The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  On the Hermitage bulletin board, where once had been posted notices of art lectures and archaeological finds, now appeared a different kind of announcement: the death of Sergei N. Anosov, an archaeologist, the first Hermitage casualty, killed on duty with the Red Army.

  And on Orbeli’s desk the telephonograms piled up from the Party Secretariat, from the Military Council, from the City Soviet:

  We ask you to mobilize from those physically able to engage in defense work 75 men. All those mobilized must be provided with shovels, picks, crowbars, saws and axes. Each must carry five days’ food supplies, and a cup, spoon and pot, a change of underwear, warm clothing and money. Advise all those mobilized that they will be on the assignment not less than two weeks.

  Aleksandr Shtein, the playwright whose wife was an artist at Lenfilm, was working now with the Baltic Fleet at Kronstadt. One late July day he got a four-hour leave to visit Leningrad. The evacuation of children was in full sway—those who had been brought back from the Luga area, those who had never been sent away. He found Nevsky Prospekt filled with buses and streetcars, packed with crying children, worried parents. Military music blared from radio loudspeakers. The youngsters carried huge bundles and boxes. At the Anichkov Bridge—naked without the famous Klodt horses, long since buried against bombing attack—there was a traffic jam.

  The windows of the big Nevsky shops were surrounded with sandbags and crisscrossed with paper strips, cut from old newspapers. War placards were everywhere: “Have you signed up yet in the People’s Volunteers?” Another showed an ultramarine sea with a battleship, its cannons spouting red flame.

  The stream of buses flowed to the stations, where huge crowds had gathered. Women kept counting their chargés . . . no . . . 112 . . . 114. Many children carried small khaki knapsacks on their backs. Shtein’s wife was there with their six-year-old daughter Tanya—off to the deep rear, somewhere in the Urals . . . just for two weeks, the mothers reassured their children—and themselves.

  Evacuation from Leningrad had been on-again off-again. For the most part it involved children, first sent to the nearby countryside and then re-evacuated to the Urals and other distant areas. To organize the exodus, a special department had been created by the Leningrad Soviet. Up to the eleventh of August it sent out of Leningrad 467,648 persons.2 But that figure had been largely nullified by the inward flow of refugees from the Baltic states. On August 10 it was decided to send another 400,000 women and children out of the city. The figure was upped to 700,000 only four days later. In reality, nothing like these numbers were evacuated. When the circle closed, 216,000 persons had been processed but not evacuated. The railroads were not able to handle the volume. They were being heavily bombed. For instance, on August 15 105 German bombers attacked the Chudovo railroad station, and on August 18 they damaged the Volkhov River bridge on the Leningrad-Moscow line, tying up traffic.

  “With catastrophic lateness,” one witness noted, “we attempted to send out of the city women and children. We collected them, put them on cars and moved them six or seven miles from Sortirovochnaya Station to Ry-batskoye or somewhere else where they stayed on the tracks, eight- or ten-train echelons. They waited three days, five days, a week, expecting to be sent on any minute, unable to communicate with their families, who thought they had long since gone. Most of them had no money, and the food for their trip was eaten on the spot.”

  Until the last moment most Leningraders considered it bad form, almost cowardice, to leave. For this the city was soon to pay dearly. The responsibility here, as in so many areas, lay directly with the Party organization. For it was the Party bosses, from Zhdanov on down to the shop stewards, who encouraged people not to leave and excoriated those (except for women and children) who sought to get out.

  Along with the children evacuated from Leningrad went large quantities of food to sustain them in the remote areas of the Urals, Central Asia and the Volga. Exactly how much food was shipped from Leningrad is not known, but on one day, August 7, Leningrad shipped 30 tons of sugar, 11 tons of butter and quantities of flour and cereals to the Kirov Oblast.

  The problem of maintaining production, especially of war necessities, grew difficult. Factories were being removed from the city—if slowly—in line with orders issued by the State Defense Committee as early as July 11. By August 1 the Nevsky machine-building plant had been loaded onto 180 freight cars and sent to Sverdlovsk, the Kirov machine plant3 had sent out 81 cars of equipment to Barnaul, and the Russian diesel plant had been moved on 70 cars to Gorky. There was considerable hesitation about evacuating big plants like the Kirov steel and the Izhorsk works. But in August about 3,000 Kirov workers and some equipment were sent to Chelyabinsk. Some Izhorsk equipment was also moved out. There was enormous confusion. As late as 1943 the director of the big Zhdanov plant was still trying to get his equipment assembled. Part of the machinery had been shipped to Tashkent and the rest to the Urals. By August 27 some 59,280 cars of machinery had been shipped, including 56,000 electric motors, 22 boiler assemblies and 23 hydroturbines. By September 1 nearly 100 plants had been evacuated in whole or in part.

  Some plants took raw materials and supplies along with them. On July 29 this was categorically forbidden for iron, steel and metals. About a week later all Leningrad plants were put on fuel quotas and work was begun to equip large boilers, such as those at Power Station No. 5, the Kirov factory and others, to burn peat and wood.

  The task of fulfilling high-priority orders of the State Defense Committee, such as a directive to the Kirov plant to begin serial production of field guns, became harder and harder. The order was subcontracted to thirty-eight separate factories but, even so, in July only 133 guns were turned out.

  Another high-priority order was for rocket shells for the famous Russian secret weapon, the Katyusha, an eight- and twelve-barreled rocket gun. This work had to be subcontracted to seventeen factories, and not until August 27 were the first shells produced.

  The Germans plunged ahead with deadly vigor. Their forward units had begun to break into the areas of Leningrad’s exurbia—if a later concept may be applied to Leningrad—the regions where many people had summer villas or commuting homes.

  Zhdanov summoned to Smolny August 16 what was called in Party circles a “narrow aktiv”—that is, a meeting not of the full active membership of the higher Party ranks but of key people: secretaries of the Party districts, the raions or counties and wards of the city and its environs, the chairmen of the governmental units, directors of big factories, the backbone of the Leningrad Party. The time had come for frank talk. Already there were grumbling and concern in the factories. Workers could not understand why the Red Army retreated, retreated, retreated. Nor were they reassured by the fact that rumor after rumor of bad news, the fall of cities and further withdrawals was confirmed days later by the official communiqués. Zhdanov talked bluntly. He said all must be prepared for a serious worsening of the situation.

  “We must expect at any moment,” he said, “mass air attacks upon areas of the city. We must immediately inspect and bring to full strength all ranks of the ARP, the fire-fighting and the first-aid commands.”

  Peter S. Popkov, Mayor of Leningrad, reported that about 400,000 persons had been evacuated from Leningrad, leaving some three million in the city. Popkov was an extremely able, energetic man. He spent little time at Smolny and usually was to be found at factories, power stations or other industrial sites, lending a hand with production problems. He was hot-tempered and nervous and not always able to maintain a calm exterior. He reported there were only five thousand air-raid shelters and that they would not accommodate more than one-third of the populace. New air-raid shelters must be built immediately.

  A. K. Kozlovsky, a Party worker at the great Northern Cable plant, attended the meeting. He jotted his impressions in his diary:

  Today I was at the narrow aktiv. Report by Marshal Voroshilov. Then Comrade Zhdanov spoke. In the most open and direct manner he laid out the situation of th
e Leningrad front. The situation is far from jolly. . . .

  But the Red Army will not permit the enemy to break into the city. Today we begin to form new workers units on the factory principle. Tne city will be surrounded by a belt of forts.

  Bychevsky came away from the meeting grim and determined. “We left this meeting filled with thought about the urgent matters which must be done immediately, this very night, tomorrow,” he recalled. “The streets seemed more tense than ever. The whistle of a militiaman invisible in the blackout seemed particularly sharp. From somewhere sounded a single shot.”

  Well the streets might seem more tense. The Germans were broadcasting by radio and leaflet to the Leningrad area that only Vasilevsky Island was still holding out and that Kronstadt “is burning.” SS and police units for “maintaining order” in Leningrad had been designated. Special passes in the name of the “Commandant of Leningrad” had been printed for cars entering Leningrad. Leaflets were dropped over Leningrad saying: “If you think that Leningrad can be defended, you are mistaken. If you oppose the German troops, you will perish in the wreckage of Leningrad under the hurricane of German bombs and shells. We will level Leningrad to the earth and destroy Kronstadt to the water line.”

  “Only hours remain before the fall of Leningrad, the stronghold of the Soviets on the Baltic Sea,” the Berlin radio announced.

  The deadly seriousness of it all was apparent to everyone. On August 20 Zhdanov and Voroshilov set up a special Leningrad City Council of Defense, headed by General A. I. Subbotin, head of the People’s Volunteers. It included Party Secretary Kuznetsov, Party Secretary Ya. F. Kapustin, Mayor Popkov, and L. M. Antyufeyev, member of the Military Council of the People’s Volunteers. The Defense Staff was to comprise Subbotin, Colonel Antonov as Chief of Staff, and Antyufeyev as Military Commissar. Its task was to direct block-by-block defense of the city. Under the Council were created all-powerful troikas—three-member directorates—in each region of the city. The troika consisted of the Party secretary, the local city executive chairman, the local NKVD commandant. The area Volunteer Military Command was attachéd to the troika. In each factory a small troika was named, chargéd with defense of the plant. Each district was divided into sectors, each sector into subsectors. One hundred fifty workers battalions of 600 men, women and teen-agers were to defend the sectors; 77 of the battalions were to be mobilized before nightfall. They were to be armed with rifles, shotguns, pistols, submachine guns, Molotov cocktails, sabers, daggers, pikes. In the neighborhoods street barricades, fire points, machine-gun nests and antitank traps began to be set up. In parks and open fields machine-gun posts were erected to protect against German parachutists. Heavy posts were fixed into the ground to wreck planes or gliders attempting to land. The fortified system was to be completed within four or five days.

  Zhdanov called to Smolny a full party aktiv on August 20. It was the second of the war. No invitation tickets were issued. Word of the meeting was spread from Party cell to Party cell. Only the participants knew the place and time. The meeting was held in Lepny Hall. There were no formalities, no election of a presidium, no reports. The participants were red-eyed, gaunt-faced, exhausted and openly alarmed. They carried their side arms into the meeting. Both Zhdanov and Voroshilov, pistols in holsters, spoke—Voroshilov first, with a map and pointer. He showed mile by mile the line defending the city, the new breakthrough points (Gatchina was closest). He warned that the Germans were preparing a savage attack but promised that “Leningrad will become its grave.”

  Zhdanov spoke slowly, solemnly.

  “We have to teach people in the shortest possible time the main and most important methods of combat: shooting, throwing grenades, street fighting, digging trenches, crawling. . . .

  “The enemy is at the gates. It is a question of life or death. Either the working class of Leningrad will be enslaved and its finest flower destroyed, or we must gather all the strength we have, hit back twice as hard and dig Fascism a grave in front of Leningrad.”

  It was a short meeting. There was no time for talk. An order was issued to the troops: “No backward step!”

  The next day a proclamation, signed by Voroshilov, Zhdanov and Popkov, carried the same message to the people. All over the city gigantic posters appeared on the walls: “The enemy is at the gates!”

  At this precise moment—unknown to Leningrad and its leaders—Hitler had squarely joined the issue: Leningrad must first be fought and won. Only after that would the battle of Moscow begin.

  Hitler issued a new directive August 21 decreeing that the principal Nazi objective was not the capture of Moscow but (in the north) the encirclement of Leningrad and junction with the Finns.

  “Not until we have tightly encircled Leningrad, linking up with the Finns and destroyed the Russian Fifth Army [the Leningrad force] shall we have set the stage and can we free the forces for attacking and destroying the Center Army Group Timoshenko [defending Moscow],” Hitler said.

  In Leningrad, security clamped down. When Kochetov and his ever-present friend Mikhalev arrived in their Ford at the Leningrad outskirts on August 22, they were halted by a patrol of the newly created Komendatura. The officer explained that the patrol was designed to prevent the Germans from infiltrating the city in the guise of refugees. “We will not permit any Fifth Column,” the officer said. He also mentioned the problem of deserters.

  While it was true that the Komendatura patrols would halt any organized German units, their chief target was spies, saboteurs, deserters from the Soviet armed forces and “other hostile elements.” No one was permitted into the city without proper papers. Anyone without them was taken into immediate custody. The disorderly flow of refugees into the city was summarily halted. Refugees were to be collected in central gathering points and then, it was hoped, directed to the rear.

  Ilya Glazunov, the little boy of the Red-Russian-versus-White-Russian game, was among those refugees. His parents had delayed until the last moment leaving their place in the country. Now thousands of people swarmed the roads. The children were serious and silent. Each had his own burden. In Ilya’s knapsack was a little porcelain Napoleon. He never could remember why he had saved it except that he’d just got it on his eleventh birthday. German planes roared over the torrent of humanity, again and again. The only shelters were the bomb pits made by earlier strafing runs. The Glazunovs managed to board one of the last trains for Leningrad. It passed through a “dead zone,” the suburban area cleansed of population where, hour by hour, the German advance guard was expected. Everywhere there were field works and trenches. The passengers talked of nothing but saboteurs and spies, about shooting, about murdered children. Someone said that the train just ahead had been attacked by German planes, almost all the passengers killed. Ilya’s mother, thinking him asleep, quietly asked a neighbor: if she covered him with her body, would that protect against the German bullets? The neighbor thought it wouldn’t. His father smoked his pipe, looked out the window and stared up at the cloudy sky.

  A curfew was imposed within the city. No one was permitted on the street between 10 P.M. and 5 A.M. without a special pass.

  The police were strengthened. The city possessed 36 police divisions, broken into 352 units of 2,341 men. In addition, there were 1,250 police posts in institutions and 80 special observation posts on building roofs.

  New enrollment of workers battalions was undertaken, and by August 28 another 36,658 individuals had been enlisted. In September these formed the cadres for the 5th and 6th People’s Volunteers.

  The new Council for the Defense of the city of Leningrad met August 20, the very day of its formation. Colonel Antonov was ordered to submit by 4 P.M., August 21, a plan for the internal defense of the city.

  Guns, grenades, Molotov cocktails were stocked on streetcar platforms. Guns were mounted on trucks—twenty heavy weapons per sector—for mobile movement from one part of the city to another.

  The city was surveyed for areas where the Germans might drop paratroop
s. Haymarket, Theater Place, Vorovsky, Champs de Mars, Palace Square, the Tauride Palace Gardens, the Volkov Cemetery, the Botanical Gardens and the Smolensk Cemetery were singled out as special danger points.

  Round-the-clock observation posts were established in the rotunda of St. Isaac’s Cathedral (at 330 feet, the tallest building in Leningrad), the roof of the Lenin flour mill, the Troitsky Cathedral and the Red Banner factory.

  The city was sown with dragon’s teeth—great cement blocks to bar the passage of German tanks. Railroad iron was crisscrossed into jungles along the outskirts of the city where the Nazis might break through.

  Some measure of the task thrown upon the backs of Leningrad men—and women, mostly women—is afforded by the statistics: 450 miles of antitank ditches, 18,000 miles of open trenches, 15,000 reinforced-concrete firing points, 22 miles of barricades, 4,600 bomb shelters.

  When Pavel Luknitsky returned to Leningrad from the Karelian front August 14, the city at first glance seemed not to have changed too much. There were crowds at the stations, trying to get aboard trains leaving the city. Few buses were running, and he noticed how empty the shelves were in the grocery stores.

  But within ten days he noted in his diary: “How quickly has the Leningrad situation changed in the last 10 days!”

  “Will we drive the enemy from Leningrad?” he asked himself. “Will they fall back in panic, pursued and attacked by our troops? Or ... I don’t want to think about the alternative. . . .”

  Rumors ran through the city: Kingisepp had been recaptured. . . . Narva had been retaken.. . . Also Smolensk and Staraya Russa . . .

  “Even if one of these rumors is correct, the situation is better,” Luknitsky wrote. Unfortunately, none was true.