Credit for Moscow’s defence usually goes to Georgy Zhukov. Stalin’s political entourage had failed, and now the generals were fighting back. The other heroes were the reserve troops – twelve entire armies – that were brought to the front that October.13 But the capital was also defended by conscripts from its hinterland, and even by intellectuals, old men and students. This second group went into battle with the mindset and the preparation of civilians. Back in July, Stalin had called on people to join a levee en masse, and plans for Moscow’s citizens’ defence, the opolchenie, swung into operation immediately. Each district of the capital raised its companies of volunteers. Anyone who wanted to, almost, could serve. Their ages ranged from seventeen to fifty-five. As one survivor put it, most believed that they were destined to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution that November in Berlin. ‘The newspapers, cinema and radio had been telling our people for decades that the Red Army was invincible,’ recalled Abram Evseevich Gordon. Like everyone else, he too believed that ‘under the leadership of the Communist Party and our Great Leader any enemy would be defeated on his own soil’.
Male volunteers of Gordon’s age soon graduated from digging trenches. By August, opolchentsy had joined the defence of the strategic highways leading out of Moscow. Gordon himself was sent out to the old Kaluga road. He recalled the grim faces of his ‘most unmilitary’ comrades as they set out to defend the capital, some on bicycles, others on foot. At their new base they received uniforms, drab black affairs that made them look, they thought, like Mussolini’s fascists, although in fact the worn garments had probably been captured in Poland in 1939. They also saw some Polish rifles, although not every volunteer was armed. And then their training started, which, to Gordon’s horror as an urban dweller and an intellectual, involved mastering horsemanship. Their instructor, an old cavalryman called Kovalchenko, used training methods that recalled the days of Napoleon and Kutuzov. The recruits had to ride bareback for hours at a stretch, enduring unaccustomed pain until the bloodstains from their blisters began soaking through their pants. ‘The only escape from this torture,’ Gordon wrote, ‘was the medical tent.’ Meanwhile, the news coming from the front grew bleaker, ‘though we did not want to think the worst’.14
Other cities went through the same procedures when the call to arms went out. In many places, militias showed courage, if not conspicuous success. Alexander Werth regarded the response of his native Leningrad as a model of local patriotism, but the use of opolchentsy there involved heartbreaking loss of life. Wherever they were made to fight, unprepared and unmilitary opolchentsy would die in their thousands. Others never expected to join combat. In Fatezh, a small town in Kursk province, the 3,000 volunteers who stepped forward in July had received no training by September 1941. They did not know how to hold or aim a gun. Many had never fired one in their lives. They had not even decided where to locate the main defensive positions round the town. Among collective farmers in the region the appeal for volunteers fell on unwilling and resentful ears, while in nearby Kursk itself training sessions were poorly attended after the first heady week. Even communists neglected blackout and no smoking rules.
Some people still believed that their country’s huge size would protect them. As late as the last week of September, the danger to Kursk province felt distant enough for locals to focus on other things, including their own private plans to get away.15 They paid a high price six weeks later when the region was crushed by the tracks of German tanks. But some had calculated that obsolete guns and home-made bombs were useless in the face of this invader anyway. There were plenty of deserters in the villages with fatalistic tales to tell. Near Moscow, too, Gordon heard terrible stories from the lips of refugees. By day, the volunteers were buoyed up by collective spirit; at night their private fears ran free.
Like many other opolchenie groups of its kind, Gordon’s division was absorbed into the Red Army in August. In the presence of members of his local Communist Party branch, he and his friends took the Red Army oath and exchanged their black uniforms for the infantry’s olive green. By then, he estimated, most of them had scarcely handled a real gun. Gordon had fired a training rifle twice. These men became the refounded 113th rifle division that September; refounded because the first division with that number had been wiped out near the Soviet border several months before. This version, too, would be consumed and reborn in the coming weeks, first in October 1941 and again in the opening months of 1942. Gordon’s incarnation of the division was destroyed in a single day.
The disaster took place in the skeletal woods of birch and pine that line the Warsaw highway leading to the capital. Gordon’s division had the task of blocking the predicted German advance, but the men panicked at the first whiff of an enemy. Like greenhorn soldiers anywhere, they could not hold their fire. By the time the enemy was within range, they had almost no bullets left. The Molotov cocktails ran out next. Gordon watched young researchers he had known from Moscow University’s geology and physics faculties hurling bottles of burning kerosene at looming German machines. The lucky ones died instantly. Others suffered terrible injuries, dying slow deaths in the woods after their friends had retreated or facing the mercy of the German SS detachment that went round the next day to clear debris from the battlefield.
Only 300 members of Gordon’s division survived till nightfall, and most of these would perish in the coming days as they tried to break out of the German ring that now surrounded them. Gordon himself was captured. He would have died in the camps, but the vast size of his column of prisoners saved him. The bemused German guards could not keep watch on everyone, and Gordon slipped away into a haystack, hiding overnight and through most of a second day. His own future would lie with the regular army, but he never forgot his first comrades in arms. In a final irony, he observed that they included many, patriotic to the last, whose names had not been entered correctly in the Red Army’s rolls when they made the transition from opolchentsy to regular troops. Their papers were not in the required order, and that meant that they counted as missing in action. The rules on this were unambiguous. The state regarded them as deserters. Instead of praise and much-needed financial help, their families carried the stigma for another fifty years.16
The slaughter of Gordon’s 113th rifle division stalled a panzer unit for a day or so. The waste of life and talent for so little gain was heartbreaking. But these were months when men were dying in their tens of thousands. Whatever else Stalin’s regime might lack, it did not begrudge human lives. The Germans put the carnage down to some trick of exotic guile, declaring the Red Army to be ‘the craftiest and most stubborn enemy that we have ever faced’. If you want to resist a Russian-style attack, a captured report advised that winter, ‘you need strong nerves’.17 But German observers had also noted the lines of special troops behind the riflemen, the men with machine guns who waited to cut the stragglers down. ‘As a rule,’ a report of the time declared, ‘they do not fight out of some ideology, nor for their Motherland, but out of fear of their officers, especially their commissars.’18 ‘Fear and hate,’ agreed another observer, ‘leave Russian soldiers to fight with nothing but the courage of desperation.’19