Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  There is much stronger evidence to show that the "Leningrad can take it" spirit was there from the very start. There was no one, except a few anti-communists, who even

  considered surrender to the Germans. At the height of the famine, a few people—who

  were not necessarily collaborators or enemy agents (as Soviet accounts assert), but

  merely people driven half-insane with hunger—did write to the authorities asking that Leningrad be declared an "open city"; but no-one in his right mind could have done so.

  During the German advance on the city, people soon learned what the enemy were like; how many young people had died through enemy bombing and machine-gunning while

  digging those trenches? And once the blockade was complete the air-raids began,

  together with the sadistic leaflets like that dropped on Leningrad on November 6, to

  "celebrate" Revolution Day: "Today we shall do the bombing, tomorrow you shall do the burying".

  The question of declaring Leningrad an open city could never arise, as it did, for

  example, in Paris in 1940; this was a war of extermination, and the Germans never made a secret of it. Secondly, the local pride of Leningrad had a quality of its own—it was composed of a great love of the city itself, of its historical past, its extraordinary literary associations (this was particularly true of the intelligentsia) and also of a great proletarian and revolutionary tradition amongst its working-class; nothing could have so blended these two great loves for Leningrad into one thing as the threat of the annihilation of the city. Perhaps even quite consciously, there was also the old competition with Moscow: if Moscow were to fall in October 1941, Leningrad at least would hold out longer, come

  what may; and, once Moscow had been saved, it was a point of honour for Leningrad to do as well, and even better. Some of the most bitter anti-Stalinists like Olga Bergholz, were also the most fanatical Leningrad patriots. But sentiment, however praiseworthy, was not enough. No doubt, the army's record, right up to the moment when it retreated to the outskirts of Leningrad, had been disappointing; and the Leningrad authorities had, obviously, done a great deal of bungling too during those first two and a half months of the German invasion. The whole problem of evacuation, especially of children, had been grossly mishandled, and little or nothing had been done to lay in food reserves. But once the Germans had been stopped outside Leningrad, and once the decision had been taken to fight for every house and every street, the faults of the army and the civilian authorities were readily forgotten; for now it was a case of defending Leningrad at any price. It was only natural that very rigid discipline and organisation were necessary inside the besieged city; but this had little to do with "an ingrained habit of obedience to the authorities", or, still less, with "the Stalinist terror". Obviously, food had to be severely rationed; but to say that people in Leningrad worked and did not "rebel" (for what purpose?) in order to have a ration card—which, to many, did not even mean "the difference between life and death"—is to misunderstand the spirit of Leningrad completely. And there is little doubt that the Party organisation, after many initial blunders, played a very important role in keeping Leningrad going: first, by making rationing as fair as was humanly possible in incredibly difficult conditions; second, in organising civil defence inside the city on a vast scale; third, in mobilising people for cutting timber, peat, etc.; fourth, by organising the various "roads of life". And there is also no doubt that, in the midst of the most appalling hardships of the winter of 1941-2, organisations like the Komsomol showed the greatest self-sacrifice and endurance in helping people.

  There can really be no comparison with London; the blitz was terrible enough, though it was not comparable to what German cities got a few years later. The bombing of London was really worse than the bombing or shelling of Leningrad, at least in terms of

  casualties. But only if one imagined that everybody in London was starving during the blitz winter, and ten or twenty thousand people were dying of hunger in London every day, would it be possible to put an equation mark between the two. In Leningrad the

  choice lay between dishonourably dying in German captivity or honourably dying (or,

  with luck, surviving) in one's own unconquered city. Any attempt to differentiate

  between Russian patriotism, or revolutionary ardour, or Soviet organisation, or to ask which of the three was the more important in saving Leningrad is also singularly futile: all three were blended in an extraordinarily "Leningrad" way.

  Local "Leningrad" patriotism gave a special flavour to all three. In Leningrad in 1943 I could observe this on every occasion; to the people of Leningrad, their city, with all that it had done and endured, was something unique. They spoke with some contempt of the

  "Moscow skedaddle" of 1941 and many, among them that very remarkable man, P. S.

  Popkov, head of the Leningrad Soviet, felt that, after what it had done, Leningrad

  deserved some special distinction. One idea, very current at the time, was that Leningrad should become the capital of the RSFSR, i.e. of Russia proper, whereas Moscow would

  remain the capital of the USSR.

  This Leningrad particularism was not at all to Stalin's liking. He must have known that there were much fewer pictures of him there than in any other city in the Soviet Union, and that Leningrad tended to look upon itself as being something rather distinct, both militarily and politically, from the "mainland". It was suspected in Moscow that Zhdanov (who had been a great chief in the days of the siege—quite regardless of all his previous

  "purge" activities and his subsequent vandalism in the cultural field) had become something of a Leningrad particularist himself, though he was not born there. There is little doubt that, especially after Zhdanov's death in 1948, Stalin decided to stamp out Leningrad's particularism. A remarkable museum, called The Defence of Leningrad, had been organised during and after the siege; this was a striking collection of documents and exhibits of every kind, illustrating the gigantic "mass effort" made by the Leningrad people, and their civilian and military leaders. This museum was closed in 1949. As

  Pavlov wrote in 1961:

  This was totally unjustified, and most regrettable. Immensely valuable data were

  concentrated in this museum reflecting the heroic struggle of the besieged, the

  conditions in which Leningraders lived during the fearful time of the Blockade; the defence measures taken against the air-raids and artillery bombardments; the

  exhibits demonstrated the high degree of organisation in producing armaments and

  in building defences, in dealing with delayed-action bombs, and so on. The museum was a remarkable tribute to the inventiveness, stubbornness and courage of

  ordinary people. But this museum was organised in the days of the "personality cult" when the heroic deeds of so many Lenin-graders tended to be attributed to single personalities.

  In 1957 (Pavlov goes on to say) a museum of the History of Leningrad was opened; but this, he says, "contains only a few rooms of exhibits relating to the war period; this

  'museum', quite different from that assembled during the war, is utterly inadequate."

  Not only was the museum of the Defence of Leningrad destroyed in 1949, but there was also the—still somewhat mysterious— "Leningrad Affair", in which Kuznetsov, Popkov and many other leaders of the defence of Leningrad lost their lives. Was the Leningrad Party organisation too "particularist", not sufficiently Stalinist? There have been no more than some vague references to it in Mr Khrushchev's speeches, with the suggestion that Malenkov played a particularly sinister role in this purge. It has also been suggested that both Stalin and Malenkov (who was an enemy of Zhdanov's) waited till Zhdanov was

  dead until they settled their scores with the Leningrad organisation, which had never been particularly loud in its praise of Stalin, least of all during the War and the Blockade.

  Chapter IX A NOTE ON FINLAND

  One thing was very striking
during the Leningrad Blockade; the enemy was Germany, and Finland was scarcely even mentioned. Yet the Finns were also at war with the Soviet Union, were taking part in the blockade of Leningrad, and their troops were within some twenty miles north and north-west of the city. Further east, they had penetrated deep into Soviet territory, and were holding a line along the Svir river, between Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega. The large Soviet city of Petrozavodsk, capital of the Karelo-Finnish SSR, was under Finnish occupation.

  The position of the Finns in their war against the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944

  was, however, very unusual. They had many bonds with the Germans, but their war

  against Russia was still a "separate" war, and they were certainly less subservient to the Germans than were, for instance, the Hungarians and Rumanians. After the war they were to claim that they had not allowed German troops to operate against Leningrad from

  Finnish soil and that they had not taken part in the bombing or shelling of Leningrad.

  There had, of course, been negotiations between Germany and Finland long before June 22, 1941 on joint operations against Russia. There is also no doubt that the Finns did, at one moment, push beyond the old frontier, since they captured the Russian frontier town of Beloostrov only twenty miles north-west of Leningrad; here, however, the Russians counter-attacked, and the Finns were thrown out on the very next day, after which this part of the front was stabilised.

  The Germans were not satisfied with this, and on September 4, Jodl came specially to see Mannerheim and urged him to continue the Finnish offensive beyond the old border—i.e.

  against Leningrad. Mannerheim appears to have refused. At the trial of the pro-German Ryti after the war, the former head of the Finnish Government even argued that the Finns had really "saved" Leningrad:

  On August 24, 1941, I visited Marshal Mannerheim's headquarters. The Germans

  had been pressing us to advance on Leningrad, after crossing the old frontier. I said that the conquest of Leningrad was not our object, and that we should not take part in it. Mannerheim and War Minister Waiden agreed with me, and rejected the

  German proposal. As a result, there arose the paradoxical situation in which the

  Germans were unable to advance on Leningrad from the north; in this way, the

  Finns defended Leningrad from the north.

  [See C. Leonard Lundin, Finland in the Second World War (New York, 1957).]

  For all that, the Finns did take part in the encirclement of Leningrad; also, according to the German historian Walter Görlitz, the Finns would have attacked Leningrad had there been a final German onslaught on the city from the south; but this never took place.

  [Walter Görlitz, Paulus and Stalingrad (London, 1963), p. 128.]

  They occupied considerable stretches of Soviet territory which had never belonged to them, notably east of Lake Ladoga. But although, as is evident from the Soviet armistice conditions presented to the Finns in 1944, there were some German troops stationed in Finland, there appears to be no evidence that they were ever used against Leningrad from Finnish territory. Whether Leningrad was ever shelled or bombed from Finnish territory is perhaps more doubtful; in 1943 I was shown one or two shell-holes on the north side of buildings in Leningrad, which suggested that some shells had been fired from Finnish territory. But even if these one or two shell-holes were genuine, there was certainly no regular shelling of Leningrad from the north. Notices in the streets of Leningrad declaring the southern "sheltered" side of the streets much safer than the north side, clearly implied that the shelling was all assumed to come from the south, i.e. from the Germans.

  It is certain that any major offensive from the Finnish side during the most critical months of the Leningrad blockade, and heavy shelling from the north would have greatly added to Leningrad's troubles. That the Finns did not attack at that critical time was due to a number of factors: a certain distaste of many Finns at being allied to Hitler, who had ruthlessly invaded Denmark and Norway; the fact that Britain and, later, the United

  States, were allied with the Soviet Union; and a perhaps genuine reluctance on

  Mannerheim's part to take part in the conquest and destruction of Leningrad.

  This does not mean that the Finnish bourgeoisie was not violently anti-Russian, as it had been ever since 1918, and even more since the Winter War of 1939-40. But grandiose

  ideas of a "Great Finland" stretching, according to some of the more absurd blueprints, as far as Moscow ("an old Finnish city, as its very name indicates") seem to have been limited to the lunatic fringe. Nevertheless, there were at least a small number of select Finnish troops which took part in the German operations against Russia proper, and,

  according to numerous testimonies I heard both during and after the war, particularly in the Smolensk and Tula areas, many of these Finnish soldiers behaved particularly

  brutally to the Russian civilian population—especially to girls and women—"worse even than the Germans".

  As far as the military and political leadership of Leningrad were concerned, there seems, however, little doubt that they were conscious of a certain negative value of the role played by the Finns in the tragedy of Leningrad. When, after the Soviet-Finnish

  armistice, Zhdanov travelled to Helsinki, he had long and pointedly courteous

  conversations with Mannerheim and, as we know, the armistice terms finally agreed to, leaving nearly the whole of Finland unoccupied by Soviet troops, were much milder than might have been expected. With an eye on future relations with the Scandinavian

  countries, and no doubt remembering the fiasco of Kuusinen's "Terijoki Government" of 1939-40, the Russians made no attempt, either then or later, to turn Finland into a

  People's Democracy.

  PART FOUR The Black Summer of 1942

  Chapter I CLOSE-UP: MOSCOW IN JUNE 1942

  I returned to England in November 1941, and did not go back to Russia again until May 1942—this time for the duration—sailing for twenty-eight days from Middlesbrough to

  Murmansk on the Liberty ship, the Empire Baffin, which formed part of the famous PQ-16 convoy. Soon after leaving Iceland, the convoy was subjected to six days' dive-

  bombing by the Germans, from their bases in Northern Norway. As we know from

  Churchill's letters to Stalin, the Admiralty expected half this convoy to be wiped out; but owing, apparently, to some faulty organisation on the Germans' part, only eight ships were sunk, out of a total of thirty-five. The Germans were to make up for it a month later with the next convoy, the PQ-17, threequarters of whose ships were destroyed.

  In The Year of Stalingrad I described this extraordinary voyage of the PQ-16, the marvellous spirit shown by both the British and the Russian seamen who took part in it; the miserably poor protection given it by a couple of submarines and a few destroyers and corvettes—the two escorting cruisers having left it after the first German air-raid.

  About 160 men lost their lives in that convoy, and many others were wounded, and were, in the end, taken to the terribly crowded and under-equipped hospital at Murmansk.

  At the end of May 1942 there were about 3,000 British "survivors" at Murmansk—many of them from the cruiser Edinburgh, which had been sunk shortly before. Despite frequent German airraids, especially when a convoy landed there from the west,

  Murmansk was still more or less intact at the time; and it was not until a month later that most of it was destroyed in a great fire-blitz.

  In the same book I described not only Murmansk in May 1942, but also my remarkable

  six-days' journey in a "hard"—i.e. third-class—carriage from Murmansk to Moscow during the first week of June. With the sun shining for nearly twenty-four hours in that part of Russia far beyond the Arctic Circle, summer had come in a rush within a few

  days, and the far north, with its millions of flowers, was extraordinarily beautiful. Of wonderful beauty too, in the midnight twilight, were Lake Imandra, in the mountainous country
of Soviet Lapland through which we travelled a day after leaving Murmansk, and then the immense forests south of the White Sea and all along the Archangel-Vologda

  railway line, which we reached on the third day. Often the train would stop, and people would jump out to pick flowers and cranberries—which had been preserved by the snow

  through the winter.

  The carriage was crowded with soldiers and civilians, and they presented a remarkable cross-section of Russian humanity. In The Year of Stalingrad I recorded dozens of conversations with soldiers, officers, railwaymen and all kinds of civilians, among them an eleven-year-old girl called Tamara, an evacuee from Leningrad, who had spent the

  winter in a small town on the White Sea and was now being taken by her mother to a

  kolkhoz, where her grandmother lived, in the more clement province of Riazan, south-east of Moscow.

  All these people had something significant to say. Tamara had gone to school during her winter on the White Sea; she had with her several school books with pictures of Stalin and Voroshilov, as well as a game of snakes-and-ladders. She said she had had enough to eat at the school canteen, thought that "Hitler would have to be killed before things got better", but kept the carriage amused, all the same, by often singing in a shrill voice an optimistic ditty she had learned at school:

  Hitler sam sebé ne rad,

  Vziát' ne mózhet Leningrád,

  Vídit Névsky i sadý,

  I ni tudý i ni sudy

  Na Moskvú pustílsya vor,

  Dáli tam yemú otpór,

  Propádayut vse trudý,

  I ni tudý, i ni sudý

  (Hitler is cursing his luck, he can't take Leningrad; he can see the Nevsky and the

  gardens, but he's got stuck. Then the thief tried Moscow, but here, too, he got thrown back; all his efforts are in vain; he's stuck, he is stuck again).

  Although enormous areas of Russia were still under German occupation, the fact that

  neither Moscow nor Leningrad had been lost gave people a certain amount of self-