the chemist’s a fifth time to get another three? Why hadn’t I bought a few vitamin C and glucose tablets? These ‘whys’ were terribly tormenting. I thought of every uneaten bowl of soup, every crust of bread thrown away, every potato peeling, with as much remorse and despair as if I’d been the murderer of my own children. But all the same, we did as much as we could, and believed none of the reassuring announcements on the radio.20
Georgi Knyazev, director of the Academy of Sciences archive, was confined to a wheelchair by paralysis of the legs. Each day he pushed himself along the same 800-metre stretch of the Vasilyevsky Island embankment, from the bronze-plaqued ‘Academicians’ Building’ where he lived, past a pair of sphinxes imported from Luxor by Nicholas I, the gabled Menshikov Palace and lime tree-filled Rumyantsev Square to the portico of the Academy. On the opposite bank spread the classic Petersburg panorama: to the left, beyond Palace Bridge, the rococo hulks of the Hermitage and Winter Palace; just visible behind them, the Palace Square angel and topmost candy-swirl of the Cathedral of Our Saviour of the Spilled Blood; ahead, the Admiralty building with its needle spire; to the right, the egg-shaped dome of St Isaac’s and Falconet’s famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great — the ‘Bronze Horseman’ — rearing from its granite boulder. This stretch of pavement, this view, was what Knyazev called his ‘small radius’, the narrow aperture through which he was to observe the whole of the siege. Prosy and conventional (his diary is addressed, with unintentional irony, to ‘you, my distant friend, member of the future Communist society, to whom all war will be as inherently loathsome as cannibalism is to us’21), he spent the first days of the war listening to the radio (‘The peoples of Europe must surely rise in rebellion!’) sorting out a first-aid kit (‘for use in the event of burns or wounds’), and attempting to energise his staff, who showed a tendency to ‘guard the sofa in the President’s office’ instead of the archive’s depository. On 2 July he visited the archive administration headquarters, in the old Senate Building:
On the staircase which once heard the rap of Guards Officer Lermontov’s sabre. . there now hangs a length of rail on a thick cord, and next to it a metal rod — a beater. This is for use in the event of a gas alarm. On the upper landing it was dark, although blue lamps were burning. Walking along the corridor, which was in almost total darkness, I felt as though I were in a Meyerhold production.
The IRLI [Institute of Russian Literature] repository was a dreadful sight. I hardly recognised the workrooms. Everything was in chaos. . Behind a statue of Aleksandr Vsevolovsky stood two large barrels of water, one of which was already leaking. There were boxes of sand and spades all over the place, and a fire hose stretched along the corridor. Outside the Pushkin room stood storage boxes, some empty, some full. I had to do them justice — Pushkin’s manuscripts were packed perfectly. . But there was a lot of fuss and agitation. Right next to the boxes, a staff member was dictating an article on fascism to a typist. Someone else was writing out a list of what had to be packed. . Everywhere, there were crowds of people carrying sandbags.
Yelena Skryabina decided to escape the war — and reduce her chances of arrest — by renting a dacha (their price had plummeted) near Pushkin, the town, formerly Tsarskoye Selo or ‘Royal Village’, that had grown up around the tsars’ summer palaces. There she and her children spent their time wandering in the sunshine round the folly-dotted Catherine Palace park. ‘Blue sky, blue lake, and the green frame of the shore. Peaceful. No voices audible. No one strolling the paths. Only somewhere, far away, the silvery walls of the palaces sparkling through the greenery.’22 On weekly visits back to the city, though, it was impossible to shut out reality. She worried about gas attacks (unnecessarily as it turned out; gas masks were issued but never had to be used), and about famine, ‘because all those newspaper reassurances about our massive food supplies are barefaced lies’. Her neighbour Kurakina whispered of the beatings her newly returned but now half-deaf and fearful husband had endured in camp; up in the cloudless sky high-flying planes left vapour trails, a sinister novelty to Leningraders, who thought them some sort of targeting device.
Not until 3 July, eleven days after the invasion, did Stalin make his first wartime broadcast. Unpolished but immediate — the rim of the glass clicking against his teeth as he took sips of water — it was, in the words of the BBC’s Moscow correspondent Alexander Werth, ‘a great pull-yourselves-together speech, a blood-sweat-and-tears speech, with Churchill’s post-Dunkirk speech its only parallel’.23 Opening with novel, almost beseeching informality — ‘Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters! I appeal to you, my friends!’ — it called the nation to total war in the tradition of the struggle against Napoleon. Production was to go into overdrive, and ‘whiners, cowards, deserters and panic-mongers’ were to be put in front of military tribunals. Not a ‘single railway truck, not a pound of bread nor pint of oil’ was to be left in the path of the fascist enslavers’ advance, and behind their lines partisans were to blow up roads, bridges and telephone wires and set fire to forests, stores and road convoys. ‘Intolerable conditions’ were to be created for ‘the enemy and his accomplices’, who were to be ‘persecuted and destroyed at every step’. ‘All the strength of the people’, Stalin rounded off with sledgehammer emphasis, ‘must be used to smash the enemy. Onward to Victory!’
The speech had a steadying effect, in Leningrad as elsewhere. In Moscow’s cinemas, Werth remembered, audiences broke into frantic cheering whenever Stalin appeared on a newsreel, ‘which, in the dark, people presumably wouldn’t do unless they felt like it’.24 Though in reality Stalin had grossly understated the success of Barbarossa, claiming heavy German losses, Russians now felt that they had heard the worst, and stood on firm ground. The seventy-year-old watercolourist Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva (who had studied under Repin, Bakst and Whistler, and seen out three tsars) listened with her maid Nyusha in their flat near Finland Station on Leningrad’s Vyborg Side. ‘Today’, she wrote in her diary, ‘I listened, with heartfelt anxiety, to the wise words of Comrade Stalin. His words pour feelings of calm, hope and cheer into the soul.’25
She would have been less reassured if she had known how far the Germans had really got. For the Soviet Union, the first eleven days of the war were devastating. Arrayed against it was the largest invasion force the world had ever seen: four million German and Axis troops, 3,350 tanks, 7,000 field guns, over 2,000 aircraft and 600,000 horses. In the north in particular, the Red Army was heavily outnumbered, with 370,000 troops compared to the Wehrmacht’s 655,000. (Numbers of guns, tanks and combat aircraft were roughly similar.26) The Germans were also better led and organised. Army Group North — one of three that attacked all along the Soviet — German border — was led by Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, the sixty-five-year-old career soldier who had led the breaking of the Maginot Line. Under him, in command of the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies, came General Ernst Busch and General Georg von Kuchler, fresh from victory in France. The Army Group’s armoured spearhead was Panzer Group Four, commanded by General Erich Hoepner, with under him Colonel Generals Hans Reinhardt and Erich von Manstein, both among Hitler’s most brilliant tank commanders. The Red Army’s Northwestern Army Group, in contrast, had lost its leadership to Stalin’s purges and was in the midst of traumatised reorganisation and redeployment. The bulk of its forces were understrength, and some had not even been issued with live ammunition. Its defences were also physically inadequate: by June 1941 the army had largely abandoned its bunkers along the old, pre-1939 frontier — the so-called ‘Stalin Line’ — but was still in the process of constructing fortifications further west.
Most of all, Germany had the advantage of surprise. When Soviet frontier guards woke to the sound of exploding shells in the early hours of 22 June, many had not yet even received Stalin’s reluctant order of less than three hours earlier to go on to full alert. Flabbergasted and afraid to take the initiative, junior officers wired for orders: ‘We are being fired upon!’ ran a typical appeal, ‘What shall we do?’ The air force did not have time to mobilise either: Luftwaffe pilots were astonished to find Soviet aeroplanes lined up, uncamouflaged, on forward airfields, and even those that managed to take off proved easy targets. ‘The Russian was well behind our lines’, wrote a Finnish air ace of one, ‘so I held my fire, though I am not at all sure that I could have brought myself to finish off such a lame duck. . His inexperienced flying suggested that he could have hardly been more than a duckling.’ In all 1,200 planes were destroyed at sixty-six bases in the first day of the war, three-quarters of them on the ground.27 For the rest of the year the Germans had complete air superiority, and were able to strafe and dive-bomb as much as their resources — still depleted by the Battle of Britain — allowed. The fact that the air raids on Leningrad did not begin until early September was due to delay in repairing airfields that the Luftwaffe had itself earlier bombed, and the city would have been far more badly damaged had it not been for its hundreds of searchlights, anti-aircraft guns and ‘listeners’ — the acoustic devices, shaped like giant gramophone horns, that tracked the approach of what were often the same bomber crews who had blitzed London twelve months earlier.
With numbers, leadership, surprise and air superiority all on its side, Army Group North advanced at
