Snow Wolf by Glenn Meade Read Free Book Online Page B

he was already a divisional
commander. A daring officer with a reputation for being headstrong, he had
somehow survived the savage purges Stalin had inflicted on his army on the eve
of war, when more than half of the senior officer corps were either shot or
deported to Siberia, many without trial, simply because Stalin, acutely
paranoid, had falsely suspected that they were plotting to overthrow him.
    Along the way Grenko had met and married
Nina Zinyakin, the daughter of an Armenian schoolteacher. Grenko first met her
when she gave an impassioned lecture on Lenin at the Moscow Institute, and he
was smitten at once. She was a resolute, fiery young woman of remarkable good
looks, and not unlike her husband in temperament. Within ten months of marriage
their first and only child was born.
    By the time the Germans advanced on
Tallinn, Anna Grenko was fifteen years old.
    The initial battle orders from Stalin
after the Germans had launched Operation Barbarossa had been to engage in the
minimum of conflict. Still foolishly believing that Hitler would not push deep
inside Russia and that hostilities would soon cease, Stalin had hoped to lessen
the conflict by not angering the Germans with a savage counterattack.
    Yegor Grenko saw it differently.
    Ordered by Moscow to retreat, he had
steadfastly refused. In his opinion, Stalin as a strategist left much to be
desired. Grenko didn't believe the Germans would hold back at the Russian
border. Convinced that within a week the battle orders would change to an
offensive, Grenko decided to fight a rearguard action and for days was
bombarded with cables from Moscow military command ordering him to retreat. He
tore up every signal and even returned one in reply. "What the hell am I
supposed to do? Sit back and allow the Germans to massacre my men?"
    Yegor Grenko was convinced that history
would prove Stalin wrong, just as he knew that the first weeks of battle are as
crucial as the last. But when he could finally ignore the cables no more, he
and his men boarded a troop train near Narva and headed back to Moscow.
    When the train pulled into the Riga
Station, Yegor Grenko was arrested and marched to a waiting car. When Anna
Grenko's mother tried to intervene she was brushed aside and told bluntly that
her husband's arrest was none of her business. The following day came the visit
from the secret police.
    Nina Grenko was coldly informed that her
husband had been tried by a military tribunal and found guilty of disobeying
orders. He had been executed that morning at Lefortovo Prison.
    A day later, fresh battle orders from
Stalin were made public. Every citizen was to repel the invading Germans with
every means, even to death, and no Soviet soldier was to retreat.
    For Yegor Grenko, the order had come a
day too late.
    After the death of her father, Anna
Grenko's family home in Moscow was confiscated on the orders of the secret
police. Her mother never recovered from the injustice of her husband's
execution and in the second month of the siege of Moscow, Anna Grenko came home
to find her mother's corpse hanging from a water pipe.
    For two days after they had cut down the
body Anna lay in her bed, not eating and barely sleeping. There was suddenly a
terrible void in her life and no one to turn to. Relatives shunned her, fearing
guilt by association and the midnight knock on the door by the secret police.
    On the third day she packed what meager
belongings she had into one small suitcase and moved out of the apartment into
a squalid, tiny room on the eastern side of the Moscow River.
    The German army was ten kilometers away,
the golden domes of the Kremlin visible through their field glasses. With the
city under constant bombardment there was little to buy or eat and almost no
fuel; anything that could be burned had long ago been burned. People devoured
what meager rations they were allowed. Dogs and cats fetched a month's wages.
Bodies were piled high in the suburbs and the German shells and Stuka