The German assault was so powerful and swift that it took the Soviet forces completely by surprise. Stalin had ignored intelligence reports of German preparations for an invasion. He even dismissed last-minute bulletins confirming a massive German build-up on the frontier as a British ploy to lure the Soviet Union into war (he had the bearers of this information shot as ‘British spies’). The Soviet defences were in total disarray. After the signing of the Nazi–Soviet Pact the old defensive lines had been abandoned; the new fortifications, hastily constructed in the occupied Baltic states, had hardly any heavy guns, radio equipment or minefields. They were easily overrun by the nineteen Panzer divisions and fifteen motorized infantry divisions that spearheaded the German invasion force. Soviet units were rushed towards the front to plug the gaps, only to be smashed by German tanks and planes, which had control of the sky. By 28 June, six days into the invasion, German forces had advanced in a huge pincer movement through Belorussia to capture Minsk, 300 kilometres into Soviet territory, while further north they had cut through Lithuania and Latvia to threaten Leningrad.
Konstantin Simonov saw much of the chaos on the Belorussian Front. When the war began he was called up to the front as a correspondent for an army newspaper and sent to join the political department of the Third Army near Grodno on the border with Poland. Travelling by train, he arrived in Borisov early in the morning of 26 June, but could not travel any further because the line to Minsk was under heavy bombardment. Simonov disembarked and found a driver to take him on to Minsk by car, but they soon came up against the Soviet forces falling back in disarray. German planes flew overhead, firing on the troops with machine-guns and dropping bombs on to the road. The soldiers fled into the woods. An officer was standing in the middle of the road, shouting at the men that he would shoot them if they did not turn around. But they simply ignored him. The woods were swarming with soldiers and civilians trying to find cover from the German planes, which swooped above the trees, firing on the crowds below. Simonov was nearly killed when a captured Soviet plane mowed down several people around him: it flew so low above the trees that he could see the faces of its German crew. When it was dark he stumbled back on to the road and found a commissar, ‘a young unshaven man with a pilotka [fore-and-aft cap], a winter coat and for some reason a spade in his hands’. Simonov introduced himself as a journalist and asked for directions to the Front Headquarters. ‘What headquarters?’ asked the officer. ‘Can’t you see what’s happening here?’2
Simonov retreated with the army to Smolensk. The roads were full of soldiers and civilians – women, children, old people, many of them Jews – heading east on every type of cart, or walking on the road with heavy bundles of household possessions on their backs. In the first days of July he passed through Shklov and Orsha – ‘quiet rural towns’ inhabited by numerous Jewish families, including his wife’s relatives, the Laskins. Stopping for water at a house in Shklov, Simonov was asked by the frightened Jews if he thought they should flee. He advised them to stay, assuring them that the Germans would be routed by the Red Army before reaching Shklov. A few days later, the Germans captured Shklov. They killed nearly all the Jews, some 6,000 men, women and children, whom they shot and buried in a pit outside the town. On 16 July, the Germans took Orsha, and set about building a Jewish ghetto. Most of Orsha’s Jews were transported to the Nazi death camps in 1943, although some, like Samuil Laskin’s brother Iakov, a doctor in Orsha, ran away to join the Red Army.3
Looking back on the catastrophe of 1941, Simonov would come to realize that its origins were rooted in the policies of the Stalinist regime. By the middle of the 1950s, when he began to write his great war novel The Living and the Dead (1959), Simonov had come to recognize that Stalin was to blame for the disaster, not just because he had failed to understand the situation and prepare for war in 1941, but more fundamentally because his reign of terror had created so much fear and mistrust that the country was virtually incapable of coordinated action in its self-defence. Simonov did not see this at the time – his advice to the Jews of Shklov was clear evidence of his belief in the propaganda version of reality – but from 1942 he began to grapple with these troubling ideas in his war diaries (on which he later drew for The Living and the Dead). It became clear to him that the fundamental problem of the Soviet armed forces in 1941 was the climate created by the military purges of 1937–8. He saw that the Terror had undermined the officers’ authority and made them fearful of taking responsibility for military decisions and initiatives in case they were punished by superiors, or denounced by the commissars and other political officers (politruki) who watched their every move. They waited passively for decisions from above, which always came too late to make a positive difference to the military situation on the ground.4
None of these ideas was printable, of course, in the war years (or, for that matter, at any other time before the ‘Thaw’ of 1956). What Simonov had written in his diaries could never have been published in Krasnaia zvezda, the main Red Army newspaper, for which he worked as a correspondent from July 1941. Censorship was tightened on the outbreak of the war. Through the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinform-biuro), created on the third day of the war to control all printed and radio reports, the government attempted to conceal the military catastrophe from the public and manipulate the news to boost morale. Journalists like Simonov were expected to give their reports a positive and optimistic gloss, even when they were writing about disasters at the front, and what they wrote was in any case nearly always cut or changed by the censors.
Simonov was in a particularly difficult position. Arriving in Moscow on 19 July, three days after the German capture of Smolensk, he was the first correspondent to return from the Belorussian Front. People in the capital had no idea about the extent of the military debacle. News of the fall of Smolensk had been suppressed to avoid causing panic (it was not until 13 August, following the failure of Soviet forces to regain a foothold in the town, that the information was finally released). Muscovites bombarded Simonov with questions about the military situation. But he could not answer truthfully without running the risk of being denounced, like Makhnach, for ‘defeatist talk and panic-mongering’. So he resolved to hold his tongue and keep to himself his depression, which, he noted in his diary, ‘even people close to me mistook as a sign of exhaustion’. Writing in the press, Simonov struggled to find something positive to say about the events he had seen. ‘It seemed impossible to write about what had actually happened,’ he recalls. ‘Not just because it would not have been printed, but also because there was something inside me’ that would not accept so dark an outcome. He needed to find some sign of hope in the catastrophe. The incident he focused on had taken place amidst the chaos of the retreat to Smolensk. Simonov had seen two men, a captain and a brigadier, walking west, against the human tide, towards the front. The last remaining men of their platoon, which had been wiped out by a German bomb, the two men were driven, it seemed to Simonov, by some innate sense of patriotic duty, in which, as time went on, he came to see the seeds of a future Soviet victory.5
In the absence of any reliable information from the Soviet media, rumours spread and people started to panic. It was said that the government had fled; that there was treason in the army staff; that the Soviet leadership was preparing to abandon Moscow and Leningrad. It was even rumoured that the German bombing of the capital, which began in mid-July, had been led by the famous Soviet aviator Sigizmund Levanevsky, who had disappeared on a flight across the North Pole to the USA in 1937. The journalist N. K. Verzhbitsky recorded in his diary a conversation with ‘a lively old man’ in a Moscow street: ‘Why hasn’t anybody spoken to us on the radio?’ the old man said. ‘They should say something – anything, good or bad. But we are completely in a fog, and must all think for ourselves.’ Stalin’s absence from the public scene added to this feeling of uncertainty. Apparently, he had suffered some sort of breakdown in the first days of the war: he locked himself away in his dacha and took no inte
rest in anything. It was not until 1 July that Stalin returned to the Kremlin and not until two days later that he made his first war speech to the nation. Pausing frequently, as if distressed, to take a drink, Stalin addressed the Soviet people as ‘my brothers and sisters, and my friends’. He called on them to unite for ‘the life-or-death struggle’, which he described as a ‘war of the entire Soviet nation’. It was the first time that Stalin had defined the Soviet people in such fraternal and inclusive terms: there was no longer mention of the class struggle or ideology. Simonov recalls the impression the speech made on himself and the soldiers at the front: ‘Nobody had spoken to us like that for a long time. All those years we had suffered from the lack of friendship. And in that speech, as I recall, it was the words “My friends” that moved us to tears.’6
Despite the galvanizing effect of Stalin’s speech, the outbreak of the war witnessed an explosion of open talk and criticism of the Soviet regime, prompted perhaps by the uncertainty or the release from fear. ‘One hears conversations that only a short time ago would have led to a tribunal,’ Verzhbitsky noted in his diary on 18 October, when the Germans were a few miles from the capital. Much of this disgruntlement came from peasants and workers, who criticized the lack of preparation for the war, the stringent labour discipline, the reduction of food rations, the coercive conscriptions and the flight of the Party bosses to the rear, which had left ordinary people to face the invasion on their own. In Leningrad, where half the city’s Party members took flight in the first six months of the war, the anti-Soviet mood of the workers was so strong that some even welcomed the prospect of a German victory. The many strikes and workers’ demonstrations in the first months of the war signalled a return to something like the revolutionary atmosphere of 1917. At one demonstration in the Ivanovo region, in October 1941, when the Party bosses tried to calm the crowds, the strike leaders shouted to the workers: ‘Don’t listen to them! They know nothing! They’ve been deceiving us for twenty-three years!’ At factory meetings workers showed that they were not afraid to blame the Communists for the outbreak of the war and the defeats at the front. According to the NKVD’s surveillance groups, there were many workers and peasants who welcomed the invasion on the grounds that it would sweep away the Soviet regime. It was a commonplace that only Jews and Communists had anything to fear from the Germans.7
The government responded to this vocal opposition by declaring war on ‘panic-mongerers’. Thousands were arrested and many people shot for loose (‘defeatist’) talk about the situation at the front. Roza Vetukh-novskaia was arrested on the third day of the war and charged with treason against the motherland. When she got to her prison cell she found that she was one of many women who had been arrested for something they had said: ‘This one said that the German army is stronger’; ‘That one said that our crops are poor’; ‘Yet another said that we work like slaves in the kolkhoz’. Most of these women were ordinary workers and peasants. Irina Shcherbov-Nefedovich was arrested in Leningrad on 30 July, one week after she had been denounced for ‘panic-mongering and spreading rumours’ by a Party worker at the Institute of Vaccines where she worked. It turned out that all she had done was to tell a friend about the bombing of Smolensk, which she had heard about in a radio broadcast by Sovinformbiuro. Sentenced to seven years in a labour camp near Khabarovsk, she died there in 1946. Irina’s husband and daughter were never told what had happened to her. They assumed that she had died in the bombing of Leningrad. It was not until 1994 that they learned the truth about her death.8
On 20 July, after the fall of Smolensk, Stalin assumed control of the military command (Stavka) by appointing himself Commissar of Defence. He sent Marshal Timoshenko, the former defence chief, to take command of the Western Front and launch a counter-offensive for the recapture of Smolensk. For a while the German advance towards Moscow was slowed down, not least because part of the German army was diverted to the south to seize the rich agricultural land, the mines and industries of Ukraine. Convinced that economics was the key to victory, Hitler thought control of these resources would help make the Third Reich invincible. During August, Hitler focused on the conquest of Ukraine, allowing the Red Army to push the Germans back on the Smolensk–Moscow front. On 6 September, Soviet forces briefly regained control of the outskirts of Smolensk, before falling back for lack of basic military equipment. Further north, on 25 September, the Germans reached the shores of Lake Ladoga, effectively surrounding Leningrad. Wanting to preserve his northern troops for the battle of Moscow, Hitler decided to lay siege to Leningrad and starve its population out of existence rather than to try to conquer it. In strictly military terms the fate of Leningrad had little real significance for the outcome of the war, which would be decided on the Moscow and the southern fronts. But as the birthplace of the Russian Empire and the Revolution, and as a citadel of European values and culture in Russia, Leningrad had a huge symbolic importance. This goes a long way towards explaining why it was not abandoned by the Soviet command; and indeed why most of its population chose to stay in the besieged city in the autumn of 1941, when Leningrad was cut off from virtually all its food and fuel supplies (perhaps a million people, or one-third of the pre-war population, died from disease or starvation, before the siege was lifted in January 1944). Meanwhile, to the south, the German advance continued slowly, because the bulk of the Soviet forces had been stationed here to protect the rich industrial and food resources of the Ukraine. A huge pincer movement by the Germans managed to encircle Kiev and its eastern hinterlands. After several weeks of desperate fighting by the Soviet troops, in which nearly half a million soldiers were killed or taken prisoner, the Germans took the city on 19 September, though much street fighting continued after that. By the start of October, with Kiev captured and Leningrad besieged, Hitler concentrated his forces on the conquest of the Soviet capital. He vowed that Moscow would be totally destroyed, its ruins flooded by an artificial lake.9
As the Germans swept across the country, millions of families were broken up, as relatives were caught behind the front. Many children were at summer camps when the invasion began and could not be returned to their families before the German troops arrived. Decades later parents were still trying to trace them through public organizations and advertisements. Thousands of children ended up in orphanages or roamed across the country, joining children’s gangs or even units of the Red Army (according to one estimate there were as many as 25,000 children who marched with the army at some point in the war).10
Iurii Streletsky was twelve years old and living in an orphanage in Leningrad in 1941. His father had been arrested in 1937, and his mother exiled to Vyshnyi Volochek, half-way between Leningrad and Moscow. When the war broke out the orphanage was evacuated to Arzamas near Gorkii. During the journey, Iurii jumped off the train and ran away. He had been unhappy at the orphanage. He joined a children’s gang, which lived off petty thefts from railway travellers, but he soon became disgusted by their criminality and turned himself in to the police. The police handed him over to the NKVD, which sent Iurii to a military aerodrome in Arzamas, where he worked as an apprentice engineer. The engineers stationed there adopted Iurii as their mascot. They gave him alcohol and cigarettes and set him up with girls, who were attached to their unit. When twenty of the engineers were transferred to Tbilisi in the spring of 1942, they took the boy with them. Iurii had pleaded with the soldiers to let him go along. He knew that he had been born in the Georgian capital, though his family had left when he was very young, and remembered going there as a child to visit his godparents. He also knew that his older sister had gone to live with them after the arrest of their parents. During the journey to Tbilisi the soldiers concealed Iurii. He had no papers for the trip and would have been arrested, had he been discovered. ‘They were very kind to me,’ Iurii recalls:
They were risking a great deal by taking me along, but none of them complained, and they all gave me food from their own rations. They were fond of me and felt sorry because I had no f
amily. When we approached Stalingrad our train was stopped by a patrol. The two NKVD guards asked to see my papers. They wanted to arrest me when I said that I had none. But the soldiers insisted that I was one of them, and refused to give me up to the two guards, who agreed to let me go for a hundred grams [of vodka].
In Tbilisi Iurii parted company with the soldiers and wandered round the city, hoping he would recognize the place where his godparents lived. Eventually he went to the city offices and obtained a copy of his birth certificate, which proved to be the start of a paper trail leading to them. From then on, Iurii lived with his godparents, who were both engineers, and his sister. Iurii became an engineer as well.11
The evacuation of the population from the western regions of the Soviet Union also broke up families. Eight million children were evacuated to the rear. The main priority was to rescue the industrial stock from cities under threat from the Germans. Three thousand factories were dismantled and transported east – to the Volga and the Urals and beyond – in more than a million railway trucks between June and December 1941. Factory workers and their families travelled east with them. Entire institutions were relocated with their staffs: government and public offices, universities and research institutes, libraries, museums, theatre companies and orchestras.12
For many families evacuation was a mixed blessing. Natalia Gabaeva was eleven years old when she was evacuated from Leningrad to Omsk, to a special children’s home belonging to the Union of Artists. Her mother, a painter, remained in Leningrad, so she could be close to her husband Sergei, a former exile who lived in Peterhof, near the city, and worked in the Agricultural Institute. In 1941, he moved to live with his sick and elderly father, a retired museum worker, in the basement of Leningrad’s Hermitage. Every day he visited his ailing mother, who was divorced from his father, in a distant suburb of the former capital. Natalia was a ‘spoiled young girl’, as she herself recalls. From Omsk she wrote ‘frightful letters’ to her mother, begging her to come and join her. ‘In one letter I even threatened to walk to Leningrad, if my mother did not come.’ In September 1941, she got her wish. Natalia’s mother arrived in Omsk. She had left Leningrad just before the Germans put up the blockade. Sergei suffered in her absence. He fell ill in the first weeks of the siege. He wrote to friends of his desperate need to see Natalia. But when he had the chance to leave Leningrad on one of the last flights from the city, in October 1941, he turned it down. As the sole support of his parents, he could not bring himself to leave them. Sergei understood that he would not survive the siege: people all around him were dying. On 1 January 1942, he wrote to his mother that his only wish was to see Natalia once more before he died. Five days later he was killed when the Hermitage received a direct hit from a German bomb. Throughout her life Natalia was haunted by a sense of guilt about her father’s death: she felt she was to blame for his abandonment by her mother, who might have helped him to survive if she had stayed with him in Leningrad. ‘I’ve been tormented by the same question since my childhood,’ Natalia recalls: ‘if my parents were threatened by some terrible danger, and I had it in my power to save only one of them, which one would I choose? I tried to banish the question from my mind, I couldn’t answer it, but it kept coming back.’13
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