Planned Destruction in Moscow

When Napoleon marched into Moscow in 1812, he found the city ablaze, a gift from the departing population designed to defeat him. If Hitler’s forces had made it to Moscow in 1941, he would have found that over 1,200 buildings had been deliberately exploded by Russian forces to wreck the infrastructure, as well as remove famous landmarks. Apparently Stalin and his aides had been influenced by the Napoleonic era decision to make Moscow uninhabitable for Napoleon. In the end, of course, Hitler’s forces got within a few miles of Moscow, but were then pushed all the way back to Berlin.