Leningrad

From Moscow General Zhukov urged on the bloodletting. ‘Commanders who retreat from defence lines without orders, treacherously squandering their positions’, a telegram of 10 July thundered, ‘have been going unpunished. Nor do your destruction battalions [of NKVD troops, responsible for rounding up deserters] yet seem to be operating; they have produced no visible results.’ Representatives of the Military Council and military prosecutor were to ‘quickly drive out to the forward units and deal with cowards and traitors on the spot’.39 Hence the abject tone of many reports from the front, which typically insist that units have fought to their ‘last round’ before being forced to retreat.40

Significant for Leningrad was the fate of Kirill Meretskov, the burly, snub-nosed forty-four-year-old general who had commanded the disastrous first stages of the war against Finland and briefly been promoted to chief of staff, before losing the post to Zhukov. He was arrested in the first days of the war, having been named by his friend Pavlov as a member of a fictitious anti-Soviet conspiracy. In prison he was beaten with rubber rods by one of NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria’s senior deputies — another former friend — before being recalled to duty in September. Cleaned up and in full uniform, he was affably greeted by his torturer on his way to Stalin’s office. Bravely, he refused to act the amnesiac: ‘We used to meet informally’, he told the man, ‘but I’m afraid of you now.’ Having enquired after his health and kindly allowed him to sit, Stalin told him that he had been appointed Stavka’s (High Command’s) representative to the Northwestern Army Group. Understandably reluctant, following this experience, to take the initiative or question orders, Meretskov was one of the Army Group’s two or three most senior commanders for the whole of the rest of the war.41

Along with the bloodletting came a reshuffle of senior military appointments. Leningrad was unlucky in being assigned to Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. Sixty years old, vain and dapper, with a pencil moustache and small, pale blue eyes, he is often portrayed as a gallant but bumbling old warhorse (not least by Harrison Salisbury, who repeats the story that he personally led a group of marines — ‘their blond hair tousled in the wind, their faces fresh, their chins grim’ — in a bayonet charge outside Krasnoye Selo in September. Perhaps he did.) He was in fact not only militarily incompetent — as defence commissar he had presided over the disastrous opening stages of the Winter War — but, like Zhdanov, a desk-bound mass murderer, organiser of the purges that had wiped out most of the senior Red Army officer corps only four years before. Dmitri Volkogonov, in charge of the Soviet army’s political education section before he became the first important glasnost-era biographer of Stalin, is eloquent: ‘Mediocre, faceless, intellectually dim’, Voroshilov was ‘nothing more than an executioner, a henchman of the Executioner-in-Chief.’42 Voroshilov’s second-in-command, Marshal Grigori Kulik, was no better. Another old Civil War cavalryman and a crony of the sadistic Beria, he was a bullying, ignorant drunkard, whose incompetent direction of the 54th Army to Leningrad’s south was largely to blame for the city’s encirclement. Soldiers nicknamed his leadership style ‘Prison or a Medal’ — if a subordinate pleased him he got an award, if not he was arrested.43

While Stalin wiped out yet more of his top brass, Hitler and his staff, now headquartered in the specially built ‘Wolf’s Lair’ outside Rastenburg in East Prussia, exulted. Hitler’s after-dinner musings reached new heights. ‘The beauties of the Crimea’, he opined between midnight and 2 a.m. on the night Army Group North captured Riga, ‘will be made accessible by means of an autobahn. The peninsula will be our German Riviera. Croatia will be another tourism paradise for us.’ Russia’s twin capitals apparently failed to offer the same leisure potential: three days later, as Pskov was taken, Hitler called Halder to a meeting and told him that it was ‘his firm decision to level Moscow and Leningrad, and make them uninhabitable, so as to relieve ourselves of the necessity of feeding their populations through the winter. The cities will be razed by the air force.’ So confident was he that the whole of European Russia was about to fall into his hands that he instructed Halder to start planning operations against the industrial cities of the Urals. Even cautious Halder admitted to his diary that things were evolving ‘gratifyingly according to plan’. Barbarossa’s initial objective — to shatter the bulk of the Red Army west of the rivers Dvina and Dnieper — had, he thought, been more or less accomplished. Though much remained to be done it was ‘probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks’.44

3. ‘We’re Winning, but the Germans are Advancing’