Leningrad

I can’t believe there’ll be famine in Leningrad. We are constantly being told of plentiful food stocks, supposedly enough to last many years. As for the threat of bombing — we are also constantly assured of the capabilities of our high-powered anti-aircraft system. . If this is even half true, then why try to leave?21

Similarly reassuring, paradoxically, was the introduction of rationing on 18 July. At 800 grams of bread a day for manual workers, 600 grams for white-collar workers and 400 grams for dependants, plus ample monthly allotments of meat, cereals, butter and sugar, ration levels were generous (‘this is not so bad; one can live on this’, wrote Skryabina22) and even represented an improvement in diet for the poor. On the same day seventy-one new ‘commission shops’ opened, selling off-ration food in unlimited quantity though at high prices. Unaffordable for many, especially given new restrictions on the withdrawal of savings, their lavish window displays nevertheless helped to instil a false sense of security. ‘When you see a shop window full of food’, thought Skryabina, ‘you tend to disbelieve talk about an imminent famine.’ Kochina was less complacent, rushing to buy the four and a half pounds of millet that was all that was left in her local commission store (‘I hate porridge made from millet’), and she would have left for Saratov with her chemistry institute had it not been for her husband’s opposition and her baby daughter’s illness: ‘Lena has diarrhoea and a fever. We’ll have to put the evacuation off for several days. And in general, how does one handle sterile baby bottles on the road?’23 The first of August found Skryabina still out at Pushkin, doing her best to ignore the war and enjoy the deserted palace parks. A niece had come to visit from the city: ‘From her I found out about the rapid German onslaught. They are advancing on Leningrad. We have decided to stay in the country until Luga is captured.’

The deluge began a week later. On 8 August, in driving rain, Reinhardt’s panzers began an assault on the northern sector of the Luga Line, near Kingisepp. In three days of chaotic fighting they broke across the Luga River in three places, at the cost of 1,600 German casualties. Manstein’s 8th Panzer Division, recovered from the Soltsi setback, cut the Kingisepp — Gatchina railway line on the 12th. A Soviet counter-offensive near Staraya Russa, launched piecemeal from 10 August, failed, with massive losses of men and equipment. ‘We pushed on a little further’, wrote Vasili Churkin, in charge of manoeuvring a gun-carriage and six horses through woods sixty kilometres to Leningrad’s south-west:

and on reaching the high road saw a huge, panicking crowd, running in total disorder towards Volosovo. On a cart lay an injured soldier, moaning and begging for his wounds to be dressed. Nearby a girl with a medical bag was walking along, but she wouldn’t stop and help him, she was afraid to slow down. Behind you could hear the sound of clanking metal — German tanks. Someone shouted at the girl to help the injured man, and we turned around and quickly made our way back to where we’d left our guns. But guns and men had gone. Coming out of the woods into a clearing we saw Battery no. 4 being dragged along, under fire from tanks. . A shell exploded right under the legs of the horse pulling the baggage cart. The horse fell and though the cart was carrying all our things, including our coats, we couldn’t get to it because the tanks were already too close, even ahead of us.24

To the south, Küchler’s Eighteenth Army advanced on the historic city of Novgorod, capital of one of the ninth-century Rus princedoms and gateway to Lake Ilmen. Its fall on 17 August went unmentioned by Sovinform, which waited until the 23rd to report fighting ‘in the Novgorod area’. Altogether, from 10 to 28 August the opposing Soviet 34th Army lost half its personnel, seventy-four out of its eighty-three tanks, 628 of its 748 guns and mortars, 670 trucks and 14,912 horses. To escape the slaughter, large numbers of soldiers either fled or mutilated themselves in hope of being invalided to the rear. Between 16 and 22 August more than four thousand servicemen were seized as suspected deserters while trying to get to Leningrad from the front, and in some medical units, a worried political report noted, up to 50 per cent of the wounded were suspected of self-mutilation. At Evacuation Hospital no. 61, for example, out of a thousand wounded 460 had been shot in the left forearm or left hand.25

Stalin’s response to the disasters was a furious telegraph to Zhdanov and Voroshilov. If the German armies won more victories around Novgorod, he thundered, they might be able to outflank Leningrad to the east, breaking communications with Moscow and meeting the Finns on the far shore of Lake Ladoga: