In October 1941, as German panzers closed on Moscow and the Soviet capital teetered on the edge of collapse, Stalin made a desperate gamble: he stripped the Far East of its best troops, betting that Japan would not attack. This episode follows the journey of the Siberian rifle divisions — men from Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and the Amur River — who were rushed west on the Trans-Siberian Railway. We explore their brutal training under General Aleksandr Lizyukov, the frozen battlefield at the Volokolamskoye Shosse, and the decisive counterattack that pushed the Wehrmacht back from the Kremlin gates. We also examine the intelligence gamble: how Richard Sorge's spy network in Tokyo confirmed that Japan's eyes were on the Pacific, not Siberia, freeing those divisions to bleed white in the snow outside Moscow. The episode draws on divisional combat logs and recent scholarship by David Stahel and Michael Jones to reconstruct a pivotal 72 hours in November 1941.
Podden och tillhörande omslagsbild på den här sidan tillhör
Fexingo. Innehållet i podden är skapat av Fexingo och inte av,
eller tillsammans med, Poddtoppen.
