#16
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
February 4, 2003
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."

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