Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest military campaign in history, on June 22, 1941. More than three million men invaded the Soviet Union bent on total victory. Hitler had no doubts: Stalin’s armies would be defeated. Moscow would fall within weeks. From the start, his panzers advanced at such a swift rate and destroyed Stalin’s armies with such ease that much of the rest of the world—America and Britain included—shared the same view. By the middle of September, the panzers were more than halfway to their destination, with the Soviet capital just 250 miles ahead.
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin kept his people in the dark about the threat. A diet of lies and half-truths gave the impression that though the fighting was hard, the “fascist hordes” would inevitably be defeated. But the Kremlin’s ruthless suppression of the truth could not prevent rumors seeping through the protective barrier of the official news channels. By October, these rumors were rife. Moscow was in danger.
ON OCTOBER 7, 1941, Peter Miller, a British historian working on a project at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, noted: “There is a feeling of approaching catastrophe in the air and endless rumours. The mood is particularly bad today.”
Most Russian soldiers at the front, not wishing to alarm their families or fearful of censors, tended to avoid describing the scale of the crisis. But one could not contain himself: “Don’t believe the papers or the radio; the things they say are lies. We’ve been through it all and seen it all, the way the Germans are driving us—our own people don’t know where to run; we’ve nothing to fight with; and when the Germans catch up with us, our men have nothing to escape in. We’ve got no fuel, so they abandon our cars and tanks and run for it.”
A Communist Party functionary, Victor Kravchenko, witnessed Moscow’s gradual disintegration. “A city, like an individual, can suffer a nervous breakdown,” he recalled. “Trams and autobuses worked in fits and starts. The shops were mostly empty, but people queued up anyhow. Homes and offices were unheated; water and electric service was intermittent and uncertain. For the first time in twenty years I heard cursing of officialdom.”
Fear, deprivation,
