The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  Now the Germans began to try some tricks. They dropped screaming, whistling bombs. They dropped booby traps, sometimes in the form of children’s toys, fountain pens and cigarette lighters. And once some students named Mikhail Rubtsov, Konstantin Kruglov and Nadezhda Zabelina saw a big ball burst over the Narva Gates. It looked like a shower of leaflets, but when the youngsters reached the area, they found ruble notes scattered all over the ground together with ration cards. Did the trick work? It is hard to say. The authorities contended that all the counterfeit money and cards were collected and turned in.

  But Dmitri Pavlov, who controlled the city’s food supplies and had to deal with problems like those of forged ration cards, was deeply concerned.

  “Egoists and crooks,” Pavlov recalled, “tried by every means possible to obtain two, three or even more ration cards. For the sake of their stomachs they tried to obtain cards even if it cost the lives of their nearest and dearest.”

  The sharpers forged cards and worked rackets to get cards illegally or legally. They bribed house janitors to certify they were living in empty apartments. They applied for cards for dead relatives or imaginary persons. They stole cards. If the Germans dropped counterfeit cards in any numbers, chaos would ensue. The whole delicate rationing system would collapse. Steps would have to be taken quickly to thwart such tactics before the Nazis realized how vulnerable the system was.

  The police reported to the Leningrad Command that the Germans were making more and more efforts to infiltrate agents into the city. There was a steady increase in circulation of dangerous and frightening rumors, many of which could directly be traced to Nazi sources. A man named Koltsov was picked up for circulating Finnish anti-Soviet leaflets in a beer hall. He was summarily shot. There were scores of cases of pilfering and juggling of books in the food-distribution system, and the black market in food, kerosene and soap rapidly expanded.

  It was not easy to train citizens to stand fast and fight the frightening fires touched off by the Nazi incendiaries. People panicked at the sight of phosphorus bombs spreading rivers of fire over apartment roofs or inside factories. On September 11 four explosive bombs and hundreds of incendiaries fell on the great Northern Cable factory. In one shop a single fireman was trying to cope with raging fires while the workers huddled in terror against the wall. Finally, Party Secretary A. V. Kassirov came to the aid of the fireman and shamed the others into helping. The next day a group of workers applied for release from work. The factory had been badly damaged, windows blown out, shops riddled. One person had been killed and four injured. The factory director noted on the petition: “This is in the category of cowardice.”

  In these critical times there could be no sign of weakness. The poet Boris Likharev put it bluntly in the paper On Guard of the Fatherland: “We will be victorious at any price, whether we live or die—not one step backward. As for cowards and traitors—shoot them on the spot.”

  Special problems arose with the work battalions on fortifications. Many found themselves without food and shelter. Others were blasted out of their positions by Nazi bombing. Bewildered and frightened, many people left the construction sites and fled back into the city. Bands of Party agitators were sent to rally those who were branded deserters, panicmongers and whiners.

  Every evening now Editor P. V. Zolotukhin of Leningradskaya Pravda made his way from his editorial offices at No. 57 Fontanka to Smolny, there to consult with Party Secretary Zhdanov and the other chiefs about the leading editorial, the play to be given stories and the wording of announcements. Often it was 2 or 3 A.M. before he telephoned back to the editorial offices, telling the weary staff that the paper could go as made up or ordering complete changes.

  As times grew more tense, Zhdanov began to take on the task of writing or rewriting the principal editorials. He it was who wrote the editorial published September 16: “The enemy is at the gates . . . Each must firmly look the danger in the eye and declare that if today he does not fight bravely and selflessly in defense of the city then tomorrow he will lose his honor and freedom, his native home, and become a German slave.” And as the times grew even more dangerous, it was Zhdanov who penned a savage call: “Mercilessly exterminate the Fascist beasts!”2

  Entering Leningrad after several days in Kronstadt, playwright Shtein found a change in the streets. His papers were examined not just at the city limits. They were checked and rechecked every few blocks. There was a sentry post at every bridge, at important intersections, at the entrance of buildings. He saw workers’ patrols on the streets,, armed with rifles. They were rounding up those who could not prove their identity or occupation. Since the circle had begun to close around the city, the streets had been filled with wandering men in rumpled uniforms, some with insignia, some without. They were deserters, or malingerers, or just men who had lost their units. Some had been in the People’s Volunteers. Some had been encircled and had slipped through the German lines and into the city. They were demoralized. Their eyes wandered. Shtein had seen them huddled at the entrances to apartment houses, going back to their homes. He had seen them in the beer halls, shouldering up to the head of the queues, demanding to be waited on first, as “military men.”

  Now this human debris was being gathered up. Some were sent to the firing squads, some to construction battalions. Others were put back into units and took their stand on the lines of the city’s defenses. Military tribunals passed out the edicts—this man to be shot, this one to the front line, this to the barricades.

  It was not easy to hold those lines. B. Rozenman had been wounded and in mid-September was going back to the front to rejoin the 168th Rifles, the Bondarev division, one of the finest defending Leningrad. Division headquarters, he understood, were somewhere near Moskovskaya Slavyanka. Leningrad was being heavily bombed as he and several officers made their way forward toward Pushkin. They met fewer and fewer persons as they got closer to the front. Alongside the road were signs of fresh bombardment. German planes periodically appeared overhead. Suddenly they saw a crowd of soldiers, obviously in panic. At the same moment a solidly built officer in a sun-faded jacket took his place in the center of the road and, pointing an automatic at the mob, shouted, “Halt!”

  Air-raid barrage balloons over the Admiralty spire.

  Evacuees assembling at railroad station. (Sovfoto)

  Air-raid victims. Litcinv Prospekt. Leningrad. (Sovfoto)

  German shell hit on Leningrad apartment building.

  The Badayev warehouses, Leningrad’s chief food storehouse, destroyed by Nazi incendiary bombs.

  Drawing water from a hole in an ice-clad street. In the background, frozen streetcars are immobilized for the winter.

  The famous “bronze horseman” equestrian statue of Peter the Great, sandbagged for protection.

  Winter street. A woman pulls a sheet-wrapped corpse on a child’s sled.

  A woman draws a starvation-weakened man on a child’s sled.

  Leningrad in blockade. A woman listens to the radio, teapot on the brick stove, with only a candle for light. (Sovjoto)

  Coffins pile up outside Okhta Cemetery. Some dead are simply wrapped in rags or clothing.

  Corpses—one in sitting posture, one half covered with snow—beside the Summer Gardens fence.

  Tanya Savicheva, eleven-year-old Leningrad schoolgirl, and pages from her diary recording the death, one by one, of members of her family during the blockade winter and spring.

  The Road of Life, the ice road for supplies across Lake Ladoga. (Sovfoto)

  Girl traffic officer on the Ladoga ice road. (Sovfoto)

  Survivors of the starvation winter, above and right. (Sovfoto)

  Aleksei Lebedev, poet who died on a Baltic submarine operation.

  Olga Berggolts, Leningrad poet and diarist.

  Vera Inber, poet and diarist.

  General B. V. Bychevsky, chief of engineers, Leningrad front.

  Marshal L. A. Govorov, Leningrad commander, talking with Andrei Zhdanov, Leningrad Part
y chief.

  Vsevolod Vishnevsky, Leningrad correspondent, with winter-clad tommy gunners.

  The fortress of Oreshek at Shlisselburg, which held out seventeen months against the Germans. (Sovfoto)

  Reinforced-concrete gun emplacement, part of the Nazi siege system around Leningrad. (Sovfoto)

  Peterhof Palace, devastated by the Germans. (Sovfoto)

  Piskarevsky Cemetery, where nearly one million victims of the Leningrad siege lie buried in common graves. (Harrison E. Salisbury)

  The soldiers halted.

  “Where are you going, comrades?” the officer said. “Leningrad is behind us. Don’t sully the honor of the Soviet soldier.”

  The soldiers were silent. A husky youngster with a week’s stubble on his chin stepped out, cast an angry glance at the officer and said, “Go fight yourself. We’ve had enough. Come on, gang!”

  No one budged to follow him.

  “Turn back,” the officer warned.

  The youngster did not glance around. He strode forward with long steps. A shot rang out and he rolled to the ground.

  “Those with weapons go to the left, those without to the right,” the officer said crisply. Then he turned to Rozenman: “And you can help me.” Rozenman tried to protest that he had to join his unit.

  “Carry out the command,” the officer snapped. Then stepping closer he whispered, “There are no soldiers on the front line. It’s being held by artillerymen. Devil take you—can’t you understand?”

  Rozenman understood. He fought all day with the pick-up unit. At nightfall when the battle slackened, he went on to try to locate his own command.

  A. Veresov was fighting near Ligovo (Uritsk). He never could remember which day of the battle it was—possibly the fourth, maybe the fifth. A flood of refugees was streaming down the highway from Ligovo toward Leningrad. Children crying in their mothers’ arms. Women with glazed eyes, some with household goods strapped to their shoulders, dragging themselves along the broken road. And over the road shells fell. Methodically. Precise. The Germans had an artillery spotter in the Pishmach factory tower who through his binoculars could see the road as well as the palm of his hand. Soldiers dashed from their dugouts, grabbing youngsters and women, pulling them from the road, out of the line of fire. A herd of cattle, stirring up a cloud of dust, frightened by the flaming asphalt of the road (set afire by a shell), dashed out into a mined field. A fireman on his tower stuck to his post, which would totter in flames within the hour.

  A scene of fright and devastation.

  At the fork where the roads branched to Krasnoye Selo and Peterhof stood a sentry box. Officers halted the retreating soldiers—some in uniform, some without uniform, some with rifles, some without, all on the border of exhaustion. Among them appeared a sergeant in torn jacket and no cap, his hands muddy, his breeches wet to the knees. He stood on trembling legs and shouted, “They’ve conquered everything. The Germans will be here in a minute. I saw them myself. On motorcycles . . . Don’t shoot. If we don’t shoot, they won’t hurt us. They’ll go on past. . . .”

  A crowd of troops surrounded the sergeant. The captain of the sentry post, a short man in the uniform of the Border Guards, quickly advanced. “Put yourself in order, Sergeant.”

  The sergeant’s hands automatically went up to his open collar, but he dropped them and shouted, “What do you mean, order? Where is there any order? The Germans are at the Kirov factory. . . . And you talk about . .. order. We must save ourselves. Do you understand? Do you understand, now?”

  The captain with a swift, silent movement ripped the triangles from the sergeant’s epaulets, stepped back two paces and, not changing his voice, said to the soldiers, “Seize him.”

  The soldiers didn’t understand. “But he’s one of ours—”

  “No,” snapped the captain. “He is not one of ours. Carry out the order.”

  A moment later the soldiers had taken the sergeant aside. A single shot rang out. The captain paid no heed to the sound of the shot. He was too busy directing the retreating troops to collection points.

  Late one evening Sayanov appeared at Smolny. He was delivering the draft of a new leaflet he had written, addressed to the German troops.

  The long corridors were lighted by flickering electric bulbs, and for once Smolny was quiet and few people were scurrying about. Sayanov was talking with the Commandant of Smolny, Grishin, a man who had been there since Lenin’s time, when a Major General came out of the office of the Chief of Staff. He knew Sayanov slightly.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Home,” said Sayanov.

  The General invited Sayanov to come with him “for a drive.” He was in a great hurry. The two raced down the big wide staircase and out into the raw darkness of the September night.

  Not until they had got into the car and were crossing the Liteiny Bridge did the General tell Sayanov where they were going—up to a “very dangerous place” in the front. A regiment was being assembled at the Kirov factory which was to follow the General up to the lines. They headed out into the suburbs. Soon they arrived at the Kirov factory, where they arranged for the troops to follow, and drove out the Peterhof Chaussée. An air alert sounded and searchlights scanned the near heavens. The AA guns barked. They heard planes overhead. The General’s destination was Fin-skoye Koirovo, about twelve miles outside town. Somewhere near Kipen a sentry halted them. He was a Kirov worker, a member of a special battalion which had been sent to halt deserters and retreating soldiers and direct them to new units. The General talked a bit with the worker.

  “What do you think?” he said. “Will we hold the city?” The worker said he thought the city would hold out. He remembered fighting for it in 1919. Then, he said, his commissar told him, “We can’t retreat any farther. Next stop is Petrograd.” “It’s the same thing today,” he said. The General went on through the night. At Finskoye Koirovo he met the commander, conferred with him for half an hour, and then returned to the car.

  “I told him what was necessary,” said the General. “Next stop Petrograd.”

  The car turned back and hummed down the Peterhof Chaussée. Sayanov was silent. So was the General. They met not one car, not one truck. They saw no one on the road. Not far from the Kirov factory the General halted to phone Smolny. He came back in five minutes. “Hurry,” said the General. The car went a short distance, then halted. There was something wrong with the carburetor.

  “Hurry up,” the General said. “There’s not a minute to lose. The Germans already have arrived at Ligovo.”

  “But our car passed through Ligovo not ten minutes ago,” said the chauffeur.

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” snapped the General. “It just means that we were the last car to come through Ligovo to Leningrad.”

  The General turned to Sayanov.

  “Remember this night,” he said. “Remember it. The most terrible battle for the city is now beginning.”

  “Will it be a siege?” Sayanov asked.

  “Yes,” said the General, “it will. It will be a siege.”

  The nine hundred days were beginning.

  * * *

  1 This problem persisted throughout the war. On January 24, 1944, Party propaganda agitators reporting on the mood of workers in the Paris Commune factory of Leningrad said there were three principal questions asked them by workers: Was there any Soviet populace remaining in areas being freed by the Red Army? What were Soviet military losses? Why didn’t Leningradskaya Pravda publish maps showing the advances of the Red Army? (poo, p. 212.)

  2 Zhdanov’s call, published in Leningradskaya Pravda, October 30, 1941, declared: “Only by mercilessly exterminating the Fascist bastards can we save our Motherland, save our wives and mothers, and save our children.”

  30 ♦ A Hard Nut to Crack

  DURING THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF MAY 8, 1887, THE sound of carpenters’ hammers could be heard in the courtyard of the ancient citadel of Oreshek. Oreshek was Peter the Great’s “hard l
ittle nut,” the fortress on an island at the point where the Neva flowed out of Lake Ladoga, the key to the water routes of Novgorod the Great, the ancient trade pathway from the land of the Varangians to the Black Sea and beyond.

  Long before Moscow was more than a forest crossroads, a strongpoint had grown up at Oreshek. Who controlled Oreshek controlled the trade lines to the Orient—the rich flow of honey, of spices, of furs, of slaves, of precious gems, of perfume, of silks and of flax. As early as the fourteenth century the city of Novgorod the Great built a powerful Kremlin, a fortress, on Oreshek. For a hundred years before Peter, Oreshek had been held by the Swedes. After Peter wrested it back he rechristened it Shlisselburg, the “key city,” and so it was now known. But two hundred years ago Shlisselburg had lost its role as a key fortress, and its grim casements had long been used as a state prison. Here Peter had incarcerated his former wife, Yevdotiya. Here Czarina Anna Ivanovna imprisoned her State Counselor Dmitri Golitsyn and the noble Dolgoruki brothers. Here Nicholas I sent half a dozen Decembrists, the brilliant but naive young officers whose revolt in 1824 in Senate Square had shaken the foundations of autocratic Russia.