Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (25 page)

‘Today, since the railway link has been restored, through the Schlusselburg gap, we have no food problem at all. This has been solved completely. The civilian rations for sugar and fats are substantially higher in Leningrad today than in Moscow. We are trying to make up for the weight everybody lost during the months of undernourishment.

‘The question: Can we or can’t we hold Leningrad? no longer arises. The question is: How soon will the Germans abandon their Leningrad positions? The Germans have built very powerful fortifications here, and they would be more than reluctant to abandon them. They will not abandon them voluntarily. But there is one question which here, in Leningrad, is in everybody’s mind; and that is the Second Front. Because we are convinced that if only the Germans were compelled to withdraw ten divisions from this front, they would have to withdraw altogether, because we’d push them out then. And the bombardments of Leningrad would automatically cease.

‘There are thirty German divisions on the Leningrad front, though looking at the map you see that it isn’t a large front. This summer, when the Germans feared we would widen still further the gap in the blockade, they brought reinforcements from the Kalinin front. Among them were troops which had taken part in the storming of Sebastopol. They had another crack at Leningrad in July but with no effect.

‘But they will hang on as long as they can. It’s a matter of prestige. Leningrad is the second capital of the Soviet Union; they’ve also got to consider Finland. If they abandon Leningrad, Finland automatically drops out of the war. But it’s all quite pointless, and they can’t do anything, except vent their rage and fury and disappointment on our civilian population. They claim to be shelling railway stations and factories. But except the Kirov works, which they can’t help hitting, they have never shelled any factory, except by chance. Actually they are trying to spread panic. But it all has little effect, and it’s really a waste of shells. We have lived through much worse times than this, and we are determined to stick it to the end. All the shelling does is to deepen the fearful hatred every man, woman and child in this town feels for the Germans. The shelling increases our hardships and sufferings and our death roll, but it does not diminish our powers of resistance – far from it.’

‘Today,’ I remarked, ‘the city was shelled for eight hours. How many casualties were there today?’

‘I can tell you exactly,’ said Popkov, ‘for I have here the latest report, received half an hour ago. The shelling went on from 8.45 a.m. to 6 p.m., with the heaviest shelling in the morning when people go to work, and towards the end of the day. Altogether 1,564 shells were fired. Many houses were put out of action today, some water-mains were smashed, and in twenty-eight places the tramlines were damaged. By eight o’clock tonight the tramlines were already restored to the extent of seventy per cent. By the morning all the damage to the tram lines will have been repaired. And the number of casualties for the day,’ said Popkov, ‘is sixteen killed and seventy-two wounded. … That’s nearly one hundred casualties. It may not seem much, compared with all the ammunition the Germans spent. But these figures mount up, and sometimes terrible things happen, when a first shell lands without warning in a crowd. For instance, one day last May, thirty-two people were killed outright and many others injured when a shell landed among a crowd of people at a tram-stop. But, once the first shell has been fired, people have learned how to take care of themselves.’
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Popkov looked at my questionnaire. ‘You asked for some details about the present railway link between Leningrad and the rest of the country. The Ladoga road – over the ice in winter and over water in summer – was chiefly used for bringing food into Leningrad. Now, with the railway working, we can bring in anything, no matter how bulky. In addition to food, we can bring in almost unlimited quantities of coal, munitions, cattle, metal, and other raw materials. The Germans claim they are constantly shelling this railway. All I can say is that the railway functions like clockwork. It has fully solved our supply problem. Without it, life would be much more difficult. The Ladoga road was, after all, only an expedient. What’s more, we not only import, but we also export – for instance, masses of scrap iron, machinery which can be more profitably used elsewhere, and all sorts of raw materials which we don’t need. And also manufactured goods. Militarily, it is extremely important, too; by creating a direct and rapid link with the whole Volkhov front, it has greatly increased the manœuvrability in the whole Leningrad–Volkhov area.’ Popkov pointed at the map. ‘That’s where it runs, linking up Schlusselburg with the main line south of Lake Ladoga. As soon as the blockade was broken last February, we started building the railway. We built the essential forty-five kilometres in twenty-two days, and we doubled this stretch here between Ladoga and Borisova Griva. Forty-five kilometres in twenty-two days – it took some doing!’ he added.

‘But although Leningrad is now normally supplied – and we shall not need the ice road next winter, we are not keen to let people come back. It remains a military zone. Of course, thousands and thousands of Leningraders are clamouring to come back. But the enemy is still at the gates. The town is being shelled. If we had more people here, we should also have more casualties. Honestly, if I were in the position of the Germans, I’d pull out. What’s the point of hanging on like this? Yet, there is no sign of their preparing to quit. They’ve got some of their most hardened troops here. There is one Spanish division here – not the Blue Division – that one was wiped out long ago, but some new, rather rubbishy division – but the overwhelming majority of the troops here are German.

‘Today,’ Popkov continued, ‘the food situation is not worrying us any more. We have larger food reserves in Leningrad today than we had at the beginning of the war; and one of the reasons why we were so short of food in the winter of 1941 was that some of our most important food stores were destroyed in an air raid. Thanks to the railway, we have now substantial coal reserves, and the work we have done on the peat bogs round Leningrad has already exceeded our production programme. Although we have the railway we still try, as far as possible, to be self-sufficient. It has not been easy, though. The workers of Lenin’s city have made many great sacrifices to supply it with timber. We have only a small territory from which to draw our timber supplies, and, for military reasons, certain woods must not be touched. The problem of timber, the most difficult of our problems, has been solved by the women of our town. We have sent 10,000 women beyond Lake Ladoga to cut wood. It is very hard work, and they work in all kinds of weather. But, thanks to them, we have enough wood to see us through the winter.
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‘The bulk of Leningrad’s industry has been evacuated, also the greater part of the population. We evacuated 500,000 people across the ice road alone. Certain categories of citizens we continued to evacuate even during this last summer. We want to keep in Leningrad only people who are useful. We are, however, keeping all the children here who have remained. There is no longer any necessity to evacuate them. They are quite cheerful here and their cheerfulness is good for the people’s general morale. In the summer they all had a spell in the country, an average of forty days. The Komsomol of Leningrad have played an immense part in all the welfare work we are doing.

‘We don’t want more people to come into Leningrad now. As I said before, the more people we have, the greater will be the number of casualties. We have enough people to keep the life of the town going. Until September 15th, many houses still lacked electric light; now there is electric light everywhere, and it can be used without limit. Our power stations are now burning peat instead of coal, we changed them over for the purpose. Twenty per cent of the water is now wasted and runs into the sewers, because of the water-mains that are still damaged and continue to be damaged; but on the whole, the water supply is satisfactory too, and tap water can be safely drunk. Except for A.A. shells, practically all the shells made by the Leningrad front are made in this city; it means a very large production – well, you saw some of it on the Kirov works the other day – because there is not a front anywhere with the same concentration of equipment on both sides as on this front of ours.’

I asked what the health of the people of Leningrad was like. Professor Moshansky, the head of the Leningrad Health Department, said that ‘apart from war casualties, the death rate among children was no greater than before the war. In hospitals, the death rate among adults was high throughout the summer of 1942, because of the after-effects of the famine, but now this death rate had been brought down to its prewar level. One of the most remarkable things about Leningrad,’ he said, ‘was that there were no cases of insanity or other nervous diseases due to bombing and shelling.’ Professor Moshansky then gave a detailed account of the anti-typhus, anti-typhoid and other inoculations which had become the general practice in Leningrad, of the prophylactic measures taken against scarlet fever, and the various prophylactic tablets that were being regularly given to schoolchildren. There were, as a result, very few cases of infectious diseases – very few cases of scarlet fever and even measles; diphtheria had almost disappeared; there was much less dysentery than before the war, very little tuberculosis, and scurvy had now disappeared completely.

All this sounded almost too good, but at the same time it was obvious that with the physically weaker part of the population having either died or having been evacuated, the Leningrad medical authorities were now really dealing with, in the main, a naturally healthy population.

Regarding the elimination of scurvy, Professor Moshansky referred to the important part played in the spring and summer of 1942 by that vitamin drink, so peculiar to Leningrad, and of which I had already heard so often – the drink made of fresh pine and fir needles. ‘Thousands of our children and youngsters went out to collect these fresh twigs, and there wasn’t a factory canteen, a school, a government office – in fact there was hardly a place in Leningrad – where there weren’t buckets of this liquid, and everybody was urged to drink as much as he could of it. It didn’t taste particularly good, but people drank gallons and gallons of it, as a sort of duty to themselves and to the common cause! And it certainly made a very big difference to their devitaminised systems.’

‘How much of Leningrad has been destroyed?’ I asked Popkov.

‘Some parts of the town have suffered greatly; but, in the main, the stone and brick buildings have been preserved. What is going on is a race between the German gunners and our repair squads. Up till now we have repaired 860,000 square metres of roofs, and put in three million square metres of windows.’

‘What, not glass, surely?’

‘Of course not! Glass adds immensely to the dangers of artillery bombardment. Wherever windows are broken we replace the panes entirely by plywood, with the exception of one small pane per room, to let in the light. Seven thousand rooms have been completely restored in 1943 alone, or 103,000 square metres of floor space. What is more, we have carried out a tremendous plumbing job throughout the town, restoring as many as 49,000 main taps, and twenty-five kilometres of water mains. Practically the whole water system had to be restored or repaired after the winter of 1941–2. In 1943 alone we have carried out the equivalent of two years’ peacetime work. The Germans destroy, and we restore – that’s part of Leningrad’s life. We can’t quite catch up with the destruction. The living-space ‘fund’ is satisfactory today, except that there are still 800,000 square metres of living space to be restored. Everywhere the water supply has been restored in houses – the water going up nearly everywhere as high as the sixth floor, and we are also busy repairing the central heating for the coming winter. The tramlines are rapidly repaired whenever hit. We are increasing the length of the tramlines.

‘The vegetable plots have been a great help in solving our food problem. We have 12,500 hectares of vegetable plots in Leningrad and the immediate neighbourhood. Moreover, we have some very prosperous state farms outside the city. The only vegetables we import from the ‘mainland’ are potatoes, but we have enough cabbages, carrots, etc. to feed not only ourselves, but to supply the entire Leningrad front. The vegetable plots are lent by the town council both to organisations and to individual families. For instance, those vegetable plots you saw in the Summer Garden belong to individual families; they take turns in guarding them.’

‘In Moscow,’ I said, ‘a lot of pinching of vegetables goes on.’

‘Not here,’ said Popkov. ‘Ours are very disciplined people, with a great sense of solidarity. Sometimes young children will pinch a handful of somebody else’s carrots, but it’s unusual. The interesting thing is that in Leningrad in the past people only knew how to eat vegetables; now everybody has become an expert gardener. A lot of lectures are given on gardening, and they are extraordinarily well attended. People have been told: “You’ll eat as much as you’ve planted, so don’t expect anything from outside.” And the results have been excellent.

‘Let me, however, draw a few conclusions about our general situation. I’m afraid that if, from what I said, you got the impression that everything was fine in Leningrad, this impression would be quite wrong. Remember that no town has to work as Leningrad has been, and is, working. Everybody feels that he is part of the show, and that every hour of work he puts in is part of the defence of Leningrad. The impulse to work is, therefore, very great. Only this public spirit of our people has made Leningrad what it is today – a place where life is fairly close to normal. Yet the fact remains that we are still half-blockaded, and that we have some dead and wounded every day. No one in Leningrad will deny that life is very hard. But at the same time you will hardly find anyone wishing to go away. The people of Leningrad have become like a large family, united by common hardships and their common effort. It is this solidarity which has made it possible for Leningrad to look fairly decent again. You should have seen it at the end of the terrible winter of 1941–2. But it has not been achieved at a low cost.