Authors: Harrison Salisbury
There was no celebration of the November 7 holiday. No parades. No review in Palace Square. No great meeting at Smolny or the Tauride Palace. A few red flags in the streets, on the Winter Palace and hung from windows. No banners proclaiming the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The street radios blared out readings from Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol stories—tales of the heroic siege of the defenders of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Vishnevsky, ever on the search for something to raise morale, thought the reading was marvelous. Zhdanov did not speak. There were speeches on the radio by Mayor Popkov, the Leningrad front commander Lieutenant General M. S. Khozin, the writer Nikolai Tikhonov and a few others.
Leningradskaya Pravda
set the tone with its editorial: “We will be cold—but we will survive; we will be hungry—but we will tighten our belts; it will be hard—but we will hold out; we will hold out—until we win.” Nikolai Akimov gave Leningrad its only holiday premiere. He presented Gladkov’s
Stepchildren of Glory
, a patriotic play about the war of 1812 at the Theater of Comedy. The cold, dark theater was half filled.
Cold and dark . . . those were the words most often used to describe Leningrad on the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Revolution. Sayanov walked down the Nevsky one early November day. Dusk had fallen. The wind hurried the people along and swung the signs above the shops, whirling the snow up in clouds, in and out of the doorways. It whistled through the drainpipes. The people, dark and black, muffled in their winter clothes, hastened along. They did not halt. They did not speak. Not far away shells were falling. No one paid heed. They struggled across the Neva bridges, past the granite embankments. Already there was ice on the river where the warships stood and here and there a steaming hole beside the shore. People had begun to bring water to their homes, where the pipes had frozen.
It was a gray, granite city, and the wind was king. Sometimes people found strange messages in their postboxes. Sheets of paper painfully initialed: “Only God can save Leningrad. Pray to Heaven. The Time of the Apocalypse has come. Christ is now in the peaks of the Caucasus.” There were Old Believers and Molokans, survivors of the sects of the forests, still in Leningrad, and this was their message to their fellow Russians.
Time of the Apocalypse, indeed ...
On November 8 the German 39th Motorized Corps under General Schmidt captured Tikhvin, forty miles east of Volkhov, and severed the rail connection between the Moscow mainland and the Ladoga supply route. On that day Hitler spoke at Munich. He said: “Leningrad’s hands are in the air. It falls sooner or later. No one can free it. No one can break the ring. Leningrad is doomed to die of famine.”
It was true—or almost true. Leningrad had not surrendered, but it was doomed. Brass bands played over the German radio. Nazi commentators in broadcasts directed to Leningrad said over and over again: “Leningrad will be compelled to surrender without the blood of German soldiers being shed.”
So it seemed. How could the city be fed? There were now panic and disarray in Leningrad. The news of Tikhvin’s fall spread like the fierce wind on the Nevsky from person to person. The press, of course, said nothing. What food was left in the city? Very little—much less than the Leningraders knew. But seven men did know. They added up the total on November 9: flour for 7 days, cereals for 8, fats for 14, sugar for 22. No meat, not a ton in the reserves. On the other side of Lake Ladoga, now so stormy, so ice-filled that boats could hardly break their way across, there were 17 days’ supply of flour, 10 days’ of cereals, 3 days’ of fats and 9 days’ of meat.
Supply trains could get no closer to Leningrad than the tiny way station of Zaborye, no miles from Volkhov. From Zaborye to Ladoga not even a forest road connected the 220 miles. Could trucks struggle through that distance even if a road could be built? How long would it take? Would not the city starve first?
The answers to these questions were terrifying.
But only seven men in Leningrad knew how terrifying, Pavlov first among them.
There was no time to lose if the city was to be saved—
if the city could be
saved
.
Emergency orders ...
In Leningrad an immediate cut in military rations was instituted. The troops had been getting 800 grams of bread a day, plus hot soup and stew. Front-line troops were cut to 600 grams of bread and 125 grams of meat. Rear units got 400 grams of bread and 50 of meat.
To cut civilian rations further, Pavlov knew, would only doom the whole city to more rapid starvation. Civilians could not maintain themselves as it was. The hope was that the ice would quickly freeze on Lake Ladoga and food could be brought across the lake. The forecast was for lower temperatures.
Zhdanov and the Leningrad Defense Council gambled. They decided to hold the civilian ration at its present level. If the ice froze, it could be maintained. Each day their first concern was the thermometer. The temperature dropped, but the lake did not freeze. Five days passed. Supplies were near exhaustion. There was no alternative.
On November 13 the city’s rations were cut again—to 300 grams (about ⅔ of a pound) of bread daily for factory workers. Everyone else was cut to 150 grams.
That reduced the daily consumption of flour to 622 tons. But Pavlov knew this level could be maintained for only a few days. He waited. He waited for the ice. It did not freeze, it was still thin. By November 20, time—and flour—were running out. Again the ration was cut—brutally: to 250 grams for factory workers, 125 (two slices) for everyone else. Front-line troops got 500 grams, rear echelons 300.
That was the day that Director Zolotukhin of
Leningradskaya Fravda
came to Sergei Yezersky and asked him to write the editorial which brought the terrible news to Leningrad.
“To write the lead editorial,” he recalled, “was always an honor. But what a difficult task this time!”
He went to his table in the section of the newspaper’s cellar which was occupied by the literary department. It was a crowded corner, neither light nor dark, neither cold nor warm. The workers slept on couches, and if there wasn’t room, they slept on the desks. There was always water on the concrete floor and they walked on wooden planking.
His editorial began:
Bolsheviks never have kept anything from the people. They always tell the truth, harsh as it may be. So long as the blockade continues it is not possible to expect any improvement in the food situation. We must reduce the norms of rations in order to hold out as long as the enemy is not pushed back, as long as the circle of blockade is not broken. Difficult? Yes, difficult. But there is no choice. And this everyone must understand. . . .
The new norms brought daily consumption of flour down to 510 tons. Pavlov was now feeding something like 2,500,000 people on 30 carloads of flour a day.
It was incredible. He had cut the daily use of flour by about 75 percent.
Here are the figures:
Beginning of blockade to September 11 2,100 tons September n-September 16 1,300 September 16-October 1 1,100 October 1-October 26 1,000 October 26-November 1 880 November 1-November 13 735 November 13-November 20 622 November 20-December 25 510
These rations doomed thousands to their deaths. By one estimate the cut doomed one-half the population of the city. Zhdanov knew this. So did Pavlov. They saw no alternative.
Zhdanov called in the leaders of the city’s Young Communists. On these younger people would rest the main shock and burden of trying to pull the city through the tragedy which was unfolding.
“Factories are beginning to close down,” he said. “There is no electricity, no water, no food. The fall of Tikhvin has put us into a second ring of encirclement. The task of tasks is to organize the life of the workers—to give them inspiration, courage, firmness in the face of all difficulties. This is your task.”
On November 13 the bread formula had been changed again. Henceforth it was to contain 25 percent “edible” cellulose. Three hundred people were mobilized to collect “edible” pine and fir bark. Each region of the city was ordered to produce two to two-and-a-half tons of “edible” sawdust per day.
Terror began to live with people. Vera Inber and her husband were walking across Leo Tolstoy Square. There had been two air raids, and now the Germans were shelling the area. It was evening and the sidewalk was icy. Just outside a bakery they heard in the dusk a quavering voice: “Dearie . . . angel . . . help me.”
It was an old woman who had fallen in the dark. Overhead the planes roared, the guns barked. She was alone. They helped her to her feet and started to go on. The old woman spoke again, “Darlings. I’ve lost my bread card. Do help me. I can’t find it without you.”
To her horror Vera Inber heard herself saying, “Find it yourself. We can’t help.”
But her husband, saying nothing, hunted on the icy ground and found the old woman’s card. Then he and Vera Inber hurried down Petropavlovsk Street, and she wondered what had come over her.
To lose a ration card meant almost certain death. The niece of a friend of Luknitsky’s was in a store when someone snatched her card and that of her mother. They were left without food until the end of the month. Luknitsky’s friend gave them her card and tried to live on the watery soup of her hospital lunchroom. When he upbraided her, she angrily replied, “It’s one thing when a grownup is hungry and another when it’s a child.”
In Yevgeniya Vasyutina’s communal apartment her friend Zina’s little daughter cried and cried. She was hungry. On the market you could trade 100 grams of sugar for a pound of cottonseed meal or a kilo of bread for a half-liter of vodka or a tin stove. Cats were beginning to get scarce. So were crows and sparrows. On November 26 Yelena Skryabina heard that 3,000 persons a day were dying in the city. That day, completely unexpectedly, an unknown Red Army man appeared at her door and handed her a pail of sauerkraut. It was manna from heaven.
The temperature was dropping. It was 15 below on November 11 and 20 below on the fourteenth. Luknitsky was sure the cold would beat the Germans. He did not realize it was likely to kill starving Leningrad first.
“November was the most alarming month of the whole blockade,” the official historians of Leningrad concluded, “not only because of the difficulties but because of the uncertainties. War is war. And it was difficult to predict how events would develop around Leningrad. The Fascist command might again mount an offensive toward Svirstroi or toward Vologda. Such a possibility could not be excluded.”
Vera Inber wrote in her diary for November 28:
The future of Leningrad is alarming. Not long ago Professor Z told me: “My daughter spent the whole evening in the cellar, looking for a cat.” I was ready to congratulate her on such love for a cat when Z explained: “We eat them.” Another time Z, a passionate hunter, said: “My life is finished when I have killed my last partridge. And it seems to me I have killed it.”
As the plight of Leningrad worsened, the rumors flew. Toward the end of November everyone heard rumors that on the first of December no more bread would be issued. On that date adults would begin to receive cottonseed cake. Children would get hardtack. This was more than torn nerves could stand. Hundreds of people stormed the few food stores. On November 25 more than 2,000 persons pushed into the Vasilevsky Island department store. An enormous line appeared outside Milk Store No. 2 in the Smolny region, where soya milk was being issued. The queue did not disperse when air-raid sirens sounded. People patiently waited. Whatever they got would be better than what they could get after December 1.
“I’ve waited since 4
A.M.
,” one said. “I’ve not eaten all day.” “I can’t go home,” another said. “My children are starving.”
Shells fell in their midst. Some fell, killed and wounded. Others ran in terror. But half an hour later the survivors were back in line, waiting for the saleswomen, wrapped up like snow maidens, their fingers trembling with weakness and cold, to tear off the coupon and give them a husk of bread.
On December first, walking down Wolf Street, Vera Inber saw something she had never before seen—a corpse on a child’s sled. Instead of being placed in a coffin the body had been tightly wrapped in a sheet, the knees and breast clearly outlined in the white swaddling cloth. A strange sight, like something out of the Bible or ancient Egypt. She did not know it would soon become a sight so common as not to attract a passing glance.
On December first the siege of Leningrad entered its ninety-second day. Ninety-one days had passed since the fall of Mga. Seven men knew the secret of Leningrad’s destiny. It was so terrible they themselves could not believe the future which the black figures foretold.
1
By comparison, the autumn shelling of the city killed 681, wounded 2,269; bombing in September killed
566
, wounded 3,853; in October killed 304, wounded 1,843; in November killed 522, wounded 2,505. The total of killed and wounded in three months’ bombing and shelling was 12,533.