{"product_id":"moscow-1941-isbn-9781400095452","title":"Moscow 1941","description":"In 1941 close to one million Russian soldiers died defending Moscow from German invasion–more causalities than that of the United States and Britain during all of World War II. Many of these soldiers were in fact not soldiers at all, but instead ordinary people who took up arms to defend their city. Students dropped their books for guns; released prisoners exchanged their freedom for battle; and women fought alongside men on the bloody, mud-covered frozen road to Moscow. By the time the United States entered the war the Germans were already retreating and a decisive victory had been won for the Allies. With extensive research into the lives of soldiers, politicians, writers, artists, workers, and children, Rodric Braithwaite creates a richly detailed narrative that captures this crucial moment. \u003ci\u003eMoscow 1941\u003c\/i\u003e is a dramatic, unforgettable portrait of an often overlooked battle that changed the world.“Eye-opening. . . . Riveting. . . . Brilliantly captures a pivotal year not only for Russia but also for the world.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Miami Herald\u003c\/i\u003e“A symphonic evocation of a great city at war.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e“A gripping portrait. . . . Braithwaite knows his subject and the personal stories he weaves together allow for a particularly rich recreation of a pivotal moment in history.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Christian Science Monitor\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eRodric Braithwaite\u003c\/b\u003e was British ambassador to Moscow during the critical years of perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the failed coup of August 1991, and the rise of Boris Yeltsin. With his long experience of Russia, on good personal terms with Mikhail Gorbachev, he was in a privileged position close to the center of Russia's changing relationship with the West. Rodric Braithwaite was based in Moscow from September 1988 to May 1992. He retains business and educational interests in Russia.Chapter OneThe Shaping of the CityBy one measure—the number of people involved—the 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 battle—926,000 soldiers killed, to say nothing of the wounded—than   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, Moscow—strangled by traffic, poisoned by the exhalations of   decrepit factories, disfigured by the exuberant constructions of a   vulgar and rampant capitalism—is 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’s geographical   position and climate, by the network of roads of which it was the   centre, and by the shape of the city itself as it developed through the   centuries in response to the actions of powerful men (see map of   Central Moscow in 1941).The countryside around Moscow—the Podmoskovie—undulates gently and   undramatically across an endless sandy plain. The Moscow River and its   tributaries wind across it, a place of fishermen and holidaymakers, of   swimmers and sunbathers in times of peace, but an obstacle in time of   war. The countryside has been partly cleared for agriculture. But even   today, thick forests of silver birch and black pine still cover much of   the land, dark and impenetrable except along the roads or paths that   have been hacked through them. It is a landscape which does not impose   itself on the observer. It has nothing of the wild grandeur of the Alps   or the cultivated beauty of England or Italy. But it speaks to the   deepest emotions of the Russian people: emotions which are captured,   even for the foreigner, by Russia’s landscape artists of the nineteenth   century.Napoleon’s veterans complained as they marched across these endless   plains that the heat was as bad as it had been in Egypt. The dust cast   up by the marching men and vehicles was so thick that the sun was   sometimes reduced to a dim red disk and drums had to be sounded at the   head of every battalion to prevent the rear from losing its way. The   dust killed Napoleon’s horses and draft animals in their tens of   thousands, and ground and clogged the engines of Hitler’s tanks and   lorries until they seized up.The winters are as cold as the summers are hot. The snow starts in   October or November and continues until April or May. The average   temperature in December, January and February hovers around minus ten   degrees centigrade. It can fall below minus forty degrees, but even   that is manageable if your house is heated and you are properly   dressed: for centuries people spent most of the winter indoors, asleep   on their stoves. But the roads are hard once the frost takes hold, and   if you have the right kind of transport you can move fairly freely.The worst time of all is the moment when autumn gives way to winter and   winter gives way to spring. This is the time that Russians call the   \u003ci\u003erasputitsa\u003c\/i\u003e, the “time when roads dissolve,” when the ground becomes   waterlogged in the rain and the slush, and all but the most modern   roads become a quagmire to any large number of men and vehicles. It was   the mud, not the winter, which brought the armies of Napoleon and   Hitler to a halt.Small wooden villages and towns—Moscow and Tver (which the Communists   renamed Kalinin), Tula and Zvenigorod, Mozhaisk and Volokolamsk, towns   which were all to see bloody fighting in the autumn of 1941—began to   appear in these forests a thousand years ago. Almost every town had its   own prince and, like Moscow, its own fortified kremlin. The princes   were mostly related to one another, and to the ancient ruling family of   Kiev—the reason, no doubt, why their tiny internecine wars were so   vicious.The men who founded Moscow in the twelfth century chose its position on   a river ford because it was convenient both for trading and for defence   against its princely neighbours, against outlaw rebels, against Tatars,   Poles and Frenchmen. The fort which became the Kremlin originally   consisted of no more than a dry moat and a palisade with wooden   blockhouses, protected on the Southern side by the Moscow River itself.   East of the fortress there grew up a settlement for traders and   artisans. The open space between them became the Red (meaning   “beautiful” in old Russian) Square. The Southern bank of the river—the   Zamoskvorechie, “Beyond the Moscow River”—was flat, marshy, and   unfortified. The Tatar horsemen who from time to time swept this far   North to exact tribute and to carry off slaves would camp on this plain   while they awaited payment. Sometimes they cut the process short by   sacking the city and burning it to the ground.The first ring of fortifications encompassed the market outside the   Kremlin walls, the Kitaigorod. Later fortifications were razed as the   need for them passed, and replaced by ring roads: the Boulevard Ring,   the Garden Ring, the Earthen Wall. In 1900 an outer ring was   constructed to carry the railway round the city; and in 1962 an orbital   road—the Moscow Ring Motorway—was built to provide a similar facility   for motor vehicles.Apart from the cartwheel pattern imposed by the concentric system of   defences, Moscow grew higgledy-piggledy. There were few planning rules   beyond a requirement to leave occasional broad gaps as firebreaks   between the houses. Even the great highways which led to the outside   world degenerated into narrow and sometimes winding streets once they   entered the city. The boulevards which are such a feature of Moscow   today began to appear only at the end of the eighteenth century. The   Boulevard Ring has retained much of its charm, but the Garden Ring is   now a polluted and sclerotic battleground for modern foreign cars and   ancient wheezing lorries.It was along the great highways that Moscow’s rulers set out to bring   the neighbouring principalities under their sway, the first step by   which Moscow was transformed from a minor settlement in a forest to the   capital of an immense empire. The highways radiate outwards from the   Kremlin, the spokes in the cartwheel. To the Northwest, one highway—now   called the Leningrad Highway—led to Tver and on to the Free Republic of   Novgorod, and in time as far as Peter the Great’s new capital of St.   Petersburg. To the Northeast, a highway led to Yaroslavl and onwards to   Russia’s first maritime trading routes through Archangel to Western   Europe. To the South lay the roads through Tula and Kashira, along   which the Tatars came in their search for tribute. To the East the   Vladimir Highway led towards the minerals and furs of Siberia and the   Urals, a road known to the people as the “Vladimirka,” the “Trakt.”   Along it generations of criminals and political prisoners trudged   painfully towards exile or worse in the Tsarist times. They were   followed in the late autumn of 1941 by miserable conscripts on their   way to their training camps, and refugees from a city apparently about   to fall to the enemy.But it was the roads to the West that had the greatest strategic   significance in Russia’s modern history: the Volokolamsk Highway, the   Mozhaisk Highway, and the Minsk Highway which leads to the fortress   city of Smolensk, to the Polish frontier and on to Warsaw. It was along   the Mozhaisk Highway that the Poles and the French marched to capture   Moscow in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and it was along   the last few miles of the Mozhaisk Highway that the Germans made their   final desperate bid to break into the city in December 1941.For centuries the Mozhaisk Highway entered Moscow through the Arbat,   the name both of a street and of a quarter of the city, a place of   craftsmen, artists and intellectuals until the middle of the twentieth   century. The vanguard of Napoleon’s army, a party of Württemberg   Hussars under Marshal Murat, passed along the Arbat on their way to the   Kremlin. It was here that Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov planned to   assassinate Napoleon himself. Stalin used to drive along the Arbat on   his way to the Kremlin from his dacha—the “Nearby Dacha”—off the   Mozhaisk Highway just outside the old city limits.These ring roads within Moscow itself—the Boulevard Ring, the Garden   Ring, the Earthen Wall, the Railway Ring; these great highways—the   Leningrad Highway, the Volokolamsk Highway, the Mozhaisk Highway; the   rivers, the towns and the villages of the Podmoskovie; the Moscow River   itself—all these shaped the Battle of Moscow in 1941, as they had   shaped so much of Moscow’s earlier history.The face of this great city has been fashioned above all by the varying   and often dubious taste of its rulers, from its founder Yuri Dolgoruki   through a series of despots—Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great,   Catherine the Great and Stalin—to the sometimes bizarre caprices of   Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of post-Communist Moscow. Until well into the   twentieth century, Moscow was a city built above all of wood. The grand   buildings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have a   facing of stucco. But the wooden framework was almost always there   behind the façade; and this was the main reason why the domestic   quarters of Moscow, and of most other Russian towns, burned down so   regularly. When war came in 1941, the fear of a conflagration forced   the authorities to mobilise much of the population of the city into a   most effective, if brutally simple, system of fire-fighting.Moscow’s Kremlin and the churches and monasteries within its walls were   rebuilt more durably of stone and brick in the fourteenth and fifteenth   centuries. By the time Richard Chancellor visited it in 1553, Moscow   was already twice the size of London. But, he thought, “it is very   rude, and standeth without all order. Their houses are all of timber   very dangerous for fire. There is a faire Castle, the walles whereof   are of bricke, and very high: they say they are eighteene foote thicke,   but I do not believe it.” Ivan the Terrible captured the Tatar capital   of Kazan in 1552 and chose a singular, almost grotesque, new style for   St. Basil’s, the cathedral he built on Red Square to commemorate the   victory. At this time, too, six great walled monasteries were built in   a ring around the city, defensive bastions to break up the assault of   Moscow’s enemies before they reached the walls of the Kremlin.   Pre-revolutionary Moscow was dominated by its religious buildings: nine   cathedrals, fifteen monasteries, ten convents, nearly three hundred   Orthodox churches and another forty churches for the dissident Old   Believers.    Moscow ceased to be the capital of Russia in 1712, when Peter the Great   moved the government to his new city of St. Petersburg on the Baltic.   But as the decades passed, some of the richer citizens built themselves   neo-classical town houses with something of a European elegance and the   city began to acquire an overlay of Enlightenment taste. When the   French entered Moscow on 14 September 1812, after the bloody Battle of   Borodino on 7 September, which they still perversely regard as a   victory, one of their number was “seized with astonishment and delight.   Although I had expected to see a wooden city, I found, on the contrary,   almost all the houses to be of brick and in the most elegant and modern   style. The homes of private persons are like palaces and everything was   rich and wonderful.”    By then the city was almost empty: the people of Moscow had fled along   the Eastern and Northern highways. “As far as the eye could see the   entire Moscow road was covered with lines of carriages and people on   foot fleeing from the unhappy capital. They jostled and overtook one   another, and hurried, driven by fear, in carriages, cabriolets,   droshkies, and carts. Everyone carried what he could. All faces were   dusty and tearstained.” The same scenes, on the same roads, at almost   the same time of year, were to be repeated one hundred and twenty-nine   years later as the Germans approached the Soviet capital.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299688665317,"sku":"NP9781400095452","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400095452.jpg?v=1767732985","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/moscow-1941-isbn-9781400095452","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}