The 900 Days (61 page)

“You know that the ration has been lowered for the third time in Leningrad. Workers are getting 400 grams, employees and children 200. It’s not much. I remind you that a working man requires 2,000 calories. Four hundred grams of our bread gives a little more than 500 calories. . . . I’m not trying to persuade you of anything, but here is the situation: If for a few days grain is not brought across the lake, then the Leningraders will not receive a single gram of bread. The Military Council of the front and the fleet, the Party committee and the City Council have instructed me to tell you that the life of Leningrad is now in your hands.”

This appeal had an effect. By herculean efforts the back of the logjam was broken and 5,000 tons of food were pushed over the lake to Osinovets. At the same time 12,000 tons of flour, 1,500 tons of cereals and 1,000 tons of meat were moved up from Gostinopolye to Novaya Ladoga to wait shipment to Leningrad. Then violent autumn storms hit and hampered shipments as much as did the Germans.

One of the worst disasters occurred November 4 when a German JU-88 attacked the gunboat
Konstruktor
, en route from Osinovets to Novaya Ladoga with decks loaded with refugees, mostly women and children. The captain dodged one bomb, then the ship was hit and sank with a loss of 204 persons, including 34 crew members.

Lake shipping came to an end with the formation of ice November 15 —except for a few final trips by Ladoga gunboats which managed to force their way through as late as November 30, bringing in another 800 tons of flour.

Total shipments by the lake had been 24,097 tons of grain and flour and 1,131 tons of meat and dairy products—a twenty-day supply in sixty-five days of shipping. Total freight brought into Leningrad was 51,324 tons— the difference being made up by munitions. In the same period about 10,000 tons of high-priority materials and 33,479 individuals were taken out over the lake. The blockade of Leningrad had occurred so suddenly and surprisingly that it trapped enormous shipments of industrial, military and artistic treasures, loaded in freight cars, unable to move from the Leningrad yards. A count of these goods after the blockade began found 1,900 cars loaded with art treasures, books, scientific apparatus and machinery. Another 227 cars were loaded with war supplies being sent out by the Defense Commissariat. In all, 282 trains of goods had been evacuated from Leningrad between June 29 and August 29, including 86 more or less complete factories. But the great Kirov works had not been sent out. It was only after the fall of Mga that Admiral I. S. Isakov was summoned to Smolny by Zhdanov and ordered to start to ship the Kirov machinery to the Urals— an operation which he attempted to carry out with the skimpy ship and port resources of Lake Ladoga plus what air transport could be commandeered. Again and again the Nazi air fleet struck at the Ladoga ships. By the end of the navigation period only 7 barges were left unsunk. Six small steamers and 24 barges had been lost.
³

Leningrad began November with 15 days of flour on hand, 16 days of cereal, 30 days of sugar, 22 days of fats, almost no meat. What meat there was came in by air and that was not much.

“Everyone knew that food was scarce,” Pavlov recorded, “since rations were being reduced. But the actual situation was known to only seven men.”

Two confidential Party workers kept a record of deliveries of food to Leningrad. Only the inner circle of the Military Command and Pavlov knew the totals.

November 7 was approaching, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the big Soviet holiday. This was the day when all Russia celebrated with feasts, wine, vodka, fat turkeys, suckling pigs, sturgeon in aspic, roasted hams, goose, sausages. It was a time of gaiety, merriment, family dinners, feasting, much drinking.

Not in 1941. Leningrad had cold, not warmth; darkness, not light. Everyone in Leningrad was hungry all the time now. November 7 was no exception. Pavlov had nothing in his storehouses to give the people. For the children he manged to find 200 grams—half a cup—of sour cream and 100 grams—a couple of tablespoons—of potato flour. Adults got five pickled tomatoes—some adults, that is; a few got a half-liter of wine and a handful of chocolates. A line of women was standing outside a store on Vasilevsky Island, waiting for the wine to be passed out, when a German shell hit. Bodies were blasted to bits. A passing Red Army man named Zakharov, just back from the front, was horrified to see the surviving women pick their way over the human wreckage and reform the queue, fearful that they might miss their allotment.

Yevgeniya Vasyutina traded 200 grams of cottonseed oil for a liter of kerosene and baked some flatcakes of pea flour for her holiday feast. She had four pieces of candy. Her factory closed early, at five o’clock. She sat down beside her radio loudspeaker. Stalin was supposed to speak. Music played until 10:30
P.M.
Then an announcement: No speech that night; listen again at 6
A.M.
She felt cheated as she went to sleep in the icy room.

The Germans had been preparing for November 7. For days leaflets rained down on the city: “Go to the baths. Put on your white dresses. Eat the funeral dishes. Lie down in your coffins and prepare for death. On November 7 the skies will be blue—blue with the explosion of German bombs.”

It was not the first time the Germans had called on the women of Leningrad to wear their white dresses. In the terrible days of August when thousands worked on the fortifications outside the city the Nazi broadcasts had told them to wear white dresses—so the bombers could see and avoid attacking them. Hundreds of gullible babushkas put white scarves over their heads, white shawls over their shoulders, and were machine-gunned in the trenches, beautiful targets for low-flying Junkers.

The Leningrad Command was certain the Nazis planned a special observance on November 7. They now had a crack bomber echelon assigned to attack Leningrad, the Hindenburg Escadrille. In an effort to immobilize the German air arm over the November 7 holiday, the small Soviet Stormovik force carried out spoiling attacks on the nearby Nazi airdromes October 30 and again November 6. A night fighter patrol was set up over the city. On the night of November 4 there was a spectacular encounter. A young Soviet pilot named Aleksei Sevastyanov rammed his plane into a German Heinkel-i 1 bomber, which fell with a tremendous explosion in the Tauride Palace gardens in the center of the city. Both pilots came down by parachute. The Nazi flier was seized by a street crowd and almost lynched.

This did not weaken German determination to mark the November holiday in a special way. On the evening of November 6, as the radio was broadcasting Moscow’s traditional ceremonial, the air-raid sirens sounded.

Vsevolod Vishnevsky and Anatoly Tarasenkov made their way through the barrage to the apartment of the mother of Orest Tsekhnovitser, the Dostoyevsky scholar who had been lost in the Tallinn disaster. The mother had sent Vishnevsky a letter, begging to know the fate of her son. Neither Vishnevsky nor Tarasenkov had ever met the mother. They found her in the typical flat of a Leningrad
intelligent
—book-lined, crowded with heavy furniture, cold and dark. The mother was gray but spirited. Tsekhnovitser’s sister was there, old, worn and ugly. They insisted on hearing the whole tragic story. Then the mother told Vishnevsky that Tsekhnovitser’s apartment had been commandeered by a police sergeant with the connivance of the building superintendent. Tsekhnovitser’s valuable books had been sold. The women had been unable to get the police to oust the usurpers.

Vishnevsky carefully jotted down the details—the name of the police official (he was attachéd to the 35th Police Station), the address of the apartment, the superintendent’s name—and promised to do what he could. A month later the policeman was given a seven-year term, the superintendent five years. Vishnevsky laconically noted in his diary: “Justice!”

The two correspondents left the apartment low in spirits. The air raid was still going on.

At Smolny the Leningrad High Command sat in the bomb shelter under the main building. Here they did much of their work. Here, in a common dormitory, slept most of the top generals and Party chiefs.

Now they were listening to the radio transmission of the Moscow ceremonial meeting which, they knew, was being held in the great Mayakov-sky Square station of the Moscow subway, one hundred feet below ground, safe from interruption by Nazi bombers. The reception was very bad.

Marshal Voronov telephoned Moscow and spoke with General N. D. Yakovlev, chief of the Artillery Administration, who had just come back from the Mayakovsky Square meeting.

“There’s big news,” Yakovlev shouted. The connection was so poor Voronov couldn’t understand what the news was. He asked Yakovlev to spell it out by letters. Yakovlev spelled “P-A-R-A-D-E.” Finally, Voronov got it. The traditional parade in Red Square would be held tomorrow, regardless of the war, regardless of the Nazi drive on Moscow, regardless of air attacks.

Voronov told Zhdanov the news. Zhdanov didn’t believe it.

“They’re just joking with you,” the Party chief said. Then, he, too, called Moscow. It was true. Somehow it made Leningrad’s troubles a bit easier to bear. And they were heavy. The Nazi air attack had not ceased. In a print shop, located in one of the old chambers of the Peter and Paul Fortress, workers of the newspaper
On Guard of the Fatherland
had been listening to the Moscow broadcast. A heavy bomb smashed through the ancient structure, killing thirteen of the fourteen men in the shop. The fourteenth man fled from the chamber, mad.

At the Finland freight station Ivan Kanashin was working with a large group of Young Communists to clear the freight jam. This was the station where food and supplies from Lake Ladoga arrived in Leningrad. It was also the collection point for refugees being sent out of the city via the Ladoga steamers. That night a crowd of women, children and elderly persons jammed the station awaiting a train to take them out of Leningrad, out of the iron circle of hunger, cold, fear and danger.

The evening started badly. A railroad bridge near Kushelevka was hit by a bomb, and movement of trains in and out of the station was halted while the damage was repaired. The jam increased.

A little later the air-raid sirens sounded. Around the station was a heavy concentration of antiaircraft guns. They began to bark. Then a blinding light appeared in the sky. The Nazis had dropped enormous flares on parachutes, which made the whole area lighter than day. Women and children huddled closer in terror. The bombs began to fall.

These were not ordinary high explosives. These were heavier than anything the Germans had used on Leningrad before—naval magnetic mines, weighing a ton or more, with a diameter of nine or ten feet, attachéd to parachutes. Many were delayed-action weapons. The bomb disposal crews had no experience with these weapons. They did not know that if they attacked them with wrenches and metal hammers they were apt to set them off.

The heavy bombs smashed into the train yards, hurling loaded trains from the rails, crushing cars already filled with women and children. Then the Germans began to toss incendiary bombs into the smoking jumble. Kanashin was in a car which stood next to a huge boiler. The boiler blew up and knocked over the car. Only the heavy steel structure saved Kanashin and his fellow workers from being crushed. The raid went on all night. In the morning the freight station was strewn with the corpses of women and children. There were enormous bomb holes everywhere. The cars were twisted masses of metal. Two trainloads of heavily wounded had been in the station. Now there was nothing but formless wreckage, piled high with bodies.

Suddenly Kanashin heard a roar of voices. He saw a crowd of women approaching. They had in their hands a young Nazi flier who had been shot down during the night. They brought him up to the mountain of bodies which lay where the trains of the heavily wounded had been obliterated. “Do you see what you did, you murderer?” they shouted. “Do you see?”

The next day Luknitsky was returning to Leningrad from the front in Karelia. It was early morning, still dark. All night he had ridden in the unheated car, filled with silent people. They were unable to enter the Finland Station. The train halted two or three hundred yards away. The station lay in ruins, the platforms smashed. Passengers picked their way through a tiny service entrance. Tired and cold, with a heavy pack on his back, Luknitsky made his way into the dismal deserted streets. He had to walk from the Kirov Bridge all the way home. Streetcar No. 30 was not running because a huge delayed-action bomb still lay in Wolf Street.

On the night of November 6 submarine
L-3
navigated without pilot, buoys or lights from Kronstadt through the Sea Canal and up the Neva into Leningrad. It was supposed to take up station at the Lieutenant Schmidt embankment but couldn’t get through the ice above the Institute of Mines. It dropped anchor there and some crew members went ashore through driving snow to see their families in Leningrad. German planes were overhead and fires swirled up in the city. Aboard the submarine the temperature was 12 degrees above freezing. The steward laid a white cloth on the mess table and produced some hot cocoa. The doctor found some wine in his supplies, and the submariners celebrated the holiday with a little gaiety. They were among the few.

Sergei Yezersky, a writer on
Leningradskaya Pravda
, jotted down his impressions of that night: