It’s said that P. Z. Andreyev and S. P. Preobrazhenskaya (of the Mariinsky Theatre) refused to leave. ‘Why?’ they were asked. ‘We’re sure that Leningrad won’t be surrendered,’ they replied. But the administration thought to themselves, ‘We know you. It’s already certain that Leningrad will have to be abandoned, and you want to go over to the Fascists! We’d better interrogate you, so as to see just what kind of Soviet people you really are.’25
By 25 August Leningrad was three-quarters surrounded. The railway lines west to the Baltics had been cut, as had the direct routes to Moscow. The only unbroken line ran to the east, splitting in two at the junction town of Mga, now itself the scene of heavy fighting. To the west, the Red Army had lost the whole of the Baltic littoral except for a sixty-kilometre stretch of Gulf shoreline to the west of Peterhof. Supplied via Kronshtadt, this ‘Oranienbaum pocket’ — named for one of the tsars’ summer palaces — held out all through the siege, though to little strategic advantage and at dreadful cost. To the north, the Finnish army under General Carl Mannerheim, having recovered its pre-Winter War borders, had crossed into Russian Karelia and was advancing along the north-eastern shore of Lake Ladoga, in accordance with a promise to Hitler to ‘shake hands’ with the Wehrmacht on the River Svir.
The threat to Leningrad now absorbed all the Kremlin’s attention. There is a school of thought, dating from Khrushchev’s ‘Thaw’-heralding ‘Secret Speech’ of 1956, which maintains that Stalin deliberately allowed Leningrad to be surrounded, out of suspicion of its liberal bent and record as a breeding ground for charismatic politicians such as the Old Bolsheviks Kirov (mysteriously murdered in 1934) and Grigori Zinoviev (shot after a show trial in 1936). But reading Stalin’s furious — sometimes fantastical — harangues of the late summer and autumn, the theory dissolves. Though he clearly contemplated abandoning the city so as to save its armies, he equally clearly viewed this as a desperate last resort.
Sometime between 21 and 27 August, as German armour rolled through the railway towns to Leningrad’s south, a ‘special commission’ set out to Leningrad from the Kremlin. Its members included Molotov, the chiefs of the air force, navy and artillery, trade commissar Aleksei Kosygin, and, most significantly, Georgi Malenkov, the thirty-nine-year-old rising star recently appointed to the State Defence Committee — the five-man chamber, headed by Stalin, that acted as the USSR’s supreme decision-making body throughout the war. Despised by Zhdanov, who gave him the servant-girlish nickname ‘Malanya’ for his pear shape, smooth chin and high-pitched voice, Malenkov was also a crony of Zhdanov’s arch-enemy, NKVD chief Beria. The commission’s mission, officially to ‘evaluate the complicated situation’, was probably in reality to decide whether Leningrad should be abandoned. The journey alone proved how near to disaster it had already come. Having flown to Cherepovets, a railway town 400 kilometres to Leningrad’s east, the group boarded a train which took them as far as Mga, where it was halted by an air raid. With fires twisting in the night sky and anti-aircraft guns hammering, the Kremlin grandees got out and stumbled along the tracks until they met an ordinary town tram, which took them to a second train that finally carried them to the city.
The commission stayed for about a week, during which Stalin continued to bombard Zhdanov with orders, now completely divorced from fast-changing reality.26 On 27 August he telephoned the Smolniy with a dream-like scheme to post tanks ‘on average every two kilometres, in places every 500 metres, depending on the ground’ along a new 120-kilometre defence line from Gatchina to the Volkhov River. ‘The infantry divisions will stand directly behind the tanks, using them not only as a striking force, but as armoured defence. For this you need 100–120 KVs [a type of heavy tank]. I think you could produce this quantity of KVs in ten days. . I await your swift reply.’27 The following day Zhdanov came up with his usual slavish agreement. Stalin’s plan for a defence line ‘of a special type’ was ‘absolutely correct’, and he asked permission to postpone the evacuation of workshops belonging to the Izhorsk and Kirov weapons factories, so that their tank production be used to fulfil the scheme.
On 29 August the Germans took Tosno, only forty kilometres from Leningrad on the Moscow road. They also reached the south bank of the Neva, cutting the forces defending Leningrad to the south-east in two. Spitting fury and paranoia, Stalin telegraphed Molotov and Malenkov alone:
I have only just been informed that Tosno has been taken by the enemy. If things go on like this I am afraid that Leningrad will be surrendered out of idiot stupidity, and all the Leningrad divisions fall into captivity. What are Popov and Voroshilov doing? They don’t even tell me how they plan to avert the danger. They’re busy looking for new lines of retreat; that’s how they see their duty. Where does this abyss of passivity of theirs come from, this peasant-like submission to fate? I just don’t understand them. There are lots of KV tanks in Leningrad now, lots of planes. . Why isn’t all this equipment being used in the Lyuban — Tosno sector? What can some infantry regiment do against German tanks, without any equipment?. . Doesn’t it seem to you that someone is deliberately opening the road to the Germans? What kind of man is Popov? How’s Voroshilov spending his time, what’s he doing to help Leningrad? I write this because the uselessness of the Leningrad command is so absolutely incomprehensible. I think you should leave for Moscow. Please don’t delay.28
How close Popov and Voroshilov came to a bullet in the back of the neck we can’t tell. Malenkov and Molotov certainly heaped on the criticism, taking care not to spare Zhdanov either. Replying to Stalin the same day, they boasted that they had sharply criticised Zhdanov and Voroshilov’s mistakes, which included creating the Defence Council of Leningrad, allowing battalions to elect their officers, holding back civilian evacuation and failing properly to build new fortifications. Worse, Zhdanov and Voroshilov were guilty of ‘not understanding their duty promptly to inform Stavka of the measures being taken to defend Leningrad, of constantly retreating before the enemy, and of failing to take the initiative and organise counter-attacks. The Leningraders admit their mistakes, but of course this is absolutely inadequate.’29 Stalin’s response was curt: ‘Answer: First, who holds Mga right now? Second — find out from Kuznetsov what the plan is for the Baltic Fleet. Third — we want to send Khozin as Voroshilov’s deputy. Any objections?’ According to Beria’s son, on the commission’s return to Moscow Malenkov urged Stalin to arrest and court-martial Zhdanov, but Beria dissuaded him.30 Instead, Stalin made Malenkov his point-man on Leningrad: Stalin’s wishes were to be transmitted to Zhdanov through him, and vice versa. This extraordinary arrangement, whereby Zhdanov communicated with Stalin via a man who had tried (as Zhdanov must at least have suspected) to have him murdered, continued for the rest of the war.
Zhdanov was spared; ordinary Leningraders were less fortunate. As the fighting rolled to and fro outside the city, Molotov and Malenkov stepped up the pace of terror inside it. A table drawn up by the Leningrad NKVD on 25 August gives a target number of 2,248 arrests and deportations, divided into twenty-nine categories, from Trotskyites, Zinovievites, Mensheviks and Anarchists, through priests, Catholics, former officers in the tsarist army, ‘former wealthy merchants’, ‘White bandits’, ‘kulaks’ and people ‘with connections abroad’, down to the catch-all ‘diversionists’, ‘saboteurs’ and ‘anti-social elements’, and simple thieves and prostitutes.31 Their zeal had its usual results. At one collection point, a disgusted observer noted,