Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War by Rodric Braithwaite
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Moscow 1941 is a very interesting book. It tells the story of the first year, more or less, of the German attack on the Soviet Union as viewed through the eyes of the people of Moscow. We do step back a few years on occasion to discuss the Revolution and Stalin’s rise to power and the purges of the 1930s which affected the Soviet armed forces. And we do see the end of the story with the fall of Berlin, but the focus is on the time period beginning in June 1941 through the end of the Soviet counteroffensive in April 1942.
The author (who was the British ambassador in Moscow from 1988 to 1992) has done an amazing job of interviewing participants and making use of many sources that are not available in English. Weaving these stories together makes this book unique in terms of the breadth of the source material. So if it definitely worth the effort to read it.
I wanted to like this book more than I actually did. There are some structural problems with the book. First, there simply aren’t enough good maps. Portions of the narrative deal with the military aspects of the struggle, and without good maps it becomes difficult to tell what is going on. The second problem is that the narrative is quite “choppy” in places. I think this is an understandable consequence of using so many sources, but it does make following all of the narrative threads difficult.
My final complaint is with the author’s repeated comparisons of the German invasion in 1941 and the French attack in 1812. He even has a table on one of the maps showing how much more quickly Napoleon got to Moscow compared with Army Group Center. The comparisons are not valid because of the diversion of the German effort to capturing Kiev, something that simply did not come into play in 1812. So the comparison is invalid. And despite the author’s complaints about revisionist historians, this is an area of legitimate research and speculation.