Russia's War

by Richard Overy

  At Leningrad's famous Hermitage Museum the curators struggled against bomb damage and cold to salvage Russia's most important art collection. Half of the museum's 2.5 million objects were evacuated in sealed and guarded trains to the Urals city of Sverdlovsk. Josef Orbeli, the Museum's director, stood and wept on the platform as the first trains pulled out. By the time the next objects were ready for evacuation, the rail link had been cut. In September the bombing started. The remaining objects were taken to the basements, where over the winter some 2,000 artists, writers and academics continued to work by candlelight. There was a little light and heat in one room, supplied by the generators of the Tsar's former yacht, the Pole Star, tied up on the river outside. Beneath the library an informal mortuary was established, where the frozen bodies remained for weeks until they could be buried.21

  Almost certainly the bulk of Leningrad's population would have starved to death by the spring had not frantic efforts been made to exploit the one loophole in the blockade – Lake Ladoga. At first small boats and barges made the journey to the tiny port of Osinovets on the west shore of the lake, about twenty miles from Leningrad. Some 45,000 tons of food, ammunition and petrol were brought in this way before November, when the lake began to freeze over.22 The only remaining option was to make a path across the ice. At some point in November the Leningrad Military Committee decided to build what became known as the ‘Ice Road’, or the ‘Road of Life’. In mid-November groups of Russian fishermen led officials across the ice, gingerly testing its thickness as they went, leaving rough markers on the way to indicate where the road should lie. On November 17 the ice was only 100 millimetres thick, sufficient only for unladen horses. It had to be at least 200 millimetres thick to support a loaded truck. The following day a bitter north wind began to blow, and within days the ice pack had nearly doubled in thickness. On November 20 the first horse-drawn sleds crossed the lake. The exhausted animals stumbled and staggered on the icy path. Those that collapsed were killed and cut up on the spot and sent on to Leningrad to be eaten.23

  The first trucks edged out onto the ice on November 22. In places the ice was still too thin; trucks plunged into watery crevasses and with their drivers disappeared beneath the ice. But enough got through to load up on the far side of the lake and to return a day later with thirty-three tons of supplies. This was an insignificant amount, but it showed what was possible. It was decided to construct a military road from Osinovets across some eighteen miles of ice to the village of Kabona, then from there through the swamps and forests beyond the German line at Tikhvin to railheads at Podborove and Zabore. The whole length was 237 miles. The army was given two weeks to build it. There was now sufficient food for seven days left in the city. Forced labour, working in sub-zero temperatures, threw the road together in a little over fourteen days. The results were meagre. The ice refused to thicken more and trucks were able to carry only half loads, with a sledge slung behind. The steep gradients and uneven surfaces led to endless breakdowns and accidents. During December an average of 361 tons were brought in each day, one-seventh of what was required to feed the population. Stores fell to one or two days' supply.24

  In December Zhdanov and Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov, the Stavka representative in Leningrad, rode out to survey the Ice Road for themselves. They sacked the general in charge, ordered repairs and improvements to the road, designated standard loads and promised handsome bonuses to the drivers. The daily tonnage began to improve. On December 24 the authorities announced an unexpected Christmas present: the daily bread ration was raised for most Leningraders by about two and a half ounces, for workers by about five ounces from December 25.25 Without radio and newspapers, most Leningraders discovered the increase only when they were at the shop counter. One woman watched a man leave a bakery, ‘laughing, crying, clutching his head as he walked along’. The increased ration was a rash move, since the flow of food across the lake was still uncertain. But in early December 1941 a Soviet offensive against the city of Tikhvin, astride the main rail route to Lake Ladoga, pushed back the overextended German line and recaptured the railway. The attack was led by none other than General Kirill Meretskov, reinstated after his bruising encounter with the NKVD. It took time to rebuild the bridges and repair the track, but by January the new railway was in full operation. The truck journey was cut by one third, and thousands of drivers, railway workers and engineers, working in bitter cold and raging blizzards, struggled to organize real relief for Leningrad. Six truck routes were built across the ice; they were permanently posted with sentries, many of them women. As the ice thickened to more than three feet the trickle of supplies became a flood, 1,500 tons a day, then more than 2,000. The bread ration was increased at the end of January, and again in February. Soon a very different cargo began to make the return journey. Refugees were crammed into the trucks going back to the railhead: in January, 11,000; in February, 117,000; in March, 221,000. In four months more than half a million exhausted and emaciated Leningraders made the trek along the Road of Life to safety.26

  By the spring Leningrad had become a different city. Along with the food came fuel, ammunition, matches – two boxes for every worker and soldier, one for each dependant – and the equipment and materials to restart industrial production. More than 200,000 garden plots were given to Leningraders to grow their own vegetables. Municipal restaurants were opened to provide cheap, warm meals; schoolchildren were given free lunches, bringing thousands of pupils back into the classroom.27 Over the summer of 1942 the Ladoga route expanded. When the ice melted in April, ships took over. By October more than 150,000 tons of supplies a month were being provided. German efforts to bomb the supply routes had little effect, as the flow was continuous, day and night. Soon food from America, Australia and New Zealand, boxed and stamped ‘for Leningrad’ or ‘for Moscow’, began to arrive in the city. German plans to seize the city in August 1942 were frustrated by an energetic Soviet counter-offensive. In January 1943 a Soviet attack prised open a land corridor south of the lake, through which trains could now pass to the besieged city. By the time the journalist Alexander Werth was allowed to visit Leningrad, in the autumn of 1943, he found a population returning to normal, almost oblivious of the regular German shelling and the thunderous symphony of Soviet guns returning the fire. The children were plump and healthy, though many were orphans. Memories of the famine were already fading.28

  Despite the revival of food supplies in the spring of 1942 it was too late to save the thousands of Leningraders who were too weakened by the weeks of starvation. Death rates remained high into May and June. When the Soviet writer Aleksandr Fadeev visited his stepsister in April he found a handsome woman transformed: ‘Before me now was almost an old woman, withered, with puffy eyelids, darkened face and swollen legs. Her dark, smoothly combed hair was heavily streaked with grey… Her delicate hands had coarsened and become rough: the knotted hands of a manual worker.’29 By the spring the deaths and evacuations left a much smaller population, which allowed the individual food ration to be quickly increased. How many died in Leningrad will never be known exactly. The refugees who crowded into the German noose were never counted. The official Soviet figure was 632,253 civilian dead over the whole course of the siege, 16,700 of them from the shelling and bombing. More than one million were evacuated, leaving a total population in the city by March 1943 of 639,000. This leaves well over one million unaccounted for from a population of over three million. Most of that one million perished slowly, painfully, tragically, in the winter of 1941–42.30

  It was a tragedy that could have been avoided only if the Red Army had withstood the German onslaught and prevented the encirclement of the city. Leningrad might have been declared an open city, as Paris was in 1940, or have surrendered to its besiegers. But Hitler would not hear of surrender; he wanted to wipe the city from the face of the earth. Even if he had been prepared to accept the city's surrender, it is unlikely that the German authorities would have been willing or even able to supply food for
its population. Most of the three million Soviet prisoners who fell into German hands in the 1941 campaign were simply left to starve to death behind barbed wire. The same fate almost certainly awaited Leningrad: ‘in this war for existence,’ declared Hitler in late September 1941, ‘we have no interest in keeping even part of this great city's population.’31 Leningrad was caught, a victim of the surprise and speed of Barbarossa (and of its location). It was a victim, too, of Soviet strategy. It was essential that Leningrad keep fighting. If Leningrad had fallen or surrendered in September, Army Group North might have swung south to tip the scales in the encirclement of Moscow . The desperate defence of Russia's old capital was vital to the desperate defence of the new.

  Zhukov was long gone from Leningrad before the famine gripped. On October 5 he received a telegraphed order from Stalin to return to the capital at once to stabilize the front there. Two days later Zhukov was at Stalin's home, where he had retreated with a heavy cold. Stalin was brusque and to the point. He asked Zhukov if Leningrad would hold out and was told it could. He then ordered Zhukov to travel to the front line before Moscow to see the true state of affairs. Zhukov found a chaotic situation. Soviet army groups had lost contact with each other. Defence units were being formed out of stragglers making their way eastward in small groups out of the German encirclements. No one knew for certain where the Germans were. Stalin acted at once on Zhukov's report. On October 8 he sacked the commanders of the encircled Western Front and Reserve Front (which Zhukov had left in September), and on October 10 placed all the Soviet forces before Moscow under Zhukov's command. Only Zhukov's intervention prevented Stalin from treating the sacked Konev as he had treated Pavlov. Konev became Zhukov's deputy. Neither man much liked the other, but they provided a partnership rich in experience and tactical skill.32

  When Zhukov took charge there were in his command only 90,000 men between the Germans and Moscow, all that was left of the 800,000 men that had started the battle in September. His priority was to strengthen the Mozhaisk defence line, a weakly held system some sixty miles from the centre of Moscow. A second line of defence was built in a semicircle round the city itself, ten miles from the centre. It was built, like the Leningrad fortifications, by hundreds of thousands of women and children, who were drafted to dig ditches and construct tank traps, fire points and rough barricades. Moscow bristled with anti-aircraft guns; barrage balloons hung in the grey air above the city. The atmosphere by late October became, according to one witness, ‘austere, military and heroic’, a very different atmosphere from the earlier panic.33 Into the Mozhaisk Line the Stavka ordered six Soviet armies, some f them veterans of earlier battles, all of them under strength in men and weapons. Both sides now struggled in the autumn mud. On October 6 the first snow had fallen, unusually early. It soon melted, turning the whole landscape into its habitual trackless state the rasputitsa, literally the ‘time without roads.

  It is commonplace to attribute the German failure to take Moscow to the sudden change in the weather. While it is certainly true that German progress slowed, it had already been slowing because of the fanatical resistance of Soviet forces and the problem of moving supplies over the long distances through occupied territory. The mud slowed the Soviet build-up also, and hampered the rapid deployment of men and machines. During October the front still moved remorselessly towards Moscow. By October 18 German armoured forces had taken the cities of Kalinin to the north of Moscow and Kaluga to the south and were poised for another battle of encirclement. Zhukov's line was outflanked, and he was forced to move further back. He urged Stalin to throw forces against the German armies to disrupt their preparations. There were local triumphs and local disasters. A Mongolian cavalry division attacked across a snowy open field, and was mowed down by machine-gun fire; 2,000 of the horsemen were killed, not a single German. Soviet forces fought better with the weapons of the twentieth century. Where the Red Army could field the new T-34 tank, which could outgun and outfight even the best German armour, German units could be halted. In 1941 there were far too few of them.

  While Zhukov and his Western Front waited for a renewed German onslaught to come when the mud became solid with the frost, Stalin decided to proceed with the usual ceremonies to mark the anniversary of the Revolution. The rally on the eve of the anniversary was held traditionally in the Bolshoi Theatre, but its floor had a large bomb crater in it. City officials suggested the ornate hall of the Mayakovsky Square subway station. A stage was erected; chairs were placed on it and it was decorated with flowers. Trains served as changing-rooms and cafés. The audience assembled at seven thirty in the evening. German aircraft had been trying for five hours to breach Moscow's air defences to disrupt it, but without success. On cue, Stalin rose to speak. He spoke of vast German losses, seven times the true figure; he admitted to colossal Soviet losses but understated them by more than half.34 It was a patriotic speech, not the speech of a revolutionary Communist. The war was a Great Fatherland War, rallying the whole population to the cause of Russia. With the loss of the Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic states, it was indeed Russia they were defending, and they would defend it bitterly. ‘If they want a war of extermination they shall have it!’ Stalin declared, to prolonged and tumultuous applause. ‘Our task now will be to destroy every German, to the very last man! Death to the German invaders!’35

  The following day saw the familiar march in Red Square. Secret preparations went on for days beforehand. The troops for the parade were told that they were training for the front, where they would be sent immediately after the parade was over. They assembled at five o'clock in the morning, in biting cold. By the time the parade began it was snowing heavily, and German bombing was out of the question. In the distance could be heard the rumble of Russian and German guns. Soviet fighter aircraft were ordered to patrol overhead. The review was taken by the colourful cavalry commander, Marshal Budyenny, whose command Zhukov had just usurped. In full uniform, his distinctive handlebar moustaches spattered with snow, Budyenny rode on a white charger from the Kremlin gate. The sand that had been scattered on the roads to prevent the tanks and guns from skidding was blown away by the wind or pushed aside by the soldiers' boots, and the heavy equipment had to be manhandled through the slippery square. Stalin then spoke to the troops, not in person but on a film recorded in the Kremlin.36 This time he left his listeners in no doubt that their cause was the cause of Russia down the ages: ‘May you be inspired in this war by the heroic figures of our great ancestors, Aleksandr Nevsky, Dmitri Donskoi, Minin and Pozharsky, Aleksandr Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov!’ These figures had fought off the Teutonic Knights, the Tatars, Polish invaders in the seventeenth century and, finally, Napoleon. Stalin was no longer appealing to revolutionary élan but to a deeper sense of nation, and of history.

  The parading soldiers marched from Red Square to the front, now only forty miles away. Hitler wanted to finish the encirclement of Moscow, though even he could see that the war in the east would run on into the following year. On October 27 Goebbels was told by Hitler that he was ‘waiting only for the roads to dry out or freeze’. Once tanks could roll again ‘Soviet resistance will be broken’.37 In early November the final assault was planned, though the army leadership was unenthusiastic. By the middle of November the ground had finally hardened. To the north of Moscow the 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups attacked towards the city of Klin, which finally fell on November 24, and towards the Moscow-Volga Canal, which was crossed on November 28. The leading units were now only twelve miles from the centre of Moscow. Further south the 2nd Panzer Group attacked towards Tula, whose capture would open the way to the region behind Moscow. That city was defended by General Boldin, a veteran of two previous encirclements. This time his men were dug in more firmly, with a deep defensive zone. Though close to being surrounded yet again, he clung on to Tula and the southern prong of the German attack ground to a halt.38

  Zhukov had very limited forces to hold the attack. His line now had 240,000 men. There were 500 tanks for
the whole front, and many of them were light tanks out of their depth on the modern battlefield. The initial defence of Moscow was conducted not with fresh troops from the Siberian hinterland but with a scratch force made up from the fragments of defeated units, non-combatants from the rear services, Moscow militia and hastily trained men from the townships around the capital. Effort was made to concentrate mobile units in ‘shock’ armies, rather than parcel them out. Zhukov organized a tighter and more co-ordinated battlefield and did not lose contact with his forces, as had happened in earlier campaigns. Soviet commanders now understood more clearly the nature of German tactics. As before a great deal was demanded of the troops. It was during these critical battles around Moscow that the legend of the ‘twenty-eight Panfilov men’ was born. A small detachment of Red Army soldiers, armed only with anti-tank rifles, grenades and Molotov cocktails, held at bay attacks by first twenty and then thirty German tanks. They crippled eighteen tanks and repulsed the German attack. At the height of the struggle the Communist political instructor, Klochkov, severely wounded, clutched a pile of hand grenades and threw himself under a tank. Before he did so he told the few men remaining, ‘Russia is big, but there is nowhere to retreat.’ These stories, like the Stakhanovite tales of the 1930s, had a clear propaganda purpose. Shock workers had now become shock soldiers, exceeding their norms to death. But these accounts should not all be dismissed as fiction, however mendacious the regime they served. There are too many witnesses to the mute valour of thousands of ordinary Soviet soldiers who fought to the death against impossible odds, not least from among their German adversaries, who found the suicidal resistance of the enemy hard to comprehend, and fearful to fight against. Panfilov's story, nonetheless, had a more sinister aspect. In the midst of the battle he received a message from Zhukov ordering him to stand fast or face a firing squad.39