Russia at war 1941-1945

He asked me for a few days' leave in the hope that his strength would return to him. He stayed at home, preparing his lessons for the second term. He went on reading books. So he spent the day of January 8. On January 9 he quietly passed away." What a human story was behind these simple words!

I have described conditions in Leningrad as I found them in September 1943, when the city was still under frequent and often intense shell-fire. This shelling continued for the rest of the year, and it was not till January 1944 that the ordeal of Leningrad finally ended. During the previous weeks a large Russian armed force was transferred under

cover of night to the "Oranienbaum bridgehead" on the south bank of the Gulf of Finland; and this force, under the command of General Fedyuninsky, struck out towards Ropsha, where it was to meet the troops of the Leningrad Front striking towards the south-west.

During that first day of the Russian breakthrough no fewer than 500,000 shells were used to smash the German fortifications. About the same time, the Volkhov army group also came into motion, and, within a few days, the Germans were on the run, all the way to Pskov and Estonia. On January 27, 1944 the blockade officially ended.

All the famous historical palaces around Leningrad—Pavlovsk, Tsarskoie-Selo, Peterhof

—were in ruins.

Chapter VIII WHY LENINGRAD "TOOK IT"

Why did Leningrad "take it"? A glib, easy and, on the face of it, quite justified argument is that, with all road and rail communications cut, the people of Leningrad had no

alternative to sticking it out, and had to be "heroic", whether they wanted to or not. Had they had time to get out, it is also argued, they would have been on the run, just as the people of Moscow were on the run on October 16, 1941. But that is not really the point.

What is remarkable, once the city was surrounded, was not the fact that the people "took it", but the way they took it.

In his interesting study, The Siege of Leningrad, Mr Leon Goure suggests that a number of people in the city were in favour of surrendering it to the Germans and that, though not a majority, "the number of disaffected persons... appears to have been far from negligible".

[Leon Goure, The Siege of Leningrad (Stanford, 1962), p. 304.]

When I was in Leningrad I heard quite a few references to a German "fifth column"

inside the city, and this is also mentioned in recent Soviet studies. But the evidence that more than a tiny minority wanted to surrender is very slender.

Mr Goure himself recognises that "patriotism, local pride, growing resentment of the Germans and reluctance to betray the soldiers" had much to do with the "maintaining of discipline". At the same time he places, in my view, undue emphasis on "an ingrained habit of obedience to the authorities", "no prior experience of political freedom", the

"Stalinist terror", and so on, and relies too much on the evidence of certain post-war refugees.

[Ibid., pp. 304-6. Mr Harrison Salisbury, in The New York Times of May 10, 1962, takes the book to task on that score, recalling Hitler's directives to "erase St Petersburg from the face of the earth", adding that "we are not interested in preserving even a part of the population of this large city"—directives on the substance of which nobody in Leningrad could have had any serious doubts.]

There is much stronger evidence to show that the "Leningrad can take it" spirit was there from the very start. There was no one, except a few anti-communists, who even

considered surrender to the Germans. At the height of the famine, a few people—who

were not necessarily collaborators or enemy agents (as Soviet accounts assert), but

merely people driven half-insane with hunger—did write to the authorities asking that Leningrad be declared an "open city"; but no-one in his right mind could have done so.

During the German advance on the city, people soon learned what the enemy were like; how many young people had died through enemy bombing and machine-gunning while

digging those trenches? And once the blockade was complete the air-raids began,

together with the sadistic leaflets like that dropped on Leningrad on November 6, to

"celebrate" Revolution Day: "Today we shall do the bombing, tomorrow you shall do the burying".

The question of declaring Leningrad an open city could never arise, as it did, for