ON THE STREETS OF LENINGRAD THERE WAS EVERY SIGN that the people were rising in patriotic anger to meet the German threat. Troops paraded down Nevsky Prospekt, singing as only Russian soldiers can sing:
Rise up, mighty land,
Rise up for the deadly battle. . . .
Let noble anger
Boil like a wave.
We march to the People’s War,
The Holy War. . . .
Mobilization points swarmed with volunteers—100,000 the first day, 212,000 within a week.1 Leningradskaya Pravda patrioteered in every column. The leading Party workers were summoned to Smolny on Monday, June 23. Party Secretary Aleksei Kuznetsov ordered them within one hour to submit estimates of the number of workers needed for war production. Another Party Secretary, Ya. F. Kapustin, ordered all essential industry to go onto an eleven-hour day.
But behind the fa9ade of convention and cliche there were gaps in the accomplishment.
Not everyone put patriotism first. Some local Party organizations in the Leningrad area were very slow to turn over tractors and trucks, which were being mobilized for military use. Often they turned over machines which were decrepit or out of repair and held on to the best ones for themselves.
The first days were filled with rumor and alarm. The vagueness of the communiqués concealed the enormity of the disaster at the front. Yet that very vagueness gave rise to the most disquieting rumors.
Two days after the start of the war Ilya Brazhin, a correspondent, went to the October Station to catch a train for Murmansk. He had to wait in line five hours to buy a ticket. The station was calm but jammed with patient, resigned people, mostly women and children. When the train finally pulled up, it was filled within minutes. No one had any real idea of how the war was going. Some had heard rumors that Brest had fallen (Brest already lay a hundred miles behind the German lines, although a small fortress was still holding out). Others had heard that Helsinki had fallen (actually, war between Finland and Russia did not start until the next day, following savage bombing attacks, largely by Soviet naval planes, on bases from which German aircraft were operating).
Thousands of parents sent their children out of Leningrad in the first few days of war, most of them to summer camps west and southwest of the city —to Luga, Tolmachevo, Gatchina—points which were to be directly in the path of German advance. But, of course, no one supposed the enemy might get this close. The danger they feared was the kind of bombing London had suffered. Most of the children were sent off in large groups without their parents—a circumstance which complicated the task of re-evacuation when that became necessary. Within a few weeks thousands of these children (and many of their parents) would be lost in the advance of the German tanks. Many were killed during evacuation. One trainload of more than two thousand youngsters was bombed at Yedrovo with very heavy casualties. A similar incident occurred at Lychkovo. As parents heard rumors of the attacks, they pressed authorities for word of their children, many of whom they were never again to see.
The Leningrad authorities had decided at the end of June to remove 392,000 children from the city. They managed to send out 212,209 in one week, June 29-July 5, of whom 162,439 went into the nearby country and the remainder largely to Yaroslavl. At best estimates, about 115,000 children were re-evacuated from the path of German advance. But thousands fell into German hands.2
No one in the early weeks could visualize what the war would bring. In many villages of the Leningrad region Party officials took no defense or evacuation precautions at all.
The great Nazi blitz of London was the horror which filled the minds of most Leningraders, official and unofficial. At any moment, they feared, the Luftwaffe might launch its attack. True, the first nights of the war were comparatively peaceful. No major Nazi attempt on the city was made. But the threat was omnipresent. German planes had been seen frequently in the vicinity of Leningrad, and the first alert had been sounded at 1:45 A.M., June 23. A group of twelve German JU-88’s flew over the Leningrad area, of which five were claimed to have been shot down.
By nightfall of the first day of war 14,000 air-raid workers had been assigned to posts. The Leningrad City Council quickly ordered the creation of 10,000 special fire-fighting units in factories, offices, stores and apartment houses. A twenty-four-hour, round-the-clock watch was established on the roofs of most buildings. Anything burnable was removed from 18,000 attics. The fire department built new concrete water-storage basins with a capacity of 220,000 cubic yards and installed 500 new water hydrants. It set up 156 fire-fighting platforms and 142 stationary fire reservoirs.
These were the facilities which played a major role in preventing destruction of the city by fire when the Luftwaffe offensive was launched in September.
Leningrad was not only the target of the German offensive. It was a great industrial city, making a major contribution to the Soviet war effort. It had 520 factories and 780,000 workers. It produced 91 percent of Soviet hydro-turbines, 82 percent of turbine generators, 58 percent of steam turbines, 100 percent of direct-current boilers, one-fifth of the country’s machine tools and 10 percent of the total Soviet industrial production. It made much high-quality paper, cloth, yarn, shoes and textiles. It was particularly important in specialized engineering and metalworking—the kinds of industry which had No. 1 priority in the war effort. The Kirov works, founded by the Putilov family, was the greatest machinery plant in the country. It turned out the new heavy KV tanks—60-ton monsters of whose existence the Germans did not dream. The same tanks were produced in the famous Izhorsk metallurgical combine. Other factories made armor plate, heavy artillery, signal equipment, radio transmitters, aircraft. The Baltic shipyards built and supplied the Soviet Fleet.
Typically, Moscow seemed more concerned about the security of these establishments than the defense of Leningrad. On Monday the twenty-third I. M. Zaltsman, director of the Kirov plant, was instructed by Moscow to proceed as quickly as possible to Chelyabinsk in the Urals and investigate whether production of the KV tank could be shifted to the Chelyabinsk tractor works. On Tuesday morning Zaltsman and his chief engineer, Z. Y. Kotin, landed in a special plane on the grounds of the Chelyabinsk factory. They inspected the tractor works, consulted the engineers and sent back their opinion within two days.3
If, the Kirov men reported, their cadres of workers and special equipment were shipped to Chelyabinsk, the plant could within two or three months produce fifteen KV tanks a day. They opposed an immediate move, and Moscow acquiesced to their view—one in a lengthening train of miscalculations which within weeks was to bring Leningrad, and the whole nation with it, to the brink of disaster.
Instead, on June 25 Moscow ordered the Kirov plant to get the KV tanks into serial production immediately. Parts and sections were subcontracted to fourteen other Leningrad factories, and by July the plant, on a twenty-four-hour shift, had doubled production. It had cut assembly time for the KV to ten hours.
It was not until June 27 that Zhdanov got back into action in Leningrad.4 He had been absent since June 19, and the war had been in progress for five days before he returned to take over the direction of the affairs of the city of which he was the leader. Meetings began immediately at Smolny and went on far into the night. Four thousand Party members were sent on that day to join military units to stiffen morale.
The great Smolny ensemble on the Neva embankment began to take on a shape and form which made it almost unrecognizable to visitors. Camouflage nets were strung over it and spattered with brown, green and gray paint. Many nets were sewn in the Leningrad theaters, and among the seamstresses was Galina^ Ulanova, the famed ballerina. From the air, it was hoped, the Germans would mistake the site for the Summer Gardens. When Lieutenant General A. V. Sukhomlin was driven there for the first time, he asked the sentry, “Am I at Smolny?” “Yes, this is Smolny,” the guard said impassively. Sukhomlin saw nothing familiar about the buildings. The needle spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress gave the camouflage command great difficulties. They had no time to erect a wooden scaffolding. Finally, an engineer clambered up the interior stonework to a height of three hundred feet and found a narrow window which gave onto an outside ladder leading to the top. A workman managed to scale the ladder and put up a rigging from which the spire could be covered.
The Admiralty tower presented even greater problems. An effort was made to drop a rigging onto it from one of the AA balloons. But after two weeks of failures amateur Alpinists, including a music teacher, Olga Fersova, were rounded up. They scaled the tower and splashed the gilded surfaces with dirty gray paint. (It took several years’ effort and enormous expense to remove the camouflage at the war’s end. Scientists experimented with various solvents, and fire towers tried to wash the paint off without success. Finally, Alpinists were called upon again and, protected by great nets, managed to remove the camouflage with chemical solvents.)
Whether the German planes were fooled by these efforts is hard to say, but Soviet airmen insisted loyally they could no longer recognize Smolny, the Winter Palace or the General Staff building.
On the last Friday in June Zhdanov called in one group after another. Workers from the City and District Party organizations were directed to organize a vast cooperative effort with the military. Factories were ordered to carry out four hours of military drill daily in addition to their eleven-hour working shift.
Zhdanov must have been aware by this time of the enormous losses in manpower being suffered on the Leningrad fronts—the virtual destruction of the Eleventh Army, the cruel damage to the Eighth and the melting away of the understrength Twenty-seventh Army. He ordered that a People’s Volunteer Corps be formed—a civilian army that would be given summary training and sent to the front or used as a security force in the rear. Later, other Russian cities adopted the device, but it originated in Leningrad.
The task was placed in the hands of L. M. Antyufeyev, a Party propaganda officer, and N. N. Nikitin, chairman of the Volunteer Air Society. It was decided to enroll 200,000 Volunteers aged eighteen to fifty. In its first days it was called the “Volunteers’ Army,” the “People’s Army” or the “Army for Destroying Fascism.” Later it got the formal name “The Popular Draft.” Major General A. I. Subbotin, one of the Leningrad Party secretaries, was named commander. Arms and officers were to be supplied by the regular army. No thought was given to uniforms.
Once Zhdanov got moving, he moved fast. On July 1—the day after the State Defense Committee, nominally headed by Stalin, was announced— Zhdanov set up his own Leningrad Defense Committee, headed by himself and including Party Secretaries Kuznetsov, Shtykov, Chairman N. V. Solovyev of the Regional Soviet and Mayor P. S. Popkov of the City Soviet. This became known as the “Big Five.” It was empowered to handle almost any operational question in the Leningrad area. Zhdanov set up “quartets"— four-man committees to handle regional and city industrial matters. Troikas were formed in each region of the city. Another troika was set up to handle questions relating to the Young Communists. Many other extraordinary dictatorial groups were also used by Zhdanov to speed the war effort.
The conversion of the city to military production went forward rapidly. By the beginning of July 5 factories had begun to produce artillery and 11 were turning out mortars, 12 were making tanks and armored cars, and 14 were producing flame-throwers. Mass production of grenades had begun in 13 plants, including a toy factory and a stove works. Antitank mines were being made by musical-instrument shops and perfume factories. By August one million Molotov cocktails had been turned out by Leningrad distilleries, filling their bottles with alcohol or gasoline.
But the production of materials for the front encountered ever-increasing difficulties as raw materials and semifinished products failed to be delivered to Leningrad, as factory workers were mobilized into the army, the People’s Volunteers and fortifications work, and as some factories began to be evacuated to the east.
Mobilization of the regular army went well in Leningrad. Two hours after mobilization was announced 91 percent of the men in the Moscow region had reported for duty, and within six hours 98.2 percent had shown up. In the first week of war 212,000 Leningraders signed up to volunteer for military duty, subject to acceptance and physical examination. The numbers ultimately enrolled in the People’s Volunteers are stated differently by different authorities, but it was between 160,000 and 200,000. By the end of enrollment the first day, June 30, 10,890 had signed up. By July 4 the number reached 77,413. In addition, about 90,000 (mostly underage youngsters) were enrolled in auxiliary police detachments.
The first topic which Zhdanov had raised on his return to Leningrad was fortifications. He told an assemblage at Smolny headquarters that “three-quarters of our effort” must be put into the rapid creation of a network of defense works around Leningrad.
This had also been on the mind of General Popov, the Leningrad commander, the moment he got back to Leningrad from the inspection tour he was making when war broke out. He ordered a secondary defense line built along the Luga River, about a hundred miles southwest of the city. He placed Colonel Bychevsky in chargé of this work and named General Konstantin P. Pyadyshev, deputy Leningrad commander, to head what would soon become the Luga Operating Group, a special army to defend the to-be-created line. The Military Council gave approval to the project June 25 at a meeting attended by General Popov, Military Council Member N. N. Klementyev, and Party Secretaries Kuznetsov and Shtykov.
Bychevsky now had far more fortifications work than he could carry out. He and his deputy, Colonel N. M. Pilipets, checked the supply depot. There were 57,000 mines on hand, of which 21,000 were antitank mines. The three armies needed at least 100,000. That meant production of 300 to 350 tons of explosives a day. They called the Leningrad Explosives Trust. It could provide only 25 tons, and this was ammonal, not TNT. There were, it transpired, only 284 tons of TNT in the Leningrad supply depots—a shortage which was soon to call into play the ingenuity of Professor A. N. Kuznetsov, who invented a substitute using sinal, a mixture of saltpeter and sawdust. It was christened “AK.” This was the first shortage to be discovered in Leningrad. It was not to be the last.
Bychevsky and Pilipets telegraphed Moscow. They got back the answer they might have expected: “To cover your needs from the Center is impossible. There are more important fronts than yours. Use your local resources.” They explained the situation to Mikhail V. Basov, chief of the industrial department of the Leningrad City Party. Basov was a businesslike man of few words. At this point he had been working for forty-eight hours without sleep.
“The picture is clear,” he said. “Will 100,000 mines the first five days be enough?”
It would be fine. Basov ordered 40,000 from the Aurora factory and 60,000 from the Woodworking Trust. If he couldn’t find enough explosives at the Explosives Trust, he would get some from local construction outfits.
The Leningrad population was drafted into the fortifications work. Everyone without a job was ordered to put in eight hours a day, digging trenches and constructing shelters. Factory workers were supposed to work three hours a day—after an eleven-hour shift on the production line. Actually, the whole idea of a “working day” had vanished. Everyone in the city was devoting fourteen, sixteen or eighteen hours a day to production and military tasks.
The Leningrad Soviet Executive approved a decision under which ordinary citizens of Leningrad, Pushkin, Kolpino and Kronstadt would be mobilized for obligatory labor on field fortifications, trenches and tank barriers.
The Military Council of the front ordered all large civilian construction work in the Leningrad area halted. The labor forces and equipment were sent to work on fortifications. The biggest crew was that engaged in building the Leningrad subway system. Led by Chief Engineer I. G. Zubkov, this organization was placed at the service of Bychevsky to build the proposed iron ring around the city. Work on the Upper Svir hydroelectric station, the ENSO power plant and the ENSO power line was halted also.
One more decision was made by Zhdanov that fateful Friday, June 27. Henceforth no factory whistle, no locomotive bell, no church chime was to sound in Leningrad except to signal air-raid alarms. Little did Zhdanov realize that the day lay not far ahead when no whistle could sound—because there would be neither steam nor electricity in the city.
Thus, when on the ninth day after the outbreak of war a thirty-one-car train pulled by two engines moved out of the freight station of the October line at dawn, carrying more than half a million precious objects from the Hermitage Museum, no whistles blew, no bells rang.
First, a pilot locomotive went ahead to clear the tracks. Then came the long train: two powerful locomotives, an armored car in which the most valued objects were carried, four linked Pullmans for other special treasures, a flatcar with an antiaircraft battery, twenty-two freight cars filled with canvases, statues, objects of art, two passenger cars—one for museum workers, headed by Art Scholar Vladimir T. Levinson-Lessing, another for the military guard—and finally, at the rear, another flatcar bearing another antiaircraft battery.
The train originally had been ordered to move out units of the great Kirov defense plant. Then plans changed. Evacuation of the Kirov plant was delayed, and the formidable aggregate was turned over to Professor Orbeli. Since Tuesday morning, clad in blue overalls speckled with cotton wisps from packing stuffs, Orbeli had been overseeing the loading of his treasures —Rembrandt’s Holy Family, delicately removed from its frame by Nikolai Mikheyev, and packed in a box strengthened with planks and protected by layer upon layer of paper; all the Titians, the Giorgiones, the Rubenses, the Murillos, the Van Dycks, the Velázquezes, the El Grecos, Da Vinci’s Madonnas —the Madonna Litta, the Madonna Benois; those of Raphael —the Madonna Alba, the petite Madonna Conestabile—all in their golden frames; and Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal, a massive 12-foot 6-inch by 9-foot 10-inch canvas in its own heavy case. Three ministers had observed the packing from Orbeli’s office —the Minister of Interior (the NKVD): the Minister of State Security (the NKGB), and the Chairman of the State Committee for Cultural Affairs —each concerned not so much with evaluation but to make certain no one stole anything.
On the train traveled the museum’s great Pallas Athena and the magnificent museum collection of diamonds, precious stones, crown jewels and ancient artifacts of gold. Along with them went the marble Venus acquired by Peter I, the Venus the old boyars called the “white devil.” And here, too, were Rastrelli’s sculpture of Peter and his collection of wax figures, packed in great crates marked in black letters: “Wax Figures —Do Not Drop.”
The tons of boxes had been stacked in the great Hermitage Hall of Twenty Columns, sometimes called the Hall of Money. Soldiers and sailors loaded them on the trucks which drew up in an endless column beside the Winter Palace and the Hermitage all through the night of July 1. The trucks rumbled down the Nevsky Prospekt in the semidusk, for the white nights had not yet ended in Leningrad.
Never had so valuable a train been loaded. As it moved slowly out of the October freight station, Orbeli stood beside the lamp post at the end of the platform. His hat rested on his breast and tears ran down his cheeks. Not until the last car, the flatcar with the A A guns on it, had disappeared, did he turn and walk down the platform. Haifa million treasures had been dispatched. A million more still awaited exit.
The prompt, efficient evacuation of the Hermitage was due almost entirely to the foresight and courage of Orbeli. Although almost all the Armenians in Leningrad had been purged by Stalin in 1938 Orbeli stood and fought for the Hermitage. He managed by a personal letter to Stalin to block the sale of many priceless Hermitage paintings abroad and he insisted on making detailed plans for evacuation of the Hermitage treasure as early as 1939 long before the German attack.
1 It had originally not been planned to start mobilization until midnight, June 22–23. But so many men appeared at the mobilization points that enrollment was begun at many of them on the evening of June 22. The Party sent 14,000 Komsomols to help handle the crowds. (Na Zashchite Nevskoi Tverdyni, pp. 17–18.)
2 The figures on evacuation vary. One estimate puts the total of children sent out of the city at 235,000, of whom 164,000 went into nearby areas. (Na Zashchite Nevskoi Tverdyni, pp. 25, 49.)
3 One account (S. Kostyuchenko, Yu. Fedorov, I. Khrenov, “Sozdateli Groznykh Tankov” Zvezda, No. 5, May, 1964, p. 168) gives the impression that Zaltsman and Kotin went to the Urals at the order of Stalin, returned in two days to Moscow and that Stalin proposed that the factory be evacuated. Stalin is quoted as saying: “You’ll not be able to work [in Leningrad] anyway once the air raids and shelling begin.” Actually, the conversation with Stalin must have occurred much later than June, probably not before late July or August. Zaltsman and Kotin are represented as opposing any evacuation as premature. Stalin is said to have agreed to defer the idea. There is no evidence that Stalin participated in any decisions whatever from June 22 until some time in early July.
4 Bychevsky, who reports Zhdanov’s departure on vacation June 19, does not give the precise date of his return but mentions it in a context that suggests June 27. There is no mention in the standard Soviet references of Zhdanov participating in Leningrad decisions before June 27. Na Zashchite Nevskoi Tverdyni (hereafter referred to as JV.Z.), which is most detailed, first mentions Zhdanov’s presence in Leningrad as on June 27 (P. 35).