Leningrad

The first three Leningrad opolcheniye divisions, totalling about 31,000 volunteers, were called up from 4 to 18 July. Each was based on a city district, which meant that men from the same factories (and often from the same families) were able to stick together in the same units. The First Division were nicknamed the Kirovtsy, after the Kirov defence works, whose 10,000 or so applicants filled two regiments and three battalions, and the second regiment of the Second Division the Skorokhodovtsy — literally ‘go-quicklies’ — after the Skorokhod footwear manufactury. The remainder of the Second came from the Elektrosila power plant. Altogether about 67,000 factory workers signed up, the majority of them skilled men who had been exempted from the ordinary draft.6 As well as creaming off the best of Leningrad’s industrial workforce, the divisions also contained a great many of its engineers, scientists, artists and students. The Railway Engineering Institute produced 900 men for the opolcheniye, the Mining Institute 960, the Shipbuilding Institute 450, the Electrotechnical Institute 1,200. Seven battalions’ worth signed up from Leningrad University. Not surprisingly, a disproportionate number of the first wave of opolchentsy were also Communists. Of the 97,000 men enrolled up to 6 July, 20,000 belonged to the Party and another 18,000 to its youth wing, the Komsomol.7

As Zhdanov’s inflated targets bit, recruitment became more systematic. District soviets were given quotas, based on numbers of eligible residents, which they in turn parcelled out among local factories. Factory managers, now working flat out to evacuate or to convert to defence production, tried hard to hold on to key personnel, in some cases sending women instead of men. ‘Production’, the Party official in charge of recruitment at the Kirov Works remembered, ‘was stripped bare.’ Managers ‘proposed to the director and the Partkom [factory Party Committee] that there should be a mechanism for deciding who should be allowed to go and who shouldn’t. But of course, a lot of people who shouldn’t have been allowed to go went all the same.’8 A. I. Verkhoglaz, chief of the opolcheniye’s political department and a member of the city Party Committee, scolded his agitators into greater efforts: ‘You can’t wait for patriotism, it has to be taught!’ They were not to ‘hang about in warm, sleepy rooms in headquarters’, but to ‘go to the factories and face people squarely. Tell them “Take up your weapons!”’9

Resisting such appeals was hard, especially after Stalin praised the Moscow and Leningrad opolcheniya in his broadcast of 3 July. ‘One volunteer’, reported the Vasilyevsky Island soviet, ‘a former Party member, applied for exemption, but reappeared an hour later with a request to withdraw his application, because he was so ashamed.’10 Another, pleading illness, was told that his health was ‘of no significance. What is important is the very fact of volunteering, and thereby displaying one’s political attitude.’ Likhachev despised the hypocrisy of his bosses at Pushkin House:

All the men were registered. They were called in turn into the director’s office, where L. A. Plotkin held court with the secretary of the Party organisation, A. I. Perepech. I remember Panchenko emerging pale and shaking: he’d refused. He said that he wouldn’t go as a volunteer, and that he would serve with the regular army. . He was branded a coward and treated with scorn, but a few weeks later he was called up as he’d said. He fought as a partisan and was killed in the forests somewhere near Kalinin. Plotkin, in contrast, having registered everyone else, obtained exemption on medical grounds. In the winter he escaped Leningrad by plane. A few hours before departure he enrolled a ‘good friend’ of his, an English teacher, on to the Institute staff, and got her on to the plane too.11

Many people, it is clear, did not realise what they were signing up for, assuming that they would be used for civil defence or specialist work, or as a home guard in case the Germans actually entered Leningrad. Extracting oneself from the opolcheniye, however, was even harder than avoiding recruitment into it. Fifty-two actors and musicians, the Party files note, tried to ‘refuse arms’ — presumably thinking that their job should be to entertain the troops — ‘but steps were taken to halt this phenomenon’.12 A Comrade Ninyukov of the Botanical Institute