by Anna Reid
4
The People’s Levy
‘And what makes you think that I want to talk about the war?’ eighty-year-old Ilya Frenklakh, retired to sun and sectarianism in Israel, scolded his interviewer six decades after the war’s end:
So, you want to hear the truth, from a soldier, but who needs it now? . . . If you speak the whole truth about the war, with real honesty and candour, immediately dozens of ‘hurrah-patriots’ start bawling ‘Slander! Libel! Blasphemy! Mockery! He’s throwing mud!’ . . . But political organiser talk – ‘stoutly and heroically, with not much blood, with strong blows, under the leadership of wise and well-prepared officers . . .’ – well, that sort of false, hypocritical language, the arrogant boasting of the semi-official press, always makes me sick.
An apprentice textile worker at the start of the war, Frenklakh learned to fight not with the Red Army, but with the Leningrad Army of the narodnoye opolcheniye, literally translated as ‘People’s Levy’ but more usually given as the ‘People’s Militia’ or ‘People’s Volunteers’. A product, initially, of the wave of popular patriotism that broke over the city on news of the German attack, it turned into the vehicle by which the Leningrad leadership, to very little military purpose, squandered perhaps 70,000 lives in July and August 1941.
The opolcheniye was no Soviet invention. Scratch levies had helped to defeat the Poles in 1612 and the French in 1812. Nor were its members, to start with at least, conscripts. ‘Most of us’, Frenklakh remembered,
passionately dashed off to war as fast as possible . . . When the Military Medical Academy came along and started choosing people for medical training, nobody wanted to join this super-elite institution for one reason only – it would mean missing the first skirmishes with the enemy . . . In my platoon there was a komsorg [a junior Komsomol functionary] from the Agricultural Institute. He had tuberculosis, he actually coughed blood. He was offered a job in the rear, but refused it, and fell in one of the first battles.1
Among the volunteers the Vasilyevsky Island district soviet turned away, according to Party documents, were ‘professors, judges, directors, and some plain invalids – Sergeyev, with half his stomach cut away; Luzhik – on one leg, and so on’.2
The novelist Daniil Alshits, now in his nineties and a grand old man of the Petersburg literary establishment, was one of 209 students at the Leningrad University history faculty who signed up. An orphan of Stalinism – his father had been exiled in the 1930s – he was nonetheless a believing Communist. ‘Very few families’, he explains,
had not suffered under Stalin. And we students never believed in those fabricated trials [the show trials of 1936–7]. But you have to understand that we felt no hostility to Soviet rule. We thought that it was just Stalin overdoing things in eliminating his opponents, that all these reshuffles at the top would soon be over. And everyone understood that Stalin was one thing and the country another.
When his knowledge of German meant that he was split off from his friends to train as an interpreter he was furious. ‘We all wanted to go to the front to fight! Nobody wanted to be left behind!’ In the event, the delay saved his life, since by the time he reached the front in late September the People’s Levy was being wound up and all but thirty of his fellow students were dead.3
What began as a spontaneous, genuinely popular movement rapidly became official and near-compulsory. A Party organiser at the Kirov Works later described the transition. The first people to come to him with a request to be sent to the front, straight after Molotov’s announcement of the German invasion, were five Red Cross girls:
They were the very beginning of the People’s Levy. (Of those five, I know that three were killed near Voronino, and one drowned in the Oredezh.) After them, other applicants began arriving in large numbers. Through the Sunday and Monday there were hundreds every few hours. We were accepting the applications but not sending people anywhere. By the end of Monday everything had reached such dimensions that we finally had to come up with some sort of specific reaction. I went to a member of the city Party Committee, Comrade Verkhoglaz, and asked him ‘What do I do with all these people?’ Other enterprises were in the same situation. The Partkom didn’t answer immediately; it just told me to keep on accepting applications. Some seven or eight days later we were told to form a division of the narodnoye opolcheniye.4
On 27 June Zhdanov had asked Moscow for permission to form an opolcheniye, envisaging that it would form part of the army reserve. The following day he received a reply from Zhukov, approving a plan for seven volunteer divisions to ‘reinforce’ the Northwestern Army Group, and the scheme was officially announced on the 30th. Moscow’s regional government followed suit with its own copycat opolcheniye proposal on 4 July – a feather in Zhdanov’s cap, especially since his arch-rival Beria had strongly opposed the plan, wanting to keep all civilian militias, like the police, under his own NKVD’s control. In a typical bit of one-upmanship, Zhdanov swiftly declared that Leningrad would match the bigger city’s numbers, setting a target (never met) of 270,000 men in fifteen divisions.5
The first three Leningrad opolcheniye divisions, totalling about 31,000 volunteers, were called up from 4 to 18 July. Each was based on a city district, which meant that men from the same factories (and often from the same families) were able to stick together in the same units. The First Division were nicknamed the Kirovtsy, after the Kirov defence works, whose 10,000 or so applicants filled two regiments and three battalions, and the second regiment of the Second Division the Skorokhodovtsy – literally ‘go-quicklies’ – after the Skorokhod footwear manufactury. The remainder of the Second came from the Elektrosila power plant. Altogether about 67,000 factory workers signed up, the majority of them skilled men who had been exempted from the ordinary draft.6 As well as creaming off the best of Leningrad’s industrial workforce, the divisions also contained a great many of its engineers, scientists, artists and students. The Railway Engineering Institute produced 900 men for the opolcheniye, the Mining Institute 960, the Shipbuilding Institute 450, the Electrotechnical Institute 1,200. Seven battalions’ worth signed up from Leningrad University. Not surprisingly, a disproportionate number of the first wave of opolchentsy were also Communists. Of the 97,000 men enrolled up to 6 July, 20,000 belonged to the Party and another 18,000 to its youth wing, the Komsomol.7
As Zhdanov’s inflated targets bit, recruitment became more systematic. District soviets were given quotas, based on numbers of eligible residents, which they in turn parcelled out among local factories. Factory managers, now working flat out to evacuate or to convert to defence production, tried hard to hold on to key personnel, in some cases sending women instead of men. ‘Production’, the Party official in charge of recruitment at the Kirov Works remembered, ‘was stripped bare.’ Managers ‘proposed to the director and the Partkom [factory Party Committee] that there should be a mechanism for deciding who should be allowed to go and who shouldn’t. But of course, a lot of people who shouldn’t have been allowed to go went all the same.’8 A. I. Verkhoglaz, chief of the opolcheniye’s political department and a member of the city Party Committee, scolded his agitators into greater efforts: ‘You can’t wait for patriotism, it has to be taught!’ They were not to ‘hang about in warm, sleepy rooms in headquarters’, but to ‘go to the factories and face people squarely. Tell them “Take up your weapons!”’9
Resisting such appeals was hard, especially after Stalin praised the Moscow and Leningrad opolcheniya in his broadcast of 3 July. ‘One volunteer’, reported the Vasilyevsky Island soviet, ‘a former Party member, applied for exemption, but reappeared an hour later with a request to withdraw his application, because he was so ashamed.’10 Another, pleading illness, was told that his health was ‘of no significance. What is important is the very fact of volunteering, and thereby displaying one’s political attitude.’ Likhachev despised the hypocrisy of his bosses at Pushkin House:
All the men were registered. They were called in turn into the director’s of
fice, where L. A. Plotkin held court with the secretary of the Party organisation, A. I. Perepech. I remember Panchenko emerging pale and shaking: he’d refused. He said that he wouldn’t go as a volunteer, and that he would serve with the regular army . . . He was branded a coward and treated with scorn, but a few weeks later he was called up as he’d said. He fought as a partisan and was killed in the forests somewhere near Kalinin. Plotkin, in contrast, having registered everyone else, obtained exemption on medical grounds. In the winter he escaped Leningrad by plane. A few hours before departure he enrolled a ‘good friend’ of his, an English teacher, on to the Institute staff, and got her on to the plane too.11
Many people, it is clear, did not realise what they were signing up for, assuming that they would be used for civil defence or specialist work, or as a home guard in case the Germans actually entered Leningrad. Extracting oneself from the opolcheniye, however, was even harder than avoiding recruitment into it. Fifty-two actors and musicians, the Party files note, tried to ‘refuse arms’ – presumably thinking that their job should be to entertain the troops – ‘but steps were taken to halt this phenomenon’.12 A Comrade Ninyukov of the Botanical Institute
kept saying that his work was extremely important, and asking to be dismissed. The same happened with Nikulin and Denisov from the Geology Institute. They have been sent back to their workplaces, where measures will be taken. Party member Taitz declared ‘If the regiment can’t use me according to my profession of engineer-metallurgist I don’t want to be in the regiment.’ The liberals from headquarters, instead of giving him the necessary rebuff, let him go back to his factory. And not until 11 July did the zamkom [deputy commissar] of the regimental political department start taking necessary measures.13
Reports on would-be draft dodgers were an excuse for coarse anti-Semitism:
Sverdlin, a volunteer in the 3rd Sapper Battalion of the 2nd Sapper Regiment, a Jew, previously worked in a food shop. He applied to become a volunteer, but suddenly realised that the division was a fighting division and about to be sent to the front. He became distressed, announcing that when he joined the opolcheniye his wife had tried to hang herself, and had only been saved at the last moment. He was dismissed . . . In the artillery Communist Brauman burst into tears because he was afraid to go to the front . . . Komsomol member Peterson wanted to leave the opolcheniye, but things were made clear to him and he was sent to work in the kitchens.14
But such backsliding was rare. Most people either itched to fight, like (Jewish) Frenklakh and Alshits, or found it easier simply to go along with the crowd. ‘It was an unequal choice’, as Lidiya Ginzburg put it, ‘between danger close at hand, certain and familiar (the management’s displeasure), and the outcome of something as yet distant, unclear, and above all incomprehensible.’15
Having created their people’s army, the authorities treated it with deep suspicion. Born of a genuine grass-roots movement rather than by Party diktat, its members showed an unwelcome tendency to organise themselves, and to offer suggestions and criticism. Particularly hard to marshal were the thousands of intelligentsia volunteers. Of the 2,600 men of the 3rd Rifle Regiment of the First Division (recruited from the institute-packed Dzerzhinsky district), about a thousand, the Political Department apprehensively noted, were ‘highly cultured types – professors, scientific workers, writers, engineers’ – who needed to be ‘planted’ with educated officers whom they could respect. Requests to be used according to a specialism – radio engineers asking to become signal officers, mining engineers asking to become sappers – were nonetheless to be treated as ‘manifestations of cowardice’, and the regiment was subsequently stripped of ‘moaners’ and ‘unstable elements’. In both of the first two opolcheniye divisions, volunteers initially chose their company commanders and ‘political leaders’ – the battalion-level entertainments officers-cum-propagandists-cum-informers known as politruki – by informal ballot,16 a perilously democratic practice that was swiftly stamped out on Stavka’s orders. The Political Department’s best efforts, though, could not persuade them to initiate ‘socialist competitions’ with other units, or to adopt military formalities. ‘Here are two examples’, lamented one politruk,
from the Zhdanovsky and Kirovsky regiments. He used to be an ordinary worker and is now an officer. In his unit he has two of his former foremen – and of course, it’s difficult to drop the [familiar] Sasha, Vanya, Petya. Or take the following incident. A commander gives an order and says ‘Repeat it.’ And his subordinate replies ‘Sasha, why do I have to repeat it, do you think I’m stupid?’ . . . We have to force our commanders to be stricter.17
Volunteerism, the Party bosses worried, might also mask treachery. Thirteen ethnic German and Estonian ‘foreigners’ were discovered to have signed up, as had an ex-Trotskyite, a White Finn, and several Spanish and Austrian Communists. All were dismissed from the opolcheniye, and their details passed to the NKVD.18
More practically, what were by 7 July 110,000 volunteers19 had to be transferred to barracks, equipped and taught to fight. In this the authorities failed miserably, as the politruki’s frank reports attest. The First, or ‘Kirov’, Division’s volunteers were called up on 4 July, and sent to improvised barracks in schools, a hospital, a factory hostel and a dormitory of the Conservatoire, where they slept on the floor or on bunks with no mattresses. They arrived, the Political Department complained, straight from work, drunk after the traditional conscription send-off and without proper clothing. They sat listening to political lectures with their shirts off, banged their newly issued rifles on their bedsteads to detach the bayonets, hid quarter-litre bottles of vodka in their gas masks and bought Eskimo lollipops from ice-cream sellers who were allowed to come and go unhindered and might be spies. Worst of all, they were not being trained. Theoretically, volunteers were supposed to have sixteen hours’ training. In practice, they had even less than this, since they had not enough weapons or ammunition to learn with, and almost no instructors (one per 500–600 soldiers, according to one report20).
In practice, no adequate training could possibly have taken place in the time available. On 7 July, after three days in barracks, the men of the Kirov Division marched through the streets, followed by crowds of wives and children, to the Vitebsky railway station, where they entrained for the front. It was a piece of theatre, for a few stops out the army command sent them back again, to pick up basic equipment. Altogether, a volunteer remembered,
we set off for the front three times . . . The first time was on 7 July. The command sent us back because we didn’t have any kit. On 8 July our weapons arrived and were distributed. We set off again, and our uniforms were handed out on the way. Again we were turned back. By the 9th we were finally properly dressed and equipped: everyone with his rifle, and the officers with carbines.
But though the First Division had artillery, machine guns and a few sub-machine guns, it had no anti-aircraft guns, its mortars lacked sights and some of the rifles that had been issued were forty years old. (‘Mine was made in 1895’, one Kirovyets remembered. ‘It was the same age as me.’21) The division finally arrived at its destination – a railway town between Luga and Novgorod – on 11 July, in the middle of an air raid.
Later opolcheniye units were even worse off. The Second Division also had no anti-aircraft guns, no automatic weapons save one machine gun, and such inexperienced gun crews that they had to ‘learn how to use their guns while in battle’. The Third Division, opolcheniye commander Major General Aleksei Subbotin complained to Zhdanov, had half its designated artillery, no armoured shells, no grenades or Molotov cocktails, ‘not a single mortar’, insufficient cable for field telephones, only a handful of cars and motorbikes, and no gun oil for rifles, which meant that they hadn’t been cleaned since being handed out. The third was nonetheless sent to man fortifications near Leningrad on 15 July, the actual day of its call-up.22
The Party saw the volunteers, internal records make clear, as cannon fodder. Meeting with his collea
gues in the Political Department, Verkhoglaz praised their diversity – ‘In our units you can see a professor marching alongside a student, a metalworker and a blast-furnace operator, or an architect doing target-practice alongside a baker’ – but admitted that ‘Since we don’t have much preparation time, they must train while fighting, and fight while training.’ Volunteers were ‘not to be used for manoeuvres, only for defence . . . which is why they need to know how to use grenades and other primitive means of fighting off enemy attacks’.23 The first division to be thrown into battle was the Second, which on arrival at the front on 13 July was immediately ordered to turn back German tank units from a bridgehead across the Luga River south-east of Kingisepp. The First and Third Divisions followed suit a week later, as the Wehrmacht’s motorised divisions spread south along the Luga Line.