The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  Fortunately, Meretskov’s troops pushed forward savagely through the snow that drifted five and six feet deep and day by day fought closer to Tikhvin despite temperatures of 20 and 30 below zero. His drive was assisted by Fedyuninsky’s Fifty-fourth Army, advancing from the north with the aid of KV 60-ton tanks which, incredibly, had been brought over the ice of Lake Ladoga. Their turrets had been demounted to reduce their weight.4

  The final attack was marked by one oddity. The Germans announced over the radio that General Fedyuninsky had committed suicide. Party Secretary Zhdanov telephoned Fedyuninsky and wished him long years of life, and the next day a VC call came in from his wife in Sverdlovsk.

  Mrs. Fedyuninsky hadn’t heard about the rumor of her husband’s suicide. But she was delighted to talk with him.

  On December 8 Meretskov’s Fourth Army fought into Tikhvin. By December 9 the city was firmly in Soviet hands again. It had been held by the Germans precisely one month. Its recapture on the seventieth day of the siege was the first real sign that the lines around Leningrad could be held, that the second ring could not be fastened about the northern capital, that the Nazi dream of striking to the east to Vologda and cutting off Moscow from the rear, from Siberia, from America, would be thwarted.

  It coincided with a directive signed by Hitler December 8, No. 59, in which he ordered Army Group Nord to strengthen its control of the railroad and highway from Tikhvin and Volkhov to Kolchanovo in order to secure the possibility of joining hands with the Finns in Karelia.

  Tikhvin was a real victory. Whether it would save Leningrad and its millions of people, now entering the skeletal world of starvation, of life without heat, without light, without transport, no one knew for certain.

  On December 9 the Leningrad streetcar system, except for a few freight lines carrying ammunition, ceased operation. The ninety cars on the eight remaining routes halted. From now on Leningrad would walk with weak and tired feet on icy, drifted streets. “There is almost no electricity in the city,” Director A. K. Kozlovsky of the Northern Cable factory wrote in his diary December 2. “Today there was none in our factory.”

  Pavel Luknitsky returned to Leningrad from the front on the night of December 8. He sat at his desk, writing in his diary at 11:30 P.M. on December 11:

  A dark night. In this room as in all the others in this house on Shchors Street and almost all the houses in Leningrad there is frost and unbroken darkness. Yes . . . Tikhvin has been liberated in the nick of time. Last night “changes in tram routes” were announced. But the trams have almost all ceased to run. Leningradskaya Fravda tonight came out in two pages instead of four. There is much new destruction. Snow drifts in the streets. People with exhausted faces walk slowly—dark shadows on the streets. And more and more coffins, roughly made, are pulled on sleds, by the stumbling, slipping, weak relatives of the dead, Worst of all—the darkness . . . hunger and cold and darkness ...

  Leningrad had won another victory. Would she survive it?

  The Germans didn’t think so. Colonel General Haider, the diarist of the Wehrmacht, jotted down under date of December 13: “The Commander of the army group is inclined to the view—after the failure of all attempts by the enemy to liquidate our foothold on the Neva—that we may expect the complete starvation of Leningrad.”

  * * *

  1 In the last six months of 1941 Leningrad produced 713 tanks, 480 armored cars, 58 armored trains, 2,405 field guns, 648 antitank guns, 10,000 machine guns, 3,000,000 shells, more than 80,000 bombs and rockets {Leningrad v VOV, p. 186). The October production quota (not fulfilled) was 1,425,000 shells, 800,000 mines (Karasev, op. cit., p. 158). Karasev estimated that more than 1,000 guns were shipped by air from Leningrad for use by Moscow in the December, 1941, offensive (ibid., p. 133). From October 31 to December 31, 11,614 Kirov plant workers, 6,000 workers of the Izhorsk factory and 8,590 wounded officers and men were evacuated from Leningrad by air (ibid.). As early as June three heavy naval batteries, including one from Battery K at Kronstadt, had been shipped to the Vyazma front. (Kuznetsov, Oktyabr, No. 8, August, 1968, p. 176.)

  2 From September 13 to December 31, 6,000 tons of high-priority freight, including 4,325 tons of food and 1,660 tons of arms and munitions, were flown into Leningrad (N.Z., p. 256). From October 21 to December 31, 3,357 tons of high-calorie food were flown in. Some 64 planes had been assigned to the route, but only 20 or 22 were normally in condition to fly. They brought in 40 to 50 tons a day. (Karasev, op. cit., pp. 132, 133.)

  3 Kulik served in Spain and was known there as “General No No” because the only Spanish he knew was “No.” He used it on every occasion, appropriate or inappropriate. On his return to Moscow he was promoted and occupied a rank equivalent to that of marshal at the outbreak of war. He fell into encirclement on the Central Front but managed to make his way out and was sent south as a Stavka representative. He was reduced in rank for gross errors of conduct, but, in the words of Admiral Kuznetsov, this had little effect on him. (Nakanune, p. 244.) Voronov says he was demoted to major general for “failure to fulfill responsible assignments for the High Command in the first days of the war.” (Voronov, op. cit., p. 354.)

  4 This detail, reported by Fedyuninsky himself, is probably in error. The KV’s actually seem to have moved over the ice in January to assist a later offensive. (A. Saparov, Doroga Zhizni, p. 146.)

  38 ♦ The Road of Life

  ON THE EVENING OF NOVEMBER 19 CAPTAIN MIKHAIL Murov and his transport regiment were working on the defense lines at Pulkovo Heights, just outside Leningrad, installing new barbed wire on the approaches to the pillboxes.

  Night falls by 3 P.M. in Leningrad in November, and it was long past sunset when Murov got orders to bring his drivers immediately to the Leningrad freight station for transportation to some unknown destination. Murov was puzzled. He didn’t know where the railroad could take his troops in the blockaded city, but he began to move them into Leningrad. Most were People’s Volunteers, and he permitted those who had families in the city to dash home for a moment on the way to the station.

  The troops marched through the wind-swept streets. Hardly a soul was visible. There was no sound but the distant rattle of guns, no light, and even the moon was in a dark phase. The men tramped through the shadows of ruined buildings, here a gaping window, there a sagging roof. Under their tough felt boots was the crunch of broken glass. Trolleycars and buses stood motionless in the snow like frozen dinosaurs. Leningrad seemed an abandoned city. Some men managed to see their families and snatch a brief, often despairing moment with them. Some did not.

  At the freight station they joined units already assembled and were loaded aboard heatless cars in which cardboard and plywood panels replaced broken windows. The train jerked to a start and crawled through the darkness. It was morning before the troops debarked at the bomb-cratered fishing village of Kokkorevo on the frozen shores of Lake Ladoga. There an officer put Murov in chargé of a sledge battalion, part of a column which was about to move across Ladoga and bring back to Leningrad its first supplies by ice road.

  The plan for the ice road had taken form as early as mid-October. The Leningrad Military Council ordered Lieutenant General F. N. Lagunov, chief of rear services, to begin preparations at that time after the success of the Nazi offensive under General Schmidt began to make it less and less likely that the circle around the city could be broken in the immediate future.

  Lagunov was already engaged in improving the primitive Ladoga port facilities to increase the tonnage being carried across the capricious lake by the special Ladoga shipping flotilla. He had some twenty thousand workers building docks and warehouses at Osinovets and Kokkorevo on the Leningrad side and at Kobona, Lavrovo, Novaya Ladoga and Voibokalo on the eastern shore.

  No one knew for certain whether an ice road could be built. Ladoga, or Lake Nevo as it was called in ancient times, was the biggest in Europe, although little known outside of Russia—125 miles long and nearly 80 miles across at its widest point. Its greatest
depth was more than 700 feet, but in the southern part between Shlisselburg and Volkhov it was shallow, ranging from 60 to 150 feet deep.

  Storms often swept the lake, particularly in autumn, when they might endure six or seven days. Lagunov could get little information about ice conditions. An observer who had spent thirty years tending a lighthouse on Sukho Island reported that he usually was cut off from the shore from the twentieth of October to the twentieth of January by alternately freezing and melting ice. The ice shifted and moved so often that it was too hazardous to attempt a crossing.

  One Leningrad scientist worked out a formula on ice formation on the lake. At 23 degrees above zero 4 inches of ice would form in 64 hours; at 14 above 4 inches would form in 34 hours; at 5 above zero 4 inches in 23 hours. A foot of ice would be laid down in 24 days at 23 above. It would take 8 days to create a foot of ice at 5 above.

  Four inches of ice could support a horse without a load. A horse pulling a sledge with a ton of freight required 7 inches of ice. A truck carrying a ton of freight needed 8 inches of ice.

  Obviously, 8 inches of ice would be the required minimum for mass movement of supplies.

  The inadequate statistics indicated that ice formation seldom began in the Shlisselburg gulf before November 19 and often not until early January. Once the ice formed, however, it usually reached a thickness of 3 to 5 feet —strong enough for almost any purpose.

  The Russians had a good deal of experience in operating over ice. There had been ice offensives during the winter war with Finland, including an attack on Vyborg and a thirty-mile march over an ice road in the Ukhta area. Earlier, during the Civil War, trains had been operated on tracks laid across the Volga near Sviyazhsk, a crossing of about a mile. There had been an ice railroad across a corner of Lake Baikal when the Trans-Siberian was being built and one across the Kola River near Murmansk during World War I.

  But none of these projects had the complexity—or the urgency—of the Ladoga route.

  Ladoga had many special characteristics. For example, the level of the water varied enormously with the wind, and it might rise or fall from as much as a foot and a half to nearly four feet within a few hours—even in winter.

  The projected route would be twenty to thirty miles long. It was linked at the Leningrad end to an old and poorly equipped branch railroad which in prewar days had been used for excursion traffic and little more. This line was thirty-five miles long and connected with five separate Leningrad depots.

  The Leningrad Military Council on November 3 ordered that the road be put into operation over the lake as soon as the ice was hard enough. If the Ladoga ice road held a high priority before the fall of Tikhvin on November 8, it became vital after that date. There was no other possibility of providing Leningrad with the supplies for survival. To be sure, a few tons per day could be flown in, but this was not nearly enough for the defense forces, and the civilian population of more than 2,500,000 would die within a few weeks.

  Nothing could be done while the lake was still unfrozen. But the fall of Tikhvin meant that a new land road must be built to Ladoga. The order for this route was issued by the Leningrad Military Council on November 8. It was to run from Novaya Ladoga through a series of unknown villages— Karpino, Yamskoye, Novinka, Yeremina Gora, Shugozero, Nikulskoye, Lakhta, Veliki Dvor and Serebryanskaya—to Zaborye. These peasant hamlets were so tiny they showed only on local maps. The road was to be finished within fifteen days, and the goal was to carry a minimum of 2,000 tons a day.1

  This route led for 220 miles along the old Yaroslavl tract, one of the ancient forest routes of old Russia. It wound through tamarack swamps, cranberry or klukva bogs, lakes and dense timber. Much of the region was hardly inhabited; much was sheer wilderness. The notion that it might be possible to maintain a flow of supplies along so tortuous a road in the dead of Russian winter with its exhausting toll on trucks, sledges and men was wildly optimistic. Yet there was no alternative. Build the road or die.

  Peasants, collective farmers, Red Army rear troops, anyone available was put to work on the highway. Meantime, aerial reconnaissance was carried out from November 8 to 10 to study ice formation, which, early as it was for Ladoga, had already begun. The fliers reported ice starting to form throughout the southern part of the lake except for one large open field of water that cut right across the projected route. On the fifteenth a strong north wind set in. Observers reported that ice was strengthening rapidly throughout the southern area.

  November 17 was gray, dark and bitter cold. The sun did not rise until well after 9 A.M. An hour earlier two reconnaissance groups had taken off across the young ice. One, headed by A. N. Stafeyev, tested the ice in the vicinity of Osinovets and Kokkorevo, the two ports on the Leningrad side. The other, led by Lieutenant Leonid N. Sokolov and including thirty men from the 88th Construction Battalion, moved out to check the route from Kokkorevo to the island of Zelenets and on to Kobona on the eastern shore. Each man wore white camouflage clothing and carried his own weapons and food. Each was equipped with ice tools, including axes and alpenstocks. They were roped together and some wore life belts. It was a hard struggle against the wind in the grim November day. They marked the route every one hundred yards with flagged stakes, to facilitate their return and to sight the future ice road. They found the ice averaging four inches thick—just about the minimum to support their movement.

  The detachment had nearly reached mid-point when they encountered the first open water. They gingerly circled to the north and finally, after sloshing across a half-submerged ice field, they came out on firm ice again. One man, N. I. Astakhov, fell through, but was rescued. Hours went by. It was very slow going. On the shore Major A. S. Mozhayev waited nervously for their report. Finally Smolny called him. A report on the reconnaissance had been promised by 6 P.M. Where was it? Major Mozhayev gloomily said he was still waiting.

  It was long after midnight before the reconnaissance group reached Kobona and 4 A.M. before Mozhayev was able to advise Party Secretary Zhdanov at Smolny that he had gotten a message from Sokolov, sent as they were nearing Kobona after a long detour to the north, expressing confidence that a route could be opened.

  Major Mozhayev was unable to restrain himself. He mounted a gray mare and rode out across the ice, following the staked route of the advance party, and within four hours had arrived in Kobona, to the astonishment of his scouts. The ice was five to ten inches thick now, and the great polynia or open lake was rapidly shrinking. The temperature had dropped to about 8 degrees above zero.

  On the nineteenth General Lagunov himself arrived at Kokkorevo. He took a local fisherman as a guide and moved off on the ice in a light M-i scout car, following the flagged route. The car was not equipped for ice conditions; the wheels slipped and Lagunov had to travel slowly, paying close heed to cracks and ice trenches. But by late afternoon he was back in Leningrad and reporting in Smolny to Party Secretary Zhdanov that within a few days regular transport on the route would be possible. That evening after a sharp dispute between Zhdanov and Lagunov a decision was approved by the Leningrad Military Council to open the road immediately.

  It was this decision which had brought the orders, transferring Captain Murov and his men from the Pulkovo Heights to the Ladoga shores. There beside the frozen lake Murov inspected the supply team with some apprehension. Half the men had had no previous experience with horses. Among them were scientists and even artists. As for the horses, they were rags and bones, so weak they could hardly pull the empty sleighs. Murov’s only hope was that on the other side of the lake, at Kobona, there might be oats or hay. Of course, it was not certain that the horses would make it across the lake. Many had not been winter-shod. Fortunately, a box of cleats was found in one of the sledges and some of the horses were shod.

  As the caravan waited to take off, an officer, probably a political commissar, came up to Murov and told him that the ration had been reduced again in Leningrad. It had been cut that day, the twentieth, to 250 grams of bread a day
for workers and 125 grams for all other individuals. The ration for front-line troops had been cut to 600 grams of bread from 800 on November 8. Now it was cut again to 500. All other troops were cut to 300 grams, about half a loaf.

  “There are supplies in the city for two more days,” the commissar said. “After that there is nothing more. The ice is very young and not very strong. But we can’t wait. Each hour is dear.”

  A few moments later the detachment started over the gray ice. There were 350 drivers. Intervals of thirty to thirty-five yards separated each sledge, and the column stretched over a distance of possibly five miles. Near the shore stood General Lagunov, watching the take-off. He commented to Murov that his men were too lightly dressed. It was true. The temperature stood at zero. The men did not have heavy snow jackets. But nothing could be done about it. The column moved on. At its head rode Sokolov on a thin but lively white horse. The lake spread out endless and drab. Soon the horses were covered with hoarfrost.

  The column moved steadily until it reached Kilometer 9, where a wide crevasse appeared. After an hour’s search the scouts directed the sledges to the south. Occasionally the ice cracked under the horses. The sun, never high on the horizon, was slipping under again by the time the column reached the island of Zelenets, where a halt was called for two hours’ rest. A ration of 800 grams of bread—nearly a week’s supply for an ordinary Leningrader—was doled out along with tea with sugar. But there was no forage. Some drivers shared their bread with the horses. It was midevening before the convoy reached Kobona. There, as the sledges were loaded with flour and food concentrates, more food was supplied the drivers, including hardtack, sugar, macaroni and cottonseed-oil cakes. But again there was nothing for the horses. Murov was in despair. This could be fatal. He did not think the animals would survive 20 to 30 miles back over the ice with loaded sledges. He remembered a trick of Civil War cavalry days and scraped back the snow, uncovering old grass for the horses. Many drivers gave their cottonseed-oil cakes to the horses.