It was soon learned that there were three circles of anti-aircraft defences round Moscow, and that, during the first raid, barely ten or fifteen German planes (out of 200) had broken through. Some high explosive bombs and some incendiaries could be heard dropping, but only very few. There were quite a number of broken windows the next morning, a few
bomb-craters, including one in Red Square, a few fires, which were rapidly put out, but nothing very serious. On the night of July 22, there was a second blitz, which also caused only limited damage, except that over a hundred people were killed when one big shelter off Arbat Square received a direct hit. But, as on the first night, only a very small number of planes got through.
The air raids continued, off and on, through the last days of July and most of August. In the instructions issued at the end of July it was now said that sand must be used against incendiaries, rather than water—though, in reality, water continued to be used as well.
No shirking was allowed in fire-fighting. Three fellows guilty of neglect, and so held responsible for the destruction by fire of a large warehouse worth three million roubles, were shot.
[A. Werth, Moscow '41 (London, 1942), p. 100.]
I wrote at the time:
I wonder if Moscow is taking the blitz as well as London? People look grim; and
there are mighty few bomb jokes. Perhaps people here feel individually more helpless than they do in London. Ambulances are comparatively scarce, and
perhaps too precious to risk in a big blitz, and they therefore do not collect the wounded during a raid, but only after the all-clear has gone. Until then the wounded have only the local first-aid to rely upon. The fire-watching rules are very drastic, and a dangerous amount of sleep is lost... nor are most of the shelters adapted yet for sleeping.
[Ibid., p. 111.]
But, on the whole, Moscow, during those two first months of the war, presented a rather paradoxical sight. Official optimism was being, more or less, kept up by the Press. The halting of the Germans at Smolensk was made out to be of the utmost importance, even though the news from other sectors of the front was still looking highly ominous. But at least the German advance was not what it had been during the desperate first fortnight.
Conditions in Moscow were becoming more difficult. If, at the beginning of July, there was no real shortage of anything—food and cigarettes in particular were plentiful, and so were even nice-looking boxes of chocolates "made in Riga, Latvian SSR", now already in German hands—some hoarding went on in a smallish way all the time, and, by July 15,
the food shortage became very noticeable, and the mountains of cigarette packets
displayed at almost every street corner rapidly disappeared. On July 18 drastic food rationing was introduced, and the population split up into favoured, semi-favoured and unfavoured categories, the rations of the latter being already extremely meagre. True, the kolkhoz markets continued to function, but prices were rising rapidly. There were still some consumer goods in the shops, and at the end of August I even managed to buy a fur coat of sorts—made of white Siberian dogskin—in a shop in Stoleshnikov Lane, where
there was still a fairly good assortment of reindeer polushubki (fur jackets) and the like. I paid 335 roubles (about £7) for my "dog-coat"—which was cheap. But other shops, I found, were already quickly running out of shoes, galoshes and valenki (felt boots).
Restaurants were, however, continuing as before, and good meals were still served in the big hotels—the Metropole, Moskva, or in restaurants like the famous Aragvi in Gorki
Street. The Cocktail Hall in Gorki Street was also crowded; the theatres—fourteen of them—and the cinemas were working normally and many of them were competing in
producing topical and patriotic shows. The Bolshoi Theatre was closed, but its filiale in Pushkin Street was working, and there were the usual crowds of young people
clamouring outside for spare tickets, in case anybody had one, and, inside the theatre, giving frantic ovations whenever the famous tenors Lemeshev or Kozlovsky sang. At the Malyi Theatre they were playing Korneichuk's In the Ukrainian Steppes; when one of the characters said:
There is nothing more maddening than when you're interrupted just as you are
completing the roof of your cottage. If only we have five more years! But if war
comes, then we shall fight with a fierceness and anger the like of which the world has never seen!
It brought the house down.
Whenever in cinemas Stalin appeared on newsreels, there was frantic cheering—which,
in the dark, people presumably wouldn't do unless they felt like it. There could be no doubt about Stalin's authority, especially since that July 3 broadcast. He was the khoziain, the boss, who it was hoped knew what he was doing. Even so, people felt that things had gone badly wrong, and many were greatly surprised that Russia should have been
invaded at all.
Patriotic plays were being concocted, such as The Confrontation in Tairov's Kamerny Theatre, in which a German agent finally gives up in despair, finding all the Russian people completely united; or plays about Suvorov or Kutuzov, those victorious "Russian ancestors". The Ermitage Garden continued to be crowded on Sundays by a half-civilian, half-military public; here, in a crowded hall, Busia Goldstein played Tchaikovsky's
Violin Concerto, while in one of the theatres they were playing "satirical sketches"
ridiculing Hitler and Goebbels, and German soldiers and German generals and German
paratroopers, who were always outwitted by the patriotic Russian villagers. None of it, perhaps, terribly convincing in the circumstances. Nevertheless, people enjoyed it, and laughed.
Poets and composers were busy writing patriotic poems or patriotic war songs, and
soldiers would be seen marching down the streets singing the pre-war Little Blue Scarf, or Katyusha or V boi za rodinu, v boi za Stalina (Into battle for the country, into battle for Stalin), or Alexandrov's brand-new and solemn Sacred War, which was to remain a kind of semi-official anthem throughout the war years:
But alongside all this, many theatres continued as before—the Moscow Art Theatre going on with The Three Sisters, and Anna Karenina, and The School for Scandal, and the usual Bolshoi Ballet season opening at the end of September with Swan Lake, with
Lepeshinskaya dancing... This only a few days before the Germans' "final" offensive began...
The British and American Embassies were very active during those days. Cripps and
Steinhardt had become familiar Moscow figures, and could often be seen on newsreels.
At the end of July diplomatic relations were restored with the Polish Government in
London, though this was soon to lead to the first complications. When, a day or two after the Maisky-Sikorski Agreement of July 30, I asked Lozovsky whether the release of
Polish war prisoners had begun and whether steps had been taken to form a Polish Army in Russia, he became extremely cagey, saying that such steps were being taken, but with the Poles "scattered all over the Soviet Union", there were a lot of practical problems still to be settled; nor could he state how many Polish prisoners there were, since this would give away vital secrets to the enemy.