Today’s historians are much less sure, crediting the brief late-July pause in von Leeb’s advance more to rain and the regular Red Army. Even if the volunteers—bewildered, unarmed, leaderless—did make a difference on the battlefield, their loss undoubtedly represented a prodigious waste of skilled and educated manpower, especially given the Red Army’s desperate need for officers shortly afterwards. (By the end of September 1941 the Red Army as a whole had lost an extraordinary 142,000 out of its total 440,000 officers. ‘Basically to blame’, reported General Fedyuninsky of a failed operation outside Leningrad in October, ‘is weak leadership on the part of platoon and company-level officers, in some cases amounting to simple cowardice.’{37}) The military historian Antony Beevor is damning: ‘The waste of lives’, he writes, ‘was so terrible that it is hard to comprehend: a carnage whose futility was perhaps exceeded only by the Zulu king marching an impi of his warriors over a cliff to prove their discipline.’ Even harsher is opolcheniye survivor Frenklakh:
There are moments I am ashamed of to this day. We repeatedly took to our heels, abandoning our casualties. Everyone was terrified of being wounded during a retreat, because if you couldn’t walk there was almost no hope of stretcher-bearers picking you up. Your only chance was if a friend helped you… After the war I thought for a long time about ’41, analysing the situation as it was then. All those fairy tales about mass heroism—they lie on the consciences of the writers and the politruki. There were some heroes of course, but there were also crowds of people who just panicked and fled. It was mass, completely unjustified, senseless sacrifice, at the pleasure of our moronic command.{38}
The last word should go to Stalin. In April 1942, wishing to humiliate Voroshilov, who had turned down an offered command, he circulated a note to the Central Committee listing Comrade (pointedly, not Marshal) Voroshilov’s failings. Among them was the fact that while in command of the Northwestern Army Group he had ‘neglected Leningrad’s artillery defences, distracted by the creation of workers’ battalions, poorly armed with shotguns, pikes, daggers etc’.{39} Voroshilov was a bad man and a bad soldier, but the disaster of the People’s Levy was not his fault alone. He had learned his trade in the Politburo, whose members’ most important life skill was the ability correctly to anticipate the wishes of Stalin himself.
5. ‘Caught in a Mousetrap’
Vera Inber arrived in Leningrad by train on 24 August. Fifty-one years old, she was, remarkably, both Trotsky’s first cousin and a prominent member of the literary establishment, producing short stories that managed to pass the censors without descending into outright socialist realism. Her husband had just been appointed director of Leningrad’s Erisman teaching hospital, a leafy complex of red-brick nineteenth-century buildings opposite the Botanical Gardens on the Petrograd Side. Having seen her daughter and baby grandson off into evacuation from Moscow, Inber was coming to join him.
The journey, in peacetime an easy overnighter, took two and a half days. Fresh bomb craters lined the tracks, and long factory trains rattled by in the opposite direction, machinery bulky under protective canvas. One could tell how long each one had been on the road, Inber noticed, by the freshness of the birch branches tied on to the wagon roofs for camouflage. Her own train, drawing towards Leningrad through dilapidated villages with picturesque backwoods names, came to increasingly frequent halts. ‘We stopped at dawn’, she wrote in her diary
and we are still here… The carriage is fairly empty, and no one talks much. In one compartment an endless card game is in progress; a general whistles as he declares his suit, an army engineer knocks out his pipe on the corner of the table, over and over again. The sound reminds me of a woodpecker tapping its tree. The pipe smoke drifts into the corridor, moves in layers, thins out and is suspended in the rays of the sun. Everything is so quiet, it’s as thought the train were resting on moss.{1}
They started to move again, through a heavily bombed wood. Trees lay charred and split; roots pointing upwards, earth scorched ochre. Passing through a station, Inber noticed its name—Mga. Normally one never took this route: already, the direct line from Moscow had been broken by the Germans.
Inber disembarked into an atmosphere of tense expectancy. The first thing she saw on leaving the railway station was a poster bearing the text of an appeal, signed by Zhdanov, Voroshilov and city soviet chairman Popkov and dated three days earlier. It was the first official acknowledgement that the Germans were now at the gates of Leningrad:
Comrades! Leningraders! Dear friends! Over our beloved native city hangs the immediate threat of attack by German-Fascist troops. The enemy is trying to break through to Leningrad. He wants to destroy our homes, to seize our factories and plants, to drench our streets and squares with the blood of the innocent, to outrage our peaceful people, to enslave the free sons of our Motherland. But this shall not be. Leningrad—cradle of the proletarian Revolution—never has fallen and never shall fall into enemy hands…
Let us rise as one man in defence of our city, our homes, our families, our honour and freedom. Let us perform our sacred duty as Soviet patriots and be indomitable in the struggle with the fierce and hateful enemy, vigilant and merciless in the struggle against cowards, alarmists and deserters; let us establish the strictest revolutionary order in our city. Armed with iron discipline and Bolshevik resolve we shall meet the enemy bravely and deal him a crushing blow!{2}
In the eight days since she had decided to leave Moscow, Inber reflected, Leningrad’s situation had become dramatically worse. Still, joining her husband had been the right thing to do. ‘He always said “If war breaks out we should be together.” And here we are—together.’
Over the next few days she saw little of him. He was frantically busy at the hospital; she made a broadcast for the city radio station (‘Moscow and Leningrad, brother and sister, stretch out their hands to one other’) and idled, feeling oddly surplus to requirements, round their airy new flat. Through the high windows the sun sparkled on the Karpovka river and the palm-filled glasshouses of the Botanical Gardens opposite. Inside, the walls were hung with fine old porcelain plates, their roses as fresh as the day they had been painted in the reign of Empress Elizabeth. What on earth would she do with them, she wondered, when the air raids began? Though there were ten to fifteen alerts each day—more like one continual drill with short breaks—everything seemed to be happening ‘far away, beyond the horizon’:
During alerts I go out on the balcony. Pesochnaya Street, always quiet, empties completely. Only the air-raid wardens in their tin helmets stand looking up at the sky. Occasionally a factory-school boy runs by—they have a hostel in one of the buildings in the Botanical Gardens. The woman tram driver had this to say about them: ‘They carry on as if they owned the tram; hang on to the step, push their way on to the platform. But I don’t mind any more—after all, they’ll soon be off to the front to dig trenches.’{3}