The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  In these conditions the number of mouths to be fed in Leningrad dropped radically, day by day. But they were still far greater than the resources available. The total of Leningrad residents for January—calculated on the basis of ration cards issued—was 2,282,000. The first-quarter figure is given as 2,116,000. The number of persons holding workers’ food cards was about 800,000 (this meant 350 grams of bread daily after December 25). The number holding dependents’ cards (200 grams after December 25) was at least 700,000. Children and nonworker employees also got 200 grams a day. It was in this category (which had received only 125 grams of bread daily from November 21 to December 25) that the heaviest death toll occurred.

  It was obvious to Zhdanov that people on these rations could not survive. To try to save at least some elements of the population he ordered on December 27 the opening of what were called statsionari, convalescent centers, in which slightly better food would be given together with minimum nursing attention. These were designed to save such elite personnel as could be saved. In reality many persons arrived at the convalescent stations so ill and weak they promptly died. By January 9 it was estimated that about 9,000 persons were being thus treated. That day Zhdanov ordered a vast expansion of the statsionari, and on January 13 the city authorities authorized an increase in beds to 16,450.

  One of the principal convalescent stations was at the Astoria Hotel, where 200 beds were set up, largely for scientists, writers, intelligentsia.

  Nikolai Markevich, a Red Fleet correspondent, took a room at the Astoria January 30. He wrote: “The hotel is dead. Like the whole city there is neither water nor light. In the dark corridors rarely appears a figure, lighting his way with a ‘bat,’ a hand-generator flashlight or a simple match. The rooms are cold, the temperature not rising above 40 degrees. Writing these lines my hand is almost frozen.”

  The statsionar was just a drop in the bucket, as was evidenced by an appeal directed to the Leningrad Front Council on January 16 by the Writers Union:

  The situation of the Leningrad writers and their families has become extraordinarily critical. Recently 12 writers have starved to death. In hospitals now are more than 15 writers and many more are awaiting places. The widow of the writer Yevgeny Panfilov who died at the front has died of starvation in spite of our efforts to save her (our possibilities are very limited). She leaves three children. In the last few days we had to recall urgently from the front the poet, Ilya Avramenko, because of the critical situation of his wife and newborn child. In the families of writers there is a very heavy death toll. Suffice to say that in the family of the major Soviet poet, Nikolai Tikhonov, working now in the writing group of the Leningrad front, six persons have died. In the Writers’ House at present lie a number of starving people who cannot walk and whom we do not have the strength to help.

  The total of statsionari opened was 109, and 63,740 persons were helped by them in one way or another.

  There was one slowly brightening spot. The Ladoga ice road, at long last, was beginning to work better. The urgent measures to improve the rail link from the lake to Leningrad had begun to take effect, and on January 11 the State Defense Committee ordered a rail line built from Voibokalo to the ice road. By February 10, thanks to a military construction crew, the link from Voibokalo to Kobona and Kosa was finished and the Ladoga truck haul was shortened by twenty miles.

  In the first ten days of January the ice road delivered 10,300 tons of freight to Leningrad. In the second ten days the total more than doubled to 21,000 tons. For the first time, on January 18 the ice road teams exceeded their quota. For the first time since the start of the war, food was flowing into Leningrad faster than it was being eaten—in part because of better deliveries, in part because of the grievous decimation of the population.

  Dmitri V. Pavlov, the food chief, breathed a bit easier. On January 20 he had nearly three weeks’ food supplies in sight, either on hand in Leningrad, en route over the lake or at depots awaiting delivery. His chart showed these tonnages:

  Flour Cereals Meat Fats Sugar

  On hand in Leningrad 2,106 326 243 94 226

  At West Ladoga warehouse 2,553 690 855 130 740

  En route across Lagoda 1,020 210 220 108 90

  At Voibokalo-Zhikharevo 6,196 846 1,347 360 608

  Totals 11,875 2, 072 2, 665 692 1,664

  Days’ supply at existing consumption rate 21 9 20 9 13

  To be sure, he had only three or four days’ supply of flour actually in Leningrad. But he could see daylight ahead. On January 24 he raised the rations for the second time—to 400 grams of bread daily for workers, 300 for ordinary employees, and 250 for dependents and children. On February 11 he raised rations again—to 500 grams for workers, 400 for employees and 300 for dependents and children.

  These steps were taken against the background of a major decision by Zhdanov and the State Defense Committee: to evacuate from Leningrad over the ice road at least one-quarter of the remaining population—500,000 persons. The official order was issued January 22, and Aleksei Kosygin, the future Premier of the Soviet Union, was placed in chargé of the task.4

  Actually, the Leningrad front had ordered the evacuation of residents via the ice road as early as December 6 and had set a quota of 5,000 persons per day to be reached by December 20. But only 105,000 persons had been evacuated from Leningrad from August, 1941, to January 22, 1942, of which only 36,738 were native Leningraders—the others being refugees from the Baltic states.

  Conditions on the ice road were so chaotic in December and early January that most persons who left the city had to make it on their own. Thousands died on the ice. From Kobona to Syasstroi throughout December and early January could be seen wrecked and abandoned cars and trucks in which elderly weak persons and feeble infants had frozen to death. There were no facilities for housing or feeding evacuees. The evacuation commission was so badly organized that hundreds of persons waited at evacuation points for days and then returned home. The evacuees often perished. The director of the Second Manual Training School tried to take his youngsters out of the city. They were confined to a frigid barracks at Ladoga for ten days, and the director eventually returned the survivors to Leningrad.

  Under these conditions it was estimated that 36,118 persons had been evacuated via the Ladoga ice road up to January 22.

  Now, it was hoped, all this could be changed. An echelon of several hundred buses was brought up from Moscow and stationed at Voibokalo. Evacuees were taken first to the Finland Station. There they were to be given a hot meal and 500 grams of bread. They were supposed to receive a kilo of bread when they took their places in the unheated train for transport to the Ladoga base at Borisova Griva. There they were placed in buses or open trucks and driven across the lake to Zhikharevo, Lavrovo and Kobona for entrainment to rear evacuation points. It was not supposed to take more than a couple of hours to cross Ladoga. There were warming points and first-aid stations at frequent intervals.

  In reality, of course, it was many winter weeks before minimum conditions were met. The evacuees were so weak that it took hours to load them. An echelon arriving at Borisova Griva on January 23 took a day and a half to load, the people were so feeble. Not many survived the ordeal. But they could not have survived in Leningrad either.5

  The death roll grew: the author of fantastic fiction, A. R. Belyayev, the poet A. P. Kraisky, the author of the novel Hunger (dealing with the Petrograd famine in the Civil War), S. A. Semenov, and the children’s writer Ye. Ya. Danko. In all, forty-five writers perished. The losses in the Academy of Science included the antiquities specialist, S. A. Zhebelev; the Semitics specialist, P. K. Kokovtsov; the historians, B. L. Bugayevsky and P. S. Sadikov; 36 members of the Mining Institute, 8 from the Chemical Technical Institute, 7 from the Railroad Transportation Institute; 136 architects;6 the artists, A. I. Savinov, V. Z. Zverev, N. A. Tyrsa, A. A. Uspensky, I. Ya. Bilibin (in all, 83 of the 225 artists in Leningrad); the composers, V. K. Tomilin, N. P. Fomin, B. G. Golts, Professor P. N. S
heffer and many others; 9 artists of the Maly Opera Theater and 29 of the Mariinsky; 44 workers of the Russian Museum (to February 13); 130 of the 560 Hermitage workers who remained in the city; hundreds of physicians, teachers, engineers, professors and students.

  The list of brilliant, able, scholarly and artistic men and women who died with their beloved city ran into the thousands. Many of them were men like the distinguished physiologist, Aieksei A. Ukhtomsky. Ukhtomsky was sixty-six years old when the war broke out. He had just completed editing his lectures on the nervous system for the University of Leningrad publishing house and was planning in the 1941–42 academic year to offer a new course in physiology. With the onset of war he put aside these occupations and began to organize special research on traumatic shock and other problems connected with the war. His laboratory and institute were packed up and shipped to Elabuga in the Tatar Republic and Saratov, but he himself refused to go. His lifelong associate, Nadezhda Ivanovna Bobrovskaya, was critically ill; she had suffered a brain hemorrhage on June 6 and he was caring for her in his apartment. Moreover, his own health was extremely bad. He was suffering from chronic hypertension and was developing slight gangrene in his feet. Also, although few knew it, the first signs of cancer of the esophagus had appeared.

  Nonetheless, he refused to be evacuated with his laboratory. Nadezhda Bobrovskaya died September 25, but Ukhtomsky still refused to go. There is not a single notation in his notebooks of any of his physical problems, although by October he could hardly swallow.

  An old friend, A. I. Kolotilov, asked him why he did not leave Leningrad.

  “I remain in Leningrad,” he said, “in order to finish my work. I haven’t long to live. I will die here. It’s too late to leave.”

  The university organized a meeting on December 2 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Lenin’s graduation. It was held in the assembly hall. The electricity was working. From somewhere flowers had been produced for the platform. But the windows were broken, icy winds filled the chamber, and there were snowdrifts on the floor. Air-raid sirens sounded during the meeting, and there were occasional explosions of German shells.

  Although he was now suffering from emphysema, although his toes were gangrenous and his cancer much worse, Ukhtomsky spoke with such vigor that participants counted his address one of his most striking.

  Somehow Ukhtomsky managed to survive the winter, frequently giving lectures in the icebound university halls. He told his friends, “It’s gloomy at home. It’s more cheerful with people.”

  By the end of spring he was still alive and on June 27, despite his gangrene, his cancer, his emphysema and his hypertension, made his way on foot from his flat on the 16th Line of Vasilevsky Island to the Zoological Institute, where with half a dozen other academic colleagues he discussed the candidate dissertations of V. V. Kuznetsov and L. K. Mishchenko and acted as the official opponent of N. N. Malyshev, who was defending a doctoral thesis on the subject, “Materials on the Physics of Electrons.” The presentation and defense of doctoral dissertations had gone on without pause in Leningrad, all through the terrible winter, in air-raid shelters, in cellars. There had been 847 defenses of dissertations in the first months of the war. In December the Leningrad Party Committee warned the academic community “not to permit any liberalization in evaluating the work of students” just because of the war and its hardships.

  So the intellectual life of Leningrad went on; so the intellectuals kept to their laboratories and their libraries, dying by the hundreds but making no concession to the terrible enemies which threatened their existence.

  To the end Professor Ukhtomsky continued to make notes, continued to talk with his students. Not until August 31, 1942, did he, like so many of his brave contemporaries, succumb. He was buried in the Volkov Cemetery. By this time Leningrad again observed the amenities. He had a grave and headstone of his own.

  * * *

  1 During most of the war Army General A. V. Khrulev, a responsible, able, energetic officer, was in chargé of Red Army rear services. But every session he had with Stalin was an ordeal in which front commanders and members of the State Defense Committee (Beria, Malenkov and others) sought to shift responsibility for errors, mistakes and deficiencies onto him. Stalin was well aware of Khrulev’s competence. This did not prevent him from telephoning one day and exploding, “You are worse than an enemy! You work for Hitler!” Then he slammed down the receiver. Soon Khrulev’s wife was arrested as a member of a “conspiratorial organization.” Stalin continued to invite Khrulev to his dacha. The General was present at a drunken New Year’s celebration at Blizhny (“The Near Place,” the nickname for Stalin’s villa on the Mozhaisk Chaussée) on New Year’s 1944. But he was soon dismissed, presumably on Beria’s provocation. (N. A. Antipenko, Novy Mir, No. 8, August, 1965, pp. 154–155.)

  2 In the first half of 1942 the Leningrad Party lost 15 percent of its membership by starvation. (Leningrad v VOV, p. 202.)

  3 The incidence of ordinary contagious diseases dropped dramatically. In December, 1941, there were only 114 cases of typhoid fever compared with 143 a year earlier; 42 of typhus compared with 118; 93 of scarlet fever compared with 1,056; 211 of diphtheria compared with 728; 818 of whooping cough compared with 1,844. (Pavlov, op. cit., 3rd edition, p. 145.)

  4 Most of the evacuees were sent to the Urals or to Central Asian cities. Some, however, were sent to the Caucasus and fell into German hands when the Nazis broke through to Maikop in the summer of 1942.

  5 Even in the winter of 1941–42 people continued to be evacuated into Leningrad from surrounding regions. It was estimated that 55,000 persons were brought into the city during the winter, most of them,ill-clothed, starving, with no place to live or means of survival. (Karasev, op. cit., p. 186.)

  6L. A. Ityin, who spoke to the meeting at the Academic Chapel January 9, was killed by a shell fragment while walking on Nevslcy Prospekt in December, 1942.

  45 ♦ The Ice Road to the Mainland

  AT 3 A.M. ON FEBRUARY 2 PAVEL LUKNITSKY SAT AT THE typewriter in his freezing apartment at No. 9 Griboyedov Canal and tapped away on his diary. He was afraid to go to sleep lest he miss the ring of the telephone or the knock at the door he was expecting. He was waiting for a man named L. S. Shulgin from the Leningrad Tass office who would take him across Lake Ladoga to General Fedyuninsky’s Fifty-fourth Army, to which he had just been assigned.

  Luknitsky did not know it, but the assignment had been urgently arranged by his colleagues in the Writers Union who were fearful that unless he got out of Leningrad immediately he would die of starvation.1

  For weeks Luknitsky had exhausted himself trying to help his fellow writers. Being a war correspondent, he was able to go in and out of Leningrad, and he had tried again and again to get permission to take a truck across Lake Ladoga on a foraging expedition to purchase provisions for the Leningrad writers. The difficulties were enormous. He had to get approval from half a dozen officials, and he needed someone to help buy the supplies. Unfortunately, he had become convinced that an honest man couldn’t do the job, and he had no desire to go into partnership with a crook.

  He had also been trying to persuade Smolny to send out of Leningrad some of the starving writers. And he had been seeking to evacuate his friend Lyudmila Fedorovna, who was at the point of death.

  Finally, on January 20 he learned at Smolny of the impending plans for mass evacuation and with great difficulty succeeded in having twelve writers included in the first party to be sent out on January 22. He even got Lyudmila Fedorovna included in the first group of twelve. By this time he was so ill with grippe, so starved, he could hardly walk. But he had to go back and forth between the Writers’ House, his own apartment and Smolny to arrange for the evacuation tickets. They were supposed to be issued January 21 at 6 P.M. Some people had been waiting in line for them at Smolny since 2 A.M. At 7 P.M. the tickets still had not been issued because they had not been received from the printers. At 7:30 P.M. it was announced that instead of fifty buses fo
r evacuation there would be only twenty-five. Only half of the people would be taken.

  Luknitsky made thirty to forty telephone calls to Mayor Popkov and other officials and finally got the writers included in the smaller evacuation party. He then walked home in 30-below-zero weather, six to eight miles, in order to pack fifty pounds of luggage for Lyudmila Fedorovna and, after two and a half hours’ sleep, brought her with the luggage on a sled to the embarkation point in the square opposite Smolny.

  After hours of waiting in the cold the writers’ group got away at 4 P.M. Luknitsky described eleven of those evacuated, including N. Vagner, S. Spassky and his wife, V. S. Valdman and her husband, as in “such condition that life hardly flickered in their bodies.” The husband of Madame Valdman died in the bus. The twelfth person showed up in the cab of a truck overloaded with his possessions. He was healthy, insolent and gnawed unem-barrassedly at a chicken bone. He pushed his way onto the bus, impudently stowing his bags and boxes over the heads of the feeble passengers.

  As the convoy pulled out, 150 to 200 despairing persons watched. They had been promised places, but there was no room.

  Luknitsky was so exhausted that he was hardly able to rise on January 23. But he had again to walk to the ends of the city, wait long hours at the military offices, obtain a new food order, stand in line in an unheated staff building where clerks worked without lights, and walk home skirting an enormous half-frozen lake (a water main had burst) which covered the squares opposite Dobrolyubov Prospekt and Dynamo Stadium, in which trucks were already being frozen for the remainder of winter. The next day he had a temperature of 102. He probably would have died that day had not an old friend, the chief of the regional air service, Korolev, taken him in hand, put him to bed in a warm room, given him a bath, 150 grams of vodka and a meal. He spent three days at the air base, and when he got back to the Writers’ House, his associates had obtained his assignment to the Fifty-fourth Army.