Ivan’s War (23 page)

The summer lingered till the first week of October. It was an alien, an uncanny, treacherous season. Perfect weather ripened crops whose fate would be to mellow, colour, choke and rot. Across the steppelands of Ukraine, fields that had teemed with cattle were now rank with weeds. Berries ripened in the woods untasted; few people were around to care. Those who passed by heading east were not travelling for pleasure. On Moscow’s orders, entire industries were being crated up and moved to the deep hinterland; it seemed as if the whole world was bound for the rails. Families who had no special rights, no contacts, set off on foot along the roads. Columns of dust followed the people and the carts, the droves of livestock, children, and the long thin lines of troops. After the refugees had gone, and after the last Soviet soldiers, the tanks came, and the trucks and horses, and the plague of grey-clad men.

The Baltic, Belorussia and most of Ukraine were all in German hands by the end of August 1941. Kiev itself fell in the middle of September. By then, too, Leningrad had been cut off from its main sources of supply. The railway at Mga, the last transport route into the city, fell to the invaders in late August. Now German heavy guns and fighter planes closed in on Russia’s second capital, their sights fixed on its industry, its wealth. The Wehrmacht was so sure of victory on this front now that some troops were diverted south to seize an even greater prize. Hitler’s orders were to capture Moscow and then to gouge it from the earth, to turn the city into a huge lake. That autumn, German troops looked set to carry out their task. On 2 October, they captured Orel, and by mid-month they had taken both Kaluga, on the Oka river to the south-west of Moscow, and Kalinin, modern Tver, towards the north. They were within a hundred miles of the Kremlin.

Red Army soldiers faced the prospect of a complete rout. By contrast, their enemy seemed vigorous and optimistic. ‘The SS and the tank divisions went into attack with such enthusiasm that you would have thought that what they had just come from was not four months of heavy fighting but a long rest,’ Erich Hoepner, the commander of panzer group four, wrote in an
arrogant report.
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His men had just motored south from the Leningrad Front to join Guderian’s in the campaign for Moscow. Killing appeared to feed their appetite for war. ‘The number of Soviet military deaths was even greater than the number of prisoners we took,’ Hoepner went on. ‘Each night the villages went on burning, colouring the low clouds with a blood red light.’
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The Germans blamed the weather for what happened next. Hoepner would claim that the capital’s defensive trenches and mines were no barrier to his determined men. His losses, he wrote, were heavy, but those of Moscow’s defenders were more catastrophic still. The snow, at first, seemed no deterrent either. Hoepner was at Borodino, barely sixty miles from the Kremlin, when he brushed the first dry flakes from his greatcoat. But then the rain began, the Russian autumn rain that goes on falling day and night for weeks. It was this rain, so unexpected and prosaic, that ‘snatched from German hands the victory that we had almost won’. The Wehrmacht was sunk axle-, knee-and fetlock-deep in heavy grey-brown mud. ‘It took two days and nights,’ Hoepner recalled, ‘to cover ten kilometres, if you could travel on at all.’ The wheels of trucks and carts spun uselessly, forcing the vehicles to sink deeper; men cursed and shivered in the all-pervading damp. ‘Our supplies were cut off absolutely,’ Hoepner continued. ‘Ammunition, fuel for our vehicles and bread soon came to be worth their weight in gold. We could not even transport our wounded to safety.’ Somewhat grudgingly, as if the Soviets were cheating in a fencing match, he added that the enemy had used the time to bring forward its trained, experienced reserves. The mud was no impediment to railways that ran eastwards across the steppe.

The Red Army deserves more credit for stalling the Nazi advance than Hoepner gave it. With nothing left but their pride and despair, some soldiers fought with suicidal courage. But there was no denying the depth of the Soviet crisis. In less than four months, the Red Army had lost more than 3 million men, hundreds of thousands of whom had been captured in the great encirclements at Kiev and Vyaz’ma that autumn. An army that had fielded nearly 5 million troops in June could now muster just over 2.3 million.
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Reserves and new conscripts were drawn up behind the front line, but there could never be enough, even in a country of Russia’s size, to compensate for such a crippling loss. By October, too, nearly 90 million people, 45 per cent of the pre-war population, found themselves trapped in territory that the enemy controlled.
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The Red Army had the first call on manpower then and later in the war, but the industries that supplied and maintained its troops needed resources,
too. Labour would always be a problem, since the workforce was now little more than half its pre-war size.
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But the most immediate economic crisis was the loss of plant. Roughly two thirds of pre-war manufacturing had taken place in territories that the Germans seized in 1941. Anything that could be moved in time had been evacuated beyond the Volga to the Urals, but serious losses could not be avoided. Not many guns were made in August and September 1941. Four fifths of Soviet war production was ‘on wheels’.
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Moscow’s defenders soon ran out of shells that autumn. They ran out of cartridges. They even ran out of the guns with which to fire them. The equipment to assemble more was still packed up in crates. New factories were thrown together inside wooden shacks, the workforce labouring around the clock, but even then production would not pick up for some months. In December 1941, an entire reserve army, the 10th, arrived for service without heavy artillery or a single tank.
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The German boast was that the Soviets were finished. It was a mistake, but an easy one to make. The same thought had crossed the minds of many Soviet civilians that autumn. In Moscow, the scene of June’s naïve patriotism, embittered citizens prepared to flee. Hoepner was gratified by the panic that his tanks created. ‘A large part of the population fled,’ he wrote. ‘Valuable equipment in the factories was destroyed. The approach of the tanks and infantry units of the fourth tank group brought terror to the red capital. Looting began. The Soviet leaders made off to Kuibyshev on the Volga.’
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Stalin, in fact, remained in his capital city, a stand that rekindled many people’s hope. But even his presence could not quell the panic that October. With enemy troops in its very suburbs, Moscow almost collapsed from within. ‘Those were dreadful days,’ a textile worker remembered. It started on 12 October, but the crisis came four days later. ‘My heart went cold,’ the woman recalled, ‘when I saw the factory had closed down. A lot of the directors had fled.’
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So had the managers of other plants, some party bosses from the city’s local wards, and almost anyone who could squeeze into a car and ride out east.

The state’s answer was to prepare a war on its own people. If they would not behave like epic heroes of their own accord, then NKVD guns would force them to. Special troops were stationed around the capital. Their brief was to defend it from invaders outside and defeatists within. The most important of these secret bodies, and the forerunner of the post-war Soviet Spetsnaz, was the Motorized Infantry Brigade of the NKVD Special Forces, OSMBON. Among its members was Mikhail Ivanovich, the son of peasants but one of the beneficiaries of Stalin’s rule. Like Kirill, this man had found
promotion and adventure in the army. In his case, the initial attraction was the opportunity to prove himself at sports like boxing. More than 800 athletes would join OSMBON in 1941.
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To be enrolled was to be part of a select and glamorous élite. Now that élite was asked to save the capital, and they felt honoured in the role.

Mikhail Ivanovich’s specific duty was to defend the Spassky Gates, keeping a vigil from the second floor of the GUM building. His sniper’s rifle was ready to fire at anyone – civilian or soldier – who threatened the sector under his guard. But looting was more of a problem than enemy troops. Mikhail Ivanovich was unemotional. ‘It was necessary, absolutely necessary, to establish order,’ he recalled. And yes, we did shoot people who refused to quit the shops and offices where food and other goods were stored. Meanwhile, Mikhail Ivanovich’s colleagues made sure that Moscow itself would not surrender. The people could die with their city if it fell. Strategic buildings – including the Bolshoi Theatre – were mined. The Special Forces’ own radio headquarters, which was housed in Moscow’s Puppet Theatre, was set to blow up with the rest.
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The battle for Moscow, which resumed in mid-November when the grey mud froze, came to be counted among the Red Army’s decisive victories. Hoepner’s tanks took the riverside town of Istra, with its golden-domed cathedral of the New Jerusalem, on 26 November. But his men were exhausted, the veterans among them muttering that even in its darkest days the First World War had known no harder fighting. Their ordered blitzkrieg had dissolved into a hell of hand-to-hand combat; their rich new land had drained of pleasure in the vicious cold. Even their darkness, as Hoepner observed, was dissipated in chaotic light as tracers flashed and glittered on the snow.
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Red Army troops, by now, were dressed in the camouflage suits they had adopted for winter campaigning since the Finnish war. Unlike their adversaries, they were also prepared for the cold. Looming out of the dark like phantoms, they unnerved their German conquerors. And then they fought, it seemed, with new determination and new stealth. By late November, it was clear that the German tanks would get no further before Christmas. Then, on 5 December, the Red Army attacked in its turn, driving the enemy back from the capital and breaking, link by link, the chain that threatened to encircle it.

Credit for Moscow’s defence usually goes to Georgy Zhukov. Stalin’s political entourage had failed, and now the generals were fighting back. The other heroes were the reserve troops – twelve entire armies – that were brought to the front that October.
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But the capital was also defended by conscripts from its hinterland, and even by intellectuals, old men and students.
This second group went into battle with the mindset and the preparation of civilians. Back in July, Stalin had called on people to join a levee en masse, and plans for Moscow’s citizens’ defence, the
opolchenie
, swung into operation immediately. Each district of the capital raised its companies of volunteers. Anyone who wanted to, almost, could serve. Their ages ranged from seventeen to fifty-five. As one survivor put it, most believed that they were destined to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution that November in Berlin. ‘The newspapers, cinema and radio had been telling our people for decades that the Red Army was invincible,’ recalled Abram Evseevich Gordon. Like everyone else, he too believed that ‘under the leadership of the Communist Party and our Great Leader any enemy would be defeated on his own soil’.

Soviet infantry in their trenches, winter 1941 

 

 

Male volunteers of Gordon’s age soon graduated from digging trenches. By August,
opolchentsy
had joined the defence of the strategic highways leading out of Moscow. Gordon himself was sent out to the old Kaluga road. He recalled the grim faces of his ‘most unmilitary’ comrades as they set out to defend the capital, some on bicycles, others on foot. At their new base they received uniforms, drab black affairs that made them look, they thought, like Mussolini’s fascists, although in fact the worn garments had probably been captured in Poland in 1939. They also saw some Polish rifles, although not every volunteer was armed. And then their training started, which, to Gordon’s horror as an urban dweller and an intellectual, involved mastering horsemanship. Their instructor, an old cavalryman called Kovalchenko, used training methods that recalled the days of Napoleon and Kutuzov. The recruits had to ride bareback for hours at a stretch, enduring unaccustomed pain until the bloodstains from their blisters began soaking through their pants. ‘The only escape from this torture,’ Gordon wrote, ‘was the medical tent.’ Meanwhile, the news coming from the front grew bleaker, ‘though we did not want to think the worst’.
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