Photographs taken on the night of 23 August 1939 show a grinning Stalin standing beside the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop in the large reception hall of the Great Kremlin Palace. Behind them, a portrait of Lenin looks down from the wall; in the foreground, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, is sitting at a desk signing one of the most notorious international accords in history. According to Molotov’s grandson, Vyacheslav Nikonov, the commissar recalled von Ribbentrop greeting the signing with a curt ‘Heil Hitler!’ The room, he says, fell suddenly silent; then Stalin gave a little laugh and made a curtsey. The ‘Treaty of Non-Aggression between the German Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ guaranteed that both nations would remain neutral if either were attacked by, or themselves attacked, a third party. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, as it came to be known, would lead to the deaths of millions and the division of Europe.
The treaty was hastily typed up on flimsy paper with none of the usual seals and flourishes. The whole thing looks a little makeshift, perhaps because it was so unexpected. Hitler had spent the preceding years denouncing Stalin’s regime as ‘a band of international criminals’. And Soviet propaganda had been preparing the way for confrontation with the ‘Nazi menace’. So deep had been the enmity between them that they had fought what was in effect a proxy war, supporting opposing sides in the Spanish Civil War.
But after 23 August, Germany was no longer an enemy. Suddenly Hitler was a friend, and Soviet public opinion would have to be told that the Nazis were now a good thing. Books and tracts denouncing Hitler and the Nazis were withdrawn from Soviet libraries. Fascism was no longer mentioned in the press. German cultural centres were opened in major cities, and German music, films and plays began to appear everywhere. Sergei Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky, which had been ordered by Stalin to portray Russian resistance to German aggressors in a previous historical era, was withdrawn from cinemas overnight and Eisenstein was instructed instead to direct a new version of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre (1870). The Soviet Union had spent the last few years executing thousands of people on charges of being fascist agents or spies. So why did Stalin opt for a pact with the former ‘devils’?
Attached to the back of the treaty was a second, secret agreement, kept hidden from the Soviet people and the rest of the world. The ‘secret protocol’ of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was a deal between Stalin and Hitler to carve up Eastern and Central Europe between them. Its paragraphs delineate ‘spheres of influence’ in which each dictator would be free to do as he liked. Stalin would get Latvia, Estonia, part of Lithuania, Finland and Bessarabia; as so often with Russo–German treaties, the biggest loser would be Poland:
Of the areas belonging to the Polish state1, the spheres of influence of Germany and the USSR shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula and San. The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish state can only be definitively determined in the course of further political developments.
Hitler now had the green light to invade the western part of Poland; Stalin was being given a free hand to annex the rest of the country, all the territory east of the River Vistula. To Stalin’s delight, Moscow would be regaining the land it had lost in the Russo–Polish war of 1919–21, and more besides. As with the partitions of the nineteenth century, the state of Poland was again destined to be wiped off the map (see here).
Even with its covert addendum concealed from public knowledge,fn1 the treaty shocked the world. Time magazine insisted on referring to it as the ‘Communazi Pact’ and its participants as ‘Communazis’. Churchill declared, ‘The sinister news2 broke upon the world like an explosion,’ and he had good reason to be surprised. At the same time as they were preparing to sign the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviets had been carrying on parallel negotiations with London and Paris. On 23 July, just a month before Stalin’s curtsey to von Ribbentrop, the Kremlin leadership had told the British and French ambassadors in Moscow that they were ready for a deal. For a moment it looked as if the three nations would fight together in the war that Germany seemed bent on triggering.
But Stalin had always been flirting with two potential suitors. For Hitler, the advantages of avoiding, at least for the time being, war on two fronts were great – Berlin believed the First World War had been lost because its forces were split between two theatres of combat – and Hitler was prepared to offer Stalin terms that seemed expansively generous. The Allies, by contrast, had not pursued Stalin’s hand with anything like the same alacrity. While Germany had been flying its top officials, including von Ribbentrop himself, to Moscow, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain seemed to think the matter was considerably less urgent. He didn’t send his foreign secretary, and those officials he did send were dispatched by one of the slowest ships in the British navy: HMS City of Exeter took five days to get to Leningrad, and the British delegation then took another two to reach Moscow. Its leader, Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, was merely competent (the British embassy wrote to ask why someone more senior had not been sent). He made little impression at the Kremlin. The day after the signing of the pact with Germany, the British and French delegations asked for an urgent meeting with the Soviet military negotiator, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, who told them bluntly, ‘In view of the changed3 political situation, no useful purpose can be served by continuing this conversation.’
The main stumbling block to an agreement with the Western powers was a lack of trust dating back to the Russian Civil War. Stalin had not forgotten Britain and France’s intervention on the side of the Whites, and the Allies remained wary of the Bolsheviks’ proclaimed desire to foment worldwide revolution and overthrow capitalism. In addition, Moscow had understandable doubts about the strength of the Allies’ resolve to stand up to the Nazis. The Munich conference of 1938, to which Stalin had not been invited, and the subsequent policy of appeasement had bred suspicion in the Kremlin that the West might be willing to collude with the Nazis, or leave Germany and the Soviet Union to fight themselves into the ground.
By 1939, Stalin felt time was running out. He wanted to ensure the Soviet Union would be protected from German expansionism. If he could not do so by making a deal with France and Britain, then he would do one with Germany.
Did Stalin believe Hitler’s promises? Soviet historians have argued that the Nazi–Soviet Pact was a deliberate ploy by Stalin to win him time to rearm and prepare for war. His purges had left the Soviet military terribly weakened – and he might have hoped Germany would exhaust itself in the struggle against the Allies – but his conduct over the next two years hardly suggests he was prepared for war when it broke out. Stalin distrusted Hitler, but felt he had the measure of him. ‘Hitler wanted to trick us4,’ he told the politburo, ‘but we got the better of him.’ That was wishful thinking.
On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. France and Great Britain declared war two days later. Not wanting to be seen to be acting in league with Germany, the Red Army waited two weeks before moving into eastern Poland, allegedly ‘in order to aid and protect the Ukrainians5 and Belorussians living on Polish territory’. The rest of Europe observed Moscow’s behaviour with undisguised puzzlement. It was unclear if the Russians were preparing to confront the advancing Germans or merely profiting from Poland’s disarray. In a speech to the House of Commons on 1 October 1939, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill declared: ‘I cannot forecast6 to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But perhaps there is a key. The key is Russian national interest … Russia has pursued a cold policy of self-interest.’
Churchill said it succinctly. The Soviets soon bullied the Baltic states into signing treaties of ‘mutual assistance’ allowing the Red Army to build bases on their territory. In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as in western Ukraine and Belorussia, rigged elections produced Communist-dominated assemblies, which ‘spontaneously’ voted to become part of the Soviet Union. For nearly two years, from 1939 to 1941, Stalin imposed rigid Soviet control on the territories in his ‘sphere of influence’. In the Baltic states, opposition was crushed and potential nationalist leaders repressed. Thousands of politicians, trade unionists, intellectuals and teachers were arrested and deported or executed. Their homes and jobs were given to ethnic Russians as Stalin revived the worst excesses of the old tsarist ‘Russification’ policies. The punitive repressions of those years would condition the attitudes of many when the Germans arrived to oust the Soviets a couple of years later.
In Poland, resistance to Soviet rule, or even the suggestion of resistance, was met with ruthless ferocity. Four hundred thousand Poles were arrested. Over 20,000 of them – army officers, officials, doctors and intellectuals – were taken to prison camps close to the city of Smolensk in western Russian. After six months of interrogation by the Soviet secret police, the men were earmarked for execution. The head of the NKVD7, Lavrenty Beria, informed Stalin that the prisoners were dangerous elements who ‘are engaged in counter-revolutionary activity and anti-Soviet agitation. Every single one of them is waiting only to be released in order to begin an immediate fight against Soviet power.’ Stalin showed no mercy. The executions of the cream of Polish society began on 3 April 1940, each man shot through the back of the head at close range with a single bullet from a revolver: 21,857 bullets; 21,857 dead. The murders were carried out in various locations, but have come to be known collectively as the Katyn Forest massacre. In 1941, when the treachery of the Germans would turn Poland back into an ally of Moscow, the Soviets were faced with demands to explain what had happened to the missing Polish officers. Stalin first suggested they had been shipped to Manchuria; later he blamed the Nazis for the crime. It would not be until 1990 that Mikhail Gorbachev finally acknowledged the truth of Soviet guilt.
But it was not only in the west that Moscow was looking for new conquests. In October 1939, Stalin offered a ‘mutual assistance’ pact to Finland. In it he demanded that the two countries’ shared border, just 20 miles north of Leningrad, be shifted further northwest. The Finnish government rejected the demand; Moscow called that a hostile act.
In late November 1939, nearly half a million Soviet troops advanced onto Finnish territory, outnumbering their opponents by three to one. So confident was the Red Army of victory that it warned its forces not to advance too far and stray into Sweden. Dmitry Shostakovich was ordered to write a Suite on Finnish Themes, to be played by Soviet military bands as they marched through Helsinki. But in temperatures that dropped to minus 45 degrees Celsius, the Red Army proved itself considerably less effective than Alexander Nevsky’s men had been on the ice of Chudskoe Lake seven centuries earlier.
The Finnish forces had dug in along a less than impregnable defensive position known as the Mannerheim Line. There was little in the way of fortifications and the Finns lacked much basic military equipment, but they fought tenaciously, proving themselves adept at guerrilla warfare.fn2 Many of the Russian invaders had no winter uniforms and were easily spotted against the snow, giving the Finnish snipers an easy target. One of them, Simo Häyhä, killed over 500 Red Army men; the Russians came to know the sniper’s bullet as the ‘white death’. After a month of fighting, a Soviet general noted bitterly: ‘We have conquered8 just enough territory to accommodate the graves of our dead.’
In January 1940, Stalin ordered a renewed offensive under the leadership of Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, and by March the Red Army had advanced far enough into Finland to force a peace on Soviet terms.fn3 Stalin got most of the territory he had demanded, but the Soviet Union had lost 100,000 men and been embarrassed by the army of a ‘small’ nation. The ‘Winter War’ of 1939–40 further stained Moscow’s international reputation. The Soviet Union was thrown out of the League of Nations and placed on its list of aggressors alongside Germany, Japan and Italy.
The Winter War showed the Red Army to be far from an invincible force. When France collapsed in June 1940 and Britain stood alone and vulnerable against the Nazis, Stalin faced the prospect of a Germany free to attack the Soviet Union in a single-front war. He had already ordered measures to reinforce the armed forces – conscription was broadened to increase the army from 2 million to 5 million men, and the production of aircraft, artillery and rifles was boosted – but more time was needed. Stalin confided to Molotov that they would9 ‘not be ready to confront Germany on an equal basis until 1943’.
Moscow was locked into a Faustian pact. To placate the Nazis, the Soviet Union was supplying Germany with thousands of tons of oil and grain. In early 1941, Stalin agreed to increase the level of material assistance, just months before Hitler would use it to invade the USSR. After the debacle of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, Britain had tried to improve relations with the Kremlin, but found its efforts rebuffed by a Soviet leadership terrified of anything that might alienate Hitler.
Stalin seems to have convinced himself that Hitler would not risk a war against Moscow (or at least not while he was still fighting the Allies in the west). He simply ignored evidence to the contrary. In early 1941, Winston Churchill informed him that British intelligence had indications of German preparations for an imminent attack, but Stalin dismissed the message as a ploy to trick the Soviet Union into helping Britain. Richard Sorge, a Soviet spy in the German embassy in Tokyo, reported that he had seen plans for an invasion of the USSR. By early May, he had sent Moscow the outline plan of the attack and even the exact date on which it was to be launched. Still Stalin refused to mobilise his troops along the country’s western border. As late as 21 June he told Defence Minister Timoshenko: ‘This is all a panic10 over nothing.’ But Nikita Khrushchev would later report that everyone knew an attack was coming. ‘The sparrows were chirping11 about it at every crossroad,’ he recalled in 1956, suggesting that Stalin had lost his nerve following the Finland setback and was deliberately deluding himself. On the very eve of the invasion12, a German sergeant-major who swam across the River Bug in Poland to warn the Red Army was shot as an enemy provocateur.
Operation Barbarossa, the largest military operation in history, began in the early hours of 22 June 1941. The Soviet army was unprepared for the magnitude and ferocity of the attack. With 4 million men13 and over 750,000 horses, 47,000 artillery pieces, 5,000 aircraft and nearly 3,000 tanks, the invaders advanced rapidly against the disorganised Soviets. Hitler described the Soviet Union as a rotten building14 – once they kicked the door down, he said, the whole edifice would crumble. On the first morning alone, Luftwaffe bombers destroyed 1,200 Soviet aircraft on the ground, German special forces sabotaged the Red Army’s communications, and heavy shelling decimated its front-line defences.
When Stalin was informed, he refused to believe Hitler had ordered the attack. He told the chief of the general staff, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, that no countermeasures were to be taken until they had spoken to the German embassy. ‘Do not give in to any provocations15 and do not open fire,’ was the order relayed to the troops on the ground. Within minutes, General Boldin, the deputy commander of the Western Military District, was on the line to the Kremlin. ‘How can that be?’ he shouted down the phone. ‘Our troops are being forced to retreat. Cities are burning; people are dying!’
The centralisation of Soviet power, the discouragement of initiative from below and the memory of the years of purges meant nothing could be done without authorisation from the top. All depended on Stalin and at the critical moment he failed. When it was finally confirmed that Germany had indeed declared war, Stalin collapsed in despair, incapable of action. Molotov was left to announce the outbreak of war:
Citizens of the Soviet16 Union! Today at four o’clock in the morning, without addressing any grievances to the Soviet Union, without a declaration of war, German forces fell on our country, attacked our frontiers in many places and bombed our cities … an act of treachery unprecedented in the history of civilised nations … Our people’s answer to Napoleon’s invasion was a Patriotic War … And now once again the Red Army and the whole nation will wage a victorious Patriotic War for our beloved country …
Only on the afternoon of 22 June, more than eight hours after the invasion had begun, were front-line commanders ordered to launch ‘heavy counterattacks17 to destroy the enemy’s main forces, to drive operations back into enemy territory’. It was an impossible demand. Many Soviet units were already isolated and encircled. But the Red Army fought bravely. The fortress of Brest-Litovsk, the nineteenth-century castle where Trotsky had signed the armistice with Germany in March 1918, offered particularly fierce resistance. Three thousand Soviet troops held out against overwhelming German forces for ten days of bloody fighting, until every one of them had perished. The heroic defenders of Brest had shown the Wehrmacht was not infallible – the German chief of staff remarked, ‘Everywhere the Russians18 fight to the last man. They rarely capitulate.’ But in other areas the Red Army was in headlong retreat.
Stalin remained in a state of shock, and on 28 June he fled to his dacha outside Moscow. For three days, isolated from the world, he issued no orders and received little news. His refusal to prepare for war had exacerbated the scale of the disaster; his purges of the Red Army’s top commanders had emasculated the Soviet military command. Eventually Molotov, Mikoyan and Beria drove out to see him. When they arrived, Stalin reportedly muttered, ‘Why have you come?’ He appeared to believe they were there to arrest him. When Molotov suggested the creation of a State Committee for Defence, Stalin timidly enquired, ‘And who should head it?’ Molotov’s immediate response – that he, Stalin, should of course be in charge – seemed to snap him out of his torpor. On 3 July, he made his first address to the nation since the outbreak of war 11 days earlier.
‘Comrades! Citizens19! Brothers and sisters! I appeal to you, my friends,’ he began, in terms he had never used before when addressing the people. ‘History shows that invincible armies do not exist and have never existed. Napoleon’s army was considered invincible but it was beaten … The same must be said of Hitler’s German fascist army today …’
In the radio recording of his speech he sounds muffled and tired. His tone is initially defiant, but then a note of doubt creeps in, a convoluted self-justification that hints at a sense of guilt:
It may be asked how could the Soviet Government have consented to conclude a Non-Aggression Pact with such treacherous fiends as Hitler and Ribbentrop? Was this not an error on the part of the Soviet Government? Of course not … No peace-loving state could decline a peace treaty with a neighbouring state, even one headed by fiends and cannibals like Hitler and Ribbentrop … By concluding the Non-Aggression Pact with Germany, we secured our country peace for a year and a half, and the opportunity of preparing our forces to repulse fascist Germany should she risk an attack on us … All the finest men and women of Europe, America and Asia approve the conduct of the Soviet government … This war is not an ordinary war. It is a great war of the entire Soviet people against the German fascist forces. This is a national war in defence of our country.
The old Communist rhetoric of class warfare was abandoned. Stalin’s speech was a return to the language of patriotism, to the nationalist spirit of 1812, an appeal to a divided nation to unite in defence of the motherland.
It seemed to work. As in 1812, popular militias were formed across the land. Recruitment stations were flooded with volunteers, as many as 120,000 signing up in Moscow alone. Stalin demanded that ‘conditions in the20 occupied territories must be made unbearable for the enemy. He must be pursued and destroyed at every step.’ Partisan movements, aided by Red Army troops caught behind enemy lines, sprang up everywhere. Young workers and students were trained to sabotage German operations. One of the most famous of them, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, was only 18 when she was caught cutting German field telephone cables. Zoya was so brutally tortured that even some of the Nazi soldiers were disgusted by it, but she steadfastly refused to reveal her identity or that of her comrades. On the makeshift gallows with the noose already around her neck, she appealed to the civilians who had been assembled to see her die:
Hey, comrades21, don’t look so glum! Now’s the time for courage! I am not afraid. It is my joy to die for the motherland – and for all of you. They will hang me, but I am not alone. There are 200 million of us. They can’t hang us all! Goodbye comrades! Don’t be afraid!
Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya became the first woman of the Great Patriotic War to be made a Hero of the Soviet Union. The Nazis had taken photographs of her execution and of her semi-naked body dumped in the snow. In Soviet hands they became a powerful tool, undeniable proof of the barbarity of the invaders. Now all the anti-Nazi propaganda that had been hastily withdrawn in August 1939 was brought out of storage. Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky was re-released and received a rapturous reception.
Logistical problems vitiated the war effort. There was not enough time to train the masses of volunteers, and not enough guns to arm them. Nikita Khrushchev recalled trying to get rifles for new recruits in Kiev and being told there were none. He was advised to equip them with ‘pikes, swords22, homemade weapons, or anything you can make in your factories’. To send untrained, poorly armed volunteers against the Wehrmacht was an act of desperation, but when gaps in the lines needed to be filled, the leadership didn’t hesitate. Entire Red Army divisions were wiped out in wave after wave of suicidal counterattacks, ordered by officers so afraid of Stalin that they dispatched tens of thousands of men to near-certain death.
Hitler had told his generals in March 1941 that ‘the war with Russia23 will be such that it cannot be conducted with chivalry; the struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful, unrelenting harshness.’ All captured commissars (the political officers attached to every army unit) were to be executed on the spot. Stalin responded in August by declaring it an offence for any Red Army soldier to be taken captive. POWs would face punishment if and when they returned; and while they were in captivity their families’ military ration cards were to be confiscated. In Stalin’s eyes there were ‘no Soviet prisoners24 of war, only traitors’.
The Germans made little effort to feed captured Soviet soldiers. Of the 3 million25 taken by the end of 1941, 2 million had died from starvation, disease or maltreatment by February 1943. The few who survived had Stalin’s camps to look forward to. Barbarossa was a fight to the death, more brutal and more terrible than anything seen on the Western Front, perhaps even in the history of war.
The Wehrmacht’s three-pronged attack advanced rapidly towards Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the centre and Kiev and Rostov-on-Don in the south. By mid July, they were in Smolensk, halfway to Moscow. By the end of August, Army Group North directly threatened Leningrad, and Kiev had fallen by September. Hitler knew he could not afford a long war of attrition. The Wehrmacht’s fuel had so far been provided by the Soviet Union itself, but supplies would not last. The Germans needed to cripple the enemy quickly, and that meant taking Moscow, Leningrad and the vital oil fields of the Caucasus.
But despite the early setbacks, the Red Army did not collapse as Hitler had predicted. Neither did the majority of the Soviet population welcome the German troops as saviours. Some, notably in occupied Estonia and Lithuania – where the Germans were perceived as allies in their struggle to throw off the Russian yoke – did join the Nazi cause, but in the main the Soviet people remained loyal to Stalin. The Nazis treated the local populations so brutally that few were likely to be won over. In Ukraine, where millions resented Soviet domination and hoped Hitler would set them free, villages had initially welcomed German soldiers with the traditional greeting of bread and salt. They were repaid with brutality. The Germans confiscated food and livestock and forced the peasants to continue working on the hated communal farms. The retreating Red Army had employed the same scorched earth policy that had helped starve Napoleon’s men in 1812, so the burned fields yielded little, to the fury of the Nazi occupiers. In response to anti-German sabotage, hostages were rounded up by the Gestapo and shot. For every German slain by the partisans, between 50 and 100 ‘communists’ (usually ordinary citizens seized at random) were executed.
The mass killings of Soviet Jews were also explained to rank-and-file soldiers as part of the ‘anti-partisan’ campaign, with the slogan ‘A Jew is a Bolshevik26 is a partisan’. The results were horrifying. An alleged attack on some German officers in September 1941 was the pretext for the worst massacres. On 26 September, notices appeared in newspapers and on the streets of Kiev announcing that the city’s Jews were about to be resettled elsewhere in Ukraine.
Yidsfn4 of the city27 of Kiev and vicinity must assemble on Monday 29 September by 8 a.m. at the corner of Melnikova and Doktorivskaya streets, next to the cemetery. They must bring with them all money, documents and valuables, as well as warm clothing and underwear. Any Yids who fail to carry out this order and are discovered in any other location will be shot.
What followed was the largest single mass killing of the Holocaust. The thousands who responded to the announcements were assembled into groups and marched to the Kiev suburb of Babi Yar. The Nazi report on the operation is full of self-congratulation: ‘We had expected only five to six thousand28, but thirty thousand appeared. Thanks to our clever organisation, they continued to believe right up to the moment of their execution that they were being resettled …’ As the columns approached Babi Yar, the Jews were channelled towards the edge of a deep ravine, where they were forced to strip and put their belongings in a pile. A German soldier watched what happened next:
It was all done so quickly29. The Ukrainian guards hurried those who hesitated with kicks and shoves … The Jews were led down narrow paths into the ravine, and when they got there the Schutzpolizei [security police] grabbed them and forced them to lie down on the corpses of those who had already been shot. It took no time. As soon as a Jew lay down, a Schutzpolizei man came with a machine gun and shot him in the back of the head. The Jews who were going down into the ravine were so terrified by what they saw that they lost all hope. Some of them even chose to lie down of their own accord and waited for the shot to come … There were three rows of bodies, each about 60 metres long. I couldn’t tell how many layers there were beneath each of them. The bodies were twitching and covered in blood.
By the end of the war, more than a million Soviet Jews had died in the Holocaust. In autumn 2010, on the sixty-ninth anniversary of the massacres in Ukraine, I visited Babi Yar where so many were murdered. A small memorial marks the spot, but nowadays little attention is paid to the massacre – the involvement of ethnic Ukrainians in the persecution of the Jews, and directly in the events of September 1941, has left a vague sense of unease about what happened here.
Seventy miles west of Kiev, in the city of Berdichev, however, I stumbled across a living link to the Holocaust. Close to the town’s Carmelite Convent a small gathering of elderly Jews – the last remnants of the 30,000 who used to live here – were marking the anniversary of the day the Gestapo began ‘cleansing’ the city. In the course of September and October 1941, the Berdichev ghetto was liquidated and more than 20,000 of its inhabitants murdered.fn5 One of the speakers at the anniversary meeting was herself part of the convoy of Jews taken to be murdered in October 1941. Her voice trembling, she told how she had somehow avoided the executioners’ bullets and fallen alive into the communal grave. Covered by other bodies, she lay still and silent until night fell, before crawling out of the pit and dragging herself to safety. The years had not lessened her anger. ‘We must never forget what the fascists did to us and to our country!’ she shouted. ‘People talk of forgiveness, but how can we ever forgive what those monsters did? Young people! Never forget, never forgive!’
On the edge of Berdichev, a reminder of the murdered generation remains. It is the abandoned Jewish cemetery, the last resting place of the city’s Jews for hundreds of years, rich in ornately crafted gravestones and sculpture. But suddenly there was no one left alive to tend it, and now it is overgrown and abandoned, the silence interrupted only by a train rumbling past and the cries of birds perching on the tombs.
The summer and autumn of 1941 brought the Germans impressive military gains. Eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia and western Ukraine were all in Nazi hands. But the 180,000 German casualties in the three months to September exceeded the Wehrmacht’s entire losses in the whole West European campaign of 1940. Soviet casualties were vastly higher, but the Germans were beginning to believe their enemies had an endless supply of men. General Halder, the head of the German High Command, commented bitterly on the Red Army’s ferocious ability to keep fighting:
The whole situation makes it30 increasingly plain that we have underestimated the Russian colossus … Their divisions are not armed and equipped according to our understanding of these words and their tactical leadership is not very satisfactory. But if we destroy a dozen, the Russians present us with a dozen more. They are near their own resources, while we are moving farther and farther from ours. Our troops, sprawled over an immense front line, are subjected to incessant attacks from the enemy.
Hitler pressed his generals to expedite the capture of Moscow and Leningrad. His directive of 22 September made it clear that he wanted the latter to become an example of Nazi invincibility:
The Führer has decided31 to erase the city of Petersburg from the face of the Earth. I have no interest in the further existence of this large population point after the defeat of Soviet Russia … We propose to blockade the city and erase it from the Earth by means of artillery fire of all calibre and continuous bombardment from the air.
So began the 900-day siege of Leningrad. For the next two and a half years the city would exist in a state of terror, shelled around the clock and starved of fuel and supplies. Only the food brought on convoys across the frozen Lake Ladoga provided the minimal rations that kept the population alive. When spring came and the lorries began to fall through the ice, the situation became even more precarious. Nearly one in three of the city’s 2.5 million inhabitants would starve to death and Leningrad’s fate would hang in the balance, caught between Hitler’s obsessive fury and the heroic endurance of her people.
While the German Army Group North battered at the defences of Leningrad, Army Group Centre was advancing along the route taken 129 years earlier by Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Their goal was Moscow, and the lessons of history had not been lost on them. The key aim of Operation Typhoon, launched in early October, was to capture the capital and gain shelter for the invading forces before winter set in. Many of the German commanders had read the grim accounts of Napoleon’s retreat and were determined not to suffer the same fate. In the first week of Typhoon, Army Group Centre won stunning victories in Vyazma and Bryansk, encircling the defending forces and capturing half a million Soviet troops. The route to Moscow was open; its fall seemed only a matter of time.
With the capital gripped by panic, Stalin ordered the immediate evacuation of ministries, government officials, industrial managers and key economic personnel. Fleets of aircraft ferried them to the safety of Kuibyshev, 500 miles southeast of Moscow on the Volga. In scenes reminiscent of the days before Napoleon’s arrival in 1812, government papers and sensitive documents were hastily burned; power plants, bridges and public buildings were rigged with explosives. Ordinary Muscovites packed what they could carry and struggled for a place on the trains still leaving the city. In an astounding feat of logistics, industrial equipment, machinery and even whole factories were dismantled and shipped eastwards to the Urals, where they were set up and resumed production in record time. By the end of the operation32, an estimated 500 factories and 2 million people had been evacuated from the capital. Lenin had been among the first to leave, his body secretly removed from the Red Square mausoleum in early July and shipped to safety in the west Siberian city of Tyumen.
In mid October, the Germans reached Borodino. The historical significance was lost on no one. The Soviet 82nd Rifle Division under Colonel Polosukhin managed to hold out for five days before being forced to retreat by superior German forces. A memorial now stands at the scene of the battle, almost as big as the one from 1812, and the heroism of Borodino’s defenders was promptly celebrated in a rousing popular song:
Borodino! Your ground stands firm33!
Your name alone brings triumph,
Conjures the fallen back from the dead,
Inspires the living to mighty deeds.
If our forefathers could only see
Through the eternal gloom of the grave
How keenly their honour is defended
By their descendants in worthy immortality!
But by early November, the Germans had advanced to within 50 miles of Moscow. Stalin ordered Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who had been organising the defence of Leningrad, to come and save the capital. Zhukov weighed up the advantages of abandoning Moscow, as Kutuzov had done in 1812, but finally told Stalin the city could and would be saved. Stalin, nominally the supreme commander of the Red Army, broadcast to the nation that he would stay in Moscow to supervise its defence. Over half a million Muscovites answered the call to help construct fortifications on the periphery of the city, and tens of thousands more volunteered to defend it. Without heating and with food in short supply, the people of Moscow now seized their chance to fight back. Four hundred thousand women, many of them with husbands at the front, went to work in arms factories making Molotov cocktails, flame-throwers and machine guns.
The author Konstantin Simonov realised in the early days of the war that people were fighting not for Stalin, the revolution and the Soviet Union, but for the Russian land – the city, town or village they regarded as home, and the people who lived there.
The villages were small34, with dilapidated little churches and large graveyards, and the old wooden crosses each looking like the next. It was then that I understood how strong within me was the feeling for my motherland, how much I felt that the land itself was my own, how deeply rooted within the land were all those people who had lived there. The bitterness of the first two weeks of the war convinced me it was impossible that this land could ever become German. In these graveyards were so many grandfathers and great-grandfathers, ancestors we had never seen, that the land was Russian. Not only on the surface but down and down for yard after yard into the very depths.
Stalin too knew the importance of the past and the appeal of nationalistic patriotism. His Revolution Day speech on 7 November took place with the sound of German guns as a backdrop. Afterwards, the troops marched straight from Red Square to the front, less than 40 miles away.fn6 Stalin linked the fighters of 1941 with Russia’s national heroes from the past:
All the peoples35 of our country support the efforts to smash the invading hordes. Our reserves of manpower are inexhaustible! … Let the manly images of our great ancestors – Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Kuzma Minin, Dmitry Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov – inspire you! Death to the German invaders! Long live our glorious motherland!
The German assault on Moscow had been slowed down by the annual period of rasputitsa, the season of rain and mud that makes Russian roads impassable before the winter freeze. When temperatures fell in mid November, the German tanks could once more advance along the frozen roads. But the Soviets still held one important advantage. The Red Army had learned from its mistakes in Finland the previous year. Its soldiers had trained to fight on skis, and they had white camouflage, fur jackets and warm felt boots. Most German soldiers had none of these, as Berlin had gambled on them being in Moscow before the worst of the winter weather. As in 1812, winter came to the Russians’ aid. Frostbite claimed thousands of German casualties as Zhukov’s forces fell back as slowly as possible towards the capital. Soviet losses were great, but the Wehrmacht’s advance was finally halted on 19 November, with its forward units reporting they could see the domes of the Kremlin.
Just how close the Germans got to Moscow is evident to any visitor who flies in to the city’s Sheremetyevo international airport. By the side of the main road into town, giant tank traps from 1941 still mark the farthest point of the German advance, just 10 miles from Red Square. The Wehrmacht had enjoyed two years of uninterrupted triumph across Europe, but the failure to take Moscow was a critical moment. The Germans had advanced 600 miles into Soviet territory, capturing an area the size of Britain, France, Spain and Italy combined. Two-fifths of the Soviet population was under enemy control; the USSR had lost nearly 4 million dead or wounded. But it had stopped the Wehrmacht before Moscow. The German troops were close to exhaustion now, facing a bitterly cold winter with stretched lines of communication and lacking vital supplies of winter clothing, boots, fur hats and antifreeze. The Soviet Union had come close to annihilation, but it had survived. As the French general Antoine-Henri Jomini remarked on the eve of Napoleon’s invasion, ‘Russia is a country36 that is easy to get into … but very difficult to get out of.’
fn1 The existence of the secret protocol was officially denied in the Soviet Union until 1989, when a demonstration by 2 million people in the Baltic states to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the treaty prompted Mikhail Gorbachev to set up a commission of inquiry and eventually to apologise for the consequences of the pact on those countries affected by it.
fn2 The Soviets found themselves assailed by a surprising improvised weapon, a bottle filled with petrol and topped with an extra-long wick, which was thrown at close range and proved remarkably effective at setting lorries and tanks on fire. The Finns gave it a nickname, the ‘Molotov cocktail’, which became known throughout the world. When challenged about the Soviet bombing of Finnish towns, Molotov had declared that Moscow was dropping not bombs but food parcels for the starving population. The Finns decided to repay the Soviet generosity by giving the Red Army ‘a drink to go with their food’. Half a million Molotov cocktails were produced before the war was over, and hundreds of Soviet tanks were destroyed by them.
fn3 In the final weeks of the fighting, Britain and France had been actively planning to send troops to help the Finns. The likely consequence would have been a catastrophic war between the USSR and the Western Allies. Fortunately, the Norwegians refused permission for the Allied forces to cross their territory.
fn4 The Russian word Zhidy is used.
fn5 The dead included the mother of the celebrated Soviet author Vasily Grossman, who was away serving as a war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper. He would never forgive himself for not doing more to save his mother, and in his most famous novel, Life and Fate (1959), he imagines the letter she might have written to him as death approached.
fn6 For security reasons, the traditional eve-of-parade meeting had to be held in Mayakovskaya metro station, with trains used as cloakrooms and dining rooms.