Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (19 page)

During the black days of the famine the Kirov works lived through much the same sombre experiences as the rest of Leningrad. ‘Those were terrible days,’ said Puzyrev. ‘On December 15th everything came to a standstill. There was no fuel, no electric current, no food, no tramcars, no water – nothing. Production in Leningrad practically ceased. We were to remain in this terrible condition until the 1st of April. It is true that food began to come in in February across the Ladoga ice road. But we needed another month before we could start any regular kind of output at the Kirov works. But even during the worst hungry period we did what we could. With small cadres we managed to do odd jobs. We repaired guns, and our foundry was kept going, though only in a small way. It felt as if the mighty Putilov works had been turned into a village smithy. People were terribly cold and terribly hungry. It is no secret that a large number of our people died during those days. And it was chiefly our best people who died – highly skilled workers who had reached a certain age when the body can no longer resist such hardships.

‘It was at that time that I was made chief engineer of the Kirov works. Now, when I look back on it, I already find it hard to imagine or describe how people lived during those days. As I said before, there was no water and no electric current. All we had here was a small pump which was connected with the sea down there; that was all the water supply we had. Throughout that winter – from December to March – the whole of Leningrad used snow for putting out incendiaries. There were very few big fires in Leningrad, the largest was that of the Gostiny Dvor. Here, on the Kirov works, not a single workshop was destroyed by fire.

‘People were faint with hunger, and it was necessary to preserve their strength as much as possible. So we organised hostels so that they could live right here. We authorised others who lived at home to come only twice a week. The anti-paratroop and fire-fighting squads were on duty day and night. In December we had to call a meeting and announce that a reduction of the bread ration from 400 grammes to 250 for workers, and to 125 for employees and dependants – and very little else besides – had become necessary. They took it calmly, though to many it was like a death sentence. Nobody raised objections. The motion approving the reduction was voted unanimously. If only as a protest they could have voted against. But nobody protested. They knew there was no other way.

‘You know, the army on the Leningrad front asked the High Command to reduce its rations so that so drastic a reduction should be avoided in the rations of Leningrad’s civilians. But the High Command decided that the soldiers were receiving just a bare minimum for carrying on, and would not agree. The soldiers’ rations then were 350 grammes a day.

‘We tried to keep people going by making a sort of yeast soup. It cost only four kopeks, with a little soya added. It wasn’t much better, really, than simply drinking hot water, but it gave people the illusion of having ‘eaten’ something. In that 250 or 125 grammes of bread, forty or fifty per cent was substitute stuff anyway. I don’t want to exaggerate. I am an engineer, not a politician, but the courage, the guts our people showed in those fearful days was truly amazing. A very large number of our people died. So many died, and transport was so difficult, that we decided to have our own graveyard right here. We registered the deaths and buried the corpses. People were hungry. But there was not a single serious incident. When the bread vans arrived, there was not a single case of looting. Now and then there were some rows, but never anything serious. Frankly, I find it hard to this day to understand how people resisted the temptation of attacking bread vans or looting bakeries. But they didn’t. Never, not once. Sometimes people came to me to say goodbye. They wanted to come to say goodbye because they knew they were going to die almost at once. Later, already in the summer of 1942, a lot of the people who had stayed on through the winter were sent east where they supplemented their comrades from Kiev, Kharkov and other places.’

‘And now?’ I said.

‘Now,’ said Puzyrev, ‘we’ve got problems of a different order. Difficult, but not as desperately difficult as those of the winter of 1941.

‘Many of our workshops have been badly damaged. No wonder! They’ve been plastering us for over two years. And yet we are carrying on, and as I’ve already told you, we are steadily increasing our output of munitions. But it’s a big problem all the same, this shelling of the Kirov works. Here, in this small room, facing north, and with thick walls and other buildings on all sides, one is relatively safe, but you just can’t choose relatively safe places for everybody on an enormous plant like this, working, as it does, right under the Germans’ noses. A few times a month now we get a real plastering. And then there are also the occasional stray shells which come without warning. We have, however, greatly reduced the danger of fire – for the Germans also use a lot of incendiary shells. We had all the wooden buildings on the Kirov works pulled down. They came in very useful as fuel last year.’

‘But how,’ I asked, ‘can you carry on at all when shellfire is heavy? Have you heavy casualties? And how do your people stand up to it?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose there is a sort of Kirov works patriotism. Except for one or two very sick people, I have never yet come across anyone here who wanted to quit, and get a quieter job elsewhere. What is also very characteristic is this.’ He pulled out a drawer of his desk and brought out a pile of forty or fifty envelopes with postmarks. ‘These have come in the last two days only. They are all requests from our workers, now in the east, to be allowed to come back to Leningrad. They know how difficult conditions of work are, but at the same time they know that the transport problem of Leningrad has been settled, and that they wouldn’t present a food problem. So they are begging us to let them return, alone, or with their families. But we can’t agree to it. These skilled Kirov workers are doing highly valuable work out there; here we haven’t much equipment, and the place is run as a sort of emergency war factory. Not unlike Kolpino, some ten miles away from here, in the south-east, where munitions are turned out in underground foundries – right in the front line.

‘The way we keep the place going is by having decentralised it. The important thing is not to hold up production, not to lose too many machine tools and too many people if and when there is a direct hit. That’s the principle on which we work. We have divided up the work into small units, with only a corner of each workshop, or quarter of a workshop taken up with people and machinery; and this section, as far as possible, protected against blast and splinters. But misfortunes – or rather a certain normal rate of casualties – will occur. In September to date, for instance – this is the 28th – we have had forty-three casualties (it’s been a fairly good month, I must say) – of these, thirteen were killed, twenty-three wounded, and seven cases of shell shock.

‘You also ask how they take it? Well, I don’t know whether you’ve ever been for any length of time under shell fire. But if anybody tells you it isn’t frightening, don’t you believe it. He’s a liar. There is no soldier and no civilian who is not frightened. I am the director here, and I am frightened. But the real thing is not to show it. And I don’t. And everybody else here knows how to act and how to behave in a bombardment. But this frequent shelling nevertheless has an effect on people’s psychology. In our experience a direct hit has a very bad effect for twenty-four or forty-eight hours. In a workshop that’s had a direct hit, production slumps heavily for twenty-four or forty-eight hours, or stops almost completely, especially if many people have been killed or injured. It’s a horrible sight, all the blood, and makes even some of our hardened workers quite ill for a day or two. But, in the long run, it doesn’t matter. Two days later, they are fully back at work again, and do their best to make up for the time lost by what’s called ‘the accident.’ But we realise all the same that working here is a perpetual strain, and when we see that a man or a girl is going to pieces, we send him or her to a rest-home for a fortnight or a month.’ I said I had seen the Kamenny Island rest-homes.

‘Besides, when a shell lands close by everybody immediately takes shelter; it’s a rule. And it has saved a lot of lives. So it is only the first shell that’s really very dangerous – the shell that comes without any warning. But more often than not the first shell hits nothing in particular, so one’s chances of surviving till the end are still fairly good! Yes,’ he said, giving the pile of envelopes before him a friendly pat, ‘all our old workers, and the families of those who are here, would give anything to be able to come right back now; they’ll come back in time. Meantime we are carrying on. The people here are the nucleus who are going to prepare the Kirov works for its complete restoration after the war.’

He ended with this optimistic flourish, and then offered to take us round some of the workshops. ‘The Germans have been unusually quiet today,’ he said, ‘you are very lucky.’ Just then a single gun fired one round somewhere in the distance, and a shell whined faintly overhead. ‘I spoke too soon,’ said Puzyrev, and our colonel looked a little agitated. However, nothing more happened, and we were able to spend another hour or so on the Kirov works, almost undisturbed.

We went out. The enormous plant was, I could now see, much more badly smashed up than its outside view from the street suggested. In a large open space, with badly shattered buildings around, stood an enormous blockhouse. In it were a number of machine-guns, and the roof was made of powerful steel girders, and the cemented walls were twelve bricks thick. ‘Nothing but a direct hit from a large gun at close range can do anything to this,’ said Puzyrev. ‘It was built during the worst days when we thought the Germans might break through to Leningrad. They would have found the Kirov works a tough proposition. The whole place is dotted with firing-points like this one.’ A number of guns were fired, quite close to us. ‘That’s all right – those are ours,’ said Puzyrev.

I cannot describe in detail all that we saw that day at the Kirov works, with the Russian and German guns close by, fighting their sporadic duel, and the German lines, down there by the Uritsk Inlet, scarcely two miles away. The factory buildings, spreading over a wide area, were battered; some were almost completely destroyed; but many of the workshops carried on behind their chipped and pockmarked brick walls and heavily sandbagged windows. ‘This is the workshop,’ said Comrade Puzyrev, pointing to a half-dilapidated building, ‘where President Kalinin used to work in his youth. He came here several times before the war, and our fellows would tell him: “Don’t worry, Mikhail Ivanovich, your lathe is still in good order”’. As we passed another large workshop, Puzyrev said: ‘This is the place where the K.V. tank was born in 1939. It was first used in the Finnish war. Oh, it’s all a terrible pity,’ he said, as we walked across a wide open space among several of the factory buildings. ‘There were lawns here, and flower-beds, and a fountain, and it was such a joy to watch the great new K.V. tanks roll out of there.’ In place of the flower-beds there was now a wide expanse of rubble and large shell-holes, many of which, judging from the fresh cement, had been filled up only quite recently.

We went into several of the workshops. They were organised just as Puzyrev had described them. Production was split up into small units everywhere. Lathes which were turning out the same kinds of shells could be found in different parts of the plant. It was, as Puzyrev had said, no use having too many machines and too many people knocked out all at once. Nearly everywhere, in these dark noisy workshops smelling of machine oil, were the shells being turned out by girls, some in overalls, some in ordinary clothes; and nearly all wearing cloth slippers; mostly young girls with tired faces and a hard concentrated look in their eyes. I remembered Tamara, the little girl in the island rest-home, and what she had told me. These young girls also had seen accidents and were working under great strain. Perhaps they were not always conscious of it, but it was there. It was dark and terribly noisy in those vast, half-empty workshops of the Putilov plant where these girls and a few men, split up into small groups, each with its own set of lathes, were turning out the shells – it was dark because of the sandbagged windows and because electric current was being economised. In a passage just outside one of the workshops a middle-aged worker with a grey moustache was busy demonstrating a machine to two girls; these were newcomers. Out of the workshops all the time fresh shells were being wheeled away in noisy little wagons.

Then we went into one of the foundries. One end of this large foundry was quite dark, but behind a strong brick partition the other half was lit up by the flames inside the open furnaces, with their red-hot walls. Dark, eerie shadows of men, but again mostly of young girls were moving about in the red glow. The girls, with patched cotton stockings over their thin legs, were stooping under the weight of enormous clusters of red-hot steel they were clutching between a pair of tongs, and then you would see them – and as you saw it, you felt the desperate muscular concentration and the will-power it involved – you would see them raise their slender, almost child-like arms and hurl these red-hot clusters under a giant steam hammer. Large red sparks of metal were flying and whizzing through the red semi-darkness, and the whole foundry shook with the deafening din and roar of machinery. We watched this scene for a while in silence, then Puzyrev said, almost apologetically, through the din: ‘This place isn’t working quite right yet. I had a few shells in here the other day,’ and pointing at a large hole in the floor now filled with sand and cement, ‘That’s where one of them landed.’ ‘Any casualties?’ ‘Yes, a few.’ We walked through the foundry and watched more closely all that the girls were doing. As we were going out, I caught the glimpse of a woman’s face in the red glow of the flames. She had a long black scarf over her head and her shoulders, though she could not have been cold there. Her face was grimy. She looked an elderly woman – almost like an old gipsy hag. And from that grimy face shone two dark eyes. There was something tragic in those eyes – there was a great weariness in them, and a touch of almost animal terror. How old was she? Fifty, forty, or maybe only twenty-five. Had I just imagined that look of terror in her eyes? Was it that grimy face of hers and the eerie shadows around leaping up and down in the glow of those red fires that had given me that idea? I had seen some of the other girls’ faces. They were normal enough. One, a young thing, even smiled. Normal – yes, except for a kind of inner intensity and concentration – as if they all had some bad memories they could not quite shake off.