Russia at war 1941-1945

There were many acts of heroism by Russian soldiers in the embittered fighting north of Volokolamsk, such as the many— if atrociously costly—feats by General Dovator's

cossack cavalry (Dovator himself was to be killed during the Russian counter-offensive on December 19), or the suicidal resistance of Panfilov's anti-tank unit who were

guarding the Volokolamsk highway at the Dubosekovo crossroads:

On that day the Germans had hoped to break through to the Volokolamsk highway,

and to advance on Moscow. After a massive air attack, German tommy-gunners

tried to break into the Russian trenches, but were driven back by rifle and machine-gun fire. Then a second attack was launched by a fresh unit supported by twenty

tanks... Using anti-tank rifles, hand-grenades, and petrol bottles the Panfilov men crippled fourteen of the tanks and the other six were driven back. Shortly

afterwards the wounded survivors were again attacked by thirty more tanks. It was then that politruk (political instructor) Klochkov turned to the soldiers, saying

"Russia is big, but there is nowhere to retreat, because Moscow is behind us"... One by one the Soviet soldiers were being wounded and killed in a merciless fight which lasted four hours. The severely wounded politruk threw himself under an enemy tank with a bunch of hand-grenades and blew it up. The Germans, having lost

eighteen tanks and dozens of men, failed to break through...

[ IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 261.]

There are various versions of the famous story of the "Twenty-eight Panfilov men"; what is curious about such stories of suicidal Russian resistance is that they are a little like a lottery or a lucky dip; numerous equally valiant deeds passed, if not unnoticed, at least unrecorded for posterity. But there were a few sample heroes, so to speak, who were to be built up in the popular imagination. The air force had its national hero in the famous Captain Gastello who, in the first week of the war, had crashed his burning plane into a column of German tanks; the infantry—its twenty-eight Panfilov men; the Partisans—

and, by implication also the Komsomol and the Soviet people generally—were to have as their national heroine Zoya Kosmodemianskaya, the eighteen-year-old Moscow

Komsomol girl, who had set fire to a German stable and was tortured and hanged by the Germans in the village of Petrishchevo near Moscow during the grim days of November

1941.

[Later in the war there was a similar "canonisation" of the "Young Guard" resistance group in the mining town of Krasnodon in the Donbas. A. Fadeyev later wrote a famous novel on them.]

It so happened that the story of Zoya was discovered, together with her tortured and frozen body, with a rope round her neck, by Lidin, a Pravda reporter at the time of the Russian counter-offensive two weeks later... In reality, neither Gastello, nor the twenty-eight Panfilov men, nor Zoya were isolated cases of Russian bravery and self-sacrifice; there were very many others in the levée en masse atmosphere of November-December 1941.

On the southern flank of the Moscow front, the industrial city of Tula, joined to the capital by a narrow bottleneck, was in constant danger of being encircled. There was a particularly strong Party organisation in that old Russian centre of arms manufacture, and the workers' battalions took a very active part in the defence of their city, which was living in a sort of "1919" atmosphere, dramatically described by General Boldin, who was placed in charge of the defence of Tula on November 22. Guderian had failed

already once to reach Tula, but had not abandoned his attempts to outflank and isolate it.

On December 3 Tula was encircled, the Germans having cut both the railway and the

highroad to Moscow. As Boldin tells the story:

On December 3, sixteen enemy tanks, together with motorised infantry crossed the