The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  To add to his plight, he had been wounded—not a serious wound, but a painful laceration of the leg which hampered his movements and made it even more difficult for him to concentrate on the confusing swirl of military events.

  In this situation he received one of the contradictory orders which so often came from Moscow. It was from the Supreme Command and it ordered him simultaneously to hold the Dvina River line and to establish secure defenses on the Velikaya River, based on the old fortified regions of Pskov and Ostrov. He ordered the Eighth Army to fall back to the Pskov and Ostrov regions. The Twenty-seventh Army was to stay on the defensive until the new Velikaya River line was established, then retire into the fortified zone.

  The commanders began to carry out the orders. At about 2 A.M., July 2, General Lelyushenko of the 21st Armored was told by his chief, Major General A. Ye. Berzarin of the Twenty-seventh Army: Hold your front firm and retire only under heavy pressure, taking care that the Germans don’t break through at any point and sever contact between units of the Twenty-seventh Army.

  Lelyushenko wholeheartedly approved. Then at 8 A.M. a new order came through. General Berzarin ordered the 21st Corps to launch an offensive “to liquidate the German position on the northern bank of the western Dvina and reconquer Dvinsk.”

  To Lelyushenko it seemed that once again Colonel General Kuznetsov had “mistakenly evaluated the actual situation.” The Twenty-seventh Army had neither the troops, the arms nor the fuel for such an undertaking. It was vastly outnumbered in armor and planes. The Germans had nine divisions poised for offensive action.

  What happened was that Kuznetsov reread the exact wording of his instructions from Moscow: “to hold a firm defense line along the river Dvina.” Kuznetsov’s troops no longer held the Dvina line. Long since, they had been forced back. In a pedantic attempt to carry out precisely the Moscow edict, he issued what the official Soviet history called orders “that did not reflect either the actual situation and condition of the troops and which did not take into account the real possibilities of the element of time.”

  Lelyushenko did what any good commander would. He did not hurry to go over to the offensive. It was just as well. About noon the Germans began to attack, throwing at him the 8th Panzers, the 2nd Motorized, the SS Death’s Head Division and the 290th and 121st infantry divisions.

  In heavy fighting, Lelyushenko fell back steadily. Had he taken his troops to the offensive, he would have been wiped out. Even so, he lost half his personnel and equipment and was left with only four thousand men. Still, he continued to exact a heavy toll on the Nazis. He positioned his shattered 42nd Division in the little town of Dagda, carefully masking its location. When the advance guard of the Death’s Head Division entered the town, he sprang his trap, wiping out several hundred Germans. The 42nd Division held its lines near Dagda until July 3. But the crack 41st Nazi Motorized Corps broke through on the right flank of the Soviet Twenty-seventh Army near Rezekne, sixty-five miles northeast of Dvinsk. Lieutenant General Akimov tried to drive the Germans back but did not succeed and had to fall back in the direction of Karsava and Ostrov.

  On the evening of July 3 Lelyushenko ordered his 185th and 46th divisions to retreat toward Ludza-Laudrei. The 42nd had trouble disengaging, but a counterattack by the redoubtable Goryainov broke into the command point of the German 121st Division of the Sixteenth Nazi Army. The German commander, Major General Lancelle, was killed.

  The 21st Corps held along the Ludza-Laudrei line on the fourth, then fell back toward Sebezh and Opochka. The retreat was carrying them into a land of endless marshes, peat bogs and dismal thickets. On the evening of July 5 the 21st at the order of General Berzarin, commander of the Twenty-seventh Army, began to retire to the old Soviet frontier, to a line along the rivers Lezh and Sinaya. The evening of July 6 found them defending Opochka against a fierce offensive, which the 185th Division once again met with a counterattack. That same day, the 21st Corps, a remnant of the outfit which had gone into action eleven days previously, was ordered out of combat and into reserve for re-equipment. Actually, the remnants were so clÖsely engaged with the Germans that they could not be pulled out. Lelyushenko continued to fight on for nearly a month before returning to Moscow for reassignment.

  The Germans were now in a position to turn the Pskov-Ostrov-Opochka line, almost the last natural barrier to their direct advance on Leningrad. They were a little behind Hitler’s timetable—but not too much.

  With the situation developing in this catastrophic fashion, Moscow decided to move three corps up from interior reserves and try to establish a new line on the Velikaya River, roughly from Pskov to Ostrov to Opochka, about 125–150 miles southwest of Leningrad. But before the troops could reach their positions the broken elements of the Twenty-seventh Army had fallen back to the southeast. The Germans seized Ostrov on July 5 and Pskov on July 9.

  Within three weeks, of the thirty-one divisions which had been allotted to the Northwest Front twenty-two had lost 50 percent or more of their strength, many of them in the first few days of fighting. This was comparable to losses on the other fronts. By this date twenty-eight Soviet front-line divisions had been obliterated—they no longer existed—and more than seventy divisions had lost 50 percent of their strength. By June 28 the commander of the 2nd Infantry Corps of the Thirteenth Army of the Western Front reported he had no ammunition, no fuel, no food, no transport for supply or evacuation, no means of communication, no hospitals and no instructions where to evacuate his wounded. His situation was typical. By June 29 the Western Front had lost 60 important supply depots, including 10 artillery, 25 fuel, 14 provisions, 3 armored-mechanized.4 It had lost more than 2,000 wagons of munitions (30 percent of its total), 50,000 tons of fuel (50 percent of reserves), 500 wagons of mechanized materials, 40,000 tons of forage (half the supply) and 85–90 percent of hospital and engineering supplies.

  By this time General Kuznetsov had been relieved of command. He had headed the Baltic front for a total of only nine days when, after being wounded, he was ordered to relinquish his post to Major General Sobennikov of the Eighth Army. So chaotic was the situation that it was four days before the two generals could meet and the command be turned over.

  Why did the distant Leningrad, or Northwest Front, collapse with such rapidity? Why did General Kuznetsov’s troops fall back again and again?

  “The Commander of the troops of the Northwest Front, Colonel General F. I. Kuznetsov, for all his positive qualities, did not possess the necessary operative-strategic preparation and experience in leading large operating units in conditions of war,” reads the verdict of the official Soviet military historians. “Placed in a very critical position by the sudden enemy attack, he was unable correctly to evaluate the evolving situation and display the necessary initiative and wisdom in utilizing the large forces which he had at his disposal.”

  The verdict is mild. Many of Kuznetsov’s peers, suffering far less critical reverses, were shot. Among them was his chief of staff, Lieutenant General P. S. Klenov.

  The Soviet military histories cite the overwhelming German numerical superiority as the prime factor in the disaster. But they also cite bad direction, faulty command, poor management, poor leadership, poor coordination— almost all the faults imaginable. There was nearly total incomprehension on the part of Soviet commanders as to how to halt the Nazi Panzers. The Soviet infantry did not know how to coordinate action with Soviet tank units, and no one understood how to use shock tactics to smash back at the onrushing Germans.

  The mass attacks of Nazi tanks and planes terrified the Soviet troops. A soldier named Nikitin of the 163rd Infantry Division tried to tell a Northwest Front brigade commissar what it was like: “We start our attack, shouting ‘Hurrah!’ The Germans start to run. And then out of nowhere their tanks and planes hit us. ... It’s terrible. And on our side we have no planes, no tanks, just infantry. How can we stand up against that kind of force?”

  Thus the direct military threat to Leningrad develop
ed with startling rapidity—far more speedily than anyone in Leningrad could conceive. More and more evident became the wisdom of the Leningrad leaders in the war’s first days in putting so much emphasis on the erection of new lines of field defenses. Now the task was under way. The whole city was throwing its shoulder into the effort. But the hour was late.

  * * *

  1 “Now, it is not difficult to note that the decision of the Supreme Command of the Soviet Army taken on the evening of the first day of war did not correspond to the actual existing situation. Moreover, it simply did not provide for concentrating forces and organizing a very complicated operation,” comments Major General P. Korkodinov, a conservative and thoughtful Soviet military critic. (Voyenno-lstoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 10, October, 1965, p. 33.) Because of broken communications the High Command had only a most imperfect picture of the front-line situation. (Shtemenko, op cit., pp. 28–29.)

  2 D. D. Lelyushenko, Zarya Pobedy, Moscow, 1966, pp. 4–28. According to another source, 98 tanks and 129 guns. (Orlov, op. cit., p. 90.)

  3 V. P. Agafonov, Neman! Neman! Ya—DunaU, Moscow, 1967, pp. 36–37. According to another account, twenty Nazi planes were circling overhead at the time of this call. They vanished when the call was refused. (Boris Gusev, Smert Komissara, Moscow, 1967, p. 88.)

  4 The General Staff had proposed in 1940 to remove all the principal supply depots from Byelorussia and other forward areas and locate them behind the Volga River. Stalin vetoed the idea and ordered depots concentrated in the frontier commands. (Nekrich, op. cit., p. 84.)

  17 ♦ The First Days

  THE FIRST WEEKS OF WAR DID NOT SEEM SO DIFFERENT IN Leningrad. The air-raid sirens sounded occasionally, but no bombs fell. When the Hermitage ARP workers heard the first alarm on the radio, they quickly mounted to the roof and took their posts at the entrances and in the courtyards. The cool early-morning light of June filtered down on them and reflected from the gray Neva. Before the museum spread the broad expanse of Palace Square, a desert of granite, empty, lifeless. In truth, the museum was still an open target for German destruction. But fortunately no planes appeared, and in the morning Academician Orbeli issued Order No. 170, congratulating the museum staff for its excellent ARP work.

  The danger of air attack on Leningrad had been a great worry to the government long before the outbreak of war. From the second day, June 23, volunteers were put to work, digging air-raid shelters in the Champs de Mars, the Summer Gardens and other parks. The city was defended by a Special Army Corps of Antiaircraft Artillery and a network of fighter fields on which 25,000 men were at work. More than one million Leningraders had participated in ARP training as early as 1940. Now in these first days the occasional German planes which appeared over the city flew at very great height, and no bombs were dropped. But each night fire fighters sat on the roofs with sand pails, water buckets, shovels and axes. A blond girl named Natasha was one of them. She was seventeen, serious and gray-eyed.

  “What did you do this past year?” someone asked her later.

  “I sat on the roof,” the girl said.

  “Like a cat,” a friend added.

  “I’m not a cat,” Natasha replied. “There are no cats left in the city. The roof was my post. I stayed at my post.”

  At first she and her friends sat on the moonlit rooftops and read poetry— Byron, Pushkin.

  “It was so quiet,” she said. “Hardly any cars on the street. Strange. I felt as though I were flying over the city—a silvery city, each roof and each spire engraved against the sky. And the blimps! On the ground they looked like sausages, fat and green. But at night, in the air, they swam like white whales under the clouds.”

  It was only later that the horror, the fear, the tragedy came.

  Along the streets windows blossomed with paper strips, pasted on to prevent the glass from shattering under the impact of bombs. Some householders cut out elaborate designs. In one house on the Fontanka the windows were decorated with paper palm trees. Below the trees sat gay groups of monkeys. Others carefully pasted crosses on their windows, possibly hoping for divine protection.

  Ordinarily the theater season in Leningrad ended by July 1. The great Mariinsky Opera House shut for the summer. So did the Conservatory. The Philharmonic closed even earlier. The Theater of Comedy and the principal drama theaters toured the provinces; only visiting companies and the Operetta Theater performed in Leningrad. Now all this changed. The Mariinsky resumed its season after a two-day interval. Ivan Susanin and Swan Lake returned to the Leningrad stage. All the theaters stayed open. Actors were mobilized in defense tasks. Olga Iordan and a friend, N. A. Zubkovsky, rehearsing in the new ballet, Gayane or Happiness, found their ARP duties more pleasant than difficult. They relaxed in comfortable chairs in the lobby of the theater through the long summer twilight, gas masks dangling from their necks, looking out on the Kryukov Canal and listening for the sound of German planes. War still seemed far, far away. Day after day the weather stayed sunny, warm and bright.

  But there were other worries. Yelena Skryabina’s friend, Lyubov Niko-layevna, boarded a plane to try to find her children, who had been visiting in a Byelorussian village. Most of Byelorussia had already been overrun by the Germans. But she did not know this. By amazing good fortune she found the children, unharmed, and managed to make her way with them back to Leningrad unscathed.

  The police began to clamp down. On June 28 was published Order No. 1 of the Leningrad Garrison “to secure social order and state security.” It fixed hours for the operation of all industrial enterprises, offices, theaters, parks, cinemas and stores. Entry into the city was forbidden except for bona fide residents and persons on official business, and 25 control points manned by a force of 232 police checked movements in and out. Those living in the suburbs and working in Leningrad got special passes. Picture taking was forbidden. Workers’ “troikas” were formed to guard railroad stations. Violations were subject to punishment under military law, that is, by shooting. Detachments of trusted Party workers were enrolled in every factory and office to maintain order. They were armed with submachine guns, revolvers and grenades. Evacuation centers—forty-two in all—were set up to receive and process refugees from the Baltic states.

  Ordinary crime fell off spectacularly with the excitement of war. The police were amazed to record a 60 percent drop in the first weeks. Robberies were down 95.6 and drunkenness 78 percent.

  But the secret police did not relax. Yelena Skryabina heard on July 1 of the arrest of her good friend and fellow worker, Madame Belskaya. The police had come at night, conducted a search and taken the woman off without explanation. Why? Possibly because the father of her daughter (born out of wedlock) was a French engineer who had lived for a time in Leningrad.

  Madame Skryabina went to see her friend’s family, a sister ill of tuberculosis, an aged mother, a three-year-old daughter and a brother already mobilized in the Red Army. When she was late getting home, Madame Skryabina’s family feared that she, too, had been arrested.

  Spy mania seized the city. A well-known academician was riding in a streetcar. Suddenly, a group of teen-agers surrounded him. One yanked at his full, flowing beard. Another shouted: “He’s a spy!” With difficulty the scholar managed to disengage first his beard and then himself.

  Security patrols roved the streets. Alexei Brusnichkin, a Leningrad newspaperman, was walking down the Nevsky, wearing a brown shirt. He had a slight limp. A patrol seized him, certain he was a Nazi paratrooper who had injured his foot in jumping. Photographer Georgi Shulyatin dashed off to Pskov, on assignment for “Northern Newsreel.” He was wearing an English tweed jacket, a foreign-looking cap and carrying a movie camera. He stopped someone to ask the whereabouts of staff headquarters and was instantly arrested. Fortunately, the police escorted him to headquarters, where he managed to get himself released. He also got a war correspondent’s uniform.

  There were ugly rumors. It was said that a well-known poet, mobilized for front-line duty, had wounded
himself in the hand, hoping to escape active combat. Instead, he was put before the firing squad as an ordinary shirker.

  Daniel Harms, an eccentric poet, lived at No. 11 Mayakovsky Street, just beyond the Anichkov Bridge. Tall and thin, Harms wore a cavalier’s hat, like those of the Three Musketeers. Around his neck dangled a chain of amulets, carved of tortoise shell and ivory. It was said that he existed mostly on milk, and it was known that he had so little money he was always near starvation. He supported himself—poorly—by publishing occasional verses for children. During his life only two of his poems for adults were published. But, to his “desk drawer,” as the Russian phrase has it, he was a voluminous contributor—a brilliant satirist, a philosopher of Gothic tendencies, a true poet of the absurd, long before the school of the absurd became chic. Such a man, an original in dress, manner, thought, habits and philosophy, did not find life easy in the Leningrad of the 1930’s. But, unlike many others, he had survived.

  Not long after the war started the writer Leonid Panteleyev spent an evening with Harms, whom he had known for many years as a talented man whose eccentricity was a mere mask, a man whose true personality had little in common with that of the clown he pretended to be.

  The two friends drank cheap red wine, ate white bread—white bread was still available in every Leningrad bakery—and spoke of the war. Harms talked with optimism. He was a patriot who knew the danger of the Germans but was confident that Leningrad—and precisely Leningrad—would decide the course of the war. The bravery and firmness of the Leningraders would prove the rock on which the Nazi war machine would be smashed.

  A few days later the hall porter knocked at Harms’s door. Someone wanted to see him in the courtyard below. Immediately. Half-dressed, one foot bare and the other in a sandal, Harms went to the courtyard. The “black crow” —the secret police van—was waiting. Off he went to prison, there to rot and die in the arctic winter of 1941–42. No one in Leningrad knew why. No one knows today. Perhaps because he wore a funny hat.