Leningrad

The journey, in peacetime an easy overnighter, took two and a half days. Fresh bomb craters lined the tracks, and long factory trains rattled by in the opposite direction, machinery bulky under protective canvas. One could tell how long each one had been on the road, Inber noticed, by the freshness of the birch branches tied on to the wagon roofs for camouflage. Her own train, drawing towards Leningrad through dilapidated villages with picturesque backwoods names, came to increasingly frequent halts. ‘We stopped at dawn’, she wrote in her diary

and we are still here. . The carriage is fairly empty, and no one talks much. In one compartment an endless card game is in progress; a general whistles as he declares his suit, an army engineer knocks out his pipe on the corner of the table, over and over again. The sound reminds me of a woodpecker tapping its tree. The pipe smoke drifts into the corridor, moves in layers, thins out and is suspended in the rays of the sun. Everything is so quiet, it’s as thought the train were resting on moss.1

They started to move again, through a heavily bombed wood. Trees lay charred and split; roots pointing upwards, earth scorched ochre. Passing through a station, Inber noticed its name — Mga. Normally one never took this route: already, the direct line from Moscow had been broken by the Germans.

Inber disembarked into an atmosphere of tense expectancy. The first thing she saw on leaving the railway station was a poster bearing the text of an appeal, signed by Zhdanov, Voroshilov and city soviet chairman Popkov and dated three days earlier. It was the first official acknowledgement that the Germans were now at the gates of Leningrad:

Comrades! Leningraders! Dear friends! Over our beloved native city hangs the immediate threat of attack by German-Fascist troops. The enemy is trying to break through to Leningrad. He wants to destroy our homes, to seize our factories and plants, to drench our streets and squares with the blood of the innocent, to outrage our peaceful people, to enslave the free sons of our Motherland. But this shall not be. Leningrad — cradle of the proletarian Revolution — never has fallen and never shall fall into enemy hands. .

Let us rise as one man in defence of our city, our homes, our families, our honour and freedom. Let us perform our sacred duty as Soviet patriots and be indomitable in the struggle with the fierce and hateful enemy, vigilant and merciless in the struggle against cowards, alarmists and deserters; let us establish the strictest revolutionary order in our city. Armed with iron discipline and Bolshevik resolve we shall meet the enemy bravely and deal him a crushing blow! 2

In the eight days since she had decided to leave Moscow, Inber reflected, Leningrad’s situation had become dramatically worse. Still, joining her husband had been the right thing to do. ‘He always said “If war breaks out we should be together.” And here we are — together.’

Over the next few days she saw little of him. He was frantically busy at the hospital; she made a broadcast for the city radio station (‘Moscow and Leningrad, brother and sister, stretch out their hands to one other’) and idled, feeling oddly surplus to requirements, round their airy new flat. Through the high windows the sun sparkled on the Karpovka river and the palm-filled glasshouses of the Botanical Gardens opposite. Inside, the walls were hung with fine old porcelain plates, their roses as fresh as the day they had been painted in the reign of Empress Elizabeth. What on earth would she do with them, she wondered, when the air raids began? Though there were ten to fifteen alerts each day — more like one continual drill with short breaks — everything seemed to be happening ‘far away, beyond the horizon’:

During alerts I go out on the balcony. Pesochnaya Street, always quiet, empties completely. Only the air-raid wardens in their tin helmets stand looking up at the sky. Occasionally a factory-school boy runs by — they have a hostel in one of the buildings in the Botanical Gardens. The woman tram driver had this to say about them: ‘They carry on as if they owned the tram; hang on to the step, push their way on to the platform. But I don’t mind any more — after all, they’ll soon be off to the front to dig trenches.’3

Across the Neva on Sadovaya Street, Yuri Ryabinkin spent the radiant late summer days playing chess, sketching out study plans with his friend Finkelstein in case their school closed, and doing more chores around the flat now that his mother had dismissed the maid. Nobody took much notice of his sixteenth birthday, but as a treat he bought himself a chess book and five roubles’ worth of supper at his mother’s office canteen. Poring over books of military strategy, he came up with a plan to save his city. The whole population would be ‘sent out into the forest’ and the Red Army would feint a retreat, luring the Germans into a trap: