The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II

I'd expected a history book like Bevoir's about Stalingrad, but Nagorski's work is more of journalistic than a military history. Rather than describing, say, how the 35th Panzer Division maneuvered against the 104th Cossacks and which village was captured when, Nagorski intersperses descriptions of the war and national leaders like Stalin and Molotov with interviews of soldiers, lesser politicians, and citizens who lived through it. I hadn't realized that many of the Russians who lived through the war are still alive and available for the first time. We are probably at the end of the time when they could be interviewed and Nagorski has done that, creating an oral history of the war and the battle along with the more conventional sources. The story by the family responsible for continuing to embalm Lenin's corpse got to me the most for sheer creepiness. But the accounts of how troops were shot if they retreated or were captured adds a dimension of understanding to what had seemed inexplicable fatalism among Soviet soldiers. An exception and extremely interesting work. I only wish similar histories had been written about earlier wars.

Andrew Nagorski knows his subject and has crafted a well-written account of the Battle of Moscow and events that led to it. And he does a great job of including political history. Perhaps the most engaging elements of the book, however, are the numerous oral histories as told by a variety of participants. I highly recommend this engaging, accessible book (as well as an earlier bit of fiction by Nagorski set during the rise of the Nazis, called Last Stop Vienna: A Novel -- he's a good writer).

Andrew Nagorski has taken one of history's most dramatic events and placed it in its political and human context. His book depicts not only the horrendous mass slaughter of huge armies battling to determine the fate of the world but also the vanity, determination and miscalculation of the megalomaniacal dictators who sent them into action. This is historical writing at its best - lucid, articulate, multidimensional. The cataclysmic battle of Moscow has at last found its definitive chronicler.

Anton Chekhov was certainly prophetic when he wrote that line, perhaps no more so than in connection with the titanic clash between the USSR's Red Army and Germany's Wehrmacht in the opening months of the war on the east front in 1941/1942. Andrew Nagorski's "The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow that Changed the Course of World War II" is a compelling, well-written examination of an epic and bloody battle for survival. Winston Churchill once wrote that "history is written by the victors". Nagorski takes the view here that sometimes history also is not written by the victors when that history doesn't serve the victor's purposes. At the outset of the "Greatest Battle" Nagorski points out that while much has been written of the battles of Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Kursk for example the battle that ended on the outskirts of Moscow has been subjected to far less scrutiny by historians. Nagorski suggests that a primary reason why Moscow has received less historical scrutiny is the fact that the victor, in this case Stalin's USSR, had little to gain by promoting a battle that would cast Stalin in a less favorable light than Stalingrad or Kursk. Documents locked in NKVD/KGB archives stayed locked well past Stalin's regime. However, since the fall of the USSR a great amount of previously uncovered records has led both Russian and western historians to take a new look at the battle for Moscow. Nagorski has done an excellent job here in amassing a tremendous amount of research material and presenting it in a way that can be appreciated by readers with either a general or specific interest in the subject matter. One of the great strengths of the book is Nagorski's wide-ranging approach to the battle. He does not rely on the old chestnut that it was simply the winter that stopped Hitler's armies. Rather, Nagorski spends a good deal of time (productively) setting out a whole range of interconnected decisions that had an impact of the course of the battle. For example, we see how Stalin's horrific purge of the Red Army in 1937 and the army's disastrous campaign in the Russo-Finnish war helped lead Hitler to conclude that a war in the east would be nasty, brutal, short and victorious. At the same time Nagorski points out how a good showing by the USSR's soldiers against Japan in Mongolia in 1939, led by Georgy Zhukov, was most likely a factor in Japan's decision not to support the German invasion by attacking Russia in the east. This decision allowed the USSR to rush 250,000 Red Army soldiers from Siberia, equipped with winter clothing, to join in the defense of Moscow. As Nagorski points out their arrival was critical to successful defense of Moscow. Nagorski also does a good job of weaving individual stories into his `big-picture' narrative. This adds a bit of real flavor to the story he is telling and also avoids the trap of writing solely from the actions of the large players on the stage. I would not

One of the most astonishing books I have ever read in my life. Nobody has ever done anything like it! It reads like Tolstoy's "War and Peace". Once you start it you won't be able put it away. It's amazing that nobody until now had enough courage to put it all on paper. Very few had access to the sources used by author. It's a gigantic undertaking and it shows on every page. The book has changed my understanding of what went on in the East in 1941. Nagorski also explains Stalin's war techniques which allowed him later to gain control of half of the European continent. I hope the book gets translated first of all into Russian and also into other European languages. They need to have a better understanding of the unknown episodes of WW II.