Long after the war, Molotov would deny that the mood had been that bleak or that Stalin had ever considered abandoning the capital, even when he was sending many of his closest aides to Kuibyshev. “That’s nonsense. He had no doubts,” Molotov maintained. “He wasn’t going to leave Moscow. I went for two or three days to Kuibyshev and left Voznesensky in charge there. Stalin told me, ‘See how they are settling in there and come back right away.’”
But Molotov was a Stalin loyalist to the end, and he wasn’t about to admit how much his boss had wavered during those crucial days in mid-October or how grim the situation looked. Dmitri Volkogonov, the former Red Army general and Stalin biographer, argued that the Soviet leader was so profoundly shaken by the threat to Moscow that “he was tormented by alarming presentiments.”
Everything was prepared for Stalin’s evacuation: a special train, fully equipped and waiting at the station, and—just in case he needed to make an even hastier exit—his personal Douglas DC-3 and three other planes were also standing by, ready to go. On the evening of October 15, Stalin decided to drive out to his dacha, only to be told it was already mined in preparation for the Germans and that he shouldn’t go there. Irritated, Stalin ordered his aides to “clear the mines” and announced that he was going to stick to his plan to spend the night there. That decision was probably more a matter of Stalin, as always, asserting his power to overrule anything he wanted than an indication that he had made up his mind about whether or not to leave Moscow.
The next day, Stalin was driving back to the Kremlin when, according to one of his bodyguards, he was greeted by the sight of “people carrying bags with flour, bundles of sausages, hams, boxes of macaroni and noodles”—in other words, everything they had looted from the stores. Ordering his driver to stop, Stalin got out and was immediately surrounded by a crowd. Some people applauded, and someone asked him, “Comrade Stalin, when will we stop the enemy?”
“There is time for everything,” Stalin replied.
The fact that he reportedly didn’t rebuke anyone for looting only showed how much the disorders on the streets must have taken him by surprise.
Arriving at the Kremlin, he told his entourage that not only the foreign embassies but also the government should be evacuated to Kuibyshev. Some ministries would be scattered in several cities, but Kuibyshev would be the capital in exile. And Stalin declared that the Politburo members should leave as well. As for his own plans, he announced, “I’ll go tomorrow in the morning.” It was very much the same message that Molotov had given the foreign diplomats: the leader would follow shortly.
Mikoyan wasn’t happy with this plan. “Why do we have to leave today if you’re going tomorrow?” he asked. “We can leave tomorrow as well.” He pointed out that Moscow Party leader Shcherbakov and the NKVD’s Beria could only leave the city once they had made the final preparations for the underground resistance that would be left behind. He added, “I’m staying and I will go with you tomorrow.”
Stalin didn’t object and turned his attention to the preparations for a German takeover of the city, pinning down which factories and other installations were to be blown up and getting military briefings on how the army would continue to try to stop the attackers, retreating to defense lines closer and closer in until they were right at Moscow’s ring road.
But Mikoyan did make the trip to Kuibyshev after all. Stalin insisted Molotov should go there and see that the new setup was functioning properly. “Let Mikoyan go with me,” the foreign minister implored him. Though Mikoyan tried to object at first, he realized he didn’t have any choice. Stalin approved of the idea and told him, “Why don’t you go with him?” It wasn’t so much a question as a command. Like Molotov, he would spend a few days in Kuibyshev before returning to Moscow.
During all of this, Stalin kept his own counsel. He read a new biography of Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, who had led the Russian army to victory over Napoleon in 1812, and underlined the observation “until the last minute no one knew what Kutuzov intended to do.”
The sense of danger was almost palpable. Mikoyan reported that German troops on motorcycles had been sighted about fifteen to eighteen miles from his family dacha, which was about nine miles southwest of Moscow. That meant the troops were only about twenty-five miles from the city’s outskirts. Other reports put German scouts even closer, though it was hard to sort out what was real and what was only rumor.
From the air, the Germans made their presence known on an almost daily basis with new bombing raids. Stalin was often forced to take refuge in the Kirovskaya metro station, where he could work and sleep in a specially prepared compartment of a train that was hidden from the rest of the station and other trains by plywood paneling. But at least on one occasion, Stalin witnessed a bombing raid from above ground. Returning to his dacha in the early morning hours, he got out of his car to the din of anti-aircraft fire aimed at a large group of German bombers, which were lit up by searchlight beams trained on them by Moscow’s defenders. He refused to move even when a shell fragment fell to the ground nearby. His security chief picked it up and handed it to Stalin. It was still warm.
Whether Stalin felt courage or fear at that moment, he was far from certain about his next moves on October 16, when Moscow looked as though it might collapse from within and without. Air Force Marshal Golovanov saw him sitting in his office that day, asking himself again and again, “What shall we do? What shall we do?”
With many Muscovites convinced Stalin had already fled, this was far more than a personal issue. His decision to stay or go would be seen as a signal of desperation or resolve. Which was probably why he agonized for what seemed like a never-ending couple of days.
In his book about his father, Sergo Beria claimed that the NKVD chief insisted that the Soviet leader should stay put. According to his account, the older Beria told Stalin, “If you go, Moscow will be lost. To ensure your security we can turn Red Square into an airstrip. The army and the people must know that you are in Moscow.” When Moscow party chief Shcherbakov and some other top officials urged the opposite course, Stalin reportedly turned on them. “Your attitude can be explained in two ways,” he said. “Either you are good-for-nothings and traitors or else you are idiots. I prefer to regard you as idiots.”
The younger Beria’s account isn’t necessarily reliable, since he was eager to put his father in the best possible light. In retrospect, all the top Soviet officials wanted to be seen as in agreement about the need for Stalin to remain in Moscow. But at the time, they had no assurance that Moscow could hold out, and the last thing any of them wanted was to be associated with a course of action that might have led to Stalin’s capture or death.
Ultimately, of course, the decision was only Stalin’s to make, but he was still in no hurry to make it. On October 18, he went to the station where his special train was waiting. Some accounts claim it was at the Kalanchevskaya station, while others say it was the Kursky station. As he was approaching his hundredth birthday in 2005, Pavel Saprykin insisted it was at the Kursky station, since he was working there at the time and had helped prepare the special train. He also saw Stalin on that pivotal day. As Saprykin recalled, the Soviet leader walked up to the train, paced the platform beside it, but didn’t board it. Instead, he left the station.
Vowing not to leave Moscow, Stalin suddenly took charge again, reverting to the tactic he had relied on his entire career—brute force. Declaring martial law on October 19, he ordered NKVD troops into the street. They were told to shoot almost anyone who looked suspicious. Emergency tribunals were empowered to deal with looters and all other violators of law and order—which also meant prompt death sentences. Surviving members of the NKVD patrols, such as Yevgeny Anufriyev, are cautious in describing what they actually did, but they don’t hold back from discussing their instructions. “We had an amazing order to shoot spies and deserters on the spot,” he said. “We were ordered to do this, but we didn’t know how to figure out who was a spy. So the order
had no practical significance.” Perhaps in his case, it didn’t. But reluctantly he hinted that there were plenty of cases in which it did. “Well, a lot of stupid things were done then. What more can I say?” he added.
There’s no reliable tally of how many Muscovites perished in the subsequent clampdown, but the message came through loud and clear: Stalin was back in charge, and few people needed much of a reminder about what that meant. The looting abruptly ended, and those Muscovites who had remained in the city began to sense a new determination to stop the Germans from taking it.
Even Muscovites like Valeria Prokhorova, who distrusted the regime that had swept up many of her relatives in the purges, welcomed that change. “We started to feel that we were being defended, we felt that the regime was defending our land,” she said. “Nobody cared for Stalin, but people were fighting for our country.”
The panic had threatened more than the internal order of the capital. It had threatened to undermine the entire effort to defend Moscow from the Germans. It demoralized its population, the military, and even its leaders. Long after those events, many Russians would still find it extremely difficult to discuss them, precisely because they were nearly responsible for an implosion that would have had disastrous consequences—and because they are so much at odds with the popular image, nurtured by the regime’s propagandists, of a brave, always united people resisting the German aggressors.
In his memoirs, Marshal Zhukov dutifully maintained that most Muscovites had behaved well during mid-October. “But, as the saying goes, there are black sheep in every family, and, in this case, too, cowards, panicmongers, and self-seekers started fleeing the capital in all directions, spreading panicky rumors about an inevitable surrender,” he wrote. The proclamation of a state of siege, or martial law, was necessary for “mobilizing the troops and civilians of Moscow to repel the enemy and…preventing a repetition of the panic stirred up by provocative elements on October 16.” While couched in Soviet rhetoric, his statement amounts to an admission that far more than a few black sheep were involved and much more was at stake than the official accounts suggest.
Perhaps the most honest examination of the painful, conflicting emotions triggered by what happened on October 16 appears in Konstantin Simonov’s classic Soviet war novel The Living and the Dead. Long after the war, his main character “found it intolerable to remember Moscow as it had been on that day, even as it is intolerable to see a loved one’s face distorted with terror.” While Simonov praised the heroism of those who continued to fight the Germans, he recognized that it appeared that the war had taken a disastrous turn “and there were other people that day ready in their despair to believe that the Germans were going to enter tomorrow.” Clearly upset by the memory of the frantic mass exodus from the city, he added the major caveat: “To be fair, only a few thousand of those tens of thousands could rightly be condemned afterwards by history.” In other words, their panic, while hardly laudable, was completely understandable.
In a letter to his wife or girlfriend, Heinrich Lansen, one of the German soldiers advancing on Moscow, wrote on October 8, “The coming victory over the Red Army should be and will be ours. The mighty Führer promised to end the most difficult campaign in history victoriously before the beginning of the severe cold weather…. My darling, your wish for the victorious end of the war will be fulfilled soon. Moscow, the stronghold of world-wide Bolshevism, will fall in a few days and the rest of the Red Army will be annihilated together with the enemy capital…. You can expect a quick end to the war and a joyful meeting…. Maybe when you read these lines, the war in the East will be over.”
Lansen’s letter never made it back to Germany, winding up in the hands of the NKVD instead almost certainly after its author had perished. But when he penned those words, Moscow looked extremely vulnerable and his predictions, while inspired by Nazi propaganda, far from outlandish. To prevent them from proving to be accurate, the Soviet political and military leaders had to mobilize everyone they could to shore up the capital’s wobbly defenses. It wasn’t enough to quell the panic. The authorities needed Moscow’s inhabitants to pitch in, making this a huge joint military-civilian effort.
With most men already in uniform, teams of women, along with some teenage boys too young to serve, constructed huge networks of trenches, tank traps, and barriers made of felled trees strewn with barbed wire that, taken together, stretched thousands of miles on the approaches of the city. Working night and day, they also dug thousands of artillery emplacements. And in the capital itself, they prepared street barricades in case the Germans breached all the other obstacles. Irina Bogolyubskaya, a teenager at the time, recalled that soldiers arrived at her apartment in October and her family was convinced they were about to be evicted. Instead, they placed a machine gun in one of the windows overlooking the street. “They were preparing for street fighting,” she concluded.
“Muscovites made their city into an unassailable fortress,” one of the official accounts claimed. “Every building became a bastion, every street a fortified area. Moscow bristled with barricades, metal tank traps and barbed wire.” Zhukov reported that more than half a million inhabitants of the Moscow region, mostly women, participated in this gargantuan effort and that their example dramatically boosted the morale of the troops, “augmenting their strength and their will to fight.”
In Soviet accounts of this period, this kind of claim was milked for its full propaganda value, quickly skipping over the panic, flight, and chaos to present a picture of a city that was far more united than it really was. Nonetheless, many Muscovites were determined and dedicated, doing everything possible to contribute to the defense of their city, no matter how shaken they were by the exodus of many of their neighbors, by the brief but unnerving near collapse of all authority, and by the hardships they endured during a prolonged period of acute food shortages, with bread in particularly short supply.
The other hardship—and danger—were German air raids. From the time of the first raid on July 22, Moscow lived with regular bombings. According to an NKVD report submitted to Beria, Shcherbakov and other top Moscow party officials on November 24, 1941, there were ninety German raids on the city during the first five months of the war. “Enemy planes dropped 1,521 demolition bombs and 56,620 incendiary bombs on the city,” it added. As a result of those attacks, 1,327 were killed, 1,931 seriously injured, and 3,122 lightly injured. While young people, especially young women, raced around the roofs of buildings to toss off the small incendiary bombs before they could do much damage, those devices set off 1,539 fires. Taken together, the two types of bombs destroyed 402 apartment buildings and damaged another 852. Twenty-two industrial plants were also destroyed, and another 102 industrial facilities were partly destroyed. Later tallies, which included subsequent bombing raids, upped all those figures: 2,196 dead out of a total of 7,708 casualties, 577 apartment buildings destroyed and 5,007 damaged, seventy-one industrial plants destroyed and eighty-eight damaged.
But such reports may have understated the damage. In his memoirs, Moscow air commander Nikolai Sbytov recalled the toll from just one day’s attack, on October 10. He reported that seventy German planes were involved, ten of which were downed. “The bombs hit the Bolshoi Theater, the Kursky station, and the Central Telegraph,” he wrote. “Fifty apartment buildings were destroyed, 150 Muscovites were killed, 278 were lightly wounded and 248 were seriously wounded.” Pointing out that this was just one raid out of a total of 122 during the entire period of the air raids on Moscow that stretched all the way to the spring of 1943, Sbytov maintained that this demonstrated a much higher casualty toll than generally reported. “Simple arithmetic will show that Moscow became a cemetery not only for German aviation, but also a grave for thousands and thousands of the civilian population.”
All Muscovites lived in fear of those raids, ducking into metro stations that served as bomb shelters whenever the air raid sirens sounded. But the warnings sometimes came too late. Irina Bogolyubskaya, the
young woman who had watched soldiers install a machine gun in the window of her apartment, happened to enter the Central Telegraph building to send a telegram on the day of the raid that Sbytov described. She was planning to then join a line of people in front of a food store on the other side of the street. Suddenly, an explosion shattered the windows of the Central Telegraph building. “A plane had dropped a bomb between the store and the Central Telegraph,” she recalled. “It was horrible.” When she ran out of the building, she saw that almost all the people who had been lined up in front of the food store on the opposite side of the street were dead and many others were severely wounded.
The bombers also targeted the civilians who were dispatched to the city’s outskirts to prepare the defense lines. Olga Sapozhnikova and other workers at the Trekhgorka Cotton Mill were ordered to dig trenches several miles outside the city center. “Those were dreadful days,” she told British correspondent Alexander Werth. Referring to the Germans by the popular derogatory term, she added, “On the very first day we were machine-gunned by a Fritz who swooped right down. Eleven of the girls were killed and four wounded.”
Vera Stepanova, who was sixteen at the time and lived in the city center, recalls that the first time she was caught in a bombing raid, she froze in fear, completely unable to run. An enemy plane came in so low that “I had the feeling that I could see the German pilot’s eyes,” she said.
The Kremlin wasn’t spared by the bombers either. Mikoyan reported that he knew of six times when German bombs fell on the territory of this leadership enclave during the fighting. One crashed into the Kremlin palace but failed to explode, and another one narrowly missed one of the Kremlin churches and also didn’t explode. But on a different occasion, a bomb blew out the windows of a reception hall of a building, and in one case, Mikoyan and his NKVD security guard were thrown to the ground by the force of an explosion near the Spassky Gate, which killed two people. When a bomb hit the Arsenal building, about thirty soldiers were killed. On October 28, Malenkov was summoned to the Kremlin by Stalin, only to learn that the Central Committee building he had just left had sustained a direct hit. “I saved your life,” Stalin pointed out.
The Greatest Battle Page 22
