On 19 October General Zhukov declared Moscow to be under a state of siege and placed the capital and its population under martial law. Breakthroughs of the Mozhaisk line between Kalinin and Kaluga and another threatened breach in the Naro-Fominsk area, the third in-depth line in front of Moscow, were creating a bulge directly threatening the Soviet capital. Zhukov repeated the emergency measures he had previously enacted in front of Leningrad. Extensive defences were ordered to be constructed in depth, covering the main approaches to Moscow. Engineering work was already underway behind the first echelon of the West Front to erect anti-tank barriers in all sectors potentially vulnerable to an enemy armoured advance. Every morning and until it was dark, nearly 70,000 women and children and 30,000 factory workers marched out from the suburbs, wretchedly clothed and equipped only with hand tools, to work on the outskirts of the city. Vera Evsyukhova dug anti-tank ditches.
‘They were huge, about 8m wide and 10m deep – as big as that. It was mostly us women that did the work, and it was hard labour. We had to light fires to thaw the earth before we could dig into it. On top it was frozen solid, but deep down it was not so hard.’(17)
Within three weeks they had dug 361km of tank ditches and erected 366km of tank obstacles with 106km of ‘dragons’ teeth’ (tooth-shaped concrete buttresses) protected by 611km of barbed wire. They needed little encouragement. Gabriel Temkin remembered the atmosphere of unease that had permeated his labour battalion. ‘Everyone felt a nervous chill, listening to radio news about the Red Army again and again abandoning cities and territories,’ he said. ‘The Germans were coming closer and closer.’(18)
Bridges were prepared for demolition on all approaches, rivers and streams mined, and huge earth embankments raised, interspersed with one-metre deep ‘fish-bone’ pattern ditches, impassable to heavy vehicles. Anti-tank barriers, consisting of ditches covered with rows of barbed wire, and star-shaped iron ‘hedgehogs’, made from six jagged iron rails welded into clusters, were concreted into vital street intersections, to prevent the passage of tanks. Concrete bunkers covered these obstacles with machine guns, anti-tank and artillery pieces.(19)
The work was not allowed to continue totally unmolested. A 25-year-old cotton weaver, Olga Sapozhnikova, ordered to dig trenches alongside a crowd of other factory girls, remembered, ‘we were all very calm, but dazed and couldn’t take it in.’ On the first day they were strafed by a low-flying German fighter: ‘Eleven of the girls were killed and four wounded,’ she said.(20) They could sense the proximity of the approaching Germans. ‘They were strange, those nights in Moscow,’ said Elizaveta Shakhova. ‘You heard the guns firing so clearly.’
‘It was freezing cold, a terrible frost, but you had to keep digging. They made us dig. We had to do it, and we did, we kept digging.’
Through it all ‘they were bombing us all the time,’ said Evsyukhova. Rumour and uncertainty reigned. ‘The Germans dropped leaflets on us stating “Surrender – Moscow is kaputt!” But we did not believe it.’(21)
There was no sign – at any stage – that Moscow would ever have surrendered. The decision to transfer the most important Soviet ministries and agencies to Kuibyshev had already been taken, and the evacuation of vital industrial assets to the Urals continued. Over a number of weeks from mid-October, 498 industrial operations were transported eastwards, carried in 71,000 freight cars.(22) Stalin had clearly resolved to fight on, a view echoed by Soviet diplomat Valentin Bereschkow who learned later that all Moscow bridges and many public buildings, including the Kremlin, were prepared for demolition with delayed-action mines. ‘If the Germans had marched into the city,’ he said, ‘they would have experienced a lot of surprises.’ The tactic had already been employed in other overrun cities such as Kharkov and Kiev. Explosive charges fired after the occupation demolished entire buildings, killing many Germans in the process. ‘The mines were supposed to explode as the installations were occupied,’ Bereschkow explained, ‘hopefully causing heavy casualties among the military headquarters staff, expected to be the first to occupy them.’(23)
Communist Party activists formed workers’ battalions in every city borough. Within a few days of the crisis Moscow scraped together 25 ad hoc companies and battalions numbering 12,000 men, most of them Party or Young Communist League members. Another 100,000 workers began military training in their spare time, while 17,000 women and girls were trained as nurses and medical assistants. Journalist A. Maluchin recalled lorried convoys full of these volunteers rolling westwards, passed by refugees streaming out of the eastern exits of the city. These reinforcements were hastily incorporated into the Western Moscow defence zone. In all, 40,000 volunteer troops formed rudimentary militia divisions. By the end of October, 13 rifle divisions and five tank brigades were despatched to create a measure of stability to the threatened Volokolamsk sectors on the River Nara and Aleksin on the River Oka. By the middle of November the STAVKA was to provide the West Front with 100,000 men, 300 tanks, 2,000 artillery pieces and numerous anti-tank guns. They were redirected to the threatened sectors.(24)
Mud and Soviet resistance had checked the German offensive at the end of October along a line running from Kalinin on the Volga, through Turginovo, Volokolamsk, Dorokhovo, Naro-Fominsk and Aleksin on the River Oka and south to the outskirts of Tula. Army Group Centre had bitten off a linear strip of 230–260km penetrating into the Russian interior. Some units were within 120–140km of Moscow. Army Group North meanwhile had retained its stranglehold on Leningrad in the north, while in the south Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt’s Army Group South was successfully maintaining its drive along the Azov coast toward Rostov. Sebastopol might hold out but the Crimean peninsula seemed about to fall. Harsh early winter sleet and rain alternating with freezing night conditions, which thawed again by day, brought the front to a standstill for three weeks. During this interlude Soviet reserves achieved a degree of stability in the threatened areas, enabling the Moscow labour force to erect an extensive series of fortifications and obstacles across the likely future route of the German advance.
General Zhukov was summoned to Stalin’s Supreme Headquarters on 1 November and questioned whether the traditional October Revolution Anniversary parade could be held on 7 November. Holding it would send a strong and politically tangible message to the international community and Russian population, demonstrating the ability of the regime to survive despite recent setbacks. Stalin had consulted General Artemev, the Moscow District Commander, the day before to assess its practicality. Alexei Rybin, a member of Artemev’s security team, recalled the general’s fear of a Luftwaffe bombing raid. ‘In the first place,’ Stalin admonished, ‘you will not let a single plane through to Moscow.’ Reality suggested, however, it could still conceivably happen. If that was the case, Stalin instructed he should ‘clear away the dead and wounded and continue with the parade’.(25) Zhukov, appreciating this resolve, advised that although there was unlikely to be a major German ground offensive, the Luftwaffe could interfere. Additional fighter squadrons were transferred from nearby fronts to minimise the chances of this happening.