On 14 September the brigade was ordered to stop digging and return to Leningrad. Grechina visited the university’s languages faculty, where she had been due to start a degree. But academia now felt self-indulgent and naive. ‘How on earth can you discuss abstract concepts with fires and bombing all around? I felt like a working person who suddenly finds herself in the company of the leisured.’ Slipping out of a lecture early, she went to the faculty canteen and swapped ration coupons for horsemeat and
Even official news sources now acknowledged that the city was in peril. On 16 September, a day of horizontal rain and the day on which Pushkin was abandoned,
is first and foremost achieved by presence of mind, bravery, and decisiveness. One must not procrastinate, but display swiftness and dash. . The fighter, having taken suitable cover [lamp posts, bollards and advertising pillars were suggested] should let the tank approach within 10–15 metres (at this distance the fighter will be in dead space; the tank will not be able to fire at him), swiftly break cover, throw the bundle of grenades under its caterpillar tracks, and just as swiftly take cover again. Exactly the same technique is used with inflammable bottles, the only difference being that the bottle is thrown at the rear part of the tank.
In the absence of grenades or Molotov cocktails, the manual blithely continued, tanks were to be disabled ‘by the decisive and dextrous use of bayonet, rifle butt, knife, crowbar or axe’.14 More convincing were the barricades being built — using steel ‘hedgehogs’ and concrete ‘dragon’s teeth’ as well as steel joists, cobblestones and tram cars filled with sand — across the principal thoroughfares, and the bricking up of windows so as to turn them into firing points. Georgi Knyazev’s Academicians’ Building was filled with hurrying sailors carrying sandbags. He and his wife moved into his office in the Academy of Sciences, where they slept on camp beds under a bust of Lenin.
What Knyazev also saw the sailors doing — as he hardly dared note in his diary — was laying demolition charges next to the Lieutenant Schmidt (formerly the Nicholas) Bridge, westernmost of the two that connect Vasilyevsky Island to the mainland. ‘By the Academy of Arts I was astonished to see sailors digging holes a short distance apart, putting something in them, laying bricks on top and sprinkling them with sand. Right opposite the sphinxes. Could it mean?. . My heart skipped a beat.’15
If the Germans did take Leningrad, the destruction of its infrastructure and manufacturing capability was to be total. A ‘Plan D’ listing everything to be demolished was not made public until 2005. We now know that it included all the city’s important factories, as well as its power stations, waterworks, telephone and telegraph exchanges, bakeries, bridges, railway network, shipyards and port — some 380 installations in total. (Aleksei Kuznetsov, Zhdanov’s deputy, is credited with forbidding the mining of the Peterhof Palace, as well as with ordering the removal of machine guns from the Hermitage’s roof, placed there in case paratroops landed in Palace Square.) At each listed institution a ‘troika’ of director, Party secretary and NKVD representative was instructed to draw up plans for the order in which machinery and buildings were to be destroyed, and for the quantity of explosive — or, for less important objects, of axes and sledgehammers — needed. The order to proceed with these ‘special measures’ was to be given by Kuznetsov, and responsibility for seeing it carried out to rest with the regional branches of the NKVD.16 Though the planning went forward in great secrecy, rumours leaked out, appalling factory workers. ‘And what are we supposed to do once the factories have been blown up?’ one man asked a friend. ‘We can’t do without factories. Even if the Germans come we have to work in order to eat. We won’t blow them up.’17
