The physics student evacuated from Moscow

On 16 October 1941, Moscow lives through its darkest day. The Wehrmacht's panzers are only about a hundred kilometres away, Operation Typhoon threatens the capital, and the Soviet state orders the mass evacuation of institutions, factories and officials to the interior. It is the "great panic": packed trains at Kazan station, files burned, rumours of imminent collapse. Moscow State University (MGU) is ordered to evacuate. For a physics student in his early twenties, should he board the convoy, rush to the recruitment office, or get hired at a dismantled factory?

The evacuation of the universities was an extraordinary logistical effort. MGU first went to Ashgabat, in Turkmenistan, on the edge of the Karakum desert, and reached Sverdlovsk, in the Urals, only in the summer of 1942. Cattle wagons, cold, hunger, typhus, weeks of travel: such was the daily lot of the displaced.

This migration was part of the greatest industrial transfer in history: under the aegis of the Council for Evacuation, more than 1,500 major enterprises and 10 to 16 million people were moved to the Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia in 1941–1942. For young people, each path weighed heavily: enlisting meant risking the opolcheniye, those poorly armed militia divisions with appalling losses; the factory imposed eleven- or twelve-hour days; the university meant an uncertain exile.