The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  The arrival of Zhukov and the change in command did nothing to lessen the threat to Leningrad. On the twelfth the Germans had taken Krasnoye Selo, Peterhof, Strelna and the Duderhof Heights. They pounded in at Ligovo (Uritsk) on the thirteenth and managed to occupy a series of villages on the edge of Leningrad—Konstantinovka, Sosnovka and Finskoye Koirovo.

  From the cupola of the Pulkovo observatory the whole battlefield could be seen. Kochetov and Mikhalev climbed the tower. Shells were landing nearby, and they did not stay long. But through the smoke and dust they could see Ligovo, Krasnoye Selo, Pushkin and Pavlovsk. Great naval shells burst in the distance, throwing columns of earth fifty and one hundred feet into the air. They saw little clusters of German tanks, here three, there five. And behind the tanks straggled long black lines—these were the German infantrymen. A battalion of Russian artillery nearby was firing on the tanks and the German infantry. It was stationed in an open field, and the grass around the guns was aflame from shell bursts. The sound of shells and the echo of explosions was constant. Overhead there was the drone of Messerschmitts, Heinkels and Junkers.

  This was the night that Olga Berggolts stood guard duty with Nikolai Fomin, commandant of the “Tears of Socialism” building where she had lived so long. It was dead quiet on Ulitsa Rubinshtein, no traffic, not a vehicle moving. She could hear clearly the roar of distant cannon.

  “The Germans have taken Strelna,” Fomin said. “They have broken through to Red Putilov.” He used the old name for the great Kirov works. It was a night of the full moon, about which the Nazis had warned, a night of wild rumors, including a persistent one that the Germans were about to use gas. The report about Red Putilov was correct. Nazi cycle detachments and light tanks had smashed through into Stachek Prospekt, right at the gates of the Putilov works, before being wiped out.

  “The shame of it!” Fomin said suddenly. “The shame of it all ... to let them in . . .”

  Fomin clambered up to the rooftop. Below at the entrance to the “Tears of Socialism” building Olga Berggolts and the porteress stood at their posts, clutching gasoline-filled bottles to hurl at Nazi tanks if they broke through to Ulitsa Rubinshtein.

  The Germans were smashing again and again and again at the weakened Forty-second Army. By the fifteenth they had concentrated their 1st, 58th and 291st infantry divisions and their 36th Motorized Division against the faltering Forty-second. The Forty-second had already been given the last reserve division at the disposition of the Leningrad Command—the 10th Rifle Division. But still it could not hold on.

  On the thirteenth, or possibly the fourteenth, Dmitri Shcheglov, the writer-turned-Volunteer officer, telephoned Party Secretary Kuznetsov and asked to see him urgently. Shcheglov’s unit of People’s Volunteers was holding a sector on the Neva and it had almost run out of ammunition. Kuznetsov asked Shcheglov to come to Smolny immediately. Despite the tension Shcheglov found the ground floor of Smolny quiet. But on the third floor where Kuznetsov had his offices there was bustle and many uniforms. Shcheglov gave Kuznetsov a quick report. Kuznetsov nodded, took notes, thanked him for the report and promised to see to the munitions. As Shcheglov rose to leave, an officer came in and said he had very urgent news. “Already?” Kuznetsov asked. “Exactly,” the officer said. “It’s beginning.”

  “It” was the German storming of Leningrad.

  Could any of the lines hold? Could the city be saved?

  Zhukov had never been in a more foul mood—and he was not noted for easy temper.

  Bychevsky was summoned to his presence on the fourteenth and gave him a general report on the fortifications. Zhukov listened in indifference, then suddenly interupted sharply: “Who are you?”

  “Chief of the Engineering Corps of the front, Colonel Bychevsky.”

  “I asked you who you are,” Zhukov snapped. “Where do you come from?”

  His voice was angry, and his chin was thrust forward. His heavy, short figure loomed over the desk.

  Bychevsky was baffled. He decided Zhukov wanted his biography and proceeded to outline his career briefly.

  “You have taken Khrenov’s place,” Zhukov snapped. “O.K. And where is General Nazarov? I called for him.”

  “General Nazarov,” Bychevsky explained, “worked in the staff of the Northwest Front Command and coordinated engineering matters between the two fronts. He has flown off with Marshal Voroshilov.”

  “Coordination . . . flying away,” snapped Zhukov. “The hell with him. So go ahead and report.”

  When Bychevsky had reported, Zhukov, accidentally or not accidentally, brushed Bychevsky’s papers on the floor. As Bychevsky picked them up, Zhukov glanced at them and asked about some locations for tanks. Bychevsky explained the tank groups were not real—they were mock-ups made by the Mariinsky Theater. He added that they had deceived the German reconnaissance.

  “The fools!” Zhukov said. “Get another hundred of them tonight, and tomorrow morning put them in these two places near Srednyaya Rogatka— here and here.”

  Bychevsky said the theater workmen couldn’t turn out a hundred fake tanks in one night.

  Zhukov raised his head and looked Bychevsky up and down.

  “If you don’t do it, I’ll have you court-martialed,” he said. “Who’s your commissar?”

  “Colonel Mukha,” Bychevsky said. (Mukha means “fly” in Russian.)

  “Mukha,” said Zhukov. “Very well, tell this Mukha that you’ll go together before the tribunal if you don’t carry out the order. I’ll check upon you tomorrow myself.”

  Zhukov took the same tone with all the commanders. Colonel Korkodin, chief of operations, was packed off to Moscow after one brief talk with Zhukov. Two days after his arrival Zhukov fired Major General F. S. Ivanov, commander of the Forty-second Army, and within a week had removed the commander of the Eighth Army, Major General V. I. Shcherbakov and Commissar I. F. Chukhnov, the Eighth Army’s Military Council member.

  On the afternoon of the fifteenth Zhukov rushed Fedyuninsky out to the Pulkovo Heights, a two-hundred-foot ridge which overlooks Leningrad from the southwest. Here was located the famous Pulkovo astronomical observatory. The Pulkovo Heights were defended by the 5th Division of People’s Volunteers, and their position had been gravely weakened by the loss of Krasnoye Selo.

  The 708th Rifle Regiment and the 21st NKVD Division had been sent to reinforce the Pulkovo position, but the lines were not holding.

  Fedyuninsky located the Forty-second Army staff in a reinforced concrete command post in the Pulkovo area. It was so close to the front that as Fedyuninsky hurried down the trench to the command post he heard bullets whining overhead.

  He found Ivanov sitting in the dugout, holding his head with both hands. Fedyuninsky had known Ivanov before the war when both were studying at the Academy of the General Staff. They had been in the same classes. Then Ivanov had become deputy commander of the Kiev Special Military District.

  Fedyuninsky remembered Ivanov as an energetic, spirited, enthusiastic man. Now Ivanov sat tired, unshaven, hollow-cheeked, dejected. He expressed no surprise at seeing Fedyuninsky, although they had not met for several years. He asked, apparently out of politeness, “What brings you here? I thought you were commanding a corps in the southwest.”

  Fedyuninsky explained that he was deputy commander of the front and had come to learn the situation. He asked Ivanov to show him on the map where the lines were.

  “I don’t know where they are,” Ivanov said, in despair. “I don’t know anything. . . .”

  “Haven’t you any communications with your units?” Fedyuninsky asked.

  “No,” Ivanov replied. “The fighting has been heavy today. I don’t know where they have gotten to. The communications have broken down.”

  Fedyuninsky questioned Ivanov’s Chief of Staff and operations head. He quickly decided that only a miracle was keeping the Forty-second in action. He found that the Germans had occupied New and Old Panovo and had worked into Ligovo but apparently not yet in strengt
h.

  The worst of it was that between these positions and Leningrad there was little or nothing in the way of defense.

  What to do? Before Fedyuninsky could think of anything a message called him back to Smolny. As he came out of the command post, machine-gun fire rattled strongly.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to change my command post again,” Ivanov said.

  “No,” said Fedyuninsky firmly. “You may not retire from here. That’s an order by the deputy front commander.”

  “Well,” Ivanov said sadly, “we’ll try to hang on.”

  Back at Smolny, before Fedyuninsky could report, Zhukov said, “Don’t bother to report. I know all about it already. While you were coming back, Ivanov changed his command post again. He is now in the cellar of a school across from the Kirov factory.”

  Zhukov was silent a moment, then spoke with decision: “Take over the Forty-second Army. And be quick about it.”

  Serious as was the moment Fedyuninsky couldn’t help grinning. Zhukov noticed this.

  “What are you snickering at?” he asked.

  “It seems to me,” Fedyuninsky said, “that you didn’t express yourself quite accurately. How can you take over an army in such a condition? All I can do is take over the command.”

  Party Secretary A. A. Kuznetsov wrote out the order, assigning Fedyuninsky to take Ivanov’s place.5 Zhukov and Zhdanov signed it and, with his chief of staff, Major General L. S. Berezinsky, Fedyuninsky hurried back to the front. He found Ivanov in the new command post in the basement of a school. The room was thick with tobacco smoke and a violent argument was in progress between Ivanov and the members of his Military Council, N. V. Solovyev and N. N. Klementyev, as to what to do next. Since they had no communications with their troops the whole argument was theoretical.

  Fedyuninsky strode up to the table.

  “I’ve been named commander of the army,” he said. “The session of the Military Council is closed. You, Comrade Ivanov, have been called to Smolny.”

  To close the council was simple, Fedyuninsky thought.

  But what to do next was not at all simple.

  * * *

  1 Karasev (p. 112) mistakenly calls it the 2nd Marines, others make it the 1st. (K. K. Kamalov, Morskaya Fekhota v Boyakh Za Rodinu, Moscow, 1966, p. 35.)

  2 The order relieving Voroshilov and naming Zhukov apparently was dated September 11. (Istoriya VOVSS, Vol. II, p. 257; Karasev, op. cit., p. 5.)

  3 L. Panteleyev thought the Smolny camouflage was silly and even stupid. He did not think the nets and the false towers, constructed of cardboard or plywood, fooled anyone. (Panteleyev, Novy Mir, No. 5, May, 1965, p. 163.)

  4 The wildest kind of rumors circulated in Leningrad over Voroshilov’s removal. One story was that Stalin, personally, had come to Leningrad and ordered Voroshilov to surrender the city. Voroshilov, in anger, hit Stalin in the face. The story, of course, was apocryphal. (Konstantinov, op. cit., p. 125.)

  5 The date is also given as September 16 (Barbashin, op. cit., p. 70) and September 21 (Istoriya VOVSS, Vol. II, p. 90).

  32 ♦ Blow Up the City!

  THE QUESTION OF WHAT TO DO NEXT BURNED IN THE minds of everyone concerned with Leningrad’s defense. It burned in the mind of Andrei Zhdanov. It glowed in the angry eyes of Marshal Zhukov. It flamed in the stout heart of Party Secretary Kuznetsov. And it curled and circled through the crafty mind of Iosif Stalin.

  But the motivations of these men were not necessarily the same. Zhdanov’s fate was tied to that of Leningrad. He must and would fight to the end for the northern capital. Zhukov was the emergency commander, sent in at the last moment to do the impossible. He would do it, sacrificing anything and anyone to that end. Then he would go on to the next emergency. Party Secretary Kuznetsov was bound to Zhdanov. He sank or was saved depending on Leningrad’s future. Stalin was something else again. His motives were never clear, never simple, and he was surrounded in the Kremlin by men for whom intrigue and plot and ambition were more important than any city or any battle.

  No one knew at this point whether Leningrad could or would be saved. Some, certainly, thought that it should not be saved. But of this there was no sign in the streets of the city, where youngsters appeared with pails of whitewash and began to paint over the street signs and blank out the house numbers. The city was preparing for street fighting, and if the Germans broke in there was to be no aid from the signposts. The Nazis would, it was hoped, lose themselves in the maze of avenues and buildings.

  The city had been divided into six sectors for block-by-block defense, taking into account the water barriers and bridges of the city. A special staff for internal defense had been established. Street barricades were thrown up—not merely paving blocks and timbers, but jungles of ferroconcrete, railroad iron, steel tubing, capable of halting tanks and standing up under air bombardment.

  There were three main areas. The northern sector extended from the Finnish Gulf to Murino, Vesely PÖselok, Ruchyi Station and the metallurgical factory. It was bordered on the east by the north bank of the Neva and the Malaya Neva and included the Petrograd side and Aptekarsky island. The eastern sector adjoined the northern sector and extended to Rybatskoye. It included the city region on the north bank of the Neva. The southwestern sector covered the area from the Finnish Gulf to the south bank of the Neva.

  The principal barrier around the city was the Circle Railroad. A second interior line was set up from the coaling docks to Alekseyevka, Avtovo, Slobodka, Alexandrovskoye, the village of Nikolayev, Farforovy Station, Volodarsky, and the Lomonosov factory.

  To the south the defense region consisted of three sectors—the Kirov, Moscow and Volodarsky; to the north—the Coastal and the Vyborg; and to the southwest the Gatchina.

  The city sewer department laid out an underground system through the great Leningrad conduits. Far below the pavement, safe from bombardment, communications lines and supply routes were set up through which ammunition and reinforcements could swiftly be rushed from one threatened area to another.

  Special “extermination” points were built into manholes and sewer openings for directing fire at oncoming German tanks. In the ground floors of corner buildings ferroconcrete pillboxes were nested inside the structures, and supports were installed so that if the upper stories were wrecked strongpoints on the ground floor could continue to operate.

  The bridges were plotted, and Colonel Bychevsky had special orders to be prepared to destroy them the moment they were threatened by German attack.

  Every section of the city was directed to form new groups of Volunteers —150 in all, composed of 600 persons each. These got the designation of Workers Battalions.

  Each Workers Battalion sector was defended by 8 reinforced machine-gun nests, 46 ordinary machine-gun points, 10 antitank positions, 2 76-mm gun posts and 13 mortar positions. Their barricades were specified to be 8 feet high and 12 feet thick. Each sector was to be protected with about 11.43 miles of barricades.

  The task of coordinating construction of the city’s defenses was placed in the hands of the NKVD, the internal police, on August 29. The police with their labor battalions had already been deeply involved. Now they had full responsibility, mobilizing not only prison labor, their own special construction forces, but the army of ordinary citizenry. More than 475,000 citizens, one-third of the city’s able-bodied citizens, were put to work in ensuing months. The statistics of work accomplished and human beings engaged are staggering. In September a daily average of 99,540 persons worked on fortifications. In October the figure was 113,300. As late as January, 1942, 12,000 were still at work.1

  Everyone lent a hand. On September 3 the Military Council of the Leningrad Front mobilized 5,000 persons from each city region—a total of 80,000 persons for defense work within the city. They built 17,000 embrasures in buildings and houses, constructed 4,126 pillboxes and firing points and 17 miles of defensive barricades.

  Even schoolchildren built fortifications. More than a thousand came from
the Smolny region, 350 from the Moscow region. There was no end to the labor poured into this work by youngsters, by old men and women, by middle-aged spinsters and teen-age youths. More than 480 miles of antitank barriers were constructed, 17,874 miles of trench systems, and 420 miles of barbed-wire barricades. More than 5,000 wood-and-earth and concrete pillboxes were set up.

  The Yegorev factory turned out 1,750 steel “hedgehogs” to bar tanks from the city. It tested them by dropping 1 ½-ton blocks on the frames from a height of 25 feet. Not all of the hedgehogs passed the test. The same plant specialized in building “Voroshilov hotels” for the reception of the Nazis. These were steel-frame pillboxes in which antitank guns and artillery were installed.

  Every effort was made to provide the newly formed Workers Battalions with weapons. But the shortages were intense. Old guns, flintlocks and muzzle-loaders, were taken from museum walls. Even so, in the Volodarsky region the Workers Battalions had only 772 rifles, 3 machine guns, 16 submachine guns and 3 mortars. In the Red Guard region there were 992 rifles, 15 machine guns and 2 mortars available.

  Each factory had its fighting detachments. The Bolshevik factory battalion numbered 584 men, that of the factory named for Lenin 412, the Proletarian locomotive works 201, the October car works 356. In the Volodarsky region there were 3,500 workers in 5 battalions. By September 1 the city had 79 Workers Battalions with 40,000 fighters.

  Another two People’s Volunteer divisions and three mortar battalions were formed for internal city defense. Despite the shortage of arms, 4,000 rifles were found for an antiair corps, and some additional guns were distributed to factories for the defense of their grounds if the Germans broke through.

  The city hoped to muster 26 rifle divisions and 6 tank battalions for the final battle, street by street. It had about 1,205 guns, or approximately 30 per mile of front, and 85 antiaircraft batteries. There were 50 antitank batteries.

  The Party concentrated every ounce of strength on stiffening the fighting ranks of those defending Leningrad. On September 9, 300 experienced Party workers were sent to the front “at the disposition of the command.” Three days later 3,000 Communists and Komsomols were mobilized to serve as front-line political officers. The next day 500 more were drafted to serve with the inner-line defenses.