by Anna Reid
Yesterday near the market a little old woman who looked like a flounder dressed in a mackintosh grabbed me:
‘Did you see? A spy for sure!’ she shouted, waving her short little arm after some man.
‘What?’
‘His trousers and jacket were different colours.’
I couldn’t help but laugh.
‘And his moustache looked as though it was stuck on.’ Her close-set angry eyes bored into me.
‘Excuse me . . .’ I tore myself away. Before pushing off, she trailed me for several steps along the pavement.
But . . . even to me many people seem suspicious, types it would be worth keeping an eye on.6
Though the mania continued well into the autumn, and the stories of raketniki seem to have been believed even by shrewd observers – like, for example, the Anglo-Russian BBC correspondent Alexander Werth – there is not a single reliable instance of a genuine foreign spy (as opposed to local sympathiser) ever having been discovered in the city.
Four weeks into the invasion the mood in Leningrad was one of disoriented anticipation, of disconnect between near-normality on the streets and the stunning news on the radio. ‘It’s just impossible to believe there’s a war on’, wrote the crippled archivist Georgi Knyazev. ‘Everything’s so calm, if only outwardly.’ The weather continued hot and still, the fluff-covered poplar seeds Russians call pukh drifted along the gutters, and after work office clerks gathered as usual in Rumyantsev Square to play dominoes. Sitting out an air-raid drill in front of the Academicians’ Building one evening, Knyazev watched a team of teenage girls shovelling a pile of sand into a lorry, while small boys in swimming trunks dived into the river off the glossy stone backs of the Luxor sphinxes. An Academician’s wife stood guard duty wearing gloves and a hat. Chatting to the building’s caretaker, Knyazev tried to introduce a ‘mood of cheerfulness and perseverance’, but the man didn’t understand why the war wasn’t working out the way it had in the films. ‘“It’s awful”, he said, “that the fighting is happening on our territory. There’s so much destruction. Why did we surrender the old border defences just like that?” There was nothing I could say in reply. We have very little information. I still don’t know how near, or how far, the Germans are from us. Is Leningrad seriously under threat or not?’ The air, he noticed, carried a faint smell of smoke, from peat bogs deliberately set on fire so as to confuse enemy aviation.7
Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, the elderly artist who had been so reassured by Stalin’s broadcast, lived opposite a military hospital. During air-raid drills she watched the wounded being stretchered down into bunkers, and medical students popping through trapdoors up onto the hospital roof. ‘Still not a single bomb has fallen on Leningrad’, she wrote on 21 July,
though the sirens go off often. Last night there were air-raid warnings at 12.30 and again at 5.30 a.m., I woke up and the anti-aircraft guns were firing so loudly that I couldn’t go to sleep again. I got dressed, went out into the courtyard and sat on a bench . . . It was a cloudless morning and though the sun hadn’t yet reached the buildings, it shone brightly on the barrage balloons scattered across the sky. They swam in the gentle blue ether like silver ships. One couldn’t see their cables; it looked as though they were floating free.8
Though most public parks were closed for the excavation of air-raid shelters, she had permission to enter the Botanical Gardens:
The gardens were still in order, but not as carefully tended as usual. I got a great deal of pleasure from the wonderful hydrangeas; they grew in big urns in bunches of white, pink and pale blue, great explosions of unbelievable loveliness. Not a soul was there. The sun shone on the grass, and through the leaves of the trees. The light played across the bench, our dresses, the pages of our books. A cool breeze blew from the river. I was living in moments of quiet calm, and for a split second forgot that we’re at war, that people are dying and cities burning.
One of the reasons the city felt so oddly quiet was that more than fifty thousand Leningraders, mostly women and teenagers, had been sent 100 kilometres to the south-west to build new defences along the so-called ‘Luga Line’. Though the first construction brigades had started work on 29 June, the line was not formally sketched out until 4 July, when Zhukov ordered the Northwestern Army Group to take defensive positions from Narva (on the Baltic coast 120 kilometres to Leningrad’s west) through Luga and Staraya Russa to Borovichi, 250 kilometres to the city’s south-east. The line’s strongest sector, behind the Luga River, was to consist of a fifteen-kilometre-deep series of minefields and anti-tank guns and barriers, with a gap between Luga and Gatchina through which the Red Army could retreat.9 Work was also ordered on two inner rings, one running from Peterhof on the Gulf, through Gatchina to Kolpino, and the second round the city itself, from the commercial port at the Neva’s mouth to the upriver fishing village of Rybatskoye.10
One of the thousands of teenage girls conscripted to work on the Luga Line was Olga Grechina, a seventeen-year-old student at Leningrad University. ‘At the Department of Philology’, she sardonically records in her memoirs,
our idol Professor Gukovsky rousingly addressed a rally, urging us to enlist in the students’ voluntary battalion. Everyone expected Gukovsky himself to enlist too, especially since many of our teachers were applying to be either translators or political workers. Instead, Gukovsky started making his appearance wearing green house slippers and leaning on a cane. Some said he had acute rheumatism; others cautiously hinted that he found calling others to action much pleasanter than acting himself. I really don’t know if he was ill or not, but it was good that he was able to write his Gogol book.11
Though, if anything, anti-Bolshevik (her doctor father had been exiled to a tiny village clinic by the Revolution, and an uncle sent to the Gulag), Grechina employed no such stratagem, and in the third week of July found herself one of a group of female students waiting, amidst crowds of evacuees, at Moscow Station for a train to the Luga Line:
There were worrying reports of strafing and bombing coming from the trenches – and especially from around Luga. But we hadn’t been told where we were headed, and when we set off that evening we were cheerful, singing songs so as to distract ourselves from the anxiety inside. When we got off the train at Gatchina it was already dark. We were sent to spend the night in a park next to the Pavlovsk Palace, but never slept since the Germans started bombing a nearby airfield, and around us everything droned and shook. We were made to get up, and told to hide anything white and not to smoke. We started walking fast along a road already full of our units. The soldiers marched quickly and quietly; if one made a sound the others shushed him for being careless. None of us had any idea where we were going or why, which made it all the more frightening. We were all desperate for something to drink, so much so that when the road went through a wood we drank muddy water from the roadside ditches.
In the morning, having marched twenty kilometres, the students reached a village, where they were distributed among local residents, two or three to a house. That afternoon their task was explained to them:
It was to dig anti-tank ditches (1.2m deep) and breastworks (supposedly 1m high). Though our only tools were shovels, axes and stretchers [to carry soil], we set to work enthusiastically. The days were sunny and hot. We worked from 5 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m., with a two- or three-hour rest after lunch. We were well fed but there was no tea, except for what our landlady made us from lime flowers. Physically it was very tough, and after two weeks, trying to lift a stretcher, I suddenly found I couldn’t straighten up again.12
Grechina was lucky only to hurt her back. Yelena Kochina was one of many ditch-diggers strafed by German Stukas:
Our whole laboratory dug anti-tank trenches around Leningrad today. I dug the earth with pleasure (at least this was something practical!) . . . Almost all the people working in the trenches were women. Their coloured headscarves flashed brightly in the sun. It was as if a giant flowerbed girdled the city.
Suddenly the
gleaming wings of an aeroplane blotted out the sky. A machine gun started firing and bullets plunged into the grass not far from me, rustling like small metallic lizards. I stood transfixed, forgetting completely the air-raid drill that I had learned not long before.
‘Run!’ someone shouted, tugging at my sleeve. I looked back. Everyone who had been working in the trenches had run somewhere. I ran too, though I didn’t know where to go or what to do . . . Suddenly I saw a small bridge. I ran towards it. Under it was a deep puddle. For a whole hour we squatted in this puddle, and didn’t do any more work for the rest of the day.13
Yelena Skryabina, hearing of the strafings and worried that her son Dima might be conscripted to dig, thought the effort ‘senseless – a good way to kill people . . . No one is excused – young girls in sundresses and sandals, boys in shorts and sports shirts. They aren’t even allowed home to change their clothes. How much use can they really be? City youths don’t even know how to use a shovel, much less the heavy crowbars that they will need to break up dry clay soil.’14
She was not wrong to be sceptical. Girls dug in bathing suits, with bits of paper stuck to their noses to prevent sunburn. They dropped their heavy shovels during the night-time marches or had to be sent home with hopelessly blistered hands and feet. The peasant women who cooked them kasha and spread out straw for them to sleep on tut-tutted over the ‘little ladies’ from the city; the men overseeing them shouted: ‘You think you’re actresses, that you’ve come to a resort? You’ve come to save the Motherland!’ Their initial enthusiasm quickly wore off: ‘What did he think we were doing – playing croquet?’ one burst out when her professor of Marxism-Leninism, out for a visit, asked if they were tired.15
Thin, patchy and in places overrun before it had even been manned, the Luga Line was nonetheless also where the Wehrmacht met its first, albeit temporary hitch. From Moscow, Zhukov ordered the Northwestern Army Group to occupy the Luga Line on 4 July, and the first divisions took up their positions the same day. On the 10th, with deployments and digging work still under way, Zhukov ordered Voroshilov to launch a counter-attack against Manstein’s 8th Panzer Division, which was in an exposed position having pushed on east after taking Soltsi, just to the west of Lake Ilmen.
By this time, the Blitzkrieg was already being slowed by terrain and climate. Dust ground out engines; bridges were not strong enough to bear the weight of tanks, and turning off the main roads, as one German officer put it, was ‘like leaving the twentieth century for the Middle Ages’. Nor could the Wehrmacht rely on its maps: ‘All supposed main roads were marked in red’, a general remembered, ‘and there seemed to be lots of them, but they proved to be nothing but sandy tracks. Our intelligence was fairly accurate about conditions in Russian-occupied Poland, but badly at fault about those beyond the original Russian frontier.’ Summer thunderstorms turned the dust into mud, passable for tanks but not for the lorries that carried their fuel, supplies and auxiliary troops. ‘An hour or two’s rain reduced the panzer forces to stagnation. It was an extraordinary sight, with groups of tanks and transports strung out over a hundred mile stretch, all stuck – until the sun came out and the ground dried.’16
Launched in 30° heat on 13 July, the Soviet counter-stroke caught the 8th Panzer Division by surprise, separating it from a motorised infantry division to its left and forcing it into a fierce four-day battle out of encirclement, during which it had to be supplied by air. Though the crisis was over by the 18th, it cost the division 70 of its 150 tanks, and helped force a pause of a vital ten days along the Narva and Luga rivers, while von Leeb and his commanders regrouped and debated what to do next. It was far, however, from the decisive victory that Moscow had wanted. At this point the Leningrad leaders, as they no doubt realised, edged perilously near the fate of General Pavlov of the Western Army Group, who had been arrested in the first week of the war and now awaited execution, together with his subordinates. The Northwestern Army Group’s sacrificial lamb was the head of the Luga Operational Group, General Konstantin Pyadyshev, a respected and experienced specialist on military fortifications and holder of two Orders of the Red Banner. At the time, he simply disappeared; we now know that he was arrested for dereliction of duty by his commanding officer, General Popov, on 23 July, and died in prison two years later. A week later Zhdanov and Voroshilov got away with a summons to Moscow and a carpeting from Stalin for ‘lack of toughness’.17
In Leningrad, the mood was one of rising anxiety. Two questions were beginning to predominate: food – would there be another famine, like the one during the 1920–21 Civil War? – and whether or not to evacuate.
Evacuation of valuables and of defence plant from the city had begun directly on news of the invasion, in expectation not of siege but of air raids. One of the best-prepared institutions was the Hermitage, thanks to the shrewdness of its director, Iosif Orbeli, who had risked accusations of war-mongering by discreetly stockpiling packing materials (among them fifty tonnes of wood shavings, three tons of cotton wadding and sixteen kilometres of oilcloth) months before. He immediately ordered that the museum’s forty most valuable paintings be moved into the steel-lined vaults housing its famous collection of Scythian gold, and the following morning staff and volunteers began the gigantic task of moving, dismantling, crating and cataloguing the whole of its vast and wonderful collection, from winged Babylonian bulls to Faberge’s snowdrops in jade and crystal. ‘We work from morning to late evening’, wrote an art student:
Our legs are throbbing. We take the paintings off the walls . . . There isn’t the usual feeling of awe for the masterpieces, though we deliberately wrap up [Titian’s] Danaë slowly . . . Downstairs the sculptors are packing things into crates. Orbeli is everywhere in the halls . . . The empty Hermitage is like a house after a funeral.18
Wherever possible, paintings were packed flat, but those too large to fit into a railway carriage had to be rolled, including, after much anguished indecision, Rembrandt’s fragile Descent from the Cross. Only one painting – Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son – got a crate to itself, and only another three – two Leonardo Madonnas and Raphael’s exquisite little Madonna Conestabile – were left in their frames. The rest – Giorgiones, Tiepolos, Breughels, Van Dycks, Holbeins, Rubens, Gainsboroughs, Canalettos, Velázquezes, El Grecos – were removed from their stretchers and the empty frames hung back in their usual places on the gallery walls. Houdon’s magnificent sculpture of Voltaire, all beaky nose and twisted smile, was lowered down the three flights of a ceremonial staircase with the help of naval ratings, using wooden runners and a system of blocks and pulleys. The Chertomlyk Vase, a fourth-century bc silver ewer magnificently decorated with doves and horses, had to be filled with tiny pieces of crumbled cork, which two women spent the night patiently feeding through a crack in its lip with teaspoons.
After six days and nights of frantic activity, a first trainload of treasures – about half a million items in more than one thousand crates – left the city on 1 July. Originally intended for the evacuation of machinery from the Kirov defence works, the train was made up of two engines, twenty-two freight wagons, an armoured car for the most valuable items and passenger carriages for guards and Hermitage staff, with flatbeds for anti-aircraft guns at either end. Its destination, known only to a few, was Sverdlovsk in the Urals (formerly Yekaterinburg, the town in which Nicholas II and his family had been assassinated). A second train, containing 700,000 items in 422 crates, left on 20 July. Orbeli’s packing materials had now run out, and an Egyptologist, Militsa Matye, was given charge of finding more. ‘For almost two years’, she marvelled later, ‘some long smooth poles had stood in the corner of my office. I would never have believed that the time would come when I would wrap them round with fabrics from Coptic Egypt and send them to the Urals.’19 Pleading with shops and warehouses for everything from sawdust to egg boxes, she gathered enough to pack another 351 crates, but by the time they were ready the siege ring had almost closed, and they spent the war stacked i
n a gallery on the Winter Palace’s ground floor.
Included on the second Hermitage train was Lomonosov’s mosaic of Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedes at Poltava, which hung (and still hangs) at the top of the main staircase of the Academy of Sciences building on the Vasilyevsky embankment. Knyazev oversaw its departure:
No words can describe what I felt when they took away the Peter the Great mosaic . . . The Hermitage workers carefully removed it from the wall and carried it out to the waiting lorry. I accompanied them in what was, to be honest, an agitated state . . . Initially we discussed secure storage in the city, but now, in view of developments at the front, our only concern is to get as much as possible evacuated. I feel that evacuation with the Hermitage will be safer . . . But my heart aches. I came home quite drained.