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Moscow-Gorkiy railway. The previous day a special train bearing Stalin, the Stavka staff and the body of Vladimir llych Lenin had passed through the same spot. Moscow, though not yet fallen, was encircled and falling. In far-off Germany radio listeners were advised to wait for a special announcement.
     
    IV
    Before the outbreak of war Moscow’s population had been in excess of four million, but by 22 September the calls to arms, the evacuation of industry and the exodus of the previous weeks had reduced the number of those residing in the city to roughly half that number. Now those two million people locked inside the beleaguered city had to decide whether or not to resist the imminent German occupation. Stalin had certainly decreed that they should, but Stalin was probably gone. Large detachments of the NKVD were certainly in evidence, but from the pragmatist’s point of view they would prove somewhat easier to disarm than the Germans.
    Nevertheless there were many prepared to continue the fight, to make of Moscow another ‘Madrid’. The heritage of the revolution had deeper roots than the Germans suspected, and they had been given new life by the approach of what Pravda called ‘the riffraff of ruined Europe’. In the factory suburbs of Moscow the German Army would learn that there was more to socialism than Stalin.
    Not all who fought did so from such convictions. Some fought out of fear of the long-term consequences should they not, many had no other motivation than the momentum of the struggle. Most of them had volunteered to join the battalions raised from the Moscow working-class in the preceding fortnight; it was these battalions who would form the organisational core of the resistance, manning the improvised defence lines which stretched along the boulevards ringing the inner city.
    There were others who opposed the decision to make a battleground of Moscow. Some did so from nobler motives than others. Surely it made more sense, they argued, to continue the struggle further east than to sacrifice the city and its inhabitants for no obvious military advantage. Those who wished to go on fighting should slip out of the city during the night, cross the fields and break through the thin German line to the east, and rejoin the Red Army.
    Such arguments made sense to those who believed in ultimate Soviet victory; it appealed little to those who doubted such an outcome. They were much more impressed by the departure of Stalin, the media and government apparati and the Red Army than by the possibilities of death and glory. There were cries that the war had lasted long enough already. Who would benefit from Moscow’s sacrifice? Certainly not the Muscovites. No, only Stalin and the hated party, now safe and warm in Gorkiy, would benefit. And they were doomed anyway, doomed by the tide of history they had so often invoked to excuse their cruelties. It would be wise to forget Stalin and his cronies, wise to rehearse heartfelt declarations of gratitude for the German liberators, and to work with these new masters for Russia’s reintroduction into the family of civilised nations.
    And of course there were many, perhaps the majority, of Moscow’s inhabitants who intended neither to fight nor to welcome the Wehrmacht. They listened to the gunfire growing louder, they hid food in the cellars. They hoped for the best, expected the worst.
    Soon they would know. To the east of the capital the Panzer Groups held the ring, to the west the infantry units of Fourth Army fought their way closer to the city. By 29 September there was fighting in the western and north-western suburbs, the next day the Germans broke through the outermost defensive ring on the edge of the built-up area. The defending forces were soon broken up into isolated units, but these continued to contest bitterly what ground they held. In the industrial suburbs of Kuntsevo and Koroshevo the workers fought for each square yard of their factories, and German