Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (9 page)

In Leningrad, the mood was one of rising anxiety. Two questions were beginning to predominate: food – would there be another famine, like the one during the 1920–21 Civil War? – and whether or not to evacuate.

Evacuation of valuables and of defence plant from the city had begun directly on news of the invasion, in expectation not of siege but of air raids. One of the best-prepared institutions was the Hermitage, thanks to the shrewdness of its director, Iosif Orbeli, who had risked accusations of war-mongering by discreetly stockpiling packing materials (among them fifty tonnes of wood shavings, three tons of cotton wadding and sixteen kilometres of oilcloth) months before. He immediately ordered that the museum's forty most valuable paintings be moved into the steel-lined vaults housing its famous collection of Scythian gold, and the following morning staff and volunteers began the gigantic task of moving, dismantling, crating and cataloguing the whole of its vast and wonderful collection, from winged Babylonian bulls to Faberge's snowdrops in jade and crystal. ‘We work from morning to late evening', wrote an art student:

 

Our legs are throbbing. We take the paintings off the walls . . . There isn't the usual feeling of awe for the masterpieces, though we deliberately wrap up [Titian's]
Danaë
slowly . . . Downstairs the sculptors are packing things into crates. Orbeli is everywhere in the halls . . . The empty Hermitage is like a house after a funeral.
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Wherever possible, paintings were packed flat, but those too large to fit into a railway carriage had to be rolled, including, after much anguished indecision, Rembrandt's fragile
Descent from the Cross
.
Only one painting – Rembrandt's
The Return of the
Prodigal Son
– got a crate to itself, and only another three – two Leonardo
Madonna
s and Raphael's exquisite little
Madonna Conestabile
– were left in their frames. The rest – Giorgiones, Tiepolos, Breughels, Van Dycks, Holbeins, Rubens, Gainsboroughs, Canalettos, Velázquezes, El Grecos – were removed from their stretchers and the empty frames hung back in their usual places on the gallery walls. Houdon's magnificent sculpture of Voltaire, all beaky nose and twisted smile, was lowered down the three flights of a ceremonial staircase with the help of naval ratings, using wooden runners and a system of blocks and pulleys. The Chertomlyk Vase, a fourth-century
bc
silver ewer magnificently decorated with doves and horses, had to be filled with tiny pieces of crumbled cork, which two women spent the night patiently feeding through a crack in its lip with teaspoons.

After six days and nights of frantic activity, a first trainload of treasures – about half a million items in more than one thousand crates – left the city on 1 July. Originally intended for the evacuation of machinery from the Kirov defence works, the train was made up of two engines, twenty-two freight wagons, an armoured car for the most valuable items and passenger carriages for guards and Hermitage staff, with flatbeds for anti-aircraft guns at either end. Its destination, known only to a few, was Sverdlovsk in the Urals (formerly Yekaterinburg, the town in which Nicholas II and his family had been assassinated). A second train, containing 700,000 items in 422 crates, left on 20 July. Orbeli's packing materials had now run out, and an Egyptologist, Militsa Matye, was given charge of finding more. ‘For almost two years', she marvelled later, ‘some long smooth poles had stood in the corner of my office. I would never have believed that the time would come when I would wrap them round with fabrics from Coptic Egypt and send them to the Urals.'
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Pleading with shops and warehouses for everything from sawdust to egg boxes, she gathered enough to pack another 351 crates, but by the time they were ready the siege ring had almost closed, and they spent the war stacked in a gallery on the Winter Palace's ground floor.

Included on the second Hermitage train was Lomonosov's mosaic of Peter the Great's victory over the Swedes at Poltava, which hung (and still hangs) at the top of the main staircase of the Academy of Sciences building on the Vasilyevsky embankment. Knyazev oversaw its departure:

 

No words can describe what I felt when they took away the Peter the Great mosaic . . . The Hermitage workers carefully removed it from the wall and carried it out to the waiting lorry. I accompanied them in what was, to be honest, an agitated state . . . Initially we discussed secure storage in the city, but now, in view of developments at the front, our only concern is to get as much as possible evacuated. I feel that evacuation with the Hermitage will be safer . . . But my heart aches. I came home quite drained.

 

A week later it was the turn of the Academy's most precious manuscripts:

 

Altogether we packed thirty boxes. We've taken every precaution against damp and dust (rubber sheeting, cellophane, oilcloth, folders and paper), and made an inventory of all the materials, with a separate list for each box. With us all working flat out, it took two weeks. The boxes were wired round and sealed. I followed the lorry as far as the embankment. It was like seeing off someone near and dear – a son, a daughter, a wife . . . I watched for a long time as the lorry slowly (I had asked the driver to go carefully), drove across the Palace Bridge . . . Orphaned, I returned to the Archives.
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Another 360,000 items – among them a Gutenberg Bible, Pushkin's letters, Mary Queen of Scots's prayer book and the world's second-oldest surviving Greek text of the New Testament – left the Public Library (affectionately known as the ‘Publichka') on the Nevsky.

Yelena Skryabina and Yelena Kochina, both working mothers, were among the many torn between evacuating with their children and colleagues, and staying behind with their husbands and elderly parents. ‘I am faced', wrote Skryabina on 28 June,

 

with a serious problem. And that is, that although I could take Dima and Yura with me, I would have to leave my mother and our elderly nanny behind. When I returned home with this news my mother burst into tears . . . Nana is overcome and silent. I am caught between two fires. On the one hand, I understand perfectly well that the children must be saved, and on the other, I pity these helpless old women. How can I leave them at the mercy of fate?

 

Like many, she also half believed the soothing propaganda:

 

I can't believe there'll be famine in Leningrad. We are constantly being told of plentiful food stocks, supposedly enough to last many years. As for the threat of bombing – we are also constantly assured of the capabilities of our high-powered anti-aircraft system . . . If this is even half true, then why try to leave?
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Similarly reassuring, paradoxically, was the introduction of rationing on 18 July. At 800 grams of bread a day for manual workers, 600 grams for white-collar workers and 400 grams for dependants, plus ample monthly allotments of meat, cereals, butter and sugar, ration levels were generous (‘this is not so bad; one can live on this', wrote Skryabina
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) and even represented an improvement in diet for the poor. On the same day seventy-one new ‘commission shops' opened, selling off-ration food in unlimited quantity though at high prices. Unaffordable for many, especially given new restrictions on the withdrawal of savings, their lavish window displays nevertheless helped to instil a false sense of security. ‘When you see a shop window full of food', thought Skryabina, ‘you tend to disbelieve talk about an imminent famine.' Kochina was less complacent, rushing to buy the four and a half pounds of millet that was all that was left in her local commission store (‘I hate porridge made from millet'), and she would have left for Saratov with her chemistry institute had it not been for her husband's opposition and her baby daughter's illness: ‘Lena has diarrhoea and a fever. We'll have to put the evacuation off for several days. And in general, how does one handle sterile baby bottles on the road?'
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The first of August found Skryabina still out at Pushkin, doing her best to ignore the war and enjoy the deserted palace parks. A niece had come to visit from the city: ‘From her I found out about the rapid German onslaught. They are advancing on Leningrad. We have decided to stay in the country until Luga is captured.'

 

The deluge began a week later. On 8 August, in driving rain, Reinhardt's panzers began an assault on the northern sector of the Luga Line, near Kingisepp. In three days of chaotic fighting they broke across the Luga River in three places, at the cost of 1,600 German casualties. Manstein's 8th Panzer Division, recovered from the Soltsi setback, cut the Kingisepp–Gatchina railway line on the 12th. A Soviet counter-offensive near Staraya Russa, launched piecemeal from 10 August, failed, with massive losses of men and equipment. ‘We pushed on a little further', wrote Vasili Churkin, in charge of manoeuvring a gun-carriage and six horses through woods sixty kilometres to Leningrad's south-west:

 

and on reaching the high road saw a huge, panicking crowd, running in total disorder towards Volosovo. On a cart lay an injured soldier, moaning and begging for his wounds to be dressed. Nearby a girl with a medical bag was walking along, but she wouldn't stop and help him, she was afraid to slow down. Behind you could hear the sound of clanking metal – German tanks. Someone shouted at the girl to help the injured man, and we turned around and quickly made our way back to where we'd left our guns. But guns and men had gone. Coming out of the woods into a clearing we saw Battery no. 4 being dragged along, under fire from tanks . . . A shell exploded right under the legs of the horse pulling the baggage cart. The horse fell and though the cart was carrying all our things, including our coats, we couldn't get to it because the tanks were already too close, even ahead of us.
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To the south, Küchler's Eighteenth Army advanced on the historic city of Novgorod, capital of one of the ninth-century Rus princedoms and gateway to Lake Ilmen. Its fall on 17 August went unmentioned by Sovinform, which waited until the 23rd to report fighting ‘in the Novgorod area'. Altogether, from 10 to 28 August the opposing Soviet 34th Army lost half its personnel, seventy-four out of its eighty-three tanks, 628 of its 748 guns and mortars, 670 trucks and 14,912 horses. To escape the slaughter, large numbers of soldiers either fled or mutilated themselves in hope of being invalided to the rear. Between 16 and 22 August more than four thousand servicemen were seized as suspected deserters while trying to get to Leningrad from the front, and in some medical units, a worried political report noted, up to 50 per cent of the wounded were suspected of self-mutilation. At Evacuation Hospital no. 61, for example, out of a thousand wounded 460 had been shot in the left forearm or left hand.
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Stalin's response to the disasters was a furious telegraph to Zhdanov and Voroshilov. If the German armies won more victories around Novgorod, he thundered, they might be able to outflank Leningrad to the east, breaking communications with Moscow and meeting the Finns on the far shore of Lake Ladoga:

 

It appears to us that the High Command of the Northwestern Army Group fails to see this mortal danger and therefore takes no special measures to liquidate it. German strength in the area is not great, so all we need to do is throw in three fresh divisions under skilful leadership. Stavka cannot be reconciled to this mood of fatalism, of the impossibility of taking decisive steps, and with arguments that everything's being done that can be done.
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Three days later Stalin's fears came to pass when Chudovo, a town on the main Moscow–Leningrad railway line, was taken. On 22 August Zhdanov begged Stalin for reinforcements. The twenty-two rifle divisions of the Northwestern Army Group, he pointed out, were now fighting along a 400-kilometre front, and seven of them had almost no heavy weapons or radios. Another five divisions he did not include in his calculations, since their ‘remaining fighting capacity' was ‘low' – in other words, they had been wiped out. He needed forty-five to fifty fresh battalions, and new weapons for five divisions.
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On the evening of 25 August Lyuban, thirty kilometres north of Chudovo on the Moscow–Leningrad line, fell too. The following day Stalin telephoned, asking for a report. Voroshilov's second-in-command, General Popov, took the call, admitting that Lyuban had been abandoned and again requesting more troops – ‘since the ones sent to us don't cover even half of our losses'; semi-automatic weapons for the infantry – ‘who only have rifles'; and that Leningrad be allowed to keep rather than send to other fronts its own armoured vehicle production. Unwillingly, Stalin agreed:

 

We've already let you have three days' worth of production, you can have another three or four days . . . We'll send you more infantry battalions, but I can't say how many . . . In a couple of weeks, perhaps, we'll be able to scrape together two divisions for you. If your people knew how to work to a plan, and had asked us for two or three divisions a fortnight ago, they would be ready for you now. The whole trouble is that you people prefer to live and work like gypsies, from one day to the next, not looking ahead. I demand that you bring some order back to the 48th Army, especially to those divisions whose cowardly officers disappeared the devil knows where from Lyuban yesterday . . . I demand that you clear the Lyuban and Chudovo regions of the enemy at any price and by any means. I entrust you with this personally . . . Tell me briefly, is Klim [Voroshilov] helping, or hindering?