Defeat in Ukraine heightened the danger to Leningrad. By 8 September the city was completely surrounded. The following day the Germans launched a new offensive that took the front line to its doorstep. On 11 September Zhukov replaced Voroshilov as commander of the Leningrad Front.62 As Zhukov later told the writer Konstantin Simonov, Stalin considered the fall of Leningrad inevitable.63 On 13 September the vozhd received the commissar of the navy, Nikolai Kuznetsov, in his Kremlin office, where they discussed scuttling the ships docked in Leningrad if the city was taken. That very day Stalin approved a plan to destroy the fleet.64 Over the next two weeks, fighting in the Leningrad suburbs became particularly brutal. As the Germans fiercely battled toward the city, Soviet soldiers, in a show of mass heroism, fought tooth and nail to repel their attacks. By the end of September the advance came to a halt. The Leningrad Blockade, one of the most horrific chapters in World War II—and one of the most astounding testaments to the fortitude of the Soviet people—began. Over the course of the blockade, hundreds of thousands of civilians died of hunger or German shelling.
Hitler’s hopes of taking Moscow before winter were revived by the destruction of a huge Soviet force in Ukraine, and he reassigned a sizable part of the German Army to the Moscow offensive. On 7 October most of the Red Army’s Western and Reserve Fronts were encircled in the vicinity of Vyazma, and on 9 October the Bryansk Front was also surrounded. The road to Moscow had been cleared. The fighter pilot Aleksandr Golovanov describes how he was summoned to Stalin’s office around this time. He found the vozhd alone, sitting silently in his chair with some untouched food before him.
I had never seen Stalin like this. The silence was oppressive.
“A great misfortune, a great sorrow has befallen us,” I finally heard Stalin’s quiet but distinct voice say. “The German has broken through our defenses outside Vyazma.…”
After a pause, either asking me or talking to himself, Stalin said just as quietly:
“What are we going to do? What are we going to do?! …”
He then raised his head and looked at me. Never before or after have I seen a human face express such horrible emotional anguish. We had met and spoken just two days before, but in those two days he had grown extremely haggard.65
According to Zhukov, Stalin was suffering from influenza at the time, but staying in bed was not an option. He continued to work, overseeing defensive preparations and the redeployment of all possible reserves to the outskirts of Moscow. As part of this effort, Zhukov was called from the Leningrad Front and put in command of the defense of Moscow. On 8 October Stalin signed a State Defense Committee order to prepare to destroy 1,119 plants and factories in the city and oblast of Moscow.66 On 14 October the Germans captured Rzhev and Kalinin. They were just kilometers from Moscow.
As Mikoyan described it, at nine in the morning on 15 October, members of the top Soviet leadership gathered (Mikoyan mentions Molotov, Malenkov, Voznesensky, Shcherbakov, and Kaganovich). Stalin informed the group that the Germans might soon breach Moscow’s defenses and proposed evacuating foreign diplomatic missions and government offices. According to Mikoyan, Stalin did not want Moscow to be surrendered, even if that meant fighting within the city until reserves capable of expelling the Germans arrived. He himself would remain in the capital as long as possible. At the conclusion of discussions, Stalin signed a State Defense Committee order dated 15 October,67 stating that “Com. Stalin will be evacuated tomorrow or later, depending on the circumstances.”68 Provisions were made. According to Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who was among a small group of General Staff members who remained with Stalin, planes were readied for a last-minute evacuation.69
The decision to evacuate Moscow prompted a brief and frantic effort to destroy or pack up files, followed by a mass exodus, primarily by party and government officials, of which there was no shortage in the capital. Even after the evacuation, “utter chaos reigned” in the Central Committee building: “The locks on many desks and the desks themselves were forced open, and forms and every sort of correspondence were scattered all over the place, including classified papers.… Top secret documents that had been brought to the boiler room to be burned were left in piles, unburned.”70 In the confusion, many officials abandoned the offices and enterprises with which they had been entrusted in order to save themselves, their families, and their property. A line of official vehicles snaked out of the city. There were many cases of theft of government property and valuables. According to official statistics, on 16 and 17 October more than a thousand of Moscow’s Communist Party members destroyed their membership documents.71 The flight of government and party officials in combination with rampant rumors provoked a general panic that grew into unrest. According to documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts, this unrest lasted for several days and fell into three main categories. First was the looting of stores and warehouses, especially those stocked with liquor, often accompanied by orgies of drunkenness. Second were attacks, often involving theft, on cars leaving Moscow filled with evacuees and their property. Third were spontaneous protests at factories and plants, including defense production facilities, by workers who had not been paid their promised wages and were upset by rumors that their places of employment were about to be destroyed. Feeling betrayed and abandoned, in many cases workers prevented the removal of equipment and demanded that the factories be cleared of the explosives that had been put in place to destroy them.72
Most of the top leadership did not leave Moscow on 15 October, as initially planned, and on the following day Stalin summoned a number of his associates to his apartment. Aviation industry commissar Aleksei Shakhurin, who was the first to arrive, describes this meeting in his memoirs. The Kremlin, he writes, looked deserted. The anteroom into Stalin’s apartment was open, and he found the vozhd smoking and silently pacing the dining room. There were signs of evacuation preparations, such as empty bookshelves. Stalin was wearing his usual jacket and pants, which were tucked into boots whose creases were riddled with holes. Noticing Shakhurin’s surprise on seeing such boots, Stalin explained that his other footwear had already been removed. Soon Molotov, Malenkov, Shcherbakov, and the others arrived. Stalin did not invite anyone to sit down. Pacing back and forth he asked everyone who arrived the same question: “How are things in Moscow?” Shakhurin reported that at one factory not all the workers had received their pay, that the streetcars and metro were not running, that bakeries and other stores were closed, and that instances of looting had been observed. Stalin responded with the following orders: fly in money using airplanes and fix the situation with public transportation and stores. He tried to calm himself and his comrades: “Well, it’s not too bad. I thought it would be worse.”73 Over the next few days the situation in Moscow really did stabilize, largely because the mass detention and arrest of “suspicious elements” began after a state of siege was declared on 20 October.74
Stalin’s comment that he had expected worse disorder in Moscow is consistent with his way of thinking. He was undoubtedly worried about the possibility of disturbances. The danger that conflict with a foreign enemy could be used to start a civil war—a formula used by the Bolsheviks in 1917—greatly affected Stalin’s political decision making in the late 1930s. The catastrophic start of the war could only have revived such fears. Yet anti-government and defeatist tendencies did not reach a critical level in the Soviet rear, in large part because of the secret police system put in place before the war. After 22 June 1941 this system was not relaxed; it became, if anything, more ruthless. Nevertheless it would be wrong to attribute political stability solely to repression. A blend of patriotism, growing hatred of the Nazis, a sense of duty, and a tradition of subservience led people to unite in the name of victory. The few large-scale disturbances about which historians have learned more from recently opened archives were mainly caused by the government’s panicked actions and a sense of defenselessness on the part of the population.