Leningrad

to be sent to the front, straight after Molotov’s announcement of the German invasion, were five Red Cross girls:

They were the very beginning of the People’s Levy. (Of those five, I know that three were killed near Voronino, and one drowned in the Oredezh.) After them, other applicants began arriving in large numbers. Through the Sunday and Monday there were hundreds every few hours. We were accepting the applications but not sending people anywhere. By the end of Monday everything had reached such dimensions that we finally had to come up with some sort of specific reaction. I went to a member of the city Party Committee, Comrade Verkhoglaz, and asked him ‘What do I do with all these people?’ Other enterprises were in the same situation. The Partkom didn’t answer immediately; it just told me to keep on accepting applications. Some seven or eight days later we were told to form a division of the narodnoye opolcheniye.4

On 27 June Zhdanov had asked Moscow for permission to form an opolcheniye, envisaging that it would form part of the army reserve. The following day he received a reply from Zhukov, approving a plan for seven volunteer divisions to ‘reinforce’ the Northwestern Army Group, and the scheme was officially announced on the 30th. Moscow’s regional government followed suit with its own copycat opolcheniye proposal on 4 July — a feather in Zhdanov’s cap, especially since his arch- rival Beria had strongly opposed the plan, wanting to keep all civilian militias, like the police, under his own NKVD’s control. In a typical bit of one-upmanship, Zhdanov swiftly declared that Leningrad would match the bigger city’s numbers, setting a target (never met) of 270,000 men in fifteen divisions.5

The first three Leningrad opolcheniye divisions, totalling about 31,000 volunteers, were called up from 4 to 18 July. Each was based on a city district, which meant that men from the same factories (and often from the same families) were able to stick together in the same units. The First Division were nicknamed the Kirovtsy, after the Kirov defence works, whose 10,000 or so applicants filled two regiments and three battalions, and the second regiment of the Second Division the Skorokhodovtsy — literally ‘go-quicklies’ — after the Skorokhod footwear manufactury. The remainder of the Second came from the Elektrosila power plant. Altogether about 67,000 factory workers signed up, the majority of them skilled men who had been exempted from the ordinary draft.6 As well as creaming off the best of Leningrad’s industrial workforce, the divisions also contained a great many of its engineers, scientists, artists and students. The Railway Engineering Institute produced 900 men for the opolcheniye, the Mining Institute 960, the Shipbuilding Institute 450, the Electrotechnical Institute 1,200. Seven battalions’ worth signed up from Leningrad University. Not surprisingly, a disproportionate number of the first wave of opolchentsy were also Communists. Of the 97,000 men enrolled up to 6 July, 20,000 belonged to the Party and another 18,000 to its youth wing, the Komsomol.7

As Zhdanov’s inflated targets bit, recruitment became more systematic. District soviets were given quotas, based on numbers of eligible residents, which they in turn parcelled out among local factories. Factory managers, now working flat out to evacuate or to convert to defence production, tried hard to hold on to key personnel, in some cases sending women instead of men. ‘Production’, the Party official in charge of recruitment at the Kirov Works remembered, ‘was stripped bare.’ Managers ‘proposed to the director and the Partkom [factory Party Committee] that there should be a mechanism for deciding who should be allowed to go and who shouldn’t. But of course, a lot of people who shouldn’t have been allowed to go went all the same.’8 A. I. Verkhoglaz, chief of the opolcheniye’s political department and a member of the city Party Committee, scolded his agitators into greater efforts: ‘You can’t wait for patriotism, it has to be taught!’ They were not to ‘hang about in warm, sleepy rooms in headquarters’, but to ‘go to the factories and face people squarely. Tell them “Take up your weapons!”’9

Resisting such appeals was hard, especially after Stalin praised the Moscow and Leningrad opolcheniya in his broadcast of 3 July. ‘One volunteer’, reported the Vasilyevsky Island soviet, ‘a former Party member, applied for exemption, but reappeared an hour later with a request to withdraw his application, because he was so ashamed.’10 Another, pleading illness, was told that his health was ‘of no significance. What is important is the very fact of volunteering, and thereby displaying one’s political attitude.’ Likhachev despised the hypocrisy of his bosses at Pushkin House:

All the men were registered. They were called in turn into the director’s office, where L. A. Plotkin held court with the secretary of the Party organisation, A. I. Perepech. I remember Panchenko emerging pale and shaking: he’d refused. He said that he wouldn’t go as a volunteer, and that he would serve with the regular army. . He was branded a coward and treated with scorn, but a few weeks later he was called up as he’d said. He fought as a partisan and was killed in the forests somewhere near Kalinin. Plotkin, in contrast, having registered everyone else, obtained exemption on medical grounds. In the winter he escaped Leningrad by plane. A few hours before departure he enrolled a ‘good friend’ of his, an English teacher, on to the Institute staff, and got her on to the plane too.11

Many people, it is clear, did not realise what they were signing up for, assuming that they would be used for civil defence or specialist work, or as a home guard in case the Germans actually entered Leningrad. Extracting oneself from the opolcheniye, however, was even harder than avoiding recruitment into it. Fifty-two actors and musicians, the Party files note, tried to ‘refuse arms’ — presumably thinking that their job should be to entertain the troops — ‘but steps were taken to halt this phenomenon’.12 A Comrade Ninyukov of the Botanical Institute

kept saying that his work was extremely important, and asking to be dismissed. The same happened with Nikulin and Denisov from the Geology Institute. They have been sent back to their workplaces, where measures will be taken. Party member Taitz declared ‘If the regiment can’t use me according to my profession of engineer- metallurgist I don’t want to be in the regiment.’ The liberals from headquarters, instead of giving him the necessary rebuff, let him go back to his factory. And not until 11 July did the zamkom [deputy commissar] of the regimental political department start taking necessary measures.13

Reports on would-be draft dodgers were an excuse for coarse anti-Semitism:

Sverdlin, a volunteer in the 3rd Sapper Battalion of the 2nd Sapper Regiment, a Jew, previously worked in a food shop. He applied to become a volunteer, but suddenly realised that the division was a fighting division and about to be sent to the front. He became distressed, announcing that when he joined the opolcheniye his wife had tried to hang herself, and had only been saved at the last moment. He was dismissed. . In the artillery Communist Brauman burst into tears because he was afraid to go to the front. . Komsomol member Peterson wanted to leave the opolcheniye, but things were made clear to him and he was sent to work in the kitchens.14

But such backsliding was rare. Most people either itched to fight, like (Jewish) Frenklakh and Alshits, or found it easier simply to go along with the crowd. ‘It was an unequal choice’, as Lidiya Ginzburg put it, ‘between danger close at hand, certain and familiar (the management’s displeasure), and the outcome of something as yet distant, unclear, and above all incomprehensible.’15

Having created their people’s army, the authorities treated it with deep suspicion. Born of a genuine grass- roots movement rather than by Party diktat, its members showed an unwelcome tendency to organise themselves, and to offer suggestions and criticism. Particularly hard to marshal were the thousands of intelligentsia volunteers. Of the 2,600 men of the 3rd Rifle Regiment of the First Division (recruited from the institute-packed Dzerzhinsky district), about a thousand, the Political Department apprehensively noted, were ‘highly cultured types — professors, scientific workers, writers, engineers’ — who needed to be ‘planted’ with educated officers whom they could respect. Requests to be used according to a specialism — radio engineers asking to become signal officers, mining engineers asking to become sappers — were nonetheless to be treated as ‘manifestations of cowardice’, and the regiment was subsequently stripped of ‘moaners’ and ‘unstable elements’. In both of the first two opolcheniye divisions, volunteers initially chose their company commanders and ‘political