The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  But what of Captain Kaliteyev? There was no word of him in the Supreme Command’s communiqué No. 303 of September 12, 1941, hailing the achievement of the Kazakhstany sole troop ship to survive the nightmare of Tallinn.

  Nor was this an accident. For Captain Kaliteyev was trapped in another nightmare. He was not dead, as most of those aboard the Kazakhstan had supposed.

  The bomb which killed the men on the bridge did not kill Kalitayev. It merely knocked him unconscious.

  “I heard the crash,” he said later, “and felt the crack of the ceiling breaking and I don’t remember anything more.”

  When he came to himself, he was lying on the right side of the bridge with his head toward the ladder leading to the upper bridge. He felt that his head was wet and putting his hand to it found it covered with blood. But he saw no wounds on his body.

  He then lost consciousness again and apparently slipped from the bridge for when he came to he was in the water with the ship sliding past him. There were many others in the water around him, and about 60 or 80 yards away was a small sloop, afire, with ten or fifteen persons clinging to it. He slipped out of his coat and boots. He wore no life jacket as he had felt that to don one would have aroused fear among the passengers.

  He kept afloat for half an hour and then with a sailor named Yermakov was picked up by the submarine S-322. The submarine was unable to return him to his ship. Instead, it took him to Kronstadt, where he arrived ahead of the Kazakhstan.

  An investigation was immediately launched into the captain’s conduct. Why had he left his ship? Why had he returned ahead of it? At first all went well. His associates in the merchant shipping service vouched for his character. The seven who saved the ship spoke up for him. Two medical experts said his story rang true.

  But then came derogatory stories from passengers on the boat. The captain had abandoned his post. He had leaped into the water in fear. Gossip went to work. The suspicious investigators of the NKVD grew more suspicious. Kronstadt at that moment was gripped by panic. Some measure of the atmosphere in which the case was judged can be grasped from the fact that Vladimir Rudny, a Moscow correspondent, and Yuli Zenkorsky, a Tass correspondent, were picked up as “spies” a few days before the Tallinn ships came in. A few days later the writer Mikhail Godenko saw a young sailor, drunk on a couple of bottles of eau de cologne, shouting, “Down with the Soviets.” A commander drew his nagan, his holster pistol, and shouted, “Stop!”

  “What. do you mean stop?” said the sailor. “You rats of the rear. Where were you when we were fighting at Gatchina, at Detskoye Selo?”

  “I’ll shoot,” the commander warned.

  “Shoot. Shoot ahead,” the sailor yelled. “Shoot me. But tomorrow the Germans will be fighting in Piter.”

  A single shot brought the sailor to the pavement.

  Admiral Kuznetsov, the Naval Commissar, visited Kronstadt August 31 —the day the evacuation of Tallinn was completed. Even before he arrived at Kronstadt he fell under the influence of the disorganized, panicky events. He found at Oranienbaum, where he embarked in his cutter for Kronstadt, undisciplined gangs of sailors, not in uniform, separated from their units, wandering aimlessly, seemingly oblivious to what was going on around them. Kronstadt was gloomy. The officers and the sailors were filled with depression.

  That was the atmosphere in Kronstadt in which the case of Captain Kalitayev was judged by the secret police. Their verdict: death before the firing squad. The chargé: desertion under fire, cowardice.

  Seventeen days after Order No. 303 was issued, honoring the seven men of Kalitayev’s crew for saving the Kazakhstan, the captain went before the firing squad and was executed.

  Not until January 27, 1962, did the Leningrad Military District Court get around to “rehabilitating” the reputation of Kalitayev and informing his widow, the actress, Vera Nikolayevna Tutcheva, that the chargés against her husband were quite without foundation. So closed one of the last and most tragic episodes of the Tallinn disaster.2

  Admiral Kuznetsov, Admiral Tributs, Admiral Panteleyev, Admiral Drozd and the other top naval men conducted a lengthy post-mortem in the ensuing weeks into the Tallinn affair. Admiral Kuznetsov tended to blame the Leningrad Command, which had operational control of the Baltic Fleet, for delay in ordering that evacuation plans be drafted for Tallinn—if necessary.

  Panteleyev felt that, while the decision to defend Tallinn to the last regardless of cost was right and necessary in order to draw as much German strength off Leningrad as possible, a major error had been made in not evacuating from Estonia long before the end thousands of civilians and all nonmilitary organizations, as well as the rear echelons of the fleet. Some officers felt the basic concept of the Baltic defense had been wrong—that the fleet should have evacuated Hangö and the islands, thrown up a strong defense line at Tallinn and then pulled back to the secure base at Kronstadt.

  As for the effort to plow through the German mine field, all admitted this had been a disastrous mistake. A later study by the fleet’s mine experts reached the conclusion that the mine field had the extraordinary density of not less than 155 mines and 104 mine protectors per mile. To traverse such a field with any safety would have required not less than a hundred seagoing mine sweepers.3

  The worst handicap, Panteleyev concluded, was the fact that the fleet had no secure bases. From the beginning of the war it had been in movement, falling back from Libau, to Riga, to Tallinn and finally back to Kronstadt. It would have been far better off never to have moved.

  The magnitude of the losses stimulated the search for scapegoats. The whole affair came under high-level security review. Vsevolod Vishnevsky, a fervent naval partisan and keen observer, wrote a sixteen-page report in the first days of his return to Kronstadt and submitted it to the Fleet Military Council and the Political Administration. He also wrote a fourteen-page report for publication in the fleet newspaper, Red Fleet. The public report was never published. The formidable Ivan Rogov, Political Commissar of the Fleet, had Vishnevsky in his black books. Moreover, the Tallinn disaster was a matter for very high-level politics. It was, in fact, a case for Lavrenti P. Beria and the secret police.

  Panteleyev and his fellow command officers were the subject of sweeping inquiry by police and prosecutors. They attempted honestly and realistically to explain what had happened. The explanations were not accepted.

  “A live criminal was what they wanted,” Panteleyev concluded, after going through a long night of questioning.

  The memory of one confrontation burned long in his consciousness. It was with an individual whom Panteleyev described as “a highly placed officer.” Could this have been Malenkov or Beria—or one of their chief aides? He does not specify.

  “Comrade Chief of Staff,” said this official, “why didn’t our fleet fight? Why have the Fascists been able to fight and we have not?”

  Panteleyev attempted to explain the complicated situation. The official would not listen.

  “No, no,” he said, “I do not agree with you. The staff is not supposed to concern itself with that kind of business. It must work out active operations and fight, and attack, and . . .”

  As Panteleyev dryly notes: “In the eyes of this important official the staff of the fleet came very close to being guilty for all the tragedies that had occurred.”

  Looking back at the Tallinn tragedy from a perspective of twenty-five years, the Soviet naval historian, Captain V. Achkasov, was convinced that its cause lay in the reluctance of any of the commanders—of either the Baltic Fleet, the Leningrad Command or the High Command in Moscow— to order preparations for evacuating the fleet.

  The reason for this reluctance, he felt, was a well-founded knowledge on the part of all that commanders of encircled units had repeatedly been subjected to the gravest chargés of cowardice and panic, often with fatal consequences. Rather than risk a firing squad, the commanders withheld any recommendations for withdrawal until a tragic outcome became inescapable.

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  1 By comparison with Dunkirk the Tallinn evacuation was sheer catastrophe. Dunkirk was a far larger operation, involving the safe evacuation of 338,226 men. The casualty figures are not entirely precise but are given as 9,291 (8,061 British and 1,230 Allied). In the retreat to Dunkirk and in the action on the beaches and in transit to England, a total of 68,111 British troops were lost. The British employed 1,084 ships in the evacuation, many of them very small. Only 108 of these were lost. The distance from Dunkirk to Dover and the channel ports was only forty to fifty miles, and there was complete command of the sea route by the British Navy and no problem of mines; even the Luftwaffe was not terribly active. (David Divine, The Nine Days of Dunkirk.) Incidentally, there is some confusion in the Soviet sources as to the number of men brought safely out of Tallinn. One source contends that 18,233 men were saved out of a total of 23,000 who started from Tallinn. This seems to be an obvious underestimate of casualties. (Vtoraya Miro-vaya Voina, Vol. II, p. 100, citing archives of the Baltic Fleet Command.)

  2 The “rehabilitation” of Captain Kaliteyev is in itself an epic and throws a penetrating light on the atmosphere which prevailed in Stalin’s Russia, during the war and after. The naval correspondent and playwright, Aleksandr Ilych Zonin, was a passenger on the Kazakhstan and a witness to what happened. Zonin did his utmost to establish the true facts and again and again implored his colleagues not to write the story as though it was the tale of “Seven Who Saved the Transport.” He placed his own version of the Kazakhstan affair in the naval archives, although he could not get it published. Orders had been issued coincident with the Order No. 303 honoring the “Seven” that Kaliteyev’s name was to be “blacked out.” The chief credit for establishing the truth is assigned by Vladimir Rudny, who long interested himself in the case, to Georgi Aleksandrovich Bregman, a correspondent of the newspaper Water Transport. Bregman had known Kaliteyev before the war and was completely confident of his bravery and honesty. He was in a military hospital recovering from wounds when he heard of the catastrophe which had befallen his friend. He began to collect evidence and after sixteen years of work managed to get the verdict against Kalitayev reversed. (Vladimir Rudny, Deistvuyushchii Flot, Moscow, 1965, pp. 57-72.) Zonin narrowly escaped the fate of Kalitayev. He was expelled from the Communist Party as a result of one of the literary political quarrels of the late 1920’s but, unlike most of his colleagues, was not arrested at that time. He served with great distinction in wartime as a Baltic Fleet correspondent and was recommended for readmission to the Party. But the Party control officials rejected him. In 1949 he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. He survived to be released after Stalin’s death but died soon of a heart attack, his health crippled by his sufferings. His son, Sergei, is now an officer in the Soviet Navy. (A. Shtein, Znamya, No. 4, April, 1964, pp. 78-84; Literaturnaya Gazeta, December 8, 1964.)

  3 After World War II when Soviet naval specialists subjected the Tallinn disaster to careful analysis, they concluded that the Baltic Fleet seriously overestimated the dangers of Nazi submarine attack. Had the fleet steamed straight out to sea, it would have been able to avoid most of the German mine fields and shore batteries. It would have risked attack by Nazi submarines, but the Germans were not present in strength in that area and, moreover, the Baltic Fleet was much better equipped to cope with submarine attack than with mines. There was also a channel close to the shore which Soviet ships had been using and which was known to be comparatively free of mines. However, it had been closed August 12 by order of the Northwest Front Command after the Nazis reached the Finnish Gulf at Kunda. (V. Achkasov, Voyenno-lstoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 10, October, 1966, p. 30.)

  24 ♦ The Northern Crisis

  THE COMMANDERS OF LENINGRAD’S DEFENSES TREATED the Northern Front—that with Finland—like a savings bank. From almost the beginning of the war they systematically transferred troops and matériel from the north to feed into the bleeding fronts on Leningrad’s south, southwest and southeast.

  But the Northern Front was not an inexhaustible reservoir of manpower. Marshal Voroshilov and Zhdanov could rob Peter to pay Paul, but sooner or later there was going to be a serious overdraft.

  For weeks the Twenty-third Army, first under General P. S. Pshennikov and now under Major General Mikhail N. Gerasimov, had held off Finnish forces north of Leningrad which were estimated at nearly twice its size. The Finns had a margin in guns of 1.2 and a 2.2 ratio of air superiority.

  But now the Twenty-third Army was falling into serious trouble. The Finns launched an offensive July 31, driving in the Keksholm direction, hoping to reach the northern shores of Lake Ladoga and split the Twenty-third Army in two.

  General Gerasimov had taken command of the army on August 4. A man of great self-confidence, his presence exuded calm. Once Colonel B. V. Bychevsky, the fortifications specialist, heard him report on a serious Finnish breakthrough. He showed no signs of nervousness. When he finished his report, he began to whistle a pleasant melody from an operetta.

  General Gerasimov’s task was complicated by the fact that he had no reserves. None whatever. All had been drained off into the defense of Leningrad’s southern approaches. Nor was that all. The High Command kept drawing on both the Twenty-third Army and its northern neighbor, the Seventh, to reinforce the shattered Leningrad front. It was a policy that was bound to lead to disaster. Now that disaster seemed near.

  The Finns drove through to the shores of Lake Ladoga near Khitola, northwest of Keksgolm, on August 6. Gerasimov’s eastern units—the 168th Rifle Regiment, the 367th Rifle Regiment and the 708th Rifle Regiment— were cut off from the west, fighting a defensive battle north of Sortavala. Another group, the 142nd Rifle Regiment and the 198th Motorized Division, continued to fight north and northeast of Kiitola. A third group was fighting south and west of Keksgolm.

  Only one division could be spared to reinforce Gerasimov. This was the 265th Rifle Division. The Finns had opened a gap of nearly twenty miles between Gerasimov’s divisions and were heading for the Lake Vuoksa, with the aim of getting behind him and encircling the forces defending Vyborg at the new Soviet-Finnish border.

  By August 15 the Finns had smashed across the Lake Vuoksa, east of Vyborg. The threat of encirclement to Gerasimov’s main forces was grave, and there were no troops available to help him. The Finnish front was crumbling at the precise moment when the Nazi offensive south and southwest of Leningrad was gaining in momentum.

  Because Leningrad had lived for so long under the danger of the nearby frontier with Finland, the Leningrad Military Command before World War II had always considered the north as the most critical area. Here the Soviets had invested tens of millions of rubles in concrete underground fortifications. Here were located the heaviest gun emplacements, the most powerful siege guns. The 1940 war with Finland had been fought to secure Leningrad’s northern approaches.

  Now the command was confronted with the tragic decision of abandoning the northern shield which had been wrested from Finland in the winter war. There was no alternative. The demands of the Southern Front were insatiable. On August 20—the very day that Zhdanov and Voroshilov prepared their “enemy at the gates” proclamation—the Supreme Command ordered the Twenty-third Army to retire to a shorter, more easily defensible line that ran from Lake Pukya to Lake Vuoksi and the right bank of the Vuoksi River, just north of Vyborg.

  The Vyborg defense group began to demolish the heavy fortifications along the new Finnish-Soviet frontier and fall back to the Vyborg area. But the Finns were too fast for them. The 2nd Finnish Corps cut behind the Russians and reached the Vuoksi, driving to within seven miles of Vyborg by the twenty-sixth of August.

  The options available to the Soviet commanders suddenly began to vanish. On August 28 Gerasimov was ordered to withdraw his three divisions to the old Mannerheim Line, along Lake Muolan and Rokkala. He was instructed to blow up all fortifications in Vyborg, to dig in on the new line and hold there.

  This was the news which
greeted Colonel Bychevsky when he arrived at General Staff headquarters the night of August 28. He knew that Gerasimov had proposed withdrawal to General Popov, the Leningrad commander, several days earlier, fearing that the Twenty-third Army might be cut off. But Popov summarily forbade such a move and reprimanded Gerasimov for what he called his “passivity.”

  The retreat in Karelia came as a personal blow to Bychevsky. He had directed the construction of much of the heavily fortified system which was now being destroyed. It was probably the best defensive line which the Soviets had ever built. He had overseen the mounting of the great guns just before the war started. He had laid the enormous and powerful mine fields which protected the forts. Now all this was lost. In fact, in the considered opinion of the Leningrad commander, General M. M. Popov, the new fortifications “played no special role” in the city’s defense. Bychevsky could not help feeling that by some means the Finns should have been halted on the fortified lines rather than on new ones which would have to be hastily improvised.