Leningrad Read online

  The result was near-universal panic and confusion. Unarmed, untrained, exhausted by night-time marches and sleepless days hiding from air attack, volunteers fled or fell into captivity in vast numbers. So many abandoned their ancient rifles that a special campaign was launched with the slogans ‘Losing your gun is a crime against the Motherland’ and ‘A soldier’s power is his weapon’. Mass flight in the face of tanks was so common that it got its own pseudo-medical name – tankovaya boyazn, or ‘tankophobia’. Verkhoglaz even hinted to his subordinates that they should spread the rumour that the Germans were using dummies:

  The other day exactly this sort of incident was uncovered; it was spotted through binoculars. A colossal column of tanks was seen approaching. The tanks stopped, an officer got out and leant against one with his elbow, and his elbow made a dent. Well, as you know, elbows don’t make dents on real tanks. This slight detail revealed the truth – the tanks turned out to be fake.24

  Whether this absurd attempt at persuading men to fight panzers virtually with their bare hands had any success we do not know; it seems highly unlikely.

  Brought to battle, the volunteers’ lives were thrown away in the most primitive fashion. ‘Russian attack method’, German chief of staff General Halder wrote in his diary: ‘Three-minute artillery barrage, then pause, then infantry attacking as much as twelve ranks deep, without heavy weapons support. The men start hurrah-ing from far off. Incredibly high Russian losses.’25 One of those infantrymen was Frenklakh. ‘You’re so terrified that your legs root themselves to the ground’, he remembered. ‘It’s extraordinarily difficult to make yourself get up, pick up your rifle and run. Once you’re up it’s fine – you just run forwards. But it wasn’t just fear of being shot in the back of the head if you didn’t that made you do it – you were high on a sense of duty.’

  Officers who emerged from battle alive were subjected to the usual suspicious bullying. Verkhoglaz interrogated a politruk, Mikhail Serogodsky, after a disastrous engagement near Kingisepp at the end of July:

  Serogodsky: ‘Nine hundred of us arrived at the railway station, and six hundred came out of the fighting there.’

  Verkhoglaz: ‘Were the rest killed, or did they make off?’

  Serogodsky: ‘Some went off towards Gdov, some were killed.’

  Verkhoglaz: ‘I know exactly why some of them ran away – it was because you lost your head. You didn’t understand that you have to lead. Thanks to your failure of leadership they ran away in animal terror.’

  The remainder of the unit, Serogodsky continued, were ordered to ‘consider themselves partisans’, broke up into groups and headed into the woods:

  Verkhoglaz: ‘The reason for your return from the rear?’

  Serogodsky: ‘We had difficulties with food. For the last three days until we met up with our units again, we fed off wild plants. We were walking through deep pine forest and living off wood sorrel. Extreme hunger forced us to rejoin our lines.’

  Verkhoglaz: ‘And your losses are how big?’

  Serogodsky: ‘Hard to say. In our detachment there are sixty-five men left. That wasn’t just deaths; twice I sent men out on reconnaissance and they didn’t come back.’26

  Anger and despair come through the battalion-level reports as well, their language burned clean of the usual political jargon. A Commissar Moseyenko of the First Division explained, on 21 July, why his unit had been forced to retreat:

  The battalion was defending itself against mortar fire, and could not open fire in return because it had no mortars of its own. The battalion had no communications with the regiment, the artillery or its own companies, as a result of which our artillery was firing at our own soldiers in their own trenches. The 1st Company of the battalion subjected the 3rd Company of the same battalion to fire.27

  Another officer of the First Division complained of the lack of medical services:

  It isn’t just that the situation with drugs is bad; we have no surgical equipment at all. If the wounded need surgery we can’t help them. There are no surgeons, no instruments, no nurses. There are the Red Cross girls – they are heroines, true, but that isn’t much help to them. We haven’t got enough first aid kits. There are no back-up stocks, only what the soldiers already have in their bags, that’s all. One small bottle of iodine per bag . . . What can I say about medical transport? We should have 380 trucks; we have 170. There are no qualified doctors . . .

  It was small wonder, he hinted, that officers often found their position unbearable:

  There was one unpleasant incident. The commander of the 1st Kirovsky Regiment shot himself. The reason, apparently, was cowardice, fear that [the regiment] was not properly armed. They say that fifteen minutes earlier he had given an excellent speech [to the troops], then walked out and shot himself. His actions have not been explained to the soldiers; they have been told that he was killed by diversionists.28

  A senior lieutenant questioned why he had ordered a retreat on his own initiative, replied, ‘I don’t know how to be an officer and I didn’t want lots of people to be killed through my fault’, before bursting into tears.29 A machine-gunner left a brisk note: ‘I’ve decided to take my own life. It’s too difficult in the company. Signed, company sergeant major Smirnov.’

  On 16 July the High Command ordered the creation of four more opolcheniye divisions, eventually comprising another 41,446 volunteers. Recruitment criteria were loosened to include ‘white-ticketers’, spectacle-wearers and the sons of ‘enemies of the people’, and age limits extended from eighteen down to seventeen, and from fifty up to fifty-five. Their grand new title of ‘Guards Divisions’ failed to disguise the fact that they were even worse equipped than their predecessors. The 3rd Rifle Regiment of the First Guards Division, for example, had 791 rifles, ten sniper’s rifles and five revolvers for 2,667 men.30 Training was again abysmal or non-existent (‘We’re teaching them to fight with stones’, lamented an instructor). Thanks to the profligacy of the past three weeks, the new divisions were also acutely short of experienced officers – of the First Guards Division’s 781 officers only eighty-two were ‘cadres’ – roughly speaking, professionals. To officer the Second Guards Division, commissars had to scout the unoccupied Soviet Union, bringing men from as far away as the Urals.31

  The new divisions were thrown into the same bloodbath as their predecessors. On arrival at the front on 11 August, the First Guards Division’s orders were changed three times, with the result that some regiments had to march seventy kilometres in twenty-four hours. They were then thrown straight into action, despite lacking cartridges, shells and grenades. More ammunition could not be brought up from the rear, a Political Department boss reported to Zhdanov after a tour of the front, because the division had no fuel tanker, and had had to leave behind 390 horses for lack of harnesses and carts. Nor could the wounded be evacuated from the battlefield, since the medical unit had only four trucks. The ‘high-ups’ who descended on divisional headquarters were more hindrance than help:

  Every one of them feels that it’s his duty to give an order or advice. A characteristic example: the divisional commander only found out that the 2nd Rifle Regiment had been ordered to attack on the evening of 12 August, when the order had already been carried out, under the command of a major general from group headquarters. In conversation with me, Major General Shcherbakov and brigade commissar Kurochkin both declared ‘Everybody gives orders but nobody actually helps.’

  A long list of requested supplies included water carts, an ambulance and a mobile field hospital, as well as twenty more mid-ranking officers and politruki to round up and rally retreating volunteers.32

  The Second Guards Division was sent into the lines at Gatchina on 12 August, and cut to pieces two weeks later. During the battle, regimental commissar Nabatov reported, it became apparent that

  A. Some of the soldiers don’t know how to handle rifles or grenades. This contributed to their dispersal during fighting.

  B. A number of soldiers were bad
ly camouflaged, having failed to carry out orders to dig themselves in. As a result we suffered large losses from artillery fire and mortars.

  C. During counter-attacks soldiers tried to keep close to one another instead of spreading out in proper formation. This meant more losses.

  D. Soldiers do not recognise their neighbours to the left and right. Mistaking their own men for the enemy, they think they have been encircled.

  E. A number of unit commanders do not know their own soldiers by name.

  F. Some soldiers do not know how to use their first aid kits. As a result some, having suffered relatively minor wounds, bleed to death before they can be delivered to a medical point.

  In between the bouts of carnage, volunteers sat out summer thunderstorms in half-built trenches, wet and hungry (‘We sploshed about’, as Frenklakh put it, ‘like hippos in the zoo’). Units pleaded for tarpaulins, tents, field kitchens, underwear, razors, mess tins, water bottles, shovels, entrenching tools, helmets, and most of all for vehicles, communications equipment, weapons (the Third Guards had only three rifles for every four volunteers) and men who knew how to use them. ‘The majority of volunteers’, reported a politruk of a battalion of the Fourth Guards Division, sent to join the eviscerated Second Division,

  are untrained, or insufficiently trained, to shoot, so that in some cases they are unable to load their own rifles and their officers have to do it for them . . . Out of 205 listed as machine-gunners only 100 turned out actually to be acquainted with machine guns, the rest were just riflemen. A list of ‘sappers’ included more riflemen and ordinary labourers, but not a single explosives expert . . . Nor do they have any tools for repairing weapons, so that simple breakage of a machine gun’s firing pin puts the gun out of commission.33

  The decision formally to wind up the remains of the opolcheniye was taken on 19 September, and by the end of the month its remnants had been absorbed into the Red Army. Some 135,400 people, including substantial numbers of female auxiliaries, had served in it altogether.34 The nearest we have to an official casualty estimate is from Zhdanov’s deputy, Aleksei Kuznetsov, who stated, in a speech in the Smolniy the following year, that no fewer than 43,000 Leningrad volunteers were killed, taken prisoner or went missing in the first three months of the war. This is almost certainly far too low. The proportion of casualties in the First and Second Divisions, and in the Second and Fourth Guards Divisions, all of which were virtually annihilated before being officially wound up, was much higher, and hints dropped to Western journalists at the end of the war suggest loss rates of up to 50 per cent.35

  Was the sacrifice worth it? The traditional interpretation is that though undertrained and underequipped, the opolcheniye held the Luga Line for a vital few weeks, winning time for the strengthening of Leningrad’s inner defences. ‘They couldn’t be considered fully-trained soldiers’, the director of the Kirov Works told Werth in 1943, ‘but their drive, their guts were tremendous . . . they managed to stop the Germans just in the nick of time . . . The fight put up by our Workers’ Division and by the people of Leningrad was absolutely decisive.’36

  Today’s historians are much less sure, crediting the brief late-July pause in von Leeb’s advance more to rain and the regular Red Army. Even if the volunteers – bewildered, unarmed, leaderless – did make a difference on the battlefield, their loss undoubtedly represented a prodigious waste of skilled and educated manpower, especially given the Red Army’s desperate need for officers shortly afterwards. (By the end of September 1941 the Red Army as a whole had lost an extraordinary 142,000 out of its total 440,000 officers. ‘Basically to blame’, reported General Fedyuninsky of a failed operation outside Leningrad in October, ‘is weak leadership on the part of platoon and company-level officers, in some cases amounting to simple cowardice.’37) The military historian Antony Beevor is damning: ‘The waste of lives’, he writes, ‘was so terrible that it is hard to comprehend: a carnage whose futility was perhaps exceeded only by the Zulu king marching an impi of his warriors over a cliff to prove their discipline.’ Even harsher is opolcheniye survivor Frenklakh:

  There are moments I am ashamed of to this day. We repeatedly took to our heels, abandoning our casualties. Everyone was terrified of being wounded during a retreat, because if you couldn’t walk there was almost no hope of stretcher-bearers picking you up. Your only chance was if a friend helped you . . . After the war I thought for a long time about ’41, analysing the situation as it was then. All those fairy tales about mass heroism – they lie on the consciences of the writers and the politruki. There were some heroes of course, but there were also crowds of people who just panicked and fled. It was mass, completely unjustified, senseless sacrifice, at the pleasure of our moronic command.38

  The last word should go to Stalin. In April 1942, wishing to humiliate Voroshilov, who had turned down an offered command, he circulated a note to the Central Committee listing Comrade (pointedly, not Marshal) Voroshilov’s failings. Among them was the fact that while in command of the Northwestern Army Group he had ‘neglected Leningrad’s artillery defences, distracted by the creation of workers’ battalions, poorly armed with shotguns, pikes, daggers etc’.39 Voroshilov was a bad man and a bad soldier, but the disaster of the People’s Levy was not his fault alone. He had learned his trade in the Politburo, whose members’ most important life skill was the ability correctly to anticipate the wishes of Stalin himself.

  5

  ‘Caught in a Mousetrap’

  Vera Inber arrived in Leningrad by train on 24 August. Fifty-one years old, she was, remarkably, both Trotsky’s first cousin and a prominent member of the literary establishment, producing short stories that managed to pass the censors without descending into outright socialist realism. Her husband had just been appointed director of Leningrad’s Erisman teaching hospital, a leafy complex of red-brick nineteenth-century buildings opposite the Botanical Gardens on the Petrograd Side. Having seen her daughter and baby grandson off into evacuation from Moscow, Inber was coming to join him.

  The journey, in peacetime an easy overnighter, took two and a half days. Fresh bomb craters lined the tracks, and long factory trains rattled by in the opposite direction, machinery bulky under protective canvas. One could tell how long each one had been on the road, Inber noticed, by the freshness of the birch branches tied on to the wagon roofs for camouflage. Her own train, drawing towards Leningrad through dilapidated villages with picturesque backwoods names, came to increasingly frequent halts. ‘We stopped at dawn’, she wrote in her diary

  and we are still here . . . The carriage is fairly empty, and no one talks much. In one compartment an endless card game is in progress; a general whistles as he declares his suit, an army engineer knocks out his pipe on the corner of the table, over and over again. The sound reminds me of a woodpecker tapping its tree. The pipe smoke drifts into the corridor, moves in layers, thins out and is suspended in the rays of the sun. Everything is so quiet, it’s as thought the train were resting on moss.1

  They started to move again, through a heavily bombed wood. Trees lay charred and split; roots pointing upwards, earth scorched ochre. Passing through a station, Inber noticed its name – Mga. Normally one never took this route: already, the direct line from Moscow had been broken by the Germans.

  Inber disembarked into an atmosphere of tense expectancy. The first thing she saw on leaving the railway station was a poster bearing the text of an appeal, signed by Zhdanov, Voroshilov and city soviet chairman Popkov and dated three days earlier. It was the first official acknowledgement that the Germans were now at the gates of Leningrad:

  Comrades! Leningraders! Dear friends! Over our beloved native city hangs the immediate threat of attack by German-Fascist troops. The enemy is trying to break through to Leningrad. He wants to destroy our homes, to seize our factories and plants, to drench our streets and squares with the blood of the innocent, to outrage our peaceful people, to enslave the free sons of our Motherland. But this shall not be. Leningrad – cra
dle of the proletarian Revolution – never has fallen and never shall fall into enemy hands . . .

  Let us rise as one man in defence of our city, our homes, our families, our honour and freedom. Let us perform our sacred duty as Soviet patriots and be indomitable in the struggle with the fierce and hateful enemy, vigilant and merciless in the struggle against cowards, alarmists and deserters; let us establish the strictest revolutionary order in our city. Armed with iron discipline and Bolshevik resolve we shall meet the enemy bravely and deal him a crushing blow! 2

  In the eight days since she had decided to leave Moscow, Inber reflected, Leningrad’s situation had become dramatically worse. Still, joining her husband had been the right thing to do. ‘He always said “If war breaks out we should be together.” And here we are – together.’

  Over the next few days she saw little of him. He was frantically busy at the hospital; she made a broadcast for the city radio station (‘Moscow and Leningrad, brother and sister, stretch out their hands to one other’) and idled, feeling oddly surplus to requirements, round their airy new flat. Through the high windows the sun sparkled on the Karpovka river and the palm-filled glasshouses of the Botanical Gardens opposite. Inside, the walls were hung with fine old porcelain plates, their roses as fresh as the day they had been painted in the reign of Empress Elizabeth. What on earth would she do with them, she wondered, when the air raids began? Though there were ten to fifteen alerts each day – more like one continual drill with short breaks – everything seemed to be happening ‘far away, beyond the horizon’: