Leningrad

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 Küchler, 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.