Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (17 page)

As always, the conversation sooner or later drifted back to the winter of 1941–2. ‘Those were fearful days,’ one of the men remarked. ‘It was much worse for the workers and the civilians, though, than it was for us. Everything was done to keep the front going; but what it could, the front gave back to the civilians. Only there wasn’t much of a margin to spare. We had only 350 grammes a day – and it wasn’t even real bread, but a mixture. We got to know many of the railwaymen during those days, and the railwaymen have since put us under their
chefstvo
(patronage), and we take an interest in their doings and they in ours, and we often meet at our club and have discussions with them, and we send one another parcels – there’s a real comradeship we’ve established with the railwaymen.’ Another soldier remarked that in winter they would all get a bit of a holiday. Each one would be sent for ten days to a rest-home somewhere outside Leningrad. ‘It isn’t very easy work really,’ he said. ‘Nobody ever writes about us in the papers, and we are never mentioned in the communiqués. People know much more about the snipers, for instance, than about us. But I think we are doing a steady, useful job – not very spectacular, but important all the same.’ It seemed that these men of Leningrad’s defences, of this essentially static front, felt a slight twinge of envy for the airmen and tankmen and gunners of the more mobile fronts, where there was more room for personal enterprise and more opportunities for individual fame. … At the same time there was, at least to me, something gratifying in the thought that there were a great many ‘dull patches’ like this between Murmansk and the Black Sea, or rather along the northern half of the front where it was, relatively speaking, ‘all quiet,’ and where comparatively few Russians were being killed daily. As for the Germans – well, there were the Russian snipers who were making the Germans’ lives miserable even on the ‘all-quiet’ parts of the front. During the quietest month on the Leningrad front, snipers, I was told, had managed to kill 6,000 – that is 200 a day.

‘We must show you this,’ said the lieutenant, as he opened a little storeroom attached to the dug-out. Here were several barrels. ‘All homemade. Pickled cabbage from our own vegetable plot around here, and salted cucumbers!’ ‘It’ll come in useful in winter,’ one of the men said. ‘Very welcome in winter,’ he added, ‘we’ll also start getting again our 100 grammes of vodka per day.’ The lieutenant grinned. ‘It gives one an appetite,’ he said.

We saw that day other bristles of the Leningrad hedgehog; but I remember particularly well that drive to the Krestovsky Island in the afternoon. It was a beautiful sunny autumn day as we drove down the Kamennostrovsky to the ‘Islands’ on the north side of Leningrad. As usual, the smart, rather
nouveau-riche
Kamennostrovsky (now called the Kirov Avenue) most of whose houses were built in the first fifteen years of this century, had a half-deserted look, and there was little traffic apart from the half-empty tramcars. Yet on this sunny day the great avenue looked cheerful, with the trees of the park round the fortress all golden in the sun, and the bright-blue tiles of the Mosque, half-way up the street, making a dazzling splash of southern colour in this essentially northern city. And it was good to feel that, in spite of everything, Leningrad had not changed so very much outwardly, and one could already visualise very clearly a sunny Sunday morning – a day just like this – not so very long after the war when thousands of young people would again be driving and walking and cycling up to the ‘Kirov Islands’ for the day. Kirov – many things are ‘Kirov’ in Leningrad today, the Kamennostrovsky, and the Islands, and the Putilov works. This man who had been killed on December 1st, 1934, was not only Leningrad’s party boss; he was widely considered as the second man of the Soviet Union, Stalin’s right-hand man and eventual successor. Few leaders in Russia enjoyed the immense personal popularity that Kirov enjoyed. In many Leningrad homes, for years afterwards, and probably to this day, December 1st was observed as a day of mourning. The energetic, jolly, very human and approachable Kirov who, moreover, represented in the eyes of so many people of Leningrad such a welcome reaction against pompous, vociferous Zinovievs who had irritated the city for so many years by their manners, appearance and ideas – became, after his death, almost a legend – more than a legend, a spirit that continued to dwell in Leningrad. In the dark days of the winter of 1941, Kirov walked through the black starving streets of Leningrad. ‘Do not lose heart; Kirov is with us!’ Nicolai Tikhonov said so in his poem called ‘Kirov is with us’ – a poem of faith, faith in miracles, perhaps the most inspired poem Leningrad produced during the blockade – and the most popular.

The Krestovsky Island, which juts further out into the sea than any other of the islands of Leningrad proper, is even now only half inhabited. It had at its eastern end a famous yachting club and tennis courts, but the rest was a marshy waste. Even before the war, apart from a few modern flats built on its eastern end, it was ‘waste land’ – to be built over in time. It was one of the areas of the new Leningrad – of the Leningrad of the future. Now, only a half-completed road ran through the middle of the island from the east to that wide half-circle of a promontory jutting far into the Gulf of Finland. We drove along this one mile of road, and the waste land on either side had been turned into cabbage and potato fields, intensively cultivated. Right on the promontory was now an enormous circular structure of cement. This was the giant stadium for 200,000 people which had been nearly completed when the war started. The marshy wastes on either side of the now muddy road leading to the stadium were to have become sports grounds, and gardens attached to little villas, in a few years’ time, if only there had been no war. The name of the stadium was naturally the Kirov Stadium. Though deprived by the war of its proper function, it was, however, to play a part in the defence of Leningrad. The large concrete slabs with which it was built were used up there and then for fortifications. I cannot describe in detail all that has been built on Krestovsky Island, but I can say that here, with the help of the stadium cement slabs and other building materials which had been accumulated before the stadium was completed, soldiers, assisted by many hundreds of Leningrad women, had built, in the last year, as perfect a network of powerful blockhouses as has yet been seen. The promontory jutting into the Gulf of Finland had become a powerful fortress dominating with its guns every approach to Leningrad from the sea. It is important because in winter the shallow and almost fresh-water sea freezes sometimes several feet thick, and there would be little that could prevent the Germans from attempting to storm Leningrad from the west, across the ice, if these western approaches were not fortified as they now are. Here are powerful anti-tank guns peering out of blockhouses of concrete and timber, here are anti-personnel mortars and machine-guns, and the men inside the blockhouses are protected against gas. The all-round ‘circular’ defence is complete, closely co-ordinated with all the other defences of Leningrad, and the Krestovsky promontory dominates every possible German approach across the ice – from south, north or west. All the necessary precautions are also taken against the possible danger of enemy landing barges. Colonel Smagly of the engineering service, red-faced, and with his turned-up nose and a black ‘Italian tenor’ chin, and accompanied by a handsome dashing young officer called Vinogradov, took us round all this high elaborate chain of fortifications, with its gas-proof blockhouses and walls made of enormous slabs of cement from the stadium up above, which looked from here like a half-dismantled Colosseum. ‘Made by the hands of our women,’ he kept on saying, with a note of affection in his gruff, soldierly voice.

But again, I confess, I was less interested in the technical details of these fortifications than in the actual scene. This was Russia’s window into Europe. It was a glorious sunny autumn day. A high mellow wind was blowing from the Baltic bringing in the smell of the sea – a smell I had missed for nearly two years in Moscow. At the back of us, to the left, was Leningrad, with the brown dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the two spires – that of the Fortress and the Admiralty – and factory chimneys in the south and east dominating the city’s skyline. In the foreground was a branch of the Neva, dark blue under a bright-blue sky, and with little white waves tossing about the small craft moored to the flat banks.

Leningrad has the skyline of a great city, and there are not many cities that have a great skyline. Paris has it, and London, and Rome. But how many more cities in Europe? Moscow – scarcely, in spite of the Kremlin; Berlin (‘whose only
raison dêtre
is human slaughter,’ Saltykov wrote nearly seventy years ago) not at all.

To the right, a little further inland than the tip of the Krestovsky, was the green and golden park of the Elagin Island, and in the sky above the cluster of trees a rainbow was faintly glittering. A thin line of fir and pine forests, coming right to the edge of the water, stretched to the north-west to the Lisi-Noss – the Fox’s Nose – promontory, some ten miles away, and beyond it, some thirty miles away, stretched the slender black line of the wooded Finnish coast. The sea, with little white waves, was a milky blue and the horizon was lost in a mist. But out of the mist rose the tiny lilac shape of another dome which from here looked like a tiny miniature of St. Isaac’s. It seemed to rise out of the water – far, far away. It seemed, indeed, slightly submerged. It was the cathedral of Kronstadt, on its narrow strip of an island. And in the south one could see from another angle what we had already seen from the observation post in the Narva district, the large white houses of the typewriter factory at Uritsk, some five miles away from here, and the German coastline running as far as Peterhof, with the ruins of the church high on the hill, and beyond it, the stretch of coast which was part of the Russian ‘bridgehead’ of Oranienbaum. It was strange, the peace and loveliness of this delicate seascape, so delicate in colouring and so majestic in outline. There was complete silence around, except for the gusts of the west wind coming in from the sea and the chuffing of a little brown tug which was towing a large barge from one island of the delta to another, through waters dangerously exposed to the German guns. This, then, was the window into Europe, and for centuries Russians had fought and died to gain it, and then to preserve it. Again, lines from the
Bronze Horseman
ran through my head:

It was the Peter of Pushkin’s vision, planning to build his new capital on the sea.

When I look back on those days in Leningrad there is one memory which stands out more clearly than anything else. I mean my afternoon at the Putilov (or Kirov) works. Here, even in September 1943, one had a glimpse of the Leningrad of the darkest and grimmest days. To the Putilov works the dark days were not a memory of the past; in a sense the people were continuing to live here through a peculiar kind of hell, and they continued to live this life voluntarily, feeling that it was their duty to do so. That it was a fearful nervous strain to go on working in these munitions works, almost in the front line and under almost constant shellfire, nobody denied; perhaps at heart some would have liked to be moved to a quieter spot, but no one would admit it. To these people it had become a point of honour to hold on to the end. To be a Putilov worker, a Kirov worker, and to stick it to the end had become to these people like a title of nobility. The workers here were not soldiers. Sixty-nine per cent of the workers were women and girls – mostly young girls. They knew that this was as bad as the front; in a way it was worse, because you did not know the thrill of direct retaliation. To work right through the war on the Kirov works was, these people felt, something of which you would always be proud, whatever the sacrifices, whatever the risks, whatever the possible or probable after-effects on your nerves and health. How many of the Kirov workers of today will live to an old age? Probably very few.

This devotion to the Kirov works had a quality of its own. A quality which was composed, not only of profound patriotism, both local and national, but also of a revolutionary fervour that was essentially working-class, and enthusiasm that was in the revolutionary tradition of the Petrograd of 1917. In many places in Russia today the war is, first and foremost, a national war, a war for national survival and national victory; at the Putilov works one had the feeling that, to the men and women who worked there, this war was also a consciously revolutionary war which was being fought to preserve at any price not only the Russian national heritage, but the heritage of the Revolution and all that Leningrad, ‘the City of Lenin,’ represented. Nazi Germany to these people was not merely the enemy of the Soviet Union, it was the enemy of the working class, of the Russian working class, which was proud of its revolutionary conquests, and was now fighting to defend them.

The story of the Kirov Division – the division composed of Kirov workers – which fought, together with other Leningrad Workers’ Divisions, a grim rearguard action at a time when the enemy was advancing inexorably on Leningrad is essentially a working-class story, reminiscent of the early days of the Revolution and of Yudenich’s march on Petrograd in 1919. It is significant that time and again I heard people say in Leningrad: ‘Our Opolchenie – our Home Guard – and our Workers’ Divisions played an absolutely
decisive
part in saving the city in September 1941.’

There is little doubt that, during the big German advance on Leningrad, after the disastrous battle of Kingisepp near the Estonian border, and the equally dangerous German advance from the south-west on Luga and beyond, the Red Army, shattered, bled white and ill-equipped with tanks and planes compared with what the triumphant Germans had, would not have withstood the final onslaught on Leningrad but for the decisive aid it received from Leningrad itself, from its people and its workers, at the most critical moment of all. And I now understood far better than I did at the time the full significance of the famous Voroshilov–Zhdanov–Popkov appeal of August 21st declaring Leningrad to be in danger. I understood now why there was a greater emphasis on the revolutionary greatness of Leningrad than on its national greatness. It was intended to rouse to a white heat of old revolutionary fervour the workers of the ‘City of Lenin’; the appeal to the workers was most important, because they were going to be the shock troops of Leningrad’s resistance. The rest of the people would follow – whether driven on primarily by a spirit of revolutionary self-sacrifice or by the spirit of a national
lutte à outrance.