The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  General Govorov carried out a detailed inspection of the Oranienbaum position in mid-October. It would be necessary to move large quantities of troops and guns into the area, and Govorov wanted to be certain that nothing went wrong. He then met at Smolny with Admiral Tributs, the top naval command, and Party Secretaries Zhdanov and Kuznetsov. The Baltic Fleet had a major assignment—to shift secretly the Second Shock Army from Leningrad to Oranienbaum before ice hindered movement in the Neva River. It was no small task, involving 2 rifle corps, a tank brigade, 600 guns, mountains of shells and equipment. Beginning November 5, each night blacked-out caravans put out from the wharves at the Leningrad factory, Kanat, and from the naval base at Lisy Nos and landed on the Oranienbaum side without loss 30,000 troops, 47 tanks, 400 guns, 1,400 trucks, 3,000 horses and 10,000 tons of ammunition and supplies. After the ice froze, another 22,000 troops, 800 machines, 140 tanks and 380 guns were sent over.

  The familiar arguments broke out between Leningrad and Moscow. Marshal Voronov was afraid that the Leningrad artillerists after three years of static defense might not be able to meet breakthrough conditions. He sent in some commanders who had distinguished themselves at Stalingrad and in the bloody summer battle at Kursk. Voronov was concerned about the Oranienbaum operation. He recommended that light artillery be employed, fearful that heavy guns could not be moved across the Gulf of Finland. He was reassured when General G. F. Odintsov, the Leningrad artillery chief, reported that 1,300 carloads of war materials had been landed on the Oranienbaum place d’armes and that, on the front as a whole, a concentration of 200 guns per kilometer had been achieved.

  General Govorov urged Marshal Voronov to come to Leningrad for the offensive. “Leningrad is your native city,” Govorov said. “Come and help us with the artillery.”

  This was not entirely without guile. Leningrad was trying to get more guns. Voronov was resisting. Finally, Party Secretary Zhdanov telephoned: “You are a Leningrader. You must be objective. You know our needs. We don’t even have enough revolvers.”

  The argument grew sharp. Voronov declined to make more guns available. Zhdanov took the case to Stalin.4 In the end 21,600 guns were provided for the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts, more than 600 antiaircraft guns, 1,500 Katyusha rocket guns, 1,475 tanks and self-propelled guns and 1,500 planes. It was probably the greatest concentration of fire power ever assembled— more than the Russians had massed at Stalingrad.

  The Leningrad and Volkhov fronts had 1,241,000 officers and men. Opposing them was Field Marshal von Kiichler’s Army Group Nord. Its strength was estimated at 741,000 men. He had 10,070 guns, 385 tanks and 370 planes, divided between the Eighteenth and Sixteenth armies.

  Top Soviet commanders had been brought in to direct the principal armies. The Second Shock Army was commanded by the veteran Lieutenant General I. I. Fedyuninsky, who had repeatedly demonstrated his brilliance on the Leningrad front. The Forty-second Army, which was to drive over the Pulkovo Heights, was led by Colonel General I. I. IVkslennikov.

  One frosty, sunny morning in early January, 1944, General Govorov went to the Pulkovo Heights. No square meter of the Leningrad front had seen more fighting than this bloody hill, still dominated by the wrecked buildings of the Leningrad observatory. Today the front was quiet and sparkling brilliantly under its cover of snow. Govorov clÖsely inspected the scene with his corps commander, Major General N. P. Simonyak. He visualized how it would be transformed in the first seconds of the crushing artillery barrage. He could not see the place where the Forty-second Army would meet with the Second Shock Army emerging from Oranienbaum. But he knew where it was. He knew how precisely timed the operation must be. The first objective was the recapture of Gatchina. Who held Gatchina controlled the front. Once Soviet troops had re-entered that battered town, the Germans must withdraw from Mga because they would have only one escape route left. Mga—soon it would be back in Russian hands again. Soon the terrible chapter of the Leningrad encirclement would unroll in the reverse direction. Govorov sighed. He could not think of Mga without a feeling of depression. “To Mga,” he said frankly, “my heart has never been inclined.”

  He went back to his headquarters and called in his artillerymen once again. “On the tempo of our advance,” he warned, “hangs the fate of Leningrad. If we are held up, Leningrad will be subjected to such a terrible shelling that it will be impossible to stand it—so many people will be killed, so many buildings demolished.”

  On January 11 a final meeting was held at Smolny. Every detail was checked. General Govorov said his men were fully ready. Long-range artillery had already begun methodically to destroy Nazi strongpoints. The air arm was carrying out intensive bombardment. There were 155,000 Communists and 115,000 Young Communists to stiffen the Leningrad front. The partisan forces in the rear of the Germans had been instructed to carry out simultaneous attacks and sabotage of rear bases, supplies and communications.

  The operation was timed to start on the morning of January 14 from the Oranienbaum place d’armes. The attack from Pulkovo was to be launched January 15. The forces of General Meretskov were to attack January 14.

  General Govorov flew in a light U-2 observation plane to the Oranienbaum sector to be present for the jump-off. During the night long-range bombers attacked German communications, railroads, command points. Heavy artillery at Pulkovo and Kolpino opened up to try and demolish the extraordinary reinforced steel-and-concrete firing points (often sunk two or three stories into the ground) which constituted the backbone of the Nazi defenses.

  January 14 was the 867th day since the Germans had taken Mga, the 867th day that Leningrad had been cut off from normal communications with the “mainland,” the 867th day of the siege.

  The tension in Smolny was almost more than nerves could bear. They were waiting for word from the commander, from General Govorov with the Second Shock Army on the Oranienbaum place (Tarmes. But the front was drenched in fog. The reconnaissance planes of the Thirteenth Air Army of Lieutenant General S. D. Rybalchenko were unable to take off. There was no correction for artillery fire. Bombing planes were grounded.5 General Govorov tried to return to Leningrad, but fog held him on the ground. Yet the Soviet forces had jumped off. The enormous concentration of guns on the place d’armes had laid down 104,000 shells on the Nazi lines in a one-hour-and-five-minute bombardment, not counting Katyusha rocket fire. The great cannon of the Baltic Fleet and the batteries at Kronstadt, Seraya Loshad and Krasnaya Gorka joined in.

  The fog was so thick that General Bychevsky, the engineering chief who fought all through the Leningrad siege, was unable to see anything from the command post of General Maslennikov of the Forty-second Army at Pulkovo. But Bychevsky’s sappers were delighted. They went on clearing a path through the mine fields, invisible to the Germans. General Govorov, unable to restrain his impatience, insisted on flying back to Leningrad over the violent objection of the air commander, General M. I. Samokhoin. Years later General Odintsov, who accompanied him, still remembered vividly how they circled and circled in the fog before locating the Leningrad airfield.

  The Second Shock Army made progress, despite the fog. It advanced about two miles on a six-or-seven-mile front—not brilliant but not bad. It had still not emerged, however, from the roadless marshes and wastes that lay between it and its objectives. Snow began to fall.

  The night of January 14-15 was sleepless at Smolny, at Blagodatny Lane, where the Forty-second Army had its headquarters, and in the mangled outskirts that stretched from shell-torn Sheremetyev Park to Pulkovo and Sred-nyaya Rogatka. The first echelon divisions were at forward positions, ready to attack.

  Everyone in Leningrad knew what was happening. The roar of artillery, the crash of bombs filled the air. For three years Leningrad had awaited this day, this shaking of the earth, this roar in the heavens.

  The artillery barrage for the Pulkovo attack was timed to begin at 9:30 A.M., January 15. It was to last one hundred minutes.

  Just before that hour Party Secretary Zhdan
ov appeared at the artillery observation post of Colonel N. N. Zhdanov. He had told him the night before: “We’re of the same family [actually they merely shared a common name]. Tomorrow I would like to be at your command point. I hope you can arrange this.”

  Colonel Zhdanov was not delighted. His post was in the unfinished Palace of Soviets building, giving a good view from Ligovo to Pushkin. The Germans knew very well that there was an observation post in the building. They often showered it with fire. It would do Colonel Zhdanov no good if Party Secretary Zhdanov was killed at his post. He decided to take some precautions. He constructed a strongpoint on the ground floor, where he proposed to delay the Party Secretary for a few minutes, getting him to put on warm clothes before taking him up to the observation post by a rope lift that his soldiers had built into the unfinished elevator shaft. The delay, he calculated, would be sufficient to enable the Soviet barrage to start, after which he did not think the Germans would have time to bother with the observation post. His calculations proved correct. Zhdanov was delayed until the Soviet barrage was a few minutes under way. He was lifted up safely, watched the troops begin to move out to the German lines, and then was brought down to return to Smolny. In the course of the artillery preparation the Russians laid down 220,000 shells—not counting rocket shells—on the Nazi positions.6 Three air wings bombed the Nazi trenches and forward installations. The storm of the German “circle of steel” which Colonel General Lindemann had assured his nervous troops could never be broken had begun. In the first day the Russians drove a wedge from one to nearly three miles deep into the Nazi lines on a three-mile front. General Maslennikov was not pleased with these results. He hurled epithets and threats at his commanders, particularly Generals N. A. Trushkin of the 109th infantry and I. I. Fadeyev of the 125th, although, in the opinion of General Bychevsky, the fault lay not with the troops but with the extremely strong German fire, which had not yet been suppressed.

  Aleksei Panteleyev had been evacuated from Leningrad in June, 1942. On January 8, 1944, he boarded the train to return to Leningrad. It was a quiet, pleasant ride, marred only by a busybody typist returning to her Smolny job who gave the impression that Leningrad lay in ruins. (“You lived on Vasilevsky Island? Wait till you see it! Your house was on Basseinaya? Well, if you want to know, not one stone is left on top of another.”) There was a tense moment going through the “corridor of death” at Shlisselburg, where the German guns were only a few hundred yards away. He ticked off the stations: Tikhvin . . . only the walls of the city were left . . . bullet holes everywhere . . . milk 60 rubles a pint, cranberries six rubles a glass. Volkhovstroi ... no railroad station . . . piles of rubble. Budogoshch . . . forests . . . children on the station platform ... no shell holes.

  Panteleyev stayed at the Astoria. He was awakened early in the morning of the fifteenth by such thunder as he had never heard. It was the roar of thousands of cannon. It waxed and waned. It was so tremendous the chandelier began to sway and plaster fell from the walls. There was no radio. His window looking out on St. Isaac’s was frosted over. At 10 A.M. he went into the street. The thunder was titanic. The offensive had begun. He walked down the Nevsky. In a courtyard gate stood a young woman with a baby in her arms. The child was wrapped in a bright blue silk blanket and a white shawl—and, thought Panteleyev, over her head, high over her head, fly thousands of shells on their way to the German lines.

  Panteleyev walked across the Anichkov Bridge. Here he had last seen Tanya Gurevich in September, 1941. She had been killed by the bomb which destroyed the Gostiny Dvor. Now on this January day he visited her sister, Rebekka Gurevich, in the Erisman Hospital. A young woman doctor at the hospital had been killed just three days earlier crossing Leo Tolstoy Square. And while Rebekka Gurevich was in the hospital, a shell exploded outside her apartment and filled it with splinters. He read in Leningradskaya Pravda the decision of the City Council to give back to the great boulevards and avenues of Leningrad their prerevolutionary names. The Nevsky (which had never been called anything else) lost its nominal name of 25th of October Street and became again the Nevsky. No longer would the signs on the Sadovaya read “3rd of July Street.” And Suvorov, Izmailovsky, Bol-shoy and all the other avenues returned to their original names. It could not, Panteleyev thought, have been done at a more appropriate moment.

  The next day, the sixteenth, there was a thaw. Bad for the offensive; it slowed down the troops. The thaw continued during the night and the next day. There was rain. Panteleyev saw some pigeons outside the Nikolsky Cathedral. They were the same gentle Nikolsky pigeons which had always been there. But in February, 1942, when he had last been in the cathedral, there were no pigeons—only twenty-four bodies awaiting burial. He came to the building at the corner of Voznesensky and Yekaterinhofskaya, where the Agulyan confectionery store had been in the days of NEP in the early 1920’s. He had lived in this building for eight years. Now it was a family tomb—the tomb of the Lebedev family. There had been two old aunts, a grandmother and Tanya, the daughter, a dear, extraordinarily talented person. Now all were dead. Tanya had been expelled from the Workers’ Literary University when it was discovered that her father had been a clergyman. In the blockade the two aunts and the grandmother died. Panteleyev saw Tanya a day or two before her death. She would not eat. She handed Panteleyev a piece of fried leather. “You eat it, Aleksei Ivanovich. I don’t need it. I am going to die anyway.”

  She wouldn’t take the leather back. It stuck in Panteleyev’s throat.

  Another resident of the building was Grigory Belykh, Panteleyev’s collaborator in the jolly satire, The Republic of Shkid. Belykh was an early victim of Stalin’s. Why, no one knew. He died of tuberculosis in the prison hospital named for Dr. Gaaz in 1938. Even as he died in the prison hospital, Panteleyev thought, Belykh understood everything. Panteleyev and his friends wrote Stalin trying to get him released. The answer came after Belykh died. It was: No. Raya Belykh, Grigory’s wife, starved to death in this building in 1942. Panteleyev had no idea where she was buried. Her daughter Tanya had been evacuated to a children’s home, suffering from tuberculosis.

  Panteleyev walked to the Kamenny Island, to the hospital where he had been taken in March, 1942, dying of dystrophy and cholera. There he had lain on a mattress on the floor for three days and nights—the mattress soaked with melting snow, the water in the carafe frozen, dark by day and dark by night, no electricity, no glass in the windows, no heat. How had he survived? Even now he could not say—possibly by sheer animal tenacity, possibly by the pitiful portions of food and the small attentions of the living corpses who served as nurses.

  He spent the night of the eighteenth with his mother on Ulitsa Vosstaniya. Nearby there was a market where you could buy vodka for 300 to 350 rubles a pint, bread for 50 to 60 rubles a kilo, butter for 100 rubles for 100 grams and Belomor cigarettes for 30 rubles. A kitten cost 500 rubles. Everyone in town wanted one.

  On the nineteenth the temperature dropped. The pace of the offensive picked up. When Panteleyev emerged into St. Isaac’s Square, he saw before the great cathedral a Russian woman, on her knees, praying, crossing herself, bowing her forehead to the ground in the orthodox Russian manner. People passed with their sleds loaded with wood. She did not move. Finally, she rose and walked quickly away—perhaps to work at the nearby post office.

  The offensive went on. Rebekka Gurevich said she had not eaten and had hardly slept, so many wounded were pouring in. “Soon Leningrad will be part of the mainland,” one boy said as he awaited an amputation. The great warships on the Neva were silent. Possibly the Germans had been driven beyond their range.

  At the Kuznetsky market Panteleyev found potatoes on sale at 65 rubles a kilo and felt boots for 3,500 rubles (the same kind the cannibals sold in the Haymarket two years earlier). There were also tobacco, cigarettes (only Belomors), flashlights, soap, meat, candy, milk and tangerines. Most of the sellers were war veterans, many of them crippled, many of them drunk, most of them quarrelsome. A rumor was go
ing around the city that once the blockade was lifted all of Leningrad would be sent to rest homes for two months.

  By January 22 reports said that the Germans were retreating in great disorder. Soviet troops were said to be having difficulty keeping up with them.

  On January 27 at 8 P.M., over the sword point of the Admiralty, over the great dome of St. Isaac’s, over the broad expanse of Palace Square, over the broken buildings of Pulkovo, the dilapidated machine shops of the Kirov works, the battered battleships still standing in the Neva, roared a shower of golden arrows, a flaming stream of red, white and blue rockets. It was a salute from 324 cannon marking the liberation of Leningrad, the end of the blockade, the victory of the armies of Generals Govorov and Merets-kov. After 880 days the siege of Leningrad, the longest ever endured by a modern city, had come to an end.7

  Panteleyev boarded his return train for Moscow two hours later. Truth to tell, he thought, the salute was not up to Moscow standards. Not enough guns. Too many were still firing on the Germans. But that did not make any difference. That evening he had shared a glass of vodka with Mikhail Ar-sentyevich, the janitor of his mother’s old building on Ulitsa Vosstaniya. Before the war Mikhail Arsentyevich hadn’t drunk. He’d gotten into the habit during the siege. Forty persons in that building had died of starvation. Almost all of them were taken away on a child’s sled by the janitor. He took them to a kind of morgue set up in an old garage or stable. Gradually it filled with bodies. That was when he got into the habit of drinking.

  Panteleyev leaned back in his compartment, writing in his notebook. At midnight the train halted at Malaya Vishera (where once the Second Shock Army and General Vlasov had headquarters). The car was carefully locked against “any internal enemies.” One such Panteleyev heard on the platform in the darkness. He was an invalid, a demobilized sailor. He wanted to buy a pint of vodka and a pack of cigarettes in the buffet car. But he was not permitted on the Red Arrow.