Leningrad

Though the mania continued well into the autumn, and the stories of raketniki seem to have been believed even by shrewd observers — like, for example, the Anglo-Russian BBC correspondent Alexander Werth — there is not a single reliable instance of a genuine foreign spy (as opposed to local sympathiser) ever having been discovered in the city.

Four weeks into the invasion the mood in Leningrad was one of disoriented anticipation, of disconnect between near-normality on the streets and the stunning news on the radio. ‘It’s just impossible to believe there’s a war on’, wrote the crippled archivist Georgi Knyazev. ‘Everything’s so calm, if only outwardly.’ The weather continued hot and still, the fluff-covered poplar seeds Russians call pukh drifted along the gutters, and after work office clerks gathered as usual in Rumyantsev Square to play dominoes. Sitting out an air-raid drill in front of the Academicians’ Building one evening, Knyazev watched a team of teenage girls shovelling a pile of sand into a lorry, while small boys in swimming trunks dived into the river off the glossy stone backs of the Luxor sphinxes. An Academician’s wife stood guard duty wearing gloves and a hat. Chatting to the building’s caretaker, Knyazev tried to introduce a ‘mood of cheerfulness and perseverance’, but the man didn’t understand why the war wasn’t working out the way it had in the films. ‘“It’s awful”, he said, “that the fighting is happening on our territory. There’s so much destruction. Why did we surrender the old border defences just like that?” There was nothing I could say in reply. We have very little information. I still don’t know how near, or how far, the Germans are from us. Is Leningrad seriously under threat or not?’ The air, he noticed, carried a faint smell of smoke, from peat bogs deliberately set on fire so as to confuse enemy aviation.7

Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, the elderly artist who had been so reassured by Stalin’s broadcast, lived opposite a military hospital. During air-raid drills she watched the wounded being stretchered down into bunkers, and medical students popping through trapdoors up onto the hospital roof. ‘Still not a single bomb has fallen on Leningrad’, she wrote on 21 July,

though the sirens go off often. Last night there were air-raid warnings at 12.30 and again at 5.30 a.m., I woke up and the anti-aircraft guns were firing so loudly that I couldn’t go to sleep again. I got dressed, went out into the courtyard and sat on a bench. . It was a cloudless morning and though the sun hadn’t yet reached the buildings, it shone brightly on the barrage balloons scattered across the sky. They swam in the gentle blue ether like silver ships. One couldn’t see their cables; it looked as though they were floating free.8

Though most public parks were closed for the excavation of air-raid shelters, she had permission to enter the Botanical Gardens:

The gardens were still in order, but not as carefully tended as usual. I got a great deal of pleasure from the wonderful hydrangeas; they grew in big urns in bunches of white, pink and pale blue, great explosions of unbelievable loveliness. Not a soul was there. The sun shone on the grass, and through the leaves of the trees. The light played across the bench, our dresses, the pages of our books. A cool breeze blew from the river. I was living in moments of quiet calm, and for a split second forgot that we’re at war, that people are dying and cities burning.

One of the reasons the city felt so oddly quiet was that more than fifty thousand Leningraders, mostly women and teenagers, had been sent 100 kilometres to the south-west to build new defences along the so-called ‘Luga Line’. Though the first construction brigades had started work on 29 June, the line was not formally sketched out until 4 July, when Zhukov ordered the Northwestern Army Group to take defensive positions from Narva (on the Baltic coast 120 kilometres to Leningrad’s west) through Luga and Staraya Russa to Borovichi, 250 kilometres to the city’s south-east. The line’s strongest sector, behind the Luga River, was to consist of a fifteen-kilometre-deep series of minefields and anti-tank guns and barriers, with a gap between Luga and Gatchina through which the Red Army could retreat.9 Work was also ordered on two inner rings, one running from Peterhof on the Gulf, through Gatchina to Kolpino, and the second round the city itself, from the commercial port at the Neva’s mouth to the upriver fishing village of Rybatskoye.10

One of the thousands of teenage girls conscripted to work on the Luga Line was Olga Grechina, a seventeen-year-old student at Leningrad University. ‘At the Department of Philology’, she sardonically records in her memoirs,