Steven Lee Myers - The new tsar: the rise and reign of Vladimir Putin

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V ladimir Spiridonovich Putin edged forward through the cratered battlefield beside the Neva River, roughly thirty miles from Leningrad. His orders seemed suicidal. He was to reconnoiter the German positions and, if possible, capture a tongue, slang for a soldier to interrogate. It was November 17, 1941,

Putin, then thirty years old, lay wounded on a bridgehead on the east bank of the Neva. The Red Armys commanders had poured troops across the river in hopes of breaking the encirclement of Leningrad that had begun two months earlier when the Germans captured Shlisselburg, an ancient fortress at the mouth of the Neva, but the effort failed. The Germans laid a siege that would last 872 days and kill a million civilians by bombardment, starvation, or disease. The Fhrer has decided to wipe the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth, a secret German order declared on September 29. Surrender would not be accepted. Air and artillery bombardment would be the instrument of the citys destruction, and hunger would be its accomplice, since feeding the population cannot and should not be solved by us. Never before had a modern city endured a siege like it.

Is this the end of your losses? Joseph Stalin furiously cabled the citys defenders the day after the siege began. Perhaps you have already decided to give up Leningrad? The telegram was signed by the entire Soviet leadership, including Vyacheslav Molotov, who in 1939 had signed the notorious nonaggression pact with his Nazi counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, which was now betrayed. It was by no means the end of the losses. The fall of Shlisselburg coincided with ferocious air raids in Leningrad itself, including one that ignited the citys main food warehouse. The Soviet forces defending the city were in disarray, as they were everywhere in the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion that began on June 22, 1941, had crushed Soviet defenses along a thousand-mile front, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Even Moscow seemed in danger of falling.

Stalin never considered surrendering Leningrad, and he dispatched the chief of the general staff, Georgy Zhukov, to shore up the citys defenses, which he did with great brutality. On the night of September 19, on Zhukovs orders, Soviet forces mounted the first assault 600 meters across the Neva to break the siege, but it was repulsed by overwhelming German firepower. In October, they tried again, hurling forth the 86th Division, which included Putins unit, the 330th Rifle Regiment. The bridgehead those troops managed to create on the eastern bank of the Neva became known, because of its size, as the Nevsky Pyatachok, from the word for a five-kopek coin or a small patch. At its greatest expanse the battlefield was barely a mile wide, less than half a mile deep. For the soldiers fated to fight there, it was a brutal, senseless death trap.