Stalingrad, or Stalingrado, is the eastern-front battle whose German defeat becomes a hinge in the novel’s military and political timelines: it helps end the immediate threat of a renewed advance on Leningrad, reveals the extent of German losses, and prompts Spanish opponents of Franco to imagine that the Republic and civil liberties might return.

Military turning point

Adrián Gallardo arrives at the front near Kolpino while the German offensive against Leningrad is keeping the sector tense. He is assigned elsewhere from Lieutenant Navarro, whose presence he has long anticipated. Months of waiting deepen Adrián’s dissatisfaction, even as he moves from alférez to lieutenant without accumulating distinction beyond his reputation as a professional boxer.

His promotion comes only days before the failed assault on Stalingrad, described as the first major reverse suffered by German forces in the Soviet Union. Hitler suspends the Leningrad offensive and abandons the attempt to advance, choosing instead to maintain pressure on the city. With the front stabilized, Adrián returns to Pokrovskaya for a week’s leave at headquarters. The battle thus changes the immediate military situation while leaving the siege unresolved.

Defeat concealed in the press

The scale of the defeat is clearer in Madrid than the Spanish public is allowed to know. On 30 January, Hitler promotes Friedrich Paulus to field marshal while invoking the fact that no German field marshal has ever surrendered. The appointment carries an implied expectation that Paulus will die rather than be captured. Instead, Paulus surrenders at Stalingrad, handing the Soviet Union what remains of the Sixth Army after Germany has lost nearly 200,000 men, almost two-thirds of them dead.

On 2 February 1943, Hans Lazar, press attaché at the embassy of the Third Reich in Spain, knows the truth and fears that Spaniards will learn it. He works to keep the defeat from being reported plainly. The next day ABC publishes a photograph of the city’s ruins but frames German resistance as a heroic stand comparable to Thermopylae and the Alcázar of Toledo. It avoids the words surrender and capitulation, as well as Paulus’s name. On 4 February the paper falsely claims that the Sixth Army is rapidly regrouping after the setback; on 5 February its front page turns to an allegedly triumphant Axis submarine campaign in the Atlantic. Stalingrad’s consequences therefore include not only military retreat but also a deliberate effort to control what that retreat means to the Spanish public.

Political hopes in Spain

In July 1943, Stalingrad also serves as a marker of changed political possibility. A clandestine political organizer tells Guillermo that after the battle everything will be different: once the Allies defeat the Axis, Franco’s fate will be sealed. He proposes preparing for that moment by building an alliance among democratic forces, from Basque nationalists to CNT anarchists, and including non-fascist monarchists and conservatives. Though he identifies himself as a communist, he says the country’s interests must come before those of the party and presents the clandestine Spanish National Union as a means of restoring the Republic and civil liberties.

The proposal moves Guillermo, who recognizes in it a cause he has long wanted to hear voiced. Yet the scene also distinguishes the appeal of the hoped-for alliance from the difficulties of political reality: Guillermo reflects that the words will not sound the same when spoken by someone else. Stalingrad becomes more than a distant battlefield defeat. It supplies the political opening around which Spanish opponents of Franco organize their expectations, even as the novel signals that hope and its eventual realization are not identical.