Four weeks into the invasion the mood in Leningrad was one of disoriented anticipation, of disconnect between near-normality on the streets and the stunning news on the radio. ‘It’s just impossible to believe there’s a war on’, wrote the crippled archivist Georgi Knyazev. ‘Everything’s so calm, if only outwardly.’ The weather continued hot and still, the fluff-covered poplar seeds Russians call pukh drifted along the gutters, and after work office clerks gathered as usual in Rumyantsev Square to play dominoes. Sitting out an air-raid drill in front of the Academicians’ Building one evening, Knyazev watched a team of teenage girls shovelling a pile of sand into a lorry, while small boys in swimming trunks dived into the river off the glossy stone backs of the Luxor sphinxes. An Academician’s wife stood guard duty wearing gloves and a hat. Chatting to the building’s caretaker, Knyazev tried to introduce a ‘mood of cheerfulness and perseverance’, but the man didn’t understand why the war wasn’t working out the way it had in the films. ‘“It’s awful”, he said, “that the fighting is happening on our territory. There’s so much destruction. Why did we surrender the old border defences just like that?” There was nothing I could say in reply. We have very little information. I still don’t know how near, or how far, the Germans are from us. Is Leningrad seriously under threat or not?’ The air, he noticed, carried a faint smell of smoke, from peat bogs deliberately set on fire so as to confuse enemy aviation.7
Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, the elderly artist who had been so reassured by Stalin’s broadcast, lived opposite a military hospital. During air-raid drills she watched the wounded being stretchered down into bunkers, and medical students popping through trapdoors up onto the hospital roof. ‘Still not a single bomb has fallen on Leningrad’, she wrote on 21 July,
though the sirens go off often. Last night there were air-raid warnings at 12.30 and again at 5.30 a.m., I woke up and the anti-aircraft guns were firing so loudly that I couldn’t go to sleep again. I got dressed, went out into the courtyard and sat on a bench. . It was a cloudless morning and though the sun hadn’t yet reached the buildings, it shone brightly on the barrage balloons scattered across the sky. They swam in the gentle blue ether like silver ships. One couldn’t see their cables; it looked as though they were floating free.8
Though most public parks were closed for the excavation of air-raid shelters, she had permission to enter the Botanical Gardens:
The gardens were still in order, but not as carefully tended as usual. I got a great deal of pleasure from the wonderful hydrangeas; they grew in big urns in bunches of white, pink and pale blue, great explosions of unbelievable loveliness. Not a soul was there. The sun shone on the grass, and through the leaves of the trees. The light played across the bench, our dresses, the pages of our books. A cool breeze blew from the river. I was living in moments of quiet calm, and for a split second forgot that we’re at war, that people are dying and cities burning.
One of the reasons the city felt so oddly quiet was that more than fifty thousand Leningraders, mostly women and teenagers, had been sent 100 kilometres to the south-west to build new defences along the so-called ‘Luga Line’. Though the first construction brigades had started work on 29 June, the line was not formally sketched out until 4 July, when Zhukov ordered the Northwestern Army Group to take defensive positions from Narva (on the Baltic coast 120 kilometres to Leningrad’s west) through Luga and Staraya Russa to Borovichi, 250 kilometres to the city’s south-east. The line’s strongest sector, behind the Luga River, was to consist of a fifteen-kilometre-deep series of minefields and anti-tank guns and barriers, with a gap between Luga and Gatchina through which the Red Army could retreat.9 Work was also ordered on two inner rings, one running from Peterhof on the Gulf, through Gatchina to Kolpino, and the second round the city itself, from the commercial port at the Neva’s mouth to the upriver fishing village of Rybatskoye.10
One of the thousands of teenage girls conscripted to work on the Luga Line was Olga Grechina, a seventeen-year-old student at Leningrad University. ‘At the Department of Philology’, she sardonically records in her memoirs,
our idol Professor Gukovsky rousingly addressed a rally, urging us to enlist in the students’ voluntary battalion. Everyone expected Gukovsky himself to enlist too, especially since many of our teachers were applying to be either translators or political workers. Instead, Gukovsky started making his appearance wearing green house slippers and leaning on a cane. Some said he had acute rheumatism; others cautiously hinted that he found calling others to action much pleasanter than acting himself. I really don’t know if he was ill or not, but it was good that he was able to write his Gogol book.11
Though, if anything, anti-Bolshevik (her doctor father had been exiled to a tiny village clinic by the Revolution, and an uncle sent to the Gulag), Grechina employed no such stratagem, and in the third week of July found herself one of a group of female students waiting, amidst crowds of evacuees, at Moscow Station for a train to the Luga Line:
There were worrying reports of strafing and bombing coming from the trenches — and especially from around Luga. But we hadn’t been told where we were headed, and when we set off that evening we were cheerful, singing songs so as to distract ourselves from the anxiety inside. When we got off the train at Gatchina it was already dark. We were sent to spend the night in a park next to the Pavlovsk Palace, but never slept since the Germans started bombing a nearby airfield, and around us everything droned and shook. We were made to get up, and told to hide anything white and not to smoke. We started walking fast along a road already full of our units. The soldiers marched quickly and quietly; if one made a sound the others shushed him for being careless. None of us had any idea where we were going or why, which made it all the more frightening. We were all desperate for something to drink, so much so that when the road went through a wood we drank muddy water from the roadside ditches.
In the morning, having marched twenty kilometres, the students reached a village, where they were distributed among local residents, two or three to a house. That afternoon their task was explained to them:
It was to dig anti-tank ditches (1.2m deep) and breastworks (supposedly 1m high). Though our only tools were shovels, axes and stretchers [to carry soil], we set to work enthusiastically. The days were sunny and hot. We worked from 5 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m., with a two- or three-hour rest after lunch. We were well fed but there was no tea, except for what our landlady made us from lime flowers. Physically it was very tough, and after two weeks, trying to lift a stretcher, I suddenly found I couldn’t straighten up again.12
Grechina was lucky only to hurt her back. Yelena Kochina was one of many ditch-diggers strafed by German Stukas:
Our whole laboratory dug anti-tank trenches around Leningrad today. I dug the earth with pleasure (at least this was something practical!). . Almost all the people working in the trenches were women. Their coloured headscarves flashed brightly in the sun. It was as if a giant flowerbed girdled the city.
Suddenly the gleaming wings of an aeroplane blotted out the sky. A machine gun started firing and bullets plunged into the grass not far from me, rustling like small metallic lizards. I stood transfixed, forgetting completely the air-raid drill that I had learned not long before.