The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  The prison traffic was not all one way. Colonel N. B. Ivushkin was a minor party official in Demyansk. He was arrested in 1938 and imprisoned. On the eve of war he was released—in time to join the 55th Infantry and march two hundred miles in the last days of June from Demyansk to Velikiye Luki. Kurakin, the husband of Madame Skryabina’s neighbor, Lyubov Nikolayevna, suddenly came home after two years in a labor camp. At first Lyubov was in seventh heaven. But her husband was so old, so tired, so despondent, so ill—he had a broken rib and had been deafened in one ear— that the joy of his return faded. And there was the husband of Aleksandr Shtein’s sister, a soldier solid as a rock, a colonel, a man who would end the war commanding an antitank brigade in Berlin, his chest glittering with medals, who began the war with handcuffs still on his wrists (after four years in prison camp as “an enemy of the people”) and went from the prison office to the military commissariat, and-from there to the battlefield.

  Indeed, there were those who saw detachments of prisoners transported directly from labor camps to the front lines and sent into battle with NKVD guards holding machine guns at their backs. Other prisoners were mobilized for work on the fortifications. As the Red Army staggered back from the Baltic, some NKVD prisoners were released. Some escaped. Some were shot.

  The question that haunted Leningrad in these days was the same that had been raised by Zhdanov the day of his return to the city from Moscow— fortifications: the Luga line.

  Since almost the first day of the war Colonel Bychevsky had been working night and day on the Luga line, the new system of fortifications running along the Luga River, roughly forty to seventy-five miles southwest of Leningrad. Each day that passed made it more apparent that if the Nazis were to be halted short of Leningrad’s gates it would only be on the Luga line.

  The other lines were crumbling, one by one. The fleeting hope that the Germans might be stopped on the Velikaya River line running from Ostrov to Pskov and on to Lakes Pskov and Peipus, roughly 150 miles southwest of Leningrad, had dissolved. Colonel Bychevsky had spent the summer of 1939 creating a system of reinforced-concrete gun positions throughout the Ostrov area—at Kolotilovsky, Olkhovsky, Gilevsky and Zorinsky. The bunkers covered every possible approach to Ostrov, and the same kind of fortifications protected Pskov. Bychevsky could hardly believe his ears when he was told the system had fallen to the Germans. But he knew then, if he had not known before, that the Luga line was almost the city’s last hope.

  Bychevsky had reason to suppose that Zhdanov felt the same way. Indeed, it was possible that Zhdanov did not think that any line would halt the Germans before they got to Leningrad. As early as June 28 Zhdanov had ordered Bychevsky to set up munitions depots in the forests and marshes northeast of Pskov and between Pskov and Gdov for the use of partisans, should the Germans reach these areas. Zhdanov personally selected the points for the caches, working over a map with Bychevsky. At Zhdanov’s orders Bychevsky planted radio-controlled mines at many key points which might be overrun by the Germans. These could be detonated by radio signals from mobile field transmitters—one of the Leningrad Command’s most secret weapons.

  More than thirty thousand Leningraders had been mobilized on the Luga line to dig trenches, mine fields and dig gun emplacements, dugouts and tank traps. A small group of army sappers directed the work, but the brunt was borne by women. With the fall of Ostrov another fifteen thousand workers were sent to the Luga line. Concrete antitank barriers were loaded up from the Karelian isthmus and trucked to Luga positions. Three factories, the Nevgvozd, Barricade and No. 189 Construction Trust, turned out rails for tank barricades.

  This work, in large measure, was directed by Party secretaries or Party representatives. Not all Party chiefs, in the smaller towns and villages, however, acquitted themselves with honor. In the Volosovo region the Party chiefs panicked and fled to the rear. They were chargéd with desertion and excluded from the Party. In the Batetsk region the Party chiefs, frightened of air attacks, took shelter in a dugout so well camouflaged no one could find it. They were expelled from the Party.

  There were other problems, some of which only became apparent later when the Germans stormed up to the defense zones. Much construction was left in the hands of local Party organizations or low-ranking military men who often had no idea what kind of defenses to build. The local barriers and tank traps were not connected. Firing positions were badly sited. Then, as the swift approach of the Panzers threw the situation into crisis, changes would be ordered, often too late. This kind of error proved almost fatal in September when the Germans reached the Pulkovo Heights. New firing positions and new gun sightings had been ordered, but little of the work had been completed.

  Youngsters from the universities and institutes were corraled into the fortifications tasks. Unlike the ordinary Leningraders, who were drafted without pay, the youngsters got nine rubles a day—more than their scholarship allowances.

  One morning Bychevsky got a telephone call from his oldest daughter, a first-year student at Leningrad University.

  “Good-bye, Papa,” the youngster said, “I’m off to work.”

  “Where?”

  “You know where, I think. We’re going in a car. I have to hurry.”

  “What are you taking with you?”

  “What do I need?” the girl replied. “A towel. Some soap. I don’t need anything else.”

  “Wait a minute,” her father said. “Wait a minute, young lady. Have you got a coat, a kettle, a spoon or a knapsack? And you must take some bread, some sugar, some linen.”

  “You’re joking, Papa,” the girl replied gaily. “None of the girls is taking anything. We won’t be gone long. We’ll sleep in a haystack. Tell Mama not to worry. See you soon.”

  But, as Bychevsky noted, the girls did not return so quickly. Nor did all return. They came back, not by car, but on foot, weary to exhaustion, their clothes in rags, their bodies aching, their hands raw, their feet bruised, black with dirt and heavy with sweat. Many bore bloody bandages over their wounds. Some were buried (and some were not) in the open fields and beside the roads, where they were caught by flights of low-flying JU-88’s and Heinkel attack bombers. The planes flew over, day after day, bombing and strafing. How many thousands were killed? No one knows. There was no accurate count of those engaged on the job and no way of identifying who returned and who did not.

  Day and night the work went ahead, regardless of air attack, regardless of losses, regardless of the exhaustion of the women, old men and young people who made up most of the force. On the approaches to Kingisepp the Leningrad subway construction crew was sent in with mechanical excavators, steam shovels and powerful cranes. But the principal instruments were picks and shovels, and the principal motive power the backs and muscles of inexperienced women and men.

  Thus the Luga line took shape, almost two hundred miles long, running from Narva and Kingisepp near the coast, then southeast along the Luga River through Luga city to Medved and Shimsk at Lake Ilmen. Its distance from Leningrad was about sixty miles south of Kingisepp, about a hundred miles at Lake Ilmen. Though the position was strong, it could be flanked if the Germans managed to penetrate east of Lake Ilmen to Novgorod.

  The Luga River was 120 to 180 feet wide, with a shore that was marshy in some places but in others suitable for mechanized forces. To protect the line, Bychevsky erected mine fields and antitank barricades, covered by fortified and semifortified gun positions to a depth of about two and a half to three miles. Soon, to Bychevsky’s horror, he discovered that some mine fields had no effect on the heavy new German armor. The light Soviet mines exploded, but the tanks rolled ahead unharmed.

  Zhdanov and the Leningrad Command knew that the broken armies rapidly falling back could hardly stand on the Luga. They were retreating too rapidly and in too great disorder. Even retreat was becoming difficult. The highways from the Baltic were clogged with refugees. Some eighty thousand workers who had been engaged in constructing fortifications in the Baltic states wer
e trying to flee east. Mixed with the refugees were shattered army units, individual soldiers, peasants trying to herd their cattle to safer fields, German agents, anti-Soviet farmers, deserters and ordinary people, filled with fear and panic.

  If the Luga line was to be held, it would be held not with such material but in spite of it.

  The commander of the Luga line—the Luga Operating Group, as it was called—was Major General K. P. Pyadyshev, a brilliant, rather sardonic man of great military experience and few illusions. It was obvious to him, as to all, that Leningrad did not have trained troops to throw into the breach.

  The retreating armies of the Leningrad (Northwest) Front were incredibly battered. By July 10 they had fallen back 300 to 325 miles in eighteen days of constant fighting. They now possessed only 1,442 guns, cannon and mortars. They had lost all their air support, most of it in the first four hours of the war. The armored and mechanized divisions had lost so much equipment that they were, in fact, mere rifle divisions. The three armies, the Eighth, the Eleventh and the Twenty-seventh, had a paper strength of 31 divisions and 2 brigades. It was just paper. In 22 of the divisions the losses were above 50 percent. In 6 divisions—the 33rd, the 126th, the 181st, the 183rd, the 188th Rifle and the 220th Motorized—the strength had fallen to an average of 2,000 men. Several divisions had fewer than 30 percent effectives. The three armies may have mustered 150,000 men. The Eighth Army was running out of arms. It had an average of 1.7 mines per mortar and 0.5 shells per weapon. The 10th Rifle Division had 2,577 men, 89 machine guns, 1 antiaircraft gun and 27 cannon and mortars. The 125th Rifles had 3,145 men, 53 machine guns, 7 antiaircraft guns and 22 other cannon.

  Any hope for holding the Luga line lay with the People’s Volunteers. The call for volunteers went out June 30. That day 10,890 signed up. By July 6, 100,000 had volunteered. By July 7, the total reached 160,000, including 32,000 women, 20,000 Communists and 18,000 Young Communists.1 Dmitri Shostakovich, the composer, was among them. In his application he wrote: “Up to now I have known only peaceful work. Now I am ready to take up arms. Only by fighting can we save humanity from destruction.” Shostakovich was not accepted. He was assigned to air-raid duty. The actor Nikolai Cherkasov signed up. So did the forty-six-year-old poet, Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky. He served for four years on the Leningrad, Volkhov and Karelia fronts, mostly as a correspondent for army papers. He also wrote poems and, in intervals, managed to finish a book of memoirs.

  Not all the writers had an easy time getting into the armed forces. Lev Uspensky tried to join the navy but ran into a problem. He wore Russian size 47 (English equivalent, size 14) boots. The navy quartermaster didn’t stock boots that large. His application was held up until they found boots big enough to put him into proper uniform.

  Yevgeny Shvarts, a nervous, gentle, half-ill satirist and writer of children’s fairy tales, tried to join the Volunteers, although his hands shook so badly (he had Parkinson’s disease) he could hardly sign the application.

  “How can you hold a rifle?” someone asked.

  “Never mind,” Shvarts replied. “There are other things to do.”

  When Shvarts was not accepted, he and the humorist Mikhail Zoshchenko worked night and day for a week and completed a satire, Under the Lindens of Berlin. It was put on at the Comedy Theater. When the Comedy Theater was evacuated in August, Shvarts and his wife refused to leave. They stayed on as members of the defense unit for their house at No. 9 Griboyedov Canal.

  Boris M. Levin, a jolly man whom the writer Samuil Marshak nicknamed the “Himalayan bear,” signed up. He lost his good nature with the start of the war and was deep in gloom. “All over the world,” he said, “the lights are going out.” Levin attended an officers’ short course. On his first night in the front lines he was killed in a Nazi attack on his dugout. He hadn’t even been issued a gun. Only eight days after the war started, the first Leningrad writer fell in action. He was Lev Kantorovich, member of a border detachment, killed June 30 near Enso.

  Enlistment points were set up in every quarter of the city. Leonid Pan-teleyev noticed one in a lane near the Narva Gates in a new school. A crowd surrounded a curious little man, narrow-chested, middle-aged, wearing the People’s Volunteers arm band. He was shouting in a teary voice, and beating his narrow chest: “Citizens, I beg you always to remember. I have three sons: Vladimir. Pyotr. Vasily. All three are at the front. I beg you to remember. And tomorrow I myself will go to the front and fight for all citizens of the Soviet Union—without exception.” Panteleyev could never decide whether the man was drunk or simply excited.

  The life of the writer Dmitri Shcheglov had changed very little since the start of the war. Each day he got up at the same time. He worked at his desk. He listened to the war bulletins. The Red Army was being thrown back. But people said this was not too significant. “It’s a war of maneuver,” they insisted. The mood of the city seemed good, but he knew the situation was getting worse. He sent off his thirteen-year-old son Alexei to the East. The father and son both held back their tears, but Shcheglov had to turn away at the last moment, he did not want his youngster to see him crying.

  The Kirov Theater asked Shcheglov to act as consultant on the libretto of a new ballet, White Nights, to be put on after the defeat of Germany. At the Alexandrinsky Theater Flandria was playing; at the Radlov Theater, The Good Soldier Schweik. At the Gostiny Dvor the ads still proclaimed: “Buy Eskimo Pies,” “Hot Cocoa” and “Meat Pasties 25 Kopeks Apiece.” But the monuments were disappearing—Catherine’s famous bronze horseman of Peter I was hidden in a great sandbox (the first proposal was to sink it to the bottom of the Neva River, as had been planned at the time of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia). The statues of General Kutuzov and General Suvorov, the conquerors of Napoleon, remained in place—as a matter of military pride—on the Nevsky and at the Kirov Bridge but were protected with sandbags. The gigantic bulls by the sculptor V. I. Demut-Malinovsky at the Leningrad Packing Plant were placed on runners and hauled to the necropolis of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. The idea was to put them underground, but it was never carried out. They stayed among the monuments and headstones all through the war, a frightening spectacle for rare visitors, especially when camouflaged in white for the winter.

  On July 8 Shcheglov and his friends, Vladimir Belyayev, Boris Chetver-nikov and Mikhail Rosenberg, went to the enlistment point and signed up for the Volunteers—a month’s training and they would go to the front. Meanwhile, Shcheglov’s wife came by the barracks each evening with a thermos of coffee and homemade sandwiches.

  Everyone was signing up for something. Fifteen thousand registered for the People’s Volunteers from the Kirov works—enough for a whole division. More than 2,500 Leningrad University students joined the army and the Volunteers, including 200 Party members and 500 Young Communists. The university provided seven battalions of Volunteers. The Railroad Engineering Institute mobilized 900, the Mining Institute 960, the Shipbuilding Institute 450, the Electrotechnical 1,200. Almost every student in the Lesgaft Institute signed up, led by their professors. One hundred and fifty of the 400 members of the Artists Union volunteered the first day. Pavel Armand, director of the film, Man with a Gun, was named commander of a machine-gun unit. By July 5 Public Order battalions numbering 17,167, mostly youngsters and oldsters, had been organized to maintain internal order. An additional six regiments of about 6,000, including 2,500 Communists and Young Communists, were formed by July 15. About 200 partisan units, including perhaps 15,000 men and women, were organized for fighting behind the Nazi lines.

  At first it was planned to form 15 divisions of Volunteers. But it was quickly found that this would exhaust Leningrad’s manpower. The figure was cut to 7 divisions at a Military Council meeting July 4.

  The first three divisions went into barracks at 6 P.M., July 4, and by July 7 (!) were supposed to be en route to their positions in the Luga line. Volunteers were accepted in the age bracket eighteen to fifty. Generally their average age was much higher than in t
he regular army. There were few officers with command experience, particularly in infantry. Many reserve officers were engineers and scientists, and others had little or no military background. It was not possible to fill more than 5 or 10 percent of line-officer posts with men of experience. Half the Volunteers had no military background of any kind. Squads and companies were made up of men from the same office or shop. All knew each other. Instead of using military language, they politely said: “Please do so and so,” “I beg of you,” etc. Leningradskaya Pravda published a picture showing a Volunteer standing at full height, throwing a Molotov cocktail at an oncoming tank. Marshal Voroshilov was furious. He made the paper publish new pictures and articles, pointing out that if the Volunteers tried to hurl gasoline bottles or grenades like that, they would be mowed down before they could lift an arm.

  The haste and carelessness with which the People’s Volunteers were organized took a deadly toll once the units went into action. Many men never reached the firing line. One commander reported that 200 of his 1,000 men dropped out on the march into action because of illness, fatigue, age and physical exhaustion.

  Most of the officers had little more training than the men. In the 1st Division of 1,824 commanders only 10 were regular army men. Only 50 percent of the officers of the 2nd Division had had any previous practice with weapons. Almost none had experience in digging trenches, camouflage, military tactics or command. In the artillery regiment of the 2nd Division, commanders were changed five times between July and October, in an attempt to find a qualified man. The longest a commander lasted was nineteen days. The commanders of the 1st Division and the 2nd Guards Division had to be removed almost the moment the units went into action.

  The first three divisions had a very high ratio of Party members (20 to 46 percent) and ordinary workers (up to 61 percent). The 1st Division was organized by the Kirov region Party secretary, V. S. Yefremov. It went into training the night of July 3-4, using the playing grounds of the 5th School on Stachek Prospekt as its drill field. It comprised between 10,000 and 11,000 men, of whom nearly one-third were Party members or Young Communists.2 In the 1st Regiment of this division were 2,496 Kirov workers and 439 men from other regional organizations, including about 1,250 Party members and 1,015 Young Communists. The 2nd Division, from the Moscow and Leningrad regions, had members from the Elektrosila, Karburator, Skorokhod and Proletarian Victory factories. Of its approximately 9,000 members, 1,197 were Party members and 1,750 Young Communists. The 3rd Division had 950 Party and 1,475 Young Communists in a total of 10,094.