The 900 Days (83 page)

What is the actual death total for Leningrad? Mikhail Dudin, a Leningrad poet who fought at Hangö and spent the whole of the siege within the lines at Leningrad, suggests that it was a minimum of 1,100,000. He offers this simple figure on the basis of 800,000 bodies estimated buried in mass graves at Piskarevsky Cemetery and 300,000 at Serafimov Cemetery. There is more than a little truth in the observation of the Leningrad poet, Sergei Davydov, regarding Piskarevsky: “Here lies half the city.”

No official calculation includes a total for military deaths, and no official figures on these have been published. It is known, however, that 12,416 military deaths attributed to hunger diseases occurred in the winter of 1941–42. Over-all military deaths are likely to have ranged between 100,000 and 200,000 in the Leningrad fighting—possibly more.

One of the most careful Soviet specialists estimates the Leningrad starvation toll at “not less than a million,” a conclusion shared by the present Leningrad Party leaders.
Pravda
on the twentieth anniversary of the lifting of the blockade declared that “the world has never known a similar mass extermination of a civilian population, such depths of human suffering and deprivation as fell to the lot of Leningraders.”

Estimates of the Leningrad death toll as high as 2,000,000 have been made by some foreign students. These estimates are too high. A total for Leningrad and vicinity of something over 1,000,000 deaths attributable to hunger, and an over-all total of deaths, civilian and military, on the order of 1,300,000 to 1,500,000, seems reasonable.

It is germane, perhaps, to note that the Leningrad survivors of the blockade thought in January, 1944, that the starvation toll might be 2,ooo,ooo.
⁸

The Soviet censors in 1944 refused to pass estimates stating the Leningrad death toll as 1,000,000 or 2,000,000. For nearly twenty years after the blockade they insisted the total was 632,253—not more, not less. Even today Dmitri V. Pavlov insists that new estimates, made by Soviet and foreign students, are incorrect. In a third edition of his magnificent
Leningrad v Blokade
, the best single source for many details of the siege, he incorporated an attack on the new totals. It is impossible, he insists, to remain silent in the face of assertions that a million or more people died in Leningrad. “Believe it or not,” he insists, “there is no foundation for such serious conclusions.” He insists that calculations based on the movement of Leningraders in and out of the city are unsound. He contends that the new estimates understate the number of Leningraders who entered military units (he puts the figure at not less than 200,000 rather than the 100,000 which Soviet authorities now use). He insists that the 632,253 calculation was accurate (he says it was completed in May, 1943, although the document is dated May, 1944, and other Soviet authorities contend it was not submitted until May, 1945).
⁹

Pavlov concludes that “the life of the Leningraders was so grim that there is no need for historians or writers dealing with these events to strengthen the colors or deepen the shadows.”

In this Pavlov is right. But the truth is that the Soviet Government from the beginning made a deliberate effort to lighten the shadows of the Leningrad blockade.

The death toll was minimized for political and security reasons. The Soviet Government for years deliberately understated the military and civilian death toll of World War II. The real totals were of such magnitude that Stalin, obviously, felt they would produce political repercussions inside the country. To the outside world a realistic statement of Soviet losses (total population losses are now estimated at well above 25 million lives) would have revealed the true weakness of Russia at the end of the war.

The Leningrad death toll had implications both for Stalin and for the Leningrad leadership, headed by Zhdanov. It raised the question of whether the key decisions were the right ones, whether all had been done that could have been done to spare the city its incredible trial. In these decisions the personal and political fortunes of all the Soviet leaders were intermingled.

Zhdanov declared in June, 1942, that there had been no line between the front and the rear in Leningrad, that everyone “lived with a single spirit—to do everything possible to defeat the enemy. Each Leningrader, man or woman, found his place in the struggle and with honor fulfilled his duty as a Soviet patriot.”

This was not quite true, and it begged the question of whether the siege had to be endured, whether it could have been lifted, whether it could have been avoided. These were the questions for which the leadership might have to answer.

Whether Zhdanov was certain of the correctness of these decisions is not clear. Not long before he died on August 31, 1948, he is said to have questioned himself and his acts, acknowledging that “people died like flies” as a result of his decisions but insisting that “history would not have forgiven me had I given up Leningrad.”

Pavlov asked himself the same questions: Why did Leningrad remain in blockade for so long, and was everything done that could have been done to break the blockade? His conclusion was that the Soviet Command simply did not have the strength to do more than was done.

Meanwhile, “history” was corrected in the Soviet way. The sacrifice of Leningrad was understated; the death toll was minimized; the chance of political repercussions was reduced, at least for the time being.

Not until many years later was the inscription carved on the wall of the memorial at Piskarevsky Cemetery:

Let no one forget; let nothing be forgotten!

For some years, at any rate, a determined effort was made to forget a very great deal that had happened during the siege of Leningrad.

¹
Her case was taken up by the Young Communist magazine
Yunost
in 1965. After publishing an expose the magazine directed an appeal to the Leningrad authorities to display some consideration for Hilma Stepanovna. Whether the appeal was heeded is not known.
(Yunost
, No. 5, May, 1965, pp. 97–99.)

²
N.Z
., pp. 340–341. Slightly differing totals are given by others. Karasev makes it 554,186 (p. 200). The same figure is given by
poo
(p. 106). Pavlov makes it 514,069
(op. cit
., 3rd edition, p. 189.)

³
The Germans resumed their air attacks on Leningrad in April. There were heavy actions April 4, 5, 14, 19, 20 and 23, directed primarily against the Baltic Fleet ships, still frozen in the Neva, and against Kronstadt and the heavy naval gun emplacements. (Pan-teleyev,
op. cit
., pp. 309-315.) The attack of April 4 was the heaviest of the war.
(N.Z
., p. 343.)

⁴
Zhdanov used the same figure in July when proposing a further evacuation to bring the city’s population down to a “military city” of 800,000. (Karasev,
op. cit
., p. 254.)

⁵
Deaths at Hiroshima August 6, 1945, were 78,150, with 13,983 missing and 37,426 wounded. In another tragedy of World War II, the Warsaw uprising, between 56,000 and 60,000 died.

⁶
The Commission report as published in the official Leningrad documentary compilation is dated “May, 1944,” but the authoritative study of this document by V. M. Koval-chuk and G. L. Sobolev asserts it includes deaths reported to May, 1945.
(Voyenno Istoricheskii Zhurnal
, No. 12, December, 1965, p. 192.) The Commission was set up by decision of the Leningrad City and regional Party committees April 14, 1943. (Karasev,
op. cit
., p. 12.) Among its members were Mayor Popkov, Chief Architect N. V. Baranov, Academicians A. A. Baikov, A. F. Ioffe, L. A. Orbeli, I. A. Orbeli, I. Ye. Grabar, A. V. Shchusev, and the writers, A. N. Tolstoy, N. S. Tikhonov, Vera Inber, Anna Akhmatova, Olga Forsh and Vsevolod Vishnevsky.
(Leningrad v VOV
, p. 690.)

⁷
This is the estimate of two reliable and conservative Leningrad authorities. (Karasev,
op. cit.,
p. 184; N. D. Khudyakova,
Vsya Strana S Leningradorn
, Leningrad, 1960, p. 57.)

⁸
This is what they told the author, who was present in Leningrad at the time.

⁹
Pavel Luknitsky comments that the official figures cannot account for all the deaths, particularly those who died during evacuation. (Luknitsky,
op. cit
., p. 539.)

The exploding bomb reminds us

Again of death,

But spring is stronger

And it is on our side. . . .

MAY DAY WAS A WORKING DAY IN LENINGRAD. FROM Moscow came the Party announcement that the traditional two-day holiday would be canceled. Everyone would work as usual for the war. No parade, no demonstrations, no bands. Just some speeches.

It was a beautiful day in Leningrad, sunny with an air of summer. On the streets Pavel Luknitsky noticed women, often in old army overcoats or workers’ boots, with little bunches of the first spring flowers, marigolds, violets and dandelions, branches of spruce or pine or handfuls of green grass. Anything to provide a little chlorophyll, any source of vitamin C to combat the scurvy of winter.

The people were convalescent after their trials. They moved slowly in the warmth, letting the sun strike deep into their thin bodies, their pale faces, their wasted arms.

The politeness of Leningrad had begun to return. It had vanished during the terrible winter. Now Aleksandr Fadeyev watched a couple, a man and his wife, carefully, tenderly, supporting an older woman who walked with tottering feet and a rather embarrassed smile at her weakness. A Red Army man helped a little old lady onto a streetcar, lifting her from the pavement to the top step with one strong gesture. The old lady turned and said, “Thank you, son. Now you will go on living. Mark my word—no bullet will hit you.”

On the walls appeared newly printed copies of
Leningradskaya Pravda
and of the Moscow papers. The presses were working again. A proclamation was pasted up by City Trade Chief Andreyenko, announcing extra rations for the holiday—issues of meat, cereal, dried peas, herring and sugar. Also vodka and beer. Notices offering to trade dresses, shoes, gold watches or sets of silverware for bread or food were still posted and black markets still operated. No longer did the cannibals stalk the Haymarket, but you could trade a watch for a kilo of bread or a woman’s jacket for a glass of
klukva
or cranberries. There was even milk for exchange at a rate of a pint for 600 grams of bread.

Leningrad’s streets were clean, but huge barricades of snow and filth stood along the banks of the Neva, the Moika and the Fontanka. The ice had moved out of the Neva, but not all the winter’s toll had been liquidated.

May i was not just a pleasant sunny spring day in Leningrad. It was a day of very heavy German shelling. It went on from early morning until late at night. The Germans, it was clear, were celebrating May Day in their own way. Heavy shells fell in the square outside the Astoria Hotel and near the fleet headquarters. There were many casualties.

In the evening Fadeyev, Nikolai Tikhonov, Vsevolod Vishnevsky and Olga Berggolts spoke on the radio. Olga had just returned from Moscow. She had been flown out of Leningrad a few days after the calvary of her long walk to visit her father. A small plane took her low over the lines and over the endless wastes of snow and pine forest. She was amazed that from the air she saw no sign of fighting, no troops, no cannon, no war. In Moscow she was given a room in the Moskva Hotel, warm, comfortable, well lighted. She had what seemed like luxurious rations of food. But she did not feel comfortable. She belonged in Leningrad, not Moscow. A day or two after her arrival a man burst into her room, a Leningrad factory director. “Excuse me,” he said. “I accidentally heard that you had just flown from Leningrad. I am also a Leningrader. Please tell me quickly— how is it, what’s happening?” She told him of February in Leningrad, of the suffering. He nodded his head. “You understand?” he said. “That is life—there. I can’t clearly express myself. There is hunger and death, but there is life, too.” She told her Leningrad audience of hearing the first performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony in Moscow on March 29. When the symphony had concluded, she said, Shostakovich rose to acknowledge the ovation. “I looked at him,” she said, “small, frail, with big glasses and thought, ‘This man is stronger than Hitler.’” Vishnevsky noted in his diary that he was happy that his radio speech was heard by “millions of people and by my friends scattered by events throughout the land.” He was happy, too, that Fadeyev mentioned him three times in his speech and “warmly.”

After the broadcast Fadeyev walked up to the seventh floor of Radio House and looked out from a balcony. All around Radio House were wrecked buildings. But Radio House had not yet been hit. “It’s a good bomb shelter,” a young Radio House man said. “But it’s a pity it’s on the seventh floor.”

Later in the evening Fadeyev and the others gathered in Olga Berggolts’ room. Fadeyev asked the question which was on the lips of every visitor to Leningrad: “How did you live and work?”

“The chief thing,” Olga Berggolts said, “was to forget about the hunger and to work and work and help your comrades to keep up their work. Work was the chief force of life. We did everything together. Everything we received we shared. The chief thing was to support those who were weaker.”

She told of her husband’s death and how her friends had helped her, and she showed Fadeyev a slip of paper on which was written in pencil: “Olya. I have brought you a piece of bread and I will bring some more. I love you so.” A pale youngster sitting at the table had written the note. “You understand,” Olga Berggolts said with deep feeling. “This was not a declaration of love!” It was something more than love, Fadeyev thought.

Someone provided a bottle of vodka. Glasses were found and a toast was proposed.

“What was the number of today’s edition of the ‘Radio News Chronicle’?” a Radio House worker asked. It was, it transpired, the 244th issue (May 1 was the 244th day of the Leningrad blockade).

“Well, the devil with it,” the worker said. “Let’s drink to the five hundredth issue.”

They could not guess that nearly twice five hundred “Radio Chronicles” would go out into the ether before the Leningrad blockade ended.

It seemed to those who had survived the terrible winter that their ordeal must be drawing toward a close. The summer surely would bring a lifting of the siege.

Leningrad had a new front commander, a tall, handsome, reserved man who was not well known to the subordinate Leningrad commanders. He was Lieutenant General Leonid Aleksandrovich Govorov, an artillery officer. The late winter and early spring had turned the Leningrad Command into a comfortable, cozy group. Most of the time, the chief, Lieutenant General M. S. Khozin, had been across Ladoga, where the fighting continued, one grueling week after another. In Leningrad remained the newly promoted General Bychevsky, the fortifications specialist; Colonel (soon to be General) G. F. Odintsov, the new artillery chief; General S. D. Rybalchenko, a new air commander; and General A. B. Gvozdkov, operations officer. Major General D. N. Gusev, Khozin’s deputy, ran the front. He was a pleasant officer with an open-door policy. He got on well with the generals and equally well with Party Secretary Zhdanov, who made most of the decisions. The generals and the Party secretaries, Zhdanov, Kuznetsov and Shtykov usually ate together at a common mess. They started each meal with a shot of “sauce” made from pine needles to ward off scurvy. Any time one of them returned from across Ladoga he brought a bunch of garlic which he shared with all—for the same purpose.

When word came in early April that General Govorov was being named to command Leningrad, no one knew him except Odintsov, who had taken courses under him in the Dzerzhinsky Artillery Academy in 1938. Odintsov could say little except that Govorov’s character was in direct opposition to his name. Govorov stems from the word “
govoryat”
—"to talk.” “Not even two words did he ever squeeze out,” Odintsov said. “And no one has ever seen him smile.” About the only other thing that was known was that he was not a member of the Communist Party.
¹

Govorov was an experienced officer. Born in 1897, his military service began in the Czar’s army in 1916, where he was enrolled in the Konstan-tinovsky Artillery School. He was impressed into Admiral Kolchak’s White Russian Army but managed to desert with his battery and make his way to Tomsk, where he entered the Red Army. He rose steadily in the Red Army but in the late 1930’s like many of his colleagues was caught up in the Stalin purges. His brief forced service with Kolchak was brought up against him, and he was removed from the General Staff Academy where he was a student. By a vagary of the Stalin era six months later he was named a professor at the Dzerzhinsky Artillery Academy. His career seemed to have turned the corner. But in the spring of 1941 Police Chief Beria again brought him up on chargés relating to the Kolchak episode, and it was only the intervention of Marshal Timoshenko and Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin that saved him from exile or execution.

Although Govorov’s name was little known in Leningrad, he had distinguished himself as one of Marshal Zhukov’s right-hand men during the Battle of Moscow as commander of the Fifth Army. He it was who had recaptured Mozhaisk in mid-January, and he was inspecting the front lines of his Fifth Army sector near the Mozhaisk highway one early April morning when a call came from staff headquarters. He was wanted by 8
P.M.
in Moscow. The road was slippery, and it was evening before Govorov arrived, so stiff he could hardly move—the effects of a recent operation. At Stavka he was told Stalin wanted to see him. His new assignment was Leningrad and, as always, there was a rush. Stalin ordered him to fly to Leningrad the next day.

Govorov was no stranger to Leningrad. He had gone there after finishing grade school to enter the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute. A few months later he was called to duty in the Czar’s army. He thought of those times as he flew north to take over his new post. He knew that he had been picked for Leningrad because he was an artilleryman and only artillery (he believed) could protect the city so long as it was under siege. He flew over the northern reaches, now occupied by the Germans, still deep in the winter snow, over the pine and spruce forests, dark shadows on the land, over the villages and towns, burned and wrecked in the battles with the Nazis, and thought of Leningrad—how to hold the city, how to protect it, how it had managed to stand firm in the incredible days of autumn and winter, how it had halted the German armored divisions, how it had fought on despite hunger, cold and want. He thought again of his days as a Petersburg cadet and of the Petrograders he then knew, and suddenly this silent man exploded:
^u
Brave lads!” His neighbors on the plane looked at him in curiosity, but Govorov continued to peer out of the airplane window. They were nearing Leningrad now. He had seen no enemy fighters. He began to think about how to lift the siege, where to deliver the first blow.

The flight attendant came to his seat. “Leningrad soon. Very soon.”

Govorov looked out the window. “But I don’t see the city!”

“No,” the attendant said. “We are landing at an airport outside the city. It is dusk already, and you will see no light from Leningrad. The city is completely blacked out.”

Govorov’s first meetings with his new colleagues were frosty. Bychev-sky found him sitting at his desk, clenching his hands nervously, snatching an occasional glance at Bychevsky with unfriendly eyes, his face white, a little puffy, his mustache carefully trimmed, his dark hair shot with gray, carefully parted, a few large moles on his temples. Bychevsky reported on the state of fortifications. It was not a good report. The winter had been hard. Many trenches had fallen apart. Dugouts were filled with water. The troops had been too weak to repair the mine fields. The civilian population had done nothing since December. He had lost most of his specialized pontoon troops on the Nevskaya Dubrovka
place (Tarmes
. Govorov listened without an interruption or question. At the end he brought his fist down on his desk and uttered one word, quietly: “Loafer!”

Bychevsky had long since learned that engineers were more likely to get the stick than the carrot. But this was too much. “And do you know, Comrade Commander,” he lashed out, “that we have on this front people who haven’t the strength to pick up a stick? Do you know what dystrophy is?”

Bychevsky’s words tumbled out. Govorov listened without comment. When Bychevsky finished, he got up, walked about the room and then said quietly in his deep base voice, “General, your nerves are upset. Go out and quiet down and then come back in half an hour. We have a lot of work to do.”

“Loafer,” it turned out, was a favorite epithet of Govorov’s. It did not really mean what it sounded like. He had gotten the habit of using it when he was a young man, coaching students from well-to-do families. He used it on them. He had used it all his life.

From his first day in Leningrad Govorov turned his attention to artillery—to the counterbattery of the Leningrad guns against the German siege weapons which day after day so heavily shelled the city. Party Secretary Zhdanov had consulted the Leningrad Artillery Chief, General Odintsov, in late March about transforming the Leningrad batteries from a defensive to an offensive basis. So long as the batteries were defensive, responding only when the Germans fired, Zhdanov felt, the Nazis would, in time, destroy the city. He wanted to know how the Soviet guns could go on the offensive. Odintsov explained it was a matter of more guns, more planes to spot artillery fire, and many more shells. If they were to exterminate 10 to 12 batteries a month, it would take 15,000 shells a month. Now they were using 800 to 1,000. With Govorov’s support, two air observation units were brought in and the shell quota was upped to 5,000 a month.

The Govorov principle was, as he once explained, “exceptionally accurate counterbattery blows against the enemy artillery.” Govorov’s guns did not wait for the Germans to open up. They systematically sought to destroy the Nazi firing points, one by one.
²