Authors: Paul Dowswell
The brave partisan girl’s final words of defiance to the Hitlerites were: ‘You cannot kill all 169 million of us.’ With such unquestionable revolutionary spirit, how can we lose the war!
Yelena, he knew, faced exactly the same fate. Only blind chance, or extraordinary luck, would save her from the noose or a German bullet. He put the paper down and sobbed until he had no more tears.
Mid-October 1941
Over the previous week the weather had turned the ground slushy – but now it was icy cold. Nikolay had told him slushy was good. Mud made it difficult for an army to advance. But colder weather meant firmer ground. The colder it got the easier it would be for the Nazi tanks to press forward and break through to the city. They were only a whisker away now. Out on the street, he would see people anxiously scanning the skies. There had been talk of German parachutists landing in their thousands and whenever a squadron of aircraft flew overhead citizens would stop in their tracks, expecting to see a stream of tiny figures emerge from them. Only when the planes had flown by would they move on.
The vast processions of displaced peasants and civilians fleeing the western front line had slowed now, but the streets were still clogged with refugees, easily recognisable by their shabby suitcases and exhausted expressions. Misha had got used to navigating his way around the small herds of sheep or pigs that sometimes accompanied them.
These days he often wondered if he was wasting his time making the journey to school, especially as there were so few teachers and children turning up. School had become a great rumour mill where the latest scare stories spread fear like a contagious disease. Many of the children travelled to school by the tram and metro and both were becoming increasingly unreliable. Whenever they stopped running, people would say the Nazis had reached the outlying stops. When Misha saw a lone tram on Ulitsa Gertsena one day, he half expected it to be full of German soldiers.
Even the most sensible people would tell the most outlandish stories. Now, after a couple of weeks of such rumours, Misha was almost starting to believe them. As he arrived at school, Nikolay ran up to greet him with the news that Nazi soldiers had been sighted at the metro terminus at Sokol – just to the north-west of the city centre.
‘Nikolay, you have lost your mind!’ Misha said. ‘If they were that close, we would have heard the fighting. You know, rifles, machine guns, artillery shells.’
Nikolay looked crestfallen. ‘Well. Sergey told me his own father had seen German tanks on the other side of Zoo Park. He said he could see the muzzle flashes from their guns.’
Misha felt disappointed. These were the sort of stories his eleven- or twelve-year-olds would tell him in class.
‘I listened to the news before I came out and it said there was still fierce fighting around Mozhaisk,’ he replied. ‘That’s still a hundred kilometres away.’
Nikolay scoffed. He lowered his voice and said, ‘Misha, you don’t still believe what the radio tells you, do you?’
Misha felt angry. ‘Nikolay, I’m not an idiot. If I hear the words “heroic defensive actions”, I know that’s probably where the fighting is.’ He tried hard not to lose his temper and put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘When we start to hear the artillery, that’s when we need to get worried.’
But a hundred kilometres was nothing. You could drive it in an hour. And there was danger within the city walls too. There had been a strict blackout since the summer, when the Nazis had captured airbases in range of the capital. Tales of rape and looting were rife and he and Valya always walked home together at the end of the day. The previous Day Four they had seen a small crowd smash a grocery shop window on Ulitsa Serafimovicha. Misha walked past it the next day and saw the looters had tried to set it alight. Fortunately for the other shops and apartments in the block, the fire didn’t take.
Much as he disliked the Militia men, who were usually such a visible and menacing presence, he missed them now. Misha hadn’t seen a policeman or a squad of soldiers out on the street for several days, although the Kremlin seemed to be full of them. Maybe the
Vozhd
was afraid of an uprising and thought most of Central Moscow’s police and soldiers were needed to protect him.
There were so few teachers and pupils that day that school finished early and Misha returned home to find the Kremlin buzzing with activity. Tanks guarded all the main entrances and scores of trucks were parked up inside the walls. Clearly something significant was happening.
He entered his apartment to find his father packing a suitcase.
‘I am so glad you are home. Hurry and pack as much as you can carry,’ said his papa. ‘The
Vozhd
has decided to leave Moscow. Essential staff and their families are travelling out tonight.’
‘Where are we going?’ asked Misha.
‘You’ll find out soon enough. It’s three days on a train, I would guess. So we must bring provisions too.’
‘What about the Golovkins?’ asked Misha. ‘Is Valya coming?’
Yegor snapped. ‘Anatoly Golovkin is staying here. He volunteered. We need to keep a skeleton staff at the Kremlin. Moscow will not surrender without a fight.’
‘I must go to say goodbye.’
‘You’ll do no such thing. Misha, we have to be at Kazan Station in the next hour or so. The Hitlerites have broken through on all three main highways to the west. There are trucks waiting already in the Ivan Square for us and our suitcases. I don’t want to leave you behind.’
Misha went to his room and filled his suitcase with as much as he could carry. At first he was angry because Papa wouldn’t let him go to the Golovkins, then he felt tearful because he was leaving his home and his life and his friends.
To Misha, leaving the apartment seemed unreal, like a dream he was having. As his papa locked the door, it occurred to him that he might never see his home again. He had an image in his mind of Mama in her green evening gown, about to go out to a Kremlin banquet with Papa. Tears welled up, and he quickly distracted himself by grabbing his heavy case and marching down the corridor.
‘Hey, Misha,’ Papa called. ‘You have to carry some food too.’ He gave him a knapsack stuffed with bread, dried meat and jars of pickled vegetables.
They walked out into a chill evening drizzle and hauled their heavy cases to Ivan Square. In the blackout this was a dangerous place to be. Lorries were already leaving, carefully weaving through milling hordes of people, their headlights muffled to a dim glow. The Petrovs were quickly consigned to an open-backed canvas-covered truck. Yegor recognised several of his colleagues and their families and greeted them briskly but these were people Misha did not know and he wished again that the Golovkins were coming.
As most of the passengers in this truck were women and children, Misha thought it would be polite to sit nearest the exit, and he watched his world disappear as the truck drove past the looming shadows of the cathedrals. He peered through the gloom hoping for a last glimpse of Valya, thinking she might have heard about them leaving and come out to wave the trucks off, but he couldn’t see her anywhere. When they drove through the Borovitskaya Tower and turned north, he realised he would probably never see her again.
Misha had not pressed his papa on where they were going. In fact, he half wondered if they would be making the whole journey by truck. He imagined it would be somewhere east of the Ural Mountains, like Kuibyshev, where Stalin’s daughter Svetlana had spent the early weeks of the war. That was a good thousand kilometres away and the thought of travelling there in the back of the truck filled him with dismay. He began to give himself a pep talk. He would try to think positive thoughts. He was going somewhere pleasant and almost certainly warmer than Moscow. And he would be out of range of the German bombers, and certainly away from the terrible danger of the street fighting that was sure to break out when the Germans reached Moscow.
The truck drove past all the familiar landscapes, now just dim silhouettes in the blackout: Red Square, the Bolshoi Theatre and the Lubyanka. A strong smell of burning hung in the damp air, most noticeably as they passed government buildings. Misha guessed they were disposing of documents and occasionally he caught a glimpse of a bonfire in a courtyard or sparks rising into the air. That was strictly against blackout regulations and would normally render its perpetrators liable to the most severe accusations. They had told him at his
Komsomol
air-raid training that traitors and saboteurs would be lighting fires to guide the German bombers to important targets.
The convoy swung north-west up the long stretch of Ulitsa Myasnitskaya. Misha began to hope they were heading for the cluster of railway stations on Komsomolskaya Square.
Ordinarily, such a journey would take ten or fifteen minutes from the Kremlin at this time of night, but that evening progress was slow. Traffic was particularly heavy. Misha had never seen so many cars on the road at once. Most were bursting with luggage both inside and strapped precariously to the roof, and Misha glimpsed anxious faces through their windows. Large trucks, loaded with factory machinery, were also caught in this human tide, and thousands of people were heading out on foot, dragging bags and cases with them. These weren’t the peasants Misha had seen earlier in the month, fleeing from the Germans with their livestock; these were citizens of Moscow.
Through the gloom and drizzle, Misha could see smashed shop windows and figures emerging clutching table lights, chairs, typewriters – a mad assortment of anything they could find. He wondered if there was any food left to loot, or bottles of vodka, or whether these had all gone days ago.
From somewhere ahead they heard gunfire, and everyone around him stiffened. The truck, already moving at barely walking speed, came to a halt. Misha stood up and peered cautiously around the side of the canvas cover. People looked terrified and the crowds on the streets were hurrying away from the sound. Misha heard people shouting, ‘The Germans are here.’
There was more shouting and more gunfire. Misha had his
Komsomol
membership card in his jacket top pocket. If the Hitlerites searched him and found it, he would be shot on the spot. He wondered if he could take it out and throw it away without anyone noticing. Someone might see and denounce him for defeatism and cowardice in the face of the enemy. And if he was stopped by Soviet soldiers or Militia men and he didn’t have it, he would be in all sorts of trouble. They might even shoot him as a spy or a deserter.
Ahead in their convoy, he could see fighting had broken out in one of the trucks. Soldiers were rushing towards the trouble and Misha felt an odd sort of relief. Whatever was happening was between Russians and Russians. The Germans were not here after all. He immediately sat down on his suitcase again. He didn’t want to see people being shot. No one asked him what was happening. His fellow passengers were sitting back, their faces stiff with fear, not even daring to see what was going on in the street.
Then Misha started to worry that people in the crowd might try to board their truck.
There was more shouting, but no gunfire. After a further delay, the truck lurched forward. Everyone sat back now, their faces in the shadows.
Ten minutes later, after much stopping and starting and honking of horns, the truck drove under a gateway, through a dense phalanx of soldiers carrying rifles with fixed bayonets, and under the cover of a vast iron canopy. Misha recognised the interior of Kazan Station at once. That gave him a clue about where they were going. It was from here that trains departed for the east: to Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Ryazan and Kazakhstan.
Soldiers appeared and helped them down, taking suitcases to load on to trolleys. ‘Comrades, you are to board the train on platform six,’ said an officer. ‘We will load your cases, so take what you need for the journey. Carriages three to seven have been reserved for government administrators and their families.’
The convoy of trucks had parked inside the enormous concourse of the station, which was almost deserted, apart from a few squads of soldiers, and a scattering of travellers, sitting despondently on their luggage. Misha coughed as exhaust from the truck caught in his throat. He peered through the gloomy electrical light of the station interior. He could see piles of abandoned bags, cases and blankets covering the entire marble floor, vast as a football pitch.
The whiff of smoke from the locomotives also caught in his nostils. That was reassuring. There were trains and they were running. The new arrivals were hurried through to the platform. The train before them seemed to go on forever. He guessed there must be thirty passenger and goods carriages at least. The platforms were not covered and Misha and his father were damp with drizzly rain by the time they reached the forward section of the train. The compartments were packed solid with passengers who had arrived earlier and by the time they got to carriage number three Misha was beginning to worry that they would not be able to find a place to sit.
‘Quick, Misha, two seats at the far end,’ said Papa.
They were lucky. Within a couple of minutes the rest of the carriage had filled to capacity. Two thickset middle-aged men in civilian clothes sat opposite them. They nodded a greeting but looked too intimidating to engage in conversation. Misha immediately assumed they were NKVD, there to listen for seditious conversations. He thought they would have been better off sending two young women in floral dresses, or a couple of lanky bookish types. These men were too obvious.