Homeless villagers in a village in the Istra District of Moscow Oblast, liberated from the Germans, December 1941

Photograph by Arkady Shaikhet.

The situation in Moscow Oblast was a particular one: the occupation was brief, and the Germans held part of the districts for only a few months, from November 1941 to January 1942. This was not Belorussia or the Smolensk region, where the occupation lasted for years and was accompanied by systematic punitive operations.

When retreating, German troops burned villages deliberately, as part of a scorched-earth policy. At the same time, Stalin's order of 17 November 1941 likewise prescribed the burning of settlements in the frontline zone, so as to deprive the Germans of shelter.

The figures for the Soviet Union as a whole are as follows: during the war years 1,710 towns and urban-type settlements and more than 70 thousand villages and hamlets were completely or partially destroyed and burned