by Anna Reid
They lived across the landing from us, on the same staircase of number 11 Nevsky Prospekt . . .
There were three children, two boys and a three-year-old girl. The two older ones, twelve and sixteen years old, sometimes used to come round. I took German lessons from their mother and aunt, such beautiful, elegant, intelligent women. The boys’ mother was especially kind, as well as highly intellectual. The elder son seemed to have inherited all his mother’s talents, and those of his father too, an engineer who spoke several European languages. I can say with certainty that the country lost a future scholar when it lost this young man.
More precisely, it lost them all. This is how it happened:
In 1938 they arrested the father
In 1941 they likewise arrested the mother
In 1944 she was shot.
The sons were left orphans with nothing whatsoever: all their possessions were confiscated. As a consequence, the older son died from starvation, since they had nothing to trade for bread. The younger son remained with his aunt and her little daughter. They were living shadows: a woman dying from starvation and two dystrophic [emaciated] children. In this condition they were deported from Leningrad – over the ice of Lake Ladoga.
During the journey the aunt died and the two surviving children were separated, never to meet again. Thus perished a family, as the neighbour drily noted ‘during the last war with the Germans, but not, strictly speaking, at the hands of the Germans’.15
Also deported or arrested in large numbers (71,112 up to October 1942, according to security service documents) were ‘socially alien’ and ‘criminal-felonious’ elements among the general population. In practice this meant the same sorts of people targeted during the 1936–8 purges: members of the old bourgeoisie (‘de-classed elements’), peasants (‘former kulaks’), ethnic minorities (‘nationalists’), churchgoers (‘sectarians’), the wives and children of earlier repression victims (‘relatives of enemies of the people’), and anyone with foreign connections or knowledge of a foreign language (‘spy-traitors’). As usual it could be fatal simply to air a grumble or state the obvious – the Soviet Union’s first execution for ‘spreading defeatist rumours’ was recorded in Leningrad at the beginning of July. Hundreds of ordinary people were arrested for complaining about their working hours, predicting a bad harvest, or passing on news of the bombing of Kiev and Smolensk.16
One of the most notable Leningraders to vanish at this time was the absurdist writer Daniil Yuvachov, better known by his pen-name Daniil Kharms. A relic of the avant-garde 1920s, he cultivated a range of eccentricities, studying the occult, drinking nothing but milk and parading the neighbourhood around his Mayakovsky Street flat in a deerstalker, shooting jacket, plus-fours, saucer-sized pocket watch and checked socks. His scraps of prose and dialogue – unpublished until the late 1980s – capture the drabness and mad bureaucratic violence of his times with nightmare black humour. In one, a man dreams again and again of a policeman hiding in the bushes, and gets thinner and thinner until a sanitary inspector orders him to be folded up and thrown out with the rubbish. In another, inquisitive old women lean out of a window, tumbling one after another to the ground. In a third, friends quarrel over whether or not the number seven comes before the number eight, until distracted by a child who ‘fortunately’ falls off a park bench and breaks its jaw. Kharms was arrested in August and sent to the psychiatric wing of the Kresty prison, where he died, of unknown causes, two months later. Why was he picked out? ‘Perhaps’, as the siege historian Harrison Salisbury put it, just because he ‘wore a funny hat.’
The volunteerism of the first few days of the war swiftly became mandatory. On Friday 27 June – before the rest of the Soviet Union17 – the Leningrad city soviet issued an order mobilising all able-bodied men between the ages of sixteen and fifty, and all women, except for those caring for young children, aged between sixteen and forty-five, for civil defence work. Most were sent to the countryside to dig anti-tank ditches; the rest were put to work in the city digging air-raid shelters, camouflaging public buildings (the entire Smolniy was draped in netting, and amateur mountain climbers painted the Admiralty’s gilded spire grey), and manning new fire-fighting, bomb-disposal and first-aid teams, as well as replacing factory workers drafted into the army. Much of the responsibility for making all this happen fell on the ubiquitous, disliked upravdomy, or apartment block managers, who were given the power to assign civil defence duties as well as to check residence permits and report on draft dodgers.18
For children, all this novel activity was rather fun. Yuri Ryabinkin helped build bomb shelters near the Kazan cathedral – ‘now I have blisters and splinters on both hands’, he wrote proudly – loaded sand – ‘the boys modelled Hitler’s ugly mug out of sand and started whacking it with spades’ – played pool and more chess at the Pioneer Palace and read David Copperfield.19 Little Igor Kruglyakov, finding himself left to his own devices, went out exploring – to the Tavrichesky Gardens, where silver barrage balloons swum like great whales above the gravel paths, and to the Suvorov Museum, whose janitor let him on to the roof to look at his racing pigeons. Blackouts – not very effective in the short, light summer nights – were introduced on 27 June, and phosphorescent badges, shaped like fireflies and roses, issued to children so as to prevent accidents. Attics were filled with sand and painted with flame-retardant limewash, and window glass pasted over with strips of paper or gauze, so as to reduce splintering. Applying the strips, wrote Lidiya Ginzburg, ‘had a soothing effect, distracting people from the emptiness of merely waiting. But there was something poignant and strange about them too, reminiscent of a sparkling surgical ward, where there were as yet no wounded, but soon would be.’ To others the strips looked light and decorative, like garden trellising or the carved window frames of prosperous peasant cabins. Some designs were imaginative – the inhabitants of a building on the Fontanka did theirs in the shape of palm trees, with monkeys sitting underneath – but the commonest pattern was two simple diagonals, and the resulting white St Andrew’s Cross became a visual leitmotif of the siege.
Dmitri Likhachev, exempted from call-up for medical reasons, did military training alongside his colleagues from Pushkin House.
We ‘white-ticketers’ were enlisted into the Institute self-defence detachments, issued with double-barrelled shotguns and drilled in front of the History Faculty building. I remember B. P. Gorodetsky and V. V. Gippius among the marchers. The latter walked in comical fashion on his toes, leaning his whole body forward. Our instructor laughed silently along with everyone else . . .
Far-sightedly, Likhachev also stocked up on food, insisting that his family claim their whole, initially generous, bread ration, and dry slices on a sunny windowsill until they had enough to fill a pillowcase, which they hung on a wall out of reach of mice. He also insisted that they buy everything they could from the rapidly emptying shops, whose windows were now blocked with double screens of earth-filled planking. Later, he was to wish that they had bought more.
In winter, lying in bed, I thought of one thing until my head hurt: there, on the shelves in the shops, there had been canned fish. Why hadn’t I bought it? Why had I bought only eleven jars of cod-liver oil, and not gone to the chemist’s a fifth time to get another three? Why hadn’t I bought a few vitamin C and glucose tablets? These ‘whys’ were terribly tormenting. I thought of every uneaten bowl of soup, every crust of bread thrown away, every potato peeling, with as much remorse and despair as if I’d been the murderer of my own children. But all the same, we did as much as we could, and believed none of the reassuring announcements on the radio.20
Georgi Knyazev, director of the Academy of Sciences archive, was confined to a wheelchair by paralysis of the legs. Each day he pushed himself along the same 800-metre stretch of the Vasilyevsky Island embankment, from the bronze-plaqued ‘Academicians’ Building’ where he lived, past a pair of sphinxes imported from Luxor by Nicholas I, the gabled Menshikov Palace and lime tree-filled Rum
yantsev Square to the portico of the Academy. On the opposite bank spread the classic Petersburg panorama: to the left, beyond Palace Bridge, the rococo hulks of the Hermitage and Winter Palace; just visible behind them, the Palace Square angel and topmost candy-swirl of the Cathedral of Our Saviour of the Spilled Blood; ahead, the Admiralty building with its needle spire; to the right, the egg-shaped dome of St Isaac’s and Falconet’s famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great – the ‘Bronze Horseman’ – rearing from its granite boulder. This stretch of pavement, this view, was what Knyazev called his ‘small radius’, the narrow aperture through which he was to observe the whole of the siege. Prosy and conventional (his diary is addressed, with unintentional irony, to ‘you, my distant friend, member of the future Communist society, to whom all war will be as inherently loathsome as cannibalism is to us’21), he spent the first days of the war listening to the radio (‘The peoples of Europe must surely rise in rebellion!’) sorting out a first-aid kit (‘for use in the event of burns or wounds’), and attempting to energise his staff, who showed a tendency to ‘guard the sofa in the President’s office’ instead of the archive’s depository. On 2 July he visited the archive administration headquarters, in the old Senate Building:
On the staircase which once heard the rap of Guards Officer Lermontov’s sabre . . . there now hangs a length of rail on a thick cord, and next to it a metal rod – a beater. This is for use in the event of a gas alarm. On the upper landing it was dark, although blue lamps were burning. Walking along the corridor, which was in almost total darkness, I felt as though I were in a Meyerhold production.
The IRLI [Institute of Russian Literature] repository was a dreadful sight. I hardly recognised the workrooms. Everything was in chaos . . . Behind a statue of Aleksandr Vsevolovsky stood two large barrels of water, one of which was already leaking. There were boxes of sand and spades all over the place, and a fire hose stretched along the corridor. Outside the Pushkin room stood storage boxes, some empty, some full. I had to do them justice – Pushkin’s manuscripts were packed perfectly . . . But there was a lot of fuss and agitation. Right next to the boxes, a staff member was dictating an article on fascism to a typist. Someone else was writing out a list of what had to be packed . . . Everywhere, there were crowds of people carrying sandbags.
Yelena Skryabina decided to escape the war – and reduce her chances of arrest – by renting a dacha (their price had plummeted) near Pushkin, the town, formerly Tsarskoye Selo or ‘Royal Village’, that had grown up around the tsars’ summer palaces. There she and her children spent their time wandering in the sunshine round the folly-dotted Catherine Palace park. ‘Blue sky, blue lake, and the green frame of the shore. Peaceful. No voices audible. No one strolling the paths. Only somewhere, far away, the silvery walls of the palaces sparkling through the greenery.’22 On weekly visits back to the city, though, it was impossible to shut out reality. She worried about gas attacks (unnecessarily as it turned out; gas masks were issued but never had to be used), and about famine, ‘because all those newspaper reassurances about our massive food supplies are barefaced lies’. Her neighbour Kurakina whispered of the beatings her newly returned but now half-deaf and fearful husband had endured in camp; up in the cloudless sky high-flying planes left vapour trails, a sinister novelty to Leningraders, who thought them some sort of targeting device.
Not until 3 July, eleven days after the invasion, did Stalin make his first wartime broadcast. Unpolished but immediate – the rim of the glass clicking against his teeth as he took sips of water – it was, in the words of the BBC’s Moscow correspondent Alexander Werth, ‘a great pull-yourselves-together speech, a blood-sweat-and-tears speech, with Churchill’s post-Dunkirk speech its only parallel’.23 Opening with novel, almost beseeching informality – ‘Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters! I appeal to you, my friends!’ – it called the nation to total war in the tradition of the struggle against Napoleon. Production was to go into overdrive, and ‘whiners, cowards, deserters and panic-mongers’ were to be put in front of military tribunals. Not a ‘single railway truck, not a pound of bread nor pint of oil’ was to be left in the path of the fascist enslavers’ advance, and behind their lines partisans were to blow up roads, bridges and telephone wires and set fire to forests, stores and road convoys. ‘Intolerable conditions’ were to be created for ‘the enemy and his accomplices’, who were to be ‘persecuted and destroyed at every step’. ‘All the strength of the people’, Stalin rounded off with sledgehammer emphasis, ‘must be used to smash the enemy. Onward to Victory!’
The speech had a steadying effect, in Leningrad as elsewhere. In Moscow’s cinemas, Werth remembered, audiences broke into frantic cheering whenever Stalin appeared on a newsreel, ‘which, in the dark, people presumably wouldn’t do unless they felt like it’.24 Though in reality Stalin had grossly understated the success of Barbarossa, claiming heavy German losses, Russians now felt that they had heard the worst, and stood on firm ground. The seventy-year-old watercolourist Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva (who had studied under Repin, Bakst and Whistler, and seen out three tsars) listened with her maid Nyusha in their flat near Finland Station on Leningrad’s Vyborg Side. ‘Today’, she wrote in her diary, ‘I listened, with heartfelt anxiety, to the wise words of Comrade Stalin. His words pour feelings of calm, hope and cheer into the soul.’25
She would have been less reassured if she had known how far the Germans had really got. For the Soviet Union, the first eleven days of the war were devastating. Arrayed against it was the largest invasion force the world had ever seen: four million German and Axis troops, 3,350 tanks, 7,000 field guns, over 2,000 aircraft and 600,000 horses. In the north in particular, the Red Army was heavily outnumbered, with 370,000 troops compared to the Wehrmacht’s 655,000. (Numbers of guns, tanks and combat aircraft were roughly similar.26) The Germans were also better led and organised. Army Group North – one of three that attacked all along the Soviet–German border – was led by Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, the sixty-five-year-old career soldier who had led the breaking of the Maginot Line. Under him, in command of the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies, came General Ernst Busch and General Georg von Küchler, fresh from victory in France. The Army Group’s armoured spearhead was Panzer Group Four, commanded by General Erich Hoepner, with under him Colonel Generals Hans Reinhardt and Erich von Manstein, both among Hitler’s most brilliant tank commanders. The Red Army’s Northwestern Army Group, in contrast, had lost its leadership to Stalin’s purges and was in the midst of traumatised reorganisation and redeployment. The bulk of its forces were understrength, and some had not even been issued with live ammunition. Its defences were also physically inadequate: by June 1941 the army had largely abandoned its bunkers along the old, pre-1939 frontier – the so-called ‘Stalin Line’ – but was still in the process of constructing fortifications further west.
Most of all, Germany had the advantage of surprise. When Soviet frontier guards woke to the sound of exploding shells in the early hours of 22 June, many had not yet even received Stalin’s reluctant order of less than three hours earlier to go on to full alert. Flabbergasted and afraid to take the initiative, junior officers wired for orders: ‘We are being fired upon!’ ran a typical appeal, ‘What shall we do?’ The air force did not have time to mobilise either: Luftwaffe pilots were astonished to find Soviet aeroplanes lined up, uncamouflaged, on forward airfields, and even those that managed to take off proved easy targets. ‘The Russian was well behind our lines’, wrote a Finnish air ace of one, ‘so I held my fire, though I am not at all sure that I could have brought myself to finish off such a lame duck . . . His inexperienced flying suggested that he could have hardly been more than a duckling.’ In all 1,200 planes were destroyed at sixty-six bases in the first day of the war, three-quarters of them on the ground.27 For the rest of the year the Germans had complete air superiority, and were able to strafe and dive-bomb as much as their resources – still depleted by the Battle of Britain – allowed. The fact that the a
ir raids on Leningrad did not begin until early September was due to delay in repairing airfields that the Luftwaffe had itself earlier bombed, and the city would have been far more badly damaged had it not been for its hundreds of searchlights, anti-aircraft guns and ‘listeners’ – the acoustic devices, shaped like giant gramophone horns, that tracked the approach of what were often the same bomber crews who had blitzed London twelve months earlier.
With numbers, leadership, surprise and air superiority all on its side, Army Group North advanced at astonishing speed. Though Leningraders did not know it, three days into the war von Leeb’s Panzer groups had already overrun most of Lithuania, and the following day they seized a bridgehead across Latvia’s River Dvina, a line the tsarist armies had held for two years in 1915–17. ‘It is unlikely I will ever again experience anything comparable to that impetuous dash’, von Manstein wrote in his (notoriously selective) memoirs; ‘It was the fulfilment of every tank commander’s dream.’ In Lithuania and Latvia, most of whose citizens rejoiced to see the Soviets pushed out, women handed the German cavalrymen bunches of flowers and nationalist militias joined in the fighting and the lynching of Jews.
As the German attack sped forward, the Red Army’s communications broke down. Shouted telephone calls were cut off mid-sentence; staff-cars dodged between smoking villages in search of command posts. Orders, when they arrived at all, bore no relation to reality, telling officers to deploy forces that no longer existed, or to defend points already far in the German rear. Typical was the experience of the 5th Motorised Rifle Regiment. Like other border units, it was not part of the regular army but came within the sprawling security empire of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD. The outbreak of war seems to have taken the regiment completely by surprise. At ten o’clock on the morning of 22 June it was travelling along the road from Vilnius northwards to Riga when it was suddenly dive-bombed by German Stukas. ‘The town of Siauliai burned’, the regiment reported, and ‘the German planes dealt brutally with the refugees and troops moving along the road. From this it became clear that war had begun.’ The regiment took shelter in a wood, where a courier reached it with orders to proceed urgently to Riga, where ‘disturbances’ had broken out. On arrival, the regiment found the city in the grip of a rising by anti-Soviet Latvian partisans, who had set up machine-gun posts in church towers, attics and behind the top-floor windows of the city’s Art Nouveau apartment buildings. Red Army and NKVD headquarters, the offices of the Latvian Communist Party and the railway station were all under attack. Rallying the local garrison, the regiment ‘engaged the fifth columnists in hard fighting. Incoming fire from windows, towers or bell-towers was answered with fire from machine guns and tanks.’ It shot 120 ‘scoundrels seized from amongst the fifth columnists’ out of hand, and also took out reprisals against civilians: ‘Before the corpses of our fallen comrades the personnel of the regiment swore an oath mercilessly to smash the fascist reptiles, and on the same day the bourgeoisie of Riga felt our revenge on its hide.’