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Propaganda often distorted the truth. It clouded it, blocked its possible paths to surface. In some cases, it exacerbated or altered it. However, there are many cases where propaganda reported the truth down to the last detail. Through beautiful posters necessarily laden with pride and with evident writings that had to strike the eyes before the image.
Winter of 1941. The German armies, after forcing Leningrad into a siege, turned in the second half of October towards the liquidation of Moscow and the capture of the Kremlin. Hitler was too convinced of victory. But he had not considered that a hint of vanity might seep into his decisions.
The poster "Otctonm Mockby!", meaning "I will defend Moscow!" was printed and pasted on every corner of the Soviet capital. The inscription that serves as the pedestal for a Red Army soldier with a determined and tenacious expression served as encouragement to the hundreds of thousands of Muscovites, engulfed in the "total war" against Hitler's Germany. The population's response to the Nazi invader was formidable and bloody, and there remains nothing but to applaud the vigorous Russian patriotism that finds few equals so exceptional. The applause derives from the sacrifice of people who, in the span of twenty years, were battered by civil war, the crimes of the NKVD bred from Stalin's madness, and all the violent wounds inflicted by a monster that preferred to soak the noble spirit of an utopia in blood.
Despite everything, the opposition to the enemy was vibrant, proud, and effective, and Stalin was fully aware that the people would sacrifice themselves until the last visible flicker of light. But not for him. The same soldiers, often trapped in inevitable death, stated it, swallowed by the trench mud. The Motherland was defended with patriotism and, paradoxically, with spiritual refuge in the existence of God. In a nation where atheism was defined as the state religion. Many soldiers who escaped the German bullets were compensated by the friendly fire of the NKVD, as no kind of reticence, desertion, or fear was allowed. Fight to the death without the possibility of appeal. Just as many were the poorly or untrained civilians who opposed the enemy with only the vigor of an apparently iron chest. The piercing lines of a poem by Yuri Belyash testify to the dangerous frankness: to be honest/in the trenches the last thing we thought of/ was Stalin/in our souls God was more present/Stalin had no role/in our soldiers’ war.
At the news of an imminent German attack, the mobilization was total. Men, women, the elderly, soldiers, and a little help from the fearsome General Winter. And the poster, with its snowflakes and a gloomy sky disturbed by the threats of the Stukas, perfectly embodied the time and the leaden atmosphere of the era. The women, true lionesses of the Great Patriotic War, provided effective labor in the construction of munitions and the digging of long and deep anti-tank ditches that hindered the advance of armored divisions. Other protagonists were the terrible "Katyusha" rockets, whose sinister noise when launched led the Germans to rename them as "Stalin's organ pipes".
The Moscow metro, one of the few good things done by Stalin, housed hundreds of thousands of citizens sheltered from potential enemy bombings. The trams, necessarily inactive, were filled with sandbags and placed in defense of the main buildings. The walls of other buildings were covered with curtains of bags and bales of straw. The iron ravens burning the clouds at the top of the poster, while flying menacingly over the Kremlin tower, were fooled by a brilliant strategic move. Red Square was literally paved with blocks of mud and dotted with dozens of small wooden shacks erected for the occasion. The same fate befell the Kremlin and the spires of St. Basil's Cathedral, camouflaged also with underbrush and hay bales. Luftwaffe pilots assigned to the bombing, not recognizing that portion of territory, unfaithful compared to that reported in the aerial photographs, were concerned not to waste bombs on what appeared to be a desolate swamp decorated with a multitude of huts wrapped in the "rasputisa". Thus, the Kremlin and the entire surrounding environment were miraculously spared from certain demolition.
As the population began to evacuate, Stalin decided to secure the government by transferring it wholesale. Embassies, ministries, offices, family, and library had to be transferred to Kuybyshev, more than 800 km east of Moscow. In another location in Siberia, the remote Tyumen, the remains of Lenin were transferred. At a Politburo meeting, the caretaker of the mausoleum was summoned and equipped with every tool needed to preserve the embalming. A special railway car equipped with shock absorbers and a refrigeration unit was constructed and coupled to a train camouflaged with tree branches. Lenin was settled in a tsarist school and monitored by a team of scientists and guards.
Moscow was defended, but nearly 700,000 human lives were sacrificed even up to the counterattack.
Honor to those who truly believed. And they were many.
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