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Beneath the surface, though, the war was beginning to tip in Russia’s favour. By autumn the Wehrmacht was grossly overstretched: its supply lines thin, its recruits ever younger and rawer, and its generals increasingly yes-men — ‘nodding donkeys’, as Speer called them4 — of the Führer. (Halder resigned in September, bewailing Hitler’s ‘fits of insane rage’ and ‘chronic tendency to underrate the enemy’.) The Red Army, in contrast, was beginning to pull itself together. Unlike Hitler, Stalin had begun to realise that military decisions were better left to the professionals. Increasingly, he listened to his generals, and in October stripped the political commissars who dogged regular officers’ footsteps of most of their powers. Lend-Lease supplies were beginning to arrive overland via Vladivostok and Tehran, instead of on the precarious Arctic convoys, and weapons production was increasing, especially of the robust, reliable T-34 tank and PPSh-41 sub-machine gun.

The sheer size of the Soviet population was also beginning to tell, as was the Red Army’s willingness to use women, who were drafted in large numbers from the spring of 1942 onwards. Used in ancillary roles from the start of the war, women — mostly, like their male counterparts, in their late teens or early twenties — were now trained as fighter and bomber pilots, anti-aircraft gunners, observers, snipers, mine-clearers and ordinary infantrymen. ‘This morning’, wrote a disconcerted Fritz Hockenjos, ‘one of my sentries spotted a riflewoman. For fun he shot at her. She dived for cover, ran, turned around, shot back and ran on — as good as any well-drilled soldier. Let’s hope I never have to deal with women like that.’ Later, during a Russian attack near Pskov, his men reported seeing female soldiers running forward with mats, which they threw over barbed-wire entanglements for the infantrymen following behind. ‘We shot them and the infantry down. The men told me about it later, using bawdy jokes to hide their discomfort. When I asked how they knew they weren’t men they said “When they jumped, everything jiggled.”’5 By the end of the war, some 800,000 such women had served in the Red Army altogether.

That the war in the East was turning became apparent to the world at Stalingrad, the small city on the Volga — less than 200 kilometres from the present-day Russian border with Kazakhstan — which is still synonymous with Soviet stubbornness and Nazi overreach. Besieged from August 1942, it seemed permanently about to fall until mid-November, when Zhukov launched an ambitious counter-encirclement of Paulus’s Sixth Army. A mid-December attempt to relieve the Sixth Army, led by Manstein, failed, and seven more weeks of terrible slaughter later Paulus surrendered, together with more than 90,000 troops. What hurt most, Hitler raged in his ‘Wolf’s Lair’, was that Paulus had not committed suicide: ‘What is Life? Life is the Nation. . He could have freed himself from all sorrow, ascended into eternity and national immortality, but he prefers to go to Moscow.’6 The same less-than-cheering sentiment was pre-printed on the Feldpost cards on which Hockejos wrote notes home to his wife: ‘It’s completely unimportant whether or not we live; what’s necessary is that our Volk lives, that Germany lives.’

For Leningrad — now down to a fifth of its pre-war population — the second winter of the siege was nothing like the first. Again, households retreated into single rooms heated by smoky burzhuiki; again, they sealed up their windows and laid in stocks of food and firewood. But the winter was a mild one, more flats now had electricity and water, and ration levels were the same as Moscow’s: there was no repeat of 1941–2’s mass death.