What Knyazev also saw the sailors doing—as he hardly dared note in his diary—was laying demolition charges next to the Lieutenant Schmidt (formerly the Nicholas) Bridge, westernmost of the two that connect Vasilyevsky Island to the mainland. ‘By the Academy of Arts I was astonished to see sailors digging holes a short distance apart, putting something in them, laying bricks on top and sprinkling them with sand. Right opposite the sphinxes. Could it mean?… My heart skipped a beat.’{15}
If the Germans did take Leningrad, the destruction of its infrastructure and manufacturing capability was to be total. A ‘Plan D’ listing everything to be demolished was not made public until 2005. We now know that it included all the city’s important factories, as well as its power stations, waterworks, telephone and telegraph exchanges, bakeries, bridges, railway network, shipyards and port—some 380 installations in total. (Aleksei Kuznetsov, Zhdanov’s deputy, is credited with forbidding the mining of the Peterhof Palace, as well as with ordering the removal of machine guns from the Hermitage’s roof, placed there in case paratroops landed in Palace Square.) At each listed institution a ‘troika’ of director, Party secretary and NKVD representative was instructed to draw up plans for the order in which machinery and buildings were to be destroyed, and for the quantity of explosive—or, for less important objects, of axes and sledgehammers—needed. The order to proceed with these ‘special measures’ was to be given by Kuznetsov, and responsibility for seeing it carried out to rest with the regional branches of the NKVD.{16} Though the planning went forward in great secrecy, rumours leaked out, appalling factory workers. ‘And what are we supposed to do once the factories have been blown up?’ one man asked a friend. ‘We can’t do without factories. Even if the Germans come we have to work in order to eat. We won’t blow them up.’{17}
Not a few factory bosses deserted their posts, as witnessed by a stream of reprimands and dismissals for ‘showing cowardice’, ‘giving way to panic’, misappropriation of funds and going absent without leave. In a memorandum to industrial managers of 5 September, Zhdanov complained of a rise in theft and embezzlement, as well as of jobsworth demands for overtime pay. The most prominent delinquent was the director of the large ‘Red Chemist’ plant, who ordered his bookkeeper to withdraw fifty thousand roubles, requisitioned a car and would have made good his escape had the bookkeeper not alerted the authorities.{18} Others, like First Party Secretary Nikonorov of Lodeinoye Pole, a small town east of Ladoga, drowned fear in drink. Instead of mobilising civilian resistance at the Wehrmacht’s approach, a purse-lipped investigator noted, he ‘occupied himself with the organisation of mass drunkenness, involving leading workers… Amongst the district police, drinking and card games flourished, chief of police Martynov personally taking part.’{19} By the end of the year 1,540 city officials ‘unworthy of the high title of Member of the Bolshevik Party’ had been stripped of their Party cards.{20}
At the same time, general security measures were tightened even further, the one which affected ordinary people most being the disconnection of domestic telephones. ‘It gave me a strange feeling’, wrote Vera Inber,
when the phone rang, and a fresh young voice said, ‘The telephone is disconnected until the end of the war’, I tried to raise a protest, but knew in my heart that it was useless. In a few minutes the phone clicked and went dead… until the end of the war. And immediately the flat felt dead, frozen, tense. We are cut off from everyone and everything in the city… Only very special offices, clinics and hospitals are excepted.{21}
Checkpoints multiplied, and the streets on to which Nazi propaganda leaflets fluttered down were quickly cordoned off. (‘We come not as your enemies, but as enemies of Bolshevism!’ ran one. ‘If your factories and storehouses burn, you will die of hunger! If your houses burn, you will die of cold!’) There were also new round-ups (3,566 detentions between 13 and 17 September) of Red Army and opolcheniye deserters, who were numerous enough to be described by diarists as ‘flooding’ the city.{22} In the Ukrainian city of Lviv, the NKVD had shot all its prisoners as the Wehrmacht approached. In Leningrad it merely evacuated them to labour camps within the siege ring, though the end result was similar. A survivor of a shipment across Lake Ladoga on 9 October remembers his voyage:
The guards stood in two rows on the deck, driving a stream of prisoners down the steps into the hold. In the dark void a small flame flickered: a lieutenant stood there, vomiting swear words right and left as he hit out with a croquet mallet, trying to pack everyone in as tightly as possible. People stood squashed together, clutching their belongings. A long line of prisoners came down after me.
By evening the hold had been packed full. It consisted of three compartments: one for men, holding about 3,000 people, one for women, of whom there were about 800, and a small corner into which were squashed two hundred German prisoners of war… From time to time a gasping prisoner would try to climb a little way up the steps, so as to gulp some fresh air. Shots would swiftly follow, and the unfortunate, having swallowed lead along with air, would tumble back down again…
A metal hundred-litre barrel was lowered on a rope down through the hatch. A mass of prisoners immediately rushed towards it. Most had nothing to scoop up the water with, so they used their hands.
[As the night progressed] conditions got even worse. To start with we had been pressed tight, but at least it had been possible to stand on the floor. Now there was more space, but the floor had disappeared beneath a layer of corpses, on which it was hard to avoid standing or sitting. It was also starting to smell… When I left the hold I looked around: the floor had completely disappeared under a thick layer of decomposing dead.{23}
The security crackdown did not quite suppress all dissent. Swastikas materialised overnight on courtyard walls, and leaflets denouncing Stalin and calling for Leningrad to be declared a Paris-style ‘ville ouverte’—a euphemism for surrender—were stuffed into stairwell mailboxes and sent anonymously to Party leaders. Widespread expectation of defeat was reflected in a dramatic fall-off in applications for Party membership—there were fewer in September 1941 than during the following February, when thousands of Leningraders were dying of starvation each day. Together with the departure of Party members for the front, this halved the size of the Leningrad Party organisation, from 122,849 full members on declaration of war to 61,842 at the end of the year. Numbers of Party cards reported ‘lost’ also rose sharply, though few were as unsubtle as a worker at the Okhtensky chemical factory, who asked his local Party secretary not to add his name to the membership list ‘because that will make it easy for them to find out that I am a Communist’.{24}
The fence-sitters had justification, for the archives make it plain that Stalin seriously considered abandoning Leningrad not only during the mid-September crisis, but on into the late autumn and early winter, when his overriding priority was the defence of Moscow.