Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (16 page)

Part 2

The Siege Begins: September–December 1941

Bread ration coupons, December 1941

In order that we should understand things fully, the winter of nineteen forty-one was given to us as a measure

Konstantin Simonov

6

‘No Sentimentality'

This was the beginning of the blockade. The mistakes had been made, the tragedy would now play out, with what from today's perspective feels like sickening inevitability. At the time, though, events still seemed to hang in the balance. Few anticipated a siege: either the Germans would quickly be pushed back, it was assumed, or Leningrad would fall.

Across the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht now seemed poised for victory. In the north, von Leeb's Army Group North
had surrounded Leningrad. Army Group Centre had captured Smolensk eight weeks previously and was now only two hundred miles from Moscow. Outside Kiev, Army Group South was in the process of encircling four Soviet armies, and shortly to capture the city itself. To the outside world, the Soviet regime seemed about to be overthrown or forced into a humiliating peace. (‘Everyone is remarking in anticipation', wrote George Orwell in London, ‘what a bore the Free Russians will be . . . People have visions of Stalin in a little shop in Putney, selling samovars and doing Caucasian dances.'
1
)
On 4 September Stalin had sent a half-desperate, half-threatening letter to Churchill via his ambassador Ivan Maisky. The Russian front, he admitted, had ‘broken down', and it was imperative for Britain to open a second front in France or the Balkans by the end of the year, diverting thirty to forty German divisions. If Soviet Russia were defeated, the ambassador added in conversation, how could Britain win the war? ‘We could not exclude the impression', Churchill wired Roosevelt after the meeting, ‘that they might be thinking of separate terms.'
2

Zhdanov and Voroshilov only dared tell Stalin that Shlisselburg had fallen on 9 September, a day late. His telegraph in response – jointly signed, ominously, with Malenkov, Molotov and Beria – bristled with contempt:

 

We are disgusted by your conduct. All you do is report the surrender of this or that place, without saying a word about how you plan to put a stop to all these losses of towns and railway stations. The manner in which you informed us of the loss of Shlisselburg was outrageous. Is this the end of your losses? Perhaps you have already decided to give up Leningrad? What have you done with your KV tanks? Where have you positioned them, and why isn't there any improvement on the front, when you've got so many of them? No other front has half the quota of KVs that you have. What's your aviation doing? Why isn't it supporting the troops on the battlefield? Kulik's division has come to your aid – how are you using it? Can we hope for some sort of improvement on the front, or is Kulik's help going to go for nothing, like the KVs? We demand that you update us on the situation two or three times a day.
3

 

Even before hearing about Shlisselburg, Stalin had decided to bring in new leadership. The previous day he had summoned his head of staff, General Zhukov, to the Kremlin and ordered him to fly to Leningrad with a note for Voroshilov that read simply ‘Hand over command of the Army Group to Zhukov and fly to Moscow immediately'.

Forty-three years old, with a bald, block-shaped head, ruthless will, brilliant tactical sense and the courage to stand up to Stalin on military matters, Zhukov was the outstanding Soviet commander of the Second World War. He had made his name (and evaded, he suspected, the clutches of the NKVD) two years earlier, with the successful repulse of a Japanese incursion into Soviet Mongolia. Later he was to mastermind the spectacular encirclements at Stalingrad, and lead the Red Army in triumph to Berlin. The three weeks in the autumn of 1941 during which he stopped the Germans in front of Leningrad were to become part of a legend.

As recounted in his memoirs, Zhukov took off from Moscow on the same day that he saw Stalin, in grey, rainy weather. He took with him two trusted lieutenants from Mongolian days, Generals Mikhail Khozin and Ivan Fedyuninsky.
4
Approaching Ladoga the cloud cleared, and their plane was spotted by a pair of Messerschmitts, which chased them low over the water until seen off by outlying anti-aircraft guns. Having landed safely at an army airfield, the generals took a car straight to the Smolniy, where they were stopped at the gate by guards. They ‘asked us to present our passes, which, naturally enough, we did not have. I identified myself, but even that didn't help. Orders are orders after all. “You will have to stay here,” the officer told us. We waited outside the gate for at least fifteen minutes before the Commandant of Headquarters gave permission for us to drive up to the door.'

Zhukov walked in, as he tells it, on a mood of drunken defeatism. A meeting of Leningrad's Military Council was in progress; being planned were the demolition of the city's utilities and principal factories, and the scuttling of the Baltic Fleet. His arrival turned the mood around: ‘After a brief conference . . . we decided to adjourn the meeting and declare that for the time being no measures were to be taken. We would defend Leningrad to the last man.'
5
All that night he kept the Council up discussing how best to strengthen the city's defences, particularly around Pulkovo, a small range of hills (site of Russia's oldest astronomical observatory) twelve kilometres to Leningrad's south. His improvisations included the adaptation of anti-aircraft guns for point-blank fire against tanks, the secondment of sailors to the infantry, and the transfer of naval guns from the Fleet's trapped ships to the weakest sectors of the front. Among the guns sent to Pulkovo were those of the cruiser
Avrora
, a blank shot from whose forecastle gun had signalled the start of the October Revolution. He also transferred part of the 23rd Army – facing the ‘docile' Finns on the Karelian Isthmus – south to fight the Germans, and abandoned plans to scuttle the Fleet. ‘If ships have to sink', he declared, ‘let it be in battle, with their guns firing.' Khozin took over as the Northwestern Army Group's chief-of-staff, and Fedyuninsky went to inspect the 42nd Army at Pulkovo. Morale, he reported, was cracking. Headquarters had lost contact with front-line units, and was itself transferring to the far rear, into the basement of a Kirov Works factory. ‘Take over the 42nd Army', Zhukov ordered him, ‘and quickly.'
6

On the ground Zhukov's arrival made no immediate difference; conditions remained chaotic. Vasili Chekrizov was a thirty-nine-year-old chief engineer at the Sudomekh shipyard. Long-faced, with large, earnest eyes and a wispy moustache, he had been demoted and temporarily deprived of his Party card during the Terror. This experience had failed, however, to make him worldly-wise. A natural whistle-blower, he was to come into increasing conflict with his corrupt bosses as the siege progressed, and never ceased to be baffled at the gap between Party rhetoric and reality. On 1 September he had been sent with a team to a village near Pushkin, to build reinforced firing points, nicknamed ‘Voroshilov hotels'. The scene he encountered was one replicated all along the Eastern Front that month: streams of peasants, driving overloaded carts or trudging with bundles over their shoulders; a mounted messenger shouting as he pushed through the crowd; unshaven officers in rumpled greatcoats; soldiers brewing tea on a park bench; a boy tugging a goat on a piece of string. Chekrizov's suggestion that the pillboxes be built further back, he confided to his diary, was not appreciated. When dusk fell, he could see the fires of three burning villages.

Over the next two days the area came under increasingly heavy shellfire, forcing Chekrizov and his team to work by night. Lacking cranes or tractors, they hauled water in buckets and concrete blocks by hand. They shared their quarters with a group of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old nurses, who slept, like them, in shifts on the floor or on tables. ‘Between the eleven of them', Chekrizov exasperatedly noted, ‘only one has a blanket. For us it's the same, though at least we have coats. It's only our fourth day, but they've been here for a month and a half . . . Could headquarters really not put them up somewhere better?' On 11 September he experienced bombing for the first time, and was startled at the fear and bewilderment on people's faces – ‘It was interesting, like looking into a mirror. Did mine really look the same?' Two of his team – boys in their late teens, who a few days earlier had been swigging cognac and bragging ‘partisan-style' to the nurses – were seriously injured in the attack, and one died overnight. Chekrizov accompanied the body back to Leningrad:

 

At the factory the news was met with indifference, brushed aside. They wouldn't even let us set up his coffin there, so we took it home to his family. Their room is very small; even without the coffin there wasn't space to turn around. They buried him today. I wanted to go to the burial, but I couldn't bear it – or more precisely, I couldn't face his mother again. She is completely grief-stricken. Better not to see tears.

 

Back at the front, the confusion was worse than ever. ‘Communications with Pushkin have been lost', Chekrizov wrote on the 16th. ‘We went to Shushary, which is where our mobile gun emplacements are supposed to be going, but we've got nothing to transport them with, and we don't know what to do with them. The situation is the same all the way up the line.' At headquarters, where he went to plead for vehicles, ‘ten people seemed to be trying to solve every problem':

 

My impression is that they're mostly just ordinary bureaucrats in military uniform. Yesterday I'd finally had enough. I told them they were a mess. I suspect that many of them secretly agreed with me . . . Here's an example, something that actually happened in Pavlovsk. The lorry drivers delivering parts to us have to fill out consignment forms, each with a number of sections, just like in the city. The transport manager warned me that it all had to be done correctly, and that one particular driver was inexperienced and needed help. Completing his form took thirty minutes, and this on the front! Oh how we worship paper! The Germans probably have a simpler process for all of this . . .

The rear is full of staff officers of every rank. Everyone runs around looking anxious. I'm sure a good half of them do nothing. Yes, in terms of leadership our army turns out to be rather weak. There's plenty of disorganisation in the factories, but it's ten times worse here . . . Will they never sort themselves out?
7

 

While Chekrizov struggled to construct his soon-to-be-overrun pillboxes, a few miles away twenty-eight-year-old Anna Zelenova, a serious young woman with round spectacles, a pugnacious snub nose and hair cut in an emancipated bob, was organising the final evacuation of Tsar Paul's domed and colonnaded Pavlovsk Palace. It was a time, she remembered, ‘of incredible hurry. The windows of the palace had been boarded up. There was no electricity so we worked by candlelight, or burned ropes and twists of paper.' Having loaded what turned out to be her last lorry to Leningrad, she dashed inside for a final check of the library:

 

I went downstairs and ran along the desks and the cabinets, opening all the doors. And in the last cupboard I saw some portfolios. I opened one and went numb. Here were all [the architect] Rossi's original plans. Then I opened the biggest one and circles danced in front of my eyes. Here were all Cameron's drawings – and Gonzago's, Quarenghi's, Voronikhin's. My instructions hadn't been followed. These priceless documents were going to be left behind.

The folders wouldn't fit into a standard crate so we had to make a special one. Fortunately the carpenters were still there. I gave them the measurements but they said ‘We've got no more wood.' So I told them to break up a chest in which cushions were kept. While the crate was being put together I made up my mind to perform an act of vandalism. I was tormented by the fact that the unique tapestry upholstery on Voronikhin's furniture from the Greek Hall was being abandoned. We couldn't save the chairs, but we could save the tapestries. Every piece was held in place with hundreds of tiny gilt nails. I still probably couldn't have brought myself to touch them if at that precise moment a gun hadn't started firing. As it was I grabbed a razor blade and started slicing into the upholstery, cutting as close to the nails as I could. We laid the portfolios in the new crate, with the tapestries between them.