On a freezing night in january 1937, a fire swept through the scrap shop of Dinamo, an electrical-machine-building factory in the Proletarskii district of southeastern Moscow. The shop was covered by a wooden scaffold, which went up like dry kindling, sending sparks high into the night sky. Leaping over the rickety wood structure and rapidly devouring the makeshift roof, the flames lit up the yards, illuminating the high drifts of dirty snow and discarded equipment, the darkened barracks, the factory's redbrick building, and the spur railway line that ran to and from its loading lock.

Hundreds of people, roused by the blaze, scurried in panic through the factory yards, carrying their meager belongings. Huddling in small groups, they stared at the fire. The yards were full of homeless peasants who slept in improvised shelters, dugouts, and tents, hoping for housing and jobs. Recent migrants from the countryside, they lived on the factory grounds, cooking over small open-air fires, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, and heating their rude dwellings with unreliable homemade stoves. No one – not the factoryșs director, not the head of the party committee, not the chairman of the union – knew exactly how many people were camped in the yards.