Russia at war 1941-1945

"You wouldn't like to change over to another factory?" I asked. "No," she said, shaking her head. "I am a Kirov girl, and my father was a Putilov man, and really the worst is over now, so we may as well stick it to the end." And one could feel that she meant it, though it was only too clear what terrible nervous strain that frail little body of hers had suffered. "And your mother?" I asked. "She died before the war," said the girl. "But my big brother is in the army, on the Leningrad Front, and he writes to me often, very often, and three months ago he and several of his comrades came to visit us at the Kirov

Works." Her little pale face brightened at the thought of it, and, looking out of the window of the rest home at the golden autumn trees, she said: "You know, it's good to be here for a little while."

The next day, after driving down the Peterhof Road through the heavily-battered southern outskirts of Leningrad, with the German lines running along the other side of the Uritsk inlet of the Gulf of Finland, I arrived at the Kirov Works, where I was received by

Comrade Puzyrev, the director, a relatively young man with a strong, but careworn face...

"Well," he said, "you are certainly finding us working in unusual conditions. What we have here isn't what is normally meant by the Kirov Plant... Before the war we had over 30,000 workers; now we have only a small fraction of these ... and sixty-nine per cent of our workers are female. Hardly any women worked here before the war. We then made

turbines, tanks, guns; we made tractors, and supplied the greater part of the equipment for building the Moscow-Volga canal. We built quantities of machinery for the Navy...

Before this war started, we began to make tanks in a very big way, as well as tank and aircraft engines. Practically all this production of equipment proper has been moved to the east. Now we repair diesels and tanks, but our main output is ammunition, and some small arms... "

Puzyrev then spoke of the early days of the war at the Kirov works. It was a story of that lutte à outrance so typical of the people and workers of Leningrad. Like one man they reacted to the German invasion, but the highest pitch of self-sacrifice was reached as a result of the "Leningrad in danger" appeal made on August 21 by Voro-shilov, Zhdanov and Popkov.

"The workers of the Kirov Plant," Puzyrev said, "were in reserved occupations, and hardly anybody was subject to mobilisation. Yet no sooner had the Germans invaded us than everybody without exception volunteered for the front. If we had wanted to, we

could have sent 25,000 people; we let only 9,000 or 10,000 go.

Already in June 1941 they formed themselves into what was to become the famous Kirov Division. Although they had done some training before the war, they couldn't be

considered fully-trained soldiers, but their drive, their guts were tremendous. They wore the uniform of the Red Army, but they were in fact part of the opol-cheniye, except that they were rather better trained than other opolcheniye units. Several such workers'

divisions were formed in Leningrad... and many tens of thousands of them went out from here to meet the Germans, to stop them at any price. They fought at Luga, and Novgorod and Pushkin, and finally at Uritsk, where, after one of the grimmest rearguard actions of this war, our men managed to stop the Germans, just in the nick of time... The fight put up by our Workers' Division and by the people of Leningrad who went out to stop them was absolutely decisive... It is no secret—a large proportion of the Workers' Divisions never came back..."

One felt that Puzyrev regretted at heart that such good industrial material should have had to be sacrificed on the battlefield; but, clearly, in 1941, when it was touch-and-go for both Moscow and Leningrad, such fine points had to be put aside; he was glad, all the same, that when the worst was over, many of the survivors had been taken out of the army and put back into industry.

He then spoke of the evacuation of the Kirov Plant. Before the German ring had closed, it had been possible to evacuate only one complete workshop—525 machine tools and

2,500 people. But nothing more could be sent east till the spring.