The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  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).

  15 ♦ The White Swans

  THE MEN WORE ICE-CREAM SUITS AND THE DÉCOLLETAGE of the ladies sparkled with diamonds. They sat under the striped awnings at the Gloria and the Golden Swan, chatting lazily, eating parfaits and sipping colored drinks through straws. Nothing in the world seemed to bother them. There was no need
to hurry. They sat, shaded from the sun, and watched behind their dark glasses. They sat waiting. . . .

  They were waiting, thought Nikolai Mikhailovsky, a correspondent who had just arrived in Tallinn, for the Germans and they cared very little whether anyone noticed or not. Across the street someone was putting up fresh posters. They read: “Comrades! Stand as one in the defense of our freedom and our life.”

  Down the street hurried military cars daubed with mustard paint. Trucks rumbled by. Crowds walked along the boulevard, staring at the bulletins posted in the windows.

  Did the men in the ice-cream suits notice what was going on? Mikhailovsky did not think so. He strolled through Kadriorg Park. The swans sailed proudly across the pond, their necks a curve of snowy white. A little stream splashed over the rocks and pigeons pouted on the newly swept walks. Chattering squirrels leaped in the trees.

  It seemed so quiet, so peaceful.

  But no one knew better than Mikhailovsky how false was the illusion of peace and security. He had spent a good deal of time in the prewar months in the Baltic states. He knew the danger that lay below this glittering surface. By day the shops were filled and people strolled lazily in the parks. By night shots rang out—the Fifth Column at work. The Russians took no chances. The naval writer Vsevolod Vishnevsky went around armed, as he said, like a cowboy with an automatic in a holster and a carbine on his back. Anatoly Tarasenkov, another writer, carried grenades in his gas mask, a rifle under his arm and, Vishnevsky joked, wanted a small cannon, too.

  Soviet rule was far from secure. The strictest security precautions prevailed. You had to have a special visa to enter the Baltic states from Russia, and they were hard to get. There were checks on the frontiers between each Baltic state to control movements from Latvia to Estonia, from Lithuania to Latvia.