The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  General Fedyuninsky, whose Fifty-fourth Army fought through the winter in the same operations, spoke of the experience in almost identical terms: “If you asked me what was the most difficult time I would without hesitation reply: The worst time of all for me was at Pogost in the winter of 1942. The four months of constant bloodletting and, worst of all, unsuccessful fighting in the forests and marshy regions between Mga and Tikhvin remain a terrible memory for me.”

  The Russian attack developed slowly. There could be no hope of surprising the Germans. The Nazis were strongly dug in, and a more vigorous commander, Colonel General von Kiichler, had replaced the aging von Leeb in early January. Just to move over the ground in the heavy snow required enormous expenditure of strength. Toward the end of January the Soviet Second Shock Army scored a small success, smashing through the main German defenses and capturing Myasny Bor in the direction of the Chudovo-Novgorod railroad.

  Feverish efforts were made to achieve success in the winter offensive. Moscow had done everything—except provide the needed men and arms. Unsatisfied with the pace at which Meretskov was moving, Stalin sent one of his police generals, L. Z. Mekhlis, to the Volkhov front on December 24. The task of Mekhlis was to chivy and hurry the operation. The Fifty-ninth and Second Shock armies, according to the schedule of the General Staff, were to be ready for the jump-off by December 25. Actually, only one division was in place.

  Delay followed delay. The date for the offensive was postponed to January 7, but by that time only five of the eight Fifty-ninth Army divisions had arrived and the Second Army was only half complete. There was no air support, and the Fifty-ninth Army had neither optical instruments nor means of communication with which to direct artillery fire. Meretskov sent an urgent telegram to Moscow, and Marshal N. N. Voronov appeared at Volkhov headquarters. The acid relations between police generals and regular army were shown in Mekhlis’ greeting to Marshal Voronov: “Well, now the chief criminal has arrived, the one who sent us artillery which can’t fire. Just watch how he tries to excuse himself.” Voronov was able to help a bit but not too much, and January 7 found Meretskov still short of artillery, reserve supplies, fuel, forage for the horses and almost every kind of matériel. Nonetheless, the preliminary attacks were launched with expectable results. The commanders were not able to direct their troops, the Germans easily contained the infantry assaults, the whole movement was a disaster. Meretskov asked Moscow to let him delay the development of the operation by three days. On January 10 Stalin and Marshal Vasilevsky talked with him by direct wire. They expressed the frank opinion that the operation would not be ready even by January 11 and that it would be better to put it off another two or three days. “There’s a Russian proverb,” Stalin said. “Haste makes waste. It will be the same with you: hurry to the attack and not prepare it and you will waste people.”

  Meretskov regarded this as a serious reprimand, but he noted (many years later) that from the beginning there had been ceaseless haste and demands from Moscow to get the action under way. The Stavka had insisted by telephone and urgent directives to hurry in every possible way. Mekhlis had been sent in for no other purpose than to keep the pressure on.

  Actually, the preparation should have taken at least fifteen to twenty days. But, of course, there was not a chance of getting that kind of time.

  There was another serious problem. The Leningrad operation was designed as part of a triple winter offensive which was supposed, simultaneously, to lift the Leningrad siege and crush Army Group Nord, destroy and encircle Army Group Center on the Moscow front and defeat the southern German armies, liberating the Donbas and Crimea.

  Meretskov, Fedyuninsky and the Leningrad commanders received a circular telegram from Stavka in Moscow dated January 10 which gave the aim of the operation as: “To drive them [the Germans] westward without pause, compelling them to exhaust their reserves even before spring, when we will have new and larger reserves and the Germans will not have large reserves, and thus secure the full defeat of the Hitler troops in 1942.”

  The task was far beyond Soviet capability. It represented almost as fatal a misreading of the situation as that which had possessed Stalin on the eve of the war.

  There was another problem. The general in chargé of the Second Shock Army, Lieutenant General G. G. Sokolov, was a police officer. He had previously been a Deputy Commissar of Internal Affairs. He had plunged into army affairs with great energy and aplomb, ready to promise anything. But he knew nothing about military matters and substituted cliches and dogma for military decisions. He had what Meretskov called “an original approach” to operational questions. Among the instructions which Sokolov issued to his troops were orders about when to eat (breakfast before dawn, dinner after sunset); the length of the marching pace (one arshin, a little less than a yard); the hours for marching (units of more than a company were not to march during the day; in general, all movements were to be made at night); the soldiers’ attitude toward cold (they were not to fear it; if their ears or hands froze, they were to rub them with snow).

  General Meretskov managed to get Sokolov removed on the eve of the offensive, replacing him with Lieutenant General N. K. Krykov.

  None of these measures helped the winter offensive. It bogged down. On January 17 Chief of Staff Marshal A. M. Vasilevsky warned Meretskov that the “situation in Leningrad is exceptionally serious and it is necessary to take all steps to advance as quickly as possible.”

  Marshal Vasilevsky’s words did not bring results. What was worse, in spite of repeated requests, Meretskov could not get the supplies he needed to feed his horses, fuel his trucks, provision his men and arm his guns. On January 28 General A. V. Khrulev, Deputy Commissar of Defense, arrived to try to speed up supplies.1 This helped a little but not enough. The Second Shock Army ground to a halt and finally had to go on the defensive. The Stavka showered down telegrams, Meretskov was chargéd with indecisive-ness and treading water. Meretskov complained in his turn about lack of tanks, planes and shells, shortages of troops, inability to give his men relief after the incredible tasks of fighting in the cold, wet, miserable morass.

  It was mid-February. Everyone was angry, depressed, blaming each other. Stalin sent Marshal Voroshilov to the Volkhov front to demand immediate action. Meretskov gathered his military council and offered a new plan, based on giving his men some rest, regrouping and bringing in reserves and new equipment, particularly artillery for the Second Shock Army. Voroshilov went from unit to unit trying to raise spirits. It did little good. The plain fact was that the men didn’t have the strength. They were to remember the winter as the worst they had ever spent. Losses were great, results almost nil.

  It was obvious in such circumstances that there would be no early response to the question on the lips of all Leningraders—"When will the blockade be lifted?"—and no early confirmation of the persisting rumors that the armies of Meretskov and Fedyuninsky were about to save the city.

  Party Secretary Zhdanov turned to such resources as he had. One was the Communist youth. Their ranks had been savagely depleted like those of the Party itself.2 Leningrad boasted 235,000 Komsomols in June, 1941. By January, 1942, only 48,000 remained. The rest had gone to the front, had been killed or transferred to urgent production tasks elsewhere. They were almost the only reserve of strength the city had.

  The Young Communists were organized into service detachments. Their task was to go from apartment to apartment, to help the living, if possible, and to remove the dead. The first Young Communist units went into action in December, but it was only in January that their work achieved an organized character.

  They themselves were little stronger than the rest of the Leningraders. A meeting was called at Smolny on January 30 by V. N. Ivanov, secretary of the Komsomol organization.

  “There were no streetcars,” one of those who attended recalled. “The meeting was called for noon. People started out at 8 A.M.”

  It was a long walk and they had to rest time and again.

/>   Ivanov told them: “We are being put to a severe test by the Party and the country. We look forward with confidence. Through the difficulties and deprivation which Leningrad is experiencing in connection with the blockade we can see our coming victory. For this we are fighting and will fight to the last drop of blood.”

  The sights which met the eyes of the youth brigades in the frozen and bleak flats of Leningrad were almost beyond the power of a Diirer or a Hogarth to depict.

  G. F. Badayev, secretary of the Moscow region of the Party, went to one frozen apartment. He heard the feeble cry of a child and turned his flashlight into a room. On a bed lay a dead woman, and beside her were two tiny children, hungry, dirty, frozen.

  “How can we permit this?” he asked rhetorically. “Why did no one look in here sooner?”

  It was a vain, pompous question.

  Vissarion Sayanov met a young woman named Anna Ivanovna Shakova at a children’s home. She had been wounded at the front and then took a job with a Komsomol brigade. One evening she went with a friend to an old house on Maly Prospekt. They entered a dark apartment and found a woman lying dead with an overcoat thrown over her body. On the bed there was a large bundle, wrapped in a tablecloth. Inside they found a nursing child, alive, whimpering and sucking on an empty nipple. They brought the baby to the nursery. No one in the apartment knew the child’s name, all the neighbors were dead, “I told them to write down my name,” Anna said. “Let him carry my name through the years.” Before the winter ended she had taken in two more babies. She had a family of three and was not yet married.

  In the great Kirov metallurgical plant there were about five thousand workers, still alive, still technically on the payroll, most of them living in the icy, shell-torn buildings, too weak to work, almost too weak to live.

  After the blockade was lifted one of the girls, Anna Vasileyeva, a chubby, red-cheeked youngster, told of her life. She was a “Putilov girl,” that is, her family for at least two generations had been workers in the Putilov, now the Kirov, plant. Her father and two brothers worked at the factory. The family lived in a house in a nearby suburb, close enough so they could walk to work.

  When the war started, Anna, only fifteen, began to work at Kirov, too. When the Nazis swept almost to the Kirov gates in September, 1941, Anna’s family had to abandon their house in the suburbs—it was in German-occupied territory. Then her father and one brother were killed by a German shell. The other brother went into the Red Army. Anna and her mother went to live in a flat in town. One day she came back from work to find her mother had been blinded by slivers of flying glass from a shell hit on a nearby apartment.

  By January no work was being done at Kirov. No one was able to work. There was no power, no heat, no light. Several of the stronger girls, Anna among them, made up a brigade. Each day one or two started from Kirov with a child’s sled. They visited three or four flats where their relatives lived—to see if they were alive, to remove any dead, to bring a little food, to light a fire or heat some water, whatever they could do. In late afternoon they would come back to the little room where their comrades huddled around a tin stove.

  “Here is the way it was,” she said. “The first thing you would do was to look around to see if everyone was there, if your friends were all alive.”

  It was the same each morning. When you awoke from your troubled, hungry, freezing sleep, you looked around the circle.

  “Then,” she said, “you’d notice someone sitting in a chair beside the stove. At first he would look all right. Then you’d look closer and see that he was sitting there dead. That was the way it was.”

  Anna Vasileyeva was seventeen. She had survived. No one else in her family had.

  Yelizaveta Sharypina visited a flat on the Nevsky where a worker named Pruzhan was supposed to live. He had failed to show up for work. She made her way along a dark corridor. The first door was padlocked. The next door would not open. Finally, she found, an unlatched door and entered a dark room. There was a cold stove in the center and two iron beds. A man lay with his face to the wall on one bed, a woman, feeble but able to talk, on the other. Pruzhan, she said, was dead. His wife had died a few days before him. A daughter was at the store getting the bread ration. She herself was not ill, only weak. She had lost her bread card. “Obviously it is the end,” she said quietly. Sharypina called a Young Communist team to see if the woman’s life could, by some means, be saved.

  At another apartment on Borodinsky Street Sharypina found the dying Stepanov family. The father had been out of work for three months. A few days before he seemed a bit better and sat by the window where a little sun came in. “Now it will be all right,” he said. “We will live.” A few moments later he toppled over dead. With the aid of a porter twelve-year-old Boris Stepanov had taken his father’s body to the morgue. His mother, cloaked in a heavy coat, lay on her bed and stared into space. She had not said a word since her husband died. On a second bed lay sixteen-year-old Volodya. He did not speak. He chewed.

  “What is he eating?” Madame Sharypina asked.

  “He is not eating. There is nothing in his mouth,” his brother Boris said. “He just chews and chews. He says he doesn’t want to eat.”

  Despite Sharypina’s efforts Boris and Volodya were dead within a few days. Only the shattered mother survived.

  One February day Sharypina was walking slowly along Zagorodny Pros-pekt when she saw a child with a stick in his hand, a piece of blanket wrapped about his head. The child darted into the next courtyard and started digging at a mound of frozen garbage.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. The child, who appeared to be about seven years old, turned a pair of suspicious eyes on her and replied that he was looking for something for his sister Lena to eat. The night before, he said, he had found some cabbage stalks. Very good. Of course, they were frozen. Lena had eaten them and had given him a piece, too.

  It was a typical Leningrad case—the father at the front, alive or dead no one knew, the mother long since taken to the hospital, alive or dead no one knew, the children living on frozen garbage heaps.

  A doctor named Milova was called to Apartment No. 67 at 11/13 Boro-vaya Ulitsa one January day.

  “The door to the apartment was open,” she reported. “I found the room I wanted and went in without knocking. My eyes met a frightful sight. A half-dark room. Frost on the walls. On the floor a frozen puddle. On a chair the corpse of a fourteen-year-old boy. In a child’s cradle the second corpse of a tiny child. On the bed the dead mistress of the flat, K. K. Vandel. Beside her, rubbing the dead woman’s breast with a towel, stood her oldest daughter Mikki. But life had gone, and it could not be brought back. In one day Mikki lost her mother, her son and her brother, all dead of hunger and cold. At the door, hardly able to stand from weakness, was her neighbor, Lizunova, looking without comprehension upon the scene. On the next day she died, too.”

  A teacher, A. N. Mironova, saved more than a hundred children in the winter of 1941–42. On January 28 she noted in her diary:

  To the 17th Line, House 38, Apartment No. 2 (on Vasilevsky Island) to get Yuri Stepanov, 9 years old. His mother was dead. The youngster slept day and night with his dead mother. (“How cold I got from mama,” he said.) Yuri didn’t want to come with me. He cried and shouted. A touching farewell with his mother (“Mama, what will happen to you without me?”).

  Another entry from Mironova’s January diary:

  Prospekt Musorgsky 68, Apartment 30. Took a girl, Shura Sokolova, born 1931. Father at the front. Mother dead. Body of mother in the kitchen. Little girl dirty, scabs on her hands. Found her in a pile of dirty linen under the mattress.

  V. N. Ivanov, secretary of the Komsomols, in a report on the winter of 1942 said, “I must tell you that nothing more terrible and difficult could have been possible. I worked under the weight of psychological trauma. I could not bear to see the people dropping around me. Human beings simply slipped away. They no longer could stand.”

  T
he Young Communists mustered 983 members for the service brigades, plus 500 to 600 additional young people enlisted in each region of the city. They visited 29,800 flats, provided medical aid to 8,450 persons and made daily visits to 10,350 starving persons—according to their official report. Another estimate puts the number of flats visited at 13,810 and the number of persons helped at 75,000.

  Death, in a measure, was beginning to modify Leningrad’s problems. The figures are not very accurate. All the Soviet authorities concede this. Probably 11,085 persons died in November of hunger. Nearly five times as many, 52,881, died in December. The figures for January and February are less precise. One of the most conservative authorities, A. V. Karasev, estimated deaths in January at 3,500 to 4,000 a day, or 108,500 to 124,000. Dmitri V. Pavlov, whose task it was to feed the survivors, puts the combined January-February death toll at 199,187. Pavlov’s total is probably too low. The overburdened Leningrad Funeral Trust handled 9,219 bodies in November, 27,463 in December. The figures for January and February are missing.

  Almost all these deaths were due to starvation-related diseases. By December dystrophy constituted 70 percent of the case load of clinics and hospitals and in January 85 percent. Most of these were men, and their death rate was about 85 percent. In February and March women constituted the majority of cases. One official report placed the death toll among those admitted to hospitals that winter at 30 to 35 percent. A more exact estimate places the dysentery death rate at 40.7 percent for the first quarter of 1942.

  The disease and death statistics have no parallel in modern history.3 Leningrad’s death rate in 1941 was 32 percent over 1940. But for the year 1942 it was fifteen times greater than for 1940. In prewar years the death rate in Leningrad hospitals was 6 to 8 percent. In the fourth quarter of 1941 it rose to 28 percent and in the first quarter of 1942 to 44.3 percent and, for the whole year of 1942, to 24.4 percent. The death rate of all diseases jumped astronomically—typhus from 4 percent to 60 percent, dysentery from 10 to 50 percent, stomach-intestinal diseases from 4.5 to 54.3 percent. All kinds of surgery became more dangerous, with the over-all death rate rising five times. The incidence of heart disease was estimated at 40 percent in blockade residents over forty years of age.