In practice, though, for Leningraders as for most ordinary Russians, the first twenty-two months of the Second World War had seemed rather distant. ‘Somewhere in Europe a war was on’, one Leningrader remembered, ‘for a couple of years now — so what?. . It wasn’t considered appropriate to worry about international events, to exhibit, as they used to call it, “unhealthy moods”.’6 Though the Finns had fought doggedly, the campaigns in Poland and the Baltics had been quick and easy. Hitler’s rampage across France and the Low Countries in the spring of 1940 had moved Western-read intellectuals such as the poet Anna Akhmatova, who wrote unpublished verses mourning the fall of Paris and London’s Blitz. But most believed the street-corner loudspeakers, the notice board ‘wall newspapers’ and the agitators at the endless workplace meetings, who told them that the capitalists were tearing each other apart, leaving the Soviet Union ready to snap up the leftovers. Though the treaty with Hitler was only temporary, any war with him would be fought on German soil and be over almost before it had begun, brought to a halt by popular revolution inside Germany itself. Hearing of the Nazi attack, workers at the Leningrad Metal Factory exclaimed, ‘Our forces will thrash them; it’ll be over in a week. No, not in a week — we’ve got to get to Berlin. That’ll take three or four weeks.’7 Even sophisticated observers, able correctly to interpret Hitler’s April invasion of Yugoslavia (in defiance of a Soviet — Yugoslav friendship pact) and Churchill’s warning speeches, were shocked when what they had feared actually came to pass. For Olga Fridenberg, a classicist and first cousin to Boris Pasternak, ‘It wasn’t the invasion that was incredible, for who had not expected it?. . It was the upheaval in our lives, their sudden cleaving into past and present on this quiet summer Sunday with all the windows wide open.’8
Famously, the Soviet leadership was caught by surprise as well. ‘Stalin and his people remain completely inactive’, Goebbels confided to his diary a month before the invasion, ‘like a rabbit confronted with a snake.’9 Though historians still debate the rationale behind Stalin’s pre-war foreign policy, it is clear that Stalin both expected war with Germany and convinced himself that with appeasement it could be delayed at least until the following year. Reports from the Soviet ambassador to Berlin were ignored, as was military intelligence of troop concentrations west of the new German — Soviet border. British warnings were dismissed as disinformation, designed to turn the Red Army into ‘England’s soldiers’. Notoriously, the trade commissariat continued to send grain, petroleum, rubber and copper to Germany right up to the very night of the invasion.
Stalin’s plenipotentiary in Leningrad at the outbreak of war was Andrei Zhdanov, a plump, sallow-faced, chain-smoking son of a schoolteacher who had risen to be Party Secretary of Gorky (formerly and now again Nizhni Novgorod), thence to the Central Committee, and after the murder of Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov (probably at Stalin’s hands) in 1934, to leadership of the Leningrad Party organisation and full membership of the Politburo. Devotedly loyal, and like Stalin a workaholic autodidact, he was one of the few people Stalin addressed with the familiar ty — equivalent to the French tu — rather than the formal Vy. Today he is best remembered for leading Leningrad’s defence and for a tragic-comic post-war stint as cultural commissar, during which he denounced Akhmatova as ‘half-nun, half-whore’, and tinkled politically correct tunes to Shostakovich on the piano. In truth, he was a mass murderer: as well as overseeing the Leningrad purges of 1937–9, he had, like other Politburo members, toured them to the provinces — in his case, to the Urals and Middle Volga. His signature, together with Stalin’s and Molotov’s, is to be found at the bottom of dozens of death lists.
Like Stalin, Zhdanov was so confident that talk of an imminent German attack was premature that on 19 June he left Moscow for a six-week break at the Black Sea resort of Sochi. ‘The Germans have already missed their best moment’, Stalin reassured him. ‘It looks as though they will attack in 1942. Go on holiday.’ Through the afternoon of Saturday 21 June, as Zhdanov settled in at the seaside, the border guards’ usual trickle of unsettling reports turned into a torrent: of yet more incursions into Soviet airspace, of covert movements of tanks and artillery, of pontoon bridges being built and barbed-wire entanglements cleared away. Shortly after nine in the evening, three deserters — a Lithuanian and two German Communists — crossed the River Bug to Soviet lines, and told interrogators of the orders that had just been read out to their units. The attack would begin at 0400, said the Lithuanian, and ‘they plan to finish you off pretty quickly’.10
In the Kremlin, apprehension still vied with denial. The German Foreign Ministry, the Berlin embassy reported, was refusing to take its half-hourly calls. Sometime in the late evening the commissar for defence, General Semen Timoshenko, rang Stalin with the news from the German deserters, at which Stalin ordered him to assemble an emergency meeting of Politburo members and senior generals. On their arrival he paused in his pacing and asked, ‘Well, what now?’ Timoshenko and the chief of staff, General Georgi Zhukov, insisted that all frontier troops should be put on full battle alert. Stalin disagreed: ‘It would be premature to issue that order now. It might still be possible to settle the situation by peaceful means. . The border units must not allow themselves to be provoked into anything that might cause difficulties.’ At half past midnight he finally allowed the order to go through — prefaced by a warning that the attacks might only be provocations, and calling for a ‘disguised’ response. The meeting broke up at 3 a.m. An hour later Stalin had just gone to bed when he received a call from Zhukov. The major cities of the western Soviet Union — Kiev, Minsk, Vilnius, Sevastopol — were being bombed. ‘Did you understand what I said, Comrade Stalin?’ asked Zhukov. He had to repeat himself before he got a reply. War, even Stalin had to acknowledge, had begun.11
The first rule of foreign policy, the dinner-party truism has it, is never to invade Russia. Why did Hitler, very conscious of the disaster that befell Napoleon there, decide to attack the Soviet Union?
His aims, from the campaign’s inception in 1940, were not those of conventional geopolitics. He did not want just to annexe useful territory and create a new balance of power, but to wipe out a culture and an ideology, if necessary a race. His vision for the newly conquered territories, as expounded over meals at his various wartime headquarters, was of a thousand-mile-wide Reich stretching from Berlin to Archangel on the White Sea and Astrakhan on the Caspian. ‘The whole area’, he harangued his architect Albert Speer,
must cease to be Asiatic steppe, it must be Europeanized! The Reich peasants will live on handsome, spacious farms; the German authorities in marvellous buildings, the governors in palaces. Around each town there will be a belt of delightful villages, 30–40km deep, connected by the best roads. What exists beyond that will be another world, in which we mean to let the Russians live as they like.12