Stalingrad, our inspiring World Cup battleground

Shortly before dawn on June 22, 1941, Josef Stalin was woken by a phone call. The frontiers had been breached in all sectors. The Germans had attacked the Soviet Union.

It was “an act of treachery, unprecedented in the history of civilised nations”’ said sombre announcements on television and radio.

That was an understatement. Less than two years earlier, Stalin had been raising a vodka glass to drink to Adolf Hitler’s health after agreeing a deal that carved up Eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The German invasion brought the Soviet Union to its knees. “Close your hearts to pity,” Hitler told his men before the attack. They did.

The German army advance was spectacular. Within days, Minsk fell. Kiev surrendered by September, just weeks after the invasion began. By October, Moscow was on the brink — with preparations under way for Stalin to evacuate the capital. Victory seemed inevitable.

The tide turned at Stalingrad: the city now called Volgograd, where England play tonight. The battle for the city, located at a strategic bend on the Volga river, was perhaps the most epic, heroic and bloody in human history.

Between 1942 and 1943, as many as two million men and women were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Fighting from house to house, street to street was brutal.

The scale of suffering is hard to conceive. Around 60,000 Germans were killed in the fighting; of the 110,000 taken prisoner when the 6th Army of Field Marshal von Paulus was surrounded and forced into surrender, only 5,000 ever made it back to Germany.

On the Soviet side, somewhere between half a million and a million died defending a city that became symbolic of the sacrifice the Soviet Union was prepared to make to defend itself.

As such, in the Soviet Union and to Russians today, the name of Stalingrad carries a blend of what the battle of Trafalgar, Dunkirk and the trenches of the First World War mean to us: heroism in battle; a victory against the odds; self-sacrifice of those serving their country and giving their lives for others; and, perhaps most of all, pride in a military success that changed the course of history.

The significance of battles often only becomes clear after they take place when historians get a chance to reflect. Stalingrad was different.

A few months after the city was liberated, Winston Churchill presented Stalin with a sword dedicated to “the steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad” that was given “in token of the homage of the British people”.

There is no better place for a World Cup game if you want to find inspiration for bravery and passion.

• Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World is published by Bloomsbury