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By Root 1073 0

sides in the battles of those days endured extraordinary experiences. Nikolai Redkin, a thirty-five-year-old infantryman, wrote to his wife on 23 October: ‘Hello, Zoya! I barely escaped death in the last battle. My chances of survival were one in a hundred, but I made it … Imagine a party of soldiers surrounded on all sides by enemy tanks and forced against a 70-metre-wide stretch of riverbank. There was only one way out – jump in the river, or die. I jumped and swam. But the bank remained under heavy enemy fire. I had to sit in ice-cold autumn water for three hours, completely numb. When darkness fell the German tanks pulled back and I was picked up by collective farmers. They thawed me and cared for me. It took all of ten days for me to get back from the enemy’s rear areas to our lines. Now I am back with my unit and ready to fight. We shall have a brief rest now, then return to the battle. Damn us if we don’t make the Germans take the same bath as we had. We shall make them bath in snow until they die.’ Redkin’s wish was eventually fulfilled, but he himself did not live to see it: he was still fighting thirty months later when killed in action near Smolensk.

The Germans were weather-bound. Army surgeon Peter Bamm wrote: ‘The back wheel of some horse-drawn vehicle in the mile-long column slips into a deep shell crater concealed by a puddle of water. The wheel breaks. The shaft rises in the air. The horses, wrenched upwards, shy and kick. One of the traces parts. The vehicle behind tries to overtake on the left, but is unable to drive quite clear of the deep ruts. The right-hand back wheel of the second vehicle catches in the left-hand back wheel of the first. The horses rear and start kicking in all directions. There is no going forwards or backwards. An ammunition lorry returning empty from the front tries to pass the hopeless tangle. It slowly subsides into the ditch and sticks fast. Everyone becomes infected with uncontrollable fury. Everyone shouts at everyone else. Sweating, swearing, mud-spattered men start laying into sweating, shivering, mud-caked horses that are already frothing … This scene is repeated a hundred times a day.’

On 30 October, panzer commander Col. Gen. Erich Hoepner wrote despairingly: ‘The roads have become quagmires – everything has come to a halt. Our tanks cannot move. No fuel can get through to us, the heavy rain and fog make air drops almost impossible.’ He added: ‘Dear God, give us fourteen days of frost. Then we will surround Moscow!’ Hoepner got his weather wish soon enough – far more than fourteen days of frost. But the descent of sub-zero temperatures and heavy snow did nothing for the Wehrmacht, and much for its enemies. German vehicle and weapon lubricant froze, and soon likewise soldiers. The Russians, by contrast, were equipped to fight on.

The second week of October 1941 was afterwards identified as the decisive period of the crisis. Zhukov was summoned to the Kremlin; he found Stalin ailing with ’flu, standing before a map of the front, complaining bitterly about a lack of reliable information. The general drove forward to the so-called Mozhaisk defence line, where he was appalled to find yawning gaps, wide open to German assault. ‘In essence,’ he said later, ‘all the approaches to Moscow were open. Our troops could not have stopped the enemy.’ Zhukov telephoned Stalin to report. He recognised that if the Germans attacked in strength, the capital was doomed. Much of the bureaucracy of Stalin’s government, together with diplomatic missions, was evacuated from Moscow to Kuibyshev, five hundred miles east on the Volga. Beria conducted a frenzy of shootings of ‘dissident elements’ in his prisons. One batch of 157 executed on 3 October included several women: Trotsky’s sister, Olga Kameneva, widow of prominent purge victim Lev Kamenev; a thirty-one-year-old air force major named Mariya Nesterenko; forty-year-old Aleksandra Fibich-Savchenko, wife of a senior ordnance officer. Moscow’s key installations and industrial plants were prepared for demolition. A quarter of a million people,