Sir Rodric Braithwaite had already served as a diplomat in Moscow before becoming the British Ambassador there at the end of the 1980s. In the Foreign and Commonwealth Office there is a well-known expression – ‘to go native’ – used in connection with those of its own employees (as well as journalists and intelligence officers) who have so fallen in love with the country where they are stationed that they then find it very difficult to distinguish between the interests of that country and the interests of their own. 

Braithwaite is a classic example of this phenomenon. During his many years in Moscow he developed a love of the USSR/Russia so great that it can be felt in every chapter of this book. On the one hand he wants to tell us how well the Soviet people (ordinary people, both civilians and soldiers) fought in the war and the enormous losses, deprivations and misery that they suffered in that gigantic struggle, and to convey all this to a Western readership that is much more familiar with endless TV programmes about the war in the Pacific and the D-Day landings. On the other hand he is striving to prettify the Soviet Union, suggesting that not everything there was so terribly bad – that there was a brighter side to it all and most people were (supposedly) quite happy and passionately patriotic, demonstrating extraordinary courage throughout the course of the war. 

Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Diplomats, intelligence officers and Western (including British) politicians had been warning Stalin about Hitler’s intentions, providing details of the numbers, equipment and strategy of the Nazi troops. Stalin ignored these warnings and even gave orders to shoot three Soviet pilots who had been sent out on reconnaissance missions and had brought back clear, detailed photographs of German troops massing on the USSR’s western borders. 

The aggressors were faced by the Red Army, numerically much larger than the German army and equipped with a greater number of tanks, artillery pieces and aircraft. As the fighting took place in the USSR, the Soviet military naturally had a much better knowledge of the terrain, climate and other factors than did the Germans, whose lines of communication and transport were obviously much longer. Nonetheless, within a few weeks the Germans had reached Smolensk, Kiev and Leningrad. On 16–18 October, less than four months after the invasion, the Germans were looking at Moscow through their binoculars from a distance of some ten to fifteen miles.

How could this have happened? Apparently Braithwaite himself is none too sure of the answer, perhaps because he has been excessively indoctrinated by decades of Soviet propaganda. He buries the overall picture of the Soviet retreat in endless details about troop redeployments, Stalin’s threatening telephone calls to his generals and numerous stories about the individual exploits of participants in the war during this terrible initial period. It is these stories that are the most valuable contribution to the book. Instead of watching American films about the Second World War, Western readers should now be able to grasp what the Soviet people went through at this time. However, the chief drawback of the individual stories is that the sources for them are two elderly former bureaucrats who worked in the Central Committee (CC) of the Soviet Communist Party – Anatoly Chernyayev and Lev Parshin. From the end of the 1980s until August 1991 the former was an assistant to Mikhail Gorbachev, and Ambassador Braithwaite had professional contact with him. 

Moscow on 16 October 1941 was in a state of panic. People were on the run. The security services were planting mines in the main buildings of the capital. Special detachments for street fighting were put together from Spaniards who had left their country at the end of the Spanish Civil War and from students at physical training colleges. There were numerous outbursts of anti-government criticism. Even Communist Party employees committed the crime of fleeing to the East without permission. At the same time the rainy season began and Russian roads turned into rivers of mud, bogging down all the German transport. Then, a few weeks later, the frosts came on, to the delight of the invaders, as their tanks could start moving again. However, the Germans’ joy was short-lived, because the temperature quickly went down to minus 30, and occasionally dipped as low as minus 40. The last attempt to take Moscow, at the end of November, was prevented by ‘General Frost’. In desperation, Stalin decided to call in fresh divisions from Central Asia, as well as troops from the Far East who had been keeping their eyes skinned on Japan. Thanks to this massive numerical superiority, the Germans were pushed back to some 150 miles west of Moscow. This was regarded by the USSR leadership as a great victory of the Soviet system.

The author ends his book with an account of the defence of Moscow. Braithwaite is correct when he writes about the unbelievable losses of the Soviet people in this war. He estimates that some nine million Soviet soldiers and about 17 million civilians died (I have recently seen figures suggesting that in reality the losses were closer to 13 million combatants and 14 million civilians – several times more than American and UK losses put together). He is also right to remind us that four-fifths of the fighting in the Second World War took place on the Eastern front. Two-thirds of the German army were in the East even after D-Day. Indeed, had they not been fighting the Russians, they would have been in France, and there would have been no D-Day. 

Then the author poses the central philosophical question: 

Above all, people asked why the Soviet people fought with such courage and at such a price in blood for a regime which had imposed such hardships on them in the years between the wars, when an inadvertent word or incautious action could lead to the loss of job, liberty, or life itself. Were they driven by patriotism or by fear of retribution from their own side?

Braithwaite doesn’t know the answer, although it is an obvious one. In the first two years of the war (1941­1942) there was hardly any courage or patriotism on the Soviet side (except, of course, on the radio). To think otherwise is to succumb to the USSR’s propaganda machine. In reality, millions of Soviet people hated the Communist regime, which explains why the German troops were met with flowers and ovations in Ukraine, Belarus, the three Baltic States and western Russia; why one million Soviet soldiers, without firing a single shot, surrendered to the Germans during the first fortnight of the war; why 550,000 people gave themselves up in and near Kiev, and why shortly after that another 500,000 surrendered in and near Kharkiv. Another two million Soviet troops surrendered to the Germans in 1942. Why the Germans reached the outskirts of Moscow in a little over three months should be no mystery.

One of the heroes of the defence of Moscow, General Andrei Vlasov, went over to the Germans and built up a 50,000-strong anti-Communist army out of some of these prisoners of war. And, as Braithwaite puts it, the Germans, taking advantage of the widespread anti-Soviet attitude, organised armed units of ‘Tatars, Cossacks, Chechens, Ukrainians, and Balts inside the Soviet Union itself. Nationalist partisan groups fought the Red Army. … Two to three hundred thousand “volunteers” … agreed to serve the Germans as doctors, nurses, cooks, cleaners, drivers, casual workers, village policemen and elders’. Of course, there were those who in one way or another supported the Soviet regime. Above all, such people came from the Moscow intelligentsia, thousands of whose members had grown close to the powers-that-were. Others were simply grateful to the regime for not having been shot during the years of the Great Terror. In July and August 1941, after an appeal (ie instruction) from the Moscow authorities, twenty-five divisions of volunteers were formed – one for every district of the capital. In September they were thrown into battle and within days most of them were completely wiped out by the Germans. Only five divisions remained more or less intact. This crime of the Kremlin, which sent unprepared and untrained academics, teachers, students and musicians to a certain death, has still not been forgotten. (In these particular operations the Germans lost no more than a dozen soldiers.)

Braithwaite’s indulgence towards the Soviet regime is quite astonishing. For instance, when writing about the partisan movement he regurgitates the tired old Soviet propaganda that it was a manifestation of the spontaneous popular resistance to the occupation. In fact, as is widely known, the ‘partisan movement’ was a sabotage operation run by a secret police unit that was headed in Moscow by Pavel Sudoplatov and Naum Eytingon, who had recently been in charge of the liquidation of Trotsky in Mexico. Then he writes indulgently of the cultural pleasures available to happy Muscovites as they saw in the 1941 New Year, when they could enjoy Swan Lake at the Bolshoi, an adaptation of The Pickwick Papers in the theatre and the latest productions of the Soviet cinema industry (full of agitation and propaganda, it should be added). Yet this was a time when every Soviet adult knew that almost all new Western books, plays, music and films, let alone newspapers, were banned, and the cultural diet was composed almost exclusively of operettas, circuses, chess and Russian songs, a time when the authorities tried to stop a production of La Traviata because of its pessimistic denouement.

Braithwaite provides a list of outstanding writers, scholars and scientists of the Soviet period in an attempt to demonstrate the high quality of Soviet education. If he had visited the primitive school (in the very centre of Moscow) which I went to between 1946 and 1956 he would have realised that the October Revolution wreaked tremendous havoc on the Russian academic and school system.

Despite the author’s wishes, the book makes it clear that, in the first two years of fighting, millions of Soviet people, with minor exceptions, did not display the patriotism and courage he ascribes to them. Most of them wanted to go to Germany or to live in areas under German occupation, as far away as possible from the hated Soviet authorities. Only at the end of 1942 did the Soviet people, military and civilian alike, realise that it wasn’t a matter of a lesser evil against a greater evil – it was six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. If they had to choose between ‘our, Soviet’ sons-of-bitches and ‘their, Nazi’ sons-of-bitches, most Soviet citizens, naturally, preferred their own, domestic brand. The last years of the war present us with a tragic drama of genuine patriotism and amazing courage on an epic scale. One should merely add the proviso that until the very end of the war there were secret police ‘anti-desertion detachments’ which were deployed to the rear of the front-line troops and which were under orders to shoot dead any soldiers who retreated, even with the intention of regrouping, in the face of overwhelming enemy fire. Incidentally, right up to 1991 Soviet nationals who had spent even one day on German-occupied territory were regarded by the authorities as second-class citizens.