The 900 Days (85 page)

Meretskov was personally directing the rescue operation, and on the morning of the twenty-fifth he was advised by some escaping officers that they had seen Vlasov and his senior officers on one of the back roads. Meretskov immediately directed a tank regiment and some mobile infantry, together with his adjutant, Captain M. G. Borod, to penetrate the region where Vlasov had been seen. They found no trace of him. Knowing that Vlasov had a radio receiver, they tried to reach him by wireless without result. Later, it was learned that Vlasov had divided his staff into three groups, which were supposed to come out about 11
P.M.
, June 24, in the region of the 46th Rifle Division. Unfortunately, none of them knew where the 46th command point was located. As they approached the Polist River, they came under strong German machine-gun fire. Vlasov apparently was not seen beyond this point. The Military Council and General Afanasyev, chief of communications, turned north. Two days later Afanasyev’s group met a partisan unit and managed to make contact with a second partisan group which had a radio transmitter. With the aid of the transmitter General Afanasyev was able to communicate with Meretskov July 14. He was brought out by plane.

At some point V. N. Ivanov, secretary of the Young Communist organization in Leningrad, encountered Vlasov, but whether before or after the Polist River incident is not clear. Ivanov was dropped with some other young Communists, by parachute, behind the German lines. By mistake the pilot let them jump over a small village which was occupied by a Nazi SS unit. Ivanov was badly wounded and took refuge in a nearby forest, where he encountered Vlasov, in Soviet uniform, still holding out. Then they separated and trace of Vlasov was again lost.

After Afanasyev’s rescue Meretskov telephoned Party Secretary Zhdanov, who ordered the partisan units to undertake a widespread search for General Vlasov and the other members of his staff. The partisans mobilized three groups and searched the regions around Poddubye for many miles but found no trace of Vlasov. A few of the command officers turned up. Colonel A. S. Rogov, chief of intelligence, got through the encirclement. He followed the route of the Military Council but came out a little behind them. For years the fate of Commissar Zuyev was unknown. Then, by chance, his grave was discovered near the 105th kilometer of the Chudovo railroad, near the Torfyanoye Station. Starving, wounded and weak, he had emerged at the railroad line and begged a bit of bread from some workers. One of them ran to tell the Germans. Before he could be seized Zuyev pulled out his service revolver and shot himself. About 9,322 men escaped encirclement; 8,000 to 10,000 were lost.

Vlasov did not shoot himself. Two days before Zhdanov ordered the partisans to search for him he surrendered to the Germans on July 12 and within a short time had placed himself at the service of the Nazi propaganda apparatus as the head of what became the Vlasovite movement, an organization of Russian soldiers and officers directed against the Soviet cause. He was the only Soviet general officer of prominence to defect, and his defection was always a prickly business in which he frequently would not play the Nazi game. But Vlasov’s treachery became such a thing of awe and horror in wartime Russia that his name was hardly uttered.

Later, however, many Soviet writers sought to put the blame for the Second Shock Army’s disaster on him. They suggested that he had been deliberately playing a double game. There is no evidence in the record of the desperate fight of the Second Shock Army to support such a view. General Khozin, who, of course, was himself deeply involved in the tragedy, concluded that the Soviet side simply did not have the strength to defeat the well-organized, well-reinforced German troops opposing them. The Germans were, he pointed out, “at the zenith of their power.” At no time was the Supreme Command in Moscow able to send sufficient reserves to the Leningrad front to create a real breakthrough force.

This, rather than failures by part of the troops, bad generalship or incipient treachery by Vlasov, was the key. The Second Shock Army was in encirclement, almost inextricably bogged down in the marshes and confronted by powerful, well-led German forces before Vlasov flew in by U-2 light reconnaissance plane in mid-April to take command. General Meretskov, not unnaturally, put much blame on Moscow for the absurd command change which ousted him in April only to bring him back in early June—a decision which played a part in the disaster. But nothing in Meretskov’s conduct of the late winter-early spring operations gave hope that the fate of the Second Shock Army would have been different had he been left in chargé. Vlasov’s role was secondary, but his emergence at the head of the Vlasovite movement threw his actions and the whole question of the Second Shock Army into the lurid limbo of critical Soviet political issues. Everyone connected with the affair had to prove that the blame rested with Vlasov, that each had no connection with the traitor, that the fault lay with Vlasov and no one else. For twenty years there were only peripheral mentions of Vlasov in Soviet historiography, and even today the main thrust of the memoirs and studies is to establish that the individual commanders had nothing to do with Vlasov or the Kremlin’s decisions in relation to him and the ill-fated Volkhov operations.

There is some substance to this. Vlasov’s career until tragedy enmeshed him in the swamps of the ancient Novgorod tract bore telltale marks of Kremlin politics. The Volkhov-Leningrad front clearly fell within the responsibility of Georgi Malenkov, a sworn enemy then and later of Leningrad Party Boss Andrei Zhdanov. The role and fate of Malenkov’s protégé, Vlasov, inevitably played a part in Kremlin politics.
⁷

With the loss of the Second Shock Army one more hope for Leningrad went glimmering—the hope that spring or summer would bring an end to the blockade. In early June Party Secretary Zhdanov had gone to Moscow and bravely told the Supreme Soviet that the people of Leningrad stood as one, united, fighting for their city. This was true. But now on July 5 another kind of decision had to be made. The Leningrad Military Council that day ordered the transformation of Leningrad into a military city, with only the minimum population necessary to carry on the city’s defense and essential services. The next day Zhdanov announced the decision: another 300,000 people must be removed by the Ladoga route. The city must be cut to the bare minimum—800,000 population, no more. It was July 6, the 340th day of the blockade. The city was holding out, but no one knew what summer would bring. The bright dreams of spring had faded. The Nazis were on the move once more. Soviet armies were falling back toward the Volga. The gains of winter in the north Caucasus had been lost. There were ominous signs of a new build-up at Leningrad. Hitler had issued directive No. 45 to General Lindemann of the Eighteenth Nazi Army and to Field Marshal von Kiichler, now in command of Army Group Nord. They were to set in motion preparations for the capture of Leningrad by the beginning of September. Heavy reinforcements both of men and artillery were being assigned to the task.

Leningrad could take no chances. The Germans were enormously powerful, and the momentum that would take them to Stalingrad and Maikop in the Caucasus was already visible. Despite all the sacrifices it might well take them into Leningrad itself.

It was at about this time that a young Leningrad soldier named Yevgeny Zhilo was making his way through the broken countryside just outside his native city. It was near dawn, and in the pale luminosity of the white night the sky was dipped in rosy pastels. Somewhere beyond the unseen horizon the sun was rising. He pushed through the clumps of lilac, his carbine tangling in the branches. For a moment he halted and buried his nose in the heavy perfume of the blossoms. In their rich fragrance, in the dew now sparkling in the sunshine, in the soft, strange quiet of the morning, there seemed nothing but the happiness and brightness of life. Standing there, a soldier for six brief months, tears sprang into his eyes. Remembering the experience twenty-five years later, Zhilo felt no sense of shame. He had cried not because he was a youngster but because it was the summer of 1942 and he was still there just beside Leningrad and he had forgotten nothing, nothing that had happened—the flickering lamp in the darkness of the room; the frosted window pane and the glare of the burning houses; the unthinkable silence of the great city; the sound of the steps of a passer-by, heard from such a distance that their approach became frightening. He remembered the starving children, little old men who knew everything, understood everything. He knew as he stood breathing in the rich scent of the lilacs that he would never see again the eyes of those nearest and dearest to him, those doomed to die with eyes wide-open, solemn and a little mad, those who stood already at the border of death.

He knew as he stood there with his carbine outside Leningrad on that sunny morning that what had happened around him had never happened in the history of the world and that no one would forget it nor would anything be forgotten—not for centuries upon centuries.

The young soldier stood in the clump of lilacs and cried and the tears ran down his face. Then he put his carbine over his shoulder again, brushed aside the lilacs, and shouldered forward toward the line of trenches, there to fight while he could.

So Leningrad entered the second summer of war.

¹
Govorov joined in July, 1942. He was admitted without going through the candidate stage. (N.Z., p. 345.)

²
The idea of “offensive” use of artillery against the German siege guns brought a tart comment from Marshal Voronov, chief of Soviet artillery. “There were people on the Leningrad front who, attracted to terminology, attempted to juggle concepts of the First World War in place of the accepted and legitimate concepts—extermination, destruction and suppression.” (Voronov,
op. cit
., p. 219.)

³
The Ladoga shipping route proved very successful and efficient in 1942. By May 28 large-scale barge movements were under way. At the orders of State Defense Committee representative Aleksei Kosygin, a major rebuilding and expansion of port facilities had been carried out as well as preparation of large numbers of barges. During the 1942 navigation season, which closed November 25, 1942, the Ladoga route delivered 703,300 tons of freight, including 350,000 tons of food, 99,200 tons of war supplies, 216,600 tons of fuel, as well as horses, cows and sheep weighing 15,500 tons, and 41,500 tons of wood (towed as rafts). The route moved out of Leningrad 270,000 tons of freight, including 162,100 tons of machinery. It evacuated 528,000 persons, including 448,700 civilians. It carried to Leningrad 267,000 persons, including 250,000 troops. (V. Y. Neigoldberg,
htoriya SSSR
, No. 3, March, 1965, pp. 102
et seq
.)

⁴
At the start of the war Zuyev was a political commissar in General Morozov’s Eleventh Army headquarters at Kaunas, where he distinguished himself in leading units of the Eleventh Army out of the initial Nazi encirclement.

⁵
There is uncertainty as to the precise date when Vlasov took command of the Second Shock Army. Luknitsky gives the date as March 6, obviously incorrect, since Vlasov did not arrive at Meretskov’s headquarters until March 9. Meretskov says Vlasov took over the Second Shock Army a month and a half later. The formal command change apparently was April 16. (Luknitsky,
op. cit
., Vol. II, p. 322; Meretskov,
Voyenno-lstoricheskii Xhurnal
, No. 12, January, 1965, pp. 66-67; Barbashin,
op. cit
., p. 603.) Krykov was flown out April 16.
(Smert Komissara
, p. 102.)

⁶
Malenkov seems to have had special responsibilities for the Leningrad front.

⁷
Vlasov and his associate anti-Soviet officers fell into Russian hands at the end of the war. His execution along with that of some associates was announced August 2, 1946. (Alexander Dallin,
German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945
, London, 1957, p. 659.) Malenkov lost his post in the Party Secretariat about this time, possibly in connection with the Vlasov affair. However, his fall from favor was brief.

THE WHITE NIGHTS BROUGHT BACK TO LENINGRAD AN appearance of ease and relaxation. In the Summer Gardens fields of cabbages replaced grassy lawns. Between the antiaircraft batteries on the Champs de Mars sprouted potato patches. Here and there were small signs: “Dr. Kozin’s garden,” “Aleksandr Prokofyev’s garden” and dozens like it. On the steps of the Kazan Cathedral a copper samovar bubbled and women drank tea made of some kind of herbs. Everyone rolled his own cigarettes with paper torn from strips of old
Pravdas
. They lighted them with magnifying glasses. No matches were needed so long as the sun shone.

There were flowers in the city—mignonettes, daisies, field roses. The streetcars were jammed. Only lines Nos. 12, 3, 7, 30, 10, 20 and 9 ran regularly. Often they stopped because of shelling. There were no buses, no taxis. Signs appeared on the streets: “In case of shelling this side is the most dangerous.” Girls sold soda water at sidewalk stands, and a kvass wagon was parked on the Nevsky. Old fishermen tried their luck along the Fon-tanka and the Moika.

Death was more rare. Pavel Luknitsky walked through Leningrad one July day. He saw only two corpses—one on the Fontanka wrapped in a blanket on a wheelbarrow, the other in a coffin being pulled in a hand cart.

To be sure, people were thin and drawn. But they moved more swiftly, and many were ruddy from the summer sun. There were not many queues and, truth to say, not many people. The streets were empty. Too many had died, too many had been evacuated, and more were going all the time.

Everywhere people picked greens. Posted on the walls of buildings were check lists of edible wild plants. They recommended young nettles, dandelions, burdocks, goosefoot, rape, sorrel. One woman discovered a nettle patch outside the Catherine Gardens. She picked a panful and made a delicious summer soup. Never mind her nettle-burned hands.

There were still children in Leningrad. They ran and played. Sometimes it was “war,” sometimes doctor-and-nurse with dystrophy victims. Sayanov encountered some youngsters who made their “patient” lie on a stove while they debated whether she should be evacuated or whether she could be cured by a special diet.

Luknitsky was sitting on a street bench one day, writing in his diary. An old woman (he knew instantly that she was really young and that only starvation and hardship made her look old) came up to him, carrying a portable phonograph in a red case, a black umbrella and a battered bag on her back. She tried to sell him the phonograph. She told him her husband was at the front, she had had no word from him, had been evacuated from her home and had no place to go with her child.

The Writers’ House on Ulitsa Voinova was clean once more—no more bodies in the back rooms. Meals were served in the dining room by waitresses in neat uniforms—supper from three to five without ration coupons for members of the union: a full bowl of good barley soup, borsht, kasha and, for dessert, a kind of glucose or a chocolate bar.

No great problem now about looking after writers. Ilya Avramenko, the poet, and Luknitsky decided to evacuate all those not doing war work. They checked the prewar list of 300 members. There were 107 in the army, mostly on the Leningrad front; 33 had died of hunger, n had been killed at the front, and 6 had been arrested.

Of those arrested two, Lozin and Petrov, had been shot. Three had been put in prison on political chargés. These included one whose name Luknitsky did not remember and another named Borisoglebsky. The third was Abramovich-Blek—the gallant, onetime officer in the Czar’s navy who had jokingly promised in September, 1941, a place in his nonexistent barge on Lake Ladoga to “Lady Astor,” the manager of the Astoria Hotel restaurant. Another writer, named Herman Matveyev, had been arrested for speculation. Already 53 writers had been evacuated. There remained about 30 in civilian status to be sent out.

What tragedy befell Abramovich-Blek is not clear. But a grim clue can be found in Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s diary. Vishnevsky had “discovered” Abramovich-Blek as a writer, had sponsored his literary debut. On July 24, 1942, Vishnevsky noted:

B——k, Vishnevsky insisted, secretly was hoping for Hitler’s victory. Vishnevsky claimed he had seen a certain number of writers of the B——k type. They disguised themselves in Soviet colors, and their work was inevitably false and hypocritical.

Whether Vishnevsky believed his protégé was a traitor or whether he was covering his own tracks, there is no way of telling. The incident underlined the fact that the vigilance of the secret police had not slackened despite the heroism of the Leningraders.

Vissarion Sayanov decided to visit the composer Boris V. Asafyev. The wonderful old Leningrad bookstores were open again. Many book lovers had sold their libraries for bread. Many had died and left their books to be sold by their heirs; many were sold by thieves who ransacked empty apartments. Book trade was one of the few that thrived in Leningrad. (There was no basis for Vishnevsky’s paranoid suspicion that saboteurs had burned up the total stock of new editions of
War and Peace
and Tolstoy’s Sevastopol stories.)

Sayanov stopped in a bookshop on his way to Asafyev and picked up a pamphlet about a production of Tchaikovsky’s
Queen of Spades
at the Mariinsky Theater, May 3, 1921. The author was Igor Glebov—the
nom de plume
of Asafyev. He opened the pages and was struck by a phrase: “From the beginning to the end of the opera the claws of death quietly and steadily draw the victim closer and closer.”

He read on:

“The terrible design of the music of
The Queen of Spades
is to be found in its ceaseless beating into our brain of a feeling of the inevitability of death and, thus, delicately, frighteningly, moving us nearer and nearer to the terrible end.”

Sayanov bought the book and presented it to Asafyev.

“How strange!” Asafyev said. “It’s as though I had not written this, but someone else.”

They came upon another sentence written by Asafyev twenty years before: “When spring came, there was no one in the world as happy as the people of this sovereign city.”

Of this they had no doubt.

Sayanov was struck by his conversation with Asafyev. It dealt not with everyday living problems, food, rations, hunger. Asafyev had lived in the bomb shelter of the Pushkin Theater most of the winter. He had come to the margin of death. But he did not talk about his personal problems. He talked about the musical structure of the songs of the western Slavs and gave Sayanov a paper he had written on the opera
The Bronze Horseman
. Not a word about the terrible January days when Asafyev lay in his bed in the dark to conserve heat, light and strength, composing music in his mind and then, after daylight came, quickly writing down the notes while he still had the strength. In those days Asafyev wrote his whole autobiography in his mind, but it was many months before he was able to put it on paper.

Walking the streets of Leningrad, Luknitsky saw a group of women at the bridges over the canals and rivers, washing clothes or dishes. They looked healthy. Some had lipstick. Their clothing was not only washed but ironed.

On the Liteiny a hunchback set up a scales and did a rushing business. Everyone wanted to know how much weight he had lost during the winter. An old bootblack appeared at the corner of Sadovaya and Rakhov streets. He had to rest between shoeshines, he was so weak. A shine cost 5 rubles, a can of shoe polish the same. There were cigarettes for sale at street corners. Prices in the black market were becoming stabilized: a quart of vodka, 1,500 rubles; 100 grams of bread, 40 rubles; a pack of cigarettes, 150 rubles; fishcakes, 3 rubles. Musical comedy tickets were exchanged for two bread rations.

On the Nevsky the rubble of broken buildings had been carted away to be used in making bomb shelters and pillboxes. In the dental gaps made by destroyed buildings false fronts were erected. They were painted to resemble the building exteriors, windows and doors faithfully reproduced. Going quickly down the street it seemed undamaged. On the false front of a building at the Nevsky and Morskaya the date “1942” appeared – whether to mark the date of destruction or pseudo reconstruction was not clear. A shell went through one onion tower of the “Church of the Blood” erected on the site of Alexander IPs assassination. It was repaired with plywood, and no damage could be seen. The Engineers Castle took a direct hit (many persons were killed, for it was being used as a hospital), but from the outside it appeared whole.

The exterior appearances were deceptive. The city looked more peaceful. It seemed more peaceful. But in reality it still stood in deadly danger. And the danger was growing. To the south the German summer offensive was in full swing. Soviet troops had yielded Sevastopol and the Crimea. The Germans were in motion across the broad waist of the South Russian steppes, driving toward the Volga. Nazi troops were thrusting deep into the Caucasus.

Everywhere there were signs that they would soon try once again to take Leningrad. For more than a month German troop movements had been seen. Vishnevsky heard that German strength was 50 percent higher than in the spring. There were more and more reconnaissance flights. On July 10 Lieutenant General Leonid A. Govorov told the Leningrad commanders that a new test of strength was in the offing. Party Secretary Zhdanov warned that the Germans would again try to take the city by storm. With the occupation of the Crimea, Hitler had ordered Manstein’s Eleventh Army north for a new offensive against Leningrad. The 24th, 28th, 132nd and 170th infantry divisions of the Eleventh Army quickly appeared before Leningrad. They were followed by the 5th Mountain Division, the 61st Infantry and the 250th Spanish “Blue” Division. Vast quantities of heavy siege guns (including a 440-mm Big Bertha), many from the Skoda, Krupp and Schneider works, arrived. They had been successfully used by the Nazis in taking Sevastopol. By the end of July the Germans had massed twenty-one infantry and one tank division and one separate infantry brigade before Leningrad and at nearby Mga and Sinyavino.

In this atmosphere the Leningrad troops were once again ordered to take the offensive. The objective was to lift the siege—the fourth attempt. But there were other objectives: to lessen, if possible, the terrible German pressure in the south. The worst crisis of the war was at hand. Leningrad must, at any cost, prevent the Germans from shifting forces to the south and southwest.

The main responsibility of the new offensive was placed on General Meretskov’s Volkhov command, which was stronger than the Neva Operating Group of General Govorov.

Steps were taken to boost Leningrad’s morale. On July 25—Navy Day— for the first time German prisoners of war were paraded down the Nevsky, the only Germans to reach the heart of Leningrad. There were several thousand of them—unshaven, dirty, lousy, wearing jackets of ersatz wool. Many were plainly afraid of the crowds, mostly women who set up a shout: “Give them to us! Give them to us!” Troops and police held the women back. Here and there a child threw a stone or stick at the bedraggled Nazis. Not all, however, were cowed. Some sneered at the crowd, some laughed.

Vishnevsky noted discouragingly in his diary that some of these “whorehouse dregs” were the sons of workers, that many failed to bow under cross-examination, continuing to mouth Nazi slogans. Some, he said, burst into tears when told they would have to rebuild all that had been destroyed in Russia before being permitted to return to their homes.

At 7
P.M.
on August 9 the doors of Philharmonic Hall opened. Again there were lights—some lights anyway—in the crystal chandeliers. Sunlight streamed through the great windows, repaired with plywood after the winter’s bombing. Here was everyone in Leningrad: Vsevolod Vishnevsky and Vera Inber (by chance they met, walking in the greenhouse of the Botanical Gardens that afternoon, the one where the palms had frozen to death in the winter and where now, again, Victoria Regina lilies were beginning to bloom, where peonies were being cut and dark barberry branches were sending forth shoots); Lieutenant General Govorov, handsome in his uniform; Party Secretary Kuznetsov, dark, lean-faced but more at ease than during the winter months; and on the podium, Director Karl Eliasberg. Everyone was wearing his good black suit or her best silk dress, the most fashionable crowd the siege had seen. The score of the Seventh Symphony had been sent to Leningrad by plane in June, and rehearsals had gone on for more than six weeks.

The glory and majesty of the symphony were played against a crescendo of Leningrad’s guns. General Friedrich Ferch, Chief of Staff of the Nazi Eighteenth Army, learning that his troops were listening to a radio broadcast of the symphony (it was carried by direct hook-up to all parts of the Soviet Union and by shortwave to Europe and North America), ordered cannon fire into the area of the Philharmonic Hall. But General Govorov, the counterbattery specialist, had foreseen this possibility. Soviet guns silenced the German batteries.
¹

Generals Meretskov and Govorov, Admiral Tributs, and Party secretaries Zhdanov and Kuznetsov met August 21 near Tikhvin to agree on final plans for the new effort to lift the blockade. There was dispute between Leningrad and Volkhov, between Zhdanov and Govorov on one side and Meretskov on the other. Leningrad wanted to take the lead. Stalin supported Meretskov and insisted that “the basic weight of the proposed operation should lie on the Volkhov front.”

Zhdanov sharply challenged Meretskov, insisting that Leningrad could lift the blockade by forcing the Neva with the Neva Operating Group. Meretskov and Stalin thought—correctly—that he was wrong.