Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (17 page)

 

Next to be dealt with were the palace's sculptures, now looking painfully fine in the bare galleries. Too bulky to evacuate, they were manoeuvred down into an inconspicuous corner of the palace cellars and bricked in. To make the new wall blend with the old it was smeared with mud and sand. The outdoor statues – Apollo, Mercury, Flora, Niobe with her weeping children – were buried where they stood, dotted about the park. On the white marble of Justice and Peace a workman wrote, ‘We'll come back for you', before disguising the newly turned earth with fallen leaves.

All around, the Red Army was now in full retreat. Entering the palace on the morning of 19 September, Zelenova was angry to see dusty military motorbikes carelessly parked among the lilac bushes of Empress Maria Fedorovna's Dutch garden. In her office, she found a major cranking the handle of a telephone:

 

I was struck by how tired he looked. Someone was grunting on the other end of the line, and he replied (obviously not for the first time) that he hadn't hung up, that the line was bad, and that he hadn't got any more men. The person at the other end carried on angrily grunting away. The major very slowly put down the receiver and I started my speech. ‘Please immediately tell your soldiers to remove their motorcycles from the private gardens!' He asked, ‘Whose private gardens?' And this poor exhausted major had to listen to a whole lecture on Cameron.

 

That evening Zelenova received a call from Leningrad's museums administration, telling her that she had been made Pavlovsk's director – an empty promotion since she was also put formally in charge of its ‘rapid evacuation'. ‘Then the call was cut off, so I couldn't explain anything . . . I knew we had to leave, but how could we abandon all the crates we had prepared, and all the things we hadn't packed yet? No, let's keep on working!' Realising that no more lorries would arrive from Leningrad, she commandeered horse-drawn carts:

 

After we had seen off the last of the cart-drivers a green MK [car] appeared. A short lieutenant jumped out and demanded, in an unexpectedly loud, bossy, voice, ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?' I explained that I was director of the Palace museum and park, and that these were my colleagues. The lieutenant exploded: ‘But everyone in the town has been evacuated!'

‘We are arranging evacuation ourselves, and waiting for transport.'

‘There won't be any transport! You're lucky that I came round to check that everyone from divisional headquarters had gone. Get in my car this minute!'

‘I can't go anywhere, even if you tell me to, because I'm here on the orders of the High Command' – and I gave him the number of the order.

‘You don't understand! Pavlovsk isn't on the front, it isn't even on the front line. It's in the German rear!'

 

A siren went off, and Zelenova ran down to the palace cellars, which were being used as air-raid shelters. Stepping over samovars and sewing machines, she announced to a crowd of women and children that Pavlovsk had been abandoned, and that those who wanted to leave for the city would have to walk. As she was speaking a forester dashed in: ‘There are German motorcyclists in the park. I saw them myself. By the White Birches!' The women, Zelenova quickly realised, were not going to move, so she went upstairs, emptied her desk drawer into a briefcase, and set off on foot in the general direction of Leningrad.

It took her all night to get there, stumbling in heeled shoes through fields and allotments, and crouching in ditches at the thump of artillery fire. On the way she passed the palace town of Pushkin, where the same sort of last-minute rescue effort – dinner services packed in new-mown hay, silver wrapped in Tsar Nicholas's naval uniforms – had been taking place as at Pavlovsk. Crossing the Alexander Palace park she saw Rinaldi's Chinese Theatre collapse in flames; at Kolpino the burning Izhorsky plant lit the sky like a false dawn. Nearer Leningrad the roads were less cratered, and she got a lift in an army lorry full of wounded, which dropped her where she could catch a tram into the city. At 10 a.m. she finally reached St Isaac's Cathedral, in whose ‘dim, grim, cold and damp' vastnesses she was to live, together with the staff and rescued contents of all the other abandoned summer palaces, for the whole of the siege.
8

On the same day that the Germans entered Pavlovsk they also took Pushkin. Again their approach was acknowledged too late for orderly evacuation: at one point townspeople who fled to Leningrad were actually sent home again, because they lacked Leningrad residency permits. Fiercely anti-Bolshevik Lidiya Osipova watched with cynical detachment as friends and acquaintances tried to decide what to do. A split, she wrote on 17 August, had arisen between ‘patriots' and ‘defeatists': ‘“Patriots” try to get themselves evacuated as fast as they can, and the latter, including us, try by every means possible to evade it.' Like many, she preferred to disbelieve reports of Nazi atrocities. ‘Of course', she wrote in her diary, ‘Hitler isn't the beast that our propaganda paints him . . . People who feel sorry for Jews in Germany, negroes in America and Indians in India manage to forget our own pillaged peasants, who were exterminated like cockroaches.' Even some Jewish friends agreed. ‘From many Jews we've heard this kind of thing: “Why should we go anywhere? Well, maybe we'll have to sit in camps for a bit, but then we'll be let out. It can't be worse than now.”'

As the fighting grew nearer anxiety mounted. Osipova's neighbour, a former Party member, spent the night of 2 September

 

running back and forth from her room to the rubbish dump in next-door's courtyard, carrying armfuls of red-bound volumes of Lenin. In between chucking out the great genius's works, she came up to us for chats and a smoke. She bemoaned her lot and Soviet rule. I can see now that Soviet power is not doing very well, because N.F. is not someone who is ruled by her emotions. She was brought up under the Soviets and has seen every rung of the Party ladder, from the highest to the lowest. All this has turned her into a cynic; she has completely lost her faith in all the Communist rubbish, the idealistic dream. It's amusing to watch her, but she should beware of the Germans, since she's been a wife to three Jews and her daughter is half-Jewish. And she's got Communist feathers on her muzzle herself.

 

In the crowded half-darkness of the air-raid shelters, conversation became unusually free. People talked, Osipova wrote, ‘about things that before the war we wouldn't have discussed even in our sleep, or when very drunk, except in the company of people we knew intimately. I'm sitting here writing my diary quite openly and nobody pays any attention.' As shells began to fall in Pushkin itself, she and her neighbours moved permanently into their cellars. Privately, Osipova longed for what she regarded as liberation. ‘We sit here all day', she wrote on the 15th. ‘The impression is of complete confusion. We asked – Where are the Germans? At Kuzmino. That means they'll get to us in about two hours.' Two days later the streets were still empty:

 

No Germans yet. We walked into the town. Overwhelming silence . . . No sign of the authorities at all. If they are here, they are hiding. Everyone's afraid that it might be our lot coming, and not the Germans . . . If it is the Germans – a few unimportant restrictions, and then FREEDOM. If it is the Reds – more of this hopeless vegetable existence, and most probably repression . . .

 

The next day she had her first uneasy intimation that the Nazis really were a different breed from the Heine and Schiller of her schoolroom, when she picked up an anti-Semitic leaflet dropped by a German plane. ‘What mediocrity, stupidity, coarseness. “A muzzle that asks for a brick!”; “Fight the Yid-
politruk
!” And what vulgar, mutilated language . . . Is it possible that we are mistaken, that the Germans really are as bad as Soviet propaganda makes out?' On the 19th the waiting was finally over. ‘It's happened', she wrote exultantly in her diary, ‘THE GERMANS HAVE COME! At first it was hard to believe. We climbed out of the shelter and saw two real German soldiers walking along. Everyone rushed up to them . . . The old women quickly dived back into the shelter and brought out sweets, pieces of sugar and white bread.' ‘NO MORE REDS!' the entry ends. ‘FREEDOM!'
9

She was horribly wrong – or wilfully blind – of course. One of the refugees from Pushkin into Leningrad was the composer Bogdanov-Berezovsky, who before being sent with other musicians to load timber at the Leningrad docks had lived in a wing of the Catherine Palace. Shortly after Pushkin's fall he bumped into a former neighbour, who had witnessed the town's takeover before escaping to the city on foot:

 

She told us of awful things . . . An ordinary German language teacher at the Pushkin middle school took a ‘leading role', volunteering as an interpreter and identifying various Communists, among them sweet Anechka Krasikova from the Palace administration. Anechka often used to drop round – pretty, young, always cheerful. Her little face wasn't even spoiled by pince-nez, though they didn't really suit her at all. Her husband and five-year-old boy managed to get away in time. But she was put in charge of the palace's air-raid shelters, in which much of the town was hiding, and so missed getting out either by truck or on foot. The fascists shot her and various others on the lawn opposite the parade ground, next to the Monogram Gates, having first made them dig their own graves. An elderly Jewish couple – the Lichters from the right-hand wing – were hanged. (The old lady was so proud of her boy, the
tankist
!) So were three Jews from the left wing. Two of them were the boys with sticking-out ears, aged about seven or eight, who were always dashing about outside our windows.
10

 

The Germans' initial searches for Pushkin's Jews and Communists were followed by an order that all Jews appear for ‘registration' at the Kommandant's office – opposite the ‘Avant-Garde' cinema on the corner of First of May Street – on 4 October. Several hundred, mostly women, children and old people, did so. From there they were marched to the Catherine Palace and imprisoned in its basement for several days without food or water, before being taken out in groups and shot, either at the aerodrome or in one of the palace parks. Their clothes were thrown to a waiting crowd from a second-floor window of the Lyceum, the court school where Pushkin had studied. The round-ups continued for several weeks. On 20 October another fifteen adults and twenty-three children were shot outside the Catherine Palace. Having been left lying in the open for twelve days, some of the corpses were thrown into a bomb crater in the palace courtyard, and the rest buried in the gardens. There are examples of Jews being sheltered by non-Jewish neighbours, but examples, too, of denunciation – often motivated, as during the Terror, by desire for the victims' living space. The Catherine Palace's bookkeeper and her husband, for example, were denounced by one of its carpenters, who took over their apartment in the palace's right wing and subsequently worked as an informer for the SS. Though the Leningrad area's Jewish population was relatively small (it lay outside the tsarist Pale of Settlement), altogether the German authorities murdered about 3,600 Jews in the region, nearly all in the first few weeks of occupation.
11

At the same time that it lost Pushkin and Pavlovsk the Red Army was also driven out of Alexandrovsk, a small suburban town at the end of Leningrad's south-western tramline, and Pulkovo, defended to the last by the
opolcheniye
's Fifth Guards Division, whose bones still lie, amid rampant shrub roses and philadelphus, in a benignly neglected mass grave next to the rebuilt observatory. Along the Gulf, Reinhardt's motorised divisions took Strelna and Peterhof, confirming the Soviet Eighth Army's isolation in the ‘Oranienbaum pocket'. His attempts at counter-offensive having failed, Zhukov ordered the establishment of a new defence line, running from Leningrad's south-western outer suburbs through Pulkovo round to the Neva where it jinks northwards halfway between Ladoga and the Gulf. This time, he stated in a characteristically brutal Combat Order of 17 September, there would be no retreat:

 

1. Considering the exceptional importance [of the Pulkovo–Kolpino line], the Military Council of the Leningrad Front announces to all commanders and political and line cadres defending the designated line that any commander,
politruk
or soldier who abandons
the line without a written order from the Army Group or army military council will be shot immediately.

 

2. Announce the order to command and political cadres upon receipt. Disseminate widely among the rank and file.

 

Three days later Stalin chipped in with orders that the troops around Leningrad should not hesitate, on pain of execution, to fire on Russian civilians approaching them from the German lines:

 

To Zhukov, Zhdanov, Kuznetsov and Merkulov,

 

It is rumoured that the German scoundrels advancing on Leningrad have sent forward individuals – old men and women, mothers and children – from the occupied regions, with requests to our Bolshevik forces that they surrender Leningrad and restore peace.