The exploding bomb reminds us
Again of death,
But spring is stronger
And it is on our side. . . .
MAY DAY WAS A WORKING DAY IN LENINGRAD. FROM Moscow came the Party announcement that the traditional two-day holiday would be canceled. Everyone would work as usual for the war. No parade, no demonstrations, no bands. Just some speeches.
It was a beautiful day in Leningrad, sunny with an air of summer. On the streets Pavel Luknitsky noticed women, often in old army overcoats or workers’ boots, with little bunches of the first spring flowers, marigolds, violets and dandelions, branches of spruce or pine or handfuls of green grass. Anything to provide a little chlorophyll, any source of vitamin C to combat the scurvy of winter.
The people were convalescent after their trials. They moved slowly in the warmth, letting the sun strike deep into their thin bodies, their pale faces, their wasted arms.
The politeness of Leningrad had begun to return. It had vanished during the terrible winter. Now Aleksandr Fadeyev watched a couple, a man and his wife, carefully, tenderly, supporting an older woman who walked with tottering feet and a rather embarrassed smile at her weakness. A Red Army man helped a little old lady onto a streetcar, lifting her from the pavement to the top step with one strong gesture. The old lady turned and said, “Thank you, son. Now you will go on living. Mark my word—no bullet will hit you.”
On the walls appeared newly printed copies of Leningradskaya Pravda and of the Moscow papers. The presses were working again. A proclamation was pasted up by City Trade Chief Andreyenko, announcing extra rations for the holiday—issues of meat, cereal, dried peas, herring and sugar. Also vodka and beer. Notices offering to trade dresses, shoes, gold watches or sets of silverware for bread or food were still posted and black markets still operated. No longer did the cannibals stalk the Haymarket, but you could trade a watch for a kilo of bread or a woman’s jacket for a glass ofklukva or cranberries. There was even milk for exchange at a rate of a pint for 600 grams of bread.
Leningrad’s streets were clean, but huge barricades of snow and filth stood along the banks of the Neva, the Moika and the Fontanka. The ice had moved out of the Neva, but not all the winter’s toll had been liquidated.
May i was not just a pleasant sunny spring day in Leningrad. It was a day of very heavy German shelling. It went on from early morning until late at night. The Germans, it was clear, were celebrating May Day in their own way. Heavy shells fell in the square outside the Astoria Hotel and near the fleet headquarters. There were many casualties.
In the evening Fadeyev, Nikolai Tikhonov, Vsevolod Vishnevsky and Olga Berggolts spoke on the radio. Olga had just returned from Moscow. She had been flown out of Leningrad a few days after the calvary of her long walk to visit her father. A small plane took her low over the lines and over the endless wastes of snow and pine forest. She was amazed that from the air she saw no sign of fighting, no troops, no cannon, no war. In Moscow she was given a room in the Moskva Hotel, warm, comfortable, well lighted. She had what seemed like luxurious rations of food. But she did not feel comfortable. She belonged in Leningrad, not Moscow. A day or two after her arrival a man burst into her room, a Leningrad factory director. “Excuse me,” he said. “I accidentally heard that you had just flown from Leningrad. I am also a Leningrader. Please tell me quickly— how is it, what’s happening?” She told him of February in Leningrad, of the suffering. He nodded his head. “You understand?” he said. “That is life—there. I can’t clearly express myself. There is hunger and death, but there is life, too.” She told her Leningrad audience of hearing the first performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony in Moscow on March 29. When the symphony had concluded, she said, Shostakovich rose to acknowledge the ovation. “I looked at him,” she said, “small, frail, with big glasses and thought, ‘This man is stronger than Hitler.’” Vishnevsky noted in his diary that he was happy that his radio speech was heard by “millions of people and by my friends scattered by events throughout the land.” He was happy, too, that Fadeyev mentioned him three times in his speech and “warmly.”
After the broadcast Fadeyev walked up to the seventh floor of Radio House and looked out from a balcony. All around Radio House were wrecked buildings. But Radio House had not yet been hit. “It’s a good bomb shelter,” a young Radio House man said. “But it’s a pity it’s on the seventh floor.”
Later in the evening Fadeyev and the others gathered in Olga Berggolts’ room. Fadeyev asked the question which was on the lips of every visitor to Leningrad: “How did you live and work?”
“The chief thing,” Olga Berggolts said, “was to forget about the hunger and to work and work and help your comrades to keep up their work. Work was the chief force of life. We did everything together. Everything we received we shared. The chief thing was to support those who were weaker.”
She told of her husband’s death and how her friends had helped her, and she showed Fadeyev a slip of paper on which was written in pencil: “Olya. I have brought you a piece of bread and I will bring some more. I love you so.” A pale youngster sitting at the table had written the note. “You understand,” Olga Berggolts said with deep feeling. “This was not a declaration of love!” It was something more than love, Fadeyev thought.
Someone provided a bottle of vodka. Glasses were found and a toast was proposed.
“What was the number of today’s edition of the ‘Radio News Chronicle’?” a Radio House worker asked. It was, it transpired, the 244th issue (May 1 was the 244th day of the Leningrad blockade).
“Well, the devil with it,” the worker said. “Let’s drink to the five hundredth issue.”
They could not guess that nearly twice five hundred “Radio Chronicles” would go out into the ether before the Leningrad blockade ended.
It seemed to those who had survived the terrible winter that their ordeal must be drawing toward a close. The summer surely would bring a lifting of the siege.
Leningrad had a new front commander, a tall, handsome, reserved man who was not well known to the subordinate Leningrad commanders. He was Lieutenant General Leonid Aleksandrovich Govorov, an artillery officer. The late winter and early spring had turned the Leningrad Command into a comfortable, cozy group. Most of the time, the chief, Lieutenant General M. S. Khozin, had been across Ladoga, where the fighting continued, one grueling week after another. In Leningrad remained the newly promoted General Bychevsky, the fortifications specialist; Colonel (soon to be General) G. F. Odintsov, the new artillery chief; General S. D. Rybalchenko, a new air commander; and General A. B. Gvozdkov, operations officer. Major General D. N. Gusev, Khozin’s deputy, ran the front. He was a pleasant officer with an open-door policy. He got on well with the generals and equally well with Party Secretary Zhdanov, who made most of the decisions. The generals and the Party secretaries, Zhdanov, Kuznetsov and Shtykov usually ate together at a common mess. They started each meal with a shot of “sauce” made from pine needles to ward off scurvy. Any time one of them returned from across Ladoga he brought a bunch of garlic which he shared with all—for the same purpose.
When word came in early April that General Govorov was being named to command Leningrad, no one knew him except Odintsov, who had taken courses under him in the Dzerzhinsky Artillery Academy in 1938. Odintsov could say little except that Govorov’s character was in direct opposition to his name. Govorov stems from the word “govoryat” —"to talk.” “Not even two words did he ever squeeze out,” Odintsov said. “And no one has ever seen him smile.” About the only other thing that was known was that he was not a member of the Communist Party.1
Govorov was an experienced officer. Born in 1897, his military service began in the Czar’s army in 1916, where he was enrolled in the Konstan-tinovsky Artillery School. He was impressed into Admiral Kolchak’s White Russian Army but managed to desert with his battery and make his way to Tomsk, where he entered the Red Army. He rose steadily in the Red Army but in the late 1930’s like many of his colleagues was caught up in the Stalin purges. His brief forced service with Kolchak was brought up against him, and he was removed from the General Staff Academy where he was a student. By a vagary of the Stalin era six months later he was named a professor at the Dzerzhinsky Artillery Academy. His career seemed to have turned the corner. But in the spring of 1941 Police Chief Beria again brought him up on chargés relating to the Kolchak episode, and it was only the intervention of Marshal Timoshenko and Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin that saved him from exile or execution.
Although Govorov’s name was little known in Leningrad, he had distinguished himself as one of Marshal Zhukov’s right-hand men during the Battle of Moscow as commander of the Fifth Army. He it was who had recaptured Mozhaisk in mid-January, and he was inspecting the front lines of his Fifth Army sector near the Mozhaisk highway one early April morning when a call came from staff headquarters. He was wanted by 8 P.M. in Moscow. The road was slippery, and it was evening before Govorov arrived, so stiff he could hardly move—the effects of a recent operation. At Stavka he was told Stalin wanted to see him. His new assignment was Leningrad and, as always, there was a rush. Stalin ordered him to fly to Leningrad the next day.
Govorov was no stranger to Leningrad. He had gone there after finishing grade school to enter the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute. A few months later he was called to duty in the Czar’s army. He thought of those times as he flew north to take over his new post. He knew that he had been picked for Leningrad because he was an artilleryman and only artillery (he believed) could protect the city so long as it was under siege. He flew over the northern reaches, now occupied by the Germans, still deep in the winter snow, over the pine and spruce forests, dark shadows on the land, over the villages and towns, burned and wrecked in the battles with the Nazis, and thought of Leningrad—how to hold the city, how to protect it, how it had managed to stand firm in the incredible days of autumn and winter, how it had halted the German armored divisions, how it had fought on despite hunger, cold and want. He thought again of his days as a Petersburg cadet and of the Petrograders he then knew, and suddenly this silent man exploded: uBrave lads!” His neighbors on the plane looked at him in curiosity, but Govorov continued to peer out of the airplane window. They were nearing Leningrad now. He had seen no enemy fighters. He began to think about how to lift the siege, where to deliver the first blow.
The flight attendant came to his seat. “Leningrad soon. Very soon.”
Govorov looked out the window. “But I don’t see the city!”
“No,” the attendant said. “We are landing at an airport outside the city. It is dusk already, and you will see no light from Leningrad. The city is completely blacked out.”
Govorov’s first meetings with his new colleagues were frosty. Bychev-sky found him sitting at his desk, clenching his hands nervously, snatching an occasional glance at Bychevsky with unfriendly eyes, his face white, a little puffy, his mustache carefully trimmed, his dark hair shot with gray, carefully parted, a few large moles on his temples. Bychevsky reported on the state of fortifications. It was not a good report. The winter had been hard. Many trenches had fallen apart. Dugouts were filled with water. The troops had been too weak to repair the mine fields. The civilian population had done nothing since December. He had lost most of his specialized pontoon troops on the Nevskaya Dubrovka place (Tarmes. Govorov listened without an interruption or question. At the end he brought his fist down on his desk and uttered one word, quietly: “Loafer!”
Bychevsky had long since learned that engineers were more likely to get the stick than the carrot. But this was too much. “And do you know, Comrade Commander,” he lashed out, “that we have on this front people who haven’t the strength to pick up a stick? Do you know what dystrophy is?”
Bychevsky’s words tumbled out. Govorov listened without comment. When Bychevsky finished, he got up, walked about the room and then said quietly in his deep base voice, “General, your nerves are upset. Go out and quiet down and then come back in half an hour. We have a lot of work to do.”
“Loafer,” it turned out, was a favorite epithet of Govorov’s. It did not really mean what it sounded like. He had gotten the habit of using it when he was a young man, coaching students from well-to-do families. He used it on them. He had used it all his life.
From his first day in Leningrad Govorov turned his attention to artillery—to the counterbattery of the Leningrad guns against the German siege weapons which day after day so heavily shelled the city. Party Secretary Zhdanov had consulted the Leningrad Artillery Chief, General Odintsov, in late March about transforming the Leningrad batteries from a defensive to an offensive basis. So long as the batteries were defensive, responding only when the Germans fired, Zhdanov felt, the Nazis would, in time, destroy the city. He wanted to know how the Soviet guns could go on the offensive. Odintsov explained it was a matter of more guns, more planes to spot artillery fire, and many more shells. If they were to exterminate 10 to 12 batteries a month, it would take 15,000 shells a month. Now they were using 800 to 1,000. With Govorov’s support, two air observation units were brought in and the shell quota was upped to 5,000 a month.
The Govorov principle was, as he once explained, “exceptionally accurate counterbattery blows against the enemy artillery.” Govorov’s guns did not wait for the Germans to open up. They systematically sought to destroy the Nazi firing points, one by one.2
Govorov took one radical decision. After examining the history of the costly place cTarmes at Nevskaya Dubrovka he said briefly, “Nothing can be expected from that except a blood bath. We must quickly transfer the people to the right bank.”
He won the agreement of Zhdanov to the evacuation and by April 27 had removed the 86th Infantry Division from the shell-pocked plot of ground to which it had clung since September, 1941. This action was not understood in Leningrad. Pride in the bloody triangle was high. Pavel Luknitsky was in despair when he learned of it on May 1. It was a great secret. But, as he heard it, the Germans had successfully stormed the foothold. The 86th Division had gone down fighting with the cry: “We will die before we surrender.” Luknitsky shuddered to think of the blood that had been lost for the sector on the southern bank of the Neva and of the hopes they had had that it might be the wedge which would splinter the German front. Seven months the battle had gone on. Once there had been only six to nine miles that separated the Neva foothold from the Volkhov front.
The tragic event cast a pall over the May Day holiday for Luknitsky —that and the end of the Ladoga ice road. The ice went out on April 24. No connection at all with the mainland now except by air. When would it come back? How would Leningrad be supplied? He did not know that on April 2 there had been a meeting at the Kremlin with Anastas Mikoyan at which plans were approved for a pipeline under Ladoga which would supply Leningrad with fuel; that the engineers were hard at work on this; that the pipe had already been located in the now abandoned Izhorsk factory (only the factory director was still on duty, the warehouse keeper was killed in an air raid April 20, the day the Ladoga engineers located the pipe); that on June 19 the pipeline would go into service; and that a Ladoga shipping service would be operative by May 22.3
“All night I have thought about it,” Luknitsky said. “It makes me sick.”
But if the liquidation of the Nevskaya Dubrovka foothold was not the tragedy which Luknitsky believed, there was slowly building up on the Leningrad front another disaster, the fruit of the terrible and indecisive winter fighting.
Neither General Fedyuninsky, in chargé of the Fifty-fourth Army, nor General Meretskov, in chargé of the Volkhov front, had been able to make real progress, but Moscow had never relaxed its pressure to get results. All winter long there had been High Command representatives with Meretskov. During most of February and early March Marshal Voro-shilov was assigned to him. In early March Voroshilov was recalled to Moscow, but he returned to Meretskov’s headquarters on March 9, and he brought with him several companions. One was Georgi M. Malenkov, making one of his increasingly frequent appearances at a fighting front. Another was Lieutenant General A. A. Novikov, deputy air commander, and a third was a brilliant new general whose star was rapidly rising, Lieutenant General Andrei A. Vlasov. There had been a shake-up among Meretskov’s deputies, and Vlasov had been named by Moscow as deputy commander of the Volkhov front. Vlasov, like Govorov, was a hero of the Battle of Moscow. While Govorov and his Fifth Army were smashing the Germans at Mozhaisk, Vlasov and his Twentieth Army were retaking Volokolamsk. Both generals were young and vigorous. Both were shown off to foreign correspondents, Vlasov just before Christmas, Govorov in mid-January. Among those who met Vlasov was Larry Lesueur, a Columbia Broadcasting System correspondent, who thought the forty-year-old Vlasov looked more like a teacher than a soldier and was impressed with his tall astrakhan hat with its crimson and gold crown and his white felt boots. Eve Curie, who visited Russia as a correspondent, was struck by Vlasov’s professionalism. He considered each question strictly from the military viewpoint. He spoke of Napoleon with deep respect and thought it nonsense to compare Hitler with him. She was pleased to find that he knew Charles de Gaulle’s views on modern war and that he respected General Guderian, against whom he had been fighting. Vlasov’s parting words to Eve Curie were “My blood belongs to my fatherland.”
It was obvious that the introduction of this vigorous and successful commander into the frozen bogs of the Leningrad hinterland was designed to break the deadlock there. The fact that he was brought in under Malenkov’s auspices suggested, as well, that the appointment had a role in the endless game of military politics in which the Kremlin was engaged.
General Meretskov had no cause to find fault with his fast-moving new deputy. Vlasov did not attempt to take upon himself any responsibilities other than those given him by Meretskov.
During the remainder of the month there was a new effort to get things moving and particularly to improve the position of the Second Shock Army. This army had scored considerable advances beyond a point called Spasskaya Polist, midway between Novgorod and Chudovo in an area of tangled swamps, underbrush and tamarack bogs, roughly seventy-five miles southeast of Leningrad. Unfortunately, in penetrating into the German positions, it almost fell into encirclement. The Germans, seeing their opportunity, sent the 58th Nazi Infantry and the SS police division into action, and succeeded in cutting the Novgorod-Chudovo highway and railroad and closing the four-mile “throat” through which the communications and transport of the Second Shock Army was maintained. A week of fierce fighting ensued, back and forth, and finally the supply route was reopened and the encirclement of the Second Shock Army relieved, but only by the barest of margins. There is bitter argument between two Soviet generals as to whether the encirclement was really liquidated. General Meretskov contends that it was. General Khozin contends that it wasn’t—that the Second Shock Army had only a corridor a mile to a mile and a half wide and that within ten days the Nazis choked it down again.
Whichever version is correct, events demonstrated that the position of the Second Shock Army was very shaky, very precarious. On April 9 the Germans attacked again and cut off the army. It was reduced to receiving supplies by plane and air drops. The situation was so difficult that Ivan V. Zuyev,4 the Second Shock Army Political Commissar, held a meeting of all political workers, army procurators, military tribunals and members of the dread “special branch” of the secret police and ordered the “highest vigilance” against any German “agents.” At this point the army commander, Lieutenant General N. K. Krykov, fell ill and had to be evacuated by plane. General Vlasov was sent in to replace him.5
The difficult situation was made more difficult by one of the erratic command changes which Stalin so often introduced. Stalin had been continuously dissatisfied at the failure of the efforts to lift Leningrad’s blockade. He had sent one high emissary after another to get some action. Now he summoned the erstwhile Leningrad front commander, General Khozin, for a conference April 21. Khozin had repeatedly put blame for the failure of the deblockading efforts on lack of coordination between the sprawling units of the Leningrad (internal) and Volkhov (external) fronts. He repeated his complaints now and urged that the Stavka ensure close and effective collaboration. He presented his views to Stalin, Marshal Shaposhnikov, Marshal Vasilevsky and a number of Defense Council members, undoubtedly including Malenkov.6 Unexpectedly, Khozin contends, Stalin proposed that the fronts be united and Khozin put in chargé. Khozin describes the idea as having been as sudden to the others as to him. Because of the “colossal authority of Stalin,” Khozin observed, no one thought of challenging the notion. An order was drafted to unite the two fronts as of midnight April 23 and put them under Khozin’s command.
No one was more surprised than General Meretskov, the Volkhov front commander, at this decision. “I could not understand what the point was of this consolidation,” he said. “In my view there was neither operative nor political nor any kind of advantage in it.” He soon heard, however, that General Khozin had promised that if the two fronts were united he could lift the Leningrad blockade. In view of this, Meretskov thought it understandable that the Stavka had ordered the reorganization and strengthened the new front with the 6th Guards Rifle Corps and another rifle division. But he did think it odd that the Volkhov front commander, that is, himself, had not been consulted.
“I learned about the proceedings,” he recalled, “on April 23 when General Khozin with the directive in his pocket and in a jolly mood appeared at the Volkhov staff headquarters.”
Meretskov insists that he called Khozin’s attention to the plight of the Second Shock Army but that “Khozin had his own opinion and didn’t agree with me.”
Meretskov went straight to Moscow, and there on April 24 he again raised the question of the Second Shock Army with Stalin and Malenkov.
“The Second Shock Army is practically stifling,” Meretskov recalls saying. “It can’t attack and it can’t defend itself. Its communications are threatened by the German blows. If nothing is done, catastrophe is inevitable.”
Meretskov proposed that the army be evacuated from the impenetrable marshes in which it was bogged down (especially dangerous with the heavy spring thaw which made every road and trail impassable) and brought back to the line of the Chudovo-Novgorod highway and railroad. He was listened to with patience and a promise of attention. He was then transferred to the Western Front to command the Thirty-third Army. Almost simultaneously the other top Leningrad commander, General Fedyuninsky, was removed from the Fifty-fourth Army and sent to command the Fifth Army, neighboring the Thirty-third on the Western Front.
Khozin’s story is that he gave first priority to the plight of the Second Army, which was virtually encircled and badly weakened by the winter of incredibly difficult fighting. Many units were down to 60 to 70 percent of rated strength. Tank brigades had no tanks and artillery no shells. The forests were so waterlogged it was impossible to move by truck or car. Even horses had difficulty getting around.
General Khozin got Stalin to agree that the Second Shock Army should go on the defensive in preparation for an effort to get out of the encirclement. There were at this time eleven infantry divisions, three cavalry divisions and five infantry brigades in encirclement. By May 4 the five cavalry brigades had forced their way out. Two infantry divisions and some smaller units broke out and joined the Fifty-ninth Army.
General Vlasov, with his Chief Commissar Ivan Zuyev, flew out of encirclement to consult with Khozin May 12. They returned to headquarters May 14 with plans for constructing a road through the wilderness along which it was hoped to move out the troops. But the idea did not get very far. The Germans had begun to build up their forces again, sensing that they were nearing the kill. The Bavarian Rifle Corps was brought in, and there were signs the Germans planned a simultaneous drive from Chudovo and Novgorod.
General Khozin had put the Fifty-ninth Army into action to try to lessen pressure on the Second, and Stalin agreed to lay aside the drive for lifting the Leningrad blockade while trying to save the Second Shock Army. Plans were laid for a simultaneous push June 5 by the Second and Fifty-ninth armies. But the Germans spotted the Soviet preparations and themselves went over to the offensive. Some Soviet troops forced their way out, but by June 6 the Germans had firmly closed the circle around parts of seven rifle divisions and six infantry brigades—altogether 18,000 or 20,000 men.
General Khozin did not try to conceal the disaster. He reported what had happened promptly to Moscow, and on June 8 General Meretskov was urgently brought back from the Central Front and again summoned to the Stavka. In the presence of virtually the whole High Command Stalin said: “We made a big mistake in combining the Volkhov and Leningrad fronts. General Khozin wanted to head the Volkhov operation, but he has done badly. He didn’t carry out the orders of Stavka for the withdrawal of the Second Army. As a result the Germans have cut off the communications of the army and encircled it.”
Stalin turned to Meretskov. “You, Comrade Meretskov, know the Volkhov front very well. So we are sending you with Marshal Vasilevsky to bring the Second Army out of encirclement even if you have to abandon the heavy artillery and equipment.”
Meretskov flew into Malaya Vishera, where Khozin had his headquarters, before nightfall. He found a gloomy situation—the Second Army cut off completely, with hardly any supplies and no way to provide food or ammunition. There were no real reserves, but Meretskov gathered what troops he could and ordered a narrow attack on June 10 to try and create an escape corridor.
The effort was only partially successful. The Germans had mustered four infantry and an SS division to the north and about five divisions including an international legion to the south.
Meretskov attacked again and again, and Vlasov smashed from the inner side of the circle. About 6,000 men made their way out up to 8 P.M., June 22. Finally an all-out attack was ordered for June 23 into which Vlasov and his men were told to throw everything in a last effort. The attack was launched at 11:30 P.M., June 23. The Second Army drove toward the Fifty-ninth Army lines. The Fifty-ninth threw its strength into opening a corridor. Toward dawn (very early in these white nights) a narrow path was opened and the first men of the Second Army passed through. They kept on coming until about noon. Then the Germans closed the passage. At this point, according to Meretskov, General Vlasov lost control of the situation. He ordered his men to try to escape in small groups, individually and on their own. This disoriented them. Communications with Vlasov were now lost. Nevertheless, toward evening of the twenty-fourth the corridor was opened again and more men slipped through. But by 9:30 in the morning of the twenty-fifth it was closed again—this time finally.
Meretskov was personally directing the rescue operation, and on the morning of the twenty-fifth he was advised by some escaping officers that they had seen Vlasov and his senior officers on one of the back roads. Meretskov immediately directed a tank regiment and some mobile infantry, together with his adjutant, Captain M. G. Borod, to penetrate the region where Vlasov had been seen. They found no trace of him. Knowing that Vlasov had a radio receiver, they tried to reach him by wireless without result. Later, it was learned that Vlasov had divided his staff into three groups, which were supposed to come out about 11 P.M., June 24, in the region of the 46th Rifle Division. Unfortunately, none of them knew where the 46th command point was located. As they approached the Polist River, they came under strong German machine-gun fire. Vlasov apparently was not seen beyond this point. The Military Council and General Afanasyev, chief of communications, turned north. Two days later Afanasyev’s group met a partisan unit and managed to make contact with a second partisan group which had a radio transmitter. With the aid of the transmitter General Afanasyev was able to communicate with Meretskov July 14. He was brought out by plane.
At some point V. N. Ivanov, secretary of the Young Communist organization in Leningrad, encountered Vlasov, but whether before or after the Polist River incident is not clear. Ivanov was dropped with some other young Communists, by parachute, behind the German lines. By mistake the pilot let them jump over a small village which was occupied by a Nazi SS unit. Ivanov was badly wounded and took refuge in a nearby forest, where he encountered Vlasov, in Soviet uniform, still holding out. Then they separated and trace of Vlasov was again lost.
After Afanasyev’s rescue Meretskov telephoned Party Secretary Zhdanov, who ordered the partisan units to undertake a widespread search for General Vlasov and the other members of his staff. The partisans mobilized three groups and searched the regions around Poddubye for many miles but found no trace of Vlasov. A few of the command officers turned up. Colonel A. S. Rogov, chief of intelligence, got through the encirclement. He followed the route of the Military Council but came out a little behind them. For years the fate of Commissar Zuyev was unknown. Then, by chance, his grave was discovered near the 105th kilometer of the Chudovo railroad, near the Torfyanoye Station. Starving, wounded and weak, he had emerged at the railroad line and begged a bit of bread from some workers. One of them ran to tell the Germans. Before he could be seized Zuyev pulled out his service revolver and shot himself. About 9,322 men escaped encirclement; 8,000 to 10,000 were lost.
Vlasov did not shoot himself. Two days before Zhdanov ordered the partisans to search for him he surrendered to the Germans on July 12 and within a short time had placed himself at the service of the Nazi propaganda apparatus as the head of what became the Vlasovite movement, an organization of Russian soldiers and officers directed against the Soviet cause. He was the only Soviet general officer of prominence to defect, and his defection was always a prickly business in which he frequently would not play the Nazi game. But Vlasov’s treachery became such a thing of awe and horror in wartime Russia that his name was hardly uttered.
Later, however, many Soviet writers sought to put the blame for the Second Shock Army’s disaster on him. They suggested that he had been deliberately playing a double game. There is no evidence in the record of the desperate fight of the Second Shock Army to support such a view. General Khozin, who, of course, was himself deeply involved in the tragedy, concluded that the Soviet side simply did not have the strength to defeat the well-organized, well-reinforced German troops opposing them. The Germans were, he pointed out, “at the zenith of their power.” At no time was the Supreme Command in Moscow able to send sufficient reserves to the Leningrad front to create a real breakthrough force.
This, rather than failures by part of the troops, bad generalship or incipient treachery by Vlasov, was the key. The Second Shock Army was in encirclement, almost inextricably bogged down in the marshes and confronted by powerful, well-led German forces before Vlasov flew in by U-2 light reconnaissance plane in mid-April to take command. General Meretskov, not unnaturally, put much blame on Moscow for the absurd command change which ousted him in April only to bring him back in early June—a decision which played a part in the disaster. But nothing in Meretskov’s conduct of the late winter-early spring operations gave hope that the fate of the Second Shock Army would have been different had he been left in chargé. Vlasov’s role was secondary, but his emergence at the head of the Vlasovite movement threw his actions and the whole question of the Second Shock Army into the lurid limbo of critical Soviet political issues. Everyone connected with the affair had to prove that the blame rested with Vlasov, that each had no connection with the traitor, that the fault lay with Vlasov and no one else. For twenty years there were only peripheral mentions of Vlasov in Soviet historiography, and even today the main thrust of the memoirs and studies is to establish that the individual commanders had nothing to do with Vlasov or the Kremlin’s decisions in relation to him and the ill-fated Volkhov operations.
There is some substance to this. Vlasov’s career until tragedy enmeshed him in the swamps of the ancient Novgorod tract bore telltale marks of Kremlin politics. The Volkhov-Leningrad front clearly fell within the responsibility of Georgi Malenkov, a sworn enemy then and later of Leningrad Party Boss Andrei Zhdanov. The role and fate of Malenkov’s protégé, Vlasov, inevitably played a part in Kremlin politics.7
With the loss of the Second Shock Army one more hope for Leningrad went glimmering—the hope that spring or summer would bring an end to the blockade. In early June Party Secretary Zhdanov had gone to Moscow and bravely told the Supreme Soviet that the people of Leningrad stood as one, united, fighting for their city. This was true. But now on July 5 another kind of decision had to be made. The Leningrad Military Council that day ordered the transformation of Leningrad into a military city, with only the minimum population necessary to carry on the city’s defense and essential services. The next day Zhdanov announced the decision: another 300,000 people must be removed by the Ladoga route. The city must be cut to the bare minimum—800,000 population, no more. It was July 6, the 340th day of the blockade. The city was holding out, but no one knew what summer would bring. The bright dreams of spring had faded. The Nazis were on the move once more. Soviet armies were falling back toward the Volga. The gains of winter in the north Caucasus had been lost. There were ominous signs of a new build-up at Leningrad. Hitler had issued directive No. 45 to General Lindemann of the Eighteenth Nazi Army and to Field Marshal von Kiichler, now in command of Army Group Nord. They were to set in motion preparations for the capture of Leningrad by the beginning of September. Heavy reinforcements both of men and artillery were being assigned to the task.
Leningrad could take no chances. The Germans were enormously powerful, and the momentum that would take them to Stalingrad and Maikop in the Caucasus was already visible. Despite all the sacrifices it might well take them into Leningrad itself.
It was at about this time that a young Leningrad soldier named Yevgeny Zhilo was making his way through the broken countryside just outside his native city. It was near dawn, and in the pale luminosity of the white night the sky was dipped in rosy pastels. Somewhere beyond the unseen horizon the sun was rising. He pushed through the clumps of lilac, his carbine tangling in the branches. For a moment he halted and buried his nose in the heavy perfume of the blossoms. In their rich fragrance, in the dew now sparkling in the sunshine, in the soft, strange quiet of the morning, there seemed nothing but the happiness and brightness of life. Standing there, a soldier for six brief months, tears sprang into his eyes. Remembering the experience twenty-five years later, Zhilo felt no sense of shame. He had cried not because he was a youngster but because it was the summer of 1942 and he was still there just beside Leningrad and he had forgotten nothing, nothing that had happened—the flickering lamp in the darkness of the room; the frosted window pane and the glare of the burning houses; the unthinkable silence of the great city; the sound of the steps of a passer-by, heard from such a distance that their approach became frightening. He remembered the starving children, little old men who knew everything, understood everything. He knew as he stood breathing in the rich scent of the lilacs that he would never see again the eyes of those nearest and dearest to him, those doomed to die with eyes wide-open, solemn and a little mad, those who stood already at the border of death.
He knew as he stood there with his carbine outside Leningrad on that sunny morning that what had happened around him had never happened in the history of the world and that no one would forget it nor would anything be forgotten—not for centuries upon centuries.
The young soldier stood in the clump of lilacs and cried and the tears ran down his face. Then he put his carbine over his shoulder again, brushed aside the lilacs, and shouldered forward toward the line of trenches, there to fight while he could.
So Leningrad entered the second summer of war.
1 Govorov joined in July, 1942. He was admitted without going through the candidate stage. (N.Z., p. 345.)
2 The idea of “offensive” use of artillery against the German siege guns brought a tart comment from Marshal Voronov, chief of Soviet artillery. “There were people on the Leningrad front who, attracted to terminology, attempted to juggle concepts of the First World War in place of the accepted and legitimate concepts—extermination, destruction and suppression.” (Voronov, op. cit., p. 219.)
3 The Ladoga shipping route proved very successful and efficient in 1942. By May 28 large-scale barge movements were under way. At the orders of State Defense Committee representative Aleksei Kosygin, a major rebuilding and expansion of port facilities had been carried out as well as preparation of large numbers of barges. During the 1942 navigation season, which closed November 25, 1942, the Ladoga route delivered 703,300 tons of freight, including 350,000 tons of food, 99,200 tons of war supplies, 216,600 tons of fuel, as well as horses, cows and sheep weighing 15,500 tons, and 41,500 tons of wood (towed as rafts). The route moved out of Leningrad 270,000 tons of freight, including 162,100 tons of machinery. It evacuated 528,000 persons, including 448,700 civilians. It carried to Leningrad 267,000 persons, including 250,000 troops. (V. Y. Neigoldberg, htoriya SSSR, No. 3, March, 1965, pp. 102 et seq.)
4 At the start of the war Zuyev was a political commissar in General Morozov’s Eleventh Army headquarters at Kaunas, where he distinguished himself in leading units of the Eleventh Army out of the initial Nazi encirclement.
5 There is uncertainty as to the precise date when Vlasov took command of the Second Shock Army. Luknitsky gives the date as March 6, obviously incorrect, since Vlasov did not arrive at Meretskov’s headquarters until March 9. Meretskov says Vlasov took over the Second Shock Army a month and a half later. The formal command change apparently was April 16. (Luknitsky, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 322; Meretskov, Voyenno-lstoricheskii Xhurnal, No. 12, January, 1965, pp. 66-67; Barbashin, op. cit., p. 603.) Krykov was flown out April 16. (Smert Komissara, p. 102.)
6 Malenkov seems to have had special responsibilities for the Leningrad front.
7 Vlasov and his associate anti-Soviet officers fell into Russian hands at the end of the war. His execution along with that of some associates was announced August 2, 1946. (Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945, London, 1957, p. 659.) Malenkov lost his post in the Party Secretariat about this time, possibly in connection with the Vlasov affair. However, his fall from favor was brief.