Between Life and Death:
Leningrad and Moscow
‘The mortuary itself is full. Not only are there too few trucks to go to the cemetery, but, more important, not enough gasoline to put in the trucks and the main thing is – there is not enough strength left in the living to bury the dead.’
Vera Inber, Leningrad diary, 26 December 1941
One name links together the fate of Leningrad and Moscow in the terrible autumn of 1941: Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov. Twice he was called upon by Stalin to perform a military miracle and save the cities, once in early September, when he was sent to Leningrad, and again in October, when he was recalled to defend Moscow. He was by any measure a soldier of genius, though certainly not infallible. Stalin came to depend on Zhukov to a degree that he would surely not have tolerated in any lesser man. Left to himself, Russia's Supreme Commander might well have lost the war. Zhukov did not win the war on his own, but no one played a greater part in Soviet victory.
Zhukov was one of thousands whose humble origins were transformed by war and revolution. He was born in 1897 in a small village outside Moscow, the son of a shoemaker. He was a bright pupil, and his father arranged for him to be apprenticed to a Moscow furrier. At nineteen the young artisan was drafted into the imperial cavalry and became an NCO before the Revolution. He stayed with the military, serving in the fledgling Red Army in the civil war. He fought in the defence of Tsaritsyn in 1919, where Stalin was the chairman of the local Military Committee. He remained a regular cavalry officer, but one who was eager to move out of the horse age into the age of tanks. In the 1930s he was sent to Spain as a military observer, but, unlike many others, survived his recall. He also survived the purges. He was a dedicated Communist, devoted to the revolutionary cause and to Stalin, though not even that was a guarantee of survival. As far as can be judged, there was something about him that Stalin liked or respected. In 1939 he was sent on another mission, this time to China, where the Japanese had invaded and occupied much of the north. From there he was posted to the Soviet far east, where he successfully commanded Soviet forces in a full-scale border war with Japan at Khalkhin-Gol.1
Zhukov was a good battlefield commander, capable of immersing himself in detail without losing sight of the campaign. He was a soldier's soldier, tough, decisive, outwardly calm and confident, who expected the utmost from his men and gave his all in return. He did not hesitate to sacrifice lives, military or civilian, if that would win battles. He was as tough-minded as his political master; victory was what counted, not the way it was won. He was less popular with his fellow commanders. His was an unusually coarse personality in a profession not noted for its decorum. His language was punctuated by repeated profanities, now expunged from the record. He bullied and threatened other generals with court-martial or execution and did not hesitate to use his access to Stalin to get rid of commanders who had lost his confidence.2 Since the war many of his colleagues have complained in their memoirs that Zhukov stole their ideas and presented them to Stalin as his own – accusations that should be assessed with caution. Zhukov's brusque manner and intolerant personality earned him much animosity. The important contribution Zhukov made was not strategic insight, much of which emanated from the General Staff rather than from any one individual, but his willingness to stand up to Stalin and to represent the military voice at the highest level so that those strategic ideas could be nourished.
At the age of forty-three he was suddenly catapulted to the top of the military tree. In January 1941 he was appointed Chief of the General Staff over the heads of generals greatly his senior. It was a post that carried its dangers. The man he succeeded, Kirill Meretskov, was arrested a few months later on the usual conspiracy charges and
Caption
Map 2 The Siege of Leningrad
savagely tortured – ‘a veritable meat grinder’ was how Beria described it twelve years later – until the usual confession came out.3 It was also a post not entirely suited to Zhukov's skills. When he argued with Stalin in July over defending the western areas, he avoided Meretskov's fate but was sacked as chief of staff and sent off to the field to command the Reserve Front defending Smolensk. Here he inflicted one of the first and heaviest reverses on the German advance at Yelnya, which may well explain why Stalin called for him again early in September to try to save Leningrad, as it faced complete encirclement and destruction.4
During the last two weeks of August one after another of the defensive positions around Leningrad, built with the sweat, and sometimes the blood, of thousands of women and teenagers, were stormed by the German armies approaching the city. The last rail link southward at Mga was cut by August 30. From the north Finnish forces pushed down to the old Soviet-Finnish frontier sixty miles from Leningrad, from which they had been forced back in 1940. To the east of Leningrad Finnish and German forces moved to complete the final encirclement of the city. Hitler had decided in August that Leningrad was not to be stormed but subjected to a close siege. After the experience of German forces in other Soviet cities, where booby traps and mines had killed German soldiers as they advanced through the abandoned streets, Hitler wanted to destroy Leningrad by artillery and aerial bombardment and, eventually, by starvation. Early in September German forces began operations to seal off Leningrad from the outside world. They stood from twelve to twenty-two miles from the city centre. After a further week of fierce fighting, in which the defenders, having few heavy weapons and almost no reserves of trained manpower, fought with anything on hand to slow the German advance, the leading German units were only seven miles from the heart of the city. On September 4 the first artillery shell fell on the central zone; two days later the first bombs fell.
On the very day Stalin sent Zhukov off from Moscow to Leningrad to investigate the crisis, September 8, the German army to the east of Leningrad reached the town of Schlüsselburg and cut off the last land link with the interior. Leningrad was encircled; it was now the task of the German armies to tighten the noose around its neck. Zhukov did not break that noose, but he succeeded in getting a hand between rope and neck. He flew from Moscow in thick clouds to give him cover, but over Leningrad the clouds disappeared. As he flew across the defensive zone German fighters approached but failed to press home an attack.5 Zhukov rushed straight to the Smolny Institute, where the city's Military Committee was in session. The city command was in crisis. None of the defensive lines had held. Little better could be expected of the new inner lines of defence dug by battalions of Leningraders who had been working since July. The city was commanded by Voroshilov, sent in by Stalin as a troubleshooter in August. He was regarded by everyone as a military incompetent, even by Stalin, but he was sent as an old Communist to instil the political will to fight on. The real work was done by the city's Party leader, Andrei Zhdanov, a popular and independent-minded Communist and an inspiration to the people of Leningrad.6 Zhukov listened, observed and returned to Moscow. By this time Stalin almost certainly knew from Communist intelligence sources in Berlin, organized in the so-called Red Orchestra, that Hitler was going to lay Leningrad to siege rather than storm it, though nothing could be certain.7 He sent Zhukov back as commander in Voroshilov's place, with orders to defend Leningrad to the last breath.
Zhukov began his work with a flourish. Arriving back at the headquarters in the Smolny he threw all the maps which the Military Committee had spread on the table onto the floor and turned his gaze towards the single wall map of the city's defences. Voroshilov made as dignified an exit as he could manage, and Zhukov and Zhdanov got down to work.8 A good deal had already been done. By early August 467,000 Leningraders had been evacuated from the city, including 216,000 children. By the end of the month the figures had reached 636,000, including more than 100,000 refugees from the Baltic states. The plans to evacuate another half a million women and children were frustrated by the German advance, and they remained sealed up with the men. Among those who remained a workers' militia was organized, an echo from the city's revolut
ionary past. It was in the same city in 1917 that Trotsky had organized factory workers into the nucleus of a revolutionary army to seize power for the Bolsheviks. Now some 36,000 workers, given a rudimentary daily drill and armed with 22,000 rifles and shotguns donated by the population, prepared to defend their city street by street, factory by factory.9
Leningrad itself became unrecognizable as primitive fortifications sprang up in every street. Seventeen miles of barricades and anti-tank ditches left long scars across the face of the city. Shops, offices and apartment buildings had wooden sheets and sandbags around the lower floors; windows were covered with plywood or scraps of timber and cardboard. Across each street appeared simple barricades, the symbol of revolution. Made of stones or wood, they were no more than a few feet thick, and dotted with firing slits. Streetcars and buses filled with sand were used as obstacles. Fortified posts for machine-guns or rifles were set up, over 20,000 in all. Air-raid shelters and slit trenches were built to protect the population from artillery fire and bombs, but there were enough for only one-third of those who remained. Around the bizarre furnishings of war Leningraders continued to work and live as best they could.
Zhukov inherited these preparations, and added some of his own. He ordered anti-aircraft guns to be used instead as anti-tank weapons, as the Germans had done with the famous 88-mm anti-aircraft gun. He had the approaches to the city heavily mined and completed a deep defensive zone in the city's suburbs. Guns removed from the ships of the Baltic Fleet were dug in by the coast or set on armoured trains; they kept up a dense and powerful artillery barrage on German positions. Even the guns of the cruiser Aurora, which had been declared a national monument for the famous part it played in shelling the Winter Palace in October 1917, were removed and sent to the front line.10 Zhukov bullied and hounded his commanders and city officials. The NKVD operated everywhere, shooting alleged slackers or deserters and cracking down on looting. The mood by mid-September was sombre and desperate, but nothing like the Moscow panic was permitted to develop. Leningraders did not need to be reminded of the sacrifices they had to make. Surviving testimony showed that many of those scheduled for evacuation did not go; children stayed with their families, wives with their husbands. Alongside the fear of the population there also stood what Zhukov later remembered as the ‘courage, endurance and tenacity' of ordinary people. ‘September 1941,’ he recalled in his memoirs, ‘impregnated itself in my memory for life.’11
The defence of the city reached its climax in the third week of September, as German forces closed in to isolate the city centre. Forty tons of high explosive were distributed to prepare for the demolition of bridges, factories and military strong points. On September 19 the German artillery began a continuous eighteen-hour barrage of the city, while aircraft bombed food stores, shops and trains. The same day orders came from Moscow to lay and prime the charges. German forces had swept through Zhukov's outer defences, taking the suburban townships one by one. The very last line of defence along the Neva River and the approaches to the city itself were fought for yard by yard. A determined push would almost certainly have brought the German army to the gates of the city, where they would have fought house by house and street by street, much as they did at Stalingrad. But the city was saved by Hitler. On September 20 the pace slackened. Intelligence sources from among the guerrilla groups fighting behind German lines showed that the Germans were digging in. Tanks and armoured vehicles were seen on trains heading away from Leningrad. Forces were evidently moving south for Operation Typhoon and the capture of Moscow. On September 25 the front line stabilized and then halted. The battle for Leningrad became the siege of Leningrad.12
No one in the autumn of 1941 could have predicted how long that siege would last. Soviet forces to the south of the city kept up their attacks on the German defences to try to break the circle, but by then Stalin needed everything available to save his own capital. The blockade of the city was complete. The only access was across Lake Ladoga, twenty miles to the east. Part of the southern shore was still in Soviet hands, but the rail line that might have brought the supplies to that shore was in German hands, and shipping to bring supplies across the lake was not yet available. The stark reality was that at the beginning of October the population of over 3.3 million had sufficient food for only twenty days. On November 1 there was enough for seven days. Without more resources famine was unavoidable.
Daily life in Leningrad during the winter of 1941–42 was a story of horrors almost beyond imagining. The city was dark and silent, draped in snow and ice. The only sound came from the German guns, heavy artillery on the hills to the south-west, which kept up a regular bombardment. Every day like clockwork the shells would fall: from eight o'clock until nine in the morning; for an hour before noon; from five until six in the afternoon; and finally a two-hour shelling between eight and ten at night.13 The shell bursts left great craters in the road, which filled with ice, mud and refuse. Buildings crumbled and cracked; debris lay uncleared in the streets. Transport came to a halt. Electricity was rationed in August to a few hours a day; by November it was limited to the most urgent needs. Private telephones were cut off. The streets were deserted during the night-time curfew; during the day the inhabitants moved nervously about, staying close to shelter. The shelling gave way each day to air attacks. German airmen were ordered deliberately to promote the slow death of the city by bombing food stores, power-plants and water-works. In September the Badaev food warehouses burned to the ground. In the first months of the siege there were over 20,000 casualties from the bombardment. The hospitals could barely cope; medicines and anaesthetics ran out.14
Life was reduced to its most primitive. Ration cards were issued to about 2.8 million people in September, leaving as many as half a million with no entitlement. The ration gave workers and soldiers about one pound of coarse, adulterated bread a day and a pound of meat a week. The rest of the population had to subsist on eight ounces of bread a day. In November and December the food supply reached rock bottom. Workers and soldiers got eight ounces of bread a day; everyone else got four ounces. These were levels that could not support life.15 The whole of Leningrad made frantic efforts to find more food. Ration cards were stolen or traded. Bread was snatched from the hands of the weakest and consumed greedily in front of them. People caught birds, dogs, cats. They ate medicines; they made soup from glue and leather. The famine brought out the best and the worst in people. Mothers sacrificed themselves to save their children. When they died their children died beside them, cold and unnourished, their ration cards stolen by desperate neighbours. Hunger produced a new morality: survive or die.
Leningraders did die, in their thousands. Starvation and cold weakened everyone. Resistance to disease diminished. The weakest died first, old men and infants, then women and children. They succumbed to the same grim cycle. First arms and legs grew weak; then the body became numb and the circulation of the blood slowed; in the last stages of dystrophy the heart ceased to beat. People died at their desks and machines; they died as they walked the streets. Those who were not yet dead took on the expression of a corpse. Eyes stared large and lifeless. The skin was drawn tight over the face, unnaturally taut and glossy, covered with sores. All the fat seemed to have been drained from the people's bodies.16 Families made pathetic efforts to honour the dead, but there was sometimes no one left with the strength to drag the small wooden sleds to the cemetery. One doctor recorded a visit to a family in January 1942:
My eyes beheld a horrible sight. A dark room covered with frost, puddles of water on the floor. Lying across some chairs was the corpse of a fourteen-year-old boy. In a baby carriage was a second corpse, that of a tiny infant. On the bed lay the owner of the room – dead. At her side, rubbing her chest with a towel, stood her eldest daughter…. In one day she lost her mother, a son and a brother who perished from hunger and cold.17
With the city death rate rising to 4,000 to 5,000 a day, the official system for registration of deaths and burial of the
dead broke down. The dead were left in frozen piles at collecting centres, to be buried in mass graves when the gravediggers regained their strength. The madness of hunger drove some people to cut off the limbs or heads of the unburied dead for food. Cannibalism was condemned by the authorities, who threatened death to those who were caught. Estimates vary on how extensive the practice was, but there is now no doubt that it occurred. Perhaps several thousand may have tried to survive from eating corpses. It is a part of the famine story that can never be told in full.18
While people died wretchedly, the city authorities tried to maintain some semblance of organized life. Factories were kept running as long as possible, turning out equipment for the city's defenders. From July to December the factories turned out over 1,100 tanks and combat vehicles, 10,000 mortars, 3 million shells. Unbelievably, Leningrad's starving workforce produced 1,000 guns and mortars for the defence of Moscow, flown out of the city over the German lines.19 At the famous Kirov Works, close to the front line, the workers bivouacked in the factory, with the shift that was resting putting out fires from German incendiary bombs or training for the factory's defence. Factories became communities, where food, companionship, even warmth could be found away from a bleaker home life. But by December most factories were closed. On December 15 the Kirov Works came to a standstill. There was no fuel, no electricity, no water, no raw materials. A foundry was somehow kept going to repair damaged guns, but production ceased until March.20 The workers with the highest skills were flown out of the city to continue their work at arms centres far behind the front line.
To keep up morale theatres and orchestras were kept going for as long as they could. The composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the early drafts of his 7th symphony, later to be known everywhere as the ‘Leningrad’, to the sound of shells and bombs. In October he was taken out of the city so that the work could be completed in safety at Kuibyshev, where it was first heard in March 1942. It was not performed in Leningrad itself until August 1942. Musicians had to be recalled from the front lines to rehearse but by the time the symphony was staged many of the players were dead or wounded. Shostakovich dedicated the work ‘To the city of Leningrad’, and it became an artistic symbol of Soviet defiance in the face of German violence.
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