The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

Vera Ketlinskaya made a speech. Soviet troops had broken two of the three circles around the city—the Tikhvin circle and the Voibokalo circle. Only Mga remained. That would be broken by New Year’s Day. The boost in the ration was just the first swallow of spring. Enormous quantities of supplies were being concentrated within sixty miles of Leningrad—50,000 tons of cereals and macaroni, 42,000 tons of flour, 300 tons of meat. And much, much more. All of this would flood into the city once Mga was taken.

  The writers, sitting like gray ghosts around the empty table, applauded weakly. Hope there was for life.

  Hope there was. Zhdanov possessed it. A mass of supplies actually was being hurried to the perimeter. Anastas A. Mikoyan had arranged to move under the most urgent priorities 50,000 tons of flour and 12,000 tons of other food to Vologda, Tikhvin and the key distribution points for the Ladoga ice road. The Railroad Commissariat had been enlisted. Mikoyan and Zhdanov knew that Leningrad had less than five days’ supply of flour on hand. The trains pounded north through the night from Zainsk, Rybinsk, Saratov. On the cars were scrawled in great letters “Prodovolstviye dlya Leningrad” (“Food for Leningrad”). The supplies poured into the ruined station and sidings of Tikhvin. They were loaded without cease upon trucks, which lumbered over the rutted roads north to Ladoga, out on the ice and on to the Leningrad shore.

  The offensive of General I. I. Fedyuninsky, the drive of the Leningrad troops toward Tosno, was going so well that Zhdanov was confident that Mga would be liberated for the New Year’s holiday.

  To give the starving, freezing people hope, to help them to survive to the New Year and the recapture of Mga, hundreds of meetings were held throughout the city—in the ice-festooned factories (hardly a plant was operating now—on December 19, 184 plants had been put on a one-, two-or three-day week); in the windowless government offices; in the apartment houses where burned small burzhuiki—makeshift stoves. The word was passed on to all: by January 1 Leningrad will be liberated; the circle will be broken; Mga will be retaken.

  But Mga was not retaken. Even before New Year’s Day it was suddenly plain to Zhdanov that his Christmas optimism had been ill-founded. The terrible truth was that the Soviet troops had neither the physical strength nor the munitions to dislodge the Nazis.

  The Red Army men were weak and sick. A report as of January 10 showed 45 percent of the units of the Leningrad front and 63 percent of Fifty-fifth Army units understrength. There were 32 divisions on the front. Of these, 14 were only up to 30 percent of strength. Some infantry regiments were only at 17 to 21 percent of authorized manpower.

  Nor was there any way to bolster their ranks. During the whole winter of 1941–42 the Leningrad front grew by only 25,000. From October 1 to May 1, 1942, about 17,000 or 18,000 men were sent to the front from rear and office assignments, 6,000 were obtained from construction units and 30,277 sailors were provided from the Baltic Fleet. Women were mobilized, largely for rear and ARP duties, but by June, 1942, there were 9,000 in the front lines. In the last three months of 1941 about 70,000 men were sent to the front by Leningrad—29,567 in October, 28,249 m November and 12,804 in December. In the ensuing six months Leningrad was able to mobilize 30,000 men for active Red Army duty, but only 8,000 of these were provided from December to March.

  These replacements hardly matched the Red Army losses. From October, 1941, to April, 1942, 353,424 troops reported sick or wounded, an average of 50,000 a month or 1,700 a day. Half of these were ill, largely of dystrophy and other starvation ailments. More than 62,000 troops came down with dystrophy from November, 1941, to the end of spring. The number ill with scurvy reached 20,000 in April, 1942.3 Deaths due to starvation diseases were 12,416, nearly 20 percent of troops on sick call, in the winter of 1942.

  Men were too weak to fight or work. Yuri Loman, commissar for a truck unit, recalled that he had seen four men trying to load a mutton carcass, weighing possibly forty pounds. They did not have the strength to lift it. A. P. Lebedeva, head of the factory committee at the Krasnaya Treugolnik rubber plant, was at her desk when a middle-aged, gaunt man tottered in. She recognized him as a cutter in the shop. “Give me a bowl of soup,” he said. “If you’ll do that, I’ll be back at work tomorrow.” Lebedeva had no food, but she poured him a mug of hot water. The worker drank it at a gulp, not realizing it was water. “Thanks for the soup, Lebedeva,” he said. “Now, I’ll go into the shop and start working.”

  Zhdanov’s gamble was not paying off. Leningrad, incredibly, had slipped closer to utter disaster. The Military Council met in emergency session December 29. The previous day the ice road had delivered only 622 tons of freight, of which 462.2 tons were food. This was about half the essential minimum. To the horror of Zhdanov, General Khozin, Kuznetsov and Pavlov, deliveries dropped to 602 tons on December 29, of which only 431.9 tons were food.

  The road of life might, it seemed, become the road of death.

  On January 1, the 123rd day of the siege, the critical tabulation, known only to Zhdanov, Kuznetsov, Khozin, Pavlov and three others, showed that Leningrad’s cupboard was bare. There was in the reserves: 980 tons of flour, 3 tons of grain, 82 tons of soy flour, 334 tons of cereals and macaroni, 624 tons of meat and sausage, 24 tons of fish, 16 tons of butter, 187 tons of vegetable oil, 102 tons of fat and 337 tons of sugar.

  That was flour for less than two days. Never had Leningrad been so close to starvation.

  The days were beginning of which Kuznetsov later was to say: “There was a time when we gave bread to no one. Not because we did not want to give it out but because we had none.”

  It was in these days that Filipp Sapozhnikov, a hard-working, bad-luck truck driver on the Ladoga ice road returned to his barracks, late once more as he had been almost every day with his truckload of flour. He found a notice posted on the bulletin board:

  “Driver Sapozhnikov: Yesterday, thanks to you, 5,000 Leningrad women and children got no bread ration.”4

  It was true. The margin was that thin. One late truck, and thousands of Leningraders waited in vain before the bread shop and scores died.

  The ice road was not working. In fact, it was critically close to failure. So was the sleazy one-track Irinovsky railroad which connected Ladoga with Leningrad. Under the impact of heavy traffic, lack of fuel, failing equipment, bad management, the weakness, illness and death of workers— from cold and starvation—shipments slowed and slowed again. By January 1 the branch was paralyzed. Not one train a day was getting through.

  Director Kolpakov had started December with 57 of his 252 locomotives in service, of which 27 were switch engines. By the end of the month there were days when he had no more than 28 locomotives operating. He was getting only 92 hours’ daily work from the engines—many of them were operating less than three hours a day. His staff was dissolving. From December, 1941, to February, 1942, he had 10,938 men and women on sick leave. Of these, 2,346 died, including 1,200 in January. The City Council ordered 5,000 persons to help keep the railroad going by clearing away the snowdrifts. Not more than 400 or 500 were strong enough to report for duty, and many were too weak to lift a shovel. The railroad had been attacked 356 times by Nazi bombers, and much of the signal equipment, switches, sidings and terminals was badly damaged or out of use.

  There was no more coal, and the city water supply which serviced the boilers had frozen. Machinists with picks and crowbars pried coal dust out of the frozen soil. There was plenty of dirt mixed with the dust, but this “fuel” was used to fire up the boilers. The average haul per locomotive in December was nineteen miles.

  Once more the fate of Leningrad was in balance. Once more Zhdanov took strong measures. The railroad director was removed on chargés of confusion and failure to organize his work. Probably he was shot.5 Extra rations—125 grams of bread—were ordered for the railroad workers. The last few tons of coal in the city reserves were turned over. Woodcutting teams were sent to nearby forests to cut cordwood for the engines. Three top regional Party secretaries kept the pressure on. Even so,
only 219 cars were loaded in January—a fraction of what was needed.

  The great New Year’s celebration which Zhdanov had promised Leningrad was not to be. True, some chauffeurs brought special gift parcels to Leningrad. Chauffeur Maksim Tverdokhleb was making his third trip over Ladoga on the day before New Year’s. His normal load was thirty barrels of flour.

  There was a sign in the loading shed: “Comrade Drivers! If you carry 200 pounds of flour above plan, you will fulfill the bread ration for thousands of Leningraders.”

  Tverdokhleb asked for his extra load. He was given a dozen wooden crates. He was surprised at their lightness. He thought they must be military supplies. Then he smelled a familiar but remarkable smell—tangerines! The cases were a gift from Georgia for the Leningrad children.

  Zhdanov took desperate action. He put the Ladoga route under the iron command of Major General A. M. Shilov with I. V. Shikin, an experienced army political worker who had been prewar head of the big Gorky auto factory Party organization, as his chief aide. They were ordered to bring deliveries up to 1,200 tons a day and by any means necessary. Seven hundred Young Communists were sent to the ice road. Traffic control posts were established every 200 or 300 yards. Antiaircraft batteries guarded each kilometer of the route. The 7th Air Corps and the remaining fighters of the Baltic Fleet were assigned to ward off Nazi strafing planes. The short new Tikhvin-Volkhov-Voibokalo connection was put into use (at 5 A.M., January 1, 1942).

  The temperature on the ice road ranged between 20 below zero and 40 below zero. The wind pressed endlessly from the north. The ice was so solid that KV-60 tanks now could be—and were—moved to Fedyunin-sky’s embattled army. But men froze to death in the cold, and trucks ground to a halt.

  On January 5 Zhdanov addressed another appeal to the men of the ice road. He cast his message in fateful language. The road continues to work badly—very badly. It brings to Leningrad not more than one-third the freight needed for survival even on the scantiest level of existence.

  “The supply of Leningrad and the front hangs by a thread,” Zhdanov said. “The people and the troops are suffering unbelievable hardships.

  “If the situation is quickly to be corrected, if the needs of Leningrad and the front are to be met, it all depends on you workers of the auto road —and on you only.”

  There was nothing more Zhdanov or the Party or the Leningrad Military Command could do. Now it depended upon the workers of the ice road.

  Dulled, frozen, weak, often unable to keep to their feet, the people of Leningrad knew that survival hung in the balance. But they did not know by what a slender thread. They lived on hope, nourished by the December 25 ration increase, by the belief that Mga would be taken. They believed in the ice road, and it was at this time they first began to call it “the Road of Life.”

  Vera Inber was in a queue before a bakery one day. An old woman corrected a remark by her neighbor. “This is not black bread,” the old woman said. “This is rye bread. It is Ladoga bread. It is the whitest of the white. It’s holy bread, that’s what.” The old woman crossed herself and kissed the rough black loaf.

  In her heatless flat Vera Inber fashioned the incident into a few lines for the poem with which she warmed herself in those arctic days, “Pulkovo Meridian.” There were many in Leningrad who echoed the sentiment of the old woman. The bread was holy. They did not know that each coarse slice they ate might be their last.

  “Never,” wrote the authors of Leningrad’s official history,

  had Leningrad lived through such tragic days. . . . Rarely did smoke show in the factory chimneys. . . . The trams had halted and thousands of people made their way on foot through the deep drifts of the squares and the boulevards. ... In the dark flats those who were not working warmed themselves for an hour or so before their burzhuiki and slept in their coats and scarfs, covered with their warmest things. . . .

  In the evening the city sank into impenetrable darkness. Only the occasional flicker of fires and the red flash of exploding artillery shells lighted the gloom of the vast factories and apartment blocks. The great organism of the city was almost without life, and hunger more and more strongly made itself known.

  Leningrad was dying.

  * * *

  1 Pavlov, op. cit., 3rd edition, p. 135; Saparov, op. cit., p. 43; Kharitonov, Voyenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 11, November, 1966, p. 120. There is controversy as to the date the order for the road to Zaborye was issued. One account says the order was not approved until November 24 and that it was to be finished by November 30. (F. Lagunov, Voyenno-lstoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 12, December, 1964, p. 95.)

  2 In the opinion of Dmitri V. Pavlov the Zaborye road played no substantial role in supplying Leningrad. (Personal communication, April 30, 1968.)

  3 O. F. Suvenirov, in V tor ay a Mirovaya Voina, Vol. II. Moscow, 1966, pp. 159-166. Dmitri V. Pavlov mistakenly asserts that “no scurvy occurred during the whole of the war among Red Army troops.” (Pavlov, op. cit., 3rd edition, p. 103.)

  4 One calculation was that each large truck carried 16,000 rations (Kharitonov, op, cit.,p. 37).

  5 Kolpakov was publicly excoriated by Leningrad’s Mayor, Peter Popkov, January 13. (A. Dymshits, Fodvig Leningrada, Moscow, 1960, p. 288.)

  39 ♦ The City of Death

  ONE LATE NOVEMBER NIGHT A MIDDLE-AGED MAN, WORN and tired, in officer’s uniform, heavy wool greatcoat, fur collar and fur hat, walked out of the Smolny grounds, past the sandbagged pillboxes, showed his pass to the tommy gunners and turned into empty Tverskaya Ulitsa.

  It was, he recalled later, like a scene out of Dante—the wastes of drifted snow, the thin rays of the moon, almost obscured by scudding clouds, and a silence so deep that each fall of his boots, each metallic squeak of leather on frozen snow, echoed in his ears.

  He was weary, and when the wind hit him, it stabbed into his lungs. Snow sifted down on his fur hat and shoulders, and his feet seemed heavier and heavier. The procession of squares and boulevards turned into a desert of ice in which he was the only living being. He saw no homes, no people. There was no sound but that of the wind, of his boots and of his heavy breathing.

  The city slowly, majestically, was freezing into death as the poet, Dmitri Grigorovich, envisaged: “. . . the winter twilight of Petersburg sinking into the black of night . . . and he alone . . . far, far from all, in the deep shadows, the snowy emptiness and the swirling wind.”

  Presently he came to the bridge to the Summer Gardens and crossed over. He could not always be certain that he was not suffering hallucinations, but he thought he passed a woman, wearing a black cloak and black mask as though going to a masquerade. He realized in a moment that the mask was just the woolen face cloth with which so many Leningraders now protected themselves from the cold and wind.

  On a bench in the drifted park he saw a couple, a man and woman, huddled together, resting, it seemed, from a long walk. He started toward them and nearly plunged into a darkly outlined hole—an excavation. No. A shell hole. He kept wondering about the two people sitting on the park bench. They seemed to be asleep. Perhaps he, too, should sit for a moment. As he went on, he glimpsed a man in the distance carrying a burden. The man walked a bit, then rested, walked a bit and rested. The burden on his shoulder seemed to sparkle in the shifting light. As the man came nearer, it was clear that he was carrying a body. A woman, no doubt, possibly his daughter.

  When he looked again, the figure with the burden had vanished as though it had never been there. A feeling of terror gripped the man, and he found himself reaching for his pistol and drawing it from the holster. He could not have told why. Presently he shuddered and walked on through the world of shadow, of cold, of snow and of wind.

  The walker was Nikolai Tikhonov, born in Leningrad, one of Russia’s best-known writers. He had not been in his native city when war broke out and had returned only in October as Leningrad began to descend into the white hell of starvation.

  Tikhonov was living now at Smolny on the second floo
r in room No. 139. He shared these quarters with Vissarion Sayanov, Aleksandr Prokofyev and Boris Likharev, all of them poets.

  Sometimes, they spent the night in room No. 139, reciting poems, dividing their tobacco, sharing their rations, pacing the corridors and arguing. As Boris Likharev wrote:

  In the nights of the blockade,

  How long it was to dawn!

  We divided the tobacco We got on the ration,

  And at midnight in the corridors

  Of Smolny strolled the poets

  Under the rumble of artillery,

  Writing proclamations to the troops.

  Sometimes they gathered in the flat where Sayanov first heard the news of war and looked out to see the white sails of boats on the blue Neva. There they now huddled about a smoky makeshift stove, burning legs from the kitchen table, listening to the beat of the radio’s metronome, which continued when no program was being broadcast, smoking “Golden Autumn” cigarettes (made of dried tree leaves), drinking hot tea or hot water, reading poetry and arguing about the war. Sometimes the talk and argument went on until dawn.

  Other nights they gathered at Tikhonov’s flat on the Petrograd side near the Tuchkov Bridge or at Prokofyev’s apartment, also on the Petrograd side, near the Bourse Bridge. Wherever they met it was cold and dark. One late November morning Tikhonov returned to Smolny and told his comrades in room No. 139, “Last night I wrote a poem which touches the limits of frankness.”

  This was Tikhonov’s great war poem, “Kirov Is with Us,” a poem which his friend Prokofyev felt was minted from new metal: “In Leningrad’s nights of iron to the city came Kirov. . . .” It was a poem evoking the spirit of the Leningrad leader whose assassination in 1934 had touched off Stalin’s most savage purge. It was a work, deeply inspirational, deeply evocative, deeply patriotic. It caught the spirit of the great city as it struggled for its life. Whether it struck a note which was likely to please Stalin was not so clear. But in the agony of Leningrad Tikhonov’s “Kirov Is with Us” became a legend.