Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (18 page)

When we drove up to the enormous black mass of buildings alongside the Peterhof
chaussée
 – these large black buildings did not seem to have changed much externally since 1917, and the newer parts of the plant were further off the road – the whole place looked deserted. Nobody was outside except a woman soldier with fixed bayonet, and in the road itself there was no traffic, except one astonishing sight. A dilapidated old droshki was driving two officers – to the front, a couple of miles down the road. … The two pedestrians I saw were a girl walking arm-in-arm below the factory walls with a Baltic Fleet sailor with a turned-up nose; the sailor was clearly a dashing flirt; he was squeezing the girl’s hand and making her giggle all the time. The girl on sentry duty, after scrutinising our papers, let us in, and a handsome young woman secretary emerged from a small building and offered to conduct us to the Director’s office. She had well-groomed fair hair and red finger-nails, and wore a smart tailor-made costume with a Persian lamb collar; her pretty face was discreetly rouged and lipsticked, and there were large turquoise earrings in her ears. The gate through which we had passed was badly battered, and there were signs of serious damage all round. However, the director’s office was in a relatively safe place, on the north side of a solid brick building. In Leningrad, as in the old days in Madrid, there are differences between safe and unsafe houses; one facing the front is obviously more dangerous than one with its back turned to it. Half a dozen walls and partitions constitute a certain measure of protection against an average shell. We were welcomed by the Director of the Kirov works, a relatively young man with a strong but careworn face. He was tall, wiry, and must have been very handsome a few years before. He wore the usual plain khaki tunic of the factory executive, and spoke rapidly and to the point in a deep bass voice. He was much the same type as Semyonov at the optical instruments factory whom we had seen on the previous day. There were many points in common between the stories the two men told; especially their experiences during the famine were very similar; but the Kirov works held an altogether exceptional place in the history of wartime Leningrad, and what Comrade Puzyrev said to me is, in a way, a historical document, because it was the first detailed interview ever given to any correspondent by the head of the Kirov works. It was not easy to gain access to the Kirov works, and the Leningrad authorities certainly made a very great concession in granting my request to see these works and to meet Mr. Puzyrev.

Puzyrev, like nearly every Russian, had an extremely good narrative gift and sense of human drama, and my condensed account of what he said does not fully render the real qualities of his conversation, which went on for over an hour.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you are certainly finding us working in unusual conditions. What we have here now isn’t really what is normally meant by the Kirov plant. The Putilov works have existed for 150 years, but now the greater part of the plant has been moved to the east. Before the war we had over 30,000 workers; now we have only a fraction of these.’ He gave me the exact figure, but I am not at liberty to quote it. ‘And sixty-nine per cent of the labour is now female. Hardly any women worked here before the war. Before the war we made turbines, tanks, guns; we made tractors, we supplied the greater part of the equipment for building the Moscow–Volga Canal. We built quantities of machinery for the navy. Already in the last war we made masses of guns and other military equipment. But the plant has since then been at least doubled, and before this war started we began to make tanks in a very big way and diesel engines for both tanks and planes. Practically all this production of equipment proper has been moved to the east. Now we repair diesels and tanks, but our main production is that of munitions, and of some of the smaller arms. As for guns, well, the truth is that the Red Army has so many guns today that it doesn’t require any from us now. This, however, was not the case eighteen months ago.

‘Those were difficult days,’ he continued, ‘and things are much easier now. A few times a month we get a pretty stiff dose of shelling, but on the whole it isn’t as bad as it’s been in the past, and what is much more important, German aircraft do not bother us any longer. In spite of very difficult conditions – and you will see later the conditions we work in – we are managing to increase our production steadily and to supply the Leningrad front with a very large proportion of its shells and mortar mines.’ Again he quoted a figure of the output of shells on the Kirov works; without being stupendous, it was impressive, all things considered.

And then Puzyrev spoke of the early days of the war on the Kirov works. It was the story of that
lutte à outrance
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 by Voroshilov, Zhdanov and Popkov on August 21st. ‘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. We could have sent 25,000 people if we had wanted to; we let only 9,000 or 10,000 go. Already in June 1941 they formed themselves into what became the famous Kirov Division. They had done some training before the war, but you couldn’t consider them fully trained soldiers; but their drive, their guts, were tremendous. They wore the uniform of the Red Army, but actually they were something different – they were part of the Opolchenie, the Leningrad Home Guard, except that they were rather better trained than other Opolchenie units. Several such Workers’ Divisions were formed in Leningrad – ours, and those of the Moscow district, and those of the Viborg district, and, in practice, they turned out to be first-class crack divisions. Many tens of thousands of them went out from here to meet the Germans – to stop them at any price. Our Workers’ Divisions were fighting at Luga and Novgorod and Pushkino, and finally at Uritsk, where, after one of the grimmest rearguard actions in this war, our men finally managed to stop the Germans – just in the nick of time. And while this was going on, 400,000 women and boys and children went out to dig trenches and build fortifications, all the way from here to Luga, 100 miles away, and in doing so they also helped to delay the German advance on Leningrad. And when the Germans, already wearied by all the unexpected resistance, reached the outskirts of Leningrad, they came up against these trenches and fortifications newly built by the hands of women and children. It was all a horrible business. The Germans had superiority in the air; they butchered our women and children, but in spite of the bombing and machine-gunning our people never gave up. Young girls went on digging with a frenzy you can hardly imagine. They went on digging even when the palms of their hands, unaccustomed to such work, were reduced to a bloody pulp.’

Lutte à outrance
 – I kept thinking of that phrase, and all that it meant. Here in Russia there was only an ‘unreasonable’ Paris, an ‘unreasonable’ Tours (perhaps it was no coincidence that Tours was ‘unreasonable’ again in 1940, even when everything seemed lost). There was no reasonable Versailles anywhere in Russia, no conflict like the eternal conflict between Paris and Versailles. If in 1792 Paris had not been complete master and Versailles had not been silenced, history might have taken a different turn. The spirit of Leningrad in 1941 was like the spirit of Paris of 1792. It was much the same everywhere in Russia, but in Leningrad this spirit could be observed in its purest and most tangible form. The
sans-culotte
was able to fight his great battle, unhampered and unpoisoned by Versailles or Vichy.
Lutte à outrance
 – Leningrad did what, after the fall of France, Churchill said England would do if she were invaded.

‘The fight put up by our Workers’ Divisions,’ Puzyrev went on, ‘and by the people of Leningrad who went out to stop the Germans was absolutely decisive in the battle of Leningrad. It is no secret – a large proportion of the Workers’ Divisions never came back. Their losses were very heavy. Many of the men are now in the regular army, while some we have managed to bring back, especially skilled workers who are invaluable in industry.’ When Puzyrev spoke of industry, one felt how deeply conscious he was of the great tradition of craftsmanship which had been built up in Leningrad for over a century. Leningrad had, indeed, the most highly skilled workers in the whole Soviet Union, and one felt that Puzyrev regretted at heart that such fine industrial material should have had to be sacrificed on the battlefield. But clearly in 1941, when it was touch-and-go – touch-and-go both outside Leningrad and outside Moscow – such fine points as the most rational and productive use of a Russian man had to be put aside, at least for a short time. Yet the fact that some of the Putilov workers had been taken out of the army when the worst of the crisis was over was typical of wartime Russia.

‘The formation of the Kirov Division wasn’t everything, though,’ Puzyrev continued. ‘It was essential to defend the plant itself – defend it against the possible breakthrough by German tanks (and heaven knows they were not far away, and in those days there weren’t all those miles of minefields and barbed wire that separate us from the Germans now), and against paratroops. The Germans were using paratroops in a very big way on this front in 1941, and often with serious results for us. So we had a large artillery unit composed of our own men, permanently stationed on the Kirov works, and also a tank brigade, and a complete anti-paratroop organisation. All three were on duty night and day.’

Puzyrev then spoke of the autumn and winter of 1941. ‘We were shelled for the first time on September 8th and on September 15th they started against the Kirov works a terrible, merciless artillery bombardment. For days and weeks we were shelled almost ceaselessly. Yes,’ said Puzyrev, ‘that 15th of September was one of our blackest days. The greater part of our second shift were living at Strelna, eight or nine miles down the Gulf. And that day the Germans broke through to Strelna and Uritsk, and a large number of our people were cut off.’ ‘What happened to them?’ ‘Quite a number of them got away to Peterhof where they joined our troops, as for the rest – ’ he shrugged his shoulders. ‘I hate to think what happened to them.

‘The shelling was so heavy during that month of September, and the Germans were so near,’ he continued, ‘that we decided to evacuate part of the plant to less threatened places in Leningrad – on the other side of the Neva – to the Petrograd District, somewhere off the Kamennostrovsky, and to the Vasili Island. For, mind you, in those days we had to be prepared for the worst. The loss of the southern half of Leningrad was not entirely out of the question. It is horrible to think of it, but at that time one had to consider the possibility of seeing the Germans in the Winter Palace, and of shelling them from the Fortress on the other side of the Neva. Nobody really believed that it would come to that. But people like us, in charge of munitions, had to prepare for any eventuality. We also sent part of the equipment to the Viborg district. If the Germans had broken in, Leningrad would have been defended, house by house, and reduced to a shambles, as Stalingrad was.’

And I remembered what somebody had told me on the previous day: when the Germans were approaching Leningrad, they dropped leaflets on the city saying Leningrad must follow the example of Paris and proclaim itself an open city. To the people of Leningrad the whole idea was entirely incongruous.

‘In view of the very grave situation,’ said Puzyrev, ‘it was decided in virtue of a government order of the middle of October to evacuate a large part of our equipment to the east. I was then the foreman of the tank department. At that time, however, it was found possible to evacuate only one complete workshop – 2,200 people and 525 machine tools and other production units. For by that time the black days had begun. In November and December we were busy packing the equipment which was going to be sent east. But actually nothing could be sent away till the spring. However, our most highly skilled workers, who were badly needed in Siberia and the Urals, were evacuated by air, together with their families. They were flown to Tikhvin, but after the Germans had taken Tikhvin we had to fly them to other airfields, and from there the people had to walk to the nearest railway station, walk through the snow, in the middle of a bitter winter, and often they had to walk dozens and dozens of kilometres.

‘The bulk of our equipment did not leave till the spring, or rather till the summer, by way of Lake Ladoga. But already in the early winter of 1941 a lot of equipment from Kharkov, Kiev, and other places in the Ukraine, and also some from Moscow, had reached the Urals, and our skilled workers were badly needed to handle the stuff and to organise production. Cheliabinsk, for instance, had never made tanks. It was essential to start this tank production going in the shortest possible time.

‘We were then in the middle of that critical transition period when industry in the west had ceased to function, and had not yet started up in the east. What was so remarkable, when you look back on it, was the tempo, the speed with which Cheliabinsk, which had never done anything on these lines before, proceeded to turn out tanks, diesel engines and high-precision instruments which only highly skilled workers could make. The people who left here in October were already working at full speed in their new place, 2,000 kilometres away, by December!

‘It was one of the greatest organisational achievements of our Soviet Government,’ Puzyrev said, ‘to have managed to carry all the necessary equipment and men to those invulnerable places. And in what conditions it was done! Trains carrying the equipment were attacked from the air, and so were the transport planes which were taking the skilled Kirov and other workers and their families from Leningrad. Fortunately the percentage of transport planes shot down was not high. The flying had to be done mostly at night, in very difficult conditions. The whole thing was tremendous really – I call it a technical super-victory, our greatest organisational victory which was to pave the way for military victory. If it had not been achieved, Allied supplies could not have made much difference. We should have been pretty well sunk.’