Leningrad

At noon the Likhachevs gathered with other holidaymakers around an outdoor loudspeaker to listen to the formal announcement of war. The speaker was not Stalin, but the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov. ‘Men and women, citizens of the Soviet Union’, he began. ‘At four o’clock this morning, without declaration of war, and without any claims being made on the Soviet Union, German troops attacked our country.’ The text struck a note of baffled injury — ‘This attack has been made despite the existence of a non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, a pact the terms of which were scrupulously observed by the Soviet Union’ — before ending with the more rousing ‘Our cause is good. Our enemy will be smashed. Victory will be ours.’ When the broadcast was over ‘everyone was very gloomy and silent. . After Hitler’s Blitzkrieg in Europe, no one expected anything good.’1

All over Leningrad, quiet midsummer weekends were similarly violated. In her apartment in the city centre, near Potemkin’s Tauride Palace, Yelena Skryabina had risen early so as to get some typing done in time for an outing to the countryside. The sunshine, the cool morning air coming in at the windows, the sound of her nanny shushing her five-year-old son Yura outside the door, all combined to give her ‘a wonderful feeling of contentment and joy’. Her older son, fourteen-year-old Dima, had already left with a friend to see the fountains being switched on at the great baroque palace of Peterhof, out on the Finnish Gulf. At 9 a.m. her husband telephoned from his factory with a cryptic, agitated message to stay at home and turn on the radio. At noon, she and her mother listened to Molotov’s broadcast: ‘So this was it — war! Germany was already bombing Soviet cities. Molotov’s speech was halting, as though he were out of breath. His rallying, spirited appeals seemed out of place. And I suddenly realised that something ominous and oppressive loomed over us.’ When it was over she went outdoors, where she found crowds of people milling about the streets and elbowing their way into the shops, ‘buying up everything they could lay hands on’:

Many rushed to the banks to withdraw their savings. I was seized by the same panic, and hurried to withdraw the roubles listed in my bank book. But I was too late. The bank had run out of money. The payments had stopped. People clamoured, demanded. The June day blazed on unbearably. Someone fainted. Someone else swore vehemently. Not until evening did everything become somehow strangely still.2

At eleven o’clock on the same morning Yuri Ryabinkin, a skinny fifteen-year-old with a pudding-bowl fringe above big dark eyes, set off along Sadovaya Street for a children’s chess competition in the gardens of the Pioneer (once the Anichkov) Palace next to the Anichkov Bridge. The policemen, he noticed, were carrying gasmasks and wearing red armbands — part, he assumed, of one of the usual civil defence exercises. He was setting out his chess pieces when he noticed a crowd gathering around a small boy standing nearby. ‘I listened and froze in horror. “At four o’clock this morning”, the boy was saying excitedly, “German bombers raided Kiev, Zhitomir, Sevastopol and somewhere else! Molotov spoke on the radio. Now we’re at war with Germany!”. . My head span. I couldn’t think straight. But I played three games, and oddly enough, won all three. Then I drifted off home.’ After supper he wandered about the tense, stuffy streets, queuing for two and a half hours for a newspaper — ‘interesting talk’ and ‘sceptical remarks’ ran through the line — until it was announced that there wouldn’t be any papers, but ‘some kind of official bulletin instead’. ‘The clock’, Ryabinkin wrote with adolescent portentousness in his diary later that evening, ‘says half past eleven. A serious battle is beginning, a clash between two antagonistic forces — socialism and fascism! The well-being of mankind depends on the outcome of this historic struggle.’3

Leningraders should have been better prepared for the Second World War — the Great Patriotic War as they still call it — than other Soviet citizens, because they had had ringside seats at its prequel. Following the Nazi — Soviet pact of August 1939, the Soviet Union had occupied not only eastern Poland, but also, in June 1940, the Baltic states to Leningrad’s west, and the lake-fretted southern marches of Finland, directly to its north.