The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  Still, the Germans didn’t accomplish all that much with their air raids, which never reached anything approaching the scale or ferocity of the London Blitz and weren’t nearly as effective. According to the figures of the Moscow Defense Museum, only about 3 percent of the city’s buildings were damaged during the raids, a far cry from the extensive destruction in the British capital. And even if the civilian deaths in Moscow were understated, they were far less than the more than twenty thousand deaths in London.

  The Germans were in no position to mount the kind of massive air assault on Moscow that they had conducted against the British capital. And pilots they could commit to the battle quickly discovered how difficult it was to penetrate the intense anti-aircraft fire they encountered on the approaches to Moscow and in the city itself. Lieutenant Richard Wernicke, who flew one of the notorious Ju-87 Stuka dive bombers, recalled how surprised he was, along with the other German fliers, by the hail of anti-aircraft fire they faced as they dove down over their targets. “It was terrible: the air was full of lead, and they were firing very accurately. We hadn’t seen anything like this before,” he said, alluding to the fact that German planes had encountered little resistance in the early months of the war.

  This was no accident. The Soviet leadership had concentrated about 40 percent of all its anti-aircraft batteries in or around the capital. There were anti-aircraft batteries on the roof of the Moskva Hotel, right next to Red Square, and at Stalin’s dacha on the outskirts of town. The city also installed giant searchlights, which were operated by women, who alternated four-hour shifts all day and all night seven days a week. “They wore men’s clothes and their hair was cut close to the skin because they were afraid of different diseases, typhus and lice,” recalled Tatyana Petrova, whose mother served in a searchlight unit. “It was very important to catch the German planes in crisscrossing searchlights quickly to determine their altitude and direction and speed.” That information was then relayed to the anti-aircraft batteries so that they could zero in on them. As a final obstacle, there were the blimps deployed over the city with dangling nets that ensnared a few low flying planes. The Soviet side claimed to have downed 1,392 German planes over Moscow.

  German pilots discovered all sorts of dangers even before they reached the capital. Guns would pop up from concealed artillery emplacements, and newly built Soviet fighters, such as the Yak-7, appeared in the sky. “They were very dangerous,” Wernicke recalled. “They even dived right behind us.” After their initial knockout blow to the Soviet air force, the Germans hadn’t had much to worry about from that quarter. During the battle for Moscow, that began to change.

  Like the soldiers on the ground, the German fliers also began to learn about the ferocity of the Russian climate. They, too, hadn’t been supplied with winter clothing. On the ground, this meant they were always cold, and, flying at sixteen thousand feet, they were literally freezing in temperatures that reached minus 49 degrees Fahrenheit. “You couldn’t stand the cold,” Wernicke said, still shuddering at the memory of how this further diminished the chance of survival. During November and December 1941, almost half of his squadron’s hundred planes, which flew from an airfield in Kalinin north of Moscow, didn’t return from their missions.

  But the real danger to Moscow was on the ground, not in the air. It would be the ground troops on both sides who would determine the outcome of the battle, and the Kremlin tried to add fresh troops any way it could. In the midst of the panic in the city on October 16, the Moscow region reported that it had collected 11,500 volunteers for Communist brigades, as the home guard units were dubbed then. Since they consisted of workers who hadn’t been called up earlier or in some cases had been rejected because of health reasons, that number had shrunk to about ten thousand by the end of the month.

  From the start, these newly minted fighters were at a serious disadvantage. They received whatever leftover weapons could be found, usually obsolete guns of Polish, French, or other foreign make, some dating back to World War I. Many of them were defective or lacked appropriate ammunition. These were problems that had been evident from the beginning of the German invasion, when the first volunteers were hastily assembled. Abram Gordon, who had just graduated from the State Pedagogical Institute, had volunteered right away. He found himself in a unit equipped with Polish rifles without any cartridges at all. Outfitted in whatever uniforms could be patched together, they hardly looked like genuine soldiers. Gordon recalled rescuing a fellow volunteer by the name of Petrovsky, who had been surrounded by a crowd yelling that he was a German spy, which prompted the police to race to the scene. “Our buddy was wearing a black uniform, carrying a strange Polish rifle and, with his beard and mustache, was taken for a German paratrooper,” he said.

  Even when they received more modern Soviet guns, the volunteers had the chance to try them only a couple of times before they found themselves in action. “It definitely wasn’t enough practice because many of us were handling guns for the first time in our lives,” Gordon pointed out. But soon they’d be thrown into battle against German tanks, sometimes armed only with grenades and Molotov cocktails. In many cases, these encounters amounted to suicide missions.

  And death could come from any quarter. Boris Kagan, a young engineer who volunteered on October 15, found himself in a battle about twenty-five miles from Moscow. As his unit came to a village, he saw Soviet soldiers fleeing the Germans. “Suddenly a tall [Soviet] officer ran out of a house with his gun and started shooting the soldiers who were running,” he said. Four of the soldiers were killed.

  During the fighting in the second half of October, Zhukov’s military command issued an appeal to the troops for courage “in this grave hour of danger for our state.” The message was one of patriotism: “The homeland calls on us to stand as an indestructible wall and to bar the Fascist hordes from our beloved Moscow. What we require now, as never before, are vigilance, iron discipline, organization, determined action, unbending will for victory and a readiness for self-sacrifice.”

  For the Soviet leadership, this, as always, translated into a willingness to sacrifice anyone they saw fit, as the shooting of the retreating soldiers demonstrated. The Kremlin saw no reason to dial back on its policy of terror, whether or not it had anything to do with the current fighting. On the contrary, the machinery of repression kept on working, often with redoubled intensity. Only a few days after Zhukov’s appeal, Stalin’s executioners were at work again, this time dispensing with those who had just barely survived the military purge trials of the 1930s. Among the victims: the widows of Marshal Tukhachevsky and several other top officers who were tried and shot in 1938, and the famed fighter pilots of the Spanish Civil War, Pavel Rychagov and Yakov Smushkevich. Nothing, not even the desperate efforts to save Moscow, could stop the internal bloodletting.

  With the arrival of the first special evacuation trains in mid-October, Kuibyshev began to adjust to its role as the alternate Soviet capital, a designation it would keep until the summer of 1943, when it was no longer deemed necessary. Led by top Soviet officials and foreign diplomats, accompanied by entire theaters and orchestras from Moscow, the new arrivals would triple the size of the city’s population, from three hundred thousand to nine hundred thousand. Many local inhabitants were given twenty-four hours to vacate their apartments so that they could be taken over by government offices and foreign embassies, and no provision was made for where they were supposed to go. The message was simple: as locals, they should fend for themselves, moving in with relatives or anyone else who would take them.

  Not surprisingly, one of the top priorities of the officials dispatched to Kuibyshev was to prepare safe accommodations for Stalin, on the assumption that he’d have to relocate there. While offices and living quarters were quickly readied in a five-story building in the center of the city, the officials weren’t about to stint on providing full protection for their leader in case the Germans kept pushing past Moscow. They drew up plans for the construction of a massiv
e bunker sunk deep into the ground, whose existence was kept secret not only during the war but even until the end of the Soviet Union nearly five decades later.

  Construction of the bunker didn’t begin until February 1942, when 597 highly experienced construction workers from the Moscow subway system came on special assignment for the project. Working sixteen to eighteen hours a day, they dug out 918,000 cubic feet of soil so that they could build the bunker 121 feet deep, making it the deepest bunker in the world—the equivalent of a twelve-story building below the surface. By comparison, Hitler’s bunker in his Wolf’s Lair headquarters in East Prussia was forty-five feet deep. Completed in November 1942, the bunker’s main hall, which was to serve as Stalin’s working area, was the size of the Aero-port subway station in Moscow, and built of similar materials. Today, the bunker serves as a museum and an emergency shelter, capable of holding six hundred people.

  But after he imposed martial law in Moscow, which put an abrupt end to most of the looting and other disorders, Stalin decided he wasn’t going to join the evacuation after all—at least, not yet. As the building of the bunker attested, he wasn’t ruling out that possibility completely. But his instinct was to hang on in Moscow as long as he could, recognizing that his presence there would have a huge psychological impact. Whether they feared or loathed Stalin, many Muscovites and the Soviet troops trying to defend them were watching his movements. It was no accident that the panic had started when rumors spread that he was leaving or had already left Moscow and that people took heart when they learned he was still in the capital.

  As November 7 approached—the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which was normally the occasion of a lavish display of Soviet military might—Stalin startled Molotov and Beria by asking, “How are we going to have the military parade? Maybe two or three hours earlier?”

  Neither of those two cronies nor the Moscow military commander, General Pavel Artemyev, had contemplated the possibility of holding a parade at a time when the Germans were pushing closer and closer to Moscow and their planes were conducting regular raids on the city. Artemyev said flat out that a parade was impossible.

  But Stalin had made up his mind. “The anti-aircraft defenses around Moscow must be reinforced,” he declared. “The main military leaders are at the front. [General] Budenny will take the parade and General Artemyev will be in command. If there’s an air raid during the parade and there are dead and wounded, they must be quickly removed and the parade allowed to go on. A newsreel should be made of it and distributed throughout the country in large numbers. The newspapers should give the parade wide coverage.” He added that he’d use the occasion to give a speech. “What do you think?” he asked.

  Molotov raised the obvious objection. “But what about the risk? There would be a risk, though I admit the political response here and abroad would be enormous.”

  “So it’s decided!” Stalin concluded. “Make the appropriate arrangements.”

  It was almost as if the Soviet leader knew something—or had reason to hope for something—that would prove that this risk was worth taking.

  8

  Saboteurs, Jugglers, and Spies

  During the summer of 2005, in the midst of the building boom in Moscow, the city’s inhabitants were provided with a vivid reminder of the legacy of the battle for the capital sixty-four years earlier. As construction workers began knocking down the Moskva Hotel, the Stalin-era landmark close to Red Square, they discovered more than a ton of explosives in the building’s foundations. Luckily, the TNT had deteriorated over time and there were no detonators, which suggested that either the hotel had served as a storage site for the explosives or the authorities had never completed the preparations to blow up the building. But whatever happened, there was no doubt that the hotel had figured in the Soviet leadership’s plans for a German-occupied Moscow. The idea was to welcome the Germans with as many explosions of key buildings and installations as possible.

  The battle for Moscow was full of secret plans and conspiratorial activity, most of it organized by the NKVD, an organization that always thrived in the shadows. By early October, the NKVD bosses were working on the assumption that the Germans would soon be occupying Moscow and the only resistance left would be whatever underground cells they could put together. At one of three hidden printing plants that they hoped to keep operating under the noses of the new masters of the capital, the first of what promised to be a series of pamphlets was prepared in galley form. It read:

  Comrades! We left Moscow due to the continuous attacks of the Germans. But it’s not the right time for us to weep. We know that Russians at times have had to leave Moscow and then liberate it from the enemy. Death to the German occupants!

  —Underground Party Committee

  And the NKVD bosses worked frantically to make death happen in a German-occupied Moscow. Along with planting explosives all over the city, they trained the agents who would be left behind and set up radio stations and sites for dead drops to maintain a clandestine communications network. The object was clear: to kill top Germans at every opportunity and to deprive them of vital facilities, sabotaging their efforts to maintain control over their conquered territories.

  Not surprisingly, it was the assassination part of the program that appealed the most to the men who were in charge at the Lubyanka, the headquarters for those who had been conducting a systematic war of terror against their own people in Stalin’s name. The prospect that they could target Hitler’s cronies was enough to pump adrenaline into their system and get them thinking, as we would put it today, outside the box. They were suddenly free to concoct the kind of murder plots that hadn’t been necessary when they were targeting “internal” enemies who had no chance of fighting back. These schemes would require an unprecedented combination of imagination and courage, for the planners knew that their foreign enemies were every bit as ruthless as they were.

  Mikhail Maklyarsky, one of the senior NKVD officials charged with the preparations, came up with the most audacious scheme. He recruited four performers who would plan the show of their lives in an occupied Moscow. Among them was nineteen-year-old Nikolai Khokhlov, who knew how to entertain crowds by whistling tunes. “The Moscow situation does not look good, Nikolai,” Maklyarsky told the teenager. “Apparently we will have to give up the city. For a short duration, of course. But anyhow, if the Germans enter Moscow, they must feel as though they have entered a hornet’s nest.”

  The hornets, in this case, were to be Khokhlov and the other members of the vaudeville group: Sergei Panilov, who was an experienced writer of skits; Tasya Ignatova, a singer; and a young woman whom everyone simply called Nina the juggler.

  The group’s assignment was to get into the good graces of the German occupiers by offering to entertain them. “Germans like art, especially if it is not too serious,” Maklyarsky explained to Khokhlov. The group would try to wangle an invitation to perform in front of the German brass when they held their victory celebration, possibly in the House of Columns near the Kremlin. “Perhaps even Hitler would honor it with his presence,” Maklyarsky continued. “Imagine a big stage show for the Nazi command! German generals, state officers, all kinds of ministers…and then, suddenly—an explosion…one, two grenades.” Whomever those explosions would kill, the message that the Russians were continuing to resist, despite the loss of their capital, would be loud and clear.

  The four performers underwent their training in a Moscow apartment, where Khokhlov remembers having the “first big romance” of his life with Ignatova, the singer. Their NKVD handlers delivered large stashes of weapons, explosives, money, ration cards, and food. They also received lessons on how to use their new arsenal, which included yellow bars that looked like soap but were really TNT and a variety of fuses, detonators, bombs, and booby traps. While they were supposed to await instructions from their superiors who were about to abandon Moscow, they all knew that their main task was to give Nina the juggler center stage at the Germans’ victory
celebration. During the performance, she would be watching for the German VIPs. Then, at the climactic moment, she would toss the pins, prepacked with grenades or other explosives, at her targets, killing as many of them as possible.

  As the government was preparing to abandon Moscow on October 15, Maklyarsky summoned the two young men in the group, Khokhlov and Panilov. They walked down a corridor of the Lubyanka full of clerks frantically destroying documents. When they arrived at Maklyarsky’s office, he was on the phone issuing an order. “All right. Now listen. Arrest her immediately and execute her at dawn.” He turned to the two young men, offering a brusque explanation that the Germans had broken a young NKVD agent who had been sent on a mission. Then he combined that implicit threat with a softer message. “What can I say to you kids? Nothing good. We are leaving Moscow, German tanks are already on the outskirts of the city. Hold on—and remember what you are defending. Don’t get excited. Wait for communications and instructions.”

  In his old age, Pavel Sudoplatov, Maklyarsky’s immediate superior, still relished the thought of the star of the show “elegantly juggling the pins and then throwing them at the Germans.” Boris Maklyarsky, the son of the mastermind of this scheme, recalls that after the Germans were forced to retreat from the outskirts of Moscow, Sudoplatov went to the apartment where the quartet had been holding its rehearsals to tell them that the show was cancelled. With no German audience, it had lost its purpose, and the performers were informed they were off the hook. To his surprise, the group was visibly disappointed, although Khokhlov would later claim they were also relieved that the pressure was off. Still, they had been looking forward to pulling off the most challenging and dangerous performance of their lives.