Leningrad

How close Popov and Voroshilov came to a bullet in the back of the neck we can’t tell. Malenkov and Molotov certainly heaped on the criticism, taking care not to spare Zhdanov either. Replying to Stalin the same day, they boasted that they had sharply criticised Zhdanov and Voroshilov’s mistakes, which included creating the Defence Council of Leningrad, allowing battalions to elect their officers, holding back civilian evacuation and failing properly to build new fortifications. Worse, Zhdanov and Voroshilov were guilty of ‘not understanding their duty promptly to inform Stavka of the measures being taken to defend Leningrad, of constantly retreating before the enemy, and of failing to take the initiative and organise counter-attacks. The Leningraders admit their mistakes, but of course this is absolutely inadequate.’29 Stalin’s response was curt: ‘Answer: First, who holds Mga right now? Second — find out from Kuznetsov what the plan is for the Baltic Fleet. Third — we want to send Khozin as Voroshilov’s deputy. Any objections?’ According to Beria’s son, on the commission’s return to Moscow Malenkov urged Stalin to arrest and court-martial Zhdanov, but Beria dissuaded him.30 Instead, Stalin made Malenkov his point-man on Leningrad: Stalin’s wishes were to be transmitted to Zhdanov through him, and vice versa. This extraordinary arrangement, whereby Zhdanov communicated with Stalin via a man who had tried (as Zhdanov must at least have suspected) to have him murdered, continued for the rest of the war.

Zhdanov was spared; ordinary Leningraders were less fortunate. As the fighting rolled to and fro outside the city, Molotov and Malenkov stepped up the pace of terror inside it. A table drawn up by the Leningrad NKVD on 25 August gives a target number of 2,248 arrests and deportations, divided into twenty-nine categories, from Trotskyites, Zinovievites, Mensheviks and Anarchists, through priests, Catholics, former officers in the tsarist army, ‘former wealthy merchants’, ‘White bandits’, ‘kulaks’ and people ‘with connections abroad’, down to the catch-all ‘diversionists’, ‘saboteurs’ and ‘anti-social elements’, and simple thieves and prostitutes.31 Their zeal had its usual results. At one collection point, a disgusted observer noted,

about a hundred people waited to be exiled. They were mostly old women; old women in old-fashioned capes and worn-out velvet coats. These are the enemies our government is capable of fighting — and, it turns out, the only ones. The Germans are at the gates, the Germans are about to enter the city, and we are busy arresting and deporting old women — lonely, defenceless, harmless old people.32

Among the victims was Olga Berggolts’s elderly father, a doctor at a defence factory. Summoned to police headquarters at midday on 2 September, he was ordered to depart by 6 p.m. the same evening. ‘Papa is a military surgeon who has faithfully and honestly served the Soviet government for twenty-four years’, Berggolts wrote incredulously in her diary. ‘He was in the Red Army for the whole of the Civil War, saved thousands of people, is Russian to the marrow. . It appears — no joke — that the NKVD simply don’t like his surname.’33 Thanks to the Germans’ advance and Berggolts’s frantic string-pulling, he managed to stay in Leningrad until the following spring, when he was deported, half-starved, to Krasnoyarsk in western Siberia. The reasons? His Jewishness, his refusal to inform on colleagues and probably his relationship to Berggolts herself, for whose good behaviour he acted as hostage once her war poetry had turned her into a popular public figure.

At the end of August the glorious run of late summer weather broke. Rainwater gurgled down Leningrad’s fat galvanised drainpipes, fanned over paving stones, dulled the greens and yellows of the stucco façades. Outside the city, seesaw fighting continued in the mud and wet. On 31 August, having changed hands three times, Mga finally fell, cutting the last railway line out of the city. ‘Stavka considers the Leningrad Front’s tactics pernicious’, menaced Stalin. ‘[It] appears to know only one thing — how to retreat and find new lines of retreat. Haven’t we had enough of these heroic defeats?’34

Vera Inber got the news from her husband, who had heard that a military hospital, loaded and waiting to depart for a week, had been told to detrain and return to quarters. The train she had arrived on herself, she calculated, must have been one of the last to get through. Yelena Skryabina, who had just ducked an evacuation order with a chit from her doctor, felt a chill of presentiment: ‘The last transport left during the night. . Leningrad is surrounded, and we are caught in a mousetrap. What have I done with my indecision?’35 Seated at his desk at midnight, Georgi Knyazev listened to the distant thump of guns: