Leningrad

by Anna Reid

  A week later it was the turn of the Academy’s most precious manuscripts:

  Altogether we packed thirty boxes. We’ve taken every precaution against damp and dust (rubber sheeting, cellophane, oilcloth, folders and paper), and made an inventory of all the materials, with a separate list for each box. With us all working flat out, it took two weeks. The boxes were wired round and sealed. I followed the lorry as far as the embankment. It was like seeing off someone near and dear – a son, a daughter, a wife . . . I watched for a long time as the lorry slowly (I had asked the driver to go carefully), drove across the Palace Bridge . . . Orphaned, I returned to the Archives.20

  Another 360,000 items – among them a Gutenberg Bible, Pushkin’s letters, Mary Queen of Scots’s prayer book and the world’s second-oldest surviving Greek text of the New Testament – left the Public Library (affectionately known as the ‘Publichka’) on the Nevsky.

  Yelena Skryabina and Yelena Kochina, both working mothers, were among the many torn between evacuating with their children and colleagues, and staying behind with their husbands and elderly parents. ‘I am faced’, wrote Skryabina on 28 June,

  with a serious problem. And that is, that although I could take Dima and Yura with me, I would have to leave my mother and our elderly nanny behind. When I returned home with this news my mother burst into tears . . . Nana is overcome and silent. I am caught between two fires. On the one hand, I understand perfectly well that the children must be saved, and on the other, I pity these helpless old women. How can I leave them at the mercy of fate?

  Like many, she also half believed the soothing propaganda:

  I can’t believe there’ll be famine in Leningrad. We are constantly being told of plentiful food stocks, supposedly enough to last many years. As for the threat of bombing – we are also constantly assured of the capabilities of our high-powered anti-aircraft system . . . If this is even half true, then why try to leave?21

  Similarly reassuring, paradoxically, was the introduction of rationing on 18 July. At 800 grams of bread a day for manual workers, 600 grams for white-collar workers and 400 grams for dependants, plus ample monthly allotments of meat, cereals, butter and sugar, ration levels were generous (‘this is not so bad; one can live on this’, wrote Skryabina22) and even represented an improvement in diet for the poor. On the same day seventy-one new ‘commission shops’ opened, selling off-ration food in unlimited quantity though at high prices. Unaffordable for many, especially given new restrictions on the withdrawal of savings, their lavish window displays nevertheless helped to instil a false sense of security. ‘When you see a shop window full of food’, thought Skryabina, ‘you tend to disbelieve talk about an imminent famine.’ Kochina was less complacent, rushing to buy the four and a half pounds of millet that was all that was left in her local commission store (‘I hate porridge made from millet’), and she would have left for Saratov with her chemistry institute had it not been for her husband’s opposition and her baby daughter’s illness: ‘Lena has diarrhoea and a fever. We’ll have to put the evacuation off for several days. And in general, how does one handle sterile baby bottles on the road?’23 The first of August found Skryabina still out at Pushkin, doing her best to ignore the war and enjoy the deserted palace parks. A niece had come to visit from the city: ‘From her I found out about the rapid German onslaught. They are advancing on Leningrad. We have decided to stay in the country until Luga is captured.’

  The deluge began a week later. On 8 August, in driving rain, Reinhardt’s panzers began an assault on the northern sector of the Luga Line, near Kingisepp. In three days of chaotic fighting they broke across the Luga River in three places, at the cost of 1,600 German casualties. Manstein’s 8th Panzer Division, recovered from the Soltsi setback, cut the Kingisepp–Gatchina railway line on the 12th. A Soviet counter-offensive near Staraya Russa, launched piecemeal from 10 August, failed, with massive losses of men and equipment. ‘We pushed on a little further’, wrote Vasili Churkin, in charge of manoeuvring a gun-carriage and six horses through woods sixty kilometres to Leningrad’s south-west:

  and on reaching the high road saw a huge, panicking crowd, running in total disorder towards Volosovo. On a cart lay an injured soldier, moaning and begging for his wounds to be dressed. Nearby a girl with a medical bag was walking along, but she wouldn’t stop and help him, she was afraid to slow down. Behind you could hear the sound of clanking metal – German tanks. Someone shouted at the girl to help the injured man, and we turned around and quickly made our way back to where we’d left our guns. But guns and men had gone. Coming out of the woods into a clearing we saw Battery no. 4 being dragged along, under fire from tanks . . . A shell exploded right under the legs of the horse pulling the baggage cart. The horse fell and though the cart was carrying all our things, including our coats, we couldn’t get to it because the tanks were already too close, even ahead of us.24

  To the south, Küchler’s Eighteenth Army advanced on the historic city of Novgorod, capital of one of the ninth-century Rus princedoms and gateway to Lake Ilmen. Its fall on 17 August went unmentioned by Sovinform, which waited until the 23rd to report fighting ‘in the Novgorod area’. Altogether, from 10 to 28 August the opposing Soviet 34th Army lost half its personnel, seventy-four out of its eighty-three tanks, 628 of its 748 guns and mortars, 670 trucks and 14,912 horses. To escape the slaughter, large numbers of soldiers either fled or mutilated themselves in hope of being invalided to the rear. Between 16 and 22 August more than four thousand servicemen were seized as suspected deserters while trying to get to Leningrad from the front, and in some medical units, a worried political report noted, up to 50 per cent of the wounded were suspected of self-mutilation. At Evacuation Hospital no. 61, for example, out of a thousand wounded 460 had been shot in the left forearm or left hand.25

  Stalin’s response to the disasters was a furious telegraph to Zhdanov and Voroshilov. If the German armies won more victories around Novgorod, he thundered, they might be able to outflank Leningrad to the east, breaking communications with Moscow and meeting the Finns on the far shore of Lake Ladoga:

  It appears to us that the High Command of the Northwestern Army Group fails to see this mortal danger and therefore takes no special measures to liquidate it. German strength in the area is not great, so all we need to do is throw in three fresh divisions under skilful leadership. Stavka cannot be reconciled to this mood of fatalism, of the impossibility of taking decisive steps, and with arguments that everything’s being done that can be done.26

  Three days later Stalin’s fears came to pass when Chudovo, a town on the main Moscow–Leningrad railway line, was taken. On 22 August Zhdanov begged Stalin for reinforcements. The twenty-two rifle divisions of the Northwestern Army Group, he pointed out, were now fighting along a 400-kilometre front, and seven of them had almost no heavy weapons or radios. Another five divisions he did not include in his calculations, since their ‘remaining fighting capacity’ was ‘low’ – in other words, they had been wiped out. He needed forty-five to fifty fresh battalions, and new weapons for five divisions.27

  On the evening of 25 August Lyuban, thirty kilometres north of Chudovo on the Moscow–Leningrad line, fell too. The following day Stalin telephoned, asking for a report. Voroshilov’s second-in-command, General Popov, took the call, admitting that Lyuban had been abandoned and again requesting more troops – ‘since the ones sent to us don’t cover even half of our losses’; semi-automatic weapons for the infantry – ‘who only have rifles’; and that Leningrad be allowed to keep rather than send to other fronts its own armoured vehicle production. Unwillingly, Stalin agreed:

  We’ve already let you have three days’ worth of production, you can have another three or four days . . . We’ll send you more infantry battalions, but I can’t say how many . . . In a couple of weeks, perhaps, we’ll be able to scrape together two divisions for you. If your people knew how to work to a plan, and had asked us for two or three divisions a fortnight ago, they would be ready for yo
u now. The whole trouble is that you people prefer to live and work like gypsies, from one day to the next, not looking ahead. I demand that you bring some order back to the 48th Army, especially to those divisions whose cowardly officers disappeared the devil knows where from Lyuban yesterday . . . I demand that you clear the Lyuban and Chudovo regions of the enemy at any price and by any means. I entrust you with this personally . . . Tell me briefly, is Klim [Voroshilov] helping, or hindering?

  ‘He’s helping. We’re sincerely grateful,’ Popov prudently replied.28

  On 26 August, also, Stalin finally allowed a retreat by sea from Tallinn, two hundred miles due west of Leningrad and the capital of Estonia. This operation – a ‘kind of Dunkirk, but without the air cover’ as Werth put it – was one of the biggest (and is one of the least remembered) of the military disasters that befell the Soviet Union in the first few months of the war. The man in charge was Admiral Vladimir Tributs, commander-in-chief of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet. Realising early on that the newly established Soviet naval base of Libau (now Liepaja), on the Latvian coast, was vulnerable in case of German attack, he had (bravely) sought and won permission to transfer his largest ships east to Estonia shortly before the war began. It was a prescient move: Libau fell two days into the war, and five days after that his flagship, the 7,000-ton cruiser Kirov, was lucky to escape Riga for Tallinn. To defend Tallinn, Tributs had at his disposal 14,000 sailors, a thousand or so police and the battered remnants, about four thousand-strong, of the frontier troops who had fled there from Riga, among them the 5th Motorised Rifle Regiment, now down to ‘150 bayonets’. Though Tributs conscripted 25,000 Estonian civilians into trench digging, most, like the Latvians, did not want to be ‘defended’. Bursts of gunfire sounded around the city at night, anonymous hands pasted up pro-German flyers and a Russian officer was murdered coming out of a restaurant. The NKVD responded with its usual round of arrests, firing squads and tribunals.

  On 8 August – the same day von Leeb began his attack on the Luga Line – Tallinn was surrounded by land, as the Wehrmacht reached the coast to its east. Tributs suggested two equally unpalatable ways out of the trap. Either he could mass his forces for a breakout eastwards towards still-unoccupied Narva, on the Estonian–Russian border, or he could sail them across the Gulf to the Finnish shore and fight back through Finnish lines to Leningrad. Stalin rejected both proposals: Tallinn was to be held at all costs.

  The Eighteenth Army launched its attack on the evening of 19 August. Shells crashed among the cobbled alleys and steep red-tiled roofs of the old city, and among the clapboard summer houses and canvas bathing machines of Pirita beach. The Kirov’s guns replied, flashing orange from her anchorage in the harbour. The city’s civilians watched and waited behind shuttered shops and barricaded doors. A week into the bombardment Tributs’s second-in-command, Admiral Yuri Panteleyev, described the situation in his journal:

  Beat off strong attack on city during the night. Enemy has changed tactics, infiltrating in small groups . . . All airfields captured by the enemy. Our planes flew off to the east. Fleet and city under bombing and shelling. Lovely Pirita burning . . . Other suburbs also burning. Big fires in the city. Barricades being built at the approaches to the harbour. Smoke everywhere . . . Fire of ships and shore batteries has not slackened. Our command post at Minna Harbour constantly under fire.29

  Later that morning Stalin finally gave permission to evacuate the fleet to Kronshtadt, Russia’s historic island naval base at the head of the Gulf of Finland. While the defenders fell slowly back towards the harbour, setting fire to a power station, grain elevators and warehouses on the way, embarkation began of the Fleet’s civilian entourage – officers’ wives, Party officials, a theatrical troupe and senior Estonian Communists, including the president of the puppet Estonian Republic. The flamboyant war correspondent Vsevelod Vishnevsky, grandstanding at the quayside, insisted that his driver not simply remove his car’s carburettor, but blow up the vehicle with a hand grenade. Loading of troops began the following day, and by the small hours of 28 August nearly 23,000 people and 66,000 tons of munitions had gone aboard a motley collection of 228 vessels, which formed up into four convoys outside the harbour mouth.30

  Through the morning of the 28th the ships lay in the roads, rolling at their anchors in a force seven gale. By noon the wind had eased, and the signal went out to get underway. Stretched out over fifteen miles of sea, the convoys had an unenviable task ahead. Their equivalents at Dunkirk fourteen months earlier had had to cover fifty miles, through waters controlled by the Royal Navy. Tributs’s ships had to travel 220 miles, over the first 150 of which they would be subject to attack by shore batteries, submarines and Finnish torpedo boats. The route was also thick with enemy mines – ‘like dumplings in borscht’. At least a hundred minesweepers, Red Fleet commander Admiral Kuznetsov later calculated, would have been needed to clear a safe path; Tributs had thirty-eight, mostly converted trawlers. Nor, despite a last-minute plea to Zhdanov for air cover, did the fleet have any protection from the Luftwaffe, Zhdanov’s orders having been issued ‘with great delay’.

  Under attack from Junkers 88 dive-bombers from departure, the convoys hit their first major minefield at six o’clock in the evening, off Point Juminda, forty miles east of Tallinn. The first ship to go down, at 6.05 p.m., was Ella, an Estonian merchantman. While rescuing survivors, a tug from the fourth convoy also hit a mine, and sank fifteen minutes later. Ten minutes after that an ice-breaker, the Kristjanis Voldemars, was sunk by bombs. Vironia, carrying civilians, was damaged in the same air attack and taken in tow by the Saturn. Less orderly now, the convoys steamed on eastwards, zigzagging to avoid the Junkers and fire from batteries on the point. The warships were too preoccupied with dodging or disentangling themselves from mines to give much protection to the transports, most of which had no anti-aircraft guns. The minefield’s next victims, as dusk began to fall, were the sweeper Krab, then a submarine, which disappeared beneath the waves in less than a minute, then the Saturn, still towing the Vironia. A gunboat went down at 8.30 p.m., as the sun was setting, and another submarine at 8.48 p.m. Two minutes later a destroyer, the Yakov Sverdlov, took a torpedo aimed at the Kirov and sank in six minutes. ‘Darkness’, as Admiral Kuznetsov describes it,

  set in quickly. The ships steaming in the tail were sharply silhouetted against the background of the fires raging in Tallinn. Erupting out of the sea, huge pillars of flame and black smoke signalled the loss of fighting ships and transport vessels. With nightfall, the hideous roar of Nazi bombers subsided. But this didn’t mean that the crews could relax, because of the danger still threatening from the water. In the darkness it was difficult to see the moored mines, now floating amongst the debris of smashed lifeboats.

  Between 9 and 11 p.m. another nine ships were lost, including the transport Everita, the Luga, carrying three hundred wounded, and four more of the flotilla’s eight destroyers. The Minsk, with Admiral Panteleyev aboard, lay wallowing after a mine exploded in one of her paravanes. The mine layer Skoriy (‘Rapid’) took her in tow, only herself to hit a mine and sink half an hour later. The best remembered casualty was the Vironia, with her gaggle of glamorous civilians. Listing to starboard and pouring smoke, she was already under tow when she hit a mine at 9.45 p.m. Soviet accounts describe dark figures leaping from the burning quarterdeck, the sound of the ‘Internationale’ drifting across the water, and the crack of revolvers as her officers took their own lives in the moments before she slid beneath the waves.

  Shortly before midnight, the surviving ships anchored in the midst of the mines and waited for better visibility. With daylight, they weighed anchor and the carnage resumed. By the end of the afternoon six more ships had been sunk by mines and eight by bombs, and two tugs had been captured by Finnish patrol boats. Among the casualties were the transport Five Year Plan, with three thousand troops aboard, and the patrol ship Sneg (‘Snow’), which had picked up survivors from the Vironia. Four more damaged ships, three of the
m transports, managed to beach themselves on the island of Gogland (Hogland to Swedes, Suursaari to Finns), from which troops (among them the remnants of the 5th Motorised Rifle Regiment) were picked up in small boats and taken to Kronshtadt. The remainder of the flotilla limped into port over the next four days. The whole operation had cost sixty-five vessels and perhaps 14,000 lives.31

  It was the worst disaster in Russian naval history, at least twice as costly as the defeat of the tsarist navy by the Japanese – the first time an Asian power defeated a European one at sea – at Tsu-Shima in 1905. Later, arguments abounded as to what went wrong. Kuznetsov and Panteleyev both supported the decision to defend Tallinn, but thought that civilians should have been evacuated far earlier, blaming Voroshilov for not ordering plans in good time. The convoys would have done better to take to deeper water, running the gauntlet of German submarines but avoiding the shore batteries and most of the minefields. Obviously, they should also have included more minesweepers (‘But where could we have got them?’ asked Kuznetsov). Today’s military historians question the defence of Tallinn itself, which cost about 20,000 soldiers taken prisoner and pinned down only four German divisions, making little difference to the fighting further east.32

  The underlying problem, though, was that of the whole Soviet command: senior officers’ well-founded fear of advocating retreat until it became inevitable, and inevitably disastrous. Instructive is the story of Vyacheslav Kaliteyev, captain of the Kazakhstan, the largest troopship in the flotilla. Knocked unconscious by a bomb that hit the bridge soon after departure on the first morning of the evacuation, he fell into the sea and was lucky to be picked up by a submarine, which took him to Kronshtadt. Meanwhile the Kazakhstan limped on, aflame, under her seven surviving crew, depositing her passengers on a sandspit before arriving at Kronshtadt four days later – the only troopship to do so. Immediately an investigation was launched. Why had Kaliteyev abandoned his ship? Why had he returned ahead of her? Had he deliberately jumped overboard? The crewmen who nursed the Kazakhstan home were rewarded with Orders of the Red Banner in a special communiqué from Stavka. Kaliteyev was executed by firing squad, for ‘cowardice’ and ‘desertion under fire’.33