Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, the now forgotten composer of Pilots and Ballad of the Men of the Baltic Fleet, decided to stay because he didn’t want to leave his mother, but also because he had just been appointed chairman of the Leningrad branch of the Composers’ Union, the previous incumbent having failed to return from his summer holiday. Others privately doubted whether German occupation would really be as bad as the propaganda made out. ‘Can it really be’, wondered Skryabina incredulously, ‘that they kill people just for being Jews?’ In mid-August she turned down a second chance to evacuate in expectation, subtly implied in her diary, that Leningrad was about to be given up. ‘If the war really is progressing at such breakneck speed then probably it will end soon. Why leave somewhere we are settled? Perhaps it would be wiser to stay in the flat. What should I do?’ She nonetheless suspected provocation when an old schoolfriend sat down beside her on a bench and ‘without any introduction, began talking about how happy he is that the Germans are just outside the city; that they are immeasurably powerful, and that if the city doesn’t surrender today, then it will tomorrow… “And this”, he said, showing me a small revolver, “is in case my hopes deceive me.”’ At Pushkin House a Jewish colleague of Likhachev’s—the same Professor Gukovsky who Olga Grechina criticised for hypocrisy—appeared in the canteen rakishly attired in ‘a peaked cap (worn somewhat to one side), and a shirt belted in the Caucasian style. He greeted us with a salute. Confidentially he told us that when the Germans came, he would pass himself off as an Armenian.’{21}
The art historian Nikolai Punin succumbed to simple fatalism. In the blacked-out, post-curfew silence of the evening of 26 August, the same day that permission finally came through for the Baltic Fleet to leave Tallinn, he sat at his desk restarting his diary, after a gap of five years, by the light of a lamp whose shade was made of blue wallpaper. For people of his generation, he wrote, death had never seemed far away. ‘In reality they’ve been inviting us to die quickly these past twenty-five years. Many have died, death draws near, as near as it can. Why should we think of it, since it thinks of us so earnestly?’ The sense of impending doom reminded him of the 1937 Terror, when he and all his friends went to bed each evening expecting a small-hours knock on the door and waiting Black Maria. Visiting the Academy of Sciences (‘confusion and chaos’) earlier in the day, colleagues had tried to persuade him to leave with them for Samarkand:
But that would mean getting drawn into the war. No, I’m not going. It’s better to tilt at windmills while one still can. The lamp burns, it is quiet. Lord, comfort the souls ascending to heaven.
Not long ago I said to someone ‘Now, there are two frightening things: war and evacuation. But of the two, evacuation is worse.’ This is just a quip, it’s true. But why didn’t they evacuate us during the Yezhovshchina [the Terror]? It was just as frightening then.{22}
The background noise to agonised personal decision-making was strong popular and semi-official disapproval of those who were quick to leave the city. Evacuees were dubbed ‘rats’, or bezhentsy—‘refugees’, but literally translated as ‘runners-away’. Olga Grechina had an awkward parting with a pair of brothers, fellow students at the university, whose mother had wangled them places on an archaeological dig in Central Asia. ‘I couldn’t understand how healthy young people could agree to be evacuated when everyone else was trying to get to the front… Conversation was difficult. I didn’t blame them for leaving; I was just terribly surprised that they had agreed.’{23} As perniciously and less inevitably, some district soviets paraded their faith in the leadership by actually discouraging civilian evacuation in their areas. As Dmitri Pavlov, wartime head of the national food supply agency, puts it in the best Soviet account of the siege, they ‘viewed citizens’ refusal to evacuate as a patriotic act and were proud of it, thus involuntarily encouraging people to remain’. The number of Leningraders evacuated through July and August, he thought, could and should have been two or three times higher.{24} Refusal to evacuate could, ironically, also be regarded as suspicious. A diarist noted the following rumour:
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.