Russia at war 1941-1945

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