The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  The people were convalescent after their trials. They moved slowly in the warmth, letting the sun strike deep into their thin bodies, their pale faces, their wasted arms.

  The politeness of Leningrad had begun to return. It had vanished during the terrible winter. Now Aleksandr Fadeyev watched a couple, a man and his wife, carefully, tenderly, supporting an older woman who walked with tottering feet and a rather embarrassed smile at her weakness. A Red Army man helped a little old lady onto a streetcar, lifting her from the pavement to the top step with one strong gesture. The old lady turned and said, “Thank you, son. Now you will go on living. Mark my word—no bullet will hit you.”

  On the walls appeared newly printed copies of Leningradskaya Pravda and of the Moscow papers. The presses were working again. A proclamation was pasted up by City Trade Chief Andreyenko, announcing extra rations for the holiday—issues of meat, cereal, dried peas, herring and sugar. Also vodka and beer. Notices offering to trade dresses, shoes, gold watches or sets of silverware for bread or food were still posted and black markets still operated. No longer did the cannibals stalk the Haymarket, but you could trade a watch for a kilo of bread or a woman’s jacket for a glass of klukva or cranberries. There was even milk for exchange at a rate of a pint for 600 grams of bread.

  Leningrad’s streets were clean, but huge barricades of snow and filth stood along the banks of the Neva, the Moika and the Fontanka. The ice had moved out of the Neva, but not all the winter’s toll had been liquidated.

  May i was not just a pleasant sunny spring day in Leningrad. It was a day of very heavy German shelling. It went on from early morning until late at night. The Germans, it was clear, were celebrating May Day in their own way. Heavy shells fell in the square outside the Astoria Hotel and near the fleet headquarters. There were many casualties.

  In the evening Fadeyev, Nikolai Tikhonov, Vsevolod Vishnevsky and Olga Berggolts spoke on the radio. Olga had just returned from Moscow. She had been flown out of Leningrad a few days after the calvary of her long walk to visit her father. A small plane took her low over the lines and over the endless wastes of snow and pine forest. She was amazed that from the air she saw no sign of fighting, no troops, no cannon, no war. In Moscow she was given a room in the Moskva Hotel, warm, comfortable, well lighted. She had what seemed like luxurious rations of food. But she did not feel comfortable. She belonged in Leningrad, not Moscow. A day or two after her arrival a man burst into her room, a Leningrad factory director. “Excuse me,” he said. “I accidentally heard that you had just flown from Leningrad. I am also a Leningrader. Please tell me quickly— how is it, what’s happening?” She told him of February in Leningrad, of the suffering. He nodded his head. “You understand?” he said. “That is life—there. I can’t clearly express myself. There is hunger and death, but there is life, too.” She told her Leningrad audience of hearing the first performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony in Moscow on March 29. When the symphony had concluded, she said, Shostakovich rose to acknowledge the ovation. “I looked at him,” she said, “small, frail, with big glasses and thought, ‘This man is stronger than Hitler.’” Vishnevsky noted in his diary that he was happy that his radio speech was heard by “millions of people and by my friends scattered by events throughout the land.” He was happy, too, that Fadeyev mentioned him three times in his speech and “warmly.”

  After the broadcast Fadeyev walked up to the seventh floor of Radio House and looked out from a balcony. All around Radio House were wrecked buildings. But Radio House had not yet been hit. “It’s a good bomb shelter,” a young Radio House man said. “But it’s a pity it’s on the seventh floor.”

  Later in the evening Fadeyev and the others gathered in Olga Berggolts’ room. Fadeyev asked the question which was on the lips of every visitor to Leningrad: “How did you live and work?”

  “The chief thing,” Olga Berggolts said, “was to forget about the hunger and to work and work and help your comrades to keep up their work. Work was the chief force of life. We did everything together. Everything we received we shared. The chief thing was to support those who were weaker.”

  She told of her husband’s death and how her friends had helped her, and she showed Fadeyev a slip of paper on which was written in pencil: “Olya. I have brought you a piece of bread and I will bring some more. I love you so.” A pale youngster sitting at the table had written the note. “You understand,” Olga Berggolts said with deep feeling. “This was not a declaration of love!” It was something more than love, Fadeyev thought.

  Someone provided a bottle of vodka. Glasses were found and a toast was proposed.

  “What was the number of today’s edition of the ‘Radio News Chronicle’?” a Radio House worker asked. It was, it transpired, the 244th issue (May 1 was the 244th day of the Leningrad blockade).

  “Well, the devil with it,” the worker said. “Let’s drink to the five hundredth issue.”

  They could not guess that nearly twice five hundred “Radio Chronicles” would go out into the ether before the Leningrad blockade ended.

  It seemed to those who had survived the terrible winter that their ordeal must be drawing toward a close. The summer surely would bring a lifting of the siege.

  Leningrad had a new front commander, a tall, handsome, reserved man who was not well known to the subordinate Leningrad commanders. He was Lieutenant General Leonid Aleksandrovich Govorov, an artillery officer. The late winter and early spring had turned the Leningrad Command into a comfortable, cozy group. Most of the time, the chief, Lieutenant General M. S. Khozin, had been across Ladoga, where the fighting continued, one grueling week after another. In Leningrad remained the newly promoted General Bychevsky, the fortifications specialist; Colonel (soon to be General) G. F. Odintsov, the new artillery chief; General S. D. Rybalchenko, a new air commander; and General A. B. Gvozdkov, operations officer. Major General D. N. Gusev, Khozin’s deputy, ran the front. He was a pleasant officer with an open-door policy. He got on well with the generals and equally well with Party Secretary Zhdanov, who made most of the decisions. The generals and the Party secretaries, Zhdanov, Kuznetsov and Shtykov usually ate together at a common mess. They started each meal with a shot of “sauce” made from pine needles to ward off scurvy. Any time one of them returned from across Ladoga he brought a bunch of garlic which he shared with all—for the same purpose.

  When word came in early April that General Govorov was being named to command Leningrad, no one knew him except Odintsov, who had taken courses under him in the Dzerzhinsky Artillery Academy in 1938. Odintsov could say little except that Govorov’s character was in direct opposition to his name. Govorov stems from the word “govoryat” —"to talk.” “Not even two words did he ever squeeze out,” Odintsov said. “And no one has ever seen him smile.” About the only other thing that was known was that he was not a member of the Communist Party.1

  Govorov was an experienced officer. Born in 1897, his military service began in the Czar’s army in 1916, where he was enrolled in the Konstan-tinovsky Artillery School. He was impressed into Admiral Kolchak’s White Russian Army but managed to desert with his battery and make his way to Tomsk, where he entered the Red Army. He rose steadily in the Red Army but in the late 1930’s like many of his colleagues was caught up in the Stalin purges. His brief forced service with Kolchak was brought up against him, and he was removed from the General Staff Academy where he was a student. By a vagary of the Stalin era six months later he was named a professor at the Dzerzhinsky Artillery Academy. His career seemed to have turned the corner. But in the spring of 1941 Police Chief Beria again brought him up on chargés relating to the Kolchak episode, and it was only the intervention of Marshal Timoshenko and Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin that saved him from exile or execution.

  Although Govorov’s name was little known in Leningrad, he had distinguished himself as one of Marshal Zhukov’s right-hand men during the Battle of Moscow as commander of the Fifth Army. He it was who had recaptured Mozhaisk
in mid-January, and he was inspecting the front lines of his Fifth Army sector near the Mozhaisk highway one early April morning when a call came from staff headquarters. He was wanted by 8 P.M. in Moscow. The road was slippery, and it was evening before Govorov arrived, so stiff he could hardly move—the effects of a recent operation. At Stavka he was told Stalin wanted to see him. His new assignment was Leningrad and, as always, there was a rush. Stalin ordered him to fly to Leningrad the next day.

  Govorov was no stranger to Leningrad. He had gone there after finishing grade school to enter the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute. A few months later he was called to duty in the Czar’s army. He thought of those times as he flew north to take over his new post. He knew that he had been picked for Leningrad because he was an artilleryman and only artillery (he believed) could protect the city so long as it was under siege. He flew over the northern reaches, now occupied by the Germans, still deep in the winter snow, over the pine and spruce forests, dark shadows on the land, over the villages and towns, burned and wrecked in the battles with the Nazis, and thought of Leningrad—how to hold the city, how to protect it, how it had managed to stand firm in the incredible days of autumn and winter, how it had halted the German armored divisions, how it had fought on despite hunger, cold and want. He thought again of his days as a Petersburg cadet and of the Petrograders he then knew, and suddenly this silent man exploded: uBrave lads!” His neighbors on the plane looked at him in curiosity, but Govorov continued to peer out of the airplane window. They were nearing Leningrad now. He had seen no enemy fighters. He began to think about how to lift the siege, where to deliver the first blow.

  The flight attendant came to his seat. “Leningrad soon. Very soon.”

  Govorov looked out the window. “But I don’t see the city!”

  “No,” the attendant said. “We are landing at an airport outside the city. It is dusk already, and you will see no light from Leningrad. The city is completely blacked out.”

  Govorov’s first meetings with his new colleagues were frosty. Bychev-sky found him sitting at his desk, clenching his hands nervously, snatching an occasional glance at Bychevsky with unfriendly eyes, his face white, a little puffy, his mustache carefully trimmed, his dark hair shot with gray, carefully parted, a few large moles on his temples. Bychevsky reported on the state of fortifications. It was not a good report. The winter had been hard. Many trenches had fallen apart. Dugouts were filled with water. The troops had been too weak to repair the mine fields. The civilian population had done nothing since December. He had lost most of his specialized pontoon troops on the Nevskaya Dubrovka place (Tarmes. Govorov listened without an interruption or question. At the end he brought his fist down on his desk and uttered one word, quietly: “Loafer!”

  Bychevsky had long since learned that engineers were more likely to get the stick than the carrot. But this was too much. “And do you know, Comrade Commander,” he lashed out, “that we have on this front people who haven’t the strength to pick up a stick? Do you know what dystrophy is?”

  Bychevsky’s words tumbled out. Govorov listened without comment. When Bychevsky finished, he got up, walked about the room and then said quietly in his deep base voice, “General, your nerves are upset. Go out and quiet down and then come back in half an hour. We have a lot of work to do.”

  “Loafer,” it turned out, was a favorite epithet of Govorov’s. It did not really mean what it sounded like. He had gotten the habit of using it when he was a young man, coaching students from well-to-do families. He used it on them. He had used it all his life.

  From his first day in Leningrad Govorov turned his attention to artillery—to the counterbattery of the Leningrad guns against the German siege weapons which day after day so heavily shelled the city. Party Secretary Zhdanov had consulted the Leningrad Artillery Chief, General Odintsov, in late March about transforming the Leningrad batteries from a defensive to an offensive basis. So long as the batteries were defensive, responding only when the Germans fired, Zhdanov felt, the Nazis would, in time, destroy the city. He wanted to know how the Soviet guns could go on the offensive. Odintsov explained it was a matter of more guns, more planes to spot artillery fire, and many more shells. If they were to exterminate 10 to 12 batteries a month, it would take 15,000 shells a month. Now they were using 800 to 1,000. With Govorov’s support, two air observation units were brought in and the shell quota was upped to 5,000 a month.

  The Govorov principle was, as he once explained, “exceptionally accurate counterbattery blows against the enemy artillery.” Govorov’s guns did not wait for the Germans to open up. They systematically sought to destroy the Nazi firing points, one by one.2

  Govorov took one radical decision. After examining the history of the costly place cTarmes at Nevskaya Dubrovka he said briefly, “Nothing can be expected from that except a blood bath. We must quickly transfer the people to the right bank.”

  He won the agreement of Zhdanov to the evacuation and by April 27 had removed the 86th Infantry Division from the shell-pocked plot of ground to which it had clung since September, 1941. This action was not understood in Leningrad. Pride in the bloody triangle was high. Pavel Luknitsky was in despair when he learned of it on May 1. It was a great secret. But, as he heard it, the Germans had successfully stormed the foothold. The 86th Division had gone down fighting with the cry: “We will die before we surrender.” Luknitsky shuddered to think of the blood that had been lost for the sector on the southern bank of the Neva and of the hopes they had had that it might be the wedge which would splinter the German front. Seven months the battle had gone on. Once there had been only six to nine miles that separated the Neva foothold from the Volkhov front.

  The tragic event cast a pall over the May Day holiday for Luknitsky —that and the end of the Ladoga ice road. The ice went out on April 24. No connection at all with the mainland now except by air. When would it come back? How would Leningrad be supplied? He did not know that on April 2 there had been a meeting at the Kremlin with Anastas Mikoyan at which plans were approved for a pipeline under Ladoga which would supply Leningrad with fuel; that the engineers were hard at work on this; that the pipe had already been located in the now abandoned Izhorsk factory (only the factory director was still on duty, the warehouse keeper was killed in an air raid April 20, the day the Ladoga engineers located the pipe); that on June 19 the pipeline would go into service; and that a Ladoga shipping service would be operative by May 22.3

  “All night I have thought about it,” Luknitsky said. “It makes me sick.”

  But if the liquidation of the Nevskaya Dubrovka foothold was not the tragedy which Luknitsky believed, there was slowly building up on the Leningrad front another disaster, the fruit of the terrible and indecisive winter fighting.

  Neither General Fedyuninsky, in chargé of the Fifty-fourth Army, nor General Meretskov, in chargé of the Volkhov front, had been able to make real progress, but Moscow had never relaxed its pressure to get results. All winter long there had been High Command representatives with Meretskov. During most of February and early March Marshal Voro-shilov was assigned to him. In early March Voroshilov was recalled to Moscow, but he returned to Meretskov’s headquarters on March 9, and he brought with him several companions. One was Georgi M. Malenkov, making one of his increasingly frequent appearances at a fighting front. Another was Lieutenant General A. A. Novikov, deputy air commander, and a third was a brilliant new general whose star was rapidly rising, Lieutenant General Andrei A. Vlasov. There had been a shake-up among Meretskov’s deputies, and Vlasov had been named by Moscow as deputy commander of the Volkhov front. Vlasov, like Govorov, was a hero of the Battle of Moscow. While Govorov and his Fifth Army were smashing the Germans at Mozhaisk, Vlasov and his Twentieth Army were retaking Volokolamsk. Both generals were young and vigorous. Both were shown off to foreign correspondents, Vlasov just before Christmas, Govorov in mid-January. Among those who met Vlasov was Larry Lesueur, a Columbia Broadcasting System correspondent, who thought the
forty-year-old Vlasov looked more like a teacher than a soldier and was impressed with his tall astrakhan hat with its crimson and gold crown and his white felt boots. Eve Curie, who visited Russia as a correspondent, was struck by Vlasov’s professionalism. He considered each question strictly from the military viewpoint. He spoke of Napoleon with deep respect and thought it nonsense to compare Hitler with him. She was pleased to find that he knew Charles de Gaulle’s views on modern war and that he respected General Guderian, against whom he had been fighting. Vlasov’s parting words to Eve Curie were “My blood belongs to my fatherland.”

  It was obvious that the introduction of this vigorous and successful commander into the frozen bogs of the Leningrad hinterland was designed to break the deadlock there. The fact that he was brought in under Malenkov’s auspices suggested, as well, that the appointment had a role in the endless game of military politics in which the Kremlin was engaged.

  General Meretskov had no cause to find fault with his fast-moving new deputy. Vlasov did not attempt to take upon himself any responsibilities other than those given him by Meretskov.

  During the remainder of the month there was a new effort to get things moving and particularly to improve the position of the Second Shock Army. This army had scored considerable advances beyond a point called Spasskaya Polist, midway between Novgorod and Chudovo in an area of tangled swamps, underbrush and tamarack bogs, roughly seventy-five miles southeast of Leningrad. Unfortunately, in penetrating into the German positions, it almost fell into encirclement. The Germans, seeing their opportunity, sent the 58th Nazi Infantry and the SS police division into action, and succeeded in cutting the Novgorod-Chudovo highway and railroad and closing the four-mile “throat” through which the communications and transport of the Second Shock Army was maintained. A week of fierce fighting ensued, back and forth, and finally the supply route was reopened and the encirclement of the Second Shock Army relieved, but only by the barest of margins. There is bitter argument between two Soviet generals as to whether the encirclement was really liquidated. General Meretskov contends that it was. General Khozin contends that it wasn’t—that the Second Shock Army had only a corridor a mile to a mile and a half wide and that within ten days the Nazis choked it down again.