Pavlov's House

Stand for a moment in the square and listen. Trolleybuses hum along the avenue, pigeons scatter off the pavement, and somewhere above you a window opens and a radio plays. In front of you is an ordinary-looking apartment block in pale plaster, four storeys tall, with balconies and curtains and potted plants. People live here today. They cook dinner, argue about football, and hang laundry out to dry. Yet this building is one of the most famous homes in the whole of Russia.

This is Pavlov's House, in the heart of Volgograd, the city that was called Stalingrad during the Second World War. The square in front of you is Ninth of January Square, close to the bank of the Volga River. In the autumn of 1942, this open ground was not a place for strolling. It was a killing field between two armies. The house you are looking at became a fortress, and its defence became a symbol of the whole battle.

To understand why, picture the city at that time. In the late summer of 1942, the German Sixth Army pushed east across the steppe toward the Volga. Stalingrad was an industrial city stretched along the riverbank for many kilometres. Heavy bombing turned much of it into rubble within days. Soviet troops held on to a narrowing strip of ground beside the water. Every street, every factory, every staircase was fought over. Soldiers on both sides described the fighting as something new and terrible.

This building stood at an important point. From its upper windows, a defender could see across the square in several directions. Whoever held the house could control the approaches toward the river. Late in September 1942, a small group of Soviet soldiers from the Thirteenth Guards Rifle Division was sent to take it. Their leader was a young sergeant named Yakov Pavlov. The men cleared the building and found it still standing among ruins. That is how the house got its name.

The defence was not a single heroic dash. It was a long, grinding siege. More soldiers joined the first small group, and an officer, Lieutenant Ivan Afanasyev, took overall command of the garrison. The men brought in machine guns, anti-tank rifles and mortars. They laid mines across the square and dug a trench back toward the Soviet lines. Through that trench came ammunition, food and water... and the wounded went out the same way.

Here is a detail that many visitors do not expect. The defenders were not all Russian. They came from many corners of the Soviet Union. Accounts name Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tatars and others among the garrison. In later years, this mix became part of the story the Soviet state told about the battle — a story of many peoples holding one line. Whatever the politics, the soldiers themselves shared the same cellars, the same cold and the same danger.

And there is a second surprise. Soldiers were not the only people inside. Civilians were sheltering in the basement when the fighting reached this square. Residents of the building and nearby homes waited out the battle underground, in darkness and noise, while the walls above them shook. Some accounts say a child was born in the building during the siege. It is worth remembering them as you look at the lower windows. For them, this was not a fortress. It was home.

Soviet accounts put the length of the defence at fifty-eight days. The garrison held from late September until the Soviet counter-offensive in November 1942, which encircled the German army around the city. A famous line is often repeated about this place. The Soviet general Vasily Chuikov, who commanded the defenders of Stalingrad, is said to have remarked that the Germans lost more men attacking this one house than they lost taking Paris. Treat it as a wartime boast rather than a statistic.

Now look at the end wall of the building, facing the square. Here the plain plaster gives way to a memorial. The wall is built in rough stone and brick, shaped to look like a broken, battle-scarred surface. Into it are set the figure of a soldier and an inscription honouring the defenders. The contrast is deliberate. On one side, a normal apartment block. On the other, a wall that shows what the building looked like after the fighting ended.

When the battle was over, Stalingrad lay almost completely in ruins. The question was whether to rebuild at all. Rebuilding began while the war was still going on. In 1943, a kindergarten worker named Alexandra Cherkasova organised a group of local women to repair this very house in their spare time. They cleared debris, carried bricks and patched the walls with their own hands. Their example spread across the city, and volunteer brigades named after her worked on many other buildings.

That makes this house a monument to two different kinds of courage. One is the courage of the soldiers who held it under fire. The other is the quieter courage of the women who came back to a destroyed city and decided to make it liveable again. A plaque on the building marks the work of the Cherkasova volunteers. Look for it as you walk along the facade. It is easy to miss among the military memorials.

As for Yakov Pavlov himself, he survived the war. He was later named a Hero of the Soviet Union, the country's highest honour. After the war he lived a long, mostly ordinary life, far from the fame of his name. Not far from here, along the riverbank, stands the shell of an old mill, left in ruins on purpose. It was a Soviet command post during the battle, and its broken walls show what most of this district looked like in 1943.

Before you leave, turn slowly and take in the square as it is now. The trees, the traffic, the benches, the families passing by. Then look back at the house, with its ordinary windows and its scarred stone end wall. Somewhere above you, the radio is probably still playing. As you walk away toward the Volga, notice how quiet and normal everything feels... and remember that this normal life is exactly what both the soldiers and the volunteers were fighting to bring back.