The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  Show your colors, City of Peter,

  And stand steadfast like Russia. . . .

  He watched silently at the window, his face tense and thoughtful as the train sped on toward Peter’s capital. There was much to be done as soon as he arrived.

  In the barnlike Leningrad offices of the Baltic Merchant Fleet beside the Neva passenger-freight port a conviction grew on Saturday, June 21, that something strange was afoot. Exactly what no one was certain. Most disturbing was the silence in Moscow, the silence of the People’s Commissariat.

  It had begun on Friday. When Nikolai Pavlenko, deputy chief of the Political Department, came to his office Friday morning, he found a cryptic radiogram on his desk signed “Yuri.” The message—sent in the clear—had been received just before dawn. It said: “Being held. Can’t leave port. Don’t send other ships. . . . Yuri . . . Yuri . . . German ports holding Soviet ships. . . . Protest. . . . Yuri . . . Yuri . . .”

  The message almost certainly had been transmitted from a Soviet freighter, the Magnitogorsk, which was unloading cargo in the German port of Danzig. The radio operator of the Magnitogorsk was Yuri Stasov, and the message center recognized his characteristic sending style.

  What did it mean? What should be done? The Magnitogorsk did not respond to wireless messages. There were five other Soviet ships in German ports. No word from them either. The “Yuri” message was relayed to Moscow. No reaction.

  Pavlenko didn’t leave the matter there. He telephoned Aleksei A. Kuz-netsov, secretary of the Leningrad Regional Party Committee, and asked for guidance. Kuznetsov suggested that precautions be taken but warned that “the question evidently is being dealt with in Moscow.” For the moment nothing could be done about ships already in German waters, but the fleet authorities decided not to send any more to the west until they knew what was going on. The motor ship Vtoraya Pyatiletka and the steamer Lunachar-sky, bound for German ports, were told to stand by in the Gulf of Finland and be prepared to put into Riga or Tallinn.

  All day Saturday the Merchant Fleet waited for instructions from Moscow. None came. Pavlenko consulted Secretary Kuznetsov again. He agreed that the Vtoraya Pyatiletka be diverted to Riga and the Lunacharsky returned to Leningrad. It was an unusual demonstration of initiative for Soviet bureaucrats—to act without orders from Moscow. Meanwhile, ships in Baltic waters were told to keep in constant communication with Leningrad.

  Toward evening the chiefs of the Merchant Fleet met. Sunday was a free day, but .they decided that top personnel should come to work. The others would stay in town, ready for a quick call in an emergency. The chief administrative and political officers and their deputies, including Pavlenko, remained at their desks most of the evening, then went home.

  The Leningrad Military Command embraced a vast area. In event of war it would become the command center for the region extending from the Baltic Sea to the Arctic reaches of the Kola Peninsula. Subordinate to it, so far as land operations were concerned, was Admiral Arseny G. Golovko, commanding the Northern Fleet at Polyarny on the Murmansk shore. Admiral Golovko had been reporting more and more alarming intelligence. For the past week flights of German reconnaissance planes had been observed over Soviet installations. What should he do? The response was: “Avoid provocation. Don’t fire at great altitudes.”

  Golovko grew increasingly restive. On the previous Wednesday, June 18, Lieutenant General Markian M. Popov, commander of the Leningrad Military District and Golovko’s immediate superior under the interlocking Soviet command system, had arrived in Murmansk. Golovko hoped for enlightenment, but none was forthcoming. Popov confined himself to questions of construction of fortifications, new airdromes, supply depots and barracks. If he had any intelligence on the current situation, he did not divulge it.

  “Apparently he knows no more than we,” Golovko noted in his diary on June 18.

  Sad. Such vagueness is not a very pleasant perspective in case of sudden attack. In the evening Popov left for Leningrad. I accompanied him to Kola. He treated us to a farewell beer in his special car and that ended our meeting.

  From Moscow nothing definite either. The situation remains unclear.

  It got no clearer on Thursday, June 19. There were more German overflights. Nothing on Friday. On Saturday Moscow’s Stanislavsky Musical Theater, starting its summer tour of the provinces, was presenting Offenbach’s La Perichole in Murmansk. Golovko decided to attend. He took his Military Council member, A. A. Nikolayev, and his Chief of Staff, Vice Admiral S. G. Kucherov, with him. The theater was filled. There were standees.

  Golovko relaxed and let the music push his worries out of his mind. So, he thought, judging by their expressions, did his aides.

  The audience seemed at ease, possibly because Golovko and his staff were present. “The situation can’t be so bad—the chiefs are here.” This is what he read in the faces of the spectators as they promenaded in the lobby between the acts.

  All the way back to headquarters he, Nikolayev and Kucherov talked about the operetta. Arriving at headquarters a little before midnight, he ordered tea and sat down for the late-evening situation report.

  At the Leningrad defense command installations at Kingisepp, on the Moonzund Archipelago of the Estonian Baltic coast, Major Mikhail Pavlov-sky spent Saturday, June 21, at Coastal Defense Headquarters. He had been receiving reports of unusual German activity for days, but nothing new came in on Saturday. As he was leaving the office, a friend in the 10th Border Regiment, Major Sergei Skorodumov, telephoned.

  “How about getting your better half and coming to the theater? The NKVD song-and-dance ensemble is giving a concert and I’ve got tickets.”

  Pavlovsky said he would have to check with his wife.

  “Any incidents today?” he asked.

  “Absolutely quiet,” Skorodumov replied.

  The two couples went to the concert. Afterward they walked home. The city was still. Most people had already retired for the night although it was still full daylight on the Baltic.

  Pavlovsky and his wife were undressing and talking about an excursion to the country on Sunday when the telephone rang. It was headquarters calling Pavlovsky back to his post.

  “What is it?” Pavlovsky’s wife asked.

  “I don’t know, Klavdiya,” he replied. “I don’t know anything at all. Maybe it’s a training maneuver.”

  He kissed his wife and, opening the door carefully so as not to disturb the sleeping children, walked out of the house. The hour was just before midnight.

  What was happening in the Leningrad area was duplicated in other frontier regions.

  June 21 found Army General Ivan I. Fedyuninsky in command of the 15th Rifle Corps, based on Kovel and defending the Bug River sector of the Central Front. His concern had mounted since Wednesday the eighteenth, when a German soldier deserted to his lines and reported that the Nazis were preparing to attack Russia at 4 A.M., June 22.1 When Fedyuninsky reported this information to his chief, Fifth Army General M. I. Potapov, he was curtly told: “Don’t believe in provocations.” But on Friday, returning from regional maneuvers, Fedyuninsky encountered General Konstantin Rokos-sovsky. Rokossovsky, commander of a mechanized corps attachéd to the Fifth Army, did not shrug off the signs of imminent Nazi attack. Indeed, he shared Fedyuninsky’s concern.2

  It was late Saturday night before Fedyuninsky retired, but he could not sleep. He got up and smoked a cigarette at an open window. He looked at his watch. The time was 1:30 A.M. Would the Germans attack tonight? All seemed quiet. The city slept. The stars sparkled in a deep azure sky. “Can this be the last night of peace?” Fedyuninsky asked himself. “Will the morning bring something else?”

  He was still pondering this question when the telephone rang. It was his chief, General Potapov. “Where are you?” Potapov demanded. “In my quarters,” Fedyuninsky replied.

  Potapov told him to go immediately to staff headquarters to stand by for a call over the special high-security line—the so-called VC telephone.


  Fedyuninsky did not wait for a car. He threw a coat over his shoulders and ran to staff headquarters. He found the VC line out of order. He got through on the ordinary phone, and Potapov ordered him to put his division on alert. “But don’t respond to provocations,” Potapov insisted. As Fedyuninsky put down the receiver he heard a fusillade of pistol shots—the car which had been sent to bring him to staff headquarters was being fired on by Nazi diversionists who had slipped across the frontier.3

  Vice Admiral Vladimir Tributs, commander in chief of the Baltic Fleet, chargéd with the defense of Leningrad’s sea approaches, had watched events through the dismal spring of 1941 with unconcealed apprehension. More, perhaps, than any other single Soviet officer, Tributs was apprised of the activity of German planes, German submarines, German transports, German agents and German sympathizers. Somewhat against his inclinations (because of security problems and the difficulty of constructing a new fleet base), Tributs had advanced Baltic Fleet headquarters from its historic seat at the Kronstadt fortress in Leningrad to the port of Tallinn, two hundred miles to the west. The shift had taken place when the Soviets took over the Baltic states in the summer of 1940. It gave Admiral Tributs an observation post within the newly acquired, only partially assimilated Baltic areas. He began to report the arrival of German troops at Memel, just across the new Soviet Baltic border, as early as March, 1941. In the same month German overflights became a daily phenomenon at most Baltic bases. By June, Admiral Tributs estimated at least four hundred German tanks had been concentrated just a few miles from the Soviet Baltic border.

  Even more suggestive was the conduct of German engineers engaged in work for the Soviet Navy. The Russians had purchased from Germany late in 1939 an unfinished cruiser, the Liitzoiv. The Russians towed it to Leningrad in the spring of 1940 for completion in the great Baltic shipyards. Several hundred German specialists were working on the Liitzoiv. In April parts and supplies failed to arrive on schedule from Germany, although the Germans previously had been remarkably punctual. Tributs mentioned the delay to Admiral N. G. Kuznetsov, the Naval Commissar, who talked to Stalin about it. But Stalin merely suggested keeping an eye on the situation.

  A little later the German engineers began to return home on one pretext or another. By the end of May only twenty remained in Leningrad, and by June 15 the last had vanished.

  Simultaneously, German ships disappeared from Soviet waters. By June 16 not one remained.

  Tributs was so worried that on Thursday, June 19, he convened his Military Council and decided to order a No. 2 Combat Alert for the Baltic Fleet. Chief of Staff, Vice Admiral Yuri A. Panteleyev, started to scribble out the orders while Tributs telephoned Admiral Kuznetsov in Moscow.

  “Comrade Commissar,” Tributs told Admiral Kuznetsov, “we have arrived at the view that an attack by Germany is possible at any moment. We must begin laying down our mine barrages or it will be too late. And I think it essential to raise the operational readiness of the fleet.”

  Tributs listened to Kuznetsov a moment, then hung up.

  “He agrees to the alert,” Tributs told Panteleyev, “but orders us to be careful and avoid provocation. And we will have to wait on the mine laying. Now, let’s get to work. . . .”4

  On the evening of June 21 Leningrad’s sea frontiers—the Baltic Fleet, the shore bases, the coastal artillery as far west as Libau (Lipaja), the island sentries in the Baltic, the new leased-area fortress of Hangö, the submarines, the patrol craft and other sea-borne units—all were on a No. 2 Alert, just a step below all-out readiness for action. Live ammunition had been distributed. Leaves had been canceled. Full crews stood at their posts.

  Tributs himself and his staff had left the Old City and moved into their war command post, an underground shelter outside Tallinn. Tributs got one more alarming report. This came from a sentry ship, the submarine M-96, on duty near the entrance of the Gulf of Finland. Captain A. I. Marinesko reported sighting a convoy of thirty-two transports, many under the German flag, near the Bengtsher lighthouse around 4 A.M., June 21.

  That evening Tributs was in constant touch with Admiral Kuznetsov in Moscow. The Naval Commissar was an experienced military man. He had served in the navy since boyhood, and in the mid-1930’s he went to Spain to advise the Spanish Navy in the Civil War. He shared Tributs’ alarm but felt powerless to act in absence of instructions from the Supreme Command. He had put the fleets on the No. 2 Alert on his own responsibility, technically calling it a “training” maneuver. In fact, it was a precaution against sudden war.

  Tributs and Kuznetsov conferred after the evening situation report by Deputy Naval Chief of Staff V. A. Alafuzov (Chief of Staff Admiral I. S. Isakov had gone to Sevastopol for the Black Sea maneuvers).

  Tributs told Kuznetsov he considered the situation so grave he and his staff proposed to stay at their command post through the night. Kuznetsov repeated that his hands were tied as far as further action was concerned. The two officers concluded their talk in a mood of frustration.

  Kuznetsov’s worry grew during the evening as he talked with the Black Sea Command at Sevastopol and the Northern Command at Polyarny, and he, too, decided to stay at his post all night. Again he telephoned the fleet commanders, cautioning them to be on the alert.

  “At the High Command until late in the evening of June 21,” Kuznetsov noted in his memoirs, “all was quiet. No one called me and no one expressed any interest in the preparedness of the fleet.”

  Sometime between 10:30 and 11 P.M. Kuznetsov got a call from Marshal Semyon K. Timoshenko, the Defense Commissar, who said: “I have some very important information. Come over here.”5

  Together with his deputy, Alafuzov (who was considerably worried because his uniform was badly rumpled and there was no time to change), Kuznetsov hurried out of his office. The Defense Command was just down Frunze Street from naval headquarters, and the two men walked to Timo-shenko’s office, located in a small building across from entrance No. 5 of the Defense Commissariat.

  “After a muggy hot day,” Kuznetsov recalls, “there had been a short brisk shower and now it was a bit fresher.”

  Young couples were strolling, two by two, on the boulevard, and somewhere nearby a dance was in progress. The sound of a phonograph came from an open window.

  The two men bounded up the staircase to the second floor of the Defense Commissariat. A breeze rustled the heavy magenta curtains, but it was so stifling that Kuznetsov unbuttoned his jacket as he strode into Timoshenko’s office. At the table sat General Georgi K. Zhukov, Chief of the General Staff. Marshal Timoshenko was dictating a telegram and Zhukov was filling out a telegraph blank. He had a pad of blanks in front of him and had already used up more than half of them. Obviously, the two had been at work for some hours.

  “It is possible that the Germans will attack, and it is necessary that the fleet be in readiness,” Timoshenko said.

  “I was alarmed by the words,” Kuznetsov recalls, “but they were not in any way unexpected. I reported that the fleet was already in a state of the highest military readiness and awaited further orders. I stayed for some minutes to get the situation precisely, but Alafuzov ran back to his office in order to send urgent radiograms to the fleet.

  “Only let them be on time, I thought, as I returned to my quarters.”

  Kuznetsov immediately telephoned Tributs.

  “Not more than three minutes passed,” Kuznetsov writes, “when I heard on the telephone the voice of Vladimir Filippovich Tributs.

  “ ‘Don’t wait until you receive the telegrams which are on the way. Put the fleet on Operative Alert No. i—combat alert. I repeat—combat alert.’

  “Exactly when the Defense Commissariat had received the order, ‘Be ready to repel the enemy,’ I do not know,” Kuznetsov reports. “But I remained without information until n P.M., June 21. At 11:35 P.M. I concluded my conversation by telephone with the commander of the Baltic Fleet. And at 11:37, as is recorded in the operational journal, the Combat Alert No. 1 had be
en announced—that is, precisely within two minutes all units of the fleet began to receive the order to ‘repel possible attack.’ “6

  The night that was no night wore on.

  Later Kuznetsov was to write:

  “There are events that cannot be erased from memory. Today, a quarter of a century has passed and I precisely remember the experiences of that tragic evening of June 21–22.”

  * * *

  1 An extensive literature has grown up around this incident, and there is controversy as to precisely when the deserter made his way to the Soviet lines. The operational journal of the 90th Border Guards unit reports that at 9 P.M., June 21, its fourth unit detained a German who had come across the lines. He gave his name as Alfred Liskof, member of the 222nd Infantry Regiment of the 74th Infantry Division. He surrendered himself at Vladimir-Volynsky, declaring the Germans had been ordered to attack at 4 A.M. He had heard this from his superior, a Lieutenant Schultz, and also had observed troops being disposed for the attack. The information was transmitted by direct wire by a Major Bychevsky to the chief of the Ukraine Border Command at Kiev and was relayed to the Army Command of the Fifth Army at Lutsk. The information was also passed to the commanders of the 87th Infantry Division and the 41st Tank Division at Vladimir-Volynsky. A. B. Kladt, writing in Istoriya SSSR, No. 3, 1965, suggests Fedyuninsky was referring to this deserter and that he mistakes the date. Nikita Khrushchev in his “secret speech” of February 25, 1956, mentions a deserter who brought over information on the night of the attack (probably the same Liskof). He says the information was relayed to Stalin on the evening of June 21 but that Stalin ignored it. Liskof became famous in the early days of the war. He was made to issue a statement calling on German soldiers to overturn the Hitler regime. Great posters were plastered up bearing his portrait on one side and the legend: “A mood of depression rules among German soldiers.” Dmitri Shcheglov saw the posters on the Leningrad streets June 28. (Dmitri Shcheglov, V Opolchenii, Moscow, 1960, p. 8.)