by Geert Mak
The numbed soldiers of the Wehrmacht did not know what had hit them.
Not far from Sheremetyevo airport stands the most significant war memorial in Europe. Today the traffic races heedlessly past, the monument suffers from the same inflation as the medals for sale on Moscow's street markets, yet its sobriety is moving. It consists, in fact, of nothing more than a pair of tank traps, a huge cross of welded rails, highly effective obstacles against any armoured attack. In all its simplicity, however, this iron sculpture marks the divide of the Second World War, the moment at which chance took a definitive turn, the furthest spot reached by German troops in December 1941. They never got any closer to Moscow.
One week after the Germans had been routed, the Franco-American journalist Eve Curie, daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, the famous chemists, drove out from Moscow onto the battlefield with a convoy of her colleagues. She saw tanks and armoured cars abandoned everywhere in the open field, ‘stubborn, dead and cold, beneath a shroud of snow’. Along the highway lay hundreds and hundreds of frozen Germans, amid dead horses and deserted artillery, often in strange positions, like wax figurines fallen from a display case. Beside a demolished tank she saw the bodies of three Wehrmacht soldiers. The first one lay on his stomach, ‘his bare back looked like frozen wax’, the snowflakes floating down onto his blond hair. The other two lay on their backs, their arms and legs spread wide, one of them wearing an Iron Cross. ‘The uniforms were of such thin material that they would not have been warm enough even for occupied France’.
This huge turnaround in the course of the Second World War took place within the space of a few days. Everything happened at the same time. On Saturday, 6 December, 1941, the German troops were beaten back from the gates of Moscow. The next day, Japan attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. On Thursday, 11 December, Hitler declared war on the United States with a lengthy tirade against President Franklin D. Roosevelt who, with the ‘satanic cunning of the Jews’, he said, was out to destroy Germany.
Hitler's declaration of war on America is the most baffling of all his decisions. He owed Japan nothing, their alliance in no way committed him to fight alongside Japan against the United States. But with it he gave Roosevelt the decisive argument he needed to go to war in Europe, something the majority in Congress had blocked vehemently until then.
Hitler himself was clearly itching for this war. He wanted to demonstrate that he could still take the initiative. ‘A great power does not let war be declared upon it, but declares war itself,’ Ribbentrop told Ernst von Weizsäcker, and that was Hitler's view as well. The attack on Pearl Harbor was exactly what he needed. After all the misery on the Eastern Front he could suddenly give a new, positive twist to his propaganda. After receiving the news about Pearl Harbor the Führer actually called for a bottle of champagne and, very much contrary to custom, drank two glasses himself.
Hitler's optimistic assault on the Soviet Union, and above all his declaration of war on the United States, belong in that row of historical errors precipitated by ‘groupthink’: decisions made by small groups of policy-makers who see themselves as all-powerful, and who dismiss all problems by refusing to admit any undesirable information from outside. Leaders great and small – the phenomenon has been seen at all levels and in every age – can in this way create for themselves a fictitious world that will, sooner or later, but inevitably, come crashing down.
Hitler's commanders had only rarely, if ever, visited the front, Albert Speer complained after the war. ‘They knew nothing about the Russian winters and the quality of the roads during that season … They had never witnessed the damage caused to the cities by the enemy's bombs … Hitler never visited a single bombed city in the entire course of the war. As a result of this ignorance, the way things were represented during the daily staff meetings became increasingly inaccurate.’
This mentality was reinforced even further by Hitler's retinue, from which almost every critical and independent spirit had been removed in the course of time. The level of Hitler's discourse at Berlin and Obersalzberg in no way approached that of Churchill's discussions at Chartwell, or the thorough reports delivered to Roosevelt day after day. In his memoirs, Speer – Hitler's closest acquaintance of long standing – hammers on and on about the all-pervasive provincialism of those with whom Hitler spent his days. Almost none of those around the Führer had ever seen anything of the world. In June 1940, Hitler had spent three hours driving through Paris in the early morning hours: that was almost the sum of what he had seen of France. Speer: ‘If someone had taken a holiday in Italy, that was discussed at Hitler's table as a happening, and the person in question acquired the reputation of having foreign experience.’
For Hitler and those around him, the war in this way remained a German war, and not a world war. The Third Reich's relationship with allies like Italy, Finland, Rumania and Hungry was only fair. While the British and the Americans carefully coordinated their activities, the Germans proved incapable of any form of cooperation with their most vital ally, Japan. Hitler and the most important Japanese leaders never even met. The Germans invaded the Soviet Union without ever consulting Japan; the same applied, conversely, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet both attacks served to determine the further course of the war.
It was also during winter 1941 that the first leading German figures began to realise that the Reich was on course for disaster. Germany's success depended entirely on quick victories. The country did not have the reserves to accommodate long campaigns in the field, and was utterly unprepared for a war with distant America. The German fleet could barely go to sea, the few battleships Germany had were no match for the combined British and American navies, and its air force – with all the technology available to it – could barely get further than England. Germany, in other words, was not even capable of reaching the territory of its greatest foe.
As early as 29 November, 1941, Hitler and the Nazi high command had been warned that the Soviet Union was producing more tanks than Germany, and that the military balance would be thrown even further off kilter if America entered the war. At the meeting held that day, Fritz Todt, the minister responsible for Germany's arms production, concluded that ‘the war can no longer be won by military means’.
One month later, after a troop inspection, Speer found this same Todt in an exceptionally sombre mood: ‘Later I would recall his words, and the extreme sadness on his face, when he said that we would probably not win the war.’ Shortly afterwards, Todt was killed in a plane crash.
Brigadier General Alfred Jodl wrote from his cell in Nuremberg that, in winter 1941–2, Hitler had already grasped that victory was no longer possible. ‘Before anyone else in the world, Hitler sensed and knew that the war was lost. But can a person surrender an empire and a people before matters have truly come to an end? A person like Hitler could not.’
Following the debacle outside Moscow, the Germany Army moved on in spring 1942, many hundreds of kilometres into Russia. Wolf Siedler observed that the atmosphere of triumph had disappeared completely in Berlin; even so, Hitler still enjoyed the people's confidence. His supporters were sure he would find a political and diplomatic way out. ‘What the average German did not see was that not a single great battle was fought after that. The Russians simply drew back, saving their strength. In 1941 the papers were full of reports about millions of prisoners of war, in 1942 there were no more such reports.’
Only one year later, after Stalingrad, did the Germans truly begin to understand how badly, how very badly, the war was going.
The sound of Moscow's resurrection is that of the grinder and the excavator. An underground shopping mall is being built outside the gates of the Kremlin. The builders worked on day and night, using everything the Russian Army and commerce has to offer in terms of manpower, cranes and excavators, and now the complex is finished, gleaming and glowing, the showroom for the new Russia.
Moscow is like a household after a divorce: after a period of neglect and con
fusion, the city is once again bursting with activity. My regular taxi driver, Viktor, calls his mafia boss: will he go along with a special rate for a regular customer? ‘You pay me twelve dollars now,’ he says to me, ‘but don't forget: seventy per cent of that goes to him.’ At the city's most chic parking spots the gates open for him free of charge: that, too, is the mafia. He shows me the wooden cudgel beside his seat: his personal protection. One of his childhood friends now owns a gym and acts as bodyguard to a big industrialist, another old friend became a sharpshooter; he was Gorbachev's bodyguard ten years ago, and now he works for the country's biggest oil magnate.
‘This is no life, this is a fire in a packed theatre!’ Chekhov's poor country doctor, Sobol, shouted a hundred years ago. ‘Anyone who stumbles or screams in fear and loses his head is the established order's number-one enemy. You have to remain upright, keep your eyes open and not make a sound!’
The more respectable part of Moscow's population still tries to follow those directives from 1892. Almost all the people I meet have two or three jobs and race around the city from this job to that deal. There is hammering and painting, one café after another is opened, a new merchant class is starting to take root. Everyone who visits the city is amazed by the speed with which it is changing, and meanwhile the pioneers of local trade and industry move on, further into the provinces.
In the café beside the disco on Pushkin Square, the city's jeunesse dorée are sipping at coffee with cognac. These are the children of the new nomenklatura: bankers, businessmen and odd-jobbers. The price of admission at the disco is thirty dollars, half the monthly salary of a journalist, and I am told the place is always full. ‘This is the great going-out-of-business sale for savers, honest incomes and respectability,’ wrote Erich Maria Remarque of the inflationary fever in the Weimar Republic in 1922, and in the Moscow of 1999 things are not very different: the vultures come flocking in from all sides, and only those with power, bad friends and a big mouth are well off.
The party now being held here signifies the end of social change from the top down. It is the great dismantling of the idea that ruled Soviet life from the 1920s to the 1980s. For let there be no mistake about this: even Stalin, with all his cruelty, was well loved in the Soviet Union during his lifetime. And his views were adhered to by a broad cross section of the population.
Stalin and Hitler were both ultra-radical, they both went to extremes in pursuit of their utopias. But Stalin was a revolutionary; in the end, Hitler, who always protected the established order, was not. And, after a certain fashion, Stalin's vision was more rational and even more optimistic. The ideal human and the ideal society were determined, in his eyes, not by birth and racial selection; no, the ideal could be achieved. The criminal could be rehabilitated and become a good citizen, the backward Russian masses could be remoulded into the building blocks of a new society. That was the core of Stalin's Soviet project.
For him, therefore, mass murder was not an end in itself, but a revolutionary means to build his ideal Soviet state. A ‘state’ indeed, for Stalin held no truck with the old revolutionary idea that the state is a ‘lie’. In his view, the nation state was to assume a fully central role once more, and that was one of the most crucial points of difference with his rival Trotsky, who continued to advocate the old Marxist idea of a ‘worldwide’ and ‘permanent’ revolution.
Hitler had his Wagnerian heroes; Stalin, too, had his role models. But those models were ‘heroes of the new humanity’, men and women who posited human force against the forces of nature in a ‘great and tragic struggle’. Their task was no longer to analyse and understand the world, as Marx and his followers did. No, in this new phase the world was to be conquered, overwhelmed and created anew. Even the concentration camps played a role in this: it was no coincidence that the camp newspaper of the slave labourers on the White Sea-Baltic Sea canal was called Perekovka, the ‘Reforging’.
At the same time, deep in his heart, Stalin was an anti-idealist. He was referred to as the Benevolent Friend of All Children, the Wise Helmsman, the Eagle of the Mountains, the Greatest Genius of All Time, the Titan of the World Revolution and the Most Profound Theoretician of the Modern Age, but in fact he was simply Josef Dzhugashvili, the son of a penniless Georgian cobbler. He had been raised with a deep mistrust of people in general, and he rid himself of his last illusions after the death of his wife in 1907. After the suicide – betrayal! – of his second wife in 1932, his cynicism soured into pure misanthropy.
Everything he did or did not do was ruled by an iron logic: once you had said A, then B and C had to follow, regardless of the human cost. When his eldest son, Yakov, was captured by the Germans, he did nothing to save him. In the end, Yakov committed suicide in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. Stalin could not imagine others living outside these norms. According to his world view, every deviation was a source of suspicion, every ally a potential rival, every comrade a potential traitor. That, after all, was how he himself operated. He had an unusually acute feeling for the weak spots of his co-workers and opponents; he could, as people say, ‘open the windows to the soul’, but this ability gradually became more and more clouded by his own paranoia. He saw ‘spies’, ‘enemies’ and ‘counterspies’ everywhere. At the end of his life, in 1951, Khrushchev even heard him say: ‘I am finished. I don't trust anyone any more, not even myself.’
Stalin was also a chameleon who could fade into his surroundings, which was how he seized power after Lenin's death. The chronicler of the revolution, Nikolai Suchanov, described him in 1917 as a ‘grey spot that became visible now and then, but never left a single trace’. The brilliant and arrogant Trotsky called Stalin an ‘excellent bit of mediocrity’ and barely took him into account. That proved to be a fatal mistake.
Trotsky was an extraordinary speaker and organiser, a popular army leader and a successful revolutionary. He was one of the five members of the original Politburo, and was widely seen in 1920 as Lenin's natural successor. But he rarely or never attended a party meeting. During the same period, Stalin worked his way up through the nebulous party apparatus until he achieved a central position of power. Internally, he was anything but a marginal figure. Soon after the 1905 revolution he became one of Lenin's most important advisers, particularly on issues concerning national minorities. In 1917, during the events at Petrograd, Stalin played a central, behind-the-scenes role in almost all major discussions and decisions. And it was he who soon supervised the course of daily affairs within the Politburo; he was able to appoint allies to top positions and dismiss opponents, thereby further broadening his power base within the bureaucracy.
After the civil war ended in 1921, Trotsky's popularity began to wane and two thirds of ‘his’ Red Army was sent home. On 3 April, 1922, at Lenin's recommendation, the plenary meeting of the central committee elected Stalin general secretary of the party. Now he was holding all the cards.
One month later Lenin had the first of a series of strokes. He was forced to withdraw almost entirely from active politics, but at the same time grew ever more concerned about the behaviour of the new general secretary. During Lenin's absence, Stalin formed a troika with Grigori Zinoviev in Petrograd and Lev Kamenev in Moscow. Increasingly, decisions were made without the sick leader being consulted.
In late 1922, Lenin dictated his political will and testament. It was a bitter piece by a man badly disappointed by the course ‘his’ revolution had taken. He came back again and again to the problem of Russia's backwardness, and seemed in hindsight even to be in agreement with the Mensheviks: the country was, indeed, not ready for socialism. Lenin did not spare any of his old comrades, but his verdict concerning his intended successor was nothing less than damning. ‘Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings between communists, becomes intolerable in a general secretary. For this reason I suggest that the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from that post and replace him with someone who has only one advantage over
Comrade Stalin, namely greater tolerance, greater loyalty, greater courtesy and consideration to comrades, less capriciousness, etc.’
But it was too late. Three months later Lenin lost the ability to speak. He died on 21 January, 1924. During the last ten months of his life, he was able to utter only a few syllables: vot-vot (here-here) and syezd-syezd (congress-congress).
Stalin went immediately for his former rival Trotsky. Apart from all their political differences, the two men also held each other in immense personal contempt. During the civil war, Trotsky had reprimanded his subordinate Stalin on a number of occasions, and Stalin had never forgiven him for that. In January 1925, Trotsky was discharged as commander of the Red Army. A campaign of slander against the ‘Trotskyite schismatics’ followed. In July 1926 he was dismissed from the Politburo; Kamenev and Zinoviev followed in October.
Eighteen months later, on 7 November, 1927, Trotsky and Zinoviev made a final attempt to stop Stalin: they issued a public call for mass demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad. The secret police beat the demonstrators back, both organisers were thrown out of the party, and only their great fame kept Stalin from liquidating them on the spot. Trotsky was dragged kicking and screaming from his apartment and put on a train for Almaty. From there he was deported to Turkey in 1929, and by way of France and Norway finally ended up in Mexico in 1936. There, at Coyoacán, he spent his last years, a prisoner in his own house, watched over by Mexican policemen and a handful of followers, waiting for Stalin's death-sentence-by-default to be carried out. On 20 August, 1940, an NKVD agent fatally wounded him with a blow of an ice-axe to the head. He died the next day.
