Leningrad

by Anna Reid

  Most of all, the Bolsheviks were to be beaten quickly. This was to be a Blitzkrieg, or ‘lightning war’, of swift onward movement led by tanks and motorised infantry. The army should not wait to capture every centre of resistance on its race east, and above all it should not get bogged down in the sort of static, attritional fighting that had lost it the war of 1914–18. In all, the campaign was to take no more than three months; the first few weeks in major battles destroying the Red Army, the rest in mopping-up operations. Once conquered, the whole of European Russia would swiftly be transferred to civilian rule under four new Reichskommissariats, allowing most troops to come home.

  Things didn’t work out that way not only because Hitler was a fantasist, but because he radically misunderstood Soviet society. He vastly overestimated the power of Russian anti-Semitism, and underestimated patriotism and national feeling. He failed – in common with mainstream British and American opinion of the time – to see that most Russians, despite having been terrorised and impoverished over the preceding two decades by their own leadership, would tenaciously resist foreign invasion. ‘Smash in the door!’ he famously declared, ‘and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down!’ The crass slurs – ‘the Slavs are a mass of born slaves’; ‘their bottomless stupidity’; ‘those stupid masses of the East’ – endlessly repeated in his mealtime diatribes were a measure not only of his racism, but of intellectual laziness, of complacency in the face of a vast, fast-changing and secretive country of which he and his advisers knew very little. His misconceptions, ironically, mirrored Soviet ones about Germany: ‘Too high hopes’, one of Hitler’s generals recalled later, ‘were built on the belief that Stalin would be overthrown by his own people if he suffered political defeats. The belief was fostered by the Führer’s political advisors, and we, as soldiers, didn’t know enough about the political side to dispute it.’15

  As the war progressed, rivalry increasingly broke out not only between the multiple, overlapping agencies responsible for the occupied Soviet Union, but between ideologues, intent on their Führer’s grand vision of extermination, and pragmatists (many of them Baltic German by background), who advised something closer to the traditional colonial policy of co-opting ethnic minorities – in particular the Ukrainians – and reversing unpopular Communist measures, such as the closure of churches and collectivisation of land. But even if Hitler had understood the Soviet Union better, it is likely that he would have ignored the pragmatists’ advice. The attack on the Soviet Union had rational justifications: it was to bring Germany agricultural land and oil wells, and eliminate an inimical regime. But it was also about race: a Vernichtungskrieg, a war of extermination. Bolsheviks, Jews, Slavs – they were vermin, brutes, cankers, poison; their very existence anathema to the National Socialist dream. Liquidating or enslaving them was not just a means to territorial domination, but part of its purpose.

  2

  Barbarossa

  On the Sunday night of 22 June, as on every midsummer night, darkness did not fall on Leningrad. The sun slipped below the steel-blue waters of the Gulf of Finland to the west, but the sky above the rooftops remained a luminous pinkish violet, held in suspended animation until the small hours of the morning, when the sun rose again and bathed the city in full, disorienting daylight. At 2 a.m., Yelena Skryabina was woken by the deafening sound of anti-aircraft guns. Believing (wrongly – it was only a drill) that an air raid was in progress, she and her family joined their neighbours in the stairwell of their apartment building:

  Lyubov Nikolayevna Kurakina orated above the din. Her husband, a former Party member, has already served two years on a charge of counter-revolution. Her Communist sympathies were shaken by her husband’s arrest, but last night, under the roar of the anti-aircraft guns, she forgot all her earlier resentment. With conviction she extolled the invincibility of Soviet Russia . . .

  Anastasiya Vladimirovna, our former landlady, sat on a large trunk, smiling sarcastically. She made no attempt to hide her hatred of the Soviet government and sees in this war and eventual German victory our only possible salvation. In many respects I share her views, but that smile irritates me. Two sentiments entered the controversy: the wish to believe that Russia will not be destroyed, and the realization that only war offers any actual possibility that we will be freed from the terror of the regime.1

  Skryabina was not the only Leningrader to have mixed feelings about the German attack. Everywhere, anger at Nazi aggression combined with anger at the government’s evident unpreparedness for war, and among some, like Skryabina’s reckless neighbour, with the feeling that German occupation might be a price worth paying for the end of Bolshevism.

  When Likhachev returned to the city on Monday he found it sombre and quiet. In the university’s Russian Literature department – housed in what had once been the customs house on the eastern point of Vasilyevsky Island, now called ‘Pushkin House’ – people were unusually talkative, though they ‘looked around’ as usual before speaking out: ‘Everyone was surprised that literally days before a very great quantity of grain had been sent to Finland – it had been in the papers . . . A. I. Grushkin talked most, making fantastic suggestions, but all “patriotic”.’ At the Kirov Works informers recorded the reactions of ordinary workers. Speakers at a public meeting were predictably resolute: ‘I cannot find words to describe the unthinkable treachery of the Fascist dogs’, declaimed one. ‘Our duty is to unite around the government and Comrade Stalin, to forget about ourselves and put all our strength into working for the front.’ But in private, people were angry and frightened:

  Comrade Martynov was overheard saying in private conversation: ‘See, we feed Hitler our bread, and now he has turned against us!’ E. P. Batmanova declared that she had heard that Hanko [a Soviet naval base west of Helsinki] has been taken by the Germans. Party members present rebuked her harshly, and explained to other comrades that such conversation is harmful and in the interest of enemy elements.

  The following day ‘canteen director Comrade Solovyov delayed lunch . . . because of problems with transport. Among those waiting the following conversation was overheard: “It’s only the second day of the war, and already there’s no bread. If the war goes on for a year we’ll all die of starvation.” ’2

  Overwhelmingly, though, the public mood in the first few days of the war was one of genuine patriotism. Even before orders for general mobilisation went out on 27 June, queues of would-be volunteers formed outside local Party offices, military recruitment centres and factory headquarters. Altogether, some 100,000 Leningraders volunteered in the first twenty-four hours of the war, well before officialdom had had a chance to call them up.3 By Thursday 26th the Kirov Works was able to report that it had received over nine hundred applications for entry into the works militia and 110 new applications for Party membership. The district recruitment office had received over one thousand requests, from women as well as men, to be sent to the front.4 On the day war was declared eight-year-old Igor Kruglyakov went with his father and uncles to the Karl Bulla photography studio on Nevsky Prospekt, to pose for a family portrait. The next day, he remembers, ‘we went over to the Petrograd Side, to accompany my father to the military commission. I remember that voyenkomat, the courtyard was surrounded by buildings all the way round. There was a little checkpoint and he was quickly registered somehow or other. He went off that same evening.’5

  Over the following few weeks, Party workers organised highly choreographed but nevertheless semi-voluntary drives to raise defence funds. At the Kirov Works, older ‘veterans of labour’ appealed to their colleagues to donate jewellery, money, bonds and other valuables, as well as one or more day’s pay. So many items were donated that factory treasurers soon asked that they be delivered directly to the banks. Refusing, at a public meeting, to accept a Party official’s invitation to forgo pay would have been hard. But as the historian Andrei Dzeniskevich – one of the first to mine Leningrad’s wartime archives in the newly free early 1990s – poi
nts out, only genuine concern could have induced somebody to ‘give up gold earrings or a single silver spoon, the existence of which nobody else knew about’.6

  This wave of patriotic volunteerism also engulfed the city’s intelligentsia, the social group, aside from army officers and senior Party officials, hardest hit by the repressions of the previous five years and thus with the most reason to hate the government. Despite the vast differences of context, the itch for action, among the young at least, was not dissimilar from that which propelled the jingo-fed schoolboys of Edwardian England into the trenches. ‘Hello Irina!’ an eighteen-year-old wrote to his girlfriend that June,

  I am going to witness something extraordinary and significant – I’m off to the front! Do you understand what that means? No you don’t.

  It’s a test of self – of one’s opinions, taste, character. And that’s not a paradox. Perhaps I’ll be able to understand Beethoven’s music better, and the genius of Lermontov and Pushkin, once I’ve been to war . . .

  Well, there’s no time to write. Now I’ve got an advantage over you. I’m going to plunge into the vortex of life, while you’re destined to keep on swotting away at your books. Am I overdoing it about the books? It’s alright; maybe we’ll see each other again one day. I hold your hands and squeeze them tight – Oleg.7

  Older Russians, for whom the Soviet Union was a foreign and hostile country, felt a new identification with their homeland. ‘In the dismay of the first few days’, as the then thirty-nine-year-old literary critic Lidiya Ginzburg later put it, educated Leningraders

  wanted to be rid of loneliness, an egoism which intensified fear. It was an instinctive movement . . . the eternal dream of escape from self; of responsibility, of the supra-personal. It all found absurd expression in an odd feeling of coincidence. The intellectual now wanted for himself the thing that the community wanted from him.

  Startlingly, people trained by necessity to disguise and hypocrisy, to never speaking their minds except to their oldest friends, suddenly found themselves sincerely in tune with the popular, state-approved mood. ‘Those not liable for call-up’, Ginzburg remembered, ‘urgently wanted to do something – go to the hospital, offer their services as an interpreter, write an article for the paper, seemingly without wanting to be paid.’ Officialdom did not always know what to do with them. They ‘fell into a machine totally unadapted to such psychological material. With customary rudeness and mistrust . . . it threw people out of some sections and dragged them into others against their will.’8

  One of the many who identified passionately with her country while loathing its government was Anna Akhmatova. Born in 1889 and brought up in Tsarskoye Selo, a palace town just south of Petersburg, she had won fame before the Revolution as a writer of lyrical, bittersweet love lyrics, travelled round Europe and been sketched – tall, lean and eagle-nosed – by Modigliani. The shadows began to lengthen in the late 1920s, when her ex-husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, was arrested and executed, one of the first prominent artists to fall victim to the Bolsheviks. Through the thirties, as all around friends disappeared into the camps, she turned to lecturing and translation, while continuing secretly to compose her own increasingly profound and wrenching poetry; each new work was committed to memory, then the manuscript burned. In 1938 her twenty-six-year-old son was arrested for the third time in five years and sent to the Gulag, where he remained at the outbreak of war. Despite all this, Akhmatova eagerly took up an invitation to make a patriotic broadcast to the ‘women of Leningrad’, and took her turn standing guard duty outside the Sheremetyev Palace on the Fontanka river, where she lived in a cramped and chaotic ménage à trois with her second ex-husband, the art historian Nikolai Punin, and his new wife and daughter.

  Another writer who wrestled with the distinction between country and regime was the thirty-one-year-old poet Olga Berggolts. Out of fashion today, Berggolts became famous with February Diary, a cycle of vivid and by the standards of the time outspoken poems, written during the siege’s first winter and broadcast early in 1942. At the war’s start she was still unknown, a junior staff member at the city radio station. Fair and delicate, with a gentle, oval face and wide blue eyes, she knew and admired Akhmatova, but was a generation younger and had grown up a believing Communist, during the idealistic decade after the Revolution. Disillusion had not come until 1937, when her ex-husband was arrested (he was later secretly executed) and she was expelled from the Party and from the Writers’ Union. Berggolts’s own turn came eighteen months later, when she was taken to the prison behind the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ headquarters on the Liteiniy, and kicked in the stomach until she suffered a miscarriage. Seven months later she was released – saved, ironically, by the Terror itself, which had just reached the upper levels of Leningrad’s security services, purging her gaolers in the process.

  By the time war broke out two years later, Berggolts had returned to the normal concerns of everyday life – a boozy flirtation with a colleague at the city radio station, hazy thoughts on a possible novel, arrangements for an illegal abortion for her sister. Her diary entry of 22 June reads simply ‘WAR!’, but on that day she also wrote a new, unpublishable poem, which tried to reconcile her fierce disillusionment with Communism as practised under Stalin with her love for her country:

  On that day too I did not forget

  The bitter years of persecution and sorrow.

  But in a blinding flash I understood:

  It didn’t happen to me but to You;

  It was You who found strength and waited.

  No, I have forgotten nothing,

  But even the dead and the victims

  Will rise from the grave at your call;

  We will all rise, and not I alone.

  I love you with a new love

  Bitter, all-forgiving, bright –

  My Motherland with the wreath of thorns

  And the bright rainbow over your head . . .

  I love you – I can do no other –

  And you and I are one again, as before.9

  The men in charge of making sure that public anger at news of the German invasion did not spill into disorder were Zhdanov (who made it back to Leningrad on 26 or 27 June), Petr Popkov, the hot-tempered chairman of the city soviet, and (with the declaration of martial law) Lieutenant General Popov, commander of the Leningrad garrison. Actual fulfilment of the city leadership’s orders rested with the executive committees of the regional, city and fifteen city district soviets. The entire structure took its cues from Moscow: Popov’s Order No. 1 of 27 June, for example, mandating longer working hours, tighter travel restrictions and a curfew, was a verbatim copy of one issued by the Moscow garrison commander two days earlier. ‘It is difficult to avoid the impression’, as one historian puts it, ‘that the Leningrad garrison commander actually copied his order from Pravda.’10

  This machinery, with its overlaps and overdependence on the faraway Kremlin and on Zhdanov’s office in the Smolniy, the gaunt former girls’ school that housed the Leningrad Party headquarters, stayed in place almost until the city was surrounded. The creation on 24 August of a Military Council of the Leningrad Front, bringing together Zhdanov and army group commander Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, streamlined decision-making somewhat, but the problem of overcentralisation remained. Four days earlier Zhdanov had tried to offload some of his mountainous responsibilities by creating a second committee, not including himself, to have charge over the construction of fortifications, weapons production and civilian military training. Stalin immediately telephoned to complain that the new body had been formed without his permission, and insisted that Zhdanov and Voroshilov join it. Zhdanov was thus left with two almost identical committees, the second of which he wound up again ten days later. Fat, asthmatic, balding, his khaki tunic littered with dandruff and cigarette ash, he thereafter made no further attempts to delegate. The saying of the time – that not a volt of electricity was allocated without his consent – was almost literally true. Typical
, among the mass of trivial documents in the archives bearing his signature, is an order that one factory deliver another nine tanks of oxygen.11

  In a crisis, these men’s first instinct was to make arrests. At one o’clock on the morning of the Friday following the invasion, Yelena Skryabina and her husband were woken by the doorbell: ‘Anyone who lives in the Soviet Union knows what the purpose of such an especially long night-time ring is. It is the sound that means a search warrant or an order for arrest. But this time it turned out to be a summons from the draft board.’ Four days later she heard that a colleague had been less lucky: ‘They came at night, searched, found nothing, confiscated nothing, but took her away anyway. All I know is that the head of the institute where we both work is very hostile to her. It could be that the charge is “foreign ties”.’ Having spent longer than she meant to visiting the woman’s family, Skryabina returned home to find her own family convinced that she had been arrested too.12

  The most predictable victims of the new wave of terror that broke over Leningrad on the outbreak of war were the city’s ethnic Germans. Descendants of German-speaking Balts, of the peasant settlers invited to plough the southern steppe by Catherine the Great, or of the numerous Germans who later came to make professional or service careers under the tsars, most had lived in Russia for generations and were indistinguishable from ordinary Russians save for their surnames. (Some tried to evade deportation by changing their names, others by pretending to be Jewish.13) In a procedure already well honed in the Baltics and eastern Poland, they were given twenty-four hours in which to prepare for departure, in overcrowded goods wagons, into what was euphemistically called ‘compulsory evacuation’ to the Arctic, Central Asia, Siberia and the Far East. About 23,000 ethnic Germans and Finns were thus deported in the summer of 1941, and another 35,162 in March 1942, across the ice of Lake Ladoga.14 Among them were the Tribergs, who lived on the Nevsky above what had once been the family business, the well-known ‘Aleksandr’ shoe shop. ‘They were just a family’, a neighbour remembered sixty years later: