Russia at war 1941-1945

"follow the Red Army to the east". However, there were different shades in the determination of the workers to "defend Moscow" at all costs. The very fact that not more than 12,000 should have volunteered for the "Communist brigades" at the height of the near-panic of October 13-16 seems indicative; was it because, to many, these improvised battalions seemed futile in this kind of war, or was it because, at the back of many workers' minds, there was the idea that Russia was still vast, and that it might be more advantageous to fight the decisive battle somewhere east.

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