Leningrad

The art historian Nikolai Punin succumbed to simple fatalism. In the blacked-out, post-curfew silence of the evening of 26 August, the same day that permission finally came through for the Baltic Fleet to leave Tallinn, he sat at his desk restarting his diary, after a gap of five years, by the light of a lamp whose shade was made of blue wallpaper. For people of his generation, he wrote, death had never seemed far away. ‘In reality they’ve been inviting us to die quickly these past twenty-five years. Many have died, death draws near, as near as it can. Why should we think of it, since it thinks of us so earnestly?’ The sense of impending doom reminded him of the 1937 Terror, when he and all his friends went to bed each evening expecting a small-hours knock on the door and waiting Black Maria. Visiting the Academy of Sciences (‘confusion and chaos’) earlier in the day, colleagues had tried to persuade him to leave with them for Samarkand:

But that would mean getting drawn into the war. No, I’m not going. It’s better to tilt at windmills while one still can. The lamp burns, it is quiet. Lord, comfort the souls ascending to heaven.

Not long ago I said to someone ‘Now, there are two frightening things: war and evacuation. But of the two, evacuation is worse.’ This is just a quip, it’s true. But why didn’t they evacuate us during the Yezhovshchina [the Terror]? It was just as frightening then.22

The background noise to agonised personal decision-making was strong popular and semi-official disapproval of those who were quick to leave the city. Evacuees were dubbed ‘rats’, or bezhentsy

— ‘refugees’, but literally translated as ‘runners-away’. Olga Grechina had an awkward parting with a pair of brothers, fellow students at the university, whose mother had wangled them places on an archaeological dig in Central Asia. ‘I couldn’t understand how healthy young people could agree to be evacuated when everyone else was trying to get to the front. . Conversation was difficult. I didn’t blame them for leaving; I was just terribly surprised that they had agreed.’23 As perniciously and less inevitably, some district soviets paraded their faith in the leadership by actually discouraging civilian evacuation in their areas. As Dmitri Pavlov, wartime head of the national food supply agency, puts it in the best Soviet account of the siege, they ‘viewed citizens’ refusal to evacuate as a patriotic act and were proud of it, thus involuntarily encouraging people to remain’. The number of Leningraders evacuated through July and August, he thought, could and should have been two or three times higher.24 Refusal to evacuate could, ironically, also be regarded as suspicious. A diarist noted the following rumour:

It’s said that P. Z. Andreyev and S. P. Preobrazhenskaya (of the Mariinsky Theatre) refused to leave. ‘Why?’ they were asked. ‘We’re sure that Leningrad won’t be surrendered,’ they replied. But the administration thought to themselves, ‘We know you. It’s already certain that Leningrad will have to be abandoned, and you want to go over to the Fascists! We’d better interrogate you, so as to see just what kind of Soviet people you really are.’25

By 25 August Leningrad was three-quarters surrounded. The railway lines west to the Baltics had been cut, as had the direct routes to Moscow. The only unbroken line ran to the east, splitting in two at the junction town of Mga, now itself the scene of heavy fighting. To the west, the Red Army had lost the whole of the Baltic littoral except for a sixty-kilometre stretch of Gulf shoreline to the west of Peterhof. Supplied via Kronshtadt, this ‘Oranienbaum pocket’ — named for one of the tsars’ summer palaces — held out all through the siege, though to little strategic advantage and at dreadful cost. To the north, the Finnish army under General Carl Mannerheim, having recovered its pre-Winter War borders, had crossed into Russian Karelia and was advancing along the north-eastern shore of Lake Ladoga, in accordance with a promise to Hitler to ‘shake hands’ with the Wehrmacht on the River Svir.

The threat to Leningrad now absorbed all the Kremlin’s attention. There is a school of thought, dating from Khrushchev’s ‘Thaw’-heralding ‘Secret Speech’ of 1956, which maintains that Stalin deliberately allowed Leningrad to be surrounded, out of suspicion of its liberal bent and record as a breeding ground for charismatic politicians such as the Old Bolsheviks Kirov (mysteriously murdered in 1934) and Grigori Zinoviev (shot after a show trial in 1936). But reading Stalin’s furious — sometimes fantastical — harangues of the late summer and autumn, the theory dissolves. Though he clearly contemplated abandoning the city so as to save its armies, he equally clearly viewed this as a desperate last resort.