Acclaim for Rodric Braithwaite’s
MOSCOW 1941
“A fascinating account of the Eastern Front’s crucial showdown…. Evokes how things might
viscerally have felt…. A wonderful book about a battle that … was in fact the biggest in world
history…. Excellent.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“A remarkable epic, vividly portrayed.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
“A vivid picture of the stark and bloody struggle for national survival with which Russia’s
war began…. As military epics go, Hitler’s lightning assault on Moscow in June 1941 and the
desperate but successful defense of the Russian capital that winter can hardly be matched. It has
an able chronicler in Sir Rodric Braithwaite.”
—The Economist
“[Braithwaite] has succeeded triumphantly in restoring the Battle for Moscow to its proper
place in history.”
—The Daily Telegraph (London)
“Riveting…. After reading Braithwaite’s account, no one will be able to recall the great
battles of World War II without adding the name Moscow…. [He] casts an unsparing light on
established truths and never fears the ugly fact about the conduct of the war on both sides.”
—The Seattle Times
“A masterful account.”
—The Times (London)
RODRIC BRAITHWAITE
MOSCOW 1941
Rodric Braithwaite is also the author of Across the Moscow River: The World Turned Upside
Down. He was British ambassador to Moscow from 1988 to 1992 and now lives in London.
Currently, he is at work on a book on the Russians in Afghanistan.
ALSO BY RODRIC BRAITHWAITE
Across the Moscow River:
The World Turned Upside Down
This book is about the men and women who lived and worked and stood their ground in Moscow in
the autumn and winter of 1941. It is dedicated to the survivors who gave up so much of their time to
tell me what it was like, and to their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, who live in a
very different city today.
And it is dedicated to Lev Parshin, who found so many of them for me. Without his tireless
enthusiasm, energy, and ingenuity the book would have been a much poorer thing.
Contents
Maps
Note on Transliteration
New Year, 1941
PART I: THE SLOW APPROACH OF THUNDER
1 The Shaping of the City
2 Forging Utopia
3 Wars and Rumours of Wars
PART II: THE STORM BREAKS
4 22 June 1941
5 The Russians Fight Back
6 The Volunteers
7 Mobilising the Masses
8 Stalin Takes a Grip
9 The Eye of the Storm
10 Fire over Moscow
PART III: TYPHOON
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
The Germans Break Through
Panic
Evacuation
Compressing the Spring
The Spring Uncoils
Defeat into Victory
Aftermath
Acknowledgements
Notes
Sources
Map 1: Central Moscow in 1941
This map shows how the requirements of defence over the centuries imposed a concentric plan on
the layout of Moscow, and how the main highways radiated outwards. The main German thrusts in
1941 were along the Mozhaisk, Leningrad and Volokolamsk Highways.
KEY:
1 The Kremlin
2 Red Square
3 GUM, the main universal store on Red Square
4 St. Basil’s cathedral
5 The House on the Embankment
6 The Palace of the Soviets, under construction on the site of the cathedral of Christ the Saviour
7 The Lubyanka, the headquarters of the NKVD
8 The Bolshoi Theatre (closed for repair on the eve of the war and damaged by a bomb)
9 The Moscow City Council (formerly residence of the governor of Moscow)
The Mayakovski Metro Station (where the anniversary of the Revolution was celebrated on 6
10
November 1941)
11 The Kirov Metro Station (the command post of the general staff during the war)
Map 2: The Invasion Route to Moscow
The Poles in 1612, the French in 1812, and the Germans in 1941 all travelled along the same route
to Moscow. On all three occasions the Russians stood and fought at Smolensk, and in 1812 and 1941
they stood at Borodino. The German army in 1941 was almost as dependent on horses as Napoleon’s
army, and took a lot longer to get to Moscow.
What distinguished the German invasion was the ability of the Wehrmacht to use fast-moving
armoured forces to surround and capture huge numbers of Russian soldiers. According to German
figures, 324,000 men were taken at Bialystok and Minsk on 10 July; 310,000 at Smolensk on 6
August; 103,000 at Uman on 9 August; 84,000 at Gomel on 20 August; 665,000 at Kiev on 16
September; 107,000 at Azov on 11 October; 663,000 around Vyazma and Bryansk on 18 October.
Map 3: Battle of Moscow 30 September–5 December
The Germans launched their assault on Moscow, Operation Typhoon, at the beginning of October.
The Panzers of Army Group Centre outflanked the Russians from the North and the South, tore a hole
three hundred miles wide in the Russian line, captured over 700,000 soldiers, and by the end of the
month were only eighty miles from Moscow. After a pause, they resumed their advance on 15
November. But now the Russian resistance had stiffened. The final German thrust along the main
Mozhaisk Highway petered out on 5 December, and the Germans were thrown back up to 150 miles by
a Russian counteroffensive that their intelligence had entirely failed to predict.
Note on Transliteration
I have not adopted any of the standard scholarly systems of transliteration, nor have I tried to be
rigidly consistent. My system attempts to be simple, phonetic, and as easy as may be for the nonRussian speaker (Russian speakers will be able to work out the original spelling for themselves). The
sounds should be spoken as written. Some sounds which do not exist in English are represented thus:
“kh,” as in Khrushchëv, sounds like “ch” in “loch;”
“zh,” as in Zhukov, sounds like “ge” in “rouge.”
An “e” at the beginning of a Russian word is usually pronounced “ye.” Thus “Yeltsin” not “Eltsin;”
but “Mount Elbruz” not “Mount Yelbruz” (because in Russian the “E” in this case is a different letter).
I have used one special sign: “ë.” The same letter is used in Russian; it is pronounced “yaw.” It is
usually stressed, as in KhrushCHËV, GorbaCHËV, YeRËMenko; but there are exceptions, as in
TrëkhGORka.
I have used the English versions of names where these are more familiar: “Moscow” not “Moskva;”
“Gorky” for the writer (but “Gorki” for the city); “Peter” not “Pëtr;” “Alexander” not “Aleksandr;”
“Tchaikovsky” not “Chaikovski;” “Mussorgsky” not “Musorgski.” Except for such well-known
Russian names, however, I have preferred to end Russian names in “-ski,” which is more accurate. I
prefer, inconsistently, “Mikhail” to “Michael.”
I have used the names of cities, streets, and other places as they were known at the time of the
action. Where the place-names were changed by the Bolsheviks, I have put the original name in square
brackets: for example, “Kalinin [Tver].”
——————
NEW YEAR, 1941
NEW YEAR, 1941
Much of his life and the lives of those around him had been lives of privation, ordeal, and
struggle. That was why, in the end, the terrible burden of the first days of the war was unable to
break their spirit.
Konstantin Simonov, The Living and the Dead1
Most Muscovites were happy enough to celebrate New Year’s Eve in the traditional fashion. They
had saved up to buy their vodka and decorate their fir trees, and they now toasted the future and their
families, sang songs to the guitar, and played silly games like “What Have I Got in My Knickers?”
Young girls looked into bowls of still water to catch a glimpse of their future husbands. People wrote
their hopes and fears on bits of paper, and then set them on fire. And when the divination and the
drinking were over, they went out into the town to go to the bars and restaurants or to walk in groups
of friends to Red Square to hear the Kremlin chimes and see the changing of the guard outside Lenin’s
Mausoleum. The more prosperous—Party officials, soldiers, artists, writers, musicians—drank sweet
champagne in their apartments or celebrated in their professional clubs and places of work. The Stalin
Car Factory laid on a party for the military. Heroes of the Soviet Union, military commanders and
ordinary soldiers (no doubt carefully selected) danced to the music of Johann Strauss and sang the
Internationale. The Central House of the Merchant Marine entertained the sailors. The Komsomol, the
Communist Youth League, put on a party for secondary school children in the Hall of Columns by Red
Square (the same building which witnessed the show trials of 1937). The atheist regime did not of
course recognise Santa Claus. But “Grandfather Frost” wore his predecessor’s long red robe and long
white beard, and handed out his presents by a large fir tree decorated with candles and glass baubles in
the old way.2 Once they had recovered from their hangovers, there was plenty for people to do on New
Year’s Day itself. The Bolshoi Theatre was putting on Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tsar Saltan and
Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, as well as a couple of other operas. The Maly Theatre was performing
Gogol’s The Government Inspector and Ostrovski’s Crazy Money. At the Moscow Art Theatre you
could see Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Dickens’s The Pickwick Club and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Day of
the Turbins, one of Stalin’s favourite plays despite its sympathetic portrait of a White Guard family.
Altogether there were forty different shows and concerts on in the city’s theatres and concert halls that
day. Among the twenty different films showing in the cinemas were My Love starring the popular
actress Lidia Smirnova, and A Girl of Character with the equally popular Valentina Serova. For the
more hardy there was fishing through the ice on the Moscow River, or skiing in the snowbound
countryside outside the city.
The official newspapers that day (in the Soviet Union there were no others) assured their readers
that all was well. The usual minor troubles apart—an underfulfilment of the plan castigated here, an
incompetent official excoriated there—production and the arts were flourishing. Medals had been
showered on the deserving—officials, artists, writers, workers from the factories and the new
collective farms, those who had fought with distinction in the recent war against Finland, the airmen
and aircraft designers who were Stalin’s particular favourites. Millions of new citizens—so the papers
claimed—had welcomed their incorporation into the Soviet Union following the annexations of the
Baltic States, Eastern Poland, Bessarabia and part of Finland. The war now waging in the West was
given wide coverage—evenly balanced between reports from the British and reports from the
Germans. Every paper reproduced the good wishes (all couched in suspiciously similar language)
which people from all over the country had sent to their great leader, Joseph Stalin, the “Father,
Teacher, Great Leader of the Soviet People, Heir to the Cause of Lenin, Creator of the Stalin
Constitution, Transformer of Nature, Great Helmsman, Great Strategist of the Revolution, Genius of
Mankind, the Greatest Genius of All Times and Peoples.” 3 All the papers—even the army paper
Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star)—contained long and sentimental poems and stories by well-known
writers such as Konstantin Paustovski as well as by the regime’s own hacks.
With a little bit of experience you could read behind the bland reports and the artificial enthusiasm
of the leading articles to discover quite a bit about what was really going on in the world. Almost
everyone in the artistic, political or military world had lost a relative or a friend during the recent
purges. All but the most powerful lived in accommodation which was inadequate at best, squalid at
worst. But ordinary people clutched at whatever grounds for hope they could perceive. Two years
earlier Stalin had appointed Lavrenti Beria as Commissar for Internal Affairs to curb the excesses of
the NKVD, the ubiquitous secret police. Arrests continued, of course, but—so far at least—things
seemed better than they had been under his predecessor. There was now food in the shops again.
Rationing had been abolished, and people were no longer hungry, as they had been only a few years
earlier. And they were genuinely proud of what the regime had done for their city: the spectacular new
Metro, the new schools, the new openings in higher education, the new jobs in the new factories, the
official support for the performing arts, the glittering opportunities for writers and artists—at least for
those who could adapt to the official line. Moscow was the city of opportunity in the First Country of
Socialism.
Moscow was still a city of first-and second-generation peasants, people who had flooded into the
capital in search of jobs and careers. They had not forgotten the horrors of collectivisation and famine.
Some hoped that war would come and sweep away the hated collective farms which Stalin had
imposed on the countryside. But the genuine enthusiasm which had fuelled the revolution twenty-four
years earlier was still there despite the horrors which had succeeded it. Had not Stalin said that when
you chop wood, the chips are bound to fly? After all, you could not make an omelette or forge Utopia
without breaking eggs.
Most people in Moscow believed—or desperately wanted to believe—the official line that their
country would keep out of the war which had engulfed the rest of Europe. If war came nevertheless,
years of official propaganda had convinced them that the Red Army, with its huge air force and its
fleets of tanks—more tanks than the whole of the rest of the world put together—would certainly repel
the invader and carry the battle onto his territory in a matter of days.
Stalin and his generals were not as sanguine as they wanted the public to think. The Pact with Hitler
in August 1939 had given the Soviet Union a new buffer zone to the West. It had been meant to secure
a breathing space. But the overwhelming German victory in France had overthrown every calculation.
For the last ten days in December 1940 the generals met in Moscow to draw the lessons. Most of them
went home when the military conference ended on New Year’s Eve. The most senior stayed behind to
begin the business of putting the lessons into practice.
A white swan died late that night in the Moscow Zoo. It was the worst possible omen for the New
Year to come.4
Part One