The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  On December 16, three days after the Pravda article that hailed the exploits of Vlasov, Lesueur, accompanied by a censor and two Red Army officers, drove north of Moscow for a promised interview with the now famous general. As they drew closer to the expected rendezvous point, they encountered signs warning of mines. One of the officers told Lesueur that as they retreated, the Germans were planting thousands of mines, which required minimal concealment since the snow quickly took care of that problem. They pulled up to a small house where they had been told to find Vlasov, which until a few days earlier had been used by his German counterpart and still bore the sign “German Divisional Headquarters.” But Vlasov was no longer there, since he had already moved further with his troops.

  Finally reaching Vlasov’s new temporary headquarters, Lesueur witnessed the arrival of the general and another top officer. “With a smile they approached us, and automatically we walked toward them, followed by a group of obviously admiring Red Army men,” he recounted. “The soldiers had no fear of the commanding officers, but seemed drawn to them as an admiring college boy is drawn to a respected professor.”

  After an exchange of greetings with his troops, Vlasov shook hands with his visitors. Lesueur sounded awed by his appearance, noting that he “looked more like a teacher than a soldier, so tall that his high gray astrakhan hat with the crimson and gold crown made him tower. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles at the tip of his nose.” Vlasov told his visitors that his troops were preparing to liberate Volokolamsk that same night and that he had already sent his ski battalion to surround the town. As the general talked about his next moves, “his eyes had a look of bright elation,” Lesueur reported.

  When Lesueur asked Vlasov where he expected the Germans to dig in and hold their positions that winter, the reply indicated just what it was that Stalin liked about this general. “I am not planning my offensive on the basis that the Germans will hold somewhere,” he said. “I intend to drive them as far as I can.”

  “Do you think they’ll try to hold at Smolensk?” Lesueur continued, referring to the city 230 miles to the west of Moscow.

  The general looked away. “Smolensk—that’s a different story,” he said.

  Lesueur concluded that Vlasov’s message was that he shouldn’t get carried away with his expectations about what the Soviet troops could accomplish during their counteroffensive that winter. This was only the beginning of the effort to drive the Germans back.

  A month later, when Vlasov’s troops were in control of Volokolamsk and had succeeded in beating back several German counterattacks in the region, Curie paid a similar call on the general, since she, too, was anxious to meet “one of the young leaders whose fame was rapidly growing.” And she, too, was impressed by the commander who came to greet her. “Vlasov was a strong, tall man of forty, with sharp features and a face tanned by the snow and sun,” she wrote. “He wore a plain, olive-green uniform: high leather boots, breeches, and a coat in Russian style, shaped like a peasant’s tunic. He had no insignia of any kind, no badges, no stars, no medals.”

  Over tea and zakuski, Russian hors d’oeuvres, an animated Vlasov described his recent battles, how his troops had launched their latest on January 10 and advanced eighteen miles within about a week, beating back three German divisions in the process. With a triumphant laugh, he spilled out the contents of a waterproof bag, which included emblems of German tank and cavalry regiments and several Iron Crosses, dated 1939, probably awarded to soldiers for the Polish campaign. “There was something very stimulating in talking with this energetic man, completely obsessed by his hard job…[who] judged everything from a purely military point of view,” Curie observed.

  Vlasov was also eager to talk about military leadership. He mentioned Peter the Great and expressed his admiration for Napoleon. “What utter nonsense to compare constantly Hitler to Napoleon,” he said. “Napoleon was a real military genius, a great captain of war!” He questioned Curie about Charles de Gaulle and was clearly intrigued by Guderian, the legendary tank commander who had recently been relieved of his duties by Hitler.

  Above all, he was focused on hitting the Germans as hard as possible. “It is not so much the number of miles retaken which counts, but the number of casualties inflicted on the enemy,” he told Curie. “Our aim is to weaken Hitler. This is why Stalin’s orders are not simply to push the Germans back, whenever we can, but to encircle their units and annihilate them. The enemy is now a wounded beast—although still very strong.”

  Curie concluded that this was a man obsessed by his mission, someone who was totally committed to his cause. Along with his declarations about the need to destroy the enemy, he repeatedly invoked Stalin’s commands by prefacing his statements with “Stalin’s order is” or “Stalin’s plan is.” As for himself, he declared, “My blood belongs to my Fatherland.”

  Six months later, the unthinkable happened. On July 12, 1942, while commanding the Second Shock Army on the Volkhov front south of Leningrad, Vlasov was captured by the Germans. But that was hardly the unthinkable part. After all, many top officers had perished or been captured when their armies were encircled. What was truly startling was that the famed general then proposed to his German captors that he should be allowed to set up a “Russian Liberation Movement” whose mission would be to topple Stalin’s regime. In other words, Vlasov decided to switch sides.

  Stalin was stunned. When Beria showed him copies of Vlasov’s statements announcing his intentions, he asked the secret police chief if they could be German forgeries. Beria told him that there was no doubt that Vlasov was now working for the Germans. “How is it we missed him before the war?” Molotov asked.

  Looking for a scapegoat, Stalin summoned Khrushchev to the Kremlin and pointed out “in an ominous tone” that he was responsible for giving Vlasov the command of the Thirty-seventh Army during the battle for Kiev. Khrushchev refused to play the fall guy, reminding Stalin that it was his decision to put Vlasov in charge of the Moscow counteroffensive. That was enough to make the Soviet leader drop the subject. But that fencing failed to address the key issue. “It was difficult to understand how a man who had displayed such devotion, bravery, and skill and who had earned such respect, could betray his country,” Khrushchev wrote.

  In December 1942, Vlasov issued the “Smolensk Declaration,” spelling out his goals and in part explaining his change of allegiance. “Bolshevism is the enemy of the Russian people,” the statement proclaimed. “It has brought countless disasters to our country and finally has involved the Russian people in a bloody war waged in others’ interests.” The “others” were identified as the British and American capitalists, while Germany was portrayed as fighting against Bolshevism, not against the Russian people. According to the statement, Vlasov’s group would concentrate its efforts on deposing Stalin and his regime and then conclude “an honorable peace with Germany.” It also promised an end to terror, the freeing of all political prisoners, and the dismantling of collective farms.

  Despite his rapid rise in the Soviet military, Vlasov probably had harbored doubts all along about the political system he served. According to some accounts, during the civil war one of his brothers fell victim to the Reds, who executed him as a traitor, and his parents were branded “rich peasants” when he gave them a cow. Whatever role such incidents may have played, Vlasov later emphasized that he was still proud of what he did during the battle for Moscow. “I did everything I could to defend the country’s capital,” he wrote in an open letter. But he was angry at the “indecisive and chaotic leadership corrupted by commissar control” that was responsible for the “heavy defeats” suffered by the Red Army. And looking back at how Stalin had ruled the country even before the war, he expressed sorrow and anger at the loss of millions of lives during forced collectivization and the wave of political arrests and executions.

  Like many of the Soviet POWs who later joined his movement, Vlasov may have also calculated that he had better odds for survival if he took up arms ag
ain. It was no secret that Soviet POWs were dying in German captivity in huge numbers and that Stalin viewed those who managed to escape as traitors. Ironically, though, Hitler was also extremely suspicious of Vlasov and other Soviet officers who wanted to fight. He wanted a clearly subjugated Russia, not a liberated Russia.

  It wouldn’t be until very late in the war, when Germany was facing defeat, that Hitler officially sanctioned Vlasov’s movement. Vlasov finally got the chance to send his divisions into action in March and April 1945, when German troops were fighting a rearguard action in Prague. But when the SS began a shooting spree there, Vlasov’s troops switched sides once again, turning their guns against the Germans to defend the Czechs.

  That did nothing to help Vlasov and his doomed followers. Captured by the Red Army, some were immediately shot. Vlasov and other top officers were brought back to the Soviet Union, tortured, and hanged. And, of course, Vlasov’s name was expunged from all official accounts of the battle for Moscow. It wouldn’t do to admit that one of its heroes had decided that he would rather die fighting Stalin than defending him. From the very beginning, the history of that battle was riddled with deliberate omissions, blatant distortions, and outright lies. Only the eyewitness testimony of Western correspondents such as Curie and Lesueur kept alive the memory of Vlasov’s role in the battle for Moscow.

  12

  The Deadliest Victory

  On January 11, 1942, Stalin sent a typically brusque order to the commander of the Kalinin front about Rzhev, the town of 54,000 people that the Germans had occupied since October 14, 1941. Located 130 miles northwest of Moscow, Rzhev was seen by both sides as a crucial jumping-off point for German troops still hoping to seize the capital. “In the course of the 11th, and in no case later than the 12th of January, the town of Rzhev must be captured,” Stalin commanded. “Staff recommends for this purpose that all available artillery, mortars and aircraft be used to smash the entire city and that you should not be deterred from destroying it.”

  Russian historians maintain that the battle for Moscow ended on April 20, 1942, when the Soviet counteroffensive stalled and both exhausted armies were trapped in another muddy season, making it impossible to launch major new assaults. But the battle for Rzhev, which was in reality an extension of the battle for Moscow, would continue for almost another year. Despite Stalin’s repeated orders to his commanders to drive the Germans out, the result was one unsuccessful drive after another, with Soviet troops suffering losses that were staggering even by the inflated standards of the time. Surviving veterans talk in hushed tones about the “Rzhev meatgrinder,” a killing machine that wouldn’t stop grinding up its hundreds of thousands of victims until the Germans decided to withdraw without a final fight and Soviet troops entered the town on March 3, 1943.

  To this day, the inhabitants of Rzhev resent the fact that in most accounts of the period those who were caught up in those epic battles haven’t received the recognition they deserve. At the town’s modest museum dedicated to the fighting there, researcher Olga Dudkina pointed out that Soviet forces mounted four major operations to liberate Rzhev, all of which failed, in some cases right at the outskirts of the town. Those included some of the largest tank battles of the entire war, along with other clashes of infantry and artillery units. The Germans also suffered tremendous losses, but the fact that they held on to Rzhev for so long infuriated Stalin. “For many years Rzhev was forgotten, probably because they didn’t want a reminder of the failures there,” Dudkina explained. “In the history of the Great Patriotic War, this was the biggest military failure.”

  The Soviet troops that were supposed to encircle and destroy the enemy were frequently encircled and destroyed themselves. This was what had happened with General Yefremov’s Thirty-third Army and General Belov’s First Cavalry Corps near Vyazma in April and would happen again and again with units fighting closer to Rzhev. According to a Wehrmacht report dated July 13, 1942, for example, the Germans surrounded and annihilated a Soviet tank brigade and several rifle and cavalry divisions. The ensuing fighting resulted in the capture of more than thirty thousand Soviet troops who survived the onslaught. The victors also reported that they had destroyed 218 tanks, 591 artillery pieces and 1,300 machine guns, along with an assortment of other weaponry.

  With the Germans preparing their offensive in the south that would lead to the beginning of the battle for Stalingrad later that summer of 1942, the Soviet forces found themselves spread out and highly vulnerable. Stalin’s insistence on launching the general counteroffensive back in January to keep pushing the Germans farther from Moscow had already started that process. When Soviet commanders had to begin bolstering their forces to meet the German challenge in the south, this meant dispatching some of the troops there who were supposed to participate in the fighting near Vyazma and Rzhev.

  Both armies were stretched thin, desperate for supplies of all kinds, and conditions in and around Rzhev became steadily more gruesome as the fighting dragged on. When soldiers from either side heard planes approaching, they’d send out “hunters” to search for any food drops, racing to get to them before the enemy did. Soviet officers from Zhukov on down complained that many of the units had to ration their shells and other ammunition carefully. Otherwise they’d find themselves completely defenseless.

  When a squadron of Soviet planes tried to make a drop of desperately needed food to General Ivan Maslennikov’s troops, who were surrounded by the Germans, the soldiers watched with dismay as the parachutes fluttered down into German-held territory. “We’re starving here and you feed the Germans!” Maslennikov radioed General Pavel Zhigarev, who was in charge of these operations. Informed of that message, Stalin promptly summoned Zhigarev to his office. According to General Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who was present, Stalin was “so furious that I thought he would kill Zhigarev with his own hands in his office.” Luckily for Zhigarev, the ruler’s anger didn’t last long, since he was preoccupied with plenty of other problems, and the air force general emerged unscathed.

  In contrast to the chronic shortages of food and ammunition, there was a constant overflow of the wounded that overwhelmed the medical teams working in field hospitals. Faina Sobolevskaya, a nurse assigned to a medical unit for Soviet troops trying to seize Rzhev in the summer of 1942, recalled that her team of two surgeons and seven nurses worked frantically in the tents they set up in the woods; their two operating tables were constantly occupied. “We didn’t know how to care for so many wounded,” she said. “We were always full.”

  During the heavy rains in August, there wasn’t enough room inside the tents for all the wounded. Since there was no way to wash and change clothes, almost everyone was swarming with lice. (The same was true for the Germans on the other side of the front lines.) Accompanied by the nerve-rattling sound of nearby artillery barrages, the doctors and nurses kept at their jobs around the clock, catching the occasional short nap whenever they could. “We were young and somehow we managed,” Sobolevskaya said. When one of her fellow nurses was killed, she recalled, her already heavy workload increased further, and the chances for rest became even less frequent. What kept her going was the visible gratitude of the soldiers they saved or mended. “The soldiers loved us,” she said simply.

  The scale of the fighting meant that there often wasn’t time to bury the dead on the battlefields or provide aid to the dying. There were also cases of the dead and the severely wounded not being sorted out properly. In the winter of 1942, Lieutenant Mirzakhan Galeyev of the 174th Rifle Division sustained a severe head wound near Rzhev. When the battle ended, the bodies of the fallen were placed in a common grave, and Galeyev was put in with them. As the gravediggers began refilling the hole in the ground, they noticed his body’s convulsions. Galeyev was unconscious but very much alive. Hauled out of the grave and treated in a nearby hospital, he pulled through. He would live to the age of eighty-six, but the headstone on the common grave where he nearly perished still bears his name, along with those of his frien
ds who really did die there.

  Inside Rzhev, those inhabitants who hadn’t managed to flee before the Germans arrived faced their own daily terror. The occupiers distributed leaflets warning that anyone who hid or fed Red Army soldiers would be hanged, and they set up a gallows in the middle of town to prove they were serious. Since they had arrived in mid-October, when the weather was already unusually cold, they seized whatever clothing they could from the locals. Nikolai Yakovlev, who, at sixteen, had been too young to join the Red Army, recalled seeing German soldiers seizing valenki, Russian felt boots, right off people’s feet. “They would take your valenki and give you their summer boots—or let you run home barefoot,” he said.

  The Germans seized whatever food they spotted as well. And both the soldiers and Rzhev’s inhabitants made swift work of any dead horses they found, chopping them up and eating them, regardless of the risks. Hunger pangs routinely trumped any fear of catching a disease from rotting horsemeat.

  Marching the locals across the bridge that spanned the Volga from one part of town to another, the Germans shot those who lagged behind and, according to Yakovlev, lobbed hand grenades into any place where they thought people were hiding. “There were a lot of corpses all over the place,” he recounted. They also began selecting the healthy younger inhabitants to serve as forced laborers, herding them onto trains for the trip west, tearing screaming mothers from their children whenever they decided they only wanted one member of the family.

  In the autumn of 1942, Zhukov orchestrated Operation Mars, the most ambitious offensive yet to dislodge the German forces in the Rzhev region and finally rid Moscow of the threat they represented. Stavka, the Soviet military headquarters, sent out the order for the operation on October 10. “The forces of the right wing of the Western Front and the left wing of the Kalinin front are to encircle the enemy Rzhev Grouping, seize Rzhev, and free the railroad line from Moscow to Velikiye Luki,” it declared. In the three weeks of the actual operation that was launched in late November, Zhukov’s troops paid a tremendous price as they were ordered to attack entrenched German positions again and again. The Soviet tally was about 100,000 dead or missing and another 235,000 wounded. And, once again, they failed in their mission.