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ring was tightening on another five in the Ostashkov region. By the afternoon of 27 August Rzhev had fallen, and only sixty-five miles separated the closing pincers. The terrain and the poor quality of the roads continued to give the Germans trouble but the enemy, for the most part fully engaged by the infantry armies, was conspicuously absent in the rear areas. The tanks roamed through empty countryside. ‘It was like France, only with less roads and more trees,’ as one panzer captain put it. On 31 August the pincers met five miles south of Torzhok. Two-thirds of the Soviet forces before Moscow were now trapped in the Yelna-Vyazma and Ostashkov pockets.
    Through the first week of September the German forces concentrated on reducing the encircled areas, opposing break-out attempts, and herding the surrendering Red Army soldiers towards the west. Of course the pockets covered immense areas and many Red Army units were able to keep out of the German clutches. But those which did escape, either by breaking through the thin lines to the east or by melting into the convenient forests, were in no state to interfere with the continuation of the German advance. The roads to Moscow were open.
    On 2 September Zhukov was appointed Supreme Commander of the forces covering the capital. He did what he could, sending what reserves he could find into the last lines covering the city. But they were few and, most significantly, their contingency orders stressed that they were to fall back to the north and south of the capital, not into it. The fall of Moscow was beginning to look inevitable. On 4 September Stalin received the British Ambassador Stafford Cripps in the Kremlin. He seemed, according to Cripps,
    “unbalanced by the tremendous strain of events. One moment he was accusing both us and the Americans of deserting him, the next moment he was stressing the importance of the aluminium shipments we were sending for the continuation of the war. After telling me that once Moscow had fallen there was no line short of the Volga that could be defended, he went on to talk with great excitement of a planned counter-attack in the south. There was none of that cold solidity which I had always assumed to be his habitual self.”
    The mood of the populace was also growing more apprehensive by the day. News that there was ‘heavy fighting in the direction of Kalinin’ meant only one thing to those trained through the years to read between the official lines. Kalinin had fallen; the enemy was less than a hundred miles distant. When Pravda talked about the ‘terrible danger’ facing the country the citizens of Moscow knew what was meant. And there were other clues than those provided by the newspapers. All over the city industrial machinery was being dismantled for evacuation or wired for destruction; from the Kremlin courtyard the black smoke of burning documents was drifting up and out across the sky.
    Through the second week of September the enemy drew nearer. Manstein’s corps captured the Volga bridge at Kalinin intact and fought its way down the road to Klin. Schmidt’s 39th Panzer Corps crashed into Mozhaysk. Guderian’s tanks took Sukhinichi and bore down on Kaluga. In the north, the centre and the south, like a tunnel looming to engulf a train, the German panzer armies closed in on the Soviet capital.
    On 10 September it was announced that the Government, the Diplomatic Corps and as much as possible of Moscow’s cultural and scientific assets were being evacuated to Kuybyshev on the Volga. No mention was made of Stalin’s whereabouts, but it soon became known that his predecessor’s embalmed body had been removed from its mausoleum for transportation to an unknown destination.
    These measures were interpreted by some as the first stage of Moscow’s abandonment, and those not privileged to share in the exodus sought self-preservation in less dignified ways. Shops were looted by citizens in the first throes of starvation; lorryloads