Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (13 page)

 

are untrained, or insufficiently trained, to shoot, so that in some cases they are unable to load their own rifles and their officers have to do it for them . . . Out of 205 listed as machine-gunners only 100 turned out actually to be acquainted with machine guns, the rest were just riflemen. A list of ‘sappers' included more riflemen and ordinary labourers, but not a single explosives expert . . . Nor do they have any tools for repairing weapons, so that simple breakage of a machine gun's firing pin puts the gun out of commission.
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The decision formally to wind up the remains of the
opolcheniye
was taken on 19 September, and by the end of the month its remnants had been absorbed into the Red Army. Some 135,400 people, including substantial numbers of female auxiliaries, had served in it altogether.
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The nearest we have to an official casualty estimate is from Zhdanov's deputy, Aleksei Kuznetsov, who stated, in a speech in the Smolniy the following year, that no fewer than 43,000 Leningrad volunteers were killed, taken prisoner or went missing in the first three months of the war. This is almost certainly far too low. The proportion of casualties in the First and Second Divisions, and in the Second and Fourth Guards Divisions, all of which were virtually annihilated before being officially wound up, was much higher, and hints dropped to Western journalists at the end of the war suggest loss rates of up to 50 per cent.
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Was the sacrifice worth it? The traditional interpretation is that though undertrained and underequipped, the
opolcheniye
held the Luga Line for a vital few weeks, winning time for the strengthening of Leningrad's inner defences. ‘They couldn't be considered fully-trained soldiers', the director of the Kirov Works told Werth in 1943, ‘but their drive, their guts were tremendous . . . they managed to stop the Germans just in the nick of time . . . The fight put up by our Workers' Division and by the people of Leningrad was absolutely decisive.'
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Today's historians are much less sure, crediting the brief late-July pause in von Leeb's advance more to rain and the regular Red Army. Even if the volunteers
– bewildered, unarmed, leaderless – did make a difference on the battlefield, their loss undoubtedly represented a prodigious waste of skilled and educated manpower, especially given the Red Army's desperate need for officers shortly afterwards. (By the end of September 1941 the Red Army as a whole had lost an extraordinary 142,000 out of its total 440,000 officers. ‘Basically to blame', reported General Fedyuninsky of a failed operation outside Leningrad in October, ‘is weak leadership on the part of platoon and company-level officers, in some cases amounting to simple cowardice.'
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) The military historian Antony Beevor is damning: ‘The waste of lives', he writes, ‘was so terrible that it is hard to comprehend: a carnage whose futility was perhaps exceeded only by the Zulu king marching an
impi
of his warriors over a cliff to prove their discipline.' Even harsher is
opolcheniye
survivor Frenklakh:

 

There are moments I am ashamed of to this day. We repeatedly took to our heels, abandoning our casualties. Everyone was terrified of being wounded during a retreat, because if you couldn't walk there was almost no hope of stretcher-bearers picking you up. Your only chance was if a friend helped you . . . After the war I thought for a long time about '41, analysing the situation as it was then. All those fairy tales about mass heroism – they lie on the consciences of the writers and the
politruki
. There were some heroes of course, but there were also crowds of people who just panicked and fled. It was mass, completely unjustified, senseless sacrifice, at the pleasure of our moronic command.
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The last word should go to Stalin. In April 1942, wishing to humiliate Voroshilov, who had turned down an offered command, he circulated a note to the Central Committee listing Comrade (pointedly, not Marshal) Voroshilov's failings. Among them was the fact that while in command of the Northwestern Army Group he had ‘neglected Leningrad's artillery defences, distracted by the creation of workers' battalions, poorly armed with shotguns, pikes, daggers etc'.
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Voroshilov was a bad man and a bad soldier, but the disaster of the People's Levy was not his fault alone. He had learned his trade in the Politburo, whose members' most important life skill was the ability correctly to anticipate the wishes of Stalin himself.

5

‘Caught in a Mousetrap'

Vera Inber arrived in Leningrad by train on 24 August. Fifty-one years old, she was, remarkably, both Trotsky's first cousin and a prominent member of the literary establishment, producing short stories that managed to pass the censors without descending into outright socialist realism. Her husband had just been appointed director of Leningrad's Erisman teaching hospital, a leafy complex of red-brick nineteenth-century buildings opposite the Botanical Gardens on the Petrograd Side. Having seen her daughter and baby grandson off into evacuation from Moscow, Inber was coming to join him.

The journey, in peacetime an easy overnighter, took two and a half days. Fresh bomb craters lined the tracks, and long factory trains rattled by in the opposite direction, machinery bulky under protective canvas. One could tell how long each one had been on the road, Inber noticed, by the freshness of the birch branches tied on to the wagon roofs for camouflage. Her own train, drawing towards Leningrad through dilapidated villages with picturesque backwoods names, came to increasingly frequent halts. ‘We stopped at dawn', she wrote in her diary

 

and we are still here . . . The carriage is fairly empty, and no one talks much. In one compartment an endless card game is in progress; a general whistles as he declares his suit, an army engineer knocks out his pipe on the corner of the table, over and over again. The sound reminds me of a woodpecker tapping its tree. The pipe smoke drifts into the corridor, moves in layers, thins out and is suspended in the rays of the sun. Everything is so quiet, it's as thought the train were resting on moss.
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They started to move again, through a heavily bombed wood. Trees lay charred and split; roots pointing upwards, earth scorched ochre. Passing through a station, Inber noticed its name – Mga. Normally one never took this route: already, the direct line from Moscow had been broken by the Germans.

Inber disembarked into an atmosphere of tense expectancy. The first thing she saw on leaving the railway station was a poster bearing the text of an appeal, signed by Zhdanov, Voroshilov and city soviet chairman Popkov and dated three days earlier. It was the first official acknowledgement that the Germans were now at the gates of Leningrad:

 

Comrades! Leningraders! Dear friends! Over our beloved native city hangs the immediate threat of attack by German-Fascist troops. The enemy is trying to break through to Leningrad. He wants to destroy our homes, to seize our factories and plants, to drench our streets and squares with the blood of the innocent, to outrage our peaceful people, to enslave the free sons of our Motherland. But this shall not be. Leningrad – cradle of the proletarian Revolution – never has fallen and never shall fall into enemy hands . . .

Let us rise as one man in defence of our city, our homes, our families, our honour and freedom. Let us perform our sacred duty as Soviet patriots and be indomitable in the struggle with the fierce and hateful enemy, vigilant and merciless in the struggle against cowards, alarmists and deserters; let us establish the strictest revolutionary order in our city. Armed with iron discipline and Bolshevik resolve we shall meet the enemy bravely and deal him a crushing blow!
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In the eight days since she had decided to leave Moscow, Inber reflected, Leningrad's situation had become dramatically worse. Still, joining her husband had been the right thing to do. ‘He always said “If war breaks out we should be together.” And here we are – together.'

Over the next few days she saw little of him. He was frantically busy at the hospital; she made a broadcast for the city radio station (‘Moscow and Leningrad, brother and sister, stretch out their hands to one other') and idled, feeling oddly surplus to requirements, round their airy new flat. Through the high windows the sun sparkled on the Karpovka river and the palm-filled glasshouses of the Botanical Gardens opposite. Inside, the walls were hung with fine old porcelain plates, their roses as fresh as the day they had been painted in the reign of Empress Elizabeth. What on earth would she do with them, she wondered, when the air raids began? Though there were ten to fifteen alerts each day – more like one continual drill with short breaks – everything seemed to be happening ‘far away, beyond the horizon':

 

During alerts I go out on the balcony. Pesochnaya Street, always quiet, empties completely. Only the air-raid wardens in their tin helmets stand looking up at the sky. Occasionally a factory-school boy runs by – they have a hostel in one of the buildings in the Botanical Gardens. The woman tram driver had this to say about them: ‘They carry on as if they owned the tram; hang on to the step, push their way on to the platform. But I don't mind any more – after all, they'll soon be off to the front to dig trenches.'
3

 

Across the Neva on Sadovaya Street, Yuri Ryabinkin spent the radiant late summer days playing chess, sketching out study plans with his friend Finkelstein in case their school closed, and doing more chores around the flat now that his mother had dismissed the maid. Nobody took much notice of his sixteenth birthday, but as a treat he bought himself a chess book and five roubles' worth of supper at his mother's office canteen. Poring over books of military strategy, he came up with a plan to save his city. The whole population would be ‘sent out into the forest' and the Red Army would feint a retreat, luring the Germans into a trap:

 

Immediately, like lightning (even more so than the Germans on 22 June), our tank units will go over to a general offensive and push the Germans into a knot. Then all the might of our artillery – which in the course of the retreat will have occupied the most advantageous positions – will be hurled at that knot. After half an hour of firing our guns will move off a few kilometres, and the places they shelled be occupied by our troops. All the aircraft massed above them will bomb the remnants of the enemy. And as soon as the enemy falters he will be pursued by land, air and sea . . .

 

Ryabinkin knew, though, that this was a wish-fulfilment fantasy. ‘But all this is impossible', he confided to his diary,

 

There is no one to undertake such an offensive. And we have too few tanks . . . Every editorial shouts ‘We shall not surrender Leningrad!' . . . But for some reason our army is not victorious; probably it doesn't have enough weapons. The policemen on the streets, and even some of the
opolcheniye
volunteers and regular soldiers, are armed with Mausers of goodness knows what vintage. The Germans are lumbering forward with their tanks and we are taught to fight them not with tanks but with bundles of grenades or bottles of petrol. That's how it is!'
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The elderly artist Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva walked the city centre, making a mental record (sketching was forbidden) of the boarding up of Leningrad's public monuments. On the Anichkov Bridge, Klodt's plunging horses had already been rolled away for burial in the gardens in front of the Aleksandrinka theatre. Opposite St Isaac's, the outline of the equestrian statue of Nicholas I was still visible under layers of sandbags, which seemed to pour endlessly downwards in a fat, globular flow. The Alexander Column in Palace Square was covered in wooden scaffolding, but the poles did not reach its triumphant angel, who continued to brandish his cross against the blue sky. There had been debate about how to protect Falconet's famous statue of Peter the Great, the ‘Bronze Horseman'. Some had suggested sinking it in the Neva, but now it too was being boarded up. Watching volunteers unload sand from a barge moored nearby, Ostroumova-Lebedeva wished she could join in: ‘It was hot, the sun was burning. I stood there and watched, and felt ashamed that I wasn't working myself.' Though her sister and nieces had left Leningrad, she had decided to stay, partly out of reluctance to abandon familiar surroundings, but mostly out of a sense of solidarity with her city and sheer curiosity as to what would happen next. ‘Everyone's worrying about the same question', she wrote on 16 August. ‘Should we leave, and if so where for, and how? What does the future hold? How does one start all over again somewhere strange, having abandoned the comforting refuge of one's flat? Poor Leningraders! I want to stay. I definitely want to stay and witness all the frightening events ahead.'
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Failing to empty Leningrad of its surplus population before the siege ring closed was one of the Soviet regime's worst blunders of the war, leading to more civilian deaths than any other save the failure to anticipate Barbarossa itself. By the time the last train left, on 29 August, 636,283 people, according to official sources, had been evacuated from Leningrad. (This compares with 660,000 civilians evacuated from London in only a few days on Britain's declaration of war two years earlier.) Excluding refugees from the Baltics and elsewhere who passed through the city, the number falls to 400,000 at best. Just over two and a half million civilians were left behind in the city, plus another 343,000 in the surrounding towns and villages within the siege ring. Over 400,000 of them were children, and over 700,000 other non-working dependants.
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