The 900 Days (40 page)

German leaflets began to appear in town, scattered from planes by parachute: “Beat the Jews. Beat the Commissars. Their mugs beg to be bashed in. Wait for the full moon. Bayonets in the earth! Surrender!”

A well-known writer visited Shtein’s next-door neighbor. The writer’s lips were white, his hands shook and somehow he looked obnoxious. He knew that the Germans had launched a new assault on the city and he had read the leaflets. He began to reason with himself aloud: “I have never said anything publicly against Fascism. I never signed any petitions. I’m not a Party man. My mother, it is true, was a Jew, but, on the other hand, my father was from the nobility. I’ve found some papers which verify that.”

In a three-room de luxe suite lived some young Estonians. One was playing a ukulele. Each had a wine glass, and a bottle of champagne stood on the table. A young girl in a tight sweater was doing a tango with a blond young man. They didn’t seem to have a care in the world. But at dawn they would be parachuted behind the German lines to organize resistance in Estonia.

Vladimir Gankevich, the Leningrad athlete who was now a Red Army lieutenant, had been given a responsible task by his commander, Colonel Pavlov. The order came from Marshal Voroshilov himself. Gankevich was to go to Murmansk and inspect the Fourteenth Army preparations for ski operations, which would commence once the snow had fallen. On the morning of August 29 Gankevich kissed his sweetheart, Galya, good-bye at the Moscow station. The hubbub was overwhelming. He heard a woman crying, “Senushka, what will happen to you? And to me? God help us! You are abandoning your home and going God knows where!”

Gankevich looked from the window as the train pulled out and saw mostly men in uniform. Some had handkerchiefs at their eyes. Most of the passengers were women and children, part of the hasty new effort to evacuate from Leningrad those not necessary for the city’s defense.

Across the compartment sat a youngster, eight or nine years old. His mother was crying. The youngster said, “Don’t cry! We’ll beat the Germans and soon be back with Papa. Did you see the gun he was carrying?”

Gankevich turned to a woman beside him and asked where she was going.

“I don’t know,” she said. “The evacuation has begun. All those with children are supposed to leave Leningrad—for somewhere in the Urals.”

Suddenly a youngster named Volodya shouted, “Look at the balloons. Look, Mama! So many!”

Gankevich looked, too. To his amazement he saw German paratroops descending in a broad meadow near the railroad tracks. He heard the heavy thump of antiaircraft guns and saw the Germans begin to form up at the far edge of the field.

The train picked up speed and roared down the tracks past a small station without stopping. Gankevich got just a glimpse of the name: Mga.

An army captain quieted the passengers. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “Nothing dangerous about that. The Germans will all be wiped out before we get to Volkhov.”

He walked from compartment to compartment, joking with the children. Finally he slid into the seat beside Gankevich.

“Do you have some tobacco?” he asked pleasantly, then whispered, “You understand what’s happened? The Germans have captured Mga. Connections with Leningrad have been broken.”

Aleksandr Rozen, the war correspondent, made his weary way into Leningrad. He had been with the 70th Division at Medved during the exciting days in July when they roughed up Manstein’s 56th Panzers at Soltsy. He was wounded in the savage Nazi assault which broke the division and sent it reeling back toward Leningrad. Sent to Novgorod, the day the city was falling to the Germans, he wandered through the city’s ancient Kremlin, older than Moscow’s, through echoing corridors, empty rooms, the abandoned headquarters of the Soviet command, which had already evacuated the city.

Painfully, he had made his way north, stage by stage, seeking the remnants of the division, remnants which constantly eluded him. Valdai, Kuzhenkino, Bologoye, Uglovka, Borovichi, Khvoinaya. At each ancient Russian village he was a little late. Finally, at Khvoinaya a commandant—against strictest orders—put him on a hospital train for Leningrad. The old engine pulled the train through one station after another, all in ruins. He saw smashed trains lying on sidings, stations burning, towns leveled.

The train passed through a little station—Mga. Rozen had never heard the name before. Soon he was at Obukhovo on Leningrad’s outskirts. One more stop, then the Leningrad freight station.

At headquarters he inquired about the 70th Division. It was in bits— one unit fighting at Lisino-Korpus, another near Tosno, a third at Ushaki. He hunted out the commanders. Fedyunin was dead. Krasnov was in the hospital. Not a man remained of Krasnov’s regiment. Colonel Podlutsky of the artillery unit was heavily wounded—in the hospital. He had led his detachment out of encirclement 125 miles behind the German lines.

Rozen walked out of the hospital down Engineers Street and turned into the Sadovaya. He went slowly, not hurrying. Strangely, his spirits had begun to lift as he walked down Leningrad’s boulevards. It seemed to him that he had already survived the worst, that Leningrad would stand, that Leningrad would survive, that Leningrad would conquer death.

He walked on down the street to the offices of the newspaper,
On Guard of the Fatherland
, for which he had written during the winter war with Finland. He met Editorial Chief Litvinov and asked what he could do to be useful. Litvinov thought for a moment.

“I think I’d like to have you go over to Lake Ladoga and interview the chief of the Ladoga flotilla.”

Rozen couldn’t understand. Why should he go to Lake Ladoga? The battle was being fought at Pushkin, at Kolpino.

“Well,” said Litvinov, “you see, railroad connections between Leningrad and the rest of the country have been cut.”

Mga . . . Rozen’s hospital train had been the last to go through the little station.

The Leningrad Public Library had shipped off 360,000 of its most priceless items (out of a collection of 9,000,000). Voltaire’s Library, the Pushkin archives and the incunabula had gone off in July. Now the attic had been filled with sand and the most precious remaining books were removed to the cellars. The main reading room was closed, and a smaller room on the first floor was opened for 150 readers. The card catalogue, the information bureau, the print collections, had been put in the subbasement, and many treasures had been transferred to the gloomy subterranean galleries of the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Alexander Nevsky catacombs.

Some fifty-two boxes of treasures from the great Pushkin palaces of Catherine and Alexander had been shipped out before the Germans swept in. The valuables of the Russian Museum were sent to Gorky and then, to the horror of Director P. K. Baltun, on to Perm by river barge.

During the second half of July most of the animals in the Zoological Gardens had been evacuated. So had the Lenfilm studios, the scientific institutes of the Academy of Science and other institutes, totaling ninety-two in all.

Most of the great artistic ensembles had now left Leningrad. The Philharmonic and the Pushkin Drama Theater went to Novosibirsk, the Conservatory to Tashkent, the Mariinsky Opera and Ballet to Perm, the Maly Opera to Orenburg. Two great trains, on July 1 and July 20, had carried off the treasures of the Hermitage and a third was being prepared.

Director Orbeli had fifty tons of shavings and three tons of cotton wadding in which to pack the first two trainloads. But for the third he had nothing but wood for boxes. By August 30 he had packed 350 boxes. Work was starting on the 351st when the order came through to halt. The Germans it seemed, had captured Mga, a little station on the last railroad linking Leningrad with mainland Russia. Perhaps it would soon be recovered. Meanwhile, hold up on the packing. The boxes stayed for a time in the main vestibule of the Hermitage. Just outside, the lindens had begun to turn yellow, but their leaves did not fall. The days were so sunny. It was still as warm as midsummer with nights that were calm, clear, moonlit.

¹
For many years Shvarts and Nikolai M. Oleinikov had edited a children’s magazine called
Chizh i Yezh
. Oleinikov had been a Party member since the first days of the Revolution. He was arrested and executed in 1937 as an “enemy of the people.” Shvarts was so shaken he was unable to write for several years.

²
The change was made January 15, 1944.

ADMIRAL KUZNETSOV ARRIVED IN LENINGRAD SHORTLY before the fall of Mga. He does not give the exact date of his departure from Moscow in his memoirs, but it must have been August 27, and he arrived in Leningrad on August 28. Kuznetsov says he originally planned to go to Leningrad somewhat earlier but that “I was summoned by Stalin on some question or another at the end of August” and was then dispatched to Leningrad with what he calls “responsible representatives of the Stavka,” as part of a special commission representing the Central Committee of the Party and the State Defense Committee. At no point in his wordy memoirs does Kuznetsov name those “responsible representatives.” The only name he mentions is that of Marshal Voronov, who left nearly a week earlier.

This is not accidental. The fact is that the “responsible representatives” were none other than two members of the State Defense Committee, Vyacheslav M. Molotov and Georgi M. Malenkov.

The other members of the mission were A. N. Kosygin (later to become Premier of the Soviet Union), who was deputy chairman of the State Committee on Evacuation; Air Marshal P. F. Zhigarev, Soviet Air Commander in Chief; Voronov and Kuznetsov. Technically, Voroshilov and Zhdanov were members of the Commission as well.
¹

The Commission was assigned the task of “evaluating the complicated situation” and rendering on-the-spot aid to the military command, the city and the regional Party organizations. It was endowed with the widest discretionary authority. Obviously, it held in its hands the fate of Leningrad, specifically the question of whether it could or should be held.

Kuznetsov did not fly directly to Leningrad; instead, he flew with the party to Cherepovets, where a special train was made available. The route itself is a clue to the desperation which must have been felt in Moscow concerning the Leningrad situation. Cherepovets is nearly two hundred miles due east of Leningrad and is a point on the east-west Leningrad-Vologda railroad, rather than the direct north-south Leningrad-Moscow railroad.

The distinguished party boarded the special train at the provincial station of Cherepovets and moved westward, through Tikhvin and Volkhov until they got to the little station of Mga, about twenty-five miles southeast of Leningrad. There, for reasons not immediately clear to Kuznetsov, the semaphore was set red against further progress. An air attack was just coming to an end; German bombers, their motors clearly audible, were flying away; antiaircraft guns were banging; explosions could be heard and fires were springing up not far from the railroad.

“To wait for dawn was not desirable,” Kuznetsov thought. But what to do? A number of bombs had fallen on the trackage, and it was not possible for the train to move forward. The party disembarked and picked its way down the tracks, boarded an interurban streetcar and presently met an armored train which Voroshilov had thoughtfully sent to Mga to pick up the bedraggled members of the State Defense Committee.

It is not likely that Malenkov and Molotov arrived in Leningrad with any great confidence in the military position.

As Kuznetsov remarked: “In a military situation one sometimes encounters unexpected situations. However, the position in which the Stavka representatives found themselves speaks of the insufficiencies of information and of control over situations even in those cases where it was essential.”

What Malenkov and Molotov did not realize until after their arrival in Leningrad was that the bombing of Mga which they witnessed was the prelude to a Nazi attack on the station which would on August 30 cut the last rail connection—that of the Northern Railroad—between Leningrad and the mainland of Russia.

The Commission members spent about ten days in Leningrad. The exact nature of their decisions is not clear from any of the Soviet accounts. There is no published record of the conversations between Malenkov, Molotov and Zhdanov. There is not to be found in any front-line reminiscences, officers’ tales or specialized histories a reference to the presence of Malenkov or Molotov on any fighting front during the time of their visit. Kuznetsov gives the impression that he concerned himself wholly with fleet matters and was not privy to the discussions.

Marshal Zhigarev is said to have aided in overcoming deficiencies in air defenses (the city was on the eve of savage German air attacks but thus far had not been bombed). Voronov helped on antitank defenses. Admiral Kuznetsov, the naval member, worked on the collaboration of Baltic Fleet units in artillery support of the Leningrad front. Assistance in plans for the internal defense of the city was rendered. Once again minute details were spelled out. The line of defense was to run from the Finnish Gulf and the Predportovaya Station along the October Railroad tracks through the village of Rybatskoye to the Utkin factory, the Kudrovo State Farm, to Rzhevka and along the line Udelnoye^Kolomyagi-Staraya Derevnya. If the Germans broke into the city, they would be met by 26 rifle divisions and 6 tank battalions, armed with 1,205 guns, or 30 per mile of front.

Much attention was given to the problem of evacuating population, factories and scientific institutions and improving Leningrad’s food position, although by this time all rail routes had been severed.

During this period Admiral Panteleyev went to Smolny at Voroshilov’s summons. A big meeting was in progress. The room was filled with people, most of them military but many civilians as well. Some were women. Voroshilov sat against the wall at a long table covered with a dark cloth. He looked tired, gloomy and discouraged. He talked in a quiet, soft voice, not at all like himself. The windows were blacked out, and the room was dark and dismal.

Panteleyev did not recognize anyone in the room besides Marshal Voroshilov, although there were many high officials present. He does not name them. Were the members of the State Defense Committee present?

The meeting was one long catalogue of disaster—of people who had refused to be evacuated, of people (especially children) evacuated into the path of the Germans, of special trains which stood on dangerous sidings for days without moving, subject to Nazi air attack, of children sent off thousands of miles to the east with no word to their families as to their destination.

Again and again someone would say: “But who would have thought the enemy would get so close to Leningrad?”

Voroshilov sternly demanded an answer as to why the government orders to evacuate the population had not been fulfilled.

The meeting didn’t take long. It left Panteleyev filled with despondency. The next day orders were issued to continue to evacuate civilians—not less than a million through Shlisselburg. Shlisselburg fell three days later.

The visit of Malenkov and Molotov to Leningrad has dropped out of Soviet historiography. But it once was firmly fixed as a stellar event. Malenkov proudly noted in his biography in the
Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsyklopedia
, published in 1952, that he “in August, 1941, was to be found on the Leningrad front.” Standard histories written as late as 1953 mentioned the visit. In fact, the official version then was that “under their [Malenkov’s and Molotov’s] firm leadership plans were worked out and measures carried out directed at organizing the defeat of the enemy.” Or, as another historian put it: “In September at the sharpest moment of the struggle for Leningrad the Central Committee sent V. M. Molotov and G. M. Malenkov into the besieged city to organize its defense.”

The mission may have been designed to assist the hard-pressed defenders of Leningrad. But it may—and this possibility is hinted at by Kuznetsov— have been entrusted with the task of deciding whether Leningrad should be abandoned.

Voronov, a tall, thoughtful man whose quiet manner inspired confidence, was first on the ground. He was there by August 22. His impressions were troubled.

“To my surprise,” he recalled, “the city continued to live very peacefully. You might have thought that the battle was being fought on the nearest approaches to Berlin and not under the walls of Leningrad.”

He was appalled to find practically nothing had been done about evacuating the population. He saw in this clear evidence of an underevaluation of the threat which now hung over the city. He was right.

The State Defense Commission, Voronov recalled, demanded the immediate evacuation from Leningrad of children, women and old persons and also all scientific institutions and factories which could not be used for the essential needs of the front or city. The Commission called for the immediate reconstruction of the life of the city on military terms.

Just though Voronov’s criticisms were, the time was far too late to undo the fatal results of weeks of false optimism.

On August 26 Zhdanov and Voroshilov, presumably joined by Voronov, talked via the VC phone with Stalin in Moscow. Reporting the desperate situation which had been created by the German capture of Lyuban Station, about fifty miles southeast of the city, and the cutting of the October Railroad between Moscow and Leningrad—the principal communications route to the city—they said they must have additional forces if the city was to be held.

Stalin responded to the plea of desperation. He agreed that Leningrad should receive the next four days’ supply of tanks from the Leningrad tank factories (principally, the KV 60-ton monsters turned out by the Kirov and the Izhorsk factories). These were two of the main producers of armored weapons in the Soviet Union, and, desperate though the Leningrad situation was, their production had continued to go almost entirely into the central strategic reserves of the Red Army in the Moscow area.
²
Stalin’s order meant twenty-five to thirty tanks for the Leningrad front. Many of them moved straight into battle, their steel bodies unpainted and glistening.

Moreover, Stalin promised to send to Leningrad four aviation regiments and ten infantry battalions. This would bring the number of reserves sent to the Leningrad front since the outbreak of war to seventy battalions. At the same time Stalin grimly ordered the Leningrad Command to “put in order” the Forty-eighth Army (actually, little more than a figure on a piece of military paper after its latest disasters) and to mine heavily the Moscow-Leningrad highway and the approaches to Leningrad. In fact, of course, the Germans had already cut the Moscow-Leningrad highway.

Each of the ten battalions which Stalin agreed to send to Leningrad comprised a thousand or more men. But not all were experienced and not all had weapons.

“Don’t hurry about throwing them into battle,” Zhdanov warned G. Kh. Bumagin, Military Council member of the Forty-eighth Army. “The new recruits need a little preparation for the battle front.”

But the caution was in vain. The Nazi 39th Panzer Corps of the 3rd Panzer Group was driving forward from Lyuban to Tosno and Mga on the outskirts of Leningrad. The commander of the luckless Forty-eighth Army threw everything he could lay his hands on into the battle in an attempt to halt the German advance. Nothing helped. The Germans drove remorselessly on.

Stalin had defined the basic task of the Leningrad Command in these terms: to protect the city from attack from the west, southwest and southeast; to prevent the Germans from cutting the October, Pechora and Northern railroads; to hold firmly the Koporsky Plateau to insure the defense of Leningrad from the sea; to halt the Finnish offensive at the Vuoksi River and keep the Finns from cutting the Kirov railroad.

It was a task beyond the capability of the forces defending Leningrad— or of any reinforcements which the city could hope to obtain.

This was the grim moment at which Malenkov and Molotov appeared on the scene.

Malenkov was Zhdanov’s keenest rival as a possible successor to Stalin and court favorite. Molotov’s role was anomalous, but the indications are that he was playing at Malenkov’s side, not Zhdanov’s. These were two members of the three-man junta which had taken power during the days of Stalin’s incapacity in June; two of the three men who had sent Zhdanov back to Leningrad to defend his fief, who had cut him off from decision-making or ambition-satisfying exercises in Moscow. Zhdanov had been in Leningrad now for two months, directing its defense. His record was hardly brilliant. Now the gravest decisions had to be made. Could the city be held? Was there any way of thwarting the Nazi offensive?

Only echoes of the icy conversations of the high Soviet leaders with their brutal underlay of anxiety and emotion come through the reports of the survivors. All mention of Malenkov and Molotov in this connection has been banished from the Soviet press since their ignoble defeat in the 1957 attempt to oust Nikita Khrushchev. Zhdanov left no record before his untimely death August 31, 1948. Most of Zhdanov’s closest associates were shot in the following years.
³

However, without question the fateful issue of abandoning Leningrad arose. If there were opposing positions in these discussions, they must have been: Zhdanov for holding on, Malenkov and Molotov for giving up.

The usual command upheavals and reshuffles, a certain sign of crisis on a Soviet front, occurred. On the twenty-third of August Karelia had been split off from the Leningrad Command. On the twenty-ninth the State Defense Committee (was the idea that of Malenkov and Molotov?) named Voroshilov as the Leningrad front commander, with Zhdanov and Party Secretary Kuznetsov as Military Council members, and General Popov as Chief of Staff. The move made considerable sense, yet it marked a downgrading of the roles of Voroshilov and Zhdanov. They formerly had been in chargé of the whole complex of fronts and armies in the Leningrad area. Now they had only the single front—essentially that of the city itself. The next day the Council for the Defense of Leningrad was dissolved and all its functions taken over by the Leningrad Front Command of Zhdanov and Voroshilov.