Red Road from Stalingrad Red Road from Stalingrad Red Road from Stalingrad is a war memoir written by Mansur Abdulin, published in Russian in 1991 and in English in 2004. In it, Abdulin recounts his service in the 293rd Rifle Division, which became the 66th Guards Rifle Division, in 1942-43. Abdulin joined the division while it was rebuilding in Buzuluk in the late summer of 1942, and he served for about a year, until he was severely wounded in action in November, 1943, during the Battle of the Dnieper. Abdulin's book is one of the first of many memoirs of ordinary Red Army soldiers
Battle of Stalingrad from the Stalingrad Front's Political Department on 8 October 1942 that: "The defeatist mood is almost eliminated and the number of treasonous incidents is getting lower" as an example of the sort of coercion Red Army soldiers experienced under the Special Detachments (later to be renamed SMERSH). On the other hand, Beevor noted the often extraordinary bravery of the Soviet soldiers in a battle that was only comparable to Verdun, and argued that terror alone cannot explain such self-sacrifice. Richard Overy addresses the question of just how important the Red Army's coercive methods were to the Soviet war effort compared