Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (6 page)

On the staircase which once heard the rap of Guards Officer Lermontov’s sabre . . . there now hangs a length of rail on a thick cord, and next to it a metal rod – a beater. This is for use in the event of a gas alarm. On the upper landing it was dark, although blue lamps were burning. Walking along the corridor, which was in almost total darkness, I felt as though I were in a Meyerhold production.

The IRLI [Institute of Russian Literature] repository was a dreadful sight. I hardly recognised the workrooms. Everything was in chaos . . . Behind a statue of Aleksandr Vsevolovsky stood two large barrels of water, one of which was already leaking. There were boxes of sand and spades all over the place, and a fire hose stretched along the corridor. Outside the Pushkin room stood storage boxes, some empty, some full. I had to do them justice – Pushkin’s manuscripts were packed perfectly . . . But there was a lot of fuss and agitation. Right next to the boxes, a staff member was dictating an article on fascism to a typist. Someone else was writing out a list of what had to be packed . . . Everywhere, there were crowds of people carrying sandbags.

Yelena Skryabina decided to escape the war – and reduce her chances of arrest – by renting a dacha (their price had plummeted) near Pushkin, the town, formerly Tsarskoye Selo or ‘Royal Village’, that had grown up around the tsars’ summer palaces. There she and her children spent their time wandering in the sunshine round the folly-dotted Catherine Palace park. ‘Blue sky, blue lake, and the green frame of the shore. Peaceful. No voices audible. No one strolling the paths. Only somewhere, far away, the silvery walls of the palaces sparkling through the greenery.’
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On weekly visits back to the city, though, it was impossible to shut out reality. She worried about gas attacks (unnecessarily as it turned out; gas masks were issued but never had to be used), and about famine, ‘because all those newspaper reassurances about our massive food supplies are barefaced lies’. Her neighbour Kurakina whispered of the beatings her newly returned but now half-deaf and fearful husband had endured in camp; up in the cloudless sky high-flying planes left vapour trails, a sinister novelty to Leningraders, who thought them some sort of targeting device.

Not until 3 July, eleven days after the invasion, did Stalin make his first wartime broadcast. Unpolished but immediate – the rim of the glass clicking against his teeth as he took sips of water – it was, in the words of the BBC’s Moscow correspondent Alexander Werth, ‘a great pull-yourselves-together speech, a blood-sweat-and-tears speech, with Churchill’s post-Dunkirk speech its only parallel’.
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Opening with novel, almost beseeching informality – ‘Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters! I appeal to you, my friends!’ – it called the nation to total war in the tradition of the struggle against Napoleon. Production was to go into overdrive, and ‘whiners, cowards, deserters and panic-mongers’ were to be put in front of military tribunals. Not a ‘single railway truck, not a pound of bread nor pint of oil’ was to be left in the path of the fascist enslavers’ advance, and behind their lines partisans were to blow up roads, bridges and telephone wires and set fire to forests, stores and road convoys. ‘Intolerable conditions’ were to be created for ‘the enemy and his accomplices’, who were to be ‘persecuted and destroyed at every step’. ‘All the strength of the people’, Stalin rounded off with sledgehammer emphasis, ‘must be used to smash the enemy. Onward to Victory!’

The speech had a steadying effect, in Leningrad as elsewhere. In Moscow’s cinemas, Werth remembered, audiences broke into frantic cheering whenever Stalin appeared on a newsreel, ‘which, in the dark, people presumably wouldn’t do unless they felt like it’.
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Though in reality Stalin had grossly understated the success of Barbarossa, claiming heavy German losses, Russians now felt that they had heard the worst, and stood on firm ground. The seventy-year-old watercolourist Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva (who had studied under Repin, Bakst and Whistler, and seen out three tsars) listened with her maid Nyusha in their flat near Finland Station on Leningrad’s Vyborg Side. ‘Today’, she wrote in her diary, ‘I listened, with heartfelt anxiety, to the wise words of Comrade Stalin. His words pour feelings of calm, hope and cheer into the soul.’
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She would have been less reassured if she had known how far the Germans had really got. For the Soviet Union, the first eleven days of the war were devastating. Arrayed against it was the largest invasion force the world had ever seen: four million German and Axis troops, 3,350 tanks, 7,000 field guns, over 2,000 aircraft and 600,000 horses. In the north in particular, the Red Army was heavily outnumbered, with 370,000 troops compared to the Wehrmacht’s 655,000. (Numbers of guns, tanks and combat aircraft were roughly similar.
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) The Germans were also better led and organised. Army Group North – one of three that attacked all along the Soviet–German border – was led by Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, the sixty-five-year-old career soldier who had led the breaking of the Maginot Line. Under him, in command of the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies, came General Ernst Busch and General Georg von Küchler, fresh from victory in France. The Army Group’s armoured spearhead was Panzer Group Four, commanded by General Erich Hoepner, with under him Colonel Generals Hans Reinhardt and Erich von Manstein, both among Hitler’s most brilliant tank commanders. The Red Army’s Northwestern Army Group, in contrast, had lost its leadership to Stalin’s purges and was in the midst of traumatised reorganisation and redeployment. The bulk of its forces were understrength, and some had not even been issued with live ammunition. Its defences were also physically inadequate: by June 1941 the army had largely abandoned its bunkers along the old, pre-1939 frontier – the so-called ‘Stalin Line’ – but was still in the process of constructing fortifications further west.

Most of all, Germany had the advantage of surprise. When Soviet frontier guards woke to the sound of exploding shells in the early hours of 22 June, many had not yet even received Stalin’s reluctant order of less than three hours earlier to go on to full alert. Flabbergasted and afraid to take the initiative, junior officers wired for orders: ‘We are being fired upon!’ ran a typical appeal, ‘What shall we do?’ The air force did not have time to mobilise either: Luftwaffe pilots were astonished to find Soviet aeroplanes lined up, uncamouflaged, on forward airfields, and even those that managed to take off proved easy targets. ‘The Russian was well behind our lines’, wrote a Finnish air ace of one, ‘so I held my fire, though I am not at all sure that I could have brought myself to finish off such a lame duck . . . His inexperienced flying suggested that he could have hardly been more than a duckling.’ In all 1,200 planes were destroyed at sixty-six bases in the first day of the war, three-quarters of them on the ground.
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For the rest of the year the Germans had complete air superiority, and were able to strafe and dive-bomb as much as their resources – still depleted by the Battle of Britain – allowed. The fact that the air raids on Leningrad did not begin until early September was due to delay in repairing airfields that the Luftwaffe had itself earlier bombed, and the city would have been far more badly damaged had it not been for its hundreds of searchlights, anti-aircraft guns and ‘listeners’ – the acoustic devices, shaped like giant gramophone horns, that tracked the approach of what were often the same bomber crews who had blitzed London twelve months earlier.

With numbers, leadership, surprise and air superiority all on its side, Army Group North advanced at astonishing speed. Though Leningraders did not know it, three days into the war von Leeb’s Panzer groups had already overrun most of Lithuania, and the following day they seized a bridgehead across Latvia’s River Dvina, a line the tsarist armies had held for two years in 1915–17. ‘It is unlikely I will ever again experience anything comparable to that impetuous dash’, von Manstein wrote in his (notoriously selective) memoirs; ‘It was the fulfilment of every tank commander’s dream.’ In Lithuania and Latvia, most of whose citizens rejoiced to see the Soviets pushed out, women handed the German cavalrymen bunches of flowers and nationalist militias joined in the fighting and the lynching of Jews.

As the German attack sped forward, the Red Army’s communications broke down. Shouted telephone calls were cut off mid-sentence; staff-cars dodged between smoking villages in search of command posts. Orders, when they arrived at all, bore no relation to reality, telling officers to deploy forces that no longer existed, or to defend points already far in the German rear. Typical was the experience of the 5th Motorised Rifle Regiment. Like other border units, it was not part of the regular army but came within the sprawling security empire of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD. The outbreak of war seems to have taken the regiment completely by surprise. At ten o’clock on the morning of 22 June it was travelling along the road from Vilnius northwards to Riga when it was suddenly dive-bombed by German Stukas. ‘The town of Siauliai burned’, the regiment reported, and ‘the German planes dealt brutally with the refugees and troops moving along the road. From this it became clear that war had begun.’ The regiment took shelter in a wood, where a courier reached it with orders to proceed urgently to Riga, where ‘disturbances’ had broken out. On arrival, the regiment found the city in the grip of a rising by anti-Soviet Latvian partisans, who had set up machine-gun posts in church towers, attics and behind the top-floor windows of the city’s Art Nouveau apartment buildings. Red Army and NKVD headquarters, the offices of the Latvian Communist Party and the railway station were all under attack. Rallying the local garrison, the regiment ‘engaged the fifth columnists in hard fighting. Incoming fire from windows, towers or bell-towers was answered with fire from machine guns and tanks.’ It shot 120 ‘scoundrels seized from amongst the fifth columnists’ out of hand, and also took out reprisals against civilians: ‘Before the corpses of our fallen comrades the personnel of the regiment swore an oath mercilessly to smash the fascist reptiles, and on the same day the bourgeoisie of Riga felt our revenge on its hide.’

It was not enough. Though demoralised and disorderly units of the retreating Eighth Army arrived in the city on 30 June, five days later the Soviets were forced to abandon Riga, retreating north into Estonia. The operation was a mess: Riga’s railway bridge was blown up before all the Soviet troops had crossed; among those left behind was another border guard regiment, of which no further news was heard – as the 5th Motorised’s report tersely puts it, ‘since the officers and staff of the 12th Border Detachment did not emerge from the battle, no documentation survives’. On 10 July orders arrived from Zhdanov to stand fast at the River Navast, which the Germans had in fact already crossed. After a vicious two-hour battle, the Red Army withdrew in disorder to the town of Vykhma. ‘In front of Vykhma there was literal butchery. As if drunk, the infuriated fascists strove to break out of Vykhma, but with fire and bayonets the fighters and commanders of the 320th Rifle Regiment and the 5th Motorised Rifle Regiment held down the enemy.’ By this time not much of the 5th Motorised can have been left, because it was ordered to put itself under the command of another regiment in the same division, to retake its positions at Vykhma and to ‘turn back, if necessary with fire, deserters’. It was an impossible demand: strafed ‘incessantly’ by German fighters, fleeing soldiers and civilians jammed the roads.
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While the Soviets bloodily exited Riga, to the east Reinhardt’s panzers broke through the old ‘Stalin Line’ at Ostrov, on the pre-1940 Estonian–Soviet border. Here the Balts’ whitewashed farmsteads and tidy fields gave way to Russia proper – an undrained, undyked landscape of alders, willows and reed beds, of scrubby birches and silver-weathered wooden cabins, their potato patches and haywire picket fences hidden behind stands of hogweed and rosebay willowherb. On 8 July Reinhardt took the fortress and forty churches of the little medieval city of Pskov, a vital road and rail junction on the route east. Again, the Soviets blew up a vital bridge before all their retreating troops had crossed: 206 out of 215 machine guns were abandoned and stranded soldiers had to swim, clinging to floating logs. In seventeen days the Wehrmacht had advanced an extraordinary 450 kilometres, not only overrunning the whole of the recently acquired and dubiously loyal Baltics, but entering the Russian heartland and threatening Leningrad itself.
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In the city, few fully understood the approaching danger. It wasn’t for want of trying. ‘Waking up’, wrote the young mother Yelena Kochina, ‘we rush to our radios, and wash down the bitter pills of the news bulletins with cold leftover tea.’ ‘The thirst for information’, Lidiya Ginzburg remembered, ‘was fearful. Five times a day people would drop whatever they were doing and race to the loudspeaker. They would fall on anyone who had been a yard nearer the front line than they had, or to a government office, or any source of news.’
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The authorities did their best to keep the public in the dark. The Soviet Information Bureau, created three days into the war and known as Sovinform, was the only body authorised to issue communiqués. It kept its twice-daily reports deliberately vague, talking about fighting ‘in the sector’ of particular cities, and anonymous ‘population points N’ having been won or lost. (This convention dated back to the nineteenth-century novel. Gogol’s
Dead Souls
, for example, opens with a carriage driving through the gates of an inn in ‘the provincial town of N’.) Rather than admit defeats, it picked out barely credible incidences of individual heroism – what the war correspondent Vasili Grossman contemptuously called ‘Ivan Pupkin killed five Germans with a spoon’ stories. Major defeats were not reported until several days after the event. Fighting ‘in the Pskov sector’ was not reported until 12 July, four days after the city had fallen, and it was still being referred to as a ‘battleground’ twelve days later, after which it simply dropped out of the news.
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