World War: BATTLE OF RUSSIA: Appointment in Samara

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A cold, frosty dawn broke over Moscow while the stars slowly died out. Automobiles, busses and tram cars already fill the streets with life, but now for the fourth day this is a different life from the one we ‘ were used to when Moscow was not only the heart of Russia and the most beautiful city, but also the cradle of all that is best in the Russian genius. Moscow has taken to arms. Moscow is preparing to fight.

A Russian radio announcer spoke thus from Moscow. If Moscow is Russia’s heart, the ancient 19-towered fortress of the Kremlin is Moscow’s heart. At a desk in a long room at the heart of the Kremlin, a grey-shocked big-chested man sat, making decisions. In Joseph Stalin’s tough heart was locked Russia’s future.

The Battle of Russia had become in tensely personal to Joseph Stalin. His own life, which he had so zealously guarded with such alphabetical horrors as OGPU and NKVD, was endangered now by a horror called TNT. His own three rooms in the Kremlin were threatened: on seven occasions within a week bombs had fallen inside the old fort.

But Joseph Stalin could not let this immediacy dazzle his eyes and stop his mind. He had to chop his way out of a thicket of decisions—about Moscow’s de fense, about moving the Government to old Samara, now called Kuibyshev, about defending the Donets Basin, about the Volga, the Urals, the Far East, about Russia’s present and Russia’s future.

The Germans were on the threshold of Moscow; they might assault it, or they might by-pass it. They had just launched a great new drive in the south, aimed at Marshal Budenny’s remaining forces around Rostov-on-Don. They had taken Odessa (see p. 26). They still throttled Leningrad. Everywhere they were exerting hasty but terrible pressure—”the last great decisive battle of the year,” Hitler had called it. Tens of thousands of Ger mans had fallen, but still the locusts came.

As he faced each successive decision, Joseph Stalin checked it against the great primary decision, which he had made long ago, even before he was attacked: Fight until there is no fight left.

After 17 weeks of war with Hitler, the primary decision had fallen into a pattern. It was something like this:

> Hold Moscow tenaciously; it is a symbol. But when Moscow is pressed too hard, leave it as a core of resistance, like Leningrad, and fall back to a new defense based on the Volga. If that in turn is cracked, fall back to a new Russia for which plans have long been laid, in and behind the Urals. In each step backward, balance losses of men and ground against damage inflicted on the enemy.

This pattern has been clearly evidenced:

> Great quantities of machinery have been shipped to and beyond the Urals.

> The capital has been moved half way to the Urals.

> Troops have been shunted from the Far Eastern to the European front. Some reports said as many as 17 divisions—one-third of the entire Far Eastern force —have been moved west. In the face of the Japanese threat (see p. 30) this bespoke a determination to do everything possible in the west.

> The British-U.S. mission was sent home with great respect for Russian equipment, with small demands for their own aid (see p. 77).

His Preparations. This week the first and most pressing piece of business was Moscow. Joseph Stalin declared a state of siege in the Capital. His proclamation, like all his speeches, was dull, factual, uninspiring. It limited traffic, decreed a curfew from midnight to 5 a.m., pointed cryptically to the double danger in the rear of the troops defending Moscow and in the rear of Moscow itself, concluded quietly: “The State Committee for Defense appeals to all toilers in the Capital to keep calm and orderly and to render the Red Army defending Moscow all possible help.”

But behind this dull facade was tremendous haste and tremendous feeling.

Joseph Stalin ordered speedy preparations. He had Comrade Mayor Pronin address the citizens. Street-to-street plans were laid. Old women, small children and useless people were evacuated. “The breath of the front is strongly felt here,” wrote Tass, official news agency. “A new line of defenses is being constructed. . . . People of the most varied professions have taken to the spade—women, weavers, streetcar drivers, students and teachers.” Moscow changed within a week from capital into fortress.

His Moscow. Capital or fortress, Stalin loved this city. He was Georgian born and his accent is still thick, but he had done much for Moscow; he had come to think of himself as a native Muscovite. He was not a sentimental man; he would not cry over the white city’s antiquities, Imperial Russia’s Golden Head, the 40-times-40 spires. But he would brood if anything happened to the parachute tower in the Park of Culture and Rest. He would be angry when the new buildings, neither garishly cubist nor grotesquely baroque because he personally had censored the architects’ renderings, were bombed. He, for whom the beautiful miniature locomotive at the Technical Institute was named, would be alarmed if the ten great railways radiating from the Capital were cut. He would be hurt every time a statue of him (in the lobby of the New Moscow Hotel, at the head of the stairs at the Moscow University, out at the Agricultural Exhibition, in every pompous spot) was hurt.

The spot he loved best was the place where he had so often shown himself, like any citizen in his rough tunic, his pants tucked into his boots, before the millions—on Lenin’s tomb in the Red Square. So one of the clearest hints of Stalin’s emotion and Moscow’s peril last week was the closing of the tomb. Millions of Russians had made the pilgrimage to this shrine. Its closing suggested that Communism’s holy relic, the remains of Lenin, had been sent away from the city.

Only Joseph Stalin could have ordered this removal. As he did so he must have remembered Nikolai Lenin’s praise of his article in 1905 on governing minorities, the first time he used the signature J. Stalin: “We have here a wonderful Georgian.” Nor could he forget Lenin’s final repudiation of him as too “crude and narrow-minded” four months before Lenin’s death. But gradually he had created a new Lenin of his own, a legend to be his own backdrop. He could afford in 1939 to be one of the sad-faced bearers of the ashes of Lenin’s widow; he now can face Lenin’s death mask in his office. For Lenin was now a shapeless memory, a symbol of Moscow, of life itself.

“Beloved Moscow!” said an officer of a citizens’ battalion over the radio. “We think of the Red Square, and Lenin too. Never shall we permit the dirty Fascist hordes to touch the tomb.” Spokesman Solomon A. Lozovsky curtly answered a correspondent’s query as to the moving of

Lenin’s remains: “Dead or alive, Lenin is always with us.”

In spite of the preparation, in spite of the effort, the Germans seemed to creep closer all the time. The outer “Moscow circle” of more or less permanent defenses was breached in at least three places (see map). The inner circle—only 60 miles from the city—was hard pressed. The entire city was in danger of encirclement.

The battles of encirclement at Bryansk and Vyazma, which preceded last week’s fighting (TIME, Oct. 20), had taken a terrible toll. The German claim of eight armies of 67 infantry divisions, six cavalry and seven tank divisions, altogether 648,000 prisoners, was probably exaggerated at least twice over; but even so many of Marshal Semion Timoshenko’s best were lost.

Because of this catastrophe, Joseph Stalin rushed everything he could into the breach. On the Moscow approaches he was reported to have sent Russian cavalry against German tanks. He heard that in defense of one 300-yard stretch of railroad track 1,600 citizens, including women and boys as young as twelve, dashed suicidally into Nazi gunfire. He heard about the death march of 15 rows of infantrymen in closed ranks. He approved the use of green reserves, even of workers’ battalions and civilian brigades in front-line actions.

He apparently thought that the defense would last a long time. Lenin’s city had held out now under five weeks of siege. Stalin’s city ought to be able to do as well.

His U.S.S.R. But Moscow was not all that was in danger, not all that touched Stalin personally. He could spread out his maps and see how Hitler’s great eraser was rubbing out Russia and his own name.

Stalinski, just north of Moscow, and Stalinogorsk, to the south (important now because it supplies more than half of Moscow’s electric power), were both in the paths of the German pincers on the Capital. Stalino, capital of the Donets region in the eastern Ukraine, was already passed in the new southern German drive toward Rostov-on-Don; Stalingrad, on the lower Volga and only 260 miles farther east, was threatened by it; and Staliniri and Stalinissi, in Georgia, might be cut off with the rest of the Caucasus by this same drive. Stalinsk, in the Far East near Manchukuo, would probably fall if the Japanese moved. This left only Stalinabad, southeast of Samarkand, and another Stalinsk, a new industrial city in what might be the new Russia—Central Siberia.

By a glance at these memorials, Joseph Stalin could see Russia’s strategic condition. By a glance into a mirror, he could examine in a moment Russia’s morale. He would see there two small, tired eyes under heavy lids; bristly upstanding greyish hair; a formidable, determined jaw. He would see weariness, and peasant cunning. He would see a very tough, strong face to go with a tough, strong past.

Behind this image he would see himself as he once was, when he was the terror of Tiflis—the face harder, no fat on it; the hair black, unkempt; the mouth more defiant. Those were the days when he, a rude Georgian lad, had, by touching Russian dirt and blood, become Russia itself.

He had lived the Revolution. While the Lenins, the Trotskys, the Bukharins had hidden in foreign exile, he had fought inside Russia. He came, down through the years, to feel that he knew what Russia needed, and he would go neither too fast nor too slowly to achieve it, though it meant the ruthless execution of hundreds of his friends and the inhuman starvation of millions of peasants.

He became a symbol, and his statue appearing everywhere meant, not the vanity of a man, but the persistence of a mystical, Oriental idea. Stalin and his people both came to believe in his deification, summed up in the words of a Kazak poet:

He is the strength of the poor.

He took into himself the tears of the ages,

He took into himself the joy of the ages,

He took into himself the wisdom of the ages,

He took into himself the strength of the ages,

He, like the morning, stands over the world.

The face he saw in the mirror was not the face of a man about to give in. That was the position of Russian morale last week.

His Enemy. As Adolf Hitler’s war breathed closer & closer to him, Joseph Stalin must have reviewed with a weary irony his relations with Hitler. When the upstart Hitler came to power in 1933, Joseph Stalin was already steel nine years tempered. He had already begun great projects: rivers to be dammed, factories built, farms collectivized, illiteracy obliterated, men freed—and opposition to be liquidated.

Stalin saw almost immediately that Hitler was a threat. He began a program of house-cleaning and defense building so drastic and brutal that he earned the hatred of most of the world. Even so, the preparations could not go fast enough to keep pace with the meteoric Hitler. So in 1939 Joseph Stalin, falling back on his peasant cunning, decided to make friends with Hitler in order to postpone the conflict until he was ready for it. By his pact with Germany, Stalin started the war which he knew was bound to engulf him eventually.

By last week it was apparent that he was well on his way to losing his bet. Hitler saw through it and attacked him before he was ready. Now, after 17 weeks, Hitler had hurt Russia so badly that, at best, Joseph Stalin would have to begin all over again. The work of years, the beautiful factories, the idea that every man might own a chessboard and have time to play—almost everything Stalinist was now broken by Hitler. This was the same Hitler who wired Stalin in 1939: “I beg you to accept my sincerest congratulations on your 60th birthday. I enclose with them my best wishes for your personal welfare as well as for a happy future for the peoples of the Soviet Union.”

Lenin built the proletariat into the wide U.S.S.R.; Hitler has already broken it by conquering its richest fields, taking many of its factories, conquering many of its people. Now Stalin must salvage the remains. But in the process he was more than likely to be broken himself. In his desperation he was like the servant in the legend who made another retreat to another Samarra:

There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said: “Master, just now when I was in the market place I was jostled by a woman in the ‘crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.” The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market place and he saw Death standing in the crowd and he went to Death and said: “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?” “That was not a threatening gesture,” Death said, “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”