The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  On the issue of supplies, the Soviet leader was more combative than appreciative. “Why is it that the United States can only give me 1,000 tons of armor plate steel for tanks—a country with a production of over 50,000,000 tons?” he demanded of Harriman. When the American tried to explain that it took time to increase capacity for this kind of steel, Stalin shot back, “One only has to add alloys.” The one time he appeared grateful was when Harriman offered him 5,000 American jeeps, and he immediately asked if more would be available.

  The next day the Germans were proclaiming the talks a failure. Chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels gloated that no agreement was possible between the visitors and the “Bolshevists.” But when the downcast duo of Beaverbrook and Harriman arrived at the Kremlin for their final meeting, Stalin promptly signaled a change in tone. “It is up to the three of us to prove Goebbels a liar,” he declared.

  Beaverbrook responded by going down the list of supplies requested by the Soviet side, pointing out which ones Britain and the United States could provide quickly and adding some suggestions of their own. While he also indicated which supplies would be harder to get, Stalin was visibly pleased. Maxim Litvinov, the former foreign minister who was serving as the interpreter in the talks, jumped up and exulted: “Now we shall win the war.”

  The visitors were delighted. “The meeting broke up in the most friendly fashion possible,” Harriman reported. “Stalin made no effort to conceal his enthusiasm. It was my impression that he was completely satisfied that Great Britain and America meant business.” Beaverbrook observed the Soviet leader carefully, even noting that his doodling habits included “drawing numberless pictures of wolves on paper and filling in the background with red pencil” while Litvinov translated his remarks. Speaking for both himself and Harriman, the British visitor offered his conclusions about Stalin. “We have got to like him; a kindly man, with a habit, when agitated, of walking about the floor with his hands behind his back,” he declared. “He smoked a great deal and practically never shows any impatience at all.” It was as if they were so relieved to find a more cordial Stalin at their final meeting that they had banished any memory of the boorish Stalin they had seen earlier.

  But others in the delegation were more observant and less prone to see only what they wanted to see. General Hastings Ismay, who headed the British military contingent, noted that Stalin “moved stealthily like a wild animal in search of prey, and his eyes were shrewd and full of cunning. He never looked one in the face. But he had great dignity and his personality was dominating. As he entered the room, every Russian face froze into silence, and the hunted look in the eyes of the generals showed all too plainly the constant fear in which they lived. It was nauseating to see brave men reduced to such abject servility.”

  Reynolds, the American correspondent who was serving as the press officer for the mission, was stunned for a completely different reason when he saw Stalin coming to greet Beaverbrook and Harriman. From the Soviet leader’s pictures, Reynolds had expected someone “huge, forbidding, surly.” Instead, “the rather bowlegged little man who walked toward us, his face a broad grin when he caught sight of Beaverbrook and Harriman, was a shattering contradiction of the public image,” he recalled. “I gather that he wore elevator shoes.” Reynolds quoted a British correspondent as saying, “He looks like the kindly Italian gardener you have in twice a week.”

  At the farewell banquet in the Kremlin, the Brits and Americans were treated to a veritable feast, as Reynolds carefully noted, “a twenty-three course orgy,” featuring caviar in huge bowls, mushrooms sautéed in sour cream, sturgeon in champagne sauce, and pilaf of quail. All this was accompanied by endless vodka toasts, with glasses instantly refilled from carafes of different varieties of the liquor. “Feasting thus, I found it a little difficult to remember that the Germans were now less than a hundred miles from Moscow—or to recall the lines of the hungry of this classless society doubtless even now waiting at the doors of food stores,” Reynolds wrote. Stalin may not have awed him, but the surreal scene made him wonder if this was a modern-day instance of the emperor fiddling while Rome burned.

  The American newsman stayed behind in Moscow after the rest of the delegation left, fulfilling his wish to see what would happen next in the Soviet capital. He wasn’t the only person who didn’t catch the flight back. Hopkins had quietly arranged for Faymonville to stay behind so that he could handle the Lend-Lease program in Russia. This amounted to an end run around Ambassador Steinhardt and other embassy staffers, who viewed the military officer as in the pocket of the Russians. They protested this action to no avail. Roosevelt, Hopkins, and Harriman all wanted someone in that post who would please the Kremlin, and they now had their man in place.

  No one was more incensed by that maneuver than Yeaton, who charged that Faymonville “was irrefutably a captive of the NKVD.” Yeaton was equally scathing in his denunciation of “Harriman’s obsequious attitude towards Stalin.” But his main concern was judging how quickly the Germans would succeed in taking Moscow, which he increasingly was convinced was inevitable. While militia units and whatever workers could still be found dug trenches and set up tank traps on the outskirts of the city, Yeaton concluded, “It was an even question which would arrive first—the Germans or the first snow storms of the season.”

  On October 14, Yeaton decided to spend the night at the embassy dacha, eleven miles from the city on the Smolensk highway. “My morale was low and I needed country air,” he recalled. He awakened the next morning to artillery fire, and when he looked out the window, he saw Red Army soldiers setting up machine guns in the front yard. He was convinced that this was the end. “I knew I would never see the place again,” he wrote.

  By the time he returned to Spaso House on October 15, that view was virtually unanimous among the assembled Americans. Ambassador Steinhardt had already sent his wife to safety in Sweden, and the purpose of the gathering was to discuss evacuation procedures for everyone else. According to Charles Thayer, one of the original Russia hands at the embassy, Yeaton predicted that the capital would only hold out for another thirty-six hours. Even Faymonville, as Thayer recalled, “now had completely lost his nerve and gave them only five hours more before the Germans would arrive.” During this discussion, Molotov summoned Steinhardt to the Kremlin and issued him instructions to evacuate all Americans to Kuibyshev, the Volga city about six hundred miles away that was supposed to serve as the new base for the government once the capital fell.

  Molotov told Steinhardt and Cripps, the British ambassador, who had also been summoned, “The fight for Moscow will continue and the fight to defeat Hitler will become more furious.” But when both ambassadors asked to stay in the capital as long as he and Stalin were there, Molotov refused, telling them that he and Stalin would join them in Kuibyshev in a day or two. The message seemed clear: the fight for Moscow would continue from outside Moscow.

  Steinhardt returned to Spaso House and told his staffers the news that they all had to assemble at the Kazansky Station for an evening train. He delivered the same message to the American correspondents, telling them that, along with their censors, they would be leaving, too. “You have no discretion in the matter,” he declared.

  After hours of milling about the station, the assembled foreigners—diplomats and journalists from all the countries represented in the Soviet capital—boarded a train consisting of thirty-three coaches and one locomotive “that seemed to tire frequently,” as Reynolds put it. The diplomats traveled in the “soft” cars, and the journalists in the “hard” cars, but the five-day, snail-paced ride wasn’t comfortable for anybody. The drinking water supply gave out on the first day, and only some of the cars were heated. But the good news for Moscow was that it began to snow on October 16. “It turned into a five-day blizzard and was the best defense Moscow had,” Yeaton noted.

  When the exhausted foreigners got their first glimpse of their new home—a dreary Volga city that nonetheless startled them with its twinkli
ng evening lights, since it was far enough east not to require the blackouts that had been the norm in Moscow—they saw little reason to believe that anything would stop the Germans from seizing the capital. After all, Molotov had all but conceded that it was about to fall. As represented by those diplomats and journalists, the world was still watching but finding it increasingly difficult to cling to the slim hope that any other outcome was still possible.

  7

  Panic in Moscow

  If there’s one overarching theme in the official accounts of the Great Patriotic War, it’s that the Russian people never wavered in their fight against the German invaders, no matter how desperate their situation or how great the sacrifices demanded of them. They believed, so those versions tell us, in the justice of their cause and the inevitability of victory, however long it would take. In short, heroic patriotism was the order of the day. But no single day shatters that myth more decisively than October 16, 1941.

  Just as the foreign diplomats and journalists were pulling out of the Soviet capital, the city erupted in panic. It was a panic that Soviet historians were eager to forget, which goes a long way toward explaining why their accounts of the battle for Moscow are so often abbreviated and full of glaring omissions and distortions. No sleight of hand can reconcile those two versions of events—the highly sanitized ones and the reality of the sudden breakdown of law and order, which included looting, strikes, and other previously unimaginable acts of outright defiance of the regime, which played itself out at a moment when most Muscovites were convinced that their city was about to be taken over by the Germans. The city wasn’t united; it was divided and perilously close to spinning out of control.

  “A threat hangs over Moscow and our country,” Izvestia proclaimed that day. “As always, the Soviet people look danger straight in the eye.” Not quite, since there was a rush for the exits from the Soviet capital. While there was an official evacuation of top government and Party officials, key factories and other installations deemed essential to the continuation of the regime, many of the city’s inhabitants fled on their own. Here the registration statistics tell the story. On January 1, 1941, Moscow’s population was 4,216,000. With refugees from other regions more than making up for those leaving the city, it had increased to 4,236,000 by September. But from then on, the capital’s population began dropping dramatically—to 3,148,000 in October and, by January 1942, to only 2,028,000.

  On October 16, the rush to leave was close to a stampede. Dmitry Safonov, who was working at an artillery factory near Moscow that was to be evacuated to the Urals, had just returned to the city to collect some belongings and was startled by what he saw. “All of Moscow seemed to be streaming out somewhere,” he recalled. Cars and trucks were loaded down with personal belongings, while many of the people rushing about on the street “didn’t seem to know where to go or what to do.” Some claimed to have already seen Germans inside the city. At the railroad station where he hoped to catch a train, Safonov saw suitcases, bags, clothes, lamps, even a piano, all abandoned by those who were trying or had managed to board anything that was moving out. The train platforms were jammed with people. Compared to his visit less than two weeks before, “I hardly recognized the city,” he said.

  While ordinary citizens fought to get any place they could on a train, even if that meant abandoning their personal belongings, Party bigwigs and factory managers vociferously argued with train dispatchers that they should be allowed to take as much as they wanted. “They tried to take pianos, tables, sofas and other furniture with them,” F. Rostovtsev, the chief of the Leninskaya Station, who was the chief dispatcher for all the trains involved in the evacuation from October 14 to 16, recalled. “They demanded ‘Supply more wagons for me, my wife and whoever else.’” He added that the train crews had to ignore those incessant demands and force the evacuees to “curb their appetites.”

  On the roads heading east, there was usually no one to keep any semblance of order, since the normally ubiquitous police had largely disappeared. Quite a few of the seemingly lucky Muscovites who had cars to take them out of the city were in for a nasty surprise. “Some people stopped automobiles driving on the highway,” G. V. Reshetin, an art editor, wrote. “They pulled the drivers and passengers out of the cars, beat them and threw their belongings to the ground.” Some of the attackers would pile into the cars themselves, while others appeared to be joining in out of sheer vindictiveness. Reshetin witnessed a crowd yelling “Kill the Jews” before they attacked a car carrying an elderly man and a young woman with bundles of documents. Both were pulled out of the car. The man was hit repeatedly, and his face was bleeding. The young woman tried to defend him, shouting he wasn’t Jewish and they were simply transporting the documents—to no avail. Although Reshetin had witnessed minor anti-Semitic incidents before, he was “shocked” by the violence of this episode.

  Almost everywhere, it seemed, normal rules no longer applied and normal services could no longer be taken for granted. Movie theaters were suddenly all closed for “renovation,” the metro stopped running, and those trams that were still operating often failed to stop since they were so crammed with people. Slava Yeremko, who was fourteen at the time, remembers the strange sight of the state bank next to her apartment building. “There was nobody in the bank—the doors were open and there was money on the floor.” Large groups were streaming by, on their way to the Belorussky train station, seemingly oblivious to the bank and the money strewn about.

  Yuliy Labas, who was only eight, recalls going out with his mother in search of milk. He was already accustomed to the sight of blimps in the air with dangling nets that were meant to entrap German planes, but now he looked up and saw something new. There was black smoke rising from the chimney of the NKVD headquarters on Lubyanka Square, which was right next to where he lived, and black snow on the ground. “They must have been burning papers,” he said.

  Not far away from her apartment near the Central Committee building, Ella Braginskaya, who was fifteen, also saw dark ashes and partially burnt papers swirling in the air and people looting the shops in the neighborhood. “Most of the looters were women, not men,” she said. Looters attacked shops in other parts of the city as well, although other eyewitnesses don’t mention a preponderance of women among them. While shops with food that had been rationed up to that point were the main targets, nothing was off limits anymore, including the apartments of those Muscovites who had already left. Looters also attacked the now empty British Embassy.

  Valeria Prokhorova, at the time a twenty-two-year-old graduate of the Institute of Foreign Languages, remembers the looting and another common sight. “People were dumping communist literature and portraits of the party leaders,” she said. In fact, Muscovites were ridding their apartments and offices of the obligatory pictures of Stalin and Lenin along with the volumes of Marx and other communist literature. Garbage bins were overflowing with this detritus of Stalin’s regime, which no one would have dared to throw away at any other time. Many did so out of fear that the Germans, whom they were expecting any moment, would identify them as communists. But some Muscovites vented their pent-up anger. Prokhorova heard people cursing Stalin. “We suffered from hunger and they kept telling us that we are living in the richest country,” she quoted them as saying. “What about now? Where is Stalin? He’s abandoned us.”

  Tamara Bylinina, the young widow of a military officer who had been executed during the purges a few years earlier, was digging trenches with other women on the outskirts of Moscow when word spread that the Germans were closing in. The women rushed back to the city, and Bylinina reached her communal apartment, which she shared with about a dozen other people. The portraits of Stalin and Lenin were gone from the walls, and someone had incinerated a twelve-volume collection of Lenin’s speeches and writings. “People were scared that the Germans could execute them for worshipping those idols,” she explained.

  But that fear was mixed with visible elation and occasionally eagerness t
o welcome anyone who would rid the Kremlin of its current rulers. “Good, they’ve sucked enough of our blood,” one of her neighbors told her. Having heard that Hitler supposedly had said he wanted to drink tea in Moscow, some of her neighbors had set up samovars on their tables. “It was done to greet the Germans,” she said.

  Ella Braginskaya, the fifteen-year-old who lived near the Central Committee building, recalls that she was worried that her neighbors might see a German occupation as a good chance to settle scores. Her Jewish mother was highly unpopular, she pointed out, as much because of her “arrogance”—she’d tell her daughter that she was from much too good a family to play with the children of the proletariat—as because of her religion. Ella’s best friend was a girl named Valya, the daughter of a communist official. As the Germans drew closer to Moscow, Ella would be greeted by catcalls when she walked through her building’s courtyard. “You’re living your last days,” they’d say. “Soon the Germans will come and kill you and Valya.”

  Not everyone acted this way. At least one neighbor, a woman who lived on the ground floor, vowed to help Ella and her mother. “The Germans are decent people,” she assured the mother. “We’ll dig a cellar and you’ll hide there and later everything will be all right.”

  And even as countless Muscovites fled to the east, others were still leaving for the front to try to stop the Germans from taking the city. During the chaos of October 16, Valeria Prokhorova and several friends went to the Belorussky Station to bid farewell to two volunteers going off to fight—Aleksandr Aniks, her favorite teacher from her language institute, and Grisha, the husband of her neighbor. They rushed in the dark through the cold snow mixed with rain, carrying a food parcel that they had managed to pull together from their meager rations. At the station, they found the train and, since it was pitch dark, they ran up and down the track, shouting “Grisha! Aleksandr!”