The Greatest Battle by Andrew Nagorski

Author:Andrew Nagorski [Nagorski, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781416545736
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

While most of the Kremlin leadership remained oddly silent during the chaos of October 16, Anastas Mikoyan personally intervened in the strike at the Stalin Motor Vehicle Plant. After the factory director had called him, appealing for help, the Politburo member drove up and found about five to six thousand workers demonstrating in front of the locked factory gates. The workers immediately recognized Mikoyan and bombarded him with questions. Why hadn’t they been paid in two weeks? Why were they locked out of their own factory? Why had the government fled Moscow, along with party and Komsomol officials from the factory? Why was no one explaining anything to them?

Mikoyan heard them out and then did his best to defuse the situation. “Comrades, why are you so outraged? There is a war on and anything can happen,” he declared. “Who told you the government left Moscow? These rumors are provocations: the government hasn’t fled. Those who have to be in Moscow are in Moscow. Stalin is in Moscow, Molotov as well—all the people who have to be here.” He admitted that some government departments had been evacuated as a result of the fact that “the front approached the city.” But he assured the workers that the government was proceeding according to well-prepared plans and that they shouldn’t worry about their livelihoods since they had already received some extra payments. “Now you have to stay calm, obey the instructions that are defined by the war situation. We need composure and discipline to deal with the enemy.”

Mikoyan’s personal intervention calmed things down and the workers gradually dispersed. But he had neatly ducked some of their questions, and his answers were often disingenuous. He failed to mention that Stalin had already ordered many top officials to leave Moscow and that at that point most of his aides were assuming that the Soviet leader was planning to join them very soon. He also didn’t tell the workers that the reason that they were locked out was that explosives had already been planted on the factory grounds to blow it up. On October 15, Stalin had issued a directive “to blow up factories, storage facilities and institutions that cannot be evacuated as well as electrical equipment of the metro (excluding water pipe and sewage systems).” The automobile factory was one of those designated facilities.

But some workers had got wind of reports that the NKVD was planting explosives in their factories. This had prompted, as the NKVD’s Moscow region counterintelligence chief Sergei Fedoseyev recalled much later, “a serious incident” at Factory No. 6, a defense plant that had also been designated an object that should be blown up rather than allowed to fall into the hands of the Germans. The factory machinery was packed in special containers to be sent east of Moscow, where it was supposed to be reassembled so that production could be resumed. But as the factory managers were dispatching the containers, they panicked and decided to load their families in the cars with them.

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