The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  The Road of Life was coming to an end. Day by day with the advance of spring the ice became more spongy, the danger of breakthroughs more likely. Evacuation of refugees from Leningrad by the ice road was halted April 12 by Kosygin. He reported to the State Defense Committee that from January 22 to April 12 he had removed from Leningrad a total of 539,400 persons, including workers, employees, families and military personnel, 347,564; trade school pupils, 28,454; students, scientific workers, professors and teachers and their families, 42,319; orphans, 12,639; peasants from Karelia, 26,974; wounded, 40,986; plus 15,152 tons of valuable machinery and supplies.2

  The ice road had continued to improve its performance. From November to April 24, when the last supplies came through, it delivered 356,109 tons of freight, including 271,106 tons of food. It built up in Leningrad reserves of flour for 58 days, cereals for 57 days, meat and fish for 140 days, sugar for 90 days, fats for 12 3 days.

  The road delivered 52,934 tons in January, of which 42,588 tons were food. The average delivery was 1,708 tons a day. In February this was lifted to 86,041 tons, of which 67,198 tons were food. Average deliveries were 3,072 tons daily. In March a peak of 113,382 tons was reached, including 88,607 tons of food, a daily average of 3,660. The April total was 87,253 tons, including 57,588 tons of food, a daily average of 2,910 tons.

  The road delivered 31,910 tons of military supplies and 37,717 tons of fuel.

  The last supplies to come by ice road were onions. Three carloads arrived at the eastern base April 23. The road had been closed, but drivers worked through the twenty-third and twenty-fourth and managed to bring 65 tons of onions across the lake.

  Leningrad got through the winter with no attention from the Luftwaffe. There had been no raids throughout January, February and March. However, the Nazi artillery had stayed active. In January 2,696 shells fell on Leningrad, in February 4,771, and in March 7,380. The bombardment killed 519 Leningraders and wounded 1447.3

  On April 15 Leningrad marked the 248th day of siege. The city had survived. But the cost had no equal in modern times. In March the Leningrad Funeral Trust buried 89,968 persons. In April the total rose to 102,497. Some of these burials were due to the clean-up, but the death rate was probably higher in April than in any other month of the blockade.

  There now remained in Leningrad, with evacuation at an end, 1,100,000 persons.4 The total of ration cards was 800,000 less than in January. When Leningrad’s supply resources—the 58 days of flour, the 140 days of meat and fish—were calculated, it was on the basis of a population on April 15 only one-third what it had been when the blockade began August 30 with the loss of Mga.

  More people had died in the Leningrad blockade than had ever died in a modern city—anywhere—anytime: more than ten times the number who died in Hiroshima.5 By comparison with the great sieges of the past Leningrad was unique. The siege of Paris had lasted only 121 days, from September 19, 1870, to January 27, 1871. The total population, military and civilian, was on the order of one million. Noncombatant deaths from all causes in Paris during November, December and three weeks of January were only 30,236, about 16,000 higher than the number in the comparable period of the preceding year. The Parisians ate horses, mules, cats, dogs and possibly rats. There was a raid on the Paris zoo and a rhinoceros was killed and butchered. There were no authenticated instances of cannibalism. Food was scarce, but wine was plentiful.

  In the great American siege, that of Vicksburg between May 18 and July 4, 1863, only 4,000 civilians were involved, although the Confederate military force was upwards of 30,000. About 2,500 persons were killed in the siege, including 119 women and children. No known deaths from starvation occurred. Horses, mules, dogs and kittens were eaten and possibly rats.

  Leningrad exceeded the total Paris civil casualties on any two or three winter days. The Vicksburg casualties, military and civil, were exceeded in Leningrad by starvation deaths on any January, February, March or April day.

  How many people died in the Leningrad blockade? Even with careful calculation the total may be inexact by several hundred thousand.

  The most honest declaration was an official Soviet response to a Swedish official inquiry published in Red Star, the Soviet Army newspaper, June 28, 1964, which said: “No one knows exactly how many people died in Leningrad and the Leningrad area.”

  The original figure announced by the Soviet Government of deaths by starvation—civilian deaths by hunger in the city of Leningrad alone—was 632,253. An additional 16,747 persons were listed as killed by bombs and shells, providing a total of Leningrad civilian deaths of 649,000. To this were added deaths in nearby Pushkin and Peterhof, bringing the total of starvation deaths to 641,803 and of deaths from all war causes to 671,635. These figures were attested to by the Leningrad City Commission to Investigate Nazi Atrocities and were submitted at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946.

  The Commission figures are incomplete in many respects. They do not cover many Leningrad areas, including Oranienbaum, Sestroretsk and the suburban parts of the blockade zone. Soviet sources no longer regard the Commission totals, which apparently were drawn up in May, 1944, as authoritative, although they were prepared by an elaborate apparatus of City and Regional Party officials, headed by Party Secretary Kuznetsov. A total of 6,445 l°cal commissions carried out the task, and more than 31,000 persons took part. Individual lists of deaths were made up for each region. The regional lists carried 440,826 names, and a general city-wide list added 191,427 names, providing the basic Commission-reported total of 632,253.6

  Impressive evidence has been compiled by Soviet scholars to demonstrate the incompleteness of the Commission’s total. All official Leningrad statistics are necessarily inaccurate because of the terrible conditions of the winter of 1941–42. The official report of deaths for December, 53,000, may be fairly complete, but for January and February the figures are admittedly poor. Estimates of daily deaths in these months run from 3,500 to 4,000 a day7 to 8,000. The only total available gives deaths for the period as 199,187. This is offered by Dmitri Pavlov. It represents deaths officially reported to authorities (probably in connection with the turning in of ration cards of the deceased). The number of unregistered deaths is known to be much higher. The Funeral Trust buried 89,968 bodies in March (it has no records for January and February), 102,497 m April and 53,562 in May. It continued to bury 4,000 to 5,000 bodies a month through the autumn of 1942, although by this time Leningrad’s population had been cut by more than 75 percent. Thus mortality as a result of the blockade and starvation continued at a high rate through the whole year.

  The Funeral Trust buried 460,000 bodies from November, 1941, to the end of 1942. In addition, it is estimated that private individuals, work teams of soldiers and others transported 228,263 bodies from morgues to cemeteries from December, 1941, through December, 1942.

  No exact accounting of bodies delivered to cemeteries was possible in Leningrad during the winter months, when thousands of corpses lay in the streets and were picked up like cordwood, transported to Piskarevsky, Vol-kov, Tatar, Bolshaya Okhta, Serafimov, and Bogoslovsky cemeteries and to the large squares at Vesely PÖselok (Jolly Village) and the Glinozemsky Zavod for burial in mass graves, dynamited in the frozen earth by military miners.

  Leningrad had a civilian population of about 2,280,000 in January, 1942. By the close of evacuation via the ice road in April, 1942, the population was estimated at 1,100,000—a reduction of 1,180,000, of whom 440,000 had been evacuated via the ice road. Another 120,000 went to the front or were evacuated in May and June. This would indicate a minimum of deaths within the city of about 620,000 in the first half of 1942. Official statistics show that about 1,093,695 persons were buried and about 110,000 cremated from July, 1941, through July, 1942.

  To take another approach. Leningrad had about 2,500,000 residents at the start of the blockade, including about 100,000 refugees. At the end of 1943 as the 900 days were drawing to a close, Leningrad had a population of about 600,000—less than one
-quarter the number of residents at the time Mga fell August 30, 1941.

  The most careful calculation suggests that about 1,000,000 Leningraders were evacuated during the blockade: 33,479 by water across Ladoga in the fall of 1941; 35,114 by plane in November-December, 1941; 36,118 by the Ladoga ice road in December, 1941, and up to January 22, 1942; 440,000 by Ladoga from January 22 to April 15; 448,694 by Ladoga water transport from May to November, 1942; 15,000 during 1943. In addition, perhaps 100,000 Leningraders went to the front with the armed forces.

  This suggests that not less than 800,000 persons died of starvation within Leningrad during the blockade.

  But the 800,000 total does not include the thousands who died in the suburban regions and during evacuation. These totals were very large. For instance, at the tiny little station of Borisova Griva on Ladoga 2,200 persons died from January to April 15, 1942. The Leningrad Encyclopedia estimates deaths during evacuation at “tens of thousands.”

  What is the actual death total for Leningrad? Mikhail Dudin, a Leningrad poet who fought at Hangö and spent the whole of the siege within the lines at Leningrad, suggests that it was a minimum of 1,100,000. He offers this simple figure on the basis of 800,000 bodies estimated buried in mass graves at Piskarevsky Cemetery and 300,000 at Serafimov Cemetery. There is more than a little truth in the observation of the Leningrad poet, Sergei Davydov, regarding Piskarevsky: “Here lies half the city.”

  No official calculation includes a total for military deaths, and no official figures on these have been published. It is known, however, that 12,416 military deaths attributed to hunger diseases occurred in the winter of 1941–42. Over-all military deaths are likely to have ranged between 100,000 and 200,000 in the Leningrad fighting—possibly more.

  One of the most careful Soviet specialists estimates the Leningrad starvation toll at “not less than a million,” a conclusion shared by the present Leningrad Party leaders. Pravda on the twentieth anniversary of the lifting of the blockade declared that “the world has never known a similar mass extermination of a civilian population, such depths of human suffering and deprivation as fell to the lot of Leningraders.”

  Estimates of the Leningrad death toll as high as 2,000,000 have been made by some foreign students. These estimates are too high. A total for Leningrad and vicinity of something over 1,000,000 deaths attributable to hunger, and an over-all total of deaths, civilian and military, on the order of 1,300,000 to 1,500,000, seems reasonable.

  It is germane, perhaps, to note that the Leningrad survivors of the blockade thought in January, 1944, that the starvation toll might be 2,ooo,ooo.8

  The Soviet censors in 1944 refused to pass estimates stating the Leningrad death toll as 1,000,000 or 2,000,000. For nearly twenty years after the blockade they insisted the total was 632,253—not more, not less. Even today Dmitri V. Pavlov insists that new estimates, made by Soviet and foreign students, are incorrect. In a third edition of his magnificent Leningrad v Blokade, the best single source for many details of the siege, he incorporated an attack on the new totals. It is impossible, he insists, to remain silent in the face of assertions that a million or more people died in Leningrad. “Believe it or not,” he insists, “there is no foundation for such serious conclusions.” He insists that calculations based on the movement of Leningraders in and out of the city are unsound. He contends that the new estimates understate the number of Leningraders who entered military units (he puts the figure at not less than 200,000 rather than the 100,000 which Soviet authorities now use). He insists that the 632,253 calculation was accurate (he says it was completed in May, 1943, although the document is dated May, 1944, and other Soviet authorities contend it was not submitted until May, 1945).9

  Pavlov concludes that “the life of the Leningraders was so grim that there is no need for historians or writers dealing with these events to strengthen the colors or deepen the shadows.”

  In this Pavlov is right. But the truth is that the Soviet Government from the beginning made a deliberate effort to lighten the shadows of the Leningrad blockade.

  The death toll was minimized for political and security reasons. The Soviet Government for years deliberately understated the military and civilian death toll of World War II. The real totals were of such magnitude that Stalin, obviously, felt they would produce political repercussions inside the country. To the outside world a realistic statement of Soviet losses (total population losses are now estimated at well above 25 million lives) would have revealed the true weakness of Russia at the end of the war.

  The Leningrad death toll had implications both for Stalin and for the Leningrad leadership, headed by Zhdanov. It raised the question of whether the key decisions were the right ones, whether all had been done that could have been done to spare the city its incredible trial. In these decisions the personal and political fortunes of all the Soviet leaders were intermingled.

  Zhdanov declared in June, 1942, that there had been no line between the front and the rear in Leningrad, that everyone “lived with a single spirit—to do everything possible to defeat the enemy. Each Leningrader, man or woman, found his place in the struggle and with honor fulfilled his duty as a Soviet patriot.”

  This was not quite true, and it begged the question of whether the siege had to be endured, whether it could have been lifted, whether it could have been avoided. These were the questions for which the leadership might have to answer.

  Whether Zhdanov was certain of the correctness of these decisions is not clear. Not long before he died on August 31, 1948, he is said to have questioned himself and his acts, acknowledging that “people died like flies” as a result of his decisions but insisting that “history would not have forgiven me had I given up Leningrad.”

  Pavlov asked himself the same questions: Why did Leningrad remain in blockade for so long, and was everything done that could have been done to break the blockade? His conclusion was that the Soviet Command simply did not have the strength to do more than was done.

  Meanwhile, “history” was corrected in the Soviet way. The sacrifice of Leningrad was understated; the death toll was minimized; the chance of political repercussions was reduced, at least for the time being.

  Not until many years later was the inscription carved on the wall of the memorial at Piskarevsky Cemetery:

  Let no one forget; let nothing be forgotten!

  For some years, at any rate, a determined effort was made to forget a very great deal that had happened during the siege of Leningrad.

  * * *

  1 Her case was taken up by the Young Communist magazine Yunost in 1965. After publishing an expose the magazine directed an appeal to the Leningrad authorities to display some consideration for Hilma Stepanovna. Whether the appeal was heeded is not known. (Yunost, No. 5, May, 1965, pp. 97–99.)

  2 N.Z., pp. 340–341. Slightly differing totals are given by others. Karasev makes it 554,186 (p. 200). The same figure is given by poo (p. 106). Pavlov makes it 514,069 (op. cit., 3rd edition, p. 189.)

  3 The Germans resumed their air attacks on Leningrad in April. There were heavy actions April 4, 5, 14, 19, 20 and 23, directed primarily against the Baltic Fleet ships, still frozen in the Neva, and against Kronstadt and the heavy naval gun emplacements. (Pan-teleyev, op. cit., pp. 309-315.) The attack of April 4 was the heaviest of the war. (N.Z., p. 343.)

  4 Zhdanov used the same figure in July when proposing a further evacuation to bring the city’s population down to a “military city” of 800,000. (Karasev, op. cit., p. 254.)

  5 Deaths at Hiroshima August 6, 1945, were 78,150, with 13,983 missing and 37,426 wounded. In another tragedy of World War II, the Warsaw uprising, between 56,000 and 60,000 died.

  6 The Commission report as published in the official Leningrad documentary compilation is dated “May, 1944,” but the authoritative study of this document by V. M. Koval-chuk and G. L. Sobolev asserts it includes deaths reported to May, 1945. (Voyenno Istoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 12, December, 1965, p. 192.) The Commission was
set up by decision of the Leningrad City and regional Party committees April 14, 1943. (Karasev, op. cit., p. 12.) Among its members were Mayor Popkov, Chief Architect N. V. Baranov, Academicians A. A. Baikov, A. F. Ioffe, L. A. Orbeli, I. A. Orbeli, I. Ye. Grabar, A. V. Shchusev, and the writers, A. N. Tolstoy, N. S. Tikhonov, Vera Inber, Anna Akhmatova, Olga Forsh and Vsevolod Vishnevsky. (Leningrad v VOV, p. 690.)

  7 This is the estimate of two reliable and conservative Leningrad authorities. (Karasev, op. cit., p. 184; N. D. Khudyakova, Vsya Strana S Leningradorn, Leningrad, 1960, p. 57.)

  8 This is what they told the author, who was present in Leningrad at the time.

  9 Pavel Luknitsky comments that the official figures cannot account for all the deaths, particularly those who died during evacuation. (Luknitsky, op. cit., p. 539.)

  PART V

  Breaking the Iron Ring

  The exploding bomb reminds us

  Again of death,

  But spring is stronger

  And it is on our side. . . .

  47 ♦ Again, Spring

  MAY DAY WAS A WORKING DAY IN LENINGRAD. FROM Moscow came the Party announcement that the traditional two-day holiday would be canceled. Everyone would work as usual for the war. No parade, no demonstrations, no bands. Just some speeches.

  It was a beautiful day in Leningrad, sunny with an air of summer. On the streets Pavel Luknitsky noticed women, often in old army overcoats or workers’ boots, with little bunches of the first spring flowers, marigolds, violets and dandelions, branches of spruce or pine or handfuls of green grass. Anything to provide a little chlorophyll, any source of vitamin C to combat the scurvy of winter.