The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  The rest of his speech was more predictable and contorted. He warned of the “grave danger” the country was facing, and praised “the heroic resistance of the Red Army,” claiming that the Germans had already suffered terrible destruction of their “finest divisions and finest air force units.” In the same breath, he admitted that “the enemy continues to push forward, hurling fresh forces into the attack.” He had to reckon with the evident gains of the enemy, while reassuring his countrymen that these were only temporary. “History shows that there are no invincible armies and never have been,” he declared, echoing his speech to the graduates of the military academy in May. “Napoleon’s army was considered invincible, but it was beaten successfully by Russian, English, and German armies.” He vowed that the Nazi invaders, like Napoleon, “will be smashed” on Soviet soil.

  Reverting to form, he issued a direct warning to his own countrymen, vowing to wage “a ruthless fight against all disorganizers of the rear, deserters, panic-mongers” and to “exterminate spies, saboteurs, and enemy parachutists.” Military tribunals would quickly mete out justice to anyone guilty of “panic-mongering and cowardice,” he added. In cases where retreat was absolutely necessary, he ordered the evacuation of all equipment and supplies. “The enemy must not be left a single engine, a single railway car, not a single kilogram of grain or a liter of fuel.” Anything that could not be taken, he concluded, “must be destroyed without fail.”

  But Stalin also felt compelled to give a convoluted justification for his decision to agree to a nonaggression pact with Hitler. He argued that it “secured our country peace for a year and a half and the opportunity of preparing its forces to repulse fascist Germany should she risk an attack on our country despite the pact.” That begged the question why that time wasn’t put to better use and why Soviet forces were so ill prepared for the invasion.

  Stalin tried to explain away the initial setbacks. “As to part of our territory having nevertheless been seized by German fascist troops, this is chiefly due to the fact that the war of fascist Germany on the U.S.S.R. began under conditions favorable for the German forces and unfavorable for Soviet forces.” He noted that the Germans were fully mobilized “whereas Soviet troops had still to effect mobilization and move up to the frontier.” He insisted that the responsibility for that disparity lay with the Germans for “treacherously” violating the nonaggression pact—and, of course, there was not a hint of a mea culpa in any part of the speech.

  The speech accomplished its purpose of showing that Stalin was indeed in control of the country and of holding out the hope of eventual victory. But on the battlefields, the Germans just kept coming. By July 16, German troops led by General Heinz Guderian, or Schneller Heinz as the famed tank commander was called, had reached Smolensk, the next big city to fall after Minsk on the march east. Once again, hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops found themselves encircled and killed or captured. It was only three weeks since Hitler had launched the invasion, and the successful drive to Smolensk meant that the invaders only had to keep going another 230 miles due east to reach Moscow. Stalin’s assurances notwithstanding, the Red Army looked as though it wasn’t capable of preventing the German forces from doing almost anything they pleased—including seizing the Soviet capital, if Hitler chose to make that their next goal. On July 21, German bombers attacked the Soviet capital for the first time. The prognosis was bad and still getting worse.

  Like most dead men, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin hadn’t traveled after he reached his resting place in 1924. Admittedly, he hadn’t been exactly allowed to rest. The scientists who cared for his body, which remained on display in the mausoleum built for him on Red Square, were constantly fiddling with him, applying special fluids to his exposed face and hands at least a couple of times a week and every eighteen months or so soaking him in a bath of potassium acetate, glycerin, water, and enough quinine chloride to serve as a disinfectant. They had followed this procedure ever since their first frantic efforts to find a way indefinitely to preserve Lenin at Stalin’s behest. The new Soviet leader was determined to keep his predecessor around as an object of worship, thereby solidifying the mythology of the Bolshevik Revolution and his own stranglehold on power. All of this elaborate maintenance took place in the mausoleum and its special lab in the basement, allowing Lenin to stay on the premises as he underwent his successive tune-ups.

  That is, until July 3, 1941, when Lenin was sent on a long journey out of the Soviet capital for the first and only time since his death. Even before General Guderian’s tanks reached Smolensk two weeks later, and even as he prepared to address his countrymen for the first time since the invasion started, Stalin recognized that Moscow was in mortal danger. Which meant that Lenin was also in danger. If the Germans seized the Soviet capital, it would be a humiliating defeat. But if they also seized the holiest of holies, Lenin, the defeat would be beyond humiliating. It would be a crushing psychological blow, representing the triumph of fascism over communism, the cult of Hitler over the cult of Lenin—and, by extension, of Stalin. So the Soviet leader ordered the evacuation of Lenin in total secrecy to Tyumen, a small city more than a thousand miles due east of the capital.

  Ilya Zbarsky remembers that day, the ensuing train journey, and Lenin’s stay in Tyumen, which would last nearly four years until the war was ending in March 1945. He remembers for one good reason: he is the sole survivor of the handful of caretakers who accompanied Lenin’s body on that voyage. His father, Boris Zbarsky, was one of two men who had developed and carried out the original embalming work on Lenin, and he was in charge of the clandestine operation to move the body to safety. In 1934, he had persuaded his son Ilya, who was studying biochemistry at Moscow State University, to join the mausoleum’s team of scientists whose task it was to ensure Lenin’s preservation. For the next eighteen years, Ilya’s work was focused on that one overarching goal.

  Sitting in his modest two-room Moscow apartment in charcoal slacks, a light gray shirt, a red sleeveless sweater, and the slippers that are de rigueur in every Russian home, Zbarsky, with an elegant mane of white hair, looked a good deal younger than his ninety years when I visited him in early 2004. As his wife served us tea and generous slices of a creamy cake, he reminisced freely about his family history, his frequently tense relations with his father and a stepmother he detested, and, of course, the privileges and perils of serving as one of those entrusted with the care of a body that had been for all practical purposes deified by the Soviet state.

  From his father, Ilya knew the story of how he and Professor Vladimir Vorobyov, head of the anatomy department at Kharkov University in the Ukraine, had worked with a team of assistants for four months to preserve Lenin’s body—a feat that many of their colleagues thought was unlikely to succeed and, for that reason, politically and personally dangerous. Over the objections of Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s rival and future victim, Lenin was subjected to an audacious, unprecedented embalming process. On Stalin’s orders, his brain was removed so that scientists at a special institute could study it to find clues to his “genius.” (Despite their best efforts, they never found any evidence that it had any unusual characteristics.) The team also removed his internal organs, such as lungs and liver. They made small cuts in the skin and soaked the body in innovative chemical baths that were designed to allow it to retain moisture and elasticity. Finally, Lenin’s eyes were replaced with fake ones, and the mouth was stitched below the mustache to keep his lips closed.

  The first time he participated in undressing Lenin to prepare him for one of his routine chemical baths, Ilya recalled, he found something “disagreeable” about handling him, although he’d worked with corpses before. Maybe it had something to do with the texture of the skin, he mused, but more likely it had to do with the thought that he was handling the corpse of someone who was the object of such intense glorification. Even from the perspective of the next century, he found it hard to analyze his feelings coolly.

/>   And then there was the fear factor. This was the 1930s, a decade when Stalin unleashed wholesale terror against his own people, a period when purges, executions, and one-way trips to the Gulag were as common occurrences as today’s weather reports. Thanks to his job, Boris Zbarsky and his family appeared to be protected from Stalin’s machinery of terror. At one point, his son recalled, the NKVD—the secret police, which would later be renamed the KGB—raided thirty-four of the thirty-six apartments in the prestigious government building where they lived; the elder Zbarsky’s was one of the only two left untouched. But they could not be sure that this would always be the case. Ilya never discussed politics with his father. “In my mind, I felt it was terror, an awful time,” he said. “But it was dangerous to even think about it.”

  Boris Zbarsky lived a privileged life, with a lavish salary and access to ample food when others were starving, but he knew everything could change in a moment. His own background provided plenty of ammunition for the NKVD should they have cared to use it. He was, by the definition of the times, a “Jewish cosmopolitan.” He had studied in Switzerland, spoke several languages, and counted people like the painter Leonid Pasternak and his son Boris, the future Noble Prize winning writer, among his friends. And, in fact, in 1952, Boris Zbarsky would discover that his service to Lenin—and, of course, by extension, to Stalin—didn’t guarantee him indefinite protection. Arrested for allegedly working for the Germans, he was one of many scientists and doctors caught up in one of Stalin’s final wave of purges, this one targeting Jews, before the dictator’s death in March 1953. Released in December of that year, he died soon thereafter, a broken man.

  But all that was in the future on July 3, 1941, when both Zbarskys accompanied Lenin to Tyumen.

  On that morning, Boris told his son of the secret Politburo decision to evacuate Lenin, informing him that he and his family had better start packing their personal belongings for the train ride east. Ilya recalled that he didn’t need to be convinced of the urgency; the German forces were advancing toward the capital, and there was little to indicate that they could be stopped. He heard Stalin’s radio address that day and was startled by his sharp Georgian accent and his opening words, in which he greeted his countrymen as brothers, sisters, and friends. “It was the first time that Stalin spoke to his people as human beings, not just as ‘comrades,’” Ilya noted. Only a truly dire situation could have prompted such a dramatic reversal.

  “We knew that it was dangerous to stay in Moscow,” Ilya added. Still, he felt upset by the order, which left him with a sense that he was abandoning Moscow at a time when it would need every defender it could muster.

  In the evening, NKVD cars arrived to pick up Ilya and his family, along with another colleague from the mausoleum team, Professor Sergei Mardashev, and his family, depositing them at a siding of the Yaroslavsky Station. There, as NKVD guards looked on, they boarded a special train that would carry Lenin, the scientists, their families, and forty Kremlin guards. But for all the preparations, the train wasn’t refrigerated, and the scientists had to work hard to protect the body, lying in a wooden coffin, from deterioration in the stifling summer heat. Ilya remembers putting curtains on the windows to block out the sun, switching shifts with his father and Mardashev, never leaving the body unattended during the four-day journey, and regularly dabbing it with fluids.

  The train was well stocked with food, and its route was lined with an unending string of green signals. At stations along the way, guards and troops were stationed to block anyone hoping to board it. With the Germans moving closer and Luftwaffe air raids already striking deep into the Russian heartland, there were crowds of desperate people seeking any transport east. The special train left them all behind.

  In Tyumen, the local authorities put a Tsarist-era, two-story building belonging to an agricultural college at the disposal of the guests from Moscow and their “secret object.” Surrounded by a brick wall and isolated from the rest of the town, it had its own guards, who made sure no locals wandered in by mistake. Ilya and his wife lived in a two-room apartment on the first floor, but they had to share it with his wife’s mother, sister, and two nephews, who had accompanied them on the journey. Ilya’s father, stepmother, and their son occupied an apartment on the second floor, where Lenin’s body was kept.

  The building was refurbished, and it was well heated and well lit, unlike most other buildings during the war. But there were no refrigeration facilities, and huge amounts of distilled water were either flown in from Omsk or sent by train, along with the special chemicals needed to prepare Lenin’s chemical baths. Before immersing him, Ilya and the other caretakers would wrap the body in special bandages made of India rubber that were produced in Leningrad for this exalted purpose. Ilya estimates that, unlike in Moscow, where Lenin was mostly on display, he was left soaking in his baths for about 70 percent of the wartime period in Tyumen. Since they had few other responsibilities, the caretakers regularly worked on whatever blemishes they found on the body. They never wrote any reports, but a special commission that arrived later in the war to check on how Lenin was holding up concluded, according to Ilya, “that the body was even in better condition than before the evacuation.”

  Along with the contingent of guards, the building had a full kitchen staff, and Ilya recalled that they lived very comfortably during a time when most Russians were struggling with even worse food shortages than usual. “They fed us well,” he said. “It was a lot easier than in Moscow. There was tea, cake, cognac.” They tuned in to Russian and German radio stations, and they were alarmed by the news that indicated that the Germans were still advancing and then particularly by the reports from Moscow in mid-October 1941. “It was clear that something terrible was happening,” Ilya noted. He heard from friends of the panic as many Muscovites tried to flee the city, convinced that it was about to fall. He also heard about arrests of professors who taught German, professors he had known at Moscow State University. Later, the Tyumen residents learned more about the fighting from wounded soldiers arriving from the front.

  Although Moscow would hold off the Germans, Stalin didn’t permit Lenin’s return to the capital until the war was ending in March 1945. Delighted with Lenin’s “health,” the government awarded Boris Zbarsky the Order of Lenin and the title Hero of Socialist Labor. It awarded his son Ilya the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. But when Boris was arrested in 1952, Ilya was fired from his job as well, and he never returned to work at the mausoleum.

  Looking back at his life and the focus of so much of his attention, he finally was willing to voice his true feelings about Lenin. “He should be taken out of the Kremlin and buried somewhere else,” he said. “He’s more a symbol of terror than a hero.” Yet Ilya still bristled at mention of newspaper accounts from the early 1990s that claimed that Lenin’s body hasn’t really been preserved, except for the hands and head. “This is all nonsense,” he protested. “Everything is intact.”

  Whatever conclusions he had come to about the system Lenin built, Ilya was proud of the role he and his father played in keeping Lenin “alive” during those nightmare years of the war, when millions of their countrymen perished. If the Germans had captured Lenin, the symbolism would have been enormous. And, of course, it would have meant that they had captured Moscow. And if they had captured Moscow, the early war years would have taken a very different path, and the outcome of the conflict would have been far from certain.

  But Lenin lived.

  That summer of 1941, when Stalin was secretly dispatching Lenin to Tyumen, Hitler was increasingly confident that the Soviet Union—with Moscow at its center and Lenin as its symbol—would soon be history. It was Hitler’s confidence that allowed him to launch Operation Barbarossa in the first place, sweeping aside all reservations and banishing worries about unnerving precedents. And it was his recharged confidence that now prompted him to edge toward another major miscalculation, which would prove to be a key factor in the outcome both of the battle for Moscow, wh
ich was still just looming, and of the entire war on the Eastern front.

  Hitler felt liberated by the attack on the Soviet Union. “Since I struggled through to this decision, I again feel spiritually free,” he wrote to Mussolini. “I am now happy to be relieved of these mental agonies.” And the initial German victories and the speed of their advance only seemed to confirm the Führer’s wisdom. On July 3, the day that Stalin was trying to rally his countrymen, German Army Chief of Staff Franz Halder wrote, “It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian Campaign has been won in the space of two weeks.” But he cautioned that it wasn’t over yet. “The sheer geographical vastness of the country and the stubbornness of the resistance, which is carried on by all means, will claim our efforts for many more weeks to come,” he added.

  It was clear that Halder was envisioning a mopping-up operation over many more weeks, not months. On July 8, he wrote the following passage in his war diary:

  “It is the Führer’s firm decision to level Moscow and Leningrad and make them uninhabitable, so as to relieve us of the necessity of having to feed the populations through the winter. The cities will be razed by air force. Tanks must not be used for the purpose. ‘A national catastrophe which will deprive not only Bolshevism, but also Muscovite nationalism, of their centers.’”

  Presumably the last sentence quotes Hitler directly. Over dinner with his entourage on July 27, the German dictator outlined his broader vision, not just for Moscow and Leningrad but for the entire territory he expected to conquer. His empire, he explained, would extend two to three hundred kilometers (124 to 186 miles) east of the Urals. The German overlords should be able to control that expanse “with 250,000 men plus a cadre of good administrators.” As his inspiration, he pointed to the British empire. “Let’s learn from the English, who, with 250,000 men in all, including 50,000 soldiers, govern 400 million Indians. This space in Russia must always be dominated by Germans.” The conquered people would be subjugated mercilessly, and the overarching strategy would be “to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as Redskins…In this business I shall go ahead cold-bloodedly.”