Leningrad

Immediately, like lightning (even more so than the Germans on 22 June), our tank units will go over to a general offensive and push the Germans into a knot. Then all the might of our artillery — which in the course of the retreat will have occupied the most advantageous positions — will be hurled at that knot. After half an hour of firing our guns will move off a few kilometres, and the places they shelled be occupied by our troops. All the aircraft massed above them will bomb the remnants of the enemy. And as soon as the enemy falters he will be pursued by land, air and sea. .

Ryabinkin knew, though, that this was a wish-fulfilment fantasy. ‘But all this is impossible’, he confided to his diary,

There is no one to undertake such an offensive. And we have too few tanks. . Every editorial shouts ‘We shall not surrender Leningrad!’. . But for some reason our army is not victorious; probably it doesn’t have enough weapons. The policemen on the streets, and even some of the opolcheniye volunteers and regular soldiers, are armed with Mausers of goodness knows what vintage. The Germans are lumbering forward with their tanks and we are taught to fight them not with tanks but with bundles of grenades or bottles of petrol. That’s how it is!’4

The elderly artist Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva walked the city centre, making a mental record (sketching was forbidden) of the boarding up of Leningrad’s public monuments. On the Anichkov Bridge, Klodt’s plunging horses had already been rolled away for burial in the gardens in front of the Aleksandrinka theatre. Opposite St Isaac’s, the outline of the equestrian statue of Nicholas I was still visible under layers of sandbags, which seemed to pour endlessly downwards in a fat, globular flow. The Alexander Column in Palace Square was covered in wooden scaffolding, but the poles did not reach its triumphant angel, who continued to brandish his cross against the blue sky. There had been debate about how to protect Falconet’s famous statue of Peter the Great, the ‘Bronze Horseman’. Some had suggested sinking it in the Neva, but now it too was being boarded up. Watching volunteers unload sand from a barge moored nearby, Ostroumova-Lebedeva wished she could join in: ‘It was hot, the sun was burning. I stood there and watched, and felt ashamed that I wasn’t working myself.’ Though her sister and nieces had left Leningrad, she had decided to stay, partly out of reluctance to abandon familiar surroundings, but mostly out of a sense of solidarity with her city and sheer curiosity as to what would happen next. ‘Everyone’s worrying about the same question’, she wrote on 16 August. ‘Should we leave, and if so where for, and how? What does the future hold? How does one start all over again somewhere strange, having abandoned the comforting refuge of one’s flat? Poor Leningraders! I want to stay. I definitely want to stay and witness all the frightening events ahead.’5

Failing to empty Leningrad of its surplus population before the siege ring closed was one of the Soviet regime’s worst blunders of the war, leading to more civilian deaths than any other save the failure to anticipate Barbarossa itself. By the time the last train left, on 29 August, 636,283 people, according to official sources, had been evacuated from Leningrad. (This compares with 660,000 civilians evacuated from London in only a few days on Britain’s declaration of war two years earlier.) Excluding refugees from the Baltics and elsewhere who passed through the city, the number falls to 400,000 at best. Just over two and a half million civilians were left behind in the city, plus another 343,000 in the surrounding towns and villages within the siege ring. Over 400,000 of them were children, and over 700,000 other non-working dependants.6