Leningrad

leaders’ — the battalion-level entertainments officers-cum-propagandists-cum-informers known as politruki — by informal ballot,16 a perilously democratic practice that was swiftly stamped out on Stavka’s orders. The Political Department’s best efforts, though, could not persuade them to initiate ‘socialist competitions’ with other units, or to adopt military formalities. ‘Here are two examples’, lamented one politruk,

from the Zhdanovsky and Kirovsky regiments. He used to be an ordinary worker and is now an officer. In his unit he has two of his former foremen — and of course, it’s difficult to drop the [familiar] Sasha, Vanya, Petya. Or take the following incident. A commander gives an order and says ‘Repeat it.’ And his subordinate replies ‘Sasha, why do I have to repeat it, do you think I’m stupid?’. . We have to force our commanders to be stricter.17

Volunteerism, the Party bosses worried, might also mask treachery. Thirteen ethnic German and Estonian ‘foreigners’ were discovered to have signed up, as had an ex-Trotskyite, a White Finn, and several Spanish and Austrian Communists. All were dismissed from the opolcheniye, and their details passed to the NKVD.18

More practically, what were by 7 July 110,000 volunteers19 had to be transferred to barracks, equipped and taught to fight. In this the authorities failed miserably, as the politruki’s frank reports attest. The First, or ‘Kirov’, Division’s volunteers were called up on 4 July, and sent to improvised barracks in schools, a hospital, a factory hostel and a dormitory of the Conservatoire, where they slept on the floor or on bunks with no mattresses. They arrived, the Political Department complained, straight from work, drunk after the traditional conscription send-off and without proper clothing. They sat listening to political lectures with their shirts off, banged their newly issued rifles on their bedsteads to detach the bayonets, hid quarter-litre bottles of vodka in their gas masks and bought Eskimo lollipops from ice-cream sellers who were allowed to come and go unhindered and might be spies. Worst of all, they were not being trained. Theoretically, volunteers were supposed to have sixteen hours’ training. In practice, they had even less than this, since they had not enough weapons or ammunition to learn with, and almost no instructors (one per 500–600 soldiers, according to one report20).

In practice, no adequate training could possibly have taken place in the time available. On 7 July, after three days in barracks, the men of the Kirov Division marched through the streets, followed by crowds of wives and children, to the Vitebsky railway station, where they entrained for the front. It was a piece of theatre, for a few stops out the army command sent them back again, to pick up basic equipment. Altogether, a volunteer remembered,

we set off for the front three times. . The first time was on 7 July. The command sent us back because we didn’t have any kit. On 8 July our weapons arrived and were distributed. We set off again, and our uniforms were handed out on the way. Again we were turned back. By the 9th we were finally properly dressed and equipped: everyone with his rifle, and the officers with carbines.

But though the First Division had artillery, machine guns and a few sub-machine guns, it had no anti-aircraft guns, its mortars lacked sights and some of the rifles that had been issued were forty years old. (‘Mine was made in 1895’, one Kirovyets remembered. ‘It was the same age as me.’21) The division finally arrived at its destination — a railway town between Luga and Novgorod — on 11 July, in the middle of an air raid.

Later opolcheniye units were even worse off. The Second Division also had no anti-aircraft guns, no automatic weapons save one machine gun, and such inexperienced gun crews that they had to ‘learn how to use their guns while in battle’. The Third Division, opolcheniye commander Major General Aleksei Subbotin complained to Zhdanov, had half its designated artillery, no armoured shells, no grenades or Molotov cocktails, ‘not a single mortar’, insufficient cable for field telephones, only a handful of cars and motorbikes, and no gun oil for rifles, which meant that they hadn’t been cleaned since being handed out. The third was nonetheless sent to man fortifications near Leningrad on 15 July, the actual day of its call- up.22

The Party saw the volunteers, internal records make clear, as cannon fodder. Meeting with his colleagues in the Political Department, Verkhoglaz praised their diversity — ‘In our units you can see a professor marching alongside a student, a metalworker and a blast-furnace operator, or an architect doing target-practice alongside a baker’ — but admitted that ‘Since we don’t have much preparation time, they must train while fighting, and fight while training.’ Volunteers were ‘not to be used for manoeuvres, only for defence. . which is why they need to know how to use grenades and other primitive means of fighting off enemy attacks’.23 The first division to be thrown into battle was the Second, which on arrival at the front on 13 July was immediately ordered to turn back German tank units from a bridgehead across the Luga River south-east of Kingisepp. The First and Third Divisions followed suit a week later, as the Wehrmacht’s motorised divisions spread south along the Luga Line.

The result was near-universal panic and confusion. Unarmed, untrained, exhausted by night-time marches and sleepless days hiding from air attack, volunteers fled or fell into captivity in vast numbers. So many abandoned their ancient rifles that a special campaign was launched with the slogans ‘Losing your gun is a crime against the Motherland’ and ‘A soldier’s power is his weapon’. Mass flight in the face of tanks was so common that it got its own pseudo-medical name — tankovaya boyazn, or ‘tankophobia’. Verkhoglaz even hinted to his subordinates that they should spread the rumour that the Germans were using dummies:

The other day exactly this sort of incident was uncovered; it was spotted through binoculars. A colossal column of tanks was seen approaching. The tanks stopped, an officer got out and leant against one with his elbow, and his elbow made a dent. Well, as you know, elbows don’t make dents on real tanks. This slight detail revealed the truth — the tanks turned out to be fake.24

Whether this absurd attempt at persuading men to fight panzers virtually with their bare hands had any success we do not know; it seems highly unlikely.

Brought to battle, the volunteers’ lives were thrown away in the most primitive fashion. ‘Russian attack method’, German chief of staff General Halder wrote in his diary: ‘Three-minute artillery barrage, then pause, then infantry attacking as much as twelve ranks deep, without heavy weapons support. The men start hurrah-ing from far off. Incredibly high Russian losses.’25 One of those infantrymen was Frenklakh. ‘You’re so terrified that your legs root themselves to the ground’, he remembered. ‘It’s extraordinarily difficult to make yourself get up, pick up your rifle and run. Once you’re up it’s fine — you just run forwards. But it wasn’t just fear of being shot in the back of the head if you didn’t that made you do it — you were high on a sense of duty.’

Officers who emerged from battle alive were subjected to the usual suspicious bullying. Verkhoglaz interrogated a politruk, Mikhail Serogodsky, after a disastrous engagement near Kingisepp at the end of July:

Serogodsky: ‘Nine hundred of us arrived at the railway station, and six hundred came out of the fighting there.’

Verkhoglaz: ‘Were the rest killed, or did they make off?’

Serogodsky: ‘Some went off towards Gdov, some were killed.’

Verkhoglaz: ‘I know exactly why some of them ran away — it was because you lost your head. You didn’t understand that you have to lead. Thanks to your failure of leadership they ran away in animal terror.’

The remainder of the unit, Serogodsky continued, were ordered to ‘consider themselves partisans’, broke up into groups and headed into the woods:

Verkhoglaz: ‘The reason for your return from the rear?’

Serogodsky: ‘We had difficulties with food. For the last three days until we met up with our units again, we fed off wild plants. We were walking through deep pine forest and living off wood sorrel. Extreme hunger forced