Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege by Alexander Werth

never yet seen. The old Triumphal Arch with the horses and chariot on top of it, built to commemorate the return of the Russian troops from France in 1815, was still the same, but the whole environment was different. Instead of the wretched wooden hovels and miserable one-storey houses that constituted this working-class suburb around the Putilov works, a new city had sprung up – avenues with enormous blocks of six-, seven-, eight-storey flats, very much better and more harmoniously designed than similar new buildings in Moscow. Nearly all the windows were broken and replaced by plywood; some buildings had been shattered by shells, and all were pockmarked with shell-splinters. But in the main there was less damage here than in the old Mokhovaya. Not far south of the Narva Gate stood the large new steel and concrete building of the Regional Soviet with a well-designed rectangular tower about 250 feet high.
    We went up this tower, climbing its long winding stair. Here, on the top platform which was one of the main observation posts of the Leningrad front were rangefinders, telescopes and other optical instruments. Here were a major and several soldiers, and a captain with half his head bandaged and a large black patch over one eye. From the top of this tower one saw a vast panorama of not only Leningrad on one side but also of the front on the other. Almost below us, in the south-west, was the massive black shape of the main building of the Putilov works, around which were large blocks of houses, some still seemingly intact, others badly shattered, which gave this part of Leningrad the appearance of the outskirts of Madrid in December 1937. It was, on the whole, less bad though than the University City of Madrid where the shelling had given the buildings the weird shapes of prehistoric animals. Here the massive blocks of flats had more or less kept their original shape, though much of the ground between them had been ploughed up by shells. Even so, there were fragments of vegetable plots everywhere around the shell-holes. Along the main road, past the Putilov works, there was a constant though not very thick stream of traffic running to and from the front. It was a cool autumn morning with a haze in the air and broken clouds in the sky. Beyond the Putilov works were the pale waters of the Gulf of Finland with the dark outline of the cranes of Leningrad Harbour only about a mile away, and – on the other side of this inlet of the Gulf of Finland, an inlet scarcely more than a mile wide – were the Germans.
    ‘That’s Uritsk,’ said the captain with the black patch, ‘it used to be called Ligovo.’ Ligovo – I remembered it very well – was a nondescript little datcha place, almost a village then, and was the first stop on the railway to Peterhof and Oranienbaum. The country house where I spent so many summers and so many weekends in winter was on the hill, three miles beyond Oranienbaum and had a superb view of Kronstadt with its forts and its cathedral only a few miles across the water. And now Uritsk – or Ligovo – was in German hands. One could see from here that it was no longer a village but had really become part of industrial Leningrad in the last twenty-five years. A large white building close to the sea stood out very clearly. ‘That’s the Pishmash (short for pishuschie mashiny ) over there,’ the captain with the patch explained. ‘The big Leningrad typewriter factory. It’s one of the German strongholds on this front. They hold about twelve miles of coast here; they hold Uritsk, and Strelna, and part of Peterhof – the so-called New Peterhof – and the front runs between New and Old Peterhof.’ So there was a Russian ‘bridgehead’ beyond that – the bridgehead just opposite Kronstadt, and running from Old Peterhof to some point twenty or twenty-five miles west, beyond Krasnaya Gorka. I felt some satisfaction at the thought that the old country house – if still extant – and at