Authors: Harrison Salisbury
On the Volodarsky near the Liteiny Bridge he encountered a five-ton truck with a mountain of bodies. Farther on he met two old women who were conveying their corpses to the cemetery in style. They had hitched their sleds to an army sledge which was slowly pulled through the streets by a pair of starving horses. There he met the shadow of a man who carried nestled to his breast an incredibly thin dog—one of the rarest of city sights. The eyes of both the man and the dog were filled with hunger and terror, the dog’s terror, no doubt, because he sensed his fate and the man’s, perhaps, because he feared someone might rob him of the dog and he would not have the strength to defend his possession.
So Luknitsky walked through the city, passing hundreds of people, struggling to survive, pulling the corpses of their relatives toward hospitals or cemeteries, pulling their little sleds bearing pails of water.
Among the hundreds he met another kind as well—a man with a fat, self-satisfied face, well fed, with greedy eyes. Who was this man? Possibly, a food store worker, a speculator, an apartment house manager who stole the ration cards of the tenants as they died and with the aid of his mistress exchanged the miserable bread rations in the Haymarket for gold watches, for rich silks, for diamonds or old silver or golden rubles. The conversation of this man and his mistress would not be of survival, of how to live through their terrible times. On such things this man would merely spit. Was he a speculator? A murderer? A cannibal? There was little difference; each was trading on the lives of starving, dying people, each was living on the flesh of his fellows.
For such persons there was only one recourse. They must be shot.
Luknitsky met Red Army men, too. They were as thin and weak as the civilians. He passed two soldiers, half-carrying a third. Most of them, despite their weakness, tried to walk with a bold step.
“Such was the image of my own, unhappy, proud, besieged city,” Luknitsky noted. “I am happy that I did not run away, that I share its fate, that I am a participant and a witness of all its misfortunes in these difficult, unprecedented months. And if I live, I will remember them—I will never forget my beloved Leningrad in the winter of 1941–42.”
Daniel Leonidovich Andreyev, son of the great Leonid Andreyev, lived through the blockade in Leningrad. He wrote of the Leningrad apocalypse:
We have known everything . . .
That in Russian speech there is
No word for that mad war winter . . .
When the Hermitage shivered under bombs . . .
Houses turned to frost and pipes burst with ice . . .
The ration—100 grams . . . On the Nevsky corpses.
And we learned, too, about cannibalism.
We have known everything. . . .
1
By February there were only five police dogs still in the service of the Leningrad police department.
(Dela i Lyudi
, p. 275.)
IN THE CITY MUSEUM OF HISTORY IN LENINGRAD THERE are a few torn pages of a child’s notebook, ABC pages in the Russian alphabet: A, B, V, G, D and so on.
On them there are scrawled under the appropriate letters simple entries in a child’s hand:
The entries were made by Tanya Savicheva, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl. They tell the story of her family during the Leningrad blockade. The Savichevs lived in House No. 13, Second Line, Vasilevsky Island. The house still stands, no signs of war to be found on its bland surface, and even the building across the street, which was hit by bombs in 1941, gives no appearance of damage. All the wounds have been healed.
For years it was supposed that the entire Savichev family had died and that after making her last entry Tanya, too, died. This was not quite correct. Like many Leningraders Tanya was evacuated in the spring of 1942. She was sent to Children’s Home No. 48 in the village of Shakhty in the Gorky area, suffering from chronic dysentery. Efforts by doctors to save her life failed, and she died in the summer of 1943.
Two members of the Savichev family survived the war. Both had been out of Leningrad during the blockade. An older sister, Nina Nikolayevna Pavlova, returned to Leningrad in 1944. Tanya’s notations had been made in her notebook. The sister found it when she came back to the apartment on Vasilevsky Island, lying in a box with her mother’s wedding dress. A brother, Mikhail, also survived. When war broke out, he was at Gdov in the nearby countryside and fought with the partisans.
The obliteration of the Savichev family was not unusual. This was what was happening to Leningrad in the winter of 1941–42. Not everyone died that winter. But the deaths went on in the months and years ahead as the privations of the blockade took their toll.
In the measured words of the official Leningrad historian:
In world history there are no examples which in their tragedy equal the terrors of starving Leningrad. Each day survived in the besieged city was the equal of many months of ordinary life. It was terrible to see how from hour to hour there vanished the strength of those near and dear. Before the eyes of mothers their sons and daughters died, children were left without parents, a multitude of families were wiped out completely.
Party Secretary Zhdanov and his associates now knew the price that must be paid for the siege. Only the most radical measures would pull Leningrad through the winter, and how many would survive till spring was an open question. Hope that the offensive so boldly planned in Moscow by Stalin, Zhdanov and the generals in early December would liberate Leningrad was petering out. The attacks by the Fifty-fifth Army headed by General V. P. Sviridov on the Leningrad front, driving toward Tosno in an effort to unhinge the Germans at Mga, yielded meager results—and heavy losses. On January 13 General Meretskov of the Volkhov front and General Fedyunin-sky’s Fifty-fourth Army of the Leningrad front launched a simultaneous attack, hoping to free the rail and highway connections between Moscow and Leningrad. The battles went on all winter long.
“I will never forget,” General Meretskov wrote, “the endless forests, the bogs, the water-logged peat fields, the potholed roads. The heavy battle with the enemy went on side by side with the equally heavy battle with the forces of nature.”
General Fedyuninsky, whose Fifty-fourth Army fought through the winter in the same operations, spoke of the experience in almost identical terms: “If you asked me what was the most difficult time I would without hesitation reply: The worst time of all for me was at Pogost in the winter of 1942. The four months of constant bloodletting and, worst of all, unsuccessful fighting in the forests and marshy regions between Mga and Tikhvin remain a terrible memory for me.”
The Russian attack developed slowly. There could be no hope of surprising the Germans. The Nazis were strongly dug in, and a more vigorous commander, Colonel General von Kiichler, had replaced the aging von Leeb in early January. Just to move over the ground in the heavy snow required enormous expenditure of strength. Toward the end of January the Soviet Second Shock Army scored a small success, smashing through the main German defenses and capturing Myasny Bor in the direction of the Chudovo-Novgorod railroad.
Feverish efforts were made to achieve success in the winter offensive. Moscow had done everything—except provide the needed men and arms. Unsatisfied with the pace at which Meretskov was moving, Stalin sent one of his police generals, L. Z. Mekhlis, to the Volkhov front on December 24. The task of Mekhlis was to chivy and hurry the operation. The Fifty-ninth and Second Shock armies, according to the schedule of the General Staff, were to be ready for the jump-off by December 25. Actually, only one division was in place.
Delay followed delay. The date for the offensive was postponed to January 7, but by that time only five of the eight Fifty-ninth Army divisions had arrived and the Second Army was only half complete. There was no air support, and the Fifty-ninth Army had neither optical instruments nor means of communication with which to direct artillery fire. Meretskov sent an urgent telegram to Moscow, and Marshal N. N. Voronov appeared at Volkhov headquarters. The acid relations between police generals and regular army were shown in Mekhlis’ greeting to Marshal Voronov: “Well, now the chief criminal has arrived, the one who sent us artillery which can’t fire. Just watch how he tries to excuse himself.” Voronov was able to help a bit but not too much, and January 7 found Meretskov still short of artillery, reserve supplies, fuel, forage for the horses and almost every kind of matériel. Nonetheless, the preliminary attacks were launched with expectable results. The commanders were not able to direct their troops, the Germans easily contained the infantry assaults, the whole movement was a disaster. Meretskov asked Moscow to let him delay the development of the operation by three days. On January 10 Stalin and Marshal Vasilevsky talked with him by direct wire. They expressed the frank opinion that the operation would not be ready even by January 11 and that it would be better to put it off another two or three days. “There’s a Russian proverb,” Stalin said. “Haste makes waste. It will be the same with you: hurry to the attack and not prepare it and you will waste people.”
Meretskov regarded this as a serious reprimand, but he noted (many years later) that from the beginning there had been ceaseless haste and demands from Moscow to get the action under way. The Stavka had insisted by telephone and urgent directives to hurry in every possible way. Mekhlis had been sent in for no other purpose than to keep the pressure on.
Actually, the preparation should have taken at least fifteen to twenty days. But, of course, there was not a chance of getting that kind of time.
There was another serious problem. The Leningrad operation was designed as part of a triple winter offensive which was supposed, simultaneously, to lift the Leningrad siege and crush Army Group Nord, destroy and encircle Army Group Center on the Moscow front and defeat the southern German armies, liberating the Donbas and Crimea.
Meretskov, Fedyuninsky and the Leningrad commanders received a circular telegram from Stavka in Moscow dated January 10 which gave the aim of the operation as: “To drive them [the Germans] westward without pause, compelling them to exhaust their reserves even before spring, when we will have new and larger reserves and the Germans will not have large reserves, and thus secure the full defeat of the Hitler troops in 1942.”
The task was far beyond Soviet capability. It represented almost as fatal a misreading of the situation as that which had possessed Stalin on the eve of the war.
There was another problem. The general in chargé of the Second Shock Army, Lieutenant General G. G. Sokolov, was a police officer. He had previously been a Deputy Commissar of Internal Affairs. He had plunged into army affairs with great energy and aplomb, ready to promise anything. But he knew nothing about military matters and substituted cliches and dogma for military decisions. He had what Meretskov called “an original approach” to operational questions. Among the instructions which Sokolov issued to his troops were orders about when to eat (breakfast before dawn, dinner after sunset); the length of the marching pace (one arshin, a little less than a yard); the hours for marching (units of more than a company were not to march during the day; in general, all movements were to be made at night); the soldiers’ attitude toward cold (they were not to fear it; if their ears or hands froze, they were to rub them with snow).
General Meretskov managed to get Sokolov removed on the eve of the offensive, replacing him with Lieutenant General N. K. Krykov.
None of these measures helped the winter offensive. It bogged down. On January 17 Chief of Staff Marshal A. M. Vasilevsky warned Meretskov that the “situation in Leningrad is exceptionally serious and it is necessary to take all steps to advance as quickly as possible.”
Marshal Vasilevsky’s words did not bring results. What was worse, in spite of repeated requests, Meretskov could not get the supplies he needed to feed his horses, fuel his trucks, provision his men and arm his guns. On January 28 General A. V. Khrulev, Deputy Commissar of Defense, arrived to try to speed up supplies.
1
This helped a little but not enough. The Second Shock Army ground to a halt and finally had to go on the defensive. The Stavka showered down telegrams, Meretskov was chargéd with indecisive-ness and treading water. Meretskov complained in his turn about lack of tanks, planes and shells, shortages of troops, inability to give his men relief after the incredible tasks of fighting in the cold, wet, miserable morass.
It was mid-February. Everyone was angry, depressed, blaming each other. Stalin sent Marshal Voroshilov to the Volkhov front to demand immediate action. Meretskov gathered his military council and offered a new plan, based on giving his men some rest, regrouping and bringing in reserves and new equipment, particularly artillery for the Second Shock Army. Voroshilov went from unit to unit trying to raise spirits. It did little good. The plain fact was that the men didn’t have the strength. They were to remember the winter as the worst they had ever spent. Losses were great, results almost nil.
It was obvious in such circumstances that there would be no early response to the question on the lips of all Leningraders—"When will the blockade be lifted?"—and no early confirmation of the persisting rumors that the armies of Meretskov and Fedyuninsky were about to save the city.
Party Secretary Zhdanov turned to such resources as he had. One was the Communist youth. Their ranks had been savagely depleted like those of the Party itself.
2
Leningrad boasted 235,000 Komsomols in June, 1941. By January, 1942, only 48,000 remained. The rest had gone to the front, had been killed or transferred to urgent production tasks elsewhere. They were almost the only reserve of strength the city had.
The Young Communists were organized into service detachments. Their task was to go from apartment to apartment, to help the living, if possible, and to remove the dead. The first Young Communist units went into action in December, but it was only in January that their work achieved an organized character.
They themselves were little stronger than the rest of the Leningraders. A meeting was called at Smolny on January 30 by V. N. Ivanov, secretary of the Komsomol organization.
“There were no streetcars,” one of those who attended recalled. “The meeting was called for noon. People started out at 8
A.M.
”
It was a long walk and they had to rest time and again.
Ivanov told them: “We are being put to a severe test by the Party and the country. We look forward with confidence. Through the difficulties and deprivation which Leningrad is experiencing in connection with the blockade we can see our coming victory. For this we are fighting and will fight to the last drop of blood.”
The sights which met the eyes of the youth brigades in the frozen and bleak flats of Leningrad were almost beyond the power of a Diirer or a Hogarth to depict.
G. F. Badayev, secretary of the Moscow region of the Party, went to one frozen apartment. He heard the feeble cry of a child and turned his flashlight into a room. On a bed lay a dead woman, and beside her were two tiny children, hungry, dirty, frozen.
“How can we permit this?” he asked rhetorically. “Why did no one look in here sooner?”
It was a vain, pompous question.
Vissarion Sayanov met a young woman named Anna Ivanovna Shakova at a children’s home. She had been wounded at the front and then took a job with a Komsomol brigade. One evening she went with a friend to an old house on Maly Prospekt. They entered a dark apartment and found a woman lying dead with an overcoat thrown over her body. On the bed there was a large bundle, wrapped in a tablecloth. Inside they found a nursing child, alive, whimpering and sucking on an empty nipple. They brought the baby to the nursery. No one in the apartment knew the child’s name, all the neighbors were dead, “I told them to write down my name,” Anna said. “Let him carry my name through the years.” Before the winter ended she had taken in two more babies. She had a family of three and was not yet married.