Leningrad

On the ground Zhukov’s arrival made no immediate difference; conditions remained chaotic. Vasili Chekrizov was a thirty-nine-year-old chief engineer at the Sudomekh shipyard. Long-faced, with large, earnest eyes and a wispy moustache, he had been demoted and temporarily deprived of his Party card during the Terror. This experience had failed, however, to make him worldly-wise. A natural whistle-blower, he was to come into increasing conflict with his corrupt bosses as the siege progressed, and never ceased to be baffled at the gap between Party rhetoric and reality. On 1 September he had been sent with a team to a village near Pushkin, to build reinforced firing points, nicknamed ‘Voroshilov hotels’. The scene he encountered was one replicated all along the Eastern Front that month: streams of peasants, driving overloaded carts or trudging with bundles over their shoulders; a mounted messenger shouting as he pushed through the crowd; unshaven officers in rumpled greatcoats; soldiers brewing tea on a park bench; a boy tugging a goat on a piece of string. Chekrizov’s suggestion that the pillboxes be built further back, he confided to his diary, was not appreciated. When dusk fell, he could see the fires of three burning villages.

Over the next two days the area came under increasingly heavy shellfire, forcing Chekrizov and his team to work by night. Lacking cranes or tractors, they hauled water in buckets and concrete blocks by hand. They shared their quarters with a group of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old nurses, who slept, like them, in shifts on the floor or on tables. ‘Between the eleven of them’, Chekrizov exasperatedly noted, ‘only one has a blanket. For us it’s the same, though at least we have coats. It’s only our fourth day, but they’ve been here for a month and a half. . Could headquarters really not put them up somewhere better?’ On 11 September he experienced bombing for the first time, and was startled at the fear and bewilderment on people’s faces — ‘It was interesting, like looking into a mirror. Did mine really look the same?’ Two of his team — boys in their late teens, who a few days earlier had been swigging cognac and bragging ‘partisan-style’ to the nurses — were seriously injured in the attack, and one died overnight. Chekrizov accompanied the body back to Leningrad:

At the factory the news was met with indifference, brushed aside. They wouldn’t even let us set up his coffin there, so we took it home to his family. Their room is very small; even without the coffin there wasn’t space to turn around. They buried him today. I wanted to go to the burial, but I couldn’t bear it — or more precisely, I couldn’t face his mother again. She is completely grief-stricken. Better not to see tears.

Back at the front, the confusion was worse than ever. ‘Communications with Pushkin have been lost’, Chekrizov wrote on the 16th. ‘We went to Shushary, which is where our mobile gun emplacements are supposed to be going, but we’ve got nothing to transport them with, and we don’t know what to do with them. The situation is the same all the way up the line.’ At headquarters, where he went to plead for vehicles, ‘ten people seemed to be trying to solve every problem’:

My impression is that they’re mostly just ordinary bureaucrats in military uniform. Yesterday I’d finally had enough. I told them they were a mess. I suspect that many of them secretly agreed with me. . Here’s an example, something that actually happened in Pavlovsk. The lorry drivers delivering parts to us have to fill out consignment forms, each with a number of sections, just like in the city. The transport manager warned me that it all had to be done correctly, and that one particular driver was inexperienced and needed help. Completing his form took thirty minutes, and this on the front! Oh how we worship paper! The Germans probably have a simpler process for all of this. .

The rear is full of staff officers of every rank. Everyone runs around looking anxious. I’m sure a good half of them do nothing. Yes, in terms of leadership our army turns out to be rather weak. There’s plenty of disorganisation in the factories, but it’s ten times worse here. . Will they never sort themselves out?7

While Chekrizov struggled to construct his soon-to-be-overrun pillboxes, a few miles away twenty-eight-year-old Anna Zelenova, a serious young woman with round spectacles, a pugnacious snub nose and hair cut in an emancipated bob, was organising the final evacuation of Tsar Paul’s domed and colonnaded Pavlovsk Palace. It was a time, she remembered, ‘of incredible hurry. The windows of the palace had been boarded up. There was no electricity so we worked by candlelight, or burned ropes and twists of paper.’ Having loaded what turned out to be her last lorry to Leningrad, she dashed inside for a final check of the library: