Leningrad

Ostministerium) had been born there. A Red Fleet ship had been scuttled in the middle of the channel out to the Baltic; the Wehrmacht had a circular tank that spat out shells like a Devil’s Wheel; and a German paratrooper had landed in the Tavrichesky flowerbeds, where he was lucky not to have been killed by old ladies armed with gardening forks.3

The authorities tried to halt the rumour mill. The city soviet’s executive committee forbade its employees from discussing the war on the telephone, on pain of prosecution for ‘disclosing military secrets’, and yet more ‘defeatists’ were arrested in accordance with a new law making those accused of spreading ‘false rumours provoking unrest amongst the population’ liable to trial by military tribunal.4 At the same time, the leadership indulged in some rumour-mongering of its own, diverting attention from disasters at the front by whipping up fear of spies, saboteurs and raketniki — ‘rocket-men’ — who were supposed to be using flares to signal to enemy aviation. Guidebooks and maps had to be handed in to a special department, as did bicycles, cameras and wireless radios. Tram and trolley-car conductors stopped calling out stops, street signs were painted over, and name boards removed from outside prominent buildings. It became hazardous to ask for directions or to appear in public in foreign-looking clothing. Dmitri Likhachev found himself trailed by small boys by reason of his pale grey coat (‘light-coloured clothes’, he remembered, ‘were not usual in the USSR’) and Yelena Skryabina, having left her tall, bespectacled son Dima outside a shop for a moment, returned to find him being questioned by a policeman. She was able to persuade him of Dima’s identity only by producing her husband’s military certificate, and by pointing out that since Dima was not yet sixteen he couldn’t possibly have a passport.5 Another diarist, Yelena Kochina, found that she herself was not immune from the spy mania, which spread like ‘an infectious disease’:

Yesterday near the market a little old woman who looked like a flounder dressed in a mackintosh grabbed me:

‘Did you see? A spy for sure!’ she shouted, waving her short little arm after some man.

‘What?’

‘His trousers and jacket were different colours.’

I couldn’t help but laugh.

‘And his moustache looked as though it was stuck on.’ Her close-set angry eyes bored into me.

‘Excuse me. .’ I tore myself away. Before pushing off, she trailed me for several steps along the pavement.

But. . even to me many people seem suspicious, types it would be worth keeping an eye on.6

Though the mania continued well into the autumn, and the stories of raketniki seem to have been believed even by shrewd observers — like, for example, the Anglo-Russian BBC correspondent Alexander Werth — there is not a single reliable instance of a genuine foreign spy (as opposed to local sympathiser) ever having been discovered in the city.

Four weeks into the invasion the mood in Leningrad was one of disoriented anticipation, of disconnect between near-normality on the streets and the stunning news on the radio. ‘It’s just impossible to believe there’s a war on’, wrote the crippled archivist Georgi Knyazev. ‘Everything’s so calm, if only outwardly.’ The weather continued hot and still, the fluff-covered poplar seeds Russians call pukh drifted along the gutters, and after work office clerks gathered as usual in Rumyantsev Square to play dominoes. Sitting out an air-raid drill in front of the Academicians’ Building one evening, Knyazev watched a team of teenage girls shovelling a pile of sand into a lorry, while small boys in swimming trunks dived into the river off the glossy stone backs of the Luxor sphinxes. An Academician’s wife stood guard duty wearing gloves and a hat. Chatting to the building’s caretaker, Knyazev tried to introduce a ‘mood of cheerfulness and perseverance’, but the man didn’t understand why the war wasn’t working out the way it had in the films. ‘“It’s awful”, he said, “that the fighting is happening on our territory. There’s so much destruction. Why did we surrender the old border defences just like that?” There was nothing I could say in reply. We have very little information. I still don’t know how near, or how far, the Germans are from us. Is Leningrad seriously under threat or not?’ The air, he noticed, carried a faint smell of smoke, from peat bogs deliberately set on fire so as to confuse enemy aviation.7

Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, the elderly artist who had been so reassured by Stalin’s broadcast, lived opposite a military hospital. During air-raid drills she watched the wounded being stretchered down into bunkers, and medical students popping through trapdoors up onto the hospital roof. ‘Still not a single bomb has fallen on Leningrad’, she wrote on 21 July,

though the sirens go off often. Last night there were air-raid warnings at 12.30 and again at 5.30 a.m., I woke up and the anti-aircraft guns were firing so loudly that I couldn’t go to sleep again. I got dressed, went out into the courtyard and sat on a bench. . It was a cloudless morning and though the sun hadn’t yet reached the buildings, it shone brightly on the barrage balloons scattered across the sky. They swam in the gentle blue ether like silver ships. One couldn’t see their cables; it looked as though they were floating free.8

Though most public parks were closed for the excavation of air-raid shelters, she had permission to enter the Botanical Gardens:

The gardens were still in order, but not as carefully tended as usual. I got a great deal of pleasure from the wonderful hydrangeas; they grew in big urns in bunches of white, pink and pale blue, great explosions of unbelievable loveliness. Not a soul was there. The sun shone on the grass, and through the leaves of the trees. The light played across the bench, our dresses, the pages of our books. A cool breeze blew from the river. I was living in moments of quiet calm, and for a split second forgot that we’re at war, that people are dying and cities burning.

One of the reasons the city felt so oddly quiet was that more than fifty thousand Leningraders, mostly women and teenagers, had been sent 100 kilometres to the south-west to build new defences along the so-called ‘Luga Line’. Though the first construction brigades had started work on 29 June, the line was not formally sketched out until 4 July, when Zhukov ordered the Northwestern Army Group to take defensive positions from Narva (on the Baltic coast 120 kilometres to Leningrad’s west) through Luga and Staraya Russa to Borovichi, 250 kilometres to the city’s south-east. The line’s strongest sector, behind the Luga River, was to consist of a fifteen-kilometre-deep series of minefields and anti-tank guns and barriers, with a gap between Luga and Gatchina through which the Red Army could retreat.9 Work was also ordered on two inner rings, one running from Peterhof on the Gulf, through Gatchina to Kolpino, and the second round the city itself, from the commercial port at the Neva’s mouth to the upriver fishing village of Rybatskoye.10

One of the thousands of teenage girls conscripted to work on the Luga Line was Olga Grechina, a seventeen-year-old student at Leningrad University. ‘At the Department of Philology’, she sardonically records in her memoirs,

our idol Professor Gukovsky rousingly addressed a rally, urging us to enlist in the students’ voluntary battalion. Everyone expected Gukovsky himself to enlist too, especially since many of our teachers were applying to be either translators or political workers. Instead, Gukovsky started making his appearance wearing green house slippers and leaning on a cane. Some said he had acute rheumatism; others cautiously hinted that he found calling others to action much pleasanter than acting himself. I really don’t know if he was ill or not, but it was good that he was able to write his Gogol book.11

Though, if anything, anti-Bolshevik (her doctor father had been exiled to a tiny village clinic by the Revolution, and an uncle sent to the Gulag), Grechina employed no such stratagem, and in the third week of July found herself one of a group of female students waiting, amidst crowds of evacuees, at Moscow Station for a train to the Luga Line:

There were worrying reports of strafing and bombing coming from the trenches — and especially from