The 900 Days (43 page)

As the Nazi attack developed, only a handful of Soviet troops found themselves, largely by accident, in Mga. The principal unit was a group under the command of a Major Leshchev. Major Leshchev and his soldiers had retreated all the way from Novgorod. They constantly found themselves just ahead of the Nazi armor, which nagged at their heels and inflicted heavy punishment. By the time they arrived at Mga they had no artillery and almost no cartridges.

The only other Soviet unit in Mga was a small group of Bychevsky’s sappers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel S. I. Lisovsky. A week after the fall of Mga, Lisovsky, his hair bleached by exposure to the sun, his face worn and wrinkled, made his way into Leningrad and told Bychevsky what had happened. He had tried to mine the highway along which the Nazis were advancing, but they came on too fast. There was no real battle of Mga—just a series of small skirmishes in which the ill-armed, exhausted Soviet units managed to slow down the Nazis until the main German strength of tanks and motorized artillery came up. By August 30 the Nazis held Mga and had cut the Northern Railroad. They quickly fanned out, and their first units reached the Neva River the same day in the region of Ivan-ovskoye, just southwest of Otradnoye—the breakthrough which the excited young Komsomol girl had so accidentally reported to Admiral Kuznetsov as he sat by chance in the office of Admiral Isakov at Smolny.

Belatedly, the Leningrad Command realized what had been happening and the implications of the loss of Mga. They had few troops to throw into the breach. The first division of NKVD troops was hurried to the scene under the command of a tough police general, Colonel S. I. Donskov. It was the first to reach the Mga area. It was followed by a Border Guard division under an able general, G. A. Stepanov, and the 168th Division under Colonel Andrei L. Bondarev. But these troops had been heavily engaged against the Finns in Karelia and had just been withdrawn from that front. They were too exhausted to be effective. Other pick-up units were rushed in—part of the 237th Rifle Division, the 1st Division of the People’s Volunteers, units from the Border Guards school, two tank regiments, one of T-26’s and one of KV 60-ton monsters, a division of 155-mm howitzers.

They went into action as early as August 31, against the 20th Nazi Panzers within Mga and against the German 122nd Infantry Division which had now occupied Ivanovskoye and Pavlovo at the estuary of the Mga River. The first attack of Donskov’s NKVD troops was successful. The Nazis were hurled out of Mga on September 1. But on September 2 the Germans brought in powerful units of the 39th Motorized Corps and the 1st and 28th Army Corps of the Sixteenth Nazi Army. By this time it was evident to both Nazis and Russians that Mga had become the key to the encirclement of Leningrad.

The German strength was far too great for the Russians. The Soviet problem quickly became not one of trying to hold or win back Mga but to keep the Nazis from striking across the Neva River itself.

This problem preoccupied Bychevsky. The key to holding the Neva line and to preventing the Germans from getting across was a railroad bridge at Ostrovki, halfway between the Tosna and the Mga rivers. If the Nazis seized this bridge, they would be across the Neva in an instant, knifing behind the Soviet lines, in a position to strike only forty-five miles northward to make a junction with the Finns and lock a vise around Leningrad.

If the Germans got across the bridge—or the river—in any strength, there was hardly a chance that the Leningrad defenders could prevent close-in encirclement of the northern capital, its inevitable fall and an opportunity for Hitler to carry out his strategic design of a massive sweep from the north to encircle Moscow from the rear.

This bridge was on the mind of Colonel Bychevsky on the morning of August 30. He had spent the whole night trying to get the exact details on the situation at the front. It was not easy. The situation was too fluid. The NKVD units were moving up to the Mga region, and the 168th Division had been ordered into position on the Izhorsk line just east of Kolpino.

Bychevsky had been unable to see the Leningrad commander, General Popov, all night long. Popov was in continuous conference with the High Command and the special commission of the State Defense Committee.

It was morning before Bychevsky got into Popov’s office. On the General’s desk was a glass of ink-black coffee. And in the air Bychevsky caught a whiff of vakrian drops, a favorite Russian restorative.

When Bychevsky walked in, Popov grumbled, “What do you want, Bychevsky? I was just going to shave.”

Popov ran his hand over the stubble on his beard and grimaced as though he had a sore tooth. “You know what the situation is,” he snapped. “You know the orders. Let’s get to work.”

Bychevsky said he wanted to go to the Neva and see about the railroad bridge at Ostrovki-Kuzminki.

“Do we have any troops there?” he asked.

Popov said that General Stepanov had been put in chargé of the area. Some People’s Volunteers were supposed to man the northern bank of the Neva, and on the southern side the 168th Division and NKVD units under Colonel Donskov were supposed to be moving into place.

“What about the bridge?” Bychevsky persisted.

“Of course, get it ready to be blown up,” Popov snapped.

A moment’s silence followed. Then Popov said, “Have you heard about the changes? The State Defense Committee has named Marshal Voroshilov commander of the front and I am Chief of Staff.”

Bychevsky left almost immediately for the threatened railroad bridge. He brought with him his deputy, Pilipets, and a detachment of sappers under Lieutenant Rubin. From the region of Porogi, on the north side of the Neva opposite the mouth of the Tosna, on toward Shlisselburg there were hardly any troops. Bychevsky found only one antiaircraft battery, manned by Baltic sailors who were preparing to use their weapon as field artillery.

So far as he could see there were no troops whatever on the southern side of the Neva, although he heard the distant sound of battle.

The railroad bridge was completely undefended.

The moment the sappers arrived Bychevsky ordered them to cut the metal girders and mine all the approaches. As Bychevsky laconically noted: “These measures were very timely. The next day the Hitlerites arrived at the Neva right in the region of the destroyed bridge.”

The blowing up of the bridge by Bychevsky’s men may well have saved Leningrad. The Nazi 39th Corps under General Rudolf Schmidt had been entrusted with the task of securing the bridge. Schmidt had a special diversionary unit of the so-called Brandenburg Corps, which was supposed to cut behind the Russians and seize the bridge before it could be knocked out.

Bychevsky’s timely action thwarted this plan. The 39th Corps had no pontoon bridges in its supply column. Instead of attempting to force the Neva, the 39th drove north along the near bank of the stream toward Shlisselburg.

But the circle around Leningrad had been effectively closed.

V. M. Gankevich, the officer and former athlete who had been sent to Murmansk to make certain that the Fourteenth Army’s ski equipment was in order, had finished his assignment and was returning to Leningrad. His train brought him as far as Volkhov. No further. Anyone who wanted to get to Leningrad would have to walk. The distance was seventy-five miles by a roundabout and dubious route—north to Staraya Ladoga, then west across the Old and New Ladoga canals which paralleled the lake shore, through Shlisselburg and on into Leningrad.

Gankevich decided to try it on foot. He set off and at dusk overtook another man, a naval lieutenant named Aleksandr Radchenko. Radchenko was slow to become friends with Gankevich until he discovered the sportsman-officer was also trying to get to Leningrad. Then they joined forces and pushed on through the night. They could hear the sound of distant cannon fire almost constantly. There was little traffic, but occasionally they met a truck. When they got to the river station at Staraya Ladoga, they heard a woman crying and in the corner of the waiting room found a man’s body, covered with a rug. The woman was sobbing beside him. The body was that of Aleksandr Ilyin-Zhenkovsky, a leader in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a Party propagandist, a onetime Soviet diplomat and a leading chess player. The woman was his wife. They had been on a barge being towed across the Volkhov River. A German flier dropped a bomb on the craft. Ilin-Zhenevsky was killed, but the other passengers miraculously escaped.

The two men arranged for the burial of Ilyin-Zhenkovsky, and in the morning he was entombed in the Staraya Ladoga cemetery beside the Volkhov River.

The officers then continued their hike. About ten miles beyond Staraya Ladoga they began to encounter Soviet infantry and tanks. The two men were intermittently under fire. By the time they got to the New Ladoga Canal they were exhausted. Gankevich was barely able to swim. There was no boat, not even a plank, in sight. However, Radchenko managed to help him across both the New and the Old Ladoga canals. The two men stumbled into Shlisselburg. The Nazis were battering at its approaches. German tanks rumbled forward over the bodies of German soldiers who had fallen in earlier waves. The Russians were suffering heavy losses from Nazi dive-bombing. Under German fire a Soviet engineering detachment was putting a pontoon across the Neva. Tugboats on the river helped to hold it in place. The two men made their way along the outskirts of the city. In an abandoned barn beside the river they found a boat without oars. With a couple of loose boards they cast off onto the Neva just as some unknown man shouted to them to halt. Their boat swirled out into the current and they paddled furiously for the opposite shore. The danger was not over. They were apt to be fired on at any moment, especially from the north bank. And they might well be taken by their own comrades as fleeing deserters.

As they bumped onto the shore, a tall, thin Soviet lieutenant with an automatic in his hand halted them.

“Who are you and from where do you come?” he demanded.

The pair handed over their documents. They found themselves in the midst of a well-constructed trench system equipped with fire points, dugouts and fully manned.

A few hours later the two men made their way into Leningrad. It had taken Gankevich ten days to make the trip from Murmansk. He got back September 8. This was the day the Germans took Shlisselburg.

The NKVD division commanded by Colonel Donskov was forced back from Mga, back from Power Station No. 8, the Mustolovo and the Kel-kolovo workers settlements toward Shlisselburg.

It was Lieutenant Colonel S. I. Sisovsky’s opinion (expressed to Bychev-sky) that the Germans could have gotten across the Neva at some point north of the Tosna estuary, but that they had elected to drive for Shlisselburg instead.

The German strength was far superior to that of the Russians. Von Leeb sent in the 12th Panzer Division on September 7 and more than three hundred supporting planes. The NKVD troops melted away, and the road along the south bank of the Neva was left free for the Germans to move to Shlisselburg.

The broken Forty-eighth Army had been taken out of the hands of General Akimov August 31 and put under the command of Lieutenant General M. A. Antonyuk. It had less than ten thousand men left. The command change was in line with Stalin’s directive to put the Forty-eighth Army “in order.” Antonyuk proved unable to get any grasp whatever of his troops, and on September 12 the remnants were thrown into the newly created Fifty-fourth Army. This army, based on Volkhov, was designed to relieve the pressure on Leningrad and, hopefully, deblockade the city. But it was headed by as great an incompetent as the Red Army boasted, the political and police officer, Marshal G. I. Kulik, who was once described by a Soviet observer as “operatively illiterate and impermissibly procrastinating.” Kulik held the command until September 25, when he was replaced by the reliable Lieutenant General M. S. Khozin.

The incompetence of Kulik, the ineptness of Antonyuk and the mismanagement of the Forty-eighth Army and the Northwest Front, then commanded
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Voroshilov, were blamed by General Dukhanov for the disastrous breakthrough along the whole line from Lyuban to Tosno to Kolpino. To what extent these factors were responsible for the success of the Nazis in reaching the Neva it is difficult to assess. Soviet military commanders, who to a man hated and perhaps feared Kulik, place a major share of the blame on him for the success of the Germans in encircling Leningrad and closing the vise about the city.

There was certainly Soviet incompetence, confusion, cowardice, failure of coordination and poor direction. But the greatest handicaps were lack of manpower, inferior and inadequately trained troops and, on a higher level, consistent underestimation of the Nazi danger.

Here and there were bright exceptions. One was the Izhorsk battalions. The lines at Kolpino did not break. Indeed, within a fortnight the Izhorsk workers units went on the offensive and pushed back the Germans a bit.

But even this action has been obscured in some measure by political factors. The wartime hero of these actions was A. V. Anisimov, the man who led out the battalion of sixty workers at dawn. It was he who in February, 1942, was singled out for special honors in a ceremony conducted at Smolny by Party Secretary A. A. Kuznetsov. It was he who was credited for organizing the defense and honored with the award of the Order of Lenin. It was he who took the salute: “Honor and glory to the Izhorsk workers!” But with the passage of years Anisimov’s image faded. Other names replaced it. Why? The answer is not clear. The question of the glory of Izhorsk seems to have shifted away from reality into the savage world of Kremlin politics—a world more deadly than that of the Soviet-German lines in September, 1941. There are two official reports of the work of the Izhorsk factory, one dated September 6 and one about January 1, 1942, included in the documentary collection of the Leningrad blockade. The factory director’s name is not signed to either report. All other factory reports in the collection are signed. The official Leningrad war history “rehabilitates” the name of the wartime Izhorsk hero, A. V. Anisimov. But it, too, omits the Izhorsk director’s name —a certain sign that high-level politics is involved.