Read Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege Online
Authors: Alexander Werth
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Military, #World War II, #Russia, #World, #Russia & Former Soviet Republics
It was on January 19th, five days after the launching of the Oranienbaum offensive and four days after the ‘great Leningrad barrage,’ that the two armies joined at Ropsha – a place until then known in history only for the assassination there of Catherine’s husband, the Prussomaniac and dipsomaniac Tsar Peter the Third.
With the breaking of the ‘padlock’ the whole German chain of fortifications crumbled. One by one Pushkino (Tsarskoye Selo), Pavlovsk, Mga in the east and Gatchina in the south fell. Further east still Novgorod had been taken by troops of the Volkhov front. By February 14th practically the whole of Leningrad Province had been cleared of the Germans – except for probably 60,000 or 75,000 new German corpses left behind in the last month.
How many hundred thousand dead the senseless Leningrad adventure cost Germany since 1941 we shall perhaps never know. On February 14th the Russians had already recaptured Luga and the whole east bank of Lake Peipus. There were not many German prisoners who boasted they would ever come near Leningrad again. Meantime in the north the Finns were shaking in their shoes, especially since the big Russian air raid of February 6th on Helsinki. They would now have to pay for the ‘glorious adventure’ of having been Hitler’s accomplices for so many years.
I revisited Leningrad at the beginning of February. Externally it had changed less than I had feared after reading all those ‘secret weapon’ stories in the Cairo papers. People were happy and, though physically tired, full of energy and plans for the future. 200 soldiers were helping in the rebuilding of the Mariinsky Theatre, which had been shattered by a half-ton bomb back in 1941, and by shells since that – the Mariinsky Theatre where Pavlova and Nijinsky had danced and Chaliapin sung. Soldiers – yes, because there weren’t enough civilians available for this kind of work. Baranov, the chief architect of Leningrad’s Town Council, remarked, ‘It shouldn’t take more than two – perhaps three – years fully to restore Leningrad. But it’s a question of labour. How soon will the war end? How many demobilised soldiers will be available for municipal reconstruction work? Anyway, it’s part of the general economic reconstruction of the country. We shall need glass for millions of windows, and several train-loads of plate glass for the Winter Palace alone.’
And the reconstruction of Leningrad is nothing compared with that of other towns in the Soviet Union which have been almost or completely obliterated. One of the most tragic sights of all is the country round Leningrad. The city now stands in the middle of a desert. There is nothing left of thousands of country houses round Leningrad; Peterhof is wiped out, and little more than a heap of ruins is left of Tsarskoye Selo, Pavlovsk and Gatchina. Of all the neighbourhood of Leningrad, the historically uninteresting and artistically non-existent north-east is more or less intact. But the famous Imperial Palaces and their beautiful parks – all those towns where every inch of ground is full of historical and literary associations – have practically disappeared.
I was with several other correspondents on this second trip to Leningrad, and I inevitably saw less and talked less. We went there by train. After following the Moscow–Leningrad main line it branched off somewhere to the east, and later we crossed the Volkhov and passed through Schlusselburg. It took thirty-six hours to reach Leningrad, but shortly the direct line will be restored and the famous Red Arrow express will run again between the two capitals. By the way, speaking of capitals, there were many Leningraders who believed that shortly Leningrad would be made the capital of the R.S.F.S.R., that is, Russia proper, as distinct from Moscow, which would remain the capital of the Soviet Union as a whole. Though I didn’t see very much of Leningrad on this second visit, I spent two days in the wasteland around it – in those places which in September I’d only been able to see from that observation tower near the Narva Gate. Snow had fallen since the great battles of January, and had modestly covered up the earth. Even with the snow covering it the terrain was irregular – ploughed up by that fantastic Russian barrage. And here and there a leg or a head was still protruding from under the snow. All around Ligovo and Pulkovo, where the main battle had been fought, there was nothing but a strange white lunar landscape with a few fantastically shaped fragments of brick walls standing (I identified one of them as Ligovo station). But already the trains were running among the ruins, running westwards towards Estonia. Here and there also a tree stood raising its bare shattered arms helplessly into the winter sky. Such was the immediate neighbourhood of Leningrad. Verdun – worse than Verdun after the last war. At Strelna, among what had once been cosy-looking little country houses (many of these were still standing, for there hadn’t been much shelling here) stood monstrous German siege guns inside concrete blockhouses eight inches thick. The Germans had certainly put in a lot of time and trouble to shell Leningrad. Beyond that was Peterhof with the pathetic remains of the great Rastrelli Palace, and a canal denuded of all its statues and fountains to show where the centre of Peterhof had been. The town of Peterhof had disappeared with the exception of a shattered church and a few other buildings. Tragic in a different way were the numerous villages, with their high-gabled huts, in the snowy plain between Peterhof and Tsarskoye Selo and Gatchina. They looked normal and intact. Yet there wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere. Everybody had been driven away into the rear by the Germans. Gatchina was the first place where ‘native’ population could be found – a couple of thousand people who had lived through two and a half years of the usual Nazi terror – with the concentration camp, still with barbed wire round it, occupying one of the main buildings of the town. From Gatchina the Germans had left in a great hurry. Mr. Glinka, who was curator of Gatchina Palace – that beautiful Palace, with its English landscape garden, built by Catherine for her favourite Gregory Orlov and later the summer residence of Tsar Paul the First – told me how he arrived at Gatchina four hours after the Germans had been driven out. Firing was still going on at the aerodrome, where the remaining Germans were being finished off, German bodies were being piled up outside the Palace gates, half-demented local inhabitants were rushing around telling soldiers what they’d lived through, and great clouds of black smoke were rising from the Palace. In their fury the Huns had set fire to it before leaving. Fury – yes. But not only fury. There was method in all this destruction.
‘Why?’ Glinka said, ‘Why, I ask you. Wasn’t it enough to have looted the Palace of all its art treasures? Wasn’t it enough to have its top floor turned into an officers’ brothel?’ And he added sadly that this was probably his last trip to Gatchina. The architects, he said, could no doubt patch up the solidly built Palace, but for the curator of its art treasures there was nothing more to do.
The quiet charm of Pavlovsk and the splendour of Tsarskoye Selo, with its beautiful baroque Palace built for Catherine by Rastrelli and the classical colonnade built by Cameron, the Scottish architect, and all the rest of that wonderful ensemble of eighteenth-century art – all was now in ruins. True, part of the Catherine Palace had escaped complete destruction. That was only because some German sappers had been caught and had been ordered to remove immediately eleven delayed-action mines they had placed under the Palace. However, everything inside had been looted. Pavlovsk Palace had been set on fire the day the Germans left. Most of the trees in those poetic parks of Tsarskoye and Pavlovsk which had been sung by Catherine’s Poet Laureate, the great Derzhavin, by the young Pushkin and much later by Innokenti Annensky, the great symbolist poet, who was headmaster of Tsarskoye Selo high school and who in 1909 collapsed and died while wandering through the park – most of the trees had been cut down by the Germans. Most of this damage will never be repaired. The destruction of these palaces and parks has aroused among the Russians as great a fury as the worst German atrocities against human beings. Many people in Leningrad have told me: ‘People who deliberately destroy works of art have no right to own any. They cannot have any real love of art. Why, then, should the Huns own the European art treasures of Dresden, Munich, and Berlin? The least thing we can expect is that as compensation our people receive the contents of some of the German art galleries. We shall rebuild the walls of our palaces. Perhaps it is the most we can do. But at least we shall have something valuable to put into them.’
I did not mean to touch on wider political issues in this book, which deals simply with a great human story. But I should like to say just this. When I see all the destruction that has been caused by this war in Russia and try to imagine the immense work of reconstruction lying ahead and all the labour that will be required to carry out this reconstruction – not to mention the equally great task of completing the pre-war plans of economic prosperity – when I see and imagine all this, I find it hard to take much notice of any talk about ‘Russian Imperialism.’ Clearly what Russia requires is many years of peace and security, without which there can be no real reconstruction and no real prosperity. Whether we like it or not Russia will insist on obtaining the maximum security even though in the process there may be moments of unpleasantness between her Allies and herself.
One of Russia’s postwar aims is to have once again a secure and prosperous Leningrad – that one and only European capital outside London which never suffered the indignity of enemy occupation. Had Leningrad been occupied by the Germans it would have shared the fate of Tsarskoye Selo and Peterhof. The danger was immense and the price of averting it terrible. Today the people of Leningrad feel that a secure and prosperous future is something to which they are entitled. And not only they but still more so the children of those who were killed in battle or died in the Leningrad famine.