Leningrad Read online

  But that would mean getting drawn into the war. No, I’m not going. It’s better to tilt at windmills while one still can. The lamp burns, it is quiet. Lord, comfort the souls ascending to heaven.

  Not long ago I said to someone ‘Now, there are two frightening things: war and evacuation. But of the two, evacuation is worse.’ This is just a quip, it’s true. But why didn’t they evacuate us during the Yezhovshchina [the Terror]? It was just as frightening then.22

  The background noise to agonised personal decision-making was strong popular and semi-official disapproval of those who were quick to leave the city. Evacuees were dubbed ‘rats’, or bezhentsy – ‘refugees’, but literally translated as ‘runners-away’. Olga Grechina had an awkward parting with a pair of brothers, fellow students at the university, whose mother had wangled them places on an archaeological dig in Central Asia. ‘I couldn’t understand how healthy young people could agree to be evacuated when everyone else was trying to get to the front . . . Conversation was difficult. I didn’t blame them for leaving; I was just terribly surprised that they had agreed.’23 As perniciously and less inevitably, some district soviets paraded their faith in the leadership by actually discouraging civilian evacuation in their areas. As Dmitri Pavlov, wartime head of the national food supply agency, puts it in the best Soviet account of the siege, they ‘viewed citizens’ refusal to evacuate as a patriotic act and were proud of it, thus involuntarily encouraging people to remain’. The number of Leningraders evacuated through July and August, he thought, could and should have been two or three times higher.24 Refusal to evacuate could, ironically, also be regarded as suspicious. A diarist noted the following rumour:

  It’s said that P. Z. Andreyev and S. P. Preobrazhenskaya (of the Mariinsky Theatre) refused to leave. ‘Why?’ they were asked. ‘We’re sure that Leningrad won’t be surrendered,’ they replied. But the administration thought to themselves, ‘We know you. It’s already certain that Leningrad will have to be abandoned, and you want to go over to the Fascists! We’d better interrogate you, so as to see just what kind of Soviet people you really are.’25

  By 25 August Leningrad was three-quarters surrounded. The railway lines west to the Baltics had been cut, as had the direct routes to Moscow. The only unbroken line ran to the east, splitting in two at the junction town of Mga, now itself the scene of heavy fighting. To the west, the Red Army had lost the whole of the Baltic littoral except for a sixty-kilometre stretch of Gulf shoreline to the west of Peterhof. Supplied via Kronshtadt, this ‘Oranienbaum pocket’ – named for one of the tsars’ summer palaces – held out all through the siege, though to little strategic advantage and at dreadful cost. To the north, the Finnish army under General Carl Mannerheim, having recovered its pre-Winter War borders, had crossed into Russian Karelia and was advancing along the north-eastern shore of Lake Ladoga, in accordance with a promise to Hitler to ‘shake hands’ with the Wehrmacht on the River Svir.

  The threat to Leningrad now absorbed all the Kremlin’s attention. There is a school of thought, dating from Khrushchev’s ‘Thaw’-heralding ‘Secret Speech’ of 1956, which maintains that Stalin deliberately allowed Leningrad to be surrounded, out of suspicion of its liberal bent and record as a breeding ground for charismatic politicians such as the Old Bolsheviks Kirov (mysteriously murdered in 1934) and Grigori Zinoviev (shot after a show trial in 1936). But reading Stalin’s furious – sometimes fantastical – harangues of the late summer and autumn, the theory dissolves. Though he clearly contemplated abandoning the city so as to save its armies, he equally clearly viewed this as a desperate last resort.

  Sometime between 21 and 27 August, as German armour rolled through the railway towns to Leningrad’s south, a ‘special commission’ set out to Leningrad from the Kremlin. Its members included Molotov, the chiefs of the air force, navy and artillery, trade commissar Aleksei Kosygin, and, most significantly, Georgi Malenkov, the thirty-nine-year-old rising star recently appointed to the State Defence Committee – the five-man chamber, headed by Stalin, that acted as the USSR’s supreme decision-making body throughout the war. Despised by Zhdanov, who gave him the servant-girlish nickname ‘Malanya’ for his pear shape, smooth chin and high-pitched voice, Malenkov was also a crony of Zhdanov’s arch-enemy, NKVD chief Beria. The commission’s mission, officially to ‘evaluate the complicated situation’, was probably in reality to decide whether Leningrad should be abandoned. The journey alone proved how near to disaster it had already come. Having flown to Cherepovets, a railway town 400 kilometres to Leningrad’s east, the group boarded a train which took them as far as Mga, where it was halted by an air raid. With fires twisting in the night sky and anti-aircraft guns hammering, the Kremlin grandees got out and stumbled along the tracks until they met an ordinary town tram, which took them to a second train that finally carried them to the city.

  The commission stayed for about a week, during which Stalin continued to bombard Zhdanov with orders, now completely divorced from fast-changing reality.26 On 27 August he telephoned the Smolniy with a dream-like scheme to post tanks ‘on average every two kilometres, in places every 500 metres, depending on the ground’ along a new 120-kilometre defence line from Gatchina to the Volkhov River. ‘The infantry divisions will stand directly behind the tanks, using them not only as a striking force, but as armoured defence. For this you need 100–120 KVs [a type of heavy tank]. I think you could produce this quantity of KVs in ten days . . . I await your swift reply.’27 The following day Zhdanov came up with his usual slavish agreement. Stalin’s plan for a defence line ‘of a special type’ was ‘absolutely correct’, and he asked permission to postpone the evacuation of workshops belonging to the Izhorsk and Kirov weapons factories, so that their tank production be used to fulfil the scheme.

  On 29 August the Germans took Tosno, only forty kilometres from Leningrad on the Moscow road. They also reached the south bank of the Neva, cutting the forces defending Leningrad to the south-east in two. Spitting fury and paranoia, Stalin telegraphed Molotov and Malenkov alone:

  I have only just been informed that Tosno has been taken by the enemy. If things go on like this I am afraid that Leningrad will be surrendered out of idiot stupidity, and all the Leningrad divisions fall into captivity. What are Popov and Voroshilov doing? They don’t even tell me how they plan to avert the danger. They’re busy looking for new lines of retreat; that’s how they see their duty. Where does this abyss of passivity of theirs come from, this peasant-like submission to fate? I just don’t understand them. There are lots of KV tanks in Leningrad now, lots of planes . . . Why isn’t all this equipment being used in the Lyuban–Tosno sector? What can some infantry regiment do against German tanks, without any equipment? . . . Doesn’t it seem to you that someone is deliberately opening the road to the Germans? What kind of man is Popov? How’s Voroshilov spending his time, what’s he doing to help Leningrad? I write this because the uselessness of the Leningrad command is so absolutely incomprehensible. I think you should leave for Moscow. Please don’t delay.28

  How close Popov and Voroshilov came to a bullet in the back of the neck we can’t tell. Malenkov and Molotov certainly heaped on the criticism, taking care not to spare Zhdanov either. Replying to Stalin the same day, they boasted that they had sharply criticised Zhdanov and Voroshilov’s mistakes, which included creating the Defence Council of Leningrad, allowing battalions to elect their officers, holding back civilian evacuation and failing properly to build new fortifications. Worse, Zhdanov and Voroshilov were guilty of ‘not understanding their duty promptly to inform Stavka of the measures being taken to defend Leningrad, of constantly retreating before the enemy, and of failing to take the initiative and organise counter-attacks. The Leningraders admit their mistakes, but of course this is absolutely inadequate.’29 Stalin’s response was curt: ‘Answer: First, who holds Mga right now? Second – find out from Kuznetsov what the plan is for the Baltic Fleet. Third – we want to send Khozin as Voroshilov’s deputy. Any objections?’ According
to Beria’s son, on the commission’s return to Moscow Malenkov urged Stalin to arrest and court-martial Zhdanov, but Beria dissuaded him.30 Instead, Stalin made Malenkov his point-man on Leningrad: Stalin’s wishes were to be transmitted to Zhdanov through him, and vice versa. This extraordinary arrangement, whereby Zhdanov communicated with Stalin via a man who had tried (as Zhdanov must at least have suspected) to have him murdered, continued for the rest of the war.

  Zhdanov was spared; ordinary Leningraders were less fortunate. As the fighting rolled to and fro outside the city, Molotov and Malenkov stepped up the pace of terror inside it. A table drawn up by the Leningrad NKVD on 25 August gives a target number of 2,248 arrests and deportations, divided into twenty-nine categories, from Trotskyites, Zinovievites, Mensheviks and Anarchists, through priests, Catholics, former officers in the tsarist army, ‘former wealthy merchants’, ‘White bandits’, ‘kulaks’ and people ‘with connections abroad’, down to the catch-all ‘diversionists’, ‘saboteurs’ and ‘anti-social elements’, and simple thieves and prostitutes.31 Their zeal had its usual results. At one collection point, a disgusted observer noted,

  about a hundred people waited to be exiled. They were mostly old women; old women in old-fashioned capes and worn-out velvet coats. These are the enemies our government is capable of fighting – and, it turns out, the only ones. The Germans are at the gates, the Germans are about to enter the city, and we are busy arresting and deporting old women – lonely, defenceless, harmless old people.32

  Among the victims was Olga Berggolts’s elderly father, a doctor at a defence factory. Summoned to police headquarters at midday on 2 September, he was ordered to depart by 6 p.m. the same evening. ‘Papa is a military surgeon who has faithfully and honestly served the Soviet government for twenty-four years’, Berggolts wrote incredulously in her diary. ‘He was in the Red Army for the whole of the Civil War, saved thousands of people, is Russian to the marrow . . . It appears – no joke – that the NKVD simply don’t like his surname.’33 Thanks to the Germans’ advance and Berggolts’s frantic string-pulling, he managed to stay in Leningrad until the following spring, when he was deported, half-starved, to Krasnoyarsk in western Siberia. The reasons? His Jewishness, his refusal to inform on colleagues and probably his relationship to Berggolts herself, for whose good behaviour he acted as hostage once her war poetry had turned her into a popular public figure.

  At the end of August the glorious run of late summer weather broke. Rainwater gurgled down Leningrad’s fat galvanised drainpipes, fanned over paving stones, dulled the greens and yellows of the stucco façades. Outside the city, seesaw fighting continued in the mud and wet. On 31 August, having changed hands three times, Mga finally fell, cutting the last railway line out of the city. ‘Stavka considers the Leningrad Front’s tactics pernicious’, menaced Stalin. ‘[It] appears to know only one thing – how to retreat and find new lines of retreat. Haven’t we had enough of these heroic defeats?’34

  Vera Inber got the news from her husband, who had heard that a military hospital, loaded and waiting to depart for a week, had been told to detrain and return to quarters. The train she had arrived on herself, she calculated, must have been one of the last to get through. Yelena Skryabina, who had just ducked an evacuation order with a chit from her doctor, felt a chill of presentiment: ‘The last transport left during the night . . . Leningrad is surrounded, and we are caught in a mousetrap. What have I done with my indecision?’35 Seated at his desk at midnight, Georgi Knyazev listened to the distant thump of guns:

  Once again I have lit the lamp with the green shade . . . But what will be happening in a few days’ time is utterly beyond imagination. Examples of the destruction, the razing to the ground of dozens, hundreds of towns leap out from the scrappy newspaper reports like nightmares. Surely the same can’t happen to a colossus like Leningrad? . . . Surely I am not going to see its death?

  He had taken down some eighteenth-century silhouettes – of Academicians, wigged and breeched, debating under delicate oak trees – from his wall, but worried that the sphinxes outside on the embankment – impassive, millennial – had not yet been sandbagged. ‘They have simply been forgotten . . . Too much to do to bother about them! And they sit there all alone, outside events.’

  Beyond the civilians’ rings of lamplight the battle for Leningrad raged on. From Mga, the Sixteenth Army’s 20th Motorised Division pushed slowly northwards, opposed by a rifle brigade and exhausted NKVD border guards. On 7 September it was reinforced with tanks from the 12th Panzer Division and split the Soviet defence, pushing the border guards westwards towards the Neva, and the rifle brigade eastwards towards Lake Ladoga. In heavy fighting it took the ‘Sinyavino Heights’, a wooded ridge above a convict-manned peatworks which was to become the scene of repeated Soviet breakout attempts and one of the bloodiest battlefields of the whole Eastern Front. Finally, on 8 September, the Germans took the fortress town of Shlisselburg, wedged like a nut at the Neva’s junction with Lake Ladoga and guardian of the river route to Moscow since the fourteenth century. With it, Leningrad lost its last land link to the unoccupied Soviet Union. For the next year and five months, Leningraders would only be able to reach the ‘mainland’ via Lake Ladoga or by air. ‘A grey mist’, wrote Knyazev from his foggy embankment, ‘conceals the outlines of St Isaac’s, the Admiralty, the Winter Palace, the Senate and the horses above the archway of the General Staff Building. And somewhere, just a few dozen kilometres away, are the Germans . . . It’s incredible, unreal, like a delirious dream. How could it have happened? The Germans are at the gates of Leningrad.’36

  Part 2

  The Siege Begins: September–December 1941

  Bread ration coupons, December 1941

  In order that we should understand things fully, the winter of nineteen forty-one was given to us as a measure

  Konstantin Simonov

  6

  ‘No Sentimentality’

  This was the beginning of the blockade. The mistakes had been made, the tragedy would now play out, with what from today’s perspective feels like sickening inevitability. At the time, though, events still seemed to hang in the balance. Few anticipated a siege: either the Germans would quickly be pushed back, it was assumed, or Leningrad would fall.

  Across the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht now seemed poised for victory. In the north, von Leeb’s Army Group North had surrounded Leningrad. Army Group Centre had captured Smolensk eight weeks previously and was now only two hundred miles from Moscow. Outside Kiev, Army Group South was in the process of encircling four Soviet armies, and shortly to capture the city itself. To the outside world, the Soviet regime seemed about to be overthrown or forced into a humiliating peace. (‘Everyone is remarking in anticipation’, wrote George Orwell in London, ‘what a bore the Free Russians will be . . . People have visions of Stalin in a little shop in Putney, selling samovars and doing Caucasian dances.’1) On 4 September Stalin had sent a half-desperate, half-threatening letter to Churchill via his ambassador Ivan Maisky. The Russian front, he admitted, had ‘broken down’, and it was imperative for Britain to open a second front in France or the Balkans by the end of the year, diverting thirty to forty German divisions. If Soviet Russia were defeated, the ambassador added in conversation, how could Britain win the war? ‘We could not exclude the impression’, Churchill wired Roosevelt after the meeting, ‘that they might be thinking of separate terms.’2

  Zhdanov and Voroshilov only dared tell Stalin that Shlisselburg had fallen on 9 September, a day late. His telegraph in response – jointly signed, ominously, with Malenkov, Molotov and Beria – bristled with contempt:

  We are disgusted by your conduct. All you do is report the surrender of this or that place, without saying a word about how you plan to put a stop to all these losses of towns and railway stations. The manner in which you informed us of the loss of Shlisselburg was outrageous. Is this the end of your losses? Perhaps you have already decided to give up Leningrad? What have you done with your KV ta
nks? Where have you positioned them, and why isn’t there any improvement on the front, when you’ve got so many of them? No other front has half the quota of KVs that you have. What’s your aviation doing? Why isn’t it supporting the troops on the battlefield? Kulik’s division has come to your aid – how are you using it? Can we hope for some sort of improvement on the front, or is Kulik’s help going to go for nothing, like the KVs? We demand that you update us on the situation two or three times a day.3

  Even before hearing about Shlisselburg, Stalin had decided to bring in new leadership. The previous day he had summoned his head of staff, General Zhukov, to the Kremlin and ordered him to fly to Leningrad with a note for Voroshilov that read simply ‘Hand over command of the Army Group to Zhukov and fly to Moscow immediately’.

  Forty-three years old, with a bald, block-shaped head, ruthless will, brilliant tactical sense and the courage to stand up to Stalin on military matters, Zhukov was the outstanding Soviet commander of the Second World War. He had made his name (and evaded, he suspected, the clutches of the NKVD) two years earlier, with the successful repulse of a Japanese incursion into Soviet Mongolia. Later he was to mastermind the spectacular encirclements at Stalingrad, and lead the Red Army in triumph to Berlin. The three weeks in the autumn of 1941 during which he stopped the Germans in front of Leningrad were to become part of a legend.