· Day 480 of 1418
“There is no land for us beyond the Volga”
Stalingrad’s factories
In October the fighting moved into the workshops of the Tractor Factory and the Barrikady plant. Sometimes the enemy held one hall and Soviet soldiers the next. Sniper Vasily Zaitsev said the words that became the battle’s motto: “There is no land for us beyond the Volga.”
The factories were not only a battlefield: they kept working to the last. In the summer tanks sometimes rolled off the Tractor Factory line straight into battle, not even painted. Worker-militiamen fought beside the soldiers.
Vasily Zaitsev grew up in the Urals and went hunting with his grandfather from childhood. At Stalingrad he became one of the best snipers and trained young soldiers, and his pupils also fought in the ruins of the city.
See it on the map