The 900 Days (42 page)

¹
Kuznetsov’s memoirs are a political document, and the Admiral is a master of half-truth. He often deliberately confuses the picture. In a 1968 version he mentions Molotov and Kosygin but not Malenkov. Kosygin had been in Leningrad since mid-July.

²
The State Defense Committee August 4 had approved a plan by the Leningrad defenders that the Kirov factory produce as many KV tanks above the planned quota as possible and that these extra tanks go to the Leningrad front. In August the plant had a quota of 180 tanks. It produced 207. The 27 extra tanks went to the Leningrad defenses. (N.Z., p. 126.)

³
There is a remarkable absence of direct source materials on Zhdanov and by Zhdanov. There are only the rarest citations of him in the Soviet historical works on the Leningrad siege. For example, the official collection of Leningrad documents
(900 Geroicheskii Dnei
—hereafter referred to as
poo)
publishes only one Zhdanov document from the fund of his personal materials in the Central Party Archives at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow: a report to the State Defense Committee submitted in October, 1943, on the evacuation of industry from Leningrad. There are no references to this or any other collection of Zhdanov materials in the official history of the Leningrad siege
{Leningrad v VOV)
. Indeed, the only available texts (usually partial) of many Zhdanov speeches in this periofl come from the personal notes of persons present, notably D. V. Pavlov in his classic
Leningrad v Blokade
. Pavlov’s notes are quoted and requoted endlessly in other source materials. There is a comparable lacuna in direct quotations of speeches by Zhdanov’s Leningrad lieutenants. In view of the Soviet habit of taking stenographic notes of all meetings and the care with which archival materials are preserved, this seems very strange. Moreover, there has been no published collection of Zhdanov speeches or papers, contrary to the practice followed with many of his less prominent contemporaries. The suspicion persists that the Zhdanov archive either was destroyed by his enemies (presumably Malenkov and Beria) or more likely is still retained under the highest security classification as an outgrowth of the Leningrad Affair.

⁴
At the end of August the State Defense Committee gave orders which Achkasov calls “of exceptionally important influence on the further course of the Leningrad battle.” He described these as formation of new units, reorganization of troops, defending the southeast and southern approaches to Leningrad, creation of new defense lines, preparation for evacuation of part of the Leningrad institutions and for organization of institutions remaining in the city for production of military needs of the front.
(Krasnoznamennyi Baltiiskii Flot v VOV
, p. 99.)

⁵
The Stavka decision was made September 11. Zhukov took over the command September 13. (A. V. Karasev,
Istoriya SSSR
, No. 2, 1957, p. 5.)

⁶
Failure to admit the loss of a town in the hope of quickly retaking it was regarded by Stalin as the gravest of crimes. He removed from command and harshly punished every commander caught in such an attempt at deception. (Shtemenko,
op. cit
., p. 116.) One source claims Secretary Kuznetsov told a Smolny meeting the morning of September 9 that Leningrad had been cut off. (A. Kostin,
Zvezda
, No. 6, June, 1968.)

⁷
Kuznetsov also claims preparation of a plan to scuttle the Baltic Fleet began in late August.

⁸
Maisky insists there was no hint of separate peace in his presentation and suggests this interpretation arose from Churchill’s “guilty conscience” about not opening a second front. But Maisky admits he made a deliberately passionate presentation. He suggests he himself instigated Stalin’s message and adds that the fear of a separate peace helped him get more for Russia. (Maisky,
op. cit
., pp. 172–173.)

With each step the feet grow heavier

But better not to pause for rest.

Perhaps, Death sits beside the road,

Just resting, too. . . .

NO ONE HAD PLANNED TO FIGHT A BATTLE AT MGA. THE little railroad station figured on no strategic charts, either German or Russian. In fact, the engagement at Mga was accidental, small-scale, haphazard. It was the consequences of Mga that were so far-reaching.

What gave Mga importance was that once the Nazis firmly grasped the town they severed all of the rail connections between Leningrad and the remainder of Russia—the “mainland” as it came to be called—and they cut all the highways.

The first sign of danger in this direction came when the battered Soviet Forty-eighth Army, which was defending the main Moscow-Leningrad railroad line in the vicinity of Ushaki and Tosno, about thirty-five miles southeast of Leningrad, began to crumble under the Nazi Panzer attacks. Instead of falling back northward toward Leningrad, the broken regiments of the Forty-eighth Army drifted
eastward
, opening up a gap which the Nazis quickly managed to exploit.

The Leningrad Command, back to the wall, striving to stem the Nazi tide at a dozen critical points, did not immediately realize what had happened.

Colonel Bychevsky, chief of Leningrad’s sappers, for example, occupied around the clock placing mines, blowing up bridges, ceaselessly seeking to build barriers against the Germans, had no inkling of the new danger. For him August 28 began very much as did each of the days of late August which later came to form in his mind a blurred calendar of disaster.

Bychevsky was disturbed that morning for a different reason. In the midst of battle the Chief of Staff, the sardonic General D. N. Nikishev, whose skepticism of Moscow’s desire or ability to provide sufficient resources for Leningrad’s defenses had never been concealed, had vanished.
¹
Along with Nikishev went his deputy, N. G. Tikhomirov. Why? Bychevsky had no better idea than he had of the other strange, never-explained command changes which so often caused his colleagues to disappear. He guessed that possibly Nikishev had offended Voroshilov. But this was only a guess. In Nikishev’s place appeared Colonel N. V. Gorodetsky from the Twenty-third Army, a good, vigorous officer. But it was not easy to pick up the threads of the complex battles then raging. Gorodetsky made mistakes, some of which cost Leningrad dearly.

On this bright August morning with the scent of buckwheat and golden-rod heavy in the hedgerows outside Leningrad, the new Chief of Staff advised Bychevsky that the Forty-eighth Army was heavily engaged in defending the Moscow-Leningrad railroad and that it needed help. He told Bychevsky to send a detachment of sappers to Tosno to lay down a series of mine fields and to destroy any bridges which might be seized by the Germans. Tosno was located about fifteen miles south and west of Mga.

Bychevsky sent off a small unit from his 2nd Reserve Pontoon Battalion and decided to go to Tosno with Commissar Nikolai Mukha and look at the situation himself.

They drove out the Moscow highway, which runs almost arrow-straight, paralleling the railroad. When they got as far as Krasny Bor, a large village fifteen miles outside the city, they heard firing in the forest. Leaving the car, they started on foot in the direction of the sound, moving very carefully. At this point they were less than five miles south of the Kolpino fortified region, established along a little stream, the Izhora River. The fortifications had just been occupied by the Izhorsk workers artillery and machine-gun battalion, a volunteer unit, which had had no training in firing from stationary batteries. Behind this small unit there was nothing—just the broad, empty Moscow highway leading straight to the southeast gates of Leningrad.

What, thought Bychevsky, is going to happen if the Germans break through here? The two officers came up to a wooden barricade thrown across the highway. Beside it was an armored car where they found two generals, A. I. Cherepanov and P. A. Zaitsev. The generals were directing a field regiment and the small engineering detachment which Bychevsky had ordered to Tosno in a fire fight against German units. The field regiment had only about fifteen cartridges per rifle and three submachine guns.

The Germans, it seemed, had broken through the remnants of the Forty-eighth Army and swept beyond Tosno. It was their armored reconnaissance that was being held up in the fire fight.

General Zaitsev went back to the Izhora River line to try to organize a defense there. The other officers stayed on the highway to hold up the German advance as long as they could.

The German fire grew hot. The Russians fell back a couple of hundred yards as the sappers hastily put up heavy wooden barriers along the highway and dug in some antitank mines. But the field regiment was running out of ammunition. The Russians would certainly have been overwhelmed had not five heavy Soviet tanks come up and laid down covering fire. Two German light tanks appeared on the highway, but one hit a mine and caught fire and the other was hit by its own artillery. The Germans began to lay in heavy mortar fire and two Messerschmitts roared down the highway, machine guns blazing.

The Russians had no alternative. They fell back into the fortified positions at Yam-Izhorsk and Bychevsky’s men mined the bridge across the little Izhora River. As the Germans approached the bridge, the mines were touched off, halting them temporarily. The Germans were advance reconnaissance units of the 39th Army Corps of the Sixteenth Army, comprising the 12th Panzer Division and the 121st and 96th Infantry divisions (with the 122nd Infantry in the second echelon).

Dusk was beginning to fall. Bychevsky and Mukha had to report to Smolny. Artillery exchanges already had begun between the Izhorsk battalion and the Germans. The officers stopped a moment to wish good luck to one of the workers units, headed by I. F. Chernenko, an engineer in the great Izhorsk works.

Chernenko had gotten back to Kolpino that afternoon from Leningrad. At the station he found he could only buy a ticket as far as Pontonny. The girl at the ticket window said the rail line was under fire and a train had been hit. He rode to Pontonny and walked into Kolpino. Within an hour or so he was sent up to the lines. He decided to wear his leather jacket even though the afternoon was hot. It probably would be cold that night in the trenches. He was right.

The Izhorsk factory where Chernenko worked was one of the greatest in Russian industry. Founded by order of Peter the Great in 1722 to produce timbers for ship construction, in the mid-eighteenth century it began to make anchors and copper sheeting and in the nineteenth century pioneered in machine building, boiler construction, engines, turbines, armor plate and heavy military equipment. It produced the armor for Russia’s early dread-naughts—the
Petropavlovsk
, the
Sevastopol
, the
Gangut
and the
Poltava
.

Under Soviet aegis it vastly expanded. Now it boasted blooming mills, steel rolling mills and a whole series of specialized plants, including artillery works, a shell factory and—extremely important at this moment—a heavy tank plant. It was turning out both the reliable Soviet T-34 and the massive KV 60-ton monster of whose existence the Germans were beginning to become aware.

Not only had the Germans driven to the entrance to Leningrad; they had gotten within close artillery range of a military factory whose production was vital to Leningrad’s defenses and to the whole Soviet war effort.

At this moment there were about a thousand men, members of Izhorsk factory volunteer units, in the fortified lines along the little Izhora River. Most of them were armed with rifles from drill halls, carbines, hand grenades and pistols. Few had more than a day or two of training. They were supported by a homemade armored unit—ton-and-a-half and three-ton trucks which had been fitted out in the shops with light armor plate. How long they might hold out in the face of serious attack by the 39th German Corps was questionable.

By early evening word spread through the sprawling red-brick Izhorsk shops that the Germans were nearing the city. Cannonading could be heard in the distance, rumbling like summer thunder. It was a dark night without stars, and on the distant horizon there appeared to be the dull reflection of fires.

G. L. Zimin, chairman of the factory Party committee, called his Party workers to a meeting.

“We don’t need anyone who’s drooling in terror,” he said roughly. “Let the real Izhorites take up their guns and—forward march! There’s no time to waste. If we do not halt them, the Germans will advance to the Neva Gates and the Obukhovo factory.”

He told the men that German reconnaissance had penetrated as far as the stadium—just outside the city. The Moscow road was cut. Yam-Izhorsk was in the hands of the Germans.

He looked at the crowd, among them elderly workers, some trembling with fatigue.

“Who is not feeling well?” he asked.

A few raised their hands.

“Go back to the shops. . . . Who hasn’t served in the army?”

Several more raised their hands.

“You are released, comrades,” he said. There were protests, but he waved them away.

“And are there any cowards here?”

The room was deathly still.

“All right,” he said. “Tonight we’ll form a factory battalion and before dawn we’ll be on the firing line.”

Only six or seven of the workers present failed to join the battalion.

By 11
P.M.
about sixty Communists and Young Communists headed by Chairman Aleksandr V. Anisimov of the region executive committee had formed up in the darkened streets. They wore their factory overalls. There had been no time for farewells to wives and sweethearts.

The battalion marched up the road past the stadium and on down toward the Kolpino settlements where many of the workers lived. Behind them rose the tall column in the center of town on which was mounted the figure of a factory worker, gun in hand, dedicated to the Petrograd workers of the 1917 Revolution.

It was dawn before the unit neared the positions which they were to occupy.

“We were coming along with our rifles when suddenly we met a youngster with a blue bundle,” Anisimov recalled. “He was a good lad, worked at the Martin oven. His name was Sasha. He saw us and asked where we were going. We answered and then asked, ‘You—where are you going with the blue bundle?"’

Sasha had been to the bakery to pick up a loaf of bread and now he was on his way to the factory. What was going on there?

Anisimov said it wasn’t a question of defending the factory but of defending the city.

“How can I?” Sasha asked. “I haven’t a gun.”

“Come along,” Anisimov answered. “We’ve got some spare guns and we’ll find you a uniform.”

Sasha shrugged his shoulders, put his blue packet into the pocket of a uniform jacket and marched along in the cold misty morning with his companions. Two days later they buried Sasha, killed by a shell fragment. They put the blue bundle under his head for a pillow.

Anisimov posted his little unit in the lines beside the other Izhorsk workers at about 6
A.M.
An hour later he went forward to the northern outskirts of Yam-Izhorsk. He and Commander Georgi V. Vodopyanov got as far as the cemetery when bullets began to fly. One whined off a cross just beside Anisimov. They decided to get back to their lines quickly.

The Germans did not break the Izhorsk line, but they were now close enough to bring the great defense plant under point-blank artillery fire. The shelling began at 7:30
A.M.
, August 30, and went on for weeks with hardly any interruption. Some units of the plant had been evacuated in August, but most had not and the systematic German bombardment virtually halted production. Forty-five workers were killed and 235 wounded. In October, when fighting came to a lull, the Izhorsk battalions began to divide their time between the front lines and the plant. The government on October 4 decided to evacuate as much of the plant as possible to the Urals (production in September had dropped to a third of the August level), and over the ensuing weeks several of the principal shops were disassembled with enormous difficulty and flown out of Leningrad.

The fierce resistance of the Izhorsk workers stopped the Germans in their headlong thrust straight toward Leningrad. But it had startling and unforeseen consequences. Halted along the Izhorsk line, the Germans were deflected to the east in the same direction as the retreat of the shattered units of the Forty-eighth Army. The Nazi Panzers, finding no opposition, pushed swiftly northward along the Tosna River. The 20th Panzer Division was in the lead, and it found the going very easy. Not many Germans realized that they had broken into one of the most famous battlegrounds in Russian history. Just 701 years earlier on the ancient soil at the mouth of the Izhora, Alexander Yaroslavovich, one of Russia’s legendary heroes, won the title of Alexander Nevsky. Here in the low ground along the Neva he led his knight: from Novgorod the Great against the Swedes, headed by Prince Birger Birger planned to advance across the Neva, across Lake Ladoga and descend via the Volkhov River to attack Novgorod, the great northern capital of ancient Russia. Strategically, his plan bore great resemblance to that of Hitler. Nevsky unexpectedly attacked the Swedes and routed them July 15, 1240, in a battle which for centuries was Russia’s most famous.

Now again the Izhorsk earth trembled to the roar of fighting men, again the fate of Russia stood in the balance. But where was the twentieth-century Nevsky?

None appeared. The Forty-eighth Army was in shreds. It stumbled back north and east, permitting the Nazi armor to drive up the excellent suburban road network with hardly any opposition. Before evening of August 28 the outriders of the Nazi 20th Panzers were approaching Mga. Mga was located on the Northern Railroad. This was not the main Leningrad-Moscow railroad, which had already been cut. The Northern Railroad was the line which connected Leningrad with Vologda, and through that junction point with Moscow.