Winter Storm

by John Schettler

  “What are you saying?” said Kirov. “What about 16th Army? What about the Rock?”

  “They moved up yet another panzer Division from the south. It was just enough to tip the balance. They hit the southern edge of Rokossovsky’s defenses, and found a hole.”

  Kirov gritted his teeth, his jaw tightening as he listened, eyes dark with foreboding. “Where?” he said slowly.

  “On the road to Naro-Fominsk.”

  “Didn’t Zhukov just send the 7th Guards in?”

  “That was on the Road to Mozhaysk and Smolensk. Under the circumstances, Zhukov suggests that we activate Black Snow.”

  Kirov rubbed his forehead, for that was the secret evacuation plan for Moscow that Berzin had been quietly organizing behind the scenes.

  “It will be much colder in Leningrad,” said Kirov, and even as he did so, the haunting warning from Fedorov echoed in his mind… “Do not go to Leningrad in December…”

  It wasn’t December, and this was 1941, not the year he was to have been killed there, but yet something about the thought of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet being evacuated to the old Tsarist Capitol bothered him. “What is the plan?” he said heavily.

  Berzin allowed a brief pause, letting the news settle a moment before he continued. “Better Leningrad than Kubyshev,” he said, which had been the historical location in the original plan to evacuate the top levels of government east. That was not possible now, because there was no safe haven on the Volga at Kubyshev. Ivan Volkov had seen to that.

  “Beria and his men arrived last night on the special train reserved for you and high government ministers,” Berzin continued.

  “Stalin’s old dog,” said Kirov uncomfortably.

  “Our dog now,” said Berzin. “He’ll be growling in the factory district first if we activate the plan. All warehouses, factory sites and major business centers will be cleared. Buildings which cannot be evacuated in five days time will be destroyed. The subway system in the city underground will be shut down in three days. We’ll use it to move the most important people out first, business class, doctors, it’s a very long list. After that we destroy the electrical equipment. Can’t have German infantry riding about on the dam subways.”

  There came the muffled sound of distant artillery fire. “Our guns?” asked Kirov.

  “Does it matter?” Berzin was the hard realist now. “The sound of those guns will start things moving soon. There are already rumors flying all over the city. The Germans are here, the Germans are there, and now they are coming up from the south too. You know how it goes. On the way to the Kremlin I saw an old woman with a bread cart near Red Square giving her loaves away for free. Another was passing out roasted potatoes to any man in a uniform. In their minds, they would rather see our own people take these things than the Germans. I even saw several shopkeepers passing out warm clothing, free of charge.”

  “Good people here,” said Kirov. “They have dug all those anti-tank ditches with the labor of their backs, sacrificed their sons and even daughters in the work crews now.”

  “Yes, and the best of them are all that we have left,” said Berzin. “The Moscow Militia Division is now posted on the road to Naro-Fominsk. Many have little more than their shovels and picks. We found rifles for most. Unfortunately, when the locals saw us arming the trench diggers, it started a quiet panic. The streets have been so empty these last several days, as there have been no regular army units in the city. Now they are starting to get busy again. People are packing up their belongings on anything that will move them. They are already starting to flee to the north on the main roads. No one can use the rails except the army, but soon the army will not be able to use those roads. They will be choked with refugees.”

  “Damn,” said Kirov. “Where are the rest of those Siberian Shock Armies Karpov promised me?”

  “Third Shock Army was pulled off the trains yesterday by General Zhukov. He wants to use it to replace the armies we pilfered from his strategic reserve.”

  “He’s still thinking about his damn counterattack? That was not planned until December!”

  “The Germans might be sitting here by then,” said Berzin.

  “Not if I have anything to say about it. Tell General Zhukov that he is to put the Siberians back on those trains and bring them here!” Kirov’s finger came down hard on the table. “Right here, to Moscow where the real battle for the life of this nation is being fought!”

  “He won’t want to hear that.”

  “I don’t give a damn what he wants. This is an order! The Siberians will come to Moscow immediately. I will pull them off the trains here, then march them right through the city—ten times if I have to, round and round Red Square until the sound of their boots drowns out these whispers and rumors of panic. Tell Beria that the first building he demolishes without my direct order will be the last thing he sees as it comes down. Then give orders that none of my personal baggage is to be loaded on that train. I’m staying right here. We will not evacuate the government either. I will not go to Leningrad…”

  “But sir… Some of the ministers are very important men, wealthy men, in spite of the humble roots of our revolution. Power and wealth still beget power. They won’t want to sit here if the Germans do get into the city, and we risk losing a great deal more than buildings if that happens—we risk losing control…”

  “I will go to the Politburo this morning and speak to the assembly,” said Kirov. “I will ask them to stay and fight on.”

  “Just like Stalin did,” said Berzin, only there was cold murder in his eyes when he asked them each that question. You read the material.”

  “Yes, but Stalin would not abandon the capital, nor will I. The Kremlin Guard will fight for Red Square if we must, and if the Germans do come here, they we’ll paint that square red again with their blood.”

  “Sir, we’ve seen this twenty times over. You saw what happened at Minsk, and at Kiev and Orel. Once the panic starts, it will be hard to stop. Stalin had to order the NKVD to literally gun down any person in the city who refused a direct order—right there on the spot. To hold Moscow, he had to put more fear into the population here than the Germans could, and sir… you are not that man. This says nothing of your courage or determination to fight on, but I do not think you will set our dog loose on this city. You told me to keep Beria and his men under a very tight leash. It doesn’t take much before a panic becomes a riot.”

  “We’ll use the NKVD if we must,” said Kirov, “but I want no wanton killing. The Siberians are the key. Don’t you see? When the people here see them, men coming from over a thousand miles away, and from another free sovereign state, to defend their city, there will not be a man among them who will turn his back and run. I will address the city on radio tonight. We stay, and we fight. Now get those orders off to Zhukov, and get that Siberian Shock Army here immediately.”

  *

  Lavrentiy ‘Nobi’ Beria did not take the news lightly. Altered states or not, he was the same ruthless and determined man he had been when Josef Stalin held his leash. A short, round-faced bespeckled man, he did not appear in any wise to be the monster that lurked within. He became Kirov’s adjutant in 1920 when the Red Army took Baku where he was studying. A member of the Cheka at that time, he was swept up in the chaos of the city and imprisoned in spite of his pleas that he was a loyal Bolshevik. It took the direct intervention of Sergei Kirov to save his head, and he soon pledged himself to the security services of the state, which he found a most beneficial environment for the advancement of his own ambitions.

  Beria soon distinguished himself as a ruthless and capable man, active in Georgia and the Caucasus until those states were lost to the Whites. Yet it was during that tumultuous time that he met another man, a Lieutenant in Denikin’s organization, and one who seemed most interested in him. The Lieutenant encountered him in Armavir, moving north in a small column, towards the safety of then Red occupied Rostov. This time it was the White Army that was planning to do
away with Beria, but this Lieutenant seemed to have a good deal of pull with Denikin’s troops, and Beria’s life was spared again.

  Yet he spent a good long while with the Lieutenant, the two men often seen after that in the dark corners of a roadside inn drinking together, and talking long into the night. Lavrentiy Beria was never the same after meeting that man. If anything he was colder, more heartless, a man who saw himself as well above and beyond those around him, and viewing others as mere chattel to be used for his own dark purposes.

  Slowly, and with surefire certainty. Those purposes saw him rise in the internal security apparatus until he was head of the NKVD. There, in Moscow as his headquarters, Beria had sound proof offices built where he would bring women he had rounded up earlier that day, and brutally rape them, delighting to the sound of their screams, which could not be heard beyond the doors and walls of his lair. The bones of young girls were later to be dug up in the gardens of his Moscow Villa, all victims of his rapacious appetite for depravity.

  Sergei Kirov tolerated him simply because of his strong armed efficiency, though he had little real love for the man. And over time, the inverse was also true. Beria came to regard Kirov as a kind of imposter at the head of the Bolshevik Party, and once, he was seen shaking a finger at a poster bearing Kirov’s image and saying to an associate NKVD Colonel: “He doesn’t belong there—not at all—and one day I will tell you why!”

  How he came to know what he claimed to know was a mystery, but Beria had an uncanny knack of sniffing out counterrevolutionary plots and schemes, breaking up fledgling cadres of conspirators, and slowly filling up the state prisons that Kirov permitted for those enemies that could not embrace his style of Soviet Communism. So as long as Beria was useful, his brutality and depravity were tolerated, though Berzin personally loathed the man, and often lobbied Kirov to have him removed as head of the NKVD.

  “The man is grown too big for his britches,” he would say to Kirov in their quiet meetings alone. “He’ll be a problem one day.”

  And that day had finally come.

  The rains fell cold and hard that morning, and a harsh wind swept in from the grey skies, chilling down the city as dusk approached. Beria had three battalions of NKVD in Moscow as the muscle end of Berzin’s Black Snow plan, now hanging in suspended animation due to Kirov’s stand fast order. Beria got the news as he was preparing to deploy his first battalion into the underground subway system, where thousands of people had taken refuge when the German bombers came, and many simply stayed, being refugees that had been swept into Moscow by the advancing tides of war, and with no place else to go.

  Occasionally, Beria would haunt the dimly lit underground, moving like a shadow with his contingent of big, well armed brutes, the Grilikovs of his handpicked security guards. If he found a particularly pretty woman, and sometimes a lovely boy or two, they might soon disappear, never to be seen again. But mostly he was all business, deciding where the key subway junctions and intersection points were, and plotting how he would flush out the system when the time came, thinking of the people there as no more than sewage.

  The order to deploy for stage one of Black Snow finally came, and Beria had all his best men moving to their assigned posts when Berzin found his armored Mercedes limousine on a quiet street, and gave him the news. The evacuation order would not be given. Kirov would address the city that evening via radio, and the Siberians would be moved in as soon as they arrived.

  “The Siberians?” he said, with wide eyed disapproval. “That scum Karpov has been sending us?”

  “Don’t be so ungrateful,” said Berzin. “Those men are the only reason the Germans haven’t broken through to the capital sooner. They fought well at Tula.”

  “Not well enough,” said Beria. “Hiring them on as mercenaries was always risky, but here? In the city? In Moscow itself? This is inviting disaster!”

  “It may be our only hope of salvation,” said Berzin. “In the meantime, take no further action in the business district unless you hear from me directly. As to the subways, leave them as they are for the moment.”

  “What about my men?”

  “Kirov wants them on the city’s inner defense ring.”

  “What? Like common militias? This is outrageous! The Germans just broke through the 16th Army! Rokossovsky couldn’t stop them, and those militias won’t stop them either. I’ll kill far more of our own good citizens than the Germans do when they start to run. That’s the only way to keep them in the trenches.”

  “There will be none of that,” said Berzin. “Deserters and shirkers, yes, they must be disciplined, but Kirov does not want summary executions.”

  “Then what am I to do when they turn tail and run, use harsh language? Don’t be a fool, Berzin. You know as well as I do that the Germans are going to take this city. What do we have left? Nothing! They will come here and round up the whole government, all our top industrialists and business leaders if they stay here.”

  “You and I know they won’t stay if things get any worse.”

  “Yes,” said Beria. “The Fat Cats know when to pack up and move. They’ll be long gone for Leningrad, and without my men here in the city, you have no chance to stop the panic that will ensue when the rank and file see their shiny limousines lined up in the streets and heading north. This city is finished. The shops are empty, food stocks are running out, even for simple things like coffee or tea. They are grinding up acorns and just throwing in a few coffee beans for flavor! There is no soap, and even running water goes off and on. People stink like the animals they are! The power is barely on, and most of the city is going without heat. The bombing has shattered all the windows, and at night the cold gets ever worse. People have started burning old books and furniture, and winter hasn’t even started yet! They are cooking on old burzhuika stoves, and the fumes kill someone every night.”

  “Like you do?” said Berzin, letting his dislike for the man slip.

  “I am no angel,” said Beria, “Not when the devil’s work is what the world most needs. Take a good look around you! We used to make furniture in the small city factories; typewriters, bicycles, fine lamps! Now we make land mines, pistols, ammunition, and flamethrowers instead of samovars. The apartments on the Moscow river were all emptied out three days ago so they could turn them in to fortified bunkers. Yet it won’t matter. No one will stay here to defend them.”

  “If Kirov stays, then the ministers stay with him, and the people. That’s the order.” Berzin was adamant. “All you have to do is hold things together until the Siberians get here.”

  Beria shook his head, for his moment of ascendency, the time he loved most when his hand was on the nightstick, and his brutally effective NKVD men were holding sway, was suddenly put on hold. He laughed, and to Berzin it seemed a mocking laugh, disdainful and dismissive.

  “Karpov’s troops are going to save us from the Germans? Ha! They have yet to take back Omsk from Ivan Volkov. There’s a man worth fighting for. One day you will know it!”

  Berzin gave him an odd look, but said nothing more, opening the limousine door and disappearing into the rush of the streets of Moscow.

  Chapter 21

  On the 23rd of September the German 61st Recon company of 11th Panzer Division reached the outskirts of Solntsevo, just 12 miles from the Kremlin. They had found a small hole in the Russian line, and motored right through. Rokossovsky cursed that his men could be there now, fighting house to house if they were not tied down holding the line ten kilometers to the west. For the moment, however, the citizen soldiers of the Moscow Militia, three regiments, two railroad battalions and two other irregular militias were holding the inner defense ring there that they had labored to build for the last 30 days.

  Yet the sight of German helmets on the road sent the rumors flying all the way to the center of Moscow, and it would be another three agonizing days before the Siberians would arrive. Zhukov protested that he already started an attack against Guderian’s fragile right flank north of T
ula, and that he needed that army to carry out his planned counteroffensive.

  That attack was mounted by the 10th Army from Ryazan, and it was falling on Langermann’s 4th Panzer Division just as they made ready to move north. Once again, it was the tanks of Mikhail Katukov’s 4th Tank Brigade that made the breakthrough. Dmitri Lavrinenko was in the thick of that attack again, in a new tank, and now his nemesis and the whole 101 Heavy Tank Brigade was far to the north fighting at Serpukhov.

  Meanwhile, three Soviet armies that had been holding in the Kaluga Bulge dissolved and began flowing out of their bunkers and fortifications and heading for the Oka River line. To their great surprise they would find German troops from Model’s 3rd Panzer Division holding the very same positions they had been ordered to move to! Model was equally surprised.

  “I have identified troops from 33rd and 43rd Armies!” he said in a radio call to Guderian.

  “Where are they now?”

  “Eight to ten kilometers west of Kremenki.”

  “You have units that far west?”

  “Another push and we’ll have both those armies in a nice big pocket,” said Model.

  “There’s no point in that. We have no pincer on the other side! Pull back to Protvino. We have trouble south on the main road. Langermann can’t come up until we restore the situation, and if he fails to do so, then we are in a nice little pocket. Understand?”

  *

  The sudden dynamism of the whole sector was a contagious energy that rippled all the way to Moscow. It was said that the entire front was collapsing, and armies that had been ordered to redeploy by Kirov earlier were thought to be forces routed by the unstoppable German Army. Morale plummeted with the news that Kaluga and Serpukhov had both fallen, and then came that single company of Motorcycle recon troops to the outskirts of the city. Beria’s grim predictions to Berzin were soon made real.