Thirdly, there was a large mass of Muscovites, difficult to classify, who were more
responsible than the others for "the great skedaddle" of October 16. These included anybody from plain obyvateli, ready to run away from danger, to small, medium and even high Party or non-Party officials who felt that Moscow had become a job for the Army, and that there was not much that civilians could do. Among these people there was a
genuine fear of finding themselves under German occupation, and, with regular passes, or with passes of sorts they had somehow wangled—or sometimes with no passes at all—
people fled to the east, just as in Paris people had fled to the south in 1940 as the Germans approached the capital.
Later, many of these people were to be bitterly ashamed of having fled, of having
overrated the might of the Germans, of having not had enough confidence in the Red
Army. And yet, had not the Government shown the way, as it were, by frantically
speeding up on all those evacuations from the 10th of October onwards?
Especially in 1942 the "big skedaddle" of October 16 continued to be a nasty memory with many. There were some grim jokes on the subject—especially in connection with
the medal "For the Defence of Moscow" that had been distributed lavishly among the soldiers and civilians; there was the joke about the two kinds of ribbons—some Moscow medals should be suspended on the regular moiré ribbon, others on a drap ribbon— drap meaning both a thick kind of cloth and skedaddle. There was also the joke of a famous and very plump and well-equipped actress who had received a Moscow Medal "for
defending Moscow from Kuibyshev with her breast".
I remember Surkov telling me that when he arrived in Moscow from the front on the
16th, he phoned some fifteen or twenty of his friends, and all had vanished.
In "fiction", more than in formal history, there are some valuable descriptions of Moscow at the height of the crisis—for instance in Simonov's The Living and the Dead already quoted. Here is a picture of Moscow during that grim 16th of October and the following days —with the railway station stampedes; with officials fleeing in their cars without a permit; the opolchentsy and Communist battalion men sullenly walking, rather than marching, down the streets, dressed in a motley collection of clothes, smoking, but not singing; with the "Hammer and Sickle" factory working day and night turning out thousands of anti-tank hedge-hogs, which are then driven to the outer ring of boulevards; with its smell of burning papers; with the rapid succession of air-raids and air-battles over Moscow, in which Russian airmen often suicidally ram enemy planes; with the
demoralisation of the majority and the grim determination among the minority to hang on to Moscow, and to fight, if necessary, inside the city.
By the 16th, many factories had already been evacuated.
All the same, below all the froth of panic and despair there was "another Moscow": Later, when all this belonged to the past, and somebody recalled that 16th of
October with sorrow or bitterness, he [Simonov's hero] would say nothing. The
memory of Moscow that day was unbearable to him—like the face of a person you
love distorted by fear. And yet, not only outside Moscow, where the troops were
fighting and dying that day, but inside Moscow itself, there were enough people who were doing all within their power not to surrender it. And that was why Moscow
was not lost. And yet, at the Front that day the war seemed to have taken a fatal turn, and there were people in Moscow that same day who, in their despair, were
ready to believe that the Germans would enter Moscow tomorrow. As always
happens in tragic moments, the deep faith and inconspicuous work of those who
carried on, was not yet known to all, and had not yet come to bear fruit, while the bewilderment, terror and despair of the others hit you between the eyes. This was inevitable. That day tens of thousands, getting away from the Germans, rolled like avalanches towards the railway stations and towards the eastern exits of Moscow;
and yet, out of these tens of thousands, there were perhaps only a few thousand
whom history could rightly condemn.
[Simonov, op. cit., p. 288.]
Simonov wrote this account of Moscow on October 16,1941 after a lapse of nearly
twenty years; but his story—which could not have been published in Stalin's day—rings true in the light of what I had heard of those grim days only a few months later, in 1942.
I also remember a very different kind of story—a story told me by a leading woman-
member of the Komsomol at the famous Trekhgorka Cotton Mill—a remarkable girl of
about twenty-five, called Olga Sapozhnikova, who belonged to a long dynasty of
Moscow cotton weavers. All her three brothers had been called up, and one was wounded and another "missing". She was a little plump and heavy, and had rough proletarian hands, with closely-clipped fingernails. And yet she had poise and character, and there was a solid kind of Russian beauty in that pale face, in her large, quiet grey eyes, firm jaw, finely shaped full mouth, and her white teeth showing when she smiled. Not a single nondescript feature about her; she belonged, even physically, to the proletarian
aristocracy; her character, like her body, shaped by good tradition.
[ The Year of Stalingrad, pp. 252-4.]
The story she told me, on September 19, 1942, differed in one respect from present-day stories; she told me how even the bravest and most determined people in Moscow had
felt uncertain of whether Moscow could be saved—or could be effectively defended had the Germans fought their way into the city.
"Those were dreadful days. It started about the 12th. I was ordered, like most of the girls at the factory, to join the Labour Front. We were taken some kilometres out of Moscow.
There was a large crowd of us, and we were told to dig trenches. We were all very calm, but dazed, and couldn't take it in. 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." She said it very calmly, without affectation.
"We went on working all day and the next day; fortunately, no more Fritzes came. But I was very worried about father and mother [both of them old Trekhgorka textile workers], with nobody to look after them.
"I explained this to our commissar, and he let me go back to Moscow. They were strange, those nights in Moscow; you heard the guns firing so clearly. On the 16th, when the
Germans had broken through, I went to the factory. My heart went cold when I saw that the factory had closed down. A lot of the directors had fled; but Dundukov was in charge; a very good man, who never lost his head. He handed out large quantities of food to us: I was given 125 pounds of flour, and seventeen pounds of butter and a lot of sugar, so that it should not fall into German hands. For me as a Komsomol—and a well-known
Komsomol at that—it was not much use staying on in Moscow. The factory people
suggested that I could evacuate father and mother to Cheliabinsk. But whatever was done about the old people, there was only one thing I could do, and that was to follow the Red Army. A lot of people had already left Moscow.
"I went and talked to mother. She wouldn't hear of Cheliabinsk. 'No,' she said, 'God will protect us here, and Moscow will not fall.' That night I went down to the cellar with mother; we took down a small kerosene lamp and buried all the sugar and flour and also father's Party card. We thought we'd live in the cellar if the Germans came; for we knew that they couldn't stay in Moscow for long. Perhaps I would have left with the Red Army, but it was hard to leave mother and father alone. That night mother cried, and said: 'The whole family has scattered; and are you going to leave me, too?' There was a feeling that night that the Germans might appear in the street at any moment; yes, it was possible, and Krasnaya Presnya was the part through which they would have come into Moscow. There
were no trains any more by
which we could leave, and what was father to do? He might have walked two or three kilometres, but no more...
"But they did not come that night. At the factory the next morning everything was mined; it was only a case of pressing a button, and the whole factory would have gone up in the air. And then came a phone message from Pronin, the Chairman of the Moscow Soviet,
saying 'Absolutely nothing must be blown up.'
"And it was also on that day that the announcement was made that Stalin was in Moscow, and this made an enormous difference to morale; it now seemed certain that Moscow
would not be lost. Even so, from the northern outskirts, people were being evacuated to the centre. There were continuous air-raid warnings and bombs fell. But on the 20th the factory was opened again; we all felt so much better and were quite cheerful again after that..."
It was, indeed, on October 17 that Shcherbakov announced on the radio that Stalin was in Moscow. At the same time he explained to the people of Moscow the "complexity" of the situation (in official Russian war-time terminology "complexity" always meant "gravity") as a result of the German offensive against the capital; he also explained why it had been necessary to take those numerous evacuation measures. He firmly denied the rumours
about the imminent surrender of the city, rumours, he said, which had been spread by enemy agents. Moscow, he said, would be defended stubbornly, to the last drop of blood.
"Every one of us, no matter what his work or his position, shall act like a soldier defending Moscow against the Fascist invaders."
Two days later, a state of siege was proclaimed in Moscow. This had partly been caused by the looting that had gone on, here and there, at the height of the panic; now all
"breaches of law and order" were to be dealt with by emergency tribunals, and all spies, diversionists and agents provocateurs were to be shot on the spot. The maintenance of order inside Moscow was entrusted to the Commandant of the city and his NKVD troops.
These, together with regular army units and newty-formed "Communist battalions" were to man the gorodskiye rubezhy, the defence lines just outside and inside Moscow. The state of siege had, by all accounts I was to hear later, a salutary, and, indeed, stimulating effect on morale.
By the end of October over two million people had been officially evacuated from
Moscow; in addition, there were many others who had fled unofficially; many stories
were current later, for instance about a very important person on Moscow Radio, who
disappeared on October 16, and did not turn up again until three weeks later. Disciplinary action was taken in some cases against such "deserters", but there is no official record of the extent of these reprisals; it seems, however, that allowances were made for the
general state of chaos in Moscow that day, and for the fact that people were genuinely frightened of falling under German occupation.
Many of those who had stayed on in Moscow later took some pride in not having lost
their heads—or their faith in Moscow being saved [Those who had fled retorted in some cases: "You didn't mind being occupied by the Germans—I did."], and liked to recall the
"heroic atmosphere" of half-empty Moscow in the second half of October and in November, with the battle still raging not far away and, indeed, coming nearer and nearer in the second half of November. But it was now felt that the situation was well in hand and that a sudden German incursion into Moscow—which seemed so likely on that 16th
of October—had become impossible.
Chapter XI BATTLE OF MOSCOW II STALIN'S HOLY
RUSSIA SPEECH
In the first nineteen days of their offensive the Germans had advanced to less than fifty miles from Moscow at Noro-Fominsk and were even nearer the capital in the
Volokolamsk area. But all the time the Russian resistance was stiffening and by October 18 counterattacks slowed down the German advance. Losses were extremely heavy on
both sides, there were signs of growing fatigue among the Germans, and between
October 18 and the beginning of November they made very little progress.
German war memoirs stress the Wehrmacht's supply difficulties; but it is quite clear that the famous "Russian winter" was in no way decisive either in October or at the beginning of November. On the contrary, some of the Germans' difficulties arose from the fact that the roads had not yet frozen. To quote Guderian:
On October 29 our leading tanks reached a point some two miles from Tula. An
attempt to capture the city by a coup de main failed owing to the enemy's strong anti-tank and anti-aircraft defences; we lost many tanks and officers... The
condition of the Orel-Tula road had meantime grown so bad that arrangements had
to be made for the 3rd Panzer Division ... to be supplied by air... In view of the impossibility of launching a frontal attack on Tula, General Freiherr von Geyr
suggested that in order to continue our advance we by-pass the town to the east...
(He) was also of the opinion that there was no possibility of using motorised troops
until the frost set in.
[Guderian, op. cit., p. 152. (Emphasis added.)]
Guderian's argument that rain and mud interfered with the success of the first German offensive against Moscow seems futile, since it affected the Russians as much as the Germans; besides, Guderian himself admits that it was the defence put up by the
Russians, and not the mud that stopped him from capturing Tula, this key position on the way to Moscow. Moreover, the Russians also sprang on him the unpleasant surprise of
throwing in some of their T-34 tanks under Katyukov much to Guderian's disgust.
[ Guderian, op. cit., p. 248.]
On the night of November 6—that is, a week after the first German offensive against
Moscow had virtually petered out, and ten days before the second offensive began—
Moscow celebrated the 24th Anniversary of the Revolution. The Germans were still some forty miles from Moscow—in some places even nearer; and although the atmosphere in
Moscow was that of a besieged city, with tens of thousands of wounded crowding the
hospitals, and many thousands more arriving every day—the conviction that Moscow
would not be lost had steadily grown in the past fortnight.
The usual Eve-of-Revolution Day meeting was held on that night of November 6 in the
large ornate hall of the Mayakovsky tube station. The hall was crowded with hundreds of delegates of the Moscow City Soviet, and various Party and trade union organisations, and representatives of the Armed Forces. As many who attended that meeting later told me, the underground setting of the meeting was uncanny, depressing and humiliating.
Stalin's speech at the meeting was a strange mixture of black gloom and complete self-confidence. After recalling that the war had greatly curtailed, and in many cases wholly stopped, the peaceful building of socialism that had gone on for so many years, Stalin said:
In four months of war, we have had 350,000 killed, 378,000 missing and 1,020,000
wounded. During the same period the enemy had lost over four and a half million in dead, wounded and prisoners. There can be no doubt that Germany, whose human
reserves are running out, has been weakened much more than the Soviet Union,
whose reserves are only now being fully deployed.
Battle of Moscow II—Stalin's Holy Russia Speech 245
It is extremely doubtful that anybody in Russia could have believed these figures; but it was perhaps essential to overstate the German losses in order to bring home his
contention that the blitzkrieg had already failed. It had failed, Stalin said, for three reasons: the Germans, as could be seen from Hess's mission to England, had hoped that Britain and America would join them in their war against Russia or, at any rate, give Germany a free hand in the East; this had not come off: Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union were in the same camp. Secondly, the Germans h
ad hoped that the Soviet régime
would collapse and the USSR fall to pieces.
Instead, the Soviet rear is today more solid than ever. It is probable that any other country, having lost as much territory as we have, would have collapsed.
Finally, the Germans had expected the Soviet armed forces to break down; after which they would, without further hindrance, push right on to the Urals. True, the German army was a more experienced army than the Soviet Army, but the Russians had the moral
advantage of fighting a just war; moreover, the Germans were now fighting in enemy
territory, far from their supply bases and with communications constantly threatened by the Partisans.
[This also was said more for effect. In 1941 partisan activity was still very weak and unorganised.]
Our army, as against this, is fighting in its own surroundings, constantly supported by its rear, and supplied with manpower, ammunitions and food... The defence of
Moscow and Leningrad show... that in the fire of the Great Patriotic War new
soldiers, officers, airmen, gunners, tank-crews, infantry men, sailors, are being forged—men who will tomorrow become the terror of the German army. {Stormy
applause.)
For all that, said Stalin, there were also unfavourable factors, which could not be denied.
One was the absence of a Second Front in Europe; whereas the Germans were fighting
the Red Army with the help of numerous allies—Finns, Rumanians, Italians, Hungarians
—there were no British or American armies on the European mainland to help Russia.
But there can be no doubt that the formation of a Second Front on the European mainland
—and it unquestionably must come within a very short time {stormy applause}— will greatly facilitate the position of our army, and make things more difficult for the
Germans.
The other unfavourable factor was the German superiority in tanks and aircraft. The Red Army had only a fraction of the tanks that the Germans had, even though the new
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