Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 Read Online Free PDF

tragedy would now play out, with what from today’s perspective feels like sickening inevitability. At the time, though, events still seemed to hang in the balance. Few anticipated a siege: either the Germans would quickly be pushed back, it was assumed, or Leningrad would fall.
    Across the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht now seemed poised for victory. In the north, von Leeb’s Army Group North had surrounded Leningrad. Army Group Centre had captured Smolensk eight weeks previously and was now only two hundred miles from Moscow. Outside Kiev, Army Group South was in the process of encircling four Soviet armies, and shortly to capture the city itself. To the outside world, the Soviet regime seemed about to be overthrown or forced into a humiliating peace. (‘Everyone is remarking in anticipation’, wrote George Orwell in London, ‘what a bore the Free Russians will be . . . People have visions of Stalin in a little shop in Putney, selling samovars and doing Caucasian dances.’ 1 ) On 4 September Stalin had sent a half-desperate, half-threatening letter to Churchill via his ambassador Ivan Maisky. The Russian front, he admitted, had ‘broken down’, and it was imperative for Britain to open a second front in France or the Balkans by the end of the year, diverting thirty to forty German divisions. If Soviet Russia were defeated, the ambassador added in conversation, how could Britain win the war? ‘We could not exclude the impression’, Churchill wired Roosevelt after the meeting, ‘that they might be thinking of separate terms.’ 2
    Zhdanov and Voroshilov only dared tell Stalin that Shlisselburg had fallen on 9 September, a day late. His telegraph in response – jointly signed, ominously, with Malenkov, Molotov and Beria – bristled with contempt:
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    We are disgusted by your conduct. All you do is report the surrender of this or that place, without saying a word about how you plan to put a stop to all these losses of towns and railway stations. The manner in which you informed us of the loss of Shlisselburg was outrageous. Is this the end of your losses? Perhaps you have already decided to give up Leningrad? What have you done with your KV tanks? Where have you positioned them, and why isn’t there any improvement on the front, when you’ve got so many of them? No other front has half the quota of KVs that you have. What’s your aviation doing? Why isn’t it supporting the troops on the battlefield? Kulik’s division has come to your aid – how are you using it? Can we hope for some sort of improvement on the front, or is Kulik’s help going to go for nothing, like the KVs? We demand that you update us on the situation two or three times a day. 3
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    Even before hearing about Shlisselburg, Stalin had decided to bring in new leadership. The previous day he had summoned his head of staff, General Zhukov, to the Kremlin and ordered him to fly to Leningrad with a note for Voroshilov that read simply ‘Hand over command of the Army Group to Zhukov and fly to Moscow immediately’.
    Forty-three years old, with a bald, block-shaped head, ruthless will, brilliant tactical sense and the courage to stand up to Stalin on military matters, Zhukov was the outstanding Soviet commander of the Second World War. He had made his name (and evaded, he suspected, the clutches of the NKVD) two years earlier, with the successful repulse of a Japanese incursion into Soviet Mongolia. Later he was to mastermind the spectacular encirclements at Stalingrad, and lead the Red Army in triumph to Berlin. The three weeks in the autumn of 1941 during which he stopped the Germans in front of Leningrad were to become part of a legend.
    As recounted in his memoirs, Zhukov took off from Moscow on the same day that he saw Stalin, in grey, rainy weather. He took with him two trusted lieutenants from Mongolian days, Generals Mikhail Khozin and Ivan Fedyuninsky. 4