Barrages also disrupted work at the Sudomekh shipyard. On 18 April thirty-one shells hit Vasili Chekrizov’s workshop, forcing it to relocate. ‘My girls were in there when it started’, he noted approvingly, ‘but before they left they locked up. Good girls. . By evening everyone had turned glazier, boarding up the windows with plywood.’16 When not repairing bomb damage, much of his time was spent battling on behalf of his staff with bureaucracy:
Interesting fact. A girl came out of hospital, went to her hostel. It had moved. Where to, nobody knew. No belongings, money or cards. The district soviet sent her to us. Processing will take six days. She spent last night outdoors in a courtyard. Today is a Sunday, so we can’t register her, and without registration we can’t give her a place in our hostel. Nor can she get new cards. . I decided to send her to the allotment organisers, but even there she can’t get cards before Tuesday. Without cards she’ll go hungry, and in three days she’ll be back in hospital as before. . So I arranged with the canteen that they’ll feed her today and tomorrow, but will they actually do it? That’s an example of the kind of work I’ve been caught up in for the last ten days. Everywhere there’s a shortage of hands, and the ones we do have, we use unproductively.17
Alongside these routine concerns, Chekrizov also continued to play his part in the virtual reality of workplace politics. At a meeting in July, the shipyard’s Party organisation staged a mini-purge. One man was sentenced to death and seven to lengthy prison terms, for colluding in food theft with senior management and for ‘preparing to welcome the Germans’. Despite having been unjustly expelled from the Party himself in the 1930s, Chekrizov seems to have no doubts about the latter charge, asking his diary ‘How did the Partorg miss it?’
In other institutions too, repression ground on. Yakov Babushkin, the lively and outspoken radio producer who had organised the Shostakovich premiere, was sacked from the Radio House in April; he thus lost his exemption from the draft, and was killed at the front a few weeks later.18 At the Yevropa hotel-turned-hospital, Marina Yerukhmanova, the twenty-one-year-old who had survived the mass death working as an orderly, was called to give evidence in the trial of its senior administrator, a man adored by the staff for his fairness, openness and charm. Defended only by Marina — who had naively assumed that others would speak up for him too — he was found guilty of ‘counter-revolutionary activity’ under Article 58 of the Criminal Code, ‘plus endless other numbers and letters. The whole alphabet, apparently, did not suffice to enumerate his crimes.’ Marina — stunned by the sight of her boss unshaven, beltless and with a look of bitter resignation on his face — was given the sack, together with her mother and sister.19
Following the partial breakthrough of January 1943 the north saw little serious fighting for several months. An early spring thaw hindered troop movements, and save for another unsuccessful attempt to widen the land corridor to the ‘mainland’ in July, attention turned to the centre and south, where the Red Army’s great post-Stalingrad counter-offensives were gathering speed. Rostov-on-Don was liberated in February; Kharkov, following July’s great tank battles outside Kursk, at the end of August. On 3 September Stalin finally got his second front, when the Allies landed in mainland Italy.
Outside Leningrad, meanwhile, trench life fell into a quiet routine. South of the Kirov Works soldiers treated visitors to home-made pickled cabbage and salted cucumbers. On the Volkhov, Vasili Churkin slept a lot, collected wild raspberries, watched his general exercising with dumbbells in the mornings and wrote his diary at a desk equipped with a kerosene lamp, inkwell, box for nibs and glass filled with wild flowers. Elsewhere soldiers used dynamite to fish for bream and pike, distilled samogon, used tethered geese as sentries and whittled knives out of the Plexiglas windscreens of downed planes. On the other side of no-man’s-land Fritz Hockenjos passed the time birdwatching (the soldier who brought him news of the first lark earned a schnapps), taking photographs — favourite subjects churches (ruined) or trees (charred) silhouetted against dramatic sunsets — and making a pet of a stray cat, which he named Minka and allowed to sleep next to his head on his rolled-up coat. His men put up comic signs — ‘Berlin 1,400km, Leningrad 3km’; Kein Trinkwasser when their trenches flooded — and named the sheltered corners in which they played cards the am Wilden Mann and the am Alten Fritz, after Swabian pubs. Separated by only a few hundred yards of wire-entangled mud, the two sides developed a sort of intimacy, ogling the girls that visited each other’s dugouts, shouting badinage — ‘You give us one of your Uzbeks, and we’ll give you one of our Romanians’ — and coming to unspoken agreements about when and where to shoot. ‘One night the Russians are all over no-man’s-land and we lie in front of the wire waiting to take prisoners’, Hockenjos observed, ‘and the next night we change roles.’20 He noted the tune of ‘Kalinka’ — picked up from Russian soldiers’ singing — in neat manuscript on the back of a range-finding form.
In September 1943, by which time the Wehrmacht was in general retreat along its whole central and southern front, Hitler’s generals began to argue for withdrawal from Leningrad. With armour and guns committed to defending Smolensk and Kiev, they no longer had any hope of reinstating a full blockade, and the retreat in the south left the northern armies dangerously exposed, especially since swelling numbers of partisans now regularly blew up railway lines and supply convoys that ventured off the major roads. (The head of the regional partisan organisation claimed, in a memo to Stalin of 25 September, that his five thousand-odd men had blown up 673 road and railway bridges, destroyed 7,992 freight wagons and flatbeds and burned 220 warehouses, 2,307 lorries and cars, 91 planes and 152 tanks. ‘The partisans let me through again’, Hockenjos wrote sarcastically in his diary on his return from a brief spell in hospital in Narva.21) Soviet intelligence recorded the doubts spreading among the lower ranks: ‘We shouldn’t be bothering with these marshes’, one captured German soldier told his interrogators, ‘they should send us to defend Ukraine.’22 Another, a deserter from the German garrison at Novgorod, claimed that his officers spent all their time drinking and gambling, while the rank and file put their faith in ‘some destructive weapon that has so far been kept a great secret’. He himself had decided to swap sides before he got killed.23 A third explained that he had always got his news from the cook in his field kitchen, ‘but now he knows no more than we do. If we’re being kept out of the picture on events at the front it’s because things aren’t going so well. Russia is too big for us to defeat her.’24
Though unwilling to give the Finns (now putting out diplomatic feelers to America) an excuse to drop out of the war by abandoning Leningrad, Hitler allowed himself to be partially persuaded, giving von Küchler permission to build a new defensive ‘Panther Line’ behind the River Narva and lakes Peipus and Pskov. Fifty thousand labourers, mostly drafted from the local population, constructed 6,000 bunkers, laid 125 miles of barbed wire and dug 25 miles of trenches and tank traps. Army Group North’s lines were shortened by a quarter, the retreat including at least a quarter of a million Soviet civilians — some willing, others rounded up so as to prevent their recruitment into the advancing Red Army. (A peasant woman with whom Hockenjos was briefly quartered was busy packing — less, he thought, in compliment to the Germans, more because she feared the Bolsheviks even more.) The ring round Leningrad, however, remained as tight as ever. From Pushkin and the Pulkovo hills, the bombardment of the city continued with futile malice — the deaths caused (like those of two girl students at the Erisman in December) all the crueller since the end of the siege was now so obviously near.