The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  “The whole 4th Panzers is hitting here, the bastards,” he said. “There’ll be two times two hundred tanks here before long.”

  Semashko had less than fifty tanks left.

  His lines did not hold despite the categorical orders of the Military Council, despite the fighting qualities of the Leningrad workers, despite the threats of Kuznetsov. The line from Kingisepp to Volosovo was cut—and within twenty-four hours. No orders, no heroism, no blood could halt the Nazi Panzers. Thousands of men and women worked on antitank ditches and trenches. They dug and dug and dug. But the lines could not hold. Von Leeb threw in his reserve Panzer division—the 8th. It cut the Kingisepp-Gatchina railroad August 12 and captured Veimarn. Kingisepp was doomed. But the Red Army fought on. It was almost driven out of the city August 13 but fought back in. On August 16 the defenders, exhausted, dirty, wounded, slipped out and fell back toward the Gatchina fortified zone. But the battle was still not over. On the twentieth the 1 ith Soviet Rifles stormed Kingisepp from the west and briefly liberated it. They were thrown out in less than twenty-four hours.

  Once the line started to crumble, it crumbled almost everywhere. It fell apart along the Luga. The Novgorod position disintegrated almost at the same moment. Novgorod fell August 13 despite valiant counterattacks by the Forty-eighth and Eleventh Soviet armies. Faulty staff work by the Thirty-fourth Soviet Army, which was supposed to join the operation, bungled the desperate Soviet effort. The Germans won control of the whole Lake Ilmen-Staraya Russa position and drove the Russians back of the river Lovat by August 25.

  The cost to the Russians of this kind of fighting may be judged from the roster of the Forty-eighth Soviet Army, commanded by Major General S. D. Akimov, after it had retired north where it tried to hold a thirty-mile front around Lake Peipus. As of August 24 this army—so called—had a total strength of 6,235 men. It had 5,043 rifles, or a ratio of five rifles to every six men. It had 31 heavy weapons—three 45-mm’s, ten 76-mm’s, twelve antiaircraft 76-mm field guns, four 122-mm mortars and two 152-mm mortars. It had 104 machine guns and 75 submachine guns.

  In fact, the Forty-eighth Army was the equal in numbers (but not in arms) to a half-strength peacetime Soviet division.

  The Forty-eighth Army was more badly mauled than some units defending Leningrad. But not much. Nor were the German losses light. One Nazi officer called the Luga offensive “the road of death.” General Hopp-ner, commanding the German 4th Panzers, noted that his men had to fight their way through 1,236 field fortified points and 26,588 mines.

  There was some truth in the call which von Leeb broadcast to his troops as they crashed forward across the Luga line:

  “Soldiers! You see before you not only the remains of the Bolshevik Army but the last inhabitants of Leningrad. The city is empty. One last push and the Army Group Nord will celebrate victory!

  “Soon the battle with Russia will be ended!”

  But as von Leeb rallied his troops with these ringing words, he was using quite different ones in his desperate appeals for reinforcement and aid to the German Supreme Command. Haider reported grimly on August 15 that because of the punishment von Leeb was taking “there will be no way of getting around issuing the order for transfer to Army Group Nord of the motorized corps. To my mind it is a grave mistake.” He noted further that “wild requests by Army Group Nord for engineering troops, artillery, antiaircraft, antitank units (on top of three armored divisions) are turned down.”

  Day by day, hour by hour, the options open to the Leningrad Command diminished.

  Tallinn, the Baltic Fleet base, had been left to the rear, fighting in close encirclement. How long it might hold on was questionable. The Karelian front was coming apart as Voroshilov and Zhdanov bled it of troops to reinforce the line just outside Leningrad. At any moment the Finns and Germans might break through north of the city.

  There were no reserves left. As Leningrad’s Chief of Staff, General Nikishev, reported to Marshal B. M. Shaposhnikov, Chief of Staff of the High Command, August 13: “The difficulty in the present situation is that neither the commanders of divisions, the commanders of armies, nor the commanders of fronts have any reserves whatever. Even the smallest breakthrough can be halted only by hurried improvisations of one unit or another.”

  Nikishev told Shaposhnikov that the Leningrad front had little left with which to oppose von Leeb beyond the untrained People’s Volunteers and the battered units which had fallen back all the way from Lithuania and Latvia.

  These forces, Nikishev declared, simply could not be expected to stop the Germans, who continued to throw into battle relatively intact motorized and armored units.

  His request to the General Staff was staggering: “a minimum” of 12 divisions, 400 planes and 250 tanks.

  Nikishev told Bychevsky about his letter to the General Staff sometime between 5 and 6 A.M. on the morning of August 14 when Bychevsky called to get the latest information. This was the only quiet hour of twenty-four at Nikishev’s headquarters. The General had the habit of snatching an hour or two of sleep, his head buried in the papers on his desk and his hand still grasping his pen.

  Tired and bitter, Nikishev asked Bychevsky whether he thought the General Staff would provide the troops to save Leningrad. Nikishev glanced at the wall where the map of the front showed the blue arrows of Nazi columns penetrating deeply into the front. He did not wait for an answer.

  “Well, of course,” Nikishev said. “They won’t give us the troops. But we had to send the request just the same.”

  Nikishev was bitter at Voroshilov, Chief of the Leningrad High Command, whom he blamed for siphoning off troops from the northern sector to the Northwest Front of the Leningrad region.

  Three days later orders came from Moscow, responding to Nikishev’s plea. Three divisions were transferred from the Northwest Front to the Northern Front (the main Leningrad front) and on the nineteenth the Forty-eighth Army was shifted from the Northwest to the Northern Front.

  The military value of the move was dubious. In fact, it may have opened the path to German encirclement of Leningrad.

  The Northwest Front had launched a fairly successful counterattack in the region of Staraya Russa and had driven the Nazis back thirty or thirty-five miles. To counter the blow, von Leeb had been compelled to put his 56th Motorized Corps and his SS Death’s Head Division into action in the Staraya Russa area. He also committed the 39th Motorized Corps, which had been shifted up from Smolensk. The Germans described their plight as a “temporary crisis.”

  The Soviet Eleventh and Thirty-fourth armies were holding off this Nazi counterattack, although they were no real match for such a powerful striking force. Moreover, the Thirty-fourth Soviet Army, in particular, was badly directed.

  Just at this moment these armies were weakened by the command shifts, requested by Nikishev. As Nikishev himself commented bitterly: “Now we can get them with a whole German corps on their tail!”

  The shift of the Forty-eighth Army was a fatal move. This bedraggled outfit, nothing but a hulk, chanced to be the only unit in the path of four fast-moving German divisions, heading for the Moscow-Leningrad railroad.

  The Nazi divisions struck at the hinge between the two Leningrad fronts, the Northern and the Northwest. They shouldered aside the wreck of the Forty-eighth Army, pushing it east. General Dukhanov was on the scene. When he learned that the Forty-eighth was retreating to the east along with units of the Northwest Front, it was, he said, “like a terrible, stupid dream.” The movement of the Soviet forces east (rather than falling back to the north) uncovered the whole approach to Leningrad.

  This error, Dukhanov believed, enabled the Germans to encircle the city. True, the over-all strength of Leningrad might still have been unable to prevent the Germans from closing the ring. But by withdrawing to the east the Soviet troops left a gap of a dozen miles open, unprotected. The Nazis paraded right into it.

  “The army in that period was on wheels,” Lieutenant General A. V. Sukhomlin, Chief of St
aff of the Fifty-fourth Army, recalled. Moscow was trying valiantly to shuffle units north to Leningrad from the reserve echelons which had been created to the east of Moscow. Troops were constantly being moved from the Karelian peninsula to the south and west of Leningrad. They were shuffled around between west, southwest and east day and night.

  It was a never-ending task, like trying to keep a sieve full of water. As fast as units were pulled from the north to strengthen the south or southwest, there was new deterioration to the southeast.

  Nothing which Leningrad tried to do in those fateful August days could halt the hemorrhage of manpower or the irresistible tide which swept the Nazi Panzers closer and closer to the city’s gates.

  * * *

  1 The figure was “up to 500,000” by the end of July or early August. (N.Z., p. 80.)

  2 On July 25 the Military Council had ordered the formation of four more divisions of People’s Volunteers from the 34,000 enrollees still in the city. They were to be called Guards Volunteers. The 1st went into the lines at Volosovo August 11, the 2nd at Gatchina on the seventeenth, the 3rd at Ropsha. The 4th was reorganized as the 5th before ever going into service. It went into the Pulkovo line September 12–13. The 6th went into action at the Rybatskoye meat plant September 16 and the 7th at Avtovo September 30.

  20 ♦ The Enemy at the Gates

  THE HUB OF THE DEFENSE OF LENINGRAD WAS SMOLNY, the great compound along the Neva, only a mile or two from the Winter Palace, Party headquarters since Lenin’s day. Long since, Smolny had displaced the General Staff building as the directing center of the battle. Here Zhdanov worked and lived around the clock, his figure growing more slack as sleepless night and endless day succeeded each other. He smoked more and more, the boxes of Belomors and Pamirs piling up on his desk in disorderly litter until they were removed by his aides.

  There was a large underground command center at Smolny. There at a long table was the communications center, men and women in military uniform, sitting behind the Baudot telegraph transmitters, rattling out orders and messages to all corners of the front. Here was the VC high-security line connecting Leningrad with Moscow. And here, when air alerts sounded, worked Zhdanov, together with the top echelon of the Party, the government and the Leningrad front.

  Smolny was heavily defended. Antiaircraft guns had been mounted on neighboring buildings and in the surrounding park. The building was protected by a maze of trenches and machine-gun nests. Four tanks stood guard near the entrance, and a gunboat was stationed on the Neva embankment nearby.

  There were no direct hits on Smolny during the heavy air attacks, but beginning with the great raid of September 8, many 500- and 1,000-pound bombs dropped in its vicinity. There were direct hits on the water pumping station and the Peasant House, only a hundred yards from the main Smolny buildings.

  Most of the time Zhdanov worked in his office on the third floor of the right wing of the Smolny complex. This was convenient for him since his Party colleagues, the other Leningrad secretaries, A. A. Kuznetsov, Ya. F. Kapustin, M. N. Nikitin and T. F. Shtykov, had their offices in the same wing. On the floor below were the headquarters of the Leningrad front and staff, and next to the central staircase was the front commander’s suite. Here the Military Council met.

  Behind Zhdanov’s desk a portrait of Stalin hung. To the left were pictures of Marx and Engels. There was no other decoration in the room. The long table that extended down from his desk was covered with red baize and heaped with maps and papki, paper folders of ocher and liver hue, tied with heavy mauve ribbon, which are the daily work load of the Russian bureaucrat.

  Zhdanov’s desk had only a few permanent fixtures—a desk set of soap-colored Urals stone, decorated with steel, the gift to him of the workers of the Kirov factory. There was a bookshelf with glass doors, neatly covered with green baize, at one side of his desk. It was filled with stacks of papki.

  Here he worked hour after hour and day after day, wheezing and coughing as his asthma grew more and more difficult with the endless consumption of cigarettes. He did not wear a military uniform, although he held the military rank (as did all the top Party officers) of lieutenant general, but the old olive-drab Party blouse, of the early revolutionary tradition. It tucked into his broad belt, billowing a bit, for Zhdanov was a chunky man running to fat around his middle.

  His dark eyes burned like coals in their deep sockets, and the stress lines across his face sharpened as the hours of night work went on. He seldom left the confines of Smolny, even to walk around the dilapidated grounds, now filled with military debris—antiaircraft batteries, field radio stations, trucks for troops, small encampments, searchlight crews, parks of courier and command cars.

  His brown hair shot with auburn tints showed no sign of gray. His fat fingers were deeply stained by nicotine, although he preferred the traditional Russian papirosy with their long cardboard draw to the conventional cigarettes.

  There were kitchens and dining rooms in Smolny, but Zhdanov did not often eat anywhere but in his office. A tray of food was brought to him, and he would wolf it as he conducted business or, infrequently, would share a dinner, often at 3 A.M., with one or two of his principal aides. Day and night he consumed tea, drinking it in the Russian style from a glass in an embossed German silver holder, a lump of sugar in his mouth and, if possible, a slice of lemon in the tea.

  Smolny was as busy after midnight as it was at high noon. Bychevsky often reached Smolny in the early hours of morning. At 5 A.M. he found every office occupied, doors opening and closing, messengers and clerks busily carrying papers from one room to another, officers going in and out, telephones ringing, telegraph keys chattering in the communications rooms.

  It was at Smolny that Zhdanov and Voroshilov planned their strategy in the defense of the city. Here it was that Zhdanov met with the top commanders, with the officials of the city upon whom he relied to carry out so many defense measures. Here he harangued the Young Communists upon whose slender shoulders more and more burdens were destined to fall, and the active members of the Party, who, in the last resort, would be called upon to fight to the end to save Leningrad from falling to the Germans.

  The prospect that the Party members would, in fact, be summoned to fight street by street, house by house, room by room, in savage city guerrilla warfare such as the world had only seen previously in the university city of Madrid was becoming more and more real.

  All night long Zhdanov and Voroshilov labored over military problems. All day and into the evening there were meetings, conferences, rallies, pep talks. The procedures were often informal; front commanders, Party workers, engineers and specialists wandered in and out of Military Council sessions, taking part or not according to circumstance or whim.

  Zhdanov and Voroshilov met with the editors of Leningradskay a Pravda in an effort to stiffen its propaganda line. They managed to shake loose from the army some of the paper’s experienced correspondents and set them to covering the fighting in a more realistic way than was possible for cub reporters like Vsevolod Kochetov and his chum, Mikhalev. Efforts were made to make available more information, particularly regarding the fighting on the Leningrad front. Rumor and confusion as to the reality of the situation were still general among the public.

  The top military and political officers were brought into Smolny on July 21. Both Zhdanov and Voroshilov warned them that there was not the slightest reason for self-confidence. Speaker after speaker stressed the need for the rapid building of fortifications. Flaws in construction work and disputes among fortifications experts were aired. It was decided to lodge responsibility in a single unified defense construction administration with Secretary Kuznetsov in chargé.

  Another rally was called at Smolny July 24, a meeting of the Communist Party aktiv. Secretary Kuznetsov was chairman.

  Voroshilov spoke first. “The task of tasks is not to let the enemy into this city,” he said. Then Zhdanov spoke. “The enemy wants to destroy our homes, seize our factories, exterminate ou
r achievements, wash our streets and squares with the blood of countless victims and enslave the free sons of the Motherland. It shall not be!”

  The entire Leningrad Party aktiv rose at Zhdanov’s call and, standing in the chamber where Lenin had decreed that the Bolshevik Revolution should begin, swore a solemn oath to “die before yielding the city of Lenin.” Then they sang the Internationale. Every member of the Party and every Party candidate was mustered to twenty-four-hour round-the-clock duty at Party headquarters. Plans were drafted for Party workers, Young Communists and workers’ detachments to defend the city, block by block and house by house.

  In all the alarm and crisis no special measures were taken to conserve food. The run on food stores began June 22, but there had been no organized attempt to control reserves. All the big Soviet cities went on a ration-card system July 18. Leningrad’s ration was the same as that of the rest of the country—800 grams1 of bread a day for workers, 600 for employees, 400 for dependents and children. The meat ration was 2,200 grams a month for workers, dropping to 600 for dependents and children. There were ample rations of cereals, fats and sugar.

  As Yelena Skryabina noted in her diary: “Nothing terrible so far. We can live.”

  Commercial stores—seventy-one in all—opened the day rationing started. In these stores without ration cards you could buy anything you wanted— and any amounts: sugar, butter, meat, caviar. But prices were high. A kilo (21/5 pounds) of sugar sold for seventeen rubles. People crowded into the stores, looked at the prices and went away muttering. Restaurant meals were not rationed and tasted as good—or bad—as ever.

  The Hermitage work went on night and day. Professor Orbeli would not cease worrying until all of his treasures had been shipped away. More and more the packing was impeded by the drafting of Hermitage workers for digging trenches and military service. By extraordinary efforts a second shipment was dispatched July 20. It filled 23 cars. There were 422 boxes, 700,000 separate articles. Fourteen members of the staff accompanied the train to its mysterious destination—now known to be Sverdlovsk. A third train, Orbeli thought, would complete the job.