PART 1
Invasion
June—September 1941
One might say that Leningrad is particularly well suited to catastrophes… That cold river, those menacing sunsets, that operatic, terrifying moon.
1. 22 June 1941
Drive sixty kilometres south-west of what used to be Leningrad and you come to what Russians call dacha country: a green, untilled landscape of small lakes, soft dirt roads, tall, rusty-barked ‘ship pines’ and weathered wooden summer houses with sagging verandas and glassed-in porches. On the Sunday morning of 22 June 1941 Dmitri Likhachev, a thirty-five-year-old scholar of medieval Russian literature, was sunbathing with his wife and daughters on the sand martin-busy banks of the River Oredezh:
The bank was steep, with a path leading along the top of it. One day, sitting on our beach, we overheard snatches of a terrifying conversation. Holidaymakers were walking along the path and talking about Kronshtadt being bombed, about some aeroplane or other. At first we thought they were reminiscing about the Finnish campaign of 1939, but their excited voices bothered us. When we returned to the dacha we were told that war had broken out.
At noon the Likhachevs gathered with other holidaymakers around an outdoor loudspeaker to listen to the formal announcement of war. The speaker was not Stalin, but the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov. ‘Men and women, citizens of the Soviet Union’, he began. ‘At four o’clock this morning, without declaration of war, and without any claims being made on the Soviet Union, German troops attacked our country.’ The text struck a note of baffled injury—‘This attack has been made despite the existence of a non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, a pact the terms of which were scrupulously observed by the Soviet Union’—before ending with the more rousing ‘Our cause is good. Our enemy will be smashed. Victory will be ours.’ When the broadcast was over ‘everyone was very gloomy and silent… After Hitler’s Blitzkrieg in Europe, no one expected anything good.’{1}
All over Leningrad, quiet midsummer weekends were similarly violated. In her apartment in the city centre, near Potemkin’s Tauride Palace, Yelena Skryabina had risen early so as to get some typing done in time for an outing to the countryside. The sunshine, the cool morning air coming in at the windows, the sound of her nanny shushing her five-year-old son Yura outside the door, all combined to give her ‘a wonderful feeling of contentment and joy’. Her older son, fourteen-year-old Dima, had already left with a friend to see the fountains being switched on at the great baroque palace of Peterhof, out on the Finnish Gulf. At 9 a.m. her husband telephoned from his factory with a cryptic, agitated message to stay at home and turn on the radio. At noon, she and her mother listened to Molotov’s broadcast: ‘So this was it—war! Germany was already bombing Soviet cities. Molotov’s speech was halting, as though he were out of breath. His rallying, spirited appeals seemed out of place. And I suddenly realised that something ominous and oppressive loomed over us.’ When it was over she went outdoors, where she found crowds of people milling about the streets and elbowing their way into the shops, ‘buying up everything they could lay hands on’:
Many rushed to the banks to withdraw their savings. I was seized by the same panic, and hurried to withdraw the roubles listed in my bank book. But I was too late. The bank had run out of money. The payments had stopped. People clamoured, demanded. The June day blazed on unbearably. Someone fainted. Someone else swore vehemently. Not until evening did everything become somehow strangely still.{2}
At eleven o’clock on the same morning Yuri Ryabinkin, a skinny fifteen-year-old with a pudding-bowl fringe above big dark eyes, set off along Sadovaya Street for a children’s chess competition in the gardens of the Pioneer (once the Anichkov) Palace next to the Anichkov Bridge. The policemen, he noticed, were carrying gasmasks and wearing red armbands—part, he assumed, of one of the usual civil defence exercises. He was setting out his chess pieces when he noticed a crowd gathering around a small boy standing nearby. ‘I listened and froze in horror. “At four o’clock this morning”, the boy was saying excitedly, “German bombers raided Kiev, Zhitomir, Sevastopol and somewhere else! Molotov spoke on the radio. Now we’re at war with Germany!” …My head span. I couldn’t think straight. But I played three games, and oddly enough, won all three. Then I drifted off home.’ After supper he wandered about the tense, stuffy streets, queuing for two and a half hours for a newspaper—‘interesting talk’ and ‘sceptical remarks’ ran through the line—until it was announced that there wouldn’t be any papers, but ‘some kind of official bulletin instead’. ‘The clock’, Ryabinkin wrote with adolescent portentousness in his diary later that evening, ‘says half past eleven. A serious battle is beginning, a clash between two antagonistic forces—socialism and fascism! The well-being of mankind depends on the outcome of this historic struggle.’{3}
Leningraders should have been better prepared for the Second World War—the Great Patriotic War as they still call it—than other Soviet citizens, because they had had ringside seats at its prequel. Following the Nazi—Soviet pact of August 1939, the Soviet Union had occupied not only eastern Poland, but also, in June 1940, the Baltic states to Leningrad’s west, and the lake-fretted southern marches of Finland, directly to its north.
The ‘Winter War’ with Finland in particular provided a foretaste of travails to come. The war was launched on 30 November 1939, three months after the invasion of Poland, and Russians expected it to be very short. ‘[We thought that] all we had to do was raise our voice a little bit’, remembered Khrushchev, ‘and the Finns would obey. If that didn’t work we would fire one shot and they would put up their hands and surrender.’{4} In fact the war proved a humiliation. Despite their tiny numbers—a population of 3.7 million compared to the Soviet Union’s almost 200 million—the Finns put up a dogged defence, forcing the Russians to send in overwhelming numbers of troops. When the Soviet Union finally pushed Finland into surrender on 12 March 1941, annexing its second city of Viipuri (today Russia’s Vyborg) and the whole of the isthmus between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga, it was at the cost of 127,000 Red Army fatalities. Via the rumours that leaked out of the military hospitals, Leningraders got their first intimation of the army’s weaknesses in leadership, equipment and training. Soldiers lacked weapons, ammunition, winter clothing and camouflage (‘We couldn’t have been offered a better target’, reminisced a Finnish fighter pilot of a column of troops crossing a frozen lake. ‘The Russians weren’t even wearing white parkas.’) Most of all, they lacked good officers, thanks to Stalin’s paranoid evisceration of the armed forces during the recent Terror. From 1937 to 1939 an extraordinary 40,000 officers had been arrested, and of those about 15,000 shot. Among them were three out of the five Marshals of the Soviet Union, fifteen out of sixteen army commanders, sixty out of sixty-seven corps commanders, 136 out of 169 divisional commanders, and fifteen out of twenty-five admirals. The survivors (44 per cent of whom had no secondary education) were mostly blinkered veterans of the Civil War or overpromoted juniors too afraid of tribunal and execution squad to take the initiative or to adapt their orders to changing circumstances.{5} The mistakes of the Winter War were repeated so exactly during the first months of the German invasion that with hindsight it resembles a warm-up for the main event. It certainly seemed that way to Finns, who still call the Second World War—during which they helped to besiege Leningrad but refused directly to attack it—the ‘Continuation War’.