The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  The threat to the Elektrosila plant became so great—the Germans were only about 2½ miles away—that all personnel were evacuated and a force of 1,100 workers occupied a perimeter defense system of pillboxes and trenches, in expectation of a Nazi breakthrough.

  That morning the leading article in Leningradskaya Pravda was headlined: “Leningrad—To Be or Not to Be?”

  Four days later, the night of the twentieth-twenty-first, Bychevsky was again called to Smolny in the early hours before dawn. He was handed an urgent order to prepare the central Leningrad rail system and all its approaches for destruction. He was appalled. Destruction of the rail network meant the end. He tried to get some explanation from General Khozin. Khozin coldly told him, “I’m occupied. Carry out the order.” His only comfort was that his old friend General P. P. Yevstigneyev, chief of intelligence, didn’t seem to think that the plan would have to be carried out.

  Rumors and hints that Leningrad was being prepared for destruction raced through the city despite every effort to keep the enterprise secret. Too many knew. The plans were too alarming. Word spread. Aleksandr Rozen heard of it almost as soon as the orders were given. He lived in a big apartment house midway between the Leningrad Post Office and the Central Telegraph—two prime objectives of Nazi bombing, two buildings doomed to destruction. Not until years later when he read General Bychevsky’s memoirs did he know the whole story—that orders had been given to destroy the whole rail network. “But what I had already learned that night was more than sufficient,” he grimly noted.

  Everyone waited. They waited for the signal to blow up the city. But it did not come.

  Had the Germans broken in, Leningrad would have been destroyed.

  That clearly was Stalin’s intention: destroy the city of revolution and march out to final battle with the Nazis. This was the plan—if the lines did not hold.

  Moscow had been burned to thwart Napoleon. An even more Dantesque catastrophe awaited Adolf Hitler if his jack-booted troops and his snub-snouted Panzers burst through the Narva Gates.

  There would be no victory parade past the Winter Palace, no reviewing stand in Palace Square, no ceremonial banquet in the Hotel Astoria. All this—all that symbolized imperial Russia, all that had been created by Peter and Catherine, the Alexanders and the Nicholases,3 all that had been built by Lenin’s workers and those who had slaved for Stalin—all this was doomed to a twentieth-century Gotterdammerung. Hitler would have no chance to erase the hated cradle of Marxism from the earth. It would be erased by its creators.

  * * *

  1 900, pp. 82–83. These figures may be slightly inflated. Other sources place the September 1 figure at 38,000, that of September 10 at 43,000, of September 20 at 66,000 and of October 1 at 90,000 {Leningrad v VOV, p. 79).

  2 The formal order of the Leningrad Command apparently was dated September 15. (Leningrad v VOV, p. 155.)

  3 Perhaps not all of imperial Petersburg was doomed. Party Secretary Kuznetsov visited Peterhof September 8 to oversee the packing of its treasures. He categorically forbade that the buildings be mined. (Bychevsky, op. cit., p. 83.) Machine-gun nests were set up on the roof of the Winter Palace to fire into Palace Square in case of a Nazi paratroop attempt. They were ordered removed in late September by the Leningrad Command. Similar installations at other historic sites were also removed in order not to give the Germans an excuse for attacking them. (S. Varshavsky, Podvig Ermitazha, Leningrad, 1965, p. 64.)

  33 ♦ “ They’re Digging In! ”

  THE STREETCAR TOOK THEM TO THE FRONT: LINE NO. 9, past the Narva Gates, where a firing position had been set up to command the broad sweep of Stachek Prospekt. Aleksandr Rozen rode the car out Stachek Prospekt. He had boarded it near the offices of his newspaper, On Guard of the Fatherland, Most of the passengers were soldiers. A machine gun was mounted in front. The red-painted trolley moved, then halted; moved and halted. A German air attack was in progress. Here and there Rozen saw a car stopped, burning, or a charred carcass, dead in the street— to stay there for months ahead, through the ice winter into the frigid spring, a skeleton, abandoned, pitiful.

  Stachek Prospekt was filled with people. Here sprawled the Kirov works, the mightiest engineering establishment in Russia, with hundreds of shops and thousands of workers. Now it seemed that everyone in Leningrad capable of holding a gun was moving slowly toward the rambling buildings that lay behind wooden and wire-woven fences on either side of the broad avenue. Moving in the opposite direction was another throng—women and children, leaving the zone of fortifications from Avtovo to Forel Hospital, the no-man’s land of hastily abandoned factories, apartment houses and buildings, the area which was to be dynamited in a desperate effort to halt the Nazi Panzers. The women in shawls, string bags over their shoulders, milk tins and buckets in their hands, the children with cord-knotted bundles of bedding and clothes, moved slowly into and through the city toward the safer Petrograd and Vasilevsky Island districts. A shell fell beyond the Kirov Gates. Then came the deep roar of a Soviet gun, replying. The streetcar halted at the viaduct. Everyone sat silent, listening to the cursing of the motorman. Rozen watched stretcher bearers emerge from the passageway. A body lay under a blanket. All he could see were the man’s high rubber boots, the kind that was hard to find.

  As Rozen waited at the Kirov Gates for his pass to be checked, a 6o-ton KV tank emerged from the passageway, wheeled majestically into Stachek Prospekt and headed for the city limits. Just behind, racing to catch up, went the streetcar. The trolleycars ran as far as the Kotlyarov streetcar barns. There they halted and the conductor shouted, “All off. This is the front. End of the line.” Beyond that you went by foot, picking your way through the military trucks, the barricades, the tank traps, the dugouts, the machine-gun nests, past the Krasnensk Cemetery and Forel Hospital to Sheremetyev Park. The trenches began there.

  The front was about two and a half miles beyond the Kirov plant. It was ten miles from Palace Square.

  Leningrad went to the front, as Olga Berggolts wrote, by “familiar streets that each remembered like a dream—here was the fence around our childhood home, here stood the great rustling maple. ... I went to the front through the days of my childhood, along the streets where I ran to school.”

  On the night of the seventeenth of September, rather late, Party Secretary A. A. Kuznetsov and Colonel Bychevsky hurried through the silent, blacked-out city toward the front. Every window was dark. Here and there a vague blue light showed where a military vehicle was moving. The whole city— the whole densely populated eighty square miles—seemed in hiding, its very shape changed so that Bychevsky could hardly tell where he was, the shadows so deep, black and menacing. The weather was surly. Gone was golden September. Behind the blackened windows, thought Bychevsky, some are sleeping—probably children, for every adult was on guard, digging fortifications, feverishly working on this most fearsome of nights. The bombing had gone on until an hour or so ago. The glow of burning buildings gleamed in the long vistas.

  Beyond the Kotlyarov streetcar barns they heard mortar blasts very close. Two big trucks sprawled in the highway, burning fiercely. A cobweb of shattered electric wires hung above the street. From here paths led off to Sheremetyev Park, where a machine-gun exchange was taking place. Ten tanks from the Kirov works had been set up in the park as stationary fire points. From the Sea Canal they could hear the deep roar of naval guns firing into the German positions just beyond Pulkovo.

  They found Colonel M. D. Panchenko, commander of the 21st NKVD Division, in a dugout—the command post of his 14th Regiment just beyond Sheremetyev Park. They were practically at the edge of Ligovo—and the town was in the hands of the Germans. They could see this from the fires.

  Panchenko, wearing a cotton-quilted Red Army jacket and steel helmet, an automatic rifle slung over his neck, stood, his head almost bumping the ceiling, leaning over a map with a kerosene lamp.

  “Have you given up Ligovo?” Kuznetsov asked.

  “We are holdin
g on,” Panchenko said, trying to make the best of the situation. “Rodionov has some strong groups in the town. They are still fighting.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Kuznetsov, nodding in the direction of a hot exchange of fire. “It sounds to me like your ‘strong groups’ have been cut off.”

  “They’ll fight on,” Panchenko said. “These are frontier guards!”

  “Yeh,” snapped Kuznetsov. “But where will they fight? Back of us? In Leningrad?”

  Panchenko held his tongue.

  “Have the Germans got the station at Ligovo, too?” Kuznetsov asked.

  “Yes,” Panchenko admitted. “I’ve just come back from there. I tried to get them out, but I didn’t succeed. They have three tanks there and automatic weapons. We got up to the entrance but had to fall back. We’ll try again in the morning.”

  Kuznetsov sank wearily onto a stool.

  “Tell me this, Colonel,” he rasped. “How does it happen that yesterday your division drove the Germans out of Ligovo and Staro-Panovo? Today you got an order to drive them farther. But, instead, this evening you abandon Ligovo to the Germans.”

  That morning, Panchenko explained, two of his regiments attacked from Staro-Panovo but were hit by fifty Nazi tanks. Before they knew it the Panzers had burst into Ligovo.

  Kuznetsov ordered Panchenko to recover the town.

  “I’ve already got that order from General Fedyuninsky of the Forty-second Army,” Panchenko said. “He even threatened, If you don’t carry out the order I’ll have your head.’ “

  “And did you get the order that if you fall back from this line you’ll also be minus a head?” Kuznetsov raged. “All the commanders know that!”

  “I know,” Panchenko gloomily replied. Then he began to name the officers who had been killed in the day’s fighting.

  Kuznetsov’s anger died down. He rose to go. “Remember, Comrade Panchenko, the workers of the Kirov factory have gone to the barricades. That you must understand.”

  All the way back to Smolny Bychevsky sat silent. Neither he nor Kuznetsov spoke. Bychevsky never knew what Kuznetsov was thinking. But Bychevsky was filled with alarm for the fate of the 21st Division. It was not right that as a result of the day’s “offensive” the division had been left without fortifications to spend the night in cold and mud before a big town. And back of it—the Kirov works. Who was to blame for this? Panchenko? Fedyuninsky? In some measure neither one nor the other. For the need of the moment was ceaseless counterattack. The enemy must not be given a moment’s ease. Everything must be done even though it brought heavy losses.

  Heavy losses there had been. Heavy losses lay ahead. The truth was that in Ligovo only a single building, the Klinovsky House, remained in Soviet hands. And it had changed hands several times. At 1:30 A.M. September 18 a file of troops headed by Lavrenti Tsiganov and Nikolai Tikhomirov cautiously went forward from a nearby trench to the house. Rockets cast an unearthly green light over the rubble. The upper stories of the Klinovsky House had been wrecked, but the soldiers found an old iron door leading to the cellar. The basement was packed with Soviet troops. A ring of firing points had been set up toward the German lines. On a long table lay loaves of bread, tobacco and piles of bullets. On a potbellied stove a teakettle was simmering. A fourteen-year-old youngster with a dog and an old man sat by the stove. They lived there.

  Many of the soldiers in the basement were workers from the Kirov plant and the northern wharves. They worked by day, turning out the big KV tanks, and went into the trenches and barricades at night. “We are soldiers as much as you/’ said Vasily Mokhov, an old blacksmith from the Kirov works. He told of the command point in the subbasement in his factory from which the defense of the plant was directed. Last night the telephone had rung. A strange voice with a heavy accent said, “Leningrad? Very good. We will come tomorrow to visit the Winter Palace and the Hermitage.”

  “Who’s calling?” the regional engineer asked.

  “This is Ligovo,” the German replied.

  The Nazis had broken into Ligovo and the telephone lines had not been cut. Neither, it turned out, had the water mains. The Germans drank from the Leningrad water supply until someone thought of turning it off.

  Some time between 3 and 4:30 A.M. the Germans launched another attack on Klinovsky House. The soldiers emerged from the cellar and fought from trenches. At 6:30 A.M. it grew light. From the shallow clay ditches the troops saw smoke curling up from the Pulkovo Heights. A wooden building was afire. From these heights—roughly 230 feet above sea level—all of Leningrad was visible. There lay the coal docks with their huge steel transporter cages. There the ships bunkered coal before long voyages. Now the port was empty and dead. Above the northern wharves towered a port crane—the one the Leningrad youngsters called the camel. To the right rose the twin towers of the Forel Hospital, now a divisional headquarters. Nearby was a streetcar blown from the rails by an aerial bomb. The asphalt of the paving had caught fire and the flames ran down the highway, casting clouds of black smoke toward the Avtovo quarter. Beyond it rose the old chimneys of the Kirov works and beyond them the inner city—the endless panorama of roofs, of chimneys, of cupolas.

  All this, thought Tsiganov, the Germans now can see—the wharves, St. Isaac’s, the Admiralty spire, the great Neva bridges, the houses, the streets, the squares. All of this was in the sights of the German guns. War had washed up to the edge of Leningrad.

  Tsiganov looked toward the west—to the road to the Peterhof Palace. He could not believe his eyes. Germans. They fired and fell, fired and fell. They came closer and closer to the Klinovsky House. No artillery preparation. A silent, sudden attack. How many were there? The green devils crawled ahead . . . farther . . . farther. They rose and came forward at full height, no longer crawling. He heard them shouting.

  “To the ready!” shouted the Soviet commander. “Grenades!”

  Tsiganov got off two grenades. He could not throw a third. Over him a German suddenly appeared. He grabbed him by the throat and slowly choked him to death. The Germans were in the trenches now. No chance for grenades, too close for rifles. He pulled his bayonet and leaped on a German officer wearing a death’s head helmet, plunging the bayonet in. ...

  The battle went on all morning. Another attack was mounted to recapture the Ligovo railroad station. It did not quite succeed.

  At midmorning the troops, to their amazement, heard the sound of music. At a first-aid point a band had started to play. It struck up the soldier’s favorite, “Katyusha.” Some of the soldiers started to sing:

  Katyusha came to the shore,

  To the very highest bank.

  She came to sing a song

  For the one she loved,

  For the one whose letter she kept. . . .

  In a lull the Russians heard from the German side a shout: “Play it again, Russ. Play it again!”

  A new Russian attack started at i: 30. A young lieutenant named Anike-yev led his men out. He didn’t shout, “For the Motherland! For Leningrad!” He said, “Let’s go.” Nobody said, “Hurrah!” They simply poured ahead into the German fire. In a half-hour’s bloody engagement they drove the Germans from their second line of trenches beyond the Klinovsky House.

  At 4:30 P.M. Tsiganov was sent back to Colonel Rodionov, commander of the regiment, with a message. Rodionov’s headquarters were in Shere-metyev Park. After delivering his message Tsiganov got a present: an hour’s sleep. About 6:30 P.M. he was aroused and sent on another errand to Captain Ivan Glutov, in chargé of a sappers’ detachment, stationed beside a dam and canal. Glutov had mined the dam. On a signal that the Germans had broken through, his duty was to blow up the dam, releasing the waters of the Finnish Gulf to flood the whole area from Ligovo to the Forel Hospital. This was what would happen if the lines broke at Klinovsky House.

  Just after 9 P.M. Tsiganov felt the ground tremble under him. There was a roar like an express train. An earthquake? Had the dam been blown up? Against the red outlines of burning
Ligovo he saw long arrows of flame against the heavens, roaring across the sky like meteors. They came from the region of the Forel Hospital and were headed for the center of the German position.

  “There go our Katyushas!” Glutov shouted.

  Katyushas they were—the rockets from multibarrel launchers, the most secret weapon in the Soviet arsenal launched on the most desperate of nights against the Germans beyond Klinovsky House.

  At 11 P.M. the night of September 18 Colonel Panchenko wearily went back to Smolny to report to General Zhukov and the Leningrad Command. He brought what he tersely described as a report “about the fighting action of the division.” The key to that report was that the Germans had been stopped.

  No one really knew whether the Germans were stopped. It was better not to believe it. If they had been halted, blood had done it. The toll of lives taken in those September days could never be counted. A little stream ran past Klinovsky House. It ran red with soldiers’ blood for days. The Katyushas? Perhaps. Nothing more frightening had been experienced in World War II than the Katyushas with their scream, their fiery trails, their thunderous impact, the mass that filled the air suddenly with fire and sound.1

  Was it Zhukov’s iron will?

  He was terrible in those September days. There was no other word for it. He threatened commander after commander with the firing squad. He removed men right and left. And he insisted on one thing: Attack! Attack! Attack! This was the essence of his first orders on taking command. It made no difference how weak the unit. It made no difference if they had no weapons, no bullets, if they had been retreating for weeks. Attack! Those were his orders. Disobey and go before the tribunal.

  Attack or be shot—a simple equation.

  On September 17 Zhukov issued a general order to all commanders of all units in the Forty-second and Fifty-fifth armies. They were told that any withdrawal from the lines Ligovo-Pulkovo-Shushary-Kolpino would be considered the gravest crime against the Motherland. The penalty: to be shot.