Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (7 page)

One of the practical results of this misinformation was that parents of children sent to stay in the countryside for their summer holidays often failed to fetch them home before they were engulfed by the German advance. Several of Yelena Skryabina’s friends were thus almost caught out. On 8 July her neighbour Lyubov Kurakina, whose husband had just returned, broken, from the Gulag, succeeded in retrieving their children from Belorussia, by then already partially under occupation:

She says she saw a German soldier just a few steps away from her. She said she wasn’t afraid of him because they are people just like we are. What did worry her was that her Party membership card might be found hidden in her stocking . . . But everything turned out all right. She found her children. They rode part of the way home by train and part by truck, and some of the way they walked.

Another friend’s husband was fortunate, as a ‘dependable worker’ – jargon for a favoured Party official – in having the use of a car to fetch their three-year-old daughter. ‘This made it possible for him to circle through several villages and towns. Even so, he was lucky to find her. He brought her back dressed only in a little nightdress.’
32
The historian Anzhelina Kupaigorodskaya, aged eleven at the start of the war, remembers how the staff of her Pioneer camp simply abandoned their charges:

We were supposed to be going on some sort of expedition, a hike. Then we were told it wasn’t happening. Two or three hours went by and finally we were called into a line and told that Hitler had attacked us. Immediately everything changed. Before, the meals had been as good as in a sanatorium, but from then on all we got was
kasha
[boiled grains]. All the men disappeared, and the only adults left were the kitchen-ladies. Camp was supposed to have ended but nobody came to fetch us. We just wandered around. Nobody explained anything; there was some sort of rumour that we were going to be sent to Moscow, to live in the metro.

She got a message to her parents via another child, and they eventually came to collect her towards the end of July. ‘I have no idea what happened to the rest of the children. Many still hadn’t been picked up, and by then the Germans were already close.’
33

Driven by fear of accusation of cowardice, even the army’s internal communications were more rhetorical than factual. ‘No sooner had the village of Polyana fallen under our fire’ ran a report of 31 July, ‘than the Germans jumped out of their cottages with their underwear down. Soldiers in the trenches also took to their heels . . . With cries of “Hurrah!” the battalion fell upon the fascists. Grenades, bayonets, rifle butts and flaming bottles came into play. The effect was stupendous.’ On 2 July NKVD border troops holed up in a ‘former kulak’s house’ outside Ostrov found themselves under attack from five enemy tanks: ‘From the flaming premises junior
politruk
[political organiser] Broitman, already twice wounded in the chest, carried on firing at the enemy, not allowing him to open his tank hatches. Next to him the
starshina
[roughly, sergeant major] of the picket, Comrade Nagorsky, heroically struck at the enemy with a submachine gun. Bleeding profusely, they courageously covered the retreat of the picket to new lines. Both fell dead in courageous defence of their picket sector.’
34

Closer to reality was a cynical joke of the time. A Red Army lieutenant is found sitting in an abandoned German lorry. He is told to move because otherwise he will get fired at. ‘Who by?’ he retorts. ‘The Germans will think it’s theirs, and our lot will run away.’
35
Throughout the war’s first weeks, the Northwestern Army Group remained in near-total disarray. Internal reports repeatedly describe units as retreating ‘as individuals and in small groups’, a euphemism for complete disorder. Cut off by the German advance, large numbers of soldiers wandered the devastated countryside, trying either to return to Soviet lines or to surrender to the enemy. Leaflet drops told them to consider themselves partisans, and encouraged them with news of the new Soviet–British alliance.
36
So many were taken prisoner that the Germans simply herded them into the nearest available secure buildings, without any provision for food, sanitation or clean water. Men who did manage to rejoin their units were accused of cowardice, desertion or spying. Though the Red Army knew the terrain, its attempts at counter-attack were conducted, according to Halder, ‘in a manner which plainly shows that their command is completely confused. Also, the tactics employed in these attacks is singularly poor. Riflemen on trucks drive abreast with tanks against our firing line, and the inevitable result is very heavy losses to the enemy.’ By 3 July, Halder estimated, twelve to fifteen of the Northwestern Army Group’s twenty-one infantry and armoured divisions had been wiped out.
37

The confusion was intensified by a deadly round of scapegoating within the Soviet High Command. The most prominent victim was General Dmitri Pavlov, commander of the Western Army Group, who was arrested on 4 July and executed on the 22nd, together with three of his subordinates. General Kopets, head of Soviet bomber command, saved the NKVD the trouble by committing suicide on the second day of the war. Further down the line uncounted numbers of officers were shot on the spot by military tribunals, for ‘cowardice’ in making unauthorised retreats.
38

From Moscow General Zhukov urged on the bloodletting. ‘Commanders who retreat from defence lines without orders, treacherously squandering their positions’, a telegram of 10 July thundered, ‘have been going unpunished. Nor do your destruction battalions [of NKVD troops, responsible for rounding up deserters] yet seem to be operating; they have produced no visible results.’ Representatives of the Military Council and military prosecutor were to ‘quickly drive out to the forward units and deal with cowards and traitors on the spot’.
39
Hence the abject tone of many reports from the front, which typically insist that units have fought to their ‘last round’ before being forced to retreat.
40

Significant for Leningrad was the fate of Kirill Meretskov, the burly, snub-nosed forty-four-year-old general who had commanded the disastrous first stages of the war against Finland and briefly been promoted to chief of staff, before losing the post to Zhukov. He was arrested in the first days of the war, having been named by his friend Pavlov as a member of a fictitious anti-Soviet conspiracy. In prison he was beaten with rubber rods by one of NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria’s senior deputies – another former friend – before being recalled to duty in September. Cleaned up and in full uniform, he was affably greeted by his torturer on his way to Stalin’s office. Bravely, he refused to act the amnesiac: ‘We used to meet informally’, he told the man, ‘but I’m afraid of you now.’ Having enquired after his health and kindly allowed him to sit, Stalin told him that he had been appointed Stavka’s (High Command’s) representative to the Northwestern Army Group. Understandably reluctant, following this experience, to take the initiative or question orders, Meretskov was one of the Army Group’s two or three most senior commanders for the whole of the rest of the war.
41

Along with the bloodletting came a reshuffle of senior military appointments. Leningrad was unlucky in being assigned to Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. Sixty years old, vain and dapper, with a pencil moustache and small, pale blue eyes, he is often portrayed as a gallant but bumbling old warhorse (not least by Harrison Salisbury, who repeats the story that he personally led a group of marines – ‘their blond hair tousled in the wind, their faces fresh, their chins grim’ – in a bayonet charge outside Krasnoye Selo in September. Perhaps he did.) He was in fact not only militarily incompetent – as defence commissar he had presided over the disastrous opening stages of the Winter War – but, like Zhdanov, a desk-bound mass murderer, organiser of the purges that had wiped out most of the senior Red Army officer corps only four years before. Dmitri Volkogonov, in charge of the Soviet army’s political education section before he became the first important
glasnost
-era biographer of Stalin, is eloquent: ‘Mediocre, faceless, intellectually dim’, Voroshilov was ‘nothing more than an executioner, a henchman of the Executioner-in-Chief.’
42
Voroshilov’s second-in-command, Marshal Grigori Kulik, was no better. Another old Civil War cavalryman and a crony of the sadistic Beria, he was a bullying, ignorant drunkard, whose incompetent direction of the 54th Army to Leningrad’s south was largely to blame for the city’s encirclement. Soldiers nicknamed his leadership style ‘Prison or a Medal’ – if a subordinate pleased him he got an award, if not he was arrested.
43

While Stalin wiped out yet more of his top brass, Hitler and his staff, now headquartered in the specially built ‘Wolf’s Lair’ outside Rastenburg in East Prussia, exulted. Hitler’s after-dinner musings reached new heights. ‘The beauties of the Crimea’, he opined between midnight and 2 a.m. on the night Army Group North captured Riga, ‘will be made accessible by means of an autobahn. The peninsula will be our German Riviera. Croatia will be another tourism paradise for us.’ Russia’s twin capitals apparently failed to offer the same leisure potential: three days later, as Pskov was taken, Hitler called Halder to a meeting and told him that it was ‘his firm decision to level Moscow and Leningrad, and make them uninhabitable, so as to relieve ourselves of the necessity of feeding their populations through the winter. The cities will be razed by the air force.’ So confident was he that the whole of European Russia was about to fall into his hands that he instructed Halder to start planning operations against the industrial cities of the Urals. Even cautious Halder admitted to his diary that things were evolving ‘gratifyingly according to plan’. Barbarossa’s initial objective – to shatter the bulk of the Red Army west of the rivers Dvina and Dnieper – had, he thought, been more or less accomplished. Though much remained to be done it was ‘probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks’.
44

3

‘We're Winning, but the Germans are Advancing'

Sovinform's economy with the truth meant that Leningraders quickly learned not to trust official news sources. ‘
Nashi byut
',
they whispered to each other,
‘
a nemtsy berut
' – ‘We're winning, but the Germans are advancing'. They also learned to interpret vague Sovinform language.
Ozhestochenniy boi
(‘bitter fighting');
uporniy boi
(‘determined fighting'); and
tyazheliy boi
(‘heavy fighting') suggested increasing levels of seriousness. ‘Complex' situations were grave ones, and the worst communiqué phrase of all – ‘Heavy defensive battles against superior enemy forces' – meant full retreat. ‘From the veiled communiqués of the Soviet Information Bureau', wrote one Leningrader, ‘it is nevertheless absolutely clear that the Red Army is unable to stop the German offensive on any one of the defence lines.'
1

More reliable, though partial, were the kitchen-table confidences or overheard remarks of men newly returned from the front. In mid-August passionately anti-Bolshevik Lidiya Osipova, a pensioner living in Pushkin, thus discovered to her joy that the Germans were only fifty kilometres away: ‘Yesterday an airman, eating at the aerodrome cafeteria, said to the girl on the till, “Now we're going to bomb the enemy in Siverskaya.” Hence we know that Siverskaya has been taken by the Germans. When are they going to get to us? And will they really come? The last hours before release from prison are the hardest.' The so-called ‘reports' by Party activists at her women's organisation were useless, ‘like extracts from an illiterate wall newspaper . . . No commentary or questions are allowed. What we could have read for ourselves in fifteen minutes takes up a whole hour. Lord, when is all this going to end?'
2

Guessing, though, was not the same as knowing, and hearsay filled the vacuum. Leningrad had not been bombed, it was rumoured, because Hitler was saving it as a present for his (mythical) daughter; alternatively, Vasilyevsky Island would be spared because Alfred Rosenberg (chief of Hitler's
Ostministerium
) had been born there. A Red Fleet ship had been scuttled in the middle of the channel out to the Baltic; the Wehrmacht had a circular tank that spat out shells like a Devil's Wheel; and a German paratrooper had landed in the Tavrichesky flowerbeds, where he was lucky not to have been killed by old ladies
armed with gardening forks.
3

The authorities tried to halt the rumour mill. The city soviet's executive committee forbade its employees from discussing the war on the telephone, on pain of prosecution for ‘disclosing military secrets', and yet more ‘defeatists' were arrested in accordance with a new law making those accused of spreading ‘false rumours provoking unrest amongst the population' liable to trial by military tribunal.
4
At the same time, the leadership indulged in some rumour-mongering of its own, diverting attention from disasters at the front by whipping up fear of spies, saboteurs and
raketniki
– ‘rocket-men' – who were supposed to be using flares to signal to enemy aviation. Guidebooks and maps had to be handed in to a special department, as did bicycles, cameras and wireless radios. Tram and trolley-car conductors stopped calling out stops, street signs were painted over, and name boards removed from outside prominent buildings. It became hazardous to ask for directions or to appear in public in foreign-looking clothing. Dmitri Likhachev found himself trailed by small boys by reason of his pale grey coat (‘light-coloured clothes', he remembered, ‘were not usual in the USSR') and Yelena Skryabina, having left her tall, bespectacled son Dima outside a shop for a moment, returned to find him being questioned by a policeman. She was able to persuade him of Dima's identity only by producing her husband's military certificate, and by pointing out that since Dima was not yet sixteen he couldn't possibly have a passport.
5
Another diarist, Yelena Kochina, found that she herself was not immune from the spy mania, which spread like ‘an infectious disease':