The security crackdown did not quite suppress all dissent. Swastikas materialised overnight on courtyard walls, and leaflets denouncing Stalin and calling for Leningrad to be declared a Paris-style ‘
The fence-sitters had justification, for the archives make it plain that Stalin seriously considered abandoning Leningrad not only during the mid-September crisis, but on into the late autumn and early winter, when his overriding priority was the defence of Moscow.
Hitler’s plan for Moscow, code-named Operation Typhoon, had been outlined in a Führer Directive of 6 September. Eight hundred thousand troops and three panzer armies, comprising over a thousand tanks, were to make two great pincer movements to the city’s south and west, encircling the Soviet armies defending its approaches. Launched on the 30th, Typhoon met its first objectives extraordinarily quickly. The small city of Orel, about two-thirds of the way along the main road from Kiev, is said to have been abandoned so fast that the German tank crews found themselves overtaking peacefully trundling trams. (‘Why didn’t you file anything about the heroic defence of Orel?’ Vasili Grossman’s editor angrily asked him on his return from a foray to the front. ‘Because there was no defence’, Grossman replied.) Five days into the offensive a Soviet reconnaissance plane spotted a twelve-mile armoured column approaching the town of Yukhnov, 120 miles north of Orel and only 80 miles from the capital. The news was so incredible that the air officer who reported it was threatened with arrest for ‘provocation’, and only believed once two more planes had confirmed the sighting.
On 6 October Stalin summoned Zhukov from Leningrad and put him in charge of Moscow’s defence. Again, Zhukov found the army in a state of collapse: communications had broken down and ad hoc units were being formed from stragglers who had managed to escape being ‘caught in the sack’ of small-scale German encirclements. Of the 800,000 troops that had held the Central Front six weeks earlier, only 90,000 still stood between the Wehrmacht and the capital. Four days later, while conscripts laboured to dig a new ring of trenches around the Moscow suburbs, Hitler’s press chief invited Berlin’s press corps to the Ministry of Propaganda to hear a statement from the Führer. The remnants of the Red Army, it declared, were now trapped. Victory in the East was assured. The next morning’s newspapers carried the headlines ‘The Great Hour Has Struck!’ and ‘Campaign in the East Decided!’
In Moscow, where the crump of artillery could now be heard even from Red Square, it was decided to evacuate the government. The Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet, the defence commissariat and the Allied embassies all left on special trains for Kuibyshev (now Samara, on the Volga) on the 15th.* The following day, the ashes of a million hastily burned files twirling above the pavements, the city descended into anarchy. Police vanished; bosses fled in commandeered lorries loaded with rubber-plants and gramophones; workers looted and lynched. The director of a dairy, spotted trying to leave, was dragged out of his car and thrown head-first into a vat of sour cream. Order was only restored five days later. The whole inglorious episode became known as the ‘big
