Leningrad

The decision formally to wind up the remains of the opolcheniye was taken on 19 September, and by the end of the month its remnants had been absorbed into the Red Army. Some 135,400 people, including substantial numbers of female auxiliaries, had served in it altogether.34 The nearest we have to an official casualty estimate is from Zhdanov’s deputy, Aleksei Kuznetsov, who stated, in a speech in the Smolniy the following year, that no fewer than 43,000 Leningrad volunteers were killed, taken prisoner or went missing in the first three months of the war. This is almost certainly far too low. The proportion of casualties in the First and Second Divisions, and in the Second and Fourth Guards Divisions, all of which were virtually annihilated before being officially wound up, was much higher, and hints dropped to Western journalists at the end of the war suggest loss rates of up to 50 per cent.35

Was the sacrifice worth it? The traditional interpretation is that though undertrained and underequipped, the opolcheniye

held the Luga Line for a vital few weeks, winning time for the strengthening of Leningrad’s inner defences. ‘They couldn’t be considered fully-trained soldiers’, the director of the Kirov Works told Werth in 1943, ‘but their drive, their guts were tremendous. . they managed to stop the Germans just in the nick of time. . The fight put up by our Workers’ Division and by the people of Leningrad was absolutely decisive.’36

Today’s historians are much less sure, crediting the brief late-July pause in von Leeb’s advance more to rain and the regular Red Army. Even if the volunteers — bewildered, unarmed, leaderless — did make a difference on the battlefield, their loss undoubtedly represented a prodigious waste of skilled and educated manpower, especially given the Red Army’s desperate need for officers shortly afterwards. (By the end of September 1941 the Red Army as a whole had lost an extraordinary 142,000 out of its total 440,000 officers. ‘Basically to blame’, reported General Fedyuninsky of a failed operation outside Leningrad in October, ‘is weak leadership on the part of platoon and company-level officers, in some cases amounting to simple cowardice.’37) The military historian Antony Beevor is damning: ‘The waste of lives’, he writes, ‘was so terrible that it is hard to comprehend: a carnage whose futility was perhaps exceeded only by the Zulu king marching an impi of his warriors over a cliff to prove their discipline.’ Even harsher is opolcheniye

survivor Frenklakh:

There are moments I am ashamed of to this day. We repeatedly took to our heels, abandoning our casualties. Everyone was terrified of being wounded during a retreat, because if you couldn’t walk there was almost no hope of stretcher-bearers picking you up. Your only chance was if a friend helped you. . After the war I thought for a long time about ’41, analysing the situation as it was then. All those fairy tales about mass heroism — they lie on the consciences of the writers and the politruki

. There were some heroes of course, but there were also crowds of people who just panicked and fled. It was mass, completely unjustified, senseless sacrifice, at the pleasure of our moronic command.38

The last word should go to Stalin. In April 1942, wishing to humiliate Voroshilov, who had turned down an offered command, he circulated a note to the Central Committee listing Comrade (pointedly, not Marshal) Voroshilov’s failings. Among them was the fact that while in command of the Northwestern Army Group he had ‘neglected Leningrad’s artillery defences, distracted by the creation of workers’ battalions, poorly armed with shotguns, pikes, daggers etc’.39 Voroshilov was a bad man and a bad soldier, but the disaster of the People’s Levy was not his fault alone. He had learned his trade in the Politburo, whose members’ most important life skill was the ability correctly to anticipate the wishes of Stalin himself.

5. ‘Caught in a Mousetrap’

Vera Inber arrived in Leningrad by train on 24 August. Fifty-one years old, she was, remarkably, both Trotsky’s first cousin and a prominent member of the literary establishment, producing short stories that managed to pass the censors without descending into outright socialist realism. Her husband had just been appointed director of Leningrad’s Erisman teaching hospital, a leafy complex of red-brick nineteenth-century buildings opposite the Botanical Gardens on the Petrograd Side. Having seen her daughter and baby grandson off into evacuation from Moscow, Inber was coming to join him.