"Hot Snow" by Yuri Bondarev, summary Automatic translate

This book is a stark and frank description of an episode in the Battle of Stalingrad. Written in 1969, the novel faithfully recreates the operation to repel Field Marshal Manstein’s tank attack. The author depicts the soldiers’ daily lives without embellishment, through physical suffering, ammunition shortages, sweat, blood, and frostbite on the snowy banks of the Myshkova River. The novel was successfully adapted into a film in 1972. Director Gavriil Egiazarov made a film of the same name, which earned widespread acclaim and won the State Prize of the RSFSR.

The road to the front and the first losses

The events begin late at night on a frozen train. Soldiers of an artillery battery are traveling toward the front line. Lieutenant Kuznetsov commands the first firing platoon. His military academy comrade, Lieutenant Davlatyan, has been appointed commander of the second. The battery is led by the imperious, demanding, and ostentatiously stern Lieutenant Drozdovsky. In the morning, the train stops in the middle of the snowy steppe. The soldiers get a brief respite. They take seats near field kitchens. Suddenly, German fighter planes swoop down. The soldiers scatter through the snowdrifts. Bombs burst, setting the train cars ablaze. The first seriously wounded and dead appear. Drozdovsky attempts to fire at the planes with a light machine gun.

The commander of the first gun, Senior Sergeant Ukhanov, disappears during an enemy air raid. Lieutenant Kuznetsov finds him in a neighboring village. Ukhanov is serenely trading government-issued soap for sunflower seeds with local residents. Kuznetsov reprimands the sergeant for his unauthorized absence. The artillerymen then return to their echelon.

General Bessonov, commander of the newly formed army, personally inspects the troops after an enemy air raid. He is a thin, middle-aged man, leaning on a cane. He constantly suffers from acute pain in his injured leg. The general conceals from those around him his intense emotional anxiety for the fate of his son, Viktor. The young man went missing on the Volkhov Front.

The army receives the order to disembark. A grueling march across the icy steppe to the southwest begins, lasting many hours. Artillery horses collapse from exhaustion. Men freeze to death as they march. Drozdovsky demands perfect discipline. He forces the weary soldiers to carry heavy duffel bags on their own shoulders. Medical orderly Zoya Yelagina tries to ease the oppressive tension. She good-naturedly flirts with the soldiers, but clearly sympathizes with the unyielding Drozdovsky.

During the descent into the ravine, the horse of young driver Sergunenkov gives way. It falls and breaks its legs on the icy road. Drozdovsky mercilessly orders the crippled animal to be shot. The artillerymen are forced to lower the heavy guns by hand.

Defense on the Myshkova River

Colonel Deyev’s division occupies defensive positions on the northern and southern banks of the Myshkova River. It is here that Soviet troops plan to stop General Hoth’s tank group. Soldiers dig their heavy guns into the frozen ground until their skin turns bloody, allowing them to fire directly. The artillerymen are completely exhausted.

That night, Bessonov arrives at the division’s command post. Assessing the dire situation, he issues a stern order: stand firm to the last bullet. Not a single step back. The general is saving the reserve tank corps for the morning counterattack. He categorically refuses to dissipate their forces to patch the emerging gaps in the infantry defenses.

At dawn, the frosty sky is thickly illuminated by German signal flares. A huge enemy tank column launches a massive attack. First, the Soviet positions are heavily bombed by dive bombers. The thunder of explosions tears apart the trenches. Frozen earth mixed with snow falls upon the men. Kuznetsov, along with Ukhanov and the elderly driver Chibisov, wait out this terrifying attack in a cramped earthen ditch.

Chibisov cries from primal fear and remembers his children. He’s already been captured by the Germans. After a grueling bombardment, sand-yellow German tanks with white crosses on their armor emerge from the gunpowder smoke.

The death of the crews and a tank ramming

The battery immediately opens rapid fire. Kuznetsov personally adjusts the gun’s fire. Deafened by the explosions, gunner Yevstigneyev stares fixedly at the panoramic sight. Blood flows from his ear. With well-aimed armor-piercing shells, they manage to set several advancing armored vehicles ablaze. Kuznetsov experiences a frenzied rage. He feels completely at one with his gun.

But some tanks bypass the positions and break through to the second platoon’s guns. Davlatyan’s gun is destroyed by a direct hit. The young lieutenant is seriously wounded. Almost his entire crew is killed. A German tank barrels into Junior Sergeant Chubarikov’s position at high speed. Men perish under the clanking treads. Ukhanov miraculously manages to knock out the side of this tank, saving Kuznetsov and the rest of the soldiers from certain death.

Drozdovsky witnesses the destruction of his crews. The lieutenant falls into a furious frenzy. A German self-propelled gun methodically fires at positions from behind the knocked-out tanks. Drozdovsky demands immediate action. He orders his driver, Sergunenkov, to destroy the German self-propelled gun with anti-tank grenades.

The boy is forced to crawl through open, gun-swept snow. An enemy machine gunner kills him with a long burst in front of the entire battery. Kuznetsov, in despair, screams at the battalion commander, directly accusing him of the soldier’s senseless death. Of the entire battery, only one gun, Ukhanov’s, remains. And four surviving soldiers: Lieutenant Kuznetsov, Sergeant Ukhanov, former sailor Nechayev, and driver Rubin. They’re running low on armor-piercing shells.

Tragedy at the command post

General Bessonov tensely watches the battle from his observation post. Enemy tanks are crossing the river on the ice and the remaining bridge. They are penetrating deep into the defenses of Major Cherepanov’s rifle regiment. Division Commissar Vesnin sets out to meet the Soviet tank reserves, hoping to expedite their advance. Along the way, his car encounters German machine gunners who have broken through. Vesnin flatly refuses to retreat. He engages in a brief firefight and is killed by a burst of machine gun fire to the chest.

The head of counterintelligence, Colonel Osin, is the first to show Vesnin the discovered leaflet before his departure. It states that Bessonov’s son is being held captive by the Nazis in a hospital. The commissar is furious at this news and orders Osin to leave the front lines immediately. Later, Osin and the wounded security commander bring Bessonov the bloody documents of the deceased Vesnin.

Bessonov is shocked by this personal and irreparable loss. But he calmly orders the reserve corps to begin a morning counterattack. In Vesnin’s documents, Adjutant Bozhichko finds a German propaganda leaflet. Major Bozhichko understands the gravity of this information and secretly conceals the bitter truth from the commander. Bessonov interrogates the captured German major. He philosophizes and discusses violence. The general continues to direct the battle, convinced that his son is missing in action.

A night outing and the loss of Zoe

In the evening, the attacks subside. A wounded Soviet scout crawls out of the darkness to Kuznetsov’s gun. He barely manages to report important news. In no-man’s land, in a deep crater, another soldier and a captured German officer remain. Kuznetsov, Ukhanov, and Rubin grab their machine guns. They go into the icy darkness to retrieve them. Drozdovsky and Zoya reluctantly tag along behind them. The Germans spot the group by the noise. The enemy opens up with a barrage of machine gun fire.

In a snowy hollow, glowing bullets reach Zoya. She sustains a fatal wound to the stomach. Drozdovsky also sustains a minor wound to the neck. He is in a state of selfish shock. The lieutenant demands urgent bandages and doesn’t even notice the girl’s death. Kuznetsov and Drozdovsky carry Zoya’s lifeless body to the firing position.

She is carefully placed in an empty shell niche and covered with a canvas tarpaulin. Kuznetsov is crushed by grief. He remembers her smile. He recalls her recent fear of being wounded in the stomach. Kuznetsov is acutely aware of his helplessness in the face of the mercilessness of war. Meanwhile, Davlatyan lies in a damp dugout. He is delirious from blood loss and begs to be sent to the medical battalion.

Morning and awards ceremony

At frosty dawn, Soviet mechanized corps launch a decisive offensive. Fresh tanks crush the flanks of the German force. The exhausted enemy retreats hastily south. Bessonov is convinced of the counterattack’s success. The general descends from his observation post to the riverbed. He slowly walks along the broken infantry trenches. Bessonov sees two miraculously surviving machine gunners from the sea. He immediately presents them with the Order of the Red Banner. The stern general weeps with delight and sorrow. He sincerely thanks the soldiers for their fortitude.

Then Bessonov approaches the only surviving gun. Kuznetsov, Ukhanov, Nechayev, and Rubin stand dirty and sooty in the pitted position. Bessonov warmly thanks them for the destroyed German vehicles. He personally presents each of them with an officer’s medal. Drozdovsky, who ran up to report, also receives a high award.

The artillerymen ceremoniously drop their medals into a mess tin of vodka. This is how they remember their fallen comrades, following an old soldier’s tradition. Kuznetsov drinks the scalding fusel oil. He retreats to an empty trench and collapses on the parapet. The lieutenant weeps long and desperately. He presses his wet face to his rough gloves. Kuznetsov mourns Zoya, his destroyed platoon, and everything he endured during those terrible 24 hours. A clear, cold morning breaks over the steppe in the east.