Leningrad

Sometime between 21 and 27 August, as German armour rolled through the railway towns to Leningrad’s south, a ‘special commission’ set out to Leningrad from the Kremlin. Its members included Molotov, the chiefs of the air force, navy and artillery, trade commissar Aleksei Kosygin, and, most significantly, Georgi Malenkov, the thirty-nine-year-old rising star recently appointed to the State Defence Committee — the five-man chamber, headed by Stalin, that acted as the USSR’s supreme decision-making body throughout the war. Despised by Zhdanov, who gave him the servant-girlish nickname ‘Malanya’ for his pear shape, smooth chin and high-pitched voice, Malenkov was also a crony of Zhdanov’s arch-enemy, NKVD chief Beria. The commission’s mission, officially to ‘evaluate the complicated situation’, was probably in reality to decide whether Leningrad should be abandoned. The journey alone proved how near to disaster it had already come. Having flown to Cherepovets, a railway town 400 kilometres to Leningrad’s east, the group boarded a train which took them as far as Mga, where it was halted by an air raid. With fires twisting in the night sky and anti-aircraft guns hammering, the Kremlin grandees got out and stumbled along the tracks until they met an ordinary town tram, which took them to a second train that finally carried them to the city.

The commission stayed for about a week, during which Stalin continued to bombard Zhdanov with orders, now completely divorced from fast-changing reality.26 On 27 August he telephoned the Smolniy with a dream-like scheme to post tanks ‘on average every two kilometres, in places every 500 metres, depending on the ground’ along a new 120-kilometre defence line from Gatchina to the Volkhov River. ‘The infantry divisions will stand directly behind the tanks, using them not only as a striking force, but as armoured defence. For this you need 100–120 KVs [a type of heavy tank]. I think you could produce this quantity of KVs in ten days. . I await your swift reply.’27 The following day Zhdanov came up with his usual slavish agreement. Stalin’s plan for a defence line ‘of a special type’ was ‘absolutely correct’, and he asked permission to postpone the evacuation of workshops belonging to the Izhorsk and Kirov weapons factories, so that their tank production be used to fulfil the scheme.

On 29 August the Germans took Tosno, only forty kilometres from Leningrad on the Moscow road. They also reached the south bank of the Neva, cutting the forces defending Leningrad to the south-east in two. Spitting fury and paranoia, Stalin telegraphed Molotov and Malenkov alone:

I have only just been informed that Tosno has been taken by the enemy. If things go on like this I am afraid that Leningrad will be surrendered out of idiot stupidity, and all the Leningrad divisions fall into captivity. What are Popov and Voroshilov doing? They don’t even tell me how they plan to avert the danger. They’re busy looking for new lines of retreat; that’s how they see their duty. Where does this abyss of passivity of theirs come from, this peasant-like submission to fate? I just don’t understand them. There are lots of KV tanks in Leningrad now, lots of planes. . Why isn’t all this equipment being used in the Lyuban — Tosno sector? What can some infantry regiment do against German tanks, without any equipment?. . Doesn’t it seem to you that someone is deliberately opening the road to the Germans? What kind of man is Popov? How’s Voroshilov spending his time, what’s he doing to help Leningrad? I write this because the uselessness of the Leningrad command is so absolutely incomprehensible. I think you should leave for Moscow. Please don’t delay.28