Leningrad

Another friend’s husband was fortunate, as a ‘dependable worker’ — jargon for a favoured Party official — in having the use of a car to fetch their three-year-old daughter. ‘This made it possible for him to circle through several villages and towns. Even so, he was lucky to find her. He brought her back dressed only in a little nightdress.’32 The historian Anzhelina Kupaigorodskaya, aged eleven at the start of the war, remembers how the staff of her Pioneer camp simply abandoned their charges:

We were supposed to be going on some sort of expedition, a hike. Then we were told it wasn’t happening. Two or three hours went by and finally we were called into a line and told that Hitler had attacked us. Immediately everything changed. Before, the meals had been as good as in a sanatorium, but from then on all we got was kasha [boiled grains]. All the men disappeared, and the only adults left were the kitchen-ladies. Camp was supposed to have ended but nobody came to fetch us. We just wandered around. Nobody explained anything; there was some sort of rumour that we were going to be sent to Moscow, to live in the metro.

She got a message to her parents via another child, and they eventually came to collect her towards the end of July. ‘I have no idea what happened to the rest of the children. Many still hadn’t been picked up, and by then the Germans were already close.’33

Driven by fear of accusation of cowardice, even the army’s internal communications were more rhetorical than factual. ‘No sooner had the village of Polyana fallen under our fire’ ran a report of 31 July, ‘than the Germans jumped out of their cottages with their underwear down. Soldiers in the trenches also took to their heels. . With cries of “Hurrah!” the battalion fell upon the fascists. Grenades, bayonets, rifle butts and flaming bottles came into play. The effect was stupendous.’ On 2 July NKVD border troops holed up in a ‘former kulak’s house’ outside Ostrov found themselves under attack from five enemy tanks: ‘From the flaming premises junior politruk [political organiser] Broitman, already twice wounded in the chest, carried on firing at the enemy, not allowing him to open his tank hatches. Next to him the starshina [roughly, sergeant major] of the picket, Comrade Nagorsky, heroically struck at the enemy with a submachine gun. Bleeding profusely, they courageously covered the retreat of the picket to new lines. Both fell dead in courageous defence of their picket sector.’34

Closer to reality was a cynical joke of the time. A Red Army lieutenant is found sitting in an abandoned German lorry. He is told to move because otherwise he will get fired at. ‘Who by?’ he retorts. ‘The Germans will think it’s theirs, and our lot will run away.’35 Throughout the war’s first weeks, the Northwestern Army Group remained in near-total disarray. Internal reports repeatedly describe units as retreating ‘as individuals and in small groups’, a euphemism for complete disorder. Cut off by the German advance, large numbers of soldiers wandered the devastated countryside, trying either to return to Soviet lines or to surrender to the enemy. Leaflet drops told them to consider themselves partisans, and encouraged them with news of the new Soviet — British alliance.36 So many were taken prisoner that the Germans simply herded them into the nearest available secure buildings, without any provision for food, sanitation or clean water. Men who did manage to rejoin their units were accused of cowardice, desertion or spying. Though the Red Army knew the terrain, its attempts at counter-attack were conducted, according to Halder, ‘in a manner which plainly shows that their command is completely confused. Also, the tactics employed in these attacks is singularly poor. Riflemen on trucks drive abreast with tanks against our firing line, and the inevitable result is very heavy losses to the enemy.’ By 3 July, Halder estimated, twelve to fifteen of the Northwestern Army Group’s twenty-one infantry and armoured divisions had been wiped out.37

The confusion was intensified by a deadly round of scapegoating within the Soviet High Command. The most prominent victim was General Dmitri Pavlov, commander of the Western Army Group, who was arrested on 4 July and executed on the 22nd, together with three of his subordinates. General Kopets, head of Soviet bomber command, saved the NKVD the trouble by committing suicide on the second day of the war. Further down the line uncounted numbers of officers were shot on the spot by military tribunals, for ‘cowardice’ in making unauthorised retreats.38