Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  transporting the supplies by road, namely from Tikhvin to a number of points on the lake, such as Kabona or Lednevo, a matter of over 100 miles of very bad winter roads. It was not till January 1 that the railway bridges between Tikhvin and Volkhov were rebuilt; by this time, the Germans had also been driven a long distance away from Volkhov and

  Voibokalo (roughly to their original "Mga salient" which they had captured in September), and it was Voibokalo, on the main Leningrad-Vologda railway line, and just south of the Schüsselburg Bay, which became the main "food base". It was only some thirty-five miles from Osinovets, on the Leningrad side of the lake. What is more, during the following weeks, a branch line was built, in incredible winter conditions, from

  Voibokalo to Kabona, a matter of some twenty miles, so as to bring the trains right up to the lake, where the food was then put in lorries.

  Although the food supplies in Leningrad were still worse than precarious at the end of December, the War Council decided to increase the bread ration slightly on December

  25. This was not enough to reduce the death-rate, but it had an important effect on

  morale.

  Altogether, between the beginning of the blockade on September 8 and January 1, some 45,000 tons of food were delivered to Leningrad in the following ways (in tons):

  By

  By

  By the ice

  Total

  water

  air

  road

  Grain and Flour

  23,041

  743

  12,343

  36,127

  Cereals

  1,056

  —

  1,482

  2,538

  Meat and meat products

  730

  1,829

  1,100

  3,659

  Fats and cheese

  276

  1,729

  138

  2,143

  Condensed milk

  125

  200

  158

  483

  Egg powder, chocolate,

  —

  681

  44

  725

  etc.

  Total:

  25,228 5,182

  15,265

  45,675

  Considering that there were about two and a half million people still in Leningrad, these quantities were, of course, extremely small, and, what is more, the quantities delivered by January 1 across the ice were worse than disappointing. It should, it is true, be added that, apart from food, a certain quantity of ammunition and petrol were also brought into

  Leningrad during this period.

  Altogether, neither in December nor even in January, could the Ice Road be said to be working satisfactorily, and at the beginning of January Zhdanov expressed his extreme discontent at the way things were going. What complicated matters still further was the decrepit state of the small railway line (in the past a derelict suburban line, built long before the Revolution) between Osinovets and Leningrad. The railway even lacked

  water-towers, and engines had to be filled with water by hand, and trees had to be cut on the spot to supply them with damp and wholly inadequate fuel. The line which used to have one train a day, was now expected to carry six or seven large goods trains. The half-starved railwaymen were fighting against terrible odds.

  There was also an acute shortage of packing material in Russia and a high proportion of the food taken to Leningrad was wasted as a result. It was not, in fact, until the end of January or rather, until February 10, 1942, when the branch-line from Voibokalo to

  Kabona was completed, and not until after a good deal of reorganisation had been done, that the Road of Life across Lake Ladoga began to work like clockwork. By this time

  several wide motor-roads had been built across the ice, and hundreds of lorries could now deliver food to Leningrad, and also evacuate many thousands of its inhabitants, many of them half-dead with hunger. The Germans did what they could to interfere both with the building of the railway line to Kabona and with the ice-roads themselves; these roads were both bombed and shelled, but Russian fighter planes protected them as far as

  possible, and traffic police were stationed along the roads. One of their duties was to lay little bridges across any holes or cracks in the ice made by German bombs or shells.

  By January 24, 1942, food supplies had sufficiently improved to allow a second increase in Leningrad's rations; workers were now getting 14 oz. of bread, office workers 11 oz., dependants and children 9 oz., and front line troops 21 oz.; on February 11, the ration was increased for the third time.

  On January 22 the State Defence Committee decided to evacuate half-a-million people

  from Leningrad; priority was given to women, children, old and sick people. In January 11,000 people were evacuated, in February 117,000, in March 221,000, in April 163,000; a total of 512,000. In May, after shipping on Lake Lagoda had been restored, the

  evacuation continued, and between May and November 1942, 449,000 more people were

  evacuated, making a total, in 1942, of nearly a million people. Moreover, the evacuation of industry, which had been so harshly interrupted in September 1941, was resumed:

  between January and April, several thousand machine tools, etc., were evacuated across the ice to the east. What is more, a petrol pipeline was laid, between April and June 1942, across the bottom of Lake Ladoga to supply Leningrad with fuel. The German attempts to wreck the pipeline by dropping depth-charges into the lake failed. Similarly, when the Volkhov power station resumed work in May 1942, an electric cable was laid across the bottom of Lake Ladoga, to supply Leningrad with electric power.

  The Ladoga Life Line—ice in winter, water in summer, continued to function

  satisfactorily right up to January 1943 when the land blockade was broken and trains began, soon afterwards, to run through the narrow "Schlüsselburg Gap".

  With the population enormously reduced, first by famine, and then by evacuation,

  feeding Leningrad no longer presented an insuperable problem. Indeed after March 1942, to make up for what the city had suffered, Leningrad rations were higher than in the rest of the country, and special canteens with extra-good food were set up, particularly for workers in poor health. Nevertheless, the winter famine had left a mark on very many people. During the summer months of 1942 a high proportion of workers were too ill to work— in one armaments plant mentioned by Karasev, thirty-five per cent of the workers were too ill to work in May, and thirty-one per cent in June. On May 23, 1942, the poet Vera Inber, whose husband worked in a Leningrad hospital, noted in her diary:

  Our hospital compound has been cleared of rubble, and has become almost

  unrecognisable—better even than before the war, I'm told. In place of heaps of

  rubbish there are now new vegetable plots. In the students' hostel they have opened a "reinforced nutrition" dining room; there are several in every district. Weak, pale, exhausted people (second degree distrophy) slowly wander about, almost

  surprised at the thought that they are still alive... Often they sit down for a rest, and expose their legs to the rays of the sun, which heals their scurvy ulcers... But among Leningraders there are also some who can no longer move or walk (third degree

  distrophy). They lie quietly in their frozen winter houses, into which even the spring seems unable to penetrate. Such houses are visited by young doctors, medical

  students and nurses; the worst cases are taken to hospital; we have put up 2,000 new beds in our hospital, including the maternity ward; so few children are born

  nowadays, one might say none are born at all!

  [Vera Inber, Pochti tri goda (Nearly Three Years), (Leningrad, 1947), pp. 118-19.]

  A very high death-rate persisted at least until April; and although, by June, people stopped dying of hunger or its after-effects, the strain of what they had lived through, as well as of the constant bombing and shelling of th
e city, continued to make itself felt.

  Karasev speaks of a widespread "psychic traumatisation", marked, in particular, by high blood-pressure; this condition was four or five times more frequent than before the war.

  Nevertheless, with the population reduced to only 1,100,000 in April and to some

  650,000 by November 1942, conditions of life became relatively more normal. 148

  schools (out of some 500) were opened with 65,000 pupils, and the children were given three meals a day.

  Although the front outside Leningrad seemed in 1942 to have been stabilised, the danger of another all-out German attempt to capture the city was ever-present, and there were several (more or less false) alarms. On the other hand, the attempts made by the Red Army to break the land blockade failed.

  The news throughout the "black summer" of 1942 of the Germans crashing ahead into the Caucasus and towards Stalingrad, had a depressing effect. The fall of Sebastopol—which had so many points in common with Leningrad—seemed particularly ominous, and there

  was also a feeling that if Stalingrad fell, the fate of Leningrad, too, would be sealed.

  The Russian counter-offensive at Stalingrad not only created a tremendous feeling of optimism in Leningrad, as it did in the rest of the country, but it also enormously

  improved the prospects of breaking the German blockade. This was now achieved as a

  result of a week's heavy fighting in January 1943, when the troops of the Leningrad Front under General Govorov and those of the Volkhov Front under General Meretskov, joined forces, and so hacked a ten-mile corridor through the German salient south of Lake

  Ladoga. Schüsselburg was recaptured and, in a very short time, a rail link was established with the "mainland" and a pontoon bridge built across the Neva; as a result, trains could travel from Moscow to Leningrad.

  [Vera Inber (op. cit., p. 194) wrote in March 1943, "only freight trains cross the pontoon bridge across the Neva at Schüsselburg. The railwaymen call this place 'the corridor of death'. It is under constant German shell fire.]

  But the memory of the terrible winter months of 1941-2 lingered on, and when I went to Leningrad in 1943, they were still the main subject of conversation.

  Chapter VII LENINGRAD CLOSE-UP

  When I went to Leningrad in September 1943, the German lines were still two miles from the Kirov Works, on the southern outskirts of the city.

  [With the exception of Henry Shapiro of United Press who went there a few weeks

  earlier, I was the only foreign correspondent allowed to visit Leningrad during the

  blockade. To me, as a native of Leningrad, who had lived there until the age of seventeen, this was a particularly moving experience. After an absence of twenty-five years, I visited all the familiar places, including the house where I had spent my childhood and school years. Many houses in the street had been destroyed by bombing and in the house where I had lived a large number of people had died of hunger in 1941-2. I have described my visit fully in an earlier book {Leningrad, London, 1944), but as it is out of print I make no excuse for reprinting from it, in this chapter, a few accounts of visits and conversations which convey something of the spirit of Leningrad during the blockade.]

  The total population had now been reduced to some 600,000, and the city, though as

  beautiful as ever, despite considerable damage caused by shells, bombs and fires, had a strange half-deserted look. It was a front-line city, sure enough, and a high proportion of its people were in uniform. There was practically no more bombing, but the shelling was frequent, and often deadly. It had caused great damage to houses, especially in the

  modern southern parts of Leningrad, and many people would recall horrible "incidents"

  when a shell had hit a queue at a tram-stop or a crowded tram-car: some of these had happened only a few days before.

  Yet, in a strange way, life seemed almost to have returned to normal. Most of the city looked deserted and yet, in the late afternoon, when there was no shelling, there were large crowds of people walking about the "safe" side of the Nevsky Prospect (the shells normally landed on the other side) and even little luxuries were sold here, unavailable at the time in Moscow, such as little bottles of Leningrad-made scent. And the "Writers'

  Bookshop" near the Anichkov Bridge in the Nevsky was doing a roaring trade in

  secondhand books. Millions of books had been burned as fuel in Leningrad during the

  famine winter; and yet many people had died before having had time to burn their books, and—a cruel thought—some wonderful bargains could now be got. Theatres and cinemas

  were open, though whenever the shelling started they were promptly evacuated. In the Marsovo Pole (the Champs de Mars) and in the Summer Garden—whose eighteenth-century marble statues of Greek gods and goddesses had been removed to safety—

  vegetables were being grown, and a few people were pottering around the cabbages and potatoes. There were also cabbage beds round the sandbagged Bronze Horseman.

  Almost from the moment I arrived in Leningrad—after travelling there by plane via

  Tikhvin and then, at night, only a few yards above the waters of Lake Ladoga—I began to hear stories about the famine. For instance this conversation on the very first night with Anna Andreievna, the genteel old lady who looked after me at the Astoria:

  The Astoria looks like a hotel now, but you should have seen it during the famine! It was turned into a hospital—just hell. They used to bring here all sorts of people, mostly intellectuals, who were dying of hunger. Gave them vitamin tablets, tried to pep them up a bit. But a lot of them were too far gone, and died almost the moment they got here. I know what it is to be hungry. I was so weak I could hardly walk.

  Had to use a walking stick to support me. My home is only a mile away, in the

  Sadovaya... I'd have to stop and sit down every hundred yards... Took me sometimes over an hour to get home...

  You don't know what it was like. You just stepped over corpses in the street and on the stairs. You simply stopped taking any notice. It was no use worrying. Terrible things used to happen. Some people went quite insane with hunger. And the practice of hiding the dead somewhere in the house and using their ration cards was very

  common indeed. There were so many people dying all over the place, the authorities couldn't keep track of all the deaths... You should have seen me in February 1942.

  Oh, Lord, I looked funny! My weight had dropped from seventy kilos to forty kilos in four months! Now I am back to sixty-two—feeling quite plump...

  On the following day I had a conversation at the Architects' Institute, where they were already working on the future restoration of the various historic buildings, such as the palaces of Pushkin (Tsarskoye Selo) and Peterhof that had been wrecked by the Germans: We went on with this blueprint work right through the winter of 1941-2... It was a blessing for us architects. The best medicine that could have been given us during the famine. The moral effect is great when a hungry man knows he's got a useful job of work to do... But there's no doubt about it: a worker stands up better to

  hardships than an intellectual. A lot of our people stopped shaving—the first sign of a man going to pieces... Most of these people pulled themselves together when they were given work. But on the whole men collapsed more easily than women, and at

  first the death-rate was highest among the men. However, those who survived the

  worst period of the famine finally survived. The women felt the after-effects more seriously than the men. Many died in the spring, when the worst was already over.

  The famine had peculiar physical effects on people. Women were so run down that

  they stopped menstruating... So many people died that we had to bury them without coffins. People had their feelings blunted, and never seemed to weep at the burials...

  It was all done in complete silence, without any display of emotion. When things

  began to improve, the first signs were that women bega
n to put rouge and lipstick on their pale, skinny faces. Yes, we lived through hell right enough; but you should have been here the day the blockade was broken—people in the street wept for joy, and strangers fell round each others' necks. Now life is almost normal. There is this shelling, of course, and people get killed, but life has become valuable again.

  Also, I remember this conversation, one day, with Major Lozak, a staff officer who

  conducted me round the Leningrad Front:

  In those days there was something in a man's face which told you that he would die within, the next twenty-four hours... I have lived in Leningrad all my life, and I also have my parents here. They are old people, and during those famine months I had

  to give them half my soldier's ration, or they would certainly have died. As a staff officer I was naturally, and quite rightly, getting considerably less than the people at the front: 250 grams a day instead of 350. I shall always remember how I'd walk

  every day from my house near the Tauris Garden to my work in the centre of the

  city, a matter of two or three kilometres. I'd walk for a while, and then sit down for a rest. Many a time I saw a man suddenly collapse on the snow. There was nothing

  one could do. One just walked on... And, on the way back, I would see a vague

  human form covered with snow on the spot where, in the morning, I had seen a man

  fall down. One didn't worry; what was the good? People didn't wash for weeks;

  there were no bath houses and no fuel. But at least people were urged to shave. And during that winter I don't think I ever saw a person smile. It was frightful. And yet, there was a kind of inner discipline that made people carry on. A new code of

  manners was evolved by the hungry people. They carefully avoided talking about

  food. I remember spending a very hungry evening with an old boy from the Radio

  Committee. He nearly drove me crazy—he would talk all evening about Kant and Hegel. Yet we never lost heart. The Battle of Moscow gave us complete confidence