The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  All of which helped generate the Anglo-American tensions in dealing with Russia that would carry right to the Yalta conference in 1945, when most of the postwar arrangements were finalized. Those tensions were first clearly visible during the final phase of the battle for Moscow, a time when some officials still doubted a Soviet victory. It was then that Roosevelt signaled his intentions to negotiate directly with Stalin, bypassing the British. With British-American talks about Russia “tangled,” as Eden put it, Welles informed Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington, that the president would take precisely that course.

  British officials were aghast. “Here was the first of several occasions when the President, mistakenly as I believe, moved out of step with us, influenced by his conviction that he could get better results with Stalin direct than could the three countries negotiating together,” Eden wrote. “This was an illusion.”

  On March 18, Roosevelt delivered a blunt message to Churchill. “I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department,” he declared. “Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.”

  Roosevelt had never met Stalin at that point, which made his confidence in his ability to “handle” the Soviet leader all the more astonishing. But along with his conviction that their presumed personal rapport would trigger Stalin’s goodwill, Roosevelt displayed his own level of cynicism that alarmed even the putatively more jaundiced British allies.

  In his conversations with Maxim Litvinov, who was then the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Roosevelt hinted broadly that while he couldn’t yet accept Soviet claims on the Baltic states and Romanian territory, he would do so later. As Litvinov reported to Moscow, the president described himself and Stalin as “realists.” Then, with a smile, he indicated “he will deal with these issues at the end of the war.”

  Presidential aide Harry Hopkins, who had been a systematic advocate of sending such signals to please Stalin, was at Roosevelt’s side when he met with Lord Halifax on March 9. The president told the British ambassador that he was planning to tell Stalin that he recognized his country’s need for firm security arrangements after the war but that it would be dangerous to put anything in writing yet. He would then add that Stalin had no reason to worry about the future of the Baltic states, since once the Red Army had retaken them, the United States and Britain wouldn’t do anything to dislodge it.

  When Halifax reported back to him the gist of this plan, Eden was appalled. “I did not like the method of this statement, because I was sure that it would fail to satisfy Stalin and because it seemed to me to give us the worst of all worlds,” the foreign secretary recalled. “We would be ungraciously conniving at the inevitable, without getting any return for it.”

  The immediate beneficiary of these Anglo-American tensions was Stalin, who, according to Eden, “as a negotiator was the toughest proposition of all.” There were very few voices in either the British or the American camp calling for a genuinely tough negotiating posture. Someone like Ivan Yeaton, the American military attaché in Moscow who viewed unconditional aid for the Soviet Union as a huge mistake, was on the losing side of the debate, which flickered only briefly. After his clash with Hopkins during the presidential aide’s visit in July 1941, he found his warnings about the nature of Stalin’s regime largely ignored, and all the more so after he was sent back to the War Department in Washington later in the year. While Churchill initially seemed more eager to please Stalin, Roosevelt’s team emphatically stressed that its Lend-Lease aid had no strings attached.

  The conventional wisdom holds that the fate of Eastern Europe was determined at the Yalta conference in 1945, consigning it to Soviet control and redrawing the borders according to Stalin’s wishes. But that was merely the final step in a long process. The Soviet leader first revealed his plans in considerable detail during the battle for Moscow. As Molotov put it later, “My task as minister of foreign affairs was to expand the borders of our Fatherland. And it seems that Stalin and I coped with this task quite well.”

  However much they differed on tactics, Churchill and Roosevelt responded in a way that only encouraged the Soviet leader’s conviction that he would ultimately prevail. On December 1, 1941, just before Stalin met with Sikorski and then Eden, the Soviet side organized a secret meeting of Polish communists in Saratov. This was the first step in the creation of a puppet government, which would ensure Soviet control of a postwar Poland. Stalin still faced a huge threat from the German invaders, but most Western resistance to his political ambitions had effectively already crumbled, and the little bit that was left would continue to erode as the fighting progressed. The Soviet ruler wasn’t just revealing his plans for the postwar world during the battle for Moscow; he was also acting on them.

  For the Western correspondents in the Soviet Union, the job of trying to report on the battle for Moscow, or any other aspect of the war, was more often than not an exercise in frustration. Quentin Reynolds, the Collier’s Weekly correspondent who had reached Moscow by assuming the role of press spokesman for the Beaverbrook-Harriman mission back in September, had stayed on as he had planned to but then quickly began to wonder if the assignment had been worth the effort. Referring to the twice-weekly press conferences of Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Solomon Lozovsky, Reynolds noted, “Always graciously inviting us to ask him any questions we wished, he succeeded in answering none. Actually, most of our news about what was going on came from American and British embassies or from the German radio.”

  When, along with the diplomats, the journalists were evacuated to Kuibyshev in mid-October, their already sour mood took a decided turn for the worse. Larry Lesueur, a CBS radio correspondent who reached Russia too late to get to Moscow and made his way to the alternate capital instead, found the other correspondents there “extremely despondent” about their plight. He had been so eager to report from Russia that he had arrived on a British convoy carrying tanks, boots, and other war aid to the northern port city of Archangel and then endured a seventeen-day, winding, stop-and-go two-thousand-mile train journey to Kuibyshev. Exultant at first that he had finally made it, he was soon infected by his colleagues’ bleak mood. “One of the world’s decisive battles was thundering six hundred miles away and the only news we could get was what came over the Russian radio,” he wrote.

  Spending most of their time in Kuibyshev’s Grand Hotel, which was off-limits to most Russians, the foreigners had plenty of reasons to feel isolated. Delivery of newspapers from Moscow was erratic, Lesueur reported, and even when they arrived, they were at least three days old. The battle for the Soviet capital also disrupted cable communications, which meant that he would often miss instructions on broadcast times. In those cases, he would go through the entire exercise of tramping across town in the evening to drop off his report at the censorship office, returning to his hotel for a bit of rest and then walking the icy streets to the Kuibyshev radio station to make his broadcast in the middle of the night—only to learn later that his voice hadn’t necessarily reached his listeners.

  Even when the correspondents managed to get out of Kuibyshev to see something for themselves, they had trouble reporting anything beyond official information. Trying to find an acceptable excuse to travel, Reynolds and Arch Steele of the Chicago Daily News asked to visit a munitions factory. To their surprise, their request was approved. Accompanied by an army lieutenant who served as their guide, they drove by a cluster of bleak wooden buildings surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, which left no doubt it was a concentration camp for Soviet citizens who were trapped inside Stalin’s network of terror. “A few soldiers with rifles were guarding the camp quite carelessly,” Reynolds recalled. “It was obvious that there was no place for any of the prisoners to run and hide.” About a mile past the camp, they came across a large group of women prisoners working on the road with picks
and shovels. “Dressed in their shapeless gray clothing, they stood just off the road and watched us pass, their faces expressionless,” Reynolds wrote.

  Knowing that the censors would never permit the two Americans to report this unexpected glimpse of Soviet reality, their guide freely admitted that these women were political prisoners. When Reynolds wrote a glowing report about high morale in the munitions plant and tried to slip in a mention of the prisoners working on the road, the censors gutted it. They cut not just that passage but even most of the laudatory description of the factory visit. Reynolds was so furious that he cabled his editor requesting a transfer for himself and another colleague, Alice-Leon Moats. Since “service cables” weren’t censored, he didn’t hold anything back. “Moats and I would like to remain to write about the heroic Russian people and the great Red Army but stupid censorship prevents us from doing this,” he wrote. “Moats wants to go to India. I want to go to London. What do you think?”

  His editor replied twelve hours later, telling them, “You two go wherever you can find stories.” Moats did head off to India, while Reynolds ended up going to Cairo to cover the war in North Africa. In any case, both reporters were happy to leave Russia.

  When the American correspondents left behind heard the news on the night of December 7 to 8 that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, they threw their fur coats over their pajamas and gathered in the room of Henry Cassidy, the Associated Press bureau chief. Cassidy decided to pull out a bottle of scotch that he had been saving for Christmas, and the reporters plotted their next moves. “Everyone talked at once and all of us made plans to leave Russia immediately for the Far East,” CBS’s Lesueur recounted. “Although we knew Russia would keep on fighting even if Moscow were taken, nevertheless her armies would be split up if the Germans captured the Soviet capital.” Besides, for the Americans this meant that their war would be taking place elsewhere. As Cassidy put it, “The big story seemed to have gone from Russia to the Pacific.”

  But cut off as they were, the correspondents didn’t know anything yet about the Soviet counteroffensive that Stalin had just launched to push the Germans back from Moscow. When they saw the official communiqué on December 12 proclaiming the success of that effort and victory in the battle for Moscow, they were stunned. “That night I wondered if the Japanese would have dared strike at Pearl Harbor if they had known that their Axis partners on the other side of the world were really doomed to failure only twenty-five miles from Moscow,” Lesueur wrote.

  The next day Soviet press officials began extending invitations to the correspondents to return to Moscow. The invitees couldn’t have been more delighted and promptly put aside, at least for a while, their earlier plans to bail out of Russia. “The Red Army had not only saved Moscow from the Germans,” Cassidy exulted. “It had also saved the correspondents from Kuibyshev.”

  It would prove to be a temporary respite, since the correspondents would be ordered back to Kuibyshev in late December, but an exciting one because they could finally get out and do something. And they would be offered more trips to the front in January, when the Soviet counteroffensive pushed the Germans back further. As always, even when they were allowed to get closer to the action, they only caught a glimpse of what was happening and could easily be misled by patently false Soviet propaganda. Cassidy reported that the battle for Moscow “was won by as smart and successful a trick play as has ever been sprung on an unsuspecting opponent.” A Soviet officer had told him how this “trick” worked. “We could have stopped them [the Germans] earlier, but we waited until it would cost us less—and cost them more,” he said. In other words, the Soviet side had cleverly lured the Germans closer and closer and then sprung its trap. This was the Kremlin’s version of spin, and highly effective, since correspondents like Cassidy were so eager to have something fresh to report.

  Nonetheless, the journalists could see enough to begin to get a more accurate picture. Driving on the Klin-Volokolamsk road north of Moscow in late December, Cassidy recognized that the Germans still had a lot of punch left and Soviet claims of victory were somewhat premature. “Out there, I could see, it was not a broken German army that was being pursued to the west. It was a still powerful machine which had stalled and was backing up for a fresh start,” he reported. “I could see, too, it was not a feeble Red Army that was tottering after a beaten foe. It was a still-growing force which was just beginning to feel its own offensive power and was actively precipitating the retreat of its enemy.”

  In Moscow itself, Lesueur and other correspondents were struck by how few buildings had been hit by German bombs and how quickly bomb craters had been filled in. “Compared with London, the Soviet capital was untouched,” he wrote. But as soon as they traveled outside the capital, they could see how close the war had come. Driving about twenty-five miles out of the city on the Leningrad Highway, the CBS correspondent saw burned-out villages, knocked-out German and Soviet tanks strewn across a field that resembled a junkyard, and a forest “devastated as by a hurricane” by fierce artillery fire and tank battles. “The blackened wreckage of the villages was appalling,” he recounted. He saw a couple of peasant women sifting through the remains of their homes that were “only charred, smoking embers.”

  And everywhere the reporters saw the dead of both armies. While the Germans had managed to bury some of their fallen comrades, even erecting crosses for them with their names and ages burnt into the wood, many of the dead were like the ones Cassidy came across on one outing. “Here, the bodies, in small groups of twelve to fifty, frozen in strange positions, many with bent arms still uplifted as though to ward off the inevitable, seemed more like wax statues than men,” he wrote. “The snow and ice clothed their deaths in merciful cleanliness.”

  In many cases, the frigid temperatures preserved the evidence of the kind of deaths the soldiers had met. Lesueur drove along a road littered with stiff bodies of Red Army soldiers. They were barefoot and shot through the head. “Prisoners,” the Soviet officer escorting him explained. “The Germans shot them when they couldn’t keep up with the retreat.”

  Lesueur also took note of the other kind of casualties. “The war was hard on horses,” he wrote. “All along the roadside their frozen bodies lay in snow-covered blasted chunks.”

  One of the Westerners who was particularly moved by the plight of the Russians was Eve Curie, the daughter of the Nobel Prize–winning scientist Marie Curie. She had come to Russia both as a reporter and as an avid supporter of the Free France movement. Because of the fame of her mother, she sometimes was given more leeway than other correspondents. As she traveled outside Moscow, she told herself, “Russia happens to be the only place in Europe where, today, one can see towns, villages, and people liberated from the Germans.” Meeting the inhabitants of those villages and towns and hearing their stories, she felt a personal connection to them, as she put it, “perhaps because I was French and because my mother came from Poland.”

  Curie was fascinated by what the local inhabitants had to say about the German occupation. One woman told her that the German officers in her village near Istra, just west of the Soviet capital, talked about “taking Moscow and then going back home to Germany.” And they’d keep repeating, “Moscow is finished, kaput; the Soviet Union is kaput.” When they received the order to withdraw, an embarrassed German officer declared, “This is not a retreat. Our tanks and trucks simply need repair. We must go away, but we will soon be back.” But as they left, the German troops threw incendiary grenades into houses, leaving the village in flames.

  Almost everywhere she stopped, Curie came across stories of German terror. The occupiers drove villagers out of their houses into the forests, shot people at random, including a young mother with five children who refused to give up some firewood she was carrying, and slaughtered cows and stole any other food available. They left bodies of their victims hanging in towns and villages, and there were endless tales of atrocities—Soviet prisoners burned alive and children machine-g
unned who had laughed at the occupiers, for instance. “These crimes seemed so dreadful and so pointless that, at times, I hesitated to believe them,” she wrote. Nonetheless, she found the accounts of different people in each town or village remarkably consistent.

  But Curie—and, independently, CBS’s Lesueur—would stumble across a story that would prove even more revealing than the soon to be all too familiar accounts of German atrocities. It was a story the import of which they had no way of recognizing at the time, a story that the Soviet authorities would soon try to excise from all accounts of the battle for Moscow. Which was precisely why their reporting would prove so valuable.

  In its triumphant article on December 13, 1941, proclaiming the collapse of the German drive to seize Moscow, Pravda prominently mentioned several generals who had distinguished themselves in the fighting around the capital. One of them was Andrei Vlasov, whose troops had taken Solnechnogorsk, northwest of the city. But soon Vlasov’s name would disappear from reprints of that article and from all other Soviet accounts of the battle for Moscow. In the official histories, he simply vanished.

  The thirteenth child of a peasant family, Vlasov was born in 1900. In 1919 he was called up to fight in the civil war. After joining the Communist Party in 1930, he rose rapidly in the ranks, and in the late 1930s served as a military adviser in China. In 1940, he was awarded the Order of Lenin. When the Germans invaded the following summer, he fought on the Ukrainian front and won plaudits for breaking out of the Kiev encirclement with his troops at the last moment. In November, Stalin put him in command of the Twentieth Army, with the assignment of keeping the Germans from breaking through to Moscow from the north. At a personal meeting with Vlasov in the Kremlin on November 10, the Soviet leader reportedly dismissed his appeal for reserve troops to help him with his mission and only provided him with fifteen tanks. Despite that typical harsh treatment, Stalin considered him one of his best commanders.