by Anna Reid
I was sitting on a stool in the middle of the ward, reading aloud a story by Gorky. Suddenly the sirens began to wail; the sound of anti-aircraft fire seemed to fill the entire sky, a bomb crashed, the windows rattled.
I sat on my stool, unable to lean back, as there was nothing to lean back against . . . surrounded by windows, and by the wounded – helpless people, all looking at me, who alone was healthy and mobile. I summoned up all my will-power. I let the drone of the aeroplanes go past, and read on, anxious that my voice might shake with fear. When I got home I felt so weak that I had to go and lie down.11
Shelling, many felt, was actually worse than bombing, since bombardments were not preceded by an alarm. From 4 September to the end of the year the Wehrmacht’s heavy artillery pounded Leningrad 272 times, for up to eighteen hours at a stretch, with a total of over 13,000 shells. Worst affected were the factories to the south of the city, including the massive Kirov defence works and Elektrosila power plant, both situated just behind the front at the end of tramline no. 9. To the end of November the Elektrosila’s buildings were hit seventy-three times. Fifty-four thousand residents and the whole or part of twenty-eight factories were moved northwards out of immediate firing range, into buildings emptied by evacuation. The rumour that some shells were filled only with granulated sugar, or held supportive notes from sympathetic German workers, was a soothing invention.
The danger from overhead was not all that occupied Leningraders, of course, for mid-September was also when the city seemed likeliest to fall. Though people could now hear the thump of artillery fire for themselves, most still did not know exactly where the fighting was going on. Sovinform’s reports were as vague as ever: more reliable, the joke went, were the news agencies OBS – ‘Odna Baba Skazala’, or ‘One Gossip Said’, and OMS – ‘One Major Said’. That the front was very close was obvious, both from the shells landing in the streets and from the hundreds of peasant families camping out, together with their livestock, around the railway stations. More would have reached the city centre had the railway administration not been ordered to prevent them from boarding suburban trains.
One source of news was the thousands of civilian volunteers still building defence works in the outskirts of the city, among them seventeen-year-old Olga Grechina. After an unhappy stint bookkeeping in a munitions factory, where she had been bullied for her gentility and innocence (‘You’re like something out of a museum’, her boss told her), she went back to trench-digging, this time in the north-eastern suburbs, near the present-day Piskarevskoye siege memorial. Conditions were much harder than in July, and the mood more sombre:
It quickly began to get cold, and though it was only the beginning of September we woke up to frosts. The food was poor – one bucketful of soup, mostly lentils, to feed everyone . . . Our women got no letters from their children in evacuation, nor from their husbands at the front.
One evening we were sitting in our landlady’s room, listening to her only record, ‘Little Blue Scarf’. Everyone started weeping inconsolably. This banal song, popular before the war, brought back so many memories. For each of the women its subject – separation from loved ones – had suddenly become very real.
Twice we were allowed to go home to wash, since many of us were infested with lice from the dirt and cold. It was the first time this had happened to me and I was alarmed and disgusted. I borrowed half a litre of kerosene from a neighbour (it was already unobtainable in the shops), and rubbed it into my hair, then spent until almost 2 a.m. trying to wash it out again with barely warm water . . .
After visits home people returned to the trenches in a sullen mood. It was getting even colder and we were digging horribly heavy blue clay. Lifting just one shovelful was hard. And even when stupid Tanka started modelling penises from this clay, it wasn’t funny any more, and people began to get annoyed with her.
Stupid Tanka, though, gave sheltered, slightly snobbish Grechina what was to be the first of many lessons on the virtues of the Socialist Republic’s working class. On Tanka’s initiative the two girls dodged guards to steal two sackfuls of potatoes from an abandoned field. Together they lugged their booty to the nearest tramstop and caught a ride into the city. Chatting to Tanka on the way, Grechina was amazed to discover that she supported a widowed mother and crippled sister. A burning factory brought the tram to a halt, and they had to get out and walk. ‘I was exhausted’, Grechina remembered, ‘and about to drop my sack, but Tanka said, “Have you gone mad?” and hoisted it on to her back . . . And then I began to understand how crude my judgement of other people had been before.’
On 14 September the brigade was ordered to stop digging and return to Leningrad. Grechina visited the university’s languages faculty, where she had been due to start a degree. But academia now felt self-indulgent and naive. ‘How on earth can you discuss abstract concepts with fires and bombing all around? I felt like a working person who suddenly finds herself in the company of the leisured.’ Slipping out of a lecture early, she went to the faculty canteen and swapped ration coupons for horsemeat and kasha.12
Even official news sources now acknowledged that the city was in peril. On 16 September, a day of horizontal rain and the day on which Pushkin was abandoned, Leningradskaya Pravda ran a near-hysterical editorial, written by Zhdanov himself, titled ‘The Enemy is at the Gates! We Will Fight for Leningrad to Our Last Heartbeat!’ ‘Each must firmly look the danger in the eye’, it urged, ‘and declare that if today he does not fight bravely and selflessly in defence of the city then tomorrow he will lose his honour, freedom and his native home, and become a German slave!’ Next day’s lead carried the clunking headline ‘Leningrad – To Be or Not to Be?’13 Factory militias were being trained in suicidal street fighting. ‘Destruction of a tank’, a manual promised,
is first and foremost achieved by presence of mind, bravery, and decisiveness. One must not procrastinate, but display swiftness and dash . . . The fighter, having taken suitable cover [lamp posts, bollards and advertising pillars were suggested] should let the tank approach within 10–15 metres (at this distance the fighter will be in dead space; the tank will not be able to fire at him), swiftly break cover, throw the bundle of grenades under its caterpillar tracks, and just as swiftly take cover again. Exactly the same technique is used with inflammable bottles, the only difference being that the bottle is thrown at the rear part of the tank.
In the absence of grenades or Molotov cocktails, the manual blithely continued, tanks were to be disabled ‘by the decisive and dextrous use of bayonet, rifle butt, knife, crowbar or axe’.14 More convincing were the barricades being built – using steel ‘hedgehogs’ and concrete ‘dragon’s teeth’ as well as steel joists, cobblestones and tram cars filled with sand – across the principal thoroughfares, and the bricking up of windows so as to turn them into firing points. Georgi Knyazev’s Academicians’ Building was filled with hurrying sailors carrying sandbags. He and his wife moved into his office in the Academy of Sciences, where they slept on camp beds under a bust of Lenin.
What Knyazev also saw the sailors doing – as he hardly dared note in his diary – was laying demolition charges next to the Lieutenant Schmidt (formerly the Nicholas) Bridge, westernmost of the two that connect Vasilyevsky Island to the mainland. ‘By the Academy of Arts I was astonished to see sailors digging holes a short distance apart, putting something in them, laying bricks on top and sprinkling them with sand. Right opposite the sphinxes. Could it mean? . . . My heart skipped a beat.’15
If the Germans did take Leningrad, the destruction of its infrastructure and manufacturing capability was to be total. A ‘Plan D’ listing everything to be demolished was not made public until 2005. We now know that it included all the city’s important factories, as well as its power stations, waterworks, telephone and telegraph exchanges, bakeries, bridges, railway network, shipyards and port – some 380 installations in total. (Aleksei Kuznetsov, Zhdanov’s deputy, is credited with forbidding the mining of the Peterhof Palace,
as well as with ordering the removal of machine guns from the Hermitage’s roof, placed there in case paratroops landed in Palace Square.) At each listed institution a ‘troika’ of director, Party secretary and NKVD representative was instructed to draw up plans for the order in which machinery and buildings were to be destroyed, and for the quantity of explosive – or, for less important objects, of axes and sledgehammers – needed. The order to proceed with these ‘special measures’ was to be given by Kuznetsov, and responsibility for seeing it carried out to rest with the regional branches of the NKVD.16 Though the planning went forward in great secrecy, rumours leaked out, appalling factory workers. ‘And what are we supposed to do once the factories have been blown up?’ one man asked a friend. ‘We can’t do without factories. Even if the Germans come we have to work in order to eat. We won’t blow them up.’17
Not a few factory bosses deserted their posts, as witnessed by a stream of reprimands and dismissals for ‘showing cowardice’, ‘giving way to panic’, misappropriation of funds and going absent without leave. In a memorandum to industrial managers of 5 September, Zhdanov complained of a rise in theft and embezzlement, as well as of jobsworth demands for overtime pay. The most prominent delinquent was the director of the large ‘Red Chemist’ plant, who ordered his bookkeeper to withdraw fifty thousand roubles, requisitioned a car and would have made good his escape had the bookkeeper not alerted the authorities.18 Others, like First Party Secretary Nikonorov of Lodeinoye Pole, a small town east of Ladoga, drowned fear in drink. Instead of mobilising civilian resistance at the Wehrmacht’s approach, a purse-lipped investigator noted, he ‘occupied himself with the organisation of mass drunkenness, involving leading workers . . . Amongst the district police, drinking and card games flourished, chief of police Martynov personally taking part.’19 By the end of the year 1,540 city officials ‘unworthy of the high title of Member of the Bolshevik Party’ had been stripped of their Party cards.20
At the same time, general security measures were tightened even further, the one which affected ordinary people most being the disconnection of domestic telephones. ‘It gave me a strange feeling’, wrote Vera Inber,
when the phone rang, and a fresh young voice said, ‘The telephone is disconnected until the end of the war’, I tried to raise a protest, but knew in my heart that it was useless. In a few minutes the phone clicked and went dead . . . until the end of the war. And immediately the flat felt dead, frozen, tense. We are cut off from everyone and everything in the city . . . Only very special offices, clinics and hospitals are excepted.21
Checkpoints multiplied, and the streets on to which Nazi propaganda leaflets fluttered down were quickly cordoned off. (‘We come not as your enemies, but as enemies of Bolshevism!’ ran one. ‘If your factories and storehouses burn, you will die of hunger! If your houses burn, you will die of cold!’) There were also new round-ups (3,566 detentions between 13 and 17 September) of Red Army and opolcheniye deserters, who were numerous enough to be described by diarists as ‘flooding’ the city.22 In the Ukrainian city of Lviv, the NKVD had shot all its prisoners as the Wehrmacht approached. In Leningrad it merely evacuated them to labour camps within the siege ring, though the end result was similar. A survivor of a shipment across Lake Ladoga on 9 October remembers his voyage:
The guards stood in two rows on the deck, driving a stream of prisoners down the steps into the hold. In the dark void a small flame flickered: a lieutenant stood there, vomiting swear words right and left as he hit out with a croquet mallet, trying to pack everyone in as tightly as possible. People stood squashed together, clutching their belongings. A long line of prisoners came down after me.
By evening the hold had been packed full. It consisted of three compartments: one for men, holding about 3,000 people, one for women, of whom there were about 800, and a small corner into which were squashed two hundred German prisoners of war . . . From time to time a gasping prisoner would try to climb a little way up the steps, so as to gulp some fresh air. Shots would swiftly follow, and the unfortunate, having swallowed lead along with air, would tumble back down again . . .
A metal hundred-litre barrel was lowered on a rope down through the hatch. A mass of prisoners immediately rushed towards it. Most had nothing to scoop up the water with, so they used their hands.
[As the night progressed] conditions got even worse. To start with we had been pressed tight, but at least it had been possible to stand on the floor. Now there was more space, but the floor had disappeared beneath a layer of corpses, on which it was hard to avoid standing or sitting. It was also starting to smell . . . When I left the hold I looked around: the floor had completely disappeared under a thick layer of decomposing dead.23
The security crackdown did not quite suppress all dissent. Swastikas materialised overnight on courtyard walls, and leaflets denouncing Stalin and calling for Leningrad to be declared a Paris-style ‘ville ouverte’ – a euphemism for surrender – were stuffed into stairwell mailboxes and sent anonymously to Party leaders. Widespread expectation of defeat was reflected in a dramatic fall-off in applications for Party membership – there were fewer in September 1941 than during the following February, when thousands of Leningraders were dying of starvation each day. Together with the departure of Party members for the front, this halved the size of the Leningrad Party organisation, from 122,849 full members on declaration of war to 61,842 at the end of the year. Numbers of Party cards reported ‘lost’ also rose sharply, though few were as unsubtle as a worker at the Okhtensky chemical factory, who asked his local Party secretary not to add his name to the membership list ‘because that will make it easy for them to find out that I am a Communist’.24
The fence-sitters had justification, for the archives make it plain that Stalin seriously considered abandoning Leningrad not only during the mid-September crisis, but on into the late autumn and early winter, when his overriding priority was the defence of Moscow.
Hitler’s plan for Moscow, code-named Operation Typhoon, had been outlined in a Führer Directive of 6 September. Eight hundred thousand troops and three panzer armies, comprising over a thousand tanks, were to make two great pincer movements to the city’s south and west, encircling the Soviet armies defending its approaches. Launched on the 30th, Typhoon met its first objectives extraordinarily quickly. The small city of Orel, about two-thirds of the way along the main road from Kiev, is said to have been abandoned so fast that the German tank crews found themselves overtaking peacefully trundling trams. (‘Why didn’t you file anything about the heroic defence of Orel?’ Vasili Grossman’s editor angrily asked him on his return from a foray to the front. ‘Because there was no defence’, Grossman replied.) Five days into the offensive a Soviet reconnaissance plane spotted a twelve-mile armoured column approaching the town of Yukhnov, 120 miles north of Orel and only 80 miles from the capital. The news was so incredible that the air officer who reported it was threatened with arrest for ‘provocation’, and only believed once two more planes had confirmed the sighting.
On 6 October Stalin summoned Zhukov from Leningrad and put him in charge of Moscow’s defence. Again, Zhukov found the army in a state of collapse: communications had broken down and ad hoc units were being formed from stragglers who had managed to escape being ‘caught in the sack’ of small-scale German encirclements. Of the 800,000 troops that had held the Central Front six weeks earlier, only 90,000 still stood between the Wehrmacht and the capital. Four days later, while conscripts laboured to dig a new ring of trenches around the Moscow suburbs, Hitler’s press chief invited Berlin’s press corps to the Ministry of Propaganda to hear a statement from the Führer. The remnants of the Red Army, it declared, were now trapped. Victory in the East was assured. The next morning’s newspapers carried the headlines ‘The Great Hour Has Struck!’ and ‘Campaign in the East Decided!’
In Moscow, where the crump of artillery could now be heard even from Red Square, it was decided to evacuate the government. The Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet,
the defence commissariat and the Allied embassies all left on special trains for Kuibyshev (now Samara, on the Volga) on the 15th.* The following day, the ashes of a million hastily burned files twirling above the pavements, the city descended into anarchy. Police vanished; bosses fled in commandeered lorries loaded with rubber-plants and gramophones; workers looted and lynched. The director of a dairy, spotted trying to leave, was dragged out of his car and thrown head-first into a vat of sour cream. Order was only restored five days later. The whole inglorious episode became known as the ‘big drap’, a sardonic play on drap’s double meaning of ‘medal ribbon’ or ‘skedaddle’.25
With Moscow teetering on the brink, Leningrad’s abandonment seemed likelier than ever. A measure of how poorly its chances were now rated was senior generals’ reluctance to take charge of its defence. On Zhukov’s departure the command initially went to his deputy, Ivan Fedyuninsky, but he immediately began lobbying for it to be passed to Mikhail Khozin, who, he pointed out, had seniority, and under whom he had served in the past.26 Khozin demurred, arguing that he could not leave the 54th Army, which he had just taken over from the loathed and incompetent Kulik. Zhdanov then tried to recruit Marshal Nikolai Voronov, a respected artilleryman and a native Leningrader, but he too turned the post down, arguing that he already had his hands full as deputy Commissar for Defence. After a fortnight of pass-the-parcel, Moscow intervened, and on 26 October the command was finally forced on Khozin, Fedyuninsky taking over the 54th Army.