Man at Station Changes Course of War February 4, 2018
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Mid October 1941. A man with a mustache walks up and down besides a train, while snow falls. He is conscious, all too conscious that he is about to make a decision that will change the direction of the war, perhaps even its outcome: a true hinge moment. And the decision? Quite simply should he get on the train, or should he leave the station and head back into the city. The man is, of course, Ioseb Jughashvili, that celebrated mass murderer and serial killer, better known as Stalin. The train was ready to take him from Moscow to Kuibyshev some five hundred miles away. Stalin knew that if he left Moscow then the city would probably fall, but things would be even worse for the Soviet State were Stalin to stay and were the city to be taken by the Germans.
It seems to have taken Stalin a week to make this apparently simple decision: from about 13 to 20 October 1941: not all of it, needless to say, spent at a train station. These days would be some of the most extraordinary in Moscow’s history. 13 October unrest began among the proletariat: it would last until about the 20 of the month. Incredibly the most totalitarian regime on the planet had rioters and looters out on the street; a kind of Soviet Saturnalia. 16 October German troops came within striking distance of the centre and an evacuation of industry and offices began in earnest: some 200 trains and 80,000 trucks would leave the city by the end of the month and 500 factories were reassembled in safer provinces; about a million people, in all, were sent east.
16 October was the day that Stalin told the Politburo that they should leave the city. He said or implied that he would leave the next day. 17 Oct the Red Army’s General Staff headed east, obviously spooked by their most recent defeats. Yet Stalin dithered asking everyone he could, even bodyguards, whether he should stay or go. 18 Oct Stalin told his personal aides to stop preparing to leave and the afternoon of 19 Oct Stalin announced to the politburo that he and by implication they would be staying in Moscow for the duration of the siege. It is heartwarming to report that Stalin still found time in this difficult week for some of his favourite hobbies: 18 Oct he ordered the execution of 25 Soviet officers who were involved in an imaginary plot. It is not as though the Red Army needed men or bullets elsewhere.
Stalin’s presence helped bring order back to the city: the looting and the riots were ‘calmed’. The upper echelons of government dug their heels in and the Red Army was strengthened by crack Soviet troops coming from the east (Stalin’s other and linked major decision). Looking back we might say that 16 October 1941 was the high tide mark of the German invasion of the Soviet Union: there would be many Soviet failures in the months and the years ahead, but the fight back had begun: 5 Dec the Russians would launch their first convincing counter attack. Stalin was a perfectly dreadful leader and a mediocre head of the Russian general staff, but on this occasion he made the right decision. The Soviet Union survived to bring another fifty odd years of misery to Russia and its satellite states. At least they bled out their cousins in the Wehrmacht.
And the scene at the station? A train was kept in permanent standby to take Stalin away at the Abelmanovsky Junction: this can be documented. As to Stalin’s presence at the station we have one witness who claimed he saw Stalin pacing up and down. Simon Sebag Montefiore writes: ‘If it happened, the image of this tiny, thin figure ‘with his tired haggard face’ in its tattered army greatcoat and boots, strolling along the almost deserted but heavily guarded siding through the steam of the ever-ready locomotive is as emotionally potent as it was to be historically decisive.’ But did it really happen? Beach is skeptical. The image is a beautiful one. But perhaps too beautiful? Other evidence for or against Stalin at the station: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com
PS Beach remembers that Orwell in Animal Farm has Napoleon be brave as a grudging tribute to Stalin: ‘He stayed in Moscow when the Germans nearly took it, and his courage was what saved the situation.’
28 Feb 2018: Stephen D wrote in, ‘When working in my fields, cutting back brambles and blackthorn, I thought a little about your post about Stalin in October 1941. Which led me to pose a question; considering the main Western leaders by the end of 1941, Churchill, de Gaulle, Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Stalin, what experience did Roosevelt have that none of the others had? Leading a nation that did well out of the war, obviously. Being in a wheelchair, ditto. But one striking experience denied to Roosevelt: All the others had been in prison, at least once. [I, Beach, questioned Stephen about De Gaulle] As prisoner of war, yes; twice wounded before 1916, captured at Verdun when stunned by a shell and (arguably) again wounded; tried four times to escape, without success. Determined bastard. De Gaulle’s attempted escapes: four times certain. Hiding like Falstaff in a laundry basket; digging a tunnel, making a hole through the wall, disguising his 6’5″ however improbably as nurse: can’t find details of a supposed 5th attempt. Remarkably, when in strict confinement in the Ingolstat fortress in Bavaria as an incorrigible escaper his cell-mate was one Lieutenant Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukachevsky of the Semenyovsky Guards; who on his fifth attempt made a successful home run, and lived to become a Marshal of the Soviet Union and to to develop theories of armoured manoeuvre that far excelled de Gaulle’s. But he lacked the essential Soviet virtue of subservience to central authority, was tortured till he confessed to being a German agent, and was shot in 1937. De Gaulle after the war continued ambivalent as between Soviet Russia and the unforgivable Anglo-Americans.
