The 900 Days (37 page)

The rear guard was almost obliterated. About 10
P.M.
the guard ships,
Sneg
and
Tsiklon
, were sunk and twenty minutes later the squadron leader,
Kalinin
, was lost off Cape Uminda-Nina. The
Kalinin
stayed afloat for an hour, and most of its wounded and personnel were removed. But at the same time the mine layers
Artem
and
Volodarsky
went down. Vice Admiral Yu. F. Rail, commander of the detachment, suffered severe wounds. The transports
Luga, Everitis
and
Yarvamaa
were sunk.

In view of the density of the mines, the terrible losses already suffered and the inability to cope with the hazards in the night, the fleet commander ordered all ships to anchor until daylight. Patrols were set up to ward off torpedo attacks.

What were the Tallinn evacuation losses? Of the 29 large transports which left Tallinn, 25 were lost, 3 were beached on Hogland Island and only 1 reached Leningrad. One of the three ships beached on Hogland, the
Saule
, later was towed to Leningrad. In all, the Baltic Merchant (noncombat) Fleet lost 38 ships in the Gulf of Riga and the Irben Strait. More than 10,000 lives were lost. In addition, 16 warships, mostly gunboats, mine sweepers and cutters, were sunk and 6 small transports were sunk. Among the great ships which went down were the
Ivan Papanin
, carrying 3,000 troops; the
V tor ay a Pyatiletka
with about 3,000; the
Luga
with 300 wounded; the
Balkhash
and the
Tobol
, each carrying several hundred. Of a total of 67 non-Navy ships, 34 were lost; of something over 100 naval craft, 87.5 percent were saved along with about 18,000 personnel.
¹

The
Kazakhstan
, carrying 3,600 troops, including 500 wounded, was the largest transport in the convoy. It was captained by Vyacheslav Kaliteyev, one of the most experienced Baltic skippers. He had been captain of the steamer
Cooperation
, which brought to Russia children of the Spanish Republicans. He had taken the
Kazakhstan
on several dangerous trips through the Arctic, and he had captained his boat through the Baltic from the beginning of the war.

The
Kazakhstan
took its place in the first convoy to leave Tallinn. Kaliteyev, was on the bridge. The ship quickly drew German attention. First there were submarine attacks and then wave after wave of JU-88’s struck. A stick of bombs fell harmlessly in the water. Then one struck. It hit a glancing blow at the bridge, killing the commander of the antiaircraft battery, the signalman and all those on the upper bridge.

The
Kazakhstan
was left without command. It lost speed and dropped out of the convoy. More than a hundred bombs fell around the ship. Flames broke out. The decks swarmed with hundreds of persons, most of whom had never before been at sea. Soldiers and passengers were pressed into service to fight the fire. For nine hours the battle raged before the flames were brought under control. Only seven members of the thirty-five-man crew survived. Headed by Second Boatswain L. N. Zagurko, they managed to get steam up and steered the
Kazakhstan
to a lonely spit of land called Vaindlo or Stenskjiner, about 500 yards long and 150 yards wide. There stood a lighthouse, a round cast-iron tower, painted white, manned by a small detachment of sailors. It was located about sixteen miles off the coast, between Naissaar and Gogland. The passengers were landed and picked up by sloops and small boats, which brought them to Kronstadt. Then, lightened of its load, the
Kazakhstan
, still under the command of its seven-man crew, was navigated, without charts, with field telephones connecting the bridge and the engine room, to Kronstadt. It got there September 1. All seven members of the crew won Orders of the Red Banner for their achievement.

But what of Captain Kaliteyev? There was no word of him in the Supreme Command’s communiqué No. 303 of September 12, 1941, hailing the achievement of the
Kazakhstan
_y
sole troop ship to survive the nightmare of Tallinn.

Nor was this an accident. For Captain Kaliteyev was trapped in another nightmare. He was not dead, as most of those aboard the
Kazakhstan
had supposed.

The bomb which killed the men on the bridge did not kill Kalitayev. It merely knocked him unconscious.

“I heard the crash,” he said later, “and felt the crack of the ceiling breaking and I don’t remember anything more.”

When he came to himself, he was lying on the right side of the bridge with his head toward the ladder leading to the upper bridge. He felt that his head was wet and putting his hand to it found it covered with blood. But he saw no wounds on his body.

He then lost consciousness again and apparently slipped from the bridge for when he came to he was in the water with the ship sliding past him. There were many others in the water around him, and about 60 or 80 yards away was a small sloop, afire, with ten or fifteen persons clinging to it. He slipped out of his coat and boots. He wore no life jacket as he had felt that to don one would have aroused fear among the passengers.

He kept afloat for half an hour and then with a sailor named Yermakov was picked up by the submarine
S-322
. The submarine was unable to return him to his ship. Instead, it took him to Kronstadt, where he arrived ahead of the
Kazakhstan
.

An investigation was immediately launched into the captain’s conduct. Why had he left his ship? Why had he returned ahead of it? At first all went well. His associates in the merchant shipping service vouched for his character. The seven who saved the ship spoke up for him. Two medical experts said his story rang true.

But then came derogatory stories from passengers on the boat. The captain had abandoned his post. He had leaped into the water in fear. Gossip went to work. The suspicious investigators of the NKVD grew more suspicious. Kronstadt at that moment was gripped by panic. Some measure of the atmosphere in which the case was judged can be grasped from the fact that Vladimir Rudny, a Moscow correspondent, and Yuli Zenkorsky, a Tass correspondent, were picked up as “spies” a few days before the Tallinn ships came in. A few days later the writer Mikhail Godenko saw a young sailor, drunk on a couple of bottles of eau de cologne, shouting, “Down with the Soviets.” A commander drew his
nagan
, his holster pistol, and shouted, “Stop!”

“What. do you mean stop?” said the sailor. “You rats of the rear. Where were you when we were fighting at Gatchina, at Detskoye Selo?”

“I’ll shoot,” the commander warned.

“Shoot. Shoot ahead,” the sailor yelled. “Shoot me. But tomorrow the Germans will be fighting in Piter.”

A single shot brought the sailor to the pavement.

Admiral Kuznetsov, the Naval Commissar, visited Kronstadt August 31 —the day the evacuation of Tallinn was completed. Even before he arrived at Kronstadt he fell under the influence of the disorganized, panicky events. He found at Oranienbaum, where he embarked in his cutter for Kronstadt, undisciplined gangs of sailors, not in uniform, separated from their units, wandering aimlessly, seemingly oblivious to what was going on around them. Kronstadt was gloomy. The officers and the sailors were filled with depression.

That was the atmosphere in Kronstadt in which the case of Captain Kalitayev was judged by the secret police. Their verdict: death before the firing squad. The chargé: desertion under fire, cowardice.

Seventeen days after Order No. 303 was issued, honoring the seven men of Kalitayev’s crew for saving the
Kazakhstan
, the captain went before the firing squad and was executed.

Not until January 27, 1962, did the Leningrad Military District Court get around to “rehabilitating” the reputation of Kalitayev and informing his widow, the actress, Vera Nikolayevna Tutcheva, that the chargés against her husband were quite without foundation. So closed one of the last and most tragic episodes of the Tallinn disaster.
²

Admiral Kuznetsov, Admiral Tributs, Admiral Panteleyev, Admiral Drozd and the other top naval men conducted a lengthy post-mortem in the ensuing weeks into the Tallinn affair. Admiral Kuznetsov tended to blame the Leningrad Command, which had operational control of the Baltic Fleet, for delay in ordering that evacuation plans be drafted for Tallinn—if necessary.

Panteleyev felt that, while the decision to defend Tallinn to the last regardless of cost was right and necessary in order to draw as much German strength off Leningrad as possible, a major error had been made in not evacuating from Estonia long before the end thousands of civilians and all nonmilitary organizations, as well as the rear echelons of the fleet. Some officers felt the basic concept of the Baltic defense had been wrong—that the fleet should have evacuated Hangö and the islands, thrown up a strong defense line at Tallinn and then pulled back to the secure base at Kronstadt.

As for the effort to plow through the German mine field, all admitted this had been a disastrous mistake. A later study by the fleet’s mine experts reached the conclusion that the mine field had the extraordinary density of not less than 155 mines and 104 mine protectors per mile. To traverse such a field with any safety would have required not less than a hundred seagoing mine sweepers.
³

The worst handicap, Panteleyev concluded, was the fact that the fleet had no secure bases. From the beginning of the war it had been in movement, falling back from Libau, to Riga, to Tallinn and finally back to Kronstadt. It would have been far better off never to have moved.

The magnitude of the losses stimulated the search for scapegoats. The whole affair came under high-level security review. Vsevolod Vishnevsky, a fervent naval partisan and keen observer, wrote a sixteen-page report in the first days of his return to Kronstadt and submitted it to the Fleet Military Council and the Political Administration. He also wrote a fourteen-page report for publication in the fleet newspaper,
Red Fleet
. The public report was never published. The formidable Ivan Rogov, Political Commissar of the Fleet, had Vishnevsky in his black books. Moreover, the Tallinn disaster was a matter for very high-level politics. It was, in fact, a case for Lavrenti P. Beria and the secret police.

Panteleyev and his fellow command officers were the subject of sweeping inquiry by police and prosecutors. They attempted honestly and realistically to explain what had happened. The explanations were not accepted.

“A live criminal was what they wanted,” Panteleyev concluded, after going through a long night of questioning.

The memory of one confrontation burned long in his consciousness. It was with an individual whom Panteleyev described as “a highly placed officer.” Could this have been Malenkov or Beria—or one of their chief aides? He does not specify.

“Comrade Chief of Staff,” said this official, “why didn’t our fleet fight? Why have the Fascists been able to fight and we have not?”

Panteleyev attempted to explain the complicated situation. The official would not listen.

“No, no,” he said, “I do not agree with you. The staff is not supposed to concern itself with that kind of business. It must work out active operations and fight, and attack, and . . .”

As Panteleyev dryly notes: “In the eyes of this important official the staff of the fleet came very close to being guilty for all the tragedies that had occurred.”

Looking back at the Tallinn tragedy from a perspective of twenty-five years, the Soviet naval historian, Captain V. Achkasov, was convinced that its cause lay in the reluctance of any of the commanders—of either the Baltic Fleet, the Leningrad Command or the High Command in Moscow— to order preparations for evacuating the fleet.

The reason for this reluctance, he felt, was a well-founded knowledge on the part of all that commanders of encircled units had repeatedly been subjected to the gravest chargés of cowardice and panic, often with fatal consequences. Rather than risk a firing squad, the commanders withheld any recommendations for withdrawal until a tragic outcome became inescapable.

¹
By comparison with Dunkirk the Tallinn evacuation was sheer catastrophe. Dunkirk was a far larger operation, involving the safe evacuation of 338,226 men. The casualty figures are not entirely precise but are given as 9,291 (8,061 British and 1,230 Allied). In the retreat to Dunkirk and in the action on the beaches and in transit to England, a total of 68,111 British troops were lost. The British employed 1,084 ships in the evacuation, many of them very small. Only 108 of these were lost. The distance from Dunkirk to Dover and the channel ports was only forty to fifty miles, and there was complete command of the sea route by the British Navy and no problem of mines; even the Luftwaffe was not terribly active. (David Divine,
The Nine Days of Dunkirk.)
Incidentally, there is some confusion in the Soviet sources as to the number of men brought safely out of Tallinn. One source contends that 18,233 men were saved out of a total of 23,000 who started from Tallinn. This seems to be an obvious underestimate of casualties.
(Vtoraya Miro-vaya Voina
, Vol. II, p. 100, citing archives of the Baltic Fleet Command.)

²
The “rehabilitation” of Captain Kaliteyev is in itself an epic and throws a penetrating light on the atmosphere which prevailed in Stalin’s Russia, during the war and after. The naval correspondent and playwright, Aleksandr Ilych Zonin, was a passenger on the
Kazakhstan
and a witness to what happened. Zonin did his utmost to establish the true facts and again and again implored his colleagues not to write the story as though it was the tale of “Seven Who Saved the Transport.” He placed his own version of the
Kazakhstan
affair in the naval archives, although he could not get it published. Orders had been issued coincident with the Order No. 303 honoring the “Seven” that Kaliteyev’s name was to be “blacked out.” The chief credit for establishing the truth is assigned by Vladimir Rudny, who long interested himself in the case, to Georgi Aleksandrovich Bregman, a correspondent of the newspaper
Water Transport
. Bregman had known Kaliteyev before the war and was completely confident of his bravery and honesty. He was in a military hospital recovering from wounds when he heard of the catastrophe which had befallen his friend. He began to collect evidence and after
sixteen years of work
managed to get the verdict against Kalitayev reversed. (Vladimir Rudny,
Deistvuyushchii Flot
, Moscow, 1965, pp. 57-72.) Zonin narrowly escaped the fate of Kalitayev. He was expelled from the Communist Party as a result of one of the literary political quarrels of the late 1920’s but, unlike most of his colleagues, was not arrested at that time. He served with great distinction in wartime as a Baltic Fleet correspondent and was recommended for readmission to the Party. But the Party control officials rejected him. In 1949 he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. He survived to be released after Stalin’s death but died soon of a heart attack, his health crippled by his sufferings. His son, Sergei, is now an officer in the Soviet Navy. (A. Shtein,
Znamya
, No. 4, April, 1964, pp. 78-84;
Literaturnaya Gazeta
, December 8, 1964.)