THE STREETCAR TOOK THEM TO THE FRONT: LINE NO. 9, past the Narva Gates, where a firing position had been set up to command the broad sweep of Stachek Prospekt. Aleksandr Rozen rode the car out Stachek Prospekt. He had boarded it near the offices of his newspaper, On Guard of the Fatherland, Most of the passengers were soldiers. A machine gun was mounted in front. The red-painted trolley moved, then halted; moved and halted. A German air attack was in progress. Here and there Rozen saw a car stopped, burning, or a charred carcass, dead in the street— to stay there for months ahead, through the ice winter into the frigid spring, a skeleton, abandoned, pitiful.
Stachek Prospekt was filled with people. Here sprawled the Kirov works, the mightiest engineering establishment in Russia, with hundreds of shops and thousands of workers. Now it seemed that everyone in Leningrad capable of holding a gun was moving slowly toward the rambling buildings that lay behind wooden and wire-woven fences on either side of the broad avenue. Moving in the opposite direction was another throng—women and children, leaving the zone of fortifications from Avtovo to Forel Hospital, the no-man’s land of hastily abandoned factories, apartment houses and buildings, the area which was to be dynamited in a desperate effort to halt the Nazi Panzers. The women in shawls, string bags over their shoulders, milk tins and buckets in their hands, the children with cord-knotted bundles of bedding and clothes, moved slowly into and through the city toward the safer Petrograd and Vasilevsky Island districts. A shell fell beyond the Kirov Gates. Then came the deep roar of a Soviet gun, replying. The streetcar halted at the viaduct. Everyone sat silent, listening to the cursing of the motorman. Rozen watched stretcher bearers emerge from the passageway. A body lay under a blanket. All he could see were the man’s high rubber boots, the kind that was hard to find.
As Rozen waited at the Kirov Gates for his pass to be checked, a 6o-ton KV tank emerged from the passageway, wheeled majestically into Stachek Prospekt and headed for the city limits. Just behind, racing to catch up, went the streetcar. The trolleycars ran as far as the Kotlyarov streetcar barns. There they halted and the conductor shouted, “All off. This is the front. End of the line.” Beyond that you went by foot, picking your way through the military trucks, the barricades, the tank traps, the dugouts, the machine-gun nests, past the Krasnensk Cemetery and Forel Hospital to Sheremetyev Park. The trenches began there.
The front was about two and a half miles beyond the Kirov plant. It was ten miles from Palace Square.
Leningrad went to the front, as Olga Berggolts wrote, by “familiar streets that each remembered like a dream—here was the fence around our childhood home, here stood the great rustling maple. ... I went to the front through the days of my childhood, along the streets where I ran to school.”
On the night of the seventeenth of September, rather late, Party Secretary A. A. Kuznetsov and Colonel Bychevsky hurried through the silent, blacked-out city toward the front. Every window was dark. Here and there a vague blue light showed where a military vehicle was moving. The whole city— the whole densely populated eighty square miles—seemed in hiding, its very shape changed so that Bychevsky could hardly tell where he was, the shadows so deep, black and menacing. The weather was surly. Gone was golden September. Behind the blackened windows, thought Bychevsky, some are sleeping—probably children, for every adult was on guard, digging fortifications, feverishly working on this most fearsome of nights. The bombing had gone on until an hour or so ago. The glow of burning buildings gleamed in the long vistas.
Beyond the Kotlyarov streetcar barns they heard mortar blasts very close. Two big trucks sprawled in the highway, burning fiercely. A cobweb of shattered electric wires hung above the street. From here paths led off to Sheremetyev Park, where a machine-gun exchange was taking place. Ten tanks from the Kirov works had been set up in the park as stationary fire points. From the Sea Canal they could hear the deep roar of naval guns firing into the German positions just beyond Pulkovo.
They found Colonel M. D. Panchenko, commander of the 21st NKVD Division, in a dugout—the command post of his 14th Regiment just beyond Sheremetyev Park. They were practically at the edge of Ligovo—and the town was in the hands of the Germans. They could see this from the fires.
Panchenko, wearing a cotton-quilted Red Army jacket and steel helmet, an automatic rifle slung over his neck, stood, his head almost bumping the ceiling, leaning over a map with a kerosene lamp.
“Have you given up Ligovo?” Kuznetsov asked.
“We are holding on,” Panchenko said, trying to make the best of the situation. “Rodionov has some strong groups in the town. They are still fighting.”
“What does that mean?” asked Kuznetsov, nodding in the direction of a hot exchange of fire. “It sounds to me like your ‘strong groups’ have been cut off.”
“They’ll fight on,” Panchenko said. “These are frontier guards!”
“Yeh,” snapped Kuznetsov. “But where will they fight? Back of us? In Leningrad?”
Panchenko held his tongue.
“Have the Germans got the station at Ligovo, too?” Kuznetsov asked.
“Yes,” Panchenko admitted. “I’ve just come back from there. I tried to get them out, but I didn’t succeed. They have three tanks there and automatic weapons. We got up to the entrance but had to fall back. We’ll try again in the morning.”
Kuznetsov sank wearily onto a stool.
“Tell me this, Colonel,” he rasped. “How does it happen that yesterday your division drove the Germans out of Ligovo and Staro-Panovo? Today you got an order to drive them farther. But, instead, this evening you abandon Ligovo to the Germans.”
That morning, Panchenko explained, two of his regiments attacked from Staro-Panovo but were hit by fifty Nazi tanks. Before they knew it the Panzers had burst into Ligovo.
Kuznetsov ordered Panchenko to recover the town.
“I’ve already got that order from General Fedyuninsky of the Forty-second Army,” Panchenko said. “He even threatened, If you don’t carry out the order I’ll have your head.’ “
“And did you get the order that if you fall back from this line you’ll also be minus a head?” Kuznetsov raged. “All the commanders know that!”
“I know,” Panchenko gloomily replied. Then he began to name the officers who had been killed in the day’s fighting.
Kuznetsov’s anger died down. He rose to go. “Remember, Comrade Panchenko, the workers of the Kirov factory have gone to the barricades. That you must understand.”
All the way back to Smolny Bychevsky sat silent. Neither he nor Kuznetsov spoke. Bychevsky never knew what Kuznetsov was thinking. But Bychevsky was filled with alarm for the fate of the 21st Division. It was not right that as a result of the day’s “offensive” the division had been left without fortifications to spend the night in cold and mud before a big town. And back of it—the Kirov works. Who was to blame for this? Panchenko? Fedyuninsky? In some measure neither one nor the other. For the need of the moment was ceaseless counterattack. The enemy must not be given a moment’s ease. Everything must be done even though it brought heavy losses.
Heavy losses there had been. Heavy losses lay ahead. The truth was that in Ligovo only a single building, the Klinovsky House, remained in Soviet hands. And it had changed hands several times. At 1:30 A.M. September 18 a file of troops headed by Lavrenti Tsiganov and Nikolai Tikhomirov cautiously went forward from a nearby trench to the house. Rockets cast an unearthly green light over the rubble. The upper stories of the Klinovsky House had been wrecked, but the soldiers found an old iron door leading to the cellar. The basement was packed with Soviet troops. A ring of firing points had been set up toward the German lines. On a long table lay loaves of bread, tobacco and piles of bullets. On a potbellied stove a teakettle was simmering. A fourteen-year-old youngster with a dog and an old man sat by the stove. They lived there.
Many of the soldiers in the basement were workers from the Kirov plant and the northern wharves. They worked by day, turning out the big KV tanks, and went into the trenches and barricades at night. “We are soldiers as much as you/’ said Vasily Mokhov, an old blacksmith from the Kirov works. He told of the command point in the subbasement in his factory from which the defense of the plant was directed. Last night the telephone had rung. A strange voice with a heavy accent said, “Leningrad? Very good. We will come tomorrow to visit the Winter Palace and the Hermitage.”
“Who’s calling?” the regional engineer asked.
“This is Ligovo,” the German replied.
The Nazis had broken into Ligovo and the telephone lines had not been cut. Neither, it turned out, had the water mains. The Germans drank from the Leningrad water supply until someone thought of turning it off.
Some time between 3 and 4:30 A.M. the Germans launched another attack on Klinovsky House. The soldiers emerged from the cellar and fought from trenches. At 6:30 A.M. it grew light. From the shallow clay ditches the troops saw smoke curling up from the Pulkovo Heights. A wooden building was afire. From these heights—roughly 230 feet above sea level—all of Leningrad was visible. There lay the coal docks with their huge steel transporter cages. There the ships bunkered coal before long voyages. Now the port was empty and dead. Above the northern wharves towered a port crane—the one the Leningrad youngsters called the camel. To the right rose the twin towers of the Forel Hospital, now a divisional headquarters. Nearby was a streetcar blown from the rails by an aerial bomb. The asphalt of the paving had caught fire and the flames ran down the highway, casting clouds of black smoke toward the Avtovo quarter. Beyond it rose the old chimneys of the Kirov works and beyond them the inner city—the endless panorama of roofs, of chimneys, of cupolas.
All this, thought Tsiganov, the Germans now can see—the wharves, St. Isaac’s, the Admiralty spire, the great Neva bridges, the houses, the streets, the squares. All of this was in the sights of the German guns. War had washed up to the edge of Leningrad.
Tsiganov looked toward the west—to the road to the Peterhof Palace. He could not believe his eyes. Germans. They fired and fell, fired and fell. They came closer and closer to the Klinovsky House. No artillery preparation. A silent, sudden attack. How many were there? The green devils crawled ahead . . . farther . . . farther. They rose and came forward at full height, no longer crawling. He heard them shouting.
“To the ready!” shouted the Soviet commander. “Grenades!”
Tsiganov got off two grenades. He could not throw a third. Over him a German suddenly appeared. He grabbed him by the throat and slowly choked him to death. The Germans were in the trenches now. No chance for grenades, too close for rifles. He pulled his bayonet and leaped on a German officer wearing a death’s head helmet, plunging the bayonet in. ...
The battle went on all morning. Another attack was mounted to recapture the Ligovo railroad station. It did not quite succeed.
At midmorning the troops, to their amazement, heard the sound of music. At a first-aid point a band had started to play. It struck up the soldier’s favorite, “Katyusha.” Some of the soldiers started to sing:
Katyusha came to the shore,
To the very highest bank.
She came to sing a song
For the one she loved,
For the one whose letter she kept. . . .
In a lull the Russians heard from the German side a shout: “Play it again, Russ. Play it again!”
A new Russian attack started at i: 30. A young lieutenant named Anike-yev led his men out. He didn’t shout, “For the Motherland! For Leningrad!” He said, “Let’s go.” Nobody said, “Hurrah!” They simply poured ahead into the German fire. In a half-hour’s bloody engagement they drove the Germans from their second line of trenches beyond the Klinovsky House.
At 4:30 P.M. Tsiganov was sent back to Colonel Rodionov, commander of the regiment, with a message. Rodionov’s headquarters were in Shere-metyev Park. After delivering his message Tsiganov got a present: an hour’s sleep. About 6:30 P.M. he was aroused and sent on another errand to Captain Ivan Glutov, in chargé of a sappers’ detachment, stationed beside a dam and canal. Glutov had mined the dam. On a signal that the Germans had broken through, his duty was to blow up the dam, releasing the waters of the Finnish Gulf to flood the whole area from Ligovo to the Forel Hospital. This was what would happen if the lines broke at Klinovsky House.
Just after 9 P.M. Tsiganov felt the ground tremble under him. There was a roar like an express train. An earthquake? Had the dam been blown up? Against the red outlines of burning Ligovo he saw long arrows of flame against the heavens, roaring across the sky like meteors. They came from the region of the Forel Hospital and were headed for the center of the German position.
“There go our Katyushas!” Glutov shouted.
Katyushas they were—the rockets from multibarrel launchers, the most secret weapon in the Soviet arsenal launched on the most desperate of nights against the Germans beyond Klinovsky House.
At 11 P.M. the night of September 18 Colonel Panchenko wearily went back to Smolny to report to General Zhukov and the Leningrad Command. He brought what he tersely described as a report “about the fighting action of the division.” The key to that report was that the Germans had been stopped.
No one really knew whether the Germans were stopped. It was better not to believe it. If they had been halted, blood had done it. The toll of lives taken in those September days could never be counted. A little stream ran past Klinovsky House. It ran red with soldiers’ blood for days. The Katyushas? Perhaps. Nothing more frightening had been experienced in World War II than the Katyushas with their scream, their fiery trails, their thunderous impact, the mass that filled the air suddenly with fire and sound.1
Was it Zhukov’s iron will?
He was terrible in those September days. There was no other word for it. He threatened commander after commander with the firing squad. He removed men right and left. And he insisted on one thing: Attack! Attack! Attack! This was the essence of his first orders on taking command. It made no difference how weak the unit. It made no difference if they had no weapons, no bullets, if they had been retreating for weeks. Attack! Those were his orders. Disobey and go before the tribunal.
Attack or be shot—a simple equation.
On September 17 Zhukov issued a general order to all commanders of all units in the Forty-second and Fifty-fifth armies. They were told that any withdrawal from the lines Ligovo-Pulkovo-Shushary-Kolpino would be considered the gravest crime against the Motherland. The penalty: to be shot.
In the early morning hours of September 18 Bychevsky was laboring on the Circle Railroad, transforming it into the inner defense line. Every fifty to a hundred yards he was installing gun positions, using equipment that had been salvaged from the ruins of the Gatchina and Vyborg fortified regions and thrown together in the Leningrad factories in the past few days. Artillerymen were calculating fields of fire. Ammunition was being brought up. There was no communications system thus far.
He had stationed sappers’ groups at the big destruction points where mines had been planted under the intersections of the major highways, at the car barns at Kotlyarov, at the Port Station and Shosseinaya. Special commands were set up to deal with German tanks which broke through the city.
At 4 A.M. Zhukov’s adjutant appeared and ordered him immediately to Smolny. As Bychevsky entered the reception room, he saw General Fedyu-ninsky and his Corps Commissar, N. N. Klementyev. Judging from their faces they had had a rough time.
Wet, covered with mud, tired, Bychevsky shuffled into Zhukov’s office. The General was sitting with Zhdanov, leaning over a map.
“So,” said Zhukov. “Here at last. Where have you been gadding about that we have to hunt you all night—snoozing*..I suppose?”
Bychevsky said he’d been working on the fortification system.
“Does the commander of the Forty-second Army know about this system?”
“In the morning I’ll give a map of it to General Berezinsky, his Chief of Staff. General Fedyuninsky himself will be with his troops.”
Zhukov smashed his heavy fist on the table.
“I didn’t ask you about drawing maps. I asked you whether the commander has been advised about the system. Can’t you understand the Russian language?”
Bychevsky pointed out that Fedyuninsky was just outside in the reception room.
Zhukov flared up again.
“Do you ever think before you speak?” he said. “I don’t need you to tell me he’s here. Do you understand that if Antonov’s division doesn’t go into the defense lines along the Circle Railroad this very night, the Germans may break into the city?
“And if they do, I’ll have you shot in front of Smolny as a traitor.”
Zhdanov seemed uncomfortable. This was not his way of dealing with people. He never used rough language. Now he intervened.
“Comrade Bychevsky, how could you have failed to go to Fedyuninsky himself! He has just taken over the army. And Antonov’s division, which must occupy the line, has just been formed. If the division moves up in daylight, it will be bombed. Do you understand what this is all about?”
The reason for the urgency finally dawned on Bychevsky. The Antonov division, the 6th People’s Volunteers, had to get into position before daylight. He had not even known that the 6th Volunteers had been assigned to the Forty-second Army nor that they had been ordered into the lines behind Pulkovo before dawn.
Bychevsky asked to be permitted to show Fedyuninsky the new lines.
“Light dawns!” snapped Zhukov. “You better get your thinking cap on. If that division is not in position by 9 A.M., I’ll have you shot.”
Bychevsky made a hurried escape and met Fedyuninsky in the next room.
“Having trouble, Engineer?” Fedyuninsky said.
Bychevsky was in no mood for chaffing.
“Just a bit, Comrade General,” he snapped. “The commander has promised to have me shot if the 6th Division is not in the Circle Railroad lines by morning. Let’s go.”
“Don’t be angry, Engineer,” Fedyuninsky smiled. “We’ve just been with Georgi Konstantinovich and we’ve got some promises, too.”
The 6th Division got into place. But without much time to spare.
Aleksandr Rozen was with Fedyuninsky at his command post on the Pulkovo Heights. It had been an incredible time. All day long on the eighteenth the Germans had attacked. Now dusk was falling. The weak sun sank toward the west in a sea of clouds. A little rain began to fall, and the ground grew slippery. Fedyuninsky and his staff began to move toward a broken communications trench when the General suddenly halted and looked fixedly into the distance. It was growing dark, but he kept peering into the distance. A shell exploded. Some stretcher bearers came by. The Germans were bombing Leningrad through the clouds. Rozen edged up to Fedyuninsky in time to hear him say: “The 6th Division of Volunteers have occupied their defense lines on the Circle Railroad. That’s the last line.”
Zhukov demanded attacks, counterattacks, counteroffensives, from all the armies under his command. The Eighth Army was cut off from Leningrad when the Germans drove through to the Gulf of Finland, winning control of a tongue of land running from the Peterhof Palace on the west through Strelna to the Ligovo sector on the Leningrad outskirts.
Major General V. I. Shcherbakov, commander of the Eighth, was ordered by Zhukov to concentrate his forces, the 5 th Brigade of marines, the 191st and 281st rifle divisions and the 2nd People’s Volunteers, and carry out a counterattack on the Germans, centering on the village of Volodarsky in the direction of Krasnoye Selo. The idea was to hit the Germans from the rear while the 21st NKVD occupied them along the Pulkovo front. Zhukov transferred to Shcherbakov the 10th and nth rifle divisions and the remains of the 3rd People’s Volunteers from the Forty-second Army. He provided from the front reserves the 125th and 268th rifle divisions.
But the effort was beyond Shcherbakov. The divisions were mere decimals of their battle strength. They had been bled white and fought until they could not fight again. They had hardly any artillery. They had no shells for the cannon, no bullets for their rifles and few mines or hand grenades. Shcherbakov was compelled to report to Zhukov that he could not carry out the order. He had no strength for a counterattack. It was all he could do to hold the fading lines around Oranienbaum. Indeed, without the constant pounding of the Baltic Fleet cannon, those located on ships and the powerful coastal batteries at Krasnaya Gorka and Kronstadt, he could not have hung on.
Zhukov’s reaction was predictable. He removed Shcherbakov and the Eighth Army’s Military Council member I. F. Chukhnov. He put Major General T. I. Shevaldin in chargé of the army as of September 24.2
General Dukhanov, the old veteran of the Leningrad front, was rushed into the Eighth Army place (Tarmes to take over the ioth Rifle Division, which was fighting near Strelna. He got his orders September 17 and had to go by boat to Oranienbaum and then back along the coast by car to reach his troops.
He found a division in name only. Its biggest “regiment” numbered 180 men. This pitiful force was supposed to counterattack the German Panzers. Dukhanov managed to hold on, in part because the bridges at New Peterhof had been mined by Bychevsky’s men and he blew them up in the face of the advancing Nazi tanks.
Then he was ordered by the new commander, General Shevaldin, to carry out a counteroffensive aimed at Strelna and Ligovo. An amphibious landing of marines was being attempted simultaneously. Dukhanov’s men (now the 19th Corps) attacked and suffered heavy losses. The Germans were well dug in and couldn’t be budged. Shevaldin—on Zhukov’s orders—called Dukhanov.
“Not a step back!” said Shevaldin. “You must attack. All commanders, including division commanders, must lead the attack. All forward!”
Dukhanov started to protest, then swallowed.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I will tell the Chief of Staff to take over the corps and I will lead the attack.”
“No,” snapped Shevaldin. “You must direct the troops and take responsibility for their actions. Carry out the order.”
Dukhanov slammed the receiver down. His Corps Commissar V. P. Mzhavanadze3 said, “What’s going on?” Dukhanov told him.
Mzhavanadze pulled on his greatcoat, grabbed his revolver and shouted, “Farewell.” He led the ioth Division into action.
Dukhanov carried out his orders. Every commander, every political commissar went to the head of his unit and marched into battle. The attack halted the Germans, but did little more. The Russians didn’t have the muscle to budge the Nazis.
“I could not then and I cannot today approve the measures for stiffening our troops which were taken by the Commander of the Eighth Army,” Dukhanov wrote years later. “The corps was threatened with complete loss of leadership and might have suffered a frightful disaster.”
But this was Zhukov’s way: Attack. Attack. The commanders could carry out his orders. They could die in the attempt. Or be shot.
Fedyuninsky was fond of quoting an infantryman named Promichev who is said to have told his fellow soldiers, “Our principle is this: If you retreat, I will kill you. If I retreat without orders, you kill me. And Leningrad will not be surrendered.” This was the Zhukov principle.
Zhukov applied the principle to all the armies. The Fifty-fourth, for example. This army had been created August 23 and sent into the Volkhov region for the specific purpose of relieving pressure on the Leningrad front. It had been designed to prevent a whole series of events: It was to keep the Germans from enveloping Leningrad from the southeast. It was to protect the city from being cut off from Moscow. It was to hold open the routes to Lake Ladoga. It was to keep the Nazis from cutting through to Mga and Shlisselburg.
It had done none of these things. In fact, it had done virtually nothing. It was led by G. I. Kulik, the police general and toady of the notorious Beria. Zhukov had him fired on September 25 and sent his reliable and ponderous Chief of Staff, General Khozin, to take over the Fifty-fourth. The Forty-eighth Army had virtually disappeared under the weak and unreliable direction of Lieutenant General M. A. Antonyuk. Zhukov simply absorbed the Forty-eighth into the Leningrad front. There was little left to absorb.
Attack—or die.
The grim slogan echoed throughout Leningrad. Vsevolod Vishnevsky took it up: Death to cowards. Death to panicmongers. Death to rumor spreaders. To the tribunal with them. Discipline. Courage. Firmness.4
In the years to come there would be endless dispute over what stopped the Germans; and when they were halted.
Von Leeb had been under enormous pressure from Hitler to complete his assignment, to encircle Leningrad, to join forces with the Finns, to wipe out the Baltic Fleet. His forces were needed and needed badly on the Moscow front, where the Germans were closing in for the kill. But how could Hitler’s grand strategy—the envelopment from the rear of Moscow, the enormous wheeling movement which was to carry Army Group Nord down behind the Russian lines at the very moment von Rundstedt attacked from the center—how could that be accomplished if von Leeb was still mired on the Leningrad front? It was a matter of timing, and time was running out. The nervous tension rose day by day. In the massive journal of Colonel General Haider the developments were noted as they were seen at the Führer’s headquarters—and by himself.
Von Leeb had been instructed by Hitler September 5 to release his armor to the Moscow Group as quickly as possible. Because he was making good progress—or seemed to be—Haider with great reluctance let von Leeb keep the armor. He still had it on the twelfth. On the thirteenth Haider let him keep it “for the continuance of the drive.” The Germans then thought Leningrad was almost in their grasp. Just a day or two and it would fall. Two days later, September 15, Haider was still hopeful. The assault was making good progress.
But two days later the Moscow front could wait no longer. The 6th Panzers were wheeled out of line. The shift of the main weight, the high-powered punch which had carried von Leeb up to the outskirts of Leningrad, to Klinovsky House, had begun. The whole 41st Panzer Corps, the Hoepp-ner group, had been ordered to the Moscow front.
Zhukov had won. Leningrad had won. But no one knew this yet. Von Leeb was still trying frantically to grasp victory, to break into the city even though the parade of armor to the south was beginning. But success was doubtful.
Haider was gloomy. On the eighteenth he wrote in his journal:
The ring around Leningrad has not yet been drawn as tightly as might be desired, and further progress after the departure of the 1st Panzers and 36th Motorized Division from the front is doubtful.
There will be continuing drain on our forces before Leningrad where the enemy has concentrated large forces and great quantities of material and the situation will remain tight until such a time when Hunger takes effect as our ally.
That was the day the Berliner Borsenzeitung proclaimed: “The fate of Leningrad has been decided.”
That was the day when von Leeb reported to the Supreme Command he had achieved a decisive breakthrough on the Leningrad front.
That was the day correspondents from Berlin wrote that the fall of Leningrad was expected within two weeks.
But already the pressure was beginning to lighten, although it did not seem that way at the front.5
In the early morning hours of September 21 Bychevsky sought out his old friend and reliable counselor, General P. P. Yevstigneyev, chief of intelligence for the Leningrad front. What was the real situation at the front? Was the pressure easing? Was it building up?
Late as was the hour and tense the moment, Bychevsky found Yevstigneyev quiet and peaceful. There was no shadow of concern on his face.
“What do you think, Pyotr Petrovich?” Bychevsky asked. “Are the Germans finally getting played out?”
Yevstigneyev considered the map on his desk for a moment. Then he raised his eyes.
“For the third day I’ve had reports from one intelligence group near Pskov,” he said. “Lots of motorized infantry are moving from Leningrad toward Pskov. From there they are moving to Porkhov-Dno.”
“Regrouping?”
“Possibly. Possibly. I got some confirmation of these data last night.”
Yevstigneyev fumbled through his papers. He looked like a scholar patiently studying some ancient Russian manuscript.
“I’ve reported to Zhukov,” Yevstigneyev finally continued, “that all of this looks very much like a regrouping of troops away from Leningrad. From Gatchina the partisans also report that the Germans are loading tanks on railroad flatcars.”
“That’s fine!” Bychevsky explained.
“That’s what I think,” Yevstigneyev said. “I put together a report for Moscow. But Zhukov will have none of it. ‘Provocations,’ he says. ‘That’s what your agents are giving you. Find out who is behind this.’”
Yevstigneyev said he had heard from the Eighth Army on the Oranien-baum sector that they had recovered dead and wounded from the 291st and 58th German divisions. Zhukov was much interested because two days before these units had been in the line at Pulkovo.
Yevstigneyev concluded that the German frontal attack on Leningrad was, in fact, weakening.
Bychevsky observed that this was why Yevstigneyev seemed more relaxed.
“How can anyone relax at this time?” Yevstigneyev said. “It’s just my professional manner.”
That was the twenty-first. On the evening of the twenty-third Zhukov called in Yevstigneyev and asked whether he had sent his intelligence evaluation on to Moscow. Yevstigneyev had. Zhukov was relieved. Moscow had just reported the appearance of the 4th German Panzer group on the Kalinin front north of Moscow and wanted to know if Zhukov could confirm its departure from the Leningrad front.
The reports were true. The evidence from behind the lines and on the lines confirmed it. The Germans were beginning to pull troops out. Thank God, Colonel Bychevsky exclaimed to himself. Now he would not have to pull the plunger on the “hell machine,” the central detonating fuse that would blow into the skies the Kirov works, the railroad viaducts, the bridges and all the great buildings of Leningrad.
A day or two later Yevstigneyev put together another report for Zhukov. He had information that the Germans had mobilized local residents to build permanent trenches and dugouts. In some instances the Russians were being shot after they had completed work on the installations. At Peterhof and other historic parks the Germans were chopping down the great pine and spruce groves for their command posts and heated quarters, installing stoves and moving in beds and good furniture.
“What is your conclusion?” Zhukov asked.
“It is evident that the tempo of the Fascist offensive is slowing down,” Yevstigneyev said. “And even ... it may be expected that the German Army is getting ready to winter on the outskirts of Leningrad.”
He stopped there, biting his tongue as it was evident that Zhukov was still reluctant to jump to optimistic conclusions.
“The stupidest thing we can do,” Zhukov snapped, “is to let the enemy dig in on our front where he wants to. All my orders about active defense and local attacks remain in force. In other words, we’re the ones who will dig them into the earth. Is that clear?”
It was clear enough. So was the evidence of digging in. The word flew about Leningrad. Admiral I. S. Isakov went back to his quarters at the Astoria Hotel after listening to the exchange between Zhukov and Yevstig-neyev. An elderly porter, long-bearded in traditional Russian style, asked, “Comrade Admiral, is it true what they say—that the Germans are digging in?”
“Maybe,” the Admiral replied. “But if you want the truth, you’ll have to ask Hitler’s grandmother.”
As he walked ahead, he heard the doorman saying to a policeman, “It’s all clear. He means they are digging in but it’s still a military secret.”
But the evidence was almost too much for weary minds to comprehend.
Aleksandr Rozen had finally found the 70th Artillery, the outfit he had been with before the retreat into Leningrad. It was stationed now to the left of the Pulkovo lines near Shushary. He was asleep in a dugout with the regimental commander, Sergei Pudlutsky, when an aide awakened them. “Come quickly to the command post.” The two men threw on their greatcoats and went out. It was very early in the morning—a smoky, foggy morning. The smell of wet leaves was in the air. As they ran toward the command post, the sun broke fitfully through the clouds. At the command post they found a crowd gathered around the stereoptical observation instrument. Finally Rozen had his turn at the eyepiece. There swam into view German soldiers, apparently so close he could have touched them. They were hard at work with shovels and hammers, building dugouts and permanent trenches.
This was it. The offensive was over. The Germans were digging in for winter.
The twenty-first was the day at the Führer’s headquarters that a special memorandum was submitted to Hitler by General Warlimont on the question of Leningrad. The frontal assault on the city, the Germans now knew, would not succeed. Indeed, it would not take place. What to do? Warli-mont’s thesis was headed: “On the Blockade of Leningrad.”
As a beginning we will blockade Leningrad (hermetically) and destroy the city, if possible, by artillery and air power. . . .
When terror and hunger have done their work in the city, we can open a single gate and permit unarmed people to exit. . . .
The rest of the “fortress garrison” can remain there through the winter. In the spring we will enter the city (not objecting if the Finns do this before us), sending all who remain alive into the depths of Russia, or take them as prisoners, raze Leningrad to the ground and turn the region north of the Neva over to Finland.
The next day a secret directive was issued, No. ia 1601/41. It was headed: “The Future of the City of Petersburg.”
It said:
1. The Führer has decided to raze the City of Petersburg from the face of the earth. After the defeat of Soviet Russia there will be not the slightest reason for the future existence of this large city. Finland has also advised us of its lack of interest in the further existence of this city immediately on her new frontiers.
2. The previous requests of the Navy for the preservation of the wharves, harbor and naval installations are known to the OKB. However, their fulfillment will not be possible in view of the general line with regard to Petersburg.
3. It is proposed to blockade the city clÖsely and by means of artillery fire of all caliber and ceaseless bombardment from the air to raze it to the ground.
If this creates a situation in the city which produces calls for surrender, they will be refused. . . .6
The evidence of the men at the front was true. The Germans had halted. They had suffered terribly. Some Nazi divisions had lost up to two-thirds of their personnel.7 But these were not to be compared to the ghost divisions which faced them—the Soviet outfits which had been wiped out, sometimes twice or three times over.
Zhukov had won the military battle of Leningrad. Within a week troops from Leningrad would be on their way to help stem the German tide before Moscow. The first of these troops, the 6th Guards Division, began to report to General D. D. Lelyushenko, hard pressed to hold his lines on the Mtsensk approaches to the capital, on October 5.
The next evening the telephone rang in Zhukov’s offices in Smolny. It was Stalin. What did things look like in Leningrad? Zhukov said that the Nazi attacks had eased off, the Germans had gone over to the defense, and intelligence reports showed heavy movements of Nazi tanks and artillery away from Leningrad to the south, presumably in the Moscow direction.
Stalin received the report silently, then, after a pause, said that the Moscow situation was serious, particularly on the Western Front.
“Turn your command over to your deputy and come to Moscow,” Stalin ordered.
Zhukov bade a hasty farewell to Zhdanov and his other Leningrad associates and telephoned General Fedyuninsky: “Have you forgotten that you’re my deputy? Come immediately.”
It was almost morning before Fedyuninsky got back to Smolny. “Take over command of the front,” Zhukov said. “You know the situation. I’ve been called to Stavka.”8
In the early morning hours Zhukov flew off to take over command of the Battle of Moscow. Now the real struggle would begin in Leningrad—the struggle with the allies whom the Germans had called to their side: Generals Hunger, Cold and Terror.
1 Artillery Marshal N. N. Voronov credited mass artillery fire—field, coastal and naval —with halting the Germans. (Voronov, Na Shluzhbe Voennoi, Moscow, 1963, p. 189.)
2 A curious controversy has arisen in Soviet historiography about the Eighth Army and its orders to counterattack. The distinguished naval historians V. Achkasov and B. Veiner describe the counterattack as having been carried out. The authoritative Bitva Za Leningrad (Barbashin) suggests that it was carried out and gives the Eighth Army great credit for engaging and weakening the Germans. (Barbashin, op. cit., pp. 70-71.) However, V. P. Sviridov, V. P. Yakutovich and V. Ye. Vasilenko cite chapter and verse of Shcherbakov’s refusal to carry out the attack. (Bitva Za Leningrad, pp. 126 et seq.) And the authoritative A. Karasev and V, Kovalchuk agree with Sviridov and Co. (Voyenno-lstoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 1, January, 1964, p. 84.) The ouster of Shcherbakov September 24 suggests that Sviridov and Co. are right.
3 Mzhavanadze became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia after Stalin’s death and in 1957 was named a member of the Presidium (now Politburo) of the Soviet Communist Party.
4 A favorite slogan of these days was: “Leningrad is not afraid of death—death is afraid of Leningrad.”
5 A whole series of dates have been given by Soviet historians for the day the Leningrad front was stabilized. They range from September 18 (selected by only a few) to September 23, 25, 26, 29, and October 13. (Lieutenant General F. Lagunov, Voyenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 12, December, 1964, p. 93.) Admiral Panteleyev heard from Leningrad on the evening of the nineteenth that the German attacks had been beaten off. (Panteleyev, op. cit., p. 218.) “The front was stabilized September 19,” says the authoritative Leningrad v VOV (p. 157).
6 This order was reaffirmed in a secret decree of October 7, High Command Order No. 44 1675/41, in which the plans for the eradication of Leningrad were reaffirmed and it was again stated that the capitulation of neither Leningrad nor Moscow was to be accepted. (Barbashin, op. cit., p. 77.)
7 The German 1st, 58th and 93rd divisions had lost two-thirds of their personnel and material. The 121st and 269th were at about 40 percent strength. (Barbashin, op. cit., p. 73.) The Russians estimated German casualties in the Leningrad campaign at 170,000(Ibid., p. 145); Pavlov says 190,000 to September 25 (Pavlov, op. cit., 2nd edition, p. 28).
8 Stalin’s telephone call to Zhukov was produced by an incredible development. The attention of Stalin and his High Command had been riveted on the rapid Nazi drive toward Tula, southwest of Moscow. The night of October 4 and 5 had been the most alarming of the war. Communications between the Western Front and the Kremlin had been broken and Stalin had no notion of what was happening. As early as 9 A.M. on October 5 word came of a Nazi breakthrough on the central front, a scant hundred miles west of Moscow, toward Mozhaisk. The report first was dismissed as the product of “panic.” At noon, however, a Soviet reconnaissance plane spotted a fifteen-mile-long Nazi armored column advancing rapidly on the Spas-Demensk highway toward Yukhnov. No one in Moscow could believe the Germans were so close, and there was no Soviet force to bar their sweep into the city. Two more reconnaissance planes were sent out. Only after each verified the sighting was the news reported to Stalin. His immediate order was to throw together a scratch force to hold up the Germans for five to seven days while reserves were brought up. Stalin then assembled his top echelon including Police Chief Beria. Beria called the reports a “provocation.” He said his agents at the front, the so-called “special department,” had reported nothing about a breakthrough. When others insisted that the air reports were correct, he responded with the words “Very well,” pronounced with special emphasis. A short time later he summoned the responsible air officer, Colonel N. A. Sbytov, and put him in the hands of his chief of military counterintelligence, V. S. Abakumov, who threatened to turn Sbytov and the reconnaissance fliers over to a field tribunal for execution. The intelligence, however, was correct. It was in this crisis, with the Moscow line being held by infantry and artillery cadets and scattered forces taken from headquarters companies, that Stalin called in Zhukov. (K. F. Telegin, Voprosy Istorii KPSS, No. 9, September, 1966, pp. 102 et seq.) Fedyuninsky mistakenly dates this talk as of October 10. (Fedyuninsky, Podnyatye Po Tvevoge, Moscow, 1964, p. 60.) Zhukov in three versions says he turned over command to his Chief of Staff, General M. S. Khozin. In fact, the formal transfer of command from Zhukov to Fedyuninsky is dated October 10, but Zhukov had arrived in Moscow October 7. Khozin replaced Fedyuninsky as commander October 26, 1941. (Zhukov, Voyenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 8, August, 1966, p. 56; A. M. Samsonov, Proval Gitlerovskogo Nastupleniya na Moskvu,Moscow, 1966, p. 18; A. A. Dobrodomov, Bitva Za Moskvu, Moscow, 1966, p. 56; Barbashin, op. cit., p. 582.) K. F. Telegin, Political Commissar for the Moscow Military District, reports that Zhukov was called to Moscow on the evening of October 6. Zhukov says he arrived in Moscow on the evening of October 7 and conferred immediately with Stalin, who was ill with the grippe but working alone in his office. On October 10 Zhukov was named to command the Western Front. (K. F. Telegin, Voprosy Istorii KPSS, No. 9, September, 1966, p. 104; Zhukov in Bitva Za Moskvu, 2nd edition, Moscow, 1968, p. 64.)