Leningrad

An apprentice textile worker at the start of the war, Frenklakh learned to fight not with the Red Army, but with the Leningrad Army of the narodnoye opolcheniye, literally translated as ‘People’s Levy’ but more usually given as the ‘People’s Militia’ or ‘People’s Volunteers’. A product, initially, of the wave of popular patriotism that broke over the city on news of the German attack, it turned into the vehicle by which the Leningrad leadership, to very little military purpose, squandered perhaps 70,000 lives in July and August 1941.

The opolcheniye was no Soviet invention. Scratch levies had helped to defeat the Poles in 1612 and the French in 1812. Nor were its members, to start with at least, conscripts. ‘Most of us’, Frenklakh remembered,

passionately dashed off to war as fast as possible. . When the Military Medical Academy came along and started choosing people for medical training, nobody wanted to join this super-elite institution for one reason only — it would mean missing the first skirmishes with the enemy. . In my platoon there was a komsorg [a junior Komsomol functionary] from the Agricultural Institute. He had tuberculosis, he actually coughed blood. He was offered a job in the rear, but refused it, and fell in one of the first battles.1

Among the volunteers the Vasilyevsky Island district soviet turned away, according to Party documents, were ‘professors, judges, directors, and some plain invalids — Sergeyev, with half his stomach cut away; Luzhik — on one leg, and so on’.2

The novelist Daniil Alshits, now in his nineties and a grand old man of the Petersburg literary establishment, was one of 209 students at the Leningrad University history faculty who signed up. An orphan of Stalinism — his father had been exiled in the 1930s — he was nonetheless a believing Communist. ‘Very few families’, he explains,

had not suffered under Stalin. And we students never believed in those fabricated trials [the show trials of 1936–7]. But you have to understand that we felt no hostility to Soviet rule. We thought that it was just Stalin overdoing things in eliminating his opponents, that all these reshuffles at the top would soon be over. And everyone understood that Stalin was one thing and the country another.

When his knowledge of German meant that he was split off from his friends to train as an interpreter he was furious. ‘We all wanted to go to the front to fight! Nobody wanted to be left behind!’ In the event, the delay saved his life, since by the time he reached the front in late September the People’s Levy was being wound up and all but thirty of his fellow students were dead.3

What began as a spontaneous, genuinely popular movement rapidly became official and near-compulsory. A Party organiser at the Kirov Works later described the transition. The first people to come to him with a request to be sent to the front, straight after Molotov’s announcement of the German invasion, were five Red Cross girls:

They were the very beginning of the People’s Levy. (Of those five, I know that three were killed near Voronino, and one drowned in the Oredezh.) After them, other applicants began arriving in large numbers. Through the Sunday and Monday there were hundreds every few hours. We were accepting the applications but not sending people anywhere. By the end of Monday everything had reached such dimensions that we finally had to come up with some sort of specific reaction. I went to a member of the city Party Committee, Comrade Verkhoglaz, and asked him ‘What do I do with all these people?’ Other enterprises were in the same situation. The Partkom didn’t answer immediately; it just told me to keep on accepting applications. Some seven or eight days later we were told to form a division of the narodnoye opolcheniye

.4

On 27 June Zhdanov had asked Moscow for permission to form an opolcheniye, envisaging that it would form part of the army reserve. The following day he received a reply from Zhukov, approving a plan for seven volunteer divisions to ‘reinforce’ the Northwestern Army Group, and the scheme was officially announced on the 30th. Moscow’s regional government followed suit with its own copycat opolcheniye proposal on 4 July — a feather in Zhdanov’s cap, especially since his arch-rival Beria had strongly opposed the plan, wanting to keep all civilian militias, like the police, under his own NKVD’s control. In a typical bit of one-upmanship, Zhdanov swiftly declared that Leningrad would match the bigger city’s numbers, setting a target (never met) of 270,000 men in fifteen divisions.5