Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  Frankly, I find it hard to this day to understand how people resisted the temptation of attacking bread vans or looting bakeries. But they didn't... sometimes people came to me to say good-bye... They knew they were going to die almost at once. Later, in the summer of 1942, a lot of people who had survived the famine were sent east to supplement their comrades from Kiev, Kharkov and other places... "

  By 1943, food was no longer a major problem in Leningrad; nevertheless, with the city under constant shellfire, and the German lines only two miles away, the Kirov Works

  continued to live through a hell that was only different in degree.

  "How," I asked, "can you carry on at all when shellfire is heavy? Have you any casualties? And how do your people stand up to it? " "Well," he said, "there is, I suppose, a sort of Kirov Works patriotism. Except for one or two very sick people, I have never yet come across anybody who wanted to quit... "

  He pulled out a drawer of his desk and brought out a pile of forty or fifty envelopes with postmarks. These were letters from Leningrad workers who had been evacuated, and who were begging to be allowed to return to Leningrad, alone or with their families.

  "They know how difficult conditions here are," he said, "but they also know that they wouldn't be a food problem to us any longer. But we can't agree to their return. These skilled Kirov workers are doing a valuable job of work out there; here we haven't much equipment, and the place is run as a sort of emergency war factory. Not unlike Kolpino, some ten miles away from here, where munitions are turned out in underground foundries

  —right in the front line..."

  "The way to keep the place going," he then said, "was by having it decentralised. We have divided up the work into small units, with only a corner of each workshop taken up with people and machinery; and this section, as far as possible is protected against blast and splinters. But misfortunes—or rather, a certain normal rate of casualties, will occur.

  This month—and it's been a relatively good month—we have had forty-three casualties—

  thirteen killed, twenty-three wounded and seven cases of shell-shock."

  "You ask how they take it? Well, I don't know whether you've ever been for any length of time under shellfire. But if anybody tells you it's not frightening, don't you believe it. In our experience, a direct hit has a very bad effect for twenty-four or forty-eight hours. In a workshop that's had a direct hit, production slumps heavily during that time, or stops almost completely, especially if many people have been killed or injured. It's a horrible sight, all the blood, and makes even our hardened workers quite ill for a day or two... But after that, they go back to work, and try to make up for the time lost by what's called the

  'accident'. But I realise all the same that working here is a perpetual strain, and when I see that a man or girl is going to pieces, I send him or her to a rest-home for a fortnight or a month..."

  Later he took me round some of the workshops. It happened to be a quiet day, with

  almost no German shelling. The enormous plant was, I could now see, much more

  smashed up than the outside view from the street suggested. In a large space, with badly shattered buildings around, stood an enormous blockhouse... The concrete walls were

  twelve inches thick, and the roof was made of powerful steel girders. "Nothing but a direct hit from a large gun at close range can do anything to this," said Puzyrev. "It was built during the worst days when we thought the Germans might break through to

  Leningrad. They would have found the Kirov Works a tough proposition. The whole

  place is dotted with pillboxes like this one..."

  Then we went into one of the foundries. One end of it was quite dark, but behind a strong brick partition the other half of it was lit up by flames inside the open furnaces, with their red-hot walls. Dark, eerie shadows of men, but again mostly of girls, were moving about in the red glow. The girls, with patched cotton stockings over their thin legs, were stooping under the weight of enormous clusters of red-hot steel they were clutching

  between a pair of tongs, and then you would see them—and as you saw it, you felt the desperate muscular concentration and will-power it involved—you would see them raise their slender, almost child-like arms and hurl these red-hot clusters under a giant steel hammer. Large red sparks of metal were flying and whizzing through the red semi-darkness, and the whole foundry shook with the deafening din and roar of machinery. We watched this scene for a while in silence; then Puzyrev said, almost apologetically, through the din: "This place isn't working quite right yet. We had a few shells in here the other day," and, pointing at a large hole in the floor now filled with sand and cement,

  "That's where one of them landed." "Any casualties? " "Yes, a few."

  We walked through the foundry and watched more closely all that the girls were doing.

  As we were going out I caught a glimpse of a woman's face in the red glow of the flames.

  Her face was grimy. She looked an elderly woman, almost like an old gipsy hag. And

  from that grimy face shone two dark eyes. There was something tragic in those eyes—

  there was a great weariness in them, and a touch of animal terror. How old was she?

  Fifty, forty, or maybe only twenty-five? Had I just imagined that look of terror in her eyes? Was it that grimy face and the eerie shadows around leaping up and down that had given me that idea? I had seen some of the other girls' faces. They were normal enough.

  One, a young thing, even smiled. Normal —yes, except for a kind of inner concentration

  —as if they all had some bad memories they could not quite shake off...

  *

  Another striking memory is my visit to a secondary school in Tambov Street, in a modern and heavily shelled part of the city, three or four miles from the front. It was run by an elderly man, Tikhomirov, a "Teacher of Merit of the USSR", who had started as an elementary teacher back in 1907. This school was one of the few that had not closed

  down even at the height of the famine. On four occasions it had been heavily damaged by German shells; but the boys had cleared away the glass, bricked up the walls that had been smashed, and had put plywood in the windows. During the last shelling in May, a woman-teacher had been killed in the yard of the school.

  The boys were typical Leningrad children; eighty-five per cent of the boys' fathers were still at the Leningrad Front, or had already been killed there, while many others had died in the Leningrad famine, and nearly all their mothers—if still alive—were working in Leningrad factories, or on transport, or on wood-cutting, or in civil defence. The boys all had a passionate hatred for the Germans, but were fully convinced by now that these

  svolochi (bastards) would be destroyed outside Leningrad before long. They had mixed feelings about Britain and America; they knew London had been bombed; that the RAF

  was "bombing the hell out of the Fritzes"; that the Americans were supplying the Red Army with a lot of lorries, and that they (the boys) were getting American chocolate to eat; but "there was still no Second Front".

  The headmaster, Comrade Tikhomirov, told me how they had "stuck it, and stuck it fairly well. We had no wood, but the Leningrad Soviet gave us a small wooden house not far

  away for demolition, so we could use the timber for heating. The bombing and shelling was very severe in those days. We had about 120 pupils then—boys and girls—and we

  had to hold our classes in the shelter. Not for a day did the work stop. It was very cold.

  The little stoves heated the air properly only a yard around them, and in the rest of the shelter the temperature was below zero. There was no lighting, apart from a kerosene lamp. But we carried on, and the children were so serious and earnest that we got better results than in any other year. Surprising, but true. We had meals for them; the army helped us to feed them. Several of the teachers died, but I am proud to say that all the children in our care survived. Only it was pathetic to watch them during those famine mon
ths. Towards the end of 1941, they hardly looked like children any more. They were strangely silent... They would not walk about; they would just sit. But none of them died; and only some of those pupils who had stopped coming to school, and stayed at home,

  died, often together with the rest of the family... "

  Tikhomirov then showed me an extraordinary document, which he called "our Famine Scrapbook", containing copies of many children's essays written during the famine, and much other material. It was bound in purple velvet, and the margins composed of rather conventional children's watercolours depicting soldiers, tanks, planes and the like; these surrounded little typewritten sheets—copies of typical essays written during the famine.

  One young girl wrote:

  Until June 22 everybody had work and a good life assured to him. That day we went on an excursion to the Kirov Islands. A fresh wind was blowing from the Gulf,

  bringing with it bits of the song some kids were singing not far away, "Great and glorious is my native land". And then the enemy began to come nearer and nearer our city. We went out to dig big trenches. It was difficult, because a lot of the kids were not used to such hard physical labour. The German General von Leeb was

  already licking his chops at the thought of the gala dinner he was going to get at the Astoria. Now we are sitting in the shelter round improvised stoves, with our coats and fur caps and gloves on. We have been knitting warm things for our soldiers, and have been taking round their letters to friends and relatives. We have also been

  collecting non-ferrous metal for salvage...

  Valentina Solovyova, an older girl of sixteen, wrote:

  June 22! How much that date means to us now! But then it just seemed an ordinary

  summer day... Before long, the House Committee was swarming with women, girls

  and children, who had come to join the civil defence teams, the anti-fire and anti-gas squads... By September the city was encircled. Food supplies from outside had

  stopped. The last evacuee trains had departed. The people of Leningrad tightened

  their belts. The streets began to bristle with barricades and anti-tank hedgehogs.

  Dugouts and firing points—a whole network of them—were springing up around

  the city.

  As in 1919, so now, the great question arose: "Shall Leningrad remain a Soviet city or not? " Leningrad was in danger. But its workers had risen like one man for its defence. Tanks were thundering down the streets. Everywhere men of the civil

  guard were joining up... A cold and terrible winter was approaching. Together with their bombs, enemy planes were dropping leaflets. They said they would raze

  Leningrad to the ground. They said we would all die of hunger. They thought they

  would frighten us, but they filled us with renewed strength... Leningrad did not let the enemy through its gates! The city was starving, but it lived and worked, and

  kept on sending to the front more of its sons and daughters. Though knocking at the knees with hunger, our workers went to work in their factories, with the air-raid sirens filling the air with their screams...

  This from another essay on how the school-children dug trenches while the Germans

  were approaching Leningrad:

  In August we worked for twenty-five days digging trenches. We were machine-

  gunned and some of us were killed, but we carried on, though we weren't used to

  this work. And the Germans were stopped by the trenches we had dug...

  Another girl of sixteen, Luba Tereshchenkova, described how work continued at the

  school even during the worst time of the blockade:

  In January and February terrible frost also joined in the blockade and lent Hitler a hand. It was never less than thirty degrees of frost! Our classes continued on the

  "Round the Stove" principle. But there were no reserved seats, and if you wanted a seat near the stove or under the stove pipe, you had to come early. The place facing the stove door was reserved for the teacher. You sat down and were suddenly seized by a wonderful feeling of well-being: the warmth penetrated through your skin,

  right into your bones; it made you all weak and languid; you just wanted to think of nothing, only to slumber and drink in the warmth. It was agony to stand up and go to the blackboard... At the blackboard it was so cold and dark, and your hand,

  imprisoned in its heavy glove, went all numb and rigid and refused to obey. The

  chalk kept falling out of your hand, and the lines were all crooked... By the time we reached the third lesson there was no more fuel left. The stove went cold and a

  horrid icy draught started blowing down the pipe. It became terribly cold. It was then that Vasya Pugin, with a puckish look on his face, could be seen slinking out and bringing in a few logs from Anna Ivanovna's emergency reserve; and a few

  minutes later, we could again hear the magic crackling of wood inside the stove...

  During the break nobody would jump up because nobody had any desire to go into

  the icy corridors.

  And this from another essay:

  The winter came, fierce and merciless. The water pipes froze, and there was no

  electric light, and the tram-cars stopped running. To get to school in time, I had to get up very early every morning, for I live out in the suburbs. It was particularly difficult to get to school after a blizzard, when all roads and paths are covered with snowdrifts. But I firmly decided to complete my school year... One day, after

  standing in a bread queue for six hours (I had to miss school that day, for I had received no bread for two days) I caught a cold and fell ill. Never had I felt so miserable as during those days. Not for physical reasons, but because I needed the moral support of my school-mates, their encouraging jokes.. .

  [Curious that in all these ultra-patriotic essays there was not a single mention of Stalin.]

  None of the children who continued to go to school died, but several of the teachers did.

  The last section of the Famine Scrapbook, introduced by a title page with a decorative funeral urn painted in purple watercolour, was written by Tikhomirov, the headmaster. It was a series of obituary notes of the teachers who were either killed in the war or had died of hunger. The assistant headmaster was "killed in action". Another was "killed at Kingisepp", in that terrible battle of Kingisepp where the Germans broke through towards Leningrad from Estonia. The maths teacher "died of hunger"; so did the teacher of geography. Comrade Nemirov, the teacher of literature, "was among the victims of the blockade", and Akimov, the history teacher, died of malnutrition and exhaustion despite a long rest in a sanatorium to which he was taken in January. Of another teacher

  Tikhomirov wrote: "He worked conscientiously until he realised he could no longer walk.

  He asked me for a few days' leave in the hope that his strength would return to him. He stayed at home, preparing his lessons for the second term. He went on reading books. So he spent the day of January 8. On January 9 he quietly passed away." What a human story was behind these simple words!

  I have described conditions in Leningrad as I found them in September 1943, when the city was still under frequent and often intense shell-fire. This shelling continued for the rest of the year, and it was not till January 1944 that the ordeal of Leningrad finally ended. During the previous weeks a large Russian armed force was transferred under

  cover of night to the "Oranienbaum bridgehead" on the south bank of the Gulf of Finland; and this force, under the command of General Fedyuninsky, struck out towards Ropsha, where it was to meet the troops of the Leningrad Front striking towards the south-west.

  During that first day of the Russian breakthrough no fewer than 500,000 shells were used to smash the German fortifications. About the same time, the Volkhov army group also came into motion, and, within a few days, the Germans were on the run, all the way to Pskov and Estonia. On January 27, 1944 the blockade officially ended.

  All the famous historical
palaces around Leningrad—Pavlovsk, Tsarskoie-Selo, Peterhof

  —were in ruins.

  Chapter VIII WHY LENINGRAD "TOOK IT"

  Why did Leningrad "take it"? A glib, easy and, on the face of it, quite justified argument is that, with all road and rail communications cut, the people of Leningrad had no

  alternative to sticking it out, and had to be "heroic", whether they wanted to or not. Had they had time to get out, it is also argued, they would have been on the run, just as the people of Moscow were on the run on October 16, 1941. But that is not really the point.

  What is remarkable, once the city was surrounded, was not the fact that the people "took it", but the way they took it.

  In his interesting study, The Siege of Leningrad, Mr Leon Goure suggests that a number of people in the city were in favour of surrendering it to the Germans and that, though not a majority, "the number of disaffected persons... appears to have been far from negligible".

  [Leon Goure, The Siege of Leningrad (Stanford, 1962), p. 304.]

  When I was in Leningrad I heard quite a few references to a German "fifth column"

  inside the city, and this is also mentioned in recent Soviet studies. But the evidence that more than a tiny minority wanted to surrender is very slender.

  Mr Goure himself recognises that "patriotism, local pride, growing resentment of the Germans and reluctance to betray the soldiers" had much to do with the "maintaining of discipline". At the same time he places, in my view, undue emphasis on "an ingrained habit of obedience to the authorities", "no prior experience of political freedom", the

  "Stalinist terror", and so on, and relies too much on the evidence of certain post-war refugees.

  [Ibid., pp. 304-6. Mr Harrison Salisbury, in The New York Times of May 10, 1962, takes the book to task on that score, recalling Hitler's directives to "erase St Petersburg from the face of the earth", adding that "we are not interested in preserving even a part of the population of this large city"—directives on the substance of which nobody in Leningrad could have had any serious doubts.]