The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  The heavy participation of Party members in the Volunteers was matched by their enrollment in the regular army. For instance, of 10,403 Communists in the Neva region of Leningrad 4,215 went into the regular army. In the summer of 1941 nearly 90,000 Leningrad Party members and Young Communists went to the front.

  The Leningrad City Party as of May 1, 1941, had 121,415 members and 32,173 candidates, a total of 153,588. Membership July 1 was 122,849 and 30,682 candidates, a total of 153,531. There were on July 1, 1941, 28,346 members and 19,844 candidates in the Leningrad region or oblast. This made a total membership in the city and region of 201,721 as of July 1. About 70 percent of the Party membership and 90 percent of the Young Communists went into military duty. In the first three months of war 57 percent of the membership went into service, including 1,142 primary Party secretaries. By October 1, 431,000 persons had been mobilized in Leningrad for combat duty, including 54,000 Party members and 93,000 Young Communists.

  On the morning of July 10 the 1st (Kirov) Division of Volunteers under command of Major General F. P. Rodin was mustered for the front. Hand grenades and Molotov cocktails were issued to each man. There were not enough rifles to go around. The unit was starting into battle with 35 percent of its allotted machine guns, 13 percent of its artillery and 8 percent of its authorized mortars. Many men carried only picks, shovels, axes or hunting knives. Some had guns last used by the Bolsheviks against General Yudenich’s attack on Petrograd in 1918. Many had nothing but empty hands and brave hearts.

  There were some who watched the Leningraders form up who could not help recalling the July days just twenty-seven years earlier. That was the month when the Czar’s armies assembled by the million and moved west against the forces of Wilhelm II and Franz Josef. Then, too, rank after rank had no rifles. Not until their comrades fell in combat would they be able to arm themselves. History was repeating itself on the Russian battlefield.

  But those who thought such gloomy thoughts did not speak them. At the head of the column of Volunteers waved a red and gold banner, presented by the Kirov factory workers. Next came a band. An hour later the men boarded boxcars at the Vitebsk freight station. As they unloaded at their destination, Batetsk, just east of Luga, German attack bombers struck. The division’s first casualty, a military engineer named Nikolai Safronov, was buried in the green fields nearby. The Volunteers quickly moved out and took over an eighteen-mile front from Unomer through Lubinets, Shchepino and Ozhogin Volochek to Kositskoye.

  The 2nd Volunteers set up headquarters in the Institute of Aviation Mechanics. On the night of July 13, headed by Lieutenant N. I. Ugryumov, it embarked on freight cars, and went to Veimarn Station, just east of King-isepp. The troops detrained under air attack and headed for their positions at Ivanovskoye, past burning izbas, or peasant huts, madly galloping horses, bellowing cattle, barking dogs and wildly fluttering chickens. The roads were clogged with refugees, many of them women with babies at the breast or old men hobbling with canes.

  In the fortifications system still toiled nearly sixty thousand workers, although the battle had almost reached them.

  It was a scene of chaos that might have been painted by Vereshchagin, the Russian battle portraitist.

  The People’s Volunteers, tumbling out of the freight cars, shielding their mouths from the acrid smoke of the burning villages, groping their way toward the unfamiliar trenches, did not know that more than two weeks ago when Army Group Nord was still in the Siauliai region the methodical Germans had completed plans for their victory parade in Leningrad. SS General Knut was to be Leningrad commandant. The Nazi troops would march in triumph through Palace Square, column after column, past the General Staff building and the Winter Palace. There, it was anticipated, the happy Führer would review his victorious armies.3

  * * *

  1 There are minor differences in figures on the Volunteers, as given in various Soviet sources. For instance, Karasev puts the figure of women volunteers at 27,000 after one month. Another source gives the total for July 7 as 200,000, possibly meaning applications rather than acceptances (B. Malkin and M. Likhomarov, Voyenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 1, January, 1964, p. 17), and Leningrad v Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voine (p. 51) gives the July 7 total as 110,000.

  2 The figures are given differently by different sources. N.Z. (p. 69) gives the total as 12,102 as does 900 Geroicheskii Dnei (p. 51). 900 (p. 51) gives the Party total as 1,258 and the Komsomol as 1,015. However, S. Kostyuchenko and his fellow authors of the official history of the Kirov factory give the figure as 11,584, including 1,285 Party members and 1,196 Young Communists. They first published these figures in Neva (No. 11, November, 1964, p. 170) and repeated them without change in Istoriya Kirovskogo Zavod (Moscow, 1966, p. 97). The differences are insignificant but throw light on the difficulty of establishing exact statistics in connnection with the Leningrad blockade. For instance, V tor ay a Mirovaya Voina (p. 150), citing Defense Commissariat statistics, gives the total as 10,431, with 3,493 Party and Komsomol members. So does Leningrad v VOV (p. 54). Karasev (p. 44) gives the total for the 2nd Division as 9,210. So does Leningrad v VOV (p. 705). N.Z. makes it 8,751. There are parallel discrepancies in the figures on the “Public Order” battalions. Karasev (p. 48) gives the figure of 17,167 enrolled in 79 battalions by July 5. N.Z. (p. 25) gives a figure of 168 battalions, numbering 36,000 persons, including 10,000 Party members and 1,500 Young Communists. V tor ay a Mirovaya Voina (p. 155) gives a figure of 00 battalions, including 19,000 “by the beginning of July.”

  3Guidebooks to the sights of Leningrad had been printed and distributed, to both soldiers and officers. Soviet writers contend that invitations had been printed for a great banquet of honor to be held in the Hotel Astoria, across from St. Isaac’s. Even the date had been fixed—July 21, just a week away. The story of the banquet and the invitations was first reported in accounts written in the spring of 1942. But none of the sources reproduce either invitations, tickets or menus. The suspicion persists that the story is apocryphal. However, special permits for automobiles in Leningrad were printed by the Germans, and examples can be seen in the Central Museum of the Red Army. (Karasev, op. cit.j p. 102.)

  18 ♦ The Luga Line

  VSEVOLOD KOCHETOV AND HIS FELLOW WAR CORRE-spondent of Leningradskaya Pravda, Mikhail Mikhalev, drove out of Leningrad just after midnight on July 14 in the office Ford, which, because of the war, was painted a kind of dirty brown.

  Kochetov felt quite proud. He had managed to wangle from his paper not only a car and a Ukrainian chauffeur, Serafim Boiko, but from the Military Commissariat on Angleterre Street he had gotten a new TT pistol, still in factory grease, and two dozen bullets. He had a permit to keep the gun until September 1, when (happy thought!) the war might be over. He also had a big birthday cake in a cardboard box, some candy and a letter. These were for Comrade Molvo, director of the new military newspaper, To Victory, which had been set up for the 2nd Division of People’s Volunteers.

  Kochetov was especially proud because he had barely managed to become a war correspondent. He was exempt from military service because of a heart illness and, not having military status, had not been picked to go to the front by Leningradskay a Pravda. He wangled his assignment after meeting Mikhalev and three other correspondents one day on the street. They were all in brand-new uniforms. Kochetov was wearing a dark-blue jacket and bright-colored shoes. Very thin, very gloomy, he begged his colleagues: “Take me along, fellows.” They interceded with the editor, P. V. Zolotukhin, and now he and Mikhalev were on their way to the front for the first time to visit the 2nd Division, located near Opolye, or, perhaps, Veimarn or Ivanovskoye. No one quite knew. The night was lovely and warm. There was hardly any traffic. They passed through Krasnoye Selo, a dark quiet village, and the turn-off road to Ropsha, a place Kochetov knew well. Ropsha had once been a hunting grounds of the czars. In the palace where Peter III, husband of Catherine, was murdered in a drunken brawl by the lover of his wife, Count Orlov, Kochetov and his fell
ow students at the Agricultural School had had their dormitory.

  It was hard to believe that war was at hand, but, at a crossroads, they saw a bullet-riddled truck. In the next village a church had been bombed. About sixty-five miles from Leningrad they came to Opolye, a big village of well-built houses, well-painted, tin-roofed. An archway led into what had been in the old days a horse market. They found that Comrade Molvo was fast asleep. Kochetov decided to leave the birthday cake until the morrow. He located an empty room above the village store and tumbled in for a little rest before setting out for the front. In the morning Kochetov was disappointed to see no signs of action. He went off to a hay barn, and there in its quiet coolness, with the comfortable feel of the new pistol in its shiny brown holster against his hip, drafted his first dispatch, which he optimistically datelined: “From the Fighting Front.”

  The bucolic scene at Opolye could hardly have been more deceptive. The truth was that Leningrad’s defenses were in crisis. Once again the speed of von Leeb’s Panzers had outpaced the desperate Soviet effort to erect a firm line. Racing on from Pskov the 41st Panzer Corps had driven straight along the highway toward Luga. They brushed aside the remnants of the 118th Soviet Rifles and crushed the 90th Infantry, which was just coming up, unaware that the Germans were at hand. The Panzers smashed across the river Plyussa, only eighteen miles from Luga, where they had finally been halted in desperate fighting.

  While Kochetov blithely was driving through the night to the “front,” the 41st Panzers had switched the axis of their attack and were moving northeast to ram a shattering blow at the very segment of the line which Kochetov had selected to visit.

  By this time the Leningrad Command was in frenzy. Marshal Voroshilov had been named Supreme Commander on July 10. Three days later—why the delay?—Zhdanov was named his co-commander, or Military Council member.

  Draconian measures were taken.

  The whole Soviet command setup was being wildly shaken up in a desperate effort at survival. Aside from the replacement of General Kuznetsov as Northwest Front commander by General Sobennikov of the Eighth Army, Lieutenant General P. S. Klenov, Chief of Staff of the Northwest Front, was dismissed for incompetence and “weak leadership.”

  The situation on the Western Front was the same as that on the Northwest Front. Marshal (then General) A. I. Yeremenko, Soviet commander in the Far East, was called into Moscow. He left the Far East on June 22 and arrived (going most of the way by train!) on June 29. He was told by Marshal Timoshenko that the Western Front was in chaos and that the government had decided to remove General Dmitri Pavlov and his chief of staff, Major General V. Ye. Klimovsky, putting Yeremenko and Lieutenant G. K. Malandin in their places.

  Yeremenko located Pavlov early the next morning, breakfasting in a small tent outside Mogilev, where he had set up his headquarters. Pavlov, one of Russia’s most experienced soldiers, veteran of the Spanish Civil War, greeted Yeremenko in his usual joking manner.

  “How many years it’s been!” he said with a smile. “What fate has brought you here? Will you stay long?”

  For an answer Yeremenko handed over the order removing Pavlov from command. The General read it dumfounded and asked, “And where do I go?”

  “The Commissar has ordered you to Moscow,” Yeremenko said.

  Pavlov blinked. Then, recovering his manners, he invited Yeremenko to join him at breakfast. Yeremenko declined, saying he had no time and needed an immediate briefing.

  Pavlov sat silent for a moment or two, then began: “What can I tell you about the situation? The stunning blows of the enemy caught our troops by surprise. We were not ready for battle. We were in peacetime conditions, carrying out exercises in our camps and firing ranges. And, for this reason, we suffered heavy losses, in air power, artillery and tanks and in manpower, too. The enemy deeply penetrated our territory, occupying Bobruisk, Minsk.”

  Pavlov mentioned to Yeremenko the late hour at which he had received orders to go on Combat Alert.

  While Pavlov and Yeremenko talked, Marshals Voroshilov and B. M. Shaposhnikov arrived at Pavlov’s headquarters, driving up in a long black Packard limousine. They confirmed Pavlov’s gloomy picture.

  “It’s a bad business,” Voroshilov said. “There is no firm front. We have separate strongpoints in which our units are holding off the attacks of superior enemy forces. Communications with them are weak.”

  That afternoon Generals Pavlov and Klimovsky flew off to Moscow. Yeremenko never saw them again. They were shot immediately. Their guilt, in the view of Marshal S. S. Biryuzov, who knew them well, lay in the fact that to the very last moment they meticulously carried out the orders issued by Marshal Timoshenko and the General Staff at Stalin’s personal direction.1

  Creation of a new command in Leningrad did not provide troops for the Luga fortifications.

  Against the crippled Soviet armies von Leeb was estimated to have 21 to 23 crack divisions of Group Nord, led by the redoubtable 4th Armored, possibly 340,000 men in all. He had 326 tanks and 6,000 guns. Soviet sources estimated German superiority July 10 at 2.4 times in infantry, 4 in artillery, 5.8 in mortars, 1.2 in tanks. The Northwest Front that day had 102 planes in service. Group Nord had about 1,000.

  With the fall of Pskov the 4th Nazi Armored Group, now heading up the highway toward Luga, was breaking the way for an estimated dozen Nazi divisions. Six German divisions drove toward the Narva-Kingisepp sector.

  Desperate, the Leningrad Commancl decided to shift forces from the north (where the Karelian front with the Finns was relatively inactive) to the Luga line.

  The 10th Mechanized Corps and the 70th and 237th rifle divisions were ordered south. But before these crack units could get into position they were diverted by Voroshilov to the southeast to halt a threat of the Germans to overrun the Luga line by flanking it east of Lake Ilmen in the vicinity of Novgorod.

  What was to be done now? Not many troops remained at Leningrad’s disposal. Finally, General Pyadyshev was given the 191st Rifle Division to protect his right flank at Kingisepp and the 2nd Division of People’s Volunteers just to the south. The key position in the middle of the Luga line was held by Colonel G. V. Mukhin and his cadets of the Leningrad Infantry School. To Mukhin’s left was another People’s Volunteer division, the 3rd. The 177th Rifle Division protected the approaches to Luga city and on the south,* covering the span from Luga city to Lake Ilmen, were the 70th Rifle Division, the 1st People’s Volunteers and the 1st Mountain Brigade. The units were strung like beads on a chain. The 191st had a fifty-mile front to defend, the 2nd Volunteers a thirty-mile front. The approaches to Kingisepp were covered only by the retreating 118th Division. There were gaps of as much as fifteen miles, not defended by any forces.

  To back up this manshift force Pyadyshev had a strong artillery unit, led by a brilliant young colonel, G. F. Odintsov, who was destined to play an outstanding role in the defense of Leningrad.

  The artillery group was made up of a regiment of officers from the Red Army Higher Artillery School, a division of the 28th Corps Regiment, artillery regiments of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Leningrad artillery schools and an antiaircraft unit from the Leningrad artillery technical schools. Later, the group acquired the 51st Corps Regiment, retreating from the Baltic.

  Half of the manpower to defend the Luga line, thus, was People’s Volunteers. The fate of Leningrad might well depend on how these hastily mobilized, totally untrained, poorly armed workers’ battalions stood up under the hammer blows of Hitler’s finest, fastest-moving, best-equipped Panzer spearheads.

  Colonel Bychevsky spent July 11 on the Luga line. He installed heavy, electronically activated mines under some large buildings at Strugi Krasnye, Gorodishche and Nikolayevo, where German tanks could be expected at any moment. He placed a radio transmitter in a secluded corner of the big park at Gatchina, ready to transmit the signal touching off the electronic mines as soon as the Germans reached the three points.

  All day Bychevsky encountered throngs of refugees,
low-flying Messer-schmitts, blown-up bridges, corpses beside the roads, fleeing soldiers and officers trying to rally them to a stand.

  The night of the eleventh he was summoned with other top commanders to Smolny for a meeting with Voroshilov and Zhdanov. Voroshilov seemed nervous and ill at ease.

  General Popov, the Leningrad field commander, a tall, rather handsome man who was always restless indoors, described the situation. Reports from the front were not clear and often contradicted each other. An argument quickly developed over the direction of the main German thrust. Deputy Commander Pyadyshev, leader of the Luga group, believed the Germans had reached the line of the 483rd Regiment of the 177th Division and were fighting on the river Plyussa. However, Major General A. A. Novikov, air commander of the front, contended that his reconnaissance showed the main German strength, two hundred tanks or so, was at Strugi Krasnye.

  “What’s the value of that kind of intelligence?” Voroshilov asked. “You haven’t got a single prisoner, not one document. How many tanks are there at Strugi Krasnye? Who is moving on Gdov?”