Leningrad

a destroyer, the Yakov Sverdlov, took a torpedo aimed at the Kirov and sank in six minutes. ‘Darkness’, as Admiral Kuznetsov describes it,

set in quickly. The ships steaming in the tail were sharply silhouetted against the background of the fires raging in Tallinn. Erupting out of the sea, huge pillars of flame and black smoke signalled the loss of fighting ships and transport vessels. With nightfall, the hideous roar of Nazi bombers subsided. But this didn’t mean that the crews could relax, because of the danger still threatening from the water. In the darkness it was difficult to see the moored mines, now floating amongst the debris of smashed lifeboats.

Between 9 and 11 p.m. another nine ships were lost, including the transport Everita, the Luga, carrying three hundred wounded, and four more of the flotilla’s eight destroyers. The Minsk, with Admiral Panteleyev aboard, lay wallowing after a mine exploded in one of her paravanes. The mine layer Skoriy (‘Rapid’) took her in tow, only herself to hit a mine and sink half an hour later. The best remembered casualty was the Vironia, with her gaggle of glamorous civilians. Listing to starboard and pouring smoke, she was already under tow when she hit a mine at 9.45 p.m. Soviet accounts describe dark figures leaping from the burning quarterdeck, the sound of the ‘Internationale’ drifting across the water, and the crack of revolvers as her officers took their own lives in the moments before she slid beneath the waves.

Shortly before midnight, the surviving ships anchored in the midst of the mines and waited for better visibility. With daylight, they weighed anchor and the carnage resumed. By the end of the afternoon six more ships had been sunk by mines and eight by bombs, and two tugs had been captured by Finnish patrol boats. Among the casualties were the transport Five Year Plan, with three thousand troops aboard, and the patrol ship Sneg (‘Snow’), which had picked up survivors from the Vironia. Four more damaged ships, three of them transports, managed to beach themselves on the island of Gogland (Hogland to Swedes, Suursaari to Finns), from which troops (among them the remnants of the 5th Motorised Rifle Regiment) were picked up in small boats and taken to Kronshtadt. The remainder of the flotilla limped into port over the next four days. The whole operation had cost sixty-five vessels and perhaps 14,000 lives.31

It was the worst disaster in Russian naval history, at least twice as costly as the defeat of the tsarist navy by the Japanese — the first time an Asian power defeated a European one at sea — at Tsu-Shima in 1905. Later, arguments abounded as to what went wrong. Kuznetsov and Panteleyev both supported the decision to defend Tallinn, but thought that civilians should have been evacuated far earlier, blaming Voroshilov for not ordering plans in good time. The convoys would have done better to take to deeper water, running the gauntlet of German submarines but avoiding the shore batteries and most of the minefields. Obviously, they should also have included more minesweepers (‘But where could we have got them?’ asked Kuznetsov). Today’s military historians question the defence of Tallinn itself, which cost about 20,000 soldiers taken prisoner and pinned down only four German divisions, making little difference to the fighting further east.32

The underlying problem, though, was that of the whole Soviet command: senior officers’ well-founded fear of advocating retreat until it became inevitable, and inevitably disastrous. Instructive is the story of Vyacheslav Kaliteyev, captain of the Kazakhstan, the largest troopship in the flotilla. Knocked unconscious by a bomb that hit the bridge soon after departure on the first morning of the evacuation, he fell into the sea and was lucky to be picked up by a submarine, which took him to Kronshtadt. Meanwhile the Kazakhstan limped on, aflame, under her seven surviving crew, depositing her passengers on a sandspit before arriving at Kronshtadt four days later — the only troopship to do so. Immediately an investigation was launched. Why had Kaliteyev abandoned his ship? Why had he returned ahead of her? Had he deliberately jumped overboard? The crewmen who nursed the Kazakhstan home were rewarded with Orders of the Red Banner in a special communique from Stavka. Kaliteyev was executed by firing squad, for ‘cowardice’ and ‘desertion under fire’.33

4. The People’s Levy

‘And what makes you think that I want to talk about the war?’ eighty-year-old Ilya Frenklakh, retired to sun and sectarianism in Israel, scolded his interviewer six decades after the war’s end:

So, you want to hear the truth, from a soldier, but who needs it now?. . If you speak the whole truth about the war, with real honesty and candour, immediately dozens of ‘hurrah-patriots’ start bawling ‘Slander! Libel! Blasphemy! Mockery! He’s throwing mud!’. . But political organiser talk — ‘stoutly and heroically, with not much blood, with strong blows, under the leadership of wise and well-prepared officers. .’ — well, that sort of false, hypocritical language, the arrogant boasting of the semi-official press, always makes me sick.

An apprentice textile worker at the start of the war, Frenklakh learned to fight not with the Red Army, but with the Leningrad Army of the narodnoye opolcheniye, literally translated as ‘People’s Levy’ but more usually given as the ‘People’s Militia’ or ‘People’s Volunteers’. A product, initially, of the wave of popular patriotism that broke over the city on news of the German attack, it turned into the vehicle by which the Leningrad leadership, to very little military purpose, squandered perhaps 70,000 lives in July and August 1941.

The opolcheniye was no Soviet invention. Scratch levies had helped to defeat the Poles in 1612 and the French in 1812. Nor were its members, to start with at least, conscripts. ‘Most of us’, Frenklakh remembered,

passionately dashed off to war as fast as possible. . When the Military Medical Academy came along and started choosing people for medical training, nobody wanted to join this super-elite institution for one reason only — it would mean missing the first skirmishes with the enemy. . In my platoon there was a komsorg [a junior Komsomol functionary] from the Agricultural Institute. He had tuberculosis, he actually coughed blood. He was offered a job in the rear, but refused it, and fell in one of the first battles.1

Among the volunteers the Vasilyevsky Island district soviet turned away, according to Party documents, were ‘professors, judges, directors, and some plain invalids — Sergeyev, with half his stomach cut away; Luzhik — on one leg, and so on’.2

The novelist Daniil Alshits, now in his nineties and a grand old man of the Petersburg literary establishment, was one of 209 students at the Leningrad University history faculty who signed up. An orphan of Stalinism — his father had been exiled in the 1930s — he was nonetheless a believing Communist. ‘Very few families’, he explains,

had not suffered under Stalin. And we students never believed in those fabricated trials [the show trials of 1936–7]. But you have to understand that we felt no hostility to Soviet rule. We thought that it was just Stalin overdoing things in eliminating his opponents, that all these reshuffles at the top would soon be over. And everyone understood that Stalin was one thing and the country another.

When his knowledge of German meant that he was split off from his friends to train as an interpreter he was furious. ‘We all wanted to go to the front to fight! Nobody wanted to be left behind!’ In the event, the delay saved his life, since by the time he reached the front in late September the People’s Levy was being wound up and all but thirty of his fellow students were dead.3

What began as a spontaneous, genuinely popular movement rapidly became official and near-compulsory. A Party organiser at the Kirov Works later described the transition. The first people to come to him with a request