The Hinge of Fate

A moving look at the Soviet capital during one of World War II's pivotal battles.

MOSCOW 1941

A City and Its People at War

By Rodric Braithwaite

Knopf. 398 pp. $30

What was existence like in Stalin's Moscow at the most fraught moment in the Soviet Union's weird history, when the German army was miles away from overrunning the city, with possibly genocidal results?

This question, among others, is addressed by Rodric Braithwaite's Moscow 1941, a fascinating account of the Eastern Front's crucial showdown, the Battle of Moscow. The altercation the book treats was World War II's biggest, involving 7 million participants on both sides (Stalingrad, by comparison, involved 4 million) and an area of operations "the size of France." It was also, arguably, the war's most important battle; outside Moscow, the Nazis suffered their first military defeat. After it failed to overrun the Bolshevik capital, Braithwaite writes, the Wehrmacht no longer seemed invincible. "In their hearts," he writes, "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."

But Braithwaite, a former British ambassador to the Soviet Union, is concerned not with the Germans or even primarily with the battle's military aspects; rather, his concern is with how life was lived during and just before the battle. Grounded in interviews with soldiers, nurses and witnesses, the book keeps to a minimum the tactical discussions that can bog down war histories for the general reader. Instead, it evokes how things might viscerally have felt in that place, at that time.

Moscow 1941 begins with a vision of Soviet life starting with New Year's Eve of 1940 -- that is, right before Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, when the average Muscovite still "desperately wanted to believe" that the country would keep clear of the slaughter to the west. Things were far from perfect, of course; newspapers were filled with homages to Stalin, the "Genius of Mankind, the Greatest Genius of All Times and Peoples," and the capital was rife with crowding and squalor. On the other hand, the theaters were buzzing, the grand Metro was new, Lavrenti Beria's NKVD seemed more humane than his predecessor's secret police, and the regime had created schools, educational opportunities and jobs. Despite the savageries, a "genuine enthusiasm" for the Russian Revolution persisted here in the "city of opportunity in the First Country of Socialism."

It was into this anxious, dynamic world that the war smashed on June 21, 1941, as the German military cakewalked across the Soviet border. Visitors to the former Soviet Union will be familiar with the rhetoric and iconography that attends a war still eerily present in the popular imagination: the brutalist statues depicting popular valor, the gloomy monuments honoring the lost empire's "Hero Cities."

Braithwaite does the Soviets he obviously admires the favor of showing the reader what incantations such as "valor" and "heroism" actually meant. Thus we see civilians seized with an almost mystical patriotism rushing to volunteer (and being wiped out in huge numbers), even as undernourished girls are sent off to dig trenches and cut firewood. At one point, Braithwaite shows us a group of Bolshoi Theater performers digging a trench on the outskirts of the city. When a Communist Party member suggested others should perform such stoop labor, they took offense: "What, do you take us for deserters?" And so on, in a panoply of sometimes vain or suicidal effort.

Interestingly, Braithwaite is also careful to give the Stalinist elite its due. Moscow boss Alexander Shcherbakov, for example, may have been Stalin's man, but he was also a tireless administrator who apparently killed himself trying to hold the city together. He dropped dead on May 9, 1945 -- Victory Day.

Not everything, obviously, was admirable. During the panic of October, when the Nazis were a mere 15 miles from Moscow, the city air swam with ash as party members burned their identifying documents. Looters marauded through abandoned homes and stores. "Cars loaded down with middle-level bureaucrats and their domestic treasures" wallowed past poorer citizens hoofing it out of the city; gangs of workers thrashed their fleeing bosses. In addition to the chaos of war, there reigned that paradoxical chaos of Soviet authoritarianism: In a system in which initiative was reserved for functionaries and information was carefully guarded, it could be difficult to act correctly. The security apparatuses, of course, confronted disorder with their characteristic tools: purging, jailing and killing.

Moscow 1941 is a wonderful book about a battle that -- although it has attracted less attention than, say, Stalingrad or Kursk -- was in fact the biggest in world history. The book is also an excellent addition to a series of recent English language histories that evoke for the Western reader how the Soviet experience must -- on a daily basis and by people from different social strata -- have been lived.

·Andrey Slivka is a writer who lives in Kiev, Ukraine.