Leningrad

Thin, patchy and in places overrun before it had even been manned, the Luga Line was nonetheless also where the Wehrmacht met its first, albeit temporary hitch. From Moscow, Zhukov ordered the Northwestern Army Group to occupy the Luga Line on 4 July, and the first divisions took up their positions the same day. On the 10th, with deployments and digging work still under way, Zhukov ordered Voroshilov to launch a counter-attack against Manstein’s 8th Panzer Division, which was in an exposed position having pushed on east after taking Soltsi, just to the west of Lake Ilmen.

By this time, the Blitzkrieg was already being slowed by terrain and climate. Dust ground out engines; bridges were not strong enough to bear the weight of tanks, and turning off the main roads, as one German officer put it, was ‘like leaving the twentieth century for the Middle Ages’. Nor could the Wehrmacht rely on its maps: ‘All supposed main roads were marked in red’, a general remembered, ‘and there seemed to be lots of them, but they proved to be nothing but sandy tracks. Our intelligence was fairly accurate about conditions in Russian-occupied Poland, but badly at fault about those beyond the original Russian frontier.’ Summer thunderstorms turned the dust into mud, passable for tanks but not for the lorries that carried their fuel, supplies and auxiliary troops. ‘An hour or two’s rain reduced the panzer forces to stagnation. It was an extraordinary sight, with groups of tanks and transports strung out over a hundred mile stretch, all stuck — until the sun came out and the ground dried.’16

Launched in 30° heat on 13 July, the Soviet counter-stroke caught the 8th Panzer Division by surprise, separating it from a motorised infantry division to its left and forcing it into a fierce four-day battle out of encirclement, during which it had to be supplied by air. Though the crisis was over by the 18th, it cost the division 70 of its 150 tanks, and helped force a pause of a vital ten days along the Narva and Luga rivers, while von Leeb and his commanders regrouped and debated what to do next. It was far, however, from the decisive victory that Moscow had wanted. At this point the Leningrad leaders, as they no doubt realised, edged perilously near the fate of General Pavlov of the Western Army Group, who had been arrested in the first week of the war and now awaited execution, together with his subordinates. The Northwestern Army Group’s sacrificial lamb was the head of the Luga Operational Group, General Konstantin Pyadyshev, a respected and experienced specialist on military fortifications and holder of two Orders of the Red Banner. At the time, he simply disappeared; we now know that he was arrested for dereliction of duty by his commanding officer, General Popov, on 23 July, and died in prison two years later. A week later Zhdanov and Voroshilov got away with a summons to Moscow and a carpeting from Stalin for ‘lack of toughness’.17

In Leningrad, the mood was one of rising anxiety. Two questions were beginning to predominate: food — would there be another famine, like the one during the 1920–21 Civil War? — and whether or not to evacuate.

Evacuation of valuables and of defence plant from the city had begun directly on news of the invasion, in expectation not of siege but of air raids. One of the best-prepared institutions was the Hermitage, thanks to the shrewdness of its director, Iosif Orbeli, who had risked accusations of war-mongering by discreetly stockpiling packing materials (among them fifty tonnes of wood shavings, three tons of cotton wadding and sixteen kilometres of oilcloth) months before. He immediately ordered that the museum’s forty most valuable paintings be moved into the steel-lined vaults housing its famous collection of Scythian gold, and the following morning staff and volunteers began the gigantic task of moving, dismantling, crating and cataloguing the whole of its vast and wonderful collection, from winged Babylonian bulls to Faberge’s snowdrops in jade and crystal. ‘We work from morning to late evening’, wrote an art student:

Our legs are throbbing. We take the paintings off the walls. . There isn’t the usual feeling of awe for the masterpieces, though we deliberately wrap up [Titian’s] Danaë slowly. . Downstairs the sculptors are packing things into crates. Orbeli is everywhere in the halls. . The empty Hermitage is like a house after a funeral.18