Eighty years and a mere 380 km separate the realities faced by Vladimir Putin this Thursday (2), when the Russian president will lead the anniversary event of the Soviet victory over the Nazis in Stalingrad as his troops seek a strategic advance in Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine .
No one knows the tone of Putin’s speech in present-day Volgograd, the city on the Volga River in the original Russian, but forced parallels between the near-suicidal heroism of the Josef Stalin regime in 1943 and the unprovoked aggression of its neighbor in 2022 will almost certainly be there. on the agenda.
The leader sanctified the calendar of events of the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is called in his Russian timeline, which begins in 1941 with the invasion of the Germans in the greatest offensive in history. Until then, Stalin and Adolf Hitler, the Nazi on the march since 1939, were suspicious allies.
And there is no date greater than February 2, 1943, when Marshal Friedrich Paulus disobeyed Hitler and surrendered to the Soviets. He and 91,000 other prisoners symbolized Nazi Germany’s biggest defeat yet – and the start of the communist steamroller that would only stop over the chancellery in Berlin, just over two years later.
It was the turning point of the war, yet Hollywood is understandably trying to sell that honor went to D-Day, led by the Western Allies on June 6, 1944. Not for the Russians. On the roads that lead to Volgograd, so called since the de-Stalinization in 1961, the old name appeared again on commemorative plaques, in addition to being officially valid on six military holidays.
There are already signs of the call to be made by Putin, who has a taste for quirky views of history. According to the Kommersant newspaper, the ruling United Russia party was instructed to establish a direct bridge between the effort paid for in blood 80 years ago and the uncertain number of Russian casualties now —which the West puts at around 100,000, between dead and wounded, against perhaps the same Ukrainian contingent.
Putin and his government have since the beginning of the war described the Kiev government as neo-Nazi, targeting a domestic audience susceptible to historical memory: 70% of Russians lost a relative in the conflict between 1941 and 1945. 2022, but the president returned to the charge on Friday (27), International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
It is a political nonsense, which takes advantage of the fact that there are sectors of Ukrainian politics and forces with neo-Nazi inspiration, which resonates with the Russian elite.
Even details like Kiev’s use of crosses reminiscent of World War II German insignia on its tanks or the fact that German armored vehicles will be used against the Russians are now part of a propaganda war. For their part, Ukrainians often compare Putin to Hitler.
None of this, however, should blemish the memory of what took place in southern Russia in 1943. The brutal numbers at Stalingrad cast a shadow over the entire history of combat, and it is widely considered to be the bloodiest battle ever fought.
Latest estimates put the number of German casualties at up to 850,000, perhaps half dead. The Soviets, on the other hand, paid with 1.3 million casualties, 480,000 dead soldiers and perhaps another 200,000 dead civilians — half their pre-war population, now around 1 million people.
These are unreliable data, but they give the proportion of the hecatomb that will be remembered by Putin. At the height of the fighting, in late 1942, there were about 1 million troops on each side of a small area on the banks of the Volga. “Rattenkrieg”, the war of the rats as the Germans said, all slinking through ruins, sewers, hiding places.
Such horrendous conditions served in films about the battle, such as the very good German (1993) and Russian (2013) “Stalingrad”, and the watered-down pan-Western “Pacific Rim” (2001). Books are even more numerous, with British historian Antony Beevor’s masterpiece, “Stalingrad – The Fatal Siege” (Ed. Record, out of print), at the forefront.
At the heart of the tragedy, Hitler’s arrogance and the personal feud between the Nazi dictator and the Soviet tyrant. Stalingrad, formerly Tsaritsyn until it was renamed in 1925 to honor the head of the Kremlin (Stalin’s city in Russian), was only an intermediate stage in a more important campaign.
After sweeping across Ukraine in 1941, the Nazis were stationed on the fronts now occupied by the men of Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, led by the 6th Army, an elite force then numbering 330,000. But Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg today) did not fall.
To make matters worse, the war effort was already taking its toll and the oil needed to carry on, taken from ally Romania, was becoming scarce. The solution in Berlin was to invest everything in seizing Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus, from Chechnya to Azerbaijan.
The Blue Case offensive began on 28 June, and it moved forward so quickly that Hitler saw fit to divide his forces: Paulus’s men would take Stalingrad, while tank divisions would head for the Baku oil fields. This proved fatal, despite apparent initial German success.
On September 30, Hitler personalized the thing, saying that Germany would never leave the city named after the enemy. In another 15 days, he would have 90% of Stalingrad in ruins under his control, but he failed to see off the Soviet counter-offensive. She gambled on encircling the city, attacking the weakest positions of less capable allies of the German Reich, such as Romanians, Italians and Hungarians in the rear.
When he realized the ongoing tragedy, Paulus asked to make a tactical withdrawal that might have saved his forces. Hitler not only said no, he promoted him from general to field marshal, in other words demanding victory or death.
The result, celebrated by every sensible leader in the West thus far, was the destruction of the 6th Army and the end of the Nazi advance east. There would still be much violence ahead, but the war was lost for Berlin —Hitler himself would place Stalingrad as the fatal milestone of his regime at the end of 1944.
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