Leningrad

We are disgusted by your conduct. All you do is report the surrender of this or that place, without saying a word about how you plan to put a stop to all these losses of towns and railway stations. The manner in which you informed us of the loss of Shlisselburg was outrageous. Is this the end of your losses? Perhaps you have already decided to give up Leningrad? What have you done with your KV tanks? Where have you positioned them, and why isn’t there any improvement on the front, when you’ve got so many of them? No other front has half the quota of KVs that you have. What’s your aviation doing? Why isn’t it supporting the troops on the battlefield? Kulik’s division has come to your aid — how are you using it? Can we hope for some sort of improvement on the front, or is Kulik’s help going to go for nothing, like the KVs? We demand that you update us on the situation two or three times a day.3

Even before hearing about Shlisselburg, Stalin had decided to bring in new leadership. The previous day he had summoned his head of staff, General Zhukov, to the Kremlin and ordered him to fly to Leningrad with a note for Voroshilov that read simply ‘Hand over command of the Army Group to Zhukov and fly to Moscow immediately’.

Forty-three years old, with a bald, block-shaped head, ruthless will, brilliant tactical sense and the courage to stand up to Stalin on military matters, Zhukov was the outstanding Soviet commander of the Second World War. He had made his name (and evaded, he suspected, the clutches of the NKVD) two years earlier, with the successful repulse of a Japanese incursion into Soviet Mongolia. Later he was to mastermind the spectacular encirclements at Stalingrad, and lead the Red Army in triumph to Berlin. The three weeks in the autumn of 1941 during which he stopped the Germans in front of Leningrad were to become part of a legend.

As recounted in his memoirs, Zhukov took off from Moscow on the same day that he saw Stalin, in grey, rainy weather. He took with him two trusted lieutenants from Mongolian days, Generals Mikhail Khozin and Ivan Fedyuninsky.4 Approaching Ladoga the cloud cleared, and their plane was spotted by a pair of Messerschmitts, which chased them low over the water until seen off by outlying anti-aircraft guns. Having landed safely at an army airfield, the generals took a car straight to the Smolniy, where they were stopped at the gate by guards. They ‘asked us to present our passes, which, naturally enough, we did not have. I identified myself, but even that didn’t help. Orders are orders after all. “You will have to stay here,” the officer told us. We waited outside the gate for at least fifteen minutes before the Commandant of Headquarters gave permission for us to drive up to the door.’

Zhukov walked in, as he tells it, on a mood of drunken defeatism. A meeting of Leningrad’s Military Council was in progress; being planned were the demolition of the city’s utilities and principal factories, and the scuttling of the Baltic Fleet. His arrival turned the mood around: ‘After a brief conference. . we decided to adjourn the meeting and declare that for the time being no measures were to be taken. We would defend Leningrad to the last man.’5 All that night he kept the Council up discussing how best to strengthen the city’s defences, particularly around Pulkovo, a small range of hills (site of Russia’s oldest astronomical observatory) twelve kilometres to Leningrad’s south. His improvisations included the adaptation of anti-aircraft guns for point-blank fire against tanks, the secondment of sailors to the infantry, and the transfer of naval guns from the Fleet’s trapped ships to the weakest sectors of the front. Among the guns sent to Pulkovo were those of the cruiser Avrora, a blank shot from whose forecastle gun had signalled the start of the October Revolution. He also transferred part of the 23rd Army — facing the ‘docile’ Finns on the Karelian Isthmus — south to fight the Germans, and abandoned plans to scuttle the Fleet. ‘If ships have to sink’, he declared, ‘let it be in battle, with their guns firing.’ Khozin took over as the Northwestern Army Group’s chief-of-staff, and Fedyuninsky went to inspect the 42nd Army at Pulkovo. Morale, he reported, was cracking. Headquarters had lost contact with front-line units, and was itself transferring to the far rear, into the basement of a Kirov Works factory. ‘Take over the 42nd Army’, Zhukov ordered him, ‘and quickly.’6