She was horribly wrong—or wilfully blind—of course. One of the refugees from Pushkin into Leningrad was the composer Bogdanov-Berezovsky, who before being sent with other musicians to load timber at the Leningrad docks had lived in a wing of the Catherine Palace. Shortly after Pushkin’s fall he bumped into a former neighbour, who had witnessed the town’s takeover before escaping to the city on foot:
She told us of awful things… An ordinary German language teacher at the Pushkin middle school took a ‘leading role’, volunteering as an interpreter and identifying various Communists, among them sweet Anechka Krasikova from the Palace administration. Anechka often used to drop round—pretty, young, always cheerful. Her little face wasn’t even spoiled by pince-nez, though they didn’t really suit her at all. Her husband and five-year-old boy managed to get away in time. But she was put in charge of the palace’s air-raid shelters, in which much of the town was hiding, and so missed getting out either by truck or on foot. The fascists shot her and various others on the lawn opposite the parade ground, next to the Monogram Gates, having first made them dig their own graves. An elderly Jewish couple—the Lichters from the right-hand wing—were hanged. (The old lady was so proud of her boy, the tankist!) So were three Jews from the left wing. Two of them were the boys with sticking-out ears, aged about seven or eight, who were always dashing about outside our windows.{10}
The Germans’ initial searches for Pushkin’s Jews and Communists were followed by an order that all Jews appear for ‘registration’ at the Kommandant’s office—opposite the ‘Avant-Garde’ cinema on the corner of First of May Street—on 4 October. Several hundred, mostly women, children and old people, did so. From there they were marched to the Catherine Palace and imprisoned in its basement for several days without food or water, before being taken out in groups and shot, either at the aerodrome or in one of the palace parks. Their clothes were thrown to a waiting crowd from a second-floor window of the Lyceum, the court school where Pushkin had studied. The round-ups continued for several weeks. On 20 October another fifteen adults and twenty-three children were shot outside the Catherine Palace. Having been left lying in the open for twelve days, some of the corpses were thrown into a bomb crater in the palace courtyard, and the rest buried in the gardens. There are examples of Jews being sheltered by non-Jewish neighbours, but examples, too, of denunciation—often motivated, as during the Terror, by desire for the victims’ living space. The Catherine Palace’s bookkeeper and her husband, for example, were denounced by one of its carpenters, who took over their apartment in the palace’s right wing and subsequently worked as an informer for the SS. Though the Leningrad area’s Jewish population was relatively small (it lay outside the tsarist Pale of Settlement), altogether the German authorities murdered about 3,600 Jews in the region, nearly all in the first few weeks of occupation.{11}
At the same time that it lost Pushkin and Pavlovsk the Red Army was also driven out of Alexandrovsk, a small suburban town at the end of Leningrad’s south-western tramline, and Pulkovo, defended to the last by the opolcheniye’s Fifth Guards Division, whose bones still lie, amid rampant shrub roses and philadelphus, in a benignly neglected mass grave next to the rebuilt observatory. Along the Gulf, Reinhardt’s motorised divisions took Strelna and Peterhof, confirming the Soviet Eighth Army’s isolation in the ‘Oranienbaum pocket’. His attempts at counter-offensive having failed, Zhukov ordered the establishment of a new defence line, running from Leningrad’s south-western outer suburbs through Pulkovo round to the Neva where it jinks northwards halfway between Ladoga and the Gulf. This time, he stated in a characteristically brutal Combat Order of 17 September, there would be no retreat:
1. Considering the exceptional importance [of the Pulkovo—Kolpino line], the Military Council of the Leningrad Front announces to all commanders and political and line cadres defending the designated line that any commander, politruk or soldier who abandons the line without a written order from the Army Group or army military council will be shot immediately.
2. Announce the order to command and political cadres upon receipt. Disseminate widely among the rank and file.
Three days later Stalin chipped in with orders that the troops around Leningrad should not hesitate, on pain of execution, to fire on Russian civilians approaching them from the German lines:
To Zhukov, Zhdanov, Kuznetsov and Merkulov,
It is rumoured that the German scoundrels advancing on Leningrad have sent forward individuals—old men and women, mothers and children—from the occupied regions, with requests to our Bolshevik forces that they surrender Leningrad and restore peace.
It is also said that amongst Leningrad’s Bolsheviks people can be found who do not consider it possible to use force against such individuals…
My answer is—No sentimentality. Instead smash the enemy and his accomplices, sick or healthy, in the teeth. War is inexorable, and those who show weakness and allow wavering are the first to suffer defeat. Whoever in our ranks permits wavering, will be responsible for the fall of Leningrad.
Beat the Germans and their creatures, whoever they are… It makes no difference whether they are willing or unwilling enemies. No mercy to the German scoundrels or their accomplices…
Request you inform commanders and division and regimental commissars, also the military council of the Baltic Fleet and the commanders and commissars of ships.
Finally the line held. On 24 September, when his forward units were only fifteen kilometres from the Hermitage—as far as the London suburb of Richmond is from Piccadilly Circus, or the Jersey turnpike from the Empire State Building—von Leeb finally acknowledged that his now exhausted and overextended armies could advance no further, and requested permission to move on to the defensive. Fighting petered out as the two sides retired to count their staggering losses. Within Germany’s Army Group North, 190,000 men had been killed or wounded since the start of the invasion, and 500 guns and 700 tanks lost.{13} Soviet casualties were even heavier. In the same period the Baltic Fleet and Northwestern Army Group had together lost 214,078 men killed, missing or taken prisoner (POWs probably comprising 70–80 per cent of the total), and another 130,848 wounded—two-thirds of their original troop numbers. They had also lost 4,000 tanks, about 5,400 guns, and 2,700 aircraft.{14}
In traditional siege histories, these days in mid- to late September, with their exhausting battles and ruthless displays of military will, were when the tide turned in the defence of Leningrad. But newer interpretations put the emphasis less on Zhukov’s (still undoubted) tactical brilliance, more on an earlier change of strategy on the German side. In this version, the Red Army did not so much beat off the Germans, as the Germans decide to focus elsewhere.
Since Barbarossa’s inception, Hitler and his generals had nursed a simmering disagreement over whether Moscow or Leningrad was the more important strategic objective. Hitler’s original directive of December 1940, which laid out the broad scheme for Barbarossa, had been clear: only once the Baltics, Leningrad and Kronshtadt had been taken, knocking out the Baltic Red Fleet and securing Leningrad’s arms manufacturers, was the advance to begin on Moscow. The service chiefs, led by Chief of General Staff Franz Halder, disagreed. Russia’s capital and biggest city should come first, they argued, and Leningrad second.