Authors: Harrison Salisbury
On September 1 Stalin delivered a formal reprimand to Zhdanov and Voroshilov. In a message from the Stavka to the Leningrad Command he laid down the line that errors of organization and lack of firmness had marked the defense of the approaches to Leningrad. He demanded that more active measures be taken for the defense of the city.
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It is likely that this reprimand was the first fruit of the intervention of Malenkov and Molotov. It may have been stimulated by an act of hopeless deception which was attempted by the Leningrad Command. Leningrad did not promptly report the loss of Mga to Moscow. Presumably, it did not report this fact because it hoped to recapture Mga and restore the situation. The hope, like so many others, was vain.
The battered Forty-eighth Army was ordered by the Leningrad Command to retake Mga Station at any price. The 1st Division of NKVD troops, withdrawn from the Karelian front, was thrown in. No luck. The Germans had Mga and they would retain it.
The record was beginning to be built up against Zhdanov and Voroshilov. First, they had been “masters of the art of retreat.” Next, they had set up an internal defense committee which Stalin seemed to regard as a possible device for the surrender of the city. They made arrangements for street fighting in the city which aroused his suspicions.
Now they were caught red-handed concealing a terrible defeat.
If Leningrad were to fall, Malenkov and Molotov would have little difficulty in presenting a record which would put full blame on Zhdanov and Voroshilov.
The fall of Leningrad from the standpoint of the junta of Malenkov and Molotov would have one favorable consequence. It would eliminate for all time a dangerous and able rival for political power within the Kremlin. Not that Zhdanov was entirely without allies in Moscow. On September 2
Izvestiya
published an eloquent declaration, expressing confidence that Leningrad and the Leningraders would fulfill their great honor and duty by defeating the Germans and driving them back from the city. It was signed, “N. Petrov.” But its author was the venerable Mikhail I. Kalinin, President of the U.S.S.R. and himself a native of Leningrad. He at least gave a vote of confidence to the Leningrad defenders. But Kalinin was by no means the equal in power and intrigue of Zhdanov’s opponents. The war on the front with the Nazis might be deadly. That behind the scenes was even more so.
Kuznetsov did not return to Moscow with the other members of the State Defense Committee. Naval matters held him up, and he did not fly back to Moscow until September 12, to the accompaniment of a thunderstorm which tossed his plane about as it flew low over the stormy waters of Lake Ladoga.
The next day he was summoned to the Kremlin at the unusual hour of noon. Ordinarily he was never called until evening. During the day Stalin worked in his Kremlin office, but at night, when air raids were likely, he often transferred his work to a suite near the Kremlin air-raid shelter. Kuznetsov felt that only an urgent matter would have brought the call at the unusual midday hour. He was right.
Stalin opened the meeting abruptly by advising Kuznetsov that the Leningrad Command had been put in the hands of General Georgi Zhukov. The decision had been made the night before,
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and Zhukov was already in Leningrad or on his way.
What Stalin did not say—or Kuznetsov did not report—was that Voroshilov had been removed after another tremendous row between Leningrad and Moscow.
Once again Leningrad had been caught out.
The Germans had smashed their way into Shlisselburg, the fortress on the Neva, and closed the circle around Leningrad on September 8. But the Leningrad Command did not report this fact—no more than it had reported the loss of Mga. It did not report the loss of Shlisselburg on September 8. It did not report it September 9. On September 9 Moscow learned about the loss from another source—the official German communiqué.
Stalin demanded an explanation.
The explanation was hardly satisfactory. On September 11 Voroshilov and Zhdanov advised the Kremlin that for two months they had been trying to create a shock group to seize the initiative from the Germans but that as fast as troops were provided they had had to be thrown into the breach. Thus their efforts to organize a powerful counteroffensive and throw the Germans back from the breakthrough to Mga and Shlisselburg had failed.
This merely confirmed Stalin in his conviction that it was the “passive-ness” of Voroshilov that had caused the Leningrad disasters. He ordered Voroshilov removed and Zhukov sent in to replace him.
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Apparently, Stalin did not go into this detail with Admiral Kuznetsov. Nor, apparently, did Kuznetsov tell Stalin of a curious experience which occurred while he was sitting in Admiral I. S. Isakov’s office in Smolny on August 30 waiting for the Admiral to return from a meeting of the Military Council. The telephone rang—not the military telephone but the ordinary city line. Kuznetsov answered it. It was a young girl, who said despairingly: “The Germans have gotten to the Neva River in the region of Ivanovskoye.”
The news was completely unexpected. Admiral Kuznetsov reported it to General Popov, the Leningrad Commander, who was inclined to think it was the fruit of panic or fantasy. But, unfortunately, it was neither. The Germans had broken through to the Neva, and they stayed there until 1943.
None of this came up in the conversation between Stalin and Kuznetsov.
Stalin strolled about his office nervously and finally sat down on a black-leather couch, peppering Kuznetsov with questions. How many ships remained in the Baltic? Where were they? Were they playing any role in the battle for Leningrad? He referred to the city by its old familiar nickname of “Piter” rather than Leningrad.
Kuznetsov sought to steer the conversation to broader naval matters. But Stalin would have none of it. He had a map on the wall, a small one, showing the German lines running right up to Leningrad, and now he got to the question for which he had summoned Kuznetsov. The situation of Leningrad was extraordinarily serious, he said.
“It is possible that it may be abandoned,” he added. Then, asking Kuz-netsov to run over again the number and classes of warships in the Baltic Fleet, he snapped: “Not one warship must fall into the hands of the enemy. Not one,” he repeated. Moreover, he made plain that if his order was not carried out, the guilty parties would be “strictly judged.” This term, in Stalin’s vocabulary, meant one thing: the firing squad.
“I understood that this was not the time to discuss this question,” said Kuznetsov later. He awaited further orders.
The orders were simple: to prepare and send to the commanders of all ships instructions to prepare for scuttling.
To his own surprise—and obviously to Stalin’s—Kuznetsov blurted out: “I cannot sign such a telegram.”
Stalin wanted to know why. Kuznetsov suddenly recalled that the fleet was under the operational control of the Leningrad front. Such orders, he said, required Stalin’s signature as chief of the Stavka.
Kuznetsov was not entirely certain why Stalin wanted the order signed by the Naval Commissar, but the implication was he wanted to shift the blame.
Stalin then suggested that Kuznetsov go to the Chief of Staff, Marshal Shaposhnikov, and have the telegrams prepared with two signatures, Shapo-shnikov’s and Kuznetsov’s.
But Shaposhnikov was not interested in putting his hand to such an order either. “This matter is entirely for the fleet,” he told Kuznetsov. “I will not put my signature to it.”
Kuznetsov told him the idea was Stalin’s. Shaposhnikov still objected. Finally, the men decided to draft the telegram and send it to Stalin for his signature. Stalin agreed but didn’t send the orders off immediately. Eventually, however, they went out.
A year later Kuznetsov had reason to congratulate himself on his foresight. Police Chief Beria sent to Stalin a report charging the Baltic Fleet Commander, Admiral V. F. Tributs, with yielding to panic in issuing “premature orders” to prepare the fleet for scuttling. A copy went to Kuznetsov. ‘I quickly reminded them what the situation was and removed the blame irom the leaders of the fleet,” Kuznetsov recalled.
The curious reluctance of Stalin to sign the order, the accusation by the police and the apparent conviction on Stalin’s part that the fall of Leningrad was likely hint at the desperate politics being played around the city.
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Stalin clearly was under pressure to abandon Leningrad. It is possible that this counsel came to him from Malenkov and Molotov, backed by complaints of the failure of Zhdanov and Voroshilov properly to defend Leningrad, of the cost of defending the city, of the impossibility of making a firm stand, of the need to use every resource for the defense of Moscow, which itself was approaching the most perilous of days.
Zhdanov was fighting for his political life, his actual life, as well as that of the city to which his fate had been linked.
Stalin also must have felt that he was fighting for his political life. On September 4 he sent a message to Prime Minister Winston Churchill couched in most gloomy terms: “We have lost more than half the Ukraine, and in addition the enemy is at the gates of Leningrad.”
He asked that Britain immediately create a second front to draw off 30 to 40 German divisions and that she send “by October 1 30,000 tons of aluminum, 400 planes and 500 tanks.”
The alternative was that “the Soviet Union will either suffer defeat or be weakened to such an extent that it will lose for a long period any capacity to render assistance to its allies by its actual operations.”
Churchill thought he recognized in the message and in the manner of Ambassador Maisky’s presentation hints of a possible bid by Moscow to Germany for a separate peace.
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Eleven days later Stalin asked that the British land twenty-five to thirty divisions at Archangel or via Iran. On September 12 Churchill proposed that if Russia was forced to yield Leningrad and destroy the Baltic Fleet, the British would partially recompense the Russians for the destruction of warships. To which Stalin replied that he would submit his bill to the Germans after the war if such an event should occur.
Under all these circumstances was Stalin prepared to abandon Leningrad? “Unquestionably” was Kuznetsov’s response. Not that Stalin wanted to surrender the city, but he felt that the fall of Leningrad was only too likely. Otherwise, Kuznetsov concluded, Stalin never would have given orders so serious as those calling for the preparation of the fleet for scuttling.
The actions flowing from the September crisis—the reprimand to Zhdanov and Voroshilov, the removal of Voroshilov from command, the dispatch of Zhukov to Leningrad, the orders by Stalin to prepare the city for its fall— suggest a political compromise. Blame for the plight of the city was placed on both Voroshilov and Zhdanov, but Voroshilov had to take the major portion. He was sacked and saddled with military responsibility for the situation. Zhdanov was given one last chance: with Marshal Zhukov’s aid he might save the city if he could. But the terms were harsh. The city must be saved very quickly because a total effort to halt the Germans before Moscow was already getting under way. Perhaps it was because Leningrad’s continued defense would divert German troops from Moscow that Zhdanov and Zhukov were instructed to try to hold the line. But it was also plain that unless Zhdanov and Zhukov turned the situation around very, very quickly, Stalin was prepared to sacrifice Leningrad, if need be, in order to save Moscow. If Leningrad did fall, the full blame would fall on Zhdanov, the Party leader, not on Marshal Zhukov, the military technician, sent in at the last moment. Indeed, the expectation in the Kremlin, or even the order, may well have been that Zhdanov was to go down fighting street by street and block by block in a Russian Gotterdammerung. But the scene of Zhdanov’s final act would be Smolny, the cradle of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Not the least difficult aspect of Leningrad’s suicidal struggle behind the scenes was the burden on energy and morale to which it subjected the fighting naval and military commanders within Leningrad.
At a moment when they were bending every effort to save the city from the Germans came sudden orders to put highest priority on mining the great ships, the naval depots, the military installations throughout the city. It was a cruel burden and a cruel blow. The bitterness which the Leningrad commanders felt has been reflected down through the years. In many it implanted a permanent, undeviating hatred for Moscow and Stalin. They became convinced that at the most critical of all moments Stalin was prepared to sell them out.
From this time onward popular feeling toward Zhdanov began to change in Leningrad, even though few in the city knew these details of high politics. Until these critical days the city and its populace had held aloof from this dynamic, humorless man, so immersed in his own aims and ambitions. Now he began more and more to symbolize to Leningrad its isolated, desperate battle. Week by week and month by month the portrait of Zhdanov spread from one area to another, one office to another, one street corner to another.
It spread so widely and so universally that two years later visitors to Leningrad could hardly believe their eyes. Almost nowhere was a portrait of Stalin to be seen except, perhaps, in some official office—and not always there. Everywhere the figure of Zhdanov glowed down from the walls. Stalin, so the people had decided, was no friend of Leningrad. Zhdanov was no friend, perhaps, but he had shared the city’s trials and desperations. He had by this become one with them.