The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  “What is to be done now?” Bychevsky asked his assistant, Colonel Nikolai Pilipets.

  Pilipets spread his hands.

  “Nobody knows,” he replied. “Army staff already has changed its location twice today, and now communications with Gerasimov have been interrupted. One thing is clear: the three Vyborg divisions are in a trap.”

  The Vyborg divisions, the 42nd, the 115th and the 123rd, had no chance to reach the Mannerheim Line on the Finnish side of the old frontier. They had virtually no ammunition and were cut off from headquarters. On their own initiative they retreated southwest to the little fishing port of Koivisto on the northern shore of the Finnish Gulf. The Finns drove steadily forward, occupying Vyborg August 29; Kivennapa, thirty miles south, on the same night; Raivola on the thirtieth; and Terijoki, on the old Soviet-Finnish frontier, August 31. The 168th Division, which had been isolated, defending Sortavala on the northern coast of Lake Ladoga, suffered extraordinary losses and finally had to be removed across Lake Ladoga to Leningrad.

  The remnants of the Twenty-third Army attempted to move back to the old Karelian fortified area and occupy the system which had defended Leningrad’s northern approaches prior to the 1939–40 winter war with Finland. This line was only twenty miles from the Leningrad city limits.

  Even this was not accomplished without great difficulty and risk. The retreating troops, destroying their equipment, attempted to slip out in small groups through the dense forest and boggy marshes. Many units lost their way and became disoriented in the gloomy wilderness. Some became demoralized. Others managed to make their way to the Sestra River and the Sestroretsk fortified line.

  For two or three critical days at the end of August there was almost no organized defense. The Finns could have pushed ahead and stormed the Beloostrov fortifications, marching into the northern suburbs of Leningrad. The only units holding on were some detachments hurriedly taken from the Baltic Fleet and thrown into battle as land marines. This handful of Soviet units staved off the storming of the northern capital by the Finnish troops.

  One of these units was a small reconnaissance outfit headed by Anatoly Osovsky. He had twenty-six men. On September 1 he found himself in Sestroretsk, where he reported to the local Party secretary and the head of the NKVD, who sent him to the highway just north of Sestroretsk where a Nazi tank column had been reported. There he discovered a handful of soldiers, who joined his group. A mile north of the city near the local customshouse he spotted a German T-3 medium tank firing down the highway. His men took cover in a sand pit. The tank slowly advanced, but Osovsky disabled it with two accurately hurled grenades which tore off its treads.

  Soon two more tanks and forty or fifty infantrymen appeared. Osovsky had fifteen men left. They opened fire with small arms and brought the advance to a halt. Osovsky’s men stayed in their positions for six days, winning personal congratulations from Party Secretary Andrei Zhdanov.

  Leonid Zakharkov, member of a naval air unit, volunteered for a naval detachment which was hurriedly thrown into the same Beloostrov front.

  “We sloshed all night through the marsh,” he recalled, “up to our waists in water. We carried our equipment over our heads—guns, mortars, ammunition. Suddenly we found ourselves almost to our necks in water. We moved ahead under machine-gun fire from the railroad tracks.”

  Fighting beside him were two girls, Valya Potapova, wife of a scout, and black-eyed, black-haired Anna Dunayeva. They lived in Terijoki and had joined a patrol battalion which on August 31 found itself fighting a Finnish parachute detachment in the Pukhtolovo Hills. There were 10 girls in the unit of 140. They had three machine guns and several dozen rifles.

  Forced to retreat to Terijoki, they found the city burning and empty. The bakery was on fire, the city hall ablaze. By nightfall they reached the road to Sestroretsk. There they got a ride part of the way and joined the little band of defenders. On that first night the lines ran through a swamp beside the Sestra River. After two days they fell back into the fortified lines, where the naval brigade joined them.

  The battle for Beloostrov went on and on into September. Twice the Russians were thrown out of the city and fought their way back in hand-to-hand combat in which an outstanding Soviet tank commander, Major General Lavrionovich, was killed. But his tanks moved forward in heavy rain and mud and managed to secure the city. Finnish attacks went on for the next three months, but the Soviet lines held.

  The collapse of the Twenty-third Army was marked by savage fighting. Ivan Kanashin, one of the youngsters who had volunteered at Komsomol headquarters at Gryady on Sunday, June 22, now was serving with a detachment of twenty-eight Young Communists, defending an airfield outside Vyborg. They had beaten off a heavy paratroop attack and on the windy, dark morning of August 29 lay in field positions and watched the thin red sunrise streak the sky. Soon an enemy tank column appeared on the Vyborg highway. The tanks halted to inspect some ditches beside the road where lay the bodies of several hundred paratroopers, killed in an attack of the previous day.

  The young troopers held their fire until the last possible moment, then opened up with hand grenades. The Finns tossed back grenades, and Kanashin dropped with a splinter wound in his neck. When he regained consciousness, he saw an officer standing over him and a group of eight Russian wounded.

  “The valiant German troops already are marching down the boulevards of Leningrad,” the officer said, in Russian. “And you stupid kids think you are going to save Russia. What’s the idea of this suicide, I ask you? Soviet Russia is kaput.”

  A youngster named Misha Anisimov raised himself, blood streaming from his mouth and down his face. “Hitlerite baboons!” he shouted. “I spit on you. Go ahead. Shoot.”

  The officer kicked Anisimov, drew his pistol and shot him. Then he shot a youngster named Ilyusha Osipov.

  “What’s the matter, ytau Russian bastards?” he said. “Are you dying of terror? Maybe you’ll come to your senses before it’s too late. One word for mercy and I’ll give you your lives.”

  Kanashin lifted himself and spat in the officer’s face.

  A minute later he was yanked to his feet. Two troopers put a chain around his neck, attachéd it to their car and started to drive off. Kanashin with his last strength grabbed the collar as he felt his body swaying behind the careening machine.

  A cold rain brought him to consciousness. He lay beside the road, half in, half out of a small stream. He had been left for dead by the troopers. Staggering to his feet, he entered the forest. Somehow he managed to make his way across the countryside, through marshes and underbrush. He stumbled into the Russian lines beyond Terijoki at the Sestra River on September 8.

  On the morning of September 1 Admiral Panteleyev had gone out into the staff garden at Kronstadt to get a little fresh air. He had been working since the night before on plans for new mine barriers to guard the approaches to Leningrad and on means of supporting the garrisons at Hangö and on the Moonzund Islands, which still held out at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland.

  As he strolled in the open, listening to the roar of the Kronstadt guns, backing up the heavy fighting on the Leningrad approaches ashore, an aide called him to Admiral Tributs.

  “There’s a call from Smolny,” Tributs said. “The 115th and 123rd divisions, falling back from Vyborg, have suffered heavy losses and they are surrounded almost without supplies and weapons along the shore at Koivisto. We don’t know the exact situation. Communications are cut. They should be somewhere near here.”

  The Admiral stepped to a chart and made a black circle with his long pencil between Koivisto and Makslakhti.

  “Is everything clear?” Tributs asked.

  Nothing at all was clear, but Panteleyev waited for Tributs to continue.

  “Voroshilov has ordered us to collect the divisions from Koivisto and bring them to Leningrad. You are in chargé. Is it clear now?”

  Tributs gave Panteleyev permission to telephone his family in Leningrad —he had not had time to s
ee them since the Tallinn evacuation. Panteleyev talked to his family, then made his plans. He would need six or seven transports for the new evacuation. While they were being collected, he decided to go to Koivisto and see for himself what the situation was.

  Protection for the rescue convoys would be provided by armored cutters and gunboats. The fleet batteries on Krasnaya Gorka and the Bjerkoe Peninsula could lay down protective fire.

  Panteleyev set off in a wooden patrol boat—the best defense he could think of against the magnetic mines which were plaguing Soviet ships in the Gulf of Finland. The weather was fine—a lazy southwest wind and gentle waves. The patrol boat skirted the Finnish coast. Panteleyev saw an occasional summer villa, no people, no horses, no cows. He had known the Koivisto cove since he was a youngster and had sailed there. It was a picturesque coast and this was where the yachts began their cruise to the Gulf of Bothnia.

  In the Koivisto Harbor Panteleyev found two Soviet gunboats, an ironclad and a landing barge. The Soviet forces had set up a defensive ring, and it seemed probable that they would be able to hold out against attack until the evacuation was completed. Word came from Kronstadt that two transports were on the way.

  Some army men appeared on the pier, gloomy, with drawn faces and hoarse voices. They were commanders of various broken units. There were many wounded. Finally a division commander came up with the remnants of his staff. He was as tired as the others but still carried himself with vigor.

  “I’ve neither guns nor tanks left,” he said.

  “Never mind,” Panteleyev assured him. “We have 130-mm guns on the ship. They will support us.”

  In the darkness the first transport appeared. It was decided to load the two thousand wounded first. Next unwounded soldiers would be boarded, but only those who still had their guns. This was a purposeful order. The officers had noticed many men throwing away their weapons. Now the troops started to scurry about. Miraculously unit after unit appeared, each man with a gun or submachine gun.

  “Our tickets for the steamboat,” one man said.

  Three ships had been assembled for the operation—the Barta, under Captain A. Farmakovsky, the Otto Schmidt, captained by N. Fafurin, and the Meero, commanded by Captain V. A. Tsybulkin.

  The Barta arrived first. It loaded 2,350 men and took off.

  Thousands still waited on the shore when word came that one of the transports—it was the Meero—had been sunk near the Bjerkesund, by either a mine or a torpedo.

  Then the Otto Schmidt ran aground, but managed to get off and picked up its load. All night long the evacuation went on. The last transport vanished to sea, and still men and women kept appearing from the forest. A gunboat was sent off, loaded to the water line with evacuees.

  Panteleyev stood by with several cutters in case more people appeared. Finally, he gave the order to cast off. His boat had gone only a short distance when the sailors spotted a dog, panting with exhaustion, running down the pier.

  “It’s our dog from the gunboat!” a sailor shouted. The boat drew back to the pier and the dog jumped aboard, wild with happiness.

  Panteleyev’s boat moved out to sea. As they approached the Stirsudden lighthouse, they hailed it. No answer. “Maybe they’re asleep,” someone said. Then the answer came: a shot from a field gun. Then another. Clear enough! The enemy had occupied the lighthouse.

  Before noon the convoy had reached Kronstadt—14,000 men had been evacuated safely, 12,000 “fit for combat” and 2,000 wounded.

  Pavel Luknitsky, the correspondent, had spent much time on the Karelian front. He had seen the tenseness, the near-panic in Petrozavodsk when women and children were evacuated with the heightening of the Finnish August offensive. Now he met the survivors of the Twenty-third Army when they arrived in Leningrad. He thought them far from fit for battle. Many were emaciated, exhausted. Many were wounded. Many had fought to the last of their strength. Others had become demoralized when they found themselves trapped in encirclement. It would take time to form these bedraggled troops into new first-class fighting units. But time was one asset Leningrad did not possess. The men were assigned to new units and sent up to the front almost as rapidly as they landed in the cutters from Kronstadt.

  In Karelia the Soviet troops dug in on the old lines, there to sit it out until 1944. To the east, on the Seventh Army front, there was another month of action. The Seventh Army positions east of Lake Ladoga had been unhinged by the disintegration of the Twenty-third Army. The Finns massed nine infantry divisions and three brigades against the Seventh Army—a manpower superiority of almost three to one. Beginning September 4 they went on the offensive. In harsh fighting the Finns captured Olonets the next day and drove to the Svir River by September 10, cutting the Kirov railroad which connected the Karelian front with the rest of the country. After a bitter battle the Finns finally occupied Petrozavodsk October 2.

  By this time—as of September 24—General Meretskov, one of the best of the Soviet generals, had taken command of the Seventh Army. He stabilized the front along the whole Finnish littoral, and for practical purposes there was no more movement until the opening of the Soviet counterdrives in 1944.

  On the line of the river Svir and on the old Finnish-Soviet frontier positional warfare became the rule of the day. The objective which Hitler had advanced before launching his attack on Russia—that the Germans and the Finns join hands across the Karelian peninsula in preparation for the final great sweeping drive south on Moscow—was not now achieved—nor would it be. But critical days lay ahead before this was to become clear.

  25 ♦ The Last Days of Summer

  THE TRAIN ON WHICH VERA INBER WAS RIDING SLOWED to a halt just after daybreak. No station was in sight, no plane in the sky, no sound of gunfire. All was stillness. Even the men in the compartment where an endless game of preference was in progress played with stealthy quietness. The Lieutenant General, whistling under his breath, named his suit. A military engineer next to him tapped his pipe so gently on the edge of the table it sounded like a distant woodpecker. A single wisp of tobacco smoke floated out the door and into the corridor, where it was caught in the rays of the rising sun.

  So still was it that to Vera Inber the train seemed to be moving on velvet rails.

  She had seen few signs of war. At Volkhov two fighter planes flew over the train for a while, and a small detachment of marines, the golden anchors on their uniforms glittering in the sun’s first rays, marched down the platform.

  To the right and the left of the track the holes, filled with water, seemed to be more frequent. Along the telegraph line there were also holes, but smaller ones. The Germans, she thought, are very economical, very German in their bombing. They wasted nothing: big bombs for the railroad tracks, small bombs for the telegraph poles. Now the forest was scorched by explosions and there were uprooted trees. She saw a birch, its bark crisscrossed with names and messages. The history of a lifetime had been scratched out on the white surface. Now it sagged, half-burnt, blackened, torn.

  When the train pulled through the next station, Vera Inber read the name, neatly outlined on white-painted stones that stood among a bed of red and white petunias. The name was Mga. Vera Inber had never heard it before. These stations, she thought, all had drowsy, ancient Russian names . . . names that smelled of the pitch and the honey of the pine and birch forests: Mga . . . Budogoshch . . . Khvoinaya . . .

  In those days the novelist Vera Ketlinskaya spent most of her time in an old stone mansion at No. 18 Ulitsa Voinova, just off Liteiny Prospekt, a stone’s throw from the Neva. Here was the headquarters of the Leningrad Writers Union, and here she sought to organize her colleagues in Leningrad’s war effort. An aeon had passed since that Sunday in the country at Sviritsa, where she had been teaching her ten-month-old son, Serezhka, to take his first halting steps and someone interrupted with the news: War!

  In the last days of August her task was not easy. She was besieged with requests for permission to leave the city. People wanted a pass to
get out before the Germans came.

  There was panic and nervousness. Not that Vera Ketlinskaya was inclined to blame anyone. The situation was frightening. The city was preparing for battle in the streets. The examples of Madrid and of London were vivid in the minds of all. Block-by-block defense units were being set up. Because there were so few guns, Finnish knives—long-bladed hunting weapons—were being passed out.

  She tried to persuade some of the writers who obviously could make little contribution to Leningrad’s defense to leave, But many refused to go. One was Yevgeny Shvarts, the playwright whose The Naked King reminded more than one Leningrader of life under Stalin (which may be the reason it remained in Shvarts’s literary archives after his death and was only performed ten years after Stalin’s death and eight years after Shvarts’s).

  The Leningrad Theater of Comedy was being evacuated. But Shvarts would not join his associates. He said he would stay on in his granite building at No. 9 Griboyedov Canal, where he was a member of the fire brigade and his wife belonged to the first-aid team.

  Shvarts was no Communist, but he was a patriot.1 A few months before the war started he wrote a play in which a foreign spy plane landed somewhere on the steppes of southwest Russia. The censors banned the play. “Really,” they told Nikolai Akimov, director of the Theater of Comedy, “do you think our air frontiers are not secure? The basic theme of this play is unjustified and impossible.”

  Shvarts volunteered to help Vera Ketlinskaya. He was with her when a Party secretary telephoned from Smolny about a uniformed war correspondent. The secretary wanted the man released so he could be sent to the rear. “This is a military question,” said the Party man, “not a literary one.”

  “Indeed,” Shvarts commented wryly, “it is a military matter—a matter of getting out of the military.”

  Two days after the correspondent escaped to the safety of Moscow an article he had written earlier was published by Leningradskay a Pravda, proclaiming: “We will defend Leningrad with our naked breasts!”