Leningrad

around Luga. But we hadn’t been told where we were headed, and when we set off that evening we were cheerful, singing songs so as to distract ourselves from the anxiety inside. When we got off the train at Gatchina it was already dark. We were sent to spend the night in a park next to the Pavlovsk Palace, but never slept since the Germans started bombing a nearby airfield, and around us everything droned and shook. We were made to get up, and told to hide anything white and not to smoke. We started walking fast along a road already full of our units. The soldiers marched quickly and quietly; if one made a sound the others shushed him for being careless. None of us had any idea where we were going or why, which made it all the more frightening. We were all desperate for something to drink, so much so that when the road went through a wood we drank muddy water from the roadside ditches.

In the morning, having marched twenty kilometres, the students reached a village, where they were distributed among local residents, two or three to a house. That afternoon their task was explained to them:

It was to dig anti-tank ditches (1.2m deep) and breastworks (supposedly 1m high). Though our only tools were shovels, axes and stretchers [to carry soil], we set to work enthusiastically. The days were sunny and hot. We worked from 5 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m., with a two- or three-hour rest after lunch. We were well fed but there was no tea, except for what our landlady made us from lime flowers. Physically it was very tough, and after two weeks, trying to lift a stretcher, I suddenly found I couldn’t straighten up again.12

Grechina was lucky only to hurt her back. Yelena Kochina was one of many ditch-diggers strafed by German Stukas:

Our whole laboratory dug anti-tank trenches around Leningrad today. I dug the earth with pleasure (at least this was something practical!). . Almost all the people working in the trenches were women. Their coloured headscarves flashed brightly in the sun. It was as if a giant flowerbed girdled the city.

Suddenly the gleaming wings of an aeroplane blotted out the sky. A machine gun started firing and bullets plunged into the grass not far from me, rustling like small metallic lizards. I stood transfixed, forgetting completely the air-raid drill that I had learned not long before.

‘Run!’ someone shouted, tugging at my sleeve. I looked back. Everyone who had been working in the trenches had run somewhere. I ran too, though I didn’t know where to go or what to do. . Suddenly I saw a small bridge. I ran towards it. Under it was a deep puddle. For a whole hour we squatted in this puddle, and didn’t do any more work for the rest of the day.13

Yelena Skryabina, hearing of the strafings and worried that her son Dima might be conscripted to dig, thought the effort ‘senseless — a good way to kill people. . No one is excused — young girls in sundresses and sandals, boys in shorts and sports shirts. They aren’t even allowed home to change their clothes. How much use can they really be? City youths don’t even know how to use a shovel, much less the heavy crowbars that they will need to break up dry clay soil.’14

She was not wrong to be sceptical. Girls dug in bathing suits, with bits of paper stuck to their noses to prevent sunburn. They dropped their heavy shovels during the night-time marches or had to be sent home with hopelessly blistered hands and feet. The peasant women who cooked them kasha and spread out straw for them to sleep on tut-tutted over the ‘little ladies’ from the city; the men overseeing them shouted: ‘You think you’re actresses, that you’ve come to a resort? You’ve come to save the Motherland!’ Their initial enthusiasm quickly wore off: ‘What did he think we were doing — playing croquet?’ one burst out when her professor of Marxism-Leninism, out for a visit, asked if they were tired.15

Thin, patchy and in places overrun before it had even been manned, the Luga Line was nonetheless also where the Wehrmacht met its first, albeit temporary hitch. From Moscow, Zhukov ordered the Northwestern Army Group to occupy the Luga Line on 4 July, and the first divisions took up their positions the same day. On the 10th, with deployments and digging work still under way, Zhukov ordered Voroshilov to launch a counter-attack against Manstein’s 8th Panzer Division, which was in an exposed position having pushed on east after taking Soltsi, just to the west of Lake Ilmen.

By this time, the Blitzkrieg was already being slowed by terrain and climate. Dust ground out engines; bridges were not strong enough to bear the weight of tanks, and turning off the main roads, as one German officer put it, was ‘like leaving the twentieth century for the Middle Ages’. Nor could the Wehrmacht rely on its maps: ‘All supposed main roads were marked in red’, a general remembered, ‘and there seemed to be lots of them, but they proved to be nothing but sandy tracks. Our intelligence was fairly accurate about conditions in Russian-occupied Poland, but badly at fault about those beyond the original Russian frontier.’ Summer thunderstorms turned the dust into mud, passable for tanks but not for the lorries that carried their fuel, supplies and auxiliary troops. ‘An hour or two’s rain reduced the panzer forces to stagnation. It was an extraordinary sight, with groups of tanks and transports strung out over a hundred mile stretch, all stuck — until the sun came out and the ground dried.’16

Launched in 30° heat on 13 July, the Soviet counter-stroke caught the 8th Panzer Division by surprise, separating it from a motorised infantry division to its left and forcing it into a fierce four-day battle out of encirclement, during which it had to be supplied by air. Though the crisis was over by the 18th, it cost the division 70 of its 150 tanks, and helped force a pause of a vital ten days along the Narva and Luga rivers, while von Leeb and his commanders regrouped and debated what to do next. It was far, however, from the decisive victory that Moscow had wanted. At this point the Leningrad leaders, as they no doubt realised, edged perilously near the fate of General Pavlov of the Western Army Group, who had been arrested in the first week of the war and now awaited execution, together with his subordinates. The Northwestern Army Group’s sacrificial lamb was the head of the Luga Operational Group, General Konstantin Pyadyshev, a respected and experienced specialist on military fortifications and holder of two Orders of the Red Banner. At the time, he simply disappeared; we now know that he was arrested for dereliction of duty by his commanding officer, General Popov, on 23 July, and died in prison two years later. A week later Zhdanov and Voroshilov got away with a summons to Moscow and a carpeting from Stalin for ‘lack of toughness’.17

In Leningrad, the mood was one of rising anxiety. Two questions were beginning to predominate: food — would there be another famine, like the one during the 1920–21 Civil War? — and whether or not to evacuate.

Evacuation of valuables and of defence plant from the city had begun directly on news of the invasion, in expectation not of siege but of air raids. One of the best-prepared institutions was the Hermitage, thanks to the shrewdness of its director, Iosif Orbeli, who had risked accusations of war-mongering by discreetly stockpiling packing materials (among them fifty tonnes of wood shavings, three tons of cotton wadding and sixteen kilometres of oilcloth) months before. He immediately ordered that the museum’s forty most valuable paintings be moved into the steel-lined vaults housing its famous collection of Scythian gold, and the following morning staff and volunteers began the gigantic task of moving, dismantling, crating and cataloguing the whole of its vast and wonderful collection, from winged Babylonian bulls to Faberge’s snowdrops in jade and crystal. ‘We work from morning to late evening’, wrote an art student:

Our legs are throbbing. We take the paintings off the walls. . There isn’t the usual feeling of awe for the masterpieces, though we deliberately wrap up [Titian’s] Danae slowly. . Downstairs the sculptors are packing things into crates. Orbeli is everywhere in the halls. . The empty Hermitage is like a house after a funeral.18

Wherever possible, paintings were packed flat, but those too large to fit into a railway carriage had to be rolled, including, after much anguished indecision, Rembrandt’s fragile Descent from the Cross. Only one painting — Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son — got a crate to itself, and only another three — two Leonardo Madonnas and Raphael’s exquisite little Madonna Conestabile — were left in their frames. The rest — Giorgiones, Tiepolos, Breughels, Van Dycks, Holbeins, Rubens, Gainsboroughs, Canalettos, Velazquezes, El Grecos — were