In the city, few fully understood the approaching danger. It wasn’t for want of trying. ‘Waking up’, wrote the young mother Yelena Kochina, ‘we rush to our radios, and wash down the bitter pills of the news bulletins with cold leftover tea.’ ‘The thirst for information’, Lidiya Ginzburg remembered, ‘was fearful. Five times a day people would drop whatever they were doing and race to the loudspeaker. They would fall on anyone who had been a yard nearer the front line than they had, or to a government office, or any source of news.’{30}
The authorities did their best to keep the public in the dark. The Soviet Information Bureau, created three days into the war and known as Sovinform, was the only body authorised to issue communiqués. It kept its twice-daily reports deliberately vague, talking about fighting ‘in the sector’ of particular cities, and anonymous ‘population points N’ having been won or lost. (This convention dated back to the nineteenth-century novel. Gogol’s Dead Souls, for example, opens with a carriage driving through the gates of an inn in ‘the provincial town of N’.) Rather than admit defeats, it picked out barely credible incidences of individual heroism—what the war correspondent Vasili Grossman contemptuously called ‘Ivan Pupkin killed five Germans with a spoon’ stories. Major defeats were not reported until several days after the event. Fighting ‘in the Pskov sector’ was not reported until 12 July, four days after the city had fallen, and it was still being referred to as a ‘battleground’ twelve days later, after which it simply dropped out of the news.{31}
One of the practical results of this misinformation was that parents of children sent to stay in the countryside for their summer holidays often failed to fetch them home before they were engulfed by the German advance. Several of Yelena Skryabina’s friends were thus almost caught out. On 8 July her neighbour Lyubov Kurakina, whose husband had just returned, broken, from the Gulag, succeeded in retrieving their children from Belorussia, by then already partially under occupation:
She says she saw a German soldier just a few steps away from her. She said she wasn’t afraid of him because they are people just like we are. What did worry her was that her Party membership card might be found hidden in her stocking… But everything turned out all right. She found her children. They rode part of the way home by train and part by truck, and some of the way they walked.
Another friend’s husband was fortunate, as a ‘dependable worker’—jargon for a favoured Party official—in having the use of a car to fetch their three-year-old daughter. ‘This made it possible for him to circle through several villages and towns. Even so, he was lucky to find her. He brought her back dressed only in a little nightdress.’{32} The historian Anzhelina Kupaigorodskaya, aged eleven at the start of the war, remembers how the staff of her Pioneer camp simply abandoned their charges:
We were supposed to be going on some sort of expedition, a hike. Then we were told it wasn’t happening. Two or three hours went by and finally we were called into a line and told that Hitler had attacked us. Immediately everything changed. Before, the meals had been as good as in a sanatorium, but from then on all we got was kasha [boiled grains]. All the men disappeared, and the only adults left were the kitchen-ladies. Camp was supposed to have ended but nobody came to fetch us. We just wandered around. Nobody explained anything; there was some sort of rumour that we were going to be sent to Moscow, to live in the metro.
She got a message to her parents via another child, and they eventually came to collect her towards the end of July. ‘I have no idea what happened to the rest of the children. Many still hadn’t been picked up, and by then the Germans were already close.’{33}
Driven by fear of accusation of cowardice, even the army’s internal communications were more rhetorical than factual. ‘No sooner had the village of Polyana fallen under our fire’ ran a report of 31 July, ‘than the Germans jumped out of their cottages with their underwear down. Soldiers in the trenches also took to their heels… With cries of “Hurrah!” the battalion fell upon the fascists. Grenades, bayonets, rifle butts and flaming bottles came into play. The effect was stupendous.’ On 2 July NKVD border troops holed up in a ‘former kulak’s house’ outside Ostrov found themselves under attack from five enemy tanks: ‘From the flaming premises junior politruk [political organiser] Broitman, already twice wounded in the chest, carried on firing at the enemy, not allowing him to open his tank hatches. Next to him the starshina [roughly, sergeant major] of the picket, Comrade Nagorsky, heroically struck at the enemy with a submachine gun. Bleeding profusely, they courageously covered the retreat of the picket to new lines. Both fell dead in courageous defence of their picket sector.’{34}
Closer to reality was a cynical joke of the time. A Red Army lieutenant is found sitting in an abandoned German lorry. He is told to move because otherwise he will get fired at. ‘Who by?’ he retorts. ‘The Germans will think it’s theirs, and our lot will run away.’{35} Throughout the war’s first weeks, the Northwestern Army Group remained in near-total disarray. Internal reports repeatedly describe units as retreating ‘as individuals and in small groups’, a euphemism for complete disorder. Cut off by the German advance, large numbers of soldiers wandered the devastated countryside, trying either to return to Soviet lines or to surrender to the enemy. Leaflet drops told them to consider themselves partisans, and encouraged them with news of the new Soviet—British alliance.{36} So many were taken prisoner that the Germans simply herded them into the nearest available secure buildings, without any provision for food, sanitation or clean water. Men who did manage to rejoin their units were accused of cowardice, desertion or spying. Though the Red Army knew the terrain, its attempts at counter-attack were conducted, according to Halder, ‘in a manner which plainly shows that their command is completely confused. Also, the tactics employed in these attacks is singularly poor. Riflemen on trucks drive abreast with tanks against our firing line, and the inevitable result is very heavy losses to the enemy.’ By 3 July, Halder estimated, twelve to fifteen of the Northwestern Army Group’s twenty-one infantry and armoured divisions had been wiped out.{37}
The confusion was intensified by a deadly round of scapegoating within the Soviet High Command. The most prominent victim was General Dmitri Pavlov, commander of the Western Army Group, who was arrested on 4 July and executed on the 22nd, together with three of his subordinates. General Kopets, head of Soviet bomber command, saved the NKVD the trouble by committing suicide on the second day of the war. Further down the line uncounted numbers of officers were shot on the spot by military tribunals, for ‘cowardice’ in making unauthorised retreats.{38}