The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  It was not the first time the Germans had called on the women of Leningrad to wear their white dresses. In the terrible days of August when thousands worked on the fortifications outside the city the Nazi broadcasts had told them to wear white dresses—so the bombers could see and avoid attacking them. Hundreds of gullible babushkas put white scarves over their heads, white shawls over their shoulders, and were machine-gunned in the trenches, beautiful targets for low-flying Junkers.

  The Leningrad Command was certain the Nazis planned a special observance on November 7. They now had a crack bomber echelon assigned to attack Leningrad, the Hindenburg Escadrille. In an effort to immobilize the German air arm over the November 7 holiday, the small Soviet Stormovik force carried out spoiling attacks on the nearby Nazi airdromes October 30 and again November 6. A night fighter patrol was set up over the city. On the night of November 4 there was a spectacular encounter. A young Soviet pilot named Aleksei Sevastyanov rammed his plane into a German Heinkel-i 1 bomber, which fell with a tremendous explosion in the Tauride Palace gardens in the center of the city. Both pilots came down by parachute. The Nazi flier was seized by a street crowd and almost lynched.

  This did not weaken German determination to mark the November holiday in a special way. On the evening of November 6, as the radio was broadcasting Moscow’s traditional ceremonial, the air-raid sirens sounded.

  Vsevolod Vishnevsky and Anatoly Tarasenkov made their way through the barrage to the apartment of the mother of Orest Tsekhnovitser, the Dostoyevsky scholar who had been lost in the Tallinn disaster. The mother had sent Vishnevsky a letter, begging to know the fate of her son. Neither Vishnevsky nor Tarasenkov had ever met the mother. They found her in the typical flat of a Leningrad intelligent—book-lined, crowded with heavy furniture, cold and dark. The mother was gray but spirited. Tsekhnovitser’s sister was there, old, worn and ugly. They insisted on hearing the whole tragic story. Then the mother told Vishnevsky that Tsekhnovitser’s apartment had been commandeered by a police sergeant with the connivance of the building superintendent. Tsekhnovitser’s valuable books had been sold. The women had been unable to get the police to oust the usurpers.

  Vishnevsky carefully jotted down the details—the name of the police official (he was attachéd to the 35th Police Station), the address of the apartment, the superintendent’s name—and promised to do what he could. A month later the policeman was given a seven-year term, the superintendent five years. Vishnevsky laconically noted in his diary: “Justice!”

  The two correspondents left the apartment low in spirits. The air raid was still going on.

  At Smolny the Leningrad High Command sat in the bomb shelter under the main building. Here they did much of their work. Here, in a common dormitory, slept most of the top generals and Party chiefs.

  Now they were listening to the radio transmission of the Moscow ceremonial meeting which, they knew, was being held in the great Mayakov-sky Square station of the Moscow subway, one hundred feet below ground, safe from interruption by Nazi bombers. The reception was very bad.

  Marshal Voronov telephoned Moscow and spoke with General N. D. Yakovlev, chief of the Artillery Administration, who had just come back from the Mayakovsky Square meeting.

  “There’s big news,” Yakovlev shouted. The connection was so poor Voronov couldn’t understand what the news was. He asked Yakovlev to spell it out by letters. Yakovlev spelled “P-A-R-A-D-E.” Finally, Voronov got it. The traditional parade in Red Square would be held tomorrow, regardless of the war, regardless of the Nazi drive on Moscow, regardless of air attacks.

  Voronov told Zhdanov the news. Zhdanov didn’t believe it.

  “They’re just joking with you,” the Party chief said. Then, he, too, called Moscow. It was true. Somehow it made Leningrad’s troubles a bit easier to bear. And they were heavy. The Nazi air attack had not ceased. In a print shop, located in one of the old chambers of the Peter and Paul Fortress, workers of the newspaper On Guard of the Fatherland had been listening to the Moscow broadcast. A heavy bomb smashed through the ancient structure, killing thirteen of the fourteen men in the shop. The fourteenth man fled from the chamber, mad.

  At the Finland freight station Ivan Kanashin was working with a large group of Young Communists to clear the freight jam. This was the station where food and supplies from Lake Ladoga arrived in Leningrad. It was also the collection point for refugees being sent out of the city via the Ladoga steamers. That night a crowd of women, children and elderly persons jammed the station awaiting a train to take them out of Leningrad, out of the iron circle of hunger, cold, fear and danger.

  The evening started badly. A railroad bridge near Kushelevka was hit by a bomb, and movement of trains in and out of the station was halted while the damage was repaired. The jam increased.

  A little later the air-raid sirens sounded. Around the station was a heavy concentration of antiaircraft guns. They began to bark. Then a blinding light appeared in the sky. The Nazis had dropped enormous flares on parachutes, which made the whole area lighter than day. Women and children huddled closer in terror. The bombs began to fall.

  These were not ordinary high explosives. These were heavier than anything the Germans had used on Leningrad before—naval magnetic mines, weighing a ton or more, with a diameter of nine or ten feet, attachéd to parachutes. Many were delayed-action weapons. The bomb disposal crews had no experience with these weapons. They did not know that if they attacked them with wrenches and metal hammers they were apt to set them off.

  The heavy bombs smashed into the train yards, hurling loaded trains from the rails, crushing cars already filled with women and children. Then the Germans began to toss incendiary bombs into the smoking jumble. Kanashin was in a car which stood next to a huge boiler. The boiler blew up and knocked over the car. Only the heavy steel structure saved Kanashin and his fellow workers from being crushed. The raid went on all night. In the morning the freight station was strewn with the corpses of women and children. There were enormous bomb holes everywhere. The cars were twisted masses of metal. Two trainloads of heavily wounded had been in the station. Now there was nothing but formless wreckage, piled high with bodies.

  Suddenly Kanashin heard a roar of voices. He saw a crowd of women approaching. They had in their hands a young Nazi flier who had been shot down during the night. They brought him up to the mountain of bodies which lay where the trains of the heavily wounded had been obliterated. “Do you see what you did, you murderer?” they shouted. “Do you see?”

  The next day Luknitsky was returning to Leningrad from the front in Karelia. It was early morning, still dark. All night he had ridden in the unheated car, filled with silent people. They were unable to enter the Finland Station. The train halted two or three hundred yards away. The station lay in ruins, the platforms smashed. Passengers picked their way through a tiny service entrance. Tired and cold, with a heavy pack on his back, Luknitsky made his way into the dismal deserted streets. He had to walk from the Kirov Bridge all the way home. Streetcar No. 30 was not running because a huge delayed-action bomb still lay in Wolf Street.

  On the night of November 6 submarine L-3 navigated without pilot, buoys or lights from Kronstadt through the Sea Canal and up the Neva into Leningrad. It was supposed to take up station at the Lieutenant Schmidt embankment but couldn’t get through the ice above the Institute of Mines. It dropped anchor there and some crew members went ashore through driving snow to see their families in Leningrad. German planes were overhead and fires swirled up in the city. Aboard the submarine the temperature was 12 degrees above freezing. The steward laid a white cloth on the mess table and produced some hot cocoa. The doctor found some wine in his supplies, and the submariners celebrated the holiday with a little gaiety. They were among the few.

  Sergei Yezersky, a writer on Leningradskaya Pravda, jotted down his impressions of that night:

  Midnight. The city is quiet and empty. The great streets and squares are dead. No lights. Only darkness. A cold wind wh
ips the snow into little whirlwinds. The sound of artillery. Low clouds reflect the shelling. Nearby an explosion. The Germans are shelling the city. At the intersections and the bridges—patrols. They challenge sternly: “Halt! Who goes there?”

  There was no celebration of the November 7 holiday. No parades. No review in Palace Square. No great meeting at Smolny or the Tauride Palace. A few red flags in the streets, on the Winter Palace and hung from windows. No banners proclaiming the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The street radios blared out readings from Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol stories—tales of the heroic siege of the defenders of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Vishnevsky, ever on the search for something to raise morale, thought the reading was marvelous. Zhdanov did not speak. There were speeches on the radio by Mayor Popkov, the Leningrad front commander Lieutenant General M. S. Khozin, the writer Nikolai Tikhonov and a few others. Leningradskaya Pravda set the tone with its editorial: “We will be cold—but we will survive; we will be hungry—but we will tighten our belts; it will be hard—but we will hold out; we will hold out—until we win.” Nikolai Akimov gave Leningrad its only holiday premiere. He presented Gladkov’s Stepchildren of Glory, a patriotic play about the war of 1812 at the Theater of Comedy. The cold, dark theater was half filled.

  Cold and dark . . . those were the words most often used to describe Leningrad on the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Revolution. Sayanov walked down the Nevsky one early November day. Dusk had fallen. The wind hurried the people along and swung the signs above the shops, whirling the snow up in clouds, in and out of the doorways. It whistled through the drainpipes. The people, dark and black, muffled in their winter clothes, hastened along. They did not halt. They did not speak. Not far away shells were falling. No one paid heed. They struggled across the Neva bridges, past the granite embankments. Already there was ice on the river where the warships stood and here and there a steaming hole beside the shore. People had begun to bring water to their homes, where the pipes had frozen.

  It was a gray, granite city, and the wind was king. Sometimes people found strange messages in their postboxes. Sheets of paper painfully initialed: “Only God can save Leningrad. Pray to Heaven. The Time of the Apocalypse has come. Christ is now in the peaks of the Caucasus.” There were Old Believers and Molokans, survivors of the sects of the forests, still in Leningrad, and this was their message to their fellow Russians.

  Time of the Apocalypse, indeed ...

  On November 8 the German 39th Motorized Corps under General Schmidt captured Tikhvin, forty miles east of Volkhov, and severed the rail connection between the Moscow mainland and the Ladoga supply route. On that day Hitler spoke at Munich. He said: “Leningrad’s hands are in the air. It falls sooner or later. No one can free it. No one can break the ring. Leningrad is doomed to die of famine.”

  It was true—or almost true. Leningrad had not surrendered, but it was doomed. Brass bands played over the German radio. Nazi commentators in broadcasts directed to Leningrad said over and over again: “Leningrad will be compelled to surrender without the blood of German soldiers being shed.”

  So it seemed. How could the city be fed? There were now panic and disarray in Leningrad. The news of Tikhvin’s fall spread like the fierce wind on the Nevsky from person to person. The press, of course, said nothing. What food was left in the city? Very little—much less than the Leningraders knew. But seven men did know. They added up the total on November 9: flour for 7 days, cereals for 8, fats for 14, sugar for 22. No meat, not a ton in the reserves. On the other side of Lake Ladoga, now so stormy, so ice-filled that boats could hardly break their way across, there were 17 days’ supply of flour, 10 days’ of cereals, 3 days’ of fats and 9 days’ of meat.

  Supply trains could get no closer to Leningrad than the tiny way station of Zaborye, no miles from Volkhov. From Zaborye to Ladoga not even a forest road connected the 220 miles. Could trucks struggle through that distance even if a road could be built? How long would it take? Would not the city starve first?

  The answers to these questions were terrifying.

  But only seven men in Leningrad knew how terrifying, Pavlov first among them.

  There was no time to lose if the city was to be saved—if the city could be saved.

  Emergency orders ...

  In Leningrad an immediate cut in military rations was instituted. The troops had been getting 800 grams of bread a day, plus hot soup and stew. Front-line troops were cut to 600 grams of bread and 125 grams of meat. Rear units got 400 grams of bread and 50 of meat.

  To cut civilian rations further, Pavlov knew, would only doom the whole city to more rapid starvation. Civilians could not maintain themselves as it was. The hope was that the ice would quickly freeze on Lake Ladoga and food could be brought across the lake. The forecast was for lower temperatures.

  Zhdanov and the Leningrad Defense Council gambled. They decided to hold the civilian ration at its present level. If the ice froze, it could be maintained. Each day their first concern was the thermometer. The temperature dropped, but the lake did not freeze. Five days passed. Supplies were near exhaustion. There was no alternative.

  On November 13 the city’s rations were cut again—to 300 grams (about ⅔ of a pound) of bread daily for factory workers. Everyone else was cut to 150 grams.

  That reduced the daily consumption of flour to 622 tons. But Pavlov knew this level could be maintained for only a few days. He waited. He waited for the ice. It did not freeze, it was still thin. By November 20, time—and flour—were running out. Again the ration was cut—brutally: to 250 grams for factory workers, 125 (two slices) for everyone else. Front-line troops got 500 grams, rear echelons 300.

  That was the day that Director Zolotukhin of Leningradskaya Fravda came to Sergei Yezersky and asked him to write the editorial which brought the terrible news to Leningrad.

  “To write the lead editorial,” he recalled, “was always an honor. But what a difficult task this time!”

  He went to his table in the section of the newspaper’s cellar which was occupied by the literary department. It was a crowded corner, neither light nor dark, neither cold nor warm. The workers slept on couches, and if there wasn’t room, they slept on the desks. There was always water on the concrete floor and they walked on wooden planking.

  His editorial began:

  Bolsheviks never have kept anything from the people. They always tell the truth, harsh as it may be. So long as the blockade continues it is not possible to expect any improvement in the food situation. We must reduce the norms of rations in order to hold out as long as the enemy is not pushed back, as long as the circle of blockade is not broken. Difficult? Yes, difficult. But there is no choice. And this everyone must understand. . . .

  The new norms brought daily consumption of flour down to 510 tons. Pavlov was now feeding something like 2,500,000 people on 30 carloads of flour a day.

  It was incredible. He had cut the daily use of flour by about 75 percent.

  Here are the figures:

  Beginning of blockade to September 11 2,100 tons

  September n-September 16 1,300

  September 16-October 1 1,100

  October 1-October 26 1,000

  October 26-November 1 880

  November 1-November 13 735

  November 13-November 20 622

  November 20-December 25 510

  These rations doomed thousands to their deaths. By one estimate the cut doomed one-half the population of the city. Zhdanov knew this. So did Pavlov. They saw no alternative.

  Zhdanov called in the leaders of the city’s Young Communists. On these younger people would rest the main shock and burden of trying to pull the city through the tragedy which was unfolding.

  “Factories are beginning to close down,” he said. “There is no electricity, no water, no food. The fall of Tikhvin has put us into a second ring of encirclement. The task of tasks is to organize the life of the workers—to give them inspiration, courage, firmness in the fac
e of all difficulties. This is your task.”

  On November 13 the bread formula had been changed again. Henceforth it was to contain 25 percent “edible” cellulose. Three hundred people were mobilized to collect “edible” pine and fir bark. Each region of the city was ordered to produce two to two-and-a-half tons of “edible” sawdust per day.

  Terror began to live with people. Vera Inber and her husband were walking across Leo Tolstoy Square. There had been two air raids, and now the Germans were shelling the area. It was evening and the sidewalk was icy. Just outside a bakery they heard in the dusk a quavering voice: “Dearie . . . angel . . . help me.”

  It was an old woman who had fallen in the dark. Overhead the planes roared, the guns barked. She was alone. They helped her to her feet and started to go on. The old woman spoke again, “Darlings. I’ve lost my bread card. Do help me. I can’t find it without you.”

  To her horror Vera Inber heard herself saying, “Find it yourself. We can’t help.”

  But her husband, saying nothing, hunted on the icy ground and found the old woman’s card. Then he and Vera Inber hurried down Petropavlovsk Street, and she wondered what had come over her.

  To lose a ration card meant almost certain death. The niece of a friend of Luknitsky’s was in a store when someone snatched her card and that of her mother. They were left without food until the end of the month. Luknitsky’s friend gave them her card and tried to live on the watery soup of her hospital lunchroom. When he upbraided her, she angrily replied, “It’s one thing when a grownup is hungry and another when it’s a child.”

  In Yevgeniya Vasyutina’s communal apartment her friend Zina’s little daughter cried and cried. She was hungry. On the market you could trade 100 grams of sugar for a pound of cottonseed meal or a kilo of bread for a half-liter of vodka or a tin stove. Cats were beginning to get scarce. So were crows and sparrows. On November 26 Yelena Skryabina heard that 3,000 persons a day were dying in the city. That day, completely unexpectedly, an unknown Red Army man appeared at her door and handed her a pail of sauerkraut. It was manna from heaven.