The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  Miraculously, they located the two men, hugged them, and gave them the food. The neighbor kissed her husband good-bye. When the train began to pull away, the teacher shouted, “Girls, tell everybody that we will defend our country. We will protect you!” This could have been a scene from a propaganda movie—except for one thing. “He never said anything about Stalin,” Prokhorova noted. “He left to fight for his country.”

  When the young women began making their way back home, Prokhorova recalled, the streets were filled with “criminals and drunks” and there were no police in sight. “It felt like doomsday,” she said.

  Standing between the German troops and Moscow, soldiers such as Albert Tsessarsky knew they weren’t well equipped to prevent doomsday from happening. A medical student who had volunteered for service after the Germans attacked, Tsessarsky was assigned to a thirty-three-man unit whose main weapon was a broken machine gun that they couldn’t make operable. At the beginning of October, the unit was deployed west of Moscow near Mozhaisk, a town at the center of the defense line about sixty miles from the capital. By that time, they had a functioning machine gun, which they set up to face the Germans, who were arrayed on the opposite side of the Moscow River. Their assignment was to dig dugouts where they would hide if the Germans broke through the thin Soviet defenses. At that point, Tsessarsky and his unit would find themselves behind enemy lines, where they were supposed to continue operating, gathering intelligence, and harassing the Germans whenever possible.

  As the medical orderly for the unit, Tsessarsky was sent with a driver to Moscow for supplies, arriving on October 16. On his trip to the capital, he was shocked to see that there were no Soviet troops in sight. “The Minsk highway was open,” he noted. If the Germans crossed the river, he realized, “all of them would march to Moscow.”

  Once he was in the capital, Tsessarsky drove right to the center of town, swinging by the Bolshoi Theater, and never saw a policeman. He did see the swirling ashes and bits and pieces of burned documents that everyone else remembers from that day. When he reported to the warehouse for military medical supplies, the manager looked at his list of requested medications and sent him away with next to nothing, claiming that Tsessarsky didn’t have the proper authorizations. He did say, however, that Tsessarsky could come back later and try again.

  Tsessarsky then set out to find his wife, Tatyana, who was still a medical student and living in a dormitory next to the medical institute. Tatyana had left Moscow on October 15 to visit her family home in Dmitrov, almost forty miles away, returning to a very unfamiliar Moscow the next afternoon. Since the metro had stopped running for the first and only time since it was built, she had to trudge back to her dormitory on foot, only to discover that it was largely empty. Most of the students and staff had fled, and both their rooms and the offices of the institute were strewn with the belongings and papers they had left behind, attesting to the haste of their departure. “They had run away and left everything,” she said.

  “For me, October 16 was a day like no other—the worst I ever experienced,” she recalled. “Nothing like this had ever happened to me before or after. The people who know about the war and the military say that if the Germans had known what was happening that day, they could have easily taken the city.”

  Tatyana was relieved to see her husband back at least briefly from the front, but that wasn’t enough to calm her fears about what would happen next. They both saw a big swastika painted on the fence running near the dormitory. “Not everyone felt patriotic,” Tatyana noted. “There were a lot of people who felt aggrieved. Most forgot those feelings once the fighting started, but not everyone.” Presumably one of those people was responsible for decorating the fence with the swastika.

  After spending the night with his wife in the nearly empty dormitory, Tsessarsky took the warehouse manager at his word and returned to try again to get the supplies he had been sent for. He discovered that everyone except for a solitary clerk had abandoned the warehouse. “Take what you want,” the clerk told him. As Tsessarsky recalled with evident satisfaction, “We filled the truck with medicine and I went back to my unit.”

  Tsessarsky succeeded in his mission only because of the breakdown of virtually all authority in the capital. Even on October 17, the morning after the panic, the authorities were strangely silent. While radio broadcasts appealed for calm, the only good news was that the Germans hadn’t arrived during the night.

  As far as most Muscovites were concerned, however, this hardly meant the Germans wouldn’t make it at all. Long after the war, Mikhail Maklyarsky, a top NKVD official who was a key member of the team charged with preparing underground activity in a German-occupied Moscow, made an admission to his son Boris that ran contrary to the official accounts, which maintained that the capital’s inhabitants never wavered in their belief in victory. “He told me that ninety-eight out of a hundred Muscovites thought that Hitler would conquer Moscow sooner or later,” Boris said. Along with his mother and other wives and children of the NKVD top brass, Boris, who was only eight at the time, had been evacuated to Kuibyshev back in July. When it came to their own families, the Kremlin’s enforcers had decided very early that Moscow wasn’t safe.

  On October 18, the head of the NKVD’s directorate for Moscow and the Moscow region, Mikhail Zhuravlev, filed a lengthy report on “the people’s reaction to the fact that the enemy is approaching the capital.” In particular, it focused on the “anarchistic behavior” of factory workers during the two previous days. A few examples:

  “Some workers of factory No. 219…attacked cars with evacuees from Moscow who were traveling on the Highway of the Enthusiasts…. They began seizing the evacuees’ belongings. Six cars were thrown into a ravine by this group.”

  At another factory, a personnel director by the name of Rugan loaded his car with food and tried to leave the factory grounds. “On the way he was stopped and beaten by the workers of the factory. The soldiers on guard at the factory were drunk.”

  Workers at a shoe factory weren’t paid on time “due to the shortage of banknotes” in the local branch of the state bank. “The protesting workers demolished the gates and entered the factory. Cases of stealing footwear from the factory were detected.”

  Buzanov, the director of the Red Front factory, tried to pacify his workers by distributing sweets. “During the distribution of cookies and candies, there was a fight between some of the drunk workers.”

  Near a synthetic leather factory, “a group of workers stopped a car with the evacuated members of the same factory’s workers’ families. Some passengers were beaten unmercifully, and their belongings were seized. At the same factory, four cars were disabled.”

  “The workers didn’t get paid in factory No. 58. Some workers shouted ‘Beat the communists!’ The group of workers forged a key to the chemical warehouse, stole spirits and got drunk.”

  At Factory No. 8, there was “counter-revolutionary agitation,” including an arson attack on a warehouse and ransacking the belongings of a group of workers and their families singled out for evacuation. “The damage from the fire is about 500,000 rubles.”

  “About 500 students of the trade school of the Stalin factory gathered waiting to get paid. The director of the school, Samoilov, wasn’t there since he had fled from Moscow. The students didn’t get their money and started destroying the school. They tore up textbooks…broke cupboards, stole warm clothes and foodstuffs.”

  The report also noted incidents of theft of cattle from collective farms in the Moscow region, apparently by farmers preparing to flee. One group of collective farm workers even tried to rob an NKVD office. And most alarming, at 2 P.M. on October 17 in the villages of Nikulino and Toropovo “white flags were hung on some of the houses of the collective farmers.” They weren’t preparing to surrender to any of the Soviet authorities. They were expecting the Germans.

  Zhuravlev’s report indicated that the breakdown of authority wasn’t complete. In a few cases, the NKVD �
�with the help of party activists and factory guards” arrested the perpetrators. In other cases, he noted that officers were sent to investigate the incidents. Special NKVD patrols were deployed around the city to try to restore order. But the overwhelming impression the report leaves is that the NKVD and the other “organs,” as the machinery of Soviet repression was called, were suddenly fighting a losing battle with a population that no longer was intimidated by them.

  During the initial panic of October 16, even the NKVD units were sometimes undecided about how to react. Aleksandr Zevelev, a history student who had volunteered for service on the day the Germans invaded and was assigned to the NKVD, found himself on patrol on Gorky Street, the main thoroughfare in the center of town. “There was marauding,” he recalled. “Food shops were abandoned open and people were looting, so we had to stop them. They were stealing sugar, bread and flour.” He also saw looters taking food from a restaurant near the Mayakovsky metro station. Although he and the other young men in his unit were armed with rifles, they didn’t fire. They only shouted at the looters to stop and then reported these incidents to higher-ups, who would supposedly send others to make arrests. It was as if the dreaded enforcers no longer knew what to enforce.

  But others within the NKVD were ignoring the confusion on the streets and acting as if nothing had changed. One scene epitomized the surrealistic feeling of that remarkable day. At midnight, thousands of political prisoners were marched to the square in front of the Kursky railroad station. Among them were several prominent scientists and academicians, including geneticist Nikolai Vavilov. Andrei Sukhno, a colleague and fellow prisoner, later described their ordeal. “Guards with dogs encircled the square and ordered us to stand on all fours. The day before it had been snowing, it was the first snow of the year, and it had melted. People stood [on all fours] in the cold slush of water and mud. They tried to creep away from the big puddles but they stood close to each other and the guards reacted violently…. So we were standing on all fours for six hours.”

  The prisoners were then herded onto a train bound for Saratov. Twenty-five prisoners were jammed into each compartment designed for five passengers, and the 450-mile journey took a grueling two weeks. While Sukhno would live to tell his story, Vavilov died of starvation two years later in Saratov’s prison. Ironically, his brother Sergei Vavilov, who was also a scientist, rose to such prominence that in 1945 Stalin summoned him to the Kremlin to appoint him head of the U.S.S.R.’s Academy of Sciences. During that encounter, Sergei inquired about the fate of his brother. In his presence, Stalin picked up the phone and called Beria. “Lavrenty, what about Nikolai Vavilov?” he asked the NKVD chief. “Dead?” Then with no hint of irony, the Soviet leader mournfully added, “Oh, we’ve lost such a man.”

  While most of the Kremlin leadership remained oddly silent during the chaos of October 16, Anastas Mikoyan personally intervened in the strike at the Stalin Motor Vehicle Plant. After the factory director had called him, appealing for help, the Politburo member drove up and found about five to six thousand workers demonstrating in front of the locked factory gates. The workers immediately recognized Mikoyan and bombarded him with questions. Why hadn’t they been paid in two weeks? Why were they locked out of their own factory? Why had the government fled Moscow, along with party and Komsomol officials from the factory? Why was no one explaining anything to them?

  Mikoyan heard them out and then did his best to defuse the situation. “Comrades, why are you so outraged? There is a war on and anything can happen,” he declared. “Who told you the government left Moscow? These rumors are provocations: the government hasn’t fled. Those who have to be in Moscow are in Moscow. Stalin is in Moscow, Molotov as well—all the people who have to be here.” He admitted that some government departments had been evacuated as a result of the fact that “the front approached the city.” But he assured the workers that the government was proceeding according to well-prepared plans and that they shouldn’t worry about their livelihoods since they had already received some extra payments. “Now you have to stay calm, obey the instructions that are defined by the war situation. We need composure and discipline to deal with the enemy.”

  Mikoyan’s personal intervention calmed things down and the workers gradually dispersed. But he had neatly ducked some of their questions, and his answers were often disingenuous. He failed to mention that Stalin had already ordered many top officials to leave Moscow and that at that point most of his aides were assuming that the Soviet leader was planning to join them very soon. He also didn’t tell the workers that the reason that they were locked out was that explosives had already been planted on the factory grounds to blow it up. On October 15, Stalin had issued a directive “to blow up factories, storage facilities and institutions that cannot be evacuated as well as electrical equipment of the metro (excluding water pipe and sewage systems).” The automobile factory was one of those designated facilities.

  But some workers had got wind of reports that the NKVD was planting explosives in their factories. This had prompted, as the NKVD’s Moscow region counterintelligence chief Sergei Fedoseyev recalled much later, “a serious incident” at Factory No. 6, a defense plant that had also been designated an object that should be blown up rather than allowed to fall into the hands of the Germans. The factory machinery was packed in special containers to be sent east of Moscow, where it was supposed to be reassembled so that production could be resumed. But as the factory managers were dispatching the containers, they panicked and decided to load their families in the cars with them. “The factory workers could see all of this and they were furious about it, which made them demonstrate,” Fedoseyev recounted. “They demanded that the evacuation be aborted and that the factory would not be closed. They were afraid of losing their jobs.”

  At that point, one of the workers shouted that the factory could blow up at any moment, and tensions escalated dramatically. Terrified, the workers assigned five people to search the factory. They insisted that a high security official, I. M. Serov, accompany them. Although Serov knew that the explosives were already planted there, he pretended not to be aware of anything as he went with the workers on their rounds. Since the devices were well hidden, they didn’t find them.

  That didn’t end the drama. Serov quickly informed his superiors about the incident. Although the factory managers had precipitated the confrontation by their sudden decision to send off their families, the government ordered the NKVD to arrest the ringleaders of the demonstration. Agents rounded up about fifteen people. “They were all shot a few days later and then rehabilitated only in 1953,” Fedoseyev laconically noted. That, of course, was the year that Stalin died, which allowed for the posthumous rehabilitation of at least some of his millions of victims.

  The handling of those protesting workers—at first with caution and even a seeming willingness to address their concerns, then with more typical violent retribution—reflected the initial uncertainty of the Kremlin leadership followed by a sudden new determination. To be precise, it reflected Stalin’s actions at a time when, once again, he initially kept everyone guessing about what he intended to do.

  Why did Stalin largely disappear from view and much of his government remain silent during those few days in mid-October when it looked as though Moscow was about to fall and lawbreakers roamed the streets? What was he doing and what was going through his mind?

  On October 14, as the mood in Moscow was growing increasingly volatile, Stalin met with Georgi Dimitrov, who as head of the communist international, the Comintern, maintained contacts with communist movements throughout the world. No stranger to the leader’s inner sanctum, Dimitrov was struck by the degree to which everyone assumed that evacuation was inevitable. “Since Moscow itself is becoming the front, preparations must be made for the worst possible scenario,” he wrote in his diary. Molotov issued him clear instructions. “Evacuation is necessary. I advise you to leave before the day is out.” According to Dimitrov, Stalin’s message to the two of
them was simple: “Moscow cannot be defended like Leningrad.”

  Switching the subject, the dictator launched into a list of complaints about Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German communists who was then a prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Thälmann, he charged, wasn’t a committed communist, and his writings showed he had been tainted by fascist ideology, although Hitler had him arrested as soon as he came to power. Which was why the Nazis wouldn’t kill him, Stalin concluded. (In fact, Thälmann was executed at Buchenwald two years later.) Once again, the dictator was demonstrating his obsession with spotting any sign of potential heresy among his followers, even at a time when his world was threatening to collapse around him.

  As Molotov and Dimitrov prepared to leave, Stalin added, “Have to evacuate before the day is out!” According to Dimitrov, he said this as casually as if he were saying “Time for lunch!” While Stalin didn’t specifically say when he might follow them, Dimitrov was convinced it would be very soon.

  Dimitrov and Molotov took the same train to Kuibyshev. En route on October 17, they met over tea with several other top officials on the train, their minds focused on the fate of the capital that they were leaving behind. “Everyone is in good spirits, although quite concerned. Everyone is contemplating the imminent capture of Moscow by the Germans,” Dimitrov recorded in his diary. In an appeal to Communists around the world, he tried to accentuate the positive—the plans to reestablish Soviet industries in the east and to continue the fight against Hitler—but his main message was a plea “not to give way to despondency in view of the fascist gang’s temporary successes.”