The 900 Days (49 page)

The soldiers halted.

“Where are you going, comrades?” the officer said. “Leningrad is behind us. Don’t sully the honor of the Soviet soldier.”

The soldiers were silent. A husky youngster with a week’s stubble on his chin stepped out, cast an angry glance at the officer and said, “Go fight yourself. We’ve had enough. Come on, gang!”

No one budged to follow him.

“Turn back,” the officer warned.

The youngster did not glance around. He strode forward with long steps. A shot rang out and he rolled to the ground.

“Those with weapons go to the left, those without to the right,” the officer said crisply. Then he turned to Rozenman: “And you can help me.” Rozenman tried to protest that he had to join his unit.

“Carry out the command,” the officer snapped. Then stepping closer he whispered, “There are no soldiers on the front line. It’s being held by artillerymen. Devil take you—can’t you understand?”

Rozenman understood. He fought all day with the pick-up unit. At nightfall when the battle slackened, he went on to try to locate his own command.

A. Veresov was fighting near Ligovo (Uritsk). He never could remember which day of the battle it was—possibly the fourth, maybe the fifth. A flood of refugees was streaming down the highway from Ligovo toward Leningrad. Children crying in their mothers’ arms. Women with glazed eyes, some with household goods strapped to their shoulders, dragging themselves along the broken road. And over the road shells fell. Methodically. Precise. The Germans had an artillery spotter in the Pishmach factory tower who through his binoculars could see the road as well as the palm of his hand. Soldiers dashed from their dugouts, grabbing youngsters and women, pulling them from the road, out of the line of fire. A herd of cattle, stirring up a cloud of dust, frightened by the flaming asphalt of the road (set afire by a shell), dashed out into a mined field. A fireman on his tower stuck to his post, which would totter in flames within the hour.

A scene of fright and devastation.

At the fork where the roads branched to Krasnoye Selo and Peterhof stood a sentry box. Officers halted the retreating soldiers—some in uniform, some without uniform, some with rifles, some without, all on the border of exhaustion. Among them appeared a sergeant in torn jacket and no cap, his hands muddy, his breeches wet to the knees. He stood on trembling legs and shouted, “They’ve conquered everything. The Germans will be here in a minute. I saw them myself. On motorcycles . . . Don’t shoot. If we don’t shoot, they won’t hurt us. They’ll go on past. . . .”

A crowd of troops surrounded the sergeant. The captain of the sentry post, a short man in the uniform of the Border Guards, quickly advanced. “Put yourself in order, Sergeant.”

The sergeant’s hands automatically went up to his open collar, but he dropped them and shouted, “What do you mean, order? Where is there any order? The Germans are at the Kirov factory. . . . And you talk about . .. order. We must save ourselves. Do you understand? Do you understand, now?”

The captain with a swift, silent movement ripped the triangles from the sergeant’s epaulets, stepped back two paces and, not changing his voice, said to the soldiers, “Seize him.”

The soldiers didn’t understand. “But he’s one of ours—”

“No,” snapped the captain. “He is not one of ours. Carry out the order.”

A moment later the soldiers had taken the sergeant aside. A single shot rang out. The captain paid no heed to the sound of the shot. He was too busy directing the retreating troops to collection points.

Late one evening Sayanov appeared at Smolny. He was delivering the draft of a new leaflet he had written, addressed to the German troops.

The long corridors were lighted by flickering electric bulbs, and for once Smolny was quiet and few people were scurrying about. Sayanov was talking with the Commandant of Smolny, Grishin, a man who had been there since Lenin’s time, when a Major General came out of the office of the Chief of Staff. He knew Sayanov slightly.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Home,” said Sayanov.

The General invited Sayanov to come with him “for a drive.” He was in a great hurry. The two raced down the big wide staircase and out into the raw darkness of the September night.

Not until they had got into the car and were crossing the Liteiny Bridge did the General tell Sayanov where they were going—up to a “very dangerous place” in the front. A regiment was being assembled at the Kirov factory which was to follow the General up to the lines. They headed out into the suburbs. Soon they arrived at the Kirov factory, where they arranged for the troops to follow, and drove out the Peterhof Chaussée. An air alert sounded and searchlights scanned the near heavens. The AA guns barked. They heard planes overhead. The General’s destination was Fin-skoye Koirovo, about twelve miles outside town. Somewhere near Kipen a sentry halted them. He was a Kirov worker, a member of a special battalion which had been sent to halt deserters and retreating soldiers and direct them to new units. The General talked a bit with the worker.

“What do you think?” he said. “Will we hold the city?” The worker said he thought the city would hold out. He remembered fighting for it in 1919. Then, he said, his commissar told him, “We can’t retreat any farther. Next stop is Petrograd.” “It’s the same thing today,” he said. The General went on through the night. At Finskoye Koirovo he met the commander, conferred with him for half an hour, and then returned to the car.

“I told him what was necessary,” said the General. “Next stop Petrograd.”

The car turned back and hummed down the Peterhof Chaussée. Sayanov was silent. So was the General. They met not one car, not one truck. They saw no one on the road. Not far from the Kirov factory the General halted to phone Smolny. He came back in five minutes. “Hurry,” said the General. The car went a short distance, then halted. There was something wrong with the carburetor.

“Hurry up,” the General said. “There’s not a minute to lose. The Germans already have arrived at Ligovo.”

“But our car passed through Ligovo not ten minutes ago,” said the chauffeur.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” snapped the General. “It just means that we were the last car to come through Ligovo to Leningrad.”

The General turned to Sayanov.

“Remember this night,” he said. “Remember it. The most terrible battle for the city is now beginning.”

“Will it be a siege?” Sayanov asked.

“Yes,” said the General, “it will. It will be a siege.”

The nine hundred days were beginning.

¹
This problem persisted throughout the war. On January 24, 1944, Party propaganda agitators reporting on the mood of workers in the Paris Commune factory of Leningrad said there were three principal questions asked them by workers: Was there any Soviet populace remaining in areas being freed by the Red Army? What were Soviet military losses? Why didn’t
Leningradskaya Pravda
publish maps showing the advances of the Red Army? (poo, p. 212.)

²
Zhdanov’s call, published in
Leningradskaya Pravda
, October 30, 1941, declared: “Only by mercilessly exterminating the Fascist bastards can we save our Motherland, save our wives and mothers, and save our children.”

DURING THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF MAY 8, 1887, THE sound of carpenters’ hammers could be heard in the courtyard of the ancient citadel of Oreshek. Oreshek was Peter the Great’s “hard little nut,” the fortress on an island at the point where the Neva flowed out of Lake Ladoga, the key to the water routes of Novgorod the Great, the ancient trade pathway from the land of the Varangians to the Black Sea and beyond.

Long before Moscow was more than a forest crossroads, a strongpoint had grown up at Oreshek. Who controlled Oreshek controlled the trade lines to the Orient—the rich flow of honey, of spices, of furs, of slaves, of precious gems, of perfume, of silks and of flax. As early as the fourteenth century the city of Novgorod the Great built a powerful Kremlin, a fortress, on Oreshek. For a hundred years before Peter, Oreshek had been held by the Swedes. After Peter wrested it back he rechristened it Shlisselburg, the “key city,” and so it was now known. But two hundred years ago Shlisselburg had lost its role as a key fortress, and its grim casements had long been used as a state prison. Here Peter had incarcerated his former wife, Yevdotiya. Here Czarina Anna Ivanovna imprisoned her State Counselor Dmitri Golitsyn and the noble Dolgoruki brothers. Here Nicholas I sent half a dozen Decembrists, the brilliant but naive young officers whose revolt in 1824 in Senate Square had shaken the foundations of autocratic Russia.

And here on this mild May morning carpenters were knocking into shape a great gallows with three gibbets that reached out, long and sinister, beyond the wooden platform. Behind a heavy iron grating in a stone-floored cell without light a young man waited for the dawn and the death which he knew it would bring. A half-hour before sunrise Aleksandr Ulyanov and four other young men were taken from their cells and marched to the courtyard. The sentence was read once again: death by hanging for their attempt on the life of Czar Alexander III. Each, as was carefully noted by State Counselor Dmitri Tolstoy, preserved his full calm. Each refused to see a priest.

The executions began. First, Vasily Generalov, Pakhomii Andreyushkin and Vasily Osipanov mounted the platform. A moment later their bodies swung out, lifeless and dangling. Aleksandr Ulyanov and Pyotr Shevyrev watched their comrades die, then mounted the scaffold and were hanged.

Since the October Revolution Oreshek had become a shrine. A marble plaque on the Royal Tower noted the names of the Revolutionary martyrs, first among them Aleksandr Ulyanov, elder brother of Vladimir Ilich Lenin.

Now in these strange September days of 1941 the sound of guns resounded nearer and nearer the old fortress.

The spearhead of the Nazi Sixteenth Army—the 122nd German Infantry, the 20th Motorized Division and units of the 12th Panzers—had been shouldering eastward since their breakthrough to the Neva banks on August 31. They had advanced north of Mga despite the fierce and repeated attacks of an NKVD rifle division, commanded by Colonel S. I. Donskov, and gradually pushed the NKVD troops back along the river road toward Shlisselburg. Three warships moved up the Neva, the gunboats
Strogy
and
Stroiny
and the cruiser
Maxim Gorky
, and laid down artillery support for the hard-pressed Soviet forces. It did no good.

On September 7 the Germans brought in three hundred planes to strafe the badly beaten Soviet forces. They fell back, some of the NKVD troops making their way to the north bank of the Neva and two regiments retiring into Shlisselburg. Other elements, including portions of a mountain brigade, retreated south of Sinyavino.

This movement left the river highway into Shlisselburg virtually clear. The Germans swept up the road and fought their way into the city.

On the morning of September 7 Party Secretary Andrei A. Zhdanov called a meeting in his Smolny office in an effort to save Shlisselburg and protect Leningrad’s communications with “mainland” Russia. Urgent measures, he said, were being taken by the Leningrad Military Council to hold Shlisselburg. He ordered Admiral I. S. Isakov to take chargé of transport facilities across Lake Ladoga and Inspector A. T. Karavayev of the Naval Political Administration was sent to the scene.

Karavayev arrived at Shlisselburg station—across the Neva River from the fortress—just after midnight September 8. Shlisselburg and the whole south bank of the Neva were in flames. Soot and sparks rained down on the Alekseyev factory and the 8th Power Station on the north bank.

The sound of machine-gun fire was clearly audible as the harassed NKVD troops sought to hold off the Germans in the Shlisselburg streets.

The wharf was filled with people, some refugees from Shlisselburg, others who had relatives there. An old woman ran up to Karavayev crying, “Help me! Help me! My son is on the other side and the Germans are already there.”

Confusion was complete. No one was in chargé. Only two small tugs were moving across the Neva, bringing out a handful of wounded.

Karavayev and other naval officers managed to restore partial order. The gunboat
Selenga
and the cutters
BKA-99
and
BKA-100
were supporting the NKVD troops. Under their cover Karavayev crossed the Neva and brought to the north bank several boatloads of women, children and wounded.

The NKVD regiments fell back through the streets and finally crossed to the north bank of the Neva by any means that came to hand. With the occupation of Shlisselburg the encirclement of Leningrad was complete. The only connection Leningrad now possessed with the “mainland” was across Lake Ladoga. Or by air.

Colonel B. V. Bychevsky was ordered to the north bank of the Neva to try to throw a pontoon bridge over the river by which a Russian counterattack to recapture Shlisselburg might be mounted. Bychevsky looked across to the south bank of the Neva. Fires burned all along the highway to Shlisselburg. Smoke rose over the gothic towers of the fortress city. And through the flames he could see heavy Nazi traffic. The Germans were moving in force. On the northern, Soviet-held bank of the river, it was deathly quiet. Artillery firing points were not yet manned. The mortars were still coming up to the front.

He looked out the Neva estuary to the ancient fort of Oreshek. It lay near the entrance of the Neva 500 feet from the Shlisselburg wharves but somewhat closer to the Soviet-held shore. There it stood, the gloomy pile which had won the nickname the “Eternal Prison” because from its walls there had been no return. What was going on there Bychevsky had no idea. Probably, he thought, it was held by the Germans. But there was no sign of life, no sign of activity. Above the little islet he could see a circling German observation plane. Long since, Oreshek had lost its military significance. For years it had been an historic monument. The Lake Ladoga flotilla stored some small arms in the old casements where the Czar’s prisoners once languished. But there had been no guns mounted in the fortress fenestrations since the time of Peter.

Unknown to Bychevsky—or to the Nazis—Oreshek was not deserted. A dozen sailors had been sent there to pack supplies belonging to the Ladoga fleet. When the Germans burst through to the Shlisselburg waterfront, the sailors were still in the subterranean ravelins. Now they had become silent and secret observers of the scene. They saw the German planes overhead. They could see the pontoon troops gathered by Bychevsky across the Neva near Sheremetyevka. From the solid watchtower of the old fort they looked over the harbor to where the Nazi troops were setting up posts on the waterfront, unloading Soviet supplies from the warehouses, and mustering Russian men and women to dig trenches and dugouts. Before their eyes the Germans erected a pillar in the center of Cathedral Square and, driving all citizens from the area, hanged four young workers from crossbeams.

Unable to restrain themselves, the sailors began to hunt through the jumble of old arms in the Oreshek cellars to see if any were serviceable. They found two cannon, long since discarded, neither with sights. One they mounted in the tower overlooking the city and the other on the fortress wall. Nikolai Konushkin, a youngster with some battery experience, directed the operation. He sighted the guns on a German firing point just across the water and gave the order: ‘Tire!”

It was never plain to the Russians why the Germans did not embark on cutters and seize the old fortress from the tiny group of defenders. Perhaps they thought it was heavily defended and not worth the price that would have to be paid. Perhaps they were too busy with other plans. Whatever it was, the Germans did not make the effort. Colonel Donskov sent in a reinforcement of NKVD troops, and a night or two later Captain Aleksei Morozov and a group of thirteen sailors of the Ladoga fleet were put ashore on Oreshek. Their task was to set up Battery No. 409—seven 45-mm cannon and six mounted machine guns—around the perimeter of the old fortress. They put in rifle-firing points and snipers’ posts. By this time the Germans had begun to direct artillery fire at the ancient ten-foot walls of the fortress. But the firing points were installed. In the weeks and months to follow, the Germans would rain down thousands of tons of high explosive on Peter’s “hard little nut.” On one September day 250 heavy shells and thousands of mortars hammered at the old walls. It was not clear for a long time whether Oreshek had the strength to hold out. Not until November 7 did the Soviet command feel confident enough of its strength to unfurl the red flag over the fortress. Once the flag was flown, it kept on flying. Sixty thousand shells rained down on the fort. Six times the flag was shot down. Five hundred days later when the Red Army began its first effort to lift the Leningrad blockade, the red flag still flew over Oreshek.

Now the Germans stood at Shlisselburg. They stood along the Neva for fifteen miles. From the rapids at Porogi around the great bend, past Nev-skaya Dubrovka and on to Shlisselburg the south bank of the river was theirs. Only the river and thirty or forty miles of wooded country stood between them and the Finnish lines; between the Germans and Hitler’s prime objective, his basic order to von Leeb, to his commanders for Operation Barbarossa: junction with the Finns, the encirclement and extermination of Leningrad and then the massive sweep to the south to envelop Moscow.

The Germans stood in strength along the Neva now. Why did they not cross?

The answer is not apparent to Soviet scholars who have studied the battle with minute care.

The river is, of course, a formidable barrier. Starting at the Lake Ladoga entrance, it has a width of 400 yards and gradually broadens to 600 yards, then narrows to 250 yards and then to 175 yards where the river Mga joins it. The breadth is considerable. The Germans reached the river without pontoons or river-crossing equipment. Thanks to the foresight of Colonel Bychevsky, the Neva bridges had been blown. The Nazis were not lucky enough to repeat their experiences of the early river crossings. Obviously, a crossing would not be easy.

Yet the question of why the Germans did not try is not answered.

Dmitri Shcheglov, the Leningrad writer who had joined a People’s Volunteer unit, was dispatched with his battalion of Volunteers to the north bank of the Neva on August 31. They marched, along the bank through a rainy night and on September 1 took up positions from the little village of Kuzminki (where Bychevsky had just destroyed the railroad bridge) through Peski to Nevskaya Dubrovka. They were spread over six or seven miles of river bank. Across the river they heard the constant sound of rifle and artillery fire in the days to come. On September 3 some villagers excitedly reported that they had seen a Nazi detachment cross the river in boats and land on a small island only about 100 feet from the Kuzminki shore. Shcheglov’s Volunteer unit had no artillery. In fact, they had hardly any ammunition and only fifteen machine guns. There was an antiaircraft unit nearby, and they got the AA gunners to lay some fire onto the islet. Soon a squad of Nazis was seen hastily pulling away in a small boat. Later four bodies of Nazi soldiers were found on the island.

By September 5 the ill-armed Volunteers were reinforced by an under-strength regiment of the 115th Division which had been pulled out of encirclement near Vyborg. This was a badly beaten-up unit, tired, grim, even more poorly armed than the Volunteers. They had lost all their guns and all their cannon and ammunition escaping the trap into which they had fallen. Their uniforms were torn, dirty and muddy. The men were so exhausted they could hardly stand. Shcheglov went to the staff headquarters, set up in a peasant hut at Plintovka. The Chief of Staff, Colonel Simonov, propped his head on a hand. His eyes were closed as though he were asleep. But he was not. He was listening to the discussion. Suddenly he sat bolt upright and started to talk:

“Why do you think we are here? Why did we have to give up Vyborg? Because the Finns concentrated against us 200,000 soldiers and officers, and on our side of the border there were only 50,000. They were able to do that and we still haven’t learned anything! What’s the result? They smashed three of our divisions. You have to know that. Don’t hide your heads under your wings like ostriches! The Finns are at Terijoki. And they are moving on Beloostrov and the Sestra River. Right here the Germans are going to try to cross the Neva in order to join up with the Finns on the Karelian isthmus. And we are going to stop that operation. We have got to outdo them. Take the initiative in your hands. Is that clear?”

It was clear enough. What was not clear was what would halt the Nazis when they started to cross the river.

On September 7 Shcheglov and his battalion saw for the first time, from their foxholes on the banks of the Neva, the Germans in force. They were moving up the highway toward Shlisselburg. They saw troop trucks, heavy equipment and tanks. They could almost make out the expressions on the German faces. Communications units passed by, motorcycle detachments, perfectly visible between the sandy river bank and a line of workers’ houses just beyond the Leningrad-Shlisselburg Chaussée.