Authors: Harrison Salisbury
But behind the façade of these still generous controls a deadly picture assumed shape.
On September 6—two days before Badayev’s pillar of flame—Peter S. Popkov, Mayor of Leningrad, sent a cipher telegram to the State Defense Committee reporting that Leningrad was on the verge of exhausting her food reserves. Food trains must be expedited or the city would starve.
Popkov’s telegram was based on an inventory which disclosed that the city then had on hand only these supplies: flour, 14.1 days; cereals, 23 days; meat and meat products, 18.7 days; fats, 20.8 days; sugar and confectionery, 47.9 days.
In eight days—between the State Committee telegram of August 29 and Popkov’s—the city’s reserves of flour had dropped by three days, of cereals by six days, of meat by nearly seven.
Should Leningrad’s consumption continue at these levels and delivery of supplies show no improvement, the city would be down to bare shelves within two or three weeks—possibly less. The time had come for extraordinary measures. Two days later Dmitri V. Pavlov arrived in Leningrad from Moscow, clothed with powers to handle all food questions in Leningrad, both for the civilian population and the army.
Pavlov was one of the ablest and most energetic supply officials in the Soviet Union. He was thirty-six years old, a graduate of the All-Union Academy of Foreign Trade, and had devoted his whole career to food distribution and production. He was Commissar of Trade for the Russian Federated Republic and an important executive of the Main Administration of Food Supplies of the Defense Commissariat. He was a direct, honest, vigorous man who saw from the moment of his arrival in Leningrad that only spartan measures, applied with an iron hand, offered a chance for the city’s survival. The first thing he had to know was the facts, the tough, naked facts—not anyone’s political or propaganda-tinged facts. What was the actual position of Leningrad so far as food was concerned? Was the city down to two or three weeks’ reserves? What supplies had the army? The navy? What was the population load? What kind of supplies could be got into the city?
Pavlov was at work almost before he clambered out of the Douglas DC-3 which brought him in low over Lake Ladoga to the Leningrad airport. He spent September 10 and 11 inventorying the city’s reserves. The figures were grim—he had known they would be—but not quite as bad as Popkov’s alarming telegram of September 6. Based on the actual rate of expenditure of food for the armed forces and the civilian population, the city’s reserves totaled: grain, flour, hardtack, 35 days; cereals and macaroni, 30; meat and meat products including live cattle, 33; fats, 45; sugar and confectionery, 60. The only food not included in Pavlov’s inventory was a small amount of “iron rations” (hardtack and canned goods) in the army and fleet reserves and a small amount of flour in the hands of the navy.
The chief differences between Pavlov’s estimates and those of Popkov were that Pavlov included all the food in the city—that in military hands as well as civilian and unprocessed materials (unmilled grain and un-slaughtered cattle), as well as flour and meat in cold storage. Moreover, by the time Pavlov cast his estimates the ration had been again cut (as of September 12) to 500 grams of bread per day for workers, 300 for office employees, 250 for dependents and 300 for children under twelve.
Pavlov calculated—correctly—that there was no hope for any supplies whatever from the outside for a considerable time. The only route open was across Lake Ladoga, and there were no boats, piers, highway and rail facilities or warehouses which could handle substantial shipments. To create them would require time.
Leningrad, he was certain, must live on what it had on hand—for how long no one knew.
How many people did he have to feed? This was not easy to establish. Pavlov estimated, on the basis of the distribution of ration cards, figures on evacuation, refugees and prewar population, that he had a civilian population of about 2,544,000, including about 400,000 children, in the city, and another 343,000 in the suburban areas within the blockade ring. The total was roughly 2,887,000. In addition, there were the military forces defending the city. No exact figure has ever been given for them, but they must have been in the neighborhood of 500,000. The number of mouths which he had to feed for an indefinite period of time, thus, was close to 3,400,000.
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It was no small task, and he was filled with the gravest foreboding. Like all Leningrad’s leadership, he inevitably lived for news that the city had been deblockaded. But, unlike the others, Pavlov had to face each day the reality of the city’s dwindling food reserves.
Almost Pavlov’s first act was to evaluate the consequences of the Badayev fire. They were serious, but perhaps not quite so serious as most Leningrad-ers thought. The destruction of Badayev did not doom the city to famine.
Pavlov estimated the Badayev losses at 3,000 tons of flour and about 2,500 tons of sugar, of which, in the grimmest months of the winter that lay ahead, about 700 tons, blackened, dirty and scorched, would be reclaimed and converted into “candy.”
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Nevertheless, he took no chances on a new Badayev. Almost all Leningrad’s flour was stored at the city’s two big milling combines—the Lenin and the Kirov. He ordered it dispersed throughout the city. He did the same with the grain in harbor elevators and storehouses.
Despite Pavlov’s insistence that Badayev was not the key to Leningrad’s future suffering, many Leningraders—Pavel Luknitsky among them—remained convinced that the great fire had more to do with the city’s suffering than the authorities have ever been willing to acknowledge.
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Pavlov blamed other causes. Ten different economic agencies had a hand in administration of food supplies. Each operated on orders from its Moscow headquarters. So long as Moscow did not forbid the sale or distribution of food, they continued. The commercial restaurants fell in this category. And they were dispersing 7 percent of Leningrad’s total food consumption, 12 percent of all fats, 10 percent of the meat and 8 percent of the sugar and candy. Cattle slaughter was being carried out without care or plan. Vegetable fat was stored in commercial warehouses, animal fats in military supply dumps. Because of consumer prejudice against crabmeat it was sold without ration coupons. Invalids in hospitals and children in nurseries were fed off-ration, but got ration cards besides. In mid-September the Moscow Sugar Administration ordered its Leningrad subsidiary to send several freight cars of sugar to Vologda—although Leningrad, of course, had lost all rail connections with the rest of the country.
Pavlov moved in. He halted the sale of food without ration coupons. He closed down the public commercial restaurants. He stopped the making of beer, ice cream, pirogi (meat pies) and pastry. He canceled all orders to food agencies from Moscow and took control of these supplies, insisting on immediate and accurate inventories. He eliminated ration cards for persons being fed in hospitals or children’s homes, cutting the total by 80,000.
But he made mistakes—as he was later publicly to admit. Even after his first harsh cuts in rations the city was still consuming more than 2,000 tons of flour a day. He permitted an increase in the sugar and fat rations in September to make up for the cuts in meat and cereals. That took 2,500 tons of sugar and 600 tons of fats—quantities which could have been saved in September and October and used to help tide over the terrible December which lay ahead.
Leningrad had entered the war with a normal reserve of food. On June 21 she had 52 days’ supply of flour and grain, including stores in the port elevators which were intended for export, 89 days’ supply of cereals, 38 days’ supply of meat, 47 days’ of butter and fats, 29 days’ supply of vegetable oils.
In July and August Leningrad received far less than normal food shipments from the nearby Yaroslavl and Kalinin regions—only 45,000 tons of wheat, 14,000 tons of flour and 3,000 tons of cereal. About 23,300 tons of grain and flour came in from Latvia and Estonia before the Germans occupied those areas. About 8,146 tons of meat were obtained from the Leningrad suburbs up to the end of the year. The Leningrad area had 25,407 pigs, 4,357 cattle and 568 goats on September 1. Total meat reserves, slaughtered and on the hoof, were 12,112 tons. Daily consumption after the September 12 ration cut was 246 tons.
The city got only a handful of the market produce she normally consumed. In 1941 Leningrad received only 6,960 tons of potatoes against a supply of 245,032 in 1940—and potatoes were the basic diet of tens of thousands. The city received 30,376 tons of vegetables against 154,682 the previous year and 508 tons of fruit against 15,234.
Leningrad used more food than usual in the weeks after the outbreak of war. The output of flour in July, for example, was 40,000 tons. In August consumption of bread went up 12.4 percent from an average of 2,112 tons to 2,305 tons daily, largely because of the influx of refugees.
Pavlov found the city was using 2,100 tons of flour per day at the start of September. This rate of consumption continued to September 11, when he brought it down to 1,300 tons. From September 16 to October 1 he cut it to 1,100 tons. In September—exclusive of the Leningrad front and the Baltic Fleet—Leningrad used a daily average of 146 tons of meat, 220 tons of cereals and 202 tons of sugar.
When the calendar turned to November and then to December, Pavlov looked back again and again at those consumption figures for early September. What he would not have given for the 8,000 tons of flour that he could have saved had the cuts gone into effect September 1 instead of September 10—not to mention the hundreds of tons of meat and other foodstuffs.
The air raids did not halt with the September 8 attack on Badayev. The next night bombs fell on the Zoo. The elephant, Betty, was killed. So were some apes. Betty’s death throes went on for hours and her howling terrified those who heard her. Several sables, frantic with fear, were released into the streets. Dogs in the Pavlov Institute, windows in their stomachs, howled like dirges during the attacks. The raids went on the next day and the next and the next.
Leningrad’s air defenses could not hold off the Nazi bombers. Because of errors and mistakes the city ARP had been reorganized and put in the hands of a troika in August. The Leningrad fighter command started the war with 401 planes, but by September the figure was sharply reduced. The main protection came from 160 A A batteries mustering 600 guns. About 300 barrage balloons hovered over Leningrad, day and night, and there were 3,500 ARP units manned by 124,000 workers.
But the Nazi attacks continued.
“Now begins our life on the roofs,” Pavel Gubchevsky, scientific colleague at the Hermitage, told his fellow ARP workers. Two posts were set up— one above the Hall of Arms of the Winter Palace and the other on the roof of the New Hermitage next to the huge skylight which gave onto the main picture gallery. For many nights no bombs fell on the Winter Palace or the Hermitage, but the rain of shrapnel from AA guns crackled and sparkled like heat lightning on the vast pavement of Palace Square. From his observation post Gubchevsky saw just across the Neva German bombers shower down incendiary bombs around the ancient Peter and Paul Fortress, where generation after generation of Russian rebels, state criminals and revolutionaries had been imprisoned. The incendiaries rolled down the thick walls of the fortress like rivers of fire and burned out on the sandy banks of the Neva. Then came a thunderous explosion and a thousand tongues of flame lashed around the “
Amerikanskye Gory"—
the roller coaster which was the main attraction of the amusement park in the adjacent gardens. Night turned to day as the wooden structure blazed toward the sky. The wind blew toward the Winter Palace, and soon sparks and soot rained down on the Hermitage roof along with heavy particles of blackened paint from the gay decorations of the amusement park. The fretwork of the roller coaster, a hodgepodge of twisted girders, stood charred and twisted throughout the war, a reminder of the fire-filled night.
The air raid on September 10 was almost as big as that of the eighth. Three more Badayev warehouses burned—fortunately they were empty. But the big Red Star creamery was hit and tons of butter were lost. The Zhdanov Shipworks were badly damaged. More than 700 Leningraders were killed and wounded and more than 80 big fires were set. On that day over the Kirov metallurgical works suddenly was heard a low-flying plane. A moment later Leonid Sanin, ARP officer, reported that paratroops were attacking the plant and hurried toward the descending chute. The next instant a tremendous shock wave knocked him unconscious. It was not parachutists the Nazis had dropped but a one-ton delayed-action bomb suspended in a parachute.
There were 23 big raids in Leningrad in September and 200 shellings. More than 675 German planes took part in the raids. They dropped 987 explosive and 15,100 incendiary bombs, and they killed or wounded 4,409 Leningraders. The worst attacks were those of September 19 and 27. There were six raids on the nineteenth, four by day and two by night, with 280 planes participating. On September 27, 200 planes attacked the city.
That of the nineteenth was the worst of the war. One bomb fell on a hospital in Suvorov Prospekt. There were heavy casualties among the 600 wounded who were sheltered there. Another hit the Gostiny Dvor, the big shopping center in the heart of the city, killing 98 and wounding 148.
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The offices of the Soviet Pisatel Publishing house were located in the Gostiny Dvor. Eight editors, among them Taisiya Aleksandrova and Tatanya Gurevich, were killed and Director A. M. Semenov was severely wounded. Most of the victims in the Gostiny Dvor were women, many of them workers in a clothing factory. A week later Pavel Luknitsky visited the site and learned that several were still alive, trapped in the wreckage, being fed with food lowered to them through a narrow hole.