Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (3 page)

Leningraders should have been better prepared for the Second World War – the Great Patriotic War as they still call it – than other Soviet citizens, because they had had ringside seats at its prequel. Following the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939, the Soviet Union had occupied not only eastern Poland, but also, in June 1940, the Baltic states to Leningrad’s west, and the lake-fretted southern marches of Finland, directly to its north.

The ‘Winter War’ with Finland in particular provided a foretaste of travails to come. The war was launched on 30 November 1939, three months after the invasion of Poland, and Russians expected it to be very short. ‘[We thought that] all we had to do was raise our voice a little bit’, remembered Khrushchev, ‘and the Finns would obey. If that didn’t work we would fire one shot and they would put up their hands and surrender.’
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In fact the war proved a humiliation. Despite their tiny numbers – a population of 3.7 million compared to the Soviet Union’s almost 200 million – the Finns put up a dogged defence, forcing the Russians to send in overwhelming numbers of troops. When the Soviet Union finally pushed Finland into surrender on 12 March 1941, annexing its second city of Viipuri (today Russia’s Vyborg) and the whole of the isthmus between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga, it was at the cost of 127,000 Red Army fatalities. Via the rumours that leaked out of the military hospitals, Leningraders got their first intimation of the army’s weaknesses in leadership, equipment and training. Soldiers lacked weapons, ammunition, winter clothing and camouflage (‘We couldn’t have been offered a better target’, reminisced a Finnish fighter pilot of a column of troops crossing a frozen lake. ‘The Russians weren’t even wearing white parkas.’) Most of all, they lacked good officers, thanks to Stalin’s paranoid evisceration of the armed forces during the recent Terror. From 1937 to 1939 an extraordinary 40,000 officers had been arrested, and of those about 15,000 shot. Among them were three out of the five Marshals of the Soviet Union, fifteen out of sixteen army commanders, sixty out of sixty-seven corps commanders, 136 out of 169 divisional commanders, and fifteen out of twenty-five admirals. The survivors (44 per cent of whom had no secondary education) were mostly blinkered veterans of the Civil War or overpromoted juniors too afraid of tribunal and execution squad to take the initiative or to adapt their orders to changing circumstances.
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The mistakes of the Winter War were repeated so exactly during the first months of the German invasion that with hindsight it resembles a warm-up for the main event. It certainly seemed that way to Finns, who still call the Second World War – during which they helped to besiege Leningrad but refused directly to attack it – the ‘Continuation War’.

In practice, though, for Leningraders as for most ordinary Russians, the first twenty-two months of the Second World War had seemed rather distant. ‘Somewhere in Europe a war was on’, one Leningrader remembered, ‘for a couple of years now – so what? . . . It wasn’t considered appropriate to worry about international events, to exhibit, as they used to call it, “unhealthy moods”.’
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Though the Finns had fought doggedly, the campaigns in Poland and the Baltics had been quick and easy. Hitler’s rampage across France and the Low Countries in the spring of 1940 had moved Western-read intellectuals such as the poet Anna Akhmatova, who wrote unpublished verses mourning the fall of Paris and London’s Blitz. But most believed the street-corner loudspeakers, the notice board ‘wall newspapers’ and the agitators at the endless workplace meetings, who told them that the capitalists were tearing each other apart, leaving the Soviet Union ready to snap up the leftovers. Though the treaty with Hitler was only temporary, any war with him would be fought on German soil and be over almost before it had begun, brought to a halt by popular revolution inside Germany itself. Hearing of the Nazi attack, workers at the Leningrad Metal Factory exclaimed, ‘Our forces will thrash them; it’ll be over in a week. No, not in a week – we’ve got to get to Berlin. That’ll take three or four weeks.’
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Even sophisticated observers, able correctly to interpret Hitler’s April invasion of Yugoslavia (in defiance of a Soviet–Yugoslav friendship pact) and Churchill’s warning speeches, were shocked when what they had feared actually came to pass. For Olga Fridenberg, a classicist and first cousin to Boris Pasternak, ‘It wasn’t the invasion that was incredible, for who had not expected it? . . . It was the upheaval in our lives, their sudden cleaving into past and present on this quiet summer Sunday with all the windows wide open.’
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Famously, the Soviet leadership was caught by surprise as well. ‘Stalin and his people remain completely inactive’, Goebbels confided to his diary a month before the invasion, ‘like a rabbit confronted with a snake.’
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Though historians still debate the rationale behind Stalin’s pre-war foreign policy, it is clear that Stalin both expected war with Germany and convinced himself that with appeasement it could be delayed at least until the following year. Reports from the Soviet ambassador to Berlin were ignored, as was military intelligence of troop concentrations west of the new German–Soviet border. British warnings were dismissed as disinformation, designed to turn the Red Army into ‘England’s soldiers’. Notoriously, the trade commissariat continued to send grain, petroleum, rubber and copper to Germany right up to the very night of the invasion.

Stalin’s plenipotentiary in Leningrad at the outbreak of war was Andrei Zhdanov, a plump, sallow-faced, chain-smoking son of a schoolteacher who had risen to be Party Secretary of Gorky (formerly and now again Nizhni Novgorod), thence to the Central Committee, and after the murder of Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov (probably at Stalin’s hands) in 1934, to leadership of the Leningrad Party organisation and full membership of the Politburo. Devotedly loyal, and like Stalin a workaholic autodidact, he was one of the few people Stalin addressed with the familiar
ty
– equivalent to the French
tu
– rather than the formal
Vy
. Today he is best remembered for leading Leningrad’s defence and for a tragic-comic post-war stint as cultural commissar, during which he denounced Akhmatova as ‘half-nun, half-whore’, and tinkled politically correct tunes to Shostakovich on the piano. In truth, he was a mass murderer: as well as overseeing the Leningrad purges of 1937–9, he had, like other Politburo members, toured them to the provinces – in his case, to the Urals and Middle Volga. His signature, together with Stalin’s and Molotov’s, is to be found at the bottom of dozens of death lists.

Like Stalin, Zhdanov was so confident that talk of an imminent German attack was premature that on 19 June he left Moscow for a six-week break at the Black Sea resort of Sochi. ‘The Germans have already missed their best moment’, Stalin reassured him. ‘It looks as though they will attack in 1942. Go on holiday.’ Through the afternoon of Saturday 21 June, as Zhdanov settled in at the seaside, the border guards’ usual trickle of unsettling reports turned into a torrent: of yet more incursions into Soviet airspace, of covert movements of tanks and artillery, of pontoon bridges being built and barbed-wire entanglements cleared away. Shortly after nine in the evening, three deserters – a Lithuanian and two German Communists – crossed the River Bug to Soviet lines, and told interrogators of the orders that had just been read out to their units. The attack would begin at 0400, said the Lithuanian, and ‘they plan to finish you off pretty quickly’.
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In the Kremlin, apprehension still vied with denial. The German Foreign Ministry, the Berlin embassy reported, was refusing to take its half-hourly calls. Sometime in the late evening the commissar for defence, General Semen Timoshenko, rang Stalin with the news from the German deserters, at which Stalin ordered him to assemble an emergency meeting of Politburo members and senior generals. On their arrival he paused in his pacing and asked, ‘Well, what now?’ Timoshenko and the chief of staff, General Georgi Zhukov, insisted that all frontier troops should be put on full battle alert. Stalin disagreed: ‘It would be premature to issue that order now. It might still be possible to settle the situation by peaceful means . . . The border units must not allow themselves to be provoked into anything that might cause difficulties.’ At half past midnight he finally allowed the order to go through – prefaced by a warning that the attacks might only be provocations, and calling for a ‘disguised’ response. The meeting broke up at 3 a.m. An hour later Stalin had just gone to bed when he received a call from Zhukov. The major cities of the western Soviet Union – Kiev, Minsk, Vilnius, Sevastopol – were being bombed. ‘Did you understand what I said, Comrade Stalin?’ asked Zhukov. He had to repeat himself before he got a reply. War, even Stalin had to acknowledge, had begun.
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The first rule of foreign policy, the dinner-party truism has it, is never to invade Russia. Why did Hitler, very conscious of the disaster that befell Napoleon there, decide to attack the Soviet Union?

His aims, from the campaign’s inception in 1940, were not those of conventional geopolitics. He did not want just to annexe useful territory and create a new balance of power, but to wipe out a culture and an ideology, if necessary a race. His vision for the newly conquered territories, as expounded over meals at his various wartime headquarters, was of a thousand-mile-wide Reich stretching from Berlin to Archangel on the White Sea and Astrakhan on the Caspian. ‘The whole area’, he harangued his architect Albert Speer,

must cease to be Asiatic steppe, it must be Europeanized! The Reich peasants will live on handsome, spacious farms; the German authorities in marvellous buildings, the governors in palaces. Around each town there will be a belt of delightful villages, 30–40km deep, connected by the best roads. What exists beyond that will be another world, in which we mean to let the Russians live as they like.
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Existing cities were to be stripped of their valuables and destroyed (Moscow was to be replaced with an artificial lake), and the delightful new villages populated with Aryan settlers imported from Scandinavia and America. Within twenty years, Hitler dreamed, they would number twenty million. Russians – lowest of the Slavs – were to be deported to Siberia, reduced to serfdom, or simply exterminated, like the native tribes of America. Putting down any lingering Russian resistance would serve merely as sporting exercise. ‘Every few years’, Speer remembered, ‘Hitler planned to lead a small campaign beyond the Urals, so as to demonstrate the authority of the Reich and keep the military preparedness of the German army at a high level.’ As a later SS planning document put it, the Reich’s ever-mobile eastern marches, like the British Raj’s North-West Frontier, would ‘keep Germany young’.

So surreal is this vision, so risible in its bar-room sweep and shallowness, that it is tempting not to take it seriously. What was the sense in occupying a country so as to destroy it? Where was the money for the new roads and cities to come from? The millions of willing settlers? The troops to hold half a continent in permanent slavery? For the Nazi leadership, though, it was no daydream. In July 1940, weeks after the fall of France, Hitler ordered the commander-in-chief of the army, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, and his military chief of staff, General Franz Halder, to start planning the conquest of the Soviet Union. Britain, Hitler argued, could not be invaded for the present, and the only way to persuade her to see reason and make peace was to eliminate the last continental power inherently hostile to the Reich. Brauchitsch and Halder were unconvinced (though less so than Halder claimed post-war), preferring to see Britain knocked out of the war first. (‘Barbarossa’, Halder wrote in his diary on 28 January 1941. ‘Purpose not clear. We don’t hit the British that way . . . Risk in the west must not be underestimated. It’s possible that Italy collapses following the loss of her colonies, and we get a southern front in Spain, Italy and Greece. If we are then tied up in Russia, a bad situation will be made worse.’
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) Equally doubtful was Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who regarded the pact with Molotov as his greatest achievement, and pointed out that the USSR was still punctiliously honouring its promises to supply grain and other commodities. Hermann Goering, head of economic planning and the second most powerful man in the Reich, worried about shortages of food and labour. But Hitler was at the height of his popularity and prestige, and used to browbeating subordinates: the waverers swallowed their doubts and accepted the inevitable. The only member of the leadership to take decisive action over the issue was the unstable Rudolf Hess, who made his bizarre flight to Scotland just six weeks before the invasion, apparently in hope of preventing a two-front war by negotiating peace with Britain.

The plan for Barbarossa was completed in December 1940, and a launch date set of 15 May 1941. Both date and design soon changed (Italy’s calls for help in Greece and Libya forced a delay, and a two-pronged attack turned into a three-pronged one), but from its conception, the campaign was to be conducted with unprecedented harshness, a policy to which the army put up shamefully little objection. ‘This war’, wrote Halder after a two-and-a-half-hour address by the Führer to his assembled generals on 30 March, ‘will be very different from the war in the west . . . Commanders must make the sacrifice of overcoming their personal scruples.’ In June High Command itself instigated the notorious ‘Commissar Order’, under which captured political officers were to be shot out of hand. Further orders authorised ‘collective measures’ against civilians ‘who participate or want to participate in hostile acts’, and removed military courts’ right to try crimes – including rape and murder – committed by German soldiers against Soviet civilians. Individual officers were effectively freed to treat the Russians they came across as they saw fit. Also assumed from the outset was ruthless food requisitioning. The occupying troops were to live off what they could commandeer locally, even if it meant that civilians starved. ‘The Russian has stood poverty for centuries!’ joked Herbert Backe, state secretary in the Ministry for Food and Agriculture. ‘His stomach is flexible, hence no false pity!’ Goebbels quipped that the Russians would have to ‘eat their Cossack saddles’; Goering predicted ‘the biggest mass death in Europe since the Thirty Years War’.
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