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
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}
Even before hearing about Shlisselburg, Stalin had decided to bring in new leadership. The previous day he had summoned his head of staff, General Zhukov, to the Kremlin and ordered him to fly to Leningrad with a note for Voroshilov that read simply ‘Hand over command of the Army Group to Zhukov and fly to Moscow immediately’.
Forty-three years old, with a bald, block-shaped head, ruthless will, brilliant tactical sense and the courage to stand up to Stalin on military matters, Zhukov was the outstanding Soviet commander of the Second World War. He had made his name (and evaded, he suspected, the clutches of the NKVD) two years earlier, with the successful repulse of a Japanese incursion into Soviet Mongolia. Later he was to mastermind the spectacular encirclements at Stalingrad, and lead the Red Army in triumph to Berlin. The three weeks in the autumn of 1941 during which he stopped the Germans in front of Leningrad were to become part of a legend.
As recounted in his memoirs, Zhukov took off from Moscow on the same day that he saw Stalin, in grey, rainy weather. He took with him two trusted lieutenants from Mongolian days, Generals Mikhail Khozin and Ivan Fedyuninsky.{4} Approaching Ladoga the cloud cleared, and their plane was spotted by a pair of Messerschmitts, which chased them low over the water until seen off by outlying anti-aircraft guns. Having landed safely at an army airfield, the generals took a car straight to the Smolniy, where they were stopped at the gate by guards. They ‘asked us to present our passes, which, naturally enough, we did not have. I identified myself, but even that didn’t help. Orders are orders after all. “You will have to stay here,” the officer told us. We waited outside the gate for at least fifteen minutes before the Commandant of Headquarters gave permission for us to drive up to the door.’
Zhukov walked in, as he tells it, on a mood of drunken defeatism. A meeting of Leningrad’s Military Council was in progress; being planned were the demolition of the city’s utilities and principal factories, and the scuttling of the Baltic Fleet. His arrival turned the mood around: ‘After a brief conference… we decided to adjourn the meeting and declare that for the time being no measures were to be taken. We would defend Leningrad to the last man.’{5} All that night he kept the Council up discussing how best to strengthen the city’s defences, particularly around Pulkovo, a small range of hills (site of Russia’s oldest astronomical observatory) twelve kilometres to Leningrad’s south. His improvisations included the adaptation of anti-aircraft guns for point-blank fire against tanks, the secondment of sailors to the infantry, and the transfer of naval guns from the Fleet’s trapped ships to the weakest sectors of the front. Among the guns sent to Pulkovo were those of the cruiser Avrora, a blank shot from whose forecastle gun had signalled the start of the October Revolution. He also transferred part of the 23rd Army—facing the ‘docile’ Finns on the Karelian Isthmus—south to fight the Germans, and abandoned plans to scuttle the Fleet. ‘If ships have to sink’, he declared, ‘let it be in battle, with their guns firing.’ Khozin took over as the Northwestern Army Group’s chief-of-staff, and Fedyuninsky went to inspect the 42nd Army at Pulkovo. Morale, he reported, was cracking. Headquarters had lost contact with front-line units, and was itself transferring to the far rear, into the basement of a Kirov Works factory. ‘Take over the 42nd Army’, Zhukov ordered him, ‘and quickly.’{6}