Russia at war 1941-1945

The air raids continued, off and on, through the last days of July and most of August. In the instructions issued at the end of July it was now said that sand must be used against incendiaries, rather than water—though, in reality, water continued to be used as well.

No shirking was allowed in fire-fighting. Three fellows guilty of neglect, and so held responsible for the destruction by fire of a large warehouse worth three million roubles, were shot.

[A. Werth, Moscow '41 (London, 1942), p. 100.]

I wrote at the time:

I wonder if Moscow is taking the blitz as well as London? People look grim; and

there are mighty few bomb jokes. Perhaps people here feel individually more helpless than they do in London. Ambulances are comparatively scarce, and

perhaps too precious to risk in a big blitz, and they therefore do not collect the wounded during a raid, but only after the all-clear has gone. Until then the wounded have only the local first-aid to rely upon. The fire-watching rules are very drastic, and a dangerous amount of sleep is lost... nor are most of the shelters adapted yetfor sleeping.

[Ibid., p. 111.]

But, on the whole, Moscow, during those two first months of the war, presented a rather paradoxical sight. Official optimism was being, more or less, kept up by the Press. The halting of the Germans at Smolensk was made out to be of the utmost importance, even though the news from other sectors of the front was still looking highly ominous. But at least the German advance was not what it had been during the desperate first fortnight.

Conditions in Moscow were becoming more difficult. If, at the beginning of July, there was no real shortage of anything—food and cigarettes in particular were plentiful, and so were even nice-looking boxes of chocolates "made in Riga, Latvian SSR", now already in German hands—some hoarding went on in a smallish way all the time, and, by July 15,

the food shortage became very noticeable, and the mountains of cigarette packets

displayed at almost every street corner rapidly disappeared. On July 18 drastic food rationing was introduced, and the population split up into favoured, semi-favoured and unfavoured categories, the rations of the latter being already extremely meagre. True, the kolkhoz markets continued to function, but prices were rising rapidly. There were still some consumer goods in the shops, and at the end of August I even managed to buy a fur coat of sorts—made of white Siberian dogskin—in a shop in Stoleshnikov Lane, where

there was still a fairly good assortment of reindeer polushubki (fur jackets) and the like. I paid 335 roubles (about £7) for my "dog-coat"—which was cheap. But other shops, I found, were already quickly running out of shoes, galoshes and valenki (felt boots).

Restaurants were, however, continuing as before, and good meals were still served in the big hotels—the Metropole, Moskva, or in restaurants like the famous Aragvi in Gorki

Street. The Cocktail Hall in Gorki Street was also crowded; the theatres—fourteen of them—and the cinemas were working normally and many of them were competing in

producing topical and patriotic shows. The Bolshoi Theatre was closed, but its filiale in Pushkin Street was working, and there were the usual crowds of young people

clamouring outside for spare tickets, in case anybody had one, and, inside the theatre, giving frantic ovations whenever the famous tenors Lemeshev or Kozlovsky sang. At the Malyi Theatre they were playing Korneichuk's In the Ukrainian Steppes; when one of the characters said:

There is nothing more maddening than when you're interrupted just as you are

completing the roof of your cottage. If only we have five more years! But if war

comes, then we shall fight with a fierceness and anger the like of which the world has never seen!

It brought the house down.

Whenever in cinemas Stalin appeared on newsreels, there was frantic cheering—which,