And everyone at the time, from Moscow to Berlin, London and Washington, understood this. It was the battle of Stalingrad (Augto February 2, 1943), on the western bank of the Volga in the “heart of Russia,” that effectively helped decide the outcome of the war and sealed the fate of the Nazis’ Third Reich. The last portion of the work is focused entirely on the Nazi attack on Stalingrad, a vital industrial and transportation center in southern Russia, and the Soviet defense of the city through the first two weeks of September 1942. Andrey Yeryomenko, but, above all, Soviet civilians and soldiers, drawn from the working class and peasantry in Stalingrad.
He portrays sections of the technical intelligentsia miners in Siberia working in war production children orphaned by the war historical figures such as Gen. Grossman offers a panoramic view of Soviet society at war. Many of the protagonists, especially the physicist Viktor Shtrum and the Shaposhnikov family, will be familiar to readers of Life and Fate. The plot of Stalingrad is too complex to be recounted in full. It is this same spirit that permeates Grossman’s novel. In a partial but significant manner, the spirit that animated the Red Army during its early years, after it was created by Leon Trotsky and the Bolsheviks to defend the revolution, was revived. Despite the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Great Terror of 1936-38, the Soviet masses rose up to defend the conquests of the October Revolution against the fascist invaders. By the end of the war, in 1945, at least 27 million Soviet citizens, including 1.5 million Soviet Jews, would be dead. Less than a year earlier, on June 22, 1941, the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union, launching the bloodiest conflict in the history of mankind. The novel begins with a meeting between fascist dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini on April 29, 1942, in which they discuss the progress of the war.
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