A War of Nerves

Stalin's initial panic and Hitler's fatal hesitancy frame Andrew Nagorski's book about the Battle of Moscow.

On the morning of June 29, 1941 -- a week after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union -- his Russian counterpart disappeared from the Kremlin. Joseph Dzhugashvili (alias Koba), the erstwhile Georgian racketeer who only changed his name to Stalin, i.e. "Man of Steel," during the Bolshevik Revolution, seemed to buckle at news of the fall of Minsk the day before. "Lenin left us a great inheritance and we, his heirs, have fucked it all up," he told his inner circle.

Unquestionably the invasion took Stalin by surprise. For at least a year the Soviet leader had been stubbornly dismissing intelligence that Hitler was about to break the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact between the two countries. Indeed he reacted with fury whenever he was confronted with evidence that he had grossly miscalculated.


On the eve of the invasion, Soviet military commanders reported that a German deserter had crossed the front lines to warn that the attack was coming at dawn. Stalin had the poor man shot. The same night his fearsome secret police chief sent a dispatch to the Kremlin: "My people and I, Joseph Vissarionovich, firmly remember your wise prediction: Hitler will not attack us in 1941!"

It is hardly surprising therefore that Stalin's confidence was, to say the least, dented by the events of the following day. The leader who inspired terror, who presided over a state built on fear, suddenly looked paralyzed by his own fear when the Germans invaded. Khrushchev remembered that the great dictator had looked throughout that period like "a different Stalin, a bag of bones in a gray tunic." His disappearance upon the fall of Minsk prompted members of the Politburo to make an unscheduled visit to the leader's dacha in the woods outside Moscow. "We found him in an armchair in the small dining room," wrote his protege Anastas Mikoyan. "He looked up and said, 'What have you come here for?' He had the strangest look on his face, and the question itself was pretty strange."

Andrew Nagorski suggests in his new study, "The Greatest Battle," that Stalin obviously assumed his visitors had come to kill him. Yet the look on the tyrant's face is not the strangest thing in this enthralling history of the struggle for Moscow. The author, a senior editor at Newsweek, brings a journalistic urgency to his narrative, eschewing the wealth of new material in Russian archives -- a feature of Rodric Braithwaite's recent and superior "Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War" -- in favor of interviews with survivors and their families that tell the story in a fresh and readable way.

Such an approach owes its success to the oddly telescoping plotline of the Battle of Moscow itself, with its dramatic setbacks and sudden reversals in a few short months. Take the upshot of the dacha trip, which was intended to persuade Stalin to lead a new committee that would be able to make rapid decisions during the war, bypassing the rest of the government. On Nov. 7, 1941, only 4 1/2 months after his panic-stricken disappearance into the woods, Stalin stood on the podium above Lenin's mausoleum in Red Square marking the anniversary of the October Revolution, despite the sound of German artillery only 20 kilometers away.

The rapidity of the German advance, known as Operation Barbarossa, surprised Stalin as much as the invasion itself. In the first month, the Wehrmacht drove 800 kilometers into Soviet territory with its army of 3 million soldiers, 4,000 tanks and 3,000 aircraft, to say nothing of 600,000 horses still essential in the middle of the last century for transporting weaponry and other supplies. Hitler dreamed of an empire that would extend 400 kilometers east of the Urals, according to his plan "to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as Redskins. ... In this business I shall go ahead cold-bloodedly."


Itar-Tass
Tanks cross Moscow's Pushkin Square on the way to the front in the winter of 1941.

In terms of the military campaign, however, the German leader was anything but ruthless. Indeed Nagorski and Braithwaite both argue that it was his failure to advance on Moscow in the first weeks of the war that led to his army's eventual and warm-blooded defeat in the harsh Siberian winter. His loss of nerve reflects Stalin's, and gives Nagorski's book a powerful human symmetry.

On Sept. 16, 1941, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock gave the orders for the capture of Moscow under the codename "Typhoon," and the following month German troops surrounded seven Soviet armies near the cities of Vyazma and Bryansk, just west of Moscow, killing or capturing a million men. The novelist and journalist Vasily Grossman, who reported from the frontline for the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, noted that the October weather seemed to the Germans a more daunting opponent than the Red Army itself. "General Mud and General Cold are helping the Russian side," he added. "But it is true that only those who are strong can make nature work for them, while the weak are at the mercy of nature."

German field commander General Heinz Guderian begged Hitler to let him press all the way to Moscow, but crucially -- and perhaps inexplicably -- the FЯhrer hesitated, in October 1941, when the capital lay defenseless, insisting that the Panzer units head south and capture Kiev first. By the time the Russians reached the outskirts of Moscow at the end of the year, it was too late. The Germans were worn down by the weather, lacked supplies for the winter and were already exhausted by the struggle.

Counterfactual approaches to history are fun but also unrewarding because nobody can say what might have happened if the Germans had actually managed to enter Moscow in mid-October. At the same time, the shadow cast by history was a factor in the war, as Nagorski observes. Both Stalin and Hitler were obsessed with the events of 1812. The German leader was haunted by Napoleon's failure to defeat an occupied Russia, while Stalin endlessly reread the biography of Mikhail Kutuzov, the unpredictable general who defeated the Grande Armee.

One of the overarching themes of official Soviet accounts of the Great Patriotic War is that the Russian people never wavered in their fight against the German invaders, even when the outlook was grim. But Nagorski's well-researched book suggests that Stalin's own unpredictability as much as the proverbial stoicism of the Russian people held the key.

His volatile temperament recovered from the dark days of midsummer to galvanize, or perhaps terrorize, the nation into a heroic resistance. The Battle of Moscow helped Stalin to work out a strategy by which the sacrifice of millions of lives made up for the inadequate weaponry and equipment of the Red Army. At one point, in early December 1941, Soviet military commanders begged Stalin to let them move the western front to the east due to a lack of ammunition. "Do our soldiers have spades," barked the Great Leader down the telephone line. "Yes, Comrade Stalin, there are spades. What should they do with them?" came the reply. "Tell your men to take their spades and dig themselves some graves.