The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  General Pyotr P. Yevstigneyev, chief of intelligence, couldn’t say.

  “What units are approaching the Luga?” Voroshilov asked.

  Yevstigneyev couldn’t answer that either.

  The weight of evidence seemed to indicate that the chief German attack was to be expected at Luga city on the direct road to Leningrad.

  But what if the Germans struck south of Kingisepp? In that case the first units of the 2nd People’s Volunteers should be arriving the next day at Veimarn, only a few miles from the Luga line. The crack infantry cadet school unit under Colonel Mukhin was already in position at nearby Sabsk. After examining the plans for the Luga fortified zone, Voroshilov and Zhdanov went to Novgorod, where the headquarters of the Northwest Front was then located. They spent the day of July 12 there and approved plans for a counterattack by the Eleventh Army against the fast-moving 56th Nazi Motorized Corps. They strengthened the Eleventh Army with a tank division and two infantry divisions and ordered the attack to be launched early in the morning of the fourteenth.2

  On the twelfth and thirteenth Bychevsky was busy with fortifications and mining. Soon after dawn on the thirteenth he transmitted the radio signal that touched off the three great bombs he had put under the buildings at Strugi Krasnye. German motorized units were quartered there and the casualties were large. That evening, back at Smolny, Voroshilov and Zhdanov called in the commanders and political commissars of four newly formed guerrilla battalions, each composed of 10 units numbering 80 to 100 men. They were ordered immediately to cut behind the German lines and attempt by any possible means to halt or hamper the pace of Nazi advance. They had orders to attack units of Nazi motorized infantry, blow up bridges, destroy communications, burn supply dumps and warehouses left in the wake of the hectic Russian retreat and carry out other “special tasks.” Before dawn the “destroyer” battalions, as the Russians called them, had been transported to the Gdov-Slantsy area and left to make their way behind the lines.

  There was an atmosphere of desperation about every act of the High Command. A few hours after the “destroyer” groups had been dispatched, early on the fourteenth, Bychevsky got a frantic call from Leningrad. The 41st Panzers had smashed into Porechye, crossed the Luga River and the fortified line, seizing a foothold at Ivanovskoye within the Soviet defense system. A similar attempt at Sabsk had been narrowly beaten off by the infantry school men.

  Porechye was the heart of the 2nd People’s Volunteers sector. Once again the Germans had reached the line before the Soviet troops. Twenty German tanks roared through Porechye and into Ivanovskoye, just beyond it, as the first units of the 2nd Volunteers clambered out of the boxcars which had brought them up from Leningrad.3 When they formed up hastily to march to Ivanovskoye, they were hit by the Germans. Firing seemed to come from every direction. Peasant telegi or carts creaked down the road. Goats bleated. Horses neighed. The Volunteers began to drop, wounded or dead. Those who had guns fired wildly, often standing at full height with weapons on their shoulders as though on the rifle range. The Germans replied with cannon over open sights. Soon the dry turf and the forest debris caught fire, sending clouds of smoke billowing over the scene.

  If the Germans broke through here, they had a smooth highway sixty miles to the Winter Palace. There was not a single organized unit, not one manned defense position, to halt them all the way to Leningrad.

  The telephone call which Bychevsky received from Leningrad ordered him to report immediately to the Commander in Chief and bring with him a company of field engineers. Leningrad told him they were dispatching a thousand mines by truck. Bychevsky gathered up the 106th Sappers Battalion and, traveling a roundabout way to avoid Nazi dive-bomber attacks, managed to get to command headquarters in five hours. He found the whole Leningrad Front Command there, including both General Popov and Marshal Voroshilov.

  The two generals were standing on an open hillside about five hundred yards from Ivanovskoye, watching the 2nd Volunteers straggle back from an unsuccessful counterattack.

  Soviet artillery was laying shells into the center of Ivanovskoye. The izbas were going up in clouds of smoke. Through his binoculars Bychevsky saw German tanks moving through the smoke to the edge of the village, their ugly guns flashing with fire. Three or four bawling goats stood still tethered to wooden slat fences in front of the izbas.

  Voroshilov greeted Bychevsky rudely. He snapped, “Sappers are always late!” Then he turned and, paying no heed to shells bursting nearby or to the splinters whistling through the air, continued to examine the battlefield.

  Bychevsky heard some machine gunners talking:

  “That’s him—Voroshilov! Klim!”

  “Look how he stands, as though he grew out of the earth.”

  “My mother says there are people who have a charm against bullets.”

  “Bullets maybe. But those are shells!”

  Voroshilov was not amused at what he saw. He wanted to know why the artillery was firing on an empty village with the German armor already on the outskirts. Popov started to explain that the artillery hadn’t had time to reconnoiter the village, then broke off. Before Voroshilov could interfere Popov climbed into a tank and headed for the village himself.

  “What the hell!” Voroshilov shouted, clapping his hands.

  Soon, however, the tank was hit by a shell and lumbered back. Popov climbed out, shaken.

  “What’s the idea?” Voroshilov yelled. “Have you lost your mind? If you are going to reconnoiter the positions, who’s going to command the front?”

  Voroshilov encountered a pretty Red Cross girl named Klavdia and told her she should not be in such a dangerous position. Klavdia pertly replied: “And what about you, Comrade Marshal? You go right to the center of the fire. Why? Because you are needed. I go where I’m needed—to where the wounded lie.”

  A few moments later Popov and Voroshilov whirled off. Not, however, without leaving orders that the place (Tarmes at Porechye-Ivanovskoye be promptly liquidated—orders that cost the 2nd People’s Volunteers dearly in a vain attempt at fulfillment. Years later the picture of the corpse-strewn battlefield was still in the mind of a participant.

  For all his warnings to Popov about reckless conduct, Voroshilov found it hard to restrain himself. On the same part of the front at the village of Sredneye, a few miles from Ivanovskoye, troops of the 2nd Volunteers had broken under a German attack just as Voroshilov came up. They were falling back in ones and twos and small groups. Voroshilov got out of his command car and personally halted the retreating men. At this moment a Soviet tank unit and some infantry reinforcements appeared. Drawing his pistol, the sixty-year-old hero of the Bolshevik Civil War led the troops across the field toward the Germans. The shout of “Hurrah!” rang out. The German attack petered out, and the 2nd Volunteers stiffened their lines, their morale restored by the old cavalryman’s personal example of bravery.

  The fourteenth was a day of dark alarms. The Germans crossed the Luga on the Sabsk front held by the infantry cadets but made little progress in sharp fighting. The Russians could not dislodge them from Porechye no matter how hard they tried.

  In an effort to stiffen the crumbling People’s Volunteers, the Supreme Defense Command in Moscow agreed to release to each infantry division three to five tanks, either the monster KV’s or the work-horse T-34’s.

  Before the day was over Zhdanov issued in his name and that of Vorosh-ilov a decree or Prikaz which was the first of what was to be a series of dramatic exhortations.

  “Comrade Red Army men! Commanders and political workers!” it began. “Over the city of Lenin, the cradle of the Proletarian Revolution, there looms the immediate danger of the invading enemy.”

  The decree took note of what was a fact—the disorder and panic that were engulfing the front. “Individual panicmongers and cowards,” said the Prikaz, “not only voluntarily leave the front, but they sow disorder among the ranks of honest and brave soldiers. Commanders and political workers not only do not suppress panic
but do not organize and lead their units in battle. By their shameful conduct they even increase disorganization and fear along the front lines.”

  The proclamation decreed that anyone leaving the front regardless of rank or responsibility would go before a field tribunal and be shot on the spot.

  Confusion and tension had been heightened by the alarming reports from the Supreme Command in Moscow. On July 10 the Supreme Command warned the Leningrad Command that the Germans planned a mass para-troop attack on the Leningrad area. Leningrad was ordered to strengthen its air reconnaissance and create reserves (from what?) of fighter and bomber aircraft to wipe out the Nazis when they landed.

  New air observation points were set up throughout Leningrad, hasty efforts were made to mobilize the population for defense (youngsters eight to sixteen were to be trained to fight in hand-to-hand combat). An effort was made to turn the whole area into a hornet’s nest of fire points from which the Germans would not emerge alive.

  The landing of the Germans never occurred. It was one of many such rumors which swept Leningrad. Because of the Nazi tactics in the West the Russians feared, above almost any other possibility, German air and sea landings behind their lines.

  The speed with which the Germans penetrated the Luga line stimulated Zhdanov to redoubled efforts to fortify the near approaches to Leningrad. He placed his first deputy, Party Secretary Aleksei A. Kuznetsov, in chargé of this work, with Bychevsky as his chief lieutenant.

  One of Kuznetsov’s first acts was to call in the NKVD and mobilize all the prisoners in the NKVD labor camps. The prisoners were sent first to the Kingisepp region, where there was every reason to anticipate an early breakthrough. Because of constant German air attack the women who had been working there were transferred to locations closer to Leningrad.

  Colonel Bychevsky, the tireless engineer, was fond of Kuznetsov, whom he called the “human spring” because his energy and even temper seemed inexhaustible. Kuznetsov was under forty, very thin, very pale. His sharp face and nose gave him an appearance of strictness, but Kuznetsov was soft, attentive and almost always tactful. He seldom raised his voice, and he did not rebuke people without reason. In this he was in sharp contrast to many Party executives, including his chief, Andrei Zhdanov.

  One night Bychevsky was working at his. desk. It was 4 A.M. The telephone rang. It was Kuznetsov, asking him to come immediately to the Mariinsky Theater. Bychevsky could not imagine what emergency had arisen. He hurried to the theater, where he found Kuznetsov bubbling with excitement. He showed Bychevsky an array of papier-mache guns and tanks which the theater’s scenic artists had built. He proposed to issue immediate orders to get the decoys up to suitable positions behind the front.

  Now there came a momentary respite in the Nazi pressure. The battered Soviet Eleventh Army, protecting the approaches to Shimsk, the Lake Ilmen anchor of the Luga line, had been reinforced with troops from the Karelia front—the 21st Tank Division, the 70th Guards and the 237th Rifle Division. Finding Manstein’s 56th Motorized Corps badly exposed, the Soviet force struck in a pincers attack. Between July 14 and 18 they drove the Germans back nearly thirty miles.

  As Manstein dryly noted: “It’s impossible to say that the position of the corps at this moment is very enviable. The last few days have been critical, and the enemy with all his strength is attempting to close the ring of encirclement.” The 8th Nazi Panzer Division had to retire for refitting. The 56th lost about four hundred vehicles. The immediate threat to Novgorod was liquidated. For the moment Leningrad could breathe a bit easier.

  Hitler showed some concern over the situation. In a directive of July 19 he warned that further advance toward Leningrad could be achieved only when the eastern flank of Group Nord had been secured by the Sixteenth Army. The 3rd Panzer Group of Army Group Center was switched to a northeast axis in order to cut connections between the Leningrad front and Moscow and shore up the right flank of von Leeb’s forces.

  Hitler followed his admonitions with a personal visit to von Leeb’s headquarters July 21 at which he demanded that Leningrad be “finished off speedily.”

  Nikolai Tikhonov and Vissarion Sayanov visited Major General Andrei E. Fedyunin, commander of the 70th Guards, after his successful rollback of von Manstein’s 56th Motorized Corps. Fedyunin’s headquarters were in Sheloni, in a clearing amid a defense forest, near a big village called Medved (Bear). Tikhonov had known Fedyunin in the days of the winter war with Finland. It was a hot summer day, a good day for picking berries, for sauntering in the woods and finding a cool stream to lie beside.

  For nearly ten days his front had been quiet. But General Fedyunin was neither relaxed nor cheerful.

  “This quiet is deceptive,” he said. “It will happen—and soon. We helped our Luga force, but now the enemy has regrouped. He will hit us here. Not this division, perhaps. He knows us. We have licked him. But he will hit the 1st Volunteers and move on Novgorod. ... It is going to be hard for us, but we have no alternative: fight to the last!”

  Tikhonov and Sayanov watched the shadows grow longer. Toward evening a woman came by with a shovel. A guard stopped her and told her the Germans were laying mortar fire into her potato field. She shrugged her shoulders and went on. “It will be dark; maybe they won’t see me,” she said.

  Someone asked General Fedyunin why he was wearing his dress uniform. He laughed. He had been wearing it when the war started and hadn’t gotten around to getting his field clothes sent to him.

  “I’ll do it tomorrow,” he said.

  The correspondents went their way. A day later, August 13, Tikhonov was in Novgorod, the most ancient of Russian cities. Its old walls rattled to the sound of artillery fire. People streamed through the square. The Novgorod lands were once again aflame with war.

  Tikhonov asked an officer about the 70th Guards. They were falling back northwest of the city, the officer said, under attack by fresh German divisions.

  “When did you leave the 70th?” the officer asked.

  Tikhonov told him. “You’re lucky,” the officer replied. “The Germans hit an hour later. General Fedyunin has been killed.”4

  The Germans were not the only enemy.

  Bychevsky worked almost daily in close liaison with Lieutenant General K. P. Pyadyshev, commander of the Luga Operating Group defending the Luga line. On July 23 Bychevsky received a copy of a new order dividing the Luga front into three sectors, each with an individual commander and staff. This might make some sense, Bychevsky thought. After all, Supreme Headquarters as early as July 15 had recommended reducing the size of units since so many Soviet commanders had proved incapable of handling large bodies of troops. But each division of the front increased the chance of openings on the flanks, of bad liaison, of gaps through which German armor could penetrate. This had been the story of the German success to now. Why suddenly split the Luga line? And what about Pyadyshev? There was nothing in the communiqué to indicate his assignment. “Pyadyshev,” Bychevsky noted, “simply vanished from the horizon.”

  Rumors began to circulate that Pyadyshev had been arrested. Bychevsky did not want to believe this. He asked the Chief of Staff, General Nikishev. Nikishev replied: “I don’t know"—and made plain he wanted no more talk about the matter.

  Pyadyshev was no military novice. For ten years he had served in the Leningrad Military District. In the 1930’s he headed military schools and conducted exercises and maneuvers. He had been chief of various commissions entrusted with work on Leningrad’s fortifications. He wore two Orders of the Red Banner, won in victories in the Civil War. He was a military scholar, a man of tact and even temper, straightforward in personal relations and solicitous of the opinion of others.

  It had been thanks to his initiative, in the absence of Zhdanov and of Popov, that work had got under way so rapidly on the Luga line. He it was who organized the special Luga artillery group and the units from the military schools. Bychevsky’s high opinion of Pyadyshev was not unique. General Mikhail Dukhanov, another Le
ningrad veteran, called him one of the best officers in the command, a man of wisdom, experience and vigor, exceptionally able at preparing troops for battle and directing them, even in a situation in which blunder and confusion were inescapable.

  Neither the reason nor the circumstances of Pyadyshev’s arrest were ever made known. Even today no public explanation has been given.5

  However, Pyadyshev’s removal was only one of a series of moves taken on July 23. A unified antiaircraft command was created, covering not only the fighting fronts but also Leningrad itself. The direction of defense construction in the Luga zone was lodged in a troika headed by Party Secretary Kuznetsov, and the fortifications work was divided into five sectors.

  One other event may have been connected with this shake-up. On July 23, Vyacheslav A. Malyshev, Commissar of Heavy Machine Building, telephoned the great Kirov factory and gave the plant director personal instructions for the organization of antiaircraft defense and fire-protection activities.

  The impression left by these moves is one of frenetic activity, bordering on hysteria if not panic.

  Perhaps Pyadyshev was shot to show his fellow officers that the warning in the Voroshilov-Zhdanov decree of July 14 meant business. Or perhaps he fell victim to a secret police plot, too confused, too complex, ever to be sorted out.

  Later on, after the war, when Soviet military historians began to examine the Leningrad battle, they tended to give more and more credit to the Luga line for saving the city from total disaster. The Germans were held up on the Luga front from July 9 or 10 to August 8—close to a month. The blitzkrieg was thrown off pace, the Nazi timetable out of balance. The date for Hitler’s victory parade on Palace Square had to be postponed and then postponed again. During the month, despite fierce fighting, despite unconscionable Soviet losses, only minor German penetrations were made from Kingisepp to Lake Ilmen and old Novgorod. The line held. It held in spite of casualties that almost wiped out the units of the People’s Volunteers—losses which an experienced officer like Dmitri Konstantinov regarded as sheer scandal. Even F. I. Sirota, a patriotic historian of the Leningrad epic, conceded the “very low military capability of the People’s Volunteers.” The officers were no more experienced than the men. Brigadier Commander Malinnikov of the 1st Volunteers, the highly regarded Kirov division, had to be removed for what was euphemistically called “losing direction of his troops.” The fact was that many Volunteers broke and fled, and no one could have halted them. The men had no training and few arms. Often they did not even remember to fire their guns at the enemy. So many lost their weapons in their first engagements that army propagandists launched a special campaign of slogans: “The weapon is the power of the soldier.” “To lose your gun is a crime against the Motherland.”