the heroic defence of Orel?’ Vasili Grossman’s editor angrily asked him on his return from a foray to the front. ‘Because there was no defence’, Grossman replied.) Five days into the offensive a Soviet reconnaissance plane spotted a twelve-mile armoured column approaching the town of Yukhnov, 120 miles north of Orel and only 80 miles from the capital. The news was so incredible that the air officer who reported it was threatened with arrest for ‘provocation’, and only believed once two more planes had confirmed the sighting.
On 6 October Stalin summoned Zhukov from Leningrad and put him in charge of Moscow’s defence. Again, Zhukov found the army in a state of collapse: communications had broken down and ad hoc units were being formed from stragglers who had managed to escape being ‘caught in the sack’ of small-scale German encirclements. Of the 800,000 troops that had held the Central Front six weeks earlier, only 90,000 still stood between the Wehrmacht and the capital. Four days later, while conscripts laboured to dig a new ring of trenches around the Moscow suburbs, Hitler’s press chief invited Berlin’s press corps to the Ministry of Propaganda to hear a statement from the Fuhrer. The remnants of the Red Army, it declared, were now trapped. Victory in the East was assured. The next morning’s newspapers carried the headlines ‘The Great Hour Has Struck!’ and ‘Campaign in the East Decided!’
In Moscow, where the crump of artillery could now be heard even from Red Square, it was decided to evacuate the government. The Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet, the defence commissariat and the Allied embassies all left on special trains for Kuibyshev (now Samara, on the Volga) on the 15th.* The following day, the ashes of a million hastily burned files twirling above the pavements, the city descended into anarchy. Police vanished; bosses fled in commandeered lorries loaded with rubber-plants and gramophones; workers looted and lynched. The director of a dairy, spotted trying to leave, was dragged out of his car and thrown head-first into a vat of sour cream. Order was only restored five days later. The whole inglorious episode became known as the ‘big
With Moscow teetering on the brink, Leningrad’s abandonment seemed likelier than ever. A measure of how poorly its chances were now rated was senior generals’ reluctance to take charge of its defence. On Zhukov’s departure the command initially went to his deputy, Ivan Fedyuninsky, but he immediately began lobbying for it to be passed to Mikhail Khozin, who, he pointed out, had seniority, and under whom he had served in the past.26 Khozin demurred, arguing that he could not leave the 54th Army, which he had just taken over from the loathed and incompetent Kulik. Zhdanov then tried to recruit Marshal Nikolai Voronov, a respected artilleryman and a native Leningrader, but he too turned the post down, arguing that he already had his hands full as deputy Commissar for Defence. After a fortnight of pass-the-parcel, Moscow intervened, and on 26 October the command was finally forced on Khozin, Fedyuninsky taking over the 54th Army.
For the rest of the year, Leningrad’s role was to produce as much weaponry as possible, while continuing to evacuate defence plant and workers by barge across Lake Ladoga. (The despatch of the six thousand staff of the Izhorsk Works tank shop, together with their families, was ordered on 2 October, and that of the Kirov Works, with 11,614 workers, a fortnight later.27) The ubiquitous slogan of the time — ‘Everything for the Front!’ — should more correctly have been ‘Everything for Moscow!’, for the bulk of Leningrad’s depleted production went not to its own beleaguered defenders, but out of the siege ring to the Central Front. Stocks of coal and peat, which could later have saved homes from freezing, were used to power production of shells and mines, and transport capacity that could have been used to import food was given over to powder and explosives, which went into munitions that were immediately re-exported to the capital.
At the same time Stalin ordered Zhdanov to try to lift the siege. ‘You must quickly break through via Mga to the east’, he telegraphed the Smolniy on 13 October. ‘You know yourselves that there are no other routes. Soon your food supplies and other resources will run out. Hurry, or we are afraid that it will be too late.’28 Two days later Voronov flew into Leningrad to oversee the offensive and to set new, impossibly high production targets. At their first meeting Zhdanov pleaded for more munitions. In response Voronov demanded that Leningrad increase its own production of shells to a fantastical million a month. ‘A million a month — that’s madness!’ Zhdanov exploded. ‘It’s a bluff! It’s ignorant! You simply don’t understand how munitions production works!’29 Three days later Stalin demanded to know if his new offensive had been launched yet:
We sent you a directive ordering an immediate advance, so as to unite the
On 23 October, the planned attack having been pre-empted by a German one threatening Tikhvin, a vital railhead for evacuation across Lake Ladoga, Stalin tore into the Leningraders yet again, in a message read out on the telephone by Marshal Vasilyevsky, deputy chief of general staff. This time Stalin explicitly admitted that Leningrad might have to be surrendered, emphasising the importance of extracting the encircled armies and Moscow’s inability to come to Leningrad’s aid:
Judging by your indolence one can only conclude that you still haven’t realised the critical situation in which the
Vasilyevsky reinforced the message personally in a call to Fedyuninsky’s 54th Army on the same day. Unarmed reinforcements were being sent from Vologda, but beyond that the army had to rely on itself: ‘Please bear in mind that in the present situation discussion is not so much about saving Leningrad, as about rescuing the
The prioritisation of Moscow continued into November, as Leningrad’s own civilian population started to die on the streets. Typical is a letter from Zhukov to Zhdanov of the 2nd. It opens confidingly — ‘My thoughts often return to the difficult and interesting days and nights when we worked and fought together. I greatly regret not having completed the business, I was convinced that I would’ — but carries a sting in its tail. The Central Front’s generals had ‘squandered all their troops; nothing but the memory is left of them. From Budenniy all I got was a headquarters and ninety men; from Konev, a headquarters and two regiments.’ Could Zhdanov send forty 82mm and sixty 50mm mortars on the next air convoy, since ‘you have them in excess, while we have none at all?’33 Zhdanov’s counter-requests for more transport planes and for deliveries of concentrated foods were fulfilled late or not at all.34 ‘You assigned us twenty-four Douglases’, Zhdanov replied to yet another of Stalin’s demands for immediate breakout, transmitted by Malenkov. ‘So where are they? Get them sent as soon as possible.’35
Altogether, between 1 October and their virtual shutdown in December, Leningrad’s factories sent the Central Army Group 452 76mm field guns with over 29,000 armoured shells and 1,854 mortars of different sizes. With hindsight, they could arguably have been better put to use outside Leningrad itself, since they were not numerous enough to tip the balance in Moscow, but might have done so south of Ladoga, where the Germans’ foothold on the lake shore was only ten miles wide. Had the Red Army then established a secure land route out of the city — a year before it actually did so — not only would hundreds of thousands of civilians have been saved from starvation, but the city’s defence factories could have resumed normal production, to the benefit of the Soviet war effort as a whole. As it was, the autumn’s massive production effort crippled Leningrad, draining it of the resources either to break the siege or — save at the cost of mass civilian death — to survive it.
*The British mission took a week to get there, thanks to frequent stops to let pass troop trains going the other way. Having omitted to supply themselves with food, its members had to bargain at farmhouses for provisions, and on arrival were put up, ‘most uncomfortably’, in a school.
