The Moscow panic

On Thursday 16 October 1941 Moscow woke up in a city that looked as though the authorities had abandoned it. For the first time in its history the metro did not open its stations, many factories and offices did not start work, and cars, carts and pedestrians laden with bundles crowded the eastern exits from the city. The day before, the State Defence Committee (GKO) had decided to evacuate the government, the diplomatic corps and the people’s commissariats from the capital, and the news, though secret, spread across the city within hours. For three days, from 15 to 17 October, Moscow was gripped by a panic such as the Soviet Union had never known: shops were looted, factory managers fled in their official cars, and people burned their party cards and portraits of the leaders. The crisis ended only when it became clear that Joseph Stalin was staying in the city, and on 19 October the GKO imposed a state of siege on Moscow from the following day.

Chronologies speak of the government moving to Samara. At the time, from 1935, the city on the Volga was called Kuybyshev, and it was under that name that it went down in history as the “reserve capital” of the USSR. Under 19 October, in turn, they mention the declaration of martial law in Moscow. Martial law had in fact been in force in the city since 22 June 1941, under a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued on the first day of the war. On 19 October a harsher regime was introduced: a state of siege.

The front at the gates

Two weeks earlier the Germans had launched Operation Typhoon, Army Group Centre’s offensive against Moscow. In the first week of October the Vyazma and Bryansk pockets had closed, trapping the main forces of the three fronts defending the Moscow axis. All that remained between the Wehrmacht and the capital was the thinly manned Mozhaisk Line, which Georgy Zhukov, commander of the Western Front since 10 October, was patching with every unit he could bring up. On 13 October the Germans took Kaluga, and on 14 October Kalinin, today’s Tver. The armoured spearheads stood some hundred kilometres from the Kremlin, and Luftwaffe bombers, which Moscow had known since the first raid in July, were again appearing more often over the city.

The inhabitants knew the situation only in part. For several days the communiqués of the Sovinformburo had spoken of fierce fighting on the Vyazma and Bryansk axes, and on the morning of 16 October the radio announced that on the night of 14–15 October the situation on the western axis had “deteriorated” and that German troops had broken through the defences at one point. For many Muscovites this was a signal that the city would fall within days. In the earlier months of evacuation hundreds of industrial plants, institutes, museums and children had already left Moscow, and Lenin’s body had been taken in the utmost secrecy to Tyumen as early as the beginning of July. So this was not the first departure, but for the first time it seemed that the state itself was leaving.

The decree of 15 October

On the morning of 15 October Stalin gathered the members of the GKO and the Politburo. The decision taken was set down in secret GKO resolution No. 801, “On the evacuation of the capital of the USSR, the city of Moscow”. It was justified by “the unfavourable situation in the area of the Mozhaisk defence line”. The document instructed Vyacheslav Molotov to inform the foreign diplomatic missions that they were to leave for Kuybyshev “this very day”. Lazar Kaganovich, as People’s Commissar for Transport, was to provide the trains, and Lavrentiy Beria’s NKVD was to protect the diplomats. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and the government, headed by Molotov as deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, were to leave the same day. A note in brackets added: “Comrade Stalin will evacuate tomorrow or later, depending on the situation.” The People’s Commissariat of Defence was to move to Kuybyshev at once, and the main group of the General Staff to Arzamas. The last point instructed Beria and the first secretary of the Moscow party organisation, Aleksandr Shcherbakov, to blow up, should the enemy appear “at the gates of Moscow”, any plants, warehouses and institutions that could not be evacuated, as well as all the electrical equipment of the metro.

The resolution remained secret until the last years of the USSR, and its full text was published only at the end of the 1980s. The whole city, however, saw it being carried out. On the night of 15–16 October trains carrying the embassies left the Kazansky railway station (PL), among them the British ambassador Stafford Cripps and the American ambassador Laurence Steinhardt. The journey to Kuybyshev took several days. After them went ministries, offices, newspaper staffs and theatres, among them the company of the Bolshoi Theatre, as well as the families of officials. In Kuybyshev the day-to-day work of the relocated government apparatus was directed by the deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Nikolai Voznesensky. Molotov, who according to the decree was to head the evacuated government, in practice remained at Stalin’s side in Moscow.

On the evening of 15 October Shcherbakov passed on to the secretaries of the district party committees the instruction to prepare plants for demolition and evacuation. According to the recollections of those involved, from that moment the secret ceased to exist: the government’s departure was talked about in queues, on trams and in the gateways of apartment blocks.

16 October

On 15 October Kaganovich ordered the metro to be closed and proposals for its destruction to be prepared within a few hours. On the morning of 16 October the stations stayed shut, and at some of them work began on dismantling the escalators. That same day the decision was reversed, and in the evening the first train ran. But for the thousands of people who came to work in the morning, the closed metro was the clearest sign that something had come to an end.

In many factories the management announced that the plant was closing, paid the workers a month’s wages and left. Where the money ran out, workers stopped the managers’ cars and searched their luggage. People’s Commissar Anastas Mikoyan recalled having to go to the angry workforce of the Stalin Automobile Works to explain that the state had not fled. In food shops the assistants handed out their stock before closing; elsewhere crowds smashed shop windows and storerooms. Columns of refugees streamed along the Highway of Enthusiasts, the main road east towards Gorky, and at the railway stations people stormed the trains. Cars carrying away officials’ belongings were also attacked. Documents were burned in party committees, and some officials deserted their posts. The head of the Moscow administration of the People’s Commissariat of Justice left the city after first ordering the courts to be disbanded.

The writer Konstantin Simonov later described that day in his novel The Living and the Dead: tens and hundreds of thousands of people rushed to escape from the Germans and flooded the streets and squares “in an unbroken stream”. At the same time he stressed that there were enough people in the city who did everything they could not to surrender it, and that this was precisely why Moscow was not surrendered. How many people left the capital in those days is not known. According to estimates cited by Russian historians, by the autumn, counting the earlier planned evacuation, roughly half of Moscow’s more than four million pre-war inhabitants had left.

The panic was not groundless, but its scale was above all the result of the authorities’ silence. Throughout 16 October the radio broadcast music and front-line communiqués without saying a word about what was happening in the city. Only on 17 October did Shcherbakov and the chairman of the City Soviet (Mossovet), Vasily Pronin, speak on the radio. They denied the rumours that the capital was to be given up, announced that Moscow would be defended, and ordered the shops to open, transport to be restored and work in the factories to resume. According to Russian historians these broadcasts did much to halt the disorderly flight. Army and militia patrols appeared on the streets, and the trams and the metro began running again.

Stalin stays

What mattered most, however, was something that was not said openly: that Stalin had not left. A residence and a shelter had been prepared for him in Kuybyshev, and an aircraft and a train were waiting at the airfield and on a railway siding. Stories that on the night of 16–17 October Stalin went to the station, walked along the platform and turned back have no confirmation in the documents. What is known is that in those days he worked in the Kremlin and received commanders and members of the leadership in his office. On the morning of 16 October, returning from his dacha at Kuntsevo, he is said by those around him to have seen the looting of shops with his own eyes.

According to Pronin’s recollections, at a meeting on the evening of 19 October Stalin asked those present whether Moscow would be defended, heard each of them answer in the affirmative, and dictated the text of a new resolution. For the inhabitants this was the clearest signal of all: the leader who in July had addressed them for the first time as “brothers and sisters” in his speech of 3 July had decided to share the capital’s fate. The news that Stalin was in the Kremlin spread across the city as quickly as the rumour of his departure had done earlier.

The state of siege

GKO resolution No. 813 of 19 October 1941, published the next day in Pravda and other newspapers, opened by announcing that the defence of the capital on the lines 100–120 kilometres west of Moscow had been entrusted to the commander of the Western Front, General of the Army Zhukov, and the defence of the immediate approaches to the city to the commander of the Moscow garrison, Lieutenant General Pavel Artemyev (PL). From 20 October a state of siege was in force in Moscow and the adjoining districts. All street traffic between midnight and five in the morning was banned without special passes from the city commandant. Responsibility for order lay with the commandant of Moscow, Major General Kuzma Sinilov, to whom the NKVD internal troops, the militia and the volunteer workers’ detachments were subordinated. Those who violated order were to be handed over “immediately” to a military tribunal, and “provocateurs, spies and other enemy agents calling for the violation of order” were to be shot on the spot.

The resolution, signed by Stalin as chairman of the GKO, gave the NKVD and the militia the right to carry out summary executions without trial. Dozens of district commandants’ offices were set up in the city, patrols checked papers in the streets, at the stations and at the city’s outer checkpoints, and blocking detachments detained soldiers who had become separated from their units. According to NKVD archival data cited by Russian historians, between 20 October and 2 November 1941, 7 people were shot on the spot in Moscow, 98 were shot on the sentences of military tribunals, and 602 were sentenced to prison. By the summer of 1942, according to the same sources, more than 800,000 people had been detained, most of them for breaking the curfew, lacking papers or desertion.

Those weeks also claimed victims who had nothing to do with the panic. Thousands of detainees were taken from Moscow prisons into the interior, and according to Russian researchers some prisoners were shot while still in Moscow. On 18 October Beria signed an order to shoot a group of prisoners, military men and officials arrested in the summer of 1941. On 28 October, in the village of Barbysh near Kuybyshev, twenty people were shot, among them Colonel General Grigory Shtern, former commander of the forces in the Far East, Colonel General Aleksandr Loktionov, the former air force commanders Lieutenant General Yakov Smushkevich and Lieutenant General Pavel Rychagov, and Rychagov’s wife, the aviator Maria Nesterenko. All of them were rehabilitated after Stalin’s death.

Ditches, hedgehogs and barricades

At the same time the building of fortifications went on. On 12 October the GKO decided to construct new defensive lines around Moscow: the main semicircle 15–20 kilometres from the city and an urban line on the capital’s boundaries. The city itself was divided into three defensive belts, marked out by the Moscow circular railway, the Garden Ring and the Boulevard Ring. Steel anti-tank “hedgehogs” were set up in the squares and on the exit roads, and barricades of sandbags, beams and blocks were built across the main thoroughfares, among other places by the Krymsky Bridge and on Zubovskaya Street. Firing positions were set up in buildings along the main streets.

Several hundred thousand inhabitants of Moscow and its province worked on the fortifications, the great majority of them women and young people, because the men were in the army or in the factories. They dug by hand, with shovels, in the mud of the autumn thaw, often under fire from German aircraft. According to the report that Shcherbakov, Pronin and other leaders of the city and province later submitted to Stalin, 361 kilometres of anti-tank ditches and 336 kilometres of escarpments were dug on the lines around Moscow, 105 kilometres of post obstacles were erected, 571 gun emplacements and 3,755 shelters and positions for machine guns were built, along with 611 kilometres of barbed-wire entanglements, and abatis more than 1,500 kilometres long were made in the forests around the city. Other tallies, covering the whole Moscow Defence Zone, give even larger figures. Some of these fortifications were never used in battle, but the lines outside Moscow became the basis of the defence in November.

From mid-October communist and workers’ battalions were formed from workers and office staff, and from them the Moscow communist divisions were created. Destruction battalions, tasked with fighting saboteurs and paratroopers, operated in the city. Factories, bridges and important buildings were mined, and NKVD sappers waited for the signal to blow them up. Moscow was preparing for street fighting.

Significance

The October panic was the deepest crisis of Soviet power during the war, and for decades it remained a taboo subject. Soviet historiography wrote of a “calm, disciplined” capital, and 16 October was mentioned, if at all, only in hints. The events showed how fragile was the trust in a state that for four months of war had not told its citizens the truth about its defeats. They also showed how much the system depended on one person: as long as it was not known whether Stalin was staying, order was disintegrating throughout the city, and once it turned out that he was, it was restored within a few days, as much by patrols and executions as by regained hope.

The Germans did not profit from the events in Moscow. In the second half of October the troops of Army Group Centre were bogged down in the mud of the autumn rasputitsa and in fighting against Zhukov’s ever more numerous units, and the advance on the capital came to a halt at the turn of October and November. Hitler had in any case already announced that he would not accept Moscow’s surrender, and that the city was to be encircled and starved. When the German forces resumed their offensive in mid-November, Moscow was already a city prepared for defence.

The strongest symbol of the turning point was the anniversary of the Revolution. On 6 November a ceremonial meeting was held at Mayakovskaya metro station, at which Stalin spoke, and on 7 November the traditional parade took place in Red Square in front of the Mausoleum. The troops marched straight from the square to the front, and in his speech Stalin invoked Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Minin and Pozharsky, Suvorov and Kutuzov. Kuybyshev remained the seat of some government offices and of the diplomatic corps until 1943, and on 5 March 1942 it hosted the premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. The state of siege in Moscow was lifted in 1942, once the Battle of Moscow had pushed the front far away from the city.