Battle Of Stalingrad Research Articles

Snow Germans by Dmitry Vachedin

reviews Turkey and its people alongside her. A Turkish reader will understand this familiar story of rebellion against family and traditions. Special attention is paid to the deeply symbolic veil that is a prominent motif in the novel. Because the details about Turkey are told through the perspective of an outsider, the feeling of being veiled and protected from real life is potent in the story. Both men and women, whether they look towards home in the East or the West, will be able to discern the power of the veil to cover and to protect. However, Silk Armor does not seek to question the validity of tradition or to compare differing cultures. Sydenham’s power of crafting characters that walk the pages as individuals with their own thickly layered struggles—calling to mind the Turkish proverb, “One who is drenched does not fear the rain”—is compelling enough to make readers turn inside to the truths within themselves. Marilyse Figueroa University of Oklahoma Dmitry Vachedin. Snow Germans. Arch Tait, tr. Moscow. GLAS. 2013 isbn 9785717200974 Russian literature’s geography, traditionally focused on the capitals and the surrounding countryside, has expanded dramatically in recent years. Many of today’s most interesting Russian-language voices hail from far-flung regions like Dagestan (Alisa Ganieva) or Kaliningrad (Yuri Buida). This debut novel from Dmitry Vachedin , an émigré writer living in Germany , adds another name to this list. Snow Germans is built on three beautifully differentiated narrative voices, conveying diverse and moving transnational experiences between Russia and Germany. The characternarrators are all what Vachedin calls “snow Germans”—ethnic Germans with complex family histories in Russia , who are now residing, once again, in Germany. Nevertheless, they have not completely left behind their Russian experience, both nostalgic and haunting, including persecution during World War II, the battle of Stalingrad, and forced migration to Kazakhstan. The novel’s plot brings these characters into one anothers’ orbits, but Vachedin resists the temptation to herd them into one room for a grand culmination. Instead, the narrators remain loosely connected nodes in a greater phenomenon that this novel only starts to explore. Valeria, who moved to Germany as a child, begins to feel disenchanted with her adopted homeland. When she meets a young German girl in need of advice on dating a Russian man, Valeria is all too eager to dispense nostalgia in the form of counsel . As she advises the German girl, her reminiscences draw her back to St. Petersburg, where she hopes to recover something Germany lacks. Meanwhile, Mark, whose family has been in Germany for generations, pines over a girlfriend he lost to a Russian rival. His teenage melancholia, which Vachedin renders in pitch-perfect histrionics, leads him to join a press junket to Russia. There, his immediate reactions provide some of the book’s best lines, and eventually move him to view himself and Russia differently. The third narrator is the Russian man who stole Mark’s girlfriend. A veteran of the Chechen war, Andrey returns to Russia after his army buddy has died. St. Petersburg alienates him from German life (and from his German girlfriend) and yet does not invite him to stay. The diversity of Vachedin’s narrators —in age, gender, and nationality —presents him with no small challenge, but his economical, mature prose is up to the task. He manages to show his characters’ level of comfort or alienation in each culture with a single word or pithy phrase. When Valeria first arrives in Germany, for instance, she finds her family’s new apartment “derisively spotless,” or when Mark arrives at his hotel in Russia, he can “hardly believe human beings had built this for other human beings.” Each narrator’s voice is arresting and completely independent. Toward the conclusion, the novel’s voices diverge, pulling the book, refreshingly, toward entropy rather than dénouement . Unfortunately, Vachedin ends with a somewhat overwrought meditation on the history of Russian-German relations, which does not seem to flow organically from any of the characters ’ voices or experiences. Despite this slightlystiltedending,Vachedin’sprose style and his ability to understand and convey diverse experiences make Snow Germans a pleasure to read and Dmitry Vachedin an author...

The Battle of Stalingrad in the focus of western historiography

This article is about: The Battle of Stalingrad is drastic turning point in World War II. The Battle of Stalingrad is discussed by western historians in markedly different ways. Methods and techniques of perversion the historical significance of the Battle of Stalingrad. Different ways to expose misrepresentation of crucial events and results of the Battle of Stalingrad.

The Battle of Stalingrad and the Second Front Problem

Using less-known documents from American and British archives the article examines the impact of developments on Soviet-German front in late 1942 on military-political planning in U.S. and U.K. with a special emphasis on the second front problem. It is demonstrated how deeply the German defeat at Stalingrad affected Anglo-American military and intelligence estimates of situation at Soviet- German front and prospects of the war in general.

The Battle of Stalingrad in the Context of Modern History

Proceeding 200 days and nights the Battle of Stalingrad became a turning point in the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people and in all World War II, it turned back, in the western direction movement of the Soviet-German front when Hitler was compelled to recognize that for Germans "possibility of the end of war in the east by means of approach more doesn't exist". After Stalingrad it became clear to the whole world that war against the USSR for a coalition of fascist aggressors is lost. Defeat near Stalingrad allied Germany of armies cracked the fascist block, having forced Italy, Romania, Hungary and Finland actively to look for contacts with the countries of an anti-Hitleriwste coalition for the purpose of a withdrawal from a war. The developed events put an end to calculations on the introduction in war against the USSR to Turkey and Japan, were decisive incentive of growth of a resistance movement in Europe and Asia. The western allies of the USSR intensified preparation for opening of the second anti-Hitlerite front in Europe. U.S. President F.Ruzvelt called battle near Stalingrad epic. Later it sent the diploma of the following contents: "On behalf of the people of the United States of America I hand over this diploma to the city of Stalingrad to note our admiration of his valorous defenders … Their nice victory stopped a wave of invasion and became a turning point of war of the allied nations against aggression forces".

Историческая память о Сталинградской битве как фактор формирования межнациональной толерантности

Историческая память о Сталинградской битве как фактор формирования межнациональной толерантности

Изучение истории Сталинградской битвы и восстановления Сталинграда в Волгоградском государственном университете

Изучение истории Сталинградской битвы и восстановления Сталинграда в Волгоградском государственном университете

The Battle of Stalingrad, Biological Weapons, and the Expert Witness: Challenging Single-Source Evidence in Intelligence Studies

In studying the sources for British foreign policy in the twentieth century we need constantly to remember that we are dealing with a laundered archive. —Christopher Andrew, 1987 1 The problems ass...

Stalingrad Statues and Stories: War Remembrance in Andreï Makine’s The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme

This article examines representations of war remembrance in the francophone Russian writer Andreï Makine’s novel La terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme [The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme, 2003]. The novel portrays events and experiences of World War II from three temporal perspectives: that of the eponymous French pilot, who flies transports for the Soviets in the Alaska-Siberia air bridge during the war; that of the narrator as a child, who witnesses the construction of Stalingrad monuments and the emergence of the Soviet war cult in the mid-1960s; and that of the adult narrator, who searches for Dorme’s remains in post-Soviet Russia and seeks to commemorate the nowforgotten pilot by writing about his life. Makine portrays official monuments and commemoration of the Battle of Stalingrad as attempts on the part of the Soviet state to manipulate the collective memory. By contrast, he depicts individual remembrance as a more authentic alternative to collective commemorative practices. This article interprets Makine’s depiction of war remembrance against the background of the Soviet war cult, showing how the novel privileges individual over collective memory. It argues that Makine represents individual oral and written narratives in particular as an alternative to official histories and public commemoration.

Introduction: Historical Memory and the Great Patriotic War

In March 2011,1 approached Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue canadienne des slavistes editor Heather J. Coleman with an idea for a special issue on Historical Memory and the Great Patriotic War, to which she responded positively and with enthusiasm. The goal was to produce a volume that would coincide in its appearance with the 70th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Stalingrad (2 February 1943), a conflict that has long been considered a critical turning point in the German-Soviet war, marking the end of the military expansion of Hitler's regime and the concomitant revival of Soviet forces. The year 1943 was also a critical time of nationalist formations in the western borderlands as anti-Soviet forces began to consider the likelihood of the return of the Red Army and Soviet rule. We decided to limit the issue to three of the former Soviet republics that we considered were deeply affected by the war and continuing to deal with it in a variety of ways, namely Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. In the event, no papers were submitted on the war and memory in Belarus, a topic that is coincidentally the subject of my own forthcoming monograph. Thus the papers in this special issue all pertain in their different ways to either Russia or Ukraine and, in fact, are divided equally between these two largest of the East Slavic nations.The reasons for limiting the selection of countries were as follows. In theory it would have been possible to expand the choice of topics to other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and especially to Poland and the Baltic States, which have had similar encounters with the experiences of the war years, as well as deep differences with Russia concerning the interpretation of some of the events of the war, both in memory and as manifested in archival sources. Fundamentally, the official perception of the end of the war is of a Soviet reoccupation rather than liberation, as evidenced by the name of the Riga Museum of Soviet Occupation. But my feeling was that the topics have been relatively well covered earlier. Scholars such as Jan Gross and Timothy Snyder, for example, have enhanced our knowledge of the war years in Poland in recent works, while broaching the most controversial issues, including that of the Jewish Holocaust.1 It was felt moreover that opening the issue to Poland would render it too large to manage within the context of a single volume and would have been more appropriate were there to be a series of volumes. One understands nevertheless that the omission may be somewhat grating, especially given the interrelated and closely linked memories of events among Ukrainians and Poles in particular, but also between Russia and Poland concerning issues such as Katyn, the Warsaw Uprising, and others.2Arguably, the Baltic States, occupied from 1940 by the USSR, and from the summer of 1941 by the Germans, might also have been added. But in that case my feeling was that other Soviet republics should then have been included as well. Many contributed to the war effort, even those that were never occupied. Some provided troops and supplies; others suffered deportation en masse for alleged collaboration with or support for the enemy (Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingushetians, and Meshketian Turks among them). Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, on the other hand, have seen a revival of debates about the war years and how they should be commemorated. The passage of time signifies that the veterans who remain will soon pass away, so that direct eyewitness accounts of the war will no longer be possible and commemorative events on various anniversaries will have to take place without the traditional veterans' parades. In this regard, the 65th anniversary of the end of the war in May 2010 may be the last major occasion on which the veterans themselves take part in official ceremonies marking the Victory (the word was always capitalized in Soviet accounts from the 1970s onward). Today these post-Soviet states are dealing with highly contentious issues of how to remember the war for a number of reasons. …

Неизвестные страницы участия соединений артиллерийских бронепоездов Красной армии в Сталинградской битве

Неизвестные страницы участия соединений артиллерийских бронепоездов Красной армии в Сталинградской битве

The Troubled Patriot: German Innerlichkeit in World War II

How German society responded to the Holocaust, military defeat, Allied bombing and the mass flights from the Eastern territories in 1945 needs to be seen in relation to the larger question of morale and attitudes towards the continuation of the war per se. Any attempt to assess German morale inevitably involves psychological and emotional analyses, and this article explores how these issues operated at the level of individual subjectivity. It focuses on the personal diary of August Topperwien, a German Protestant, who was not a Nazi and yet maintained a loyal patriotism to the end. In so doing, it probes the troubled conscience of someone whose conflicting senses of personal duty and political obligation found their vent in pages of silent self-reflection, and so reveal with an unusual clarity the underlying frames of moral reference, which so often remain implicit and unargued in the short-hand and commonsense of other diaries and family letters, let alone macro-level surveys of popular opinion. Many historians have followed the lead of Martin Broszat and accepted that, after the Battle of Stalingrad, German society was increasingly alienated not only by the demands of the Nazi regime but by the war itself, and retreated into privacy. Careful reading of a diary such as this one reveals that support for the Nazi regime and for the war were not the same thing, and questions how much interiority remained untouched by the emotional and moral claims of war.

La Batalla de Stalingrado: Una Perspectiva Basada en el Análisis de la Conducta

The purpose of the present paper is to suggest ways in which historians may use behavior analysis as a tool to design research agendas that may help them understand complex human behavior and atypical decision making processes. This paper presents a brief outline describing the general epistemological and pragmatic virtues of approaching human behavior from a behavior analytic perspective. This outline is followed by a general description of the elements that should be taken into consideration when developing a research agenda based on behavior analytic principles. Lastly a research agenda regarding a series of puzzling events leading to the encirclement of German Sixth Army during the so called “Battle of Stalingrad,” is used to exemplify the methodology proposed in this paper.

How Memory was Made: The Construction of the Memorial to the Heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad

How Memory was Made: The Construction of the Memorial to the Heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad

Prelude to German Operation Blau: Military Operations on Germany's Eastern Front, April–June 1942

Military historians have written volumes about German Operation Blau, Hitler's offensive toward Stalingrad and into the Caucasus region in the summer of 1942, and about the ensuing dramatic battle for Stalingrad. However, they have paid far less attention to the military operations which preceded the famous German offensive. In addition to setting the stage for Operation Blau and conditioning German successes during the summer, the operations provided context for the climactic struggle that ensued in the Stalingrad and Caucasus regions. Exploiting new books on these subjects, as well as recent archival releases, this article summarizes the nature of those preliminary military operations, and by doing so provides necessary context for the more famous battle.

10th Rifle Division of Internal Troops NKVD: Profile and Combat Performance at Stalingrad

During the battle of Stalingrad the 10th Rifle Division NKVD was responsible for a number of vital internal security and combat tasks on, and immediately behind, the front line. In this article the author assesses the division's combat performance at a critical moment in the Stalingrad battle. Another line of enquiry—one that came as a surprise to the author—was the degree to which the 10th Rifle Division NKVD, (and other NKVD Rifle divisions), was plagued by disciplinary problems, inadequate training, and even desertion.

Dulag-205: The German Army’s Death Camp for Soviet Prisoners at Stalingrad

Ration return documents in the archive of the German 6th Army reveal that approximately 30,000 Soviet soldiers were conscripted or volunteered to work for their German captors at Stalingrad. Their fate after the German capitulation remains unknown, though it seems likely that the bulk of them fell into the hands of the NKVD and SMERSH, undergoing a lengthy process of filtration and interrogation. The precise details of what befell these Hilfswillige or Hiwis remain one of the major unresolved questions concerning the battle of Stalingrad. Those Soviet prisoners who were deemed by German intelligence to be unreliable or simply too loyal to the Soviet regime were incarcerated in Dulag-205. After the capitulation of 6th Army the officers responsible for the running of Dulag-205 were captured and interrogated so revealing a regime of starvation, beatings, and forced labor inflicted on Soviet troops. In this article, which is based on access to the original interrogation files of the German officers, the author traces the history of this forgotten death camp inside the Kessel. The existence of Dulag-205 was one of the more gruesome discoveries made by the Red Army after the capitulation of 6th Army. The officers responsible for the running of Dulag-205 were captured and interrogated so revealing a regime of starvation, beatings, and forced labor inflicted on Soviet prisoners. In this article, which is based on access to the original interrogation files of the German officers, the author traces the history of this forgotten death camp inside the Stalingrad Kessel.

Distance and Historical Representation

The questions I want to raise here first presented themselves to me in a pointed way during an undergraduate class on historiography. I had recently published a social and intellectual biography of a little-known mid fifteenth-century Florentine merchant and memorialist named Marco Parenti, whose anonymous history of a failed revolt against the Medici I had discovered in the Florentine archives.1 The collapse of the anti Medicean faction must have made it expedient to hide the narrative, and over time both the unfinished history and the would-be historian had faded into nearly total obscurity a condition that seemed to make Parenti an ideal subject for microhistory, that favourite form of late twentieth-century historical writing. My students had perhaps not taken away from the book as much as I would have wanted about the forms and traditions of Renais sance historical writing. Still, they appeared to have enjoyed the more concrete elements of this narrative of ideas, especially the mix of political intrigue, intimate social detail, and strong personality preserved in the family correspondence that was my chief biographical resource. But along side these narrative pleasures, there was also some nervousness about how much to trust this Rosencrantz and Guildenstern vision of a period they were accustomed to thinking of in grander terms. One student in particu lar stays in my memory because he was prepared to put his doubts quite bluntly, as well as to extend them to other, more notable representatives of the genre the lousy Cathar peasants, massacred cats, deluded millers, and returned 'husbands' he had encountered in more than one of his under graduate history courses. My protestations that these microhistorians had found a new way to represent ordinary lives and everyday experience were simply waved away: 'Aren't you really saying that your generation came too late to get the really important stuff the lives of people like Cosimo de' Medici or Lorenzo the Magnificent so really there was not much left over for you to write about except this bunch of odd balls and small potatoes?' Since my first defence had met only limited success, I improvised a new direction that in retrospect has come to seem more fruitful because more historical. I asked them to consider a choice between two quite different accounts of the battle of Stalingrad. The first book presents this crucial battle in a form that is traditional to military histories: that is, it provides a tactical narrative of the conflict and analyzes the success of the Soviet command in outmanoeuvring the German army, so that the invaders found themselves encircled and cut off from all supplies, surrender finally being their only option. Alternately they might want to read a rather different sort of narrative, one that, deliberately ignoring the larger strategic

Victory at Stalingrad (review)

Geoffrey Roberts's account of the battle of Stalingrad may not be a definitive, [End Page 280] groundbreaking account of the oft-described battle; but it does fill an academic niche that will be of value to courses on World War Two. To put it bluntly, there is nothing here that we have not already seen before—but to see it presented so clearly and with such a large array of historiographic arguments, makes this book a worthwhile addition to many undergraduate courses.

Memories of war, part 2: On the railroads, the battle on the outskirts of Vishnyovy hamlet, ‘mysterious are the ways of the Lord’, fear, and about blocking detachments

I was assigned to the 300th Rifle Division's 1049th Rifle Regiment [in the Stavka reserve's 4th Reserve Army in September and early October 1942] in August 1942 just before the height of the Battle for Stalingrad. The division was reforming after losing about 80 per cent of its personnel during the preceding bloody battles in the Ukraine on the road to Stalingrad [as part of the Southwestern Front]. The division began fighting once again at Stalingrad in October 1942 [subordinate to the Stalingrad Front]. At first, I served as a guncrew commander in a 76mm field gun battery, and in November 1942 I became a firing platoon commander in the same battery [in the Stalingrad Front's 51st Army]. I was awarded the rank of junior lieutenant in March 1943, and I became a guards lieutenant a year and a half later [in April 1943 the 300th Rifle Division became the 87th Guards Rifle Division]. I served as a battery commander from January 1945 until war's end. Although 1 was shell‐shocked once and twice wounded, I never left my regiment for treatment at a field hospital. My service with the regiment included combat at Stalingrad, in the Don Steppes, along the Mius River, in the Donbass, in the North Tavria, at Perekop, where we stormed the famous ‘Turkish Wall’, and at the liberation of Sevastopol’. Later our regiment fought in Lithuania and East Prussia, stormed Königsberg, and captured Pillau. I returned home on New Year's Eve in 1946 with four military orders and three medals. I fought in the same artillery battery throughout the entire war. Our field guns (and the men who manned them) were nicknamed ‘Farewell, Fatherland!’ We earned that name because of our position in combat, which was always well forward. According to regulations, the regimental 76mm guns were always deployed close to the front line trenches to provide the infantry with direct support ‘by fire and wheels [maneuver]’. I emigrated to the USA in 1994 at age 71.

How Government Bond Prices Reflect Wartime Events. The Case of the Stockholm Market

How are political events reflected in financial asset prices? Break points in sovereign debt prices are analyzed for Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Germany and Belgium during 1930-1948, using unique data from the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Unlike in countries involved in WWII, this market was unregulated. The outbreak of World War II heavily depressed prices of government bonds. Countries which were occupied (Belgium, Denmark and Norway) or under attack (Finland) saw their debt depreciate substantially. The battle of Stalingrad turns out indeed to be a turning-point of the war. This approach represents a complementary quantitative method to analyze the impact of political events.