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Author : D. Safonov
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
The big window in my shop floor office offered a
view of all the welding cabins and the bright flashes
of light coming from them to indicate they were op-
erating. When suddenly the light went out in one
cabin, I waited a bit before walking over to see why
the work had stopped. What I saw was the poor girl
with her head bent down with her visor on and asleep,
apparently after many sleepless nights, and dead to the
world with the cooling electrode resting on the component she was working on.
I didn't have the heart to wake her up.
The factory was mainly making artillery guns and other defense equipment. An important
part of what it made were the so-called makeshift defense contraptions like anti-tank
hedgehogs made of angled iron.
I can't undertake to pass judgment on how effective those things were, but I know the fac-
tory soon discontinued manufacturing the midget "hedgehogs" because the tires on Ger-
man vehicles were self-sealing after any puncture.
At first I worked the usual eight-hour shifts and could leave for Moscow after duty to stay
with my small but very dear family till morning and take the train back to the factory. But
this easy schedule didn't last long; soon they introduced a war-time schedule.
Special teams were assigned to stay through air raids on rooftops and in garrets to dispose
of incendiary bombs if any. These teams were filled in by the aircraft defense instructors
on how to throw incendiary bombs off the roofs to the ground and how to deal with them
thereafter.
Air raids on Moscow and its suburbs grew in frequency the closer the enemy was drawing
to Moscow. At the end of August, the factory already had to interrupt work several times
during the night.
Moscow was at the hardest, if not critical, point during the entire war.
That was Moscow as I saw it during its fateful days in mid-October 1941: fidgety, tense
and even anxious. It was totally different from what it always used to be: settled in its ways
and feeling it was inviolable. There was good reason to be anxious and taken aback to a
degree, because the enemy was literally on its threshold and could discern through binoc-
ulars Red Square and other places. German tanks could start rolling along its streets at any
moment.
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Moscow in Its Fateful Hour