrad and Kharkov. If Hitler stuck to the original plan and put nearly everything into taking Moscow( which all the main railroads essential to Russia's logistics) ran through then he would have knocked out Russia early. Hitler also erred by being stupid and evil the administration of the Eastern territories and the political SS pissed off an initially welcoming population which would have been eager to join with the Germans to wage war against the communist.
Talk about a dilemna. Would you fight for Hitler, Stalin, or against both?
The same Stalin who so decimated the Red Army officer corps in the purges that the Finnish Army came within an inch of defeating a horribly-led Red Army in 1940?
The same Stalin who cowered in his office like a scared schoolgirl when the Germans were practically at the gates of Moscow?
Many Russians wanted to defect to Germany but the SS ussually shot them or at best put them into a regimen of forced labor in a concentration camp( and Stalin shot nearly everyone who was captured or taken as a laborer after the war, one thing you don't hear about is every member of the Russian population behind the lines except partisans were put on trial, most weren't shot but...). Hitler ordered that no Russian volunteers be accepted.
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