At Sovnarkom headquarters… high officials rounded up the younger women employees for a drunken debauch that went on for hours. In hundreds of other government offices people behaved as if the end of the world had come. Aerial bombardment and rumors whipped the panic into frenzy.9
Another witness, the writer Arkadii Perventsev, a Communist, wrote: ‘If the Germans had known what was going on in Moscow, 500 of their paratroopers could have taken over Moscow.’10 The Germans bombarded Moscow five or six times a day, and the bombings continued through November.11
At the October 19 GKO meeting, Beria advised: ‘We should leave Moscow or they will strangle us like chickens.’12 Stalin strongly objected. Still, he ordered all Politburo members, except Malenkov and Beria, to move to Kuibyshev. Later he ordered Molotov and Mikoyan to come back. The GKO appointed Major General Kouzma Sinilov, former commander of the NKVD Border Guard Troops of the Murmansk Military District, as military commandant of Moscow.13 General Sinilov’s measures were harsh. Kravchenko remembered: ‘The military tribunals worked around the clock. Though many thousands were arrested and shot, it was not terror which quenched the panic. It was the news… that the Germans were withdrawing under blows from the newly arrived Siberian and Far Eastern troops.’14
On November 7, 1941, the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin ordered a traditional military parade at Red Square in Moscow. It was organized cautiously, in secrecy, and was an important statement of resistance at a time when Hitler had planned his own victorious parade in Moscow. 28,500 men, 140 cannons, 160 tanks, and 232 vehicles took part in the parade. Additionally, there were military parades in the cities of Kuibyshev, where the main governmental organizations and foreign diplomats had been evacuated, and Voronezh, where many Ukrainian organizations had been evacuated from Kiev.
In Moscow it was a very cold, snowy day. Stalin was standing on Lenin’s Mausoleum in a fur cap with the earflaps turned down and knotted in front, while Marshal Semyon Budennyi inspected the parade. In a speech that was transmitted on the radio, Stalin said, in particular: ‘The German-Fascist aggressors are facing a catastrophe. Currently, hunger and poverty are rampant in Germany, and during the first four months of the war Germany lost four and a half million soldiers… The German invaders are down to their last resources… A few months more—half a year, maybe a year—and Hitler’s Germany will explode due to its own crimes.’15
If Stalin believed what he said, he was completely out of touch with reality. The troops standing in front of the Mausoleum were skeptical. Mark Ivanikhin, one of the few participants in the parade who survived the war, recalled in 2010: ‘I was only eighteen, without any military experience, but even I understood that it wouldn’t be possible to push the Germans out in such a short period of time.’16 In the United States, the Soviet documentary Moscow Strikes Back, which featured Stalin’s speech, was among four winners for Best Documentary at the 15th Annual Academy Awards in 1942. It also won the National Board of Review Award and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best War Fact Film. American audiences did not know that due to the bad weather Stalin’s speech in the documentary was not filmed during the parade, but afterwards, in one of the Kremlin palaces, where Stalin repeated his speech in front of cameras.17
The fierce Soviet defense, combined with a crumbling German supply line, finally halted the German advance on November 21, 1941.18 The German troops were stopped only 40 miles from Moscow. After regrouping, the Red Army began advancing west on December 5. Amazingly, Berlin received information about the chaos in Moscow much later, and then only from the intelligence services of other countries.19 In the Soviet Union, discussing what happened in Moscow in October 1941 was taboo until the first detailed description was published in 1995.20
Executions Continue
Incredibly, the sentencing and execution of ‘political enemies’ continued in Moscow through October 1941.21 A huge group of Latvian military leaders, arrested in Latvia in May–June 1941 (plus one who was arrested earlier), were sentenced to death in July 1941 as members of an anti-Soviet plot; they were executed en masse on October 16, 1941, during the height of the frenzy of fear (Appendix I, see http://www.smershbook.com). On the same day, the wives of Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, and some other executed Soviet officials were also shot. On October 28, Ulrikh and six members of the Military Collegium left Moscow for Chkalov (currently Orenburg), where the main part of the Military Collegium’s staff had moved in August, but on December 19, Ulrikh was back and the Collegium continued its work in Moscow.
Ironically, the fate of the generals arrested as members of Rychagov’s ‘plot’ was decided precisely when the need for experienced officers was the greatest. On the night of October 15, 1941, the prisoners in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison were transferred to prisons in Kuibyshev and Saratov. Three days later Beria ordered, with Stalin’s approval, the execution without trial of Rychagov, his wife, 18 other ‘plotters’, and an additional five prisoners, including Mikhail Kedrov, the Old Bolshevik who was the first OO head.22 A team of executioners arrived from Moscow, and on October 28 most of the prisoners were shot near the village of Barbysh, not far from Kuibyshev. The others were shot a few days later in Saratov.
On February 13, 1942, the OSO sentenced to death the rest of ‘Rychagov’s plotters’ and a few other ‘military plotters and spies’, including Ivan Sergeev, former Munitions Commissar, and three of his deputies, as well as a number of other industrial managers and designers arrested in May–June 1941. They had appeared two weeks earlier on Beria’s execution list of 46 people, on which Stalin wrote in blue penciclass="underline" ‘Shoot to death all those listed. J. Stalin.’23 This was the last time Beria provided Stalin with such a list. The listed were executed on February 23, 1942 (Appendix I, see http://www.smershbook.com). Now all the Rychagov-connected ‘plotters’ were dead, and their family members were sentenced to many years of imprisonment in labor camps or exile in Central Asia.
The Aftermath
Although the counteroffensive had started, many Red Army detachments that fought near Moscow experienced serious problems. Field OOs and Abakumov personally informed Beria about numerous problems.
In November 1941, the just-formed 1st Shock Army began its successful attack against German troops. On December 9, Abakumov reported to Beria: ‘Bad organization of rear services hampers the fast advancement of the 1st [Shock] Army [at the Western Front]. Sometimes servicemen do not receive hot food for 5–6 days… On November 25, the 18th Ski Battalion did not have food at all… The army does not have the necessary number of vehicles. For instance, the 71st Rifle Brigade has only 20 trucks instead of 162.’24
In general, losses in the military equipment were enormous. By July 9, 1941, the Red Army lost 11,700 tanks, and by the end of 1941, it lost 6.29 million rifles and 11,000 planes.25 But the real problem was not even the losses, but the devil-may-care attitude of Soviet servicemen to the military equipment. In February 1942, the OO head of the above-mentioned 1st Shock Army reported to Beria:
From December 1, 1941 to January 20, 1942, total of 77 tanks were lost. Of them, 33 were destroyed by the enemy, 4 tanks drowned while crossing rivers and in swamps, and 42 tanks were disabled due to mechanical problems…