Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (3 page)

Comparing all of these sources, today historians estimate the number of Leningrad residents who died during the most intense period of the siege, between September 1941 and July 1942, to be around 650,000–700,000 (a mortality rate 15 times the peacetime average). Close to one in three of the city’s inhabitants caught in the blockade died, the vast majority from hunger and exhaustion, with victims of artillery strikes and bombing raids representing only 2 or 3 per cent of total civilian losses. The worst months were the winter months, particularly vicious that year (with temperatures dipping below 20°C for several weeks in a row in December and January). In December 1941, 54,000 deaths were recorded (that is, 13 times more than during a normal winter month), 127,000 in January, 123,000 in February, 98,000 in March, 66,000 in April. The torture of hunger was compounded by the cold. The only form of fuel was wood gathered by teams of woodcutters (the majority of them women), whom the city authorities tasked to cut down trees in the city’s parks (with the notable exception of the famous Summer Garden, as Alexander Werth noted). Frugally parcelled out by block committees, the wood supply was still quickly exhausted. As to the distribution of electricity and gas, the supply was shut off from mid-November for private citizens. The city was plunged into darkness. Only a few official buildings, centres of civil defence and a limited number of administrative buildings, continued to be illuminated for a few hours per day.

The cold snap which took hold at the beginning of December caused pipes to burst in some unheated buildings, depriving residents of drinking water. As captured by Mikhail Trakhman in his gripping photographs, in the city centre citizens were reduced to boring holes in frozen canals or the Neva to extract murky water. From mid-December onwards the power shortage meant that even the city’s most important firms, such as the Kirov factories, were forced to slow and even halt production. The city’s chief mode of public transport, the tram system, ceased to operate, obliging the city’s inhabitants to walk miles on foot to get to work or to the few-and-far-between bread distribution points, where endless queues numbering hundreds began to form from four o’clock in the morning. With a fuel shortage forcing almost all motor traffic to a halt, the sledge became the principal mode of transport for those unable to walk, pulled by those who still had the strength. Sledges were used to bring sufferers of ‘dystrophy’ to hospital, but also to take cadavers to cemeteries. Any hope of an end to this desperate situation rested in three possible solutions: break the siege with a counter-offensive; evacuate as many civilians as possible; or get more supplies and raw materials into the city.

In mid-December 1941, an attempt at the first of these solutions failed for want of troops, the chief priority of the Red Army high command at that moment being to drive the Germans as far from Moscow as possible. The second proposed solution took some time to implement. After a botched attempt at the start of December, when the authorities seemed convinced that the siege would soon be lifted in the wake of a Red Army counter-strike, a large-scale evacuation of children, pensioners, the ‘idle’, and mothers began during the second half of January 1942. Between 22 January and 15 April, more than 450,000 people were evacuated in motorised convoys across the frozen Lake Ladoga. The losses sustained were not inconsiderable – German planes bombarded the convoys, claiming many lives – and even amongst those who survived the crossing, some were so weakened that they would perish shortly after reaching Vologda, the first stop out of Leningrad.

A second wave of evacuations, this time conducted by boat, started up in mid-May 1942 after several weeks of forced inaction caused by the thawing of Lake Ladoga. During that summer, more than 500,000 additional civilians were evacuated, most of them women, children and the elderly or infirm, relieving some of the pressure on those left behind. By September, only 800,000 people remained, less than a third of the population at the beginning of the siege a year before. The city’s evacuation committee had fulfilled its objective to ‘turn Leningrad into a front-line city with only a core population of productive and economically independent citizens’. The third priority in order to hold out and save the civilian population was to bring in food and raw materials.

After Tikhvin was retaken by the Red Army on 9 December 1941, it took several more weeks to repair the railways, which had been damaged by the Germans, to the point where supply convoys could approach the besieged city by train. They went as far as Voibokalo, and from there were taken in trucks over bad roads and the frozen river as far as Osinovets, and from there to Leningrad. Uncertain and dangerous though it was, the ‘Road of Life’ allowed for a small but vital supply of food to reach the civilian population. On Christmas Eve 1941, after five successive reductions of rations, the authorities introduced the first increase – those in the first category saw their bread ration rise from 250 to 350 grams, while all other categories went from 125 to 200 grams. A month later the ration allowance rose again slightly, to 400 grams and 250 grams respectively.

Fifty additional grams per day could not hope to reverse their physical deterioration, and so the effect of the increased allowance was largely on the morale of the besieged citizens. In reality, however, during these ferocious winter months only ration stamps for bread (although this ought to be placed in inverted commas, so common were
ersatz
substitutes) were being honoured, and only after long hours of queuing at distribution points. Distribution of other foodstuffs theoretically included in the ration allowances remained irregular and sporadic until at least March 1942. Even though January and February saw a third increase of the food allowance (on 11 February, daily bread rations went up by 50 to 100 grams depending on category), the death rate reached its peak in these months. Several recent studies have shown that during the winter, death stalked the male population in particular, regardless of age. The deaths were often caused by sudden cardiac arrest, striking down victims in the street (police records show that nearly 5,000 corpses were picked up in January and February alone), at work or at home. Many of those that Alexander Werth spoke to mentioned this type of death.

Beginning in the spring this tendency reversed, and women – who during the wintertime had seemed to fare better – began dying in greater numbers, although the overall death rate fell sharply from April–May onwards (43,000 deaths were reported in May, 25,000 in June, 15,000 in July and 7,500 in August) as the decline in population led to increased availability of food for those still alive.
⁶

Alexander Werth’s book sheds light on the numerous survival strategies adopted during the siege, not only by ordinary people, but also by heads of industry and even the municipal authorities. In a short space such as this – for to do the subject justice would mean citing whole chunks of the wrenching private journals kept by many residents trapped by the blockade – how can one possibly convey what the great Leningrad poet Olga Bergholz called the ‘tactics of micro-existence’?

The tactics of micro-existence are what keep us alive – drawing a bucket of water on Gorokhovaya Street, then counting each step our cotton-clad legs climb to get home, then warming a dishwater stew over a bundle of sticks, then sucking on our crust of bread for as long as possible – behold all there is to distract us and save us from our thoughts, our feelings and, for many of us, keep us from insanity.
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Leaving the private domain to discuss survival strategies in a more objective sense, the most immediately obvious one is the decision to turn all of the city’s green spaces and industrial wasteland into farmland. From the spring of 1942 onwards, they became vast vegetable gardens. The distribution of the plots was the cause of much frenzied haggling, which prioritised the most needy (hospitals, orphanages, nursery schools) but was also open to exploitation through the system of connections and privileges established before the war, meaning that large, strategically significant firms were left far better off than smaller companies deemed less important.

Under the blockade the collectives – whatever form they took – generally provided an invaluable support network. As long as a citizen could manage to get to school, to work or to their institution or factory, he or she could hope to gain some small advantages (even if this meant nothing more than a little heating, some medicine or a pale imitation of a collective canteen) from membership in the right work group, institution or organisation. Naturally, some support networks were more effective – when it came to the famine, some citizens of Leningrad were more equal than others.

As we have previously seen, individual entitlements were divided into categories. It should be remembered that this system was put into action in the 1930s, when the catastrophe of forced collectivisation of farmland and the eradication of private enterprise left the government with no choice but to introduce ration books (which remained in use until 1935), assigned according to a complex ‘hierarchy of consumption’.
⁸
Those who contributed directly to production, whether labourers, manufacturing workers, supervisors or engineers, were better provided for than those working in offices or in administration. Other, less publicised factors also came into play, however, meaning that members of the
nomenklatura
and political, economic, scientific and intellectual elites benefitted from numerous unofficial privileges, including supplementary food parcels, private dining halls and otherwise inaccessible luxury goods.

Even now we know relatively little about how this privilege system functioned under the blockade. What is clear, however, is that certain employers could offer their workers a better chance of survival. It is hardly surprising to note that employees of the Baltika factory, which provided the city with bread, had a mortality rate three times lower than that of the general population, or that almost everyone employed by the factory which produced margarine survived the siege.

In both cases, the remarkable rates of survival can be attributed to smuggling – on both a small and large scale – and surreptitious siphoning off of supplies.
⁹
In general, despite working 11-hour days when the factories were operating at full capacity, factory work offered several advantages in addition to automatic placement in the ‘first category’ of rationing allowance. Many factories had access to supplies of raw materials which could be eaten in these extreme circumstances, such as industrial casein, albumin and dextrin. The most important and strategically significant firms, those contracted to work for the Ministry of Defence, could also make use of their close connections in the military to secure some of the prioritised provisions destined for the army. They also boasted their own fully equipped dormitories close to the factory sites (sparing workers the burden of commutes on foot), infirmaries and canteens where a bowl of hot stew could always be procured to accompany the bread ration, which – another not inconsiderable advantage – was distributed in the factory, rather than after long hours of queuing in the street in the freezing cold.

The famished citizens of Leningrad also had recourse to other methods, illegal but overlooked by the authorities – specifically, the black market. The famous Sennaya Square returned to its roots as a marketplace, becoming the hub of illegal traffic. Anything could be parted with for a little food, according to an exchange rate that rose and fell in accordance with current shortages. In the winter of 1941–1942, a fur coat could be exchanged for a pound of bread, a Persian carpet for two 25-gram bars of chocolate, and a gold watch for five or six potatoes. Whilst tens of thousands of the city’s inhabitants were dying of hunger, a small minority were making a killing.

‘Not All Were Brave’ – this was the title given by Harrison Salisbury to one of the chapters of his monumental study of the siege of Leningrad, published in 1969.
¹⁰
Since then, several studies have explored a hidden side to the epic of Leningrad, one that is murky and sometimes appalling. The most notable of these is probably Nikita Lomagin’s
Neizvestnaïa Blokada
(
The Unknown Blockade
),
¹¹
using information gleaned largely from top-secret Leningrad NKVD reports, which were forwarded every week to Communist Party top brass and the Moscow NKVD. These reports presented an analysis of the general mood of the city’s residents, but also contain precise details regarding supplies, the fluctuating death rate, crime levels, ‘hostile demonstrations and anti-revolutionary actions’ and any abnormal behaviour, most particularly concerning necrophagy and cannibalism.

In the isolated city, the secret police continued to maintain its surveillance network and keep a tight grip on the population, through its agents (of whom there were more than 1,200 at the end of 1942), but especially thanks to some 10,000 ‘political block representatives’, who were selected by the local Party and the NKVD and were authorised to carry out document inspections and searches of anyone in their block at any time of the day or night. In addition, a network of thousands of informers kept the NKVD abreast of general morale in the city, carefully noting and passing on any subversive remarks they heard uttered. The postal service was also monitored, and any letter found to include ‘negative information’ of any kind was immediately confiscated.

According to police sources, the state of mind among the populace – which had been distinguished by a sincere patriotic spirit during the first weeks of the war – began to degenerate quickly from the second half of August 1941 onwards. A growing number of citizens questioned the lack of readiness for the German invasion and the political and strategic blunder Stalin had committed by allying himself with Hitler in August 1939.

Even worse was the widespread circulation of rumours to the effect that ‘the Germans are all right, they only have it in for Jews and Communists’, ‘if the Germans take Leningrad, it won’t be any worse than being under the Communists!’, ‘the Germans are too strong and our soldiers don’t fight back – what do they have to fight for? The Communists have ruined our people and robbed them of everything’, etc. These ‘defeatist rumours’ only increased over the weeks that followed, according to the NKVD files, as everyday life became harder, rationing became more severe and the German advance proved unstoppable. It was in those long queues of housewives in front of empty shops that the NKVD informers gleaned most of their examples of ‘defeatist and anti-revolutionary remarks’. The theme was always similar: ‘What’s the point of defending the city? We are going to starve to death. If the Germans come, perhaps they will feed us. We ought to open up the city.’ But to what extent are these comments representative of the population?