The 900 Days (24 page)

Bychevsky now had far more fortifications work than he could carry out. He and his deputy, Colonel N. M. Pilipets, checked the supply depot. There were 57,000 mines on hand, of which 21,000 were antitank mines. The three armies needed at least 100,000. That meant production of 300 to 350 tons of explosives a day. They called the Leningrad Explosives Trust. It could provide only 25 tons, and this was ammonal, not TNT. There were, it transpired, only 284 tons of TNT in the Leningrad supply depots—a shortage which was soon to call into play the ingenuity of Professor A. N. Kuznetsov, who invented a substitute using sinal, a mixture of saltpeter and sawdust. It was christened “AK.” This was the first shortage to be discovered in Leningrad. It was not to be the last.

Bychevsky and Pilipets telegraphed Moscow. They got back the answer they might have expected: “To cover your needs from the Center is impossible. There are more important fronts than yours. Use your local resources.” They explained the situation to Mikhail V. Basov, chief of the industrial department of the Leningrad City Party. Basov was a businesslike man of few words. At this point he had been working for forty-eight hours without sleep.

“The picture is clear,” he said. “Will 100,000 mines the first five days be enough?”

It would be fine. Basov ordered 40,000 from the Aurora factory and 60,000 from the Woodworking Trust. If he couldn’t find enough explosives at the Explosives Trust, he would get some from local construction outfits.

The Leningrad population was drafted into the fortifications work. Everyone without a job was ordered to put in eight hours a day, digging trenches and constructing shelters. Factory workers were supposed to work three hours a day—after an eleven-hour shift on the production line. Actually, the whole idea of a “working day” had vanished. Everyone in the city was devoting fourteen, sixteen or eighteen hours a day to production and military tasks.

The Leningrad Soviet Executive approved a decision under which ordinary citizens of Leningrad, Pushkin, Kolpino and Kronstadt would be mobilized for obligatory labor on field fortifications, trenches and tank barriers.

The Military Council of the front ordered all large civilian construction work in the Leningrad area halted. The labor forces and equipment were sent to work on fortifications. The biggest crew was that engaged in building the Leningrad subway system. Led by Chief Engineer I. G. Zubkov, this organization was placed at the service of Bychevsky to build the proposed iron ring around the city. Work on the Upper Svir hydroelectric station, the ENSO power plant and the ENSO power line was halted also.

One more decision was made by Zhdanov that fateful Friday, June 27. Henceforth no factory whistle, no locomotive bell, no church chime was to sound in Leningrad except to signal air-raid alarms. Little did Zhdanov realize that the day lay not far ahead when no whistle
could
sound—because there would be neither steam nor electricity in the city.

Thus, when on the ninth day after the outbreak of war a thirty-one-car train pulled by two engines moved out of the freight station of the October line at dawn, carrying more than half a million precious objects from the Hermitage Museum, no whistles blew, no bells rang.

First, a pilot locomotive went ahead to clear the tracks. Then came the long train: two powerful locomotives, an armored car in which the most valued objects were carried, four linked Pullmans for other special treasures, a flatcar with an antiaircraft battery, twenty-two freight cars filled with canvases, statues, objects of art, two passenger cars—one for museum workers, headed by Art Scholar Vladimir T. Levinson-Lessing, another for the military guard—and finally, at the rear, another flatcar bearing another antiaircraft battery.

The train originally had been ordered to move out units of the great Kirov defense plant. Then plans changed. Evacuation of the Kirov plant was delayed, and the formidable aggregate was turned over to Professor Orbeli. Since Tuesday morning, clad in blue overalls speckled with cotton wisps from packing stuffs, Orbeli had been overseeing the loading of his treasures —Rembrandt’s
Holy Family
, delicately removed from its frame by Nikolai Mikheyev, and packed in a box strengthened with planks and protected by layer upon layer of paper; all the Titians, the Giorgiones, the Rubenses, the Murillos, the Van Dycks, the Velázquezes, the El Grecos, Da Vinci’s Madonnas —the
Madonna Litta
, the
Madonna Benois;
those of Raphael —the
Madonna Alba
, the petite
Madonna Conestabile—all
in their golden frames; and Rembrandt’s
Return of the Prodigal
, a massive 12-foot 6-inch by 9-foot 10-inch canvas in its own heavy case. Three ministers had observed the packing from Orbeli’s office —the Minister of Interior (the NKVD): the Minister of State Security (the NKGB), and the Chairman of the State Committee for Cultural Affairs —each concerned not so much with evaluation but to make certain no one stole anything.

On the train traveled the museum’s great
Pallas Athena
and the magnificent museum collection of diamonds, precious stones, crown jewels and ancient artifacts of gold. Along with them went the marble Venus acquired by Peter I, the Venus the old boyars called the “white devil.” And here, too, were Rastrelli’s sculpture of Peter and his collection of wax figures, packed in great crates marked in black letters: “Wax Figures —Do Not Drop.”

The tons of boxes had been stacked in the great Hermitage Hall of Twenty Columns, sometimes called the Hall of Money. Soldiers and sailors loaded them on the trucks which drew up in an endless column beside the Winter Palace and the Hermitage all through the night of July 1. The trucks rumbled down the Nevsky Prospekt in the semidusk, for the white nights had not yet ended in Leningrad.

Never had so valuable a train been loaded. As it moved slowly out of the October freight station, Orbeli stood beside the lamp post at the end of the platform. His hat rested on his breast and tears ran down his cheeks. Not until the last car, the flatcar with the A A guns on it, had disappeared, did he turn and walk down the platform. Haifa million treasures had been dispatched. A million more still awaited exit.

The prompt, efficient evacuation of the Hermitage was due almost entirely to the foresight and courage of Orbeli. Although almost all the Armenians in Leningrad had been purged by Stalin in 1938 Orbeli stood and fought for the Hermitage. He managed by a personal letter to Stalin to block the sale of many priceless Hermitage paintings abroad and he insisted on making detailed plans for evacuation of the Hermitage treasure as early as 1939 long before the German attack.

¹
It had originally not been planned to start mobilization until midnight, June 22–23. But so many men appeared at the mobilization points that enrollment was begun at many of them on the evening of June 22. The Party sent 14,000 Komsomols to help handle the crowds.
(Na Zashchite Nevskoi Tverdyni
, pp. 17–18.)

²
The figures on evacuation vary. One estimate puts the total of children sent out of the city at 235,000, of whom 164,000 went into nearby areas.
(Na Zashchite Nevskoi Tverdyni
, pp. 25, 49.)

³
One account (S. Kostyuchenko, Yu. Fedorov, I. Khrenov, “
Sozdateli Groznykh Tankov” Zvezda
, No. 5, May, 1964, p. 168) gives the impression that Zaltsman and Kotin went to the Urals at the order of Stalin, returned in two days to Moscow and that Stalin proposed that the factory be evacuated. Stalin is quoted as saying: “You’ll not be able to work [in Leningrad] anyway once the air raids and shelling begin.” Actually, the conversation with Stalin must have occurred much later than June, probably not before late July or August. Zaltsman and Kotin are represented as opposing any evacuation as premature. Stalin is said to have agreed to defer the idea. There is no evidence that Stalin participated in any decisions whatever from June 22 until some time in early July.

⁴
Bychevsky, who reports Zhdanov’s departure on vacation June 19, does not give the precise date of his return but mentions it in a context that suggests June 27. There is no mention in the standard Soviet references of Zhdanov participating in Leningrad decisions before June 27.
Na Zashchite Nevskoi Tverdyni
(hereafter referred to as JV.Z.), which is most detailed, first mentions Zhdanov’s presence in Leningrad as on June 27 (P. 35).

THE MEN WORE ICE-CREAM SUITS AND THE
DÉCOLLETAGE
of the ladies sparkled with diamonds. They sat under the striped awnings at the Gloria and the Golden Swan, chatting lazily, eating parfaits and sipping colored drinks through straws. Nothing in the world seemed to bother them. There was no need to hurry. They sat, shaded from the sun, and watched behind their dark glasses. They sat waiting. . . .

They were waiting, thought Nikolai Mikhailovsky, a correspondent who had just arrived in Tallinn, for the Germans and they cared very little whether anyone noticed or not. Across the street someone was putting up fresh posters. They read: “Comrades! Stand as one in the defense of our freedom and our life.”

Down the street hurried military cars daubed with mustard paint. Trucks rumbled by. Crowds walked along the boulevard, staring at the bulletins posted in the windows.

Did the men in the ice-cream suits notice what was going on? Mikhailovsky did not think so. He strolled through Kadriorg Park. The swans sailed proudly across the pond, their necks a curve of snowy white. A little stream splashed over the rocks and pigeons pouted on the newly swept walks. Chattering squirrels leaped in the trees.

It seemed so quiet, so peaceful.

But no one knew better than Mikhailovsky how false was the illusion of peace and security. He had spent a good deal of time in the prewar months in the Baltic states. He knew the danger that lay below this glittering surface. By day the shops were filled and people strolled lazily in the parks. By night shots rang out—the Fifth Column at work. The Russians took no chances. The naval writer Vsevolod Vishnevsky went around armed, as he said, like a cowboy with an automatic in a holster and a carbine on his back. Anatoly Tarasenkov, another writer, carried grenades in his gas mask, a rifle under his arm and, Vishnevsky joked, wanted a small cannon, too.

Soviet rule was far from secure. The strictest security precautions prevailed. You had to have a special visa to enter the Baltic states from Russia, and they were hard to get. There were checks on the frontiers between each Baltic state to control movements from Latvia to Estonia, from Lithuania to Latvia.

Many Russians hesitated to enter the Baltic area, fearing the general state of insecurity. Some wives of naval officers refused to accompany their husbands to Riga. They had heard too much about the Latvian nationalists, about terrorists, snipers and bombings.

Beginning on June 13, at the very moment when the Tass communiqué was denying rumors of war, special detachments of the Soviet secret police had been concentrated in the principal Baltic cities. That day and each day thereafter they carried out mass arrests. In Lithuania possibly 35,000 persons were taken into custody. The number arrested in Estonia and Latvia was on the same order. The total was close to 100,000.

The police rounded up members of non-Communist parties, former military and police officers, priests, ministers, businessmen and well-to-do farmers. Persons who had been arrested in the early months of Soviet rule were taken from their prison cells and loaded on trains for the long journey east to Siberian prison camps.

The purge was far from complete when war broke out. Many remained in prisons in Vilnius, Kaunas, Riga and Tallinn, awaiting transport to the east. Nor was care taken by the police as to who was arrested. Soviet publications later delicately noted that “in conditions of the Stalin cult of personality not a few mistakes were perpetrated.”

Vladimir Rudny, a young Moscow newspaperman, witnessed the action in Riga. On June 17 the entire Riga Party organization was mobilized to assist in the arrests. Among those mobilized, as later became evident, were secret members of the Latvian underground, who protected their cohorts and managed to send to prison persons either neutral or inclined to the Soviet cause.

Late in the evening, walking through the Riga streets, Rudny heard firing. A colonel of the Latvian nationalist army was shooting it out with an
NKVD
detachment, trying to save a cache of arms and radio transmitters.

As Rudny watched the battle, a young Latvian woman came up and they fell to talking. She warned Rudny to get out of Riga, saying she knew that war was about to start and that the Germans would quickly be in Riga. Rudny replied in anger. That kind of rumor spread panic. That was why the arrests were being made, to round up the Fifth Column so there would be no repetition of events in Spain.

“Do leave, I beg you. Do leave,” the woman insisted and melted into the darkness.

Later Rudny met two colleagues—Vyacheslav Susoyev and the playwright Sergei Mikhalkov, a man of extraordinary thinness and height—six feet five inches tall and weighing, then, only 150 pounds.

To Rudny’s amazement, Mikhalkov ako said war was only a few days distant.

“Nonsense,” snapped Rudny. “That’s a fairy story for beginners in Civil Defense.”

“Wait and see,” said Mikhalkov calmly. “Time will tell.”

The trio were drinking wine in the ancient cellar of the Fokstrotdil. Nothing more was said. But Rudny was never to forget the conversation.

Soviet authorities did not explain to the population what was going on. Panic and rumors spread. The NKVD sent off to Siberia a considerable number of Soviet supporters and left untouched many bitter opponents. The result fanned the hatred already felt by many Baits for their Soviet masters. The round-up underlined the dichotomy with which the Soviet leadership viewed the possibility of conflict—on the one hand acting with hysterical haste to prepare for war and on the other banning talk of war as virtual treason.
¹

The Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians had welcomed the Soviet takeover in 1940 with little enthusiasm. They enjoyed independence. Their feeling of nationalism was strong. It was reinforced by passionate anti-Communism and, quite often, chauvinistic hatred for Russians.

For a thousand years the Baltic states had boasted a strong German minority. The Germans played a leading role in cultural, economic, political and military life. Even in St. Petersburg the Germans had been an important factor. Many settled there in the time of Peter and Catherine. The German influence in the Romanov court had been profound and was blamed by many for the final collapse of the czarist dynasty.

At the time of the Soviet takeover the German minority in Latvia numbered 60,000, passionately pro-Hitler and banded together in 268 Nazi organizations. Some 52,000 of these Germans were repatriated in October-December, 1939, but official German missions had been established in both Riga and Tallinn, and as late as March 7, 1941, Berlin was still trying to get consular status for them.

In all the Baltic states fiercely nationalistic anti-Soviet organizations remained in the underground along with a network of German spies. Soviet intelligence agents had been at war with them for months. They uncovered one spy in the code room of the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From July, 1940, to May, 1941, the NKGB rounded up 75 underground nationalist groups in Lithuania. Throughout 1940 and the first quarter of 1941 the NKGB took into custody
66
resident German intelligence agents and 1,596 individual operatives. Of this number 1,338 were in the western areas, the Baltic states and the Ukraine.
²

In preparation for the attack on Russia the Germans established in 1940 a special organization known as Brandenburg-800 to carry out diversionary operations behind the Russian lines—the destruction of bridges, blocking of tunnels, capture of rear fortifications and similar objectives. It was to operate in liaison with agents already inside the Soviet Union—nationalist and other anti-Soviet groups.

“At the disposal of the staff of the German Army,” reported Admiral Canaris, chief of German intelligence, on July 4, 1941,

Among the nationalist groups in Lithuania were the Union of Lithuanians, the Front of Lithuanian Activists and the Committee for Rescuing Lithuania. In Latvia they included the Perkinkrusts, and in Estonia the underground Legion of the East and the Committee of Rescue, otherwise known as the Izmailites and the Kaitzelites. The Estonians before the outbreak of war had organized so-called Erna battalions to carry out diversions behind the lines of the Red Army.

In prewar weeks tension was high in Latvia. Several mysterious forest fires were attributed by Soviet police to Latvian nationalists. In many villages the kulaks or richer peasants were in, open rebellion against the Soviet Union. Agitation against the regime was widespread. There had been interference with spring sowing and growing reluctance on the part of poor peasants to join in Soviet agricultural projects. Sabotage was reported in sawmills. From the pulpits priests and ministers were giving frank voice to their antagonism to Soviet power.

Nowhere was the situation sharper than in Lithuania. The Lithuanian Activist Front had been established in Berlin November 17, 1939, by Colonel Kazys Shkirpa, former Lithuanian military attaché in Germany. He formulated a program for liberation of Lithuania and on March 24, 1941, smuggled into Lithuania directives for carrying out an uprising to be timed with the German attack on the Soviet Union.

LAF cells of three or five persons were assigned individual tasks—the taking over of police stations, seizure of telephone exchanges, etc.

By the eve of the war the LAF estimated its membership at 36,000. It was damaged by the Soviet round-up of June 14, but not seriously. Two command centers were established, one in Vilnius and the other in Kaunas.

There were other nationalist organizations active in Lithuania: the Lithuanian Defense League, the Iron Wolf at Sakiai, the Lithuanian Freedom Army in Siauliai and the Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters.

The dissident Baits were encouraged by the overt Nazi preparations for attack. By mid-June the Nazis hardly bothered to conceal their work along the Baltic frontier. Engineers labored openly, setting up fire points and observation posts, strengthening bridges on roads leading to the Soviet frontier and putting down pontoons along the streams. In some places new mine fields were laid, in others old ones were taken up. Beginning about June 17 groups of German officers in cars began to cruise along the border, studying the terrain and the deployment of Soviet troops. On the night of the twentieth a skirmish was fought near Buraki, where a group of German scouts tried to force their way into Soviet territory. Three were killed and two captured.

With the outbreak of war the Baltic states were quickly in turmoil. Soviet authorities were so uncertain of the population that they made no effort to order mobilization, fearing that they could not rely on such forces. As a result even elements loyal to the Soviet Union had no weapons and no means of defending themselves against the Germans or anti-Soviet Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian nationalist bands.

The former Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian armies had been incorporated into the Red Army, where they formed three territorial corps, the 29th (Lithuanian), the 24th (Latvian) and the 22nd (Estonian). Each consisted of two rifle divisions with corps artillery, communications and engineering units. Most of these were at summer camps when war broke out, and none played a role of consequence in the defense of the Baltic littoral— probably because the Soviet command had grave doubts of their loyalty.

Neither the Baltic armies, commanded by Colonel General F. I. Kuznetsov, nor the Baltic Fleet, under Admiral Tributs, had plans for evacuation of their forces or of the civilian population. There were no plans for carrying out any operations whatever on Baltic soil. All the Soviet war plans called for carrying the war to the enemy’s territory. There was nothing in the directives about fighting on the home ground.

Within twenty-four hours the radio station at Kaunas had been seized by the Lithuanian underground organization. At 11:30
A.M.
Radio Kaunas proclaimed Lithuanian independence. It announced the formation of a new government headed by Shkirpa, with General Rastikis (who was also in Berlin) as Minister of National Defense.
³
Lithuanian underground groups seized the police stations, captured the prison, freed political prisoners and took control of the automatic telephone station. Fighting between the Lithuanians and Soviet troops was severe. Some two hundred Lithuanians were killed in the Kaunas battle and possibly two thousand in other cities and villages.

By the time Colonel General Georg von Kiichler marched into Kaunas June 25 in parade formation at the head of the Eighteenth Nazi Army, the Lithuanian rebels controlled the city. The Lithuanians estimated that nearly 100,000 persons joined the uprising.

Only too swiftly did it become apparent that the glacis which the Soviets had hoped to create in the Baltic states as a reliable defensive zone and protection to Leningrad was a deadly trap.

Nothing was secure within it. The Russians found themselves overwhelmed at the front by the swift German Panzer thrusts. They were cut off from communication from their headquarters and isolated in hostile country where every village might contain an ambush and every street corner might conceal deadly peril. German paratroops dropped into the countryside. German agents, native patriots, bands of dissident elements seemed to spring out of the very ground.