‘Run!’ someone shouted, tugging at my sleeve. I looked back. Everyone who had been working in the trenches had run somewhere. I ran too, though I didn’t know where to go or what to do. . Suddenly I saw a small bridge. I ran towards it. Under it was a deep puddle. For a whole hour we squatted in this puddle, and didn’t do any more work for the rest of the day.13
Yelena Skryabina, hearing of the strafings and worried that her son Dima might be conscripted to dig, thought the effort ‘senseless — a good way to kill people. . No one is excused — young girls in sundresses and sandals, boys in shorts and sports shirts. They aren’t even allowed home to change their clothes. How much use can they really be? City youths don’t even know how to use a shovel, much less the heavy crowbars that they will need to break up dry clay soil.’14
She was not wrong to be sceptical. Girls dug in bathing suits, with bits of paper stuck to their noses to prevent sunburn. They dropped their heavy shovels during the night-time marches or had to be sent home with hopelessly blistered hands and feet. The peasant women who cooked them kasha and spread out straw for them to sleep on tut-tutted over the ‘little ladies’ from the city; the men overseeing them shouted: ‘You think you’re actresses, that you’ve come to a resort? You’ve come to save the Motherland!’ Their initial enthusiasm quickly wore off: ‘What did he think we were doing — playing croquet?’ one burst out when her professor of Marxism-Leninism, out for a visit, asked if they were tired.15
Thin, patchy and in places overrun before it had even been manned, the Luga Line was nonetheless also where the Wehrmacht met its first, albeit temporary hitch. From Moscow, Zhukov ordered the Northwestern Army Group to occupy the Luga Line on 4 July, and the first divisions took up their positions the same day. On the 10th, with deployments and digging work still under way, Zhukov ordered Voroshilov to launch a counter-attack against Manstein’s 8th Panzer Division, which was in an exposed position having pushed on east after taking Soltsi, just to the west of Lake Ilmen.
By this time, the Blitzkrieg was already being slowed by terrain and climate. Dust ground out engines; bridges were not strong enough to bear the weight of tanks, and turning off the main roads, as one German officer put it, was ‘like leaving the twentieth century for the Middle Ages’. Nor could the Wehrmacht rely on its maps: ‘All supposed main roads were marked in red’, a general remembered, ‘and there seemed to be lots of them, but they proved to be nothing but sandy tracks. Our intelligence was fairly accurate about conditions in Russian-occupied Poland, but badly at fault about those beyond the original Russian frontier.’ Summer thunderstorms turned the dust into mud, passable for tanks but not for the lorries that carried their fuel, supplies and auxiliary troops. ‘An hour or two’s rain reduced the panzer forces to stagnation. It was an extraordinary sight, with groups of tanks and transports strung out over a hundred mile stretch, all stuck — until the sun came out and the ground dried.’16
Launched in 30° heat on 13 July, the Soviet counter-stroke caught the 8th Panzer Division by surprise, separating it from a motorised infantry division to its left and forcing it into a fierce four-day battle out of encirclement, during which it had to be supplied by air. Though the crisis was over by the 18th, it cost the division 70 of its 150 tanks, and helped force a pause of a vital ten days along the Narva and Luga rivers, while von Leeb and his commanders regrouped and debated what to do next. It was far, however, from the decisive victory that Moscow had wanted. At this point the Leningrad leaders, as they no doubt realised, edged perilously near the fate of General Pavlov of the Western Army Group, who had been arrested in the first week of the war and now awaited execution, together with his subordinates. The Northwestern Army Group’s sacrificial lamb was the head of the Luga Operational Group, General Konstantin Pyadyshev, a respected and experienced specialist on military fortifications and holder of two Orders of the Red Banner. At the time, he simply disappeared; we now know that he was arrested for dereliction of duty by his commanding officer, General Popov, on 23 July, and died in prison two years later. A week later Zhdanov and Voroshilov got away with a summons to Moscow and a carpeting from Stalin for ‘lack of toughness’.17
In Leningrad, the mood was one of rising anxiety. Two questions were beginning to predominate: food — would there be another famine, like the one during the 1920–21 Civil War? — and whether or not to evacuate.
Evacuation of valuables and of defence plant from the city had begun directly on news of the invasion, in expectation not of siege but of air raids. One of the best-prepared institutions was the Hermitage, thanks to the shrewdness of its director, Iosif Orbeli, who had risked accusations of war-mongering by discreetly stockpiling packing materials (among them fifty tonnes of wood shavings, three tons of cotton wadding and sixteen kilometres of oilcloth) months before. He immediately ordered that the museum’s forty most valuable paintings be moved into the steel-lined vaults housing its famous collection of Scythian gold, and the following morning staff and volunteers began the gigantic task of moving, dismantling, crating and cataloguing the whole of its vast and wonderful collection, from winged Babylonian bulls to Faberge’s snowdrops in jade and crystal. ‘We work from morning to late evening’, wrote an art student:
Our legs are throbbing. We take the paintings off the walls. . There isn’t the usual feeling of awe for the masterpieces, though we deliberately wrap up [Titian’s] Danaë slowly. . Downstairs the sculptors are packing things into crates. Orbeli is everywhere in the halls. . The empty Hermitage is like a house after a funeral.18
Wherever possible, paintings were packed flat, but those too large to fit into a railway carriage had to be rolled, including, after much anguished indecision, Rembrandt’s fragile Descent from the Cross. Only one painting — Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son — got a crate to itself, and only another three — two Leonardo Madonnas and Raphael’s exquisite little Madonna Conestabile — were left in their frames. The rest — Giorgiones, Tiepolos, Breughels, Van Dycks, Holbeins, Rubens, Gainsboroughs, Canalettos, Velázquezes, El Grecos — were removed from their stretchers and the empty frames hung back in their usual places on the gallery walls. Houdon’s magnificent sculpture of Voltaire, all beaky nose and twisted smile, was lowered down the three flights of a ceremonial staircase with the help of naval ratings, using wooden runners and a system of blocks and pulleys. The Chertomlyk Vase, a fourth-century bc silver ewer magnificently decorated with doves and horses, had to be filled with tiny pieces of crumbled cork, which two women spent the night patiently feeding through a crack in its lip with teaspoons.
After six days and nights of frantic activity, a first trainload of treasures — about half a million items in more than one thousand crates — left the city on 1 July. Originally intended for the evacuation of machinery from the Kirov defence works, the train was made up of two engines, twenty-two freight wagons, an armoured car for the most valuable items and passenger carriages for guards and Hermitage staff, with flatbeds for anti-aircraft guns at either end. Its destination, known only to a few, was Sverdlovsk in the Urals (formerly Yekaterinburg, the town in which Nicholas II and his family had been assassinated). A second train, containing 700,000 items in 422 crates, left on 20 July. Orbeli’s packing materials had now run out, and an Egyptologist, Militsa Matye, was given charge of finding more. ‘For almost two years’, she marvelled later, ‘some long smooth poles had stood in the corner of my office. I would never have believed that the time would come when I would wrap them round with fabrics from Coptic Egypt and send them to the Urals.’19 Pleading with shops and warehouses for everything from sawdust to egg boxes, she gathered enough to pack another 351 crates, but by the time they were ready the siege ring had almost closed, and they spent the war stacked in a gallery on the Winter Palace’s ground floor.