The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  Stalin’s suspicions concerning the internal defense plans for Leningrad almost certainly were stimulated by Beria, who seems to have done everything possible to prevent the organization in Leningrad and elsewhere of civilian militia, paramilitary or partisan outfits, insisting that all such functions be kept in the hands of the police.8

  The care with which one author after another uses almost the same language to describe these matters supports the view that the whole complex of Leningrad decisions—the formation of Volunteer units, the organization of local paramilitary forces, the attempt to vest in local Leningrad officials responsibility for internal defense of the city—became in later days part of the pseudo-legal foundation on which the bizarre chargés of the so-called “Leningrad Affair” were, at least in part, based. The men who devoted the last ounce of energy and ability to protecting their city from German conquest were, within a few years, to be executed for fulfilling these very acts.

  At just this time—middle or late August—Stalin widened extraordinarily the powers of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs to maintain “social order.” These powers, as well as other special military weapons placed in the hands of the police for dealing with rumormongering, sowing alarm and panic among the population, were used by Beria and his lieutenants as a basis for accusations of anti-Soviet activity and counterrevolutionary thoughts among the military as well as the civilian population.

  Beria’s interference was so effective that he managed to prevent the setting up of any centrally directed guerrilla movement until late spring 1942. Under the direction of Zhdanov, Leningrad had taken a lead in forming People’s Volunteers and in sending partisans behind the lines. It had gone further than any other Soviet city in creating informal workers battalions.

  Stalin’s dissatisfaction with Leningrad thus was reinforced by Beria, possibly working together with or parallel to Malenkov.

  * * *

  1 The questions about the defense of Tallinn, Ösel and Dagö suggest a meeting toward the end of July. It was not until July 14 that the Supreme Leningrad Command ordered the Eighth Army to prepare to defend Tallinn and the two islands, and not until the end of the month did their situation become really serious. In a 1968 rewrite of his memoirs Kuznetsov puts this meeting in “the last days of June.” (Oktyabr, No. 8, August, 1968, p. 100.) In 1963 he fixed the date as “in July when the enemy was attacking toward Tallinn” (V. M. Kovalchuk, editor, Oborona Leningrada, Leningrad, 1968, p. 237).

  2 Poskrebyshev vanished from public view the day after Stalin’s death March 5, 1953. Outside of one sarcastic reference to him by Khrushchev as Stalin’s “shield-bearer,” his name did not appear in print for several years, and it was generally thought that he had been executed for his role in Stalin’s purges. However, he survived until autumn 1966, according to the evidence of Galina Serebryakova, the Soviet writer, who met him in the Kremlin hospital in 1964. She found him completely callous about Stalin’s crimes, even taking a grim humor in the plight of the victims. She quoted him as saying that “We"—meaning Stalin, Beria and himself—began to use poison to kill purge victims in 1939 or 1940.

  3 General Shtemenko and other writers of memoirs universally ridicule Khrushchev’s contention. In fact, however, Stalin may well, occasionally, have pointed out locations on his globe if a military map was not immediately available. (Shtemenko, p. 117.)

  4 General P. A. Belov had an interview with Stalin November 14, 1941. He had not seen him since 1933. He found him enormously changed. “In eight years,” Belov said, “he seemed to have aged twenty.” Stalin had lost his previous confidence, and his eyes were not steady. Marshal Zhukov spoke sharply to him, as though he, Zhukov, were his superior. Stalin accepted it all as though this were normal. Sometimes, Belov thought, Stalin seemed confused. (P. A. Belov, Za Nami Moskva, Moscow, 1963, p. 43.)

  5 The strain of this system was so intense that many officers broke down and many, their health wrecked, retired prematurely at the end of the war. Often Stalin invited the staff to stay on after reporting and watch a movie, sometimes with a foreign statesman or other guest. This would prolong the evening two or three hours more while urgent orders remained unexecuted in their briefcases, (Shtemenko, op. cit., p. 137.)

  6 Marshal S. S. Biryuzov reported that in this period almost all documents and orders were signed “at the order of the Supreme Command” by Marshal B. M. Shaposhnikov, Chief of Staff. (S. S. Biryuzov, Kogda Gremeli Pushki, Moscow, 1963, p. 247.) After the war began to go in Russia’s favor the orders were signed by the Supreme Commander (Stalin) and the Chief of Staff or his deputy. Lesser orders were signed “by the authority of the Supreme Headquarters.” (Shtemenko, Voyenno-lstoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 9, September, 1965.)

  7 As late as 1964 the official military history of the Leningrad siege glossed over this critical point. It made no mention of the dispute with Stalin nor the naming of the original Council for the Defense of Leningrad on August 20. Instead, it reported the formation of the Council as occurring August 24 and gave its membership as that dictated by Stalin. There was no reference to the August 20 action nor to the dissolution of the Council on August 30. (I. P. Barbashin et aL, Bitva Za Leningrad, 1941–1944, Moscow, 1964. p. 60.)

  8 Panteleimon K. Ponomarenko, who eventually organized the Soviet partisan movement, reported that a commission to set up this movement was approved in July, 1941, with himself, L. Z. Mekhlis and others as members. But the existence of the order was not revealed until near the end of the war. In November, 1941, a central partisan staff was set up under Ponomarenko but was killed by Beria’s interference. On May 30, 1942, the State Defense Committee again ordered the Commission activated, but its activity was sharply limited at Beria’s initiative. Terenti Shtykov, the only Leningrad Party Secretary to survive the murderous “Leningrad Affair” (possibly because he was in eastern Siberia when it occurred in late 1948 and early 1949), flatly blames Beria and hints that the whole question of paramilitary and partisan activity was in some manner related by Beria to the Leningrad Affair. Beria apparently had full responsibility for all underground activities, for he is blamed for destroying the foundations of such units in the purges of 1938-41. (Ponomarenko, Voyenno-lstoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 4, April, 1965, p. 33; Shtykov in Khrabreishiye iz Khrabrykh, Leningrad, 1964, p. 5; VOVSS, p. 108.)

  22 ♦ The Tallinn Disaster

  WEEK BY WEEK THE NAVAL CORRESPONDENT NIKOLAI Mikhailovsky had watched them—the golden people on the bright sands of Pirita where the blue waves of the Baltic gently caressed the clean sweep of beach. They lay there in the blazing sun, growing more and more brown, their eyes invisible behind the dark glasses, white towels about their shoulders, lazily idling on the sand, seldom going near the water. He watched them as they sauntered to the white-and-green-striped bathing machines. He watched as they emerged in light linens and, toward the end of day, took their places at the tables in the boulevard cafés. They had been waiting since June. It was mid-August now, and it did not seem likely that they had much longer to wait, the well-to-do of Tallinn, the bourgeoisie, the secret and not-so-secret sympathizers with the Germans. Day by day they grew more bold, more insolent, more self-confident—or so it seemed to Mikhailovsky. Hardly a day went by without a sumptuous wedding at one of the great churches and a festive procession with flowers and holiday costumes through the central streets of the city. It was as if they deliberately wanted the city to see—"Yes, we are here, we are waiting. Soon that rabble will be gone and once again we will be in chargé.”

  Old Johannes Lauristin, the chairman of Soviet Estonia, a man who had spent half his life in the prisons of pre-Soviet Estonia, better known as Yuhan Madarik, author of two or three novels, mused in his offices in the Old City over the “golden people.”

  “They exist, you know,” he said sadly, then went on to talk of the “patriots,” the workers of the docks and the ports and the factories who were supporting the Soviet forces.

  Tallinn had changed since Mikhailovsky arrived on the fi
rst day of the war. Week by week the tension had grown. “Their” forces, the sympathizers with the Germans, had grown more and more active. From the ninth of July onward the countryside had become so dangerous for Soviet citizens that few ventured out alone. The Germans captured Ainazi July 6 and quickly seized Parnu. There was no real force between Parnu and Tallinn. Had the Germans driven straight up the highway, a distance of less than a hundred miles, they would have captured Tallinn out of hand. The city was seized with panic. The wildest rumors circulated. Enormous stores of oil and munitions were set afire to keep them from “falling into German hands.” The Baltic Fleet Staff boarded the packet Pikker and the Virona and kept steam up. Even the director of the Baltic Fleet newspaper fled along with many other Russians. They were terrified that Estonian nationalists would attack them en route.1

  Hearing the news of the German breakthrough, Admiral Tributs called Moscow: “Who is going to defend Tallinn from the land side? We have no forces.” The Eighth Army, he was told, would protect Tallinn. He got the same answer from Leningrad. The truth was that no plan existed for the land defense of Tallinn. No one ever imagined it would be attacked.

  The Eighth Army had been the answer when the Germans crossed the frontier; when they took Libau; when they took Ventspils; when they crossed the western Dvina; when they captured Riga. Admiral Tributs no longer believed in the Eighth Army. He turned to the Estonian Soviet Government, and they provided 25,000 men and women with spades and picks to throw up three lines of trenches.

  The move saved Tallinn for the moment. But it came almost too late. Admiral Panteleyev went out to meet the makeshift Estonian defense staff —only twelve or fourteen miles outside the city. He got caught in a skirmish between a detachment of Estonian nationalists and a fire truck on which were riding Soviet firemen, armed with rifles. He had a narrow escape.

  On July 9 the Germans landed by plane and parachute two trained units of Estonian guerrillas called Erna-I and Erna-II. The situation grew more tense.

  “We had to be on guard,” Mikhailovsky recalled. “We had to be careful. The Kaitseliitovtsi, the Estonian nationalists, began to raise their heads. In cellars, in storehouses or in holes in the ground they had hidden their guns and just waited for a favorable moment to put them to use.

  “There were places where the local Fascists shot our retreating soldiers in the back and met the Hitlerites with flowers, like liberators.”

  The struggle against traitors, Nazi sympathizers, cowards and panicmon-gers was nip and tuck. Vsevolod Vishnevsky didn’t even want to write about it. Only the stiffest measures—firing squads, military tribunals, summary executions, on the spot—maintained a semblance of order.

  Mikhailovsky shared a room in the Golden Swan Hotel with a prominent Dostoyevsky scholar, Orest V. Tsekhnovitser, one of the most revered men on the faculty of Leningrad University. He had volunteered his services to the Baltic Fleet.

  They walked through the Old City and the spreading expanse of Kadriorg Park, the rambling ensemble of forests, lakes, formal gardens, streams and recreation areas which spread along the Baltic shore in the heart of Tallinn. The park stretched beside the sea for a mile and a half and was three-quarters of a mile wide. Here, facing the embankment, was the monument to the old Russian cruiser, the Rusalkay sunk in the terrible storm of 1893. They visited the little house of Peter the Great, the house in which he lived while he watched his labor crews build the great port of Revel, the port now called Tallinn. They admired the round mirrors, the wide oak bed under a rotting canopy, the mahogany bureau, the high chair with the artistic carving on its back in Peter’s house. They walked silently into the cool, gloomy precincts of the ancient cathedral, Toomkirka, as it was called, six centuries old, the burying place of the great Russian admirals, Krusentern and Greig. An old caretaker told them that Krusentern and his wife occupied the newest graves in the church, only two hundred years old. Some mummies in the vaults were three and four hundred years old.

  The professor occasionally wrote letters back to his wife in Leningrad. Mikhailovsky copied a few lines from one:

  I see how history is being made, and I am happy that I am not on the sidelines in these decisive days. I want to tell you all something more significant. Don’t be worried about me and, in general, not only “me” but “us.” I see around me such heroic dedication, such love for our native land that all this makes me quite another person.

  It is incredibly difficult for us now. But we clearly see the perspective of the struggle. We know that we will win in Europe, that we will get to Berlin and for all time destroy this hated Fascist regime. Victory unquestionably will be ours.

  The spirit, the enthusiasm and the energy of Professor Tsekhnovitser filled Mikhailovsky with confidence.

  Not all the Soviet colony in Tallinn was so solemn. Anatoly Tarasenkov, who had inherited the editorship of the Baltic Fleet paper when its director fled to the rear, lived in a barracks at No. 20 Vaitenberg with a communications company. All they did, Tarasenkov recalled, was dream about girls— and chase them. A very moral political commissar was wild about Selma, an Estonian street girl, whom he picked up on a Kadriorg Park bench. The girl was small, young and very dull. But, observed Tarasenkov, “she was a very erotic girl for the age of seventeen or eighteen.” Another member of the company had a romance with an Estonian nurse named Elsa. Sometimes, Tarasenkov went to the Rom Restaurant with or without feminine company. In the winter to come in starving Leningrad his mind would go back again and again to the cauliflower, the oily borsht, the fat kolbasa and the meat pies at the Rom. In the market there were beautiful flowers—and beautiful flower girls.

  But, as Tarasenkov was to note, “the vacation was soon to end.”

  The aid which the Eighth Army could give to Tallinn was minimal. The fleet organized a scratch force of marines which halted the Germans on the Parnu-Tallinn road in actions around July 30. More troops, including a construction battalion, were sent to cover the Paldiski region, just west of Tallinn, and NKVD detachments were pressed into service. Retreat had carried the Eighth Army considerably east of Tallinn. It was falling back on Narva, where it called for help. The fleet answered by sending in warships from Tallinn and Kronstadt.

  By August 8 the Germans had cut off Tallinn, both east and west, telephone communication with Leningrad was lost, and Admiral Tributs and his associates had begun to consider possible means of getting out of the trap.

  Various proposals were taken up. One called for massing all available forces and attempting to break through the German lines in the direction of Narva. This was the plan ultimately rejected by Stalin August 21. Another variant advanced by N. K. Smirnov, a member of the Military Council of the Baltic Fleet, called for transferring the Tallinn forces to the Finnish shore and fighting through the Finnish-German lines to Leningrad. Both of these proposals required intricate movement of men and ships through heavily mined waters under German gunfire, German observation and German bombing. Both in the end were rejected by the Soviet Supreme Command.

  With the capture of Kunda on the Gulf of Finland, east of Tallinn, on August 8 the port was surrounded. Its narrow streets settled into a gloomy quiet, broken only by the shout of patrols and the quick step of marines. Barricades covered the main approaches.

  A rain of artillery shells plunged down on the city, on the varicolored beach houses, at Pirita, on the fishing villages with their unpainted huts and drying nets.

  In the harbor the 6-inch guns of the cruiser Kirov and the 4.5-inch weapons of the destroyer leader Leningrad began to drop shells on the German positions. From the old harbor watchers saw the orange flash of flame as the great guns trained in on the Nazi targets. First the flash, then... one second . . . two seconds . . . the thunder of the gun and a moment later the dull roar as the shell exploded to the rear.

  The Germans brought up long-range artillery and zeroed in on the warships. On one day, August 23, the Germans dropped more than six hundred shells into the harbor. German planes, hi
gh above the range of Soviet antiaircraft, bombed the fleet.

  Business life in Tallinn dwindled to nothing. No one walked the streets. The Tallinn cabbies vanished. Streetcars halted. The radio loudspeakers fell silent. No newspapers appeared at the kiosks.

  Mikhailovsky took a quick stroll in Kadriorg Park. The red squirrels swore angrily at him. They were hungry. No one came to feed them. The narrow lanes were quiet and empty. Debris piled up in the streets. For days no street cleaners had appeared. Porters with their white aprons, their brooms and dustpans, vanished. In a barbershop window he saw a sign: “Suletud (Closed).” The owners of the shops on Hara Street put down their heavy steel shutters. At the end of the street Mikhailovsky heard a carpenter hammering. He was putting the last nails into a wooden coffin.

  In the comfortable restaurant of the Golden Swan a fat headwaiter with two chins met Mikhailovsky each evening. Now his face grew as stony as that of an Egyptian mummy.

  “What do you want?” the waiter asked.

  “Is it possible to dine?”

  The man in the morning coat smiled sarcastically. “It’s finished, all finished, respected comrade. ...”

  The whistles of the factories were silent, and without them Mikhailovsky felt a great emptiness. It seemed, indeed, that all was finished.

  The defense of the city was placed in the hands of Admiral Tributs August 17.2 The defense force comprised what was optimistically called the 10th Corps. Actually, it represented about 4,000 weary, dispirited men holding a line fifteen or sixteen miles outside the city. From the beginning Major General Nikolayev, Tributs’ deputy, flatly declared that “the forces are completely insufficient.” Many in the fleet harshly criticized Nikolayev, but there was little anyone could have done. A few Tallinn workers were drafted, all the sailors that could be spared from the ships were sent ashore, together with such police and political workers as could be scraped together. Marshal Voroshilov sent in 425 Communists and Young Communists from Leningrad. There were 73 Party workers from the fleet and 100 from the army to stiffen the defense units.