The Greatest Battle Read online

  How Stalin eventually turned what looked like a rout into a victory, the human price of that victory, and how it set the stage for so much that followed—both in terms of the fighting and the early diplomatic wrangling between Stalin and the West about the future of a postwar Europe—is the subject of this book. For even as Moscow’s fate hung in the balance, Stalin was already laying the groundwork for the expansion of his empire, and the United States and Britain were struggling to find an effective counterstrategy. If Moscow had fallen, none of this would have mattered. Yet Moscow survived, even if just barely, and that was enough to make all the difference.

  Finally, a personal note. As someone who was stationed in Moscow twice as a foreign correspondent, I thought I had a general idea about the significance and scale of the fighting there. Now that I’ve spent the past few years digging out what I can about that subject, I realize I couldn’t have been more wrong. Like everyone who flies in and out of Sheremetyevo Airport in the Russian capital, I have passed the battle monument on the airport road—three oversized hedgehogs representing the anti-tank barriers that were strewn about the city in anticipation of a German assault—on each of those occasions. But my knowledge of what really happened was extremely limited. I knew the Germans had come close, perhaps right up to where the monument now stands in the Khimki district on the outskirts of the city, a mere half-hour drive from the Kremlin when the road isn’t jammed with traffic. Nonetheless, like most Westerners and even most Russians, I was oblivious to so much of Moscow’s story. This book is my attempt to fill in this gaping hole in the history books and the popular imagination.

  1

  “Hitler will not attack us in 1941”

  For a time, it seemed, they were natural allies, two dictators who mirrored each other in so many ways that they seemed like a perfectly matched couple in their cynicism, cunning and staggering brutality. When Hitler and Stalin concluded their infamous nonaggression pact, signed by their foreign ministers, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, on August 23, 1939, they both knew this was the signal for World War II to begin, allowing the Germans to invade Poland from the west on September 1 and the Red Army to attack from the east on September 17 to divide the spoils. But it may have been precisely because Hitler and Stalin were so much alike that they had to become enemies, that even at a time when they were acting in concert, the next act would be a life and death struggle pitting one against the other. Maybe it was true that the world wasn’t big enough for two such monsters.

  Just how alike were they? Valeria Prokhorova, a Muscovite who was a student during the uneasy Nazi-Soviet alliance and then witnessed the battle for Moscow, calls Hitler and Stalin “spiritual brothers.” Like many of her generation, she has plenty of reasons to feel that way: the memory of family members and friends who perished in Stalin’s successive waves of terror in the 1930s and, after the war, her arrest on trumped-up charges that led to six years in the hell of the Gulag. The main difference between the two men, she maintains, was one of style. “Stalin reminds me of a murderer who comes with flowers and candy, while Hitler stands there with a knife and a pistol.”

  There is a long list of uncanny similarities in their life stories, some trivial and coincidental, others more significant and telling. Prokhorova notwithstanding, there are also major differences, not just of style, which would ultimately play a decisive role in the outcome of their showdown. But these were and are less immediately evident.

  The parallels begin with their childhood. Both men were born far from the political center of the countries they would come to rule: Hitler in Upper Austria, then part of the Hapsburg empire, and Stalin in Georgia, an impoverished southern region of the Russian empire. It’s hardly surprising that both of them had a father who believed in harsh discipline, which, particularly in Stalin’s case, translated into frequent beatings. Stalin’s parents were serfs, who were freed in 1864, only fourteen or fifteen years before Joseph was born (his official year of birth is listed as 1879, but his birth certificate is dated a year earlier). His father was a cobbler, probably illiterate. He undoubtedly shaped his son’s character. “Undeserved and severe beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as the father was,” recalled a friend of the young Stalin, or Joseph Dzhugashvili as he was originally called. “Since all people in authority over others seemed to him to be like his father, there soon arose in him a vengeful feeling against all people standing above him.”

  Hitler, who was born a decade later, in 1889, had a father who had risen higher in society than his peasant ancestors, enjoying a relatively comfortable life as a customs official. But he, too, was a stern, authoritarian figure. To be sure, in those days in both cultures this was more the rule than the exception, and plenty of boys with similar fathers grew up to lead reasonably normal lives. And in Hitler’s case, his failure to gain admission to the Vienna Academy of Arts after his father’s death and his years of drift and frustration in the Hapsburg capital probably played a more significant role in stoking his sense of grievance than the beatings he received as a child. But without overindulging in armchair diagnosis, it’s fair to say that in both men’s lives the stern father was an essential component of their early development.

  General Dmitri Volkogonov, the former propaganda chief of the Red Army, who in the glasnost era wrote one of the most thorough and devastating biographies of Stalin, offered this description of his subject. “His contempt for normal human values had long been evident. He despised pity, sympathy, mercy. He valued only strong features. His spiritual miserliness, which grew into exceptional harshness and later into pitilessness, cost his wife her life and ruined his children’s lives.” Except for the part about his wife and children, this could have described Hitler as well as Stalin. So, too, could the credo of the nineteenth-century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, which Stalin underlined in his book: “Don’t waste time on doubting yourself, because this is the biggest waste of time invented by man.”

  Both men built their career by appealing to a collective sense of grievance, which they magnified and exploited. Hitler was famous for his virulent denunciations of Jews, communists, the Weimar government and everyone else whom he blamed for Germany’s defeat in World War I, the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty and the economic misery and political unrest that followed—all of which were elements in his stab in the back theory, which he elevated to the status of popular gospel. Although no match as an orator, Stalin, too, launched his political career by claiming to represent the little people, all those who were oppressed by the tsarist system for any reason, even in direct contradiction to Marxist ideology.

  In a 1901 essay, Stalin ponderously evoked the oppression of national and religious minorities. “Groaning are the oppressed nationalities and the religions in Russia, among them the Poles and the Finns driven from their native lands and injured in their most sacred feelings,” he wrote. “Groaning are the many millions of members of Russian religious sects who want to worship according to the dictates of their own conscience rather than to those of the Orthodox priests.” In hindsight, this reads like the theater of the absurd, but it highlights the yawning chasm between Stalin’s words and his deeds that would exist throughout his entire gruesome passage through the world. As with Hitler, that chasm never gave him the slightest pause; in fact, it felt perfectly natural.

  Both men suffered early setbacks, resulting in imprisonment and, in Stalin’s case, exile to Siberia. Those episodes provided grist for the “struggle” sections of the biographies-hagiographies that would be churned out once they emerged victorious. Of course, none of those accounts noted the obvious: the penal conditions they experienced as inmates were laughable compared to the concentration camp systems under their leadership. Isaac Deutscher, one of the early Stalin biographers, pointed out that the future Soviet leader “spent nearly seven years in prisons, on the way to Siberia, in Siberian banishment, and in escapes from the places of his deportation.” Offering nothing like the cozy conditions Hi
tler experienced during his less than a year in Landsberg prison after the aborted Beer Hall putsch of 1923, tsarist prisons and banishment were Spartan, even harsh. But as measured against the horrors that would soon replace them, they were hardly draconian. And the fact that Stalin, like many early revolutionaries, easily escaped on numerous occasions is the clearest proof of that.

  When it came to women, Stalin appeared to be the more “normal” of the dictators. He enjoyed the company of women and—unlike Hitler, whose sexual abilities and proclivities are still the subject of endless speculation—he was married twice and had three children. As a young man, he married Yekatarina Svanidze, the sister of a fellow student at the Georgian seminary where he would switch his allegiance from religion to revolution. Yekatarina bore him a son, Yakov, but she died in 1907 of tuberculosis. Although Stalin had been largely an absent husband, he told a friend at her funeral, “This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for people.”

  Hitler, by contrast, only married Eva Braun shortly before they committed suicide together in his bunker in Berlin as Soviet troops were taking the city. In his early days as a rising political leader, he demonstrated an ability to charm older women and solicit their financial backing for the Nazi movement. But he was visibly ill at ease with women his age, and he was drawn to teenage girls—although the nature of any physical relationship is far from clear. This is particularly true when it comes to his long affair, if that’s what it was, with his vivacious niece Geli Raubal, who came to live in Munich as a teenager and soon moved into his spacious new apartment, which was funded by his supporters. There were rumors of angry, jealous fights, and in 1931, at the age of 23, Geli was found shot dead in his apartment, with an unfinished letter on the table that gave no indication of what had transpired. The death was ruled a suicide, but even the strong-arm methods of the Brownshirts couldn’t quell the rumors that Hitler had subjected her to humiliating sexual practices.

  The story of Stalin’s second marriage to Nadezhda Alliluyeva, which took place in 1918, looks more prosaic at first. Twenty-two years younger than her husband, she bore him a boy, Vasily, and a girl, Svetlana; they also took in Yakov, Stalin’s son by his first marriage. As Stalin consolidated his grip on power, the Ukraine suffered a massive man-made famine, the result of forced collectivization, and Nadezhda almost certainly heard about the ghoulish sightings of starving peasants from relatives who traveled or lived there. This, combined with the rising tensions within Stalin’s court as the first cycle of terror started and Stalin’s frequent crude bullying of his young wife, took a cumulative psychological toll. Nadezhda began suffering from chronic migraine headaches and depression. One night, after attending dinner with her husband, she committed suicide. The date was November 8, 1932, just a little over a year after Geli had been found dead in Hitler’s apartment in Munich. The eerie similarity doesn’t end there. In both cases, a Walther pistol was the death weapon.

  Death stalked Stalin’s and Hitler’s early rivals as well. In each man’s case, there were those within their party who questioned their rapid rise. Most famously, a dying Lenin warned in the political testament that he dictated on December 24, 1922: “Comrade Stalin, having become general secretary, has boundless power concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that power with sufficient caution.” In an addendum dictated on January 4, 1923, he spoke more bluntly. “Stalin is too crude, and this defect, although quite tolerable in our own midst and in dealings with us Communists, becomes intolerable in a general secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post.” To take his place, Lenin urged, they should find someone who is “more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.”

  By the time Lenin’s widow delivered this letter after his death a year later, it was too late. Stalin’s rivals and anyone perceived as a potential rival—a long list beginning with Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin—would pay with their lives. After fleeing Russia, Trotsky ended up as an exile in Mexico, where he was finally murdered in 1940. Bukharin was one of the stars of the show trials of 1938, which inevitably ended with guilty verdicts and prompt executions.

  Hitler’s only serious potential rival was Gregor Strasser, who represented the socialist wing of the Nazi party. He was also one of the first of a long line of people who made the mistake of thinking they could harness Hitler’s “magnetic quality” for their own purposes. Strasser’s younger brother Otto, a propagandist for the Nazis who later broke with Hitler and fled into exile, tried to persuade Gregor to follow his lead. Earlier than most, he understood the danger of Hitler’s appeal. “Hitler responds to the vibration of the human heart with the delicacy of a seismograph, or perhaps of a wireless receiving set, enabling him, with a certainty with which no conscious gift could endow him, to act as a loudspeaker proclaiming the most secret desires, the least admissible instincts, the sufferings and personal revolts of a whole nation,” he wrote. “But his very principle is negative. He only knows what he wants to destroy.”

  Instead, Gregor dissociated himself from Otto, only to lose out completely in a power struggle in 1932, the year before Hitler became chancellor. On June 30, 1934, he was among the scores of victims murdered in the Night of the Long Knives, which would give a foretaste of Hitler’s reign of terror. Neither Strasser nor Bukharin possessed enough cunning and ruthlessness to have a chance against Hitler or Stalin. But the fact that they were perceived as rivals was enough to seal their fate.

  While both dictators used highly suspicious but convenient pretexts—the Reichstag fire in Hitler’s case, the assassination of the Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov in Stalin’s case—to sweep away any restraints on their power, they also carefully nurtured their image as brilliant statesman, benevolent father figure, and heroic savior. It’s no accident that many of the propaganda trappings—the giant portraits, lavishly orchestrated public gatherings, fawning tributes—looked so similar in Germany and the Soviet Union. Or that each dictator produced a turgid book that became the bible of his country, which all his subjects were supposed to study as the fount of all wisdom: Mein Kampf and History of the All-Union Communist Party: A Short Course. While Hitler dictated all of Mein Kampf, Stalin only wrote one chapter of Short Course, but he edited the full text five times.

  Valentin Berezhkov, who served as Stalin’s interpreter for his meetings with German and then Allied leaders during the war, vividly recalled his emotions when he witnessed Hitler arriving at the opera in Berlin in June 1940—the frenzied crowd, the shouts of “Sieg Heil!” “Heil Hitler!” and “Heil Führer!” “As I am watching all that, I am thinking to myself—and the thought scares me—how much there is in common between this and our congresses and conferences when Stalin makes his entry into the hall,” he wrote. “The same thunderous, never-ending standing ovation. Almost the same hysterical shouts of ‘Glory to Stalin!’ ‘Glory to our leader!’”

  Less known, or more quickly forgotten, is the way both leaders could turn on the charm and convey the sense that they were focused on the welfare of others and embarrassed by the adulation they routinely demanded. Even in the midst of the war, Hitler could put a nervous young woman, Traudl Junge, at ease when she tried out for the job of his personal secretary. Her story, which she told in the revealing 2002 documentary Blind Spot—Hitler’s Secretary, paints a picture of a man who could keep those around him totally blind to his true nature.

  Stalin would go to great lengths to make sure a colleague received a comfortable dacha or was sent on a well-deserved vacation, and he loved carefully orchestrated references to his modesty. At a Party meeting in February 1937, when his terror was reaching new heights, Lev Mekhlis, one of his most loyal henchmen, rose to read a note Stalin had written in 1930 opposing the use of such terms as “leader of the party” in describing his role. “I think such laudatory embellishments can only do harm,”
Mekhlis quoted his boss as writing. Of course, such passages were written precisely so that they could leak out in this manner.

  Hans von Herwarth, a German diplomat who served in Moscow in the early 1930s, offered this comparison of the two leaders. “Stalin struck me then as exuberant, not without charm, and with a pronounced capacity for enjoying himself. What a contrast he seemed to make with Hitler, who had so little zest for pleasure! As a distant observer, I was also left with the strong impression that Stalin, again in contrast to Hitler, had a sense of humor. Stated simply, Stalin was quite appealing in his way, while Hitler was thoroughly unattractive.” But the diplomat, whose dislike of his own leader may have led him to heighten the contrast, also was struck “by the feline quality in which he [Stalin] moved.” He added, “It was easy to think of him as a lynx or a tiger”—in other words, as a dangerous yet appealing animal.

  Most telling of all was the mutual if grudging admiration the two leaders occasionally voiced for each other, their subordinates sometimes echoing them. Stalin took immediate notice of his counterpart’s Night of the Long Knives. “Hitler, what a great man!” he declared. “This is the way to deal with your political opponents.” Hitler was just as impressed by Stalin’s reign of terror, and during the war, once declared, “After the victory over Russia it would be a good idea to get Stalin to run the country, with German oversight, of course. He knows better than anyone else how to handle the Russians.” Even if this was less a recommendation than an ironical aside, the sentiment behind that remark was genuine. Later in the war, Hitler would complain that he should have followed Stalin’s example and purged his military brass. And Ronald Freisler, the president of the notorious Nazi People’s Court, saw his Soviet counterpart, Andrei Vyshinsky, as his role model. Vyshinsky presided over the worst of the purge trials of the late 1920s and 1930s, dispatching his victims with the command “Shoot the mad dogs!”