In Europe, both sides welcomed the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hitler, pleased that the industrial bulwark of the Allies was now preoccupied with an Asian enemy, almost immediately declared war on the U.S. Churchill and Stalin were relieved that America was finally a combatant.
By the beginning of December 1941, German troops were in Istra, a suburb only 15 miles west of Moscow. Ever since Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa at 4 a.m. on June 22, 1941, his forces had swept through Stalin's European empire. They took the half of Poland that had been partitioned to the Soviet Union in 1939, stripped off the Baltic states that Moscow had annexed just a year before, seized Belorussia, and were marching south into Ukraine. Stalin's generals were stunned. They had believed the idea of blitzkrieg was an unreliable bourgeois strategy. No one had expected such a lightning conquest.
By Oct. 16 Germans were 60 miles from Moscow, and the capital was in a panic. Muscovites were stampeding out of the city, packing railway stations, crammed into trucks, huddled in carts. By the end of the month, 2 million had evacuated eastward in what the Soviets still call "the big skedaddle."
In spite of what seemed to be inevitable doom, in spite of hundreds of thousands of fleeing party apparatchiks, Stalin remained in Moscow. In a speech on Nov. 6, 1941, the eve of the 24th anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover, he cast the enemy as beasts. "It is these people without honor or conscience, these people with the morality of animals, who have the effrontery to call for the extermination of the great Russian nation." Patriotic Russians would never let that happen. "No mercy for the German invaders," he said. In Red Square the next day, he again sought to rein in the panic and rally the country. Under a sky ringed with antiaircraft blimps, with artillery fire echoing and under constant threat of Luftwaffe attack, the Soviet leader evoked the glories of Russia's heroic past -- Alexander Nevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin; he also, of course, included Lenin in this pantheon. "The enemy is at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad," he said. "The war you are waging is a war of liberation, a just war." He thundered, "May you be blessed by great Lenin's victorious banner. Death to the German invaders . . . Onward to victory!"
The tyrant's appeal transfigured a shell-shocked country. Suddenly a hopeless cause became the Great Patriotic War. Even those who hated Stalin -- like the novelist Victor Nekrasov -- remember rushing into combat crying "Za rodinu, za Stalina!" (For the motherland, for Stalin!). The reanimated Russians could also count on a perennial ally: Father Winter.