about a hundred people waited to be exiled. They were mostly old women; old women in old-fashioned capes and worn-out velvet coats. These are the enemies our government is capable of fighting — and, it turns out, the only ones. The Germans are at the gates, the Germans are about to enter the city, and we are busy arresting and deporting old women — lonely, defenceless, harmless old people.32
Among the victims was Olga Berggolts’s elderly father, a doctor at a defence factory. Summoned to police headquarters at midday on 2 September, he was ordered to depart by 6 p.m. the same evening. ‘Papa is a military surgeon who has faithfully and honestly served the Soviet government for twenty-four years’, Berggolts wrote incredulously in her diary. ‘He was in the Red Army for the whole of the Civil War, saved thousands of people, is Russian to the marrow. . It appears — no joke — that the NKVD simply don’t like his surname.’33 Thanks to the Germans’ advance and Berggolts’s frantic string-pulling, he managed to stay in Leningrad until the following spring, when he was deported, half-starved, to Krasnoyarsk in western Siberia. The reasons? His Jewishness, his refusal to inform on colleagues and probably his relationship to Berggolts herself, for whose good behaviour he acted as hostage once her war poetry had turned her into a popular public figure.
At the end of August the glorious run of late summer weather broke. Rainwater gurgled down Leningrad’s fat galvanised drainpipes, fanned over paving stones, dulled the greens and yellows of the stucco façades. Outside the city, seesaw fighting continued in the mud and wet. On 31 August, having changed hands three times, Mga finally fell, cutting the last railway line out of the city. ‘Stavka considers the Leningrad Front’s tactics pernicious’, menaced Stalin. ‘[It] appears to know only one thing — how to retreat and find new lines of retreat. Haven’t we had enough of these heroic defeats?’34
Vera Inber got the news from her husband, who had heard that a military hospital, loaded and waiting to depart for a week, had been told to detrain and return to quarters. The train she had arrived on herself, she calculated, must have been one of the last to get through. Yelena Skryabina, who had just ducked an evacuation order with a chit from her doctor, felt a chill of presentiment: ‘The last transport left during the night. . Leningrad is surrounded, and we are caught in a mousetrap. What have I done with my indecision?’35 Seated at his desk at midnight, Georgi Knyazev listened to the distant thump of guns:
Once again I have lit the lamp with the green shade. . But what will be happening in a few days’ time is utterly beyond imagination. Examples of the destruction, the razing to the ground of dozens, hundreds of towns leap out from the scrappy newspaper reports like nightmares. Surely the same can’t happen to a colossus like Leningrad?. . Surely I am not going to see its death?
He had taken down some eighteenth-century silhouettes — of Academicians, wigged and breeched, debating under delicate oak trees — from his wall, but worried that the sphinxes outside on the embankment — impassive, millennial — had not yet been sandbagged. ‘They have simply been forgotten. . Too much to do to bother about them! And they sit there all alone, outside events.’
Beyond the civilians’ rings of lamplight the battle for Leningrad raged on. From Mga, the Sixteenth Army’s 20th Motorised Division pushed slowly northwards, opposed by a rifle brigade and exhausted NKVD border guards. On 7 September it was reinforced with tanks from the 12th Panzer Division and split the Soviet defence, pushing the border guards westwards towards the Neva, and the rifle brigade eastwards towards Lake Ladoga. In heavy fighting it took the ‘Sinyavino Heights’, a wooded ridge above a convict-manned peatworks which was to become the scene of repeated Soviet breakout attempts and one of the bloodiest battlefields of the whole Eastern Front. Finally, on 8 September, the Germans took the fortress town of Shlisselburg, wedged like a nut at the Neva’s junction with Lake Ladoga and guardian of the river route to Moscow since the fourteenth century. With it, Leningrad lost its last land link to the unoccupied Soviet Union. For the next year and five months, Leningraders would only be able to reach the ‘mainland’ via Lake Ladoga or by air. ‘A grey mist’, wrote Knyazev from his foggy embankment, ‘conceals the outlines of St Isaac’s, the Admiralty, the Winter Palace, the Senate and the horses above the archway of the General Staff Building. And somewhere, just a few dozen kilometres away, are the Germans. . It’s incredible, unreal, like a delirious dream. How could it have happened? The Germans are at the gates of Leningrad.’36
Part 2. The Siege Begins: September — December 1941
In order that we should understand things fully, the winter of nineteen forty-one was given to us as a measure
Konstantin Simonov
Bread ration coupons, December 1941
6. ‘No Sentimentality’
This was the beginning of the blockade. The mistakes had been made, the tragedy would now play out, with what from today’s perspective feels like sickening inevitability. At the time, though, events still seemed to hang in the balance. Few anticipated a siege: either the Germans would quickly be pushed back, it was assumed, or Leningrad would fall.
Across the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht now seemed poised for victory. In the north, von Leeb’s Army Group North had surrounded Leningrad. Army Group Centre had captured Smolensk eight weeks previously and was now only two hundred miles from Moscow. Outside Kiev, Army Group South was in the process of encircling four Soviet armies, and shortly to capture the city itself. To the outside world, the Soviet regime seemed about to be overthrown or forced into a humiliating peace. (‘Everyone is remarking in anticipation’, wrote George Orwell in London, ‘what a bore the Free Russians will be. . People have visions of Stalin in a little shop in Putney, selling samovars and doing Caucasian dances.’1) On 4 September Stalin had sent a half-desperate, half-threatening letter to Churchill via his ambassador Ivan Maisky. The Russian front, he admitted, had ‘broken down’, and it was imperative for Britain to open a second front in France or the Balkans by the end of the year, diverting thirty to forty German divisions. If Soviet Russia were defeated, the ambassador added in conversation, how could Britain win the war? ‘We could not exclude the impression’, Churchill wired Roosevelt after the meeting, ‘that they might be thinking of separate terms.’2
Zhdanov and Voroshilov only dared tell Stalin that Shlisselburg had fallen on 9 September, a day late. His telegraph in response — jointly signed, ominously, with Malenkov, Molotov and Beria — bristled with contempt:
We are disgusted by your conduct. All you do is report the surrender of this or that place, without saying a word about how you plan to put a stop to all these losses of towns and railway stations. The manner in which you informed us of the loss of Shlisselburg was outrageous. Is this the end of your losses? Perhaps you have already decided to give up Leningrad? What have you done with your KV tanks? Where have you positioned them, and why isn’t there any improvement on the front, when you’ve got so many of them? No other front has half the quota of KVs that you have. What’s your aviation doing? Why isn’t it supporting the troops on the battlefield? Kulik’s division has come to your aid — how are you using it? Can we hope for some sort of improvement on the front, or is Kulik’s help going to go for nothing, like the KVs? We demand that you update us on the situation two or three times a day.3