The viewing line that stretched through the center of Moscow was clearly marked and guarded by the police and army, which used vehicles to maintain order (as they hoped). Then, on March 6, 1953, people came in large crowds to Trubnaya Square from the narrow Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, and found the square partly blocked with cordons of trucks and troops on horseback.
There wasn’t enough room for people to pass, yet they couldn’t go back as the others were still coming. “The crowd got more tightly packed and you couldn’t move, you just had to go with it, unable to escape the flow,” said Yelena Zaks, one of the thousands of people caught in the crowd. She was lucky enough – when she was passing by the guarded fence, one of the soldiers standing up above grabbed her and took her out of the crowd, possibly saving her life.
Link to rbth.com article