The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  Zhukov and his defenders would later claim that these sacrifices kept German troops tied down that otherwise might have been sent south to rescue Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus’s beleaguered Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Carrying out the plan dubbed Operation Uranus, the Red Army succeeded in encircling Paulus’s troops in November, setting the stage for the Germans’ devastating defeat there. While Zhukov was one of the architects of that victory, military historian David M. Glantz points out that the attempts to portray the failures at Rzhev as a clever diversion are “at best disingenuous and at worst blatant lies.” In his book Zhukov’s Greatest Defeat, he argues that the northern offensive, Operation Mars, represented a huge failure of Stalin’s top military commander. It was supposed to deal as big a blow to the Germans as the highly successful Operation Uranus in the south. Instead, while the Germans had to surrender at Stalingrad in January 1943, they continued to occupy Rzhev until March of that year.

  Inside occupied Rzhev, the German terror continued right up until the first Soviet troops finally entered the town on March 3, 1943, although the Germans had fled two days earlier. By that time, most of the town’s buildings had been leveled—first by German bombers and artillery when the Germans were attacking, then by successive Soviet bombardments when the Soviet forces sought to take it back, and finally by the retreating Germans, who torched whatever they could on their way out. Only 297 of 5,434 buildings were still standing by early March, and only a few hundred inhabitants were left in the city. The others had fled, died, or been deported. Most of the remaining residents had lived in dugouts and other improvised shelters to survive the shellings and minimize contact with the Germans.

  When a Soviet intelligence platoon entered the town, they couldn’t find any of the local inhabitants at first. Then they discovered 362 of them locked up in a church. The Germans had planted explosives to blow up the church, but the retreating troops had failed to detonate them. Those trapped inside could only assume the worst. With temperatures dipping to minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit, they burned bibles and other church literature to stay warm. They also had no food. But all these terrified people survived.

  The teenager Nikolai Yakovlev considered himself relatively lucky. A few months after the Germans took control of Rzhev, they rounded him up with his mother and first put them into the town’s makeshift concentration camp for a couple of days. During that time, his mother made soup from a dead cat they found, which nourished them till they were sent to another camp in Vyazma, where they weren’t fed at all. Those prisoners who tried to make a run for it were shot. A few days later, the others were loaded on trains again and traveled to Brest, where they were disinfected from lice. The next stop was Königsberg in East Prussia, and from there Yakovlev and his mother were dispatched to a farm, where they worked until the Red Army approached the area near the end of the war.

  Yakovlev would soon feel doubly lucky. The Germans herded all the forced laborers into a concentration camp as the fighting drew near, and they were later abandoned. Unlike in other camps, there was no final death march. The Soviet forces arrived and SMERSH, the dreaded military counterintelligence unit whose mission it was to ferret out traitors, began vetting everyone who had fallen into their hands. “I wasn’t a POW—I was clean,” he said, still breathing a sigh of relief that he wasn’t in the position of Soviet POWs, who were automatically considered traitors by Stalin’s regime. Since he had been too young to serve, he was considered less of a security threat. “The ex-POWs were sorted out and led away,” he added.

  The leader who was responsible for such policies of internal terror rarely ventured out of Moscow during the war. He had no urge to get closer to the fighting or to make morale-boosting excursions to other cities or towns. On the night of August 4 to 5, 1943, however, Stalin stayed in a small wooden house in Rzhev. No one quite knows why he chose to do so, but local inhabitants like to think that maybe it was his way of honoring the memory of those who perished there—which, to say the least, would have been a highly unusual gesture for a man who never flinched at sending millions to their deaths.

  Preserved as a modest library, the house contains a plaque informing visitors that Stalin stopped there and ordered an honor guard to fire a volley of shots in honor of the troops who had liberated more towns from the Germans. After Khrushchev launched his de-Stalinization campaign in 1956, the plaque was removed. Put back in the 1980s, it remains there today, serving as a small reminder of the deeply ambivalent feelings Stalin still inspires among so many of those who survived both his reign of terror and the war.

  Like the larger battle for Moscow that it was a part of, Rzhev’s ordeal put the horror of the Soviet-German conflict on full display and demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of both sides. It showed how tenaciously the invading army held on to a strategic piece of real estate long after the Kremlin had declared that the capital had been saved but also showed the self-destructive nature of Hitler’s policy of terrorizing the Soviet people. It showed how Stalin pushed Zhukov and others to continue hurling their troops into battles without adequate preparation or equipment and the Soviet leader’s refusal to ponder, even for a moment, whether a more carefully calibrated, less callously brutal strategy could have saved lives and scored at least as many victories.

  Until he died at the age of ninety-six in late 1986, Vyacheslav Molotov remained completely faithful to the ruler he served so long, always defending his actions, never admitting that he could have been seriously wrong about anything either before or during the war. As he saw it, Stalin couldn’t be faulted for anything. After all, he was “a genius” and a strikingly handsome one at that. His eyes were “beautiful,” Molotov said, and he couldn’t understand how anyone could see any imperfections in his appearance. “He had pockmarks on his face, but you could barely notice them,” he told an interviewer long after the war.

  The former foreign minister was at his most strident when faced with questions about Stalin’s paranoia, which led him to launch wave after wave of terror and to distrust the reports of his best spies about Hitler’s intentions. Molotov suggested at one point that Stalin couldn’t act upon the warnings since this would have given Hitler an excuse to attack the Soviet Union earlier than he did; then, without acknowledging the contradiction, he declared that Stalin failed to act because his spies couldn’t be believed. “Provocateurs everywhere are innumerable…. You couldn’t trust such reports,” he said.

  As for the notion that Stalin had been lulled into believing Hitler, Molotov responded with a mixture of contempt and pride. “Such a naïve Stalin. Stalin saw through it all. Stalin trusted Hitler? He didn’t trust all his own people! And there were reasons for that. Hitler fooled Stalin? As a result of such deception, Hitler had to poison himself, and Stalin became head of half the world!” In other words, the ultimate outcome of the war proved Stalin had been right all along.

  It was also nonsense to suggest, as the tyrant’s critics did, that the terror, particularly the sweeping military purges of 1937, weakened the Soviet state and contributed to the disarray of its armed forces once the Germans attacked in 1941, Molotov insisted. In his view, this was a total misreading of history. The victims of the purges were “enemies” beyond a doubt, and if they hadn’t been eliminated before the war, the conflict with the Germans would have been even bloodier than it was. “There would have been more victims,” he asserted. “We would have prevailed in any case. But it would have required millions more victims. We would have had to beat back the German invasion and fight the internal enemy at the same time.”

  The specious nature of that logic aside, it’s hard to imagine still more victims. Today, Russian historians estimate that approximately 27 million Soviet citizens died during the war, of which at least 8.6 million constituted Soviet military personnel. Even during the later period of the war, when Hitler’s forces were retreating, Soviet losses were higher than German losses on the Eastern front; on average, they were at least three times as high. Retired general V
yacheslav Dolgov, who had just graduated from a military school in June 1941 and served as a political officer in the early fighting, looked back at the battle for Moscow and the rest of the war that he miraculously survived and stated a simple truth. “I suppose it’s right to trumpet the victories to today’s young generation,” he said. “However, our victory wasn’t only the result of successful battles; it was mainly the product of brutal defeats.”

  The horrific toll of those victories and defeats was a direct result of Stalin’s decisions that weakened rather than strengthened his country: first by decapitating his military in 1937, second by keeping up the steady delivery of Soviet supplies for Hitler’s war machine during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact and by turning a willfully blind eye to the German dictator’s preparations for an invasion.

  “It would be hard to find a worse beginning to a war than that of June 1941,” Stalin’s biographer Dmitri Volkogonov, another retired general, noted. “All the leading political and military authorities had thought the U.S.S.R. might survive at most three months. But the Soviet people had proved them wrong. However, the fact of unbelievable resistance and staunchness would be ascribed to the ‘wise leadership’ of Stalin, the very person most directly responsible for the catastrophe.” Stepan Mikoyan, the son of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan and a fighter pilot during the war, put it more succinctly. “All things considered, I believe—contrary to the opinion of some war veterans who still say that ‘we won the war thanks to Stalin’—it would be correct to say that we won the war despite Stalin’s dictatorship,” he wrote.

  Similarly, the Soviet Union emerged victorious despite Stalin’s continued policy of terror during the conflict. The arbitrary executions of Soviet soldiers for alleged treason, desertion and other crimes, the killing sprees in which the Red Army and NKVD targeted civilians and prisoners as they retreated before the German onslaught and the “blocking units” behind Soviet lines machine-gunning those of their own men who tried to retreat all contributed to an unprecedented number of defections. It wasn’t just General Vlasov who switched sides, later organizing his Russian Liberation Movement. There were “Hiwis”—the abbreviation for Hilfswillige, Soviet volunteers—from the beginning of the conflict. Many were Soviet POWs who were desperate to find a way of surviving and hoped that by switching sides they’d better their chances. But there were plenty of defectors who genuinely believed they had made the right decision.

  They included members of disparate national and other minorities—Ukrainians, Balts, Cossacks, Georgians, and others—whose accumulated grievances against Stalin’s regime prompted them to fight for anyone who promised to destroy it. The very policies that Stalin had instituted to subdue his subjects—executions, mass deportations, the Gulag—helped set the stage for this wave of defections. During the course of the war, the defectors numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

  But Stalin may have been saved from the consequences of his policies by Hitler’s own policy of terror. If some inhabitants of the Ukraine and other Soviet territories initially welcomed the Germans as liberators, the draconian occupation that followed quickly opened their eyes to the nature of the conquerors. In village after village, town after town, from the border to places such as Rzhev on the approaches to Moscow, the litany of atrocities grew longer and longer and the notion of liberation at the hands of the Germans was thoroughly discredited. The number of defectors was at its highest in the early period of the war and declined precipitously as the fighting progressed. In part, this was due to the realization that the pendulum was swinging against the invaders, but it was also the clear result of the nature of the German occupation. Hitler’s reign of terror was the greatest gift the German leader could have given to his Soviet counterpart.

  Stalin indirectly hinted as much in a speech he delivered on May 24, 1945, right after the war in Europe had ended. “Our government has made many mistakes,” he declared. “We had some desperate moments in 1941–42 when our army was in retreat, forced to abandon our native villages and cities…abandoning them because there was no other way out. Some other nation might well have said to its rulers: You have not fulfilled our expectations, go away, we shall set up another government, which will conclude peace with Germany and will secure us quiet.”

  That was a rare admission on Stalin’s part, although as always he failed to take any personal responsibility for those “mistakes,” blaming them instead on the government, as if it operated independent of his control. More important, though, this statement constituted an implicit recognition that he might have faced far more defections, even a general revolt, if the German invaders had behaved differently. Stalin ruled by fear and, given an alternative that offered a life without fear, there’s no telling what his people would have done. But with Hitler giving the orders to the invading army, a life without fear was never an option. His terror began to trump Stalin’s terror.

  If the early period of the war puts the terror tactics of both sides in stark relief, they don’t account for the outcome of the battle for Moscow, which would prove to be the largest and deadliest battle of World War II. They don’t explain why Hitler’s powerful war machine came up short, why the Blitzkrieg strategy that had been so successful in Poland, France and most of the rest of western Europe failed to achieve the same results in the Soviet Union, why the capital managed to hold out.

  Top German officials and generals often blamed the Russian weather—first the mud season that trapped and wore down their armies, then the exceptionally cold winter—for their setbacks. “Will this winter never end? Is a new glacial age in the offing?” Goebbels wrote plaintively in his diary on March 20, 1942. “Certainly one is inclined at times to yield to this suspicion when one contemplates the constant, repeated attacks by winter weather.” Hitler, he added, never liked winter and he had never imagined that it would “inflict such suffering upon German troops.” In his memoirs, Churchill drew the obvious parallel with Napoleon. “Like the supreme military genius who had trod this road a century before him, Hitler now discovered what Russian winter meant,” he wrote.

  This kind of explanation infuriated Zhukov. He saw it as an effort to convince everyone that “German troops were beaten at Moscow not by the iron steadfastness, courage and heroism of Soviet soldiers, but by mud, cold and deep snow.” He added, “The authors of these apologetics seem to forget that Soviet forces had to operate under the same conditions.” Of course they did, but they were much better prepared—which by no means absolved Hitler of his responsibility for failing to outfit his soldiers with proper winter gear.

  Walter Kerr, a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune who reported from Russia that winter, offered a more judicious verdict. “It was cold, all right,” he wrote, describing December 1941, “but the weather could never explain what happened to the German Army in the next two months. Still, it played its part.”

  Aside from his failure to prepare his troops for a winter war, Hitler’s other colossal blunder was to refuse to listen to Guderian and his other generals who wanted to keep driving due east from Smolensk in August, making Moscow their immediate goal. Instead, the German leader chose that moment to divert his invading army south to the Ukraine and its capital, Kiev, delaying the assault on Moscow for nearly two crucial months.

  During his talks with Roosevelt’s envoy Averell Harriman, Stalin left no doubt about his view of the magnitude of that decision. “Stalin told me that the Germans had made a great mistake,” Harriman recalled long after the war. “They tried a three-pronged drive, remember, one at Leningrad, one at Moscow and one in the south. Stalin said that if they had concentrated on the drive toward Moscow they could have taken Moscow; and Moscow was the nerve center and it would have been very difficult to conduct a major operation if Moscow had been lost. He said the Germans had made that kind of mistake in World War One—by not going to Paris. So Stalin said they were going to hold Moscow at all costs.”

  By all accounts, Hitler kept changing his mind about th
e importance of seizing Moscow. He’d predict that a quick victory there would produce the collapse of the Soviet Union, but after encountering more resistance than expected, he’d act as if it wasn’t at the top of his list of priorities. One clear reflection of this can be found in Goebbels’ diary entry on March 20, 1942. In it he flatly declares: “The Führer had no intention whatever of going to Moscow.” Yet a few lines later, he states that Hitler’s plans for the coming spring and summer consist of “the Caucasus, Leningrad, and Moscow.” For a leader who had scored his first victories by a string of audacious actions, his behavior during the battle for Moscow revealed a new vacillating side to his character, which would become increasingly visible as the war dragged on.

  The one firm decision Hitler made then—to dismiss several top generals and assume direct command of all military operations in December 1941—meant that he drew the conclusion from the defeat at Moscow that he needed to rely on his generals less, not more. “He wanted to be another Napoleon, who had only tolerated men under him who would obediently carry out his will,” Field Marshal Erich von Manstein would write later. “Unfortunately he had neither Napoleon’s military training nor his military genius.” Hitler also continued to believe that he could outdo Napoleon by winning the war in Russia even after many of his generals were coming to the opposite conclusion.