The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  Kuznetsov sought to steer the conversation to broader naval matters. But Stalin would have none of it. He had a map on the wall, a small one, showing the German lines running right up to Leningrad, and now he got to the question for which he had summoned Kuznetsov. The situation of Leningrad was extraordinarily serious, he said.

  “It is possible that it may be abandoned,” he added. Then, asking Kuz-netsov to run over again the number and classes of warships in the Baltic Fleet, he snapped: “Not one warship must fall into the hands of the enemy. Not one,” he repeated. Moreover, he made plain that if his order was not carried out, the guilty parties would be “strictly judged.” This term, in Stalin’s vocabulary, meant one thing: the firing squad.

  “I understood that this was not the time to discuss this question,” said Kuznetsov later. He awaited further orders.

  The orders were simple: to prepare and send to the commanders of all ships instructions to prepare for scuttling.

  To his own surprise—and obviously to Stalin’s—Kuznetsov blurted out: “I cannot sign such a telegram.”

  Stalin wanted to know why. Kuznetsov suddenly recalled that the fleet was under the operational control of the Leningrad front. Such orders, he said, required Stalin’s signature as chief of the Stavka.

  Kuznetsov was not entirely certain why Stalin wanted the order signed by the Naval Commissar, but the implication was he wanted to shift the blame.

  Stalin then suggested that Kuznetsov go to the Chief of Staff, Marshal Shaposhnikov, and have the telegrams prepared with two signatures, Shapo-shnikov’s and Kuznetsov’s.

  But Shaposhnikov was not interested in putting his hand to such an order either. “This matter is entirely for the fleet,” he told Kuznetsov. “I will not put my signature to it.”

  Kuznetsov told him the idea was Stalin’s. Shaposhnikov still objected. Finally, the men decided to draft the telegram and send it to Stalin for his signature. Stalin agreed but didn’t send the orders off immediately. Eventually, however, they went out.

  A year later Kuznetsov had reason to congratulate himself on his foresight. Police Chief Beria sent to Stalin a report charging the Baltic Fleet Commander, Admiral V. F. Tributs, with yielding to panic in issuing “premature orders” to prepare the fleet for scuttling. A copy went to Kuznetsov. ‘I quickly reminded them what the situation was and removed the blame irom the leaders of the fleet,” Kuznetsov recalled.

  The curious reluctance of Stalin to sign the order, the accusation by the police and the apparent conviction on Stalin’s part that the fall of Leningrad was likely hint at the desperate politics being played around the city.7

  Stalin clearly was under pressure to abandon Leningrad. It is possible that this counsel came to him from Malenkov and Molotov, backed by complaints of the failure of Zhdanov and Voroshilov properly to defend Leningrad, of the cost of defending the city, of the impossibility of making a firm stand, of the need to use every resource for the defense of Moscow, which itself was approaching the most perilous of days.

  Zhdanov was fighting for his political life, his actual life, as well as that of the city to which his fate had been linked.

  Stalin also must have felt that he was fighting for his political life. On September 4 he sent a message to Prime Minister Winston Churchill couched in most gloomy terms: “We have lost more than half the Ukraine, and in addition the enemy is at the gates of Leningrad.”

  He asked that Britain immediately create a second front to draw off 30 to 40 German divisions and that she send “by October 1 30,000 tons of aluminum, 400 planes and 500 tanks.”

  The alternative was that “the Soviet Union will either suffer defeat or be weakened to such an extent that it will lose for a long period any capacity to render assistance to its allies by its actual operations.”

  Churchill thought he recognized in the message and in the manner of Ambassador Maisky’s presentation hints of a possible bid by Moscow to Germany for a separate peace.8

  Eleven days later Stalin asked that the British land twenty-five to thirty divisions at Archangel or via Iran. On September 12 Churchill proposed that if Russia was forced to yield Leningrad and destroy the Baltic Fleet, the British would partially recompense the Russians for the destruction of warships. To which Stalin replied that he would submit his bill to the Germans after the war if such an event should occur.

  Under all these circumstances was Stalin prepared to abandon Leningrad? “Unquestionably” was Kuznetsov’s response. Not that Stalin wanted to surrender the city, but he felt that the fall of Leningrad was only too likely. Otherwise, Kuznetsov concluded, Stalin never would have given orders so serious as those calling for the preparation of the fleet for scuttling.

  The actions flowing from the September crisis—the reprimand to Zhdanov and Voroshilov, the removal of Voroshilov from command, the dispatch of Zhukov to Leningrad, the orders by Stalin to prepare the city for its fall— suggest a political compromise. Blame for the plight of the city was placed on both Voroshilov and Zhdanov, but Voroshilov had to take the major portion. He was sacked and saddled with military responsibility for the situation. Zhdanov was given one last chance: with Marshal Zhukov’s aid he might save the city if he could. But the terms were harsh. The city must be saved very quickly because a total effort to halt the Germans before Moscow was already getting under way. Perhaps it was because Leningrad’s continued defense would divert German troops from Moscow that Zhdanov and Zhukov were instructed to try to hold the line. But it was also plain that unless Zhdanov and Zhukov turned the situation around very, very quickly, Stalin was prepared to sacrifice Leningrad, if need be, in order to save Moscow. If Leningrad did fall, the full blame would fall on Zhdanov, the Party leader, not on Marshal Zhukov, the military technician, sent in at the last moment. Indeed, the expectation in the Kremlin, or even the order, may well have been that Zhdanov was to go down fighting street by street and block by block in a Russian Gotterdammerung. But the scene of Zhdanov’s final act would be Smolny, the cradle of the Bolshevik Revolution.

  Not the least difficult aspect of Leningrad’s suicidal struggle behind the scenes was the burden on energy and morale to which it subjected the fighting naval and military commanders within Leningrad.

  At a moment when they were bending every effort to save the city from the Germans came sudden orders to put highest priority on mining the great ships, the naval depots, the military installations throughout the city. It was a cruel burden and a cruel blow. The bitterness which the Leningrad commanders felt has been reflected down through the years. In many it implanted a permanent, undeviating hatred for Moscow and Stalin. They became convinced that at the most critical of all moments Stalin was prepared to sell them out.

  From this time onward popular feeling toward Zhdanov began to change in Leningrad, even though few in the city knew these details of high politics. Until these critical days the city and its populace had held aloof from this dynamic, humorless man, so immersed in his own aims and ambitions. Now he began more and more to symbolize to Leningrad its isolated, desperate battle. Week by week and month by month the portrait of Zhdanov spread from one area to another, one office to another, one street corner to another.

  It spread so widely and so universally that two years later visitors to Leningrad could hardly believe their eyes. Almost nowhere was a portrait of Stalin to be seen except, perhaps, in some official office—and not always there. Everywhere the figure of Zhdanov glowed down from the walls. Stalin, so the people had decided, was no friend of Leningrad. Zhdanov was no friend, perhaps, but he had shared the city’s trials and desperations. He had by this become one with them.

  * * *

  1 Kuznetsov’s memoirs are a political document, and the Admiral is a master of half-truth. He often deliberately confuses the picture. In a 1968 version he mentions Molotov and Kosygin but not Malenkov. Kosygin had been in Leningrad since mid-July.

  2 The State Defense Committee August 4 had approved a plan by the Leningrad defenders that t
he Kirov factory produce as many KV tanks above the planned quota as possible and that these extra tanks go to the Leningrad front. In August the plant had a quota of 180 tanks. It produced 207. The 27 extra tanks went to the Leningrad defenses. (N.Z., p. 126.)

  3 There is a remarkable absence of direct source materials on Zhdanov and by Zhdanov. There are only the rarest citations of him in the Soviet historical works on the Leningrad siege. For example, the official collection of Leningrad documents (900 Geroicheskii Dnei —hereafter referred to as poo) publishes only one Zhdanov document from the fund of his personal materials in the Central Party Archives at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow: a report to the State Defense Committee submitted in October, 1943, on the evacuation of industry from Leningrad. There are no references to this or any other collection of Zhdanov materials in the official history of the Leningrad siege {Leningrad v VOV). Indeed, the only available texts (usually partial) of many Zhdanov speeches in this periofl come from the personal notes of persons present, notably D. V. Pavlov in his classic Leningrad v Blokade. Pavlov’s notes are quoted and requoted endlessly in other source materials. There is a comparable lacuna in direct quotations of speeches by Zhdanov’s Leningrad lieutenants. In view of the Soviet habit of taking stenographic notes of all meetings and the care with which archival materials are preserved, this seems very strange. Moreover, there has been no published collection of Zhdanov speeches or papers, contrary to the practice followed with many of his less prominent contemporaries. The suspicion persists that the Zhdanov archive either was destroyed by his enemies (presumably Malenkov and Beria) or more likely is still retained under the highest security classification as an outgrowth of the Leningrad Affair.

  4 At the end of August the State Defense Committee gave orders which Achkasov calls “of exceptionally important influence on the further course of the Leningrad battle.” He described these as formation of new units, reorganization of troops, defending the southeast and southern approaches to Leningrad, creation of new defense lines, preparation for evacuation of part of the Leningrad institutions and for organization of institutions remaining in the city for production of military needs of the front. (Krasnoznamennyi Baltiiskii Flot v VOV, p. 99.)

  5 The Stavka decision was made September 11. Zhukov took over the command September 13. (A. V. Karasev, Istoriya SSSR, No. 2, 1957, p. 5.)

  6 Failure to admit the loss of a town in the hope of quickly retaking it was regarded by Stalin as the gravest of crimes. He removed from command and harshly punished every commander caught in such an attempt at deception. (Shtemenko, op. cit., p. 116.) One source claims Secretary Kuznetsov told a Smolny meeting the morning of September 9 that Leningrad had been cut off. (A. Kostin, Zvezda, No. 6, June, 1968.)

  7 Kuznetsov also claims preparation of a plan to scuttle the Baltic Fleet began in late August.

  8 Maisky insists there was no hint of separate peace in his presentation and suggests this interpretation arose from Churchill’s “guilty conscience” about not opening a second front. But Maisky admits he made a deliberately passionate presentation. He suggests he himself instigated Stalin’s message and adds that the fear of a separate peace helped him get more for Russia. (Maisky, op. cit., pp. 172–173.)

  PART III

  Leningrad in Blockade

  With each step the feet grow heavier

  But better not to pause for rest.

  Perhaps, Death sits beside the road,

  Just resting, too. . . .

  27 ♦ The Circle Closed

  NO ONE HAD PLANNED TO FIGHT A BATTLE AT MGA. THE little railroad station figured on no strategic charts, either German or Russian. In fact, the engagement at Mga was accidental, small-scale, haphazard. It was the consequences of Mga that were so far-reaching.

  What gave Mga importance was that once the Nazis firmly grasped the town they severed all of the rail connections between Leningrad and the remainder of Russia—the “mainland” as it came to be called—and they cut all the highways.

  The first sign of danger in this direction came when the battered Soviet Forty-eighth Army, which was defending the main Moscow-Leningrad railroad line in the vicinity of Ushaki and Tosno, about thirty-five miles southeast of Leningrad, began to crumble under the Nazi Panzer attacks. Instead of falling back northward toward Leningrad, the broken regiments of the Forty-eighth Army drifted eastward, opening up a gap which the Nazis quickly managed to exploit.

  The Leningrad Command, back to the wall, striving to stem the Nazi tide at a dozen critical points, did not immediately realize what had happened.

  Colonel Bychevsky, chief of Leningrad’s sappers, for example, occupied around the clock placing mines, blowing up bridges, ceaselessly seeking to build barriers against the Germans, had no inkling of the new danger. For him August 28 began very much as did each of the days of late August which later came to form in his mind a blurred calendar of disaster.

  Bychevsky was disturbed that morning for a different reason. In the midst of battle the Chief of Staff, the sardonic General D. N. Nikishev, whose skepticism of Moscow’s desire or ability to provide sufficient resources for Leningrad’s defenses had never been concealed, had vanished.1 Along with Nikishev went his deputy, N. G. Tikhomirov. Why? Bychevsky had no better idea than he had of the other strange, never-explained command changes which so often caused his colleagues to disappear. He guessed that possibly Nikishev had offended Voroshilov. But this was only a guess. In Nikishev’s place appeared Colonel N. V. Gorodetsky from the Twenty-third Army, a good, vigorous officer. But it was not easy to pick up the threads of the complex battles then raging. Gorodetsky made mistakes, some of which cost Leningrad dearly.

  On this bright August morning with the scent of buckwheat and golden-rod heavy in the hedgerows outside Leningrad, the new Chief of Staff advised Bychevsky that the Forty-eighth Army was heavily engaged in defending the Moscow-Leningrad railroad and that it needed help. He told Bychevsky to send a detachment of sappers to Tosno to lay down a series of mine fields and to destroy any bridges which might be seized by the Germans. Tosno was located about fifteen miles south and west of Mga.

  Bychevsky sent off a small unit from his 2nd Reserve Pontoon Battalion and decided to go to Tosno with Commissar Nikolai Mukha and look at the situation himself.

  They drove out the Moscow highway, which runs almost arrow-straight, paralleling the railroad. When they got as far as Krasny Bor, a large village fifteen miles outside the city, they heard firing in the forest. Leaving the car, they started on foot in the direction of the sound, moving very carefully. At this point they were less than five miles south of the Kolpino fortified region, established along a little stream, the Izhora River. The fortifications had just been occupied by the Izhorsk workers artillery and machine-gun battalion, a volunteer unit, which had had no training in firing from stationary batteries. Behind this small unit there was nothing—just the broad, empty Moscow highway leading straight to the southeast gates of Leningrad.

  What, thought Bychevsky, is going to happen if the Germans break through here? The two officers came up to a wooden barricade thrown across the highway. Beside it was an armored car where they found two generals, A. I. Cherepanov and P. A. Zaitsev. The generals were directing a field regiment and the small engineering detachment which Bychevsky had ordered to Tosno in a fire fight against German units. The field regiment had only about fifteen cartridges per rifle and three submachine guns.

  The Germans, it seemed, had broken through the remnants of the Forty-eighth Army and swept beyond Tosno. It was their armored reconnaissance that was being held up in the fire fight.

  General Zaitsev went back to the Izhora River line to try to organize a defense there. The other officers stayed on the highway to hold up the German advance as long as they could.

  The German fire grew hot. The Russians fell back a couple of hundred yards as the sappers hastily put up heavy wooden barriers along the highway and dug in some antitank mines. But the field regiment was running out of a
mmunition. The Russians would certainly have been overwhelmed had not five heavy Soviet tanks come up and laid down covering fire. Two German light tanks appeared on the highway, but one hit a mine and caught fire and the other was hit by its own artillery. The Germans began to lay in heavy mortar fire and two Messerschmitts roared down the highway, machine guns blazing.

  The Russians had no alternative. They fell back into the fortified positions at Yam-Izhorsk and Bychevsky’s men mined the bridge across the little Izhora River. As the Germans approached the bridge, the mines were touched off, halting them temporarily. The Germans were advance reconnaissance units of the 39th Army Corps of the Sixteenth Army, comprising the 12th Panzer Division and the 121st and 96th Infantry divisions (with the 122nd Infantry in the second echelon).

  Dusk was beginning to fall. Bychevsky and Mukha had to report to Smolny. Artillery exchanges already had begun between the Izhorsk battalion and the Germans. The officers stopped a moment to wish good luck to one of the workers units, headed by I. F. Chernenko, an engineer in the great Izhorsk works.

  Chernenko had gotten back to Kolpino that afternoon from Leningrad. At the station he found he could only buy a ticket as far as Pontonny. The girl at the ticket window said the rail line was under fire and a train had been hit. He rode to Pontonny and walked into Kolpino. Within an hour or so he was sent up to the lines. He decided to wear his leather jacket even though the afternoon was hot. It probably would be cold that night in the trenches. He was right.

  The Izhorsk factory where Chernenko worked was one of the greatest in Russian industry. Founded by order of Peter the Great in 1722 to produce timbers for ship construction, in the mid-eighteenth century it began to make anchors and copper sheeting and in the nineteenth century pioneered in machine building, boiler construction, engines, turbines, armor plate and heavy military equipment. It produced the armor for Russia’s early dread-naughts—the Petropavlovsk, the Sevastopol, the Gangut and the Poltava.