Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War - Hardcover

Braithwaite, Rodric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400044308 ISBN 13: 9781400044306

Publisher: Knopf, 2006

Synopsis

A brilliantly researched and realized history, an essential addition to the literature of World War II.

The 1941 Battle of Moscow—unquestionably one of the most decisive battles of the Second World War—marked the first strategic defeat of the German armed forces in their seemingly unstoppable march across Europe. The Soviets lost many more people in that one battle than the British and Americans lost in the whole of the war. Now, with authority and narrative power, Rodric Braithwaite tells the story in large part through the individual experiences of ordinary Russian men and women.

Setting his narrative firmly against the background of Moscow and its people, Braithwaite begins in early 1941, when the Soviet Union was still untouched by the war raging to the west. We see how—despite abundant secret intelligence—the breaching of the border by the Wehrmacht in June took the country by surprise, and how, when the Germans pushed to Moscow in November, the Red Army and the capital’s inhabitants undertook to defend their city. Finally, in the winter of 1941–1942, they turned the Germans back on the very outskirts.

Braithwaite’s dramatic, richly illustrated narrative of the military action offers telling portraits of Stalin and his generals. By interweaving the personal remembrances of soldiers, politicians, writers, artists, workers, and schoolchildren, he gives us an unprecedented understanding of how the war affected the daily life of Moscow, and of the extraordinary bravery, endurance, and sacrifice—both voluntary and involuntary—that was required of its citizens.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One

The Shaping of the City

By one measure—the number of people involved—the Battle of Moscow was the greatest battle in the Second World War, and therefore the greatest battle in history. More than seven million officers and men from both sides took part, compared with the four million who fought at Stalingrad in 1942, the two at Kursk in 1943, the three and a half in the battle for Berlin in 1945. This was a scale never matched in the fighting in Western Europe and Africa. The Battle of Moscow swirled over a territory the size of France, and lasted for six months, from September 1941 to April 1942. The Soviet Union lost more people in this one battle—926,000 soldiers killed, to say nothing of the wounded—than the British lost in the whole of the First World War. Their casualties in this one battle were greater than the combined casualties of the British and the Americans in the whole of the Second World War. This was the horrendous price they paid for inflicting on the Wehrmacht the first real defeat it had ever suffered. They fought the Germans to a standstill, bled them white, and hurled them back hundreds of miles from the very walls of their capital. The Wehrmacht went on to win more dazzling victories on the plains of Southern Russia in the summer of 1942. But in their hearts many Germans already knew that, if the Battle of Moscow was not the beginning of the end, it was most certainly the end of the beginning.

Even today, Moscow—strangled by traffic, poisoned by the exhalations of decrepit factories, disfigured by the exuberant constructions of a vulgar and rampant capitalism—is a city which throbs with power. The focus and symbol of that power is still, as it always has been, the fortress of the Kremlin, the magnificent and awe-inspiring central point of an imperial city. Russia may now be bereft of empire, but the overwhelming aura of the Kremlin remains. The successors of the Tsars and the Bolsheviks still rule the country from behind the great walls of red brick that surround the offices, the grand palaces, and the glittering churches bearing the golden crosses of Russia’s ancient Orthodox faith. Above the churches and the palaces, even today, the high towers of the fortress are crowned with the great red stars of illuminated glass, the symbols of a ruthless regime under whose banners the men and women of the Soviet Union held and then destroyed the German invader in the greatest war in history.

Beyond the Kremlin walls Moscow seems to be a rambling chaos of churches and monasteries, now once again crowned with golden cupolas which glow in the sunset, of great palaces and public buildings, of Stalinist fantasies, of drab offices and slums from the 1960s and 1970s, of exuberant post-Soviet kitsch. This is the city which has given Europe some of its greatest science, painting, music and literature. This is the city where Pushkin and Dostoevsky were born and where Tolstoy and Chekhov spent much of their working lives. Far more than the coldly formal city which Peter the Great built for himself amid the marshes of the Baltic Sea, Moscow is the core and the essence of Russia itself, sprawling, huge, unmanageable, a country both of Europe and apart from it. Moscow is a city which fascinates and obsesses the citizen and the stranger alike. Without Moscow European culture as we know it would look very different.

Beneath all its apparent chaos Moscow, like Vienna, is shaped by a simple logic, the logic of defence. Like Vienna, the core of Moscow is a defensive fortress on the bank of a river, protected by concentric lines of fortification, and joined to the outside world by great highways radiating to all the points of the compass. The course of the Battle of Moscow in 1941 was determined by the city’s geographical position and climate, by the network of roads of which it was the centre, and by the shape of the city itself as it developed through the centuries in response to the actions of powerful men (see map of Central Moscow in 1941).

The countryside around Moscow—the Podmoskovie—undulates gently and undramatically across an endless sandy plain. The Moscow River and its tributaries wind across it, a place of fishermen and holidaymakers, of swimmers and sunbathers in times of peace, but an obstacle in time of war. The countryside has been partly cleared for agriculture. But even today, thick forests of silver birch and black pine still cover much of the land, dark and impenetrable except along the roads or paths that have been hacked through them. It is a landscape which does not impose itself on the observer. It has nothing of the wild grandeur of the Alps or the cultivated beauty of England or Italy. But it speaks to the deepest emotions of the Russian people: emotions which are captured, even for the foreigner, by Russia’s landscape artists of the nineteenth century.

Napoleon’s veterans complained as they marched across these endless plains that the heat was as bad as it had been in Egypt. The dust cast up by the marching men and vehicles was so thick that the sun was sometimes reduced to a dim red disk and drums had to be sounded at the head of every battalion to prevent the rear from losing its way. The dust killed Napoleon’s horses and draft animals in their tens of thousands, and ground and clogged the engines of Hitler’s tanks and lorries until they seized up.

The winters are as cold as the summers are hot. The snow starts in October or November and continues until April or May. The average temperature in December, January and February hovers around minus ten degrees centigrade. It can fall below minus forty degrees, but even that is manageable if your house is heated and you are properly dressed: for centuries people spent most of the winter indoors, asleep on their stoves. But the roads are hard once the frost takes hold, and if you have the right kind of transport you can move fairly freely.

The worst time of all is the moment when autumn gives way to winter and winter gives way to spring. This is the time that Russians call the rasputitsa, the “time when roads dissolve,” when the ground becomes waterlogged in the rain and the slush, and all but the most modern roads become a quagmire to any large number of men and vehicles. It was the mud, not the winter, which brought the armies of Napoleon and Hitler to a halt.

Small wooden villages and towns—Moscow and Tver (which the Communists renamed Kalinin), Tula and Zvenigorod, Mozhaisk and Volokolamsk, towns which were all to see bloody fighting in the autumn of 1941—began to appear in these forests a thousand years ago. Almost every town had its own prince and, like Moscow, its own fortified kremlin. The princes were mostly related to one another, and to the ancient ruling family of Kiev—the reason, no doubt, why their tiny internecine wars were so vicious.

The men who founded Moscow in the twelfth century chose its position on a river ford because it was convenient both for trading and for defence against its princely neighbours, against outlaw rebels, against Tatars, Poles and Frenchmen. The fort which became the Kremlin originally consisted of no more than a dry moat and a palisade with wooden blockhouses, protected on the Southern side by the Moscow River itself. East of the fortress there grew up a settlement for traders and artisans. The open space between them became the Red (meaning “beautiful” in old Russian) Square. The Southern bank of the river—the Zamoskvorechie, “Beyond the Moscow River”—was flat, marshy, and unfortified. The Tatar horsemen who from time to time swept this far North to exact tribute and to carry off slaves would camp on this plain while they awaited payment. Sometimes they cut the process short by sacking the city and burning it to the ground.

The first ring of fortifications encompassed the market outside the Kremlin walls, the Kitaigorod. Later fortifications were razed as the need for them passed, and replaced by ring roads: the Boulevard Ring, the Garden Ring, the Earthen Wall. In 1900 an outer ring was constructed to carry the railway round the city; and in 1962 an orbital road—the Moscow Ring Motorway—was built to provide a similar facility for motor vehicles.

Apart from the cartwheel pattern imposed by the concentric system of defences, Moscow grew higgledy-piggledy. There were few planning rules beyond a requirement to leave occasional broad gaps as firebreaks between the houses. Even the great highways which led to the outside world degenerated into narrow and sometimes winding streets once they entered the city. The boulevards which are such a feature of Moscow today began to appear only at the end of the eighteenth century. The Boulevard Ring has retained much of its charm, but the Garden Ring is now a polluted and sclerotic battleground for modern foreign cars and ancient wheezing lorries.

It was along the great highways that Moscow’s rulers set out to bring the neighbouring principalities under their sway, the first step by which Moscow was transformed from a minor settlement in a forest to the capital of an immense empire. The highways radiate outwards from the Kremlin, the spokes in the cartwheel. To the Northwest, one highway—now called the Leningrad Highway—led to Tver and on to the Free Republic of Novgorod, and in time as far as Peter the Great’s new capital of St. Petersburg. To the Northeast, a highway led to Yaroslavl and onwards to Russia’s first maritime trading routes through Archangel to Western Europe. To the South lay the roads through Tula and Kashira, along which the Tatars came in their search for tribute. To the East the Vladimir Highway led towards the miner...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1400044308
• ISBN 13: 9781400044306
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416