Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (2 page)

Alexander Werth was born into a well-off family of industrialists of German origin who had lived in St. Petersburg for several generations. His father, Adolf Werth, was both a captain of industry and a senior official in the Ministry of Communications, one of those businessmen convinced of the need for state intervention to kick-start the economy of a country which, although rich in resources, still lagged behind in development. Intimately connected in the political circles of the Constitutional Democratic Party, he had the good sense to leave the country a few weeks before the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, setting up home in Glasgow, where his son attended university. After receiving a degree in journalism, Alexander Werth started work at the
Manchester Guardian
, becoming its Paris correspondent in the 1930s. From there, he monitored French politics closely, wrote many notable pieces predicting a serious crisis of French democracy in the face of the rise of Nazism, and became involved in the anti-Munich Agreement faction.

He was still posted in Paris when war broke out, witnessing the French defeat in May–June 1940, which he recorded and analysed in a short book published in London – having escaped at the last moment by boat via Bordeaux – under the title
The Last Days of Paris: A Journalist’s Diary
.
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A well-regarded journalist with fluent Russian, Werth immediately emerged as the obvious candidate to cover the war in the East following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. On 1 July, as a correspondent for the BBC and the
Sunday Times
, he set off in a plane taking members of the British military mission to Moscow, led by General MacFarlane. After a 16-hour flight via the Shetland Islands, he landed at Arkhangelsk. From there, the British delegation was taken by plane – this time, a Soviet one – onward to Moscow. Werth would remain in the USSR as a correspondent for nearly seven years, until May 1948. Like all foreigners posted to Moscow, except diplomats, he was based at the Hotel Metropol. It was right next door to the Kremlin, yet from the start he was frustrated by the dearth of information about what was happening at the front and by the restrictions placed on the movement of foreign journalists.

Thanks to his perseverance and easy manner, however, he managed to gain access to the front several times: to the region of Smolensk in September 1941 where, for the first time since 22 June, Soviet troops had managed to contain the lightning advance of the Wehrmacht; to Stalingrad in January–February 1943; and, in September 1943, to Leningrad. In March 1944, he covered the Soviet advance into Ukraine; at the start of August 1944, he was the first Western war correspondent to enter the Nazi extermination camp at Majdanek, discovered ten days before by a Red Army unit on 23 July 1944. At once, he sent off a long report to the BBC in which he described the gas chambers and the methods of mass extermination of the Jews. The BBC refused to broadcast his first-hand account. ‘Not credible. A Soviet propaganda operation, a set-up. You have been tricked,’ was the response of the BBC directors. They began to grow openly suspicious that their correspondent, who since 1942 had proven a tireless advocate of the opening of a second Western Front, and thus a supporter of the Soviets’ chief demand, was too ‘Russianised’, even ‘Sovietised’. In spite of this, Werth’s weekly programme,
Russian Commentary
, which was broadcast on the BBC at nine o’clock in the evening on Sundays after the news, and was the only regular programme concerning the Eastern Front, was a huge success.

To better contextualise and illuminate Werth’s remarkable account of September 1943, I think it opportune to briefly go over a few points regarding the history of the siege of Leningrad. In what circumstances was the town ensnared at the end of the summer of 1941? What do we now know about the dreadful famine which, during the winter of 1941–1942, decimated the population of the city? What have we learnt from recent studies – and there have been many since the opening up of state archives which followed the collapse of the Soviet regime – concerning the everyday life of the people of Leningrad during the siege, their strategies for survival, the way in which the local authorities handled the crisis, the state of mind of the population, the ‘hidden’ (and sometimes extraordinarily bleak) face of the siege of Leningrad?

Operation Barbarossa, developed by the Wehrmacht General Staff, dictated that four army groups would lead the Blitzkrieg against the USSR and force the Red Army to capitulate before the winter of 1941. The Finnish group, commanded by General Dietl and the Finnish Marshal Mannerheim, was to take Murmansk and the White Sea coast. The Northern group, commanded by General von Leeb, was to advance on Leningrad. The Central group, the most significant, led by General von Bock, was to march on Moscow. Lastly, the Southern group, directed by General von Rundstedt, was assigned to occupy Ukraine. As it had done elsewhere, the German advance on Leningrad moved with lightning speed. In two weeks the Soviet armies of the ‘north-west axis’, commanded by Marshal Voroshilov, a member of the Politburo and one of Stalin’s intimates, were routed in the Baltics.

On 8 July, the German forces occupied Pskov, 200 kilometres from Leningrad, whilst the Finns advanced at a slower pace through the north-west, towards Petrozavodsk, on Lake Onega. In an attempt to slow the German advance on Leningrad, the authorities organised a mass levy of civilians. It must be said that, more than in any other Soviet town, tens of thousands of Leningrad’s inhabitants – men (those ineligible for military service), women and youths – voluntarily came to the defence of their city, from the very first days of the conflict. Some of them formed auxiliary battalions, assembled in haste and soon despatched to the front, where they were decimated in their first engagements with German forces. The majority of the volunteers, however, were assigned to dig trenches and anti-tank ditches, to plant barbed wire, and to build fortifications and bunkers. By August, more than half a million citizens of Leningrad were busying themselves constructing three lines of defence, two of them directly outside the city.

When the German troops launched their ‘final offensive’ on Leningrad, on 10 August, the situation became catastrophic, and within a few weeks the city was surrounded. To the south-west, the first line of defence on the Luga River was quickly broken. On 21 August, the rail line between Moscow and Leningrad was severed when the Germans took the town of Chudovo. One week later, they took Mga and thus the final rail link between Leningrad and the rest of the country was cut off. To the south the situation was no less desperate for the Soviets, who managed nonetheless to retain a foothold at Oranienbaum once the Germans reached the Gulf of Finland. At the same time, further to the east, the German troops had arrived as far as the southern bank of Lake Ladoga and taken Schlüsselburg. At the end of August 1941, the Germans could therefore reasonably expect to launch an attack on Leningrad soon.

It was in this context of extreme peril that Voroshilov, Zhdanov, the Communist Party secretary of Leningrad, and Popkov, the president of the City Soviet, issued their famous call to the people of Leningrad, often referred to in Werth’s account. This call on the people to defend the city alerted the citizens – who, like the rest of the Soviet population, had received no information concerning the scale of the defeat of the Red Army – to the gravity of the situation. By now it was too late to leave the city, which had been the target of German air raids since 4 September. The raids on 8, 9 and 10 September had been particularly violent and had sparked many fires, most notably striking the fuel and resupply depots near the port. At this critical juncture, the authorities briefly considered abandoning the entire city south of the Neva and concentrating the resistance in the northern districts. On 13 September, Merkulov, the NKVD (secret police) second-in-command, arrived from Moscow bearing a top-secret mandate from the State Defence Committee instructing the Leningrad authorities to blow up bridges, factories and public buildings deemed strategic in the event that the enemy should break through the final line of defence in the southern suburbs of the city.

Two days later, General Zhukov had been put in charge of the Leningrad front. Replacing the hapless Voroshilov, against the odds he succeeded in securing the front line a few kilometres south of the city, which nonetheless remained cut off from the rest of the country, except for the hypothetical possibility of communication via Lake Ladoga. It appears that, by this point, Hitler and the German high command had already decided not to attempt to take the city by force, but to starve it out. As General Jodl acknowledged at the Nuremberg Trials, the Germans had no intention of occupying the town, much less of feeding the survivors. Leningrad, the cradle of Bolshevism, must simply be razed to the ground, and its inhabitants perish of hunger.
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Hitler’s plans did not come to fruition, but nearly one in three of Leningrad’s remaining inhabitants would die of hunger during the winter of 1941–2. At the beginning of September, when the city was first surrounded and all rail links cut off, the supply situation was already dire. The speed of the German advance had caught out the authorities, who had not instituted a ration card system until 18 July, 27 days into the war. Besides this, other catastrophic mistakes had been made in the panic of the first weeks of war; namely, thousands of tons of supplies from the Baltic states invaded by the Germans had been evacuated by the Soviets to the East and not towards Leningrad. The city’s provisions barely stretched to 35 days’ worth of wheat and flour, 30 days of meat and 45 of fat. To try to conserve these meagre reserves, daily rations were reduced on three occasions between 2 September and 13 November 1941. For those included in the ‘first category’ (labourers, factory workers, engineers), the daily bread ration went from 600 to 300 grams per day. For white-collar workers and other professionals (second category), it went from 400 to 150 grams; for ‘inactive adults’ (third category) and children under 12, from 300 to 150 grams. These rations, meagre though they were, could not stretch the provisions out for very long.

Ersatz
products were widely used – bread was padded with cellulose, specially treated cotton paste, and soya. Other unappealing substitutes were dreamt up, such as the 2,000 tons of sheep’s entrails discovered by chance in the port district and transformed into a jelly intended to replace meat. Trying to relieve the pressure, the authorities arranged – with some hesitation, after the fiasco of a preliminary evacuation of children, who in July were sent to areas south-west of Leningrad which were then promptly occupied by the Germans – for the evacuation of some ‘priority’ citizens: skilled workers from strategically important armament factories, the scientific and intellectual elite, and relatives of the
nomenklatura
.

During the autumn of 1941, 70,000–80,000 people were evacuated (barely 3 per cent of the 2.5 million citizens caught in the siege), half by plane, and the rest by boat across Lake Ladoga. The lake became the ‘Road of Life’, also used to bring in some paltry supplies to the besieged city. At Osinovets, a small port was hastily constructed which, by the end of September 1941, could receive a dozen supply boats per day. This line of communication, however, was constantly under threat of attack by German aeroplanes based around 40 kilometres south of the lake. In reality, the quantities of provisions brought across this route were absurdly insufficient for the requirements of the population – in two months, the besieged city received a mere 24,000 tons of flour and cereals and 1,100 tons of meat and dairy products, which added up to 20 days of starvation rations. The early onset of winter prevented navigation on the lake from the beginning of November.

The only remaining mode of communication with the outside world was by air; however, resupplying by this method quickly proved inefficient and even fewer provisions reached the city. From 22 November, though, the lake was again traversable due to the thick layer of ice which had formed upon it. The only difficulty presented by the ‘Ice Road’ was bringing the supplies over terrible roads from the Vologda–Leningrad railway line, which passes around 20 kilometres south of the lake, up to the lake’s edge, and from there across the frozen and snow-covered lake to Osinovets, linked by rail to Leningrad. But on 9 November, the Germans seized Tikhvin, severing the Vologda–Leningrad line. For a month, until the Soviet troops retook Tikhvin, the ‘Road of Life’ was cut off. On 20 November, the ration allowances were reduced for the fifth time: 250 grams of bread for those in the ‘first category’, 125 grams for everyone else. Other ration coupons – for meat, dairy products, fats and sugar, at the rate of a few dozen grams per day – were honoured only rarely, and after long hours of waiting, beginning in the night, outside empty shops.

From the second half of November, the number of deaths caused by ‘nutritional dystrophy’ – a euphemism used by the administration to refer to death by starvation – skyrocketed. For the last decade, the deadly famine which struck the inhabitants of Leningrad during the blockade has been the subject of several studies, by both Russian and Western historians.
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Amongst the questions addressed, that of the number and social status of victims of the blockade looms large, and various differing estimates have been offered since the 1960s.
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This task is made particularly difficult for several reasons: for one, the administrative divisions upon which the census was based in the 1930s do not entirely correspond to the borders of the city during the siege; for another, the military and civilian statistics are difficult to differentiate – in the besieged city, administrative bodies tended to become enmeshed, counting both civilian and military victims. Nevertheless, certain sources have proved to be invaluable, notably the ration cards which were distributed to all residents during the latter half of July 1941, and thus offer a relatively exact estimate of the total population of the encircled city. The ‘card statistics’ should, however, be approached with caution. Not all the cards were distributed by the same organisation, meaning there are likely to be duplicates, as well as numerous instances of fraud involving the cards of dead or evacuated people whose death or departure had not been duly registered (30,000 wrongfully used cards were confiscated during the winter of 1941–1942). The most reliable source, in all likelihood, remains the civil records which the authorities continued to maintain, often in the places with the highest concentration of deaths, such as hospitals. Nonetheless, a number of deaths – experts estimate between 10 and 15 per cent – went unreported.