The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  That discomfort hardly eased when they arrived at the apartment. Igor’s official job was working at the local railroad station, but he was also part of a rescue brigade charged with putting out fires in his neighborhood. The wooden houses there would burn easily as a result of air raids or, if the Germans came close enough, shelling. And then there were other duties, preparation for sabotage activities. All of which meant Igor was rarely in the apartment, often sleeping on the job wherever it was. After bringing Natalya to her new quarters, he quickly left her in the apartment alone. The awkwardness of their situation may have given him added incentive to do so.

  Once he had left, Natalya surveyed the apartment’s one small room. It contained a bed, a table, and a chair and, she recalls, cigarette butts all over the floor. She swept the floor, straightened the bed, and when night fell, tried to sleep. But she was too nervous to settle down, and at five in the morning she went for a walk in the nearby woods to clear her head. Just then, Igor returned and panicked when he saw that she wasn’t there. He immediately contacted Maklyarsky and Sudoplatov, who reprimanded her for not keeping Igor informed of her whereabouts.

  Natalya’s official job was to monitor the chemical content of the area’s water supplies. But her more important assignment was to assist Igor in his preparations for resistance once the Germans took over the city. He was supposed to keep working at the Rublevo railway station, using that job as cover for serving as liaison between different resistance groups and keeping the government, presumably evacuated at that point to Kuibyshev, informed about what was happening in the occupied capital.

  The Soviet authorities had already placed explosives or mines in major buildings such as the Bolshoi Theater, where top Germans were likely to appear, and on roads and in other public facilities. Igor knew all about those mines, since they were wrapped in special antimagnetic containers that had been developed in the Leningrad Mountain Engineering Institute, where he had studied. These containers made it almost impossible to detect the mines’ presence. But when it came to the Rublevo railway station, where he worked, Igor had a special certificate from Molotov, Stalin’s right-hand man, forbidding Soviet troops to burn or blow up the station as they retreated. The idea was to keep it functioning as a resistance center.

  Igor’s other special privilege: at a time when almost all cars were commandeered for the front lines, he was assigned an M-1 car, a prestigious vehicle normally assigned to government officials, to make his rounds and allow him to send radio messages from different locations. The front seat cushion was an early James-Bond-like creation. It looked perfectly normal on the outside, but the inside was filled with a five-kilowatt battery that powered his radio gear.

  The NKVD gave Igor and Natalya forged documents and a new last name: Shevchenko. At times, Igor went out alone; at others, Natalya joined him and helped him with his myriad tasks. Like the good math student that he was, Igor remembers that he buried 4,400 liters of fuel poured into 110 milk containers, which could be dug up and used for making explosives. He also buried sacks of dynamite, guns, and grenades for use by the underground. When she accompanied him, Natalya helped him camouflage the hiding places by covering them with leaves and grass. Since he was an engineer, Igor also monitored the water and sewage systems, keeping tabs on how he could smuggle resistance fighters through them.

  That last responsibility led to a sudden summons to Stalin’s dacha. As a result of a stray German bomb, the water supply to the dacha had sprung a leak. “You must fix the pipe immediately!” the dictator’s chief bodyguard commanded him. Igor kept his cool and ordered the other bodyguards to start digging to find the leak. Within three hours, he had completed the repair job and was awarded the Order of the Red Star for doing so. He was one of the lucky ones whose close encounter with the tyrant ended happily.

  Dmitry, Natalya’s boyfriend in the army, kept writing to her every day. And Natalya was still bothered enough by her fictitious marriage that she went to Maklyarsky and asked him if she couldn’t be assigned to a partisan unit. The NKVD boss wouldn’t hear of it.

  In the meantime, Igor insisted that Natalya address him by his first name instead of the more formal Igor Aleksandrovich to keep up the pretence that they were married. He tried to act the caring husband, and he tried to coax her to relax. As Igor pointed out, working in the underground meant acting their parts with conviction, since their lives depended on it. Over time, both of them became more accustomed to their roles, and then they no longer felt like roles. In 1943, with Moscow no longer threatened, Natalya was sent to an NKVD radio liaison school for four months. Since the students were not allowed to leave the premises during the course, Igor visited her every night. They were married for real in 1944. By the time her old boyfriend Dmitry returned from the war in 1945, she and Igor had a five-month-old son.

  When I visited the couple in May 2004, Natalya—short, stooped but still spry—tallied the rest of the family history: four children, one of whom died, three grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. The elderly couple live with a daughter, son-in-law, and grandson in their two-room apartment in a Stalin-era building with high ceilings, lugubrious double windows that let in very little light, and shabby Soviet furniture. The bookshelves contain a jumble of wartime memoirs, especially of NKVD agents, and their grandson’s toys—miniature cars, Star Wars games, and the latest Harry Potter book in a flashy Russian edition. They had been petitioning everyone to get a separate apartment for her daughter’s family, with no success. Ailing and tired, Igor didn’t seem particularly interested in fighting anymore for that cause. But always ready to spring into action, Natalya held out a ray of hope. “We’ve written to Putin,” she said. She was waiting for a reply.

  For every story that had a happy ending, where the protagonists survived, there were countless others with tragic endings during the battle for Moscow. But the Soviet leaders made sure that carefully selected cases were put to good use, transforming the victims into mythic figures whose courage would inspire others to follow suit, no matter what the price. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the eighteen-year-old who had volunteered for underground work along with Natalya Shchors, was at the top of that list.

  Natalya’s memory from that single encounter with Zoya was of a teenager who was “tall, pretty, with short, cropped brown hair like a boy’s.” What else could she say about her? “You could see she was a good girl.”

  She was also a brave one, who paid the ultimate price for her courage. Dispatched in late November 1941 on an arson mission to the German-occupied village of Petrishchevo about fifty-five miles from Moscow, she was captured, tortured, and executed. That much of her story is clear, but there are differing accounts of the rest of it, and there is a key omission in all the official versions that followed.

  For all the obvious pitfalls of relying on NKVD interrogation records, which were often the product of methods that were every bit as brutal as the Gestapo’s, the official report on the interrogation of Vasily Klubkov, one of two Red Army soldiers who were sent on the mission with Zoya, appears to be accurate in the main outline of her story. Dated March 11 to 12, 1942, the top secret document offers a transcript of the interrogation of Klubkov that started at 10 P.M. and continued until 5 A.M. Klubkov was captured by the Germans, and the NKVD prepared the transcript as evidence that he was the one who betrayed Zoya and then went on to work for the Germans. According to some rumors, the villagers may have betrayed Zoya, but no mention of that possibility ever appears in the report or in other official versions of the events.

  Like Zoya, Klubkov was eighteen, a postal worker with seven years of schooling. He had joined the Red Army only a month before this first disastrous mission. A three-person team, which consisted of Zoya, Klubkov, and a soldier named Boris Krainov, was equipped with bottles filled with fuel—better known as Molotov cocktails—guns and food before they were sent on their way. The threesome walked for four days to get to the village, approaching it through the woods in the middle of the night. On
ce they reached their destination, they decided to split up to set fire to buildings in different parts of the village.

  Klubkov told his NKVD interrogators that as he approached the house that he was supposed to set on fire, he could see that Zoya and Boris had already set their targeted buildings alight. He claimed that he tossed his Molotov cocktail but “for some reason it didn’t burn.” At that moment, he spotted German guards and ran for the woods about three hundred meters away. “As soon as I got to the woods, two German soldiers jumped me and took my gun, two bags with five bottled explosives and a bag of food from me.” He noted that the food bag also contained a liter of vodka.

  The Germans brought their captive to their village headquarters, where an officer took charge of him. The senior man immediately pointed a gun at Klubkov and demanded he tell who else had accompanied him on his mission. According to the transcript, Klubkov confessed that he promptly complied. “I was a coward,” he said. “I was scared I would be shot.”

  The officer gave an order to the German soldiers, who quickly left the house. At that point, Klubkov also told the officer that he was part of a four-hundred-man reconnaissance unit based in Kuntsevo, a village on the southwestern outskirts of Moscow, and that this unit was sending out small sabotage teams, usually of five to ten people, behind enemy lines.

  A few minutes later, the soldiers brought in Zoya. Klubkov said he didn’t know whether they had also captured Boris. As Klubkov looked on, the Germans began their interrogation of the new prisoner. Asked how she had conducted her arson attack, Zoya denied that she had set fire to anything. “The officer started beating Zoya up and demanded she answer the questions,” Klubkov reported. “However, she refused to say anything.”

  When the Germans asked if this was really Zoya and what he knew about her, Klubkov confirmed her identity and the fact that she had set fires in the southern part of the village. Zoya stubbornly remained silent, and, increasingly frustrated, several officers stripped her naked and beat her with rubber truncheons for two to three hours, trying to force her to break her silence. “Kill me but I won’t tell you anything,” Zoya reportedly declared. Klubkov added: “After that, they took her out of the room and I didn’t see her anymore.”

  The details of what happened next to Zoya are open to dispute. Her story was subsequently portrayed in a play and a film and depicted in propaganda art, which hardly qualify as unimpeachable historical sources. According to some accounts, the Germans led her through the village with a placard around her neck before torturing her some more, cutting off her left breast, and then hanging her. When Soviet troops finally arrived in the village, they found her frozen, mutilated body still hanging from the gallows.

  In the screen version, Zoya’s story takes on even more symbolic meaning. The film claims she was born on January 21, 1924, the day that Lenin died. It shows footage of Lenin lying in state, juxtaposing this with shots of baby Zoya, who will keep his spirit alive. She grows up in a loving home, with her parents teaching her all the communist virtues. When the war breaks out, she quickly volunteers for dangerous partisan missions. The film depicts her capture and torture and how she is led to the gallows walking barefoot in the snow. In the execution scene, the villagers are clearly awed as they watch the beautiful young woman bravely face death, shouting out at the last moment: “Stalin will come!” There’s nothing subtle about the message: Stalin will be their savior.

  But the filmmakers didn’t hesitate to rearrange the facts when it suited their purposes, starting with Zoya’s date of birth. The public record is clear. Zoya was born on September 13, 1923, a few months earlier than in the film and certainly not on the same day as Lenin’s death. Nina Tumarkin, whose book The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia examines the mythmaking process at work in the Soviet Union, discovered that Zoya’s family situation was also a far cry from the way it was depicted on the screen.

  Zoya, Tumarkin writes, “had had a tragic home life that propelled her toward suicide.” Her father, who is portrayed in the film as going off to the front when the war starts, was already dead by that time—shot, along with her grandfather, during Stalin’s terror campaign in the 1930s. Influenced by an uncle who was a committed communist and by her mother’s desire to clear the family name, she volunteered for the Komsomol’s local partisan group, even though this was a path to nearly certain death at that time in that particular region. “The forest was sparse and the terrain was flat,” Tumarkin notes. “There was no cover for partisans and no opportunity for them to accomplish anything except to turn themselves into exemplars of heroism by getting killed.”

  After Zoya perished, her mother lobbied intensively to make her into a national hero. “She told me, ‘I will die as a hero, or come back as a hero,’” the mother declared. In 1944, she also urged her still underage son, Zoya’s younger brother, to volunteer for service. He, too, was killed, another victim of his mother’s zeal.

  As for Vasily Klubkov, the fellow teenager who was captured by the Germans, the NKVD transcript of his interrogation several months later tells the rest of his story. Once Zoya was led away, the German officer told him, “You are going to work for German intelligence now. Anyway, you have already betrayed your motherland. We will train you a bit and send you to the Soviet home front.”

  “I accepted the officer’s offer to work for German intelligence,” he told his NKVD interrogators. He then went on to describe other Soviet POWs he met when he was sent off for special training in Krasny Bor, a town near Smolensk. There German officers explained how he and the others were supposed to return to Red Army units, claiming that they had escaped captivity. Klubkov’s specific mission was to get himself back into his old unit, where he could find out what groups were about to be dispatched behind German lines, and relay that information to his German masters.

  When he “escaped,” he did manage to return to his unit, but he was quickly arrested and the interrogations began. From the transcript of his interrogation during the night of March 11 to 12, it’s clear that he was already broken, willing to confess to anything his interrogators insisted upon. Stalin’s working assumption was that any Soviet soldier who allowed himself to be captured was by definition a traitor and that anyone who escaped German captivity was doubly suspect. His interrogators certainly knew that they were expected to share the same set of principles. Which meant getting Klubkov to produce the kind of confession that would only confirm their accuracy.

  Klubkov may have been telling the truth, since it’s easy to imagine a terrified teenager on his first mission agreeing to his German captors’ demands. But there’s no way of knowing for sure how he really behaved, since he surely was just as terrified when he was interrogated by the NKVD. Or how much of what he said about Zoya was accurate, since the NKVD may already have been preparing the transcript with the idea of her elevation to mythic status. Only Klubkov’s fate is certain. In the Central Archives of the current Russian secret service, now known as the FSB, the top secret report of his subsequent trial on April 3, 1942, accompanies the transcript of Klubkov’s earlier interrogation. It’s a very short document, which contains Klubkov’s confirmation that he betrayed Zoya and his motherland “due to my own cowardice.”

  The court’s verdict: “Execution by shooting, without confiscation of property due to its absence.”

  As the Germans advanced closer and closer to Moscow, Stalin found himself looking to another type of agent with a secret mission, one who was working under cover in Tokyo for the GRU, the military intelligence arm of the Red Army. This was Richard Sorge, the master spy who had infuriated the Soviet leader before June 22, 1941, by bombarding Moscow with warnings that Hitler was about to strike. In the late summer and early autumn of 1941, the Kremlin desperately needed to know whether Japan’s forces were preparing to attack the weakened Soviet Union from the east, as its German ally was urging it to do. So long as that looked probable or even possible, Stalin had to keep a large contingent
of his troops deployed in Siberia rather than calling them back to help in the defense of Moscow. All of which meant that nothing would be more valuable than accurate intelligence from Tokyo. No one had a better track record there than Sorge, no matter how much Stalin despised him.

  Born of a Russian mother and a German father, Sorge didn’t just flirt with danger, he courted it. Officially working as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung in Tokyo, he garnered inside information from the German embassy and senior Japanese officials, which he’d promptly pass on to Moscow. He skillfully maintained his dual identity, even when, as often was the case, he drank heavily. He carried on affairs with a wide array of Japanese and other women, including the wife of the German ambassador, Eugen Ott. His exploits fascinated even the postwar occupiers of Japan, whom he didn’t live to see. According to a U.S. military intelligence report, he was “intimate with some thirty women in Tokyo during his years of service, including the wife of his good friend, the German ambassador, the wife of his foreign assistant, and the mistress of this same assistant.”

  But he took his greatest risks by openly disputing German predictions that they’d quickly seize Moscow and win the war. In effect, he portrayed himself as a patriotic German who was confident enough to air all his misgivings. “This war is criminal! We have no chance of winning!” he told Ambassador Ott shortly after the Germans invaded. “The Japanese laugh when we put out the line that we’ll be in Moscow by the end of August!” In his contacts with Japanese officials, he also argued that German calculations were wildly wrong, doing his best to undermine the efforts of Ott and other Germans to convince the Japanese that they should join their country in crushing the Soviet Union. There was certainly some method to Sorge’s apparent madness. Ott, for one, was convinced that Sorge’s outbursts proved that he wasn’t hiding anything from him. Besides, the German ambassador genuinely liked Sorge and, as more of an opportunist than a diehard Nazi, he wasn’t about to report his heretical views.