Chapter 92: The Review

During the Second World War, the Russians called the Germans “Hans,” because there were so many Germans named Hans. By the same logic, the Germans called the Russians “Ivan,” because Ivans were everywhere.

In essence, propaganda was no different from the mud-slinging matches of today’s internet trolls. You slandered yours, I slandered mine, and neither side yielded an inch.

And in order to keep morale high, exaggeration was everywhere. One day Hans claimed he had wiped out Ivan’s entire ancestry; the next day it was probably another eighteen generations. By rights, the Russians ought to have lost a billion men already.

The Ivans were much the same. If they knocked out a single Mark Four tank, they could boast of destroying an entire enemy tank battalion.

The latest war reports were often in the newspapers within an hour, then spread across all the major cities on their side.

This time, however, the feat of destroying an entire German army headquarters was unexpectedly suppressed and not released.

It was rather like one of the ten most famous snipers of the Second World War, Vasily Zaitsev, who killed a total of 225 German Wehrmacht soldiers during the Battle of Stalingrad, and rose to fame even more after taking down Germany’s sniper ace, König.

Think about it: if Vasily killed two or three Germans a day, he could make the headlines every single day.

So why, after Mumu annihilated an enemy army headquarters and indirectly enabled Chuikov’s great counteroffensive to succeed, could he not make the front page?

There was only one reason: his military exploit had been held back by the Supreme Commander himself, Stalin.

In the Kremlin, Stalin was thoroughly irritated.

At first, when the battle report came in from below, he saw that a young man who had once been a hunter was not only ferocious in combat, shooting down a Stuka with a rifle, but had also used the stealth skills of a hunter to penetrate deep behind enemy lines, wipe out an enemy headquarters, and kill one lieutenant general and one major general.

Such a tremendous deed would have made him a new national hero on the spot without the slightest exaggeration.

Because the military situation was so unfavorable, they needed a personal hero to divert the people’s attention.

But another report from the Ministry of Internal Affairs made Stalin feel like strangling Mumu himself.

“Kamenka... why Kamenka!?”

There was nothing inherently wrong with Kamenka. In fact, at that time the Soviet Union, apart from harshly suppressing the newly annexed smaller states such as Lithuania, did not really discriminate against any of its constituent republics.

After all, Stalin himself was a textbook Georgian.

Kamenka stood out for one reason only: the commander of the Sixty-Second Army, General Anton Ivanovich Lopatin, whom Stalin had recently removed from his post, was from Kamenka.

After the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, Lopatin had compiled an impressive record.

In 1942 he was awarded the rank of general and, in August, dispatched to the Stalingrad Front to command the Sixty-Second Army. Between the Don and Volga rivers, Lopatin’s Sixty-Second Army suffered heavy casualties while resisting the Germans’ fierce attacks.

In September 1942, the Germans advanced to the outskirts of Stalingrad. The Supreme Command of the Red Army issued a strict order to the Stalingrad Front to hold the city at all costs, and the responsibility for defending the urban area fell upon the Sixty-Second Army.

By then, the units under the Sixty-Second Army were already badly depleted. Lopatin candidly believed that, in its current condition, the army could not possibly defend Stalingrad. As a result, he was relieved of his post as commander of the Sixty-Second Army.

That heavy responsibility fell to Chuikov, who had just taken office.

In this parallel universe, Lopatin was nowhere near as lucky as the Lopatin on Mumu’s Earth. He was inevitably branded with the labels of “incompetence” and “passive resistance to the war,” and was now sipping tea at the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

In the column for relatives on Lopatin’s file, there was a striking entry: Nephew, Major Drosky!

It was an irony of the highest order.

A general accused of passivity in resisting the war, whose nephew had won the most glorious victory on the very same army front, on the very same battlefield, against the very same enemy.

Was this not a slap in his uncle’s face?

In this timeline, it was Stalin himself who had stripped Lopatin of rank and nearly sent him to be shot as a surrendering opportunist. Was Stalin now going to personally sign another order declaring Mumu a national hero?

That was why Stalin felt both irritated and tense.

Still, when he saw the report—Stalingrad had recaptured a large swath of the city, and the percentage of territory under Soviet control had risen back to 44 percent—Stalin felt comforted again.

Lopatin had only angered him because he had been too blunt. In truth, Lopatin had always been a staunch antiwar fighter. Besides, nothing mattered more than the security of Stalingrad.

With more territory secured, there could be more supply docks, better logistics, and improved resupply. It was a virtuous cycle.

What was more, not only Chuikov but even his favored general, Zhukov, had jointly recommended this Drosky.

After a moment’s thought, Stalin made a sweeping stroke of the pen and issued his approval.

On the German side, after waiting for what felt like an eternity, they finally received the Soviet report. In fact, the moment they discovered that the uniforms of the two generals had been stripped away and one camera was missing from the war correspondent’s equipment, they had already braced themselves for the worst.

Only, the Führer could not quite understand this: since the Russians had sent out such a formidable assault team, why had they not equipped it with a proper spy camera? Those portable cameras were as plentiful as dirt in the Soviet Union.

He had no idea that the so-called Soviet super assault team was actually just one person, and that this person was being vetted by the political department even as he worked.

Inside a small dark room, under the dim, flickering light of an unstable power supply, the Ministry of Internal Affairs was treating Mumu to coffee.

“Sergeant Drosky, do you know Anton Ivanovich Lopatin?”

Following the information on his retina, Mumu recited it verbatim: “Yes, he is my uncle. When I was very young, my mother was still alive, and our families were still in contact. But after the war broke out, our hometown was hit by a German raid, and I lost contact with my uncle.”

“Do you know what kind of man your uncle is, and what position he holds?”

“I’m not clear on that. I only know he’s an officer in the Red Army. What happened to Uncle Lopatin?”

One of the internal affairs men suddenly slammed the table. “Stop pretending! You don’t know what’s going on with Lopatin now?”

The Oscar-winning Mumu showed just the right amount of shock, though in fact his own hypnosis spell was already at work. “I... I really didn’t know... I fled eastward with the refugees. I only managed to pick up a Mosin-Nagant and used it as a hunting rifle to make a living by hunting. Then I was drafted to Stalingrad.”

Mumu did not know what the little lady from the scales had done with this identity, nor what it might bring him. He only instinctively felt that she would not screw him over.

In truth, in these chaotic times, to sort out the most basic identity records already made the Ministry of Internal Affairs remarkable.

In this age of war and disorder, human lives were worth less than dogs.

To big shots like Stalin, the lives of ordinary Soviet citizens could be measured in how many bullets and how many supplies they were worth.

Besides, Mumu was so calm because the system scan had told him that, right next door, there were two towering pillars of strength standing guard.