Russia at war 1941-1945

biggest losses were suffered by the trawlers and destroyers trying to take the convoy through the German minefields. In the end, the "greater part" of the ships, carrying several thousand soldiers, landed in Kronstadt or Leningrad.

The Russian naval garrisons of Dago and other islands off the Estonian coast, held out till the middle of October, when the 500 survivors of the defence of Dago succeeded in

sailing under cover of night to Hangö, the Russian naval base in Finland, which was then still in Russian hands.

It was, in fact, not until the Russian armies had retreated—or fled might be the right word

—to the immediate vicinity of Leningrad after the collapse of the "Luga Line", that they began to contain the Germans with any success. Voroshilov had lost his head completely, and it was not until General Zhukov was rushed to Leningrad at the beginning of

September and reorganised the troops on the spot that the defence of Leningrad began in real earnest... It was to become the greatest of all the great Russian stories of human endurance. Never yet had a city of the size of Leningrad been besieged for nearly two-and-a-half years.

Chapter VIII ROUT IN THE UKRAINE "Khrushchev versus

Stalin"

Meantime, as we have seen, Hitler had decided to strike his main blow, not at Moscow, but at the Ukraine. Abandoning, for the time being, the drive on Moscow, he had

transferred some troops to the north to speed up the capture of Leningrad, and even larger reinforcements were sent to the Ukraine, which, together with the Crimea, he planned to overrun within a few weeks.

Early in July, the Russians had had a few local successes in the Ukraine; thus they had checked a German breakthrough to Kiev some ten or twelve miles outside the city. But at the end of July and the beginning of August, the blitzkrieg had been resumed. On August 17 the Germans occupied Dniepropetrovsk, at the far end of the Dnieper bend, and forced the Dnieper, despite the Soviet Supreme Command's order to hold the Dnieper Line at all costs. Kherson, Nikolayev and the iron-ore centre of Krivoi Rog were captured.

In the south-west Odessa was cut off by the Rumanians from the Soviet "mainland".

Meanwhile, north of Kiev, the Germans had started another offensive in the general

direction of Konotop, Poltava and, ultimately, Kharkov. Thus, by the beginning of

September, Kiev formed, in fact, the tip of a long and constantly narrowing salient, the Germans having advanced far to the east both north and south of the Ukrainian capital.

It is here that we come to one of the major controversies of the war—a controversy

involving not only Hitler and his generals, but also Stalin and Khrushchev. Khrushchev was a Member of the War Council attached to the staff of Marshal Budienny, the C.-in-C.

of the "South-Western Direction".

[ It should be explained, to avoid confusion, that the " South-Western Direction" was one of the three "Directions" into which the whole Front had been split in July. Several

"Fronts" (i.e. Army Groups) came under the authority of each "Direction". One of the

"Fronts" that came under the authority of the "South-West Direction" was the "SouthWest Front", the principal victim of the Kiev encirclement. By October 1941, the Front was no longer divided into "Directions", but only into "Fronts" (i.e. Army Groups). In September the commander of the "Direction" was Budienny, the commander of the

"Front" was Kirponos.]

Present-day histories are untiring in their praise of Khrushchev who, as a member of the Politburo and as Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, aroused everywhere, they say, the patriotic fervour of the people of the Ukraine, and of Kiev in particular—even though, lacking the great proletarian and revolutionary

traditions of Moscow and Leningrad, the levée en masse seems to have been considerably less spectacular there than in the other two cities. Moreover, Kiev had a peculiar

mentality. Only some twenty years before it had been occupied in quick succession by the German and Austrian armies, who had put up a puppet ruler, Hetman Skoro-padsky,

at the head of the Ukrainian "state", by Ukrainian nationalists under Petlura, by Reds, Whites and Reds again and, for a short time, in 1920, even by Pilsudski's Poles. Older people may have remembered that the German-Austrian occupation of 1918 had not been

as terrible as all that.

As by September 9, the Germans were advancing on Nezhin [ Seventy miles ENE of

Kiev.] from the north, and other German armies had penetrated far into the Dnieper bend in the south, and as no Russian reserves were available to check these two German

advances, Budienny and Khrushchev decided to pull out of the Kiev salient.