The Panic

October 16, 1941

By mid-October of 1941, Moscow seemed on the verge of falling to the Nazis. German troops had reached the city’s edge, and there were rumors of fascist tanks closing in. At the same time, the situation seemed to have, literally, frozen in place. As the poet Semyon Gudzenko wrote: “Curse you, forty-first year, freezing the infantry in the snows.”

It was as if both the German armies and the scattered, fragmented units of the Western Front that were defending Moscow had been trapped by the frigid, torrential snows of October 1941. Nobody could muster the strength to surge forward: it was taking everything the Soviet troops had just to defend Moscow, and the Germans, for whom just a tiny stretch stood between them and their prize, were stuck. Both sides were on their last leg.

It is easy to imagine the sense of shock felt in Moscow and across the Soviet Union at that point. For years the Soviet people had been told that their country’s military was the mightiest on earth. Even civilians lived in a state of constant combat readiness: they sang rousing songs about how the mighty Soviet people would unite to crush any aggressor, and, beginning in 1931, virtually every young person in the country was involved in an athletic program with the no-nonsense name “Be Prepared for Labor and Defense.” All that running and jumping, all those push-ups and sit-ups, were not for people’s own health – they were to make them more effective workers and better defenders of the motherland in case of enemy attack.

And that attack was seen as inevitable. The world’s imperialists were consumed by envy toward the achievements of the first Five Year Plans. Fascists longed to strangle the communist state, and from some ominous, faraway place, Leon Trotsky had been sending spies and wreckers into the country, until icepick-wielding saviors finally dispatched him in Mexico in 1940. The Soviet people understood the need to be ready to confront their enemies, but they felt sure that their mighty country would be up to the task.

Back in 1938, an incredibly popular film, Tractor Drivers, set in an ordinary Russian village where the protagonists spent their days peacefully plowing the earth, was filled with songs along the line of “March of the Soviet Tankmen.” As the Soviet people knew perfectly well, tractors and tanks are essentially brothers, so there was nothing odd about it when collective farm workers at the wedding of the two main protagonists broke into exuberant song about the invincibility of Soviet tanks: “Our armor is strong and our tanks are fast/Our people are full of courage,” before turning to a portrait of Stalin, raising their glasses to him, and bellowing:

Thundering with fire, steel flashing bright
Our tanks will make their frenzied advance
When Comrade Stalin sends us to fight
The First Marshal leading the way!

Гремя огнем, сверкая блеском стали
Пойдут машины в яростный поход
Когда нас в бой пошлет товарищ Сталин
И Первый маршал в бой нас поведет!

It was perfectly clear that the enemy would be instantly crushed by these shining tanks and tough, fearless people. Any war was destined to end “with little bloodshed and on someone else’s territory.” As another line from Tractor Drivers went: “We don’t want a foot of someone else’s land, but we won’t give an inch of our own.”

Then came the summer and fall of 1941, which were nothing like what the movies, songs, and propagandistic speeches had promised. By October 1941, many vast stretches of Soviet territory had been lost, and nobody was talking anymore about instantly crushing the enemy and pushing it back onto “someone else’s territory.” As for blood, better not to think about how much was being shed. Any idea that the Soviet Union was mighty and invincible had crumbled for all to see, and now that the enemy was at the capital’s very doorstep, all bets were off as to what would happen.

All summer, women, adolescents, and old people had been digging trenches and building fortifications along the approaches to Moscow, although everyone understood that they would be of little effect, since real fortifications take years to build. Indeed, the Germans easily broke through the defensive lines surrounding the city. Another desperate step was the formation of militias in Moscow and other cities made up of those who, due to their age or health, had not been considered combat material: the elderly, nearsighted, or otherwise physically unfit, most of whom had never held a weapon in their lives. This impromptu force was thrown into the meatgrinder of war, a pebble intended to tip the scales at least a bit. But where tanks and artillery were failing, what could this hapless infantry do? Moscow’s militia was almost entirely decimated.

The tiniest spark would have been enough to set off a firestorm of panic in this tinderbox of fraught nerves and desperation, and the spark generated on October 15 was by no means tiny: a decision was made to evacuate government offices and foreign embassies to the Volga city of Kuibyshev (now Samara), which was being designated an emergency capital.

This was probably a reasonable decision, but to ordinary Muscovites it sent a simple message: the bosses were fleeing and they were being thrown to the wolves. This was the message received by workers who suddenly noticed that their supervisors, who were supposedly “organizing the evacuation of factories,” were nowhere to be found, and by passersby who saw boxes upon boxes of papers (and, according to some rumors, money) being carried out of all the commissariats. Basically, everyone could see what was happening, and the next day, on October 16, thousands of Muscovites began surging eastward – on foot, on bicycles, with wheel barrels, sacks, and suitcases. The panic escalated by the hour. In some places, people were given their wages a month in advance, and grocery stores began handing out free food right from their front door. It felt as if the city was in its death throes.

To make matters worse, that same day the Metro was shut down. The Moscow Metropolitan, which had opened with great fanfare just a few years earlier, was one of the Soviet Union’s proudest and most symbolic achievements, with stations that resembled palaces adorned with elaborate mosaics and stucco conveying the grandeur and invincibility of the state that created it. Anyone involved in building the Metro was seen as a hero. Now, the doors to these underground palaces were closed and the system was mined so that it could be blown up if the Germans captured the city. This also meant that the underground network could not be used to shelter during air raids.

The panic, chaos, and flight lasted just one day. On October 17 it was ceremoniously announced that the city would not be surrendered. Stalin would stay – this alone made a strong impression, even though everyone knew that if the city did fall, he of all people would be safely evacuated. The Metro went back into operation and life got back to some semblance of normality.

The German troops were still right at Moscow’s edge, and in November there would be another attack, and a successful Soviet counterattack. The Battle of Moscow would take thousands of lives, but by early 1942 the city was saved from occupation.

Muscovites, however, would never be the same. The already crumbling facade of invincibility had, for a brief moment, vanished entirely.