Russia at war 1941-1945

Other members of her family had also suffered in the Purges. And yet, Olga Bergholz's book of reminiscences, The Daytime Stars, is one of the most moving books on the fearful days of the Blockade. There is, for instance, an unforgettable description of how, faint with hunger and with only a crust of bread and one cigarette to last her a day—the other cigarette she kept for her father—she wandered for ten miles through the snowdrifts and across the ice of the Neva, almost stumbling over dead bodies, to see her father, an elderly doctor, himself nearly dead of hunger, and with patients around him dying. She is a typical Leningrad phenomenon—a woman who was ready to die for Leningrad, but

who, at heart, hated Stalin.

And so, in September 1941, three million people were trapped by the Germans; never had a city of that size endured what Leningrad was to endure during the winter of 1941-2.

Chapter II THE ENEMY ADVANCES

In Leningrad the news on June 22, 1941 of the German invasion produced a wave of

mass meetings, and in the next two weeks an immense number of Leningraders

volunteered for the opolcheniye formations. At the great Kirov Works alone, 15,000 men and women applied for immediate military service. Not all these applications could be accepted, since it was essential that the Kirov Works should go on producing armaments.

The original plan, therefore, to form fifteen workers' divisions had to be abandoned, and, on July 4, it was decided to limit the opolcheniye divisions to three, until further notice.

By July 10, the first opolcheniye division was sent to the front, followed a few days later by the second and third. They had only a few days' training, which had taken place in the main squares of Leningrad. These three opolcheniye divisions were rushed to the so-called Luga defence line, which was 175 miles long and was only sparsely defended by three rifle divisions and the pupils of two military schools, who had also been rushed there from Leningrad. By July 14, the Germans had already succeeded in establishing a large bridgehead north of Luga, on the right bank of the Luga river; it was from there that they were to develop their subsequent offensive against Leningrad.

The situation was extremely grim, and it seems that Voroshilov, the C. in C. of the

Northern Armies, and Zhdanov, head of the Leningrad Party organisation, were in a truly desperate state of mind, as one may judge from the order read out to all the Red Army units of the "North-West Direction" on July 14:

Comrades Red-Army men, officers and political workers! A direct threat of an

enemy invasion is now suspended over Leningrad, the cradle of the Proletarian

Revolution. While the troops of the Northern Front are bravely fighting the Nazi

and Finnish Schützcorps hordes all the way from the Barents Sea to Tallinn and Hangö, and are defending every inch of our beloved Soviet land, the troops of the North-Western Front, often failing to repel enemy attacks, and abandoning their

positions without even entering into combat with the enemy, are only encouraging

by their behaviour the increasingly arrogant Germans. Certain cowards and panic-

stricken individuals not only abandon the Front without orders, but sow panic

among the good and brave soldiers. In some cases both officers and political

workers not only do nothing to stop the panic, and fail to organise their units for

combat, but increase even more, by their shameful behaviour, the panic and

disorganisation at the Front.

The order went on to say that anyone abandoning the Front without orders would be tried by a field tribunal which could order them to be shot, "regardless of rank and previous achievements".

[A. V. Karasev Leningradtsy v gody blokady (The Leningraders in the Years of the Blockade) (Moscow, 1960), p. 65.]