Moscow 1941 A City and Its People at War

Chapter One The Shaping of the City By one measurethe number of people involvedthe Battle of Moscow was the greatest battle in the Second World War, and therefore the greatest battle in history. More than seven million officers and men from both sides took part, compared with the four million who fought at Stalingrad in 1942, the two at Kursk in 1943, the three and a half in the battle for Berlin in 1945. This was a scale never matched in the fighting in Western Europe and Africa. The Battle of Moscow swirled over a territory the size of France, and lasted for six months, from September 1941 to April 1942. The Soviet Union lost more people in this one battle926,000 soldiers killed, to say nothing of the woundedthan the British lost in the whole of the First World War. Their casualties in this one battle were greater than the combined casualties of the British and the Americans in the whole of the Second World War. This was the horrendous price they paid for inflicting on the Wehrmacht the first real defeat it had ever suffered. They fought the Germans to a standstill, bled them white, and hurled them back hundreds of miles from the very walls of their capital. The Wehrmacht went on to win more dazzling victories on the plains of Southern Russia in the summer of 1942. But in their hearts 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. Even today, Moscowstrangled by traffic, poisoned by the exhalations of decrepit factories, disfigured by the exuberant constructions of a vulgar and rampant capitalismis a city which throbs with power. The focus and symbol of that power is still, as it always has been, the fortress of the Kremlin, the magnificent and awe-inspiring central point of an imperial city. Russia may now be bereft of empire, but the overwhelming aura of the Kremlin remains. The successors of the Tsars and the Bolsheviks still rule the country from behind the great walls of red brick that surround the offices, the grand palaces, and the glittering churches bearing the golden crosses of Russia's ancient Orthodox faith. Above the churches and the palaces, even today, the high towers of the fortress are crowned with the great red stars of illuminated glass, the symbols of a ruthless regime under whose banners the men and women of the Soviet Union held and then destroyed the German invader in the greatest war in history. Beyond the Kremlin walls Moscow seems to be a rambling chaos of churches and monasteries, now once again crowned with golden cupolas which glow in the sunset, of great palaces and public buildings, of Stalinist fantasies, of drab offices and slums from the 1960s and 1970s, of exuberant post-Soviet kitsch. This is the city which has given Europe some of its greatest science, painting, music and literature. This is the city where Pushkin and Dostoevsky were born and where Tolstoy and Chekhov spent much of their working lives. Far more than the coldly formal city which Peter the Great built for himself amid the marshes of the Baltic Sea, Moscow is the core and the essence of Russia itself, sprawling, huge, unmanageable, a country both of Europe and apart from it. Moscow is a city which fascinates and obsesses the citizen and the stranger alike. Without Moscow European culture as we know it would look very different. Beneath all its apparent chaos Moscow, like Vienna, is shaped by a simple logic, the logic of defence. Like Vienna, the core of Moscow is a defensive fortress on the bank of a river, protected by concentric lines of fortification, and joined to the outside world by great highways radiating to all the points of the compass. The course of the Battle of Moscow in 1941 was determined by the city'Braithwaite, Rodric is the author of 'Moscow 1941 A City and Its People at War', published 2007 under ISBN 9781400095452 and ISBN 140009545X.